The Review

He knows who runs the DoD

Photo: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Don't worry, Gray. It'll be a lot clearer pretty soon.

Photo: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

That was then. This is now.

(Review) James Lileks makes a World War II comparison with modern life.

Modern Life: standing in aisle 6 of Walgreens, considering the prices of camcorder tape, noting that the entire tobacco section has been replaced with scented candles, listening to my headphones: the man on the news insisting that America has declared war on Islam, and America will be defeated. LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING! he said, and he proceeded to tell me nothing I didn't know already: American troops are kicking down the doors of mosques in Iraq and using flame-throwers on the exposed soles of the faithful, etc etc. I turned it off and took off the headphones. The modern world: Muzak is preferable to the news. Times like these I do the unfair but instructive WW2 comparison; imagine a fellow standing in the aisle of a drugstore in 1942, with huge cans on his head, a thick cable going to a heavy box strapped around his waist.

Hey, Mac, what’s that?

“It’s a portable radio! It lets me listen to news and opinion wherever I go.”

Huh. Why?

“I wish to stay informed.”

I get it; sure. Good for you. A lotta these jakes and jills here, they wander ‘round like nothin’ changed, like the world’s still nothin’ but toothpaste and movie magazines. So what’s the news? Whaddya hear from the front?

“Oh, nothing from the front. I’m listening to a German-American in Brooklyn insist that the Nazis will defeat us.”

(Pause)

Brother, take them things off. Go listen to a jukebox or somethin’. Leave it alone for a while.

He'd have a good point

The WWII generation was simply different from us, in a truly qualitative way. Because, in 1942, you wouldn't have heard a German American expound on the radio about how the Nazis were gonna whip us.

Unlike us, the WWII generation hadn't come from 50 years of unparalleled economic prosperity, that insulated them from the essential harshness of the real world. Instead, they had a decade of economic depression that left a quarter of the workforce unemployed, and family fortunes reduced to worthlessness.

Their preparation for WWII was hardscrabble penury, midwest drought, and looming fascism across the world. That kind of preparation leaves you fairly clear-eyed and ruthless when the big test comes along.

When Bull Halsey steamed into Pearl Harbor a couple of days after the Japanese attack, his one comment after surveying the wreckage was, "When this war is over, Japanese will be a language spoken only in hell." George Patton's usual prediction to his troops was, "We're gonna go through those Nazi b*st*rds like sh*t through a goose!"

Although he said it without the asterisks.

CBS wasn't carrying interviews with some pompous academic who explained to us carefully that the Japanese attack on Pearl, while regrettable, was an understandable act of rage against our attempts to throttle the legitimate national aspirations of the Japanese people though our economic embargoes. Or that the Germans were attempting to reverse the unfair conditions foisted upon them by the vengeful Western Powers at Versailles.

No, CBS was carrying Ed Murrow, who explained to us that those Nazi SOBs were bombing London, and Bill Shirer, who after spending a nearly a decade in Berlin prior to the war, that those Nazi SOBs were enjoying it.

It was a different world, and our grandparents--the kindly old people who now offer us tea and cookies--were different people. Those people were ready to bear the hardships of rationing and years of separation at home, and the ugly tasks of killing Germans and Japanese abroad until those two countries were reduced to rubble.

We seem not, on the whole, willing to do what needs to be done. Or, rather, willing to do what needs to be done only if we can find a way to do without actually causing offense to anyone.

We've had it a lot easier than our grandparents. But they had a lot more resolve, and a lot less confusion about right and wrong.

Proof that politicians are as dumb as a bag of hammers

(Review) The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that there is a move on Capitol Hill to convert about $20 billion of aid to Iraq into a loan.

Over Bush administration objections, many Democrats and Republicans in Congress want to ease the sticker shock of postwar operations in Iraq by requiring that Iraq repay up to $20 billion in proposed reconstruction aid.

Providing the aid as loans rather than direct grants is expected to ease the bill's passage through the Senate this week, despite lawmakers' persistent questions about specific items in the President's request. The House is expected to act by mid-October.

What slack-jawed morons think this is a good idea?

John McCain has it right:

"Every despot, every extremist, every opponent all over the world will say, 'See, the United States was only there for one reason, and that's the oil,' " Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) said. "That's what they'll say, and there will be some legitimacy to it."

That should be a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Obviously, it isn't.

I suggest you immediately get on the telephone or write a letter--not an email--to your congressman and senator and try to get this nipped in the bud ASAP.

If you don't know who they are, then you should be ashamed of yourself. But you need to go to the House or Senate web sites, find out who your congressman or senator is, and write a polite letter pointing out that this is an extraordinarily unwise idea. It is far more important to our national security to look like we are helping the Iraqis, than to look like we are looking for a nice chunk of cash out of the deal.

I mean, it's bleeding obvious!

(Link via Instapundit, like he needs any more inbound links.)

Arianna quits. Now maybe we can get a minute of freakin' peace, here.

(Review) California's chief attention whore, Arianna Huffington, a woman who 9 years ago believed Newt Gingrich should be president, is now considering dropping out of the recall race in order to help quasi-socialist, mechista Cruz Bustamante in the governor's race.

You know, nobody makes a political turnaround like that in 9 years, especially after reaching their 30s, unless they are a complete dilettante.

You never know

When I look through my referral logs, I always find hundreds of referrals from these odd sites I've never heard of. Usually they're message boards. And they inevitably use one of two pictures from my web site. This:

or this:

No references to my articles, or blog, or political commentary. Just one of these two pictures. The Bush Photo was a standard Reuters picture from a couple of months ago. The meerkat picture is one I took at the San Diego Zoo.

It's just odd what people pick up on.

Oh well, at least they are using the pictures directly from my site instead of stealing them and uploading them on their own.

The parade of failure continues

(Review) Afghanistan is set to unveil its new constitution, which is intended to be a compromise document that allows the new Afghani state to combine its fractious population into a single society.

But after 11 months of work by dozens of constitutional experts and three months of public consultations, in which 150,000 people submitted suggestions, "a balance has been found," an Afghan official involved in the drafting told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The [constitutional] commission sent 460,000 questionnaires out to the public this year and held meetings in villages across the country seeking public input.

No doubt this is a sign of another abject failure for the Bush Administration for failing to impose a carbon copy of the US Constitution on Afghanistan.

Free Speech v. Privacy

(Review) Mona Charen is a bit confused at the state of free speech law in this country.

If you are a stripper in a nightclub, or an aluminum siding salesman phoning Americans at suppertime, your activities are fully protected by the First Amendment. That is the import of last week's decision thwarting the Federal Trade Commission's Do Not Call list. But if you are a political organization like the American Civil Liberties Union or the National Right to Life Committee, you may not run advertisements 60 days before a general election urging Americans to vote for or against any candidate. That is the state of the law at this moment.

