The recovery of Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Vogt.

Just thought I'd mention that the latest word (care of the Washington Post) is that both men are on the mend - albeit slowly. Mr. Vogt is (or, at least, has been) conscious, which is certainly a good sign; Mr. Woodruff's health is more at question. Part of his skull was removed to ease pressure on the brain, and I gather it's not yet clear whether he's looking at permanent brain damage.

Anyway, just thought I'd add (for those who missed it) that the Post ran a puff piece on the ABC anchor team on Sunday; Elizabeth Vargas was the one who'd dated Michael Douglas, and Bob Woodruff was the one who spoke Mandarin and had served as a translator for CBS news during the Tianenmen Square massacre. It's the kind of article that's hard to take seriously as anything other than genial promotion of a commercial product, but it does impart the sense that Mr. Woodruff brought something to the screen. Experience of the world, maybe, a sense of the importance of journalism - qualities network news desperately needs these days.

But, of course, I wouldn't wish this on him no matter what he did.

So, here's hoping these men - along with all the thousands wounded in Iraq about whom we hear absolutely nothing - heal cleanly, quickly, and well.

Well, that's that.

Later today, in all likelihood, Sam Alito will be put on the Supreme Court; Senator Kerry's valiant (if underorganized) attempt at a filibuster bit the dust yesterday. The lefty blogosphere is trying to turn the frown upside-down and is taking pride in the impact its dissatisfaction might have had on the twenty-five senators who voted against cloture (see Digby here and Firedoglake here for good examples), but - just at this moment - I'm in no mood to let the `net seduce me away from policy and into politics.

Where my big concern with John Roberts was that he'd be tempted to undo the powers the federal government has assumed care of the Commerce Clause - environmental protection-type stuff, among others - the red flag with Samuel Alito is his tendency to exaggerate the legitimate powers of the presidency (particularly given this presidency, which tends toward power-madness all on its own). Yes, I think he's also been remarkably dishonest about certain unsavory associations in his past, and, yes, I think he's likely to bury legalized abortion to the best of his ability - but, somehow, what really bothers me is his unwillingness to say under oath that Congress can make it illegal for the president to have people tortured. In the past, he's worked to curtail federal liability for illegal wiretaps, he's argued that presidents should use signing statements to impose executive interpretations of new law; we spent most of the `90s with a president I liked and a Congress I loathed, so I should be as ready as anyone to examine the virtues of a more monarchic system, and yet I still can't help but think that the philosophy of government this man represents is genuinely unhealthy for the republic.

And yet we're going to be stuck with him for decades to come.

Well, I hope this president has no more chances to shape the Court. That's the only thing I have left to say; he's too short-sighted to be trusted with the job.

A quick thought on the ongoing Palestinian mess.

The official word is that foreign aid to the Palestinians is likely to be deeply curtailed (I rather expect Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and a few other Muslim states with money to spare and volatile citizens to impress to keep some money flowing regardless) unless Hamas - now essentially the governing party - renounces violence and the stated desire for the eradication of the Israeli state. You can find some details here and here, if you haven't picked up on them already.

The early prognosis isn't good - Hamas is rejecting the demands - and, just to add infection to injury, American evangelical Christians are apparently planning to take this opportunity to become more involved in Israeli politics.

Because, really, that's what this crisis needs: more Pat Robertson.

Anyway, I don't get a vote, but if I did I'd call for Condoleezza Rice - or, at the very least, a pretty damn impressive special envoy - to get over to Hamas's leadership for emergency negotiations. I wouldn't expect them to do a lot of good, I hasten to add: Hamas is Hamas, and it can almost always be counted on to do something stupid, bloody, and ultimately harmful to Palestinians and Israelis alike. But these people are currently the Palestinians' elected leaders, having been legitimized by reasonably fair elections, and I think we'd do ourselves some good in the Muslim world if we went beyond the call of duty to demonstrate that we respect the Palestinian choice, as manifest in these people, even as we unflinchingly reject what they actually do.

But, yeah, it's a lousy decision for the world's leaders to have to make - right up there with the Palestinians' lot of having to choose between the corrupt incompetents and the barking lunatics.

Very little, rather late.

Sorry for the prolonged act of silence here; some of it is down to the whims of my immune system, no matter how heroically it was boosted by a flu shot, and some of it is down to a book that was in no hurry to leave my hands.

Anyway, my capacity for surprise in situations like this has long since been exhausted, but it's worth mentioning that there's another expert alleging that the Bush administration doesn't want him sharing his expertise with the public. In this case, it's NASA's chief climate expert - presumably, anything he says might tip off the terrorists. [For a quick look at where we're at, global-warming-wise, I refer you to an article in today's Post titled "Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change." What you smell in the air now are early (but not that early) whiffs of real panic.

Okay, panic and certain heat-trapping emissions.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has a lovely editorial blasting the administration for various falsehoods it's employed over the course of the illegal surveillance story. It's reasonably comprehensive and genuinely angry, and we could do with a lot more like it.

Bush! And! Abramoff! Sitting in a tree!

Thanks to Joe Conason for doing the spadework:

Bush suggested today that he had scarcely heard of the lobbyist until his indictment, doesn't remember ever meeting him and knows little about him, but there are more than a few reasons to wonder how that could possibly be true:

Abramoff has worked closely for decades with Karl Rove, his old friend and Bush's top political advisor, as well as with Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed and members of the Bush campaign's inner circle. Bush performed favors for the lobbyist as early as 1997, when he wrote a letter about school choice to Abramoff's clients in the slave labor haven of the Mariana Islands. (The letter was copied to an Abramoff associate.)

Abramoff sent his personal assistant, Susan Ralston, to serve as Rove's personal assistant during the earliest weeks of Bush's first term. Within a few months, he had arranged a May 2001 meeting with the president for two tribal leaders he represented.

Abramoff's partner David Safavian was appointed by Bush to serve as the top procurement official in his administration (and last year pleaded guilty to five felony counts that stemmed from an Abramoff scheme to acquire control of Washington property owned by the government).

Abramoff served on the Interior Department's transition team -- where he was exquisitely positioned to advance the interests of his clients in the Mariana Islands and on Indian reservations -- and subsequently raised more than $100,000 for Bush's campaign. The lobbyist and his aides met with or contacted administration officials on at least 195 occasions to promote client interests during the first several months of Bush's first term, according to Abramoff's billing records.

And then there is the most intriguing instance of a presidential action that, wittingly or not, served Abramoff's interests. On Nov. 18, 2002, the federal prosecutor in Guam issued a subpoena to court officials on the Pacific island, who had secretly retained the lobbyist to stop legislation in Congress that would have curtailed their authority. The subpoena demanded all the records concerning the strange Abramoff contract from the administrative director of the Guam Superior Court.

On the day after U.S. attorney Frederick Black issued the subpoena to Abramoff's covert clients in Guam, the White House announced the president's decision to replace him. A career federal prosecutor who had held the Pacific island post for a decade, Black was demoted to a staff position. His replacement was a lawyer recommended by the Republican Party on Guam. Rove received the recommendation from another lobbyist for government officials Black had been investigating.

And of course, Bush's firing of Black killed the investigation of Abramoff's secret dealings with the Guam court officials, as the Los Angeles Times reported last August.

Perhaps the president really doesn't know Abramoff and had no idea that the lobbyist was telling clients that he could fix the Bush White House. Maybe his abrupt removal of the U.S. attorney who was investigating Abramoff three years ago was merely a curious coincidence. But if he has nothing to hide, then why are he and his press secretary concealing the facts and photos of Abramoff's repeated visits to the White House?

"Here's hoping it's a step in the right direction."

That's what I wrote the day before yesterday.

It wasn't. Hamas to all intents and purposes swept the Palestinian elections, almost guaranteeing that the closest that particular part of the world comes to a peace process in the next few years will be a series of unilateral moves from Israel. Any unfairnesses inherent in that process are going to be borne first and foremost by the Palestinians themselves - and the upper echelons of Hamas probably won't be displeased. After all, if the populace is hungry and out of work, it's the radicals who benefit (at least, as long as they can maintain a facade of competence; we'll have to see how that goes).

