SOME USEFUL OBSERVATIONS from Frank Fukuyama on the American / European divide:

The ostensible issues raised in the US-European disputes since the ‘axis of evil’ speech for the most part revolve around alleged American unilateralism and international law. There is by now a familiar list of European complaints about American policy, including but not limited to the Bush Administration’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, its failure to ratify the Rio Pact on biodiversity, its withdrawal from the ABM treaty and pursuit of missile defence, its opposition to the ban on land mines, its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, its opposition to new provisions of the biological warfare convention, and most recently its opposition to the International Criminal Court.

The most serious act of US unilateralism in European eyes concerns the Bush Administration’s announced intention to bring about regime change in Iraq, if necessary through a go-it-alone invasion. . . .

In the realm of economics, the Europeans don’t have all that great a record with regard to respect for multilateral rules when compared to the United States. They have been on their high horse this year because of American actions with regard to steel and agricultural subsidies, and they are right to complain about American hypocrisy with regard to free trade. But this I regard as kind of normal hypocrisy: all countries act in contradiction of declared free trade principles, and the Europeans have been notorious for, among other things, agricultural subsidies maintained at higher levels and over longer periods of time than American ones. America is guilty only of the most recent outbreak of hypocrisy.

There are a number of areas where the Europeans have acted unilaterally in economic matters, and in ways that at times contravene the existing legal order. The EU resisted unfavourable decisions against them on bananas for nine years, and beef hormones for even longer. They have announced a precautionary principle with regard to genetically modified foods, which is very difficult to reconcile with the WTO’s sanitary and phytosanitary rules. Indeed, the Europeans have been violating their own rules with regard to GM foods, with certain member states setting standards different from those of the community itself. The European Competition Commission under Mario Monti successfully blocked the merger of GE and Honeywell, when the deal had been approved by American and Canadian regulators, in ways that promoted suspicions that the EU was simply acting to protect specific European interests. Finally, the EU has succeeded in exporting its data privacy rules to the United States through its safe harbour arrangements.

For all their talk of wanting to establish a rule-based international order, the Europeans haven’t done that well within the EU itself. As John van Oudenaren has argued, the Europeans have developed a decision-making system of Byzantine complexity, with overlapping and inconsistent rules and weak enforcement powers. The European Commission often doesn’t have the power even to monitor compliance of member states with its own directives, much less the ability to make them conform. This fits with an attitude towards law in certain parts of Europe that sees declarative intent often of greater importance than actual implementation, and which Americans tend to see instead as undermining the very rule of law.

Not much here that the blogosphere hasn’t said, but it’s interestingly put together.

MICKEY KAUS FACT-CHECKS THE NEW YORK TIMES –AGAIN! It’s almost like having SmarterTimes back, only with more font changes!

SPINSANITY delivers a brutal takedown of MediaWhores Online. Excerpt:

MWO’s tactics simply pollute the public discourse. While many intelligent people read the site and are not seduced by its methods, the overall effect is to build a self-reinforcing community of aggrieved partisans and to help break down taboos among liberals against the rhetorical viciousness promoted. . . . The reality is that, with liberals increasingly agitated, both sides will continue to escalate their rhetoric to the point of hysteria, all the while pointing wildly at each other to rationalize their actions. In the end, these tactics are unacceptable no matter who uses them.

They’ll get some hatemail for this one.

SAUDIS ARE BUYING GOLD in quantity, reports Cato the Youngest, who suggests that this means they’re worried. Reading the article, though, I’m not so sure he’s right.

ADD THIS TO THE AIR SECURITY FILE. Jeez.

THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF TALK IN THE BLOGOSPHERE about the perfidy (or not) of Delaware. I’ve kind of ignored it, because I learned in law school that the Delaware-screws-shareholders argument doesn’t hold water. Now WyethWire points to a new law review article on this subject that says (echoing Ralph Winter, my old Corporations professor) that rather than a race to the bottom among the states, we have a leisurely walk to the top. You may find it interesting. I haven’t read the Jonathan Chait article that started all this, but if Chait doesn’t address this thinking, then he didn’t do enough research.

UPDATE: I just looked. Chait mentions it in passing, but dismisses it rather blithely. The whole piece appears less serious than the Blogosphere attention it got would suggest.

