IN THE MAIL: Elliott Currie, The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence. The Insta-Wife’s take is that Currie is half-right, but that he drastically exaggerates the amount of discipline teenagers are actually subject to.

I wonder if there’s even a “crisis of adolescence” going on at the moment, really. In fact, the kids seem to be alright, with dramatically lower rates of teen pregnancy, crime, etc. (I credit Internet porn and violent videogames!). Of course, there’s always a crisis of adolescence when it comes time to sell books on teenagers, and as far as I can tell there always has been.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

Kofi Annan survived the disasters of UN peacekeeping in Srebrenica and Rwanda, the bitter Security Council divisions over the Iraq war and the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

But the man described by some as the “secular Pope” is now more vulnerable than ever, because of growing scandal over his organisation’s mismanagement of sanctions and humanitarian aid to Iraq.

Calls for Mr Annan’s resignation were once restricted to ideologically driven hardline US conservatives. Now diplomats in New York are openly asking whether the secretary-general can remain in office until the end of his term in December 2006.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Well stories like this certainly won’t help:

Peacekeeping troops guarding refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo sexually abused girls as young as 13, giving out scraps of food or money in return for favours, the United Nations admitted yesterday. . . .

Many were orphans from a war that has claimed more lives than any since 1945.

Soldiers continued abusing children even after the onset of an internal UN inquiry.

Read the whole thing. And remind yourself of how much more attention this would get — even from Kofi — if American troops were involved.

MICHAEL SAVAGE, REMIXED: I wonder if it’ll get an Yglesias review?

JONATHAN LAST CALLS THE CBS RATHERGATE REPORT A WHITEWASH:

And Mary Mapes understands it, too. “Indeed, in the end, all that the panel did conclude was that there were many red flags that counseled against going to air quickly . . .” she says now. “I am heartened to see that the panel found no political bias on my part, as indeed I have none.”

Well, if the documents weren’t forged and Mary Mapes acted with no political bias, then her firing would have been unjust and she really would be a scapegoat. But since there is abundant evidence that the documents were forgeries and that political attitudes were important in driving the story, the better conclusion is that the CBS Report is a whitewash.

Read the whole thing.

GOT YER HEALTHCARE BLOGGING RIGHT HERE: Grand Rounds is up.

I THINK THAT KEVIN DRUM has it right on the “not enough troops” claim:

Of course, no one seriously suggests that we should strip every last soldier from Europe, North Korea, and our other overseas deployments. Realistically, then, the maximum number of troops available for use in Iraq is probably pretty close to the number we have now: 300,000 rotated annually, for a presence of about 150,000 at any given time.

The only way to appreciably increase this is to raise the Army’s end strength by several divisions, and this is exactly what Kagan and Sullivan think Rumsfeld has been too stubborn about opposing. But as they acknowledge, doing this would take a couple of years — and as they don’t acknowledge, it would have made the war politically impossible. The invasion of Iraq almost certainly would never have happened if Rumsfeld had told Congress in 2002 that he wanted them to approve three or four (or more) new divisions in preparation for a war in 2004 or 2005.

In other words, when Rumsfeld commented that you go to war “with the army you have,” he was exactly right. Kagan and Sullivan both supported the Iraq war, but it never would have happened if Rumsfeld had acknowledged that we needed 100,000 more troops than we had available at the time.

For that reason, conservative critiques of Rumsfeld on these grounds strike me as hypocritical. Would Kagan and Sullivan have supported delaying the Iraq war a couple of years in order to raise the troops they now believe are necessary? If not, isn’t it a little late to start complaining now?

I’m not convinced that “more troops” is the answer in Iraq, but I’m perfectly OK with the idea of adding troops until the cuts of the 1990s are undone, though I presume that folks at the Pentagon — usually not quick to turn down money — would jump at this if they thought it would be useful. And those who think we ought to have more troops should start agitating to undo the 1990s cuts; I’d probably be happy to go along. But the notion that Rumsfeld is, out of some inexplicable stubbornness, refusing to send enough troops has never made sense with me. We clearly had plenty of troops to beat Saddam’s army, and, as I say, it’s not clear that more troops are the answer now — read this post by David Adesnik for more on pre-invasion planning and post-invasion execution and you’ll see that troop numbers aren’t the big issue, and that critics seem mostly to be engaging in hindsight today. I think that calling for “more troops” is a way to criticize while not sounding weak, and that it thus has an appeal that overcomes its uncertain factual foundation.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here and, from Iraqi blogger Ali, here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

MORE: I found this post by Reid Stott a bit confusing, but perhaps that’s because he found me confusing as well. We had enough troops to beat Saddam’s army — and, as some have pointed out, above, the only way to have had more would have been to either wait, or strip troops from everywhere else, a situation that remains true today. That was fairly obvious at the time of the invasion, which makes me, like Kevin, wonder why people are emphasizing it now.

To Reid’s past-and-present tense, I’ll add another: the future tense. That is, the real question is whether we have enough troops to do what we’re going to do next. I think the answer to that is yes, and I think that if so, then the question of whether we should have more troops on occupation duty right now will turn out to be less important.

GAYPATRIOT SAYS THAT HE’S NOT “THE NEW ANDREW SULLIVAN:” I agree.

SANDY BERGER UPDATE:

WASHINGTON — The criminal probe into why former Bill Clinton aide Sandy Berger illegally sneaked top-secret documents out of the National Archives — possibly in his socks — has heated up and is now before a federal grand jury, The Post has learned. . . .

“It may have been off the front pages, but the investigation has been active,” said a source with knowledge of the probe.

“[Berger] has been interviewed several times by federal agents — FBI and prosecutors.”

