Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Debate liveblogging

Every time I keep thinking that Kerry's winning, he manages to screw it up. The general rule is that the candidates both do better at answering the questions they're asked than rebutting. But Kerry's managed to score some good points in both opening and rebuttal.

Unfortunately, he's also prone to ramble. I've heard an enormous laundry list of things that Bush hasn't done. Maybe that makes him sound knowlegeable, but it also kinda makes him sound like that trained seal in your seventh grade class who thought he was brilliant because he could parrot facts his parents had force-fed him, but couldn't find his way home from school.

But Kerry doesn't need to be too good, because Bush is flailing. The stuttering, the groping pauses . . . he reminds me of the kid who got to play the angel in the Christmas pageant because of his lovely blond curls, but hadn't enough under the curls to remember the lines.

Kerry is getting pissy now because Bush keeps asking for extended time to respond to his rebuttals. Kerry pissy is about as charming as warm jello.

Oooh, Kerry is trying to paint his refusal to vote for the $87 billion as a bold stand, that he took out of painful necessity. Ooh, that'll teach Bush to accuse you of flip-flopping! Show America you're man enough to take an ironclad stand against giving money to our troops.

Kerry is good when he makes the case that Bush shouldn't have invaded Iraq. He's utterly dreadful when he gets off that message. And yet he keeps getting off that message.

Bush is scoring points now on Kerry for denigrating our allies. He's lost that deer-in-the-headlights look. Listening, Kerry has got his "bring it on" face on, so raring to go that he's rising up on his toes. Looks like he expects Bush to drive inside for a layup, and come to think of it, he did.

Oooh, Kerry, bad move berating Bush for failing to turn ovre sovreignty to the UN fast enough.

But then there's Bush, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: when Kerry argues that we had no "grand coalition", only Britain, Australia, and us, Bush pipes up "you forgot Poland!" Wow, Poland! One down, 183 to go . . . can we get that cavalry into Fallujah?

Kerry: we don't have enough troops from other countries; the most is Britain, with 8,400.

Problem: Presuming that Kerry does not believe that Russia and China will be contributing troops, what other military does he think has enough troops to send more than a few thousand? Of course, we all know that John Kerry's secret plan to end the war is pure fantasy, but presumably the voters don't, or he wouldn't keep saying it, so this is probably a smart line.

Still, it would be nice if, after accusing the president of lying about IRaq, John Kerry didn't start spinning wild lies about his ability to get foreign leaders to commit troops and money they don't have to a conflict they don't support.

I assume John Kerry thinks that smirking when Bush speaks makes Bush look worse than Kerry. Sadly not the case. Oddly, "the smirking chimp" is not smirking during Kerry's turns. He looks like he's too busy wondering why those lights keep getting bigger and bigger . . .

Bush is getting a little too emotional defending his decision to go to war. He sounds like he's running for head of the Missions committee. But now he's back on track defending the sacrifice of lives in Iraq . . . he's at his best with anecdotes and heartfelt, good old American moments.

Kerry is trying to counter with Vietnam. So far, he's doing pretty well. Excellent line: "it's important not to confuse the war with the warriors". But wait . . . the Ramblenator is back! What were you saying again? Oh, yeah, did you know John Kerry was in Vietnam?

Bush keeps having these odd moments where it looks like the camera is hypnotising him. Then he suddenly snaps into motion, as if the aliens finished downloading the new instructions.

Kerry managed to screw up a great line: citing "the Pottery Barn rule", he said, "you break it, you fix it". I hate the way when I break things at Pottery Barn, they chain you to a little bench in the storeroom until you've glued them back together.

Boy, is Bush relentlessly on message. So relentlessly that when these debates are over, I will have to pound myself int eh head with a small hammer to get the sound bytes out. Is it better to confuse your audience with details, or bore them into a coma? Well, a comatose voter is one that one isn't getting to the polls to vote for Kerry, now isn't he?

Holy cow! Kerry is claiming positive knowlege that Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora. Did I miss a memo?

On the other hand, the "outsourcing the job to the Afghan warlords" is a good line. Plus I've only heard it twice, which makes me positively predisposed.

Holy herd of cows! Did Kerry just promise to take US troops into Darfur?

What was Kerry's name before his grandfather changed it? O'Rambler? Ramblinson? Ramblinovich? Von Rambler?

Bush just scored a good one on Kerry's line, saying that Bush hasn't "passed the test . . . passed the global test". Bush has exactly the same "what the {censored} does that mean?" look on his face that I did when Kerry said it, and he's now saying that this isn't about passing some test; it's about making America safer. Kerry has wisely decided not to pursue a rejoinder to this, presumably hoping it dies a quiet death.

Worst wonky moment of the night: Kerry says the thing to do about the Iranian nuclear problem is offer to provide Iran the nuclear fuel for their reactors. This may have excellent wonky credentials, or it may be one of those silly policy proposals that people only talk about because they can't think of anything that would work. But it sounds perfectly idiotic. "I'm not going to stand for all these burglaries. Let's put the furniture out on the lawn, where the thieves won't have to work so hard!"

Kerry also loses points for saying that he is for both bilateral and multilateral talks. No one who's ever worked on anything larger than the prom committee is going to buy this. Of course, the fact is, nothing's going to do much good in North Korea, so why not have two useless sets of talks instead of one? I mean except that the only way we got the multilateral talks was to refuse to have the bilateral ones.

Kerry is asked about genocide, and he responds with logistics. Then he brings up the draft, calling stop-loss orders a "backdoor draft". Except for not involving civilians, that is. He gets points for saying he'd commit troops to Sudan if needed. He loses them for making it abundantly clear that he is lying.

Bush loses points for disparaging sanctions on Iran, and then promoting them in Sudan. But he gains some for soundly spanking John Kerry, who argued that the problems with Iranian sanctions were that they were unilateral; Bush pointed out that the sanctions date from long before his administration.

Bush is better at these little joky moments. Kerry makes a joke sound like a painful duty.

Oh, boy. Kerry just promised to shut down a nuclear weapons research programme because it's not fair for us to ask other countries to stop proliferating when we're doing it ourselves. That would be a good strategy, if we were the world's parents. He's bringing up Ted Kennedy and the anti-proliferation treaty. Hitching his star to Ted Kennedy on defense is certainly . . . er. . . bold.

Bizarrely, they have now switched places in the North Korea debate: Kerry is pushing for bilateral talks, Bush for multilateral. Bush has the better argument, but luckily for Kerry, he's trying to make it by raising his voice, rather than, y'know, making his argument.

Listening to Bush trying to pronounce Vladimir Putin's first name is certainly a rare treat.

Now Jim Lehrer is trying, and failing to start a cat-fight between them. Bush gets big points for resisting the urge. Also scores big points for saying that Kerry looked at the same intelligence he did, and Bush hasn't called him a liar for disagreeing with him. Kerry is trying to pull out the save, but you can tell that was a body blow . . . he looks like a boxer with the wind knocked out of him. His closing speech is boring, windy, and every time he mentions one of his secret plans to fix something, it knocks my confidence that he might actually do so donwn a notch.

Bush's closer are better. He doesn't talk about his plans; he talks about what he'll do, and he has some very good lines. Still, I think Kerry won overall. I expect to see some bounce in Kerry's numbers tomorrow. Of course, it all depends on which clips make the news, doesn't it?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A modest proposal

Dan Froomkin has had an idea:

Bloggers Unite to Fact-Check the Debate

And here's another way to make sure that the substance of Bush and Kerry's comments are fully and quickly assessed.

Some key political bloggers, who have so effectively proven their ability to hold the press accountable, will tonight be posting their own debate fact-checks -- and will be asking their readers to find and document substantively incorrect statements by the candidates, as well.

I've already talked to several bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum and they're on board. I urge others in the blogging community to join in the experiment. Just make sure you e-mail me at froomkin@washingtonpost.com so I know you're out there.

In tomorrow's column, I'll link to the bloggers who are actively fact-checking and I'll try to highlight some of the best and best-documented posts.

I'll be watching the debates with the Galt clan this evening, and if I find any egregious errors, I'll post about it. Meanwhile, the thread is open to the blogless: if you see errors, post 'em here for Mr Froomkin to read.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Yes, sir, we can hear everything you're saying

Reason #1,249 not to have long conversations on your cell phone in public places: you never know who might be listening.

