Latin America: Forever Continent of the Future

The Lost Continent is the title of a recent Foreign Policy piece by Moises Naim on Latin America.

Back in the days of JFK and the Alianza Para Progeso, the Latins had a collective GNP on average of 25% and were deemed to be the best place to invest for the future. Japan and Korea and Taiwan were still regarded as not quite ready for prime time.

Today, the Latins earn around twenty percent of the US average income. What happened?

Latin America has grown used to living in the backyard of the United States. For decades, it has been a region where the U.S. government meddled in local politics, fought communists, and promoted its business interests. Even if the rest of the world wasn’t paying attention to Latin America, the United States occasionally was. Then came September 11, and even the United States seemed to tune out. Naturally, the world’s attention centered almost exclusively on terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, and on the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. Latin America became Atlantis—the lost continent. Almost overnight, it disappeared from the maps of investors, generals, diplomats, and journalists.

Indeed, as one commentator recently quipped, Latin America can’t compete on the world stage in any aspect, even as a threat. Unlike antiAmericans elsewhere, Latin Americans are not willing to die for the sake of their geopolitical hatreds. Latin America is a nuclearweapons free zone. Its only weapon of mass destruction is cocaine. In contrast to emerging markets like India and China, Latin America is a minor economic player whose global significance is declining. Sure, a few countries export oil and gas, but only Venezuela is in the top league of the world’s energy market.

Clowns like Hugo Chavez pirouette around the world peddling Castro-lite nostrums and silly populist slogans. It works in a place as devoid of human capital as the Caracas slums, but why is Venezuela's economy actually shrinking under the Chavez oil-price rise?

And Lula is re-elected president of Brazil. He promises to tax the rich to raise the level of the poor. Sound familiar?

And, except for Chile and Colombia and to a lesser extent, Mexico, most of the big Latin economies are under the influence of magical thinking and magical realism. And not only in the literary genre sense, but in the Evo Morales coke-snorting and Castro-pal Chavez insurgency departments. And how about Ecuador's election run-off?

Glad I didn't opt for the Latino track during my State Dept days.

LATimes Plummets; NYPost Ascends

It looks like the NYPost will pass the LAT at the rate things are going as readers evidently just don't like the brand of brain-dead knee-jerk liberal pap the LAT distributes on a daily dead-tree basis. All the Pulitzers in the country can't get the LAT back on track. Within a few years, the tabloid NYPost will surpass the tabloid-quality NYT. Then Murdoch & Company will have truly slain the dragon!

Here are the top 25 daily newspapers in the U.S. by circulation (with percent change) for the six-month period ending September 2006.

1. USA Today: 2,269509, (-1.3%)
2. The Wall Street Journal: 2,043235, (-1.9%)
3. The New York Times: 1,086,798, (-3.5%)
4. Los Angeles Times: 775,766, (-8.0%)
5. The New York Post: 704,011, 5.1%
6. Daily News: 693,382, 1.0%
7. The Washington Post: 656,297, (-3.3%)
8. Chicago Tribune: 576,132, (-1.7%)
9. Houston Chronicle: 508,097, (-3.6%)
10. Newsday: 413,579, (-4.9%)
11. The Arizona Republic, Phoenix: 397,294, (-2.5%)
12. The Boston Globe: 386,415, (-6.7%)
13. The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J.: 378,100, (-5.5%)
14. San Francisco Chronicle: 373,805, (-5.3%)
15. The Star Tribune, Minneapolis: 358,887, (-4.1%)
16. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 350,157, (-3.4%)
17. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland: 336,939, (-0.6%)
18. The Philadelphia Inquirer: 330,622, (-7.5%)
19. Detroit Free Press: 328,628, (-3.6%)
20. The Oregonian, Portland: 310,803, (-6.8%)
21. The San Diego Union-Tribune: 304,334, (-3.1%)
22. St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: 288,676, (-3.2%)
23. The Orange County (Calif.) Register: 287,204, (-3.7%)
24. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: 276,588, 0.6%
25. The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee: 273,609, (-5.4%)

Maryland Dems Support Steele

I once lived in Prince George's County where wealthy blacks and whites live in racial harmony, far from the cocktail chattering-class inane psychobabble of Montgomery County "liberals" who are all appendages of the US government sugar-daddy in D.C.

Steele, who as lieutenant governor is the first African American elected statewide in Maryland, said he was humbled by the support. "I said I did not want this [campaign] to be so much about party but about the people," he said. "And these people understand that."

Ron Walters, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, said the endorsements could be significant. "This is going to go through the black community like a rocket," he said. "It's going to be the talk of the county, the state, maybe even the nation."

The Maryland Dems are dependent on the black vote, but throw only occasional political crumbs to their single largest constituency. The unions and old-time Baltimore white nabobs control the party, and have selected one of their hacks, a party-line white limousine liberal, instead of a qualified black who was narrowly beaten in the primary.

I hope Steele pulls out a victory, as the hypocritical smug stand-patism of the liberal Maryland Dems needs a shake-up very badly.

MSM in Tank for Dems

Media Bias Toward Dems and Against Repubs is prohibited by the Global Warming Oath that what is in front of your nose is off limits to MSM discussion. Hence, a straight-faced hack at USAToday can write the following without any curiosity as to just why "The study found that three out of four evaluations of Democratic candidates' chances of winning — such as sound bites — were positive, compared with one out of eight for Republicans" happens to be the case. That would be journalism, and one looks in vain for that at USA Today or elsewhere in the MSM.

Network news coverage has favored Democratic candidates in the midterm election, and the page scandal involving former congressman Mark Foley has been the main story line, drawing almost as much coverage as Iraq and terrorism combined, a new study finds.

An analysis by the Center for Media and Public Affairs of midterm election stories aired on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts Sept. 5-Oct. 22 found that 2006's coverage has been almost five times as heavy as in the 2002 midterm elections: 167 stories, compared with 35 four years ago.

The study found that three out of four evaluations of Democratic candidates' chances of winning — such as sound bites — were positive, compared with one out of eight for Republicans. Coverage has been dominated by two major themes: the effects of the Foley scandal, and the impact the Bush presidency is having on the party's congressional candidates.

The Foley scandal produced 59 stories alone, compared with 33 on Iraq and 31 on terrorism/national security issues. “What's hurting Republican candidates is the media's focus on two non-candidates: Mark Foley and George W. Bush,” says center director Robert Lichter.

As Camille Paglia, a Democrat, noted in a Salon article recently:

Foley is obviously a moral degenerate, and the Republican House leadership has come across as pathetically bumbling and ineffectual. But the idea that this is some sort of major scandal in the history of American politics is ludicrous. This was a story that needed to be told for, you know, like two days.

Mark Foley was never on the radar of anyone outside the small circle of news junkies. So his fall and banishment from Washington were nothing but a drip in the torrential flood of current geopolitical problems. The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was "Foley, Foley, Foley!" -- and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.

After three or four days of it, as soon as I heard Foley's name, I turned the sound off or switched channels. It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don't the Democratic strategists see this? These tactics are extremely foolish. Gay men through history have always been more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians, who -- unless they're out there parading around in all-leather bull-dyke drag -- simply fit more easily into the cultural landscape than do gay men, who generally lead a more adventurous, pickup-oriented sex life.

Not only has the public image of gay men been tarnished by the over-promotion of the Foley scandal, but they have actually been put into physical danger. It's already starting with news items about teenage boys using online sites to lure gay men on dates to attack and rob them. What in the world are the Democrats thinking? We saw the beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian. Since when does the Democratic Party use any gay issue in this coldblooded way as a token on the chessboard? You'd expect this stuff from right-wing ideologues, not progressives.

Camille is incensed at Democratic hypocrisy, stupidity, and downright demagoguery that might endanger one of its many whack-job left constituencies:

I kept hearing on the radio the stentorian voices of Democratic women politicians saying that Foley was "preying on children." When will this stop? This blurring of the line between teenagers and children -- who should be vigilantly protected by any society.

And in Washington, the age of legal consent is 16.

Exactly! Therefore if it wasn't absolutely clear at the start who exactly Foley was flirting with, the Democrats should have been far more cautious about what they said. All that's been accomplished by this scandal is to call into question one of the central erotic archetypes of gay male tradition -- the ephebic beauty of boys at their muscular peak between the ages of 16 and 18. It goes back through Western iconography from Michelangelo's nudes to Hadrian's Antinous and beyond that to Greek sculpture. It's a formula at the heart of Plato's dialogues, as in the Symposium, which shows Socrates in love with but also declining sex with the handsome young Alcibiades. In ancient Greek culture, an adult man could publicly profess his love for a young man without necessarily having sexual contact with him.

The Foley scandal exploded without any proof of a documented sex act -- unlike the case of the late congressman Gerry Studds, who had sex with a page and who was literally applauded by fellow Democrats when they refused to vote for his censure. In the Foley case, there was far more ambiguous evidence -- suggestive e-mails and instant messages. Matt Drudge, to his great credit, began hitting this issue right off the bat on his Web site and radio show. What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way.