So the kind of speech the founders were most keen to protect -- explicit political expression about important public policy matters -- is slapped down, while invasions of privacy are not.

Welcome to Opposite World.

That's what I call a speech

(Review) David Aaronovitch writes the speech that Tony Blair should give to the Labour Party Conference. Very amusing.

The Plame that burns bright in their hearts

(Review) Pejman is all over Mark Kleiman's crowing about the Valerie Plame affair.

I'm not sure what went on vis a vis Plame, or her husband's antipathy toward the Bushies. But Bob Novak's response has been:

Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction.

Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else.

According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives.

Well, if true, that seems to take the wind out of the Left's sails, since it lets the administration off the hook.

But I think it would behoove the White House to get out front on this and ensure that 1) a full determination is made about who, if anyone, did something illegal, and 2) ensure whoever did something illegal is prosecuted.

Right now, the Administration is in danger of dying the death of 1,000 cuts, because of the constant sniping from the Left. Sooner or later the handfuls of mud the Dems are throwing at the president are going to stick, whether their charges are true or not.

The Republicans, quite frankly, are poor players of the game that is now being played by the Democrats. Ted Kennedy charges that the Bush Administration made up the justification for the Iraq war in Texas. Bush responds that Teddy is being uncivil. Democrats respond that Bush's criticism of Kennedy is a new low in cheap shots at such a virtuous Senator. The Administration's response is, well, nothing much.

The Democrats learned something very useful 10 years ago during the last round of the Social Security/Medicare crisis: Always attack. The Democrats essentially won that round because their line was that Republicans wanted to kill old people and starve children. And the only response the Republicans could come up with was "No we don't! Really!"

The Republicans need to learn how to play this game the way Democrats do. Every time Ted Kennedy opens his trap, somebody needs to point out that he could have been president if he'd only learned how to drive. Every time Pat Leahy mouths off about how "extremist" Bush's Judicial picks are, someone needs to point out that Leahy is a damned liar. Democrats are cackling with glee that they shot down the Estrada nomination through what was a campaign of outright lies. And the Bush Administration just takes it.

Well, I'm all for a civil tone in our politics, but if that's the game the Democrats want to play, Then that's the way I'd play it. I spent far too long in the shouting and killing people business to roll over like a weasel and expose my softer parts to those hyenas.

You want to change the tone in Washington, Mr. President? Then start pounding the Democrats like cheap veal for every lie and every inconsistency. Start making them pay the same price they demand of you.

By necessity, that sort of strategy requires that you root out any improper behavior in your own administration in a highly public way, so that it looks like a matter of you redeeming your own honor, rather than a response to sniping from the sidelines.

You can't "change the tone" when your opponents hate you. The only way to prevail in that sort of contest is to give as good as you take until the political price is too high for them to continue the game.

Back in 1984, I went to Air Base Ground Defense (ABGD) school at a miserable place called Camp Bullis, Texas. This 7-week course was the equivalent of the Army's advanced infantry training. The Air Force doesn't have dedicated infantry like the Army does, so the Air Force sends all it's Security Police personnel through ABGD, so that they can become the Air Force's infantry soldiers in wartime.

One of the important things they taught us there is that when you are ambushed, hunkering down to take cover is precisely the wrong response. Instead, you wheel in the direction of the enemy's fire and charge their position.

If you try to take cover, you're dead. If you charge into the teeth of withering enemy fire, well, that's probably not too good for your health either, but it gives you an excellent chance of breaking through their positions, disrupting the ambush, and routing the enemy force. At the very least, you'll take a good portion of them down with you.

Yeah, it's dangerous as hell, but it beats getting whacked where you stand. I think the analogy I'm trying to make is obvious.

A Real War on Terror

(Review) John Derbyshire writes from an alternate reality, where a real war on terror is going on.

Common Knowledge?

(Review) Clifford May writes that, as far as he knows, knowledge of Valerie Plame's CIA ties were pretty well known.

On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.

That wasn't news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.

So, if this is true, Novak's leak could have come from a number of sources, both inside and outside the government.

The Valerie Plame Affair

(Review) The DoJ is starting a criminal investigation into who leaked that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent.

Plame is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who challenged Bush administration assertions earlier this year that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from an African nation.

Wilson was sent to Niger last year to check out the claim that Iraq's deposed leader had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium. He could not confirm the allegation, and in a July editorial in the New York Times challenged 16 words in President Bush's State of the Union address that said Saddam had made inquiries about uranium in Africa. One week after his column appeared, his wife's name was published in a newspaper column.

My position is simple: If a crime has been committed, find the guilty party, impeach them if necessary, and punish them.

I suspect it was some minor flunky somewhere in the Administration that did this. But, even if it goes to the top of the White House, anyone who breaks the law should be punished.

Unlike many Democrats vis a vis Clinton, I believe that principle is more important than party.

Not that I don't love a good party....

The Missing Moral Component

(Review) In a tolerably long and very scholarly Weekly Standard article, David Gelernter discusses what's really missing from the Bush Administration's rhetoric about Iraq: The moral justification for our actions. The president is uniquely willing to discuss our interests, but not the moral component.

The president needs to attack his opponents head-on, on principle. Peace is good, but if you have to buy it by turning your backs on suffering--at least don't be proud of the fact. We're proud that we didn't. Yes, our intervention served a practical purpose too, but let's start with Morality 101. In Iraq we expected to find hard evidence of cruelty, terror, and mass murder, and we did find it, and we told you so. (And the best reason to say so is not to win over opponents but to buck up supporters.)

Gelernter justifies this through a detailed example of the appeasement movement of 1930s Europe with respect to Nazi Germany.

People who are wrong but have seized the moral high ground, others who are right but cannot or will not pull them down--that was late-1930s Britain. Appeasers struggled with their opponents and beat them. Churchill spoke eloquently, compellingly; in reading his speeches, the historian Robert Rhodes James wrote in 1993, "one asks oneself again and again, 'Why didn't they listen?'" The standard responses--"because people were lazy and it was easier not to"; "because Churchill had made himself so grossly unpopular that people dismissed him without thinking" (James's answer, in effect)--are no doubt true. But there is more to this story, of direct concern to America today.

The appeasers wanted to right wrongs that had been inflicted on Germany in the Peace of Versailles that ended the First World War. Some held that Britain and the West were tainted by Versailles, lacked moral standing to dictate right and wrong to Germany or anyone else. But above all, they believed in peace. The distinguished anti-appeaser Leo Amery once said of Neville Chamberlain: "He described himself as a man of peace to the inmost of his being, and that he assuredly is."

Churchill, as Gelernter points out, never attacked the Conservative Government of Neville Chamberlain on moral grounds. Churchill argued from necessity, from the point of view of Britain's interests, from the threat posed by Nazi Germany. But he never attacked Chamberlain's policy as a false sort of morality per se.

