This Gives "Extra-Vehicular Activity" A Whole New Meaning

You think you have a hard time getting a plumber when you need one? Pity the poor astronauts awaiting a spare part to fix the toilet on the international space station. "Okay, that'll be $37.50 for the pump, $150 labor and $2,000,000 for the service call." (I admit it. I don't know how much each flight of the the space shuttle Discovery actually costs and just pulled a figure from my... well, never mind that.)

But my favorite quote from the story is as follows:

The space station's Russian-built toilet has been acting up for the past week. The three male residents have temporarily bypassed the problem, which involves urine collection, not solid waste.

Top 10 Surprises in McClellan White House Book

From the home office at the Crawfish Ranch, the Top Ten surprises in Scott McClellan's new White House exposé, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, are:

10. Cabinet meetings scheduled in president’s calendar as “keggers”

9. George Stephanopoulos’s secret stash of hair grooming products left behind podium includes "industrial strength mousse"

8. Flight jacket worn during “Mission Accomplished” speech borrowed from Indiana Jones

7. Karl Rove quit in disgust when polls showed public thought Cheney more evil

6. After hunting accident, Vice President Cheney’s wife Lynne heard to comment “His gun still fires? News to me.”

5. No one on White House staff has ever seen vice president between dawn and sundown

4. President overjoyed that The Hottie & The Nottie finally released on DVD

3. Staff panicked when president rehearsed Axis of Evil speech and kept saying “Iraq, Iran and North Dakota”

2. Secret Service code name for Vice President? “Mr. Burns”

And the number one surprise in Scott McClellan’s new White House “Tell All”:

1. President still pondering last minute third term run

Far From The Madding Crowd: A Libertarian Convention Non-Report

My preferred on-the-spot reporter would have been Triumph the Insult Comic or, failing that, Yakov Smirnoff (“In former Soviet Union, people actually give rat’s ass about Libertarian Party!”) Still, Reason’s David Weigel is doing a workmanlike job covering the 2008 Libertarian Convention, and you might want to check out Reason’s coverage if you, unlike me, care.

Picking the next Libertarian Party candidate is like being a battered wife fresh from the shelter walking into a pool room and flirting with the guy with the most prison tats and the fewest teeth. Forgive me if I don’t swoon at the prospect of Bob Barr, Mike Gravel or any of the other candidates carrying the tattered banner of libertarianism into the certain obscurity that yet again awaits it.

I will say, however, that if the ideological zealots who make up actual LP activists hand the nomination to a political careerist and opportunist like Barr because they think it will give the party added exposure, both sides to that bargain will have gotten exactly what they deserve. Barr will never again be taken as seriously as he once was (a good thing) and the LP will (correctly) be perceived as the political equivalent of a Star Trek convention. Not a good thing but not so bad, either. Hey, is that Penn Jillette over there? Oh, never mind, it's just Drew Carey again.

Constant Viewer: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the first movie of 2008 Constant Viewer intends to go back and see again. We are, just in case you haven’t noticed, in a period in the movies where the woolly mammoths of yesteryear are making one last charge before, well, you know about woolly mammoths, don’t you?. We saw it with Bruce Willis and (twice, no less) with Sylvester Stallone and we are seeing it now with Harrison Ford, reprising the role that really made him a major star (no, children, it wasn’t playing Han Solo that made Ford a star) for the first time in nearly two decades.

Stallone did a far better job than CV expected, mostly by not actually embarrassing himself in Rocky Balboa, while Willis delivered one of the best action pictures of his career in Live Free or Die Hard. With a George Lucas story and Steven Spielberg behind the camera, so, amazingly, does Ford. This is one of the few movies in quite a while CV just plain had fun watching, almost from beginning to end.

Almost. Rumored claims that Ford did much of his stunt work are clearly preposterous. Judging from the amount of footage in the first several reels where Indy is running in a medium shot with his face hidden in shadows, CV seriously doubts Ford did anything strenuous or dangerous, and the movie gets off to a slow start. By the time he takes refuge in the refrigerator in a suspiciously life-sized doll house on a military reservation, though, you know you’re in the hands of masters who carry you on a thrill ride for the next hour and a half with just enough comic relief and inside jokes along the way to let you catch your breath and enjoy the entire ride. The movie deserves its PG-13 rating (not that this will keep idiot parents from bringing their toddlers) but anyone old enough to ride an adult roller coaster should go see it.

There is an entire generation of moviegoers who have never seen an Indiana Jones movie on the big screen before. Nowadays, CGI makes any screen image possible and thereby makes none of them magical any longer, and it’s hard to describe how audiences felt when the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977 or when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was released in 1981. In fact, in terms of film history, Raiders really only updated the black and white Saturday afternoon “cliffhanger” serials of the 40s and 50s, but then that’s like saying modern medicine has only updated the practices of leeching and bleeding patients. What Lucas and Spielberg and Ford managed to create in the late 70s and early 80s truly was magical. Best of all, they haven’t forgotten how.

Constant Viewer: Prince Caspian

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian continues C.S. Lewis’s well known series of Christian apologetics thinly veiled as children’s literature and it does so neither better nor worse than The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which Constant Viewer also didn't like. Constant Viewer finds it difficult to be objective about the merits of these films because he frankly loathed the books when he (tried to) read (some of) them as a youth. Then again, sentimental drivel of a vaguely Christian nature abounded in Constant Viewer’s youth back when every television series trotted out some sort of saccharine Holiday Special in late December. (And the holiday in question wasn’t Hanukkah, either, Bubala.) These days, by contrast, religious ignorance in America is so rampant that one of CV’s friend's teenage children had never heard the story of Noah and the Ark. It’s gotten so bad that homophobes yelling “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” have to stop and explain who Adam and Eve were.

Sorry. CV ‘went away’ there for a moment, but he’s back now. Where were we? Oh yes, Prince Caspian. There’s certainly no reason not to take the kiddies to see Prince Caspian. The battle scenes aren’t gory -- they aren’t all that exciting, either, sadly enough -- and even the scene in the tomb when the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) tries to escape probably isn’t frightening enough to scare the little ones. Unlike the original books, the movie doesn’t flog the Christian mythos and symbolism incessantly. On the other hand, for all the supposedly magical mystery of Narnia, Prince Caspian is a surprisingly lifeless and nearly joyless affair, three parts medieval warfare to one part talking animals. Worse yet, what few interesting special effects there are seem almost gratuitously trotted out at the end, making the trailer a bit of a ‘bait and switch’ ploy in CV’s opinion. Aslan the Great Lion of Narnia (voice acted by Liam Neeson) has little more than a cameo at the finale, mostly just to summon the walking trees and water giant in the nick of time to vanquish the human army’s catapults. Frankly, there isn’t enough here to sustain nearly two and a half hours and CV wished he had a catapult to hop on, better to flee the theater, Iron Man like, as quickly as possible no matter how painful the landing.

Pssst! Hey, Can You Keep A Secret?

What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination:

1. George W. Bush is an idiot.

2. As controlled unclassified information goes, #1 isn't much of a secret. Still, try not to let it slip out beyond, oh, say, our solar system lest galactic embarrassment ensue.

3. "Controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination" sounds simultaneously pompous and stupid, like Dean Wormer's "double secret probation" except it's even more like how Otter would explain to Flounder where the emergency beer keg was hidden.

4. Reading any biography of the young George W. Bush makes points #1 through #3 not only obvious but unnecessary. That is all. Over and out.

Forget Money, Guns and Lawyers; Send Credit Cards, XBox and Hookers!

And speaking of promising political careers, I give you 13 year old Ralph Hardy who ordered a duplicate credit card on his father's account and used it for a $30,000 spree with friends that ended in a Texas hotel room with $1,000 hookers playing Halo on XBox.

What separates Ralph and his friends from your run-of-the-mill juvenile thieves, you ask? When the prostitutes balked because he and his friends seemed so young, they told the women they were "people of restricted growth" and that refusing them would be illegal discrimination against the disabled!

I am in awe.

"Come on, try it! Hey, the first grant's free!"

Bravo to Chardon Township, Ohio for turning down $10,000 in disaster aid from FEMA following a March snowstorm. Township Trustee Chuck Strazinsky explained it was a typical snowstorm unworthy of federal aid and that the money should be reserved for true emergencies, whereas Township Trustee Steve Borowski disagreed, saying help from the federal government shouldn't be turned down. Alas, Mr. Borowski probably has the far more promising political career.

Clinton Endorses Obama?

No, not really.
For now, just file under Stories That Wouldn't Surprise Us:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Today in a surprise announcement just hours before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin, former President William Jefferson Clinton declared his total and enthusiastic support for Barack Obama to become the Democratic Party nominee for president, effectively becoming the last significant member of the Democratic Party aside from Hillary herself to endorse Obama.

