Nick Kristof on Darfur.

Dive in and feel the horror while the Times's opinion page is still free-access!

In all seriousness, Mr. Kristof went to Sudan and spoke to a woman who watched her husband be murdered by the janjaweed, was then gang-raped, and most recently saw the youngest of her five children die - possibly of starvation - in a refugee camp.

Mr. Kristof was able to make his visit as a member (of sorts) of Kofi Annan's recent mission. Now, as if the stories that emerged from that visit weren't bad enough, the Sudanese government has cracked down on Mr. Annan's translator - apparently, it's the policy of the Sudanese government to insist that no rapes are taking place in Darfur, and when evidence to the contrary is presented, they tend to intervene (despite promises to the contrary). They've also arrested aid workers from the Dutch chapter (if that's the word) of Medecins Sans Frontiers and threatened the total expulsion of Medecins du Monde for very similar "offenses."

Meanwhile, the rainy season's about to start, and we may be looking at severe food shortages, particularly in the south of the country.

Just in case anyone needed another reason to be grateful for not living in the Sudan.

Khodorkovsky out.

Just to follow up on an earlier post:

Former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was Russia's richest man before the government dismantled his empire, was convicted Tuesday of fraud and tax evasion and then sentenced to nine years in prison following a trial widely denounced as politically motivated.

. . .

Khodorkovsky is one of the so-called oligarchs who became enormously wealthy during the murky post-Soviet privatization of state industries in the 1990s. Such tycoons are widely resented by ordinary Russians, and demonstrators denouncing him have been a daily fixture outside the courthouse during the verdict-reading.

But there have also been gatherings of Khodorkovsky supporters, who say the trial was revenge for Khodorkovsky's political activities and raised substantial doubt about Russia's commitment to rule of law.

The verdict "shows that in Russia there is no independent court, in Russia there is only the all-powerful prosecutor-general," liberal politician Irina Khakamada said.

Such concerns have spooked many foreign investors.

From the AP.

Mr. Khodorkovsky's legal team is expected to appeal; the Russian state is expected to file more charges. The ex-oligarch is almost certainly going to be kept at a good distance from politics during the 2008 Russian elections, so Mr. Putin ought to be feeling pretty pleased right now.

Done.

Incidentally . . .

The son of assassinated former premier Rafik Hariri swept Beirut legislative elections, officials said Monday, in a solid rejection of Syrian influence that marked a turning point in Lebanese politics.

For the record.

Keeping up-to-date on Benedict XVI.

The Times reports that . . .

Pope Benedict XVI waded gingerly into Italian politics today, endorsing a call by Italian bishops for a boycott of a contentious referendum on medically assisted fertility.

The referendum seeks to overturn key provisions in a law passed last here last year that is the most restrictive on medically assisted fertility in Europe. The current law bans donations of sperm and eggs; defines life as beginning at conception; and allows fertility treatment only to "stable heterosexual couples" who are living together and can prove infertility.

. . .

In his comments today, Benedict raised the temperature a decisive degree by backing the strategy of Italian bishops, who have encouraged Italians to shun the June 12-13 referendum in hopes of killing it and preserving the law. Any referendum that does not attract at least 50 percent turnout automatically fails.

Now, I think this is entirely within the bounds of what's acceptable for the Catholic Church as an institution (though it looks like the law Pope Benedict is hoping to preserve is one that I'd deem fairly indefensible) - the pope is following the lead of local bishops and calling for a line of action well within republican traditions. There seems, moreover, to be no sign that individual voters will suffer any sanction if the instructions of their consciences deviate from those issued from the Vatican. This campaign might ultimately be counterproductive, if it alienates Italian Catholics, but it's reasonably fair play.

No, what I find interesting about this is that it suggests a pattern. The other two most prominent actions taken so far in this papacy (that I've seen, at least) have been an attack on legalized gay marriage in Spain, and a promise of rapprochement with the Orthodox Church. On one level, sure, we could say it's all unified by the desire to return to the state of Christianity as St. Augustine knew it - but the thing I find most interesting is how very European it all is. There's been no major mention of Latin American or African Catholicism that I've seen, no serious attention yet paid to the parts of the world where the religion of old Rome is at its most vibrant. Instead, Pope Benedict has been looking from Iberia to Russia, and - as the Scotsman article notes - flying helicopters low enough to watch local Italian football matches; he plans to go to Cologne for World Youth Day, and then retire to Castel Gondolfo, in Italy, for the summer.

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying it's good: I'm just saying the regional emphasis is very clear to the eye of an outsider.

. . .

And to the eyes of the insiders, too, now that I think to Google it.

Poor baby, expanded.

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note dropped me a nice thank-you email for a pittance of a donation; I tried to reply cordially, and with restraint, but ended up adding a rant of a P.S. about Vice President Cheney's aforequoted words on Larry King Live.

Unfortunately (maybe), my email bounced off his mail server, and seems unlikely ever to be read by its intended audience. Some would say that that just preserves my dignity - but I've got a blog, so my dignity is always vulnerable.

In that spirit, behold the rant:

Good grief. Even were Guantanamo not itself a source of legitimate outrage, one would hope that the sincerely held concerns of an awful lot of the world's population would be met by . . . I don't know, courtesy? Humility? The absence of disdain?

I was in Scotland for about a month in the second half of 2002, just as the Iraqi campaign was starting to look likely (if not quite inevitable), and I found it just amazing how much damage is done - at least in the English speaking world - by our leaders' frequent insistence on shaping their public statements primarily for the benefit of that portion of the American public which is most inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. The impression I had from the (admittedly surly) Celtic fringe was that this kind of rhetoric seemed arrogant, it seemed simple-minded, and - though this bothered me more than them - it seemed beneath the dignity of a great nation.

"Frankly, I was offended by it?"

We can't possibly be paying our professional diplomats enough for all the damage control they have to do.

See that? That's what genius looks like.

Cough.

Poor baby.

From the AP, care of Salon:

Vice President Dick Cheney says he's offended by a human rights group's report criticizing conditions at the prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

The report Amnesty International released last week said prisoners at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba had been mistreated and called for the prison to be shut down. Cheney derided the London-based group in an interview set to be broadcast Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live."

"Frankly, I was offended by it," Cheney said in the videotaped interview. "For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously."

Well. That's that, then. Glad we cleared it all up!

When it all goes wrong again . . . .

We've been in "wait and see" mode at the Long Wall for some time now, so I figure it's about time I shake things up with an irresponsible prediction: the filibuster fight is going to resume sooner rather than later. The parties on the Right that were spoiling for a brawl still are, and the underlying political conditions haven't changed as much as the hopeful 14 would want. Calls upon the administration to consult with Congress over judicial appointments? I refer you to White House spokesman Scott McClellan:

Well, I mean, the president -- we have -- the White House has and will continue to consult the Senate on judicial nominees. We welcome opportunities to listen to any views they have. But the president is going to continue to move forward on appointing individuals who have a conservative judicial philosophy and believe in interpreting the law, not making law from the bench. And that's what I would expect them to do. That's something he ran on when he first ran for office, and when he ran for re-election, as well.

So, that's that. In fact, the Post noted over the weekend that there was a "big judicial compromise" in 2004 as well, as a result of which the president dug in his heels and pushed even harder for activist judges of his preferred flavor (in fact, he offered to renominate all the judges who had been rejected first time through; some just didn't accept the honor).

As an aside, I'm kinda surprised that the White House is leaving all the hand-holding in the Senate to Bill Frist . . .

But his administration may be the first to make modern campaign tactics -- stump speeches, political ads, e-mail bursts, war rooms -- into a routine part of the legislative process, and a higher priority than cultivating disaffected rank-and-file legislators. Note, for example, that the White House played no significant role in the Senate compromise on judicial filibusters last week, except to reiterate its intent to press ahead with getting its nominees confirmed.

. . . when, from what I recall, then-Governor Bush was not at all afraid to personally work the Texas legislature in his day. Maybe - and I'm not being facetious - they consider it to be beneath the dignity of the executive office to try to sway individual legislators. Or maybe he just has less personal leverage with these guys than he did with the Lege.

