Right Wing Nut House

When the government of a free people is flush with almost two trillion dollars of its citizen’s monies, the very smell of all that largess draws the hucksters, the flim flam men, the fakes and phonies in addition to the virtuous to Washington.

The city is awash with cash money. Cash for campaigns. Cash for lobbying. Cash for fat federal contracts. Cash for government consulting. Cash for consulting with businesses doing business with the government. Cash for showing businesses how to get fat federal contracts in the first place. Cash for the native guides who, like the Himalayan Sherpas assisting climbers of Mount Everest, shepherd the bewildered yokel through the maze of federal regulations and the dizzying array of alphabet soup monikered bureaucracies, all manned by self important little people with an agenda and a fiefdom to protect so that their clients can reach Nirvana; the federal teat.

Like some kind of out of control pyramid scheme, the cash moves up the chain from bottom to top with the most lucrative business going to the small cadre of lobbyists who can grab the brass ring - your very own, personal earmark or tax exemption, or legislatively friendly line hastily written in the dead of night into some innocuous bill worth millions of dollars to your company.

Whose keeping track? A few million here. Several hundred thousand there. Since no one sweats the small stuff, the game continues and it adds up somehow to billions coursing through the cracks in the system opened by greed, apathy, and a cynical belief that no one cares because no one is really paying attention.

And the physical manifestation of this rape and sodomy of the taxpayer is on display in the conspicuous consumption of the inhabitants who live, work, play, and spend their money in the surrounding suburbs of Sodom:

The three most prosperous large counties in the United States are in the Washington suburbs, according to census figures released yesterday, which show that the region has the second-highest income and the least poverty of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Rapidly growing Loudoun County has emerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, with its households last year having a median income of more than $98,000. It is followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, with Montgomery County not far behind.

That accumulation of suburban wealth, local economists said, is a side effect of the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, coming after the local technology boom of the 1990s. “When you put that together . . . you have a recipe for heightened prosperity,” said Anirban Basu, an economist at a Baltimore consulting firm.

The result is that the Washington area’s households rank second in income only to those in San Jose, eclipsing such well-heeled places as San Francisco and the bedroom suburbs of New York.

Of course, not all of this is the result of ill gotten or undeserved wealth. In fact, I would hope that the overwhelming portion of it was skimmed legitimately from the government. It’s just that it should be very distressing to anyone who loves liberty and its necessary companion of honest government to stand on a hill and look down on this scene feeling absolute horror and frustration at the place that the American government has come to rest in the early 21st century. Viewed from afar, one feels helpless, almost catatonic when contemplating the enormous effort that goes into devising ever more elaborate and inventive ways to separate the taxpayer’s money from government.

Certainly there are necessary and vital expenditures and businesses that cater to government in a variety of ways and serve the nation honorably in that respect. But then there are the shysters, the gimlet eyed lobbyists like Abramoff who, given enough money, can work miracles with politicians and bureaucrats. Those miracles can take the form of tax breaks geared specifically to your industry or even your individual business; earmarks that crowd legislation with unnecessary expenditures; and even re-arranging a few words or sentences in bills that could spell the difference of millions for a wealthy contributor or golfing buddy.

But the Ambramoffs of Washington are unimportant in the larger scheme of things. It’s the Duke Cunninghams with their reach into the bureaucracies where the real moneychangers operate. The discreet call from a hometown Congressman to the government contracts bureaucrat. Perhaps an invite to lunch or dinner. The shuffling of a few papers. And voila! Not quite illegal. Not entirely unethical. But the deed is done and the constituent is served.

They call it “taking care of the home folks.” What the taxpayers would call it if given the chance is unknown.

I am very happy for the people who live in those three counties around Washington that have now been declared 3 of the wealthiest places to live in the United States. And like good little capitalists, the denizens of those counties have recognized opportunity and grabbed for it. The overwhelming majority of them are blameless, only wanting success and to take care of their families the best way they know how.

But who do you blame? The system? Jesus Christ himself may have thrown up his hands in frustration at doing anything about these defilers of the temple of liberty.

Too much money. Too many compromises with ethics. Too much skirting on the edge of legality. Too many with their hands out and too many with their hands in the cookie jar.

Something has got to change. And the depressing thing is, I don’t even know where to begin.

TO ARMS! TO ARMS! The forces of darkness are gathering to strike a blow against liberty, justice, the American way, and…and…THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!

The Electoral college?

Yes, it’s true. Not content to simply posit conspiracy theories about how Republicans steal elections, liberals have now set their sights on stripping America of one of her oldest and most cherished institutions. Now, gentle reader, before you scratch your head and ask the obvious question of who cares if we give the Electoral College the heave-ho, perhaps a little history lesson is in order. And who better to give it than I, Professor Moran, BFA, MS, and VAH (Very Amateur Historian).

WHAT IS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE AND DO THEY HAVE A FOOTBALL TEAM?

I’ll take the second question first, Mr. Trebek. Not that I’m aware of although I understand they’ve had some pretty wild keggers over the last 217 years. And starting in 1920 when the college went co-ed, it’s rumored that Toga Parties became all the rage.

Notwithstanding such juvenile shenanigans, the Electoral College is a product of one of the more divisive debates that took place during the Constitutional Convention. For a very educational and thorough examination of this history, I recommend you go here since I’ll be dealing with only the bare bones of what the institution is all about.

The College consists of electors, chosen by the states in various ways, that (ideally) reflect the outcome of the popular vote for President in that particular state. The number of electors is what’s important. That number is determined by how many Senators (2) and Congressmen (proportionally awarded based on most recent census) the state has. So Pennsylvania has 21 electoral votes because they have 2 Senators and how many Congressmen? Class? CLASS? WAAAAAKE UUUUP!. Thank you. Nineteen Congressmen is the correct answer.

The kicker is that it’s a winner take all competition. Whoever wins the popular vote gets all the electors from that state.

ISN’T THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE KIND OF ARCHAIC?

Depends what you mean by archaic. Given that liberals have voted against every major weapons system currently in use by the military (an exaggeration, but hey! We don’t call this site the RIGHT WING Nuthouse because we’re impartial!), perhaps they wants us to fight terrorism using bows and arrows…or spears. Do you mean archaic in THAT sense?

The answer is no. And like my sainted father used to say “Old things are best.” Many of the reasons for the electoral college are still valid today. Look at the election of 2000. Al Gore would have been President if he had carried one more state. That would have given him a grand total of 18 states voting Democratic. George Bush would have won 32 states and gotten nothing, nada, zip-i-dee-doo-da. This is exactly what the electoral college was set up to prevent. Al Gore, if he had won Florida, would have captured 8 of the 10 largest states and won the election by appealing mostly to urban and coastal constituencies. George Bush demonstrated broader support in the electoral college appealing to states in the north, south, east, and west. Bush, even though narrowly losing the popular vote, proved himself a much more national candidate.

And there are other issues to consider when thinking of ditching the electoral college:

First, the direct election of presidents would lead to geographically narrower campaigns, for election efforts would be largely urban. In 2000 Al Gore won 677 counties and George Bush 2,434, but Mr. Gore received more total votes. Circumvent the Electoral College and move to a direct national vote, and those 677 largely urban counties would become the focus of presidential campaigns.

Rural states like Maine, with its 740,000 votes in 2004, wouldn’t matter much compared with New York’s 7.4 million or California’s 12.4 million votes. Rural states’ issues wouldn’t matter much either; big-city populations and urban issues would become the focus of presidential campaigns. America would be holding urban elections, and that would change the character of campaigns and presidents.

Recently, California passed a law that would award the state’s 55 electoral votes to the winner of the most popular votes nationally rather than the winner of the state’s individual race for President. This is apparently part of a national movement to marginalize the electoral college and give the larger states (mostly liberal and Democratic) a bigger say in who is President.

To say this would be catastrophic to American democracy would not be overstating the case one bit. Done under the guise of the “one man, one vote” battle cry which is largely responsible for the permanent incumbency found today in the House of Representatives, the so-called “direct election” of the President would radically alter not only the way we choose a President but the presidency itself.

WHAT WOULD BE THE PROBLEM WITH DIRECT ELECTIONS FOR PRESIDENT?

Pete Du Pont sums up a couple of the major arguments:

Second, in any direct national election there would be significant election-fraud concerns. In the 2000 Bush-Gore race, Mr. Gore’s 540,000-vote margin amounted to 3.1 votes in each of the country’s 175,000 precincts. “Finding” three votes per precinct in urban areas is not a difficult thing, or as former presidential scholar and Kennedy advisor Theodore White testified before the Congress in 1970, “There is an almost unprecedented chaos that comes in the system where the change of one or two votes per precinct can switch the national election of the United States.”

