Proceed With Caution

When naming an organization, care should be taken not just to have a descriptive name, but in relation to how the organization's name might appear when contracted into abbreviated form. As that does not always happen, if you're a member of an organization such as the National Association of Alcoholic Beverage Licensing Attorneys, you should probably spell out the organization's entire name when adding it to your résumé. Let's just say, your proud declaration of your membership in NAABLA is probably not something you want your prospective employer to misread.

A Fascinating Learning Experience

Zoom all the way in. (More info. is available on Google Blog.)

War on Drugs Gone Wrong

John Tierney is getting a lot of attention for his piece on "Punishing Pain", in which he tangentially addresses Florida's bizarre, over-the-top drug laws. I do have a criticism of the piece, as in order to imply the innocence of the subject of his piece, a man who is presently incarcerated for forging prescriptions for narcotic medications, he effectively accuses the man's doctor of writing improper prescriptions and of committing perjury. Such an implication is not necessary to his point, which is that you shouldn't have to risk incarceration to obtain effective pain relief.

The Florida law itself is not about "punishing pain" - it's part of the "war on drugs"> Reading the statute, it appears that Florida tacked language pertaining to prescription opiats onto a clause that was written to address street drugs, specifically heroin. The "mixture containing"-type language the statute uses is common for laws addressing street drugs that are "cut" by drug dealers. The presumption that somebody with 28 grams of heroin intends to traffic drugs makes more sense than the notion that somebody with a bottle of 60 Percocet (about the number of pills that, during his period of addiction, Rush Limbaugh obtained via prescription in any given week, and not likely to be more than a month's supply for any chronic pain patient) is a drug dealer? That's a stretch. On the other hand, if you looked to the actual weight of the drug, let's say 10 mg Percocet, you would have to have about 2,800 pills to implicate the law, which would make a presumption of intent to deal seem more reasonable.

Whatever you think of the law, the outcome in this case seems unjust. It does not appear that Mr. Paey ever engaged in drug trafficking, or that he ever had any intention of doing so.

Scott Andringa, the prosecutor in the case, acknowledged that the 25-year mandatory penalty was harsh, but he said Mr. Paey was to blame for refusing a plea bargain that would have kept him out of jail.

Well, no. The prosecutor picked the charge. The prosecutor chose to pursue Mr. Paey through three trials. And no matter to what degree the prosecutor felt bound by duty to do so, an absurd sentence mandated by law is not rendered less absurd by a defendant's unwillingness to plea bargain.

It is a shame that Tierney was so focused on the mistreatment of "sick people", as he could do more good by explicitly arguing for the introduction of some common sense into the "war on drugs". Or was that a deliberate choice - he doesn't want to challenge the war on drugs? I guess we'll find out over the next few years, if he continues to address these issues.

Bloggers' Rights

CJR Daily today observes,

Say that blogs are granted the same protections as news organizations. What is to stop, say, corporations or trade unions from setting up stealth blogs to promote their agenda, while collecting funds from the public or to spend on ads to promote their own interested point of view?

One might ask, what's to stop corporations, religious organizations, or chambers of commerce from setting up stealth news organizations to promote their agenda?

Many partisan bloggers are little more than political activists, and as activists they raise funds for their own pet political causes, something reporters don't -- and can't -- do. In this, they should be included under campaign finance laws.

But "reporters" apparently can obtain secret, lucrative contracts from the government to push a particular story or perspective. News organizations can carelessly (or perhaps intentionally) run "video news releases" which are disguised as news coverage. Mainstream "reporters" and columnists can act as willing conduits for dubious (or false) stories to advance their careers and curry favor with politicians. Reporters at press conferences for important subjects can act like sheep, afraid of being culled from the herd if they ask tough questions.

In the end, it's a complicated issue, and both sides have salient points.

True. But who's the pot and who's the kettle?

Crocodile Tears Revisited

Today's Times attempts to rehabilitate Judith Miller, by rationalizing her conduct.

But the hard truth is that no reporter can choose the circumstances for upholding a principle. It doesn't matter whether we think a source is a good person or has good motivations. A reporter promises confidentiality, and the paper backs up the journalist because otherwise the public will not learn what it needs to know. It's up to the reporter and editor to determine whether information given under a promise of confidentiality is reliable. But reporters cannot apply ideology when protecting their sources, any more than civil liberties lawyers can defend the First Amendment rights of only the people they agree with.

But wait - the paper just got through telling us that Miller didn't write a story, so it seems fair to assume that the leak at issue did not implicate the needs of the public to "learn what it needs to know". At a certain point, when a reporter shields dubious sources with promises of anonymity, the reporting ends and what amounts to a conspiracy begins - a conspiracy that allows a lazy reporter to sit behind her desk, get sensational "scoops" from anonymous high level sources, and print them without regard to their truth. That's not protecting the needs of the public - it is self-serving conduct, which primarily helps the reporter, secondarily helps her newspaper sell copy, but in fact causes harm to the public. When one of those dubious sources later telephones the reporter to leak the identity of a CIA operative, as part of a revenge plot against the operative's husband, the public interest is not advanced by protecting the source. Once again, the public interest is harmed.

The prosecutor produced what he claimed were waivers of confidentiality signed by White House officials, and his supporters have asked how Ms. Miller or any other journalists could remain silent if the presumed sources say they are free to talk. In fact, these documents were extracted by coercion, so they are meaningless.

That is true, actually. If everybody has to sign a waiver to keep his or her job, the source will be placed in the position of either signing a waiver or being identified by virtue of his or her refusal. To the extent that a reporter is willing to go to jail on principle under such circumstances, there's some substance to the principle. Whether or not this applies to Miller? Not even the NY Times seems to know.

Personally, I think Miller's "principles" are that she is protecting her ability to be a lazy reporter, an eager conduit for salacious and inflammatory rumors from people like Karl Rove, reprinting them without regard to truth. I don't believe that the "sources" she is protecting are those traditionally associated with reporting - that is, she didn't find them by doing anything that is traditionally associated with investigative reporting. They came to her and she cut a deal with them which was against the public interest. She kept her end of the deal (and gained considerable notoriety) by disseminating innuendo and falsehood on their behalf, with scant regard for the public interest. So I have little sympathy for her present, ostensibly "principled", stand.

In fairness, at least when it came to this particular story, she was more principled than Robert Novak.

The Cost of Research

In an unsigned idiotorial, the Washington Post apparently joins with those who wish to do away with comprehensive medical insurance programs, noting that new medications can be extraordinarily expensive and concluding,

Drug companies charge this much mostly because our broken non-market system allows them to get away with it.

As if the typical patient with a typical illness gets a $100,000.00/year medication? The idiotorial asserts,

The standard justification for high drug prices is that they finance medical research. Yet huge research budgets are justified only if they achieve something useful. Usefulness means not just producing drugs but extending and improving the quality of life at a reasonable price.

Oh - so pharmaceutical research should only take place when the pharmaceutical company knows in advance how much the research will cost through the time of FDA approval, the market for the drug, and that the research will be successful. Because scientific research always occurs in a predictable straight line, and scientists always end up with the exact thing they desired when they commence a particular line of research, right?

Or perhaps you should consider that Viagra was initially developed as a potential treatment for high blood pressure and angina. MAO's, an early form of antidepressant medications, were discovered by a researcher who was trying to create a pain remedy for tuberculosis patients. While modern research attempts to remove chance from the equation, you can't be certain at the outset that research will be successful, that it will produce a medication that is more effective than the alternatives, that it will produce a medication that treats the targeted condition, or that it won't turn out to be a dead end.

The iditorial also omits mention of the cost of advertising, or the drop-offs in price when competing medications come on the market, when production methods improve, and when patents expire. It fails to mention that pharmaceutical companies spend enormous sums on marketing, both to doctors and directly to consumers, and pass those costs along to us in the price of our medicines. It fails to mention that the place where its "straight line" formula best applies is where a drug company is trying to produce a competing medication for an existing problem - that is, it is cheaper and easier to create a medication to compete with others that already exist within a given therapeutic class, than it is to create the first drug within a class.

