Back of the Envelope

The elections in Iraq have come to a conclusion, with a phenomenal 60% turnout overall. I'd call that successful, as that kind of turnout just doesn't happen in the US. There was some violence, as FoxNews notes:

As estimated 8 million people — 60 percent of eligible voters — braved violence and calls for a boycott to vote in Iraq. A string of homicide bombings and mortar volleys killed at least 44 people, including nine attackers.

U.S. and Iraqi forces sought to clamp down on violence by imposing a strict curfew and seriously restricting traffic around polling places. About 300,000 Iraqi and American troops were on the streets and on standby to protect voters.

Eight million voters and forty-four deaths. Any death is to be mourned, but this pretty much puts an end to Zarqawi as a force in Iraq. It's not the bloodbath he promised, and if he can't deliver on this, intimidating and terrorizing the people taking part in the most important event in Iraq's recent history, then he's shown himself impotent. The Iraqi people stood up to terrorism, and the people won. Now they know that Zarqawi's nothing more than a braggart with a small following, able to murder, but not able to alter the events in Iraq. What followers and sympathizers he has will drift away, leaving him only with a small corps of dead-enders. They won't go away: they'll continue to attack Iraqis and US forces in Iraq, but now they're nothing but criminals opposed to the Iraqis themselves.


Update: My initial comments on the turnout in the first few sentences were more appropriate for the original 72% estimate. While writing this post, I corrected the number but neglected to tone down the enthusiasm appropriately. 60% is good, about what the turnout was for the November election in the US, but I wouldn't call it phenomenal in itself--although I would call it phenomenal in the face of Zarqawi's threats.

I haven't really been following the James Dobson/Spongebob Squarepants issue. Why not? Well, I didn't find it very interesting, to be honest. From the very beginning, it was obvious that the whole thing was following the usual pattern of a Religious Right story™. The anatomy of a Religious Right story™ is something like this:

1. A religious conservative says something poorly worded.
2. The New York Times (or some similar newspaper), always looking for the opportunity to turn a poorly worded public comment into the latest controversy of the day, takes his words out of context and blows them out of proportion.
3. Other newspapers take the Times's word for it and run the story. Meanwhile, libertarian bloggers, eager to show that they're as quick to condemn stupidity on the right as stupidity on the left, are quick to condemn the religious conservative.
4. Evangelical bloggers, who are religious conservatives and thus more sympathetic to their own, and less ideology-driven news services, look into the matter more closely and discover that the Times and all its imitators have blown the story out of proportion.
5. The libertarian bloggers realize their mistake and back down--slightly.
6. The general public, getting all their information from the New York Times and its flunkies, add one more story to their file on Religious Right stupidity.
7. My co-workers, who are clearly part of the general public, discuss how this incident demonstrates the stupidity of the Religious Right.
8. Not having followed the story, since I realized the path it would be taking way back in Step 2, I find myself vaguely aware that the controversy was a whole lot of nothing (I at least skimmed the relevant blog posts), but I lack the grasp of the facts necessary to effectively defend the religious conservative.
9. I decide to research the issue and write a blog post, so that the next time the topic comes up, I'm prepared.

And that's how these things work. Now, applying this model to this particular case, Dobson explains what he was talking about:

From the outset, let's be clear that this issue is not about objections to any specific cartoon characters. Instead, Dr. Dobson is concerned that these popular animated personalities are being exploited by an organization that's determined to promote the acceptance of homosexuality among our nation's youth.
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The video in question is slated to be distributed to 61,000 public and private elementary schools throughout the United States. Where it is shown, schoolchildren will be left with the impression that their teachers are offering their endorsement of the values and agenda associated with the video's sponsor. While some of the goals associated with this organization are noble in nature, their inclusion of the reference to "sexual identity" within their "tolerance pledge" is not only unnecessary, but it crosses a moral line.

The New York Times, meanwhile, turned the story of "Dr. Dobson criticizes advocacy group for using Spongebob Squarepants in elementary school video" into "Dr. Dobson accuses Spongebob Squarepants of being gay", mostly through a lot of innuendo and ascribing of motives without evidence, and very few quotes:

On the heels of electoral victories barring same-sex marriage, some influential conservative Christian groups are turning their attention to a new target: the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.