“You know I love Hillary,” Clinton explained, “and short of remaining faithful to her sexually I’d do just about anything for her; but politics is the art of the possible and, quite frankly, that bitch just won’t hunt, if you know what I mean.”

In a brief question and answer period following his announcement, Clinton said he thought poor white voters would vote for Obama over McCain in November. “After all, they voted for me twice, so this time all they have to do is vote for a black president who’s, you know, actually black.”

Clinton also said the chances of Hillary being offered or accepting the Vice Presidential nomination were “about as likely as me giving Kenneth Starr ‘a Monica,’” and he flatly denied rumors that his endorsement came at the price of Obama naming him for the first Supreme Court vacancy. When asked as he was leaving the stage why then there were numerous recent reports of him interviewing female law students “for possible clerkship openings,” Clinton simply smiled and declined comment.

Nothing But Net (Gain)?

I'm still waiting to hear a valid negative (against) a kid accepting a scholarship, free education, at an early point in his life. – Howard Avery, whose 8th grade son Michael committed to the University of Kentucky’s basketball program this month.

The obvious “valid negative” here, Mr. Avery, is that neither you nor your son knows what the fair market price of his talents really are. You might, after all, be selling (out) way too low.

Child athletes, be they gymnasts, tennis players or whatever, pose a special problem for our culture, especially given how much we pretend that much of our interference in each other’s lives is “for the children.” Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. There have probably been few cultures that have hated children more than ours does, going out of its way to regulate and micromanage their every activity, forcing them to spend over a decade in penal-like rehabilitation institutions, prematurely sexualizing them, encouraging them to engage in sexual intercourse and then branding thousands of them sex offenders when we catch them on the wrong side of the statutory rape laws.

But I digress. So what if professional athletes and prostitutes both ruin their bodies for the amusement of total strangers? We do still outlaw child prostitution, quaintly enough, but child athletics are not only encouraged, they are actively promoted. What better way to get your kid into Princeton or Stanford on a free ride than to find some niche sport you can start them in at around three or four in hopes of having them recruited for the varsity team? And if the kid shows enough talent for a possible pro career? Hey, who wants to waste years grooming a kid to go to Johns Hopkins Med School when the NBA draft is right around the corner? And nobody ever sued a starting point guard for malpractice, either. (Point shaving, on the other hand, well, you know.)

Children pose a special problem for libertarians. Put a bit more amusingly, a friend of mine says that libertarianism is an adults-only activity. On the one hand, children are not and cannot be regarded as their parents’ property. On the other hand, the only viable recourse against child neglect and abuse is the state. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree as to what exactly should count as actionable abuse or neglect. So, for that matter, can unreasonable people, people who contend a mere spanking or letting kids eat junk food are sufficiently egregious to warrant state intervention. But surely even the most adamantly purist libertarian would admit that, for example, children are entitled to the same level of police protection against assault that adults are and that it shouldn’t matter in such cases that the assailant is a parent. (Anarcho-capitalists, on the other hand, might have a problem with child free-riders, here, but I digress again.)

I have little concern whether Michael Avery goes on to play for Kentucky someday though I do hope the kid manages to get some good advice from a sports attorney between now and then, too. I hope he doesn’t get injured along the way or that he manages to get someone to pay for some heavy insurance against such an accident keeping him from a lucrative pro career. I don’t even know if such insurance is possible, but if it is I hope he gets it. And maybe, just maybe all this is not only what the kid really wants but, far more unlikely, he is sufficiently mature to be making these sorts of decisions. In any case, I wish him well.

As for the Kentuckys and the sports fathers of the world, it would be nice if I could wave a magic wand and forever prohibit any of them from contending that what they were doing was really “for the children.”

Gene R. Nichol at William & Mary

I’ve said before that the values of the College are not for sale. Neither are ours. – College of William & Mary former president Gene R. Nichol

I rarely post specific biographical information on the internet, but I will make an exception today and note that I am one of the less distinguished graduates of the College of William & Mary in Virginia. I was therefore a recipient this morning of a lengthy and, in my opinion, typically self-serving letter from its now former President Gene R. Nichol. Mr. Nichol's contract the Board of Visitors has declined to renew and who has therefore resigned, effective immediately.

Along with many others, I actively opposed renewal of Mr. Nichol’s contract. I would probably have just silently applauded the BOV’s decision but for certain assertions in his resignation letter. As Mr. Nichol seeks even now to portray himself as a righteous martyr to the forces of troglodyte conservativism, I think it is necessary that some of us who opposed his continued tenure to respond to that portrayal. Mr. Nichol contends his ouster resulted from “four decisions, or sets of decisions,” as follows:

1) His removal of the cross from the Wren Chapel;

2) His refusal to prohibit a “Sex Workers’ Art Show” at the College;

3) His efforts to increase funding to attract lower income students; and

4) His efforts to “increase diversity” at the College.

Taking these in reverse order and obviously speaking only for myself, I will say first that I am largely unaware of whatever efforts Mr. Nichol actually made to “increase diversity” at William & Mary, but if it involved any sort of affirmative action style preferential hiring policy for faculty or staff, then I would have opposed it. I share to some extent Mr. Nichol’s dismay at seeing that among “35 senior administrators of the College [there were] no persons of color.” But the only morally proper solution to such situations is the removal of legal barriers which will then lead to greater diversity occurring as a matter of course over time. In any case, I am also unaware whether whatever he did or tried in this regard stirred much controversy. As far as I know, such efforts didn’t receive much coverage in the press or internet and they certainly didn’t have anything to do one way or the other with my opposition to his presidency.

I frankly applaud anything Mr. Nichol did to increase scholarship funding for low income students. I suspect that his real motives for those efforts were, as they so obviously are in so many other institutions of higher education, merely the attempted end-run around increasing legal barriers to the reverse discrimination of affirmative action. Even so, I believe it is entirely proper that the College seek out on a colorblind basis and provide adequate funding to permit academically worthy, low income students the opportunity to attend.

As for Mr. Nichol’s “[refusal], now on two occasions, to ban from the campus a program funded by our student-fee-based, and student-governed, speaker series,” good for him. If Nichol were being let go simply because of his defense of the students’ right to spend their own student activity fee money on the Sex Workers’ Art Show, I would rise to his defense. As I understand it, the show in question, pornographic or not, is political in nature and thus unquestionably worthy of First Amendment protection. But for all I care, W&M students could have Tijuana style donkey shows on campus. Hell, they could hold the shows in the Wren Chapel -- just please remove the cross first! -- and I’d support their right to do so just as readily. (I recognize, of course, that I'm almost certainly in the minority among Nichol's opponents on this point.)

Finally, in his own words, President Nichol:

altered the way a Christian cross was displayed in a public facility, on a public university campus, in a chapel used regularly for secular College events -- both voluntary and mandatory -- in order to help Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious minorities feel more meaningfully included as members of our broad community. And it was certainly motivated by the desire to extend the College’s welcome more generously to all. We are charged, as state actors, to respect and accommodate all religions, and to endorse none. The decision did no more.

Well, no. In the first place, the (oddly third person) sentence “The decision was likely required by any effective notion of separation of church and state,” is a fine bit of legal weasel-wording. "Likely required"? "Any effective notion"? No one prior to Nichol ever raised a legal challenge in the entire hundred year history of this 300 year old university’s state control. In the second place, if the existence of the cross constituted “endorsement” of Christianity, then why doesn’t the altar, itself? Whatever others may think about a Christian cross sitting on a (still consecrated) Christian altar in what was once a private university, there is scant evidence that non-Christian students somehow felt... what? That they were only meaninglessly included until Gene Nichol came along? In fact, the cross was routinely removed whenever any secular or non-Christian activity took place in the Chapel, anyway, and had been from as long as I, at least, can remember.

There were other highly questionable decisions and actions in his thankfully brief tenure, not the least being his silly and, I believe, hypocritical battle to try to preserve the school’s athletic logo (an Indian feather) and the decision to place an English professor as temporary chair of the philosophy department. Regarding the former, Mr. Nichol apparently was insufficiently concerned about the extent to which this Indian feather logo, far more prominently displayed throughout the College than the Wren cross, might make Native American students feel less than "meaningfully" included.

But it wasn’t Mr. Nichol’s substantive decision regarding the Wren Chapel cross or any particular one of his other such decisions, per se, that led me to oppose his continued tenure as president of the College. Instead, it was Mr. Nichol's leadership style and, more troubling, his character, at least as evidenced by his behavior throughout these controversies. He unilaterally had the cross removed almost literally in the dead of night without so much as a thought for those who might be troubled by his decision, let alone the manner of its accomplishment. No doubt he genuinely did not expect nearly the reaction he got. In any case, his behavior afterwards, especially including his subsequent, highly questionable account of his knowledge regarding the impact of that decision on a pending gift to the College made it more and more clear to me that Mr. Nichol was not the sort of person best suited to lead the first college in the nation to institute an honor code of conduct for students.