The Democrats' control over the Dinosaur broadcast news recently vacated by strident shills like Rather and Brokaw is still strong, as Williams, Gibson, and especially Couric are proven nomenklatura on the far-left, in personal preferences if not open attitudinizing. The NYT flaunts its anti-American bias as though it were the BBC or AP or Reuters. And the little pilot-fish press in the Midwest and Left Coast follow the great White Snark's path through the waters of leftist salinity.

No news here. But happily, the circulation of the dead-tree media is plunging as fast as the broadcast media's viewership. NY Post readership went up almost 6% while the leftie rags all lost ground.

Hope this will change things a bit in 2008.

Grad School Kool-Aid Drinkers Make Bad Pollsters

Michael Barone has a nice piece on the election coming up that notes that polls are a very imperfect art form:

Fewer people vote in off-year elections than in presidential years. In 2002, 75 million people voted. In 2004, 122 million did. My hunch is that people who identify themselves as independents are substantially less likely to vote this year than people who identify as Republicans or Democrats -- which would be good news for Republicans, since independents give Bush low job ratings. Another hunch is that the Republican turnout apparatus, with which the Democrats haven't yet caught up, will boost Republican turnout as it did in 2004, and that the resulting electorate will be more evenly divided in party identification than the electorates shown in most of the public polls.

Serious pollsters concede that there are some problems with polling. Americans have fewer landline phones than they used to, and the random digit dialing most pollsters use does not include cell-phone numbers. Larger and larger percentages of those called are declining to be interviewed.

Interviewers can inject bias in the results. The late Warren Mitofsky, who conducted the 2004 NEP exit poll, went back and found that the greatest difference between actual results in exit poll precincts and the reports phoned in to NEP came where the interviewers were female graduate students -- and almost all the discrepancies favored the Democrats.

Traditionally, the Harris Poll tilts Dem on an average of several basis points, due to methodologies designed to elicit responses favoring Dems. Ditto several other polling organizations. The reason Dems hate Rasmussen is that it's honest, and does not have ditzy grad students or other dumbed-down hires doing the polling. Hence the numbers reflect actual facts, which Dems like Dave Letterman do not recognize, but claim others [Repubs] make up.

Dems Run Right, But Will They Govern Left?

Big government has been the mantra of the Democratic Party for several generations,
but the current election cycle is finding a lot of centrist-conservatives amongthe Democrat List of candidates. [h/t: WSJ] James Taranto cites the link in noting that the nutroots have not pulled the Dems leftward, but had a polarizing effect of moving many to the center:

It has been less than three months since Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate primary. The New York Times editorial page hailed an "uprising" by "irate moderates," which, translated into normal political nomenclature, means a victory for the crazy left. It seemed that the Democratic Party was moving left just at a time when the party's fortunes were about to take a turn for the better.

We'll know in eight days whether the party's fortunes have improved, but already there is reason to question whether the move to the left is as pronounced as we thought on Aug. 8. Not only does Lieberman, now an independent, seem a shoo-in against Lamont, but the Times (the news side, that is, not the crazy editorial page) reports that "in their push to win back control of the House, Democrats have turned to conservative and moderate candidates who fit the profiles of their districts more closely than the profile of the national party":

One such candidate, Heath Shuler, was courted by Republicans to run for office in 2001. Mr. Shuler, 34, is a retired National Football League quarterback who is running in the 11th Congressional District in North Carolina. He is an evangelical Christian and holds fast to many conservative social views, like opposition to abortion rights. . . .

While Democratic leaders have gone to great lengths to promote the views of these candidates, some, like Mr. Shuler, have views on issues like gun control and abortion that are far out of step with the prevailing views of the Democrats who control the party. On some issues, they may even be expected to side with Republicans and the Bush White House.

Democratic officials said they did not set out with the intention of finding moderates to run. Instead, as they searched for candidates with the greatest possibility of winning against Republicans, they said, they wound up with a number who reflected more moderate views.

This would pose an interesting difficulty for a Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which Dick Armey, an erstwhile GOP majority leader, sums up in a Washington Post op-ed:

In essence, Pelosi will be forced to choose between a vocal base--expecting immediate satisfaction on issues such as withdrawing from Iraq, legalizing same-sex marriage and the impeachment of President Bush--or policies that are tolerable to a majority of Americans. That's quite a dilemma: appeasing a base that has been hungry for political revenge since 2000 and 2004, or alienating moderate and swing voters.

Pelosi has stated that House committee chairmen will be chosen by seniority. This could backfire on the Democrats, because members from the most consistently partisan districts are usually the ones who stick around the longest. Chairmen have the power of the subpoena; Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the would-be judiciary chairman, has already drafted articles of impeachment for Bush, while others are calling for investigations on the war in Iraq and the federal reaction to Hurricane Katrina. A revenge-hungry Democratic majority, substituting political grudge matches for serious policy, will not remain a majority for long.

Perhaps Pelosi has the skills to negotiate this; as the Los Angeles Times notes, she does manage to get re-elected in San Francisco, a district much too liberal even for her:

Even as Republicans across the country vilify Pelosi as the face of the lunatic left, here she faces the enmity of the fire-breathing liberals she supposedly represents. Only in San Francisco would Pelosi be picketed as a right-wing warmonger, as she was at a January town hall meeting overrun by protesters who jeered her refusal to cut off funds for U.S. troops in Iraq.

But it's hard to see how to keep together a slender majority that would include both Heath Shuler and John Conyers. They have no policy agenda like the Contract With America, and while Democrats are united now in their opposition to President Bush, he won't be much of a factor two years hence when the Democrats will have to defend their putative majority. Even if the Democrats win next week, they will face some enormous challenges.

If the Dems unseat the relatively-sane Steny Hoyer and put Murtha in as Dem Whip, then the Repubs can rest assured that they will make a comeback in '08.

"Bobby" Movie Opens in London to much Fanfare

Weirdly, the same piece by Roger Friedman noting the happy event of Studio 60's crash-and-burn also has a supposed hit about the last hours of Bobby Kennedy.

Emilio Estevez’s terrific movie, "Bobby," got a standing ovation last night at its premiere sponsored by the Times of London for the London Film Festival.

Estevez looked mildly shocked on stage as a full Odeon theatre, with guests including likely future prime minister of England Gordon Brown, honored him for his work on this outstanding film.

"Bobby," as I told you some weeks ago, is a Robert Altman-like story of many different characters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 4, 1968, as Kennedy makes his way there to celebrate winning the California primary.

Last night, a few of the cast members including Christian Slater, Joy Bryant, Svetlana Metkina and Freddy Rodriguez (of "Six Feet Under" fame) came with Estevez and his new fianc?e to accept the kudos.

The screening — and following swellicious party at Claridge’s — was such a hot ticket that Estevez’s other guests included Oscar-winning directors Anthony Minghella and Hugh Hudson; actors Jason Isaacs, Eric Bana, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as well as Americans Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins, who came over from shooting “Fred Claus” nearby with Judi Dench, Vince Vaughn and Kevin Spacey.

I say weirdly, because I had been working on Gene McCarthy's National Staff in his Presidential bid and the evening of the California Primary, where I had worked for weeks for Gene, I had been invited to the Ambassador Hotel by a senior McCarthy Staffer preparing to defect to Bobby that evening. Bobby himself had run across me in Watts/Compton a couple of weeks before and asked me, with my McCarthy paraphrenalia all over me, to cross over to his campaign. Since he was on the back of a pick-up truck with Herb Addington and other Green Bay Packers, my personal team, I was sorely tempted. His thumb on his right hand had a huge indentation in its flesh---something so weird that I wonder whether Bobby was foredoomed----as I learned in the Far East from my FSO days, the Chinese regard the thumb and not the hand as the chief indicator for reading one's future.

The California primary remains one of the high points of my life, and I got for a short time exposure to the glamour and glitz---talked to Jill St. John for a half-hour, Eva-Marie Saint and a whole raft of Mission Impossible stars all in the tank for Eugene McCarthy.

However, the Chicago Convention a couple of months later was to be the absolute weirdest time in my whole existence, one that got written up by T.H. White in The Making of the President, 1968. As T.H. recounts it on pp. 309-309,

Police and National Guard insisted that what was being thrown [from the Hilton onto the cops] was from the fifteenth floor, Corner Suite 1505A and 1506A. The first verbal and immediate charge was that fish were thrown---sardines or herrings, but unspecified whether in the can or not.....

For the record, it was smoked whitefish, with only the head and tail connected by a classic rib and backbone. I had not eaten in the excitement from being tear-gassed much of the day, bought the fish, ravenously consumed it in the McCarthy Commo Center on the fifteenth floor, then looked out the window to see two lines of six cops per line with robin's-egg blue helmets. No one was in the room when I delicately tossed the fish onto the blue helmets below.

I was drinking Scotch in the cast party for the staff [I was billeted on the fifteenth floor] and I remember getting completely hammered and talking about pitching the ash-trays onto the street. Unlike the smoke-fish, I have no clear memory of doing it. I staggered off to bed alone as I was totally fagged out and for the only time I can remember, double-locked the hotel room door and sank into dreamless stupor---until pounding on my door around 3AM started, along with huge ruckus and door-slams up and down the corridor. Someone yelled out that the room was empty and the cops moved on. T.H. White was obviously a bit biased toward the "We Are The Movement" Clean for Gene Corps, and said:

Checking and re-checking, I could find no witnesses who had seen or known of anything being thrown from that floor.

