David Horowitz responds, Watchful Babbles on: Horowitz has brought up HorowitzWatch in his latest blog, but does not, we fear, provide any substantial points, thus capping off a week of remarkable moderation in his rhetoric. Even worse, he doesn't even mention me or The Rittenhouse Review! I'm hurt, Mr. Horowitz. Really and truly hurt.

Anyway, leaving aside the exchange of ad hominem attacks between him and Scoobie Davis, which I find enjoyable though not enlightening, I would like to address one charge:

I am also accused by Scoobie of being an apologist for white supremacy. The mind boggles at the imbecility of this attack. ... Scoobie's readers have full access to what I have wrtten and he is attacking. He even links his accusations to my text which will show anyone with half a brain that Scoobie is both a liar and knave.

This, however, is not entirely correct. Scoobie says (and I agree) that Horowitz acted "as an apologist for white supremacist Jared Taylor of American Renaissance magazine," which is a very different thing. Horowitz's obsession with race has always, to me, seemed the symptom of a man raging against betrayal (by his former allies on the left); that propulsive emotion has led him to say some remarkably foolish things in the past, and to join with some very disreputable characters, tarnishing his own reputation and that of conservatism as a whole.

Readers can judge for themselves whether the article in question, originally seen in AmRen and published, in redacted form, by Horowitz, is -- as we believe it to be -- a rather sophisticated and invidious piece of propaganda, masquerading as journalism but filled with the cant of intellectualist racism. But until Horowitz chooses to respond to these charges, we have, for better or for worse, the last word on the issue.

In the meantime, I would suggest that Horowitz, and all other conservatives who ally themselves with the fringe on policy while privately maintaining doubts regarding philosophy, consider the words of Lord Acton, used as an epigraph in Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition.

Maxim saves journalism; Daniel Bell, 83, commits suicide. Okay, so I'm joking about the esteemed author of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but for God's sake, don't let him see this self-congratulatory speech by Maxim editor Keith Blanchard. Today's readers "have shorter attention spans than any previous generation, they are chronically overstimulated and easily bored ... [they] demand, and have a right to expect, constant novelty and stimulation ...." So, naturally, the correct answer is to overstimulate them with a local redo of a British laddie magazine. I may be in Mr. Blanchard's target market, but I'll stick with Foreign Affairs and First Things. (Hell, I've felt guilty reading Foreign Policy ever since they had that image makeover.)

 
It's been a while since Andrew Sullivan's said something to set me off, but TRR's latest salvo against the Iron Queen is worth reading. He includes a link to a Kurtz biologue where the WaPo writer is in full RW Apple mode (I mean, I like Kurtz's column and all, but this pretty much proves that he's basically a well-educated Parade-style writer.)

If they taught physics, things would float up. Jane Galt links to an interesting -- no, make that depressing -- story on economic education in American high schools. Speaking of an economics professor who teaches summer classes to prospective high-school economics teachers (who are rarely exposed to economics at all), the article says

When he introduced the idea that a high minimum wage creates unemployment, a teacher said: "I just don't like to think of it that way."

"Well, OK, says Taylor. "It's a free country. But if you're going to teach economics, you have to think about it."

Paging Henry Hazlitt! (Oh, Max Sawicky is likely to lambast me for invoking that name when he gets back from vacation....)

 
I've always had good experiences with Muslims. I have a number of Muslim friends from various parts of their theological spectrum; had a great, if all-too-brief, experience with Islam while visiting Mali, in West Africa (my sister, as a Peace Corps volunteer, spent two years there and came back with great respect for Malian Muslims); and I try to keep up relations with my local mosque, where I sometimes drop by to discuss theology (same thing do with Jews and Christians. Not so much with pagans, though. I could never get through Tolkein; why would I want to talk to someone who lives it?)

Having, I hope, established my ecumenical bona fides, I'd like to mention that the Rittenhouse Review points to "Challenging the Ignorance on Islam," from the reliably out-there folks at Counterpunch.

The author is Gary Leupp, one of those post-Said scholars who have become so vociferous as of late (Leupp is not, by the way, an expert on the Middle East; his area of expertise is Japan, in particular Japan through the lens of queer theory). Now, the article's worth reading, if you can avoid grinding your teeth through it, because TRR is right in that it makes some critical points about Islam that are well worth noting.

However, to get to the nuggets, you'll have to pan through a lot of effluence: Leupp is one of those -- thankfully few -- leftists who genuinely seems to dislike everything about America and Western society

According to Leupp's worldview, the U.S. is "a power structure that banks on knee-jerk popular support whenever it embarks on a new military venture, at some far-off venue, on false pretexts immediately discernable to the better educated, but lost on the general public." Those "better educated," however, don't "habitually counter this ignorance and protest the imperialist interventions that Washington routinely undertakes. Some of them may indeed support the venture, cynically asserting that the advertised pretext fulfills some sort of valid function, regardless of the lies and distortions that surround it." Thankfully, despite this "made-in-USA version of fascism," supported by crypto-fascist academics and an "ignoran[t]" populace, we have people like Dr. Leupp and his allies to lead us into the light. Even better, there's not enough of them to make a difference outside of the Faculty Senate.