A highly placed source close to Asymmetrical Information was riding back from Washington D.C. on the train today, sitting behind some chap with a cell phone who spent the entire trip yammering away. This gent apparently worked for MoveOn/George Soros, and used his enforced train confinement to elaborate their plans for a co-ordinated push on the lefty blogs tomorrow. The focus of this multi-blog push is to be a Joe Klein article in Time magazine, which argues that the Bush administration is deceiving the country about how well Iraq is going. Presumably this is the article in question, but maybe there's some blockbuster piece coming in next week's magazine. Certainly the article I linked doesn't seem to present anything revolutionary enough to warrant a full court press.

Our source is a Democrat himself, but not so much of one that he could resist giving this scoop to AI. So if you see a big spate of stories tomorrow, or over the weekend, about this Joe Klein piece, you'll know that it's the murderous hand of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy at work, aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Memo to Soros: Not everyone who rides the Acela first class car is a liberal activist. It just seems that way. Train trips are a good time to fold up your mobile and break out the cribbage board.

Impact this "scoop" will have: none, I'm sure. It's not exactly news that MoveOn loves the internet, and liberal bloggers love MoveOn. Or that both sides of the political spectrum are looking to spin the debates. But I'm a journalist, and it's the first time I've gotten any sort of scoop at all, except for when I predicted the fast food lawsuits. So important or not, I'm going to enjoy it just the same.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Reds or greens?

After a long time dithering, Russia has finally decided to back the Kyoto treaty.

This is good news for supporters of the treaty, since without Russia on board, the treaty had about the same chances as the proverbial tissue-paper dog chasing an asbestos cat through the ninth circle of hell.

But that doesn't mean that Kyoto is a done deal. America hasn't signed it (and never had any chance of doing so, Democratic talking points aside -- it flunked the Senate by 99 votes). And without the US on board, I think other countries will find it politically difficult to get their populations to embrace carbon reduction, which will hurt economic growth. But we shall see.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Thank God for celebrities in politics

. . . who else would be brave enough to speak out against the vast campaign to legalise rape?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Unpanic time for the Republicans and others

There was some panicking in both right-wing political circles, and economic circles (there is some overlap in the Venn diagram) over the weak GDP numbers during the second quarter. Some people who had been very sceptical that Bush's tax cuts had had any effect on economic growth -- such as, er, me -- began to revise that belief in light of the fact that we were getting a slowdown in both growth and employment just when you would have expected if Bush's stimulus had worked.

Luckily, we sceptics have been saved by the Commerce Department. Their revised estimate is sharply higher than the earlier one -- 3.3% annualised growth, instead of the 2.8% they originally predicted. In some sense it's silly to be glad, because of course, the GDP was what it was, and having the Commerce Department stick a number on it doesn't make Americans any more or better off than they actually were during the April-to-June period. But nonetheless, I'm going to let myself heave a little sigh of relief.

Update The title of this post incorrectly implies that I am relieved that the Republicans are pulling ahead. I have no current plans to vote for George W. Bush; my relief is that the economy is doing better, not that the Republicans have a better chance of retaining the White House.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Buy Kerry, sell Bush?

Farhad Manjoo is arguing that Bush is overvalued on the Iowa Electronic Markets. Someone sure is; the prices of the four contracts available (Bush wins more than 52% of the vote, Bush wins with less than 52% of the vote, Kerry wins with less than 52% of the vote, and Kerry wins with more than 52% of the vote) -- sum to more than $1. Since the potential payoff of each contract is a dollar, and those four possibilities are the complete universe of possible outcomes, their prices should total to $1, in an efficient market. I presume the problem is that you can't sell short on Iowa, which makes it harder for information to travel between the Bush market and the Kerry market.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

This just in . . .

. . . the folks at MoveOn have officially lost their minds.

Their candidate is slipping, and they have money to pay for a full page ad complaining that Gallup's not faaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrr? What's next? "Call George Bush and tell him: Americans don't like shag drapes in their White House."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

To do or not to do

Matthew Yglesias has a very smart post about our intuitions on outsourcing:

Brad Delong calls an intellectual foul on those who would have us buy fewer coir doormats made with third world labor. He seems to believe that a failure to "think analytically" and understand economics is the problem. That certainly part of the story, but I think the bigger issue here is the powerful grip an unsound version of the doing/allowing distinction has on our intuitions. If I buy product X and the workers who produce it labor under bad conditions, then I am to blame. If I abstain from participating in the Indian economy, then I am not to blame for whatever may happen in India. And the intuition is a powerful one. No one can bring themselves to believe that subscribing to Direct TV with the NFL Sunday Ticket and buying a Tivo instead of donating the money to save the lives of famine victims is really just as bad as taking out a gun and shooting a homeless man you might find in a park somewhere. But these same intuitive principles, well-suited though they may be for life among small groups of people, can have disastrous consequences when applied to an interconnected 21st century world.

A while back, I witnessed a discussion that included a liberal English professor, and a libertarian professor of Economics. The liberal English professor was making the case that it was not fair for those with genetic disease predispositions (such as the breast-cancer-causing BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 mutations) to have to pay higher insurance rates; after all, it was not their fault.

"But wait," said the economics professor. "Let's look at other cases of people being born with problems that are not their fault. Being born in Africa makes you much, much worse off than being born in America with the BRCA-1 mutation. Your expected lifespan is shorter, and your quality of life is much lower. By your logic, why shouldn't we take all the money everyone in America spends on health care and send it to Africa, where conditions are much more unfair, and the health care dollars there will produce much larger reductions in relative unfairness?"

The English professor sputtered. She fumed. Belatedly, as the discussion was almost ready to move on, she shouted "because I pay taxes!" But of course, this argument makes no sense in the context of her earlier assertion. The earlier conversation was about fairness; now she had shifted 180 degrees to transactional rights. But by definition, discussions about national health insurance, or laws forcing insurers to cover everyone, are not about transactional rights, because the beneficiaries are people who cannot get others to voluntarily transact for what they want. No government system can survive if paying a small amount of taxes entitles everyone to an even larger amount of benefits.

Of course, she wasn't thinking logically. She had an intuitive boundary for discussions of certain kinds of fairness, such as the distribution of medical services: the United States. Setting up those sorts of boundaries is necessary if you're in a hunter-gatherer tribe, but it's not logical.

Which is probably one of the most frustrating battles for the policy-making elite of academics, journalists, and so forth. The language of policy-making is rational. But it takes place within a framework of emotion-laden value judgements and intuitive boundaries that confound any true attempt at rationally reasoning out a policy from first principles. And selling those policies to the public is generally entirely dependant on our politicians' abilities to push certain buttons located deep in the reptilian sectors of our brains, rather than on the policy's objective worth. This is why journalists (and academics) spend so much time sputtering about how debased the whole process is.

But it's not going away any time soon. Until we've had some time to evolve in a math class instead of the savannah, politicians are the only thing standing between policymakers and everyone's worst instincts.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Memo to Jimmy Carter

RE: Appearing to side with the UN against the US Making nasty accusations against your own country

Mr Carter, if you are going to rhetorically lump the US in with tinpot dictatorships that stage elections, there are a few things you might want to consider, so that the effect redounds to the greater glory of yourself and your party, rather than alienating the unwashed masses who will be voting in this sham election.

1) You should not only complain about the swing state of Florida, when the conditions that you claim do not meet "basic international requirements" exist in many states, including Democratic ones. Focusing only on Republican-controlled Florida might give people the misimpression that you care less about electoral justice, than in getting your own guy into the White House By Any Means Necessary.

2) You should not, immediately after lumping Florida in with places like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, lambaste the Republican Secretary of State for undemocratically, illegally, and unjustly . . . allowing too many political parties on the ballot.

The top election official has also played a leading role in qualifying Ralph Nader as a candidate, knowing that two-thirds of his votes in the previous election came at the expense of Al Gore.

Your outrage at the idea of a supervisor brazenly allowing people to vote for someone other than Al Gore might give people the mistaken idea that you care less about having democratic elections than having Democratic elections.

3) If you are going to express outrage at the Republican-controlled machine's abuse of the felon purge lists, you might want to display some token outrage at the at least equally abusive Democratic drive to register people such as illegal aliens and, oh convicted felons, who are not legally allowed to vote. Surely, in your time as an election observer, you have seen that letting people vote too many times disenfranchises legitimate voters every bit as much as not letting them vote in the first place. Failing to address both sorts of fraud might give people the erroneous idea that you care less about fairness than about Winning One For the (Democratic) Team.

