Back of the Envelope

Rather than write about politics today, let's take a look at our favorite webcomics.

Sluggy Freelance -- Riff's back. Enough said.

Day by Day -- John Kerry, the New York Times, and Martha Stewart. So many people to make fun of, so little time.

It's Walky! -- Martians, zombies, and lawyers. Who do you think is the most scary?

College Roomies from Hell! -- Mike's sneakiness gets him into trouble.

General Protection Fault -- Yoshi runs into trouble with the law.

Schlock Mercenary -- Now that the mercenaries have a little downtime, Breya pushes for some target practice.

There's a story developing that could actually kill the Kerry campaign. I haven't discussed it since it just seemed too out there to be believable at first, but Captain Ed has been going over the details. From a New York Sun story:

Senator Kerry of Massachusetts yesterday retreated from his earlier steadfast denials that he attended a meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War at which a plan to assassinate U.S. Senators was debated. The reversal came as new evidence, including reports from FBI informants, emerged that contradicted Mr. Kerry’s previous statements about the gathering, which was held in Kansas City, Mo. in November 1971.

“John Kerry had no personal recollection of this meeting 33 years ago,” a Kerry campaign spokesman, David Wade, said in a statement e-mailed last night from Idaho, where Mr. Kerry is on vacation.

As I said in the Captain's comments, how do you forget something like that? I mean, Kerry seems to remember every minute detail from his time in Vietnam, considering how every situation reminds him of a new anecdote. I think a meeting where he opposed an assassination attempt and which ultimately caused him to resign the organization would be just a little bit memorable.

And I'm being generous in my interpretation of events: Kerry, hearing about the plans for assassination, was horrified at the thought, argued strenuously against it, and even after successfully opposing the idea, decided that he had to leave the organization. There are much more cynical ways of looking at it, but even this way, guilt by association makes Kerry look very bad. His involvement in a truly radical organization makes him look hopelessly naive at best, more likely dangerously anti-American even if he did have limits.

The more I think about it, the more I think that this could kill Kerry's campaign. It may be enough of a disgrace to force him to withdraw from the race entirely. As I don't think a Sharpton or Kucinich Presidential nomination are very likely, that would leave the Democratic side wide open. There isn't much telling what would happen then.

New Post: More here.

U of R's College Republicans are holding an Affirmative Action Bake Sale today. If you don't know what that is, it's a bake sale where discounts are given to women and "disadvantaged" minorities (i.e., Blacks and Hispanics). When I went by, there was a good crowd there, although to judge by the stickers they were wearing, most of them were members of the College Republicans. I didn't see any hecklers or demonstrators, which these sorts of things have drawn at other campuses.

While I'll defend the right of the College Republicans to hold these Bake Sales, I'm not a big fan of the events. It strikes me as needlessly insulting, which I guess is the point. Why should you be offended by being offered baked goods at a discount if you aren't offended by lowered admission standards and job quotas? Shouldn't that be considered even more patronizing? (La Shawn Barber has a good post on this today.) Still, it seems to me that there ought to be better ways to get the idea across. First, who is the target audience? Presumably it's those who normally benefit from affirmative action. I doubt it's to get the non-beneficiaries all riled up (and I certainly hope that's not the case). Second, will your target audience be too offended to listen to your point? The thinking might be that they won't listen unless you show graphically how offensive affirmative action is to them, but I'm still unconvinced. And I think many of them have such a low opinion of Republicans that they'll assume that the whole purpose of the exercise is either to get the non-beneficiaries riled up or to insult the beneficiaries, and they'll miss the message the Bake Sale is supposed to convey.

New Post: If you want some information on the Bake Sale itself, I have some pointers above.

Joe Carter has a nice post wherein he talks about the best way to engage in cultural debates. Arguing the slippery slope, which seems to be the only argument with which conservatives gain any traction these days, doesn't work against those who see nothing wrong with what's at the bottom. Here are some more of his don'ts:

First, we must realize that scoffing is not an argument. If we stacked all snarky tomes by Rush and Sean and Bill and Ann they would not fortify us against even the weakest liberal argument. Think for a moment how long Limbaugh has been on the radio. Now name one battle in the culture war in which he was instrumental in attaining a victory for our side. I can’t think of a single one. These pundits may bring the issues to our attention but they rarely provide adequate solutions to the problems they point out. We can’t rely on them to think for us; we have to do the intellectual heavy lifting ourselves. We would do well not to blindly imitate their approach.