I seem to vaguely recall that Phil Ochs, the singer/performer of the Ochs/Sulzberger family that had a vague holding called The New York Times, was one of the participants in the Scotch party where I know we discussed tossing ash-trays! Guess T.H. couldn't get Phil for an interview? Or maybe I'm mis-remembering another bacchanalian party-evening in the Hilton where I met Ochs.

Anyway, if you want to read some very interesting historical stuff, White speculates that the incident on the fifteenth floor led to an estrangement between Humphrey and McCarthy so deep that McCarthy sat out the election campaign in southern France, Richard Nixon won the presidency by little more than a whisker, and the Dems began their long Odyssey into second-class B-List political status.

As Claudius, the Roman Emperor says in Robert Graves' great works:

"Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud HATCH OUT....."

I went to the "Counter-Inauguration" Jan 20th, 1969 and took one of the special No Parking from Midnight January 19 to Midnight January 20, 1969, Presidential Inauguration parking signs. It still hangs in my bedroom, to remind me of those not-so-halcyon days of yore.

Studio 60 Hits the Fan

TMZ got a submission from me on why Studio 60 sucked with a capital X. My main rant centered on how Aaron Sorkin's arrogant coke-head chic and an anti-Christian plotline doomed the nutroot-inspired SNL knock-off from the start. I should have put money on it:

Sorkin and friends will argue that NBC has done something wrong, or that the audience isn’t smart enough. Alas, in this case, neither is true. 'Studio 60'—as I wrote on August 7th after viewing the pilot—is just a bad show. There’s nothing wrong with the acting, directing, or dialogue writing. But the premise is faulty. No one cares whether a bunch of over caffeinated, well off yuppies, some with expensive drug habits, put on a weekly comedy sketch show from Los Angeles.

Knowing Hollyweird, this will not hurt careers there because there is a vested interest in dissing the viewing public built into a certain oh-so-socialist degenerate drug culture that Sorkin & Co. can come back to again and again until burn-out occurs. Or maybe Studio 60 is the Sorkin-squad's premature miscalculation signaling terminal burn-out. The half-life of the agit-preppies is getting shorter and shorter.

Hopefully.

Rumsfeld Must Go, Cheney Too

Jules Crittendon has a draconian cure for what ails Iraq. What history will record with unforgiving accuracy is that Gen. Shinseki was right when he said to Congress that 350,000 troops would be needed to pacify Iraq. Rumsfeld, and his eminence grise partner, Cheney, were dead wrong, and are still in denial, that they remain dead wrong about the way to get Iraq out of its quagmire.

For the Middle East to retain any semblance of stability, Iraq must survive intact, with a free and democratic government, without the sectarian bloodbath that would make what is happening there now look like a garden party.

For that to happen, the United States must remain committed to Iraq. We must quietly apply pressure on Iraqi leaders to take control of their country, to look beyond personal, partisan, sectarian objectives. We must increase the number of U.S. advisors attached to Iraqi army and police units. We must put enough troops in Iraq to destroy the Shiite militias, and hand bellicose Iran’s proxy forces another defeat, on top of their defeat in Lebanon this year. We must destroy al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency. Ruthlessly.

To accomplish this, President Bush must finally do what he failed to do five years ago: Increase the size of the U.S. military. We needed it then, as these wars were forced on us, and we need it now, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but as a credible deterrent to threats from Iran, North Korea and eventually China.

Congress, whether Democratic or Republican, must provide funding to recruit, train and equip a larger army. Technology and special forces, tanks and infantrymen. But just as important, we need the national political will to continue to prosecute this war.

This means Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney must go. They must announce before this election decides which party will control Congress. On Jan. 1, heads high, with their president’s accolades, Cheney and Rumsfeld must walk out the door.

Rumsfeld made the critical error four years ago of thinking he could do Iraq on the cheap. He thought he could fight a multifront war with a downsized, post-Cold War army. He thought he could, overnight, transform a politically and psychologically traumatized, ethnically divided nation.

It is one thing to make mistakes, and another to fail to learn from them. It is time for someone who can make the case for Iraq without becoming the issue himself.

Cheney is about the past. The next two years are about November 2008. With Bush already in lame-duck territory, it is past time to think about legacy, about leaving America in a position to keep fighting when he is gone.

Rumsfeld was American Ambassador-at-Large to the Middle East in 1982-4 and busied himself visiting Saddam during the Iran-Iraq bloodbath, among other duties. The Best Man at my wedding was his State Dept assistant and confided in me that Rumsfeld was a completely political player in the inside-the-Beltway mode. My Best Man Al said that Rumsfeld made no attempt that he was aware of to acquaint himself of the many nuances and variables and cultural quirks of that troubled region while he was Ambassador-at-Large. And Rumsfeld demonstrated his abysmal vast indifference to regional expertise when, according to the book Cobra II, he cashiered Gen. Jay Garner and dozens of US State Dept experts with hundreds of man years of experience with the offhand comment: "We need some fresh thinking." So the serially incompetent Rumsfeld brings in L. Paul Bremer, a politically loyal cupbearer to the egoistic SecDef and former Amb. to the Netherlands, to run the CD in Baghdad. When a dual-chief mode was suggested, with Amb. Khalilzad running in tandem with Bremer, Bremer said no and threatened to quit. Amb. K. was kept out of Bremer's deliberations, which de-Baathified the government and decommissioned the Iraqi Armed Forces---leading to an embittered elite and a vast number of recruits for a potential insurgency that did not take long to develop. For this massive incompetence, Bremer was awarded the Medal of Freedom.

Just as an update, the American government has decided to reconstruct the Iraqi Army and allow Baathists back into government jobs. So Bremer's coup de pouce has been reversed by common sense. Cheney backed Rumsfeld who backed Bremer who provided the seedlings and the fertilizer for the insurgency. And Rumsfeld remains while Colin Powell, a voice of relative sanity, cries out in the wilderness.

Crittendon finishes his article with a surprise recommendation:

It is time for Condoleezza Rice to take on the role of strong vice president.

She may be the one best suited to carry forward Bush’s vision of America in the world. Even if she chooses not to run, she is better suited to fight for that vision over the next two years.

We must prevent Iraq’s slow burn from weakening the resolve of America’s people and politicians, to the extent that they might delude themselves into thinking no plan at all is a viable option.

So that, in two years’ time, Bush’s successor will inherit an America willing to stay in the fight. Politically and militarily, an America that is not stumbling toward April 1975 again.

Much as Cheney deserves the boot, along with Rumsfeld, appointing Rice after her recommendation that Hamas be allowed to participate in the January elections---no one thought Hamas had a chance to win---has proven her dubious judgment. And her go-slow policy with Iran has emboldened Iranian assets like IAEA Chief El-Baradei to openly and overtly lobby for an Iranian nuke to Rice, counting on her to repeat her mistake with Hamas.

But GWB has been proven to be a corporate figure, rather than a leader, although immediately after 9/11 he showed promise of breaking out of his Harvard MBA mindset. Unless he does something original after the election, the last two years may be the lamest for a sitting president in a century.

Voting Machine Chaos Likely to be Widespread November 7?

George Will has a good take on the possible national crisis as the fall election approaches:

The hoariest jest in conservatism’s repertoire is that the three least credible assertions in the English language are "The check is in the mail," "Of course I’ll respect you as much in the morning" and "I’m from the government and I’m here to help you." Which brings us to the exquisitely named Help America Vote Act.

Having fixed Iraq and New Orleans, the federal government’s healing touch is now being applied to voting. As a result, days - perhaps weeks - might pass after Election Day without the nation knowing which party controls the House or Senate. If that happens, one reason might be HAVA, that 2002 bit of federal helpfulness.

Will expatiates on how the US got along for a long time without machines and how the US gradually improved the imperfect art of taking ballots.

States ran elections; some ran them better than others. Some ballots have been better designed than others, as have some voting machines. Most have been adequate. The gross defects of American voting practices were laws that established or permitted discrimination and other abuses. Tardily, but emphatically, those laws were changed and other abuses were halted.

Then came 2000 and Florida and the 36-day lawyers’ scrum about George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory. In response to which, Congress passed HAVA, which in 2006 may produce fresh confirmation of the prudential axiom that the pursuit of the perfect is the enemy of the good.

The lesson that should have been learned from Florida was: In Florida, as in life generally, one should pursue as much precision as is reasonable - but not more. When, as very rarely happens, a large electorate, such as that state’s 6.1 million voters in 2000, is evenly divided, the many errors and ambiguities that inevitably will occur during the marking of millions of ballots will be much more numerous than the margin of victory. That is unfortunate, but no great injustice will be done, no matter who is declared the winner in a contest that is essentially tied.

Unfortunately, the lesson the nation chose to learn from Florida was that American technological wizardry could prevent such highly unusual events, and no expense should be spared to do so. Hence HAVA, which made $3.8 billion available for states to purchase the most modern voting equipment.

On Nov. 7, 38 percent of the nation’s voters will use touch-screens to record their choices, according to Election Data Services. Unlike optical scanners that read markings put on paper ballots, most touch-screen machines - including those which The New York Times reports will be used in about half of the 45 districts with the most closely contested House races - produce no paper that can be consulted for verification of the results, if a recount is required.

