Belgium's "War of the Worlds"

Not particularly important, but kind of funny.

State television broke into regular programming late Wednesday with an urgent bulletin: The Dutch-speaking half of the country had declared independence and the king and queen had fled. Grainy pictures from the military airport showed dark silhouettes of a royal entourage boarding a plane.

Only after a half-hour did the station flash the message: "This is fiction."

It was too late. Many Belgians had already fallen for the hoax.

Frantic viewers flooded the call center of RTBF, the station that aired the stunt. Embassies called Belgian authorities to find out what was going on, while foreign journalists scrambled to get confirmation.

The network said it was merely trying to demonstrate the importance of debate on the future of Belgium, which harbors several linguistic and cultural divides. But most people were not amused.

I was, though.

Belgium, politics, midtopia

Quick! Hide the money!

Governmental transparency is good -- unless it involves legislative salaries.

Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., introduced a bill that would remove all information on House employees from public records....

Wicker’s spokesman, Kyle Steward, said the Web site is what prompted his boss’ interest in drafting legislation. Seward said Wicker plans to reintroduce the measure when the new Congress returns next month.

“While he is an advocate of the free flow of information, he does not think it adds to the public discourse to publish individual staff members’ salaries,” Steward said.

The bill is a direct reaction to LegiStorm, a site that went online a few months ago and allows easy access to, and comparison of, staff salary records.

I understand how he feels. My father was a professor at a big state university. He was particularly prominent in his field, and as a result was one of the highest paid professors at the school.

The university was required to make its top salaries public, and every year our local newspaper published the list, with my dad's name near the top. And every year my dad complained about his pay being splashed all over and talked about. He felt his privacy was being violated for no good reason.

His ire was understandable, but it ignored the same fact that Wicker's bill does: that the people in question are public employees, being paid out of the public purse. And the public's interest in knowing how its money is spent outweighs the privacy concerns of people who have chosen to work for governmental entities.

The same principle is why the pay of a public corporation's top executives are public domain: so shareholders can see how their money is being spent. If a CEO doesn't want his pay to be known, he should only work for privately-owned companies.

Wicker's bill died when the lame-duck session ended, but he says he plans to reintroduce it in the new session. Consider writing your representative to explain why passing it would be a bad idea. The public has the right to know the public's business.

politics, ethics, politics, midtopia

Jefferson blocked from committee seats

William Jefferson, D.-La., handily won his runoff for re-election, garnering 57 percent of the vote despite keeping $90,000 in FBI bribe money in his freezer.

Okay, the voters have spoken, even if what they said isn't particularly great. It happens from time to time: when I lived in New Jersey in the early 1990s, the mayor of Union City was re-elected while sitting in a jail cell.

But that doesn't mean all is forgiven, especially in the new ethics-conscious Democratic caucus.

House Democrats, insistent that they will hold lawmakers to higher standards, decided Tuesday that Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana will not return to an influential committee until a federal corruption investigation involving him is completed.

Incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the Democratic Steering Committee had resolved that Jefferson, who last Saturday won a runoff election in his New Orleans district, will not be given back his spot on the Ways and Means Committee, the panel that determines tax and trade policies.

Good. Members shouldn't have committee seats taken away on mere allegations, but the weight of evidence in Jefferson's case justifies a vigorous response from the caucus. Especially when what's at stake is merely committee seats, not his seat in Congress.

The story also notes that Pelosi has a couple more headaches to deal with, in the person of James McDermott (who was criticized on Monday by the House ethics committee for letting reporters listen to an illegally taped phone call) and Alan Mollohan, who has been accused of using his position to enrich himself and his friends.

McDermott's transgression is both relatively minor (a leak to the press) and a decade old, so a rebuke strikes me as an appropriate sanction. He also faces a civil case over it, which could end up causing some real pain if he loses.

Mollohan was forced to quit the ethics committee because of the allegations against him, and he should remain off of it until they are resolved. The question at hand is whether he should be stripped of other posts. At the moment the facts don't sustain that: while like Jefferson he is the subject of a federal inquiry, in his case no concrete evidence has surfaced that clearly points to wrongdoing.

He should, however, not be given any post that would give him oversight over the FBI or other agencies that are investigating him.

Mollohan, McDermott, William Jefferson, ethics, politics, midtopia

Whither Iraq

We've heard the Iraq Study Group's opinion, and President Bush's response.

Now we get an elaboration of the latter: Bush will not be rushed into a decision.

Although the White House had initially suggested that Bush would deliver his speech on Iraq strategy before Christmas, he has decided to delay it until early next year.

Defending that decision, Bush said, "I will not be rushed into making a difficult decision ... a necessary decision."

Given Bush's stubborness and perceived inability to acknowledge his mistakes in Iraq, I can understand why such a statement would raise alarm bells that Bush will attempt to ignore reality and simply keep doing what he's been doing.