[snip]

Third, direct election would lead to a multicandidate, multiparty system instead of the two-party system we have. Many candidates would run on narrow issues: anti-immigration, pro-gun, environment, national security, antiwar, socialist or labor candidates, for they would have a microphone for their issues. Then there would be political power seekers–Al Sharpton or Michael Moore–and Hollywood pols like Barbra Streisand or Warren Beatty. Even Paris Hilton could advance her career through a presidential campaign.

If we were to simply go by the popular vote to decide who’s elected President, several other major alterations would occur that would permanently change the landscape of our political culture.

* Candidates would concentrate on big states in their campaigns. Whoever the party nominees were, they would move to California, set up residence, and try to shake 40 million hands. An exaggeration of course. But a politician who already lived in California - say a Governor or Senator - would have an enormous advantage in any race for the Presidency. If such a candidate could run up a huge majority in California the task of getting 50.1% of the vote would become much easier. This begs the question; should one state have such an enormous say in who gets elected President? The state already supplies fully 20% of the electoral votes necessary to get to the magic number of 270. Can you imagine what a 5 million vote lead would mean coming out of California to a national candidate based on directly electing a President?

* Minorities would become marginalized. If you think candidates ignore the concerns of minorities now, you’ll love direct elections for President. More than ever, Democrats would take the minority vote for granted and Republicans would continue their half-hearted attempts at outreach. the rationale being, why spend time and money preaching to (or begging from)) the converted?

* Small states and rural areas would be slighted in national elections. Would a campaign that never visited Bucktooth PA or Watchoutforthatcroc FL be any fun at all? I doubt it. I think that we’d lose something if Presidential candidates only visited big states and big state TV markets. Somehow, watching a candidate interact with these simple folk gives you a handle on what kind of person they are, hence what kind of leader they’d make.

Finally, there is this to consider:

Finally, direct election would also lead to weaker presidents. There are no run-offs in the Interstate Compact–that would require either a constitutional amendment or the agreement of all 50 states and the District of Columbia–so the highest percentage winner, no matter how small (perhaps 25% or 30% in a six- or eight-candidate field) would become president. Such a winner would not have an Electoral College majority and therefore not be seen as a legitimate president.

So rather that trying to eviscerate the Electoral College, we should be embracing it. It was put in the Constitution to allow states to choose presidents, for we are a republic based on the separation of powers, not a direct democracy. And the Electoral College–just like the Senate–was intended to protect the residents of small states. As James Madison said, the Electoral College included the will of the nation–every congressional district gets an electoral vote–and “the will of the states in their distinct and independent capacities” since every state gets two additional electors.

What Mr. Du Pont doesn’t say and what the proponents of abandoning the Electoral College never tire of pointing out is that the Electoral College was put in place because our Founding Fathers didn’t trust Jefferson’s yeoman farmers any further than they could throw them - literally. They saw us common folk as rabble, a dangerous mob and in great need of guidance by men better suited to the task of governing by virtue of their superior breeding and education. The Electoral College was originally seen as a brake on popular passions and allowed for the wisest men in the country to gather once every four years to pick our national leader.

How the Electoral College has evolved over the years to reflect the will of the people in the various states in Presidential elections is one of the more fascinating aspects in studying the American government. In fact, since the choosing of electors is up to each individual state, the system is a hodge-podge of processes and procedures that functions largely out of respect for tradition:

Here is a list of how the different states have political parties choose who will be their electors. It also shows whether or not the electors’ names appear on the ballot in November. Finally, it indicates which states have passed laws to bind their electors. Not too many do, and even fewer have defined penalties for an unfaithful elector. Yet, of more than 16,000 electors in U.S. history, less than a dozen have ever voted contrary to the wishes of the people who elected them. Don’t you wish we could say the same about our other elected officials?

The evolution of the College from something akin to the College of Cardinals to a body that reflected the democratic will of the people didn’t take long. Electors running in each district usually made it clear who they would vote for President when the College convened. But the federalist impulse behind the invention of the college remains to this day, a demonstration of the recognition that we are indeed a federal republic. And getting rid of the Electoral College would go a long way towards destroying that idea.

WILL WE TOSS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE ANY TIME SOON?

Not as long as the current political party situation remains unchanged. Republicans would be at enormous logistical disadvantage under such a system. Think of it like a war. Republicans have a lot more territory to defend than Democrats and thus, their resources would be stretched much thinner. To get to the magic number of 50.1% of the popular vote, Democrats would be able to expend a lot less energy and money to defend their own turf thus freeing them up to raid Republican strongholds. Republicans would have to fight off Democratic insurgencies in red states while carrying on an expensive battle in blue states to pick off a few voters here and there.

No wonder the idea is popular with liberals. It would maximize the influence of their strategic assets while diminishing the power of most of the people who disagree with them.

But hey! All for a good cause, right?

UPDATE

Good Lt. blogging a the Jawas:

Yes. The Democrats want the dense inner-city populations and their infinitely successful approaches to problems like education, crime and corruption to run the national government without regard to what anybody else outside of the large population centers might think.

Times have changed so much under the long dark night of Bushiburton fascism that the very democracy that was perfectly acceptable a decade ago has collapsed entirely and needs to be replaced with procedures favorable to urban liberal constituencies.

Du Pont puts the issue correctly. Mucking with the electoral college will basically disenfracnchise rural voters. Campaigns will not only ignore them but it is likely that Administrations will also give their concerns short shrift.

DEMOCRATS DISCUSS THE THREAT OF TERRORISM AGAINST THE UNITED STATES

I remember the good old days when liberals would place the War on Terror in quotation marks as if the “war” only existed as a political ploy to elect George Bush and Republicans. In this universe, talk of terrorism against the United States was a gigantic trick, a distraction that was used to establish King George’s kingdom while surreptitiously savaging our civil liberties and readying the concentration camps for occupation by regime opponents.

There was something comfortable about this idiotic construct. After all, by denying there was a “war” in the first place, one could blithely go along secure in the knowledge if they were right, liberals had a hook they could use to reel in gullible voters on election day. And if they were wrong and al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group struck, they would simply point out that Bush once again failed to protect us despite their opposition to every single measure the government has taken to do so.

Of course, the left would be banking on the media to help the American people forget that they demeaned the very idea of a War on Terror in the first place. In this, they would probably be successful given the general apathy and short attention span of most voters. But no matter. For the left, it’s “heads I win, tails you lose” when it comes to national security posturing.

Now for reasons having to do with their failure to elicit the proper outrage by the voters against the President’s anti-terrorism efforts - the foolish American people actually support the President’s trying to protect them - the left has switched gears and have taken a “Don’t worry…Be happy” approach to the threat of sudden death from fanatical jihadists:

Most of all, though, we should recall that what’s scary about, say, al-Qaeda isn’t the number of people it has killed, or even the number of people it can kill — it’s the number of people it would like to kill. Terrorists armed with liquid explosives are a problem on a par with lightning strikes or peanut allergies. Terrorists armed with a nuclear bomb is a legitimate nightmare.

I don’t know about you but after reading that I feel much better. I mean, leave aside the fact that dead is dead no matter how the depressing event happens. I would certainly feel worse if I went to the hereafter as a result of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich than if I met my demise as a passenger on a plane that was blown to smithereens by a liquid bomb planted by some Islamonut. I happen to adore my P & B (Skippy Creamy, of course, with gobs of Concord Grape Jelly) and would be loathe to give it up for anything.

Then again, we don’t ban peanut butter from airplanes. Authorities however, take a rather dim view of liquid bombs being brought on board passenger aircraft, correctly deducing that while peanut butter is sticky and could ruin the upholstery of airplane seats, a liquid bomb might do considerably more damage and should therefore be confiscated before boarding.

According to Mr. Yglesias, however, we should be expending the same amount of resources and attention to terrorism as we do on the pressing problem of overdosing on Skippy. Or perhaps on educating golfers about the fact that the 2 million volts of electricity contained in a bolt of lightening is attracted to an upraised metal golf club the same way that Osama might be attracted to Whitney Houston. If saving lives was the only goal in preventing terrorism, the left could have a point, couldn’t they?

Philip Klein:

Furthermore, terrorism is a different type of threat because in addition to the human carnage it leaves behind, it targets symbols of American power and prosperity (such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon). Were we to have a nonchalant attitude toward terrorism because it mathematically presents a lower fatality risk relative to other dangers, it would not only put us at risk for attacks worse than Sept. 11, but it would demonstrate weakness to current and potential adversaries. As the 9/11 Commission reported, Osama Bin Laden was inspired by the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993. How would our enemies and allies view America today were we to brush aside dastardly attacks on prominent symbols of our financial and military might?