The Democrats, in case one hasn't noticed, are run by lawyers and for lawyers. The Clinton Administration turned overlawyering into a textbook example of how not to govern [by judiciary and ACLU], and Clinton even appointed an ACLU lawyer as a Supreme Court Justice---without a peep from compliant Repubs gulled into dementia by their own naivete. The election day results will predictably be challenged by phalanxes of Dem lawyers while the bumbling, fumbling, incompetent Hastert and Frist are, as usual, caught unawares. Since Delay left the scene, there is no guiding whip hand and Hastert bungles along to what appears to be a big Repub defeat. Frist is gone, and any dreams that this lightweight may have had for President are, or should be, gone also. But I digress, as my main point reflects George Will's thesis that the US government is slipping from very little competence to almost none at all. In a word, the US government solves problems, or makes them worse, by kludge, and the advent of Dems actually aiming for higher taxes and more government in American lives should scare the informed voter out of his wits. George Will may be wrong, but he is also pessimistic:

Maryland’s new $106 million touch-screen system melted into a chaos of mechanical and human errors in last month’s primary election. Lawsuits have been filed in five states seeking to block use of touch-screen machines.

Today’s political climate - hyperpartisanship leavened by paranoia and exploited by a national surplus of lawyers - makes this an unpropitious moment for introducing new voting technologies that will be administered by poll workers who often are retirees for whom the task of working a DVD player is a severe challenge. Furthermore, an election is, after all, a government program, and readers of Genesis know that new knowledge often brings trouble. So we should not be surprised if, on Nov. 7, new voting machinery does what new technologies - dams, bridges, steamships, airplanes - have done through history: malfunction.

Murphy's Law will be operating on Election Day. You can count on it.

U.S. Finally Starting to Fix Iraqi Mistakes---Two Years Too Late

Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times is one of the most lucid commentators on the Iraq War that threatens to swamp the Bush Presidency and the Republican Party over the next two years.

Weeks of soaring casualties and degenerating chaos have forced America’s politicians to confront the reality of Iraq. But in the debate over who is to blame and how to get out of the quagmire, what seems to be lost – and may be most disheartening – is that the problem is not so much the policies now promoted by the US; it is that they come too late to turn the tide of violence.

For over a year, particularly since the arrival in Baghdad of Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador, the Bush administration has been quietly shifting strategy in the management of Iraqi politics, reversing many earlier decisions in favour of actions that its critics had long urged.

The rest is pay-per-view, but can be summarized as follows: the baleful influence of Cheney and Rumsfeld foisted an underqualified loyalist, L. Paul Bremer, to oversee the post-battlefield development. Instead of Arabists, pinhead Rumsfeld wanted "fresh thinking," according to Cobra II and Bremer nixed Khalilzad as his co-chair overseeing CD activities. Bremer immediately de-Baathified the country, depriving it of any qualified leadership, and disbanded the armed forces instead of confining them to barracks. Two separate fountainheads of insurrection were therefore embittered by American incompetence and enabled by the under-estimation of U.S. troops necessary to maintain public order.

Khalilzad came in as Ambassador two years too late, as Rumsfeld/Cheney mismanagement had made a manageable situation virtually impossible to control. Ambassador K. has got the new government trying to do the right things, to empower the Sunnis and share oil resources enough to keep a unitary state. Mainstream Sunnis bought in on the promise of oil-profit sharing after the October elections last year.

U.S. failure to keep the radical Sunni insurgents under control and the Samarra Dome atrocity gave the Shias motivation to use their base in the Ministry of Interior and their militias to break the restraints urged by their religious leaders and seek vengeance---which in turn has driven mainstream Sunnis into U.S. arms. But the criminal gangs and Shias are conducting a near civil war and the Maliki government finds itself unable to use police and Iraqi army forces to control the Shi-ites, who are Maliki's main source of political support in parliament. Last week that parliament followed a Shi-ite majority to vote for federally autonomous regions after 18 months, which may mean promises to Sunnis for a share in the oil economy are in jeopardy.

So Washington has finally realized that the Shi'ites might make a grab for the same kind of power that enabled the minority Sunnis to lord it over the Shi-ites since 1920 until the overthrow of Saddam in 2003. The Sunnis might decide a civil war is more desirable than organized Shi-ite payback for 80 years of humiliating submission to the Sunni minority.

Khalilzad is the right man for the job, if that man exists. But many think not even Superman could keep the two Arab sectarian rivals from a fight to the death mano-a-mano.

UN Doing Nothing to Stop Iran From Bomb

Israeli PM Olmert correctly nails the feckless lying incompetents at the UN for secretly supporting Iran's quest for a nuclear device.

The moronic stick-insect ectomorph El-Baradei all but told Condi Rice last week that he believes Iran has a right to a nuclear bomb. This clown won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 [of course Jimmy Carter won one in 2002 and Kofi Annan in 2001, so the trend appears clear that the Norswedes are even dumber than their reputations.]

Anti-Semitism and envy that Israel can be so successful while its neighbors wallow in victimhood and incompetence have a lot to do with it. A 23-member Arab League and an Islamic Conference of many under-developed countries are well-organized in the UN, but of course, powerless to build their own economies due to lack of human capital. And the OIC gets the African Union to desist from punishing Sudan for genocide to black Muslims because they are not Arab. And the corrupt AU leaders take bribes and buy into the OIC/AL conspiracy against Israel.

Losers hate success, which is why Democrats hate Republicans. And why the Old Media/Academicides hate capitalism, which rewards risk and intelligence. Both of which are lacking on the Dino-Drive By Cheap Shotters on the Left.

And Israel pays the price of success and UNSC scofflaws like Saddam get praised by Hans Blix and El-Baradei and Annan. Ahmadodojihad fits into the Saddam mold, and the crime-coddlers at the UN who hate the Jews for their success, reward the scofflaws like Iran and N. Korea.

Because the UN is full of losers. And losers hate winners.

New Orleans dismemberment apes Black Dahlia

By a strange occurrence that Carl Gustav Jung might have called an instance of synchronicity, I just finished watching a History Channel program on "Perfect Crimes" treating the notorious Black Dahlia murder when I got on Drudge and saw another dismemberment saga still in the news.

It turns out that a suspicious chain of circumstances recently unearthed by a sleuth named Harnisch has linked the Black Dahlia possibly with a distinguished M.D. named Walter Bayley who had been Chief Surgeon at LA's biggest hospital and whose estranged wife lived about a block from where the unfortunate Betty Short's nude dismembered body was found. Bayley died less than a year after the crime, his live-in lover was left most of the estate, and his estranged wife sued for the estate, charging that the Doc's lover had compelled him to leave her his estate because she knew of a "terrible secret" about the esteemed Dr. Bayley. The expertly carved-up body was dumped near Mrs. Bayley's suburban digs because Dr. Bayley was obsessively determined to shame her in some way, according to Harnisch's theory.

The New Orleans saga is less mysterious, and involves drugs, alcohol, high living and French Quarter low-life---a recipe for disaster that anyone with a sliver of common sense could see might occur in the post-Katrina N0LA environment. But the dismemberment---by a refugee from LA, no less---fits right into a life-style that thinks voodoo is just another form of self-expression.

Pete Townshend Walks Out on Howard Stern

I have always considered The Who as the greatest and most creative of the great bands, with the possible exclusion of The Beatles. I went to five of their concerts live back in the day, two in France and three in the USA. The only live band that could match The Who [or rather approach it] in onstage energy that I ever saw was Bruce Springsteen. And I saw the Rolling Stones right in front of the stage.

Now it happens that obnoxious nobody Howard Stern, whose only known skill is squeezing his mental acne on-air, has dissed a genuine all-time great Rock & Roll hero, and Pete
Townshend did what any self-respecting person would do when faced with talking about a supposed crime which had been thrown out as without merit. He dissed obnoxious Matzoh-Pizza native Stern right back by walking out on the interview before it started.

I hope The Who get down to South Florida this winter so I can attend the sixth live concert and relive some of the wild genius that The Who brings to their live act. I hope nearly-deaf Pete is still the greatest guitarist in the world---and that includes Keith and Eric Clapton, with the possible exception of Chuck Berry. And B.B. King, whom I saw live in Zurich, of all places.

Camille Paglia: The Sane Democrat

Salon has an interview with one of its founders, Camille Paglia, who is the Ann Coulter of the sensible middle. Some nuggets:

I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts and callers have of the American artist. Art is portrayed as a scam, a rip-off and snow job pushed by snobbish elites.

I was warning about this for years in my Salon column. I was virtually alone on the pro-art side in criticizing the Brooklyn Museum's 1999 "Sensation" exhibit for its needless provocations, which I foresaw would damage support for arts funding at the local level nationwide. Now the cold reality seems to be sinking in.

But I was still amazed at all those servile TV reviewers who raved about the recent four-hour PBS documentary about Andy Warhol. What a tedious, pretentious program -- with its funereal music and preening, jargon-spouting talking heads. Shows like that do incalculable damage to the reputation of the fine arts in the U.S. And this was about one of the most populist artists ever! Warhol, who came from working-class Pittsburgh, spoke directly to the mass audience with his Campbell's soup cans and Brillo boxes. And where was the protest about [director Ric] Burns' censoring out of Warhol's pioneering drag queens? It was outrageous, but the cowed reviewers didn't utter a single peep.