Just some suggestions. It would be a shame to squander your reputation by accidentally implying that your ideals are subservient to your ideology.

Update John Henke makes a similar point:

Florida, due to discrepancies in data collected on various forms, produces a potential felon list with more blacks than hispanics. (there is no "hispanic" box on the felon list, while there is on the voting list) However, they also issued specific directions to the counties to to "verify the information" and "contact the voters" before taking any action to remove them from the voter rolls.

However, some people thought that was unfair--to the hispanics, who should also have a chance to be disenfranchised, I suppose--and "state officials have scrapped the entire list".

So, of course, Jimmy Carter speaks up....

"A fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61 Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons."

Mr Carter said Florida Governor Jeb Bush - brother of the president - had "taken no steps to correct these departures from principles of fair and equal treatment or to prevent them in the future".

Jimmy Carter--who couldn't find voter fraud in Venezuela if he had a 36% exit poll discrepancy....and he did--has found "voter fraud" in Florida in the form of a felon list that was rejected two months ago. And, in response to Florida's rejection of that list, he claims "no steps" have been taken "to correct these departures"???

At any rate, Jimmy Carter has spoken out about this threat to Democrats democracy in Florida.

In Ohio? Not so much.

The state of Ohio is stepping in to investigate possible voter fraud in Summit County. ... More than 800 voter registration cards in Summit County are under investigation, NewsChannel5 reported.

The Board of Elections said the voter registration cards in question are for addresses that don’t exist, spelling mistakes or have similar handwriting. Fifty of those questionable cards apparently came from the AFL-CIO central office in Cleveland, WEWS reported.

Hands up if you know which major party an AFL-CIO Union is likely to support.

For bonus point, try to find a story in which Jimmy Carter gives this 1/10th the attention he has given a Florida felon list that was old news two months ago.

His commenters also point out that John Fund's new book on election fraud argues -- convincingly, I'm told -- that the number of felons who voted in the 2000 Florida election far outstripped the margin of error. Felons broke for Gore 68%.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

This will drive the environmentalists crazy

Perhaps unusually for a Libertarian, I'm sympathetic to the "smart growth" folks. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I treasure the ability to walk where I need to go, rather than driving every which way. I love public transportation (although, of course, being a Libertarian, I would love it even more if it were privatised.) I'm pretty sure that driving everywhere is the reason that so many Americans are fat, and that rural areas tend to be heavier than urban areas. I dislike the compartmentalisation of our lives that neighbourhoods without sidewalks imply. I prefer shopping on New York's streets to the best-designed mall.

If I had to design my perfect place to live, it would be a townhouse, on a square of similar townhouses that opened up onto a large communal yard where children and dogs could romp. A train station would be no more than a few blocks away, as would shops, schools, and other accoutrements of refined living.

But unlike the smart growth folks, I recognise that this is, to a large extent, a fantasy.

Smart growth is great if you are an upscale professional, preferably without children, who can score a relatively large apartment fairly close to work. It's a lot less fun for the majority trying to cram your family into four or five rooms. Smart growth is great if you are savvy enough to manipulate an urban school system into keeping your children away from the poor kids; it is not so nice for the majority who must make do. Smart growth is great if you can afford to have everything you buy delivered, or are in excellent physical condition with a physically undemanding job; it is not so great if you have to come home from your shift at the nursing home to lug groceries a quarter-mile down the street, and then up three flights of stairs. Smart growth is great if you can afford to eat in the plethora of restaurants; it is not so enjoyable if you have to scrape up an extra 20% for the ingredients in tuna casserole. Smart growth is great if you have a nanny to take the kids to the park during the day; it is not so terrific if you have to choose between wasting several precious hours standing around the playground, or letting your kids languish inside. Smart growth is great if you can afford taxis when you need them; it is not so good if you are forced to take three busses to get somewhere you really need to be. Smart growth is great if your family members are all affluent enough to take care of themselves; it is not so fulfilling when you have to shove your ailing mother into the kids room when her resources fail.

Smart growth, in other words, is wonderful for those with the werewithal to smooth over its little rough spots. But ask the priced out secretaries commuting 2 hours a day from Yonkers how "liveable" New York is.

The New York Times magazine had a wonderful piece on this yesterday, which explodes many of the myths of smart growth:

Mass transit is the cure for highway congestion. Commuter trains and subways make sense in New York, Chicago and a few other cities, and there are other forms of transit, like express buses, that can make a difference elsewhere. (Vans offering door-to-door service are a boon to the elderly and people without cars.) But for most Americans, mass transit is impractical and irrelevant. Since 1970, transit systems have received more than $500 billion in subsidies (in today's dollars), but people have kept voting with their wheels. Transit has been losing market share to the car and now carries just 3 percent of urban commuters outside New York City. It's easy to see why from one statistic: the average commute by public transportation takes twice as long as the average commute by car.

Anthony Downs, an economist at the Brookings Institution who favors giving more aid to transit, says the subsidies have social benefits (like helping people without cars), but he warns it will make little difference in highway congestion. O'Toole and Wendell Cox, a transportation expert and visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, estimate that even if Congress miraculously tripled the annual subsidy for transit, the average driver's commute would be reduced by a grand total of 22 seconds.

Drivers are getting a free ride. Yes, the government spends a lot more money on highways than transit, but most of that money comes out of the drivers' pockets. If you add up the costs of driving -- the car owner's costs as well as the public cost of building and maintaining highways and local streets, the salaries of police patrolling the roads -- it works out to about 20 cents per passenger mile, and drivers pay more than 19 of those cents, according to Cox. A trip on a local bus or commuter train costs nearly four times as much, and taxpayers subsidize three-quarters of that cost.

Drivers do avoid paying some indirect costs of their cars, like the health consequences of the pollution from tailpipes. One of the most thorough attempts to measure these social costs was done by Mark Delucchi, a cost-benefit analyst at the University of California, Davis, who factored in everything from expenditures in the Persian Gulf to the cost of the real estate devoted to free parking lots. Autonomists complain that he overestimated the car's costs, but even so, his calculations show that when compared with the social costs of transit systems (like taxpayer subsidies and noise from buses), the car is at least twice as cheap per passenger mile as transit.

The fact is, public transportation is an absolute failure everywhere it has been tried except for cities which grew up around a public transportation network in the pre-automobile era. Public transportation -- and I am second to none in my love for public transportation, and have a fabulous commute besides -- is more expensive, both in money and environmental costs, than automobiles outside of New York, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago. That's right, I said it's more environmentally costly than giving every person on the train a car, because a train running empty consumes an enormous amount of energy.

In order to persuade people to live in a public transit zone, rather than an auto zone, the trains have to run frequently enough, and for a long enough period, for people to be able to base their lives around them. Those five cities (and I'm not sure about Philly) produce net energy gains only because they shift an enormous number of people during rush hour; enough to offset the inevitable losses during off peak periods, when the trains expend a tremendous amount of energy to move very few people. If your trains aren't jam packed for six hours a day during rush periods, you can never make up the losses. Such usage levels require a whole infrastructure at each end of the journey, a network of very dense development that affords the benefits, like a wide array of restaurants and bars, that attract people to such areas. But that sort of development is complementary; restaurant owners and developers won't build where there isn't enough traffic to support them, and people won't move where the lifestyle isn't well established. Plus the train network has to be huge to allow people to quickly get from their house to their office; they can't up and move to a different train line every time they get a new job. And unless you (or nature) sharply restrict mobility, people won't choose those places anyway; the majority of Americans want a detached house with a yard, and they'll vote with their feet.

Putting a monorail in LA is not going to make Angelenos live like Manhattanites. (more's the pity).

I do favour a stiff gasoline tax, because I think that drivers should pay for the negative externalities, from foriegn entanglements to global warming to air pollution, of their habits. (I favour a tax on all fossil-fuel consumption, and yes, I know how much hate mail I'm going to get for that. I went to the University of Chicago, home of the internalised externality. So sue me.) But the aggressive tactics of smart-growthers need a rethink. It seems to me that their attempts to drive Americans out of their cars are likely to succeed only in driving unfortunate members of the middle class into substandard housing and near-penury.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness!

For those of us who were raised on science fiction, this is the best news since Air Supply broke up: Richard Branson plans commercial space flight service.