But those concerns are misplaced. First, Bush is right: important decisions should be made deliberately, not rushed. After all, it was a desire to act quickly while looking tough and decisive that led Congress to rush through the Patriot Act without proper deliberation, for instance.

More importantly, though, is that Republicans would probably string Bush up themselves if "deliberation" turned into foot-dragging and inaction. Change must come: it is up to Bush to decide if he wants to lead the charge or get run over by it.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is preparing to weigh in on Iraq, and the LA Times reports that it increasingly favors "Go big."

Strong support has coalesced in the Pentagon behind a military plan to "double down" in the country with a substantial buildup in American troops, an increase in industrial aid and a major combat offensive against Muqtada Sadr, the radical Shiite leader impeding development of the Iraqi government.

Of course, troop constraints mean "go big" would really be "go sort of large", with something south of 40,000 new troops. And even that would only be sustainable for a year or so. The plan also calls for increasing the size of the military by 20,000 soldiers, but recruiting and training timetables mean that wouldn't help much in the short term, and it wouldn't make a gigantic difference in the ability to sustain force levels.

And never mind the near-complete lack of public support for such a move. Even the military is sharply divided over the idea.

I also can't help asking: if more troops were the answer (and IMO, they were), why is this plan only being put forward now? Shouldn't we have sent in more troops long ago, when they still could have made a serious difference?

Given the risky nature of going big or doubling down or whatever it will eventually be called, any such plan must also include yardsticks for success, with a plan to call it off if the objectives are not being met. Otherwise we risk an open-ended, ever-growing commitment like we had in Vietnam, where we kept sending more and more troops because nobody wanted to be the one who "lost" Vietnam. The result, beyond the additional lives and money lost, was a shattered military and the emergence of a risk-averse national psyche.

But at least we've now got the debate bookended by what I've long called for: "get serious or get out." At this point in the war I favor the latter, but if we choose the former and go about it intelligently, I'll cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Prager gets an ally!

In the brouhaha over Rep. Keith Ellison saying he intends to be sworn in on the Koran, Dennis Prager has found a high-profile friend -- (fired) judge Roy Moore.

His take: Congress should refuse to seat Ellison in the name of religious freedom.

I'm not making that up.

Moore, you may recall, is the Alabama state Supreme Court justice who was fired for installing a two-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of his courthouse in the dead of night, then refusing court orders to remove it.

He has the chutzpah to write the following....

To support the Constitution of the United States one must uphold an underlying principle of that document, liberty of conscience, which is the right of every person to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, without interference by the government.

...and then proceed to carve out a Muslim exception, justifying it by pointing to the words and deeds of extremist Muslims and saying such actions prove that Islam as a whole is incompatible with America.

That's like pointing to Eric Rudolph and claiming that Christianity is incompatible with the Olympics.

Moore's summation:

Enough evidence exists for Congress to question Ellison's qualifications to be a member of Congress as well as his commitment to the Constitution in view of his apparent determination to embrace the Quran and an Islamic philosophy directly contrary to the principles of the Constitution. But common sense alone dictates that in the midst of a war with Islamic terrorists we should not place someone in a position of great power who shares their doctrine.

Bleh.

Eric Rudolph, by the way, recently complained that the conditions of his imprisonment are designed to drive him insane. Sorry, Eric, but that train left the station years ago.

Eric Rudolph, Roy Moore, religion, politics, midtopia

Sen. Tim Johnson hospitalized

The Democrat reportedly suffered a stroke.

I'll get into this in more detail later as time and information allow. Beyond the personal implications for Johnson and his family, if he is unable to serve his replacement will be named by the state government, which is dominated by Republicans. That would probably lead to a 50-50 split in the Senate, which would throw control of that body back to Republicans thanks to the vice president's tie-breaking vote.

Just when you thought it was over....

Update: As the commenter noted, it wasn't a stroke and doesn't appear to be serious -- although they're not saying what it was.

Update II: Johnson is now in critical condition after brain surgery. The problem was a "congenital arteriovenous malformation", which causes tangled blood vessels.

The surgery was apparently successful and the prognosis is good.

Tim Johnson, politics, midtopia

The right words, but hear that siren call?

In yet another sign of how firmly the pendulum has swung to the middle, lobbyists are on the march -- with centrists in their sights.

One of the earliest signs that life for Democrats would be different in the majority came at a post-election event sponsored by the New Democrat Coalition, the pro-business group of centrist Democrats.

Previous affairs drew at most 20 lobbyists, but the “meet-and-greet” at Nortel’s Washington office two days after Democrats swept to power drew around 60 mostly high-tech lobbyists looking to build a relationship, according to Kevin Lawlor, the spokesman for New Democrat Coalition (NDC) Chairwoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.).

Worried about what the Democratic Congress may mean for their business clients, to say nothing of the new limits on member access Democrats may impose as part of an ethics reform package, lobbyists have tried hard in the weeks following the election to build new links to the new majority.

