MORE HORRIFIC REPORTS from North Korea.

WALTER IN DENVER offers a Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup, which is cool. What’s also cool is that the Rocky Mountain News is pointing it out with a link from its op-ed page. Bravo! (And thanks to Linda Seebach for the pointer.)

BIG ATTACKS ON SHI’ITES IN IRAQ. It seems to me that this suggests that the captured Zarqaawi memo, which spelled out a strategy of engaging in just such attacks in the hopes of encouraging Iraqi Shia to attack Iraqi Sunnis, thus pushing the latter in the Al Qaeda camp, was in fact genuine.

I also think that this makes clear what the terrorists are really about, even to those who didn’t get it before. This is about a drive for dominance by a particular group of fanatical Wahhabists, not a more general Islamic struggle against the West, or Zionism, or any of the other excuses offered in the “why do they hate us?” vein. They attacked civilians in the United States because they thought it would help advance their campaign to restore the Caliphate with themselves on top. Now they’re attacking Iraqi civilians because they hope that it will advance their chances of survival in a world in which even most Sunni Arabs don’t like them.

That also suggests that we’re making progress.

UPDATE: They’re attacking Shi’ites in Pakistan, too. I don’t think this will help their cause.

RAMESH PONNURU HAS RESPONDED to my TechCentralStation column from yesterday on the stacked Kass Council. It turns out that we don’t disagree all that much on some important issues:

I am not sure that the Kass council on bioethics has done anything worthwhile — anything, that is, to justify its existence.

I agree. He also says that Leon Kass has been gulty of “ham-handedness” in his handling of the appointments I complain about. (I provisionally agree; see below). But he says it doesn’t matter, because — even though the Council was stacked — the Bush Administration won a less than complete victory.

Um, okay. Here’s what I know, and how it’s shaped my assessment of the Council. When Kass was first contacted by the White House, he was asked to bring someone who disagreed with him. Instead, as Virginia Postrel noted, “he did quite the opposite. He brought along someone whose views, both on the issue at hand and on medical progress more generally, mirror his own.”

That was a setup; an odd behavior for an ethicist. And, with the Council, both at the time and since, people I trust have felt that Kass was doing exactly what Ponnuru says he should have done, but claims he didn’t:

It seems to me that the entire point of appointing such a council, if the executive branch already basically knows its mind on the relevant issues, is to provide support for its positions.

That wasn’t what Bush said the Council was about, but Kass has acted in ways that made it look as if Ponnuru’s philosophy was driving things, even if not to an outcome that was entirely to Ponnuru’s satisfaction. (Ham-handed, indeed.) Now two people generally less sympathetic to Kass’s views have left, and have been replaced by people who, go figure, seem to be more in agreement with Kass, moving the already-unbalanced Council farther in that direction. As I said before, they’re not bad people, they’re just not bringing ideological breadth to the Council; in fact, they seem to be part of a narrowing and consolidation.

If the Council is, in fact, a vehicle whose sole purpose is to dream up justifications for policies already arrived at, then none of this matters — it just means that those justifications won’t gain any additional force by virtue of the Council’s name, or its makeup, or its deliberative process. And, you know, that’s what I’ve been pointing out.

UPDATE: This statement by Natasha Vita-More in U.S. News isn’t really true, but it’s certainly catchy: “The council is against cloning but it’s full of nothing but clones.” Things aren’t actually that bad, but it does seem as if Kass is aiming at an intellectual monoculture.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Leon Kass has written an oped in the Washington Post in which he denies that there’s any commission-stacking going on, and says that the Bioethics Council is remarkably diverse. It’s notable, though, that he focuses on the credentials of the new appointments — which no one challenges — rather than offering any specifics on viewpoints, which are the real issue. (And are we supposed to take this statement at face value? ” Their personal views on the matters to come before the council in the coming term are completely unknown.”)

I hope, of course, that Ponnuru is right, and that the problem is Kass’s heavyhandedness, rather than outright bias. I still think, as many do, that the Council was stacked, and that the new appointments make that problem worse. I’d be happy to be proved wrong, of course.

EXIT POLLS show a Kerry sweep.

UPDATE: Edwards is quitting.

EVIDENCE OF WATER, but not life, on Mars.

MORE ON THE SENATE AS AN ASTONISHINGLY SUCCESSFUL investment club.

UPDATE: Mark Schmitt, on the other hand, says there may beless here than meets the eye.

DID BUSH JUST LOSE THE ELECTION? Could be. More likely the bill will just die.

UPDATE: Yep, the bill’s dead now. That didn’t take long.

TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING IN MARYLAND: Bryan Preston has tried it, and he didn’t like it:

The problem is, you get no paper record of how you voted. No receipt comes out, so you can’t look walk away with anything in your hands that shows how or even whether you actually voted. And I couldn’t see any security mechanism that would stop poll workers from casting votes for absentees when no one is around–well, other than the fact that some are supposed to be Republicans and some are supposed to be Democrats and therefore they’re supposed to serve as a check on each other. But what if there is a strong third-party challenge? It’s not unthinkable that the two major parties could collude and block the third party using these electronic machines and their lack of verifiable output. It’s very disturbing. What if the machine misregistered my votes? I have no way of detecting error, and therefore no recourse.

What’s more, here’s a similar report of voting machine problems from Georgia. This is deeply disturbing.

Fortunately, there’s a technological fix that can be deployed, if people are willing to do so.

Meanwhile Kevin Holtsberry is reporting from Ohio, where he predicts a Kerry win.

UPDATE: Athena Runner emails from California:

My husband and I went to vote this morning at 7 a.m. in Carlsbad, CA (San Diego County) and the new and improved *cough* electronic voting system wouldn’t boot up. I went back twice and at 8 a.m., they still weren’t working. Apparently it’s a sporadic problem county wide.

When voter turnout is so low already, forcing people to try and come back multiple times is a huge problem. I miss my paper ballot.

Bryon Scott also emails:

At least the machines in Maryland are working. Here in San Diego the local radio stations are reporting that more than a dozen areas in the county can’t even get the machines up and running.

Paper always works.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bruce Bender emails:

New voting machines were down in at my polling place in Oceanside, CA (next door to Camp Pendleton). Many people here leave for the day to work in San Diego and Orange and will either try again tonight or not vote. It is a strange feeling to be denied the chance.

Several other readers are reporting problems in various locales. You can’t expect any system to work perfectly, of course, but this really doesn’t seem ready for prime time.

MORE: Stephen Bainbridge reports that electronic voting (employing a different mechanism) is working fine in Los Angeles. But Maryland reader Mike McDaniel joins in dissing Maryland’s system:

I can verify that the new system is wretched. Clumsy and horribly insecure. Worse, Maryland has a long and sordid history of election fraud – and these electronic systems seem tailor-made for fixed elections. What REALLY steams me is that our county had to give up perfectly good, secure, optically scanned paper ballots for this trash.

And Brendan Loy has more on California’s problems. And Ann Bishop notes that it doesn’t have to be bad:

We’ve been using touchscreen systems for years. We must sign in with multiple real people before we get that little initialed slip that we hand to the machine attendant. I’m sure his total slips must match the total votes on his machine at the end of the day. ~~Ann Bishop in Nashville

Auditability is key. I’m getting a lot of mail on this, but this is a two-class afternoon so I’m pretty busy. I’ll try to pull some more stuff together tonight.

A CULTURE OF CORRUPTION? That’s what I keep hearing.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT VENEZUELA, which is unravelling under the radar. Caracas Chronicles and Miguel Octavio are blogging the subject, as is CaribPundit.

OXBLOG NOTES a disappearing quote at the New York Times.

UPDATE: And, in connection with a different story, Ed Cone is accusing The New York Times of a coverup. Apparently, facts that don’t fit the storyline just don’t make the story, however, um, prominent they may be. . . .

HERE’S MORE ON PRISON RAPE FROM LEGAL AFFAIRS:

The prevalence of rape in prison is fearsome. Line officers recently surveyed in one southern state estimated that one in five male prisoners were being coerced into sex; among higher-ranking officials, the estimate was one in eight. Prisoners themselves estimated one in three. . . .

Last year, Congress passed the Prison Rape Reduction Act, which allocates $60 million to support rape-prevention programs run by federal, state, and local corrections staff and to aid investigations and punishment of perpetrators. The bill, which enjoyed bipartisan support in the House and the Senate, also requires states to collect statistics on prison rape. Backers of the legislation hope federal oversight will make sexual assault prevention a priority for jail and prison systems across the nation. . . .

A higher hurdle, however, is the task of changing the way Americans think about prison rape. While San Francisco was honing its rape-prevention protocols, the state’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, was joking that he “would love to personally escort” Enron CEO Ken Lay “to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’ ”

While humor about conventional rape has always been taboo, jokes about prison rape remain common. A recent 7-Up ad, eventually pulled from the air, depicted a spokesman handing out 7-Up in prison. When he accidentally drops a can, he says, “I’m not picking that up.” Later, the spot shows the spokesman sitting in a cell, being hugged by an inmate. “When you bring the 7-Up, everyone is your friend,” he says nervously. “Okay, that’s enough being friends,” he adds as the cell door slams. The insinuation of what’s going to happen next is clear—and it’s played for a laugh.