Incredibly, the idiotorial then attempts to apply a nebulous economic formula to human life, asserting,

Cancer doctors are willing to prescribe medicines costing more than $300,000 for an extra year of life, according to a study by Dr. Eric Nadler of Harvard Medical School. But by analyzing how much people are willing to pay for various life-extending safety precautions, health economists have concluded that society values an extra year of life at about $75,000. The physicians' indifference to cost explains why drug firms charge outrageous prices.

Well, no. Whatever value "health economists" might derive for the value the population at large places on the last year in the life of someone else, the calculus changes when the issue is personalized. Few people would take $75,000.00 to give up their last year of life. Few would take $75,000.00 to give up the last year of a loved one's life. So what exactly is this idiotorial suggesting when it argues that we should look at this $75,000.00 figure, and "create a health care market that pays for only cost-effective treatment"? Cut off the elderly after they hit that magic cost point, and let them pay their own way or die?

Meanwhile managed care companies, which were once regarded as the best hope for containing unjustified spending, have been more or less defeated; but faced with this failure of the private market, federal policy is to move Medicare toward a private model.

So we are told that the problem is that there is too much insulation between medical cost and the consumer, market forces should be applied to make the health care market more "rational" and thus more affordable, but this is best done without "privatizing" Medicare? The mind boggles.

What? You Want *Tears*?

Some news agencies and columnists seem shocked that the U.S. public is indifferent to the incarceration of Judith Miller, for her refusal to obey a lawful court order that she disclose her source(s) in relation to the "outing" of CIA agent Valerie Plame. David Broder suggests that the moral of the story is that reporters need to be more careful when selecting their sources - but that doesn't apply to Miller (at least in this context) as she didn't run a story on Plame. She obtained information from sources which revealed Plame's identity as a CIA operative. To the extent that some people are less sympathetic to Miller because of her history of cultivating dubious anonymous sources, and printing stories based upon their "disclosures" which ultimately proved to be false, I don't think that explains the public indifference to Miller's incarceration, or the possibility that it might be extended by virtue of criminal contempt charges.

The public has a natural skepticism of "anonymous sources", and with good cause. A lot of misinformation, and a lot of injustice, has resulted from the abuse of anonymity. When a reporter asserts that she will go to jail rather than disclose her source, the public can reasonably be expected to consider the actual downside of disclosure. Not the "chicken little" downside, where we are immediately propelled down a slippery slope to a point where nobody dares to provide information to reporters under cover of anonymity. But an actual downside - the here and now, "in this specific case" downside, which can be weighed against the benefit of disclosure.

In the case of the "outing" of Plame, the "downside" of disclosure is that the people who leaked Plame's identity will become known. In a best-case scenario, if you accept the word of the Bush Administration's spin doctors, Plame herself had limited value as an operative. But it isn't just about Plame - it is everybody who had contact with Plame during her covert work, and everybody associated with the company she ostensibly worked for, which was also unmasked as a CIA operation. And while I doubt that the typical citizen has thought through all of the ramifications of the disclosure, I don't think that there is much sympathy at all for the people Miller is protecting. This is not a situation where a leak helped unmask government deception, government corruption, or crimes by government officials. This is a situation where the corrupt, deceptive, and/or criminal conduct is the leak itself.

Am I surprised that Miller, her appeals exhausted, her justification for her refusal to testify (she has a release, but it might have been coerced) tenuous, and the principle for which she ostensibly stands (advancing the ability of the media to uncover sensitive stories by protecting anonymous sources) turned on its head by the actions of her sources, gets little public sympathy? Particularly at this point, where Miller's testimony appears to be desired not to gain new names, but to connect a few key dots to complete the investigation of a crime? Not at all.

Broder also notes,

Novak, who has a well-earned reputation for carrying water for his favorite conservatives, has not been prosecuted for publishing Plame's name and has refused to discuss his role in the case or his dealings, if any, with the grand jury investigating the leak.

At this point, is there actually any lingering doubt about Novak's cooperation with the Grand Jury?

Mr. Pecker Gets A Politician Into Trouble

What can I say?

A few years ago, according to the book, tabloids were writing about Mr. Schwarzenegger's alleged sexual affairs, hurting his political prospects. Then, in July 2003, when Mr. Schwarzenegger was contemplating running for California governor, he met with Mr. Pecker.

Okay, we're dealing with two different "individuals", but obviously that's not the first time a "Mr. Pecker" has led Arnold into controversy.

Wrongful Death

Not the tort kind - the "death penalty" kind.

In this case, an extremely unusual private investigation was conducted after Mr. Griffin's death. It was sponsored by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and led by Samuel Gross, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. That investigation has pretty much demolished Mr. Fitzgerald's account of what occurred and prompted Ms. Joyce to reopen the case.

* * *

Professor Gross, who has received extensive pro bono help from prominent law firms, has given prosecutors the names of three men he believes committed the murder, and the evidence that points to their guilt.

Professor Gross has an unusual background for a law professor (at least at a school like Michigan) - and it's good to hear (although not surprising) that he continues to perform this type of work. He also taught one of my favorite classes in law school, and always seemed to be a genuinely nice guy.

Driving History

David "Babbling" Brooks today suggests, in relation to selecting a Supreme Court Justice:

Mr. President, don't repeat the mistakes of the past. Ideas drive history, so you want to pick the person with the biggest brain.

I'm not sure which of the current set Mr. Brooks believes to have small brains. But I'm not sure that, within the context of his thesis, "bigger is better". If the selection is about driving history, as Mr. Bush can certainly attest, history is often more driven by bad ideas than by good ones.

Territoriality

Over at Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground I found reference to an interesting story about how some companies are now using plaintiff's firms for corporate litigation, much to the consternation of defense lawyers:

But defense attorney Levi McCathern of McCathern Mooty in Dallas believes corporations are selling themselves out to the plaintiffs bar. He argues that plaintiffs attorneys are winning businesses over because of the lucrative verdicts they get.

Companies are impressed with these big verdicts, he said, so they're willing to hire plaintiffs attorneys to take on their big cases.

"I just think they'd be better served by using the defense bar," McCathern said. "Commercial litigation has long been the work of the defense bar. But not anymore. ... I've seen it go south."

So businesses are using plaintiff's lawyers for their commercial litigation because they have the temerity to beat defense firms in court and obtain large verdicts, rather than sticking with defense firms out of... tradition? The nerve!

Fascinating....

Somebody writes in to a law forum with a tale of woe:

A week ago I was caught shoplifting at a local store and my court date is tomorrow. ...

I was going to ask for a PD (counsel) on my court date because after I pay the stores $200 civil fine and whatever fine that the courts will give me providing they don't lock me up and I have to make bail, I just won't have the money for counsel. Not to mention the fact that I have not told me husband about the incident because I don't want him to worry or stress over my stupidity and I did not want my kids to find out. What procedure do I need to go through when I get called before the judge and requesting counsel?

I have one final question for you. I have been told not to admit premeditation, but my excuse (not like there should be an excuse) is better than saying, "I don't know why I did it." My excuse is it was a fraternity stunt. I had to either get select items from the store or I had to inflict bodily harm on someone, and I personally felt that stealing was better give the options. I do totally understand however that my decision was poor altogether and I am a total idiot for doing it to begin with; however, I thought the fraternity would look good on the old résumé when I graduated. Anyway, would the truth be better than the old I don't know why or should I say I don't know why I did it?

A bit short in the internal consistency department? Or have college fraternities now opened their doors to married women (with children)?

Word Games

William Raspberry, addressing the First Amendment, tells us:

"There's nothing in common sense - and certainly nothing in the First Amendment - that requires government hostility to publicly expressed religion, which is where the requirement that government be 'secular' takes you," he says. "I think it's better to say 'temporal' rather than secular. Temporal means the here and now, without reference to the hereafter. Our government was designed to be temporal, but you have only to look at the words and actions of the Founders to understand that they had no interest in the sort of secularity the court now seeks to enforce."