Ehud Olmert is promising (as is President Bush) to ignore the Hamas government; Binyamin Netanyahu is crowing that it's the natural result of giving the Palestinians any kind of shake at all. None of this is good for Israel - particularly if it leads to the crazy-ass rump of the Likud picking up steam as we head into the next elections - but it's not like there are a lot of options. Political engagement may one day take Hamas away from violence and fundamentalist lunacy, but there's no indication that it's going to happen overnight, and that leaves the Israelis with no good diplomatic choices.

Juan Cole has a piece up at Salon calling the Bush administration on its complicity in this new mess - you can check it out here, if you've got a subscription, or are willing to put up with an ad - but the most concise post-mortem I've seen for the hopes of the day comes from the New York Times editorial page.

There are many reasons to explain why Palestinians voted to hand over their government to Hamas, an organization that revels in terrorism and is sworn to destroy Israel. The inability of President Mahmoud Abbas's party, Fatah, to run its affairs is first on the list, if pre-election polls of Palestinians were accurate. Fatah has been corrupt and inept, and it represented the status quo, not a happy position given the lawlessness in Gaza, the unemployment rate in Nablus and the despair among young people in Jericho. Mr. Abbas didn't help matters much, proving weak and incapable of imposing control over the battered Palestinian Authority.

Israeli hard-liners can blame themselves as well. Even though most reasonable people have recognized Mr. Abbas as a far more pragmatic negotiating partner than Yasir Arafat was, Prime Minister Sharon failed to give Mr. Abbas any concession that he could point to as an achievement. Instead, Israel has busied itself with carrying out Mr. Sharon's doctrine of unilateral separation from the Palestinians, a doctrine that is sure to gain more favor now that the Palestinians have chosen Hamas.

But all of this is peripheral to two central facts. Hamas grew out of a terrorist organization that has undermined every small step toward peace with mass murder. And on Wednesday, Palestinians voted almost two to one to put Hamas in charge of running their government. For there to be any hope of getting out of the impasse in the Middle East, one of those two things must change.

. . .

Hamas has a choice between governing and terror. Is the party more interested in making sure that the electricity and water stay on, that Palestinian boys and girls make it to school, and that these battered people finally get a state of their own? Or is it more interested in continuing its campaign to destroy Israel? If Hamas chooses the latter, it's more than likely that it will not be around for long, and rightly so.

Not good.

The next step in Middle Eastern democracy?

Here's hoping it's in the right direction.

Today marks the first parliamentary elections held by the Palestinian Authority in a decade, and the first ever in which Hamas has fielded candidates. In fact, at this point, they're running neck-and-neck with Fatah in the polls.

If you don't see that last point as terribly positive . . . well, you're not alone. Still, if Ha'aretz is to be believed, it seems likely that any governing coalition formed will favor the relative moderates in Fatah - they have more support in the independent parties. Meanwhile, a look at Sinn Fein's history in Northern Ireland should offer us all some hope for the long term; political legitimacy seems, at least occasionally, to smooth terrorist impulses away - it's the miracle of enfranchisement.

Certainly, the Palestinians themselves seem unusually optimistic.

Palestinian spokesmen spoke a great deal yesterday about a "festival of democracy," describing a carnival atmosphere in the territories in advance of today's balloting. The Palestinian media deliveredinstructions to the public, stressing in particular that people carrying arms are not allowed to come near the polling stations.

While Israelis and others are concerned by Hamas' participation and expected success in the elections, almost all Palestinian political activists expressed great satisfaction over Hamas' entry into organized political life.

Senior PA officials and the Palestinian media argued repeatedly that Hamas' presence in the legislature, and perhaps even in the government, did not symbolize a retreat from the diplomatic process, but rather a step forward.

As Mohammed Dahlan told his rivals from Hamas at a campaign appearance in Gaza, "the very existence of the Palestinian Authority, and these elections, are the result of the Oslo Accords." In other words, the very fact that Hamas is participating in the election proves that it sees no choice but to accept the Oslo Accords.

Hamas has tried to rebut these arguments. Its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, argued that the Oslo Accords died years ago, and that this election is being held in a manner that differs both technically and substantively from the earlier one: Instead of 88 parliamentary representatives, all elected by district, there will be 132 representatives, half elected by district and half on national lists.

Surprisingly, Islamic Jihad supports Fatah and the PA in this argument.

Islamic Jihad is the only Palestinian faction not running in the elections, and its spokesmen agree that participating in them constitutes indirect recognition of Oslo. But all the other opposition factions are running, including two that, like Hamas, boycotted the 1996 elections because of their opposition to Oslo: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

This makes it possible to hope that perhaps Abbas and his colleagues are right: That a new parliament and a new government, in which Hamas and the left participate, might ultimately advance the diplomatic process rather than halt it.

And it all has the virtue of coming from within the native populace . . . .

Another superb essay from Glenn Greenwald.

Check it out.

Sigh. I wish we had a human rights investigator, too.

A European human rights investigator said on Tuesday there was evidence the United States had "outsourced" torture to other countries and it was likely that European governments knew about it.

. . .

His remarks, in a preliminary report, kept pressure on the CIA and European governments over allegations that the U.S. intelligence agency flew prisoners through airports in Europe to jails in third countries where they may have been tortured.

"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing of torture'," Marty said in his initial report into the allegations for the 46-nation Council, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.

He said it had been proved that "individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture."

From a Reuters piece, available here.

Oh, Canada.

I know, I know. The Liberals were in power too long. They'd become ossified and corrupt, and they're probably better off now that they can step past the Jean Chrétien/Paul Martin era and reinvent themselves for the twenty-first century. Besides, the Conservatives may now be the dominant party, but they don't enjoy a majority; any descent into Republican-style soullessness will presumably be controlled by the fine mechanisms of coalition-maintenance.

And yet I'm bummed.

The Times has a little write-up here, if you haven't already seen the news.

Hear that sound?

That's me, growling. Think of me as a lazy old dog who's suddenly realized there are idiots with clubs about to attack my puppy.

Okay, it's a gratuitously strange metaphor. It's just that Josh Marshall has pointed me to an article in the Washington Post that's making me worry about something I didn't think I had to worry about before: apparently, American phone and cable companies really want to have a greater hand in directing Internet traffic into and away from specific sites. How? Well, by managing the connection speeds involved in each transaction; if AT&T were to receive a gratuity from Amazon that eBay didn't match, well, shopping at Amazon would require less time than shopping at eBay through AT&T lines. Depending on how far they take it, the same kind of scenario might well play out between the web-presences of the Washington Post and the New York Times, to say nothing of all the smaller venues that couldn't afford the same sorts of payoffs to the telecoms.

Here at street level, I'm bristling at the notion that my online life might suddenly start looking more like it did in those dark, dark days when I was using dial-up - I'm annoyed by the idea of unnecessary inconvenience, and frustrated by the apparent arrogance of the phone company executives, who are apparently prepared to muck around in the guts of a profoundly complicated system just for the potential rewards of opening up a new protection racket. On the macro scale, though the article almost paints it as little more than a picture of dueling lobbyists, I have to hope that Congress isn't going to be willing to expand the de facto regulatory powers of this nation's telecommunications companies over . . . what, hundreds of billions of dollars in annual electronic commerce? More? It's like letting the owners of number 11, Wall Street direct traffic on the NYSE trading floor; the social good of neutral, uninhibited, massive-scale commerce in our crazy capitalist society pretty much has to outweigh any proprietary rights over the marketplace itself. Honestly, I'm half-tempted to argue for a massive abuse of eminent domain, just to make sure the telecoms can't keep arguing against full public access - look what they can do in places where connectivity is treated as a public good as well as a commercial service.

Sigh.

Anyway, check the article out: the story probably concerns you.

Jack Abramoff, and the president's bad memory.