Personally, I prefer nonchalance to all this preparedness crap. That way, no one can accuse you of having an “inordinate fear” of terrorism. I’m sure you’ve heard the latest slings and arrows coming from our liberal friends; conservative “bedwetters” and “chicken littles” who quake in their boots about dying in a terrorist attack - as if there was any chance of that happening. Better to brush off the threat and put on macho airs (Do liberals had anything down there that would give them real courage in the first place?). This impresses females and also has a salutary affect on the left’s facial acne eruptions what with all those hormones being released in response to their primal chest thumping and declarations of fearlessness.

And just in case we haven’t quite gotten the message about terrorism being no more of a bother than allergies and thunderstorms, up steps Ron Bailey in that bastion of reasonableness Reason Magazine:

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that’s a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It’s easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the “tools” they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn’t matter—because it doesn’t really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.

For the record, I stink at math so we’re going to have to take Mr. Bailey’s descent into the statistical wilderness at face value. Besides that, Mr. Bailey actually has a point. There are other things besides terrorism to be afraid of in America - and one of them is Bailey and his ideological ilk.

To say that Mr. Bailey gets first prize for sophistry and jaw dropping idiocy is to let him off too easily. I would first make the request that the next terrorist attack that occurs - and we know that one is coming and will be successful - Bailey, Yglesias, and the entire crew of lefty head cases who are advancing this meme should be forced to pay a visit to the families of the dead and comfort them with their statistics, graphs, and the law of averages. And when queried about why their loved one died, they could always say “Stuff happens.”

I’m sure that will ease their pain and suffering.

But the truly dangerous nature of Mr. Bailey’s (and others) statistical approach to national security lies in its deceptive call for a “return to normalcy.” While I shouldn’t make fun of their obvious sincerity and concern over the government’s aggressive anti-terrorism efforts, the point is that enduring terrorist attacks on a regular basis because we failed do everything possible to prevent them due to the low probability that any one American will die is loony. Not only is it politically unsustainable it is a disheartening effort to cheapen individual human lives. The intellectual gymnastics performed by people who think like this are breathtaking. It turns everything about America that we admire and that others have fought and died for on its head; that the individual is and must be supreme over the state.

For when the state begins to think like Bailey et. al., it becomes easier to treat Americans as an amorphous mass of humanity rather than individuals with rights, privileges, and responsibilities. Their admirable concern for the state’s overreach in its anti-terrorism efforts loses any relevance when one can turn their argument around and say less than .01% of 1% of people’s civil rights have been egregiously violated. Thus, the anti-terror programs that they find objectionable can be justified using their own logic against them.

We are closing in on 5 years at war in this country. We have yet to reach any kind of a national consensus on the liberty vs. security issue, a prerequisite for our survival as a free country and national entity. This argument being made by Bailey, Yglesias, and others is extraordinarily unhelpful in this cause and serves only to undermine our efforts both to protect our selves and our rights.

I kind of liked it better when they didn’t think we were at war at all…

My hometown of Chicago is starting to get quite a reputation for being the laboratory for every loony left idea that’s come down the pike recently. In the late 1980’s, the city followed the lead of Berkley and other enlightened enclaves of the left by making Chicago a nuclear free zone. Presumably, this means that any missiles launched by an enemy at the city will be issued a citation for violating the ordinance if the warheads don’t alter course and blow up some other place, say Madison, Wisconsin.

Then last December, the city became the latest major metropolitan area to ban smoking in restaurants and bars. Now before I hear from the non-smokers who want to take me to task for spreading second hand smoke and thus ruining their health, I would only point to the historic and cultural connections between food, drink, and the nasty weed. Smoking, despite its tarnished reputation, is in fact a social vice, as embedded in the fabric of human interaction as food, alcohol (a more addictive and destructive drug by far) and coffee. And give the food Nazis a few years and they’ll have coffee roasters and growers in their sights.

But a couple of months ago, the City Council decided to give in to the animal rights loonies and ban the sale of Foie Gras in the city’s restaurants. If you’ve never had Foie Gras or don’t know what it is, think liver sausage without the rye bread, dark mustard, and pickle. Made from the livers of geese, its name means “fatty liver” in French. And in order to achieve the best taste and consistency, goose farmers force feed the birds a high fat diet which causes their livers to grow up to 10 times normal size.

Now don’t get me wrong. I feel for the birds just as I feel for the turkeys that are crammed together on turkey farms, never being able to move more than a few feet for their entire lives. And let’s not forget the slaughtering of cattle and pigs, not a pretty sight I’m sure and not very healthy for the animals either.

Animals are bred, raised and slaughtered for the sole purpose of feeding human beings. We grow them as we grow crops like wheat and soy beans. How they meet their end or how they are treated when they are alive should concern us the same way that we should care for any living thing. But animal rights activists look at our food supply in an anthropomorphic way, wishing to ascribe the same moral tenets to food as they do to other humans - sometimes granting the brutes a superior moral frame of reference to people.

This is nuts. It has nothing to do with animals not having “souls” or even the fact that, with very few exceptions, most beasts are not self-aware and thus have a completely different conscious life than humans. It has to do with relative value. A human life - any human life - is more valuable than that of an animal. This self evident construct escapes the animal rights activists whose agitation presupposes no relative difference between man and beast.

But in lobbying for a ban on Foie Gras, the animal rights activists have become quite selective in their pity. In fact, it is pure politics. Foie Gras being an expensive delicacy ostensibly eaten only by the rich, PETA has hit upon an issue that boosts their profile in the activist community, thus assuring an increase in donations while politicians can strut and posture like peacocks in the barnyard, showing off their care and concern for the well being of our feathered friends. And since the delicacy can be passed off as a rich man’s treat, the City Council figured that they could inject a little class warfare into the issue just for good measure.

What they didn’t count on was a revolt by the proletariat against the idea that government should be telling people what moral choices they should or should not be making about what they eat:

Don’t come between foodies and their foie gras.

That was the message sent by Chicago diners who dug into foie gras dishes Monday, on the eve of the city’s ban on foie gras taking effect. High-end restaurants had special foie gras tastings to protest the ban, and even a few down-home sandwich and pizza joints added it to their menus for the occasion.

[snip]

“What’s next?” asked Gadsby, who also hosted an Outlaw Dinner last month at his Noe Restaurant & Bar in Los Angeles, where foie gras will be subject to a statewide ban by 2012. “They’ll outlaw truffles, then lobster, beluga caviar, oysters. There are diners who eat to fill a hunger urge, and there are diners who eat to be dazzled. If you take away the luxury ingredients, how can you dazzle them?”

The Chicago City Council passed the foie gras ban in April, joining California and several European countries that outlawed foie gras alleging animal cruelty.

The “Foie Gras Revolt” has people talking like it’s 1776 rather than 2006:

The ordinance bans only the sale of foie gras, so restaurateurs have speculated that they can get around it by giving away foie gras or serving it at private parties.

Gadsby jokingly wondered whether he could cook with handcuffs on. He said he’d like to hold underground secret foie gras dinners or label foie gras as “duck liver” or “monkfish liver” to sell it.

Meanwhile, various chefs have reported demand for foie gras mushrooming since the ordinance was approved.

Perhaps if we started calling it “Liberty Liver” we could get the anti-Francophiles on our side.

And it’s good to see that there are still some people who take a perfectly practical, all American view of liberty:

Kou Patra and Saurabh Shah, both physicians, attended Gadsby’s dinner on their first day in Chicago after moving from Cleveland. They recently returned from vacationing in France, where they ate foie gras regularly. “I can’t believe we moved to a place where they banned foie gras,” said Patra, 33.

Some Chicagoans are outraged at what they see as a patronizing law, even if they rarely eat foie gras.

“They might as well make a citywide bedtime ordinance,” said bartender David Brown, 29, who feasted on the outlaw ingredients with his wife, Jennifer, at 676. “It’s like banning smoking. If I’m a bartender, I don’t run a health club. We’re adults; we’re allowed to have bad habits.”

This tendency by my hometown City Council to micromanage the behavior and habits of adults is extremely worrisome. It is a harbinger of what may become commonplace in the near future; states and localities taking it upon themselves to shape our diet, eliminating or curtailing foods based not on whether the foodstuffs contain ingredients or additives that are poisonous or will make us sick but rather based on the nebulous and uncertain effect the foods will have on our future health - or, as in the banning of Foie Gras, the effect on animals raised for the sole and exclusive purpose of feeding people.

Travel down that road a bit and you can see the banning of all meat, regardless of how it is grown or managed. This is the goal of PETA of course. And the politicians who voted for this ban and who shamelessly gave in to the activists, should think twice about their surrender the next time they’re enjoying a steak at Harry Carey’s.

In a perfect world, all that would be needed to understand the law would be a heap of common sense and a love of liberty. Indeed, in the early days of the Republic, “the law” was largely considered self evident and that the nuances of a particular statute were interpreted not by highly trained legal minds but rather by judges appointed or elected based on their reputations for fairness and their ability to apply country wisdom to a legal problem.

