ARE THE DEMOCRATS TRYING to come across as wimps? First there’s the bogus brouhaha about Bolton being “abrasive” (another Moynihan? Horrors!). Now Mickey Kaus notes that Education Secretary Margaret Spelling is a regular thug:

It seems she once called somebody “unAmerican” and contacted Utah’s governor instead of its education superintendent! She even threatened to cut off federal funding if Utah flouted the law’s requirements for getting federal funding! If that’s Dillon’s idea of “bare-knuckle politics” he must have grown up in an ashram.

Call me crazy, but “the party of Tom-Daschle soft-talkers” seems like a bad branding move to me.

OUR “FRIENDS,” THE SAUDIS: Not so much, really. As Dan Darling notes: “I mean, how else should we take their chief justice calling for jihad against US forces in Iraq as well donating cash towards said endeavors? And from the comfort of a government mosque, no less.”

I continue to regard the Bush Administration as insufficiently serious where the Saudis are concerned, though I’d love to turn out to be wrong about that.

I’VE MENTIONED KNOX COUNTY SCHOOLS’ rather draconian attendance policy, and how that conflicts with the school system’s own unseriousness at times, but yesterday took the cake. My daughter had a wonderful time — on a day-long “field trip” to see the local minor-league baseball team play. Enjoyable, yes? Educational? Not so much.

IT’S NOT LIKE THERE’S A WAR ON, or anything.

RAW-FILE ENCRYPTION: A tempest in a teapot?

CANADA UPDATE: Damian Penny says that Paul Martin is desperate.

PROTESTS IN EGYPT have passed a crucial milestone: They’re now producing photos of protest babes. This should have Hosni Mubarak worried.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s a report of a protest by Syrian dissidents, in Damascus.

I THINK THAT ANDREW SULLIVAN IS GUILTY OF OVERREADING my earlier comments on the religious right. Unlike Sullivan, I don’t think we’re in the grip of a theocracy — unless “theocracy” is defined as “a population that doesn’t support gay marriage,” in which case the point is true, but trivial.

I do think that the Republican Party is making the very mistake that I warned against immediately after the election, in Reason:

“Great election, kid. Don’t get cocky.” That could be Han Solo’s advice to President Bush. But it’s not the advice he’s getting from either the left or the right. Eager to explain away Kerry’s defeat in a way that lets them feel morally superior, many on the left are saying that it was all about “moral values,” particularly gay rights and abortion. Eager to expand their power in the second term, advocates for the Christian Right have been swift to agree.

Listening to them would be a big mistake for Bush. There’s no question that incidents like the Janet Jackson breast episode have angered a lot of Americans who feel that the entertainment industry doesn’t respect their values. And gay marriage polls badly even in the bluest of blue states. But there’s little reason to believe Americans eagerly cast their votes in November in the hope that busybodies would finally start telling them what to do.

In their book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge explain how the Republican coalition could go wrong: “Too Southern, too greedy, and too contradictory.” Taking the advice of advocacy groups left and right is likely to send the Bush administration in that direction. Is Karl Rove smart enough to realize that?

The answer would seem to be “no.” I do think, though, that Andrew’s constant complaints about theocracy aren’t helping and indeed make even his valid points less persuasive. Andrew did a wonderful job of convincing undecideds — and even some decided-againsts — to think positively of gay rights and gay marriage, but lately his tone has been such that I doubt it’s winning many converts. I support gay marriage, though no doubt with less intensity than Andrew, but it’s clearly a minority position in the country, and last year’s courtroom “victories” seem to have done more harm than good. You go from being a minority position, to a majority position, by convincing people that you’re right. It’s not clear to me that playing the theocracy card will do that. Because either the American people agree with the “theocrats'” program, in which case there’s not much difference between theocracy and democracy, and you’d really better start changing some minds, or they don’t agree with it, in which case they’ll discipline the Republicans at the next election — assuming that the opposition doesn’t discredit itself to an even greater degree first. Trust me — you don’t want to sound like Al Gore.

UPDATE: Related thoughts, here, from Daniel Drezner, and here, from Chris Lawrence.

[LATER: Sorry — Chris Lawrence link was wrong before. Fixed now.]

THE IRS FLUNKS AN AUDIT:

The Internal Revenue Service’s employee tuition assistance program has spent more than 60 percent of its funds — or $4.4 million in two years — on administrative costs, employing the equivalent of 30 full-time workers while turning away hundreds of employees for lack of funds, an inspector general audit has found.

(Via TaxProf, which also has a link to the audit itself).

HERE’S SOMETHING I HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE: A pro-filibuster protest at my local mall this afternoon. Signs read: “U.S. Senate — Nuclear Free Zone,” and something I couldn’t make out regarding “right-minded judges.”

ANNE HAIGHT IS WENDY’S-BLOGGING — and giving fear-mongers the finger.

FOR PROFESSORS, HAVING A BLOG means that no research idea is ever wasted! And here’s more on academic blogging, in the Baltimore Sun.

MORE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ REVISIONISM, at The Mudville Gazette.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire emails:

The Times was pummeled in Nov 2003 for this revisionism – Andrew Sullivan
(the old Andrew) had two timely posts.

Link

Link

EJ Dionne, *not* a Righty, criticized Bush after the 2003 SOTU for offering
*three* rationales for war, and asked him to pick one.

Link

Finally, here is the speech Feb 26, 2003 speech to which the NY Times
referred.

Link

Really, the Times — and those others who are trying to rewrite history here — ought to be ashamed. No one denies, of course, that Bush talked about WMD, but what’s inexcusable is the way the critics are now trying to deny that he talked about anything else.