Anyway, the White House has signalled it's not going to change its approach. Likewise, Senator Frist is making a lot of noise to indicate that he's not going to suffer a body blow to his 2008 presidential ambitions lightly - hence the "magic 8-ball" speech mentioned in today's Times. From the same article:

For Dr. Frist, a potential presidential candidate who is courting conservative voters, the battle over judicial confirmations has become a test of his credibility with the party's social conservative base. And for many conservatives, that now means breaking the compromise.

"This is a direct challenge to Bill Frist," Patrick J. Buchanan, the former Republican presidential candidate, wrote in a column this week. If Dr. Frist and the Republican leadership accept the compromise, Mr. Buchanan wrote, "they will invite the contempt of the people who sent them here with a conservative mandate." After the compromise was reached, some Republican senators made no effort to hide their disappointment and impatience.

Yep, yep, yep. The senator's already demonstrated a flair for odiously opportunistic displays, so nobody gets to pretend to be surprised when he pushes this forward to impress James Dobson. Sounds increasingly like William Myers to be the test case. The Times article cited above explains Democratic opposition in terms of his history with lobbyist groups; the Boston Globe is a bit more thorough:

Myers has never been a judge at any level, never been a law professor, never even participated in a jury trial. As the top lawyer in Bush's Interior Department, Myers regularly did favors for his former paymasters in the mining industry. In one case, Myers reversed a Clinton administration ruling that a proposed gold mine would pollute the environment and intrude on a sacred tribal site. He did so without consulting with tribal officials, although they had asked for a meeting with him.

The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit regularly hears cases that touch on critical land-use issues such as the Clinton administration's roadless rule protecting the national forests and leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands. Myers's views on such matters can be summed up in the opinion he once expressed that federal management of public lands is like ''the tyrannical actions of King George in levying taxes" on the American colonies without their representation. In his opinion, both the Endangered Species Act and the wetland provisions of the Clean Water Act are examples of "regulatory excesses."

In the end, I'm afraid all the moderates have done is made it seem like the filibuster has indeed been misused - that threatening its use is the act of an extremist party. Expect to find the meme explored in the next month or two.

I can hardly wait.

Big media notices Second Life and all the filthy lucre related thereto!

Now, I myself don't play - if "play" is the word with Second Life - but, as the shady detective says, I know people who have. And, since there's been some talk in the past in circles I frequent about the intersection of virtual economies and real-world money . . . well, I direct you all to the New York Times (registration required), which says things the ludoscenti among you probably already know.

[And, yes, I realize the article's about MMOGs in general, with Second Life prominent only in a couple of anecdotes. I'm still impressed, dammit!]

More for Don Rumsfeld to ignore!

From a letter from Congressman John Conyers (D. - Michigan) to Secretary Rumsfeld:

As a result of these new disclosures, I would ask that you respond as promptly as possible to the following questions:

1) Did the RAF and the United States military increase the rate that they were dropping bombs in Iraq in 2002? If so, what was the extent and timing of the increase?

2) What was the justification for any such increase in the rate of bombing in Iraq at this time? Was this justification reviewed by legal authorities in the U.S.?

3) To the best of your knowledge, was there any agreement with any representative of the British government to engage in military action in Iraq before authority was sought from the Congress or the U.N.? If so, what was the nature of the agreement?

"New disclosures?" Well, we look to the U.K. - more specifically, to the Sunday Times. The Liberal Democrats have gotten their hands on documentation that suggests that American and British bombing in Iraq was considerably amplified in late 2002, apparently both to erode Iraqi air defense capabilities and to try to provoke Saddam into aggressive action of his own. This is a big deal (at least in Britain) because the bombing strategy began in May, but it was November before Resolution 1441 passed the Security Council. The war has long been deeply unpopular in the U.K., and all this emerging proof that there was no significant good-faith effort to find a non-violent alternative - despite official claims to the contrary - is infuriating a good hunk of the British populace.

In the States, it's gotten less of a public hearing. Partially because of the painfully uneven performance of the media . . .

[As an aside, the New York Times's new ombudsman, Byron Calame, has jumped in a few days before his job officially begins to scold his paper - and others, which did even worse - for its failure to pursue the matter as diligently as he feels it deserves. That said, if you can bear it, check the New York Review of Books for a long look at what the Downing Street Memo actually signifies.]

. . . and partially, I think, because discussion of the war (and the conduct of the Bush Administration in a larger sense) has become so politicized that even the underlying facts seem delegitimized. Recent polls show public trust in both parties in Congress at modern lows, and trust in journalists even lower, and all the facts that somehow bleed into the public sphere automatically get contextualized into meaninglessness according to whom they most seem to benefit.

In that spirit, I don't have a lot of hope for Representative Conyers' efforts. If they get any public attention at all, I'm reasonably sure they'll be cut off with a dismissive snipe at Democrats' crassly partisan efforts to improve their position by undermining the war on terror and placing our troops at greater risk. It's unforgivably cynical, but it works.

Which is a shame - those three questions above (and their kind) just are not unfair.

Non.

French voters rejected the European Union's first constitution Sunday, early government results showed -- a stinging repudiation of the ambitious, decades-long effort to further unite the continent.

With about 83 percent of the votes counted, the referendum was rejected by 57.26 percent of voters, the Interior Ministry said. The treaty was supported by 42.74 percent, the ministry said.

Care of the AP, care of the Times.

Some kudos to Mr. Wolfowitz.

Here's hoping something good comes of this!

What's wrong with this picture?

Compare and contrast:

Nearly a decade after he was appointed to investigate then-Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, independent counsel David M. Barrett spent more than $1.26 million of federal money in the last six months of fiscal 2004, the Government Accountability Office reported yesterday.

Since its inception, the Cisneros investigation has cost nearly $21 million, a total rivaling some of the largest independent counsel investigations in history. Much of the money has gone for pay and benefits, travel, rent and contractors.

Barrett was appointed in May 1995 to investigate allegations that Cisneros lied to the FBI about money he paid to a former mistress. Cisneros pleaded guilty in September 1999 and paid a $10,000 fine and a $25 court assessment. He was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton. By then, Barrett had spent $10.3 million on his investigation, and Congress had allowed the independent counsel law to lapse.

But Barrett stayed in business to investigate whether anyone in the Clinton administration had attempted to obstruct justice during the probe.

. . . versus . . .

Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq -- the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets -- have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.

. . .

Pentagon spokesmen said the awards for the analysts were to recognize their overall contributions on the job over the course of each year. But some current and former officials, including those who called attention to the awards, said the episode shows how the administration has failed to hold people accountable for mistakes on prewar intelligence.

Despite sharp critiques from the president's commission and the Senate intelligence committee, no major reprimand or penalty has been announced publicly in connection with the intelligence failures, though investigations are still underway at the CIA. George J. Tenet resigned as CIA director but was later awarded the Medal of Freedom by Bush.

Both taken from the Washington Post - the former from an April 1st story (but not an April Fool's joke) by Jonathan Weisman, the second from an article by Walter Pincus in today's edition.

Am I the only one enjoying a certain degree of cognitive dissonance over the somewhat erratic standards of accountability in effect in Washington just now?

French (lower-case "r") revolution?

The referendum on the European Union constitution has already begun in the farther corners of France's noncontiguous nation; unless the voter turnout is really odd, the treaty is expected to be rejected (and perhaps again in the Netherlands on Wednesday).

If this happens, the immediate consequences aren't entirely clear - the constitution needs unanimous support from member states to be instituted, but the E.U. is indicating that the ratification process might continue in the fourteen countries that would still be officially uncommitted (of twenty-five total) after the Dutch vote. But, of course, this may well be denial talking.

Apparently there are those in the "non" camp in France that hope that a defeat would spark not a total collapse, but a certain amount of tinkering; as the Guardian puts it:

Many opponents of the treaty in France are convinced it can be renegotiated on France's terms, taking account of the main leftwing objection that it represents a blueprint for an unacceptably free market Europe which would destroy French jobs and wreck France's social services.