One favored path has been through moderate to conservative blocs like the New Democrats and the Blue Dogs, who are a group of budget-minded conservative Democrats mostly from Southern states.

Now the cynical or pessimistic (okay, realistic) among you, may see this as a harbinger of bad things to come, as the huge Niagara Falls of political cash overwhelms yet another class of idealistic freshmen and turns them into greedy, money-grubbing captives of their special interests.

And in the long run, you're probably right; few people resist the temptation forever. But in the short run, there is still hope, because the Democrats keep promising concrete things that they can be judged on.

emocrats taking control of Congress next month say they will try to ban for the remainder of fiscal 2007 the special-interest "pork" projects that got Republicans in so much trouble with voters in the November elections.

"We will place a moratorium on all earmarks until a reformed process is put in place," the incoming Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House appropriations panels, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, said late on Monday.

That won't eliminate the power of special interests, of course, but it would short-circuit one of the most egregious ways they extract direct favors.

The article was worthwhile simply for the spectacle of seeing Byrd, an earmark king, denouncing earmarks. You could almost see Nancy Pelosi behind him, twisting his arm until he could touch his own shoulder blade with the flat of his palm.

But having said it, they'll be hard-pressed to back off on it. And no one will be impressed if they try to weasel out of it by saying they meant no new earmarks -- while allowing all the old ones to slip comfortably through.

Wait and see.... Wait and see....

corruption, politics, midtopia

The perils of restricting free speech

As all of you undoubtedly know by now, Iran is hosting a conference on the Holocaust. Billed as an academic inquiry, the thinly-veiled gathering of Holocaust deniers has drawn international criticism.

Let's be clear here. Holocaust deniers rank right up there with flat-earthers as people not to be taken seriously. They're a bit like creationists, pointing to bits and pieces here and there, or building elaborate theories based on the flimsiest conjectures, all while ignoring the towering mountains of evidence all around them.

But frankly I think the conference mostly demonstrates why countries like Germany and Austria are misguided when they make denying the Holocaust a crime.

Why? Because by banning discussion of the topic, they make racist, conspiratorial fools like David Duke look reasonable, even civic-minded. From his website:

In some Western nations, to diverge even slightly from Holocaust orthodoxy will cause an historian to face not only a loss of academic career but also imprisonment.

The main theme of the Holocaust Conference is that there must be freedom of speech on this subject as on all others. Free speech, inquiry and debate is the only way to learn the truth on any issue. Many Western governments have imprisoned many academics for simply expressing their historical opinions on the Holocaust.

For instance, world-renowned historian David Irving at this moment sits in a prison near Vienna, Austria for simply stating his historical opinion about Auschwitz in a lecture in Austria in 1989. German researcher/chemist Gemar Rudolf faces years of imprisonment for simply publishing a forensic analysis that challenged the authenticity of alleged Auschwitz gas chambers...

First, freedom of speech is a vital human right. It is the cornerstone of all other rights, because without freedom of speech no one has to the right to even freely know and learn of the abrogation of other rights affecting human freedom and survival. That is why the American founding fathers put freedom of speech, press and religion as the first and highest of the Bill of Rights.

Second, freedom of speech and debate are absolutely vital for the truth to prevail. If one side of any controversial issue can suppress the voice of opposition, we cannot arrive at the certainty of any truth. If academics and citizens can be career and monetarily blackmailed; if they can be threatened with firings, loss of income, or imprisonment from simply sincerely pursuing an historical inquiry and publishing it, how can the truth be fairly arrived at?

See? Duke is simply asking for the right to speak freely, and may the best idea win. How can you disagree with him? You can't; he's right. And by banning him you give him the opportunity not only to indulge his paranoid fantasies ("Look! Look! I'm being repressed!") but to cloak himself in the language of light and freedom.

Never mind that he's a lying loon. He also writes:

I and Davidduke.com take no hard position on the historical accuracy of the Holocaust. Obviously, Jews, as well as other nationalities suffered great losses during the Second World War.

But at the conference in Iran:

On Monday, Mr. Duke asserted that the gas chambers in which millions of Jews perished did not actually exist. In prepared remarks published by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, he contended that the depiction of Jews as the “overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors of the war, and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of Palestine.”

Hmmm... no hard position, except the gas chambers didn't exist. Sure, Dave.

See what happened there? We gave Duke some light, and exposed him for a fraud. That's how free speech works; while bad ideas are never actually banished, they lose their ability to influence the mainstream. Banning bad ideas merely gives bad ideas credibility and a certain outlaw panache.

I recognize that the Holocaust is a much more provocative and painful topic in Europe than it is here in the States. And I can even understand -- though not agree with -- the feeling that such talk needed to be controlled immediately after the war. But 60 years have passed; three generations have been born since then, more than enough time to get some historical distance on those dark days. Holocaust censorship now does more harm than good, and should be stopped.