But it's not just in impossibly arcane Supreme Court decisions that "secular" plays us false, says Hasson. "It gets us in needless trouble internationally as well. The Arabic word for secular is almehni, meaning godless. So when Muslim fundamentalists hear us talk about secular government, they think we mean, quite literally, a godless government. Temporal translates into another Arabic word entirely, dunyawi, or worldly.

Hasson is not just playing word games.

Well, yes. He is.

Take for example somebody who argued that the Elbonian word for "Godly" is "ignorant". While it is fair to respond that the Elbonians, a fictional ethnicity featured in Dilbert cartoons, are famous for their ability to get pretty much everything wrong, the better response would be to point out that if "ignorant" is the best word in the Elbonian language to describe the concept of Godliness, the Elbonians in fact have no word for Godliness. Further, as we are not applying the inaccurate Elbonian definition of Godliness within our nation - we use the English language, after all - the deficits of the Elbonian language have no relevance to our domestic debates.

If I were to add to this that the Elbonians translate the word "Cotton Candy" as "Worldly", you would probably find it ridiculous if I were to suggest that we call our government a "Cotton Candy government" in order to convey a more accurate meaning to the Elbonians. "But," you would assert, "Cotton candy in English means 'a candy made by spinning sugar that has been boiled to a high temperature'." And you would be right. While "temporal" is a closer match to "worldly" than is "cotton candy", it still carries a different meaning (particularly in its most common uses) than worldly.

This ultimately raises some questions for Mr. Hasson: What is the Arabic word for "worldly"? Because if it is something other than "dunyawi", which you say means "worldly", we're engaging in some pretty peculiar contortions. And if "worldly" (which you suggest to be a word which properly conveys the nature of our government to other cultures) translates to "dunyawi", why do you prefer the term "temporal" to the term "wordly"? Perhaps, to confuse the English language debate?

Gotcha Politics

Is it just me? Because sometimes it seems like even people who should know better are way to quick to embrace "gotcha politics" - most notably the character assassination of public figures based upon a single comment or statement, often taken out of context, usually blown way out of proportion. The problem seems to be getting worse, perhaps because that is the nature of our times, although this is an area where bloggers seem inclined to fan the flames.

As by now everybody knows, when asked to comment on the effect the London terrorist attack had on the markets, Fox anchor Brit Hume said,

Well, maybe. The other thing is, of course, people have -- you know, the market was down. It was down yesterday, and you know, you may have had some bargain-hunting going on. I mean, my first thought when I heard -- just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, "Hmmm, time to buy." Others may have thought that as well. But you never know about the markets. But obviously, if the markets had behaved badly, that would obviously add to people's sense of alarm about it. But there has been a lot of reassurance coming, particularly in the way that -- partly in the way the Brits handled all this, but also in the way that officials here handled it. There seems to be no great fear that something like that is going to happen here, although there's no indication that we here had any advance warning.

Or perhaps you didn't know that. Perhaps your understanding is that he flipped on the television, saw that terrorists had attacked London, and declared, "This will give me a great opportunity to buy stocks!" Because, more or less, that's how certain people (most of whom should know better) are trying to reshape that comment.

I'm not going to defend Brit's words, which obviously could have been more artful and sensitive. I'm just tired of this effort to sabotage people's entire careers and legacies (or even those of institutions - e.g., "Amnesty International said 'gulag' so they have no credibility and we can ignore them forever and ever") on the basis of a poorly chosen word or poorly phrased comment, when we know what the person really meant.

Now I will grant, there are times when a poorly chosen word or comment reflects so badly on the speaker that they deserve to be dragged to the (figurative) public pillory, or at least that their future conduct and statements be regarded with a somewhat jaundiced eye. A civil rights leader, for example, who uses an ethnic slur to refer to the Jewish residents of New York. Or a judge who uses the same type of "[slur]-town" epithet in relation to its largely black population. If you can scrape back from that type of conduct, well, I'll never look at you the same way. And if you can't, you deserve your fate.

There's also a context where somebody uses hyperbole, exaggeration, speaks in the heat of the moment, or speaks without thinking, and makes a statement that should result in immediate clarification and apology. And your reaction to being confronted can cast fair light on how strongly your comments should be held against you. If you contend that you are not a bigot but think you should be able to survive describing your staff in terms such as "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple" you had better act quickly to explain yourself - because otherwise, I won't be crying for you when you have to resign 18 days later. If you say warm things about Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign, but can't bring yourself to quickly explain how you could forget its racist and pro-segregation emphasis, and apologize for saying something that stupid without thinking, you don't deserve to be the Senate majority leader.

As we move into gotcha, we have fair political comment, sometimes involving hyperbole, exaggeration, the heat of the moment, or momentary thoughtlessness, which is distorted, exaggerated, or beaten to death in the name of gotcha politics. It may not be wise for a singer to express in a concert, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." But it's a statement made at a concert for goodness sake, and how often do those live past the moment they are said? It's also fair political commentary, even in a "time of war", to disagree or even be ashamed by your nation's leader - just as it is fair to vehemently disagree with that sentiment.

And then we have comments that we know are true. That a horrific description of prisoner treatment, even if we assume it to be truly exceptional, is the type of account we would expect to read in relation to a state we hold in contempt. Or, moving back to Hume's comment, imagine that part of your job is to comment on such things as market movements, and imagine that following a terrorist attack you view as far less consequential than other major geopolitical events there is a sharp downturn in the market. Would you not have a thought similar to Hume's? I didn't follow the markets on the dates at issue, but had I done so I would have been skeptical of the sell-off.

It is inevitable that people who are in the public eye, and who are constantly making on-record or public statements, will at times make mistakes. Hume falls into that category - he makes enough statements that it is inevitable that he will have some, many, which could be worded better. That's no excuse to try to distort his inartful statement into "When I heard about the terrorist attacks, I immediately thought of buying futures." If you have any doubt, demand clarification. "Are you comparing our troops to Nazis?" "Are you really stating that when you heard of the terrorist attack, your first thought was how to profit in the stock market?" The sad part is, when you know the answer will be "Of course not", and you run with it anyway to score a cheap political point.

Changing the Balance

Robert Novak, anticipating Rehnquist's imminent retirement, informs us,

That would enable Bush to play this game: Name one justice no less conservative than Rehnquist, and name Gonzales, whose past record suggests he would replicate retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on abortion and possibly other social issues. Thus, the present ideological orientation of the court would be unchanged, which would suit the left just fine.

Well, not really. But maintaining the ideological status quo would probably be the sort of bitter pill the left would quickly swallow, given the alternative. But, as Novak obviously knows, Bush's problem is most certainly not how to please the political left.

If a Rehnquist vacancy now is thrown into the mix, will Bush be tempted to temporize by naming one conservative and one non-conservative? If he nominates conservative Justice Antonin Scalia as chief justice and thus creates a third confirmation, will he think he has escaped by saying he has named two conservatives? No such maneuvers will make Gonzales acceptable to the Bush base.

Consequently, Bush's USA Today interview has been a source of intense anxiety on the right. Typically, the president did not defend Gonzales on his merits but with outrage that anybody would dare criticize his friend. That reflects a general schoolboy attitude that is losing the president support from fellow Republicans and conservatives.

I find it interesting that in this hypothetical scenario (in which Bush names "one conservative and one non-conservative") Gonzales is somehow transformed into a "non-conservative". That, to me, highlights the depravity of our present political classifications (or, should I say, stereotypes) - you can only be a true conservative these days, it seems, if you adhere to the philosophies of the religious right - even if you are otherwise contemptuous of everything traditionally associated with political conservatism. Otherwise, you're at best a "paleo-conservative" or, worse, a RINO (Republican In Name Only).

If Bush gets the opportunity to appoint two justices, and he doesn't make appointments which leave the religious right satisfied that Roe will be gutted or overruled, he will create an interesting conundrum for the Republican Party - a party which got about 30% of its votes in the last election due to high voter turnout and high voter loyalty among the religious right. If, in appreciable numbers, they stay home or vote for a third party candidate in the 2006 or 2008 elections, the post-election maps may be considerably more blue than the Republicans would like.