"Does anybody here know SpongeBob?" Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, asked the guests Tuesday night at a black-tie dinner for members of Congress and political allies to celebrate the election results.

SpongeBob needed no introduction. In addition to his popularity among children, who watch his cartoon show, he has become a well-known camp figure among adult gay men, perhaps because he holds hands with his animated sidekick Patrick and likes to watch the imaginary television show "The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy."

Now, Dr. Dobson said, SpongeBob's creators had enlisted him in a "pro-homosexual video," in which he appeared alongside children's television colleagues like Barney and Jimmy Neutron, among many others. The makers of the video, he said, planned to mail it to thousands of elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge" that includes tolerance for differences of "sexual identity."

Dobson's position is actually pretty nuanced. (And here I thought The New York Times liked nuance.) He's not opposed to the video itself, which is typical multi-culti pap. It's the group making the video, and the fact that the kids might see the use of a video they produced in school as an implicit endorsement of the group and its entire agenda by the school, but it's important to see the difference. Maybe he's ascribing to the kids too much intelligence and not enough wisdom. As for what the group, We are Family, actually advocates, here's what Dobson explains:

I want to be clear: the We Are Family Foundation — the organization that sponsored the video featuring SpongeBob and the other characters was, until this flap occurred, making available a variety of explicitly pro-homosexual materials on its Web site. It has since endeavored to hide that fact (more on this later), but my concerns are as legitimate today as they were when I first expressed them in January.

So let us consider the evidence. One of the first resources to catch our attention on the foundation's Web site was a booklet that lists a number of organizational "allies," including five of the largest pro-homosexual organizations in the nation: the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, and Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Also, the Web site made available school lesson plans...

One of the lesson plans, titled, Uncovering Attitudes About Sexual Orientation, presents what are deemed "stereotypical definitions" of words that encourage bigotry and bias. If you have any doubt about the pro-homosexual agenda inherent to these materials, check out these loaded terms, which could be coming soon to an elementary school near you. (All are direct quotes.)

• Compulsory Heterosexuality: The assumption that women are "naturally" or innately drawn sexually and emotionally toward men, and men toward women; the view that heterosexuality is the "norm" for all sexual relationships. The institutionalization of heterosexuality in all aspects of society includes the idealization of heterosexual orientation, romance, and marriage. Compulsory heterosexuality leads to the notion of women as inherently "weak," and the institutionalized inequality of power: power of men to control women's sexuality, labor, childbirth and childrearing, physical movement, safety, creativity, and access to knowledge. It can also include legal and social discrimination against homosexuals and the invisibility or intolerance of lesbian and gay existence.
• Gender: A cultural notion of what it is to be a woman or a man; a construct based on the social shaping of femininity and masculinity. It usually includes identification with males as a class or with females as a class. Gender includes subjective concepts about character traits and expected behaviors that vary from place to place and person to person.
• Heterosexism: A system of beliefs, action, advantages, and assumptions in the superiority of heterosexuals or heterosexuality. It includes unrecognized privileges of heterosexual people and the exclusion of nonheterosexual people from policies, procedures, events and decisions about what is important.
• Homophobia: Thoughts, feelings, or actions based on fear, dislike, judgment or hatred of gay men and lesbians / of those who love and sexually desire those of the same sex. Homophobia has roots in sexism and can include prejudice, discrimination, harassment, and acts of violence.

Is this the kind of nonsense you want taught to your kids, especially if the nation's most popular cartoon characters are used to get across the concepts? I pray not!

If you're planning on visiting the We Are Family Foundation's Web site [www.wearefamilyfoundation.org] to verify the accuracy of the above information, don't bother. In the days since this story broke, the majority of overtly pro-homosexual content has been removed. The founder of the organization, Nile Rodgers, appeared on the "Today Show" and said that we had the wrong site and that they had nothing to do with homosexuality. That was Jan. 21. Two days later, most of the homosexual content disappeared or became inaccessible. I will leave it for you to determine the motive behind the mysterious vanishing of such material by the We Are Family Foundation. Suffice to say that we have clear documentation that these materials were being promoted on the Web site as recently as late January, despite denials to the contrary.