This was an age when the courts were considered great entertainment, when judges and juries were routinely swayed not by careful legal reasoning but by the powerful oratory and histrionics of up and coming lawyers. Most of our great statesmen in the early decades of our history were lawyers who made their reputations in this manner. When one of these legal superstars was involved in a case, it would draw people from miles around to watch and listen as the barrister would hold forth, delighting the crowd with humor or moving it to tears with pathos.

But for the law to be a civilizing influence, it was perhaps inevitable that these simple, frontier practices would eventually give way to a legal complexity so discombobulating that ordinary people like you and me would be forced to place our trust in writing and interpreting the law into the hands of educated, trained legal high priests whose common sense and wisdom were less important attributes than their ability to obfuscate and confuse the nuances of the law, all the better to bend it to their will.

In short, somewhere along the path to legal enlightenment, cleverness and chicanery replaced intelligence and common sense as prerequisites to being a good lawyer.

I may get an argument from some of my readers who practice law regarding that last statement but I think my point is valid; understanding of the law is now beyond even those who might be considered reasonably intelligent and perceptive. Without the technical expertise in the law vouchsafed those who train for a career as a lawyer, the rest of us are at sea when it comes to the great legal issues of the day.

I say this only in defense of what follows. In a case that involves the very essence of our constitutional system of government, only a relative handful of the 300 million citizens of this country have the specialized knowledge to examine and debate the issues raised in Judge Taylor’s decision on the legality and constitutionality of the NSA terrorist surveillance program.

This won’t stop the rest of us from forming an opinion on the matter. But that opinion will be based largely on what other, more informed sources have instructed us to think. And in the court of public opinion, like the lawyers of our early history, emotionalism and sensationalism seem to sway our opinion more than common sense and reason.

I say this realizing that I am as susceptible to this kind of argumentation as the next fellow. But in recognizing my limitations, I feel confident that I can nevertheless offer up some observations on Judge Taylor’s opinion that are as valid as anyone elses - lawyers included.

I have had reservations about the legality and efficacy of this program from the beginning. I still do. Leaning once again on authority, there are many people whose opinion I value that have said this program is unconstitutional just as there are those I consider equally knowledgeable believing the program both legal and constitutional.

But then there are those - Eugene Volokh and Orrin Kerr to name two - who aren’t sure. The reason sounds plausible; not all of the details (technical or otherwise) about how the program actually works have been made public. The Washington Post brought this out in their editorial yesterday:

The NSA’s program, about which many facts are still undisclosed, exists at the nexus of inherent presidential powers, laws purporting to constrict those powers, the constitutional right of the people to be free from unreasonable surveillance, and a broad congressional authorization to use force against al-Qaeda. That authorization, the administration argues, permits the wiretapping notwithstanding existing federal surveillance law; inherent presidential powers, it suggests, allow it to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance on its own authority. You don’t have to accept either contention to acknowledge that these are complicated, difficult issues. Judge Taylor devotes a scant few pages to dismissing them, without even discussing key precedents.

Readers of this site know that I have taken a rather jaundiced view of the Bush Administration’s stretching of the constitution using the “inherent powers” argument on secret programs of which we know little or next to nothing. It makes me uncomfortable even though I realize the necessity for the secrecy that must be maintained if these surveillance programs are to be effective. I was especially confused by the tortured reasoning used by the Attorney General in citing the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda as a justification for what any objective observer would have to conclude is a broad based and troubling expansion of federal surveillance practices. It didn’t ring true then and it doesn’t now.

Having said that, I find it equally mystifying that so many on the left - including the probable next Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers - have already charged, tried, and convicted the President for engaging in surveillance practices whose exact outlines we can only guess at and with absolutely no evidence that the program has been used injudiciously. From what we know about oversight, it has not only been reviewed periodically by the Justice Department (causing alterations in the program to satisfy some of the attorneys there) but the NSA has apparently put strict procedures in place that are designed to prevent the kind of abuse so worrisome to all of us.

Is it enough? Who knows. Certainly not Lamchop and his hysterically unbalanced, unyielding, absolutist opposition to anything this President has done to decrease the likelihood of another 9/11. This goes for the rest of the cockamamie left whose hatred for Bush, the Republicans, and conservatives along with a lusting for power that would be unseemly in another, less forgiving age has poisoned their reason and clouded their judgement to the point that they question the very basis for the increased surveillance; that we are at war with fanatical jihadists.

In this context, it is easy for them to dismiss anything and everything the government does to protect us. Indeed, in their feverish desire to kill the Bush presidency, they have undermined the war effort, giving tremendous aid and comfort to people who want to kill us all. Whether this is deliberate or not is beside the point. It is the logical outgrowth of their hatred.

Does this mean the legality and constitutionality of these programs shouldn’t be questioned? Of course not. All Americans should welcome a discussion between opposing viewpoints on these critical issues. But having a civil, reasoned debate about the lines that must be drawn between expansive civil liberties and terrorist surveillance as the Washington Post is calling for is falling upon deaf ears on the left. Instead, hysteria, paranoia, and a shameless emotional exhibitionism rules the day.

I have said repeatedly that in order to win the War on Terror, we must find a way to engage the left in a dialogue that will bring both sides closer together so that some kind of unity of purpose can be achieved. Simply put, we will lose this war if we remain divided as we are. And as I’ve speculated recently, perhaps it will take a liberal President to make that happen. The pain and angst demonstrated by the Democratic left in being out of power is so profound as to border on psychosis. Hence, they will only listen to one of their own when he/she is sitting in the big chair and faces the awesome responsibilities of the office as well as the frightening truth about the nature of our enemies.

Perhaps then we won’t be seeing the “War on Terror” in quotation marks quite as often and the constant questioning of motives when some horrific plot is uncovered as it was last week in Great Britain. The breathtakingly stupid response of many on the left in this country to that near miss (they found “martyr videos” from some of the suspects which would indicate what a very near thing this plot was to unfolding) shows a continuing lack of seriousness on the part of liberals toward our safety and a sublime ignorance of the nature of our enemies.

Judge Taylor’s decision on the legality of the NSA terrorist surveillance program read more like a press release from a candidate for public office than a legal opinion. This seems to be an almost universal take on Taylor’s writings. Even Lambchop agrees:

Yes, sure, it is true that the judicial opinion issued yesterday is very weak, in places borderline incoherent, in its reasoning with regard to some issues. Anyone can see that. Most everyone who commented on it, including me, pointed that out. But that does not undermine in any way the fact that this President has been systematically breaking the law for no reason other than he thinks that he can, and that judge’s rejection of that belief is quite eloquent and powerful. Most importantly of all, it is indisputably correct.

How we get from “incoherent” to “eloquent” in the space of two sentences only someone with the brains of a sock puppet can say. But it isn’t just the weak arguments and torturous language that jump out at one when reading the decision. It is the same familiar language used by leftist netnuts to describe the Bush Presidency that makes Taylor’s reasoning - or lack thereof - so eerie. It actually made me giggle a little when I realized that the pejoratives she hurled against the President had actually appeared on Lamchop’s website on numerous occasions. Chiding the President for acting like a “king,” is straight from Lamchop’s (and most of the left’s) list of Bush bashing ad hominems.

Is Taylor’s decision, despite its problems, the right one? It doesn’t appear to me that she knows any more about the way that the NSA program works than I do. Perhaps she was privy to information not available to the general public. If so, she doesn’t make that clear. And if she has no more knowledge of how the program works than the rest of us, how can her decision have any merit? It is one thing for sock puppets and other bloggers to state flatly that the program is illegal and unconstitutional. They are, after all, internet pundits and their opinions do not have the force of law. But when a federal judge, armed with exactly the same information that I or Lambchop has, writes an opinion that is in its surety a very serious indictment of lawbreaking by a sitting President, one can legitimately question other motivations that moved Taylor to come down on the side of the issue that she did.

In short, the revelations about Taylor’s past made by many righty bloggers are perfectly legitimate points of discussion considering all the factors at work in her issuing this opinion. And in that respect, Judge Taylor appears small minded, partisan, and eager for publicity - all points that call into question her ultimate judgement and the impartiality of her thinking that led to the decision in the first place.

No, I’m not a lawyer. But I’m not brain dead either. Nor am I insensible to the role that politics plays in our judiciary. But all things considered, Judge Taylor’s headline grabbing decision on the legality of the NSA terrorist surveillance program is not helpful to the kind of ongoing debate we must have on the nature and extent of civil liberties in war time. Bush may not be king. But he is Commander in Chief. And in that role, the President must be given expanded powers when America’s citizens are at risk. Does this mean that the NSA program is legitimate and legal?