Moreover, it became clear that Mr. Nichol came to William & Mary apparently convinced that he and those who agreed entirely with him were in sole possession of the moral high ground against any and all opposition. At least that is the strong impression he gave to this alumnus. Here is one final example of that mindset, a paragraph from his resignation letter:

I add only that, on Sunday, the Board of Visitors offered both my wife and me substantial economic incentives if we would agree “not to characterize [the non-renewal decision] as based on ideological grounds” or make any other statement about my departure without their approval. Some members may have intended this as a gesture of generosity to ease my transition. But the stipulation of censorship made it seem like something else entirely. We, of course, rejected the offer. It would have required that I make statements I believe to be untrue and that I believe most would find non-credible. I’ve said before that the values of the College are not for sale. Neither are ours.

Stipulation of censorship? Apparently, this law professor would have us believe he does not understand the substantive legal (never mind moral) differences between a contractual quid pro quo, one that occurs in litigation settlements all the time, and censorship.

Apparently, also, Mr. Nichol believes that the BOVs decision was “based on ideological grounds.” And perhaps it was. Not being privy to their deliberations, I could not say. I’m not so naïve as to think that some, perhaps many of Nichol’s opponents are not, in fact, paleoconservatives of the first order or that some delegates in Virginia’s state legislature didn’t make untoward threats, veiled or otherwise, to the Board of Visitors. In a just world, the Commonwealth would have approximately 20% say in William & Mary’s affairs, as that is roughly the current percentage of state support. But this isn’t a just world and Nichol, who is no stranger to politics, knows it isn’t.

One more point needs to be made. Both Gene Nichol and his family were subjected to entirely unwarranted and utterly irrelevant personal attacks (e.g., crude and cruel comments about Mr. Nichol’s weight) throughout the course of his controversial administration. Such attacks and those who made them are despicable.

Parts of the blogosphere are already chattering about this turn of events and, as usual, both the Right and the Left are grossly oversimplifying the situation. Suffice it to say here that for at least some of his critics, the controversy that dogged Gene Nichol was not so much about crosses or feathers or diversity or sex workers or any of those specific issues but finally about the man, himself. It is far too facile to frame the controversy exclusively in terms of liberal or conservative politics or policies.

But if Gene Nichol now becomes a poster child for liberalism, then it is liberalism that has been most poorly served.

Oh, There He Is Over There!

Sigh....

In yet another example of ego triumphing over prudence, I have accepted a kind invitation from Jason Kuznicki to join him and his colleagues over at Positive Liberty. Accordingly, I expect to post one or two pieces a week there until either (1) I find even that schedule too demanding or (2) more likely, my newfound colleagues decide to un-invite me.

In any case, gluttons for punishment my loyal readers -- rumored to number well into the low double digits -- are similarly invited to join us.

Where's Ridgely?

“That’s not writing, that’s just typing.” Truman Capote (on Jack Kerouac)

Thanks to readers who took notice of my continued absence and inquired as to my health. All is well, as far as that goes. The simple fact is, however, that the blog was eating up an enormous amount of my time, a fact I didn’t fully appreciate until I took a break this August. Since going cold turkey from the blogosphere, I’ve found that the increase in my time, e.g., reading books (remember books?) rose dramatically, as has the time I’ve devoted to more, um, careful and considered writing.

Specifically, and as I predicted in my first blog entry here, “the extent to which I labor to fill this virtual space is inversely proportional to the extent I write anything in return for which I might ever see, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, ‘the necessary.’” Something has to give and I’m afraid it has to be the blog. While I would be happy to consider returning to blogging in a group effort such that I did not feel compelled to churn out new material on a daily basis, I am unwilling for the present to continue in a solo capacity, especially since I am now convinced that the trade-off between the quantity and quality of my efforts was sacrificing too much of the latter for the former.

I will leave this site up for another month or so. Thanks, again, to well wishers and, for that matter, to my silent readers.

- DAR

Housekeeping - July 2008

Throughout most of August, I shall either be on the road or on the beach, though in neither case at all like Jack Kerouac's nor, I pray, Nevil Shute's characters. Neither beach vacations nor road trips lend themselves to blogging, but little goes on in August, anyway, as politicians and journalists alike pay homage to one of the three great French contributions to Western civilization; namely, taking a full month off from what are largely phoney-baloney jobs, anyway. (The other two contributions, by the way, are baguettes and Pepe Le Peu.) It would be churlish of me not to follow suit, so new postings here will be few and far between until, at long last, schools re-open and the NFL season begins. See you then.

______

Retired Header ‘Quotes’:

March 2007 – “Pay no attention to that man behind the veil!” – the Wizard of Rawls

April 2007 – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one may still post on the internet.” – Ludwig Blogenstein

May 2007 - “Don't follow leaders, watch the blog hit meters!" - Blog Dylan

June 2007 - "Thanks to minoxidil, Russell is a damned liar!" - the present King of France

Jobs Immigrants Won't Do

Planning a family road trip from Delaware to Texas this August, my wife and I were researching various cities and other attractions along the way we might want to check out with the kids. We've never been to Little Rock, Arkansas, for example, but then we read on one web sit that among the Top Ten things to see there was Murry's Dinner Theater (located at the corner of Asher and University in the K-Mart Shopping Center; dinner at 6, the show starts at 7:45.) So much for Little Rock.

Dollywood looks promising, both because I have faith that Dolly Parton ("You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!") would never lend her name to anything shoddy and also because, hey, I mean, it's Dollywood, fergawdsakes! Tickets are a bit pricey though, no doubt due to the high cost of living in in Pigeon Forge, TN, so we're still pondering that option.

My wife suggested a day or two in Memphis, which frankly surprised me. Neither of us are, to put it mildly, Elvis fans and a trip to Graceland based on its astronomically high kitsch/camp/cheese factor would be lost on the kids. While I'm sure Memphis (and, yes, even Little Rock) has many family attractions worth seeing, the only thing other than Elvis that comes to my mind is Beale Street which, like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, is best seen late at night and definitely without the kiddies.

Doing a bit of web surfing this morning, however, I did chance on at least one other Memphis attraction hitherto unknown to me. It seems Memphis is the first city in America to offer lawn mowing and other gardening services by bikini clad women! Actually, Tiger Time Lawn Care's Bikini Cut service appears to be in very good taste as this sort of thing goes.

But it struck me that this clever marketing stunt also belies the old canard about immigrants doing jobs like gardening that Americans won't do any longer. Judging from the company's photos, I deduce two conclusions. First, it is clear that these are jobs native born Americans definitely will still do if the price is right. Second, and I believe I am on very safe ground here, it is almost inconceivable that first generation Latina women would don bikinis to mow lawns for a living. Then again, something tells me that when their affluent grandchildren own their own suburban McMansions they won't let their husbands hire bikini clad Anglo gals to mow the lawn, either.

Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Voldemort!

J.K Rowling has again cast her Novelus Blockbusterus spell on most of the English speaking, or at least the English reading world with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There probably follows a two to three day plummet in the demand for electricity, as televisions and game systems are temporarily abandoned for the unpracticed pleasures of reading. Woe be it, also, to the author whose publisher thought so little of him as to release his book for sale this week, as both display and shelf space in bookstores will have been slavishly devoted to Pottermania to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

I'm not wild about Harry, having read and enjoyed the first book because of its clever inventiveness and charmingly offbeat characters but grown, well, disenchanted with each newer, longer, darker and more convoluted offering. I gave up somewhere around the fourth or fifth book, I honestly can't remember which, and my interest in Harry's fate or that of his friends isn't particularly keen. My guess, though, is that Rowling isn't nearly big enough of a goose to kill the wizard that laid the golden royalty check and that Harry will survive his "final confrontation" with He-who-must-find -a-good-plastic-surgeon just in case she decides, say, ten years from now that she misses the attention or is down to her last billion pounds.

In any case, Megan McArdle has written an interesting column in the (U.K.) Guardian, complaining about Rowling's muddled sense of economics in the Potter novels. I'm not sure McArdle, herself, is a economics wizard (her use of the term "opportunity cost" is a bit wierd), but she's definitely on to something amiss about the magical world Rowling has wrought. Why, for example, are the Weasleys poor? Why would any even semi-accomplished wizard want for material goods when they learn how to change inanimate boxes into mice and such in elementary school? Can changing lead to gold be that much harder? For that matter, why on earth would gold, itself, be valuable to such people, unless of course they were using it to buy goods from ordinary people, which apparently they do not. It seems they have their own self-contained demimonde society with shopkeepers and such. It is one thing, after all, if only a few people possess magical skills or such magic is clearly limited in its power. But in Rowling's world everyone has enough magical power to live in the style to which Rowling, herself, has since become accustomed.