Better start saving now. Those of you who want to help a girl realise a lifelong dream will find the tipjar at the right . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those schneaks!

Looks like Teresa Heinz-Kerry might be getting her October Surprise.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What Dan hath wrought

The Wall Street Journal Asia is reporting that Sumner Redstone, the liberal president of Viacom (CBS's parent company) is supporting George W. Bush.

It seems more likely to me that a reporter garbled what Mr Redstone said, than that Mr Redstone has suddenly gotten in touch with his Inner Republican. But if it is true, his conversion is awfully recent: Fundrace reports that he's already given thousands to John Kerry this year. Too many thousands, in fact: either the website has an error, a nasty joke has been played on him, or someone's been a little bit naughty--Fundrace shows $3,000 given to Mr Kerry, instead of the $2,000 legal maximum.

And while the statistician in me cries that correlation is not causation, unfortunately that cry is faint. My Inner Statistician is a tiny, pitiful creature, weak at birth and starved ever since. Which is why it's terribly hard for me to believe that Mr Redstone's sudden revelation, if it plays out, doesn't have something to do with distancing himself from the big, fat mess his company's in.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Flossing three times a day

Virginia Postrel cuts to the chase (as usual):

Reporters and media critics are bored, bored, bored by the very sort of discourse they claim to support (a lesson I learned the hard way in 10 long years as the editor of Reason). They, and presumably their readers, want conflict, scandal, name-calling, and some sex and religion to heighten the combustible mix. Plus journalists, like other people, love to read about themselves and people they know.

Yes, polemics and/or scandal are often the 'spoonful of sugar' that makes the facts go down.

Fortunately, there are some great bloggers out there (many of them scholars using blogs to popularize otherwise academic debates) who don't seem to care whether they ever get invited to go on TV or whether Howard Kurtz ever writes about them.

Um....Indeed.

A quibble: Virginia takes exception to Glenn's comment that "the political blogosphere is to a large degree about media criticism" by saying "many of the best policy blogs have almost no media criticism, nor do they go looking for political scalps." I believe there is a distinction between Glenn's 'political blogosphere' and Virginia's 'policy blogs', much like the distinction between the Sunday Morning pundit-fests and think-tank publications.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Taxable Second Breakfast

Ken Summers provides an interesting summary of arguments against the estate tax here and here. From my own experience, Estate Tax concerns drive the private company M&A market. This may explain the antagonism of liberal investment bankers to its repeal.

Incidentally, an old post of mine is linked above in which flawed wording might give the impression that I don't think higher deficits can increase interest rates. I address the point more carefully here. It seems they must in extremis, as the government must ultimately monetize its debt or default, which would increase the inflation and/or risk components of Treasury interest rates. Recent history suggests, however, that a) there are many intervening variables and b) it may be a 'sticky' function. The question is does it happen significantly at the (current) margin?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Personal Lojack

It is clear that terrorists operating in Iraq believe that kidnapping and internet-beheading are among their most powerful weapons because the media exposure amplifies the effect.

As a way to deprive them of this weapon, I wonder whether the military or U.S. employers in Iraq have considered use of a personal transmitter - a Lojack for their people, in case they are kidnapped. Let's face it, these individuals will be killed. If they are removed to a terrorist hideout that is promptly blown up, their death will not be used to further terrorist aims.

I suppose if it were in an item of clothing or jewelry, terrorists would soon figure out to strip the victim. However, I assume we have the ability to implant such a device.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Everybody into the pool, stupid!

I don't think criticizing allies for standing with us is an effective strategy for bringing more nations into Iraq. Hopefully John is reining in the younger sister as we speak.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Ouch

You don't see this sort of thing too often:

In one of the harshest penalties ever handed down against a bank operating in Japan, the Financial Services Agency on Friday it would revoke subsidiary Citibank N.A.'s effective license to serve high net-worth customers. In a strongly worded statement, the financial regulatory body criticized the unit for not having properly functioning internal controls, adding that it found a long list of "serious violations of laws and regulations" and "extremely inappropriate transactions."

...The FSA investigation portrayed a culture within Citigroup's Japan operations that tolerated lax and potentially criminal practices as long as aggressive sales targets were met. FSA officials said that Citibank salespeople routinely took advantage of Japanese customers, many of whom were wealthy, suggesting unrealistic returns on investments and encouraging them to purchase complicated, derivative products they didn't understand.

In some cases, the salespeople sold derivative products based on U.S. Treasuries and Japanese government bonds at prices well above what the market would have indicated their price should be. Though FSA officials declined to say how much higher than fair value the prices were, they indicated Citibank salespeople put unreasonably high markups on the products.

The private-banking arm also violated Japanese banking law by brokering and soliciting unauthorized products, including foreign real estate investments, foreign life insurance policies and deals involving art.

This isn't typical of Japanese regulatory action. I suspect some really egregious individual stories will emerge shortly, as well as a lot of speculation as to whether the FSA would have done the same to a Japanese institution.

On a related note, for extraordinary stories about derivatives sold to Japanese companies for 'window dressing' (and profit), try reading the last few chapters of FIASCO.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stop salivating, Republicans

There's no way that Bush is leading Kerry 54-40%. Best bet is it's a close race, with Bush ahead by 1-3% . . . easily enough to let Kerry come back.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Digging into the data

OpinionJournal notes that Maureen Dowd has broken a big story--but buried the lede:
From a comment by Maureen Dowd in a New York Times online forum on "women, the presidency and the election":

The latest CBS News poll shows that among George W. Bush supporters, 51 percent are men and 48 percent are women--and of John Kerry supporters, 41 percent are men and 43 percent are women. In the last election, out of those who voted for Al Gore, 42 percent were men and 54 percent were women. Of the people who voted for George W. Bush, 53 percent were men and 43 percent were women.

Hmm, let's put this into tabular form:

	2004 Bush	2004 Kerry	2000 Bush	2000 Gore
Men	51%	41%	53%	42%
Women	48%	43%	43%	54%
Total	99%	84%	96%	96%

This means that, if Dowd is right, 16% of Kerry supporters are neither men nor women. What are they? Perhaps she'll explain in a future column. But also note that only 1% of Bush's supporters belong to the mysterious third sex, down from 4% in 2000. If there really are voters who belong to neither sex, this could spell trouble for the incumbent.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Quick, while it's looking away...

UPDATE: My oldest son (12) offers this flash animation:

I remember I was about his age when American-made car became synonymous with 'ugly bucket of bolts'. Calling Viacom branding professionals...
-------

I'm not enough of a photoshop jockey to complete this, but..

We just need some pajama-clad bloggers scaling the mountain next to it, or perhaps just a few Times Roman letters (packed suspicously close together).

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is Ra^thergate helping John Kerry?

I don't think so. I've said it before, and I'll say it again (and you kids have no gawdamm respect these days, not like when I was a girl, and people listened when their elders talked and didn't give them impertinent guff about repeating themselves, which I wouldn't have to do if young people didn't have hte attention spans of sickly gnats . . .)

Er, excuse me. As I was saying, I think the only reason the SwiftVets hurt Kerry so much is that he made his Vietnam service such a central plank of his campaign. Bush has largely innoculated himself against these charges by basically admitting that he was a privileged screwup for the first forty years of his life.

Thus, even if these charges are true, I don't think anyone much cares, except of course that people who already hated Bush will seize upon it as further proof of his utter perfidy, much as the Clinton haters were thrown into militant frenzies by the fact that Mr Clinton had a rather excessive taste for the ladies.

Seen in this light, the Kerry campaign's decision to attempt to capitalise on this story was a tragic waste of precious time and money--especially now that CBS & NBC are asking them to cease and desist from using their copyrighted clips.

So clearly, I don't buy the idea that this is going to help Kerry by keeping the Bush/AWOL story in the news longer. Even if I thought the story was damaging to Bush, I'd still think that this story was more likely to innoculate him against more moderate and substantiated charges, than to hurt him. Ruy Teixera argues that the SwiftVets hurt Bush as much as Kerry, because people assumed his campaign was behind it; I imagine that logic runs the other way, especially since they're running an ad on the scandal. And while I agree that most of the SwiftVet stories didn't pan out, these memos are being refuted rather more conclusively than the SwiftVets charges were. Especially as the SwiftVets have now moved onto Kerry's very well-documented postwar activities in their ads.