Roger Simon adds this observation:

T]he Times’ own executive editor wrote a long, positive profile in their magazine (before the war) of Paul Wolfowitz, in which the Deputy Defense Secretary speaks ad infinitum about the democracy argument. What I think is really going on here is liberal embarrassment. They have been caught on the wrong side of history. Worse, the anti-idealistic side.

Good point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tom didn’t say he posted on this, but he did. Read the whole thing, which goes beyond the comments above, but this point is worth quoting:

Years later, the Times may be imagining that, since disarmament was the only reason that liberals wanted to hear, it must have been the only reason Bush offered.

Well, they knew better at one time, and perhaps they will again.

Especially if we keep reminding them!

A MEDIA TIPPING POINT? My TechCentralStation column is up.

RICH, BLOGGY GOODNESS: This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is up.

A DESPERATE BID FOR ATTENTION at Air America.

UPDATE: Here’s some valuable historical perspective.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION is up, featuring education-bloggers from all over.

MORE VIOLENCE IN TOGO.

NOW THIS IS JUST OUT-AND-OUT DISHONESTY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:

The only plausible reason for keeping American troops in Iraq is to protect the democratic transformation that President Bush seized upon as a rationale for the invasion after his claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be fictitious. If that transformation is now allowed to run off the rails, the new rationale could prove to be as hollow as the original one.

I’ve already provided a link-rich refutation of this revisionist history, and this claim that democratic transformation was some sort of new rationalization is, not to put too fine a point on it, an out-and-out lie, readily fact-checkable and in fact already fact-checked, that the Times should be ashamed of.

What’s more, the Times editorial board should be very careful not to confuse “wrong” with “fictitious,” given its miserable performance on the war.

UPDATE: Reader Greg Wallace notes that The New York Times editorial board apparently doesn’t even read its own earlier work. Like, say, this from February 27, 2003:

President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a ”free and peaceful Iraq”…

Sorry, but this is just a pathetic performance by the Times, and warrants a correction. And an apology.

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Bennett (not the Anglosphere one) has further thoughts.

MICKEY KAUS refers to “the semi-mysterious slump of President Bush in the polls.”

I don’t think it’s much of a mystery, and I agree with Bush pollster Matthew Dowd that it has something to do with Terri Schiavo. (“The country’s generally unhappy, and maybe they think the Terri Schiavo case is taking away from things that Congress or Washington ought to be working on.”) Only it’s broader than that.

The Democrats’ weakness is that people worry that they’re the party of Jane Fonda. They tried — but failed miserably — to convince people otherwise in the last election.

The Republicans’ weakness is that people worry that they’re the party of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They tried, successfully, to convince people otherwise in the last election, but they’re now acting in ways that are giving those fears new life. Add to this the fact that the war is going well, weakening the national security glue that holds Bush’s coalition together, and a drop is natural: People who reluctantly backed Bush because Kerry was just unacceptable on national security are now seeing their worries about domestic issues as more credible.

Perhaps the Republicans think this will all be forgotten by 2006, or at least by 2008. And perhaps they’re counting on the Democrats to remain so feckless on national security that it won’t matter. Perhaps they’ll be right, but they’re certainly suffering short-term declines in the polls that hurt the President’s ability to act right now. I think that if he had a 60% approval rating, or even a 53% approval rating, he’d be making more progress on Social Security reform and on his various nominations. Was it worth this damage to solidify the social-conservative base? They seem to think so, but I’m not so sure.

UPDATE: Caught a few minutes of Limbaugh as I was running errands this afternoon. He seemed to be playing defense on this issue ferociously enough to convince me that there’s something to it.

Rand Simberg and Rob Huddleston, on the other hand, think this is much ado about nothing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Will Franklin says it’s all about consumer sentiment

CAPTAIN ED says that the Duelfer Report’s language on WMD and Syria is being misrepresented.

THE SUPREME COURT’S ENTHUSIASM FOR FOREIGN LAW seems to have its limits:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday curbed the reach of a federal law that prohibits convicted felons from possessing guns, ruling 5 to 3 that the law does not apply to those who were convicted by courts in foreign countries.

The majority arrived at that conclusion by interpreting the statute’s reference to a conviction in “any court” to mean “any court in the United States.” Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s majority opinion said that in the absence of any indication that Congress even considered the issue when it enacted the law in 1968, the court should apply a legal presumption that “Congress ordinarily intends its statutes to have domestic, not extraterritorial, application.”

Justice Breyer said the gun law would create anomalies if applied to foreign convictions, because foreign legal systems have made different choices of what conduct to regard as criminal. Citing the Russian criminal code as an example, he said that someone might be regarded as a felon “for engaging in economic conduct that our society might encourage.” A foreign conviction does not necessarily indicate that a person is dangerous, Justice Breyer said.

That’s true, and I’m delighted to see such a forthright acknowledgment that American values differ sharply from those of other countires.

On the other hand, quite a few domestic felony statutes have nothing to do with dangerousness, and I wonder if the promiscuous designation of crimes having no significant moral or dangerousness component as “felonies” might itself be a due process violation.

JEFF JARVIS is asking for car stereo advice.

PUBLIUS NOTES more protests in Belarus, where the opposition is not letting itself be cowed.

PHIL CARTER: “Nine months after the 9/11 Commission issued its report, America sees little follow-through on many of the Commission’s critical recommendations.”

He also says there’s been a failure of responsibility over Abu Ghraib, though I suppose that’s not entirely surprising given the way it has been politicized.

UPDATE: More homeland security problems here.