SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CASE OF IMPRISONED IRANIAN DISSIDENT AKBAR GANJI, at the Daily Demarche.
Archive for 2005
July 13, 2005
MORE AL-QAEDA INFIGHTING.
CONGRATULATIONS TO EUGENE VOLOKH, who just received a chair at UCLA.
No, not one of these,
UPDATE: Reader Tucker Goodrich thinks that Volokh should have gotten one of these chairs. Well, yeah.
JOHN HINDERAKER: “I’ve been surprised at how Britons have reacted to the news that the subway bombers were native British Muslims. Home Secretary Charles Clarke is just one of many who expressed “shock” at this revelation. It’s not clear why anyone should be surprised that British citizens could also be terrorists.” Certainly no one who was paying attention.
UPDATE: Norm Geras is unsparing on terrorist apologists:
It needs to be seen and said clear: there are, amongst us, apologists for what the killers do, and they make more difficult the long fight that is needed to defeat them. (To forestall any possible misunderstanding on this point: I do not say these people are not entitled to the views they express or to their expression of them. They are. Just as I am entitled to criticize their views for the wretched apologia they amount to.) The plea will be made, though – it always is – that these are not apologists, they are merely honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we all live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy that seeks to dissipate responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else.
Read the whole thing.
ANOTHER BREDESEN-FOR-PRESIDENT MENTION: He’s certainly getting better press than our previous governor.
UPDATE: Bill Hobbs is less impressed.
MORE VIDEO FROM AUSTIN BAY, this time from Bagram.
ROBERT BYRD IS SHOUTING BUSH’S NAME FROM STEEPLE TOPS — which is quite a gesture for a man his age.
AT THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE, some thoughts on suicide bombers killing children:
Some day you may hear someone describing the virtues of the “resistance” or “freedom fighters” in Iraq , or claiming moral equivalence between these animals and coalition soldiers. You may even hear someone say we’re on a “crusade” against Muslims. When you do, send them here.
I will.
UPDATE: Here’s an article on suicide bombing from The Atlantic Monthly, made free to non-subscribers.
RON BAILEY LOOKS AT PROPERTY RIGHTS AND POVERTY, and offers advice to the Friends of the Earth:
Amusingly, while the FOE report insists on all kinds of rights for the world’s poor, including environmental, human, political, collective, legal, and women’s rights, there is in the report not a single mention of the word “property,” as in “property rights.” While FOE is to be commended for its support for restoring stolen land to poor people around the globe, it just cannot bring itself to permit individual poor people to own land. Consequently, most of the “sustainable development” schemes endorsed by FOE involve collective ownership of land and natural resources. (By collective ownership, FOE most emphatically does not mean corporate ownership.) Collective ownership by a defined group is better than government theft, but it limits the options of the joint owners who are subject to the tyranny of generally conservative majorities who stifle entrepreneurship. Evidently, FOE would prefer that poor people sit around voting all day rather than getting rich. Think church vestries or condo association meetings.
Ack.
THE DISCOVERY LAUNCH has been scrubbed. Is it a case of too much caution, or not enough?
Regardless, the Shuttle’s future is limited, and we need to be moving on something better — which probably shouldn’t be another government-monopoly Big Rocket. Related thoughts here and (with a cool Webb Wilder quote to open) here.
A LOOK AT THE L.A. TIMES ethics code.
CLAUDIA ROSETT has more on connections between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. I know it’s an article of faith — in the most literal sense — of the antiwar crowd that no such connections exist, but assertions to that effect mostly serve as a time-saver, by making clear who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
A WHILE BACK, quite a few readers recommended this book by Peter Hamilton, and I’m reading it, and enjoying it, now — though alas my rather high workload at the moment is limiting me to a half-hour or so before bed most days. I need to do less writing, and more reading.
Maybe next year.
SHRINKING DEFICITS: The trade deficit is down:
The U.S. trade deficit narrowed unexpectedly in May to $55.3 billion as exports rose slightly to a record and imports retreated a bit from the record set in April, a U.S. government report showed on Wednesday.
The smaller-than-expected trade gap suggested stronger-than-expected U.S. economic growth in the second quarter and could help persuade the Federal Reserve to remain on a path of steadily rising interest rates.