Update: Duke goes on CNN and calls Wolf Blitzer a "Jewish extremist." And that was before he got really nutty.

free speech, civil liberties, Holocaust, Iran, politics, midtopia

Why does anyone read WorldNetDaily?

Some conservative bloggers are fond of citing the Richard Mellon Scaife-backed WorldNetDaily or its evil twin, NewsMax, to support their arguments. When I criticize such sources, I get accused of attacking the source instead of attacking the argument.

Enter the Captain. I view Captain's Quarters the same way I view Antonin Scalia -- I disagree with much of what he says, but there's no denying that he is smart and thoughtful. He's one of the most influential conservative bloggers out there.

Here's what he has to say about WND:

While this article is an opinion column and therefore slightly less egregious than the news article from last month, it uses some of the same tricks seen in that WND exclusive. It references vague 'studies' without ever naming them or providing links to them. It assumes that a food element consumed for thousands of years in Asia in significant amounts without turning it into a large version of Fire Island has suddenly begun feminizing Americans.

WND reminds me of the National Enquirer. It sometimes gets stories right, and most of the time has at least some elements of truth. More often than they should, WND relies on hyperbole and outrageous exaggeration to draw attention to its political agenda. Readers who know this can pick their way through the chaff -- but those readers know better than to waste their time at WND.

The "last month" article he refers to is this one.

The WND article that triggered all this is here.

Loons.

WorldNetDaily, blogging, politics, midtopia

The nature of civil war

James Traub, one of my favorite writers, has a piece in this Sunday's New York Times on Iraq and civil wars in general. He quotes James Fearon, a Stanford University expert on civil conflicts, who ticks off the death toll, the massive refugee flows, the major players, and says "by any reasonable definition, Iraq is in the midst of a civil war."

But that's not really the point of this post, which is to delve into what we might expect in the future as Iraq is consumed by sectarian conflict.

Scholars and diplomats who have closely studied civil wars describe them almost as forces of nature, grinding on until the parties exhaust themselves, shredding bonds that cannot be stitched back together even long years after the killing stops.

Wars that do not end quickly -- as the Rwanda civil war did, for instance -- tend to drag on for years. Take Northern Ireland, for example, or (as the article does) Bosnia and Lebanon. All three continued until everyone finally recognized that they were not going to win by force alone and decided that just about any alternative, including compromise with hated enemies, was better than continuing to fight.

In Lebanon -- perhaps the best parallel for Iraq -- that came only after 5 percent of the population was killed or wounded and half had become refugees. Translated to Iraq, those numbers would mean a war that caused 1.3 million casualties and uprooted 13 million people.

The good news, I suppose, is that we're already making excellent headway on those numbers, with death estimates in the 100,000-plus range and 3.4 million refugees.

Given that civil wars are driven by grievances rooted in tribal, religous and ethnic divisions, it's possible to view an Iraq civil war as inevitable. In this instance we were the catalyst, knocking over the dictator that kept the lid on the bubbling pot. But Saddam wasn't going to live forever, and when he finally shuffled off the scene the suppressed tensions were likely to explode anyway. And one could argue that it's better for that to happen sooner rather than later -- otherwise the grievances keep piling up and make the subsequent spasm of violence that much more gruesome.

So what happens if civil war is indeed in Iraq's future? Assuming the Kurds don't simply secede and the Shiites don't overrun the Sunni, this:

When the sectarian combatants finally do exhaust themselves, Iraq will need a great deal of outside help, though not the kind it has received so far. Civil wars liquidate the trust among parties that makes settlements possible; outsiders must act as guarantors and, usually, peacekeepers. And they have to be prepared to make a major commitment: NATO put 60,000 troops in Bosnia, with a population less than one-sixth that of Iraq, to police the Dayton Accords that ended the war. Today 1,900 soldiers from the European Union are sufficient to do the job.

For Iraq, that means returning in several years as peacekeepers, 400,000 strong -- the same number, not coincidentally, that we should have gone in with in the first place. And it probably won't be us doing it, but a coalition of non-Western forces, perhaps under UN flag, that won't rekindle the anti-Western resistance our presence has provoked.

Perhaps from the perspective of history our invasion of Iraq, flawed as it was, will not be viewed as a horrible catastrophe that caused all sorts of problems in the Mideast. Instead, it will be viewed as the event that merely triggered a catastrophe that was coming anyway. It's a measure of our attenuated ambitions that such a historical verdict might be something for us to hope for.

civil war, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Regional winners and losers in the 110th Congress

Technical note: You may see several versions of this post over the next few hours, as it is my first attempt to include a table with a post. If it looks weird in your browser, let me know.

The Democrats have nailed down most of their committee assignments for the new Congress. Much has been made of the race and gender of the new chairmen and chairwomen. But what does that tell us about how business will be conducted come January?

Beyond the politics of the individual chairmen, consider the way power shifted regionally.