"The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said.

The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While TIME's source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.

From Time.

Honestly, what's most surprising about this is that Scott McClellan was ever careless enough to take such an absolutist tack: "doesn't know and can't recall meeting" is just too easily upended. The White House seems more off-balance than I'd expect on this one, given how much warning we all had that it was coming.

The Iranian problem.

In today's Washington Post, Ivo Daalder and Philip Gordon have a sensible piece on Iran, its nuclear ambitions, and how the rest of the world might best respond. I'm doing the article a disservice by grabbing four paragraphs and calling them representative of the whole, but the following should at least get the point across:

Given these bad options, what should the United States and Europe do instead? The answer is that they should do what they said they would do -- make Iran pay a real price if it refuses to suspend its uranium enrichment activities again. This means first making a concerted effort to win Russian and Chinese support for tough action at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.N. Security Council next month. Ideally, the Security Council should not only denounce Iran's actions but agree on an oil embargo and a ban on investment in Iran.

The credibility of sanctions would be enhanced if it were clear that negotiations could resume -- and punitive actions be suspended -- as soon as Tehran terminates the enrichment activities it recently resumed. The offer to support a civilian nuclear energy program, increase trade and investment -- and even engage in regional security talks and restore diplomatic relations with the United States -- would also remain on the table.

But if Tehran refuses to back down, it must pay a price. And while Russia and China may not go along, Europe, Japan and the United States should not hide behind their refusal. The argument that sanctions won't work without China, Russia and India on board is overstated. Only Western companies at present possess the sort of expertise and technology that Iran's energy sector needs, and in an integrated world oil market, whatever oil China and India purchase from Iran liberates supplies elsewhere. Iran could, of course, retaliate by pulling its oil off the world market, which would cause a price spike. But if Americans and Europeans are unwilling to run the risk of a temporary rise in oil prices as part of what it takes to prevent an Iranian bomb, then they had better be prepared to live with the consequences as well.

The Iranian government believes, as Ahmadinejad put it recently, that "you [the West] need us more than we need you." Do we really want to encourage him in this belief?

Now, almost a week ago, Josh Marshall raised an important point: even for those of us playing armchair diplomacy, there's no way to get away from the people who are actually going to execute American policy. The Bush administration's approach to North Korea over the last five years seriously calls into doubt the chief decision-makers' ability to arrive at a coherent, sustainable carrot-and-stick policy toward nuclear disarmament anywhere, and the idea that they'd be willing to risk the political damage inherent in spiking gasoline prices, particularly in an election year, just because it might be the least bad policy seems pretty damn naive. So, in a sense, the article cited above is almost meaningless; there can be no reasonable presumption that policies will be enacted competently on our end, and to pretend otherwise is just as irrational as assuming that President Ahmadinejad is going to react to pressure in the way a secular, rational parliamentarian might.

Still, I think it's true that sanctions are the least awful of all the options anyone might consider. Contrary to what you might take away from the saber-rattling of Senators McCain and Lieberman, military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities seem horrendously dumb at first glance: the intelligence on which they'd be based is almost certainly incomplete, it would radicalize the Iranian population (who, again, primarily voted Mr. Ahmadinejad into power on the strength of his populist rhetoric, not his religio-nationalist zealotry and yelping xenophobia), it would further destabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, that pesky oil freeze would be more or less inevitable, and - oh, yeah - we're apparently not going to be looking at a desperate problem for a decade. The situation now is urgent, but not critical.

But, yes, it is urgent; we don't want to resign ourselves to Iranian nukes before we absolutely have to - the current regime's judgement is just too poor, and its ties to terrorist organizations (albeit, I think, more the Hezbollah stripe than al-Qaeda) too real. So, sanctions - preferably a better-targeted lineup than those Saddam Hussein twisted around to keep Iraq hungry and confused in the `90s.

As an aside, TPMCafe is gearing up to host blogs from a couple of arms control experts, from Monday to Friday - if you're interested in getting in from the start, or if you have any questions you'd like to see answered by pros, the comments thread over here is a good place to start.

The new bandwagon.

You may've heard that Chris Matthews said a fairly stupid thing the other day.

When I first heard about it, I grimaced and set it aside. Not because it isn't annoying, but - bear with me - because I've seen Mr. Matthews on the Daily Show.

It was painful to watch. He wasn't a barking madman there, and he wasn't going out of his way to slur anybody; he just seemed a little bit lost. As I remember it, he talked quickly, in a slightly high pitch, and giggled a little too often in a way you really wouldn't expect - and I mean giggled, a very nervous kind of sound - and he really seemed to be hurrying to find a way to twist his familiar TV persona into something that would play well before a live, active, cynical and/or wary and/or bemused audience. I don't mean to knock him for that, exactly; it's human enough to tense up in front of a strange kind of crowd - though God knows it wasn't the sort of wry, assured performance most of the network anchors deliver during their visits to the halls of Stewart and Colbert - but I came away with an uneasy sense that he's probably too insecure for the job, and for the influence, he's got. He really seemed to want to be accepted by whoever was in front of him, and that's not usually a quality you look for in a man who's supposed to tell a lot of truth.

But, once you know what's going on, you have a sense of what to expect.

So, this week. Of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Matthews said, "He sounds like an over-the-top Michael Moore, here . . . ." I figured that was just Mr. Matthews' way of showing he could be a man's man in the same kind of style Bill O'Reilly is - a little bit of casual bullying to establish whatever the cable news equivalent of street cred happens to be. There's no way for me to know, but I don't suppose he even thought about it much at the time.

His later clarification - once he realized he was being "misunderstood" - was that he felt that Mr. bin Laden was using the "lingo of the left in America" in his latest recording (the transcript in translation is available here, care of the New York Times), and that's just kind of surreal. [Though not nearly as much so as Joe Scarborough's apparent belief that al-Qaeda has to leave the Middle East and go to Ted Kennedy for stories about American soldiers and Iraqi women.] The blather about the inevitability of suicide among American soldiers and the growing "fierceness" of the insurgency isn't anything being paraded around by Michael Moore; it's a cheap psy-op from a thug in a hole in the ground somewhere in Pakistan, and, if we're really unlucky, a coded message to some assholes with bombs. The only Western material to which Mr. bin Laden specifically points is a book most of us had never heard of (and one which I'm not going to link here), and - if we're charitable enough to take him at his word - unnamed recent polls.

Whoop-de-doo.

The fact that Mr. Matthews thinks this ugly little mindgame evokes the language of the American left in general, and Mr. Moore in particular, seems to be based on . . . well, what? A common lack of reverence in discussing President Bush? Parallel beliefs that the war has been mismanaged?

Seriously, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Mr. Matthews, whatever he really thinks, is saying that the language of dissent is illegitimate, and maybe kind of unhinged. There's no other way to read Mr. bin Laden's statement and take from it the notion that he's getting his ideas from someone relatively mainstream from the Western side of the lines. Apparently, for the purposes of national news analysis, being to the political left of Joe Lieberman means your head is in the same place as that of a murderous, undermedicated Saudi fruitloop with messianic pretentions.

Again, I don't think Mr. Matthews really means it. I think this was just a cute, cheap shot, meant to make him look Republican and tough before a red-meat-eating audience, and he's now trying to dial it back a little without being seen as having been intimidated into disavowing it. It's moronic, but not hard to understand - it's just what happens when cable news is made to look as much like a junior high school recess as it possibly can. It's a symptom of a larger disease.

But, strangely enough, it's a symptom that's actually getting some attention - way more than I'd expected. The Daou Report has an incomplete list of grumblers, ranters, and voices raised in complaint, but the most surprising post is up on Daily Kos, care of veteran presidential candidate John Kerry. Admittedly, it's more a call for serious coverage of the story of bin Laden at Tora Bora than a show of dismay at Mr. Matthews' behavior (i.e., this), but the Hardball gaffe features as more than just a pretext.