No, I think this is hurting Kerry, because it's sucking up media oxygen that he desperately needs to build his image. He's now got a month and a half to create some convincing chimera that the American people can invest with their hopes and dreams. And given his lack of charisma, I'd say he needs every second of that time.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Just let Kerry be...something else

I read Just let Kerry be Kerry and think, haven't I heard this before?

At each and every turn, the Democratic candidate's dweeb team of advisers, now reinforced by a rescue squad straight from hell, tries its best to make its candidate look like he's saying one thing while he does something else. The adviser team heretofore led by Bob Shrum, a longtime loser (7-0 in bungled campaigns), is now bolstered by John Sasso, the distinguished adviser to the ghastly 1988 Dukakis presidential bid. That was the campaign in which Dukakis's brainy advisers tried to make him more appealing to the masses by having the Massachusetts governor put a helmet on his head and poke it up out of a tank. People are still laughing at that one. And it was the year of another great moment in the history of political campaigning: The late Lee Atwater, in his most unforgettable moment, lobbed the Willie Horton grenade into the Dukakis bunker.

......Thirty-five years later, the same Kerry, now a senator, again answered the call of the nation and his president, and voted to support the war in Iraq, accepting the president's statements that it was in the interests of our national security to attack. So did most of Congress, convinced that Saddam was a monster and a liar who was secretly amassing weapons of mass destruction. When Kerry, like numerous others, discovered this not to be the case, he opposed Bush's policies and started calling it the wrong war at the wrong time. He publicly stated there was no easy way out, that we would have to craft an international approach through the U.N., perhaps run by NATO, and in this way gradually disentangle ourselves. This is not a flip-flop. It is a careful, judicious, moderate way forward proposed by a man who knows about war. So let Kerry be Kerry. Whatever happens, please let's not have another Dukakis.

Politicians, particularly Democrats trying to replicate Clinton's capture of the center, are always threatening to just let it all hang out. *

Well, by all means. Perhaps the problem is he is being Kerry. This is a guy who always hedges his positions so he can sell them to a home and national constituency. This is not so unreasonable for a Senator with Presidential aspirations. And it's why his votes are accompanied by lengthy qualifying speeches.

Which Kerry will get the modified limited hang out?

UPDATE: George Will weighs in on the Senate albatross:

Kerry also is a casualty of nuance-itis, which is a kind of house mold prevalent in the north wing of the Capitol. Senators -- unlike governors, who often sharpen issues -- are forever blurring things to manufacture legislative majorities. Partly for that reason, senators rarely become president.

* It turns out Gore letting it all hang out is kind of terrifying.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

You're either with us or you're with the bloggers

Pinch Sulzberger lashes out at the hoi polloi and proves he is both a snob and a stasist (via Kaus):

This takes us to another important on-line phenomenon, the rise of bloggers. These individuals publish web logs that offer an ongoing narrative of their thoughts and observations. Some are professional journalists, but the vast majority of them are just folks with something on their minds.

While some of these individuals are making a serious and thoughtful contribution to our global dialogue, too many simply contribute to the sense that we're in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all.

Well, excuse us. Journalists vs. "just folks with something on their minds"; "serious and thoughtful" vs. "opinion-ridden free-for-all". Such manicheanism.

The Scribe is troubled. Some intrepid new group blog needs to name themselves "Opinion-Ridden Free-for-All" (or that could be AI's slogan!).

UPDATE: More tired defenders of the establishment weigh in:

"Information Anarchy"; "It hurts because now anyone can publish on the Web. You have people who are politically aligned raising questions about our standards, but there is no attention given to their standards."

It hurts, it hurts us. Nasty bloggerses have no precious standards.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Now this should warm every anarcho-capitalist's heart . . .

Private enterprise steps in to provide yet another function currently served by the government.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Conspiracy theories ho!

Shots Across the Bow offers the twistiest conspiracy theory yet about the provenance of the memos.

My theory: Colonel Mustard. In the Bathroom. With 60 MInutes' reputation . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Curiouser and Curiouser

The New York Times, Dr Manhattan points out, just led with a pretty amazing headline:

Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says

HOUSTON, Sept. 14 - The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed that they are fakes.

But she also said they accurately reflect the thoughts of the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, and other memorandums she typed for him about Mr. Bush.

That is the tack taken by most of those quoted in the story. But the NYT buries the lede, in favour of Killian's secretary telling us that though the memos are fake, the accusations are valid.

(I understand that for those of you who are most concerned with the political aspects of this story, this may not amount to burying the lede. But those of us in the know realise that there's a much more important issue at stake: how does this story affect journalists! Thus, the most important aspect of Ra^thergate is not whether Bush did, or did not, turn up for his national guard drills. The important question is how long can we gleefully revel in CBS's misfortune.)

Here's the truly shocking bit:

On Tuesday, two more experts came forward and said they had been consulted by CBS. One, a forensic document examiner from Texas, Linda James, said in a telephone interview with The New York Times that she noticed indications that the two documents she inspected were the product of a word processor and relayed that to the producers.

"I had questioned the superscript on there," she said, referring to the raised letters that appear after the number 111 to indicate the name of the flight squadron, adding she also had some questions about what she believed were some inconsistencies in the documents' signatures. She said she was awaiting more documents and more type samples to draw a stronger conclusion but with time running out she referred the network to another expert, who officials at CBS identified as Mr. Matley.

Ms. James first made her comments Tuesday night on "World News Tonight'' on ABC. The newscast also presented a second document expert, Emily Will, who said she raised still more serious concerns about the authenticity of a document she inspected for CBS's producers. Ms. Will said during a telephone interview afterward that she told network producers as late as the night before the report was shown, "I had a lot of questions and I would not support the documents." She said she also warned the network, "if they ran the story on Wednesday they would be asked the same questions I was asking on Tuesday on Thursday, by a whole lot of document examiners."

The "innocent victims" angle seems to have taken a big hit -- I think it will be hard for CBS to get out of this without rolling some pretty important heads, now.

But that's not all! In fact, this story is so chock-full of juicy new data that we are hard put not to excerpt the entire thing. For a little ways down, we also see that suspicions that Bill Burkett was involved in this may have been well-founded:

CBS has refused to say how it obtained the documents. But one person at CBS, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a report in Newsweek that Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer who has charged that senior aides to then-Governor Bush had ordered Guard officials to remove damaging information from Mr. Bush's military personnel files, had been a source of the report. This person did not know the exact role he played.

If Burkett is involved, it begins to challenge his credibility on his earlier allegations that he had personally witnessed people "sanitising" George Bush's military record. Until now, I had regarded that story much the same way I regarded the Juanita Broderick story about Clinton raping her: certainly possible, but given that each was the sole witness of the events in question, I felt the stories were impossible to verify, and thus the respective presidents deserved the benefit of the doubt. But now, he seems more like a man obsessed . . . as if Juanita Broderick had claimed Clinton raped her, and then turned up as the main complaining witness in the Whitewater investigation.

It is Burkett's lawyer, David Van Os, who provides the best quote of the whole scandal to date, superceding even Dan Rather's assertion that it is the defendants, rather than the prosecution, who have the burden of proof when they are accused of a crime. Take a gander at this:

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush's military service, Mr. Van Os said: "If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 - which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done'' - then, he continued, "what difference would it make?"

So if I honestly believe that Bill Clinton had Vince Foster killed, and gave written orders to someone to do so, it's okay if I go ahead and type up a couple of memos to that effect and hand them to the press . . . and okay if the press runs with them.

The Ra^ther Doctrine spreads . . . and my job just keeps getting easier. By next week, we're going to give up printing news entirely, and give our pages over to Tom Clancy.

Update This Drudge interview with the secretary doesn't exactly burnish her reputation: she seems to admit that she was content to let the forgeries ride as long as they were accepted, and only came forward to substantiate their claims after everyone realised they were forgeries. She also admits she hates Bush. Now she's duking it out with Killian's son, who I seem to recall is a staunch Republican, as to whether or not Killian actually wrote something like this. Joy.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Maintenance and such

For those of you who have emailed:

1) the "remember me" function in comments should be working again now.

2) the list of refers at the bottom of each individual entry (which shows the top 20 refers in the last 30 days) is working again. The database was a dead loss, so I started over and it is counting as of about 10 tonight)

3) There are permalinks in the comments (the timestamp).

4) for other bloggers: I suggest you import our blacklist. I just harvested about 200 more urls from a huge spam.