Oh, sure, you can make the same argument that Gore made in 1999 - a Republican counterpart to "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." But if you voted for Bush on the belief that he would deliver the Supreme Court and saw him deliberately pass on the opportunity to fulfill that implied promise, how inspired would you be to vote for a Republican candidate who in all likelihood will be more secular and more centrist than Bush?

Missing Money

It's not hard to find expressions of indignation about the "oil for food" scandal. And hey - there's good cause for indignation. But many of the harshest critics of the UN, lamenting the manner in which Iraq's corrupt leaders diverted Iraqi money, are completely silent about this.

The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security".

It took Hussein about a decade to siphon about $9 billion from "oil for food". It took Bremer a fraction of that time to lose $6 billion from the same program, along with a few billion dollars of money contributed by U.S. taxpayers. So, while I'm all for holding accountable those who participated in and profited from "oil for food", I would like to see some heads roll over the billions lost to corruption and incompetence under Bremer's watch.

And we complain about a whitewash at the UN.

So Much Self-Righteousness In Such A Small Space....

Fans of Christopher Hitchens, assuming such creatures still exist, may want to change the channel.

A recent Hitchens piece in Slate was, well, typical of his work. Which is to say, unimpressive except it its ability to rationalize, self-justify, and demonstrate Hitchen's tireless ability to pat himself on the back. Now, you might think he was going to address an unexpected subject, or demonstrate a bith more thoughtfulness than usual, as he explores the unfortunate shooting of Iraqi news correspondents by U.S. troops. But... well, you know better already, don't you.

But the truly sobering reflection is that crimes and blunders of this kind are committed, in effect, by popular demand. It is emphasized every day that Americans do not want to read about dead soldiers. So it is arranged that, as far as possible, they will read (or perhaps not bother to read) about dead civilians instead. This is the price that a "body-bag" mentality exacts.

See - it's in no way the fault of the military that innocent people die as a result of military policies that emphasize troop protection. It's the fault of lily-livered Americans who can't stomach the notion that our troops might be injured or killed. But for these weak-kneed Americans, presumably our soldiers would be proudly dying all over Iraq in order to present a friendlier face to the locals. If only liberals would share Hitchen's apparent belief that troops are pawns - cannon fodder, if you will - the Hitchens vision for Iraq might come to fruition.

But wait a minute. It isn't the liberals Hitchens is impugning. It is the conservatives and their "liberal hawk" peers (even if he doesn't want to come right out and say it). Why do I say that? Because if the government and military were playing to the sensitivities of people who thought this war was a bad idea from day one, we wouldn't be in Iraq. Hitchens is accusing the military of conforming its policies to the expectations of people who supported the war, but expected it to be quick and easy, and (like the liberals he loves to impugn) don't like the idea of Americans coming home in body bags.

Hitchens tells us, surprise, that Hussein and his fellows were nasty people, they did nasty things, and that they hoped that high troop casualties would weaken American resolve. Well, how do I say... duh? But last I checked, Hussein was in prison, his buddies weren't running the show, and the easy victory that was all-but-promised by the war's strongest supporters has faded into a violent insurgency that the Bush Administration would like us to believe is in its "last throes"... even if those "last throes" might last, oh, ten or twelve more years. (It is curious that Hitchens, after depicting a Machiavellian Hussein, plotting to undermine popular support for the war through suicide attacks on troops at checkpoints, can't resist undermining his own argument with a gratuitous addendum to his column, describing Hussein as "deluded and deranged during the final days of his despotism". He always wants to have it both ways)

Military and civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are a test of something beyond themselves. They are part of a design, by those who boastfully claim to be unmoved by killing or by being killed, to evoke in us an emotion that they themselves negate. This terrible quandary cannot be escaped by leaving our civilian allies unprotected, let alone by shooting them if they don't wave quickly enough.

Well, yes, it would seem that leaving our allies unprotected, or shooting them, would be bad policy. It is hard to believe that we have been unable to formulate a system by which our allies can be better identified by our troops, so as to avoid unfortunate "friendly fire" deaths. But as for the rest... what the heck?

Military and civilian casualties are not a test of our fortitude, or of our commitment to a cause. Also, military and civilian casualties caused by enemy activity should not be confused or conflated with military and civilian casualties caused by our mistakes. We are to believe that there are people "who boastfully claim to be unmoved by killing or by being killed", and they are testing our fortitude by somehow forcing our military to respond to domestic political concerns by creating policies of self-protection which at times result in unnecessary civilian casualties? Even if I accepted that argument, how does it support Hitchen's thesis? (Perhaps he hopes his readers will, by this point, forget that the deaths under discussion weren't caused by suicide bombers?)

I don't want to seem like I'm being unfair to Hitchens - I do understand the points he is trying to make. I am simply astounded that he makes them so poorly and that, with even the slightest reflection, he should realize that he is undermining his own past and present positions. Hitchens would also do well to address the public relations strategies that made many of the war's most vehement supporters believe that the Iraq invasion would be a quick, easy war with few casualties, and candy and flowers for everyone.

As for his comments on Professor Ellis? It's hard to speak to them without seeing the letter at issue. But I do think it is fair game to ask, of all the nations in the Middle East, and of all the nations which have well-documented connections to anti-U.S. terrorism or more specifically the 9/11 attacks, why did we choose to attack Iraq? You can easily regard the attack on Afghanistan as a frontal attack on Islamic fanaticism in its own homeland, and as being in retaliation for the attack on ours. Iraq? C'mon. If that's in fact what we wanted to do, shouldn't a considerable number of other nations been way ahead of Iraq on our "to invade" list?

Slate would do well to dump Hitchens in favor of, say, Paul Craddick, who (whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions) obviously puts a great deal more thought into these issues for a weblog than Hitchens is willing (or perhaps capable) of extending even when paid.

Amazon.com

A change in business model? My latest experiences involve mediocre selection, mediocre prices, poor "in stock" inventory, poor performance on delivery, and poor customer service.

Escaping

Today, Eugene Robinson takes us (for some reason) through the divorce proceedings of Terry McMillan. Perhaps I should spend more time reading the Post's gossip columns, or Us Weekly - I wasn't even aware that Ms. McMillan was getting divorced.

The gist of the column seems to be that somebody as savvy, intelligent, and well-educated as Ms. McMillan should have been able to see right through the deceptions of her much-younger husband, and recognized him as one of the "slick, predatory, no-good players" that appear in her novels. (Perhaps it is that depiction that inspires the column - the woman who was too good for the players got played, and this is her comeuppance.)

First of all, I'm thinking that an educated, accomplished, professional woman in her forties, even while joyfully regaining her groove with a Jamaican cabana boy less than half her age, would have to be thinking in the back of her mind that this probably wouldn't turn into forever.

Maybe McMillan made that calculation and decided to bring him home anyway. I hear that men have been known to bring home hot, young, empty-headed things, and she did have the foresight to make him sign that prenup. But if it were all calculated, she wouldn't be so angry. The betrayal isn't just that he's lost interest in her; it's that his new interest is in men.

Here's where I get myself in trouble (if I haven't already): In 10 years with this guy she didn't have a clue? In the bathroom cabinet, no stock of overly metrosexual hair products? No hint when the business he got her to finance turned out to be a dog-grooming salon? Terry McMillan, such a keen observer of love and war between the sexes, and nothing ever showed up on her "gaydar"?

I have a somewhat different reaction.

Terry McMillan spent her childhood in Port Huron, Michigan. I recall reading in Time Magazine, many years ago, about how she spent her years as an early teenager, spending her time volunteering in the public library. How when she got the opportunity to escape her childhood home, she took it - ultimately becoming an author, and becoming a success not because of her family and community, but in spite of it. Her success, or some shadow of it (if nothing else, escaping the family and environment, going to college, and becoming a success) is the type of vision most people reading this blog might have for themselves, had they been born into similar circumstances - the notion that, with their inherent intelligence and academic interests, they too could have escaped.