Second, we have to become cultural missionaries, translating the components of our worldview in a way that can be understood by our opponents. Take, for example, an example of what Russell Kirk calls a “common principle” of conservatism: the principle of prescription - a reliance on the “wisdom of our ancestors.” Since the Enlightenment, the inherent value of tradition and ancient learning has slowly been eroding. The liberal elite, in particular, have fallen for what C.S. Lewis termed “chronological snobbery”, the presumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.

There are some interesting thoughts, but there's not a whole lot of practical advice for how to proceed (the post contains more "do nots" than "dos"). It's definitely worth reading, however.

Doc Rampage thinks the al Qaeda letter (in which al Qaeda says that it's calling a truce with Spain as long as it really withdraws from Iraq and that it wants Bush to win because Kerry's so smart he'd be a real threat to the terrorists) is a fake. Maybe. It certainly doesn't strike me as particularly intelligent, whether fake or real. So are we supposed to believe that the terrorists really want Bush to win, because Kerry scares them? If Kerry had done anything aside from promise to return us to the pre-9/11 status quo, I might find it a little bit believable. As it is, you've got to be a way-out Lefty to believe that Kerry will fight the war on terrorism better than Bush, and a none-too-bright Lefty, or perhaps a really stupid terrorist trying his hand at reverse psychology, if you think anyone other than the far-Left can be convinced that terrorists really are more afraid of Kerry than they are of Bush. Either that, or the writer might be a somewhat clever conservative who thinks that people won't take the letter at face value and it will end up making Kerry and the Spanish Socialists look bad.

Opinionjournal has a transcript of Cheney's speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday. It's clearly a campaign speech, divided equally between praise for Bush and put downs for Kerry. I noticed immediately that it hits on many themes which the blogosphere has been saying that Bush needs to put forward in his campaign. Either the blogosphere's becoming more influential, or we're just pointing out the obvious. As an example, Cheney stresses the need to go on the offensive against terrorism:

This great and urgent responsibility has required a shift in national security policy. For many years prior to 9/11, we treated terror attacks against Americans as isolated incidents, and answered--if at all--on an ad hoc basis, and never in a systematic way. Even after an attack inside our own country--the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, in New York--there was a tendency to treat terrorist incidents as individual criminal acts, to be handled primarily through law enforcement. The man who perpetrated that attack in New York was tracked down, arrested, convicted and sent off to serve a 240-year sentence. Yet behind that one man was a growing network with operatives inside and outside the United States, waging war against our country.

For us, that war started on 9/11. For them, it started years before. After the World Trade Center attack in 1993 came the murders at the Saudi Arabia National Guard Training Center in Riyadh, in 1995; the simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in 1998; the attack on the USS Cole, in 2000. In 1996, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad--the mastermind of 9/11--first proposed to Osama bin Laden that they use hijacked airliners to attack targets in the U.S. During this period, thousands of terrorists were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. And we have seen the work of terrorists in many attacks since 9/11--in Riyadh, Casablanca, Istanbul, Mombasa, Bali, Jakarta, Najaf, Baghdad and, most recently, Madrid.

Against this kind of determined, organized, ruthless enemy, America requires a new strategy--not merely to prosecute a series of crimes, but to fight and win a global campaign against the terror network. Our strategy has several key elements. We have strengthened our defenses here at home, organizing the government to protect the homeland. But a good defense is not enough. The terrorist enemy holds no territory, defends no population, is unconstrained by rules of warfare, and respects no law of morality. Such an enemy cannot be deterred, contained, appeased or negotiated with. It can only be destroyed--and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the business at hand.

This leads into the appropriate attack on John Kerry later in the speech: "In his defense, of course, Sen. Kerry has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all. Recently he said, and I quote, 'I don't want to use that terminology.' In his view, opposing terrorism is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law enforcement operation."

About Kerry's claim of support from foreign leaders, and his refusal to say who they are, Cheney has this to say:

A few days ago in Pennsylvania, a voter asked Sen. Kerry directly who these foreign leaders are. Sen. Kerry said, "That's none of your business." But it is our business when a candidate for president claims the political endorsement of foreign leaders. At the very least, we have a right to know what he is saying to foreign leaders that makes them so supportive of his candidacy. American voters are the ones charged with determining the outcome of this election--not unnamed foreign leaders.

Which is a point that bears repeating. It is the business of the voters what Kerry is saying to foreign leaders, since we are the ones who will decide whether he will be running our foreign policy.