I just don’t know. I guess it depends ultimately on whether or not you trust the President not to abuse the enormous power he has, even without this particular program. I wish it weren’t so. I wish everything could be revealed, all decisions about how to best to protect ourselves made in the light of day, all logic and reasoning used to encroach upon our civil liberties made public. But by the ultimate necessity of winning the war, such will not be the case.

The rationalists in this country recognize this. The hysterics do not. And therein may lie the difference between victory and death.

UPDATE

Hugh Hewitt:

Not a single Democrat of any stature or visibility has stepped forward to criticize much less reject the opinion from Judge Anna Diggs Taylor declaring NSA surveillance of our enemies contacting their operatives inside our country to be unconstitutional. Their collective silence has grown more and more revealing as the chorus of legal commentary mocking the absurd opinion has grown throughout the day.

The Democrats cannot be seen to say anything against the opinion because of Kosputin and his minions. The party of Lamont is unhinged, and Judge Taylor’s opinion is now a new icon of the movement.

In fact, the Dems have been mostly silent on this program since it was revealed by the NY Times last December. Given the fact that the President, under the requirement of law, notified the intelligence committees of Congress of this program and that even Dems on those committees have mostly kept their mouths shut, one wonders that if those who know more about this program than Judge Taylor or Lambchop aren’t saying it’s illegal and unconstitutional, how we do we square this with Taylor’s decision?

Strange indeed.

In the midst of a war where the forces of civilization have just suffered their first major defeat, it is quite natural to start pointing fingers and assigning blame. In Israel, they are already sharpening the long knives as MK’s are making room on their lodge poles for the scalps of several politicians and generals who, according to most observers, allowed Hizbullah this rather impressive strategic victory.

While the United States was not engaged militarily in this debacle, we nevertheless failed utterly in the only place where we really could have done some good for Israel; at the United Nations. The passage of Resolution 1701, mandating a cease fire in Lebanon, is already turning into our very own diplomatic nightmare. And the blame for this must rest squarely on the shoulders of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

Perhaps anticipating the heavy criticism that will be coming her way once it is apparent that Hizbullah will not cooperate in implementing the cease fire accord and that Israel will be constrained from taking any action to make them, Rice penned a dishonest Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post where she not only tries to spin her way out of trouble but also misstates several key parts of the cease fire agreement and downplays or glosses over others that she knows will never be implemented. And if she actually believes some of the tripe she has written, perhaps that is reason enough, along with the fact that she may have lost the confidence of the President, for her to resign.

Rice lists 3 components of the cease fire that she claims will be decisive in altering the “status quo” on the Lebanese-Israeli Border:

First, it puts in place a full cessation of hostilities. We also insisted on the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah must immediately cease its attacks on Israel, and Israel must halt its offensive military operations in Lebanon, while reserving the right of any sovereign state to defend itself. This agreement went into effect on Monday, after the Israeli and Lebanese cabinets agreed to its conditions.

The United States may have “insisted on the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers” but we didn’t get it. That is an issue to be determined later and will almost certainly involve a prisoner exchange, not “unconditional release.” of the IDF men. In fact, we insisted on many things in this resolution including an international force not part of UNIFIL operating under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter which would have allowed this independent force to shoot if Hizbullah would not comply with the terms of the cease fire. What we got was a tepid augmentation of the UNIFIL force operating under Chapter 6 strictures which are much more defensive and will prevent the UN from enforcing the will of the Security Council with regards to Hizbullah’s weapons.

Here’s the second component of the cease fire agreement that the Secretary assures us will alter the status quo on the border:

Second, this resolution will help the democratic government of Lebanon expand its sovereign authority. The international community is imposing an embargo on all weapons heading into Lebanon without the government’s consent. We are also enhancing UNIFIL, the current U.N. force in Lebanon. The new UNIFIL will have a robust mandate, better equipment and as many as 15,000 soldiers — a sevenfold increase from its current strength. Together with this new international force, the Lebanese Armed Forces will deploy to the south of the country to protect the Lebanese people and prevent armed groups such as Hezbollah from destabilizing the area. As this deployment occurs, Israel will withdraw behind the “Blue Line” and a permanent cease-fire will take hold.

Either the Secretary has blinders on or she is being deliberately disingenuous and perhaps dishonest.

How will this resolution expand the authority of the Lebanese government? The resolution says much. It’s high minded words are soothing to the ear. But we are not dealing with people who plan on relinquishing their hard won gains at the conference table that they won on the battlefield.

Hizbullah and their leader Hassan Nasrallah are in the ascendancy in Lebanon. During the conflict, Nasrallah exercised veto power over what cease fire terms were acceptable to Lebanon. The sad fact is that Prime Minister Siniora is not in charge at the moment in Lebanon. With Hizbullah balking at disarming as well as moving their forces from the southern part of the country, Siniora doesn’t dare call a cabinet meeting to discuss the matter lest the Hizbullah ministers walk out and his government fall - a blow that could open the door to any number of nightmare scenarios. Siniora is trapped and no United Nations resolution is going to help him “expand the authority” of the Lebanese government until Hizbullah is disarmed.

And what about that little detail, Madame Secretary? In her Op-Ed, Rice is all over the map regarding the disarmament of Hizbullah. In the segment quoted above, she seems to be saying that the Lebanese army will deploy with the augmented UNIFIL force to “protect the Lebanese people and prevent armed groups such as Hezbollah from destabilizing the area.” So will Hizbullah be armed or disarmed? Here, she seems to be saying that UNIFIL will disarm the terrorists:

Finally, this resolution clearly lays out the political principles to secure a lasting peace: no foreign forces, no weapons and no authority in Lebanon other than that of the sovereign Lebanese government.

Clearly the two goals are incompatible, although she may be talking about a “lasting peace” in the context of further negotiations over other issues such as prisoner exchanges and the Shebaa Farms matter. However, surely she knows Israel’s ironclad position on Hizbullah disarmament; that the IDF will not leave southern Lebanon until the terrorists lay down their weapons. How can she reconcile her rosy resolution scenario with the completely useless Lebanese army being deployed alongside a UN force that has failed for 28 years to fulfill its mandate?

Just today, Secretary Rice said that UNIFIL would not be disarming Hizbullah, that this was a job for the Lebanese government:

“I don’t think there is an expectation that this (U.N.) force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah,” Rice said. “I think it’s a little bit of a misreading about how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of the militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily.”

If Hezbollah resists international demands to disarm, Rice said, “one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are willing to call it, which is a terrorist organization.”

If people are not going to call Hizbullah a terrorist organization after the thugs launched almost 4,000 rockets and missiles into Israeli towns and cities in order to kill as many civilians as possible then nothing on earth they do will change the laggard’s minds.

It is this kind of disconnect from reality that makes me question the Secretary’s fitness to remain in office. For there is much more in the Washington Post Op-Ed that calls into question Ms. Rice’s grasp of the situation as well as her honesty.

Her belief that the Lebanese army will be effective in doing anything at all is belied by this assessment from Janes:

Yet as things stand the Lebanese Army, which has operated primarily as an internal security force since the 1975-90 civil war, is incapable of undertaking any peacekeeping mission unless Hizbullah is completely disarmed.

It has been starved of funds for years because of Lebanon’s economic woes, it is poorly equipped and does not have the combat experience or motivation of Hizbullah’s battle-hardened Shi’ite fighters.

More troublesome is the composition of the army’s 11 mechanised brigades and half-dozen special forces formations along sectarian lines between Christians and Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims.

The Lebanese army has been a barracks army for 20 years. Calling them an “army” doesn’t make them so. And if this is the bunch that is being counted on to help disarm Hizbullah - something that Nasrallah has insisted isn’t going to happen voluntarily - then the world and Resolution 1701 are in deep trouble.

And what of this mythical arms embargo? As I write this, Iran and Syria are busy resupplying their client in Lebanon with no thought of complying with the resolution’s mandate that only the government of Lebanon be the recipient of any arms transactions. Why should Iran and Syria comply? Who is going to stop them?

Perhaps the augmented UNIFIL force will be able to help - if they ever get there:

A United Nations international force is expected to land in Lebanon within two weeks, but analysts said yesterday that U.N. troops will be unable to disarm Hezbollah against its will.

“We would like to see 3,000 to 3,500 troops within 10 days to two weeks,” Hedi Annabi, assistant secretary-general for U.N. peacekeeping operations, told reporters in New York.

“That would be ideal to help consolidate the cessation of hostilities and start the process of withdrawal and deployment of the Lebanese forces,” Mr. Annabi said.

[snip]

Mr. Annan has been working the phones since Saturday to get world leaders to commit to creating a robust international force, but there have been no formal commitments, Mr. Dujarric said.