SENATE

Committee	Former chairman	Incoming chairman
Aging	Gordon Smith (R-Ore.)	Herb Kohl (D-Wis.)
Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry	Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.)	Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)
Appropriations	Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)	Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.)
Armed Services Committee	John Warner (R-Va.)	Carl Levin (D-Mich.)
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs	Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)	Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.)
Budget	Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)	Kent Conrad (D-N.D.)
Commerce, Science, and Transportation	Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)	Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)
Energy and Natural Resources	Pete Domenici (R-N.M.)	Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.)
Environment and Public Works	James Inhofe (R-Okla.)	Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
Ethics	Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)	Tim Johnson (D-S.D.)
Finance	Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)	Max Baucus (D-Mont.)
Foreign Relations	Pete Domenici (R-N.M.)	Joe Biden (D-Del.)
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions	Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.)	Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)
Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs	Susan Collins (R-Maine)	Joe Lieberman (I/D-Conn.)
Indian Affairs	John McCain (R-Ariz.)	Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.)
Intelligence	Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)	Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
Judiciary	Arlen Specter (R-Pa.)	Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
Rules and Administration	Trent Lott (R-Miss.)	Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)
Small Business and Entrepreneurship	Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)	John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Veterans' Affairs	Larry Craig (R-Idaho)	Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii)

Analysis: Power shifted generally from the middle and South to California, New England and the Upper Midwest. Mississippi and Maine each lost two chairmanships, New Mexico and Iowa broke even, while Hawaii, California, North Dakota, West Virginia, Connecticut and Massachusetts each gained two. The middle South remains shut out.


HOUSE

Committee	Former chairman	Incoming chairman
Agriculture	Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)	Collin Peterson (D-Minn.)
Appropriations	Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.)	David Obey (D-Wis.)*
Armed Services	Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.)	Ike Skelton (D-Mo.)
Budget	Jim Nussle (R-Iowa)	John Spratt (D-S.C.)
Education and the Workforce	Howard McKeon (R-Calif.)	George Miller (D-Calif.)
Energy and Commerce	Joe Barton (R-Texas)	John Dingell (D-Mich.)
Ethics	Doc Hastings (R-Wash.)	Howard Berman (D-Calif.)
Financial Services	Michael Oxley (R-Ohio)	Barney Frank (D-Mass.)
Government Reform	Tom Davis (R-Va.)	Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)
Homeland Security	Peter King (R-N.Y.)	Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.)
House Administration	Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.)	Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Calif.)
Intelligence	Peter Hoekstra (R. Mich.)	Silvestre Reyes (D-.N.Y.)
International Relations	Henry Hyde (R-Ill.)	Tom Lantos (D-Calif.)
Judiciary	James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.)	John Conyers (D-Mich.)
Resources	Richard Pombo (R-Calif.)	Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.)
Rules	David Dreier (R-Calif.)	Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.)
Science	Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.)	Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.)
Small Business	Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.)	Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.)
Transportation and Infrastructure	Don Young (R-Alaska)	James Oberstar (D-Minn.)
Veterans' Affairs	Steve Buyer (R-Ind.)	Bob Filner (D-Calif.)
Ways and Means	Bill Thomas (R-Calif.)	Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.)

Analysis: A more muddied picture, but generally power shifted from Virginia and the Central Midwest -- Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio -- to New England, the Upper Midwest and the South. Alaska, again, lost its only chairmanship. Texas, California, Wisconsin and Michigan broke even; New York went from two to three chairmanships. The West remains entirely shut out.

Looking at specific subject areas, you can predict what sort of legislation will make it out of certain committees in both houses:

Agriculture: Midwest (Minnesota, Iowa) takes over from the South (Georgia, Virginia). Among other things, might the dairy subsidy system (which has long penalized farmers in the Upper Midwest) be in for a reform effort? Also expect efforts to increase tax credits for ethanol production.

Energy: The House chairmanship stays in New Mexico, but the Senate chair shifts from Texas to Michigan. Look for fewer "drill more!" solutions and more emphasis on alternative energy. ANWR will remain untouched.

Transportation: The Alaskan stranglehold that led to such excesses as the "Bridge to Nowhere" is gone, replaced by a Hawaiian and a Minnesotan. Look for a greater emphasis on air travel. Further, with both states sharing large port facilities, expect stepped up efforts on port security and infrastructure.

Anyone see any other patterns of significance? Point 'em out!

politics, midtopia

Democrats still sounding good

As the lame-duck session of Congress drew to a close, the Democrats are still managing to make the right noises on reform.

Several days ago, they announced the new Congress would work a five-day week -- a far cry from the current Congress, which was lackadaisical on a historic scale, tending to put in three-day weeks and notching the fewest days of work of any Congress since reliable records were first compiled in 1948.

One legislator's complaint, while understandable, isn't likely to land on many sympathetic ears:

But Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said: "Keeping us up here eats away at families. Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families, that's what this says."