CHARLES JOHNSON reports an interesting historical connection for the Saud family. These guys were never our friends.

“IT USED TO BE A RELIGIOUS MIRACLE, but now it’s a scientific miracle.” Very cool story. (Via Faisal.Com).

ACCORDING TO THIS ARTICLE in The Times, the U.S. government no longer considers the Saudis allies and is getting better cooperation from Syria than from Saudi-controlled Arabia:

The final “stab in the back” for Washington was the decision to ban American bombers from attacking Iraq from Saudi airbases. That has soured relations to such an extent that the country from which America launched its 1991 invasion of Iraq is now being excluded from discussions about a post-Saddam era.

Even Syria, which in public is opposed to an attack on Iraq and has been engaged in trade and arms deals with Baghdad, is talking secretly to the Americans and the British about the role that Damascus may play in the region if Saddam is overthrown. A Syrian delegation is understood to have had discussions with British officials in London this week. . . .British diplomatic sources said that the Saudi ruling elite was immersed in a “dynastic battle” and was so concerned about survival that the key figures were afraid of taking any decision that would be interpreted by the people as being pro-Western and anti-Arab.

Free advice for the House of Saud: Screw the dynastic battle, and find yourself a nice safe place to live abroad. I don’t think the Saudi monarchy is going to last long enough to be worth battling over.

Either that, or this is the best disinformation operation of all time.

UPDATE: Robert Crawford asks: “Would a severe dynastic battle in Saudi Arabia warrant western (US, really) intervention?” We may find out.

SPEAKING OF EMAIL: When InstaPundit was new, I tried a feature called “From the Mailbag.” But that was stupid, since there was no mailbag — and “From the Mail Subdirectory on the Hard Drive” just didn’t have the same ring to it. But while I’m replying to email, I should note that I’ve gotten a number of emails from people who think Max Sawicky is wrong (see below) but that I shouldn’t have said the District of Columbia isn’t ready for self-government.

Well, whether I should have said it or not is somebody else’s problem. But it’s true. At least, the District isn’t ready to be a state, and it’s not clear that it’s even capable of being a self-governing city with any expectation of success. And this shouldn’t be a surprise because it’s inherent in the character of a federal district that serves as the seat of government.

The dysfunctional character of recent DC government is beyond dispute. City services are dreadful. (When I lived there, ambulances routinely took 12 hours to arrive — the joke was that if you had a heart attack you should call Domino’s. They’d have a guy there in 30 minutes, and you could ask him to drive you to the hospital.) The homicide clearance rate by the DC police is rotten, and even in a high-profile case like Chandra Levy’s they’re notably inept, as Josh Marshall has pointed out. (I once got a ticket for “driving through a flashing yellow light,” though, which necessitated an afternoon at the DMV before I pointed out to a judge that that wasn’t against the law. And the parking enforcement people had a tendency to ticket legally parked cars with out-of-state plates. I saw this myself.) City officials have gold-plated staffs and offices, but citizens — many of whom are poor and depend heavily on city services — go unserved, or badly served. Roads are potholed and crappy, but taxes are high. Things are somewhat better, I think, than when I lived there — and I lived in the heart of the District, just off of Logan Circle — under Marion Barry, but not all that much.

The statehood issue is a bit silly, and mostly pushed by people hoping to pick up a couple of Senate seats on the cheap. DC has a smaller population (by better than 100,000 people) than metropolitan Knoxville. There are probably a couple of existing states with smaller populations, but that’s not an argument for creating more unpopulous states. What’s more, the Constitution specificially makes the seat of the federal government a district that’s not a part of any state, for reasons of structure and federalism that make sense to me — and that, even if they didn’t, are in the Constitution.

More importantly — and this is why it doesn’t work well as a city, either — DC has a captive main industry and a huge transient population in proportion to its size. One check on lousy government is when business threatens to move away; that won’t happen here. The other is close attention by voters who feel they have a stake, and who have the political skills and interests to pay attention and make a difference. But a lot of the population that in most areas would be most active in civic affairs is transient — officeholders and staff and other people who won’t be there for a long time, and know it. And there’s no tax base. DC, even if it were a state, couldn’t constitutionally tax its main industry, the federal government, and would depend on in-lieu-of-taxes federal largesse, making its financial independence notional regardless.