Bear in mind that unemployment in France is currently at about 10%, and the economy distinctly weak. In parallel, the French right seems to be hoping that Turkish involvement in the European experiment can be minimized, once the E.U. proper gets a good scare.

But it's hard to say for sure. After the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty and the Irish did the same for the Nice Treaty, each did receive concessions (the Danes could maintain a separate currency and the Irish tradition of military neutrality was protected) - but these treaties were of a different nature than your out-and-out constitutional convention. Major changes of the sort popular with the French left wouldn't fly in Eastern Europe, for one thing. [More in the Scotsman, if anyone's interested.] And, of course, the British are soon to assume the E.U. presidency in late June - and may be quite willing to save themselves the grief of their own scheduled referendum and pronounce the current document dead, if given a pretext.

This isn't to say that everything contained in the proposed constitution would just disappear. The BBC's off-the-cuff prediction:

They say it is more likely that EU leaders will attempt to salvage key parts of the constitution by other means. Some measures could possibly be implemented simply as a result of agreements between heads of state.

It would also be possible to take some measures from the constitution and tack them onto existing treaties - though changes to these treaties may still need to be put to a referendum in some countries, such as Denmark and Ireland.

French President Jacques Chirac has warned voters that France's influence in the EU will be severely weakened if they reject the constitution. However, one possibility is that the failure of the constitution would stimulate the creation of a "core" group of countries, including France, that would seek to integrate more quickly and deeply than the rest.

Still, given all the confusion that would rise out of this defeat - the political fallout in France alone could be transformative - there's no way to make confident predictions about the next ten steps for the E.U.; current institutions certainly won't suddenly dissolve, but the direction of the enterprise as a whole could look very different in a year's time.

Time for more waiting and seeing!

Identity consolidation, by Hewlett-Packard!

A couple of news bits/press releases here and here - the latter even offers a glimpse at a demo card. And, hey, the software is produced with the assistance of Microsoft, so we know it must be secure!

. . .

Okay, yeah. Cheap shot.

Anyway, HP is already working on identity management (if you will) in Italy, Israel, Poland, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. All we have to do is wait for the early reviews to come in . . . .

Fare thee well, Uncle Duke.

The ashes of legendary gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson are to be fired from a cannon housed in a giant fist-shaped monument paid for by movie star Johnny Depp.

John Equis, the man organizing the memorial service, adds, "This is a respectful, casual event for friends and family." [More here.] The blast won't be televised, contrary to earlier reports, but if you're one of Mr. Thompson's legion of fans, you can at least actively honor his memory by drinking Gonzo Imperial Porter - proceeds of the beer sales will go toward the construction of a 150 foot tall stone fist. [Though this may be the same fist that Mr. Depp is now revealed to be providing, in which case . . . well, the beer may just be beer. But maybe Ralph Steadman gets a cut.]

Anyway: heh.

It was a stupid, wasteful death - if a dramatic capstone to a life always halfway lived for legend - but I'm glad he's getting a raucous aftermath. Seems like the sort of thing of which he would've approved.

More for Darfur.

Quickie from Salon's AP feed:

International donors pledged an additional $200 million Thursday to fund the African Union peacekeeping operation in Sudan's western Darfur region during a conference to discuss the ongoing violence.

AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare said officials were still analyzing the pledges but that it appeared enough money was raised to bolster the force currently in Darfur.

"There is a clear will. Many states and countries are willing to bridge the gap," Konare told reporters.

Canada made the largest new pledge, promising $134 million. The State Department's senior representative on Sudan, Charles Snyder, said Washington was adding an additional $50 million to the $95 million already pledged to end what he called "acts of genocide" in the ongoing conflict.

Boltonathon `05!

So, absent cloture, the vote gets pushed back `til at least June 7th. Senator Biden promises (on behalf of the Dems) to stop filibustering when the executive branch releases documentation "concerning a battle Mr. Bolton waged in the summer of 2003 over intelligence assessments on Syria, and the names of Americans given to Mr. Bolton by the National Security Agency as having been mentioned in intercepted communications." The quote's care of the New York Times, as is the expansion below:

The State Department has said that providing the information about the debate on Syria would have a "chilling effect" on future internal debates within the government. As for the intercepted communications, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, briefed the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate intelligence committee two weeks ago about the reports from the National Security Agency about which Mr. Bolton had used his power as an under secretary of state to obtain additional highly classified information.

But General Hayden refused, on privacy grounds, to provide those senators with the names of 19 Americans mentioned in those reports, although Mr. Bolton had been able to obtain the names. Mr. Biden said that position was unacceptable, and reflected a mistrust of the Senate.

I don't mean to be facetious here, but has anyone seen any formal declaration from the White House of what it perceives the Constitutional role of the Legislature to be? "Advice and consent" is necessarily pretty limited if, by fiat, investigations from Senatorial committee leaders are held to have "chilling effects" on governmental communications. How far could executive privilege really have been meant to extend?

Anyway, this isn't a vote that can be deferred forever - even if the White House continues to resist appeals to come clean. I don't know what to expect from the vote itself; Mary Landrieu (D. - Louisiana), Ben Nelson (D. - Nebraska), and Mark Pryor (D. - Arkansas) voted for cloture, and may be inclined to support the nomination as well. Joe Lieberman (D. - Connecticut) was also pretty prominently on the fence as of a week ago. On the Republican side, George Voinovich (Ohio) has made his opposition very clear (from the Times article cited above):

"When was the last time so many individuals have emerged from an administration to send warning signs to the U.S. Congress about an individual?" Mr. Voinovich asked, in a reference to former colleagues of Mr. Bolton who have voiced strong public opposition to him. Mr. Voinovich added, "We owe it to the United States, our children and our grandchildren, to heed this warning, and to ask our president, 'Please, Mr. President, find a better candidate to send to the United Nations.' "

A spokeswoman for Mr. Voinovich, Marcie Ridgway, said Mr. Voinovich regarded Mr. Bolton as an obstacle to a promise the senator had made to his own children and grandchildren, in deciding to seek re-election to the Senate last year.

Added to this now is word that John Thune (R. - South Dakota) is planning to vote against Mr. Bolton's appointment, though more as a way of expressing discontent over the proposed disestablishment of Ellsworth Air Force Base than as a principled rejection of Mr. Bolton himself.

Two rogue Republicans, alas, aren't enough to kill this appointment dead - even if Harry Reid can herd all his Democrats into a united front. Anything short of six defections from the Red State gang and, at best, Vice President Cheney swoops in to break a tie - and given that both the White House and Senator Frist have already had a battering couple of days, there's going to be a very hard press on any Republican waverers to make sure that this doesn't look like an even bigger show of weakness for the president's faction than it does right now.

I guess it all depends on whether anything really embarrassing gets out over the next week or two, but my best guess at the moment is that we Americans can all look forward to incompetent representation at the United Nations.

But I'm very glad there's a fight going on against it.

Briefly . . .

According to Steve Clemons, cloture on the Bolton vote has been blocked!

Two bits of good news? About Israel and Palestine? What's the catch?

From the Baltimore Jewish Times:

Sharon needn't have worried: It was clear from the launch of this year's annual policy conference on Sunday that AIPAC was undertaking a dramatic policy shift.

For the first time since the collapse of the Oslo accords, AIPAC was envisioning Israel's pullout not just from Gaza, but from the West Bank as well — and in terms that demanded less than absolute stability from the Palestinians.

"If the Palestinians transform Gaza into a reasonably well-functioning, reasonably peaceful place — not necessarily Sweden — then the world won't have to pressure Israel to do this in the West Bank," Howard Kohr, AIPAC's executive director, said at the conference.

Meanwhile, President Bush has stuck his thumb in Congress's eye - in a good way this time - and shown Mahmoud Abbas some love. I don't know what the promise of fifty million dollars actually entails; as suggested before, Congress has, in the post-Arafat period, proven remarkably good at finding ways to give Palestinian aid to Israel. From the Washington Post, three weeks ago:

In the emergency spending bill that lawmakers completed late Tuesday, the White House had sought $200 million "to support Palestinian political, economic, and security reforms," as the president said in his February State of the Union address. But the fine print of the document gives $50 million of that money directly to Israel to build terminals for people and goods at checkpoints surrounding Palestinian areas. Another $2 million for Palestinian health care will be provided to Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, while the allocation of the rest of the money is tightly prescribed.