I stand by my original judgement, of course: an incident of idiocy is less troubling than the culture that encouraged it, and - first and foremost - we should all be calling for more real reporting and less unreflective punditry from our big media players. [Unimportant jackasses like myself, of course, get a pass.]

But this was indeed an incident of idiocy, and maybe if people cry foul on it, and enough like it, CNN and its competitors might eventually be scared back in the direction of real professionalism. So, belatedly, I flag it.

And I really do hope that somebody wrings an apology out of this son of a bitch on Michael Moore's behalf. Mr. Moore's particular swagger has never really set well with me, but he hasn't done anything to deserve being made into a straw man for any right-wing jerk too lazy to make an honest political argument, and he deserves to get his name back.

Incredible, but true!

My tardiness in commenting on the Iraqi election results does not, in fact, imply that the results aren't in! For all of you out there who have trusted for so long in my infallibility, I can only say this: it's your cash that fuels my mighty powers. Send me enough giant bags of money to let me build a seventy-foot tall golden statue of myself, clutching your giant bags of money, and I'll never let you down again.

Except insofar as I stop blogging and devote myself full-time to sybaritic excess.

Anyway, the results are in, and they're not hugely surprising. Shi'ite fundamentalists are apparently ten parliamentary seats short of outright majority (or eight seats, if the Sadrists reliably play along), and with the Kurds they've actually got a good shot at hitting a two-thirds supermajority without having to cut deals with any lesser groups. [It's worth noting that there were actually more Sunni reps elected than Kurdish, but I don't know what that means - I gather there's basically just the one Kurdish political party, so its delegates can be expected to present a unified front; I'd expect the Sunnis to be a bit more fragmented.] Juan Cole has done a nice job of sketching out what the parliamentary composition is likely to mean in the near term, for what it's worth.

A new dimension in illegality!

Well, with the Bush administration once again asserting that Congress and the Constitution made everything they've ever wanted to do legal, it's worth noting that the non-partisan Congressional Research Service has just issued its second conclusion of law-breaking. The Post gives us this:

The Bush administration appears to have violated the National Security Act by limiting its briefings about a warrantless domestic eavesdropping program to congressional leaders, according to a memo from Congress's research arm released yesterday.

The Congressional Research Service opinion said that the amended 1947 law requires President Bush to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of such intelligence activities as the domestic surveillance effort.

. . .

The White House has said it informed congressional leaders about the NSA program in more than a dozen briefings, but has refused to provide further details. At a minimum, the briefings included the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees and the two ranking Democrats, known collectively as the "Gang of Four," according to various sources.

. . .

Cumming's analysis found that both intelligence committees should have been briefed because the program involved intelligence collection activities.

The only exception in the law applies to covert actions, Cumming found, and those programs must be reported to the "Gang of Eight," which includes House and Senate leaders in addition to heads of the intelligence panels. The administration can also withhold some operational details in rare circumstances, but that does not apply to the existence of entire programs, he wrote.

Unless the White House contends the program is a covert action, the memo said, "limiting congressional notification of the NSA program to the Gang of Eight . . . would appear to be inconsistent with the law."

I'm sure the White House will contend whatever is most convenient to contend, but even if we're to concede that the entire program is a covert action (which I don't), the fact seems to be that even the full Gang of Eight was never brought into the picture.

Anyway, it's worth stressing again that this is the second CRS report on the spying mess; the first one, which supports the thesis that the warrant-free surveillance itself amounts to a violation of FISA, is dated January 5th - and is available on-line as a pdf (though, for some reason, pulling in pdfs from FAS killed Firefox last time I tried - still more proof that acronyms are unhealthy).

Obviously, any act or practice is - in practice - illegal only insofar as someone is willing and able to arrive at a ruling in a court of law to that effect, and God knows my faith in the judiciary has taken some hits since late 2000. So maybe I shouldn't be screeching that this stuff is, y'know, blatantly against the law.

But I think I can say in good faith that the people who write legislation have largely accepted the (fairly common sense) conclusion that the laws' clear intent has been violated.

More on the Medicare scam.

Honestly, the more I read about this, the more annoyed I am with myself for going ignorant for so long. It's a blogger's dream - it takes no work at all to show how awe-inspiringly stupid some of its provisions are.

Which isn't to suggest that commentator wunderkind Ezra Klein isn't working. Go check out the three tasty paragraphs he's served up (with the help of data from Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research) to sketch out how much money the country might save if Medicare were allowed to bargain down pharmaceutical costs the way its counterparts in less lobbyist-beholden countries typically do. The punchline goes something like this:

Baker, clever economist that he is, compared Medicare Part D's projected pharmaceutical costs to Congressional Budget Office data on what other countries pay. In 2006, Medicare beneficiaries will spend an estimated $113 billion on drugs. If their costs were equivalent to the next most expensive country, they'd be paying only $86 billion. If they got the prices of the cheapest country, they'd spend $61 billion. And if, as one would expect, they used their larger size to get proportionately larger savings, they'd only spend $42 billion. Over a seven year projection, the standard benefit would cost $1.361 trillion, the high estimate in a single-payer system would cost $834 billion, the middle estimate $602 billion, and the low estimate $418 billion. And those numbers include adjustment for increased drug usage due to lower costs. Add in, too, the $38 billion savings in administrative costs and you've got quite a chunk of money -- in the optimistic estimate, almost a trillion dollars -- the Bush administration passed up on. But if that's getting you down, remember: money can't buy happiness. Only things like good health, often gained through the purchase of exorbitantly expensive pharmaceuticals, can do that.

Mm. That's some good snark!

A hit of good news?

Okay, at this point I'm taking all updates on multilateral talks with North Korea as being, incomplete, doomed to immediate obsolescence, or - at most - more significant for having been issued than for their contents. The rug's just been pulled out from under me too many times.

Still, today the Korea Times ran a short article that starts off like so . . .

Even though there is no visible change in the positions of the United States and North Korea, expectations suddenly run high that the stalled six-party nuclear negotiations will be resumed next month at the latest. The long-awaited good news came out of a meeting of top nuclear negotiators from the North, China and the U.S. in Beijing on Wednesday. Though the details of its results were not revealed, the tripartite meeting raised hopes of a breakthrough to resumption of the six-party talks, suspended since the brief convocation of the fifth round last November, in consideration of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill’s reaction to it. Before heading for Washington after the meeting, Hill told reporters that he had good discussions.

No matter what the outcome, the meeting was enough to draw global attention as it was held on the very day North Korean leader Kim Jongil returned to Pyongyang after his week-long trip to China. The North officially confirmed his visit to China, which had been steeped in secrecy. The significance of the trilateral meeting emerged from Kim’s summit talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday. As disclosed by the North, the major topic of their discussion was the stalemate in the six-party negotiations, following U.S. financial sanctions against Pyongyang last October. It is reported that Kim called upon Hu to help remove the U.S. financial strictures for his country’s return to the forum of the six-party dialogue. He also told the Chinese leader that Pyongyang is fully committed to resolving the three-year nuclear standoff with Washington through the multilateral negotiations.

. . . and that's sufficiently upbeat that I'll cling to it like a St. Bernard on a bad day in the Alps.

Snapshots from the fall.

Arianna Huffington's writing this time around may not be the deepest on the `net, but she's done us all a service by compiling links on our soon-to-be-abandoned reconstruction of Iraq. [Apparently, the free market will lift the place up - or not. "The world is a competitive place," a particularly choice quote goes.]

Anyway, take the link and bookmark it - someday, it may prove useful in explaining to the grandkids why the rest of the world doesn't take American magnanimity as seriously as we might want.

I don't write this kind of thing often, but: Go, Vatican!

The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as "correct" the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

"If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another," Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano.

"But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science," he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. "It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious."

The article was not presented as an official church position. But in the subtle and purposely ambiguous world of the Vatican, the comments seemed notable, given their strength on a delicate question much debated under the new pope, Benedict XVI.

From the New York Times. Nice to see an organized religion recognize that science represents a tested methodology, and not just a body of potentially awkward ideas.