I don’t think that these problems exist because people in DC are stupid. I think they’re the consequence of the way the place is set up. The voters (and people there do vote, though the Financial Control Board and other structures set up to clean up the financial mess — slightly — undercut that, but the problems certainly arose during a time when the voters were electing who they wanted) don’t pay the city’s bills. Bad government won’t leave voters unemployed, or forced to follow their employers elsewhere. DC is comparatively small and insular, and small and insular places are usually badly governed. The fact that the city government will get less scrutiny than it would most other places because the federal government sucks up most of the press attention doesn’t help either.

DC would be better run, I suspect, under the old Congressional system. It’s true that people would be denied the vote in municipal elections then, but judging by the miserable turnout rates in municipal elections generally, that’s not a right that Americans hold especially dear. And for those who do, the opportunity for residence in a bona fide state is just a couple of miles away.

JOSH MARSHALL UPDATE: I got an email asking if I was going wobbly on the Talking Points question, in light of this post below. No. I’ll try to be clear about this: it’s not that the term “Talking Points Memo” is dreadfully unique. It’s that they’re using it for, basically, the very same thing for which Marshall has already established a reputation.

Thought experiment: “Post” is a pretty generic term as applied to newspapers, far predating a certain DC paper. If I published, say, the Knoxville Post it would just join a long line of papers named after mail. The identical name wouldn’t matter because it would be in a different market (kind of like Bill O’Reilly’s feature, which is on TV instead of the Web, isn’t competing with Marshall). But try publishing your very own “Washington Post” in Washington, and arguing that, well, there’s nothing distinctive about “Post” and, well, naturally it’s the “Washington Post” if you’re publishing it in Washington. Go ahead, try it. I dare you.

The Washington Post won’t sit still for that, trust me. But that’s basically what they’re doing: publishing the same kind of thing, with the same title, in the same neighborhood. I don’t blame Marshall for being P.O.’ed. If they don’t know about Marshall’s use of the term, then they don’t deserve to be publishing a political weblog. If they do know, then they’re just trying to muscle in (and they’d never try to do the same thing to a traditional media feature with the same name). Either way, they ought to be embarrassed.

UPDATE: Shouting ‘Cross the Potomac notes that Terry Neal’s column ran today and isn’t called “Talking Points.” Could this be victory for Marshall? I’m not sure. I’m not even sure it’s the same feature, though it looks kind of bloglike.

ANOTHER UPDATE: No such luck. The feature referred to above is from the print edition. A separate online feature is still called Talking Points.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Hendry writes:

I seem to recall that sometime in the last 20 years, the Post sued a restaurant in the west for calling itself the Washington Post (hitching post, that is). The menus used the same fonts as the newspaper. I also recall that the Post succeeded in forcing the restaurant to change its name.

Wouldn’t surprise me.

PROBABLY THE LAST UPDATE: Reader Tim Hartin writes:

Yup. Happened here in Madison, Wisconsin, I think around 6 years ago. I don’t know about the menus, but the restaurant was on Washington street, and used a “newspapery” Olde Englishe font for its name (don’t know if it was the same font as the Post uses, but it was similar).

And this was for a frickin’ restaurant.

Also, another reader writes that O’Reilly’s TV feature is reprinted (repixeled?) on the Web under the “Talking Points” rubric. That’s news to me (hey, I just write for the Fox website, why should I know anything?). But, while I admit that makes it closer, the O’Reilly feature is still basically a TV feature that happens to be echoed on the website. It’s not nearly as much of a direct competitor as the Post’s feature.

But not to worry. In case Marshall doesn’t like the Post using his site’s name, he can always change it. Maybe to “The Federal Page.”

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: According to this AP report he’s getting unusually large donations from Citigroup. The article suggests that Citi’s motivation is to get Davis to oppose financial-privacy legislation that would keep banks and other big businesses from selling personal information.

But Davis is a Democrat. They’re against that sort of conduct by big business. Right?

READER GARY HUDSON SAYS I’M WRONG to think that the grounding of aircraft on 9/11 did any good:

I have to register an exception to the oft-heard comments that Mineta (or whomever was responsible) “saved the day” ordering aircraft to land on 9/11. This action saved nothing and help to bring the commercial and general aviation communities to the point of collapse.