Churchill and his few supporters could have met these moral arguments head-on, but they chose not to. They could have said: You are wrong in your application of Christian principle. They could have said: Peace is sacred, but not when you pay for it out of other people's suffering. Churchill was vividly aware of these issues but chose to base his campaign on security instead. He sought to bring his opponents to their senses, not (or only rarely) to prick the balloon of their moral presumptions. He talked strategy; they talked morality. Communications were doomed from the start.

A similar miscommunication is going on today between the president and his opponents. Like Chamberlain and Churchill, they are talking different languages. 

Supply-Side quackery

(Review) Bruce Bartlett, ever the cheerleader for Supply-Side economics, responds to a blog entry in TAPPED that criticizes supply-side theory.

One of the rare civil criticisms I got came from my friends at TAPPED, the Web log of the liberal American Prospect magazine. Their point is that Mr. Krugman was justified in his attack because supply-siders have no academic allies, despite a large number of conservative economics professors. "Supply-side ideas simply won't stand up under scrutiny," TAPPED wrote.

As it happens, around the time I was reading this blog entry, I had on my desk a recent paper from the International Monetary Fund, "An Analysis of the Underground Economy and Its Macroeconomic Consequences." Right on Page One, it has this to say: "Our model simulations show that in the absence of budgetary flexibility to adjust expenditures, raising tax rates too high drives firms into the underground economy, thereby reducing the tax base."

In other words, the Laffer Curve works — and this from an organization hardly known as a hotbed of supply-side economics. Nor is this the only instance in which the IMF has acknowledged fundamental truths about supply-side economics.

• As long ago as 1987, it published an entire book titled, "Supply-Side Tax Policy: Its Relevance to Developing Countries."
• In 1997, it published a paper on Social Security reform in France that contained this finding: "The simulation results ... point to the presence of 'self-financing,' whereby reductions in various tax rates lead to lower budget deficits in the long run, as the result of an expanding tax base and lower unemployment insurance outlays."
• In 1999, it held a seminar on trade policy that came to this conclusion: "A number of countries maintain tariff rates that exceed revenue maximizing levels. These countries could liberalize, at least initially, without significant adverse consequences for revenues from trade taxes."

The IMF is not alone in its acknowledgment of supply-side truths. Across the street, the World Bank has done similar studies. In 1993, one of them came to this conclusion: "Above a certain level of the official tariff rate, further increases in the official rate produces no increase (and there is some evidence of a decrease) in the collected rate."

The problem with Bartlett's explanation here is that practically every economist in the world believes that there is a Laffer Curve, or something very much like it.

Believing in the Laffer Curve, however, does not a supply-sider make. All the Laffer curve tells is is something we already know. If tax rates are too high--i.e., more than the citizenry wishes to pay--the citizenry actively seeks to avoid paying taxes, and government revenues decline.

But the folks at TAPPED are right. Despite the fact that university economics faculties are often staffed with conservatives of all stripes, there is very little support for supply-side economics in the academic world.

The reason is that supply-siders like Bartlett refuse to acknowledge the shortcomings of the Laffer Curve when dealing with anything other than the broadest gauges of taxation.

First, the optimum tax rate (or "equilibrium point") changes all the time. People allow themselves to be taxed, often at absolutely extortionate rates during wartime. During peacetime, people may feel that higher taxes are necessary to pay down a high level of national debt.

I personally feel that the reason the Clinton Tax hikes of 1993-1994 went down as well as they did was because people were perfectly willing to be taxed more because of their awareness of how much debt had been accrued over the previous decade or so.

But supply-siders universally attacked those tax hikes as the precursor to another recession. Well, they weren't. And, so far, the Bush tax cuts haven't added an extraordinary measure of economic recovery to the economy, especially as regards the jobs picture.

Why would that be?

Probably because we are awfully close to the optimum tax rates already. The tax rate cuts implemented by JFK and Ronald Reagan worked in the supply-side sense because rates were already extortionate. Kennedy bought the top rate down from 90% to 70%. Reagan bought all rates down by 15%, and lowered the top rate to 31%, along with indexing the rates for inflation.

There was simply no question that rates were on the right side of the curve prior to the rate decreases.

Nor is there any question that European or African tax rates are pretty far to the right side of the curve either. But I think there is some serious question about where US tax rates are in relation to the equilibrium point.

But, Bartlett is simply wrong in assuming that the IMF's embrace of the Laffer Curve in the macro means that there's academic support for it in the micro.

The 1993-1994 period shows the key weakness of supply-side theory as science. Science requires that a hypothesis do a couple of things.

• It must incorporate and explain the relevant facts.
• It must be repeatable.
• It must be predictive.

Supply-Side fails at least the last two of those requirements. If supply-side theorists are right, they have to explain why the "largest tax increases in history", the 1993-1994 Clinton tax hikes, were immediately followed by an extraordinarily long and robust economic expansion, contrary to what supply-side theory predicts.

If it isn't repeatable, and it isn't predictive, it isn't science. And that's why TAPPED is right and Bartlett is wrong.

The Laffer Curve is only useful when dealing with what it purports to measure: A broad relationship of tax rates to government revenues. It cannot, as Bartlett appears to believe, be used as a foundation for an entire theory of macroeconomics.

I have a much longer critique of of Supply-side economics here, if you're interested. 

Dean's a unilateralist, too

(Review) According to Ronald Brownstein, Howard Dean doesn't really mind upsetting our allies. He just wants to do it his way.

Here's former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, in a speech in Iowa in February, describing Bush's foreign policy: "I believe that the president too often employs a reckless, go-it-alone approach that drives us away from some of our longest-standing and most important allies, when what we need is to pull the world community together in common action."

Now here's Dean, back in Iowa in August, telling a union audience how he would convince America's trading partners to adopt labor and environmental laws as stringent as those in the United States: "How am I going to get this passed?" Dean asked. "We are the biggest economy in the world; we don't have to participate in [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and we don't have to participate in the [World Trade Organization]. If we don't, it falls apart."

Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.

It turns out Dean intends to talk to other countries about trade pretty much the way he says Bush talks to them about everything else. Much like Bush at the United Nations before the invasion of Iraq, Dean is offering the world a simple choice on trade: Either do things our way, or we'll abandon the international rules and systems that we, more than any other nation, helped to build.

I have offered the rather snide comment in the past that the Democrats haven't had a new economic policy idea since Das Kapital was translated into English. But, the Democrats' veer towards protectionism indicates the grain of truth in that remark.

Not getting the whole story

(Review) John Leo writes that the parade of bad news coming out of Iraq is at variance with the experiences of people who actually go there to see what is happening themselves.

