REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR.
Archive for 2004
December 7, 2004
ECOTERRORISM spreads from the West to the East.
STUART BUCK says that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of boredom.
“A MONEY-LAUNDERING CLEARINGHOUSE:” Interesting lawsuit. Sending trial lawyers after terrorists seems a bit unsporting, though.
PERHAPS, ONE DAY, Heroin will be “the new Heroin.”
UPDATE: Reader Carl Dahlman emails: “Socialism is the heroin of the intellectual.”
I’VE OCCASIONALLY BEEN CRITICIZED for not doing more blogging about health care. But, in keeping with the tenor of the times, I’ve outsourced a lot of the health blogging to the various medical professionals at Grand Rounds!
IMPENDING DOOM at CBS?
SIMON WORLD’S Asian Blog Roundup is up.
THE BIG NEWS OF THE DAY:
KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 7 — Three years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s first popularly elected president, Hamid Karzai, was sworn in Tuesday in a dignified, heavily guarded ceremony attended by hundreds of Afghan and foreign guests, including Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In a brief inaugural address, Karzai expressed his thanks to the Afghan people, who defied Taliban threats to participate in largely peaceful national elections in October, and to the United States, which led the international coalition that ousted the Islamic fundamentalist regime in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
This is an amazing accomplishment, but I suspect it won’t get the attention it deserves.
December 6, 2004
INVOKING VIETNAM HAPPENINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED: Well, it’s not as if we haven’t seen that before.
THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL IS CALLING FOR KOFI ANNAN’S RESIGNATION:
But mismanagement, corruption, and manipulation of the program by Saddam Hussein allowed his regime to amass at least $21 billion outside of the United Nations’ control, with the great bulk of that sum — $17.3 billion — pilfered between 1997 and 2003 on the secretary general’s watch. In effect, the United Nations colluded in Saddam’s successful evasion of U.N. sanctions. The most damning charge so far — that a former chief of the oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, accepted bribes from Saddam’s regime — was made in October by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer, who led a Senate investigation into the scandal. The program is now the subject of at least four congressional investigations, three U.S. federal investigations and the U.N.-appointed commission of inquiry led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. . . .
The sooner the United Nations can get past this matter, the sooner it can get back to the important business of making itself an effective instrument for collective security against terrorism, failed states, and acts of genocide, a goal that Annan has strongly supported. The secretary general should place this critical mission ahead of his personal interests, and step aside. Given his own lack of credibility on the oil-for-food program, this step is the price Annan must pay to help restore the U.N.’s credibility, and to salvage his legacy as secretary general.
Indeed.
UPDATE: A question for Kofi, from law professor Tom Smith — I think he picked the wrong answer, though . . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: The DLC has issued an Emily-Litella-like “correction” that can be read at the link above, or in this update.
ACADEMIA’S LACK OF RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY chases out another mind:
As many of you already know, I decided to derail my plan to get a PhD at ASU and instead switched a Master’s program that I will graduate from this month. Naturally, there were numerous reasons for making this decision, among them my mental health and my relationship with Brendan. But those paramount concerns, topped with a hostile academic environment, chased me away from the ivory tower.
(Via Brendan Loy, who has further thoughts).
SOME PROBLEMS WITH OUTAGES over at Amazon.com today. I had some trouble reaching the site earlier, but it seems to be working now.
Some people are unhappy. And, in my case, the key gift item I was looking for is sold out anyway. Dang.
INSTAPUNDIT: Both the Best Blog overall and #4 for the “most overrated blog.” Well, there’s no logical contradiction there, really . . . .
UPDATE: Hey, last year I was most overrated, as well as “Best Blog overall.” So I’m less overrated this year. Er, which is an improvement, right?
FILIBUSTERS USED TO BE BAD: Now they’re good!
Repackaged rhetoric will save the Dems! I like “poison-free communities” (instead of “environmental protection”)–but somehow I don’t think “public protection attorneys” (i.e. trial lawyers) will fly. ..
Me neither.
ARTHUR CHRENKOFF ROUNDS UP more under-reported news from Iraq, including this:
Louis Sako, the Chaldean Archbishop of Kirkuk, is a very frustrated man these days. “It is not all death and destruction,” says the archbishop. “Much is positive in Iraq today. . . . Universities are operating, schools are open, people go out onto the streets normally. . . . Where there’s a kidnapping or a homicide the news gets out immediately, and this causes fear among the people. . . . Those who commit such violence are resisting against Iraqis who want to build their country.”