McArdle's larger point is that there is no satisfactory explanation of the distribution of magical powers or their limitations in the books. There is no internal consistency, either. Rowling is forever inventing new gizmos and spells to resolve otherwise impossible situations. To paraphrase McArdle, Rowling can't get by with the occasional deus ex machina; she needs an Olympian pantheon of such plot rescuers time and again. On any sort of close scrutiny, the world she has created simply isn't believable, not because of the existence of magic but because of the sort of world the widespread prevalence of magic has supposedly created. It has, at best, a sort of ad hoc dream logic about it, so little wonder the dream turns so easily into a nightmare.

In a sense, therefore, one can understand Voldemort's perspective. What good is magic, after all, if the end product is no more than some sort of quaintly absurd pseudo-Victorian society where the economy makes no more sense than the officious but otherwise useless bureaucracy? What better way to put magic to use in such a world than to acquire power over such a dimwitted lot who, by the way, seem not at all troubled by their own effective enslavement of a different sentient species? Voldemort's ambitions may be ignoble, but at least they make sense.

... or would Jason vs. Freddie be more apt?

Let's take a break from consideration of Emperor George's sweeping new antepenultimate claim of Executive Privilege. (The penultimate claim will be that even if Bush were impeached and convicted, actual ouster from the White House would require executive branch personnel whom, as a matter of Executive Privilege, the President can order to disregard the impeachment. The ultimate claim will be indefinite suspension of elections, "lest the terrorists win.") Let's look instead at something slightly less trivial than fired U.S. Attorneys like, oh, say, the war in Iraq.

Admittedly, taking sides in a p*ssing contest between the Bush Administration and Hillary Rodham Clinton is a bit like taking sides in Alien vs. Predator. To quote the movie's tag line: Whoever wins... We lose. Still, the contratemp between the Department of Defense and Hillary in her occasional capacity as a U.S. senator is worth a quick look. The story thus far is that Clinton wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates requesting information regarding current DoD contingency plans for troop withdrawal from Iraq or, if such plans did not exist, an explanation why.

Now, let's not kid ourselves, boys and girls. The letter was almost certain a political ploy from the start. Clinton knows that the Defense Department has contingency plans tucked away somewhere for just about every scenario imaginable probably including invasion by Vatican City. (That's not to say such plans have been approved at any high level, but only that they exist.) She also knows full well how Congress goes about seeking and securing information from the Defense Department and therefore how to make a 'request' designed to be rebuked, however politely and respectfully.

Be that as it may, all hell broke loose when recess appointee Eric S. Edelman, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, sent Clinton a reply, the verbatim second page of which (as opposed to the snippets commonly excerpted by the press and blogosphere) is as follows:

Although we share our commanders' belief in ours and the Iraqi Security Forces' ability to establish security in Baghdad, this is only a precondition for further political and economic progress, not a guarantee of it. Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks in order to achieve compromises on national reconciliation, amending the Iraqi constitution, and other contentious issues. Fear of a precipitate U.S. withdrawal also exacerbates sectarian trends in Iraqi politics as sectarian factions become more concerned with achieving short-term tactical advantages rather than reaching the long-term agreements necessary for a stable and secure Iraq.

I assure you, however, that as with other plans, we are always evaluating and planning for possible contingencies. As you know, it is long-standing departmental policy that operational plans, including contingency plans, are not released outside of the department.

I appreciate your interest in our mission in Iraq and would be happy to answer any further questions.

Courtesy of TPM Cafe, here is Sen. Clinton's reply:

July 19, 2007

The Honorable Robert M. Gates
Secretary of Defense
The United States Department of Defense
The Pentagon
Suite 319
Washington, D.C. 20301

Dear Mr. Secretary:

On May 22, 2007, I wrote to you to request that you provide the appropriate oversight committees in Congress – including the Senate Armed Services Committee – with briefings on what current contingency plans exist for the future withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq. Alternatively, if no such plans exist, I asked for an explanation for the decision not to engage in such planning.

I am in receipt of a letter from Eric Edelman, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who wrote that he was responding on your behalf. Under Secretary Edelman's response did not address the issues raised in my letter and instead made spurious arguments to avoid addressing contingency planning for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

As I noted in my original letter, "the seeds of many problems that continue to plague our troops and mission in Iraq were planted in the failure to adequately plan for the conflict and properly equip our men and women in uniform. Congress must be sure that we are prepared to withdraw our forces without any unnecessary danger."

Rather than offer to brief the congressional oversight committees on this critical issue, Under Secretary Edelman – writing on your behalf – instead claims that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies. Under Secretary Edelman has his priorities backward. Open and honest debate and congressional oversight strengthens our nation and supports our military. His suggestion to the contrary is outrageous and dangerous. Indeed, you acknowledged the importance of Congress in our Iraq policy at a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee in March, when you stated, "I believe that the debate here on the Hill and the issues that have been raised have been helpful in bringing pressure to bear on the Maliki government and on the Iraqis in knowing that there is a very real limit to American patience in this entire enterprise."

Redeploying out of Iraq will be difficult and requires careful planning. I continue to call on the Bush Administration to immediately provide a redeployment strategy that will keep our brave men and women safe as they leave Iraq – instead of adhering to a political strategy to attack those who rightfully question their competence and preparedness after years of mistakes and misjudgments.

Other members of this Administration have not engaged in political attacks when the prospect of withdrawal planning has been raised. At the June 7 Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, I asked General Lute "what level of planning has taken place" and "whether the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs have been briefed about the level of planning." I also asked General Lute to determine "what kind of timeline would exist if a decision for either military or political reasons were taken to begin withdrawal" and if he considered this kind of planning to be part of his responsibilities.

General Lute replied, "Thank you Senator. I do think such an adaptation, if the conditions on the ground call for it, will be part of this position."

I renew my request for a briefing, classified if necessary, on current plans for the future withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq or an explanation for the decision not to engage in such planning. I also renew my concern that our troops will be placed in unnecessary danger if the Bush Administration fails to plan for the withdrawal of U.S. Forces. Finally, I request that you describe whether Under Secretary Edelman's letter accurately characterizes your views as Secretary of Defense.

I would appreciate the courtesy of a prompt response directly from you. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely yours,
Hillary Rodham Clinton

Okay, it is a fair reading of Edelman's letter that all public discussion of troop withdrawal is harmful to what he blithely calls "our mission in Iraq," but it is at least equally fair to read the entire letter as the Department of Defense, itself, declining to engage in such public discussion for fear of the consequences. Moreover, only an idiot could deny any plausibility to the concerns Edelman raises. That's certainly not to say that the American people or Congress shouldn't discuss withdrawal; but a blanket denial or disregard for those concerns is, from a strategic and tactical point of view, simply insane.

I don't have access to Clinton's original request and it seems to me impossible to pick a side in this dust up without that verbatim request. Given the administration's track record to date, the outrageous conclusions Clinton reads from the letter can't be dismissed out of hand. Given Clinton's ambitions and known political ruthlessness, however, one cannot dismiss out of hand that her original request wasn't specifically designed to generate controversy for political mileage, either.

It does seem likely to me, however, that there is more spin than substance on both sides here and that Sen. Clinton's personal outrage should be taken with at least a grain or two of suspicion.

"... the whole warmth business..."

Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily, Slate's Bonnie Goldstein publishes an 11 page Richard Nixon memorandum (pdf) to H.R. Haldeman (remember him?) addressing the need to get the public to know and appreciate the kinder, gentler Nixon. You know, the guy who made telephone calls "to people when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody," and the guy who treated subordinates "like dignified human beings, and not like dirt under my feet." Ah, the common touch!

Dick Cheney was a White House intern back in those days (no, not that sort of intern) and a staff member working for Donald Rumsfeld. Maybe that's where Cheney learned to project the warm, cuddly image we all know and love him for today.

Barnett on Libertarianism, the War and Ron Paul

Today's online FOX Wall Street OpinionJournal includes a column by Georgetown Law professor Randy E. Barnett entitled Libertarians and the War. He is especially keen to make the point that Ron Paul's opposition to the Iraq War is not the 'official' libertarian position and that one can be, as many libertarians were and some still are, supportive of the war without grave violation to what they hold to be the essence of libertarianism.

This is certainly true, though not entirely for the reasons Mr. Barnett articulates, and the key word is "entirely." There simply is no single set of libertarian principles shared by all who define their political views as such, so Barnett's unqualified claim that "libertarians believe in robust rights of private property, freedom of contract, and restitution to victims of crime ... that ... define true 'liberty'" is not, strictly speaking, true. Some do, some don't, and that is a point at least worth making as his point that Dr. Paul does not speak for all libertarians.