. . .

"The conferees agree that the budget request and the recommendation contained in this Act do not provide specific direct financial support for the Palestinian Authority," the conference report said. The bill requires that $5 million of the aid be used for an independent examination of the authority's accounting procedures and expenditures.

Direct aid to the Palestinian Authority is symbolically important for Abbas, who is also known as Abu Mazen. Shortly after Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in November, Bush allowed $20 million to be delivered directly to the Palestinian Authority. Under an agreement with Congress, however, that money was immediately transferred to pay bills owed to Israel's electric company.

Edward G. Abington Jr., a consultant to the Palestinian Authority, said the congressional action is a "huge slap in the face to Abu Mazen," whose party faces a strong challenge in the upcoming municipal elections. He said it was a "pretty startling setback" for Abbas because Abington believes the aid restrictions are now more stringent than when Arafat was alive.

Given that the chief political advantage a moderate like Mr. Abbas holds over his rivals in, say, Hamas is the hope that he can win some benign influence over major players in the international debate, humiliating him and his administration just seems profoundly counterproductive.

That said, this is a particularly counterproductive Congress, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, at a glance, I have to say that President Bush may have done some real good here; beyond the pledge of cash and the air of potency lent to President Abbas by a high-profile visit to a friendly White House, Ha'aretz is also reporting that the P.A. has secured a guarantee that they won't be held responsible by the U.S. for disarming anti-Israeli militants until after the elections (currently scheduled for July 17th, but potentially subject to postponement). If Mr. Abbas' administration can put real money into the Palestinian infrastructure, can continue to point to positive signs from Israel, and can avoid launching what would likely be an unpopular crackdown . . . well, maybe we'll keep seeing small steps forward rather than the patterns of grinding collapse that have so typified the scene since the latter days of Israel's Barak government.

Off to check on the cat!

While, right next door . . .

Scary stuff in Iraq, as Shi'ites start talking dreamily of loose federalism and semi-autonomous zones. This is, of course, a page from the Kurdish book of aspirations - so I guess there's just a lot of passion among the traditionally second-class ethnic groups for the idea of grabbing as many oil fields as possible and leaving the Sunnis stuck hungry in the middle.

At a glance, there's a certain degree of fairness to it. The borders of Iraq were only fixed in 1920, and they didn't represent a triumph of shared nationalist sentiment - hell, the Kurds only agreed to participate in the first place because they were (falsely) promised more autonomy than they expected from Turkey. Check the Wikipedia blurb, under "British Mandate Period."

The problem, of course, is that fairness won't stop wars. Civil wars within the current boundaries, incursions from the Turks (whom the Kurds make nervous) - all sorts of good stuff. Particularly if refugee situations get out of hand, or if the region's rather delicate water-sharing system gets disrupted.

The voice of the American government in the article cited at the very top of this post insists that no such move toward decentralization will be permitted, and I suspect that's true. Still, it's been more than two years since the invasion of Iraq - I personally would have hoped that by now the trends would have been toward less talk of separation, not more.

It's a hard, hard job for the people running the place . . . .

Politics as normal . . . in Iran?

Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, former chief of Iran's national police force (and, as it happens, one of your bloodier-handed hardliners), is running for the presidency as a Blair-Labour man!

Well, no. Not exactly. Instead, we're talking about importing tactics - Mr. Qalibaf needs the boost. He never looked like a front-runner, and apparently much of the support that he had expected from the military is going in other directions.

Meanwhile, Mostafa Moin - whose expulsion from the race I mentioned a day or so back - has been un-expelled. This little reversal is being credited to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself, and is being taken as a sign of some desperation: the powers that be don't want to see the sort of feeble turnout at the polls that early surveys have threatened.

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the front-runner, is busily raising his international profile; specifically, he's granted a very rare interview to the New York Times (registration required) - and the newspaper itself spells out the spin: "The mere fact that Mr. Rafsanjani gave an interview to The New York Times - his first - and has spoken to a few other foreign news organizations is a sign that he seeks to convince voters that his reach stretches far beyond Iran."

Expect strange new developments to keep coming quickly . . . .

Hits just keep on coming.

The cat saga continues. He's lost ten percent of his body weight in the last two weeks, he's dehydrated (which may have something to do with the point immediately preceding), and his intestines are apparently inflamed. No fever anymore, at least.

He's spending the next two days on an IV, and X-rays are pending. We've got a very nice vet, whom I hope is also competent, and . . . well, there's no "and." We're in limbo. I'm just hoping that this also means that the downward slide is about to be stopped.

More later, like it or not.

And today's distraction was . . .

. . . or, The Return of the Friendly but Troubled Little White Cat.

The guy's stopped eating again, and has now taken to vomiting up his medication. Panic is again setting in - and he's got another trauma on a metal table scheduled for tomorrow morning. I can't honestly say that I spent the day cradling him and singing the songs sung to me when my childhood was bad, but I can say that I found it hard to get worked up enough about the filibuster stalemate to crank out the expected three or four pages of blithering. Maybe tomorrow.

On the other hand, the season finale of "House" was tonight. It didn't match last week's episode, though it certainly had its moments - it was too much about setting up big subplots for season two. Now, these were subplots worth setting up, so the show loses no respect. In fact, it also earns triple points for one of the most well-thought out lines of character interaction I've ever seen on television: without spoiling too many spoilers, our protagonist's ex-girlfriend (played by Sela Ward) has returned, and she and House have their necessary conflicts scattered throughout the episode. What's smart, though - what's really, really smart - is that she keeps calling him on habits that he has, in fact, outlived. There's one really explicit example (which I won't spell out here), but it's true in a larger sense as well: she keeps insisting that he deals with his patients in a way that we can see he might have done when he was younger, and even more arrogant, and in some ways less rigid. And he doesn't do it so much anymore, and he himself insists that he doesn't do it so much anymore, and yet he's so conflicted over how he feels about her that one gets the sense that he actually thinks he might be lying.

. . .

Which doesn't do you any good if you haven't watched the show, granted. Still, trust me: this may be the smartest thing on TV right now, and if Hugh Laurie doesn't get at least an Emmy nomination, I'm afraid the Emmys lose all their validity in one swift stroke of militant stupidity.

On that note: g'night.

Bruce Ackerman zings Vice President Cheney.

And potentially rightly so. Filibuster broadside: go!

The key rule in this debate isn’t the one that requires 60 senators to end a judicial filibuster. It isn’t even the special provision that requires 67, rather than 60, senators to terminate debate on those special occasions when the Senate is considering a change in its standing rules. It is Rule 5: “The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules.” The only way of changing the filibuster provision that is “provided in these rules” is the one that requires 67 votes. If Cheney followed Rule 5, he would have to rule out of order any effort to change the filibuster provision with less than this kind of super-majority support.

It really is as simple as that -- which is why the leadership isn't consulting with the Senate parliamentarian. Instead, Cheney has announced that he won't enforce the rule, which expresses the consistent understanding of the Senate for two centuries. He will put the power of his office behind Frist’s complex parliamentary maneuvers that aim to nullify the key provision. And if the Senate ties at 50-50, he will cast his deciding ballot in favor of destroying the rules that, as the Senate's presiding officer, he is charged with enforcing. No Senate president has abused his power like this in American history.

Thuggish theocrats on the move!

The Guardian Council in Iran has ruled that, of the over 1000 hopefuls under examination, six are fit to compete for the presidency. Oddly, the most popular reformists - most prominent among them Mostafa Moin - didn't make the cut.