But some families are reminiscent of the trash monster from Star Wars IV - the moment they sense you might escape their misery, they wrap themselves around your ankles, pull you down as hard as they can, and try to drown you. I am not one to try to psychoanalyze Ms. McMillan, but if I were in her shoes I would be angry at her husband not, as Robinson suggests, because "he lost interest" - or even that his interest was in men. I would imagine finding somebody much younger than me, certainly, but probably also much different from anybody I ever knew before and, after ten years, being angry when he turned out to be yet another anchor - somebody whose attentions and affections now appear to be all about getting money.

In any event, I think Ms. McMillan's achievements are remarkable, and I would rather read an article that applauded her achievements rather than one which... well, I hope wasn't gloating over disappointment in what really should be her personal life.

Be Careful Driving

At least around here, the roads seem to be full of drunk drivers on their way home from their first "Independence Day Weekend" parties.

Quite a Mistake

If you're in-house counsel, and you're going to conspire with management to steal a rival's trade secrets, and you just left a voice mail message for in-house counsel for that rival... perhaps you should double check to be sure that you remembered to hang up? (Thanks to Have Opinion, Will Travel)

My biggest surprise in this case, at least from the law.com article, is how long it took for courts to zero in on the crime-fraud exception to lawyer-client privilege.

A Feast Fit For A King

Today, the London Guardian speaks somewhat critically of the fortune expended by the Queen to support her various households - £36 million, or $65,823,000.00. The article notes,

The £500,000 a year that the Queen spends on these occasions is, apparently, partly due to the gluttony of the guests - each of whom, on average, consumes 14 buns, bridge rolls and ice creams. A spokesman, demonstrating a grasp of arithmetic that is beyond question, pointed out that if the average is 14, some people ate even more. One of the ways of cutting the royal budget is, as Marie Antoinette failed to recognise, "let them eat less cake".

I would venture that the issue is not that the guests eat, on average, "14 buns, bridge rolls and ice creams. I would venture that the issue is that the Queen's caterers order that many "buns, bridge rolls and ice creams" per guest to ensure that no guest ever has to hear the words, "I'm sorry - we're out of buns. Will a bridge roll do instead?"

Whatever the case, I do hope that the Queen permits her staff to enjoy the leftovers, rather than having the surplusage go to waste.

The Shrinking Box Office

Reportedly, Hollywood is in something of a tizzy because of declining box office revenues. I think a big part of the problem has to do with the behavior of movie house patrons, and the reluctance of their owners to intercede.

A few years ago, an older woman I know expressed to me that she stopped going to movies when they were transformed from a nice night out to a place where you had to suffer through the person behind you slurping soda and chomping a bucket of popcorn. I don't think she would be attracted back to today's movie houses, where increasingly you can add such items as pizza, nachos, and hotdogs to your list of "eat while viewing" pleasures. Yet most people adapted to that level of interference with their movie enjoyment. So enter what bothers me.

The phenomenon of parents dropping kids off at a movie theater for several hours, such that the movie theater acts as a de facto babysitter, is not new. Nor is the fact that some teens don't behave well in the theater. But in recent years the type of bad behavior one might associate with a young teenager seems to be exemplified in a population of young adults - people in their late teens and early twenties - who seem to believe that the movie theater is an extension of their living rooms. Most of these people are just plain inconsiderate, but some actually make a special effort to make a movie unenjoyable for everybody else in the theater. When a patron complains, missing part of the movie to do so, management may warn the rambunctious viewers, but the sanction for bad conduct rarely extends past a warning, and the bad behavior often resumes the moment the manager (or security guard) leaves the theater.

I think that the theaters view this as in their own self-interest. The problem customers are frequent visitors. The complainers are typically infrequent customers. With profits turning on repeat viewers (that is, people who watch the same movie more than once) and high concession sales, movie theaters seem to prefer losing the older, more mature customers who are irregular movie viewers, in favor of retaining those who disturb the viewing pleasure of other patrons but (statistically) see lots of movies. (Movies, particularly "blockbusters", are increasingly written to draw viewers in their teens and early twenties to the theater, two, three, four or more times. The economics of a blockbuster are dependent upon repeat viewers.)

Two adult tickets, a couple of sodas, and a bag of popcorn - about $25? A DVD rental, a bag of microwave popcorn, beverages from your fridge, and nobody talking over the movie dialog - about $7? If this Michigan experience is typical of the rest of the nation, presumably a big part of the box office decline can be attributed to people deciding that there are darn few movies which they want to see so badly that they won't wait for the DVD.

My Faulty Memory

Today, David "Babbling" Brooks cautions us about being too hasty in our assumptions on the future of Iraq:

Still, one thing is for sure: since we don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war, it's important we don't pass judgment prematurely.

My memory seems to be faltering - did Brooks issue a similar caution during the lead-up to the war, about the "candy and flowers" scenario? Did he issue a similar warning in the days leading up to Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner? Or is he only concerned about the thoughtful review of such niceties as "facts", "evidence" and rash action when the wind isn't blowing in the direction he wants?

What If You Threw A Bipartisan Commission And....

The Washington Post editorializes that the Democrats should somehow, magically, forge a bipartisan initiative to resolve the long-term financial viability of Social Security.

But there is also the little matter of what's right for the country. Failing to act now will make the problem harder to fix down the road; cuts or tax increases will have to be steeper the longer the problem goes unaddressed. ... Democratic lawmakers keep insisting that they take the Social Security problem seriously and want to deal with it. This seems a good time to start.

Unless I missed something, Bush has not reached out to the Democrats and invited them to participate in an effort to reach a bipartisan plan for the future of Social Security. He has been much more consumed with dismissing any criticism of a plan, even as he declines to give specifics, while pressuring Republican representatives to sign on to his plan and attempting (rather unsuccessfully) to sell his plan directly to the American people, so that he can avoid negotiating over details. In terms of negotiation, the available evidence suggests that Bush views "everything I want" as the starting and ending point. If the Democrats offer any plan which gives Bush an inch, he'll take it - and then castigate the Dems for not giving him a mile. So where's the upside for the Dems in proposing reform plans which will never be adopted by the Bush Administration, but will instead be used to advance the distortion, "you voted for it before you voted against it", to obtain compromise at no cost?

Now It Makes Sense

Last week, John Tierney suggested that older Americans were greedy and lazy for not working past standard retirement age. Today, he tries to redeem himself, holding out President John Quincy Adams as an example:

Most workers could keep going longer if they and employers reconsidered the old assumption about a career trajectory. They could learn from the example of John Quincy Adams, who was elected to Congress after serving as president. He dismissed objections that the new job was beneath him, and voters didn't discriminate against him for being overqualified.

Adams started his new career at age 63, just about when the typical American man now retires. He wasn't especially spry, once calling his body "a weak, frail, decayed tenement battered by the winds and broken in on by the storm." Yet he stayed on the job until his death at age 80.

He accomplished so much in those years that he is remembered as a better congressman than president. You could call him an inverse example of the Peter Principle, someone who succeeded by being demoted below his level of incompetence.

So I guess the next time I see a person, past the retirement age, clearing tables at McDonalds or working as a "greeter" at WalMart, I'll keep in mind Tierney's suggestion of the "inverse Peter Principle" - that they were probably not competent at their jobs before they took the more humble work - and that they could be serving in Congress had they not found that particular job to be beneath them.

Oh, how sad it must be to be a former President, with so few income opportunities available to you - and all of them so demeaning. Tierney sure knows how to blow the wind out of the sails of a song like "Fortunate Son".

Wedding Rings

A wedding ring story from mythago, and her comment on John Scalzi's wedding ring story (to which she links), brought to mind another....

A friend of mine was getting married, and was emphatic that he was not going to wear a wedding ring. Perhaps needless to say, he endured some teasing on the subject from his friends.

The minister who was to preside over the ceremony approached him and inquired if this was in fact the case. My friend affirmed that it was. "I see," the minister responded. "In all my years as a minister, I have only had one other man who didn't wear a wedding ring after the ceremony. He worked with industrial machinery, and if a wedding ring were caught in a machine it might rip his finger off." The minister then excused himself to attend to other duties.

"See?," my friend asked, "The minister says it's okay if I don't wear a ring."