Cheney also takes Kerry to task on his promises to rebuild alliances while he simultaneously attacks them:

Sen. Kerry speaks often about the need for international cooperation, and has vowed to usher in a "golden age of American diplomacy." He is fond of mentioning that some countries did not support America's actions in Iraq. Yet of the many nations that have joined our coalition--allies and friends of the United States--Sen. Kerry speaks with open contempt. Great Britain, Australia, Italy, Spain, Poland and more than 20 other nations have contributed and sacrificed for the freedom of the Iraqi people. Sen. Kerry calls these countries, quote, "window dressing." They are, in his words, "a coalition of the coerced and the bribed."

Many questions come to mind, but the first is this: How would Sen. Kerry describe Great Britain--coerced, or bribed? Or Italy--which recently lost 19 citizens, killed by terrorists in Najaf--was Italy's contribution just window dressing? If such dismissive terms are the vernacular of the golden age of diplomacy Sen. Kerry promises, we are left to wonder which nations would care to join any future coalition. He speaks as if only those who openly oppose America's objectives have a chance of earning his respect. Sen. Kerry's characterization of our good allies is ungrateful to nations that have withstood danger, hardship, and insult for standing with America in the cause of freedom.

Cheney also addresses on Kerry's flip-flopping on the issue of Iraq:

A neutral observer, looking at these elements of Sen. Kerry's record, would assume that Sen. Kerry supported military action against Saddam Hussein. The senator himself now tells us otherwise. In January he was asked on TV if he was, "one of the antiwar candidates." He replied, "I am." He now says he was voting only to "threaten the use of force," not actually to use force.

And of Kerry's hypocrisy in attacking Bush's lack of adequate support for the troops while voting against the supplemental funding bill:

Sen. Kerry has also had a few things to say about support for our troops now on the ground in Iraq. Among other criticisms, he has asserted that those troops are not receiving the materiel support they need. Just this morning, he again gave the example of body armor, which he said our administration failed to supply. May I remind the senator that last November, at the president's request, Congress passed an $87 billion supplemental appropriation. This legislation was essential to our ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan--providing funding for body armor and other vital equipment; hazard pay; health benefits; ammunition; fuel, and spare parts for our military. The legislation passed overwhelmingly, with a vote in the Senate of 87-12. Sen. Kerry voted "no." I note that yesterday, attempting to clarify the matter, Sen. Kerry said, quote, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." It's a true fact.

Finally, Cheney notes that Kerry's Senate voting record on Defense is one of the worst in the country:

On national security, the senator has shown at least one measure of consistency. Over the years, he has repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military. He voted against the Apache helicopter, against the Tomahawk cruise missile, against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He has also been a reliable vote against military pay increases--opposing them no fewer than 12 times.

Many of these very weapons systems have been used by our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are proving to be valuable assets in the war on terror.

There's so much stuff on Senator Kerry that I kept thinking it was the majority of the speech, when in fact it was less than half. And all of these talking points have been brought up on the blogosphere in the preceding months, including many of the old quotes of Kerry from the nineties which Cheney uses.

You know, I was joking when I said that Orrin Hatch must be reading my blog. I still don't think he is, but I'm beginning to wonder if someone in Congress really is reading my blog. (Thanks to Evangelical Outpost for pointing this out.)

Update: It occurred to me that perhaps I should explain what the heck I'm talking about. The bill I mention would give Congress the authority to overturn Supreme Court rulings with a 2/3rds vote of both houses. This is similar to an Constitutional amendment I proposed a long time ago. I'm pretty sure such a law would be struck down by the Supreme Court. It would take a Constitutional Amendment to do this.

I haven’t done much blogging today. Well, if Glenn Reynolds can take a few days off, so can I. Well, a day, anyway. The irony is that while Glenn is saying he won’t post unless something really big happens, such as "alien invasion, atomic bombings, etc.", I would have sworn that those were the only things that could have kept him from blogging. In any case, mostly I’ve been working on my personal webpage. I just finished this very nifty map.



The numbers represent places I’ve lived, and if you click on them you’ll find out what I was doing there.

What's going on in Iran? CNN is painting it as harmless celebrating under the indulgent eye of the authorities, but CNN is not above whitewashing their accounts (free registration required) when they might otherwise lose access. Meanwhile, Project: FREE IRAN! claims it's a full-scale revolution. I hope it is, although others might not. A friend of mine, who is German, asked whether a revolution in Iran would be a good thing. In response to my "Of course!", he took the counter-argument. That, first, a revolution may cause the mullahs to try to find an enemy outside of Iran, and try to focus the people's anger against us. Second, we wouldn't want Iran's WMD projects to fall into the hands of non-government forces. Third, revolutions are sources of chaos, more likely to give power to demagogues than democrats.