Commercials like this one might merely be examples of corporate tastelessness, but there is ample evidence that they are symptoms of a more disturbing phenomenon: an indifference to the rights of prisoners or perhaps even an acceptance of rape as a de facto part of the punishment.

That’s clearly Lockyer’s position, which is unfortunate since he’s the chief law enforcement official of California.

UPDATE: Ronnie Schreiber emails:

There is only one reason why jokes about prison rape are acceptable – because men are the victims. In our current popular culture, men are fair game for being the butt of all sorts of jokes and comments that would be completely unacceptable if they were about women. Almost every commercial on television or radio that uses male characters treats the men as idiots and women as the font of all human knowledge and good behavior.

Yes, this sort of systematic demeaning of men is well-entrenched in the culture, though people are starting to notice and complain.

KERRY AWOL?

Presidential hopeful John F. Kerry has been a virtual no-show in the U.S. Senate over the past 14 months, but he hasn’t missed a paycheck, even though a dusty federal law says some of his $158,000 salary should have been withheld.

During his run for the presidency, Kerry has missed every one of the 22 roll call votes in the Senate this year and was absent for 292, or 64 percent of the roll call votes last year, according to a Herald review of Senate records.

That means the Massachusetts senator has been away from his post in the Senate chamber for at least 128 days over the past 14 months. . . .

Section 39 of the United States Code Service requires the Secretary of the Senate and the Chief Administrative Officer of the House to deduct daily pay from members for each day they are absent.

The only legal excuse is if the senator or representative, or one of their family members, is ill, the law states.

This seems to actually refer to 2 U.S.C. sec. 39, which provides:

The Secretary of the Senate and the Chief Administrative Officer of the House of Representatives (upon certification by the Clerk of the House of Representatives), respectively, shall deduct from the monthly payments (or other periodic payments authorized by law) of each Member or Delegate the amount of his salary for each day that he has been absent from the Senate or House, respectively, unless such Member or Delegate assigns as the reason for such absence the sickness of himself or of some member of his family.

I hope he’ll cut a check to the Treasury immediately.

UPDATE: Despite their near-total absence from the Senate in recent months, Kerry and Edwards are returning to Washington today to cast pro-gun-control votes, even though it’s the biggest primary day of the season, according to a story I just heard on NPR.

I guess this makes clear where they stand on the issue, something that people may wish to remember in the Fall.

THE WEATHER HAS BEEN TERRIFIC, and it got to 70 degrees today. I thought it was just good luck, but looking more closely at the truck shown to the right, I guess that the University of Tennessee Physical Plant people have been hard at work on the climate. Terraforming: It’s not just for Mars anymore!

I just didn’t realize that things had progressed so far.

IF YOU’RE MAKING A FILM OR TELEVISION SHOW about the military, you might want to read this.

Of course, they don’t do any better with lawyers, and most Hollywood people actually know lawyers.

EUGENE VOLOKH has some interesting thoughts on rebooting.

FRANK J. INTERVIEWS G. GORDON LIDDY: Funny, I always thought Frank J. was G. Gordon Liddy.

JACOB LEVY ON THE BIOETHICS COUNCIL STACKING:

I’m all in favor of political theorists with University of Chicago connections who write about Montesquieu, really I am. But these changes have the clear intent and effect of making the advisory council more intellectually homogenous and less likely to air any dissent from Kass’ essentially religious and anti-science views.

The Straussian link to foreign policy is deeply overstated. That to the bioethics commission is much less widely-known– other than to longtime readers of Virginia Postrel’s blog– but much more real. The President is at complete liberty to replace members of the council; there’s no procedural irregularity here, no wrongdoing. Just a very bad idea, and one that illustrates the administration’s approach to science and research questions. After Kass was appointed chair of the council, much was made of the overall intellectual balance of the group. With the spotlight gone, that balance is getting replaced with something else altogether.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Phil Bowermaster observes:

I was, at best, lukewarm on George W. Bush until September 12, 2001. I have been a staunch supporter ever since, believing that he has done exactly what was needed by taking the war to our enemy. I understood that the war had to take precedence over everything else, but I’m beginning to wonder…does President Bush understand that? If he does, then why is he pandering left and right? The smart thing would be to move to the center on all these social issues and keep his support solid. As it is, in November I plan to hold my nose and vote for Bush. The fact that I have to put it that way indicates that he has, indeed, wasted the good will that I had for him.