I also felt the same way, that Warhol was being bowdlerized by the unctuous little lapdog Ric Burns, whose serial genuflections at the altar of Dem false memories are beginning to make the transition from tiresome to insufferable. Paglia goes on to castigate Democrat hypocrisy and two-faced exploitation of homosexuality for political ends:

Foley is obviously a moral degenerate, and the Republican House leadership has come across as pathetically bumbling and ineffectual. But the idea that this is some sort of major scandal in the history of American politics is ludicrous. This was a story that needed to be told for, you know, like two days.

Mark Foley was never on the radar of anyone outside the small circle of news junkies. So his fall and banishment from Washington were nothing but a drip in the torrential flood of current geopolitical problems. The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was "Foley, Foley, Foley!" -- and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.

After three or four days of it, as soon as I heard Foley's name, I turned the sound off or switched channels. It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don't the Democratic strategists see this? These tactics are extremely foolish. Gay men through history have always been more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians, who -- unless they're out there parading around in all-leather bull-dyke drag -- simply fit more easily into the cultural landscape than do gay men, who generally lead a more adventurous, pickup-oriented sex life.

Not only has the public image of gay men been tarnished by the over-promotion of the Foley scandal, but they have actually been put into physical danger. It's already starting with news items about teenage boys using online sites to lure gay men on dates to attack and rob them. What in the world are the Democrats thinking? We saw the beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian. Since when does the Democratic Party use any gay issue in this coldblooded way as a token on the chessboard? You'd expect this stuff from right-wing ideologues, not progressives.

More on Foley and Dem hypocrisy from Paglia:

I kept hearing on the radio the stentorian voices of Democratic women politicians saying that Foley was "preying on children." When will this stop? This blurring of the line between teenagers and children -- who should be vigilantly protected by any society.

And in Washington, the age of legal consent is 16.

Exactly! Therefore if it wasn't absolutely clear at the start who exactly Foley was flirting with, the Democrats should have been far more cautious about what they said. All that's been accomplished by this scandal is to call into question one of the central erotic archetypes of gay male tradition -- the ephebic beauty of boys at their muscular peak between the ages of 16 and 18. It goes back through Western iconography from Michelangelo's nudes to Hadrian's Antinous and beyond that to Greek sculpture. It's a formula at the heart of Plato's dialogues, as in the Symposium, which shows Socrates in love with but also declining sex with the handsome young Alcibiades. In ancient Greek culture, an adult man could publicly profess his love for a young man without necessarily having sexual contact with him.

The Foley scandal exploded without any proof of a documented sex act -- unlike the case of the late congressman Gerry Studds, who had sex with a page and who was literally applauded by fellow Democrats when they refused to vote for his censure. In the Foley case, there was far more ambiguous evidence -- suggestive e-mails and instant messages. Matt Drudge, to his great credit, began hitting this issue right off the bat on his Web site and radio show. What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way.

After a very nice little grace-note urging feminists not to oppose Condi Rice in her historic opportunity as Secretary of State, Camille lambasts the Clintons, especially Bill, virtually implying that he is becoming another Jimmy Carter:

The Democrats' portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn't fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it's job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy -- not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality. The Democrats are in some sort of time warp in always proposing a government solution to every problem. It's like Hillary's philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, does it? Or does it take a strong family and not the village?

What's broadened the appeal of conservatism in recent years is that Republicans stress individualism -- individual effort and personal responsibility. They're really the liberty party now -- I thought my party was! It used to seem as if the Republicans were authoritarians and the Democrats were for free speech and for the freedom to live your own life and pursue happiness. But the Democrats have wandered away from their own foundational principles.

The Democrats have to start fresh and throw out the entire party superstructure. I was bitterly disappointed after voting for Ralph Nader that he didn't devote himself to helping build a strong third party in this country. When the American economy was still manufacturing based, the trade unions were viable, and the Democrats stayed close to their working-class roots. But now the Northeastern Democrats, with their fancy law degrees and cocktail parties, have simply become peddlers of condescending bromides about "the people."

Bill Clinton was always able to seem as though he was connecting with people outside of his realm. What have you thought about his latest media incarnation?

Whenever Clinton speaks, it throws into dramatic relief the inarticulateness of our current president, who sometimes can barely get through a sentence. After a career teaching in art schools, I've seen many examples of highly intelligent performers and artists who weren't naturally verbal, so I always gave Bush the benefit of the doubt. But now I feel that he really doesn't perceive subtleties and that his thinking is schematic and reductive. Clinton's range of reference and his ability to think out loud and to mesh the large idea with the small detail is remarkable.

On the other hand, I think, what the heck is Clinton doing? I used to assume he was campaigning to be the next secretary general of the United Nations, but he's turning into a compulsive blabbermouth who is compromising his own dignity as a former president. He was unusually young after two terms in office, but no former presidents have tried to hog the spotlight. He acts like he's the shadow president. This isn't Great Britain, where the leader of the opposing party is ready to step in if the government falls. It's a bad precedent, because we wouldn't want a disgruntled Republican ex-president bouncing around the map bad-mouthing a sitting Democratic president. Why is Clinton undermining the authority of the president when national security is so sensitive?

It doesn't really look like it can help his wife's political career.

Right! If Hillary is a serious presidential candidate, to have her husband constantly careening around the landscape like an unguided missile and stealing the limelight is disastrous. It may betray his own ambivalence and his desire to return to power. He's undermining her -- if we vote for her, are we going to be stuck with him? How will she be able to govern? Are we going to have co-presidents? It's probably too late for her to dump him.

I thought that Bill's recent performance on Fox News was very ill-advised. I know many Democrats loved it: “Oh, finally someone going toe-to-toe with Fox!” Well, what is this shibboleth about Fox as some sort of satanic force in American politics? Get over it!

It came at a time when Fox's ratings numbers have finally cooled off a little bit. It seemed more calculated.

It may have been mixed. It began as a challenge to the right-wing media, but I think Clinton got out of control and went embarrassingly too far. It was a perfectly civil and reasonable question from one of Fox's most neutral commentators. But Clinton went off on a tirade, waved his finger in Chris Wallace's face, and accused him of sitting there with a "smirk." That was over-personalizing the interview by any standard. And to charge Wallace with setting his guest up, with ambush journalism -- good heavens, the problem with American journalism is hardly that it's too severe and punitive. Our reporters' questioning of politicians is pallid and wimpy compared to what goes on in Britain and Europe. BBC journalists jump right in the face of every political figure from the prime minister on down. So for Clinton to make a huge fuss about a mild question about his administration's record in dealing with Osama bin Laden was a bullying of our journalists -- an act of war, in fact, on American journalists, saying, "Don't you dare go off our agreed-to list of questions!" Every Democrat who was disgusted by the American media's cowering passivity leading up to the Iraq war should have gone red-hot over this episode and said, "Clinton, back off! We want journalists to be bolder, ruder in challenging authority. Put more spine into our reporters!"

This overblown fear of Fox News is such a sentimentality on the part of too many Democrats. Talk radio is infinitely more powerful than Fox. Radio hosts are blanketing the country with round-the-clock conservative ideology -- not because they're dastardly conspirators manipulating the media but because they've achieved their success, market by market, in creating programs that millions of people want to listen to. The recent filing for bankruptcy by Air America dramatizes my party's abject failure to produce shows that are informative and entertaining and that systematically build an audience -- the way all the top radio hosts did who climbed the ladder from obscurity to their present prominence. Aren't we the party of Hollywood? The fact that we've failed so miserably at this central medium of communication shows how something has gone very wrong in Democratic sensibility.

Finally, Camille pulls out the stops as she depants and spanks the ineffable insufferable imposter Al Franken and generally rebukes liberal comedians and sneering shallow talksters like Randi Rhoades, who she compares to Maureen Dowd in fatuous inconsequential attitudinizing. Finally, she rebukes American intellectuals, journalists and hangers-on for their enclaves of isolation and impotent eunuch-style pontifications:

The more liberal parents are, the less contact their children have with religious ideas. That will surely disable our future American leaders from being able to understand the religious commitment of Islamic fundamentalists. Liberal journalists often seem incredulous about how anyone would seek death for religious principles. But that was the entire history of early Christianity, when the saints willingly sought martyrdom. We're heading into that world again.

What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It's snide, elitist, and politically marginalized. The chattering class clearly has no effect whatever on decision-making in Washington. Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush's decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler's rise. The intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.

Paglia reminds us that not all Democrats are the Eurotrash-wannabe soccer-mom Oprahfication empty-headed nincompoops. Speaking of Oprah, gotta watch Bill O'Reilly right now on Oprah's couch. I trust he won't do a Tom Cruise hopalong around the stage and onto the furniture!

France in Freefall? A French Margaret Thatcher?

Le Grand Charles de Gaulle once asked how one can govern a country that has 500 different kinds of cheese. Or three hundred different ways to cook eggs?The Economist does not answer that question, but does pose a number of questions on why and how the UK went from its '70s doldrums [I remember walking through a brown-out London in the mid-seventies when Ted Heath was PM and the TUC were on strike] making only three-quarters the GDP of France to its current position of a 5% percapita advantage over the hapless French. That's a lot of ground to make up.