Right. Tell it to all the people who have to do such things every day. Maybe this will make him more sympathetic to working conditions, labor laws and bills dealing with child care and flexible scheduling.

Opponents have a point when they say that lawmakers' work away from Washington can be just as important as the work done in the Capitol. But it's hard to argue things are fine when this same light-load Congress failed to pass nine of 11 appropriations bills, which after all is their main job.

The news provoked some interesting perspectives from WaPo readers, including several who weren't thrilled at the prospect of a Congress with more time to do mischief.

Separately, the Democrats also blocked a proposed Congressional pay raise unless Congress also ups the minimum wage. It's a bit of a gimmick -- the pay raise will go into effect in several weeks unless Congress votes to block it again. And several critics objected to it being tied to the minimum wage, claiming the two issues aren't related. And they're right to an extent. One involves Congress changing its own pay structure; the other involves the government intruding on private pay structures nationwide.

But I for one don't mind. Legislators are well-paid already, so it's hard to show an overwhelming need for a pay raise. In fact, indexing Congressional pay to inflation was a way for Congress to avoid the politically unpopular act of voting itself a pay increase while still getting the money.

And the minimum wage is exactly that -- a minimum -- and hasn't been increased in nearly 10 years. Raising it isn't going to have a major effect on the economy; it will simply keep the minimum wage from becoming irrelevant.

As with many things, however, we must now wait and see what the Democrats actually do when they take control. The table has been set; let's see what they serve up.

ethics, politics, midtopia

Ruh-roh

Meet Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Nice guy, by all accounts quite smart and hard working.

And stunningly ignorant.

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil....

And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah...”

Let me help you out, Silvestre. They're a Shiite militia in Lebanon backed by Syria and Iran.

Yeepers.

Does it make anyone feel better to know that key Republicans and FBI counterterrorism officials fared poorly on the same test? Cuz it sure doesn't do anything for me. These guys are paid $160,000 a year to understand this stuff. The fact that I am apparently more familiar with the forces at play than they are is -- well, pick your adjective: absurd? appalling? frightening?

But it goes a long way towards explaining why we've done such a horrible job in Iraq.

As I noted above, Reyes is by all accounts a very smart man. Let's hope he's a quick study, because the nation is going to need it.

terrorism, Islam, Iraq, Reyes, politics, midtopia

Immigration and crime

It seems obvious that new immigrants -- and especially illegal immigrants -- bring with them various short-term ills, including increased crime. There's nothing particularly surprising about that belief; crime is often correlated to poverty and limited opportunity, and new immigrants tend to be poor and face barriers of language and culture that can make social mobility difficult.

One problem though; the popular belief appears to be untrue. As immigration has skyrocketed, crime has fallen.

Ramiro Martinez Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, has sifted through homicide records in border cities like San Diego and El Paso, both heavily populated by Mexican immigrants, both places where violent crime has fallen significantly in recent years. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “I’ve discovered that the homicide rate for Hispanics was lower than for other groups, even though their poverty rate was very high, if not the highest, in these metropolitan areas.” He found the same thing in the Haitian neighborhoods of Miami. In his book “New York Murder Mystery,” the criminologist Andrew Karmen examined the trend in New York City and likewise found that the “disproportionately youthful, male and poor immigrants” who arrived during the 1980s and 1990s “were surprisingly law-abiding” and that their settlement into once-decaying neighborhoods helped “put a brake on spiraling crime rates.”

The article quotes other researchers who found similar things. And even David Brooks has noted that as illegal immigration surged in the 1990s, the violent crime rate fell by 57 percent.

There are plenty of alternative explanations for doubters. Perhaps the effect of immigrants was simply overwhelmed by other factors, like the booming economy. One such critic also notes that illegals are less likely to report crime, thus masking the true crime rate in immigrant neighborhoods.

But that doesn't truly explain experiences like this:

In June, Sampson and I drove out to a neighborhood in Little Village, Chicago’s largest Hispanic community. The area we visited is decidedly poor: in terms of per capita income, 84 percent of Chicago neighborhoods are better off and 99 percent have a greater proportion of residents with a high-school education. As we made our way down a side street, Sampson noted that many of the residents make their living as domestic workers and in other low-wage occupations, often paid off the books because they are undocumented. In places of such concentrated disadvantage, a certain level of violence and social disorder is assumed to be inevitable.

As we strolled around, Sampson paused on occasion to make a mental note of potential trouble signs: an alley strewn with garbage nobody had bothered to pick up; a sign in Spanish in several windows, complaining about the lack of a park in the vicinity where children can play. Yet for all of this, the neighborhood was strikingly quiet. And, according to the data Sampson has collected, it is surprisingly safe. The burglary rate in the neighborhood is in the bottom fifth of the city. The overall crime rate is nearly in the bottom third.