From what little I've been able to find in English, the Council ruled that Mr. Moin is not an adherent of the system of velayat i/e-faqih, or government by religious jurist, that Ayatollah Khomeini and his generation foisted off on the Iranian nation in 1979. The point of velayat e-faqih, as I understand it, is that this particular sect of Shi'ites believes that during the occultation of the hidden imam (a long story, the outline of which can be read here), the faithful are temporarily denied the leadership of the rightful successor of Mohammed, and the only way in which they can be sure to be leading appropriate lives is to subject their laws and institutions to the approval of the most virtuous (and orthodox) theologians in the community. True believers argue that this isn't incompatible with the architecture of a working republic - that the role of the religious jurists is essentially parallel to that of, say, the American Supreme Court. They are, after all, ruling on matters of constitutionality in a state where the constitution is grounded in religion. The obvious problem, of course, is that the majority of Iranian citizens would seem to dispute the correctness (and legitimacy) of their jurists' interpretations - which makes the whole system rather overstressed.

As for Mr. Moin:

Addressing a gathering of students at the University of Science and Technology, Moin said he considers national interest as the red line and that the nation needs a new approach to tackle opportunities and threats, IRNA reported.

“By national interest, I mean I should support the fundamental rights of people and I will not allow the rights of people to be violated,“ he said.

Moin further said he would prepare the ground for freedom of expression in universities.

Asked about his views on the High Council for Cultural Revolution, Moin said there is no place for such a council in the Constitution and the late Imam Khomeini ordered establishment of several institutions as an exigency in the early days of the Islamic Revolution.

“I think the state of affairs should be normalized by getting away from the revolutionary period. We should come back to the law, as all institutions should constitutionally be administered by public votes,“ he said.

From IranMania. I think it's fair to say that the man's take on things is indeed different than what the Guardian Council considers theologically sound - and, if it wasn't obvious, I think that has darker implications for the Council's fitness than that of Mr. Moin.

At any rate, I gather there's to be an appeal - and if that fails, the reformists are threatening boycott. [More here.] But, if we presume that the Guardian Council isn't going to give a crap, despite the intercession of President Khatami (the president's actual letter of protest is available here, care of the Iranian Students News Agency, to anyone who can read it), who's left in the race?

The L.A. Times has a fairly strong article on the election up at the moment (registration is required to read it), but they do seem to be wrong on one major point - there are four hard-liners (Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, former national police chief; Ali Larijani, former IRIB TV director; Mahmud Ahmadinejad, mayor of Tehran; and Mohsen Rezai, Expediency Council Secretary), not five. The fifth candidate is, in fact, Mehdi Karrubi, former speaker of the Iranian parliament - the BBC calls him a "reformist," while the AP/Agence France-Presse go with "centrist."

Now, President Khatami's two terms seem to demonstrate that the best one can hope for from a progressive Iranian executive is a certain amount of resistance to the pressures of the theocrats proper - and that's reason enough to hope for Mr. Karrubi, of course. But, instead, the Iranians are still overwhelmingly likely to get Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. To quote Barry O'Connell (ordinarily of SW-Asia.com):

It could not be a better slate for Rafsanjani if Rafsanjani picked them himself. Qalibaf is the competition but he has Larijani, Ahmadinejad, and Rezaii to his right cutting into his strength. To Rafsanjani's left is Karrubi who has weak poll numbers in key areas. Among students where a reformist needs to pull 60 percent or better Karrubi polls 5% far behind Rafsanjani in first and in second, Qalibaf. A strong showing with students is to be expected for Qalibaf who is seen as the "Young" candidate in this race but first among students is a major coup for Rafsanjani.

Rafsanjani still only polls 25% among all voters. What I saw when I was in Iran last week was that the average man was rejecting Rafsanjani until the white-haired men would ask, "Who can handle America?" "Who can handle the Nuclear Power issue?" Then the younger men would say "Rafsanjani". As long as Israel and the US keep the pressure on Iran many people who do not really want Rafsanjani will vote for him. Depending on Western pressure Rafsanjani may not need a run-off to win.

I know a whole lot less about Iran than this man does - but, for what it's worth, I think he's got it just about right.

The election's on June 17th. Start making your bets . . . .

Latest update on the friendly little white cat.

Not so friendly at the moment.

Things started going right for him a bit after midnight (speaking as the man who crawled out of bed at two hour intervals to check the heights of the piles of food with which he'd been left), and by 6:30 this morning he was finally beginning to seem like some kind of approximation of his proper self - gliding alongside handy human legs and prowling the windows in search of any hapless squirrels that might somehow fall through the glass. Even if his appetite wasn't fully restored, this was, I'm confident, the best he's felt in days.

Then this big jerk with an eyedropper full of vileness pounced on him. He struggled with all the canniness his feline instincts could provide, got a bit of the gunk squeezed between his teeth, and then made a break! Hoorah for the little white cat!

Big jerk then repeated the procedure. Three more times, in fact.

Three terrible, terrible times.

Big jerk then had to take a guess at how much of the vileness had ended up on the floor, collected a comparable amount, and then - in a show of particular viciousness - applied it to the little white cat's haunches while little white cat was nursing his dignity behind a barbeque grill. Little white cat fled, and probably licked himself until his tongue was raw, and then collapsed back into the miserable little loaf of bread position he's maintained for so much of the past few days.

Big jerk, meanwhile, is missing a second hit of Revenge of the Sith for this, so maybe it all balances out.

That said, I'm feeling genuinely relieved for the first time since Thursday - despite my worries last night, the little dork really is showing signs of improvement.

Another big thank you to everyone who wished us well!

War, and all the houses of God.

Here's another little glimpse into Sunni-Shi'ite tensions in Iraq, care of Knight-Ridder's Yasser Salihee. The key paragraph:

The battle over the Hassan bin Ali Mosque is perhaps the bloodiest in a two-year power struggle that has turned Iraq's holiest places into sectarian battlegrounds. Shiites have seized up to 40 Sunni mosques since Saddam Hussein's regime fell, according to Shiite and Sunni clerics. While Sunnis view the campaign as a land grab, Shiites say they're reclaiming plots that Saddam stole from Shiite landowners.

As far as I can tell, this is another one of those deals where generations of wrongs leave no rights. Sunni Islam was the faith of the Ottoman Empire, and Shi'ism (admittedly, Persian Shi'ism rather than Arab Shi'ism) was the name of the game next door - as I understand it, in the early 18th century, the precursor to the modern Iranian state started exporting Shi'ite clerics into the southern bits of what's now Iraq, then Ottoman territory. Shi'ism always had roots in the area, but - again, if I remember this right - this new push was somewhat transformative; it caught on with less urbanized Arab tribes, and increasingly made the Ottomans nervous. To keep the area institutionally non-Persian, the local governments became more intent on protecting Sunni privileges - and the trend basically just kept going. Ottoman Iraq was Sunni at the top, then British Mandate Iraq was Sunni at the top, then Hashemite Iraq was Sunni at the top, then Ba'athist Iraq started out with a show of pseudo-Turkish secularism and then, under Saddam, became more and more overtly Sunni. The Shi'ites, who represent the majority of the population, just never got much of a shake.

So, yes, I'm entirely willing to believe that there's some legitimacy to their claim that, in defying Ayatollah Sistani's fatwa, they're only taking back those properties that were wrongfully taken from them; for the Sunnis - who, as mentioned before, are coming to fear a standing policy of ethnic cleansing from the new government - this looks more like a systemic attack on among the most symbolically resonant sites of their community. And tensions keep rising.

Unless Ayatollah Sistani can (and does) step in, this particular mess looks like something that could only be resolved (or at least muted) by an impartial and respected judiciary. I take it they don't have one yet, though; President Jaafari seems to be making the creation of a functioning institution something of a priority.

Only question's whether it'll come soon enough to do any good . . . .

So I called the vet . . .

. . . on behalf of a friendly little white cat who was off his food and immobile at the start of a second consecutive day. I was told, very soothingly, that they could see him if I wanted to come in; I was also told (in that same reassuring voice) that a worst case scenario could have the poor guy dead by tomorrow morning with, in all seriousness, an exploded bladder. I said my thank yous and I called a cab. I may have taken the time to breathe in between, but I wouldn't bet big Yankee dollars on it.

Then I went to bag the sick cat. Given that the biggest clue to his problems was a total lack of interest in moving or exerting himself in any way, you might think that this would be the easiest part of the program.