Leupp may be obstinately stupid, but his asides on American foreign policy are just that, and should have been red-penned out of existence by an alert editor. The rest of his article is better, though still suffused with a contempt for Americans and America in general. In fact, points one through three are perfectly valid, if one ignores the condescending attempts at bon mots (Islam "was not designed as an anti-U.S. movement?" Who knew!). But Leupp gets into trouble soon after.

Point four says that "The Qur'an depicts Jews and Christians as "People of the Book," meaning that they have their own scriptures bestowed upon them by God ... Muslim scripture counsels respect for these communities." This is partially correct; as "people of the book," who proclaim the first half of the Shahadah ("la ilaha illa 'l-Lah" -- "there is no god but God") while denying the second ("wa Muhammadan rasula l-Lah" -- "and Muhammad is His prophet"), Jews and Christians have a special place in Islamic cosmology: people who have received the word of God, but who have not yet recognized Muhammad as God's chosen Prophet. (The Arabic term for these people is dhimmi.)

However, the Koran makes it clear that the dhimmi are still heretics, even if they aren't pagans, and heretics are not to simply be tolerated:

[9.29] Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
[9.30] And the Jews say: Uzair [Ezra] is the son of Allah; and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!
[9.31] They have taken their doctors of law and their monks for lords besides Allah, and (also) the Messiah son of Marium and they were enjoined that they should serve one God only, there is no god but He; far from His glory be what they set up (with Him).
[9.32] They desire to put out the light of Allah with their mouths, and Allah will not consent save to perfect His light, though the unbelievers are averse.

One critical point is in 9:29, where the Koran refers to a tax; this is jizyah, a "poll tax" paid by all non-Muslims within the Islamic empire. The bulwark of Islamic tolerance was strength: they would tolerate the dhimmi, as long as they lived under the green banners of Islam. Allowing heretics and pagans to maintain their own states was not an option.

In addition, the development of tolerance in Islamic states is historically correlated with the reduction of piety; thus, the secularizing Umayyad caliphate allowed Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists to live in peace within the empire, so long as the jizyah tax was paid, but under the Abbasid caliphate and later rulers, both dhimmi and pagans were exposed to numerous social humiliations and economic restrictions in addition to the tax, to say nothing of the prevailing attitude today. It is not pushing a point too far to say that "Under Muslim rule, Christian and Jewish communities generally flourished," is tantamount to arguing that 'Under Southern segregation, black communities generally flourished."

This does not obviate the point that Christian Europe was busily engaged in pogroms, autos-da-fe, bonfires of the vanities, and other such activities; compared to being herded into keeps and being burned alive, the poll tax and daily humiliations were marks of freedom to the suffering Jews. But Islam has never been a totem to multiculturalism or liberality; at best, it has displayed tolerance from arrogance. And the strides made in Western Civilization since the Renaissance, and particularly since the Scottish Enlightenment, form the most powerful argument of all.

Leupp notes that the Koran is ferociously violent against pagans, but argues that "the Old Testament is replete with its own exhortations to genocide." This is correct, but it misses the point: the Koran, unlike the scriptures of the Jews or the Christians, provides an active, open-ended mandate to fight until an Islamic kingdom girdles the world. It can be said, however, that today most Muslims -- and, al-Qaeda sleepers aside -- virtually all Muslims in the Developed World treat those passages as calls to "striving," to proselytize, not fight, to establish their kingdom. (There is historical precedent for that and, if you're willing to torture general principles from particular circumstances, the Koran can be used to justify modern concepts of tolerance and international relations.) In other words, most Muslims are religiously active in the same way that missionary Christians are. However, Islam is much easier than its sibling religions to interpret, and more prone to be interpreted, as marching orders to crash airliners into buildings.

Leupp also argues that "Islamic 'fundamentalism' is not a species apart from other fundamentalisms, including the Christian, Jewish, and Hindu varieties;" however, this misses the radically political crucible Islamic fundamentalism -- dubbed "Islamism" by the Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes -- was born in. The major intellectual figures in Islamism, such as Qutb and Mawdudi, arose from political struggles in Egypt and pre-Partition India. Terroristic Islamism was primarily born from the chaos in Algeria. Palestinian terrorists, traditionally a secular force, have been absorbing and adapting Islamism to give them both moral and rhetorical power in their war with Israel.