(I doubt that I need to explain that my friend does not work with industrial machinery, for you to figure out that the minister probably intended a different message.)

Epilogue: He now wears a wedding band.

Father's Day

The New York Times offers a Father's Day perspective of parenthood from a father who lost his baby daughter when she was 47 days old. In many ways his experience was the opposite of mine - he had, by all appearances, a healthy daughter who died unexpectedly of a brain hemmorhage. I had an unexpectedly unhealthy daughter, entangled in her umbilical cord, who made a remarkable recovery from that birth trauma. (Her 1 minute APGAR score was 1.) A few seconds after the delivery, my wife said "I hear her crying". I'm not sure what she heard; I'm not sure what, if anything, I said in reply. It was a long couple of minutes before she made her first noise.

I'm not sure that I breathed between the time she was born, and that point about ten minutes later when a nurse asked for our camera so she could take some pictures for us. Fourteen minutes after she was born, Emma briefly met her mother. Four hours later, she was released from the NICU and into our care.

I can't really describe the weight of that moment - the fear. The room is full of medical professionals, all focused on the baby. Nobody has the time to tell you "it's going to be okay", and (if you can imagine seeing this scene) even if they did it would be hard to believe. The many months spent anticipating parenthood, a tough delivery, and the sudden experience of your life, your hopes and your plans being completely beyond your control.

A delivery room nurse, checking on my wife after delivery, was concerned that I might see a small blood clot - "The way you turned white when the baby was born," she said, "I thought you were afraid of blood."

On this Father's Day, I am very grateful to have my daughter.

George Will on America

Today George Will shares an interesting perspective on the Emmett Till case.

The War on Drugs

Today George Will suggests that the war on drugs is one we can win - or, if not, that it is nonetheless worth fighting. To advance his point, he presents the following arguments:

• In the early days of the War on Drugs, during Nixon's presidency, key administration officials already perceived it as an unwinnable war;
• Profit margins for illegal drugs are enormous, and the sale price for cocaine can reach 100 times the cost of production;
• Illegal drugs are easily smuggled from impoverished nations into the United States;
• Inflation-adjusted prices for marijuana, cocaine and heroin have decreased significantly over time;
• There are 19 million active users of illegal drugs, 7 million of whom are addicted;
• Marijuana is stronger and more potent than ever (although I know some aging hippies who scoff at that claim);
• The increase in drug prosecutions since 1990 arises from increased prosecution of marijauana possession, not trafficking offenses; and
• The cost of the "war on drugs" is $35 billion per year.

I will acknowledge that Will notes periodic downward trends in marijuana use among teens, that occasional large seizures of portions of the 200 metric tons of cocaine that entered the U.S. last year caused "abrupt shortages in some metropolitan areas", and that alcohol use did not rise to pre-prohibition levels until the 1960's, but otherwise... which side was he arguing, again?

"It Couldn't Happen Here...."

In a scathing attack on gerrymandering, the Washington Post opines:

In some areas, open competition between political parties gave way to deal-cutting that foreordained most results and so depressed turnout.

Oops - my bad. That was about Lebanon.

Closed, Polygamous Communities

When you are living in a polygamous community, where the male leaders want and expect to have a dozen or more wives, how do you balance the demographics? How about exiling the teenage boys who would otherwise be competitors for wives?

Keeping The Elderly In The Workforce

When I saw the teaser for Tierney's latest on Social Security ("If the elderly were willing to work longer, there would be lower taxes on everyone and more national wealth and tax revenue to help the needy.") my first thought was, "He's probably going to tell us that if we would only work to the age of 105, like the industrious Chileans, everything would be perfect." (I was inspired, of course, by his past writings.) I didn't actually expect that to be the case, but I was a lot closer than I expected. Meanwhile, Tierney continues to overlook the once-lauded "privatization" of Britain's pension system.

Tierney argues, with little apparent thought given to the realities of life for the elderly, that

Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement. Their jobs are less physically demanding than their parents' were, but they're retiring younger and typically start collecting Social Security by age 62. Most could keep working - fewer than 10 percent of people 65 to 75 are in poor health - but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, they prefer not to.

Those darn lazy elderly workers have, it seems, no incentive to work once their Social Security benefits become effectively fixed.

Once you've worked 35 years, more work often yields only a tiny increase in your benefits (sometimes none at all), but you still have to keep paying the onerous Social Security tax, which has more than doubled over the last half century.

If the elderly were willing to work longer, there would be lower taxes on everyone and fewer struggling young families.

This, of course, is meant to be an argument for privatization of Social Security - that if people contributed to their private accounts, rather than contributing to a defined system of guaranteed benefits, they would have greater incentive to keep working because their "private account" would continue to grow. But somehow, recalling the various elderly people I see working in the community at stores like Meijer or even fast food restaurants, I find it hard to believe that they see no financial benefit from working - it seems far more likely that they are trying to supplement their fixed retirement incomes by working low-wage jobs. Perhaps, though, Tierney (who, in a most non-elitist manner, compares the retired elderly to Bartleby the Scrivener) isn't even aware that such people exist. The Guardian provides a more informed take on the situation:

It is all very well to talk glibly about raising pensionable ages. Nobody has yet explained what many people will do in their extended working lives. Some are capable of carrying on for years past 60: doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, desk workers.

But nobody can reasonably expect manual workers to keep going as their physical strength declines and all the usual ailments of late middle age set in. Even more significant for industry and commerce, it seems absurd to suggest that people in executive roles should be given a right to keep them after 60.

Most of us slow up, some become burnt-out cases. It is already a problem for many businesses that, amid relentlessly changing markets and technologies, key jobs need the energies and imaginations of 30-something-year-olds, not tired sexagenarians.

The Guardian acknowledges that some realignment of the British system may be requires, but unlike Tierney it directly addresses the realities for elderly workers:

Many people in their last working years will have to do humbler jobs than they have been used to, for less pay.

Tierney also argues that by forcing the elderly to work longer before they could retire, ostensibly while removing Social Security from the tax system, the net result would be "more national wealth and tax revenue available to help the needy, including people no longer able to work as well as the many elderly below the poverty line because they get so little Social Security." Hm. So if the elderly work longer, more jobs will magically be created in the economy? If Social Security taxes are no longer part of the tax system (through a privatization estimated to require $2 billion from the general fund?) tax revenues will go up? And the net effect of this will be to allow us to subsidize the impoverished elderly, who presently retire too early because Social Security is so generous? One hardly knows what to say.

And then, to cap it off, he resorts to the Chilean system - and actually suggests that if we had a system like Chile's we could retire sooner than the present system allows. But he apparently recognizes the contradiction, and thus suggests that Chileans have a "saner attitude about retirement" than lazy American baby boomers, and typically intend to work after they retire. (His thesis is supproted by a conveniently perfect quote from an ostensible "typical Chilean", encountered... somehow. Tierney's taking a page from Friedman's style book.)

[Updated to correct hyperlink to Tierney's original editorial.]

Restore My Faith In Human Nature (A Bit)....

Please - somebody tell me that the woman releasing doves with each Jackson "not guilty" verdict was one of his employees....

Apportionment

Rep. Candice Miller, concerned about the possibility that Michigan will again lose at least one Congressional seat following the next census, has proposed a constitutional amendment affecting apportionment.

"I find it absolutely outrageous that people who are not in our country legally are having such a profound impact on our political system," Miller said. "Every 10 years the census determines the number of Congressional districts allocated to each state and how those districts are drawn. If we continue to include illegal aliens in that count, we'll allow criminals to steal the Congressional voice of honest, legal Americans. This is about fundamental fairness and the American ideal of `One Man; One Vote."

I wonder if Miller would accept a compromise proposal whereby we count all citizens, and three fifths of all other persons.

Class Mobility

Uh oh - Sebastian Mallaby is engaging in class warfare.

Now, you want to hear something really bad? The poorest fifth of Americans has experienced a rise in incomes of just 3 percent over the past three decades. The real problem in America is not about the middle class. It's about the underclass; about Americans who lack the skills and habits to advance at all.