Unfortunately, I was - though presenting a rigidly stiff upper lip in the manner of any number of reputably stoic masculine archetypes - choking and sniffling and making the sorts of desperately unhappy sounds that normally might emerge from a violently ill washing machine; even sick, the little guy knew he wanted nothing to do with that action. He did the sensible thing and dove for cover under his couch. I tried to reason with him - "Look here, son, I don't mean to alarm you, but your bladder might explode if we don't get you help. Plus, there's a very good chance that I'm paying a soft-spoken Pakistani immigrant two-fifty a minute to sit in the driveway. Let's just buck up and make the best of a bad deal! Maybe they won't actually stick anything up your rectum this time!"

[That last part was, incidentally, a lie.]

When civil discourse finally failed, I slithered under the couch myself. He made a dash, but in his weakened condition was barely able to squirm out and halfway behind a trashcan before I'd swatted aside a recalcitrant footstool and writhed in close enough to grab a hind leg. He failed to sever my hand from my wrist: a bad sign.

The whole thing was bad. I always feel terrible when we stick him in a cage and take him out of the house. At least one time in the past, somebody did that to him and then left him in a room full of wire and disease and broken animals - we originally got him at his last stop before euthanasia, as it happens - and from the stillness he assumes inside his little plastic box I invariably become half convinced that there's a corner of his brain that's simply resigned to losing another home, too. He just curls in a ball by the front gate and rubs his face against the fingertips I can squeeze through the grille, and waits for the next horrible step.

That said, the ride itself wasn't awful. The aforementioned cab driver was a pro, the roads were smooth, and though the little white cat made an occasional kittenish wail, he wasn't unduly terrified by the metal groans of passing traffic or the kids shouting at one another from the bus stops at the big intersections. We got where we were going in good time, and I plonked down my first lush tip of the day.

At the vet's: a nervous parrot, two dogs (though not at the same time) - the former of which climbed up next to me on my windowside bench and, as God is my witness, leaned against my shoulder until she could be taken and mined for fecal samples - and an old issue of National Geographic. I didn't have to wait long, and didn't get to know any of them well, but the cat and I were glad they were there. [Little white cat turns out to be remarkably blase about dogs.] They were, if nothing else, all distractions from the feline medical scene proper.

Little white cat had lost three tenths of a pound - that's three percent of his total body weight, mind you - in nine days. He was running a serious fever, and didn't much resist as the vet squeezed him in awkward places to gauge the size of his bladder (though he wasn't so enfeebled that we could get by with less than three people pinning him in place for the temperature-taking event). He's got some variety of feline immunodeficiency virus, so every scare is a real scare; in that spirit, he was escorted to a room where nervous humans aren't allowed, and they pumped something redemptive and viscous into his left shoulder - a quarter of an hour later, some of it was still seeping out, a little bit tinted by blood. [I, meanwhile, was handed a little bottle and an eyedropper - my mission, for the next week, is frankly too horrible to recount here. If he feels well enough to defend himself at any stage, I'm sliced like processed cheese.]

But the vet was cheerful and the nurses sweet.

Then we had fifteen minutes in the lobby; I watched out the window for another soft-spoken South Asian driver; little white cat let his eyes unfocus and seemed to pretend that he was somewhere other than in a cage in a small room in a building not his house. Every so often, I'd stick a fingertip in through the metal, but he was in no mood to press against it. Fair enough - I'd lied to him about the rectal thing.

Cab ride two, and the second thirty-five percent tip of the morning (though I'd probably have offered one at the animal hospital if given the chance - his bladder, it seems, is unlikely to explode). No plaintive cries from the box at all this time; from the way his head was moving, I think he must have been trying to see the birds on the high-voltage lines. Or maybe he's just into clouds. Then home - his temperature was already down, and he was moving like moving didn't bring him pain: a step up from yesterday. Still, he sniffed his food and gave it a pass; after watching birds in the back yard for twenty minutes, he found his way back to the futon on which he spent maybe twenty-two hours on Friday, and curled up, and shut out the world.

[J. steps away from the computer, and then J. steps back.]

But now he's watching birds again.

So maybe we're all okay.

This would be his first ever veto? This?

Sigh.

Apologies.

For the light blogging for the past couple of days, that is. Between Star Wars, outside work, and neurotic hovering over a sick cat, I've been either away from the big black keyboard or uninspired by it. Hopefully, I'll get back into gear a little later on tonight.

In the meantime, I give you this: Revenge of the Sith emphatically does not suck, and George Lucas has won me back. Hayden Christensen actually delivers a fine performance (and I use "fine" in the mid-20th century sense of the word, as a real compliment), and Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid positively excel. [Poor Natalie Portman is still wasted as the Tragic Love Interest, but she certainly gets more compelling moments than in the last two films. Combined.]

So, that's all good.

More later. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you'd think good thoughts for a friendly little white cat who's off his food . . . .

Rising tension . . .

In Iraq, this time. A fairly major Sunni leader is crying murder and pointing fingers at the Badr Brigade; Juan Cole adds that the Sunnis are entertaining rumors that the Badr types are using the Interior Ministry of the new government to launch a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

One hopes the charges are all reasonably ill-founded (though the murders themselves are real enough), but the fact these allegations are being made - and made loudly enough to reported in the States - is a bad sign in and of itself.

Here we go.

From Reuters:

A heated showdown over President Bush's stalled judicial nominees began in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday with Republicans threatening to reduce Democrats' power in Congress if the conservative candidates are again thwarted.

Fierce debate over an expected bid to change centuries-old Senate procedures began immediately, with Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, accusing Democrats of using obstructionist tactics to "kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees."

. . .

The parties have been lurching toward this face-off for months, and Republicans prepared for a vote in the coming days that could take away the Democrats' power to block judicial nominees with a procedural hurdle called a filibuster. It remained unclear, however, if they had the votes to prevail.

Anyway, here's how it started: today Senator Bill Frist brought the nomination of Priscilla R. Owen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Justice Owen is currently sitting on the Texas Supreme Court, and I must admit she seems to be popular in her home state. Human Events Online tells me she was "[r]e-elected with the 84% of the vote in 2000-—the highest percentage of any of her colleagues on the Texas Supreme Court—-after winning endorsements from all major Texas newspapers." More, she "[r]eceived a unanimous 'well-qualified' rating from the American Bar Association" (though, according to the Raw Story, "the most recent American Bar Association survey of Texas jurists showed that more (47%) deem her performance on the bench 'poor' as compared to any other judge in the state"), and she "[g]raduated at the top of her class in law school and had the No. 1 grade on the Texas Bar Exam." She's got her faults - and we'll get to them in a minute - but she's not a fool.

As for those faults, I've found a twenty-two page survey, care of the Alliance for Justice (a pdf file, I'm afraid). The list of rulings and dissentions much to the right of national norms is pretty meaty stuff. A few paragraphs chosen almost at random from the "Environmental Cases" subsection (footnotes excised):

In her Questionnaire, Justice Owen named In re City of Georgetown, which Texas Watch named one of the state’s “Terrible Ten,” as one of her ten “most significant opinions.” In this case, she held that the section of the Texas Public Information Act that requires a governmental body to disclose finished reports or evaluations “unless the category of information is expressly made confidential under other law” did not require the release of a report requested by the Austin-American Statesman. The report had been commissioned by the City of Georgetown and was related to a lawsuit brought against it for unlawful wastewater discharges. After the city refused to release the report, the Attorney General ordered its release, finding that it did not fit the “expressly confidential” exception. The trial court also ordered its release, and the appellate court refused to hear the case on appeal. Justice Owen’s decision reversing both lower courts resulted in the withholding of important information regarding government decisions on environmental protection. In a strong dissent joined by Justices Phillips and Baker, Justice Abbott wrote that, in deciding as it did, “the Court [abandoned] strict
construction and [rewrote] the statute.”

In another case, FM Properties Operating Co. v. City of Austin, Justice Owen dissented from the majority’s ruling that a state law that had been tailored to allow a particular developer to bypass the city of Austin’s municipal water-quality laws was unconstitutional. The majority pointed out that the law constituted an illegal delegation of rights – in this case, the right to pollute – to a private property owner. Justice Owen’s dissent, which harshly criticized the decision for restricting property owners’ rights, drew derision from the majority: “most of Justice Owen’s dissent is nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric and thus merits no response.”