Some members of Congress are sounding the same theme. Georgia Democrat Jim Marshall says negative media coverage is getting our troops in Iraq killed and encouraging Baathist holdouts to think they can drive the United States out. Marshall, a Vietnam vet, said there is "a disconnect between the reporting and the reality," partly because the 27 reporters left in Iraq are "all huddled in a hotel."

Marshall and a bipartisan group of six other representatives just returned from Iraq. The lawmakers charged that reporters have developed an overall negative tone and a "police blotter" mind-set stressing attacks and little else. Ranking member Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat, said he found the creativeness and flexibility of the U.S. forces impressive, including their 3,100 projects in northern Iraq, from soccer fields to schools to refineries, "all good stuff, and that isn't being reported."

And why isn't it being reported? The vast majority of us cannot go halfway across the world to see what is happening for ourselves. We, as a people, require the proper information if we are to make informed policy choices. But, evidently, we're not getting that information from our free press.

And I'd like to know why.

We are winning

(Review) Debra Orrin writes in the NY Post that, contrary to the media's line about an Iraqi "quagmire", we're definitely winning in Iraq. And elsewhere.

The cover of this week's Time magazine blares: "Mission Not Accomplished" - as if the Iraq war has suddenly morphed into a total failure. But is that true?

The mission was to get rid of Saddam. He's gone from power. It's an ongoing frustration that he hasn't been caught, but his removal has already brought a major shift in the Middle East, the center of terrorist threats.

Oddly enough, Saddam's exit has been most quickly accepted in the Arab world. The famous "Arab street" didn't erupt. Al-Jazeera TV lost some credibility. And post-Saddam Iraqi leaders were welcomed into OPEC and the Arab League.

It hasn't led to instant Arab-Israeli peace, but it has enormously reduced the potential support for Mideast terror. Saddam is no longer there to bribe the families of homicide bombers. No one but terrorists regrets his fall.

And others, notably Russian President Vladimir Putin this weekend, have joined Bush in warning the other two nations with Iraq in his "Axis of Evil" - North Korea and Iran - against any nuclear-weapons ambitions.

All of which suggests that Bush's action against Iraq strengthened America's credibility around the world, rather than weakening it as critics claim.

There is, on the Left, a strain of pessimism that, no matter how often it is proved wrong, simply will not go away.

Think about all we've heard from the Left since 911.

• We couldn't overthrow the Taliban.
• We couldn't create the semblance of a civil society in Afghanistan if the Taliban was defeated.
• Three weeks into the Afghanistan campaign, we were told it was bogging down into a quagmire. Just like Vietnam.
• The Arab street would erupt if we defeated the Taliban.
• We couldn't win in Iraq without massive casualties.
• The Arab street would erupt if we invaded Iraq.
• Ten days into the Iraq campaign, we were told it was bogging down into a quagmire. Just like Vietnam.

Now, the line is that post-war Iraq is a failure. Well, when I hear that, I gotta consider the track record of the guy who's telling it to me. And that track record is pretty awful.

Yes, we appear to have seriously underestimated what it would cost in time and money to pull Iraq back together again. But that isn't because we trashed the place, but rather, after running the place for two decades like it was his personal dog kennel, Saddam had pretty much trashed the place before we got there.

Well, not his places, of course. They all had gold-plated bidet fixtures.

But stories like this make me think that, once again, the pessimists are just wrong. 

McClintock to Republicans: "Drop Dead"

(Review) Tom McClintock, as always sure of his own rectitude, will not drop out of the campaign, even if it splits the Republican vote.

But McClintock, a 47-year-old career politician who has earned his conservative credentials during almost 17 years in the state Legislature, refuses to bow to critics who call him the Ralph Nader of the Republican Party, referring to the Green Party's 2000 presidential candidate widely asserted to have received votes that otherwise would have gone to Democrat Al Gore.

McClintock prefers to compare himself to Seabiscuit - the scrappy California race horse who outran the establishment. He said he believes millions of voters will embrace his anti-tax, anti-abortion, pro-gun philosophy.

"I believe in the final days of the campaign we'll see a lot of voters who prefer me but doubt I can win coming back in droves," McClintock said. "The crowds have been phenomenal. They say, 'Don't you dare drop out, we need someone to believe in.'"

I may believe that magic pixies will deliver bags of gold to me during the night. That doesn't mean it's gonna happen. Or that it's reasonable to believe it. His "grass roots" support, no matter how fanatically they believe in him, appears to be less than 20% of the population. With 18% of the vote an 65 cents, you can get a cup of coffee, but you won't be getting into the governor's mansion anytime soon.

Tom's got a serious messiah complex. That may carry a conservative senate district in Ventura. But it doesn't make him a very effective leader. I certainly don't think it would help him ram a budget down the throat of a legislature where even half of his fellow Republicans despise him.

People don't dislike Tom because they are "country club Republicans". They dislike him because he is insufferably sure of his own rectitude. You can get away with that kind of attitude in a legislature where your vote is one out of fifty. It's a lot harder to do so as a governor, where a mastery of the art of compromise and negotiation is a fixed requirement for dealing with the legislature.

But Tom thinks millions of voters will magically appear on election day, even though his highest poll reading is 18%. That doesn't indicate to me that Tom has a firm grip on reality, which, come to think of it, also isn't a very attractive characteristic in a potential governor.

The Gallup Recall Poll

(Review) The new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows what looks like bad news for Gray Davis in particular, and Democrats in General.

This tracks pretty closely to the Survey USA Poll I referred to last week.

Not that it means anything. The polls have been all over the place on this race, mainly, I think, because of the difficulty of figuring out who is actually gonna be voting.

Today's Gallup poll allowed voters to identify themselves as likely voters or not, which is probably closer to the mark than using past voting behavior as a guide.

It does seem, though, that the Gallup results point to the analysis I offered last week about what California voters are really feeling about this election.

People don't get this interested in an election if their primary interest is in keeping things the way they are. High voter turnout on election day probably means Gray Davis is dead meat. And that probably goes for Cruz Bustamante as well.

Audit materials

(Review) When Arnold Schwarzenegger conducts his audit of California state finances, he should really look at this.

Where are Saddam's WMDs?

(Review) Tony Karon asks the question. Frankly, I'd like to know, too.

Everybody thought Saddam had a WMD stockpile. We certainly knew he had built one prior to the Gulf War. We knew without a doubt that he was doing everything he could to hide them afterward.

Jeez, even the French and Russians thought he had a boatload of the stuff.

So where is it? Did he simply fool us into believing he had an arsenal he didn't have?

If so, that's pretty poetic justice.

Visas? We don' need no stinkin' visas!

(Review) Debra Saunders writes about Cruz Bustamante's...uh...generous ideas about illegal immigration. Essentially, Bustamante doesn't beleive any immigration is illegal.

When asked if he saw a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants earlier this month, Bustamante told reporters, "I think that anybody who works and pays taxes ought to have a right to citizenship."