Sampson's theory is that many Mexican immigrant communities are tight-knit, with neighbors watching out for neighbors. He also notes that Mexican immigrants are more likely to be married than either blacks or whites. In short, they're more socially conservative, even if they are here illegally.

Two more interesting things researchers have found. One, second-generation immigrants are substantially more likely to commit crimes than their parents; and third-generation immigrants are even more likely still. So the more Americanized they become, the more criminally inclined they become.

Second, one reason why immigrant neighborhoods are linked to crime in the public eye:

The experiment drew on interviews with more than 3,500 Chicago residents, each of whom was asked how serious problems like loitering and public drinking were where they lived. The responses were compared with the actual level of chaos in the neighborhood, culled from police data and by having researchers drive along hundreds of blocks to document every sign of decay and disorder they could spot.

The social and ethnic composition of a neighborhood turned out to have a profound bearing on how residents of Chicago perceived it, irrespective of the actual conditions on the streets. “In particular,” Sampson and Raudenbush found, “the proportion of blacks and the proportion of Latinos in a neighborhood were related positively and significantly to perceived disorder.” Once you adjusted for the ethnic, racial and class composition of a community, “much of the variation in levels of disorder that appeared to be explained by what residents saw was spurious.”

In other words, the fact that people think neighborhoods with large concentrations of brown-skinned immigrants are unsafe makes sense in light of popular stereotypes and subliminal associations. But that doesn’t mean there is any rational basis for their fears.

When something is this counterintuitive, I'm reluctant to accept it at face value. But it's something to consider, at any rate.

crime, immigration, race, politics, midtopia

Ethics committee rebukes GOP over Foley

That's a sexy headline, but for the most part there's nothing here we didn't already know. The GOP leadership knew about the relatively tame e-mails, and evinced roughly zero curiosity over them. A failing, to be sure, but an understandable one. When you hear about a friend of yours being friendly with the kids, your first thought generally isn't "I wonder if he's a pedophile?"

This is not to let them off the hook. As the full report (pdf) states, on Page 74:

The Investigative Subcommittee does not conclude, however, that the e-mails sent to the former Alexander page were merely "overly friendly", as they have often been described... When read carefully and in context, the e-mails reflect inappropriate communications... (the committee) finds no merit to any of hte suggested justifications by Rep. Foley or anyone on his staff for the tone or content of the e-mails....

The emails clearly provided sufficient basis to at the very least confront Rep. Foley.

So while resignations aren't in order, severe shaming and political beatings are.

There is, however, the matter of the far-more-lurid instant messages. The IMs were highly incriminating. If anyone knew about them and did nothing, they should be sanctioned.

But on page 75 the report flatly states that there is no evidence anyone in the House knew of the IMs prior to their publication by ABC.

Finally, who provided the e-mails and IMs to ABC? The e-mails are easy; they had been circulating among media outlets for nearly a year, to the poitn that by this summer Foley's office assumed that every reporter they talked to knew about the e-mails. It was only a matter of time before someone -- in this case, ABC -- published them.

And the IMs? There was a lot of speculation that they were released by Democratic sources. but it turns out it was simply a former page (see page 62 of the report). The IMs had been circulating among the pages for years, but none of them thought to send them to the media until the e-mail story broke.

And so the story ends. The GOP leadership gets slapped around, but they already received most of their comeuppance at the polls. And all the Republican conspiracy theories about a Democratic "October surprise" prove false.

corruption, Foley, politics, midtopia

What does this say about terror?

Police have foiled a plot -- and I use the term loosely -- to "blow up" a Chicago-area shopping mall, as the AP headline breathlessly reports.

A Muslim convert who talked about his desire to wage jihad against civilians was charged Friday in a plot to set off hand grenades at a shopping mall at the height of the Christmas rush, authorities said.

Blow up a mall? He wanted four hand grenades, and planned to set them off in garbage cans. Not particularly nice, but a far cry from "blowing up" a mall.

Let's note two other things about this case:

1. As usually happens, he never got close to carrying out his plan. He was arrested when he met with an undercover agent to trade stereo speakers for the grenades.

2. He was caught through old-fashioned police work: a tip from an acquaintance, followed by a police sting operation.

Thus this case demonstrates two things:

1. The low threat actually posed by terrorists. Most of the people we've been arresting lately are low-capability loons. We haven't sniffed a serious domestic plot since shortly after 9/11.

2. Law enforcement is the proper venue for catching and punishing would-be terrorists, with a supporting role provided by the military and intelligence agencies. And they don't need to dramatically curtail civil liberties to do it.

I'm not suggesting that terrorism is something to be taken lightly; far from it. We should take it very seriously indeed, as these police did. Beyond catching bad guys, we should take reasonable and prudent security measures to make us less vulnerable to attack in the first place. And the perps should be punished severely.

But we do not need to overreact.

For more detail on that approach, check out "Terror: a military or a criminal problem" in my sidebar, under "Notable Posts".

civil+liberties, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Xenophobia

Where does the "War on Terror" end and simple racism begin?