C. David Welch, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said the U.S. would send a senior interagency team to the United Nations today and tomorrow to help shape the enhanced UNIFIL force.

The United Nations, he said, “is on a fast track to try and supplement and enhance” the force in Lebanon. “They are meeting every day in preparation for that.”

The current UNIFIL force has troops from China, France, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Ukraine. Mr. Welch said other countries, including Turkey, might participate in the enhanced force.

There is no doubt that Secretary Rice is sincere in her belief that she got the best possible deal for the United States and Israel at the UN. And despite her obvious spinning and outright dishonesty in putting the best face on the outcome, the fact is that Resolution 1701 - recognizing as it does a terrorist group as a legitimate combatant in a war with Israel - is an unmitigated disaster for the United States and almost as big a blow to the cause of freedom and democracy as Israel’s disaster on the battlefield.

Pretty strong stuff, I know. But if one were to examine the world prior to the Israeli-Islamist War and the world afterwards, several hugely significant differences have emerged that have further endangered Israel, complicated our efforts to deny Iran the nuclear weapons it wants so badly, pushed our allies in the Middle East closer to the Iranians, and perhaps fatally weakened the Lebanese government.

In Rice’s defense, it is not entirely her fault. Some of the blame must accrue to the President for not infusing a sense of urgency on Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert in the early days of the war against Hizbullah. Bush refused to call Olmert for the first few weeks of the military campaign - a campaign that unfolded with painful slowness and puzzling hesitancy on the part of the IDF. While Bush’s reticence with Olmert was rightfully interpreted as signalling a “green light” for Israel to carry out a wide ranging war against Hizbullah, once it became clear that Olmert wasn’t moving with boldness and speed, perhaps a call from the President would have alerted Olmert to the fact that his “green light” could turn amber or even red in the very near future unless he got a move on.

Finally, it is very possible that Rice has lost the confidence of the President. This piece that appeared in Insight Magazine is extraordinary for the candor of the Secretary’s people in describing how the President allowed Rice to be undermined by the Cheney faction in the White House during the war:

The disagreement between Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice is over the ramifications of U.S. support for Israel’s continued offensive against Lebanon. The sources said Mr. Bush believes that Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah would encourage Iranian adventurism in neighboring Iraq. Ms. Rice has argued that the United States would be isolated both in the Middle East and Europe at a time when the administration seeks to build a consensus against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Instead, Ms. Rice believes the United States should engage Iran and Syria to pressure Hezbollah to end the war with Israel. Ms. Rice has argued that such an effort would result in a U.S. dialogue with Damascus and Tehran on Middle East stability.

[snip]

The sources said Mr. Bush’s position has been supported by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to a lesser extent National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. They have urged the president to hold off international pressure and give Israel more time to cause strategic damage to Hezbollah as well as Iranian and Syrian interests in Lebanon.

Secretary Rice bears most of the responsibility for agreeing to a UN cease fire resolution with little prospect that it will do anything that it says it will. All it has done is prevented Israel from continuing an offensive that was just starting to make rapid progress in inflicting the kind of damage on Hizbullah that would have made Nasrallah’s claims of “victory” ring hollow. For this reason, her continued usefulness to the President should be called into question.

UPDATE: MORE “FIG LEAF DIPLOMACY”

Via the Washington Times, AP is reporting that the Lebanese cabinet has reached an agreement with Hizbullah to deploy the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon as long as Hizbullah keeps its weapons out of sight:

The government ordered the army, which has been assembling north of the river, to “insure respect” for the Blue Line, the U.N.-demarcated border between Lebanon and Israel, and “apply the existing laws with regard to any weapons outside the authority of the Lebanese state.”

That provision does not require Hezbollah to give up its arms, but rather directs them to keep them off the streets. “There will be no authority or weapons other than those of the state,” said Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said.

Hezbollah’s top official in south Lebanon said the group welcomed the Lebanese army’s deployment even as he hinted that the Shiite guerrillas would not disarm in the region or withdraw but rather melt into the local population and hide their weapons.

“Just like in the past, Hezbollah had no visible military presence and there will not be any visible presence now,” Sheik Nabil Kaouk told reporters Wednesday in the southern port city of Tyre.

I would wager that the UN will stipulate that Lebanon is in compliance with Resolution 1701 despite this cynical and transparent attempt by Hizbullah to circumvent its mandate and then dare the Israelis to break the cease fire.

This is no surprise. It was predicted by most opponents of the Resolution before it was even voted on. We should be ashamed of ourselves for signing on to this treacherous bit of UN lunacy. Before the truly evil thugs of the world, the United Nations is worse than useless; it becomes complicit with the evil in order to satisfy its own narrow minded and cynical membership who crave the appellation “peacemaker” when in fact they become little better than gravediggers.

This next round is on the UN.

UPDATE II

Bryan at Hot Air links a rather over done piece from the New York Post equating the cease fire with Munich but he’s nevertheless spot on with this assessment:

The Syrians and Iranians think they have hit upon a strategy to destroy Israel: Attack it with standoff weapons like Katyushas, goading it into fighting a ground war that frightens the world into halting Israel’s defensive actions. The end game is that Israel can’t defend its borders, it becomes demoralized and then the Arabs and Iranians move in for the kill. In response to the standoff attacks, Israel has the choice of non-response, weak response or brutal response–there’s no way to uproot an entrenched army of any size without using some very nasty tactics and weapons. I’m not talking nukes or anything like that–just weapons that make for bad TV. Which gets us back to underestimating the weakness of the left.

And you shouldn’t underestimate the ambitions of tyrants. You’d think we would have learned that lesson by now.

Indeed.

There are so many “plans” to stop the violence in the Israeli-Islamist War that I thought I’d lay them out in one post so that you can see how hard it is going to be to achieve a halt anytime soon.

The major players at the UN - France vs. Britain and the US - and the Middle East - US/Israel vs. Lebanon/Hizbullah - all have their own ideas on how to stop the war. And the differences are not insignificant, not by any means. Let’s look at the US-Israeli positions first.

US/ISRAEL

1. No “cease fire” (an important word choice) until an international force is “in place.”

2. International force would occupy a buffer zone between Israel and Lebanon (size to be determined)

3. International force must have rules of engagement that allow it to shoot back in order to keep Hizbullah from re-occupying the south.

4. Hizbullah must be disarmed - either by the Lebanese themselves or by the International force.

5. Immediate release of Israeli prisoners.

6. Lebanese Army will take over from the International force once they are trained and deployed.

7. Lebanese government will have sovereignty over all of Lebanon.

Now here’s the Lebanese government/Hizbullah formulation:

LEBANON/HIZBULLAH

1. Immediate cease fire along with an immediate withdrawal of IDF forces.

2. No international force - only an augment to the UNIFIL force already there.

3. No buffer zone and Hizbullah gets to re-occupy positions in the south.

4. Lebanese government will disarm Hizbullah following discussions carried out in the context of the National Dialogue.

5. Release of all Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails in return for the two captured IDF soldiers.

6. Resolution of the Shebaa Farms issue with the UN turning over the tiny slice of land to Lebanon.

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah (who is temporarily calling the negotiating shots) has made it clear that any international force not connected to UNIFIL will be considered invaders. And the Israelis have agreed to release 3 Lebanese prisoners in exchange for their two captured soldiers.

Now, what’s going on at the UN?

UNITED NATIONS

Roughly speaking, France has taken the Lebanese positions while Condi Rice has modified the American position marginally in order to come a little closer to what the French are asking:

Efforts are under way at the United Nations to set up a mechanism that would facilitate “direct or indirect” Israeli-Lebanese discussions, senior Israeli diplomatic officials said Thursday.

According to the officials, under this proposal “everything would be discussed: a cease-fire, the Shaba Farms issue, the prisoner exchange, and deployment of the multinational force.”

According to UN and American officials, an arrangement of this kind, which would include a pair of Security Council resolutions, is now within reach.

Here is the French proposal:

FRANCE

1. Immediate cease fire.

2. No discussion of other issues until the guns stop.

3. All “political issues” like the disarming of Hizbullah and deployment of the Lebanese army to be worked out before France or any international troops occupy the buffer zone.

4. Weak rules of engagement for the international force.

How close can Condi come to that position? Here’s what she and the Brits have come up with:

The solution to these divergent positions has come in the form of two resolutions. The first, to be voted on in the coming days, will establish a “cessation of hostilities” and articulate a political framework for the future.

Israeli officials said that this document would likely be similar to a statement issued by the G-8 soon after the crisis began last moth, and include a call to release the captive Israeli soldiers, for a cessation of hostilities, and for beefing up the Lebanese army.

The first resolution would be window dressing. It would call for “a cessation of hostilities” rather than a “cease fire.” In the cuckoo land of diplomacy, this makes everyone happy. It is immediate which pleases the French but it doesn’t use the words “cease fire” which pleases us and the Israelis.