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive - full entry text in the rdf and xml files.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Moral Quandary of the Day

Here's something I've never really thought about much, but should have: should people with dementia be allowed to vote:

Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient's wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth.

"I said 'Did he pick?' and she said 'No, I picked for him,' " Swerdloff said. "I felt bad. She essentially voted twice" in the Florida election, which gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory and the White House.

I think most of us could agree that if you think FDR is president, you're not qualified to vote. But drawing the line on who, exactly, is qualified, is a task ripe for abuse. There are nice bright lines that I would hope most of us -- except those who want to pad their candidates rolls with the mentally incompetent -- could endorse, such as adults who require legal guardians. But giving the state the power to take your vote away because it thinks you aren't smart enough to execute it gives me the creepy-crawlies.

Open thread below. What do my readers think? From whom, if anyone, should we take the vote on the grounds of incompetence? In general, I don't think we do enough to prevent voter fraud -- it's simply ludicrous that we allow people to vote without photographic ID, in this day and age, and if you want to "live off the grid", well I'm very sorry, but I think there's a more compelling state interest in preventing vote fraud than in making sure you can vote without a driver's license. Cross checking between states, to make sure people aren't voting more than once, also seems like an obvious slam dunk, as does checking death certificates. Have I any commenters who are willing to stand up and oppose these measures?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stop me before I blog again

Okay, I can't resist: from Jim Treacher, comes a treasure. Dan Rather: Prove I'm Not the Queen of the Space Unicorns.

Seriously, though, his responses have become decidedly odd. He told the New Zealand Herald he had nothing to prove.

Over the weekend CBS insisted that it had carried out the most thorough checks. "Until someone shows me definitive proof that they are not [authentic], I don't see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumour mill," presenter Dan Rather declared.

We all know that I think both that they're fake, and that Mr Rather was innocently taken in. But this seems strange to me. I don't think I'd get very far at my publication if I took the position that the burden of proof was on my readers regarding the evidence I present.

Oh, sure, we ignore wingnuts who write to us saying that they have a dispositive communication from the High Glazool of Vega Nine proving that Oswald wasn't anywhere near Dallas that day. But serious questions have been raised about these documents, neither trivial nor foolish. If Mr Rather is so confident in them, why doesn't he give us the name of some of his experts, or allow independant experts to examine his copies? I mean, at this point, aside from one guy who verified a signature (and apparently shouldn't have, if he'd used his own standards about not certifying copies), not one expert anywhere seems to be willing to say, on or off the record, for anyone but CBS, that the documents look anything other than fake. While I'm pretty damn sure there is no proof that they are anything other than modern, I can think of a number of tests that would at least cause me to question my certainty. Were they photocopied on 30-year-old paper, using a 30-year-old machine? Is there a plausible chain of custody, other than the widow, for personal files such as these? Can someone produce a 1972-era typewriter capable of replicating the memos with reasonable ease (reasonable meaning, I don't have to replace typing balls and precision-mill a 1/8-line uptick by hand to get the famous superscript, nor put a little extra thingy over my typewriter head in order to get curly quotes) such that we could reasonably presume someone typing a memo for his own files would have done it? (Or can someone produce a 1972-era LTC who could type, or would entrust memos of this nature to his clerk-typist?) Are there other documents from that unit that look like these? Surely, with all of its resources, CBS can offer us such proof, if it exists.

Or maybe it's better that they don't. Because starting tomorrow, I'm going to urge my boss to switch to the "Rather Doctrine". I'm practically salivating thinking of all the time I'll save . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Panic in the polls?

I'm a big fan of Mark Kleiman's, but I'm afraid that in this post he has strayed into the Land o' Wishful Thinkin.

Un-panic, Goddammit! UNPANIC!!!

While you weren't looking, two new polls came out, one from Zogby and one from Democracy Corps, showing Kerry down two to three points among likely voters. Those results match the Fox News results released yesterday, and the Rasmussen numbers (today's three-day spread is up to 1.6 points).

Those aren't the only polls out there, but the narrative that Bush has suddenly surged into a big lead just isn't supported by the facts available right now. It is, however, capable of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy if Kerry gets Gored: typed as a bad campaigner so that his "failure" becomes the story.

Would I rather be up than down? Sure. But this isn't a terrible place for the challenger to be a week after the incumbent's convention and after a month of pounding. Relax, and get to work.

As it happens, I spend a lot of time looking at these polls for my job. Now, I'm certainly not going to start predicting that Mr Bush is some sort of a lock (we all know how well that worked out last time.) But there's not really much question that a) Bush got a huge bounce out of his convention b) Kerry didn't and c) Kerry's still declining.

Zogby and Democracy Corps, as it happens, have always been among the most consistently pessimistic polls for Bush, as you can see by looking at the chart Mark linked. (One hears rumours that Mr Zogby's anti-war sentiments may be . . . er . . . punching up the questions, but as I know nothing about the various poll methodologies--other than the fact that there is some kind of methodological divide of which Mr Zogby is on one side, and Time the other--I find it just as plausible that he is simply following his sincere and earnest beliefs about the way people should be polled.)

Now, these polls show a tight race, and most of them show a Bush lead within the margin of error. But when ten polls all show you a Bush lead, that means trouble for Kerry. (Though I agree that the lead is probably not anywhere near 12%.) "Panic" might not be the right reaction, but "worry a whole lot" probably is, as it's historically very hard to reverse leads after Labor Day. The Dems managed to narrow it in 2000 through a rather nasty "November surprise": the hushed up DUI conviction, which was publicised just days before the election, leaving the Bush campaign no time to respond. I find it unlikely that the Dems have a similar bomb in their arsenal this time; my understanding is that you generally look for such things to be leveled at the challenger, not the incumbent, which can't make Kerry supporters sleep any easier at night.

The bottom line is that Kerry muffed his convention -- made it all about Vietnam, which backfired, and didn't fix the big hole I've been ranting about all spring and summer, which is that no one has any very clear notion what this guy stands for, except election. He has yet to craft a consistent image for voters to hang their heart's desires upon. And he now has damned little time to do it. I never thought ABB was going to be enough to carry this election, and it appears the voters agree with me. If Mr Kerry wants to get back in the game, it's time for him to get his image-makers together, haul in the lente, and festina like hell.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

On the memos, but not on the memos

This New York Times piece focused me on a much larger issue: how good are our memories?

Mr. Hodges, 74, who was group commander of Mr. Bush's squadron in the 147th Fighter Group at Ellington Field in Houston in the early 1970's, said that when someone from CBS called him on Monday night and read him documents, "I thought they were handwritten notes."

He said he had not authenticated the documents for CBS News but had confirmed that they reflected issues he and Colonel Killian had discussed - namely Mr. Bush's failure to appear for a physical, which military records released previously by the White House show, led to a suspension from flying.

A CBS News spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, indicated that Mr. Hodges had changed his account.

"We believed General Hodges the first time we spoke to him," Ms. Genelius said. Acknowledging that document authentification is often not an iron-clad process, she said, "We believe the documents to be genuine, we stand by our story and we will continue to report."

A spokeswoman for the CBS anchor Dan Rather, Kim Akhtar, said that Mr. Hodges had declined to appear on camera. As a result, Ms. Akhtar said, he was read the memos and responded that "he was familiar with the contents of the documents and that it sounded just like Killian." He made it clear, she added, that he was a supporter of Mr. Bush.

Mr. Hodges said that he had not spoken with anyone from the Bush administration or campaign about his views and that he was basing his belief now that the records are fakes on "inconsistencies" he had noticed.

He specifically pointed to a memo theorizing that the Texas Guard's chief of staff, Col. Walter B. Staudt, was pressing Mr. Hodges to give Mr. Bush favorable treatment. Mr. Hodges said that was not the case and that Mr. Staudt had actually retired more than a year earlier, though he acknowledged that Mr. Staudt might have remained in the Guard in some capacity after that. Mr. Staudt has not answered his phone for several days.

Mr. Hodges said he had also begun taking a dim view of the memos after hearing disavowals of them from Colonel Killian's wife and son.

The son, Gary Killian, said Saturday that he initially believed the documents might be real, if only because the signature looked like his father's. He said he had since been persuaded by the skepticism of some document experts.