Berger admits removing 40 to 50 top-secret documents from the archives, but claims it was an “honest mistake” made while he vetted documents for the 9/11 commission’s probe into the Twin Towers attacks.

Berger has also acknowledged that he destroyed some documents — he says by accident. . . .

The documents include multiple drafts of a review of the 2000 millennium threat said to conclude that only luck prevented a 2000 attack.

That story conflicts with Berger’s own testimony to the commission, in which he claimed that “we thwarted” millennium attacks by being vigilant — rather than by sheer luck, as the review reportedly suggests.

I’d been wondering what was going on with that case.

UPDATE: Lorie Byrd has more.

BILL STUNTZ:

Odds are, George W. Bush will soon appoint a new Chief Justice. More Supreme Court appointments will follow, along with hundreds of lower-court judges. The federal judiciary will soon be Bush Country, a fact that could have larger long-term effects than Social Security reform and the war in Iraq.

Unless something changes, the effects will be bad. Not because Bush’s judges and Justices will be too conservative, but because they won’t be conservative enough. Most conservative judges today believe in a theory that leads to very un-conservative results — law that amounts to little more than judges’ opinions, concentrated power in the hands of an allegedly all-knowing Supreme Court, and legal rules that reinforce the power of liberal interest groups like teachers’ unions. The right has the wrong legal theory.

The theory boils down to three “isms”: federalism, originalism, and formalism. The unifying theme behind this trinity is that all are things Earl Warren wasn’t. Warren believed in broad Congressional power to regulate the economy and protect civil rights. Modern-day federalists believe in states’ rights. Warren believed in a living Constitution that changes with the times. Originalists think the Constitution means exactly what James Madison thought it meant when he wrote it. Warren cared about the consequences of his decisions. Formalist judges follow legal forms and procedures and believe that worrying about consequences is a job for politicians.

All these theories are supposed to limit judges’ power, so they can’t “make law from the bench,” as the President likes to say. But the holy trinity of conservative legal thought does not cabin judges’ power so much as hide it. Judging, Scalia-style, is a little like a card trick: the audience’s attention is drawn to one hand while the other does all the work.

Read the whole thing. I’m not at all sure I agree with this, but it’s interesting how much Stuntz’s analysis seems to overlap with what Larry Kramer says in his recent book, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review, though I think it’s fair to say that Stuntz and Kramer are not very close together politically.

UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru doesn’t like Stuntz’s essay. And John Tabin has thoughts about federalism and education.

And for more on originalism, here’s a rather lengthy critique of Robert Bork’s approach to originalism that I wrote some years ago.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up. Actually, it’s been up for a while, but I was busy and forgot to link it.

BLOG TRAFFIC PRE- AND POST-ELECTION: N.Z. Bear analyzes the trends. It’s worth comparing his patterns with this graph of overall annual traffic patterns from the Online Journalism Review. In part, it looks to me as if the election exaggerated an underlying pattern.

UPDATE: Why did InstaPundit peak in late September, instead of at the election like Kos and Power Line? InstaPundit’s traffic peaked with RatherGate, and specifically on the day of CBS’s press conference. It may have equalled that on Election Day (the server problems make that unclear) but InstaPundit is a media-criticism blog more than it’s a political blog, and I think the traffic shows that. It’s okay with me — RatherGates don’t happen every day, but there’s always plenty of media stuff to criticize!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten discovers that SiteMeter is undercounting his site. Lots of people say that. I’ve assumed that it’s at least a useful standard of comparison, as I assume it undercounts everyone similarly. I wonder if I’m right about that, though? I don’t care if it’s wrong — I’m long past obsessing over daily traffic — but I always assumed that it was at least consistent.

NANOPARTICLES TO TREAT BREAST CANCER: NanoPundit has the scoop.

TENNESSEE GOVERNOR PHIL BREDESEN has announced deep cuts in TennCare, the Tennessee health-care plan that was a sort of HillaryCare lite. There’s a roundup on the subject here.

AUSTIN BAY has started a blog.

ROGER SIMON: “Anchormen should be extinct.”

TVNEWSER interviews a CBS vice president.

MORE ON RATHERGATE — over at GlennReynolds.com.

CONGRATULATIONS to Eugene Volokh, who’s improving the gene pool once again.

“DEATH SQUADS” IN IRAQ: Armed Liberal notes that some of those who are decrying the topic today were calling for assassinations in place of an invasion.

And as I ask below, why are they “death squads?” I thought that people who did this sort of thing were called “insurgents,” in the interest of neutrality, unless one chose to compare them to the Minutemen? Or is that only when they’re on the other side?

THE CULT OF THE IPOD REALLY DOES RULE THE WORLD: “President Bush prepares his I-pod during a bicycle ride at a secure location outside Washington D.C. December 12, 2004.” (Direct photo link here.)

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF rounds up more news from Afghanistan.

DAN RATHER offers thoughts on accountability. “I am responsible. I am accountable. I am not an excuse-maker. I am not someone who minimizes my own mistakes and those of CBS News.”

I’LL BE ON HUGH HEWITT’S SHOW, in a few minutes, talking about RatherGate. You can listen live here.

MORE ON THE NAVY and tsunami relief, over at GlennReynolds.com.

STRANGELY, neither Kos, Atrios, nor Josh Marshall has anything to say about RatherGate so far, though Armstrong Williams gets rather more attention. Here at InstaPundit, on the other hand, both subjects are discussed. I’m just, you know, sayin’. . . .

UPDATE: Yeah, I don’t usually comment on what people don’t blog about — that’s their business. But even Richard Bennett has noticed this!

ANOTHER UPDATE: They’re not silent over at Democratic Underground, though! M. Simon rounds up some choice reactions.