There is something structurally odd about that quoted assertion (the literal text of which I have edited but the sense of which remains intact) and it is his unqualified assertion of certain rights as definitional of (the oddly scare-quoted) liberty. The strong implication here is that libertarianism rests on some sort of natural rights theory, which indeed it does for many but does not for others, and that such view is the only (possible?) theoretical foundation of libertarianism. That is certainly wrong, and for several important reasons.

First, it is always important to distinguish moral claims of rights from legal rights. Legal rights exist, if at all, by operation of government including a legal system established to enforce such rights. I may or may not have a moral right to hold you to your promise to pay me for painting your house, but it is my legal right under the law of contracts that makes commerce possible. (Whether the mechanisms of legal rights enforcement must be governmental or can be privatized is a matter of dispute among libertarians but is irrelevant here.) So, too, whatever Lockean or other natural rights in property one might argue in philosophical debate, it is the law of property, essentially a creature of the state, that gives the contemporary concept of property most of its useful substance.

Natural rights theories have been out of fashion among academic philosophers for some time now. It is true that academic philosophers have a long and notorious history of changing their minds but being wrong both before and after, but that is not to deny that they have analyzed natural rights theories down to the subatomic level and found them wanting for good and serious reasons. My own view is that any theory of natural rights weak enough to be conceptually defensible is unlikely to be sufficiently robust to get most libertarianism where they want to go. That said, I also think that if any natural rights do "exist" (I trust my use of scare-quotes makes sense here), they include the moral right under most circumstances to be left the hell alone. (That is, I take individual autonomy to be presumptively legitimate and the moral burden on those who would violate it, but that does not quite equate to a theory of natural rights.)

In any case, while one can attempt to defend libertarianism in terms of rights and duties (to use the philosophical jargon, on deontological grounds), many prefer a purely consequentialist, usually utilitarian, approach. They argue, in effect, that libertarianism, by maximizing individual liberty, results in or at least affords the greatest good for the greatest number or at least the greatest opportunity for the greatest good or some such. Barnett inches toward that justification in the same paragraph, claiming that his rights defined concept of liberty:

... provide[s] the boundaries within which individuals may pursue happiness by making their own free choices while living in close proximity to each other. Within these boundaries, individuals can actualize their potential while minimizing their interference with the pursuit of happiness by others.

This formulation, interestingly enough, is a "virtue ethics" approach; that is, an ethical justification that goes to the goal of individual self-actualization or flourishing in the Aristotelian sense rather than the objective of collective good that tends to be the focus of most political theory.

It isn't so much that I disagree with what I think is Barnett's rather muddled one paragraph justification of libertarianism (it is, after all, only one paragraph and in an opinion column at that), as that it needs to be said that libertarianism as a living political movement is more about its generally shared conclusions than its specific theoretical justifications. That said, it is certainly true that Ron Paul's current fifteen minutes of fame could well misrepresent libertarianism in general and Barnett is correct to point that out. I might add that Paul's position on abortion, which I largely share, is even less widely held by libertarians.

Finally, I suspect Barnett is mistaken in his implied belief that most of the Americans who have taken note of Paul identify him as a libertarian. Whether they do or not, the presence of an elected official and major party presidential candidate voicing libertarian themes and receiving even modestly positive reactions among the public at large is surely of greater value than the loss of any prospective converts to libertarianism because of Paul's anti-war position. On that point he happens to be in the majority at the moment, a fact that augurs well for the prospects of liberty in post-Bush America.

Two-Fer's

Via memeorandum, I happened upon a Boston Herold column by Margery Eagan that articulates something telling about Hillary Clinton. When her husband first ran for president and suggested the nation would get, in effect, a "two-fer" if he was elected, reaction was swiftly and strongly negative. While Hillary does not, of course, use the phrase now, there is no doubt that but for her husband she would never have been elected to the Senate, let alone the front runner now for the Democratic presidential nomination. Indeed, Bill's slowly increasing visibility in Hillary's campaign strongly suggests their probably correct belief that she cannot win unless the nation now does believe it would, in effect, be getting a two-fer.

Most career politicians are neither very intelligent nor very honest. Intelligence (as opposed to cunning) is not a particularly useful political trait and can be a serious handicap. Voters say but do not really believe they want leaders much smarter than they are and most voters are not very smart. Honesty, on the other hand, is a fatal quality in a politician, as the art of politics is essentially the art of self-interested lying. What a career politician really needs most is likability of the game show host variety (think Pat Sajak, not Alex Trebek).

Neither of the Clintons lack intelligence, though neither is nearly as smart as claimed, either; and, of course, neither has ever been hampered in the slightest by even the most occasional outburst of honesty. But what makes Bill Clinton sui generis among contemporary politicians is his almost superhuman ability to make people who don't know him like him and trust him. Okay, maybe not with their wives or girlfriends, but with something less important like the presidency.

And therein lies Hillary's major political liability: her own uncanny ability to make strangers dislike her is almost as keen. Whatever she may be like in person behind closed doors when her public persona is not in jeopardy and no matter how hard she tries to improve that public persona, Hillary Clinton has a Nixon-like offensiveness about her. Simply put, she lacks the common touch. In spades.

Whether Bill Clinton's presidency, blemished as it was, is ultimately deemed a success (and I believe it will be), the fact that he ever became president was as much an accident of fate as the result of his lifelong will to power. George H.W. Bush's popularity had scared away the likely Democratic candidates, opening an opportunity for an obscure governor to have a shot at the nomination when conventional wisdom unanimously believed Bush would easily win a second term. So much for conventional wisdom.

The Clintons could not, of course, make any of that happen. They could only be ready and willing to run when it did, and they were. They have been planning a comeback ever since, believing correctly that 2004 would have been too soon for Hillary and 2012 might be too late. And now yet another failed Bush presidency may be handing them the keys to the White House yet again, for no Republican candidate likely to win the nomination can or will distance himself far enough away from Bush to escape partial blame for the damage Bush and his willing accomplices in Congress have done to the party and to the nation in the last six and a half years.

The only thing really standing in their way is Hillary, herself, who must now hope the country is at last ready for a two-fer.

Kristol Finds Whole Herd of Ponies!

NeoCon extraordinaire and Editor-über-alles of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol whirls like a dervish in today's Washington Post to gin up support for his claim that "George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one."

Those who neither debated in high school or college nor suffered the subsequent tortures of a legal education may be left agog at the brazen audacity of Kristol's argument, falling as it does into the category of destroying the village to save it or begging the court's mercy for the fellow who, having murdered his parents, is now an orphan.

His opening gambit here is breathtaking in its audacity. Let's simply pay no attention, he asserts, to that man behind the curtain, er, Bush's "unnecessary mistakes and ... self-inflicted wounds." And you have to admit it, if we willfully ignore his unnecessary mistakes, that is, the overwhelming majority of them, Bush doesn't end up looking nearly so bad after all. Also, focusing on Bush's self-inflicted wounds distracts attention from the more numerous and serious wounds he has inflicted elsewhere; so that's a nice piece of misdirection on Kristol's part, too.

So, what accomplishments do Kristol tout to support his claimed successful Bush presidency? Why, (1) the absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, (2) the strong economy and -- wait for it -- (3) the war in Iraq! Oh, and a couple of conservatives on the Supreme Court, an almost throw-away point for Kristol but probably the only thing I might agree was both Bush's doing and, on balance, a good thing.

Not that the absence of terrorist attacks here or a strong U.S. economy are bad things. Only there's precious little reason to believe that Bush can take much responsibility for the latter and little tangible evidence that he is responsible for the former. Tax cuts are presumptively good, though not nearly as good as tax cuts combined with cuts in government spending, and we all know the administration's record on that point. In any case, Kristol's blithe causal connection between tax cuts alone and the state of the economy over the past five years is tenuous at best. Then again, Kristol's claim that Bush's prescription drug benefit Medicare expansion has "gone ... smoothly ... under projected costs" studiously ignores the elephant in the living room that is the looming, long-term cost of my Baby Boomer generation as we only now start to reach Medicare eligibility age. I guess economics wasn't Leo Strauss's strong point.

Shrouded in greater paranoia secrecy than any other administration in my lifetime, the Bush Administration has consistently refused to offer any serious or credible evidence of its purported success in staving off post-9/11 attacks. Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn't. Without such evidence, what neither Bush nor his fawning supporters can claim is that we should simply take the mere absence of such attacks as proof. The time has long since passed where Bush is entitled to even a presumption of honesty with the American people. While I do personally believe that the war in Iraq has drawn the attention of would-be U.S. attackers to more easily reached Middle Eastern and European targets, most of the plots discovered world-wide since 9/11 have shown far less grandiose ambition than 9/11. Meanwhile, America and Americans have lived as though under a constant state of siege with, if Bush and Kristol have their way, no end in sight.