I'd like to run through the optimistic view of a revolution's consequences first, then answer each of these protestations in turn.

A revolution in which the pro-democracy, pro-American movement in Iran came to power would have numerous beneficial results:

1. It's always a good thing when oppressed people become free.
2. A new democracy in the Middle East is also a good thing, as it can help to serve as an example to other Middle Eastern countries.
3. A Middle Eastern country becoming a democracy on its own is even better, as we want to encourage a new order which comes from within, not from without. The country is stronger and more confident for achieving freedom on its own. We want the people of the Middle East to reform on their own, through peaceful reform if possible, through revolution if necessary.
4. The pro-American strain in this movement makes it perticularly promising, as it would give us another ally in the Middle East.
5. It would stop Iran's nuclear program in its tracks.
6. It would eliminate a major base of operations and a major source of support for terrorists. Hezbollah is supported by Iran, and there're indications that al Qaeda is receiving significant aid from them.
7. Iran is providing support for the terrorists trying to destabilize Iraq, and removing that support would help to settle the situation there.

So, what of the protestations?

1. A revolution may cause the mullahs to try to find an enemy outside of Iran, and try to focus the people's anger against us.
I think this is unlikely to work, as the revolutionary movement is strongly anti-mullah and strongly pro-American. The two seem to go hand-in-hand, and I don't think the mullahs can divert the sentiment with an external threat. Second, the basic assumption here is that the revolution fails. I think it has a good chance to succeed.

2.We wouldn't want Iran's WMD projects to fall into the hands of non-government forces.
The assumption here is that it's safer to leave it in the hands of the government. Considering that one of the more powerful members of Iran's ruling council has called for Iran to use nuclear weapons against Israel, I'm not sure that's true. Iran's connections with terrorism make the simple handing over of WMDs to terrorists a possibility. While there is a risk that WMDs could end up in terrorist hands if Iran's government collaped, I'm not sure the risk would be any higher than it is now.

3. Revolutions are sources of chaos, more likely to give power to demagogues than democrats.
This is true, but it doesn't have to happen that way. For example, the fall of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe involved remarkably little bloodshed and chaos, and stable democracies arose very quickly.

There are risks in revolutions, of course. In some situations, however, I think the reward is worth the risk.

Old Post: I first offered to blog Ralph Nader's U of R talk here.

Someone went and contributed $3 to my "Convince me to live-blog Ralph Nader" fund, so I guess I can't use the "nobody cares anyway" excuse. I purchased a ticket and checked out the wireless access in the auditorium. Unfortunately, the auditorium seems lacking in that department. I'm hoping there will be some sort of wireless access available on March 24th (it's right on the edge of the covered area), but maybe not. If not, Nader's talk won't be live-blogged after all, but it will be blogged, I promise.

Update: I clarified what I meant about wireless coverage, and a few other minor edits.

The big news items this weekend were the terrorist attacks in Spain and the following election. The election removed the Conservatives, who had backed Bush in Iraq, and installed the Socialists, who are now saying that they will be tough on terror while also promising to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. Curiously, they don't appear to see any contradiction between those statements. Iraq is the hard edge of the war on terror, where US and allied troops are fighting daily against al Qaeda forces. Originally, the forces in Iraq were a combination of Ba'athist remnants and international, al Qaeda terrorists. Since Saddam's capture, the Ba'athists holdovers have dwindled and what remains are the terrorists. It seems to me that if the Socialists wanted to fight al Qaeda, that's where they'd want to be. Apparently not, though.

The first question is why the Spanish voted the way they did. The second question is how the terrorists will perceive it.

The second question is much easier to answer, so I'll start there. The terrorists struck in Spain, either because Spain was an ally to the US or because of a 500 year old grievance. Most likely both. All of Europe is the enemy to them, but some are more immediate enemies than others. (Al Qaeda's such a basket case of overlapping causes that I'm not sure there's enough central control to work out long term strategies.) Spain immediately elected a party that's wants to withdraw from the main front on the War on Terror. In the terrorists' eyes, they struck, Spain capitulated, and terrorist attacks just before national elections suddenly become their most effective strategy. They will try again, very likely in the US come October.

So, knowing that, why did Spain vote the way it did? Well, the first possibility is that they were planning to vote that way anyway, and the terrorist attack had no effect on the voting. The second possibility is that they blamed the Aznar administration for the attack in the first place. Whether they place the blam on the Iraq war, which was not popular in Spain, or just poor security, Aznar's administration makes a good scapegoat. The third possibility seems most likely to me, and that it was not Aznar's actions before the attack but after the attack, that it looked like he was playing politics, fingering the ETA rather than al Qaeda, rather than dealing with the problem head on (see here).