The author's statement that "The American people are ... far more threatened by Christian fundamentalism than its Islamic counterpart" is hardly worth discussing, except to note that federal appellate courts and Con Law classes have done much to uphold the Establishment Clause, whereas they would have made a very poor shield deployed around the World Trade Center.

Skipping to the end, we should look at Leupp's argument that

The Arab-Israeli conflict is not, fundamentally, about Islam, or a clash between Islam and other faiths, but about this-worldly land grabbing, settlement, dispossession and oppression that has enraged the Muslim world, as it should enrage any thinking, moral human being. ... In understanding Islam, Americans should give some thought to one of the pivotal episodes in world history, the Crusades, or Wars of the Cross, that ripped up the Holy Land between 1096 and 1291.

Leupp's assignment of "land grabbing, settlement, dispossession and oppression" to the Israelis, while simultaneously arguing that "any thinking, moral human being" would automatically side with the Palestinians, regardless of whether they be doctors or bombers, would be a moment of breathtaking audacity, were it not so depressingly common amongst academics in the liberal arts colleges of today. But the second point is well worth exploring.

In 1994, with the Oslo Accords fresh and hope for reconciliation in the air, I had the fortune to meet, as part of a conference, the PLO's representation in America, in their office off Farragut Square. (At the time, I was struck by the irony of being lectured on the oppressed Palestinian people by men who had just hung up cashmere topcoats purchased from Burberry, just down the street.) Like most of the people I went with, we had high hopes for peace in the Middle East. But we had been talking for less than half an hour when one of the men almost exploded, leaping to his feet and pacing up and down the length of the conference table.

"The Jews!" he snapped, "The Jews, always about the Jews! There were Jews living in Palestine long before Israel! It is not the Jews, it is the Europeans! The Israelis, they are just the latest warriors in your Crusade against us!" I'm not sure how many of the Americans I was with were able to follow him when he set in on the betrayal of Saladin by the treacherous Richard, coeur de lion, but it was obvious that, to the Palestinians and the Arabs in general, the Crusades still deeply informed their view of the world, causing them to view us, and our actions, through the lens of wars centuries past. We left the meeting rather less hopeful than when we went in.

It is that force of memory, in the end, that must be overcome. Ignorance can be bliss; just ask any refugee from a civil war. Memories of ancient enmities cause us to look at those around us as oppressors and slaves reborn. It is that tendency that the classically liberal society struggles with, and has largely vanquished in America and other modern societies. And that tendency, if not moderated, will continue to create atrocities that, one day, we may come to brood upon.

 
Despite his "somewhat confrontational and somewhat unusual" defense strategies, Zacarias Moussaoui is competent to enter a guilty plea, and, after meeting with law professor Sadiq Reza, he came to court today ready to do so for counts one through four of his indictment: "[B]eing a member of a conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries," "involve[ment] in a conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy," "conspiracy to destroy aircraft" and "conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction." (Transcript here.)

Of course, it's never as simple as that with Moussaoui, and so he ended up in an argument with the judge over the definition of conspiracy and what kinds of mitigating circumstances could be presented during the sentencing phase. After a rather tortured round of questions, Judge Brinkema got him to understand (well, kind of) that he wasn't actually pleading guilty to any of the charges, he was simply acknowledging certain facts that were components of the charges.

In the course of the hearing, the defendant also gave perhaps the most unusual endorsement of the jury system ever: "I want to talk to these 12 people, these 12 American, who are my enemy, but sometime you can find honest enemy." Unfortunately, he wanted to get in front of that jury by pleading guilty. (No, don't ask.) After the judge suggested that perhaps what he really wanted to do was stipulate to the facts, he abruptly changed course, saying that, since a guilty plea would open him to the death sentence, Islamic law prevented him from contributing to his own death.

Howard Bashman points to Dahlia Lithwick's commentary, where she observes that "Moussaoui and Brinkema seem to have reached an unspoken arrangement wherein she's become, for all intents and purposes, his lawyer. They don't cut each other off, they grant small courtesies, and, as the death penalty looms larger, each of them seems focused on trying to comprehend the other." (Bashman also provides a link to Reza's homepage, which I didn't catch.)

It's Christmas in July, at least for me, as Bashman -- what, him again? -- gives notice of a ruling from the Seventh Circuit regarding a trademark dispute between "The Church of the Creator," with whom I'm not familiar, and "The World Church of the Creator," of whom I've heard waaay too much about, thanks for asking. (WCC is one of the more active and disreputable of the white supremacist sects, by the way, espousing a kind of strange pagan outlook that attacks ethnic minorities and Judeo-Islamic-Christian religion with equal vehemence.) The short but exceptionally charming opinion is here.