Finally, amazingly, Kristol touts the war and hangs his hopes on General Petraeus, this year's -- let's be candid -- Great White Hope for the remaining supporters of this absurd and tragic misadventure. Of course, had we not attacked Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, doing, um, well, we really don't know what. Neither does Kristol, but he assumes the worst because at this point it is only such counter-factual speculation that could possibly support the claim that America, never mind Iraq, is better off for having ousted Hussein in 2003.

Kristol concludes with a bit more wishful thinking about how the prospect of Democratic control of both the White House and Congress is so frightening that one of the lackluster or worse Republican presidential candidates may actually win next year, thus somehow vindicating Bush. Yeah, sure. His bottom line?

"If Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president."

And if we had some bacon, we could have bacon and eggs for breakfast.

If we had some eggs.

Iranians Arrest 14 Squirrels for Spying

"Islamic Republic's intelligence agents allege rodents were carrying advanced Western spy gear."



The picture isn't part of the story, but this is (so far) being reported as true. I can't make this stuff up, folks; but, yeah, I have a sneaking suspicion in this case that someone did.

Constant Viewer: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is not a good movie to take the kiddies to see. Whether it is a good movie, on the other hand, depends on one's criteria.

Constant Viewer can't imagine many first-time viewers for this film -- that is, folks who somehow managed to avoid all four of the previous movie versions of J.K Rowling's fabulously successful books -- so CV won't bother setting the stage or, for that matter, describing the plot or characters. Everyone and just about everything from Potter-ville is back; indeed much of the first hour feels a bit like the first Star Trek movie where half the film was taken up reintroducing characters we already knew as well as friends or family back from a long trip abroad. Depending on how one feels about one's friends or family, this could be a good or a bad thing.

From a purely filmic point of view, however, Order of the Phoenix works quite well as an entertaining and more or less self-contained movie. The plot, though complicated, makes sense and proceeds to its logical conclusion, the special effects are appropriately dazzling, and the adult cast of A-list British acting royalty all turn in splendid performances. More importantly (since, after all, we have two more films to look forward to), Daniel Radcliffe has developed into a competent actor whose post-Potter film career looks increasingly promising. Special mention must be made of Imelda Staunton, whose bravura performance as Ministry of Magic hack and Hogwarts' new sadistic teacher Dolores Umbridge should forever leave viewers feeling repulsed by pink Angora. CV heartily approves of this result.

No review of Order of the Phoenix can avoid using the word "dark," so let's get to it. Yes, the film is dark, symbolically and literally, so much so that damned little of its two hour and eighteen minute running time takes place in daylight. Rowling's essentially Manichean universe is peopled with good guys and bad guys and Order of the Phoenix is definitely a tale from the dark side even though, of course, the good guys manage to prevail. Speaking of the "dark side," CV had to start laughing toward the end during Dumbledore's battle with one of Voldemort's henchmen for the -- let's be charitable -- homage director David Yates pays to a certain well-known George Lucas franchise. Well, what the heck, Lucas swiped the scene from just about every Errol Flynn swashbuckler ever made, so let's just call it a set piece.

CV cannot vouch personally for how well Order of the Phoenix tracks the novel, having given up on the Potter series somewhere around page 2,347 of that fifth book. CV's two sons, however, found little to object to on that score. Frankly, once the novelty of Rowling's initially charming and wondrous universe has faded, one pretty much has to be a die-hard fan to keep slogging through the books or the films. CV admits he is only mildly curious about how the final book will conclude.

The film-makers in particular have to give the movie audiences something worth returning for when there are, after all, next to no surprises awaiting them. Order of the Phoenix fills that need by showing us a Harry Potter who, childhood innocence having long ago been taken from him, is now on the verge of becoming a man. That's a story worth watching, magic or no.

Rags to Riches ...

... or at least to more widespread literacy. (Not to mention -- hold your britches! -- a 13th century case of recycling that made sense.)

How Not To Honor Our Honored Dead

Where's Jack Kevorkian when the nation really needs him? I sometimes think I'd rather see the 1st Amendment put out of its misery quickly than witness its lingering, painful death at the hands of contemporary politicians, regardless of their motives. In the case of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain–Feingold), of course, the motive is entirely self-serving. "Bipartisan" is the tipoff here and the objective is simply to further entrench the two-party system and make it that much easier (read: cheaper) for current incumbents to retain office.

Not every attempted rape of the 1st Amendment is self-serving, however. Occasionally, benighted legislators act out of genuine, if misguided, concern for some competing interest other than their own. Several states have already passed (and other states are considering) legislation banning the sale of the t-shirt shown below, the fine print being a Vietnam Memorial style listing of U.S. personnel who have thus far died in Iraq. The other side of the shirt reads "BUSH LIED" with the same background.



In Congress, Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla) introduced H.R. 269, the proposed Soldiers Targeted by Offensive Profiteering Act of 2007 (STOP Act), which includes the following language:

Except with the permission of the individual or individuals designated under subsection (d), no person may knowingly use the name or image of a protected individual in connection with any merchandise, retail product, impersonation, solicitation, or commercial activity in a manner reasonably calculated to connect the protected individual with that individual's service in the armed forces.

Let us acknowledge at the onset that many, perhaps most, perhaps even all of the U.S. casualties of the Iraq War believed in the cause they were fighting for and that many of their survivors continue to do so or, at the very least, are emotionally harmed by the use of their loved ones' names in this manner. The Defense Department made similar arguments about photographs of the caskets of such casualties and I freely acknowledge that at least part of the rationale for the objection was and is a legitimate concern for the feelings of the survivors and a moral, if not legal, right of privacy on the part of the deceased.

That said, let us also acknowledge that the primary rationale for the 1st Amendment is the protection of free political speech. (See, e.g., various commentaries here.) As such, whatever other dubious exceptions the Supreme Court has carved out to the amendment's apodictic prohibition against any federal "law ... abridging the freedom of speech," even the High Court has given special deference (except, alas, in the case of McCain-Feingold) to political speech.

Some state legislatures, at least dimly aware of this fact, have attempted to construe the t-shirt and its printing as "commercial speech." Ordinarily, commercial speech is understood by the Court to mean "expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience," so I rather seriously doubt these state laws will withstand constitutional scrutiny if and when they are challenged in court. Here, in any case, is the current prevailing test under Central Hudson Gas & Elec. v. Public Serv. Comm'n for regulation of commercial speech. Commercial speech may be regulated if:

1. The regulated speech concerns an illegal activity,
2. The speech is misleading, or
3. The government's interest in restricting the speech is substantial, the regulation in question directly advances the government's interest, and the regulation is no more extensive than necessary to serve the government's interest.

I simply cannot imagine how any state legislatures have managed to convince themselves that their prohibitions can meet this test. Then again, one should never underestimate the capacity of legislators either to delude themselves or to engage in a bit of grandstanding when it comes to such emotionally sensitive issues as properly honoring our war dead. (A phrase I want to make completely clear I do not mean at all ironically. Those men and women unquestionably do deserve to be honored for their sacrifice.)

Similarly, I serious doubt that congressional attempts to justify such restrictions on both the allegedly commercial nature of the speech and creation of, in effect, new property rights for the deceased and their family members as "protected persons" can withstand both these and other constitutional concerns, e.g., the fairly glaring viewpoint discrimination involved.

I suspect Boren and others genuinely believe they are doing, or at least trying to do the right thing here. But they're not. If anything, and however unintentionally, these laws do a disservice to our war dead. If the American men and women who have died in Iraq did not give their lives to preserve the very freedoms some claim our enemies hate us for, why on earth did they die?

(Hat tip to Reason's Radley Balko.)

Location, Location, Location

That's the mantra of every real estate agent I've ever encountered, their way of saying, in effect, that the price of real estate is a function of, well duh!, supply and demand. Pack millions of people into an island roughly 23 square miles in size like, oh, say, Manhattan and it's little wonder that supply and demand makes for a healthy seller's market. So it is that the New York Times reports on the sale of condominium parking spaces in Manhattan with a going price of $225,000 apiece.

However outrageous such prices may seem to many of us, the fact is, at least according to Steven E. Landsburg, what is really outrageous is how underpriced parking is in most cities and how significantly that contributes to the problem of urban congestion.

Food for thought the next time you complain about feeding the meter.

Not What The Doctor Ordered

Today's New York Times is running a fairly scathing report of Administration attempts "to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations" during Dr. Richard H. Carmona's four year tenure as Surgeon General.

According to the Times, those reports included such topics as embryonic stem cell research and "a landmark report on secondhand smoke [that] concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm."

Reasonable people can reasonably disagree about the moral status of human embryos. As such, that issue, itself, is a legitimate policy matter for the Bush Administration. What is not a legitimate policy matter but a purely scientific question is whether or to what extent embryonic stem cells are essential or vitally important in medical research. Again, one might hold that human embryos being persons, no medical advances would justify their intentional destruction, but we should at least know as best we can what the likely payoff of such research would be and what, if any, alternatives exist.