We also want to append a call for sanctions against any nation that resupply’s Hizbullah. France is frowning on that because they want to engage the Syrians to help rein in Hizbullah. But as we’ve seen with sanctions elsewhere, there are ways around them so in the end, France will probably give in.

This resolution will be trumpeted by the media but will mean little. It is the second resolution that will have teeth (if any) and that will tell the tale as to whether or not any cease fire will mean a pause of a couple of weeks or a genuine solution:

The second resolution, which would follow after an as yet determined amount of time, would set the composition and mandate of a multinational force and the contours of a new buffer zone in southern Lebanon. It would also assert the authority of the Lebanese government and propose help to the Lebanese Army to gain control of its borders.

Israel’s position is that the IDF first needs to clear the buffer zone, one currently being carved out by the IDF, in order for the multinational force to move in. Israel wants this force to be “an international army,” not an observer force like UNIFIL, but rather one strong enough that it can impose its will.

The real sticking point here is what happens to the buffer zone in the meantime? France wants Israel to withdraw and the UNIFIL force occupy the buffer zone until the International force can be constituted. Israel and the US naturally are balking at that idea.

The solution may involve a token international “rapid response” force that could be flown in immediately and buttress UNIFIL’s efforts. Israel quite naturally is very wary of this and may put the kibosh on the entire idea - unless Washington insists:

There are two possibilities for solving this remaining problem. The IDF could maintain its position until the arrival of an international force, a position clearly favored by the Israeli government and opposed by Lebanon, among other countries. The other option is for the current UNIFIL mission to be beefed up. Its troops could then be integrated into whatever larger, more robust force arrives. Israel, considering UNIFIL to be weak, opposes this solution.

This remains a major point of contention between the American and French. As French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told France-Inter radio on Thursday, “We are working well with the Americans, working night and day. We are advancing toward a common resolution, but we’re not yet there. There is still work to do.”

That actually sounds more hopeful than is realistic. After spilling all that blood (and having Washington stick its neck out in support of Israel’s offensive) it is doubtful that we will compromise when it comes to Israeli forces in the buffer zone leaving until a sizable force of International soldiers who can enforce their will by having “robust” rules of engagement is in place. This will probably be a sticking point that takes another 10 days to 2 weeks to resolve.

In the meantime, here’s my speculation.

The first resolution calling for a “cessation of hostilities” will pass easily. Israel will probably stop bombing outside the buffer zone in Lebanon (or perhaps stop bombing all together). This will put pressure on Nasrallah to make good on his promise to stop launching rockets into northern Israel. It will not stop the IDF from carrying out “mop-up” operations in whatever buffer zone they can carve out between now and the passage of that first resolution.

The Security Council will have a devil of a time coming to an agreement on the second resolution. In the end, Hizbullah will probably be kicked out of southern Lebanon but still get to keep their guns. The Lebanese government will be just as weak as it was before the conflict started but will perhaps have assistance from the international community in training its army (which I predict will include Hizbullah as an independent command thus making them part of the army rather than a militia that needs to be disarmed) and rebuilding its devastated infrastructure.

And then both sides will lick their wounds, re-arm, and get ready for the next go around.

Ah Chicago! That toddling town!

As in “infantile:”

After months of fevered lobbying and bitter debate, the Chicago City Council passed a groundbreaking ordinance yesterday requiring “big box” stores, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, to pay a minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2010, along with at least $3 an hour worth of benefits.

The ordinance, imposing the requirement on stores that occupy more than 90,000 square feet and are part of companies grossing more than $1 billion annually, would be the first in the country to single out large retailers for wage rules.

What in the wide, wide, world of sports could my hometown City Council be thinking of? When I wrote about this issue a couple of months ago, Wal-Mart was undecided about whether or not it would go through with its plans to open several more stores within the city limits, thus creating thousands of new jobs for Chicagoans - a city with an announced unemployment rate of 6.1% but with tens of thousands more not receiving benefits and thus, not counted.

Well, Wal-Mart has made up its mind:

In an interview at Wal-Mart’s Chicago office last week, Lewis said if the city council approved the bill, Wal-Mart would “put more time and effort in the suburbs,” in particular focusing on those close to the city in order to draw shoppers across city lines.

“It would stand to reason that we would ring Chicago with Supercenters,” Lewis said.

Late Wednesday in a written statement issued after the Chicago vote, Lewis added, “Our preference is to serve the people of Chicago in their communities and we will do what we can to keep up with significant consumer demand from city residents.” The official statement didn’t address whether Wal-Mart would carry through with threats to avoid opening stores within the city limits.

And to that, I’ll add a great big “duh.”

The backers of this measure are made up of the usual suspects; big labor, social activists groups like ACORN, and others who have what amounts to a kindergarteners understanding of economics:

“At the heart of this ordinance is equality and fairness,” Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon said in a statement. “Today’s vote sends a message that our elected officials and community members alike are not interested in the creation of low-paying jobs that fail to provide a living wage or adequate health-care benefits for working families.

“The choice between no job and a low-paying job is a choice between bad and worse,” Gannon said.

Mr. Gannon, sitting in his plush office in the Prudential Building downtown, obviously hasn’t talked to very many poor, unemployed people recently. If he had, he would know that his last statement about the choice between “no job and a low-paying job” is a crock of unadulterated crap. It also reveals a stupidity that is beyond belief. Better, Mr. Gannon supposes, that we just keep the unemployed on the dole rather than give them the hope and dignity that a job - any job - can give.

In addition, most of the jobs available at these “big box” retail stores are entry level jobs offered to those with few if any job skills. In the suburbs, these include teenagers, young dropouts, and college graduates who majored in philosophy or comparative lit.

In the city - especially this city with its dysfunctional public schools and blighted neighborhoods - it includes most of the unemployed as well as those who are unemployable. The measure passed by the Council has undermined the very nature of the “entry level” job opportunity for these people. The profit margin of retail stores is low to begin with. One of the only ways to hold down costs and make the store profitable is to keep entry level wages low since these positions suffer from the most turnover.

And the reason for that turnover is not necessarily low wages and benefits. It has much more to do with the failure of the employee to demonstrate even minimal job skills by being constantly late or not showing up for work at all as well as poor job performance. A retailer like Wal Mart will have a turnover of up to 60% after 90 days for these reasons alone. This doesn’t include things like employee theft, leaving for another job, or illness. There’s also the fact that the entry level employee has to be trained at a cost in productivity and time which adds considerably to the cost of a new hire.

The difference between $7.50 and $10.00 per hour is insignificant. Employees who stay on in entry level positions (and thus become eligible for regular raises in salary as well as benefits) overwhelmingly cite how they are treated by superiors as well as their enjoyment in working with people they get along with as reasons for staying on. Salary has little to do with a new hire sticking it out long enough to start earning a decent wage.

Also not addressed is that the scale has gone up for managers as well. In short, the entire salary structure for the store has been skewed. Does the store then raise the prices of its items to offset the rise in salaries? Not if it wants to stay in business very long. There are plenty of non-big box stores not subject to the whims of a bunch of economic ignoramuses sitting on the City Council who will be able to sell exactly the same products at a lower price.

Just how ignorant are the Council members who voted for this measure?

But some of the aldermen who voted in favor asserted that big retail firms, despite threats otherwise, will continue to locate in Chicago because of the growth that it offers and its fertile market.

“There is a buck to be made, a lot of bucks,” asserted Ald. Joe Moore (49th), the ordinance’s sponsor. “If they are to continue to remain profitable, they must expand.

Huh? You bet they’ll expand. They’ll expand right out of the city limits and into the near suburbs where they’re not treated like some factory manager in the old Soviet Union forced to run his plant according to what a bunch of idiots in the Politburo thought was proper.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the perplexed and bewildered President of the local retail association:

As union leaders and other proponents claimed victory, the Illinois Retail Merchants Association was poised to go to court, if necessary, to seek to have the measure declared unconstitutional.

“I’m not as disappointed as the thousands of job seekers who would have had an opportunity for employment,” said David Vite, the association’s president. “There are, as it stands, thousands of jobs that are going to be lost.”

And the Chamber of Commerce weighs in:

Gerald Roper, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, put it in more dire terms.

“I think that the aldermen who voted in support of this helped put the sign up, really big, that development in Chicago is dead,” he said. “There is no sense of coming to this city because there is no predictability … And it is a sad day.”

Indeed. And the Chamber is ready to play a little hardball:

We are going to take a look at those aldermen who have decided they don’t want development in their particular wards, and we will make sure when we bring in retailers and other companies we go to the wards that have supported development,” Roper said. Two of the council members in good standing with the chamber because of their opposition to the measure are Ald. Isaac Carothers (29th) and Ald. Emma Mitts (37th), who represent impoverished wards on the West Side.