Could it be the liberalization that the feckless crone-Prez Chiraq claims is worse than Communism? Do Sarkozy [my bet] or Royal have it in them to risk barricades in Paris to jettison parts of the massive bureaucracy smothering French economic life? [Chiraq certainly didn't, although he talked a good game.] Here's a snippet:

....the planned society relies crucially on an intelligent and efficient state, and over the years the French version has become untenable: too many bureaucrats, supported by too many taxes, impose too many rules in too many overlapping organisations. Despite all this effort, there is little sign that the public sector in France is any more efficient than in other rich countries. French public spending accounts for 54% of GDP, compared with an OECD average of 41% (see chart 1). One in four French workers is employed by the public sector. Public debt amounts to 66% of GDP, compared with 42% in Britain, and over the past ten years has grown faster in France than in any other EU-15 country. The baby-boom generation is leaving behind a poisoned legacy: as the title of a recent book puts it, "Our Children Will Hate Us."

Too top down
Moreover, in such a hierarchical system people too often expect solutions to be provided from the top. For example, whereas Google was devised by two graduate students at Stanford University, a rival search engine with the unpronounceable name "Quaero" was ordered by the French government from, among others, two big French companies, Thomson and France Telecom. CNN was founded by Ted Turner, an American entrepreneur in Atlanta; a new French challenger to the cable television network, France 24, which is due to start broadcasting shortly, was invented by Mr Chirac and is financed with government money.

The problems have been building up for some time. Thirty years ago, Alain Peyrefitte predicted that the mal fran?ais—essentially, a bureaucratic mentality—would stifle creativity and innovation and entrench resistance to change. Another critic wrote in 1994 of a "France suffering from a more profound sickness" than anybody then imagined: a "heavy and inert" state machinery that, if unreformed, would "block the evolution of society." The prescient author? Mr Chirac.

Even so, politicians have consistently failed to explain to the citizens why the country cannot afford to go on as before. This is the third source of French electoral dissatisfaction. Instead of making the case for change, successive politicians have preferred to blame, and thus to discredit, outside forces—usually Europe, America or globalisation. "The French political class has constructed a wall of lies against the globalised world," comments Nicolas Baverez, author of "France in Freefall." No wonder there is no consensus for reform.

Yet this survey will argue that French decline is not inevitable, any more than British decline was inevitable in the 1970s. There is nothing that necessarily predisposes the French to conservatism or resistance to change. Just because political leaders in the past have failed to push through bold reforms—Mr Chirac himself, in 1986-88; Alain Jupp?, a former prime minister, in 1995—does not mean that the country is unreformable. The unruly French do not make the task easy, but winning them over is a question of political leadership—the courage to level with voters and tell them why things need to change.

Anyone who has lived in France has learned to love [and hate] the place at the same time, though some express unqualified love, or others hate. I can remember when Vice Consul of Lyon, the U. of North Carolina students in an exchange program with the Universite of Lyon would ask me why the French hate Americans so much. I would explain that the Lyonnais were not your typical French [the Parisians hate the US more, the conservative countryside actually likes the US] and that the French hate everyone else even more than Americans, including other Frenchmen! Oh well! The Economist believes that change is possible and that the French, if their strait-jacket social model is loosened somewhat, retain the human capital to excel again:

Change need not mean trampling on values that the French cherish. Some of those who defend the status quo argue that France is a civilised country that has simply chosen different priorities. Like a misunderstood teenager, it wants to do things its own way. It still believes in solidarity and social cohesion, in small farmers and local markets. It does not want to abandon its poor to the streets and its shopkeepers to Wal-Mart.

Yet economic efficiency and social justice need not be incompatible. The Netherlands, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Canada have all revived once-flagging economies without destroying their welfare system or way of life. France's long dole queues and troubled banlieues are proof that, by keeping things the way they are, the French model is failing to deliver on its promise. France has 3.7m people living in poverty (defined as having a household income of less than half the median income); 2.5m living on the minimum wage; and over 2.4m unemployed.

Politicians will have to explain that tightening welfare rules need not rip a hole in the safety-net; that subjecting hypermarkets to more competition need not drive the boulanger or patissier from the high street; that removing pharmacists' monopoly on non-prescription drugs need not deprive every village of its green cross. They will also have to persuade voters that the prize is worth having. According to the IMF, more competition in French markets for both goods and services, combined with labour-market reform, could in the long run boost GDP by more than 10%.

Elections are coming up next year, and Chiraq is sure to be defeated if he doesn't take his horrific poll numbers seriously and gracefully retire. It would be a precedent if this delusional opportunist made a graceful move to quell the critics.

The two presidential front-runners—S?gol?ne Royal on the left and Nicolas Sarkozy, currently the interior minister, on the right—are both in their early 50s, and both claim to offer a break with the past. But is this new generation as reform-minded as it sounds? And how can it build a consensus for change in a country that seems so resistant to being nudged out of its comfort zone?

Britain needed a Thatcher to jolt the UK out of an outmoded social model that no longer functioned as planned. Will Sarkozy be the Thatcher that France requires?

Michael Scheuer: Dems are Osama's Fifth Column in USA

When I bought his book and read parts of it before returning it to Barnes & Noble last year, I thoughtMichael F. Scheuer was a Democrat embedded in the CIA. Now read his piece in the Washington Times and judge for yourself:

Bin Laden, his lieutenants and their allies are no doubt pleased by the destruction of the Spanish and Thai governments and the exhilarating message it sends to the worldwide Islamist movement: The infidels are weak, politically divided, terrified of using full military power and think we can be appeased. In short, war works; keep at it.
Even so, bin Laden, et. al, know the biggest prize looms just ahead — the chance that the Republican Party will be ousted from one or both houses of Congress. There are many factors contributing to this possibility: the Foley abomination, other corruption cases, the trumped?up "crisis" over First Amendment rights and the administration's ill-informed and ham-fisted handling of the Iraq and Afghan wars. If the Republicans are ousted, pundits on both sides of the aisle will find the causes strictly in America's navel.
But what will bin Laden and his Islamist allies think? Well, if Republican defeat comes to pass, they will first thank the Almighty — "Allahu Akhbar!" or "God is the greatest!" — for tangible proof of approaching victory. In Spain, Thailand, and Britain — where Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered the fate of Messrs. Aznar and Thaksin for the same reason, but is leaving gracefully — al Qaeda and its allies see politicians winning power who argue: "The military option has been tried and it has failed. We must seek other-than-martial means to defuse the Islamists' appeal and power." As in Europe and Thailand, this has been the refrain of Sens. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jane Harman, and a swath of Republicans who value their seats more than U.S. security.
If Americans vote for what sounds like sweet reason from the Democrats, bin Laden and company will rejoice. What they will hear is the death knell for any prospect of effective U.S. military resistance to militant Islam. With the Republicans out, the Islamists will be confident that Democrats will deliver the best of both worlds: less emphasis on military force and a rigid maintenance of U.S. foreign policies that are hated with passion and near-unanimity by 1.3 billion Muslims. If Osama approved of music, he would be whistling "Happy Days Are Here Again!"

Scheuer had been boosted by the Old Dinosaur media when his book criticized elements of Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But recently Scheuer excoriated Clarke and Berger for their inept craven cowardice when the CIA had Osama virtually in its crosshairs and the perpetually overlawyered Clintonites dithered and dallied and finally passed up the opportunity. Since then, Scheuer hasn't been on the Drive-By media shows and the Dead-Tree lib outlets have put him on their C-List as not totally trustworthy in the Hate America Department. Scheuer ends his piece with a paragraph that will ensure his permanent absence from the NYT Op-Ed treason page:

Enemy perceptions are worth remembering......, because if Americans elect Democrats believing them likely to defeat al Qaedaism, history suggests they will be wrong.
The combination of Democratic rhetoric and the indelible fact of the Clinton administration's relentless refusal to try to kill bin Laden — preferring to protect its Arab, arms-buying buddies at the cost of American corpses — ensures that voters will receive what Clinton-era Democrats are best at giving: barely disguised pacifism that has and will continue to allow al-Qaeda and its allies to steadily destroy U.S. security.

Now here's a fellow who knows what he's talking about and has the intestinal fortitude to say what he thinks.

Meaning he just won't be invited into a Dem Administration as they prefer cowardly craven backstabbing fingerpointers who have countless lawyers treating Osama and his fellow terrorists as a law and order problem.

Why not just make Jamie Gorelick Secretay of Defense and completely destroy America's ability to defend itself?

NYT Op-Ed: US Should Not Run For Exits from Iraq

Just for a welcome change of pace from its usual daily dosage of liberal pabulum and foreign policy apologizing for the US being powerful and the world's only credible policeman [now that the UN has demonstrated through Annan and El-Baradei complete incompetence and wooly-minded weakness], the NYT has a sensible Op-Ed on Iraq. Peter Bergen proves the broken-clock principle is alive and well on the NYT Op-Ed page as he weighs into the demerits of American withdrawal from Iraq before there is a semblance of stability established by the Baghdad government. Bergen notes:

A total withdrawal from Iraq would play into the hands of the jihadist terrorists. As Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, made clear shortly after 9/11 in his book “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,” Al Qaeda’s most important short-term strategic goal is to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world. “Confronting the enemies of Islam and launching jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on a Muslim land,” he wrote. “Without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing.” Such a jihadist state would be the ideal launching pad for future attacks on the West.