 
An affinity for totalists, a contempt for moderates: Mitchell Cohen dissects Negri and Hardt's Empire with a Rawlsian scalpel. Empire is an ideological molotov cocktail wrapped in layers of turgid prose and the kind of unreadable post-1968 European postmodernism that glories in excess of all sorts: sexual, chemical, and political. (You may remember Negri as the former leader of the Red Brigades, implicated in a wave of political violence that culminated in assassination, and who now lives in luxurious house arrest in Italy, where he finds the time and leisure to help compose odes to bloody revolution such as Empire.)

Incidentally, Harvard Press was gullible enough to publish Empire, and even provided a PDF, when demand from the Seattle set became too strong for its print runs. Bespeaks not well of that august institution.

 
Good news for Jim Traficant: he got one vote against his expulsion. The bad news: it came from Gary Condit.

 
Play the odds, but don't bet the farm. Here's a question: when a person well familiar with the subject matter you're writing on thinks you argued the opposite of your meaning, is (A) he, or (B) the author, at fault?

The correct answer, of course, is (C): the gremlins that slipped onto my keyboard at night and ruined the piece on "reverse hate crimes" and probability.

Hm. You didn't buy that, huh? Okay, I confess: my bad.

David Grover writes:

[Y]ou make a big (if extremely common) error called "the gambler's fallacy."

[I]f the chance of a subscriber being drawn is 1/13 on the first draw, its still 1/13 on the second, the third, and all the other draws. the chance of it being the same person on the second draw is 1/522,356 or whatever the total population is, which is the same as the chance on the first draw, and its the same on all subsequent draws.

The culprit here is not (so far as I know, anyway) my meaning, but instead my choice of metaphors, which will serve me as a warning in the future: what I think is clever, may end up being very misleading. In this case, I failed to make clear a very important point: the probability of any individual event in a series of events retains its probability, no matter how improbable the entire series is.

To find the probability P of a series of n discrete events, wherein each event has a probability p, obtain the product of all event probabilities, which (should) look something like this:

The upper-case Pi is product notation; it simply means multiply each px until x=n.

(Actually, the "Pn" is probably incorrect, or at least redundant, but since I put the image together at 2 AM CST, I'm not currently inclined to go back and correct it. It doesn't affect the equation, however.)

The critical point is that each event e has probability p, regardless of the value of P. In the sweepstakes metaphor, when, in the post, we got to the second drawing, I said that "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." p is still 1:13, but P has just increased dramatically. Or, to put it another way, I'm not saying that the chances of drawing a subscriber's name are 1 in 169, but I did recalculate the odds of drawing all subscribers up to the point we are at. And, I'm afraid, that other than in that one sentence above, I failed to clearly state that requirement.

The problem with the metaphor I used is that, by positing a sweepstakes where names were drawn out sequentially, I didn't clearly delineate the difference between P and p, and may have given the impression that p changed relative to P.

If, for example, you're in the crowd, watching the drawing, you might decide to make a friendly wager with the fellow next to you. If you're daring, you might say, "I'll bet you twenty bucks that the next two names they pull out are of sweepstakes subscribers." In this case, your odds are equal to the product of both probabilities p; in this case, p(1) = 1:13, and p(2) = 1:13. 1 * 1 is 1, of course, and 13 * 13 is 169, so the odds are 1:169. (If you know the game's rigged, it's not daring: it's insider trading: p = 1, and so P = 1.)

However, should you watch the Clearinghouse pull a subscriber's name from the drum, you might want to tell your neighbor, "I bet that when they pull out the next name, both of those names are going to be of subscribers." Your new friend thinks about it, wonders what the odds are of two subscribers showing up in a row, and opens his wallet based on the 1:169 odds. But, you're not so daring as you appear: the odds are still against you, but you're betting now on one event: p remains 1:13, not 1:169.

How many times have you said something like, "My luck's about to break" or, should you be the gambling type, how often have you pulled out of a craps game because you were convinced a hot table was about to go cold? That's the gambler's fallacy in action.

Mr. Grover also notes that the argument I did make -- that a random sampling of individuals is unlikely to draw 100% from a small minority -- is "a bit of a stretch." And I have to agree.

In the sweepstakes, we explicitly gave everyone an equal chance to be chosen. But, in reality, crime isn't like that: some groups are at higher risk, or pose a higher risk, than others, to or from others. For our purposes, it's enough to note that (A) blacks and whites die from homicides (and legal interventions, but we won't represent those) at differing rates; and (B) blacks and whites have statistically different risks for being killed by either blacks or whites. This isn't to say that I believe the sweepstakes metaphor to be worthless, but it's illustrative rather than truly probative.