It’s not just the terrorists who, according to His Eminence, are creating problems for Iraq: Elections in January “will be a starting point for a new Iraq,” he says. Yet “Western newspapers and broadcasters are simply peddling propaganda and misinformation. . . . Iraqis are happy to be having elections and are looking forward to them because they will be useful for national unity. . . . Perhaps not everything will go exactly to plan, but, with time, things will improve. Finally Iraqis will be given the chance to choose. Why is there so much noise and debate coming out from the West when before, under Saddam, there were no free elections, but no one said a thing?”
The archbishop has this wish for the international bystanders: “Europe is absent, it’s not out there; the United States is on its own. . . . [Europe] must help the Iraqi government to control its borders to prevent the entry of foreign terrorists, [but] also provide economic help to encourage a new form of culture which is open to coexistence, the acceptance of others, respect for the human person and for other cultures. . . . Europe must understand that there is no time to waste on marginal or selfish interests: The entire world needs peace.”
Archbishop Sako’s frustration is increasingly shared by other Iraqis, who can hardly recognize their country from the foreign media coverage.
Sigh. Of course, they can’t even get Kansas right.
DON’T MISS THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS, where econo-blogging is the rule, instead of the exception!
STUDENTS HECKLE IRANIAN PRESIDENT:
Students chanted “Shame on you” and “Where are your promised freedoms?” to express their frustration with the failure of Iran’s reform movement.
A visibly-shaken Khatami defended his record and criticised the powerful hardliners who have closed newspapers and jailed dissidents.
First Chris Hedges and now this. (Ed Morrissey has more thoughts).
FLOYD ABRAMS EXPLAINS WHY HE SHOULD LOSE:
The crux of the reporters’ contention is that the public would be less well informed if journalists could not promise their sources confidentiality. However, the proliferation of blogs and bloggers could represent the Achilles’ heel in this approach. If Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are entitled to claim special treatment in the courts, so too could hundreds of thousands of Americans who use the Internet to post comments about their views on current events.
“They’ll say anybody with a modem and a computer is a ‘journalist,’” said a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, Jane Kirtley. “No court is going to be comfortable with that sort of wholesale privilege.”
Ms. Miller’s attorney, Floyd Abrams, said he is bracing for questions from the court about the perils of granting legal protection to the burgeoning ranks of bloggers.
“There’s no doubt that’s the potentially dangerous aspect of it,” Mr. Abrams said in a telephone interview from his Manhattan office yesterday. “If everybody’s entitled to the privilege, nobody will get it.”
Mr. Abrams said he thinks many bloggers should be entitled to the same kind of protection he is seeking for his client and other traditional journalists. “I think a blogger who communicates with and tries to communicate with thousands of people is not less deserving than a journalist who may communicate with a smaller audience through a small-town newspaper,” the attorney said. “There should be protection so long as information was obtained for the purpose of dissemination to the public at large in some sort of analogous way to what ‘journalists’ do.”
He almost hits on the right answer here, except for the audience size. Does this mean that we should look at our Sitemeter counters before deciding whether we get First Amendment protection?
The notion of journalism as a profession, with a guild and special privileges, was always a weak one. It’s now much more obvious just how weak it is. And Abrams seems to have figured it out:
It is widely expected that the current dispute, involving Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper, could end up before the Supreme Court. Mr. Abrams said that given the sentiments of some justices, traditional journalists could actually benefit from being lumped in with the bloggers.
“For some courts and some members of the public, the image of journalist as romantic hero had faded, but the notion of bloggers on duty to catch Dan Rather has not,” Mr. Abrams said. He said he may argue that turning aside the privilege would actually be as much as a blow to bloggers as to mainstream reporters.
“A number of members of the Supreme Court who are very hostile to the notion of special press privileges might at least take a second look at the issue. We’re not talking about a pressonly privilege,” Mr. Abrams said.
A privilege for journalism is fine, though the argument for protecting the confidentiality of sources against legal process has always seemed weak and self-serving to me. But a privilege for approved “journalists” is not. Here’s a piece I wrote on the Vanessa Leggett case, which is also mentioned in the article above, a couple of years ago in the Wall Street Journal.
Read this, too.
THE BECKER/POSNER BLOG (featuring, er, Gary Becker and Richard Posner, natch) is now active, and they’re debating preventive war.
TENNCARE, HILLARYCARE, and what might have been — some reflections.