While CBS right now seems to be being somewhat choice in their selection of facts to present, as they struggle not to make this look as bad as it is, I believe that Hodges was probably willing to authenticate the documents when he was told about them, as was Killian's son until he thought it through. That's because, although we believe that memories are . . . er . . . seared, seared into our brains . . . the fact is that they're constructed after the fact, and our brain does rather too much construction for veracitical comfort.

Take the common experience of suddenly waking up, just as you are drifting off to sleep, because of a too-real dream that you are falling.

Here's teh thing: the falling sensation comes after the waking up, according to brain scans. Your brain has just conveniently back-dated it to explain the two events, because the causal connection makes more sense that way.

Or try this fun experiment: go to one of your siblings and say something like "remember the time Bugs Bunny accidentally sat on you at Disneyland? I thought your eyes were going to bug out of your head!" Chances are, you can get a large percentage of your family members confabulating with you on something that simply couldn't have happened, given that Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character.

There is, I understand, some evidence that many prosecution experts (and probably defense ones as well) are "tainted" by being shown the other evidence against the defendant. "Knowing" he's guilty makes them more likely to find conviction about their own tiny piece of the puzzle . . .

That's why I've been extremely sceptical about people on both sides of teh Swift Vets controversy to generate such amazingly detailed memories about things that happened thirty-five years ago, and were in many cases about events almost completely unremarkable. And also sceptical of claims that the Swift Vets are certainly venal liars (leaving aside the fact that some of their minor claims seem to have been borne out) . . . it's easy indeed to gussy up one's memory without any malice aforethought. It's possible that Kerry's Cambodia story was the product of one such episode, and we should give him the benefit of the doubt as to motive, I think.

But we should bear this in mind as we try to sort out all these details of military service long past. People can, with the utmost goodwill, be brought to believe false things, especially if someone tells them there's hard evidence. I suspect that Hodges was the victim of such a procedure . . . having been told that there were rock solid memos, he confabulated memories to go with them . . . and then felt like a rook and a fool when the memos turned out to be probable fakes.

But it should give those of us in the media especial pause, when we think about how easy it might be to manufacture a story . . . especially one that agrees with our innermost political wishes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More inside baseball

Okay, the schadenfreude is back. But there are some odd elements of CBS' defense:

1) Apparently, Dan Rather says they've been working on this story since the 2000 election. What's with the timing?

2) What's with the anonymous experts? I've never heard of such a thing. Anonymous sources, sure, but document examiners aren't like priests or employees -- they expect to testify about what they do. That's what they get paid for. How come CBS's won't come forward? Are they really that afraid of Karl Rove's Special Document Examiner Hit Squad?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of huh?

What's so bad about windsurfing? I mean aside from the fact that I seem to have an uncanny ability to find the only dead spot on the water, requiring me to tire my delicate little arms paddling the durn thing back to the dock. My childhood included windsurfing, and I don't think people are going to be starting sentences "Patrician, aristocratic Jane . . . " any time soon.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The other story I missed

. . . was Bill Clinton's heart trouble. A quadruple bypass is a hell of a thing, and I'm very glad to hear the former president's recovering. Here's hoping for a speedy recovery, and that those of you who pray about these kinds of things have added him to your list.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Yes, Virginia, they're fake

So here I am in sunnyfoggy London, having spent a lovely week in Ireland after my grandfather's funeral. I'm sitting in an internet cafe, paying their absolutely outrageous (£2.00/hr) charges for the privilege of catching up on old news. I missed the Russian tragedy, may its perpetrators enjoy eternity in the company of Grtug, the nine-headed fire demon. I missed Bush's amazing bounce (cough). And, of course, I missed the Amazing Memo Caper.

Well, having spent my two quid brushing up on its intricate details, I confess myself gobsmacked that CBS bought these things. The first thing that I thought when looking at them (and due to poor clicking, I thought I was looking at verified comparison documents, not the memos in question) was "but that couldn't have been made in the 1970's".

But Jane, you will say, you were but a mewling infant when these memos were typed. Indeed so. However, my parents were of the tiresome middle class sort who believe in instilling a strong work ethic in their children by (shudder) making them work. From an unbearably young age. Hence, I have rather more experience with the IBM Selectric than your average girl of my years.

It is simply not possible that such a typewriter was used to produce something that lines up perfectly with a Microsoft Word document. The tab stops were set by moving a lever, for one thing. While it is, I suppose, vaguely conceivable that you might set your tab stops to the same exact ones as Microsoft Word, your tab would slide around a bit, because you never get it *exactly* back to the same place it was before. Anyone who has ever done inset text on a Selectric knows what I'm talking about.

And it is literally Impossible that on three separate memos, the typist managed to perfectly line up centered text exactly the way Microsoft Word would. It's impossible to get it done that well once, much less three times. Even if our typist were in the throes of an OCD fit hitherto unsurpassed in the history of man, there is absolutely no way you could mill it that precisely, because the paper goes in at a different place every time you load it. Since the tab stops will fall at a slightly different place each time, due to small shifts in the distance of the left edge of the paper from the edge of the typewriter roll, even if the typist were managing, somehow, to line the centered hed up perfectly with the paper, it would then *not* line up perfectly with the text below it -- it would look off center.

The chances of someone, purely by luck, managing to break all the lines they typed in exactly the same place as Microsoft Word's defaults are also pretty slim -- about the same, I'd estimate, as those of my getting up out of my chair, trotting over to Athens, and winning the ladies 400M relay single-handedly this evening.

Etc. Etc. You've read it already, covered by better blogs than mine. But the slam dunk is the 'curly quotes' -- the apostrophes that curl towards the words they surround. There is no key for this on your keyboard, nor was there on any typewriter I've ever worked on. But there's no need to rehash this. The chances that you could produce, by accident, a typewritten document that looks exactly like what comes out of your laser printer when you write the same thing in Microsoft Word, is a hell of a lot smaller than the chance that the earth will be destroyed by an asteroid: i.e. too small to worry about.

What flabbergasts me is how Dan Rather could have been taken in. He's old. He knows what typewritten things look like. These documents don't look like that. It also makes me wonder if 60 minutes is staffing its newsroom with twelve-year-old Pakistani children in order to save money on labour. How else could not one person say "y'know, this looks an awful lot like the stuff I type on my computer."

{end media-person schadenfreude attack}

And the left-wing blog commenters really need to get over it. Trying to defend these memos is sillier even that the run of the mill, bipartisan "everything my guys say is true, and I'll kick your butt if you say otherwise, na-na-na-na-I-can't-hear-you" blog ridiculousity. Do not throw your credibility after Dan Rather's. It's okay for not every single horrible accusation against George Bush to be true, just like right-wingers can hate John Kerry just fine even if Larry Thurlow got it wrong.

On a final note, I haven't seen Dan Rather's defense personally, but I've read the transcript, and from what I understand, it's surprisingly bad. Yes, there were machines that could do all of the things that people have pointed out (except curly quotes, which AFAIK, are entirely a word processing phenomenon). But no machine could do them all together, and the procedure outlined for actually doing them is so mind-bogglingly tedious, complicated, and time consuming, that I find it hard to imagine how anyone could seriously entertain the idea that someone did so for a non-official memo.

But leave off the lambasting -- let's talk motives. Because even more staggering than the fact that CBS aired these, is that some drooling incompetent produced them. I mean, how the hell hard would it be to buy a used IBM Selectric and type out some memos?

In fact, it seems to me that the "Republicans did this to get Kerry" is almost the best explanation here. The memos are sorta-kinda believable, but there are enough faults left in to totally and completely discredit them. What better way to hurt the credibility of everyone hurling charges at Bush, than to let a nice big fat juicy scandal blow up in the faces of those pushing it? Now the next time charges are levelled, some proportion of the population will remember that there are people willing to make up big, stupid lies in order to drag him down.

On the other hand, no one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the general public. Why not give it a try? If it's good enough to fool Dan Rather, maybe it'll go over with the American people too.

This will hurt Kerry a little, more I think, because attack ads will get less cred than because people will blame him. That's not fair. On the other hand, the Democrats who eagerly stepped forward to make political hay out of this can't really complain now that they've been baled.

Update I wasn't trying to single out Kevin Drum, who has been heroically evenhanded, but his commenters, some of whom are a little too tightly round in the Cloak of Wishful Thinking. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

All Things Implied - question the timing of the questioning of the memos

I had to drive around this [update:yesterday] afternoon and caught All Things Considered. They covered the fake Bush memo around 5:07, interviewing two experts who opined that it was a fake.. The way they described the forgery story breaking was to say that "a [unnamed] blogger first posted suspicions about the memo at 8:59PM" the night of the 60 Minutes story, when it was unlikely that they could have seen enough of the memos from the screen to do such a close examination.