Basically, what it seems to me we're going to have to look at is a series of dependent events: a person will (1) have to be murdered; (2) have to be a given ethnicity; and (3) have to be murdered by a person of a given ethnicity. Once we have the probabilities for those different events in hand, we can start looking at the (im)probability of a killer of ethnicity X killing n victims of ethnicity Y. I actually spent the evening working on just this problem (using a DoJ study that collected longitudinal homicide data across several cities, and Census data to work the probabilities) so Mr. Grover's thoughtful note happened to be a piece of serendipity that convinced me to put this note out, not only to correct any misapprehensions, but to ask for any advice from those who might have applicable experience -- I was intending to use a Bayesian analysis to chain the events together, but there may be more elegant, or useful, tools that I don't know about. (A statistician I have never claimed to be.) So: any ideas?

 
Now hiring: One copy editor. Apply c/o Doxagora.blogspot.com. A number of sharp-eyed readers have written in to correct my logic and clarity alike. Tonight's winning entry: Jeffrey Kramer chides me for getting my publications mixed up in the post regarding David Horowitz's use of an article from a racist publication. What I intended to say was

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.

Unfortunately, what I said was

Like many other racist publications, Frontpage advocates an "Identity Christianity" that mixes a kind of Christianity -- I hesitate to call it that -- with a vulgar Spenglerian national racism.

... which is wrong on so many levels that I wouldn't even know where to begin. My thanks to Mr. Kramer, and my apologies to Mr. Horowitz -- whatever the quality of his ill-chosen allies, he is certainly no proponent of Identity Christianity.

 
And in the left corner.... The merry prankster Soobie Davis has announced a contest at HorowitzWatch to name an appropriate punishment for DH's years fellow-travelling with the Stalinist left. (This leaves his punishment for fellow-travelling with the white-supremacist fringe open: Anyone care to compete for copies of Hayek or Posner?) That Horowitz has renounced the Marxism of his earlier years is not in doubt; whether he has renounced the underlying intellectual errors that led to his unfortunate alliance is another issue entirely. "Once a Stalinist, always a Stalinist...."

 
More wind for the mills: White supremacist leader William Pierce has died, ending his decades-long leadership of the lunatic fringe ... How do we stop "heart-rending" war crimes? Madeline Morris, a Duke law professor deeply involved with war crimes prosecutions in Sierra Leone, says the ICC isn't the answer ... There is nothing that I can say about Harvey Pitt's request for elevation to the Cabinet and a 21% pay raise, except that the Administration has stymied the request ... The House voted to ease the trade and travel bans on Cuba, but the White House says, no es posible ... Howard Bashman (mentioned below) points to an AP story about a House amendment that criminalizes the attempt to commit a Federal crime. The sheer extent of the law, and its application to crimes that have a wide variety of actus and mens components means that the new class of crimes, pace the amendment's sponsors, isn't like "attempted rape" or "attempted murder;" this law threatens to turn criminal trials in epistemological exercises.

Today's most interesting blog: Howard Bashman's "How Appealing," "The Web's first blog devoted to appellate litigation." Bashman's blog is brilliant but casual, kind of like a really good graduate seminar. (Pointed to by Stuart Buck.)

Credit where credit's due: An interesting piece in Horotwitz's Frontpage compares the defense strategies of three terror suspects (if you can call Moussaoui's pro se filings either a "defense" or a "strategy"), and says that there may be hope for John Walker Lindh after all. In any case, he'll have twenty years to reflect.

The least of our problems: Lou Marano strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel when he comes out against pregnancy in the military. Marano makes good points -- a bit overblown in my opinion, unless he's confining his objection to the military's "refus[al] to view pregnancy as a disqualifying condition for military action" (the quote comes from a journal article cited by Marano) -- but it seems to me that if we intend to prosecute a full war against Iraq, preganancies will be less of a logistical stumbling block compared to such criticalities as fuel stocks and water.

 
What's wrong with Priscilla Owen? Well, says NOW, she's a conservative ... and, uh, a conservative. And there might be Enron stuff in there, too, except that her ties to the failed energy giant have been scrutinized for months now. But mostly ... she's a conservative. (Ironically, this probably wouldn't have been quite so difficult if Bush hadn't downplayed the traditional role of the ABA in judicial nominations, as Owen was voted a unanimous "well qualified" from the Bar Association.) Now, the WP says lay off.