U.S. citizenship is a right for non-Americans who break the law.

In Bustamante World, illegal immigrants should pay no penalty whatsoever. Au contraire, they should be rewarded with documents, tuition discounts and health care.

As for Californians who believe in enforcing immigration law -- well, their beliefs get no respect. To call for any limits on immigration, or any enforcement of immigration law is to be anti-immigrant. Read: racist.

Reason #946,276 not to vote for Cruz Bustamante.

Unhinged

(Review) Charles Krauthammer reviews Teddy Kennedy's hysterical charges against President Bush about the War in Iraq.

You can say he made a misjudgment. You can say he picked the wrong enemy. You can say almost anything about this war, but to say that he fought it for political advantage is absurd. The possibilities for disaster were real and many: house-to-house combat in Baghdad, thousands of possible casualties, a chemical attack on our troops (which is why they were ordered into those dangerously bulky and hot protective suits on the road to Baghdad). We were expecting oil fires, terrorist attacks and all manner of calamities. This is a way to boost political ratings?

Whatever your (and history's) verdict on the war, it is undeniable that it was an act of singular presidential leadership. And more than that, it was an act of political courage. George Bush wagered his presidency on a war he thought necessary for national security -- a war that could very obviously and very easily have been his political undoing. And it might yet be.

To accuse Bush of going to war for political advantage is not just disgraceful. It so flies in the face of the facts that it can only be said to be unhinged from reality. Kennedy's rant reflects the Democrats' blinding Bush-hatred, and marks its passage from partisanship to pathology.

"Unhinged" is about as accurate a definition as any. The whole Left has come unhinged about Bush.

It seems to me that is qualitatively different from the "Clinton Hatred" we saw during the last administration.

Look, there's always gonna be a lunatic fringe. There were all sorts of conservative crazies out on the fringe during Clinton's term. The whole Mena airport/drug smuggling/mass murder thing. And, on the Left side of the ledger right now, there's the whole "Bush is Hitler without the snappy mustache" deal. We're always gonna have those types with us, because the tin-foil hat brigade is a venerable part of American politics.

The difference now is that these criticisms aren't confined to the loonies. When the senior senator from Massachusetts is part of it, something's up. When an editor of a respectable publication like The New Republic goes to great pains to explain why he hates the president, then we have something of a different order going on.

As I hinted previously, the real problem is not anything Bush has done, but the self-image of those on the Left.

Thomas Sowell writes about this in his book, The Vision of the Anointed. Many on the Left perceive themselves as having been anointed to bring to the rest of us--the benighted--a particular vision of political organization. The believe in that vision with a religious intensity. Consequently, those who disagree with them simply cannot be doing so out of a conviction that their policy prescriptions are wrong. Instead, they must be opposing the vision out of selfish or immoral motives. So, in the eyes of the anointed, opposition is a moral failing.

Hence, to Teddy Kennedy, Bush must have been lying about the need to go to war in Iraq. He must have had ulterior political motives. It simply can't be anything else. Because if it was a simple policy disagreement, that implies that Senator Kennedy's position might be wrong; that reasonable people might disagree.

If Kennedy's position is a fundamental moral principle, however, then reasonable people can't disagree. The right position is obvious, and opposition to it is not simply a disagreement, but an obvious and fundamental moral failure on the part of his opponents.

Of course there are issues that the right moralizes about. Abortion is the prime example. Many on the right feel that abortion is equivalent to murder. Many on the Left deny that, and try to tell us that an abortion is no more morally significant than scraping away some skin on the inside of our cheek. (Which makes one wonder, by the way, that the Left is then quick to assure us that the decision to have an abortion is a deeply painful one. Either it is significant or it's not. No fair trying to have it both ways.) But its an issue whose parameters and arguments are almost entirely moral in nature.

But on the Left, as I wrote last year, nearly everything is a moral issue. Tax cuts, foreign affairs, you name it. This is extraordinarily dangerous to a democratic political system, because it denies the legitimacy of any opposing viewpoints. That is nearly exactly the opposite of what democratic governance is supposed to be about.

McClintock: Hanging on like a leach

(Review) The GOP bigwigs in California are abandoning Tom McClintock for the Arnold steamroller. Tom, however, just cant take a hint.

2002 gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon endorsed Arnold Yesterday. Today, Darrell Issa, the man who kicked off this whole recall deal, and finance the lion's share of it, is expected to endorse Arnold as well.

Not being content to simply split the vote, it appears that McClintock wants to ensure that the Republican Party goes down in flames in some sort of hideous Viking funeral, as a penalty for not choosing him.

McClintock's campaign team isn't happy with the GOP leadership's embrace of Schwarzenegger, who's making his first run for elective office.

"He's a liberal and Tom's a conservative and if that's where the party wants to go, fine," said John Feliz, a political consultant for McClintock. "But they'll pay the price with rank-and-file members."

Feliz also suggested that McClintock could run ads slamming Schwarzenegger's Republican credentials.

"We may very well do that when we come to the end of the campaign," he said.

Are you now beginning to understand why about half of his own Republican colleagues in the legislature don't like him? The more I know about McClintock, the more I believe he is a man of zeal, superbly convinced of his own rightness.

He may know a lot about the state's government, but more, and more, I'm coming to believe that if he were to be elected, he would accomplish almost nothing. Politics is the art of compromise, and compromise appears to be the one thing McClintock is incapable of doing. I think his rigidity and inflexibility would so alienate the legislature that any budget plan he tried to implement would be dead on arrival.

I think he'd be an utter failure as governor.

By the way, what is the audience looking at?

Photo: Reuters/Jim Ruymen

He's no Reagan. But he might already be governor

(Review) Andrew Peyton Thomas ponders the difference between Arnold, a a previous actor who sought political office. His conclusion: Arnold is no Ronald Reagan.

OK, fine, no argument there. But Thomas adds this bit of analysis into the article, which is the point I really want to address:

Recent polls have shown two especially notable developments. First, the electorate is split down the middle on whether to oust Governor Gray Davis. Second, there is a congealing of public sentiment around the three leading candidates. Depending on the poll, Cruz Bustamante now garners between 30 and 32 percent of the vote, Schwarzenegger between 25 and 27 percent, and McClintock from 14 to 18 percent. Bustamante's supporters are mostly partisan Democrats; Schwarzenegger and McClintock are dividing the Republican vote between them; independents are sprinkled in among the three. These groupings are unlikely to change appreciably in the next two weeks unless McClintock drops out. There is still a fairly large bloc of undecided voters (one in five self-described conservatives and one in four moderates were still undecided, according to the most recent Field Poll). Still, unless all of these votes go to one Republican candidate and Bustamante loses some of his support — an unlikely scenario — the odds are stacked against a Republican victory.