Freeport McMoRan, the mining company that owned the developer, gave $2,500 to Justice Owen’s campaign, and its legal counsel gave her $44,958.

This last bit might seem improper to casual observer, but it's apparently deemed fair play in Texas - in the words of this same paper, "The state has a highly permissive judicial code of conduct that places few restrictions on the receipt of campaign contributions and does not require justices to recuse themselves from cases involving contributors."

The survey also singles her out for her extremism in matters pertaining to abortion:

While Justice Owen has had no occasion to rule on the constitutionality of abortion, her
rulings in a number of abortion-related cases, as well as comments from former law clerks, strongly suggest that she opposes a woman’s right to choose. Her opinions show that she is either unwilling or unable to put aside her personal views and interpret the law in accordance with both its plain language and legislative intent. In every reported case to come before her prior to her nomination to the federal bench, Justice Owen voted against permitting a minor to obtain an abortion without notifying her parents. She frequently attempted to raise additional obstacles to a pregnant minor’s reproductive rights, misrepresenting and, in some cases even rewriting, provisions of the Texas Parental Notification Act.

This is also the context in which Justice Owen received her much-quoted upbraid from Alberto Gonzales, currently U.S. Attorney General.

In a third case, Justice Owen disagreed with the Texas Supreme Court’s decision that a college-bound high school senior was sufficiently mature and well informed to have an abortion without notifying her parents. Strongly criticizing the dissenters – Justices Owen, Abbott, and Hecht – for what he perceived to be their desire to re-write the law, Justice Alberto Gonzales, now U.S. Attorney General, wrote:

"The dissenting opinions suggest that the exceptions to the general rule of notification should be very rare and require a high standard of proof. I respectfully submit that these are policy decisions for the Legislature. And I find nothing in this statute to directly show that the Legislature intended such a narrow construction…. [T]o construe the Parental Notification Act so narrowly as to eliminate bypasses, or to create hurdles that simply are not to be found in the words of the statute, would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism."

Again, read the whole thing if you're so inclined, and if you've got your Acrobat installed and at the ready. Her sense of jurisprudence is clearly well liked in Texas - or at least it cleans up well on the campaign trail - but it's not hard to see how political figures at the national level can in good faith challenge her suitability for the Fifth Circuit. Getting back to that Raw Story piece mentioned above:

Owen is not held in high esteem by her peers—the most recent American Bar Association survey of Texas jurists showed that more (47%) deem her performance on the bench “poor” as compared to any other judge in the state, with particularly terrible marks with regards to whether she is, “Impartial and open-minded with respect to determining the legal issues.” She has won zero support among Democrats in the Senate, and is not a favorite of many Senate Republicans as well. She is the first nominee to ever be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then re-nominated by the president—so Frist’s characterization that a Democratic filibuster is keeping her from office is plainly erroneous; Owen would not even be up for nomination again if Bush wasn’t grimly and doggedly determined to force her through the confirmation process, “advice and consent” be damned.

That said, if this were still a fight about her qualifications, I think Karl Rove's much applauded political instincts would probably be showing - she's played within Texas's broadly drawn lines, and the Republicans could screech to a compliant press all day long about arbitrary and partisan obstructionism - regardless of the facts, there's a simple storyline that could be maintained. Instead, though, all of the noise has become about the nature of majority rule.

Right, so. Back to the narrative: the matter of Justice Owen has now been brought to the floor. Senator Reid has indicated that the nomination will be filibustered. Sometime soon - probably by early next week - Senator Frist is expected to attempt to set a procedural precedent to the effect that filibusters of judicial nominations (and only judicial nominations, at the moment - legislative filibusters are another breed) are unconstitutional. [This bit about constitutionality, as Josh Marshall observes, is a point which not even the major Republican players profess to believe in real terms. Senator Frist ran up against the logic of his position today and seems to have had a very bad time of it. There's more on the Constitutional and traditional role of the filibuster from Norman Ornstein, of the rather non-left-wing American Enterprise Institute, over here, but the short form is that Senator Frist and his allies are really just making it up as they go.]

Anyway, how does all this work? From the Washington Post (registration required):

Tomorrow or Friday, Frist and other Republican senators are likely to file a motion seeking cloture, or an end to debate. One session day must pass before a vote to end debate, so a vote would be held and Republicans would expect to get fewer than 60 votes to confirm Owen.

Frist aides say he has not decided exactly what would occur next. But the scenario most widely expected among senators in both parties is that he would seek a ruling from the chair -- Vice President Cheney, if it looked as if the vote was going to be close -- that filibustering judicial nominations is out of order. Assuming the chair agreed, Reid would then object and ask that the ruling of the chair be tabled. Most Republicans would then vote against the Democratic motion, upholding the ruling. Then the Senate would move to a vote on Owen, and a precedent will have been set that it takes 51 votes, not 60, to cut off debate on a judicial nomination.

Again, this is not the way things are supposed to be done. It ordinarily requires a two-thirds vote to change Senate rules; what these guys seem to want to say instead - by way of their point of order - is that filibustering was always against the rules, and the actual practice of the last two hundred years amounts to . . . what, sloppy management?

The guardians of tradition seem not to be looking kindly on this venture:

A report last month by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service asserted that "the point of a 'nuclear' or 'constitutional' option is to achieve changes in Senate procedure by using means that lie outside the Senate's normal rules of procedure."

Also, some Democrats have advanced evidence that the GOP gambit lacks support from the Senate parliamentarian, the official who typically rules on what is allowable under the chamber's rules and precedents.

Reid told reporters last month that the parliamentarian, Alan S. Frumin, had told him that he opposed the Republicans' plan and that "if they do this, they will have to overrule him."

And there it is. The point is to try to take fifty-some votes (possibly including that of Vice President Cheney) and turn them into brute force. A recent ABC-Washington Post poll finds that 66% of Americans oppose the move (26% support it, and 8% have no opinion) - and, given that, maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that there's a real question about whether Senator Frist has enough Republicans in the Senate to carry the day.

Is Bill Frist really careless enough as Majority Leader to launch a campaign this dangerous without his votes counted? If he tries and fails, he's burned an awful lot of political capital on a move that's broadly unpopular with the public, he's brought his own influence and competence into question in the Senate, and in return he gets . . . what, martyr's honors with the Christian Right? All well and good, but I don't get the sense he's earning the kind of love that, say, Tom DeLay receives; come 2008, an heroic failure (or two, if you include his performance in the Terri Schiavo matter) isn't likely to be enough to make him too many people's first choice for the Oval Office.

Of course, that's my best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that Senator Frist wins, and a major impediment to the whims of a thin but disciplined majority gets tossed out in a naked power grab. When we talk about the legislature - particularly a legislature that gets on as well with the executive as the gang we've got today - politicizing the judiciary (both by reconstituting the rules of their selection and by threatening sanction against independent judicial voices - as in the aftermath of the aforementioned Schiavo case), we might do well to look back at a few of the country's founding principles. Let's go with Federalist Paper 47, and the start of a passage that's meant to become something reassuring . . .

One of the principal objections inculcated by the more respectable adversaries to the Constitution, is its supposed violation of the political maxim, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct. In the structure of the federal government, no regard, it is said, seems to have been paid to this essential precaution in favor of liberty. The several departments of power are distributed and blended in such a manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disproportionate weight of other parts.

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system.

So there.

Bill Moyers responds.

There's a transcript of a rather nice speech he gave over the weekend up at Salon; I'm afraid you'll be forced to watch an ad if you're not a subscriber (and if you're interested). The speech was, among other things, a response to the rising storm over the politicization of PBS, and a limited articulation of the man's personal expectations of journalism. I'm pleased to say he makes a fairly rousing case of his biases.

A bit more on Khodorkovsky.

Over on FindLaw. Nothing all that startling, but the punchline passages deserve a little bit of theft and presentation:

"There is a school of thought that says they haven't been found guilty, they haven't said the words yet and they sure haven't provided any analysis," said John Papallardo, an American lawyer for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. "But the conventional wisdom is that they will be found guilty."