I give them a nod.

Sometimes the paper just makes me so tired.

I live in the DC metropolitan area; the Washington Post is the one old-fashioned newspaper that lands somewhere around my driveway in the mornings. It's what I read over breakfast, and so I see articles I miss during my on-line news-scans - articles I wouldn't see in any other paper.

Today, I'm honestly wondering why I bother.

The hit came from an article by Chris Cillizza titled "Gore Says Bush Broke the Law With Spying." You'd think that somewhere in an article based on that theme, the author might choose to observe that the president has admitted to breaking the law with spying, but chooses to believe that the law doesn't apply to him, despite a lot of noise from law professors, congressmen, and non-partisan committees to the contrary (for God's sake, Christopher Hitchens is suing!). Whatever; I'm getting used to the American news organizations' inability to stand up to power.

What depresses me is a new look at the consequences. The Post's article cites a poll whose results I hadn't seen before - a bare majority of the participants (51%) agreed that "'wiretapping of telephone calls and e-mails without court approval' was an acceptable tool for the federal government to use when investigating terrorism."

Some of it may be the way the question was phrased, but it just sucks the life out of me. This isn't an isolated incident; this president is in the midst of a broad effort to expand the powers of his office beyond what the Constitution allows, and he takes what he grabs and uses it to make room for torture, and kidnappings, and the detention of American citizens without trial, and giveaways to big energy executives, and God knows what else, and a majority of us - including just about everyone in a position to make things better - either don't know, are too afraid to respond, or, worst of all, think it's all okay.

I'm not totally naive. We're not, as a nation, falling from a really great height; the United States blundered through the Cold War visiting crimes like these on its citizens and cynical wars on the rest of the world (I'm talking Latin American banana wars, not Korea). We've seen where the idealism of our founders would lead, but we've rarely been strong enough to follow as far as we should.

But there was one moment, after President Nixon's long and unsightly slough from grace, when (I think) the country really stood up and demanded better of its leaders and itself. The newspapers were brave, Congress was responsible, and the people weren't so deceived that they stood in the way. People like Dick Cheney tried to drag the spring back into winter from the moment of the first bloom, but for most of my life I took it more or less for granted that they wouldn't succeed - I was naive enough for that.

And now here we are. We have a spoiled, intemperate brat for a president, we're seeing the Constitution take little nick after little cut, and for all that it's happening right out in the open, fifty-one percent of us don't see it and want it to stop.

"Gore Says Bush Broke the Law With Spying."

We should be doing better than this!

Another point on FISAgate.

Laura Rozen kindly points us all to this article in today's Times. First two `graphs?

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

It's interesting stuff, as far as it goes, and if you ever need ammunition against a "Why won't you just let the president do what needs to be done?" it's always good to be able to demonstrate that bad ideas frequently don't yield good results.

Again, though, the main point is that this is illegal stuff. This is explicitly illegal stuff. The president is claiming that that's beside the point, because anything he does is super-legal - and that's the bit that really deserves our outrage. Inefficient programs in and of themselves aren't really all that novel.

On the Medicare boondoggle . . . .

I'll admit, I haven't given this the attention it deserves - medical care is, in general, kind of a blind spot for me, and the political dimensions of it doubly so. But the fact is, this is as clear a case of congressional and executive malfeasance leading to public disaster as anything we've seen over the last few years (as with FEMA, there's also a good deal of incompetence in the mix, but it really is best to remember that the original legislation was pretty crooked from the get-go).

Anyway, yesterday's New York Times offers a look at the mess from the front lines right here, while Josh Marshall and his readers/contributors have started looking at the origins of the problem (bribes and intimidation and all) here and here. [The "J" responsible for the latter essay is no relation.]

By the way, this paragraph stands out as a special tribute to the shittiness of the legislation:

Arbitrary drug classes like benzodiazepenes and barbiturates are specifically excluded from coverage. Congress left no clue as to the legislative intent of the exclusion. Someone seems to have decided that these two drug classes are incompatible with some Biblical teaching. Or maybe the competing drug classes are much more profitable for someone's campaign contributors (as both benzodiazepines and barbiturates are cheap and produced as generics, unlike their likely treatment alternatives). As a result the nation's psychiatrists are going batshit right now, trying to figure out what to do with patients on drug regimens for things like seizures.

Super.

I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this in the weeks ahead.

"The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control."

Great new speech from Al Gore.

The Washington Post gets righteous!

And, thankfully, with good cause.

Today, there's a front page story about a translator who's set to go to jail for "supporting terrorism." If the term seems a little bit vague, it's way better than the specifics - the translator, Mohammad Yousry (a U.S. citizen), was sent to work for the defense team of an Egyptian radical in a terror trial. He translated what the attorneys told him to translate, and nothing more; the defense attorney ultimately read one of the defendant's translated letters on television - and that was the crime for which Mr. Yousry was eventually convicted.

The prosecution's theory is apparently that reading the letter publicly was an incitement to terrorist acts (despite the fact that no terrorist acts occurred as a result), and that Mr. Yousry should've known better than to do his job. The actual case seems to have relied heavily on allusions to 9-11 (for which, according to one juror, the jury wanted to mete out revenge), and to have been rather short on actual evidence. They never bothered to make the case for sinister intent.

"Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist," prosecutor Anthony Barkow acknowledged in his closing arguments to a jury in federal district court in Manhattan earlier this year. "Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence."

He's looking at twenty years in jail.

So this is one of those articles that's written in the hopes of stopping an injustice before it can really take root by embarrassing everyone involved, and as far as I can tell it deserves to work. Read the thing for yourself and see if you think otherwise.

What community means.

There's a piece in today's Post to remind us in the West that the idea of a reborn, pan-Islamic caliphate doesn't just appeal to Osama bin Laden and his cult.

The notion of caliphate as coalescing institution endures even here in secular Turkey.

"I wish there was a caliphate again, because if there was a caliphate all the Muslims would unite," said Ertugul Orel, in a sweater and tie at the sidewalk cafe he owns outside Istanbul's vast Hagia Sophia, an iconic building to both Christians and Muslims. "There would be one voice. But I know neither the American nor the Europeans will ever allow it."

From the next chair, gift shop owner Atacan Cinar added, "Before the end of the Ottoman Empire, there was no problem in the Islamic countries."

I chose those particular paragraphs `cause they go a long way toward illustrating the extent to which caliphates of yore have been (or at least can be) mythologized into a shining and cleanly delineated golden age. The truth, of course, is that there was indeed intra-Islamic conflict long before the modern day, starting at least with the schism between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites (and even within the Sunni world there've been competing caliphates - in and around the year one thousand, for example, I think there were three: the Abassid, the Fatimid, and the Ummayad), while the Ottoman Empire was known as "the Sick Man of Europe" for generations before partition.

But Islam, the religious tradition, carries with it the ideal of Islam, the unified culture, in a way that Christendom never really managed. From the earliest days of the organized faith, Christians translated the Bible; Latin was the language of the Church in the West, but it was never the language of God, and inherent in the expression of that is a kind of looseness, a willingness not to cohere. Jesus never had a conventional kingdom, after all. Muslims, on the other hand, have always had a sense of perfection - if not metaphysical perfection on Earth (I don't mean to be blasphemous), then at least civil and ethical perfection - within arm's reach; the Arabic language is sacred and unifying, and Mohammad's example is one of governance and political (transcendently political, in a sense) community. The Koran is written literally in the language of revelation (a belief which, according to Bernard Lewis, dramatically discouraged the study of foreign languages in the Ottoman glory days), and it describes the birth of the perfect, inclusive Muslim community. Two of the five most significant acts of Muslim worship - the annual donation to charities (zakat?), and the pilgrimage to Mecca - are acts of social affirmation as much as anything else, and they've got nothing at all to do with modern nationalism. Instead, it's a bunch of people joining together to take care of one another, and to commune in a place where their shared identity took shape.