Now, I have echoed this analysis often enough myself, and, indeed, so has everyone else. But maybe it's time to look at some other factors that might prompt one to take an alternate view.

Interest in this election is high. Half a million absentee votes were sent in three weeks prior to the election. Half a million.

Voter registration is also way up. It's somewhere between the registration levels seen for the 2002 gubernatorial election and the 2000 presidential election. That's really high for a previously unscheduled special election.

These two points nag at me, because it brings something to mind.

Way back when there was a Soviet Union, and it started cracking apart, the Commie Sandinistas that were running Nicaragua were forced by international pressure to hold a free election. All of the pre-election polls indicated that the Sandys were going to win this thing.

Everybody in the country registered to vote. Lines started filling up at the polling places before dawn. By noon, the lines went for blocks.

By the end of the day, it was painfully obvious to the Sandys that they had gotten stomped like a Honda rider at a Hell's Angels rally.

P.J. O'Rourke, who was in Nicaragua observing the whole thing, noted a simple, yet easily overlooked principle. People don't start lining up at 5:00AM to vote for the status quo.

It may the same in California at this moment. Polls of "likely voters" really only cover people who have voted regularly in past elections. New voters, or people who only vote sporadically unless energized by something specific just get lost in the shuffle.

I'm not sure that what the polls are telling are really reflective of what the electorate is thinking. I don't think that hundreds of thousands of new voters have registered because they want to show their support for Gray Davis. And that implies that, after choosing to dump Davis, they won't be particularly keen to choose "Cruz Bustamante: A Browner Shade of Gray" as his replacement. If you are going out to vote for a change, after all, you vote for change, not for a replacement whose main selling point is, "I'm just like Gray Davis, but more so."

All the moaning about McClintock as a spoiler--justified moaning in regular times--might be completely wrong at this particular time. Polls that make Democrats smile by showing that Bustamante out-polls Arnold might be horrifically wrong if it's Arnold's entry into the race that has energized all these new voters. Arnold may just have gotten a lock on this election already.

I submit this proposition inquisitively, rather than asseveratively, but I suspect it at least bears thinking about.

Arnold's the guy to beat

(Review) The new SurveyUSA poll indicates that Bustamante may not win even if McClintock stays in the race.

I hope this is right. I'm in "anyone but Bustamante" mode right now.

Well, anyone except Huffington or Camejo.

Seeing the facts converts a critic

(Review) Federal Judge Donald Walter was a staunch opponent of the War in Iraq. After spending a month there, he isn't a critic any longer.

I want to make it clear that, initially, I vehemently opposed the war. In fact, I only changed my mind after my trip.

The team of 12 that went to Iraq was to assess the judiciary and to make recommendations for the future. During the first two weeks, we talked to a few hundred Iraqis and interviewed about 60 judges.

Despite my initial opposition to the war, I am now convinced that, whether we find any weapons of mass destruction or prove Saddam Hussein sheltered and financed terrorists, we absolutely should have overthrown the Ba'athists - indeed, we should have done it sooner.

Judge Walter thinks that more people would probably be less critical about what's going on Iraq, if they knew the truth about what's happening there. Unfortunately they don't, and it appears that the press corps isn't going to tell them.

We are not getting the whole truth from the news media.

The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective. Good news doesn't sell. Ninety percent of the damage you see on TV was caused by Iraqis, not by coalition forces. All the damage you see to schools, hospitals, power generation facilities, refineries, pipelines and water supplies, as well as shops, museums and semi-public buildings (like hotels)was caused either by the Iraqi army in its death throes or Iraqi civilians looting and rioting.

The day after the war was over, nearly zero power was being generated in Iraq. Forty-five days later, one-third of the total national potential of 8,000 megawatts is up and running. Downed power lines are being repaired and were about 70 percent complete when I left. There is water purification where little or none existed before, and it is available for everyone.

Oil is 95 percent of the Iraqi GNP. For Iraq to survive, it must sell oil. All the damage to the oil fields was done by the Iraqi army or looters. Today, the refinery at Bayji is at 75 percent of capacity. The crude pipeline between Kirkuk and Bayji has been repaired, although the Ba'athists keep trying to disrupt it.

By my sample, 90 percent of Iraqis are glad we came and the majority don't want us to leave for some time to come.

Why we are not getting a similar picture from the mainstream media is quite an interesting question, indeed. Are we getting real reporting, or are we getting only the news that conforms to the ideology of the reporters? Why do so many people who go to Iraq come back telling us that the media is not reporting accurately on the situation there? Why do they go there as critics and come back as supporters?

All interesting questions, none of which are being answered by the boys at CNN, CBS, et al.

Analyzing the debate

(Review) My analysis of last night's gubernatorial debate in Sacramento can be given in short and sweet form.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: He didn't lose. Thus, he won.

Cruz Bustamante: How does a guy manage to be so arrogant, with so little to be arrogant about?

Tom McClintock: He seemed like a very nice boy. With disturbingly scary eyes.

Arianna Huffington: Now I know why Michael Huffington turned gay.

Peter Camejo: When the saucers land, he'll be the the first to volunteer as ambassador.

The longer version goes like this:

Arnold was, I think, the big winner--insofar as anyone won. All he had to do was show that, to paraphrase Fredo Corleone, he was smart, and that he could handle stuff. That was, I think, the Big Question about Arnold. A question he raised himself by refusing to participate in any of the other debates. He put that question to rest by being able to hold his own in the free-for-all portions of the debate. Too bad Arnold doesn't believe in all 10 Amendments contained in the Bill of Rights, which bothers me intensely.

Bustamante's Gore-like debate performance made me want to throw things at my TV. He has been essentially a paid hack for special interests for his entire career. Where does he get off acting so smug? Until last night, I despised Bustamante's policy "ideas" for the foolish crap they were. Now, I dislike him personally as well. It's a good thing I wasn't on stage last night, because about the third time he rolled those piggy little eyes at me I would have wanted to stomp around to his side of the table and slap him until he cried like a girl. We'll see how smug you are when your $10 billion in new taxes, sends businesses fleeing out of state, leaving us with a 10% unemployment rate, ass.

Tom McClintock. You know, when it comes to having an encyclopedic knowledge about how Sacramento works, nobody beats Tom McClintock. Unfortunately, when it comes to inflexible, unforgiving, ideological purity, nobody beats Tom McClintock. If Gray Davis gets recalled, Bustamante will be the next Governor, and it will all be McClintock's fault. He is incapable of bending or compromising, and he's incapable of being a team player. Tom always has to be right, and you have to do it his way, or no way at all. Half of the Republicans in the legislature despise him for precisely these reasons. If I ran the Republican Party in California, I would make it my personal mission in life to destroy his political career.