Bergen goes on to note another huge problem with an American pullout prior to a well-functioning civil Iraqi civil government:

Another problem with a total American withdrawal is that it would fit all too neatly into Osama bin Laden’s master narrative about American foreign policy. His theme is that America is a paper tiger that cannot tolerate body bags coming home; to back it up, he cites President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 withdrawal of United States troops from Lebanon and President Bill Clinton’s decision nearly a decade later to pull troops from Somalia. A unilateral pullout from Iraq would only confirm this analysis of American weakness among his jihadist allies.

Bergen excoriates the Americans for their blundering execution of the post-victory occupation, a series of mistakes that make the overall Iraqi expedition counter-productive and perhaps worse than not having invaded Iraq in the first place. But Bergen says that if we are in for a penny, we'd better be in for a pound:

...for the United States to wash its hands of the country now would give Al Qaeda’s leaders what they want.

This does not mean simply holding course. America should abandon its pretensions that it can make Iraq a functioning democracy and halt the civil war. Instead, we should focus on a minimalist definition of our interests in Iraq, which is to prevent a militant Sunni jihadist mini-state from emerging and allowing Al Qaeda to regroup.

While withdrawing a substantial number of American troops from Iraq would probably tamp down the insurgency and should be done as soon as is possible, a significant force must remain in Iraq for many years to destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq.

That can be accomplished by making the American presence less visible; withdrawing American troops to bases in central and western Iraq; and relying on contingents of Special Forces to hunt militants. To do otherwise would be to ignore the lessons of history, lessons that Al Qaeda’s leaders certainly haven’t forgotten.

If the Dems return to a controlling or at least blocking influence on American foreign policy, center-left thinkers like Bergen and Peter Beinart might be level-headed enough to avert a foreign policy catastrophe which the far-left fever- swamp dwellers advocate with hyperzealous fervor.

Let's hope for America's future that a Democratic takeover doesn't make Osama and his fellow terrorists look like prophets.

Irony: Shameless Mexican Prez Says New Fence "Embarrassment"

When the sadly misgoverned country to the U.S. south has a president like Vicente Fox whose malfeasance, misgovernance and misrule has caused millions of people to flee his country in search of a better way of life, one would think that he was referring to his own error-ridden years of governing his kleptocratic country.
He's the one who should be embarrassed.

Ah, but this would give the failed president too much credit for brains, moral fiber and common sense. Fox actually thinks the U.S. should be embarrassed for, in his own inapt and feeble-minded utterance, erecting what he calls a "Berlin Wall."

Of course, it's necessary to remind the fact-challenged kleptocrat cacique that the Berlin Wall was built to keep enslaved victims of Communism INSIDE East Germany and preventing these victims of misrule from fleeing Marxist tyranny.

Metaphor Alert: The U.S. "Berlin Wall" is being constructed to keep victims of Fox's bad governance from fleeing Mexico, not the U.S.A.. This is a subtle nuance way beyond the feeble-minded elitist kleptocrats to our south. Since Mexico is systematically misgoverned by Fox and the other elitist oligarchs in Mexico City, the impoverished inhabitants of Mexico WANT TO FLEE MEXICO and enter the prosperous, well-governed U.S.A.

But knowledge of history is just another of Fox's numerous lapses in general mental and moral development. His successor Calderon also agrees with the Berlin Wall analogy, indicating that diminished IQ and inability to understand metaphors, analogies, and elementary democratic government will continue to extend to the very top of intellectually impoverished Mexico.

When are these insufferable lightweights to the South going to reform their country's economy instead of blaming the U.S. for erecting a wall to keep Mexicans from illegally entering our country? Since when does a country not have the right to regulate its own borders? When high IQ, hard-working, tax-paying Filipinos and other East Asians are forced to wait for decades in legal queues for legal entry to the States, why should Mexicans have the "right" to violate our borders with impunity?

But then, we must remember that with leaders of the caliber of Fox and Calderon, who wouldn't want to get the hell out of Mexico?

Cargo Cult Science? Global Warming Gets Shrill.

Global Warming appears to be Al Gore's latest political ticket, as he poses once again. I recall when he ran for Prez in the New York primary in 1988, he postured as Israel's greatest defender and was rarely photographed without a yarmulke. In 2000, he mutated so often that between earth tones and finger-wagging, he couldn't quite find out which brand of imposter he thought the voter would like best. Now he preaches Global Warming like a Savonarola of Big Science. But here are some alternative views:

Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an editorial last April for The Wall Street Journal:

"To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere have increased by about 30 percent over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming.

"These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming."

Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, in an email interview:

"Climate change is a real problem, partly caused by human activities, but its importance has been grossly exaggerated.

"It is far less important than other social problems such as poverty, infectious diseases, deforestation, extinction of species on land and in the sea, not to mention war, nuclear weapons and biological weapons.

"We do not know whether the observed climate changes are on balance good or bad for the health of the biosphere. And the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide as a fertilizer of plant growth are at least as important as its effects on climate."

William Gray, hurricane expert and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, in a 2005 interview with Discover magazine:

"I'm not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle '40s to the early '70s. And there has been warming since the middle '70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.

"Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us. If you don't know anything about how the atmosphere functions, you will of course say, 'Look, greenhouse gases are going up, the globe is warming, they must be related.' Well, just because there are two associations, changing with the same sign, doesn't mean that one is causing the other."

Patrick J. Michaels, professor of Natural Resources, Virginia Tech, State Climatologist for Virginia in an email interview:

"In climate science, we only have two things: data (the past) and models or hypotheses (the future). The data show us that distribution of warming since the mid-1970s is consistent with what one would expect from an enhanced carbon dioxide-related greenhouse effect. The ensemble behavior of our models is that, once this warming is initiated, it tends to take place at a constant (rather than an ever-increasing) rate. Indeed this has been the case for the last three decades.

"Consequently we know, with considerable confidence, the rate of warming for the policy-foreseeable future, and it is about 0.85 degrees Celsius, [1.53 degrees Fahrenheit] per half-century. This is near the low end of projections made by the United Nations. However, there is no known suite of technologies that can affect this rate significantly, so the proper policy is to invest in the future rather than to waste money today in a futile attempt to significantly reduce warming."

But wait, there's a new boy on the block, who got into Harvard, but couldn't get into Harvard Law. And this guy is the reigning expert on the subject, having by his own admission invented the Internet. Freeman Dyson was formerly the scientist a la mode for the fashionable left, but the chattering classes abandoned him for the trendy Gore, whose credentials are absolutely fabulous in the cargo cult science department.

Gore said. "We face what I think should be described as a full-scale planetary emergency."

While aware such a phrase sounds shrill to many ears, Gore added that "unfortunately, I believe it is exactly dead-on accurate."

Gore cited increases in carbon dioxide, the thickening of the atmospheric blanket enveloping Earth, rising sea levels and the increased acidification of the world’s oceans that could completely disrupt the marine food chain.

"We have a climate crisis," Gore said.

Although Gore forgot to enumerate the coming storm drain crisis, otherwise his true-believer Chicken-Little The-Sky-is-Falling hysterics have recently pretty much covered the landscape with horrific scenarios of doom and devastation unless the world adopts Luddite measures against the internal combustion engine, which limousine-driven private-jet user Gore claims is "ridiculously inefficient." As Richard Feynman might have paused to note:

"Cargo cult science".... has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty".

Stalin's favorite environmental "scientist" Lysenko would have been proud of Gore.

IAEA's El-Baradei Gives Rice & US Advice on How to Handle Dear Leader, Ahmadodojihad

Of the three cretinous faineant airheads awarded the Nobel Peace Prize since 2001 [Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Mohammed El-Baradei, perhaps El-Baradei is the most dangerous. Read the link for this fatuous freak of nature's imbecilic partiality toward dictators and religious madmen.

The retention of El-Baradei in 2005 may be the fault of the ingenuous Rice/Bush tandem, the same pair who persuaded Israel not to veto Hamas's participation in last January's elections.

But this moronic idiot exceeds the last Arab, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in his crimes against common sense and general human intelligence. Perhaps many observers are correct that first-cousin in-breeding among Arabs has produced an Ozarks/Kentucky brand of generalized dumbed-downedness. Here is what the WSJ has on the IAEA chief:

"I don't think sanctions work as a penalty," Mr. ElBaradei opined after meeting with Condoleezza Rice on Monday. The director general was talking about North Korea, of whose leaders he took the forgiving view that they are testing nuclear weapons because "they feel isolated, they feel they are not getting the security they need." As for Iran, "the jury is still out on whether they are developing a nuclear weapon." However, he was quite certain that "at the end of the day, we have to bite the bullet and talk to North Korea and Iran." No doubt Condi was grateful for this free public chiding.

And this ectomorph stick-insect also has advice to the US after Cong. Pete Hoekstra chided the IAEA for firing an Iranian inspector for actually doing his job:
the IAEA decided to leak to the press an ostensibly private letter to Mr. Hoekstra detailing its objections to a report on Iran, which the agency variously labeled "outrageous," "dishonest," "erroneous" and "misleading."

