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September 20, 2006

I’VE GOT SOME THOUGHTS ON DARFUR AND THE U.N.’S FAILURES, over at The Guardian’s blog.

UPDATE: The belief on the part of many Guardian commenters that concern about genocide in Darfur is just some sort of Zionist plot is . . . disturbing.

MORE RACE RELATIONS PROBLEMS for the netroots.

September 19, 2006

MORE CRUSHING OF POLITICAL SPEECH: By Oprah.

MAIMON SCHWARZSCHILD: “Given the present climate of liberal opinion, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to see historical revisionism in praise of Neville Chamberlain.”

CLAUDIA ROSETT: “Kofi Annan has finally agreed to fill out one of the financial disclosure forms now required of UN senior staff.” But there’s a catch.

ORIN KERR:

Is the Specter bill a good idea as a matter of policy?

I haven’t blogged on this question before, mostly because I find the question essentially impossible to answer. Almost no one knows what the facts of the NSA program are, what it does, and whether and how much it works, so I don’t know how we’re supposed to know whether it’s a good idea for Congress to endorse it legislatively. It’s like me telling you, “I’m thinking of a government program. Do you want to allow it or prohibit it?”

Lots of people could answer that question, if you just told them whether Bush was for it or against it. . . .

NELSON ASCHER WRITES on the media, NGOs, and paranoia.

KATRINA REFUGEES, A SURGING HOMICIDE RATE, and bad feeling in Houston.

UPDATE: Rob DeJournett says the LAT is wrong about the crime.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Several Houston readers say that DeJournett is wrong, and crime rates are up. Reader Gus van Horn writes: “The LA Times is, I am afraid, correct about Houston crime. You cite the bioscientist whose calculations are based on crime stats hear the Astrodome, which is merely where the refugees were initially housed for a short time. (They were also required to report to the dome for curfew.) They eventually landed in low-income apartment complexes in other parts of town, most notably Southwest Houston.” He sends a link to this post from his blog, too.

And Laurence Simon writes to the same effect.

MORE: Kinky Friedman blamed “crackheads and thugs” from New Orleans for Houston’s increase in crime and got some blowback. More on the story here.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Enough apologies:

None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing — and start uniting. . . .

True, these principles sound pretty elementary — “we’re pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence” — but in the days since the pope’s sermon, I don’t feel that I’ve heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it’s time that it should.

Indeed.

A COUP IN THAILAND?

Armoured units of the Thai military blocked the area around Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s offices with tanks, witnesses said today.

Rumours of a military coup swept the Thai capital after an army-owned television station suspended regular programming and played patriotic songs.

On a government-owned TV station, Thaksin – now abroad on a visit to New York – declared a state of emergency.

Newley Purnell is posting lots of news. He emails that he’s in Kuala Lumpur right now but will be heading to Thailand shortly.

UPDATE: More from Paul Lukacs. Excerpt: “The city of Chiang Mai, in the north, appears unaffected. I am in an internet cafe surrounded by the usual complement of teenagers playing video games. I don’t think most of them know.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more in this roundup from Pajamas Media.

IN THE MAIL: Andrew Sullivan’s new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. Having never made any pretense at being a conservative, my interest in this topic is pretty much academic, but I’m pretty sure that this passage in the publisher’s blurb is wrong: “They have substituted religion for politics, and damaged both.”

In fact, there has been plenty of politics, and not all that much religion, out of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party over the past six years. There are theocrats and theocrat-wannabes out there, but they’re really not much in evidence in the Bush Administration’s policies, and the rest of the blurb certainly seems to suggest that Sullivan thinks otherwise. Perhaps the blurb doesn’t accurately reflect the argument in the book, which I haven’t read yet, obviously.

ARRRH! Don’t forget that it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day.

THE JANE FONDA/GLORIA STEINEM RADIO SHOW is panned as boring.

This show, on the other hand, has real potential . . . .

HOSSEIN DERAKSHAN: “I believe Iran needs to produce nuclear weapons as a defensive mechanism, to deter the U.S. today and the ever-expanding and equally energy-hungry China tomorrow.”

I disagree, though the response is obvious.

JOE GANDELMAN looks at the Bush/GOP polls and observes: “It is no longer a ‘given’ that the Democrats will gain at least one house of Congress in the November elections — and the latest poll shows trend that should make Democrats nervous.” It was never really a given that the Dems would take back Congress, and these polls certainly don’t make it a given that they won’t. Beware of poll fever!

In the short term, however, these polls may reduce the extent of GOP defection from Bush’s legislative agenda, which may actually help the Republicans hold on to Congress.

MEET THE BLOGGERS: Me, James Lileks, and quite a few others on the BBC. You can get the audio here.

GAS PRICES KEEP TUMBLING: “Gasoline prices continue to tumble briskly, dropping Monday to a U.S. average of less than $2.50 a gallon for the first time since March. Service stations even are beginning old-fashioned gas wars to avoid losing customers to price-cutting rivals.”

And, strangely, Bush’s poll numbers are up.

UPDATE: John Wixted is skeptical of claims that Bush’s approval is tied to gas prices, and says it’s something else: “as concerns about the war and immigration go up, Bush’s approval rating goes down.”

JOHN HAWKINS IS UNIMPRESSED with arguments that we need to observe the Geneva Conventions in order to protect our troops:

Exactly what protections are our troops being provided by the Geneva Convention? No enemy we’ve ever fought or are fighting has abided by it. So, in real world terms, the Geneva Convention provides no protection for our troops whatsoever. If we completely withdrew from the Geneva Convention tomorrow, it would have no impact at all on how our troops are treated.

Granted, the Geneva Convention could be of use in the unlikely event that we were to get into a war with Belgium, Italy, Spain or some other Western European nation. However, isn’t the argument we’re hearing from Europeans and American liberals that we should treat the terrorists we’ve captured by the rules of the Geneva Convention (as a matter of fact, better than the rules require) despite the fact that they haven’t signed onto the treaty? Since that’s the case, why wouldn’t the same rules apply to any signatories of the treaty that we fought with? Even if, theoretically, we were doing something as evil as kicking their captured soldiers into industrial paper shredders for fun, shouldn’t they give our soldiers every benefit the Geneva Convention requires?

What’s that, you say? If we don’t do it for their soldiers, why should we expect them to treat our troops with respect? Great! Now why doesn’t that apply to our troops and Al-Qaeda? If Al-Qaeda is torturing and murdering our troops, why should we treat their captured prisoners as well as, say, American soldiers that are thrown into the brig? Why should we treat some terrorist from Saudi Arabia who wants to kill American citizens like he’s a uniformed soldier who follows the rules of war or worse yet, like he has the same constitutional rights as an American citizen?

There are arguments for treating terrorists as if the Geneva Conventions applied, but reciprocity isn’t one of them and, as Hawkins notes, the argument from reciprocity actually cuts the other way.

NO BLACK BLOGGERS IN HARLEM or New York City? Who knew?