So, yeah, there are a lot of folks on this planet - not just the violent, not just the uneducated, and not just the disenfranchised - who have an alternative to the nation-state somewhere in their heads. The more marginalized they are by conventional power politics, the more appeal that alternative is likely to have - no matter how unrealistic it actually is.

[And, honestly, it's really very unrealistic. The Saudis wouldn't really want to see their oil wealth distributed evenly throughout the Muslim world, and I don't think most Turks would consent to live in the sort of society the Wahhabis would dictate. Nationalism has set in much deeper than Mr. bin Laden and his more deranged fellow travelers would ever care to admit.]

What does all this mean for those of us in the West? I think some of the voices quoted in that article make at least one very good point: we want to be very careful in our language when we talk about the extra-national nature of the (sigh) "War on Terror," and we don't want to talk about the idea of the caliphate is though it were inherently evil. To a lot of people, it simply signifies a very intimate sense of kinship with peers close and distant; we - even members of the Bush administration - don't want to take that sense of mutual identification and make everyone who feels it into a rhetorical dumping zone. It alienates people needlessly, and it doesn't do us any good.

Y'know what I love?

I mean, what I really, really love?

That the AOL News story on "truthiness" lets the reader vote on which definition he or she prefers. Stephen Colbert's comedy world has just taken us over, my friends!

And it's about time.

Stung by a recent Associated Press article that didn't credit him for coining the word "truthiness," Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert has struck back.

The world's oldest news organization, Colbert says, is the "No. 1 threat facing America."

On Wednesday evening, Colbert placed the AP atop the Threat Down segment of "The Colbert Report" show. What was No. 2?

Bears.

Know what "equitable subrogation" is?

Apparently, it's what the insurance companies want to screw us out of. Visit Kevin Drum for the big picture.

Thank you, Glenn Greenwald.

The man is doing some excellent writing on the Alito hearings - and, yes, the danger to established political and legal norms the nominee represents. Check this one and this one if you've got the time.

It's late, and I'm tired, so for now the only thing I'll add is that when I read the following . . .

When Alito says that "nobody is above the law," it really means nothing. To the Bush Administration, "the law" has come to mean that the President has the constitutional authority to violate Congressional statutes and that neither Congress nor the judiciary has power to stop it -- that decisions which even broadly relate to terrorism are, to use the formulation of the Yoo Memorandum, "for the President alone to make."

Alito is infinitely more likely to endorse this theory than virtually any other judge one can find. It is precisely why he was nominated. The President was obviously in search of a nominee who will not stand in the way of these theories of the all-powerful Executive. It's why he chose the painfully reverent Harriet Miers, and when he couldn't have her, he took the next best thing. Alito's answers today -- including his refusal to say that the President would be constitutionally prohibited from ordering torture even in the face of a Congressional statute prohibiting it -- strongly bolster that view.

. . . I have this cool, damp fear that the ghost of Sisyphus has come out to watch over the entire effort. The rhetorical question around which Mr. Greenwald frames the later of those two essays, "If Bork was too radical for the Court, why isn't Alito?" has an unfortunately simple answer - the president and the dominant faction of the congressional Republicans have embraced the same radicalism. It's all been foisted off on the country dishonestly and furtively (at least, until the president stood up and claimed the power to ignore FISA), but no matter how unexamined it is by the citizenry, within the branches of power, it's mainstream.

Yes, it's a ludicrous interpretation of the Founders' intent - but, from the point of view of the White House, that's either beside the point, or only true in a parallel liberal universe. What's relevant here is that this is indeed exactly what the president wants from his Supreme Court appointees, particularly with domestic spying on the table and Jack Abramoff cutting deals. If by some chance Sam Alito trips up on abortion, or his membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, and gets voted down - or if the Democrats defy all political expectation and successfully filibuster - the president will hunker down and find someone else who's sincerely convinced that the executive branch (in the person of the president) has powers that transcend the mere execution of the will of the legislature, and command over the military as we've understood it. Full executive immunity from oversight is what he wants most, and he's going to keep tossing in avowed supporters of it until one of them makes it through the Senate intact.

If the public debate were hinging on the unitary executive theory, we'd have a shot at shaming it all away - but the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee aren't taking that tack in any organized way, and the media's quite happy to be focusing on Mrs. Alito's tearful retreat from the proceedings.

There's no doubt that this is a fight worth fighting, but I'm deeply concerned that - unless the Dems suddenly demonstrate that they've got a real A game in them - it can't be won. The timing on the Alito appointment is simply too tight to educate the public enough to get them pissed off and vocal enough to shame the pols. What we can do, I hope, is raise enough of a stink to shake out a pro-sanity swing vote on executive power somewhere else on the high court. I'm hoping that the temptation to be responsible will be harder to resist if the supremes think people are watching.

But I reserve the right to think better of all of this, once I've had a few hours of sleep. In the meantime, if you're politically minded, check out Glenn Greenwald's blog - he's a fine writer with a fairly clear head, and his work is a good read.

Dissent on the other side?

The New York Times has a new piece suggesting a growing schism between Iraqi Sunni insurgents and the Wahhabi-sponsored lunatics from outside the country. A lot of it is anecdotal, and probably highly specific to the people and region surrounding one string of vendetta killings - but the idea makes a lot of sense. The al-Qaeda sorts presumably don't come from within Iraq's familial infrastructure - insofar as they're Muslims, they're less foreign than the occupying powers, but their goals aren't inherently nationalistic in the same way the locals' are.

Also, I think it's fair to say that you don't get to become a member of al-Qaeda if you believe in respecting local cultures. If the goal is a kind of neo-primitive pan-Muslim theocratic state, all the local politics you encounter in the real world are going to look transitory at best, and flawed or immoral at worst - and, of course, anybody who isn't a member of your cult is, at best, a tool.

So, yeah, I'd expect there to be a certain amount of friction. Let's hope it's a lot.

Even if so, the most basic problem in Iraq - the failure to build bridges between the Arab Shi'ites, the Arab Sunnis, the Kurds, and the smaller indigenous subgroups - isn't getting any closer to being solved. The latest news on that front is that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI (the most powerful Shi'ite faction around at the moment), has announced that the Sunnis have no hopes of getting the Iraqi Constitution modified to put a little economic balance in the federalism. This isn't exactly a huge surprise, but it's not going to do anything to reduce tensions. All we (by which I mean the outside world) can do is hope that the Sunni bloc in government is going to have enough leverage to keep from getting steamrolled - the sense of political enfranchisement among its constituents is the one real success we can point to from the last few months, and if that's undone then there ain't no sunshine on Iraq's horizon for a long time to come.

This seems like a heavy-handed science fiction story.

Exaggeration with a message. If it were fake, I'd resent it.

"This," I should say, is this:

An estimated half million female fetuses are aborted annually by parents in India who are desperate for more economically beneficial boys, according to new research.

That translates into at least 10 million "missing girls" since ultrasounds and other sex-selection tests became available two decades ago -- a striking example of modern technology facilitating age-old prejudices.

From the Globe and Mail, link care of the Broadsheet at Salon.

For those of us - myself included - who tend to think criminalizing abortion probably doesn't serve much of a social good, this is a kick in the teeth. I don't know to what extent this trend tends to reflect the prejudices of the parents, and to what extent it's about the penalties built into the regional social and economic systems (I have the idea that there are more financial disincentives to having girls than having boys in the subcontinent), but either way it leads to babies not getting born because they'd be girls - and that's both morally abhorrent and pretty damn unhealthy for the Indian state. Setting out some legal impediments sure seems like it would be something to explore.

And I'm aware of the hypocrisy - I'll line up quietly behind the right to choose until it's really, really clear that I don't like the choices being made - but here we are. I don't think the assumptions underlying those choices are deserving of respect, so the choices themselves don't have much legitimacy. Would I rather impose mandatory counseling than jail time? You bet. But I don't think there's a lot of room to convince me that this situation shouldn't be in some way made to change, and that the Indian government (if only by default) would probably have a role in that.

Admittedly, I don't have a vote in India, so it's kind of a moot point.