And so is the budget deficit:
Based on revenue and spending data through June, the budget deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year was $251 billion, $76 billion lower than the $327 billion gap recorded at the corresponding point a year earlier.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the deficit for the full fiscal year, which reached $412 billion in 2004, could be “significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps below $325 billion.”
The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.
Most of the increase in individual tax receipts appears to have come from higher stock market gains and the business income of relatively wealthy taxpayers.
Hmm. Weren’t people telling us just recently that the budget deficit was growing because wealthy taxpayers were paying less? Apparently they were in error.
BORING FROM WITHIN: But not boring!
“EMPTY-HEADED TELEVISION PEOPLE:” I have video of Ana Marie Cox and Hugh Hewitt talking about press coverage of the Plame scandal, plus a few comments of my own, over at GlennReynolds.com.
UPDATE: This is funny: “The Times is keeping silent because the public has a right to know.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.
MARTIN KRAMER charges Juan Cole with error. And with airbrushing in the correction of same.
STEM CELL UPDATE: People wondering why Arlen Specter has been less-than-helpful to the Bush Administration on judicial matters may want to note Specter’s anger over the Administration’s stem-cell policy:
The President’s Council on Bioethics laid out several options in a white paper in May.
Bioethicists and scientists testified Tuesday regarding the theories outlined in the white paper before the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. Arlen Specter, (R-Pennsylvania), who is suffering from cancer and authored a competing bill, chairs the subcommittee.
Specter’s voice was rough from chemotherapy treatments. He said he is angry that stem-cell research is still being delayed by lack of funding.
“I’ve been waiting too long already,” Specter said.
Specter has introduced a bill that would overthrow President Bush’s executive order, which limits federal funding to a small number of human embryonic stem-cell lines. Specter’s bill would open up funding to unused embryos donated by couples after in vitro fertilization. The House has already passed the bill, and the Senate was expected to do the same.
But the president has promised to veto it.
Read the whole thing, which includes discussion of several other bills. There’s also a roundup on the legislative battles in this article in the Los Angeles Times. The Bush Administration’s stem-cell policy has seemed deeply misguided and wrong to me, but it would be ironic if this comparatively minor bow to pro-life politics messed up Bush’s chances to appoint a conservative Supreme Court justice, a far more significant matter.
It’s certainly easy to see why this would make Specter mad:
Some Republicans said the White House goal was to get several of the alternative measures passed, so that even if the embryonic stem cell research bill opposed by the White House were approved, Bush could sign the other measures into law while vetoing the measure that would undermine his policy.
“I think the point is to confuse the issue,” said Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), co-sponsor of the House embryonic stem cell bill.
If I were Specter, it would make me feel uncooperative, too.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Chris Phoenix is blogging the Nano Bootcamp. “At the sub-micron scale, watching paint dry is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen.”
WHY IS JUDITH MILLER STILL IN JAIL? I’ve wondered that too.
UPDATE: John Hinderaker notes that the New York Times is in a rather awkward position.
MICKEY KAUS remains on top of the all-important Oliver Stone story. With help from Oliver Stone!
A HALLIBURTON EQUIVALENCE? Not exactly.
ANTI-ARROYO PROTESTS in the Phillipines. Gateway Pundit has a roundup.
STRATEGYPAGE ON CHINA:
China’s military build up has been big news for the last few months. This development was known all along by the military and defense industry journalists, but the story never broke big, until recently, in the mainstream media. Before that, it was something defense geeks were going on about, and not worth paying much attention to. The Chinese made little effort to hide their military buildup, with civilians, and tourists, able to move past bases where the new weapons, and military units, were in plain sight. As the Internet, and email, became more common in China over the last five years, more details of the Chinese buildup got out to more people in the West. Many Chinese scientists and engineers cultivated email contacts in the West, and freely talked about the military developments in China. They also talked about all the books being published in China that talked of the coming wars with the United States. These developments were reported in the West, but few news directors were connecting the dots. Now they have, and the story of China’s military buildup is considered quite a scoop.
Well, it is, for those who don’t read StrategyPage . . . .