Arianna Huffington is...I mean...Judas H. Priest! Look in the dictionary under "shrill harpy". That's her picture, right there. Just the sound of her voice could be used to train pit bulls for the fighting ring. And to top it all off, she doesn't seem to know that she isn't running for President. Hey, Lady, that election happens next year. There's more than enough to do right here in California, without worrying about what George Bush is doing 3,000 miles away in DC. One gets the impression that she isn't really running for governor, just looking for an excuse to irritate us with runaway mouth of hers. She is the perfect attention whore.

Peter Camejo seems not to understand why there's no longer any Iron Curtain. In fact, there is very little poor Pete understands, except that you make too much money, and he wants to take it away from you. I half expected him to start running off on a rant about how the progressive revolutionary vanguard of international socialism would defeat the running-dog lackeys of the capitalist-imperialist forces. Jeez, this guy could have been a PR hack for Henry Wallace, except that Wallace would probably have taken a harder line on the Soviet Union.

These are our choices? It's either one of these guys or the proven rank incompetence of Gray Davis?

Maybe it's time to sell my home and move to Arizona.

Bush Hatred

(Review) Jonathon Chait writes in The New Republic that he hates President Bush, and tries to explain why he, and many of his friends on the Left do so.

Unfortunately, he gives the whole game away right at the very outset of his article.

I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche.

Wow.

That tells me a lot more about your friends than it does about W. Most of all, it tells me that your friends are freaks.

Look, I think that Gray Davis is a rank incompetent and a political hack whose lack of ability has turned California into a fiscal disaster area. I think he needs to be thrown out of office. I think Cruz Bustamante, his putative Democratic replacement--and a man who finds the Lt. Governor's job an awesome intellectual challenge--is even worse.

But neither of them is "constant oppressive force" in my "daily psyche", despite my deep disdain for their policies. Do you know why? Because I have a life outside of politics.

How sad it must must be to have one's personal happiness dictated by the actions of a politician sitting in a distant capital.

If you are so wrapped up in your political ideology that you feel oppressed that an opposing politician is successful, then you need to get a freakin' life, for cripes' sake. Read a novel. Go to a play. Volunteer at an animal shelter. Connect with the larger world outside the beltway.

If the mere existence of George Bush a constant oppressive force in your daily psyche, then you've got some real problems of perspective. You are, in fact, hysterical. The political has become inseparable from the personal, and the success of a political opponent is an assault on your personal sense of self.

Your problem is not a thing that is based in the character of George W. Bush. It is based in your inner anger at not having one of your guys in charge. You are angry that your policies aren't being followed. That people aren't voting for your side. You are maddened at the thought that if Bush is successful, then it must mean people don't like you.

And that, near enough, is pathological. Because it means that the next conservative president will be equally oppressive to your psyche.

That strikes me as both sad and pathetic.

As you go deeper into the article, Chait describes with impressive detail why he feels Bush is worth of such hatred.

"Instead, Bush has governed as the most partisan president in modern U.S. history. The pillars of his compassionate-conservative agenda--the faith-based initiative, charitable tax credits, additional spending on education--have been abandoned or absurdly underfunded. Instead, Bush's legislative strategy has revolved around wringing out narrow, party-line votes for conservative priorities..."

So, Chait's first count of the indictment is that a conservative Republican president acting with a conservative Republican congress, has implemented conservative policies.

Well, yes, I can see how that would be a shocker. Because, as we all know, a liberal Democratic president with an equally compliant liberal Democratic congress would never implement liberal policies over the objections of a conservative minority. Right?

Maybe Chait hasn't been keeping up with current events, but we have a partisan political system. We've had it since George Washington's second term as president. I guess partisanship is only legitimate when Mr. Chait's party is doing it, implementing policy that Mr. Chait likes.

Chait complains liberals hate Bush even more than Reagan, because Reagan never pretended to be anything other than a conservative war horse. Bush was supposed to be a compassionate conservative, but he turned out to be just a plain ol' conservative.

It's just not fair. Why, he practically promised to let liberals get some of their policies implemented, and then--he didn't.

The ultimate crime.

Conservatives believe liberals resent Bush in part because he is a rough-hewn Texan. In fact, they hate him because they believe he is not a rough-hewn Texan but rather a pampered frat boy masquerading as one, with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to disguise his plutocratic nature.

Oh. OK. So it's simple class hatred. Well, that's easy enough to understand. Chait hates Bush because Bush was born rich.

That's certainly a good enough reason to be oppressed by his very existence.

But perhaps most infuriating of all is the fact that liberals do not see their view of Bush given public expression. It's not that Bush has been spared from any criticism--far from it. It's that certain kinds of criticism have been largely banished from mainstream discourse.

Well, there could be a couple of reasons for this. It could, as Chait theorizes, be a tacit conspiracy in the media to protect Bush by declaring certain criticisms out of bounds.

Or, it could be that rational people in the media can recognize pathology when they see it.

The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt.

Yes, I can see where that would hurt. After all, Bush is, as everyone knows, a moron. Sure, relatively few morons manage to acquire master's degrees from Harvard, but still...

In any event, despite his obvious dullness, Bush keeps wrapping up political victory after victory over Democrats. I imagine that would be frustrating to a partisan (but in a good way) Democrat like Chait.

Because it follows as night follows day that if Bush is a moron, then any view that credits him with some part in his won success must be "absurdly heroic".

How it must grate on Mr. Chait, day after day, watching Bush's success. How his heart must leap almost into his throat with joy every time Bush makes a misstep.

How...wierd.

The Big debate

(Review) The California recall debates will be on tonight from 6:00PM to 7:30PM California time. The debate will kick off with the 12 Questions the California Association of Broadcasters came up with.

The link above goes to my answers to the 12 Questions.

Arnold's fiscal plan

(Review) Arnold Schwarzenegger writes in today's Wall Street Journal to explain his fiscal plan for California. In brief his plan consists of the following points:

First, on taxes, I believe that not only should we not raise tax rates on anyone in California, but we have to reduce taxes that make our state uncompetitive.

Second, the California state budget should not grow faster than the California family budget. We need to put teeth into a spending limit law through a constitutional amendment that caps state budget growth.

Next, the worker's compensation system needs an overhaul.

Fourth, I am a fanatic about school reform...I will maintain the state's testing program and bring school authority and spending closer to students, parents and local taxpayers and take it away from Sacramento bureaucrats...[W]e will expand choice options for parents with charter schools and enforce public school choice provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

I would agree with all of that, except the last point, which doesn't go far enough. How about vouchers, Arnold?

"Bush must fail" thinking

(Review) Jonah Goldberg writes that Wesley Clark's sudden popularity among Democrats is a sign of simple personal animosity towards Bush.

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows two dogs in business suits sitting at a martini bar. One dog says to the other, "You know it's really not enough that dogs succeed. Cats must also fail."