Today's helpful hint: try not to get arrested in Afghanistan!

This isn't news, exactly, but Juan Cole - in what I take to be exasperation, but which could just as easily stretch anywhere from despair to rage - has put together a helpful sampling of rulings from Afghanistan's current Chief Justice which most Westerners (non-Pashtun infidels as we are) might not be prepared to endorse. Adulterers are still to be stoned to death, cable television is banned, and the death penalty has been recommended for "un-Islamic" (a phrase that I presume suggests deviation from local cultural norms as much as formally codified religious tradition) journalists. He's also panned co-ed schooling, but it's not clear that he has the authority to kill the practice.

Anyway, the point stands: the US and its allies pushed the Taliban out of Kabul, and - at the very least - severely damaged the regional infrastructure of al-Qaeda (I've got no idea what's going on in Pakistan, of course), and that's all very much to the good - but, man, what we've left in Afghanistan isn't just of questionable stability. It fails to recognize rights that we kinda technically hold to be self-evident. Whether President Karzai himself supports the move toward hard-edged application of Sharia law, he appointed the Supreme Court justices, including our friend Fazal Hadi Shinwari, and he specifically acknowledged the legitimacy of the journalists' blasphemy trial. If his sensibilities are more or less Western, then his hands aren't clean, and if he's more of a reactionary zealot than his PR people have let on . . . well, then, that's what he is.

Regardless, it's probably healthy for us to remind ourselves that we haven't magically made Afghanistan a good place to raise a daughter.

One step closer to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with nukes.

Iran broke open internationally monitored seals on at least three of its nuclear facilities on Tuesday, clearing the way for uranium enrichment activities that Europeans and Americans say are a crucial step toward making a nuclear weapon.

The Iranians said the step was only for research on enriching uranium, and outside experts said Iran was still years away from producing enough fuel for a bomb.

But the United States and its European allies condemned the action and stepped up a campaign to persuade the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions, perhaps by the end of the month.

From the New York Times. The Chinese and the Russians are still on the fence on sanctions - and, honestly, I don't know what sorts of sanctions are likely to result in a positive effect; Iran's xenophobic hardliners are likely to take any such gesture as proof of the righteousness of their cause, after all. With luck, we can keep project-specific parts out - maybe - but anything more dramatic seems likely to be counterproductive.

Anyway, the real news here probably is just that the Iranians under Mr. Ahmadinejad are much more willing to offend the Europeans than most of the preceding regimes. One begins to wonder whether Ayatollah Khamenei is pleased; the man's hardly a teddy bear, but he has demonstrated a pragmatic streak in the past - and alienating the Russians would hardly seem to be in keeping.

Regardless, nuclear catastrophe still seems to be a few years off. We can all go back to worrying about the dollar for now . . . .

Good news? Stock market > 11000!

Bad news? The dollar may be about to tank.

China has resolved to shift some of its foreign exchange reserves -- now in excess of $800 billion -- away from the U.S. dollar and into other world currencies in a move likely to push down the value of the greenback, a high-level state economist who advises the nation's economic policymakers said in an interview Monday.

As China's manufacturing industries flood the world with cheap goods, the Chinese central bank has invested roughly three-fourths of its growing foreign currency reserves in U.S. Treasury bills and other dollar-denominated assets. The new policy reflects China's fears that too much of its savings is tied up in the dollar, a currency widely expected to drop in value as the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits climb.

China now boasts the world's second-largest cache of foreign exchange -- behind only Japan -- and is on pace to see its reserves climb past $1 trillion later this year. Even a slight diminishing of the dollar as a percentage of those holdings could exert significant pressure on the U.S. currency, many economists assert.

In recent years, the value of the dollar has been buoyed by major purchases of U.S. Treasury bills by Japan, China and oil-exporting countries -- a flow of capital that has kept interests rates relatively low in the United States and allowed Americans to keep spending even as debts mount. Some economists have long warned that if foreigners lose their appetite for American debt, the dollar would fall, interest rates would rise and the housing boom could burst, sending real estate prices lower.

I assume that the Bush administration is going to push really, really hard to keep this from happening - but as warning flares go, this one seems scarily bright. Anyone reading this with a firmer grasp of economics than mine and some optimism to share is more than welcome to tell me otherwise . . . .

So you know . . .

Part of the reason blogging has been so light lately is that I'm well into my Christmas reading - just finished Romulus Hillsborough's fascinating (if sketchy) Shinsengumi: the Shogun's Last Samurai Corps, and am now exactly one hundred pages into George Packer's The Assassins' Gate. I'll tentatively recommend the former to anyone who's interested in a glimpse into the losing side of the Meiji Restoration; the author is unfortunately prone to lapsing into meditations on "the will to power," but the story of a pack of gifted swordsmen and rabid xenophobes who rose very high in the Tokugawa Bakufu very quickly (and then fell very far) is too damn dramatic to get thrown out of whack by eccentric parenthetical asides. They were monstrously arrogant, and strangely disciplined, and genuinely compelling as subject material; it's no surprise that they seem to crop up fairly often in modern Japanese pop culture (particularly the indomitable survivor and the sickly child prodigy).

Anyway, a good read, if you know a little bit about the subject material going in.

Mr. Packer's book, meanwhile - this one's already impressed the hell out of me. The prose is very approachable, the author has access to a great many important voices, and yet there's a thoughtfulness and uncertainty (I mean that in a good way) that's often lacking from contemporary histories written at this political height. Already, the insights into the pre-war thinking of the neocons (for want of any other word as immediately recognizable) and the histories of the Iraqi advocates in exile are as seductive as the stuff of good literature - ideals and mistakes and momentum all build at a frightening rate. It's not just important, it's a page-turner.

More on it as I read, maybe . . . .

Somebody needs to fix this. Now.

A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

The ceramic plates in vests now worn by the majority of troops in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.

More here, care of the New York Times.

Is the fight on?

A senior administration official later confirmed that the president believes the Constitution gives him the power to authorize interrogation techniques that go beyond the law to protect national security. But in enacting the law, Congress intended to close every loophole and impose an absolute ban on all forms of torture, no matter the circumstances, Graham said.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the senators' statements ''mean that the battle lines are drawn" for an escalating fight over the balance of power between the two branches of government.

''The president is pointing to his commander in chief power, claiming that it somehow gives him the power to dispense with the law when he's conducting war," Golove said. ''The senators are saying: 'Wait a minute, we've gone over this. This is a law Congress has passed by very large margins, and you are compelled and bound to comply with it.'"

From the Boston Globe.

More fun with recess appointments!

Yesterday, I berated the president for his political cowardice on the subject of torture; I neglected to mention his political cowardice in making recess appointments. What sort of people has Mr. Bush elevated?

I refer you to an editorial from today's Washington Post:

What's worrying about many of Mr. Bush's recess nominees is the caliber of the candidates and the importance of the jobs in which they have been installed. Even before Wednesday's raft of appointments, the ambassador to the United Nations and the head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division held power by virtue of this maneuver. Now Mr. Bush has added the number two official at the Defense Department, Deputy Secretary Gordon R. England, and the head of the immigration bureau, Julie L. Myers -- hardly minor jobs.

Ms. Myers was chief of staff for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, but she has little experience with immigration issues. Ellen R. Sauerbrey, who was given a recess appointment as assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, is a long-standing Republican party loyalist and a failed Republican candidate for Maryland governor, but she has no refugee or humanitarian experience.

It's particularly ironic, and particularly disturbing, that Mr. Bush on Wednesday used this undemocratic maneuver to name three of the six members of the Federal Election Commission, including to two of the commission's Democratic seats. This was not a situation in which nominations had languished; Mr. Bush didn't make the nominations until the Senate was about to leave town, meaning that senators had no opportunity for hearings. That's the very least that should have happened, especially in the case of Republican Hans von Spakovsky, a Justice Department civil rights lawyer who was instrumental in approving a Georgia voter identification law over career lawyers' objections that it would harm black voters.