My reasoning is simple. Let’s say there were “threats” in the air. Is there any way that ordering an aircraft to land (vs. letting it continue on flight path) would have any effect on what a hostile aircraft might do? A hostile won’t obey the order to land. Hostile aircraft move towards their targets.

They don’t respond properly to radio calls. The FAA Tracon (and certainly later the AWACS that were airborne) can discriminate between threat/hostil aircraft and vector interceptors to identified threats. We know they had 11 “threats” and 10 of those were false; the other was UA Flight 93. Anyone think to call them up? Maybe ask who the chief pilot of the airline is? If the answer comes back “Allah akbar” you know you have a problem. Otherwise you check it off.

Given that it took three hours to bring down all the aircraft in the system, the order did nothing whatever to help identify threats. It was a classic case of ass-covering by bureaucrats.

I seem to recall press coverage last Fall suggesting that the grounding did prevent some attacks (including one in London) but those reports could be wrong I suppose. Anyway, here’s an alternative view.

UPDATE: But Norm Mineta thinks it’s a big deal — so big that, according to this piece in Slate from last April, forwarded by an alert reader — he went out of his way to take credit for the decision when it was really made by someone else.

WHAT PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS COULD LEARN FROM BUFFY: Dave Tepper has the answer. Take it away, Orchid and Missy!

CORNEL WEST UPDATE: I’ve actually pretty much given up on this feature, now that Larry Summers has successfully maneuvered him out of Harvard and he’s nestled in amongst the Ivy League’s champion computer hackers at Princeton. But Ed Driscoll has brought together some information that supports the notion that West was the provoker, rather than the provokee.

EUGENE VOLOKH FACT-CHECKS HANDGUN CONTROL, INC. with some pretty devastating results.

MINETA UPDATE: I’ve given Mineta credit for deciding to land the planes on 9/11. But according to this USA Today story (scroll down to “9:45 a.m.”) Mineta merely ratified a decision already made by the FAA. He still deserves some credit for not screwing this up (I believe there was pressure from some quarters in the Administration not to ground the planes) but that’s not quite the same.

JONATHAN TURLEY, who can hardly be dismissed as a shill for the Democrats, issues a warning about the Hamdi case and Attorney General Ashcroft’s reported plans for the future.

As I said earlier, there’s a good reason for a firewall between the treatment of Americans and of noncitizens. Locking up noncitizens can’t pervert the political process. But once you lock up citizens without due process, the temptation to target political enemies — and, even if you don’t give in to that temptation, the suspicion or fear that you plan to do so — is deeply corrupting.

It’s possible that Turley’s fears are overdrawn — reports of “prison camps” being prepared for American dissidents have been a staple paranoid fantasy since the 1960s — but reassurance on this front doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, and the government’s rather broad claims in the Hamdi case certainly don’t provide any.

UPDATE: TAPPED has more on this.

THE AMERICAN PROWLER says that Josh Marshall should lighten up and be more like me. Well, yeah — oh, wait, no. I remember a Twilight Zone episode in which a guy wished for that, and wound up in a world where everyone else was just a copy of him. When, obviously, he should have wished for everyone else to be a copy of the (pre-cosmetic surgery) Jennifer Connelly.

A COLLEAGUE was just commenting on law school applications being up. We figured it was the economy, but I suppose there could be something else attracting people to the profession.

GUN CONTROL UPDATE: NYU law professor Jim Jacobs has a book entitled Can Gun Control Work? coming out from Oxford University Press. I haven’t read the book (it’s not out yet) but I’ve skimmed the preface and first chapter, which are available online. Looks interesting.

SCOTT ROSENBERG says that Paul Krugman is wrong about Cisco. He likes Cisco’s hardware, too.

DECLAN MCCULLAGH says it’s open war. (Via Aimee Deep).

STILL MORE ON AIRLINE SECURITY STUPIDITY from Lauren Schulz. And Kathryn Jean Lopez is calling for Mineta to resign. I think the dump-Mineta movement is gathering steam.

DIANE E. is a bit taken aback to find herself called a “men’s rights advocate.” Scroll and follow the links to see an interesting discussion on parenthood, marriage, child support, abortion, and traditional sexual morality.