What makes this case especially ironic is the confirmation, earlier this year, of David Bunning -- former assistant federal attorney and, entirely by coincidence, son of GOP senator Jim Bunning -- as a federal judge despite being considered "not qualified" by a majority of the ABA committee:

Mr. Bunnings [sic] civil case experience, however, is very limited and shallow. It includes no exposure to, let alone experience in, complex civil matters that regularly find their way to federal district courts. ... While his criminal experience takes him to court regularly and he has concluded eighteen trials to verdict, the cases were not of the type that called for particularly challenging lawyering. ... A review of the legal writings he submitted found them to be sufficient from a legal standpoint. Yet, the issues addressed were routine and not complex, and the writing style was plain. They revealed little advocacy or elegance, and to me they read very much like the work of a young associate in our firm. ... One might fairly ask whether a 35-year old could be qualified to sit as a federal judge? I am not alone on the Committee in my belief that there are 35-year olds with ten years of experience who have the professional competence to so serve. Our Committee's belief, however, is that Mr. Bunning is not one of them. Yet, neither his age nor his lack of twelve years experience are the determining factors. Rather, it is a combination of average academics, limited civil experience, repetitious and routine criminal matters, writings which "just do the job," serious doubts by respected members of the Bench and bar, and no intellectual spark or legal enthusiasm that carry the day for our Committee.

The Senate Democrats, so vociferous in going after a highly-qualified, well-respected judge with extensive experience on the Texas Supreme Court, was strangely silent on the matter of Mr. -- now Judge -- Bunning, unanimously confirming him via voice vote, with no debate. Matters of Senatorial privilege, it seems, trump the needs of the Republic. But, then, one can ask the 28-year-old Federal Attorney for South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, Jr, as to the value of family connections.

The enemy of my enemies: Paul Weyrich comes down in support of Jim Traficant, arguing that the pot of Congress has no business tarnishing the name of the Traficant kettle. Sentencing for Traficant's ten felony convictions is set for this Friday. The indictment, by the way, can be found here.

 
Osama bin Marxian? So says Jonathan Rauch in a thoughtful and excellent column comparing the radical left with Islamism, noting that both have "a genius for disguising a brutal and self-serving political agenda as a quasi-religious mission of world salvation."

Can quotas save conservatives? Dick Morris says they're gonna have to, evidently because conservatism isn't strong enough to attract new converts on its own.

In The Hill, Morris warns of a "looming demographic extinction of the GOP," the result of "the Republican Party ... running out of white people." The "Democratic lock on these key [black and latino] constituencies" won't be broken, he warns, marveling that despite Bush's "appointment of African-Americans to two of the top jobs in his administration ... blacks seem to be continuing their solid support for Democrats."* The answer, he says, is clear: "Only the designation of a Colin Powell or a Condoleezza Rice at the top of the ticket can reverse the 50-year decline of the Republican Party among minority voters."

In case you're wondering, that's what we here in Texas call "a whole lotta bull and not much steak."

The GOP, and conservatives in general, aren't going to benefit from cynically fast-pathing a token figure, even were he a Douglass Dilman,** to any political position, even the Presidency. After all, Republicans have had quite a few brilliant politicians and staff members who were of various persuasions, as they say, and they've all been dismissed as 'unrepresentative' tokens, as if there were a genetic or absolute environmental link between race and the ballot box.

There is no question that the GOP hasn't been attending to blacks, or latinos, or even asians and arabs as much as it needs to. It's that persistent rhetorical neglect -- and the Dems' constant trumpeting of it -- that will make any attempt at a cynical quota strategy fall flat. But none of that has to do with conservatism as a philosophy; much of it is the result of perception, and of fringe elements co-opting conservative positions while undermining the underlying thought. When Americans think of the arguments against slavery reparations, it does the GOP no good to have them think of David Horowitz.

What conservatives need to do is fiercely articulate what core values make it a better choice for minorities. After all, conservatism and classical liberalism -- as opposed to the postliberal leftism that pervades most "race talk" these days -- is the very bedrock of traditional African-American society, and it's a radically inclusive philosophy that depends on one's commitment to civic responsibility, not one's skin color, or religion, or political affiliation.

One of the finer summations of this philosophy can be found in a work almost a century old:

Next to a proper religious and intellectual training, the one thing needful to the freedmen is land and a home. Without that a high degree of civilization and moral culture is scarcely possible.

The emphasis on "civilization," on the place of education, religion, and one's own work -- in short, what has been erroneously called "the Protestant work ethic" -- refers specifically to the Southern land grant of 1866, which provided land in return for effort. The author is W.E.B. Du Bois, in his Economic Co-operation Among the Negroes, a massive study that showed how black communities, fostered by ties of church and civic organizations alike, came to create a society that valued work and community, and which prospered based on that belief, despite the ardent efforts of powerful racists to destroy them.

Today, there are those who claim to be the staunch friends of blacks and other minorities. But the government aid they champion, salutory in small and measured doses, is postliberal poison in the draughts they advocate. This is not to say they don't mean well -- they do, and it's that which gives me hope they'll eventually be browbeaten into enlightenment. But those communities, once Hercules standing at the crossroads, became Achilles, confused and directionless. It is a way back from quiesence that conservatism offers, and we should be shouting that hope from the mountains. For those who live in inner cities devastated by white flight and corrupted by a violent undersociety; for those who have ambition and energy, but whose surroundings are poisoned, not by poverty, but passivity; for those who want to raise the timbers of a new church of civic responsibility: what other choice is there?