Hey - wait a second. Aren't we supposed to pretend that we're a "classless society", that everybody is "middle class", and that the richest of the rich aren't really any different from the rest of us? Perhaps I should consult Ann Coulter to see if Mallaby should be indicted for treason.

This comes on the heels of an observation by Mallaby which I deem, at best, banal:

This is more than merely heartwarming. It takes the ugliest monster in American society and smacks it on the head. Inequality in the United States is sharpening, and income increasingly reflects parental status. And while this may be linked to bad Republican tax policy, it has a lot more to do with bad education policy, defended for the most part by interest groups connected to the Democrats.

As you might expect from such a statement, Mallaby essentially argues that the real problem in our society is inequity in our K-12 schools, apparently best overcome by bashing teachers unions and public school boards. (Never mind that performance in charter schools and in private or parochial schools accepting vouchers is on the whole no better, and in some cases is worse, than that of their public counterparts). But the root of why kids end up with similar earnings as their parents has very little to do with the policies of either major political party and far more to do with modeling - kids pick up a lot from their parents. Does Mallaby think it is a mere coincidence that the children of college graduates are more likely to attend college, the children of teachers are more likely to become teachers, the children of doctors are more likely to enter the medical professions.... Even within "bad" school districts, you will find trends of that sort.

And no amount of improvement in the Los Angeles Public Schools, directly or through charter schools, is going to magically provide the same type of opportunity that wealthy kids in our society are born into. At the extremes, the hardest working kid at one of Kushner's schools isn't going to be admitted as a legacy into Harvard or Yale on middling grades, and he isn't going to be able to follow his father's footsteps into government. She's not going to be able to hire a publicist and a plastic surgeon, repeatedly create a public spectacle of herself, and end up starring on a pseudo-reality TV show on the basis of her manufactured fame. And, in more mundane terms, he is not likely to be welcomed into the "CEO Class", even if he finished college and attends a good business school.

News Flash: Children learn a great deal from their parents, however good or bad their public schools. You can't expect a child's school to magically cure a lousy, unsupportive home environment. Nor can you expect a public school (or private school, or charter school) to create limitless opportunity for every student, entirely divorced from what their parents do (or do not do) for a living.

Mallaby concludes,

Education is the last, lumbering public monopoly, and it is not performing: Only 23 percent of blacks and a fifth of Hispanics graduate from high school prepared for a four-year college; a quarter of all college freshmen require some sort of remedial course. So long as this is so, the alarming wealth gap in this country will remain unbridgeable, no matter whether tax policy is designed by Republicans or Democrats

But where is his evidence that public schools are not performing at least as well as the alternatives? Citations to exceptional examples do not prove the case, and the statistical evidence to date suggests the opposite - that on the whole charter schools underperform public schools. The most strident supporters of vouchers, particularly where parochial schools qualify to receive them, typically oppose requiring the schools which accept vouchers to administer the same standardized tests which are supposedly essential to measure performance in public schools. That suggests first that their goals are something other than improvement in education, and second that they don't expect objective measures of performance to lend support to voucher programs.

I'm no fan of public schools. But I'm even less a fan of proposed "magic answers" to persistent problems which are based on knee-jerk politics and guesswork. In my opinion, Mallaby's editorials often read like reworked press releases from lobbying groups seeking to advance a political agenda, presenting broad generalizations which seem to be backed with little thought or evidence, and this doesn't seem to be an exception.

Entreaties to GoogleGuy

At WebmasterWorld's forums, an anonymous representative of Google, "GoogleGuy", has taken on the thankless task of responding to webmaster inquiries about Google. There are a lot more questions than answers, perhaps because... well, if I were to parody the typical inquiry, my query to GoogleGuy would probably be along the lines of,

Googleguy, my right mouse key sticks ever since the Google "Bourbon update", and this is costing me thousands of dollars. When can I expect this to be fixed?

Professorial Carelessness

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy a couple of days ago, Eugene Volokh wrote:

I Am Glad To Live in a Country in which the President does not say things like:

Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia those who want to quench their thirst, and let us dare to taste those 'fresh waters that run from the Lake of Memory' -- as the words say on the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus, that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending reincarnation.

This passage was attributed to an article in the London Telegraph, which identifies the new Prime Minister of France as a self-published poet, whose "excrable verse" has led President Chirac's wife to deem him "Nero", adding,

Recently, in an essay on France's need for national confidence (which, note, is not quite the same thing as Euro federalism), de Villepin wrote: "Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia those who want to quench their thirst, and let us dare to taste those 'fresh waters that run from the Lake of Memory' - as the words say on the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus, that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending reincarnation."

I would have thought that context would have been important to Professor Volokh - we're not talking about a statement made in public, but part of a self-published poetic essay by a hobbyist poet - made worse, no doubt, by translation from French into English. Is it the language and metaphor to which Volokh objects? Here's how a song the President has proudly and publicly performed (en masse, in mass) reads when roughly translated into French:

J'ai lu un mandat ardent d'evangile dans des rangées polies d'acier;
"comme affaire de ye avec mes contemners, ainsi avec vous ma grace s'occupera";
Laissez le héros, soutenu de la femme, écrasement le serpent avec son talon,
puisque Dieu marche dessus.

Battle hymn or no, out of context it looks pretty silly. So perhaps Prof. Volokh's comment,

In fact, maybe that should be our reaction any time President Bush is mocked for misspeaking: "Hey, at least it's not 'Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe . . . .'"

should be taken with a grain of salt. Or at least with an eye first to context, and second to audience - two factors I would expect a law professor to consider as a matter of instinct.

I recognize that it is fashionable in some circles to gratuitously bash the French - as was the apparent intent of the opinion article he quotes (which is even titled, in reference to a line from the Simpsons, "Surrender Flunkey") - but I am willing to assume that Prof. Volokh had something else in mind. Perhaps he did mean to simply express that, while we have a President who sometimes trips over his native tongue, we are lucky not to have one who is a mediocre hobby poet. There, of course, he makes the assumption that President Bush doesn't have a desk drawer stuffed full of poems he authors during his free moments. Perhaps he should reflect upon why he believes that assumption is a safe one to make.

Additionally,the position of Prime Minister in France does not parallel that of the President in the United States, and is more one of carrying out the directives of the President and managing France's civil service. Perhaps Prof. Volokh overlooked the portion of the article which describes how de Villepin took office after his predecessor was "sacked by President Chirac" - something that should have put him on notice of a difference. Do I care if somebody in the Bush Administration, such as Andrew Card, writes horrendous poetry in his spare time? Not in the least.

But perhaps the most peculiar aspect of Prof. Volokh's jibe is that it doesn't seem to have anything to do with qualification for office. I would prefer an articulate President. I would prefer to read good poetry. But if a Presidential candidate is reasonably articulate, at least to me, other issues become dominant - and whether he writes poetry (good or bad) in his spare time isn't among them.

Don't Believe The Hype

A Lawyers Weekly article, reprinted in the Arizona Capital Times, reflects significant excitement about legal weblogs ("blawgs"). But some of the statistics presented in the article seem dubious:

• "In the four months since the blog — www.antitrustlawblog.com — was launched, the number of readers has skyrocketed to 50,000, up from 4,000 readers a month."
• J. Craig Williams, a lawyer in Newport Beach, Calif., estimated that his blog — mayitpleasethecourt.net — gets 20,000 hits a day."
• "“You can set up a Web site for $10,000, or put up a blog for $10,” [Larry Bodine] said. “I tell all my small-firm clients — forget the Web site, let’s get you a blog.”"

The first claim, of 50,000 unique visitors per month (or perhaps they were confused, and mean 50,000 total visitors, or 50,000 page views) would be extremely high for a subject such as antitrust. The Overture "search term suggestion tool", which indicates how many times a particular search term or phrases is used on all properties which use Yahoo! Search Marketing products, indicates that in April of this year there were 5,831 searches using the term "antitrust" across such properties as Yahoo!, MSN and InfoSpace. Even giving Google its due, "antitrust" is not such a popular subject that a claim of 50,000 visitors per month seems likely. (And other measures which might support a claim, such as Alexa rankings, link popularity checks, or even the number of comments on the blog itself, don't support the claim.)