"So far we can see only one thing: The sentence repeats word for word the guilty accusation - right down to the spelling errors," the Interfax agency cited defense lawyer Anton Drel as saying.

"House" called.

Get it? Ha!

This episode looked for all the world like a gimmick show - complete with Carmen Electra's legs! - and then it opened up into what was probably the strongest hour of drama on American network TV this year. And, of course, the series as a whole is going a long way toward helping me suppress my incredibly infantile reaction to having to spend another year without any Sorkin in my West Wing.

And, really, that's a lot to ask of it.

Must I say good-bye to Paul Krugman?

This by way of Atrios by way of Ezra Klein - the Times is apparently gearing up to put a fifty dollar wall between me and its Op-Ed page. Dig it:

The New York Times Co. on Monday said that, starting in September, access to Op-Ed and certain of its top news columnists on the paper's NYTimes.com Web site will only be available through a fee of $49.95 a year. The service, known as TimesSelect, will also allow access to The Times's online archives, early access to select articles on the site, and other features. Home-delivery subscribers will automatically receive the service, the NYT said.

This is a very real shame. We're talking about one of the livelier opinion pages out there, sure, but I'm not sure I'd ever pay out half a hundred dollars in a lump just to secure the right to disagree with David Brooks two or three times a week.

Still have time to ponder it, though . . . .

Superman dogtags.

No, seriously. The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation also has more conventional ways of raising money, but the tags are there for the unbearably stylish among us . . . .

One more way for Japan to irritate China.

The Tokyo High Court has ruled that (or, more properly, affirmed a lower court ruling to the effect that) Japanese forces were responsible for the 1932 deaths of some 3000 villagers in Pingdingshan (in Liaoning Province, in a big hunk of northeastern China that Imperial Japan tried to remake into a colony - Manchukuo/Manshukoku). The High Court has also concluded that the Meiji Constitution - the law of the land in `32 - precludes any acts of restitution to the survivors.

In the words of the presiding judge, Kimio Miyazaki, "The plaintiffs suffered great emotional anguish and we cannot say that Japan made sufficient compensation, but war compensation issues should be a diplomatic issue decided between governments." Not an unreasonable statement - but I gather there's no indication that the Japanese government is inclined to give much ground on this particular diplomatic issue; it's been in contest since at least 2002.

[2002, it should be noted, also marked the first time victims of Japan's wartime forced labor system ever won redress in a Japanese court - but, of course, that was later overturned; charges had been filed (as with other recent cases) outside the statute of limitations for the crimes. Then, in 2003, the Japanese Foreign Ministry turned over forced labor records that had been strenuously argued not to exist for quite some time, and then "discovered in its basement storeroom." As of 2004, it was believed that less than 10% of the 38,000 Chinese laborers were still alive, and they must be running out of time.

[We won't even get into the matter of the "comfort women."]

Anyway, once again the Chinese are annoyed. The plaintiffs in this case (three survivors of Pingdingshan - by way of the IHT, their names seem to be Yang Baoshan, Mo Desheng, and Fang Surong) intend to appeal, and I just don't know what their chances are. Not great, I suspect.

I'm reasonably confident that Judge Miyazaki was correct in interpreting the Civil Code of the Meiji Constitution - mostly because I'm reasonably confident that the Meiji Constitution would've been constructed in such a way as to grant Japanese soldiers operating at the behest of the Emperor an awful lot of latitude in the pursuit of their duties. That's kind of a hard point to avoid when looking at early 20th century East Asian history.

I also think the Japanese government would do well to step up, apologize, and give these poor people the half a million dollars they've sued for. Killing another round of bad publicity in Asia must surely be worth more than that - and, as the judge himself says, it's not like restitution would be inappropriate.

Khodorkovsky down.

Well, the ruling had been postponed until today, and in a sense it still hasn't been handed down. That said, the judges have announced that he's committed at least some of the crimes for which he's been charged, so when the formal pronouncement comes I think it's safe to assume there aren't going to be any great setbacks to Mr. Putin's latest bid to consolidate power within the Kremlin.

There's a lot going on here. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was clearly a political threat to Mr. Putin - he's lent financial support to opposition parties (particularly Yabloko and the Union of Rightist Forces) and supported media (particularly the Moskovskiye Novosti) outside the Kremlin's control, and at least one source said to be close to Mr. Putin seems to be implying that he was going so far as to plan a coup. Meanwhile, the Russian government has also not-so-quietly renationalized the oil fields Mr. Khodorkovsky's former company, Yukos, had controlled.

Most of us in the West see this as a particularly blatant grab for power on Mr. Putin's part, but it should be noted that the Russian president has put all this into a narrative that at least some of his countrymen find vaguely compelling. Again, from the BBC:

Russian president Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he is correcting a period of "cowboy capitalism" in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Many Russians feel that the country's key assets were sold off too cheaply, turning those close to the privatisations into some of the world's richest people.

This has bred resentment among many Russians and raised concerns that the state controls too little of its key resources.

For a bit more insight into this, I turn to an actual book - specifically, to the afterword to the 1998 edition of David Remnick's excellent Resurrection: the Struggle for a New Russia, pp. 178 and 179. This is how it was late in President Yeltsin's career (heavy-handed italics mine):

Constitutionally, the Russian presidency is enormously powerful, far more so than the American office, but, in fact, the most powerful men in the country are seven business barons - "the seven boyars," "the Magnificent Seven" - who own nearly the entire news media and a fantastic proportion of the national wealth . . . .

These seven men are Boris Berezovsky of Logovaz (automobiles, television, oil); Mikhail Friedman of the Alfa Group (oil, tea, sugar, cement); Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Ros-Prom (banking, oil); Vladimir Gusinsky of Media-Most Group (television, newspapers, banking, real estate); Vladimir Potanin of Uneximbank (banking, real estate, oil and gas, media, ferrous metals); Mikhail Smolensky of SBS-Agro (banking); Vladimir Vinogradov of Inkombank (banking, metals, oil). Potanin alone has major interests in seven of Russia's twenty largest companies. Other imperial beachheads include Gazprom, the country's immense natural gas conglomerate [and, recently, a failed bidder on Yukos], and various regional potentates . . . .

The ascent of this oligarchy began with the collapse of the old system and the legalization of commercial banking in 1988, but it really accelerated in 1995, when Yeltsin instituted a "loans-for-shares" privatization scheme whereby the new breed of Russian bankers, who had made their initial fortunes by speculating on the international currency markets at a time of runaway inflation, could make loans to the cash-starved state. The state could not pay back the loans and instead allowed the bankers to participate in rigged insider auctions for some of the most valuable industrial properties in the country. The bankers were pleased to be picking up these bargains, and Yeltsin was pleased to give them out to friendly bankers rather than to the provincial industrialists who backed the communists. And the bargains! It was like shopping for conglomerates at Filene's basement. Berezovsky, for example, paid $100 million for Sibneft, the Siberian oil giant; western investors, who were going to join in with Berezovsky on the deal backed [sic] out because they were nervous that Yeltsin might be voted out of office. After Yeltsin won, Berezovsky claimed he was offered a billion dollars for the property. Khodorkovsky bought three-quarters of Yukos oil for $168 million; annual revenues for Yukos are now [circa 1998] around $3 billion.

Which is to say, Mr. Khodorkovsky's enormous wealth wasn't amassed with entirely clean hands - and the Russians do know it.

So, it's an awkward situation - that said, for my own part, I still come down in pro-Khodorkovsky camp (not that it matters now); Mr. Putin's government isn't doing Russia any favors in dramatically undermining property rights, no matter how carelessly they were originally assigned, and the fact that the state's motives seem fundamentally anti-democratic doesn't help anything, either.

[The following added at 7:42.]

Well, that concluding paragraph was pretty stupid - judging virtue as an abstraction rather than commenting on actual points of Russian law. All I can say in my own defense is that I have the sense that Russian law in this case is best considered as rather elastic.

By which I mean subject to political pressure.