Don't count the GOP out just yet, Mr. Morris. And don't ask for empty gestures. The electorate won't be fooled, but they can be inspired.

 
Hey, Mister Wizard, what's that? Continuing the great history of breathless British tabloid journalism, the Beeb mistakes itself for a Jerry Bruckheimer production, warning that a 2-kilometer-wide "Space Rock" is "On [a] Collision Course." Or not, as it turns out; the margin of error in the current calculations means that it could pass anywhere within "several tens of millions" of kilometers of Earth. Horseshoes, hand grenades, and British journalism, one might say.

Best misleading quote: "Astronomers have given the object a rating on the so-called Palermo technical scale of threat of 0.06, making NT7 the first object to be given a positive value." Of course, since the Palermo scale was only developed this year, that's not saying much. And, in any case, the chance of asteroid showers has been downgraded to -0.14, below the threshold of worry.

In a related story, authorities are investigating an Internet ad for a 2-kilometer asteroid, delivery to be guaranteed by November, 2019.

Anyone who's followed the development of bioeconomics as a discipline won't be surprised at a NYT story that finds "We're Wired to Cooperate," providing some bio-imaging meat on the social-science bones that began with iterating the Prisoner's Dilemma with memory functions. Libertarians looking for more evidence that the free market Just Plain Works are encouraged to check it out.

 
Leak, Spin, Rinse, Repeat: James Robbins at NRO asks why the NYT "report[ed] on highly classified war plans for no apparent reason" in their July 5 article on DoD plans for an invasion of Iraq. Robbins explains why this story is, indeed, different from the Pentagon Papers and other superficially similar cases, and in a highly amusing "wilderness of mirrors" aside on the Political Style in Arab Paranoia, shows just what effect the story had on negotiations with Iraq ("observers later claimed that the article made it impossible for [Iraqi negotiator] Sabri to seek a rapprochement [on UN monitoring of WMD development], thus scuttl[ing] the talks") and how the story has been interpreted in the Middle East.

Robbins scores quite a few good hits against the perpetually-listing Grey Lady, but I think his concerns about blowing operational security are slightly -- not terribly -- overstated. When it comes to boots-on-the-ground details, the document doesn't provide the sort of information that would be needed to successfully set defenses against an American invasion (not that Iraq is necessarily good at doing that anyway; during the Desert Storm operations, an over-ambitious officer ordered an assault against Iraqi positions west of Kuwait before allied operations began in earnest in that area. If the Iraqis had been a bit more coordinated, or its officers better-trained, they might have met force with force in that war). However, his argument that the Times has just made life much more difficult for government officials trying to forge a coalition against Iraq is entirely merited. Even without opportunistic press plays, it's going to be almost impossible to get regional allies to provide logistic staging areas for an invasion of Iraq. By pointing out that the necessary consultations haven't been started yet, the NYT may have just deep-sixed any hope of them bearing fruit.

One question that still remains is, in my fractured Latin, "qui transpiras?" Since the document in question envisions a large-scale buildup and invasion of Iraq, it suggests that the source believes that an operation more akin to the war in Afghanistan -- heavy airstrikes coupled with special forces and local fighters on the ground -- can be used to topple Hussein. It's possible that a disgruntled military officer is the source, a possibility reinforced by Robbins' news that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) has been tasked to find the leaker. (Let's see, which branch would benefit from a war heavy on airstrikes and light on armor?) It'll be interesting to see where this story goes in coming weeks.

 
The Second Annual Weekly Doremus Jessup Award goes to columnist Lee Weaver, of the Wichita Falls Times-Record News. The lefties in the house will no doubt enjoy this guy (after all, he refers to Election Night 2000 as "The Night I Became A Screaming Liberal"). Just remember that Texas is also the only state where you'll find card-carrying members of the ACLU and the NRA in the same house. Hell, you'll find 'em in the same body.

Charles Murray can still be a voice of reason, when he chooses to stick his head back around The Bell Curve, and so his latest column at AEI is a welcome note, taking on the latest changes to the SAT:

The more tightly the SAT measures what students have been taught rather than how much raw cognitive processing power they have, the more important a certain kind of school becomes--the kind of school the children of the affluent attend. Private or public, their schools are the ones that already do the best job of teaching content, and they are the ones that will be most responsive to changes in whatever the SAT tests for.