As for "mayitpleasethecourt.net" getting 20,000 "hits" per day, that particular term has long posed problems - does a "hit" mean a "file hit" (for which there are typically multiple "hits" per page view), "page view" (the number of times a page is displayed), or something else? And given the report that this traffic "generates one new client a week for his five-lawyer firm", well, generating business is good, but that would be an unbelievably poor conversion rate if that's one new client per 140,000 visitors to the weblog.

I am reminded of a lawyer I know who insisted that a peculiar website she was running was getting "a million hits per day". I'm sure her SEO ("Search Engine Optimizer") was telling her that the site was achieving that level of popularity - but neither its subject matter nor its subsequent (lack of) prominence supports that claim. Be aware, folks, that web designers and SEO's will not always be honest about the amount of traffic their work inspires - if you hear a huge figure from a professional you have hired, ask to see an actual report of traffic metrics based upon an analysis of the website's logs.

As for Bodine's suggestions, I simply disagree. First, it's only going to cost you in the neighborhood of $10 for a weblog if you "do it all yourself". And if you use that measure, it is no more expensive to set up a website if you "do it all yourself". Second, if you were to retain Mr. Bodine's services to set up a small firm website, I sincerely doubt that his quote would be in the $10 range. Third, websites and weblogs provide very different functions. A good law firm weblog can be integrated into the firm's website, with ready access to other content from that site, including information about the firm and its lawyers. A stand-alone weblog will be a less effective marketing tool. And, to the extent that Bodine's insistence that the "freshness" of a weblog's content helps a weblog achieve better search engine results, that would also hold true for a weblog which is integrated into a website.

And that traffic thing....

The other big reason for starting a blog, Bodine said, is to increase a firm’s visibility on the Internet. Google and other search engines rate the relevance of a site by how frequently it’s updated, as well as the number of other sites that link to it.

“The reason you want to have a blog is because it gets much more traffic [than a Web site] because search engines have tuned up their algorithms to seek and list blogs first,” Bodine said. “Blogs are basically what search engines are looking for — text and something that’s refreshed and interesting.”

Well, then, going back to an earlier example, what happens when you search Google for the word antitrust? The Antitrust Law Blog is result #42 - a decent result given the 7,390,000 hits reported, but not likely to generate significant traffic. Many of the "top ten" results are from traditional websites, some of which have seen little to no change in years. Yes, "fresh" content can get you a boost in the search engines, but that of itself won't give you staying power, and that of itself won't necessarily cause you to outrank established, traditional websites. Further, good content on an established website will continue to rank in search engine results, month after month, year after year, while "fresh" content from a weblog will typically become effectively absent from search engine results within weeks.

Yes, it may well be possible to create a new weblog, and to use the weblog to achieve short-term search engine results which are better than those you are likely to achieve with a traditional website. (As I've mentioned in the past, most law firm websites are bad, and it shouldn't be surprising that bad websites don't generate much business.) If you have neither a website nor a weblog and you feel you must choose one or the other, it can thus make sense to start with a weblog, and then to establish your traditional site. If you will be attracting business based upon current legal issues and events, a weblog may well be the easiest way to get that "fresh" content before your potential clients. But if you are producing good content which is of longer-term interest, you will almost certainly benefit from building a traditional website.

Whatever you do, in the (im)mortal words of Public Enemy, don't believe the hype.

Say What?

I have been following some of the news about Apple's decision to switch to Intel as the future supplier of its CPU's. Let's just say that although some people love Windows XP, I am not among them. I was not particularly impressed with early analysis, which often went along the lines of "Apple will never switch, so this is really about negotiating a better deal for the Power PC chip". Moving onto an Intel platform raises a number of interesting possibilities for Mac, presently theoretical, particularly if Microsoft continues to suffer delays in its release of its next generation operating system.

Some technology coverage, though, still leaves me scratching my head. For example, an article that asks (in its headline) "Apple Goes To The Dark Side?" How is switching from IBM to Intel "going to the dark side"? The author states,

For Apple, crossing over to Intel, which many of its longtime customers consider “the dark side”, makes for some interesting future directions.

Well, no explanation there. The author continues,

If the release of the Mac-mini was any indication, Apple has decided to try and lower the price of its systems to gain market share (currently a paltry 2 percent of the total PC market). With the move to Intel based machines, Apple will be forced to bring the price point of Macs closer in line to that of PCs.

Right.... Just like when GM puts the same engine in a Cadillac as it uses in a Chevrolet, it can't price the Cadillac significantly above the Chevy....

Furthermore, moving to the Intel platform will make it easier for other manufacturers to produce Mac clones – something Apple already knows will make a significant dent in its hardware sales.

Well, not really. That is, unless Apple permits other manufacturers to make Mac clones. One of the big attractions of the Intel chip is its built-in features which help facilitate the licensing of intellectual property (and make infringement more difficult) - something that should be of use as the iTunes Music Store continues to grow, but which could also help Apple block its OS from running on any unauthorized hardware. That is, the new processors should make it harder to clone a Mac, absent Apple's express consent.

That's not to say that we couldn't see Apple authorize Mac clones, or issue versions of its OS (or server software) which run on any PC. But I fully expect Apple to retain control of its hardware, until such time as it decides that "clones" should again be allowed.

Representing Yourself In Court

Looking at a document, prepared by a lawyer who is representing himself, I note that he described himself in the caption as "Im Pro Per". ImProPer? Defense counsel may agree with that one.

Power Outage

No power in parts of Ann Arbor for more than a day, after a brief but very intensive storm? I guess the bright side is, it didn't happen in Ohio.

Nothing Magical Here....

The Sun and Mirror take on practitioners of the dark arts, in an effort to save Harry Potter. Or something like that. Book 'em, Danno.

Cambodia

In a line of argument even Powerline seems to regard as nutty, Ben Stein, Peggy Noonan and Pat Buchanan are attacking "Deep Throat" for supposedly causing Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia (by participating in events which led to Nixon's resignation from office when, in Stein's words, "No one doubts RN would never have let this happen") I am left wondering... given Nixon's 1970 expression on Cambodia's civil war, what would he have done? He wasn't even particularly committed to standing against public opinion at that time ("A majority of the American people want to end this war rather than to have it drag on interminably. The action I have taken tonight will serve that purpose.") The Watergate break-in occurred more than two years after he gave that speech.

Further, it could be suggested quite plausibly that the roots of the Cambodian civil war lie with Nixon's secret war in Cambodia (with its estimated 600,000 casualties), and with U.S. support for the corrupt and incompetent government of Lon Nol.

Also, Pol Pot did not take power until 1975 - so is the suggestion that but for a scandal which started in June of 1972, Nixon would not have brokered a 1973 peace deal with North Vietnam, would have conqured the North, and would have kept a significant U.S. military presence to stabilize both the reunified Vietnam and Cambodia, and thereby would have prevented the rise of Pol Pot? It seems to me that events that led to the "victory with honor" withdrawal from Vietnam were well in progress prior to the Watergate scandal.

Am I wrong in suggesting that, but for the intervening years of Gerald Ford's Presidency, at least Noonan and Buchanan would be blaming Carter for the genocide as well? Can anybody find a single word from any of the critics, which in any way, shape or form is approving of Vietnam for invading Cambodia and bringing Pol Pot's brutal reign to an end? Did any of them criticize Ronald Reagan, following Vietnam's invasion, for insisting upon the continued recognition of the Khmer Rouge as the official government in exile of Cambodia?

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Updated to remove reference to the wrong Ben. Ben Stiller? What was I thinking....

Ben Stein seems like a bright guy, but....

Oh, spare me.

Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW's, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?

Ben, pick a better hero.

The Presumption of Innocence

I've been contempating for a couple of months over a possible blog post on the diminishing "presumption of innocence" in criminal cases. For now, an interesting discussion at Crime and Federalism on post-arrest, pre-Miranda silence, and a plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose-type followup (or whatever that would be in Latin) by mythago will have to suffice.