A President is bound to alienate some supporters with some things that he does. But it certainly seems as if I’ve been hearing this sort of thing from a lot of people, on a lot of different issues, and often put far more negatively than Phil does. It makes me wonder what, exactly, the plan is.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails:

It strikes me that the Kass bioethics council is Bush’s equivalent of Clinton’s National Monologue (er, “dialogue”) on Race — both DOA for not being genuine dialogues between the two widely-held poles of opinion on the subjects under discussion. There is no national consensus on either cloning or affirmative action, and to have a national exercise that excludes one of the poles makes the whole thing pointless at best and offensive to many.

Indeed.

MORE: I’ve gotten a number of emails — interestingly, all seemingly from University of Chicago alumni — saying that I’m being too hard on Kass. I don’t think so, as this has been the modus operandi from day one:

In other words, when the president of the United States asked Kass to bring along someone who disagreed with him, he did quite the opposite. He brought along someone whose views, both on the issue at hand and on medical progress more generally, mirror his own.

This smacks of dishonesty, to me, and his behavior since has been consistent.

STILL MORE: David Bernstein offers perspective.

MORE STILL: Reader Karl Bade observes:

Has Phil considered that W is pandering precisely because the war takes precedence over everything else? Why does Phil think that moving to the center on social issues will keep his support solid? If conservative evangelicals sit at home this November, there won’t be enough moderates in this country to make up for it. If Phil wants to argue that the evangelicals should understand that the war takes precedence over everything else, fine. There are a number of responses to such an argument, but it would be an interesting debate. I would note in passing that W is acutely aware that his Dad alienated conservatives for the sake of obtaining domestic support for the Gulf War, and it earned GHWB an early retirement, which was followed by eight years in which our response to terrorist attacks was minimal.

Yes. And while I’m happy to complain here, I freely admit that I might have the politics of what’s going on here all wrong — there’s a strong tendency to confuse doing things one dislikes with acting politically dumb, and the two aren’t necessarily the same. From where I sit, though, it seems as if Bush is in danger of getting the worst of both worlds — moving far enough right to alienate non-evangelicals, without giving the evangelicals enough to inspire them on election day. But I’m no expert on that sort of political calculation. Of course, it’s true that there are all sorts of people vulnerable to criticism on these issues:

Many of the same types who would criticize Bush for including religious opinion on a scientific panel debating the use of fetal cells – are those who refer to transgenic crops as “Frankenfood” .

Biblical scholars have no place in scientific discourse, but Mary Shelley does?

I don’t mind Biblical scholars on a panel. (Or science fiction writers, though Shelley may prove unavailable. . . .) My complaint about this panel, though, is that it’s stacked to produce the recommendations that Leon Kass (and, presumably President Bush) want. As Jacob Levy notes, there’s nothing illegal about that — but on the other hand, there’s nothing admirable, or persuasive, about it, either.

MICKEY KAUS OFFERS A CONVENIENT LIST OF ALL THE THINGS WRONG WITH JOHN KERRY, just in time for Super Tuesday.

My list would be slightly different, but Mickey’s is worth reading.

UPDATE: More here.

I’M GIVING A TALK ON BLOGGING RIGHT NOW, and this is a post to illustrate how easy it is to put something up.

THE END: Reportedly, Judge Roy Moore opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment because it would interfere with States’ Rights.

Hmm. I thought it was dead before, but now I really think so.

GEORGE BUSH’S MULTILATERALISM (here, too!) contrasts interestingly with John Kerry’s bellicose unilateralism.

HARVARD IS OPENING A NEW CENTER FOR STEM CELL RESEARCH:

Set to be announced in April, the stem cell plan will bring together researchers from Harvard and all of the Harvard-affiliated hospitals to unlock the mysteries of a type of cell that has the potential to develop into any healthy tissue in the body, but has triggered ethical controversy over the way it is created. Though not housed in a central building, the initiative will be large, even by Harvard standards, with a fund-raising goal of about $100 million, according to the scientists involved.

The move by Harvard, one of the nation’s top centers for biomedical research, marks a declaration of independence from the rules surrounding federal science funding and signals increasing frustration among American stem cell scientists. Embryonic stem cells, they say, hold tremendous promise to cure diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes. Yet President Bush, citing concerns about the use of fertilized human egg cells in research, sharply curtailed government support for the research in 2001.

The federal government doesn’t fund this sort of research, but it’s not illegal, though some people would like for it to be.

Note, too, this article saying that U.S. researchers are losing their edge in stem cell research because of the federal funding ban.

Antitechnology sentiment has seriously damaged Europe’s biotechnology industry. Since I’d rather not see that happen here, I’m glad to see non-government sources stepping up to the plate. (Via The Speculist).

5.6% UNEMPLOYMENT: “low” under Clinton, high under Bush! Go figure.