Is it just me or do the celebrations of the proponents of this measure ring hollow when Aldermen representing two of the poorest neighborhoods in the city begged their fellows not to pass this measure?

So much for “equality and fairness.”

UPDATE

I’m starting to feel picked on by the state. Every move I make is watched. Every conversation I have is taped. Every time I go to the bathroom, I feel the omnipresent and watchful eyes of the government making sure I flush and wash my hands.

Or…I’m a nut!

Almost 5 years after 9/11, the Israeli-Islamist War has revealed the shocking fact that the CIA is still getting “surprised” by events in a part of the world where the life and death of the United States can be effectively decided:

The power and sophistication of the missile and rocket arsenal that Hezbollah has used in recent days has caught the United States and Israel off guard, and officials in both countries are just now learning the extent to which the militant group has succeeded in getting weapons from Iran and Syria.

While the Bush administration has stated that cracking down on weapons proliferation is one of its top priorities, the arming of Hezbollah shows the blind spots of American and other Western intelligence services in assessing the threat, officials from across those governments said.

American and Israeli officials said the successful attack last Friday on an Israeli naval vessel was the strongest evidence to date of direct support by Iran to Hezbollah. The attack was carried out with a sophisticated antiship cruise missile, the C-802, an Iranian-made variant of the Chinese Silkworm, an American intelligence official said.

At the same time, American and Israeli officials cautioned that they had found no evidence that Iranian operatives working in Lebanon launched the antiship missile themselves.

But neither Jerusalem nor Washington had any idea that Hezbollah had such a missile in its arsenal, the officials said, adding that the Israeli ship had not even activated its missile defense system because intelligence assessments had not identified a threat from such a radar-guided cruise missile.

The list of “surprises” handed to the CIA just since the end of the Cold War is astonishing. Pierre Legrand:

Man I tell you I was shocked, shocked I tell you when I read that our intelligence agencies were caught “off guard” by the sophistication of the missiles being fired into Israel. After all they have had such a sterling record of prognostication these last few years, being caught “off guard” by India’s test of a Nuclear weapon, being caught off “guard by Pakistans test of the same, etc…guess super sleuth Joe Wilson was busy.

With people like Valerie Plame working for them I would be surprised if the agency could predict which part of the horizon the sun would rise on. Ooh sorry I “outed” a supersecret agent…”outed” hehe…love that word makes me feel so like an insider. We need to “out” a few hundred/thousand more incompetents in the CIA before we can hope to get our money’s worth.

Since 9/11, the CIA has been so busy leaking to cover its bureaucratic ass for the massive number of mistakes they’ve made and playing partisan politics against an Administration whose policies and people it despises, that it has failed in its primary duty of giving our policy makers a heads up about the kinds of threats posed by our enemies. Suppose for the sake of argument (and I do not support this supposition) that a situation arose where our navy would have to engage in combat with Hizballah. While I don’t think any of our ship captains would make the same mistake as the Israeli skipper who sailed into a war zone with a de-activated missile defense system, not knowing the offensive capabilities of the enemy could still lead to big trouble. And the blithe manner that it appears the CIA approaches analyzing these capabilities calls into question the competence of the career bureaucrats who are running the various desks and departments at the agency.

Consider that the CIA National Intelligence Estimate (leaked last summer) estimated that Iran was at least a decade away from being able to build a nuclear weapon. This is the estimate from a group who has been wrong about every nation that has gone nuclear since the 1960’s when they were surprised by the Chinese bomb in 1964. They were surprised when India first exploded a nuke in 1974. They were surprised when Pakistan detonated their own nuclear device in 1998. They have been surprised, astonished, puzzled, perplexed, ignorant, and clueless about America’s enemies for decades.

Well, it doesn’t surprise me that they’re clueless about Hizballah. And their confident assertion that no Iranians helped Hizballah with launching the anti-ship missile doesn’t make me feel any better. Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been reported in the Bekaa Valley for years, facilitating Iranian aid and helping to train Hizballah terrorists. How they can make such a confident assertion when they missed the overall picture of Hizballah weaponry and capabilities is beyond me.

The agency is still dysfunctional 5 years after the towers fell. Somebody somewhere at some point has to change the “corporate culture” at the CIA or we will wake up one morning and all of us will be “surprised” as we were that horrible September day.

UPDATE

The Commissar has renditioned me to Bulgaria. My only complaint is that they’re still not giving me any sour cream with my borscht.

One fascinating aspect of the controversy over the terrorist bank monitoring imbroglio has been the insistence by the press that 1) the terrorists already knew about the program so it wasn’t a secret; and 2) it’s okay to reveal secrets as long is it’s in the cause of “the people’s right to know.”

Does anyone else see something a little strange there? It was okay to reveal a program that all the reporters and editors involved wrote was a “closely held” secret when the story broke but now we’ve decided it wasn’t a secret anyway?

I must confess to becoming dizzy from all the spin being created by the press and the left on this issue. Round and round we go, careening from explanations about what a good thing it is to reveal secrets that, in the opinion of the press, are essential to the preservation of liberty to why it doesn’t matter because the terrorists know everything so its not a secret anyway.

Stop the world I want to get off!

This encomium to the freedom of the press, waxing poetic about the media’s right to publish anything it damn well pleases by Time Magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengler is a real jaw dropper. For sheer brazenness on the issue of press irresponsibility, it has no equal. And its dripping condescension and arrogant assumptions about the American people reveal a man so out of touch, he may as well be writing from another galaxy:

The stories in the New York Times and other newspapers about the government’s highly classified program to monitor bank records have provoked outrage from the White House. President George W. Bush called them “disgraceful” and said the revelations caused “great harm” to America. Vice President Dick Cheney said the press had “made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult.”

I do not know if they are right. What I do know is that Presidents in wartime assert that their constitutional responsibility for national security trumps any issue of civil liberties. Often that has meant trampling on them.

First, I suppose it’s possible one could out a “highly classified program” that everyone knows about, although one would think the very definition of “highly classified” would preclude such a construct.

But note Mr. Spengler’s uncertainty about whether or not the Administration’s criticism is valid. In other words, when in doubt, publish. That seems to sum up all of the gratuitous chest thumping we’ve seen from the likes of Bill Keller and Dean Baquet who, as editors of the New York Times and LA Times respectively made the decision to publish details of this top secret program. And reporter Eric Lichtblau, who stressed how secret the program was in his New York Times article, is now backtracking furiously:

“USA Today”, the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into—outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret.

(HT: Patterico)

The fallacy of that particular piece of illogic is in the details. For instance, Hitler knew full well we were going to invade France in the summer of 1944. But could you imagine the New York Times publishing the fact that the intended target of the invasion was Normandy and then defending its decision by saying that Hitler knew we were coming anyway?

I realize the exaggeration inherent in my example, but the essential truth of it holds. The terrorists may have known in a general way that we were tracking their bank transactions. But given the specificity of what we were doing with Swift contained in the Times article, it is ridiculous to assume that this information wasn’t at least helpful to terrorists and their financial enablers in either confirming their methods were effective in avoiding scrutiny or how vulnerable they truly were to detection.

The former is probably equally as damaging as the latter. And the fact that Stengler doesn’t even acknowledge that possibility is revealing. By taking on the role of Commander in Chief in deciding what information should be shared with the American people, the press in this case proves themselves inept, incapable, and incompetent in evaluating potential damage to our security, reason enough to slap them down particularly hard on this issue.

In fact, Stengler’s only acknowledgement of responsibility is this curious statement:

The government’s assertion that it must be unhindered in protecting our security can camouflage the desire to increase Executive power, while the press’s cry of the public’s right to know can mask a quest for competitive advantage or a hidden animus. Neither the need to protect our security nor the public’s right to know is a blank check. So listen carefully because, after all, you are the judge. It is the people themselves who are the makers of their own government.

What Stengler fails to mention is that if a President oversteps the bounds of the Constitution in his grab for excess executive power, he can be held responsible through impeachment. Making the press accountable for misusing their trust is an entirely different matter.

How do we hold the press responsible? The free market is a useful tool in that if enough people get upset with the newspaper over publishing secrets and cancel their subscriptions, the paper dies an ignoble death. But in reality, the chances of this happening are extremely remote and in fact, would be unprecedented in American history.

This has given the press a kind of immunity that no President or politician enjoys. For this reason, Stengler’s carefully constructed house of cards about the equal responsibility of the press and the executive is, in the end, a chimerical attempt to hide the fact that the press is asking the American people simply to trust it when it comes to revealing secrets, that their motives are pure and their judgement supreme to that of the people’s elected representatives.

If there is another definition of “hubris,” I haven’t seen it.