This summarizes the attitude of so many Democrats today. Yes, yes they want to win. But even more than that, they want George Bush to lose. And the latest thinking is that a military man with an impressive national security resume, good hair and better posture is the perfect recipe to beat George W. Bush. If next week the computers at the DNC churn out a political analysis that says a mean-spirited sweaty socialist will win, then the party will go nuts for Michael Moore.

This of course makes sense considering the loop-the-loop inconsistency of the Democratic Party on foreign policy these days. Democrats are against nation-building in Iraq, because Bush is for it there. They're in favor of it in Afghanistan, because they think Bush is against it there. They're for multilateralism and the U.N. in Iraq because that's where Bush is seen as "unilateral," but at the same time they're aghast that Bush won't deal unilaterally with North Korea, ridiculing his insistence that regional partners and the U.N. be in on the talks. This is not serious foreign policy. This is "cats must also fail" thinking.

To win with this mindset, however, you have to make everybody else hate the president as well, not just the activists in the Democratic Party's far left wing.

Arnold's Hydrogen Plan: A lot of hot air

(Review) Both environmentalists and businesspeople are saying the obvious. If Arnold thinks we'll be driving around in hydrogen-powered cars within a decade, he's living in what his native Austria would call wolkenkuckucksheim¹

But even supporters of fuel cells said daunting technological hurdles associated with hydrogen-powered cars -- combined with consumers' preference for gas-guzzling vehicles -- mean that his pledge of lowering emissions is probably pie-in-the-sky.

Daniel Sperling, an engineering professor and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, said the impact of hydrogen-powered vehicles on emissions in the next few years is zero.

Yes, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It is not, however, floating around free on earth. And extracting it is pretty energy-intensive.

Scientists have long believed that hydrogen, the most abundant element, could be a relatively cheap and mobile source of electricity to power vehicles, with water vapor and heat as the only waste products.

But to become an effective fuel source, chains of hydrocarbons must be "cracked" -- a process that is both expensive and requires a great deal of energy. Environmentalists worry that a switch to hydrogen fuel cells could actually increase reliance on traditional, polluting sources of electricity.

In other words, right now, the energy needed to make hydrogen fuel would cause more pollution than the use of hydrogen fuel cells would eliminate.

Look, I love the idea of a hydrogen economy. I think we should really be looking at the science necessary to create it. But Arnold won't jump-start the hydrogen economy by government fiat.

California tried this nearly a decade ago with mandatory electric vehicle sales for all manufacturers. And they found out that just because Sacramento orders something, it doesn't magically get done.
__________
¹ Cloud cuckoo land

The professional's view

(Review) Election law professor Rick Hasen offers his analysis of the 9th's decision.

Bustamante gets slapped around in court

(Review) Here's the story. Last year, the people of California decided that candidates for governor could accept no more than $21,000 from a donor.

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who's now running for governor in the recall election, wanted to raise some money. Indian gaming interests, in whose pocket Bustamante is firmly ensconced, wanted to give him money. $4 million, to be precise.

So, they donated the money to Bustamante's old, pre-contribution-limits campaign fund. Bustamante then transferred the money out of his old campaign fund and put it in his new one.

Bustamante, of course, was immediately sued by Republican State Senator Ross Johnson. In response, Bustamante said, in effect, that he wouldn't spend it on his gubernatorial campaign, after all. Instead, he would make commercials--starring himself, of course--opposing ballot proposition 54.

Sacramento County Judge Loren McMaster wasn't having any of that. She ordered him to return the entire $4 million to the Indian gaming interests from whence it came.

It appear, however, that Bustamante has spent a lot of that money. So the last two weeks of the campaign, he might not be able to have any paid media ads at all, because he's got to give that $4 million back.

Heh.

Bush's UN Speech II

(Review) president Bush's speech to the UN today met opposition from The Usual Suspects.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday criticized Bush's "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq, but also urged world leaders to set aside their disputes and join forces to build a peaceful democracy in the troubled nation.

The fact that, without Bush's pre-emptive attack, there would be no chance whatsoever to "build a peaceful democracy" there seems never to have entered his mind. Instead, thousands of Iraqis would still be facing daily imprisonment, torture, and death by being fed into industrial shredders. We should be sorry for stopping this? Don't hang around by the phone, pining for an apology, Kofi.

French President Jacques Chirac, a strong opponent to the Iraq war, said Tuesday that, "the war, embarked on without Security Council approval, has undermined the multilateral system."

"In an open world, no one can isolate themselves, no one can act alone in the name of all and no one can accept the anarchy of a society without rules," he continued. "There is no alternative but the United Nations."

Uh, actually, I think we just showed the world an alternative. Iraq is, if not a free nation, at least on the road to becoming one. Under the UN's aegis, Saddam Hussein would still be looting the country for solid gold bidet fixtures. If the UN is the only alternative, then the world is screwed.

I'm sure Jacques Chirac thinks we should go to the UN. It is, after all, the only place in the world where France has the power to be anything more than the useless, "also-ran" it's been since the 1950s. Additionally, one notes that Jacques Chirac wasn't particularly interested in the UN's opinion when it came time for him to dispatch French troops to Africa.

Chirac said the transfer of sovereignty to the people of Iraq is "indispensable" to the country's reconstruction.

But Chirac didn't repeat French demands for a handover within as little as a month and said it should be "gradual" and "according to a realistic timetable." Chirac also voiced support for a multinational force in Iraq, which would be under U.S. command. Some countries have said the United States shouldn't necessarily have that military authority.

Yeah, now that we've done the job they didn't want to do in the first place, they want to take charge of the situation.

Since the Korean War, the UN has never been keen to get involved in combat operations. They've usually waited 'til the war was over, then sent in peacekeepers to shoot the wounded. That's precisely what they want to do this time out, as well.

If it was up the UN, Uday would still be cruising Baghdad in his white Mercedes, looking for more virgins to rape. So, I'm not gonna come over all quivery at the thought of UN "blue helmets" leading the Iraqis down the path of salvation.

In fact, based on their results in the past, I suspect that quite the opposite would occur. I refer you to the bang-up job the UN did in the former Yugoslavia.

Analyzing the 9th Circuit's ruling

(Review) The full 9th Circuit ruling is a per curiam ruling, which means no one is credited with authorship, and there are no dissents. So we don't know how the individual votes on the panel went.

The ruling shreds the ACLU's case for requesting an injunction postponing the election.

First, an injunction, also known as a request for "injunctive relief", is basically a request for the court to tell someone, "Knock it off!", Usually, you request a preliminary injunction (as the ACLU did in this case) in order to get someone to stop doing something while a court case proceeds. In order to get an injunction in the case of an election, where there is a substantial public interest in holding a constitutionally required election, there are some tests you have to meet:

[A] plaintiff is required to establish "(1) a strong likelihood of success o