And what was so dreadful about the report, which had bipartisan blessing? Aside from huffing over two committee "errors"--one of them trivial, the other semantic--the IAEA took furious exception over the committee's statement that the IAEA had decided to remove Chris Charlier, its chief weapons' inspector for Iran, after Mr. Charlier said publicly that he thought the Iranians were intent on building a nuclear weapon.

The IAEA insists that it was Iran, not the IAEA, that demanded Mr. Charlier's removal, and that Iran is within its legal rights to do so. That's true. But it is also true that Iran has repeatedly--and illegally--denied IAEA inspectors the multiple-entry visas they need to do their job.

"Iran has consistently been in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement on this point," a former IAEA official recently told the Platts news agency. "And until now the IAEA has been unwilling to draw international attention to that fact." Our sources tell us that, in addition to Mr. Charlier, Iran denied entry to two other IAEA weapons inspectors in August alone.

I guess El-Baradei's membership in the "religion of tolerance" may have provoked a bias in favor of Iran's building a weapon because "they feel isolated, they feel they are not getting the security they need" and not because "the jury is still out on whether [Iran is] developing a nuclear weapon." The WSJ ends up its piece:

...Under Mr. ElBaradei's leadership the IAEA has presented itself as the ultimate arbiter on questions of nuclear proliferation, despite its failures to detect Iraq's nuclear-weapons programs in the 1980s and Libya's in the early part of this decade. Yet if the IAEA cannot get its personnel unimpeded into Iran--and especially if Iran can bar the toughest, most skeptical inspectors--the quality of the IAEA's information and the reliability of its judgments are bound to deteriorate.
Had Mr. ElBaradei been doing his real job, he might have made a more strenuous effort at pointing out publicly Iran's failures to comply with its obligations, rather than offer grand pronouncements on diplomacy and making partisan intrusions into American politics by critiquing Congressional white papers and Administration policy. As it is, we have Mr. Hoekstra to thank for bringing to light yet another instance of Iran's bad faith, and of the U.N.'s unreliability.

El-Baradei has demonstrated such widespread blockheadedness that perhaps he is running for SecGen of the UN, as it appears from Boutros-Ghali and Annan that stupidity is the chief requirement for getting that job.

NYT a Fraud; Jane Pauley Sues

Jane Pauley should have known that the NYT is a fraudulent publication, but being one of those weak-minded liberals, she trusted Pravda on the Hudson and got burned.

Oh well!

Halperin and The Note Catch MSM Uber-Strategy

Mark Halperin
and his scurvy crew at the ABC Washington Note are right on the money about the MSM's Mighty Wurlitzer [Old Media, Drive-By Media, Dinosaur Media] and the RNC's last minute rush to turn the tide. Read it all because this is straight from the bowels of the liberal cabal's brain-trust [pardon the metaphor, but I think the liberal brain resides largely in his bowels, just prior to excretion]:

The Note's First Principles of the 2006 midterm elections, all of which are well known to the commander in chief:

1. All that matters substantively and politically is who controls the House and Senate come January.

2. The overall national climate is fantastic for Democrats, who will gain seats in both the House and the Senate, and might not lose a single incumbent.

3. On the current trajectory, most Republican and Democratic strategists agree, Democrats will take control of the House, and end up with 48, 49, 50, 51, or 52 Senate seats.

4. There are no network/AP exit polls that allow the projection of House races.

5. This election has to a large extent been nationalized, which favors Democrats over Republicans.

6. President Bush's insistence on being prominent in the closing days of the election will reinforce the national nature of the contests, but, he hopes, nationalize them more around national security and taxes than around Iraq — even when he talks about Iraq!!

7. All indications are that there will be no pre-election Foley revelations, ethics committee leaks, or ethics committee report that will stoke the page scandal to the detriment of either side.

8. Uttering the phrase "have you seen Drudge?" is not necessarily the only way to cover political news in America.

9. Despite the national climate — as reflected in national public polls and most district and state private polls — Republicans have a lot of fight left in them.

If you want to follow the subtle shifts, if you host your own conservative radio show, and/or if you blog in your pajamas, you need to start your day looking at the little wisps out there that might — just might — mean Republicans can keep from being completely massacred (while still losing seats).

A. The flaps over the RNC ad attacking Harold Ford and the Michael J. Fox ad are a three-fer for the Republicans:

1. They get the national debate focused away from Iraq. Every day for the next two weeks that the network news says the election is about ANYTHING but Iraq is a good day for George W. Bush's party. (Now: why President Bush plans to use a press conference to put Iraq front and center is beyond The Note — and, we would say, beyond the many Senate and House candidates of the president's party. Note to Paul Begala: the POTUS must be putting nation ahead of politics, right?)

2. They give Republicans some sense of hope that their negative messaging might finally break through and define Democratic candidates as liberal and unacceptable.

3. They produce an Old Media reaction (pro-stem cell research, pro-Fox, pro-Hollywood, pro-Ford) that Republicans can use to go to the base and say, "Don't let the Old Media steal this election!"

B. Read the fine print on the national and state polls carefully. Who is being surveyed? Registered voters? Likely voters? Who does the pollster think a "likely voter" is? Will more Democrats or Republicans turn out to vote? Ask yourself: who is more likely to turn out: a committed conservative (who hates abortion, loves guns, and thinks Nancy Pelosi is an advanced scout for Hillary Clinton) or an independent who doesn't like the war in Iraq? (Michael Barone, thinking along these lines, crunches the numbers and suggests a bare Democratic majority is coming in the House — but perhaps not one that will be clear on election night, or one that will necessarily produce a Speaker Pelosi. LINK

C. Read Jackie Calmes' Wall Street Journal story for a portrait of faithful Lori Viars and Jim Winters, Ohio Republican activists who do not want to let George W. Bush down. (and read it for a closing paragraph that will rally the anti-Old Media GOP base even more.) LINK

D. Dan Bartlett's clever stagecraft is creating impressions through devices such as this Wall Street Journal lede: "With few military options left to counter the violence across Iraq, top U.S. officials are shifting more of the onus onto Baghdad's beleagured political leaders to broker compromises they hope might stem the rising bloodshed." Not the "American troops heading home by the thousands" that Republican candidates had hoped and assumed they would see before Election Day, but better politically than the status quo.

E. As the Wall Street Journal hints this morning, the next two weeks are going to see major corporate spending by the pharmaceutical industry and other interests who have a Roveian sense of the stakes involved. Spending tens of millions of dollars now can potentially save these companies hundreds of millions — maybe billions — down the road.

F. As the Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times polls in key Senate races suggest, Republicans continue to have some white male/religious conservatives/rural mojo.

G. In the space of one Dana Milbank column, Charlie Cook goes from saying he would be "surprised" if Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) can "survive," to BlackBerrying that "Montana is closing more than thought . . . Burns might not be dead yet."

H. The Washington Post makes clear today that polls suggest — counter to the CW — that Democrats are in fact not necessarily more energized than Republicans.

"In the most recent poll, 29 percent of self-identified conservatives said they plan to vote for Democrats for the House, compared with 17 percent in 2004. Among white evangelical Protestants, 30 percent favor Democrats, compared with 25 percent two years ago. At the same time, Republicans report being as enthusiastic as Democrats about voting this year, belying the assumption that they might stay home."

And then there is what could happen in New Jersey today. If the state Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage, it might not dominate the network news and big papers for the next two weeks, but it will become a key part of the targeting message operation of the RNC and its allies in nearly every competitive race in the country. Even Blue states and districts have plenty of anti-gay-marriage voters.

The decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court is expected to be issued at 3:00 pm ET today. The decision is expected to be the last of Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz's 10-year career, she is stepping down due to an age limit.

What a way to step down, as it were! Sounds like that excretion metaphor is applicable just one more time for Judge Debbie's last product on the bench [as it were].

Great Minds Yadda, Yadda

Mickey Kaus had this piece yesterday, which sorta aped my piece, or vice versa:

House Republicans especially saw the border-fence measure as excellent proof to voters that Republicans are serious about cracking down on illegal immigration. So they wanted some pomp and circumstance surrounding the bill-signing.

But Bush, who is holding out for "comprehensive immigration reform'' that acknowledges the millions of undocumented immigrants already living in the United States, plans to sign the fence bill in a relatively low-key ceremony in the Roosevelt Room on Thursday morning.[E.A.]

It seems to me that, by downplaying the fence, he's sacrificing a big 2006 GOP selling in the vague, slightly fearful pursuit of the Latino vote in the long term. It still makes no sense to me. Does Bush think the GOP is in such a strong position that he can win the midterms without every advantage he can bring to bear? Why not have a big, spotlighted ceremony at which Bush declares this the first, necessary and relatively non-punitive step toward larger reform? It's not as if Latinos aren't going to find out the bill was signed. ... Bush's action reinforces my earlier paranoid thought: He doesn't really care that much about winning the midterms. Or, at any rate, he cares less about them than about what he imagines as his "legacy"--a semi-amnesty that somehow turns Hispanics into permanent Republicans.

I got flamed by a commenter over at Redstate for my own comments. Wonder what he'll think of Mickey?

I want to watch that ceremony on TV, unless GWB chokes in the clutch at the last minute.