This is a good time to plug an article from last year's Psychological Review (which I was led to, in a roundabout way, by Max Sawicky) that provides an excellent rejoinder to Murray and Herrnstein's genetics-only model of intellectual phenotypic development. I always felt that Murray gave short shrift to the effects of culture (as opposed to small shifts in immediate environment) in the development of individual intelligence, and Dickens and Flynn do a fantastic job of modeling the reciprocal effects of intellectual culture and cultured intelligence.

 
Short Orders:

There was an INS judge named Ho,
Who heard a refugee's tale of woe,
The judge struck down her plea,
But called the girl "he;"
Cut-n-paste orders: no go.

Paramasamy v. Ashcroft

 
Who is Jane Galt? Story time: The political scientist Ted Lowi -- brilliant, if a rather cantankerous dinner guest -- says in his End of the Republican Era* that he once asked F.A. Hayek if he had ever met Objectivist found Ayn Rand. Hayek replied he had indeed met Rand, once, at a party that was held for the two of them. They had a brief, tense conversation, then "she called me a compromiser and walked away."

No real point to the story, except to note that one can be a classical liberal without being a libertarian (indeed, one may be compelled to, if one is to take the Old Liberal authors seriously), and that I'm not sure how I missed the excellent writing of Jane Gault, wherein she discusses the limited but highly useful function of spontaneous order in human society. Vampire bats, too, but that's not important right now. (Given the nom de blog I've adopted, I really have been remiss in publishing bioeconomics stories.)

Sassafrass provides a link to Stuart Buck, a former law student (or current lawyer, take your pick) whose last blog was shut down by, God help us all, the DC Circuit while he was clerking for them. He's back, and it's a good thing for the rest of us.

Max Sawicky also points to the very good Amateur Economist, which has a remarkable density of information. If these folks aren't on your regular bloglist (you do have a bloglist, don't you?) I highly recommend them.

 
NYT's questionable polling practices, revisited: Shortly after Howell Raines took over the op-ed page at the Times, he told Susan Faludi that he "had the general sense that Op-Ed too often echoed the editorial page." Now that Raines is executive editor of the NYT, one could perhaps be forgiven for suspecting that the editorial page echoes the op-ed page echoes the paper as a whole. At least, that's the impression that I get as the Grey Lady unloads its rhetorical shotgun across the op-ed and commentary pages today, with a house editorial arguing that Bush needs to clean his stables to calm a jittery market, while Brookings alum Alan Blinder says the markets really, really want to be regulated, and GWB just isn't getting it done.

The editorial trots out the polling numbers from the paper's misleading poll analysis from last week, telling us that

The most chilling result in last week's New York Times/CBS News Poll was that 45 percent of the respondents said they thought "other people are really running the government" � exactly the same percentage as said the president was in charge. That is no way to run a White House when the nation's worst domestic problem is a lack of confidence in its economic and political leaders.

Terrible news for Bush, no? Obviously, there's been a massive crash in the public's confidence in him as a leader. Obviously, Bush couldn't be "in a worse position to deal with the crisis of confidence in American business." Obvious, that is, until one looks at the historical CBS/NYT polling data* (Question:"Do you think George W. Bush is in charge of what goes on in his administration most of the time, or do you think other people are really running the government most of the time?"):

Date      Percentage responding "Bush in Charge"
10/2000   45% 
12/2000   43%   
1/2001    38%
2/2001    42%
7/2001    43%
1/2002    52% 
7/2002    45%

In other words, Bush's numbers in that regard are exactly the same as they were mere days before the American public elected him President (yeah, yeah, I know, electoral college and all that, but bear with me, okay?), and that, excepting the period right before he assumed office, and during the days following the September 11 crisis, have remained completely stable. The only chill from those numbers is the White House's supreme and studied coolness to the data.

One interesting point is that the 10/2000 poll -- taken before the election -- showed not only that an unsurprising 45% of the respondents thought that Bush would be in charge of the government, but that only 48% of the voters thought the same of Gore:

48 percent think Gore would be in charge, while 45 percent think Bush would be. In both cases, voters think that being in charge is a good thing, while letting others run the government is not.

In other words, Bush went up against the most wonkish, hands-on Presidential candidate in recent years, and came within the margin of error of Gore in that question.

This latest editorial is emblematic of the Times' disturbing trend towards placing editorial content in the news section and then having its editorials quote the articles as if they were entirely disinterested pieces of journalism. Using an editorial section to prosecute an agenda is nothing new -- the Wall Street Journal has been pushing its often brain-damaged version of supply-side economics for years -- but roping in the entire reporting staff to do so is something that hasn't been seen since Hearst and the sinking of the Maine.

Mail Call! I've gotten a few letters over the weekend that deserve good responses, so I'll be posting them sometime tomorrow (I just got back in town late this afternoon, and I got distracted hunting down the CBS/NYT polling data), assuming I can provide them the attention they merit.