So, I repeat for emphasis, what sort of people? People President Bush didn't want to have put before the American public over the course of Congressional hearings.

[It's worth noting that the president and his posse also made sure that the appointments have to be considered to have been made over the course of the coming Congressional year, since they came after the pro forma Congressional session at noon on January 3 - and if that sounds kinda sneaky, it's probably because it is - and are therefore binding until the end of 2007. So, we're stuck with them for most of the remainder of this presidency, barring awkward resignations.]

Ellen Sauerbrey, now our assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, may have presented an instructive case for the White House - late last year, she did present herself to Congress, and she was not well received. [You'll note that, contrary to the linked article's prediction, she was not voted into the job the following week - Senator Boxer successfully had the vote postponed until after the winter recess; now, obviously, it's a moot point.]

As a Maryland resident, and a survivor of her 1994 and 1998 gubernatorial campaigns, I feel a certain personal dismay at the heights to which this woman has climbed - but I'll try to restrict my argument here to the most basic point: she's just been placed in charge of a seven hundred million dollar a year operation, and she has precisely no relevant experience in disaster relief and refugee issues. According to Salon (I'm afraid you'll have to endure an ad if you follow the link), two of the last three people to hold the job - one Democrat and one Republican - recommended to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she be denied the appointment; as of last Halloween, the Washington Post made the same case rather bluntly: "If she is confirmed by the Senate, think of her as the Michael D. Brown of the refugee world."

So why push her for the job? Well, that Salon article has a few paragraphs touching on how certain of her views could impact the issues in her new portfolio:

She had no international experience until Bush appointed her U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. There, she was notorious for her active opposition to programs that expand women's access to contraception. She infuriated representatives of other countries by working to scuttle international agreements that codify women's right to reproductive healthcare. In March, she was loudly booed by delegates at a U.N. women's conference in New York -- a rare occurrence -- for her comments endorsing abstinence education as the best way to fight HIV.

In the past, Sauerbrey has made no secret of her opposition to reproductive freedom. She began a November 2003 address to the right-wing group United Families International by saying, "I always feel when I'm being introduced as a representative of the United Nations that I have to say I'm a conservative; I'm not a feminist." She continued, "Sean Hannity, this morning, talked about visions and the differences in visions. My perception is that this prevailing vision at the U.N. is one that is based on rights, but rights without responsibility. Family, whatever you want it to be. Sexual freedom, anything goes. Practically every resolution that goes before the U.N. ... somebody tries to figure out a way to put in 'reproductive services.'"

As she spoke, it became clear that her objection to "reproductive services" encompasses far more than just opposition to abortion. "So, what is our vision? It is certainly recognition that government policies have to be supported with the family," she said. She added that "we have to look at ourselves and recognize that government tax policies, government welfare policies ... no-fault divorce, [and] sex education have not been healthy to the promotion of the family."

Sauerbrey's opposition to sex education and safe sex initiatives will likely have profound effects on America's refugee policies. "The first issue is whether she is fully supportive of family planning efforts for refugee women, including things like emergency contraception, which has been unbelievably controversial in this administration," says Jodi Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, an NGO focused on international reproductive rights. "In refugee settings, 80 percent of refugees are women and children. There are extremely high rates of sexual violence and coercion in refugee settings. You have a really, really high need for effective reproductive and sexual health programs that would include access to emergency contraception and HIV prophylactics and that kind of thing."

Too bad. It's a safe bet abstinence education is what the really, really highly needy should expect. It's kind of a trend with the staff in this White House.

I wonder if the American people would have approved, if given the chance.

More Israeli politics.

Ha'aretz has a new poll out, and it features a surprisingly strong showing for a Sharon-less Kadima - yes, the support is almost certainly inflated by the passions fired up in the wake of the Prime Minister's health crisis, but there's apparently still a chance that Ehud Olmert or (ironically enough, given Labor's fortunes in recent years) Shimon Peres could lead the as-yet-embryonic Sharonista party to command of the next Knesset.

This would probably be a good thing. [Not that it matters, but the Bush administration probably agrees.]

At any rate, it now seems pretty clear that Ariel Sharon will not be coming back to fight in this fight; even if he survives, the likelihood of permanent brain damage is apparently quite high.

Quick correction.

In an earlier post, I railed against the judgement of whoever chose to put Israeli Prime Minister Sharon an hour away from a hospital, given his importance and recent worries about his health. I've read articles since that offered some more context: apparently, Mr. Sharon was awake and alert when the ambulance arrived at his ranch, and - given that relatively positive sign - there was a decision made to aim not for the closest hospital, but (I presume) the one with the most qualified response team.

And, in fact, the worst of the hemorrhaging seems to've taken place within the hospital itself, so the decision probably proved to be right one. My apologies to those whose judgement I wrongly questioned.

For the record, though, I'm still afraid of what happens if Bibi Netanyahu reclaims power.

Just an aside to the press.

Okay, headlines on Yahoo News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post would all lead me to believe that I should be in some way impressed that President Bush has held a chat session and photo op with a group of former secretaries of defense and state. The theme: Iraq.

[What went on? Well, from the Post: "[Former secretary of state Lawrence] Eagleburger said that 'there was some criticism' by the former secretaries during the meeting, but that it was 'very mild' and generally aimed at encouraging Bush to talk more candidly with the American people about Iraq.

[President Bush apparently did not take questions from reporters on his way out.]

So. Reuters, the Times, and the Post all embrace the idea that this is in some way significant - not on the basis of anything they know was said at the meeting, nor because there's any particular reason to think that the president's opinion was swayed, but simply because it's the first time in two or three years that the man has had a meeting with people from outside his administration.

Okay, guys, I think you're being spun (particularly when Reuters offers subheadings like "HAIG: BUSH 'ABSOLUTELY CORRECT'") - but fine. Whatever. I guess some days, if you're not being spun, you don't have anything to print.

But, please, since you've got next to nothing to work with, at least work with your next to nothing! If the only salient fact you can offer (apart from the fact that retired statesmen say polite things about the sitting president and think the war in Iraq is tricky) is that there was a meeting, flesh out that fact. How long did it last? Did President Bush close himself in a room with the sixteen people featured in the stunning promotional photo (thirteen former secretaries, plus Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Don Rumsfeld) for, say, an hour? Two? Where was it held? What was the setup? Was it an open conversation, did the president ask questions, did anybody come with prepared statements - hell, was food served?

This isn't rocket science, guys - please, describe the meeting as a meeting so we can try to guess how seriously to take it, or tell us why you can't.

Torture: no apologies, and no end.

When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president's signing statement, which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New Year's weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law.

A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security.

''We are not going to ignore this law," the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. ''We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment."

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law's restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

''Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case," the official added. ''We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it's possible that they will."

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

''The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,' " he said. ''They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

From the Boston Globe.

"The rule applies except for when I really think it shouldn't." Great.

What's really striking is the cowardice of it. If President Bush and the White House opposed this legislation, they should have vetoed it: that's how checks and balances in our Constitutional system are applied. The executive has the power to just say no.

But, of course, that would've put Mr. Bush back on the news arguing for torture, and that would come at a political cost. It's so much easier just to fake compliance and to plan to break the law even as he signs it - with that approach, it's not necessarily the president who pays the price, but just the American system of government.

All because he's too small and craven a man to stand up for the policies he supports. In most posts, I try very hard not to take this personal a tone - but, my God, he's disgracing the office. He's not just wrong, he's petty, and we all deserve better.

A little bit more life for the dying.

A rarely used treatment that pumps cancer drugs directly into the abdominal cavity can add 16 months or more to the lives of many women with advanced cases of ovarian cancer, doctors are reporting.

Medical practice should change immediately to reflect the findings from the study, being published today, as well as those from several earlier studies, cancer experts say.

In the United States there are more than 22,000 new cases each year, and 16,000 deaths. Currently, most women receive chemotherapy intravenously. They should still do so, but many should get the drugs abdominally as well.

From the New York Times.