So, too, many have questioned the scientific validity of the aforementioned study on secondhand smoke. I haven't read the study or the criticism, so I won't offer an opinion beyond acknowledging skepticism about the sweeping nature of some of the claims reported in the press. Be that as it may, scientific research needs to be made available precisely so it can be challenged scientifically. Ethical and policy concerns remain, but we should at least have the benefit of a full examination on the scientific merits of such studies first.

Beyond that, though, it seems clear to me that if the nation is going to have a Surgeon General at all, the office must be accorded greater independence from both political branches of government. As matters stand, the office falls under the Department of Health and Human Services which is, frankly, a prime target for political manipulation regardless of the party controlling the White House.

Conversely, we could simply eliminate the office or relegate it to its primary function as head of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and create some independent medical advisory authority in its place. Science and health policy is properly the responsibility of policy makers, not of scientists and physicians, themselves. But it is equally true that the soundness of the scientific or medical research required to make those policy decisions must remain in the unfettered province of the scientific and medical community, itself.

Oh, and for goodness sakes, drop the silly uniforms.

Security Clearances, the Supply and Demand of Them

The Hill reports today that the Pentagon is seeking "repeal of the department’s [seven year old] restriction on granting security clearances to ex-convicts, drug addicts and the mentally incompetent."

Good.

Lest the casual reader think the Pentagon has lost its wits entirely and seeks to share nuclear technology secrets with drug addled criminal psychopaths, the reality here is that lower level security clearances up to and including a "Secret" clearance are required simply to work in any capacity at all in many government installations. The laws of supply and demand, especially given the rapid growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the need for both federal and contractor personnel in other civilian agencies, for which the restrictions do not apply, have created a tremendous backlog of applicants seeking clearances for DoD jobs and artificially high (dare I say windfall profit level?) salary demands from those already possessing high level clearances. (Oh, by the way, did you know that the background checks for security clearances has, for the most part, been contracted out?)

Moreover, classified materials are not left strewn about the Pentagon or elsewhere in DoD facilities like so many FBI records cluttering the halls of the Rose Law Firm. The mere possession of a clearance does not entitle its holder to access to classified materials, one must also have a legitimate need for such access on a case by case basis.

I'll refrain from making the too obvious jokes about mental incompetence and elected officials, and note that the particular crime a felon has been convicted of may be entirely irrelevant to whether he is an acceptable security risk. More important in terms of sheer numbers of applicants, once again our idiotic War on Drugs is providing further evidence of the mental incompetence of its advocates. (Okay, so I couldn't resist.) One can certainly make the case that a prospective employee with an ongoing addiction to drugs or alcohol is not an acceptable risk. The notion that anyone ever convicted of mere possession of marijuana is an unacceptable risk is, by contrast, simply absurd.

The article ends with a bit of ax-grinding about whether repeal of the restrictions would permit recently convicted felon I. Lewis Libby to obtain a security clearance. The better question, I think, is whether the current restrictions would have prevented an even higher level official with a documented history of alcohol abuse to have ever gotten a security clearance in the first place. Of course, that would be an argument in favor of their retention. Never mind.

Live Earth D.O.A.

Ho-hum.

The predictable disease of stardom, whether of the Hollywood variety or among musicians, is egotism ranging from fragile narcissism to full blown monomania. Little wonder, then, that the Gore-Fest better known as Saturday's Live Earth concert was so much sound and fury punctuated by hot air. Or, as the (U.K.) Daily Mail reports, a foul-mouthed flop.

Gore now qualifies, of course, as one of the Hollywood crowd, having picked up his Oscar en route to becoming Bono with a better tailor. The concerts did nothing to raise public awareness of global warming, as the affluent segment of humanity has already heard all about it and the rest of humanity have more pressing concerns on their minds. The fate of the earth a century from now is of only modest interest to someone suffering from malaria or dysentery or trying to feed her children or find shelter or potable water. Only rock stars and their ilk could possibly convince themselves that jetting across the world to leave mountains of garbage in their wake could be a net contribution to stopping global warming.

Charity rock concerts, whether to raise money or public awareness, have a checkered history. George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh was at best a mixed and controversial success. However noble Harrison's intentions or those of the many who (myself included) bought the subsequent album to support victims of the 1970 Bhola cyclone (think Katrina, only much worse), ineptitude and corruption both took their toll on the final results. At least, however, it was a humane attempt at responding to a genuine catastrophe.

Then again, as far as the motives of the attendees go, massive rock concerts "to change the world" have always been, to put it mildly, a mixed bag. Sure, some of the hundreds of thousands who went to Woodstock were bona fide "hippies." Most, however, were just there for the sex and drugs and rock & roll.

Ali

Forty years ago, back when Americans enjoyed due process of law even if they were Muslim Americans, in fact, even if they were Black Muslim Americans, Muhammad Ali was convicted on June 20, 1967 in federal court for refusing induction into the United States armed forces. America was, after all, at war, defending itself from encroaching world-wide communist domination and, we were told, if the North Vietnamese won it would have a Domino Effect throughout Asia.

Three years earlier, in the same year he first won the World Heavyweight Boxing championship from Sonny Liston and became a member of the Nation of Islam, Ali had failed to pass the Armed Forces qualifying examination. In 1966, however, the test was revised -- the laws of supply and demand being what they were even then -- and Ali was reclassified 1-A, draft eligible. Ali claimed but was denied conscientious objector status, famously declaring, “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. They never called me a nigger.” After refusing induction, Ali was tried and sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. The conviction was upheld by the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals but in 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction.

In the interim, however, Ali was stripped of his title and banned from boxing during what boxing experts believe would have been his prime boxing years. Also in his prime, George Carlin described the situation (roughly, and with apologies to Carlin because I couldn’t find the exact quote) as follows:

Muhammad Ali has a strange job - beating people up – but the government wanted to give him a new job – they wanted him to go to Viet Nam and kill people – but Ali said, “No... that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ‘em up but I don’t want to kill ‘em" – and the government said, “If you won’t kill ‘em, we won’t let you beat ‘em up!”

Boxing, it must be said, is a brutal, barbaric sport; the only sport still legal where the primary objective is to injure one’s opponent to unconsciousness. But for Muhammad Ali, I would never have become a fan of boxing at all. After Ali, I quickly lost interest. But Ali became, and remains, the only athlete who ever came close to being a hero to me. It was impossible, for me at least, not to be astonished and delighted by his athleticism, his great speed and agility; impossible also not to admire his uncompromising integrity.

That is, of course, not to say I agree with or approve of everything Ali has done in his life. I’m not about to argue the merits of the Nation of Islam (Ali converted to Sunni Islam in 1975) or whether, on legal or moral grounds, he was entitled to conscientious objector status, nor would I claim that his personal life – he has been married four times – is exemplary.

Most significantly, he fought too many times and took too many blows to the head especially in his later career, resulting in his chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or Parkinson’s Syndrome). Once, and perhaps still, the most famous and beloved man alive, Ali deprived both himself and his literally billions of fans the pleasure of each other’s company after his final fight in 1981, some six years after his last great fight against Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila. Ironically, both that fight and his decision to continue boxing afterwards, whatever the reasons at the time, probably cost him tens of millions of dollars if not more, as the public demand for him remains largely unabated even after all these years and in his unfortunate condition today. Last month, for example, in one of his now rare public appearances Ali was given an honorary doctorate by Princeton.

Trite though it is to mention, no one who did not live through the 1960’s can fully appreciate what that decade was like. We speak too easily today about how polarized America has become in the last twenty years, but the truth is that America was far more polarized by both the Viet Nam War and the Civil Rights Movement than it is today. It is worth remembering that Muhammad Ali was reviled and despised by much of white America forty years ago, perhaps as much for his refusal to accept control by the white-dominated boxing establishment as for his refusal to serve in what he believed was the white establishment’s war in Southeast Asia. Undaunted, he stood his ground like a true champion and, more importantly, like a man.

Ellen Goodman's Race Problem

Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize winner and current resident of Brookline, Massachusetts (Estimated 2005 median house / condo value: $1,115,200. Estimated black population: 2.7%), has a race problem. Try as she might to understand Clarence Thomas as a man (and, truth be told, she doesn't try very hard), all she can see is a black man.

Goodman opens her column gladdened "that [the Supreme Court] won't do any more damage until the first week in October" and closes it by dredging up Anita Hill (remember her?) and implying that Thomas is a "rigid ideologue." In between, we find her serving up a few buckets of psycho-babble about how Thomas's Court opinions are really little more than rebellion against the sort of "black stereotypes" one suspects nicely characterize the majority of Goodman's (no doubt numerous) black friends.