The clear implication is that the famousFreeper comment #47, from which Powerline picked it up, was a plant. More of the silly Evil Genius Rove stuff.

The existence of these forgeries obviously doesn't materially change Bush's story, but the charge of the Big Media Light Brigade should definitely be of interest to political bloggers. Why Atrios, Willis, Kos et al refuse to acknowledge that angle I can't tell you.

UPDATE: I didn't get around to posting this until this (Saturday) morning (in my Pajamas). I see they were materially wrong, too. I see this morning the forgeries have become even clearer, despite the New York Times' equivocation (they also cover it here ). Somewhere Dan Rather is saying 'we'll just have to win!".

Another thing I've just noticed (in my pajamas) is that Cornel West thinks weblogs are like oral sex! Along with cocaine and ecstasy they are apparently responsible for the 'soul murder' of American youth.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Tech bleg

I'm getting all this spam lately that's just a JPG (1.jpg, 5.jpg...)

Out of curiousity, do they do this just to disguise the marketing text from text filters, or can you actually embed something destructive in an image?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Fresh from the stupid idea department

Paul Rudnick is looking to join Nicholson Baker in the contest for weirdest symptoms of Bush Derangement Syndrome:

July 7, 2004—I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t see it coming. I’m a husband. I’m a father. I’m the President of the United States of America. I’m freedom’s go-to guy. But today, while I was watching one of my ads, that spot attacking him for being all flippity-floppity on Iraq, I realized, beyond a shadow of a doubt: Oh, my God, I’m in love with John Kerry.

July 8, 2004—I hoped that once I’d written it down, once I could actually see the words in these most secret diary pages, my undeniable feelings would, I don’t know, just somehow vanish. I mean, I’ve never even thought about another fellow that way, not ever—O.K., Ted Kennedy at the pool in those sopping madras trunks. I’m only human. But this is different. This is oddly . . . sacred. Those liquid, burden-of-decency basset-hound eyes. That long, luscious, Leno ’n’ Lincoln jaw. That cinder-block-thick, brushed-chrome hair. Who cares what really happened in Vietnam? That dense, silvery helmet could make any nation feel safe. I’m so ashamed. And I’ve never felt more alive.

The New Yorker needs to aim a little higher (not to mention funnier and less pseudo-hip). I haven't been a big user of the 'imagine if the same thing were said about [insert Democrat/woman/minority group here]' contrivance, but I'd recommend the New Yorker try it a few times and then think where they might find such a piece. (in the comments here?) Has the Manhattan Liberal Cocoon completely dulled their senses? Is Rudnick the next Maureen Dowd?

In the same issue, see this short profile of political youth:

A panelist affiliated with the Young Communist League who wore a hoop through her lower lip softly interjected something about America’s “superpower, capitalist society.” Her braces flashed.

“All right, I’m sorry to cut you off—we’ve got a segment,” Ahmad said. “I don’t actually know what it’s about.”

“The draft,” Naomi said, and a short documentary was shown.

“It’s a war on minority youth,” one panelist said, to applause, when the camera cut back to the stage. Salazar begged to differ: the draft bill brought before Congress last year, she said, had been introduced by a Democrat from Harlem, and was aimed at white people. “That’s not true!” several people shouted at once. “It is true,” said a small voice from the studio audience: Salazar’s six-year-old sister, wearing a backward National Review cap and clutching a baby doll with a “Bush-Cheney ’04” button on its chest.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

comment spam alert

You may want to add s**glory.com and any of its many subdomains to your blacklist now. This one leaves comments about a yard long.

As ever, you can find our blacklist here.

Ah, maintenance.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Congratulations..

..to Kevin Drum on his Book Review of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s War and the American Presidency:

How does Schlesinger reach so many dire conclusions? It's hard to say. Take his chapter on ''Patriotism and Dissent in Wartime.'' It contains some instructive and readable historical anecdotes about wartime dissent. We learn that compulsory flag salutes were struck down by the Supreme Court at the height of World War II -- on Flag Day, no less -- and Schlesinger reminds us that two hyperpatriots, Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Taft, were in their day fervent believers in the duty to criticize the president during wartime (although Schlesinger might have noted that both Roosevelt and Taft were criticizing presidents of the opposite party).

John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and a host of others are also trotted out to make Schlesinger's point clear: dissent during wartime has a long and honorable history in America. But the chapter has no punch line. When he gets to the present conflict, all Schlesinger can bring himself to say is: ''There were those in the second Iraq war who promoted the idea that patriotic Americans had a moral obligation to rally around the president. This idea, as we have seen, is valid neither in principle nor in practice.''

One of those mysterious patriotism-questioning people at work again. Schlesinger's Roosevelt-colored glasses have been a target here a few times.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

'The Me Maneuver'

Eddie Izzard likes to imitate Doctor Heimlich choking:

What do you think, Doctor Heimlich?" "Huh? I don't *cough* - I don't *cough* - I don't know, *cough* I have sw - swallowed a football and I can't *cough* get it - out. Can you per - grab me - perform my maneuver on me, the me maneuver."

Maureen Dowd claims Bush performed her maneuver on Anne O'Hare McCormick in his remark about NYTimes editorials:

Painting himself as the noble agent for "the transformational power of liberty" abroad, he said "there have always been doubters" when America uses its "strength" to "advance freedom": "In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to Allied forces, a journalist in The New York Times wrote this: 'Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. European capitals are frightened. In every military headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.' End quote. Maybe that same person's still around, writing editorials."

She isn't. Anne O'Hare McCormick, who died in 1954, was The Times's pioneering foreign affairs correspondent who covered the real Axis of Evil, interviewing Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Patton [sic - see comments]. She was hardly a left-wing radical or defeatist. In 1937, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, and she was the first woman to be a member of The Times's editorial board.

The president distorted the columnist's dispatch. (download a PDF of the original column)The "moral crisis" and failure she described were in the British and French sectors. She reported that the Americans were doing better because of their policy to "encourage initiative and develop self-government." She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course - not cut and run.

Mr. Bush Swift-boated her.

Nice try, but the verb remains "Dowdified^TM".

But he did (ohmygod, I agree!). If you read the original article, you will find Ms. McCormick hardly took a defeatist tone, except possibly in the last paragraph.

It demonstrates that post war success in rebuilding, even when the enemy is completely defeated as in WWII, is hard-won with many problems along the way. Bush should have stuck with that point (or used the Dos Passos article instead, but then he wouldn't have been able to take a swipe at the Times). Comparing Ms. McCormick to today's uniformly anti-Bush and pessimistic NYT editorialists seems unfair. As Dowd says, "She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course - not cut and run."

This passage:

The Manichaean Candidate's convention was a brazen bizarro masterpiece. The case to sack John Kerry featured the same shady tactics used to build the case to whack Saddam - cherry-picked facts, selective claims and warped contexts.

reminds me of some brilliant satire I found the other day (courtesy of Stuart Buck):

This is why one of the first most important things to do is to seperate people into good and bad based on whether they think the Iraq war was wrong. This is the ONLY way to fight the wrong results of Bush's Manacheinism.

Maureen Dowd complaining about "cherry-picked facts, selective claims and warped contexts" is pretty rich.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A Chicken of a Different Color

We made our annual trip to the Goshen Fair today, something I've been doing since I was a kid.

the view above is from the ferris wheel, where I was slightly distressed to find some repair work under my seat that really was just duct tape and bailing wire:

We also saw some very unusual-looking chickens. I have to admit I am either gullible or ignorant to be unsure whether these are a genetic morph (as are common in the reptile breeding trade) or just creative dye work.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Maugham's Templeton on marriage

Over vacation a few weeks ago I read The Razor's Edge. My favorite quote, from the snobby American-turned Euro Elliott Templeton:

"Marriage is a serious matter on which rest the security of the family and the stability of the state. But marriage can only maintain its authority if extraconjugal relations are not only tolerated but sanctioned. Prostitution, my poor Louisa-"

There's also a wonderful passage (reflecting the author-as-character's opinion, not that of the other characters) on the optimism of Americans, but I can't find it. Why isn't this book on line yet?