Whatever the reason, it was the wrong response. If we take terrorism seriously, if it influences our voting at all, the correct response to such attacks is to do exactly what the terrorists least want, refusing to be cowed. This is important not only for the results, but just to show the terrorists that terrorism does not work as a means of influencing us in their favor--it can only work to turn us against them.

Update: I should point out that the first reason Spain might have voted the way it did (it was planning to anyway) is almost certainly wrong. The projections pointed to a victory for the conservatives just before the bombing.

I was just reading CNN's AM Quicknews (an automailed news summary), and apparently the big question in politics is who went negative first in the presidential race. Huh? The entire Democratic primary process was based on negative campaigning against Bush. He's been called unpatriotic, a traitor, the worst president in the history of the US, a deserter, and, of course, a moron. Now Bush has only recently started saying things in response, and there's a question about who went negative first? Again, I say huh?

Update: Typo corrections and clarifications. Nothing big.

I made my first blog post on February 14th at 7:54 pm. This blog is now officially over a month old. Granted, February is a short month, so while it's a month old, it's less than 30 days. I've received over 2100 hits in that time, averaging to more than 70 a day. However, if you look at my Sitemeter monthly readout, you'll see that the majority of these hits occured in two large spikes, one from a link from National Review's The Corner, and one from a link from Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal.com's Best of the Web. Still, it's not bad for my first month, and in between the spikes I generally get 25-35 visitors each day. I figure that my visits can't account for more than ten of those.

This post marks another first--it's the first post I'm making from my new laptop, over a wireless network. I hope this will lead to more blogging.

I'm sorry this is late, but as I've said before, I'm in Boston and my Internet access is limited. Anyway, some nice things are happening recently.

Sluggy Freelance -- Torg and Sam escape, making a run for it, Kent and Nana's plan to rescue Arminius gets sidetracked, and Arminius is left to his own devices.

Day by Day -- The crew goes hiking. As might be expected, they get lost.

It's Walky! -- Several disparate threads all go crazy at once. Enjoy the mayhem, the bloodshed, and being sent through the emotional wringer by the evil cartoonist yet again.

College Roomies from Hell! -- Dave and Roger have a long overdue talk, while Mike's busy sowing mayhem through his powers of deception.

General Protection Fault -- The simmering feud between Fred and Trent reaches a boil.

Schlock Mercenary -- The Dark Matter Entities (DaMEs) finally arrive and all the double-crosses become moot: Breya and Tagon are finally working together again.

Since none of you guys seemed to want to buy me a new laptop, I got one of my own. It's a Dell Latitude D600, 1.6 GHz processor, 512 MB memory, wireless internet, 40 GB hard drive, and a DVD/CD-RW drive. It's very nice. A friend was trying to sell it, brand new, and I was able to buy it off him for significantly less than the going price on Dell's website. He even allowed me to pay in installments.

And now that I have it, it looks like I ought to live-blog Ralph Nader's talk after all. I was hoping lack of interest, and laptop, would save me from that ordeal, but no such luck. Now if someone were to donate some money to me via the Amazon button on the left, at least I wouldn't feel so bitter about it. $3 would cover the price of the ticket.

These are the posts I put up this past week which I thought might be of interest to visitors.

Getting Traffic -- I point out some of the ways a new blog can drum up traffic.

Ethical Considerations in Quantum Computation -- I point out that my field of research has some associated ethical questions as well. Assuming people are bothered by me reading their credit card information off the Internet, that is.

Ralph Nader at U of R -- I offer to live-blog Nader's talk at U of R if someone buys me a laptop. Of course, I later buy my own laptop and offer to live-blog Nader for $3.

The Roe Effect -- I talk about the Roe effect, a pet theory of James Taranto at Best of the Web.

Quantifying the Roe Effect -- I calculate how much the Roe Effect may have shifted the electoral college. There are some problematic assumptions, but it's interesting to see how much the effect may be. I got a link from Best of the Web because of it.

Post-Christian Europe: How long will it last? -- Mark Steyn's beautiful column points out how far along the Roe Effect is in Europe, although his viewpoint is closer to Doc Rampage's, that abortion is a symptom rather than the cause.

Sharing the Addiction -- I'm trying to convince MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship to start their own blog. I'll let you know how that goes.