It's all about race for Goodman, you see. Thomas can't really be independently conservative; that is, he can't possibly be the Court's "most predictable member of the conservative camp" because he honestly and rationally believes that nonsense. He can't possibly have rationally come to view racial discrimination of any sort as wrong despite having personally benefited from it. Could he? No, of course not. It's all about his resentments, the ingrate!

Poor Ellen, you see, didn't get a black liberal "successor to Thurgood Marshall." In Goodman's ideal world there should be a black liberal on the Court and a Jewish liberal and a female liberal, etc. That's diversity! She is outraged that Justice Thomas might seriously doubt whether forced racial integration has been the unqualified success she believes it to be.

What nonsense. And racist nonsense, at that.

I often don't agree with Thomas's opinions. But I have listened to liberals denigrate his intelligence and competence and -- Gasp! -- his blackness ever since he was appointed and I have yet to find any evidence at all of the first two claims. As to the last, I'm not a black man and do not, therefore, know what his experiences as a black man in America have been. Neither, it should be obvious, does Goodman. Then again, we will never understand Clarence Thomas or anyone else in this world if we can't ever get past the color of his skin.

The Democrats' Shakespearian 'Fool'

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed there are no second acts in American lives and spent the rest of his life proving it. Politicians, on the other hand, are occasionally capable of reanimation, horror movie style, after a dormant period long enough for the American memory, not our strongest faculty, to fade.

Thus, once upon a time, we saw the “new Nixon” arise from the politically dead and these days we are witnessing the re-branding of the “new and improved” Hillary Clinton. In Hillary’s case, of course, we knew the monster hadn’t been completely destroyed at the end of the first movie. Merely exiled to the Senate after eight years in the White House, the Clinton’s had learned well from their Hollywood pals about setting up a sequel in the final reel.

When lesser luminaries than headliners like Nixon and Clinton suddenly see the spotlight once again, it is usually because of the vicissitudes of fate. Take, for example, Democratic presidential hopeful Mike Gravel.

Gravel is to the Democrats what Ron Paul is to the Republicans, the Shakespearian fool providing both comic relief and almost zen-like insight into the true folly of our two-party presidential marathon. Gravel represented Alaska in the Senate from 1969 to 1981, and first came to light back in the Viet Nam war era as a key figure in brokering an end to the military draft and in the public release of the infamous Pentagon Papers. Thanks for the most part to the war in Iraq, he's back on stage, however briefly.

A populist at heart, Gravel’s positions range from immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq to elimination of the IRS and institution of a “progressive” national sales tax to universal health care vouchers to decriminalization of minor drug offenses. Unlike all of the other candidates except for Ron Paul, Gravel no doubt believes in every single stand he is taking, oblivious to the pollsters and spin doctors who tailor the other candidates’ campaigns. As a predictable result, and as with Paul, there is something for everyone to like about Gravel’s platform, and something to dislike, too.

Of course, it doesn’t matter. Gravel’s chances of securing the Democratic nomination are infinitesimal. Not even Shakespeare could pull off a final act where the fool gets the crown, let alone a tragedy where everyone lives happily ever after.

The Protectionist Price of Patriotism

The price for American flags will rise in Minnesota when, as the (U.K.) TimesOnline reports, a new law goes into effect requiring "all US flags sold in the state to be of American manufacture. Violations of the law, which comes into force at the end of the year, will be punished by a $1,000 fine or 90 days in jail."

The man behind the law, Democratic state congressman Tom Rukavina, reasons as follows:

The biggest honor that you can give the flag is that it be made by American workers in the United States of America.... Nothing is more embarrassing to me than a plastic flag made in China. This replica of freedom we so respect should be made in this country.... I think this Bill is about jobs, jobs for Americans.

Several things, elected officials high among them, embarrass me far more than Chinese plastic flags, but we'll let that ride.

I don't know if Minnesota ever had any extensive textile manufacturing, but if it did I rather doubt it wasn't lost years ago to cheaper Southern textile manufacturers who, in turn, lost to cheaper foreign concerns. But who knows? Apparently the Flag Manufacturers’ Association of America is behind the legislation (surprise, surprise!), and perhaps they have offered to keep or build in Minnesota a flag plant to supply the state's new "Made in the U.S.A." needs.

Of course, the state government can impose any restrictions on itself it wants and if taxpayers have to pay a fraction of a penny more in state taxes because their flags have just tripled or quadrupled in price, well, that's just another case of concentrated and visible benefits and diffuse and invisible costs.

Whether Minnesota can, let alone should, keep it's own citizens from buying U.S. flags made in China is another matter entirely. Even if the law is a constitutionally permissible restriction on interstate commerce, which I doubt, its practical effect will be to drive "unpatriotic" Minnesota flag buyers to make their purchases via mail-order or online. Of course, I have no idea what the size of the market for flags in Minnesota is, but the law might even end up reducing the state's net number of jobs. If so, let's hope state congressman Rukavina is among the first to be let go.

Fourth of July Memories

Some twenty-five years ago my wife and I and a couple dozen friends, mostly from college, met every 4th of July down at the National Mall to make a day of the festivities. In those days glass bottles were prohibited but cans were permitted and one could still take coolers filled with beer (oh, and food) and stake out some territory by the Washington Monument for a perfect overhead view of the fireworks.

We were all in our 20's or early 30's at most, in the final days of the first stage of our adult lives, still mostly childless and still early in our careers, mostly as doctors or lawyers -- lots of lawyers! -- with an odd journalist or bureaucrat or two as well. After all, we are talking about Washington, D.C. here. People played Frisbee and shot off illegal bottle rockets and ate and drank and burned in the hot July sun. Even then, the most casual look at the tens of thousands of people who had gathered on the Mall made it obvious beyond question that we are both a nation of immigrants and a single people.

These were the early days of the Reagan Administration, and in 1981 and 1982 that most quintessentially American band, the Beach Boys, played their most quintessentially innocent and joyful music at the big concert stage down by the Monument. The National Symphony also played pop and light classical music at the Capitol steps, but that was at the other end of the Mall and, besides, even today I'd opt for "Fun, Fun, Fun" over Tchaikovsky in a heartbeat.

But 1983 was far and away my favorite year, for it was then that Interior Secretary James Watt decided the Beach Boys were, well, attracting the wrong element to the Mall and booked Wayne Newton instead. Perhaps Watt was a secret fan of Lenny Bruce, who once observed that there was no place in America more American than Las Vegas. In any case, Wayne brought all the trappings of his Vegas act with him, complete with dozens of feather-headdress wearing, scantily clad but sequin festooned showgirls. It doesn't get any more American than that, except perhaps at the Folies-Bergere in Paris.

Getting close to the stage was much harder than when the Beach Boys played because it was already heavily surrounded by a mosh pit of silver-blue haired women. Fortunately, their average height was only around 5'4", so I didn't have to elbow my way through little old ladies to see the stage clearly. It was, to put it mildly, quite a show. Newton sang his hits as the showgirls shook their, well, you know, and concluded appropriately enough with "America the Beautiful." But then he came back to do a Vegas style encore, probably "Danke Schoen" though I don't recall exactly, and it was at that exact moment that I grasped the genius of Watt's decision. Alas, Nancy Reagan liked the Beach Boys better and they were back the next year, another government program that, once started, refused to go away.

The fate of the United States, indeed, of the Earth was still very much in jeopardy in those days from the Cold War's Mutually Assured Destruction. Thank God, it never happened, but we lived with that terrible risk as we now seem incapable of living with the risk of a small number of fanatical enemies who, even in our most nightmarish scenarios, don't pose a tenth of a percent of that decades-long threatened nuclear holocaust. Our biggest complaints about air travel were that it was uncomfortable, boring, expensive and too often delayed. We were spending a vast fortune on defense, but at least we were defending ourselves against a credible threat. Accusations of an imperial presidency focused more on Nancy's White House china patterns than on jackbooted thugs hauling U.S. citizens off to prison without so much as a hint of due process.

Of course, both the world and America have changed in many ways for the better in the past quarter-century. Many, but not all. I have no idea what sort of controlled environment or enhanced security the National Park Service is imposing on the crowds today down at the Mall, but I know I want no part of it. And I'm not at all nostalgic for the 1980s, however much this comes across that way. Sure, I'd like my youth back, but that doesn't mean I'd like to be living in 1983 again.

I merely note, like Joni Mitchell, that the passage of time involves loss as well as gain. Some things, like youth, we cannot help but lose. Whether we lose other things, like the courage to demand free lives and accountable government, is up to us, as is our relationship with the rest of the world. I, for one, would prefer the world to think of us as a people willing to risk a bottle rocket or two with a can of beer in our hands singing along to "Fun, Fun, Fun," than for the nationalistic bombast of the 1812 Overture, especially when you consider how the Battle of Borodino turned out.