In Texas.

A plan to build a mosque in this Houston suburb has triggered a neighborhood dispute, with community members warning the place will become a terrorist hotbed and one man threatening to hold pig races on Fridays just to offend the Muslims.

What did the Muslims do? They bought an 11-acre parcel for $1.1 million, on which they plan to build the mosque, and asked a neighbor to stop pasturing his cattle on it. He got mad and vowed to do pig races.

It could all be a misunderstanding:

Baker ... mistakenly thought the Muslims also wanted him off the land his family has lived on for more than 100 years.

Except Baker still seeks his revenge.

Though he now concedes the Muslims are probably not after his land, Baker said he is obligated to go through with the pig races, probably within the next few weeks, because “I would be like a total idiot if I didn’t. I’d be the laughingstock now because I’ve gone too far.”

Meanwhile, another resident has set up an anti-Islamic Web site that claims residents will have to listen to a call to prayer five times a day, keeps a running tally of terrorist attacks since 9/11 and provides the home addresses of some of the Muslim association members.

And the Sheriff has been fielding calls like this one:

Cynthia Blackman wrote Radack that the center was a security risk: “Would you and your family safely and comfortably live next to this 11-acre Muslim mosque and facilities?”

Xenophobia really brings out the stupid in people.

racism, Islam, religion, politics, midtopia

Bush on ISG: Don't hold your breath

In response to the Iraq Study Group's report (which I blogged about here), President Bush today essentially blew them off.

President Bush said today that the United States needs "a new approach" in Iraq, but he implicitly rejected a key recommendation of a bipartisan panel that issued a hard-hitting report yesterday: the holding of direct talks with Iran and Syria independently of other issues.

Beyond that, he continued to insist on "victory" in Iraq, despite rising criticism -- including from the ISG -- that his definition of victory is unachievable.

He also refused to acknowledge that his strategy has failed.

That's his right, of course, but those are not the words or actions of man who is open to major changes of course.

To be fair, it can be very hard for anyone -- and most especially someone with Bush's stubborn personality -- to be told that their plan has failed. It's doubly difficult when the message is delivered clearly, in public and in some measure by his dad (through family proxy James Baker).

And it doesn't get easier when Baker throws doubt on one of Bush's orginal reasons for invading.

Both Baker and Hamilton also questioned one of the Bush administration's original premises for the 2003 invasion -- that going into Iraq was necessary to defeat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups following the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

Asked directly by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) whether Iraq was central to the war on terror, Baker said "it may not have been when we first went in," even though he felt "it certainly is now."

Ouch. And I'd even dispute the "certainly is now" line. Sunni Iraqi leaders are already miffed with the foreign jihadists; once we leave those jihadists will be persona non grata in large parts of Iraq. Al Qaeda simply does not have much popular support among Iraqis of any stripe.

Administration officials said Bush will make a decision on Iraq strategy in the next few weeks. Let's hope his eventual decision is more promising than his initial reaction.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Quran dustup, revisited

A followup on the "controversy" over Keith Ellison's plan to be sworn in on a Koran.

Not only are Jewish and Muslim leaders alike demanding that Prager apologize; we have yet more examples of how he's simply wrong historically.

In his Nov. 28 column, Prager claimed that all members of Congress, including Jews, use a Christian Bible for the swearing-in ceremony.

However, members of Congress are sworn in together in a simple ceremony that only requires that the representatives raise their right hand. Individuals may carry a sacred text, but its presence isn't required. Representatives can bring in whatever they want, said Fred Beuttler, House of Representatives deputy historian.

In his column, Prager also claimed that no "Mormon official demanded to put his hand on the Book of Mormon." In 1997, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Oregon), a Mormon, carried a Bible that included the Book of Mormon to his swearing-in ceremony. But Ellison's use of a Quran isn't without precedent. In 1999, Osman Siddique became the first Muslim to serve abroad as a U.S. ambassador, and he took his oath using both a Quran and a Bible.

I hope he continues to refuse to apologize. It's fun beating him black and blue with his own ignorance.

Keith Ellison, Dennis Prager, Islam, religion, politics, midtopia

The second battle of Pearl Harbor

The New York Times came up with the best Dec. 7 story, hands down -- a never-published article by their wartime correspondent on the astonishing salvage work after the Japanese attack.

The discussion of how they refloated the battleship West Virginia is incredible -- filling the gaping holes in her hull with concrete, attaching cofferdams to slowly raise her, gingerly moving her into drydock, then blasting the concrete out with dynamite so they could get to work on repairs. It was more of rebuilding than a repair, and came with its own hazards -- like the discovery of an unexploded 1,750-pound bomb deep in the ship's guts.

It's a classic story of the unheralded side of warfare, which is as moving and dramatic as any story of battlefield heroism.

Pearl Harbor, war, history, politics, midtopia