Now, people often remove things from their website that they decide they don't want people to see. I've deleted a post or two myself when I decided I had said something I shouldn't have--although never to hide something that someone had called me on. Still, it appears that someone is lying here, and those who don't like Dr. Dobson are liable to assume it's him. It's hard to tell, as I can't give you any first hand account, although others comment on the now missing lesson plans (and link to the removed pages).

Maybe you don't disagree with what the We are Family Foundation wants. Maybe you do but don't see what the big deal about the video is. Well, consider it slightly differently. Consider a video that everyone considers harmless, such as "Barney and Friends." Okay, some people think it is the spawn of the devil, and I think it's annoying as all get-out (although there are far, far worse), but we'll remove that from the equation for now. Then, consider a group that everyone disagrees with, such as NAMBLA, which advocates pedophilia. If you found out that this group was producing "Barney and Friends," you'd immediately start seeing all kinds of innuendo and double entendres in the show. Dobson, remember, doesn't do this with the video. If he suspects it, he ignores it and instead focuses on the obvious fact of who it's sponsored by. But if you found out who was sponsoring such a show, you'd be much more reluctant to let your kids watch it. I'm not trying to equate this video with Barney, although he does appear in it, nor am I trying to equate the We are Family Foundation with NAMBLA, I'm merely pointing out that who sponsors something does matter.

The Iraqis are voting right now. So far, there's been some violence, but hardly the bloodbath you'd expect from Zarqawi's rhethoric. Apparently, the Shiites are much more eager to vote than the Sunnis, but that's hardly surprising. And, as I said before, the Sunnis are only going to hurt themselves. They can't make the elections illegitimate by refusing to participate; they can only make the candidates representing them more sparse. They need us more than we need them. What they really need, of course, is a more US-style democracy, a federal system where smaller local governments are protected by decentralizing power and implementing checks and balances. Doc Rampage wonders why they aren't getting it.

I don't usually update a post which is more than a day old. I prefer to write a new post, so that regular readers don't miss what I wrote. I made an exception with this post on the murder of a Coptic family in New Jersey, possibly by Islamists¹, since it's getting a bit of traffic through various websearches. However, I saved a bit for a new post. Here are two paragraphs which I didn't quote from the CNN article previously:

Grief and rage erupted Monday at the funeral for the slain family members, who were found bound and fatally stabbed in their home early Friday. Mourners fought in the street, with many blaming Muslims for the deaths.

As the coffins were carried through the streets to St. George & St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church, one protester's sign, above a photograph of the smiling Armanious family read: "American Family Beheaded on American Soil. Welcome Bin Laden." Others declared: "Terrorists Reached Our Home" and "Bush: Crush Sleeper Cells."

I very much doubt this was connected to organized terrorism. (Although I also doubt it was just one person.) But I think that before you brush this reaction away as anti-Muslim bigotry, it's worthwhile to ask whether there is a significant part of the Muslim immigrant population in America that is unassimulated, that has a culture that is not only distinct from our common culture, but isolated, which doesn't believe in American ideals or laws. This is becoming a big problem in Europe, and it took some high profile murders to get the Netherlands to start thinking about it, and I still don't know whether the rest of Europe is taking this problem seriously. It's something we need to consider carefully here as well. The solution is not to ban immigration or round up immigrants, but some careful thought on the dangers of radical multiculturalism. Cultural diversity is fine, but cultural isolation is not, and we shouldn't be saying it is.

¹Bloggers use the term Islamist not as a synonym for Muslim, but as a way of saying Islamic fascist, those who believe that it is their duty to kill the infidels and the heretics.

Jonah is sounding awfully optimistic these days:

Amid the media din about the tsunami, Dan Rather's implosion, and the usual grim news from Iraq, an amazing story has been unfolding — but has received scant appreciation from the chattering classes. Democracy is on the march.

The Ukraine election reversal is the most significant victory for democracy in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Palestinians have held the first legitimate nationwide (so to speak) election in their history (Arafat's previous "election" was a sham). And while the new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, leaves much to be desired, his fair victory is significant and momentous in its own right.

Meanwhile, Iraq is preparing for its first fair elections since before Saddam Hussein came to power. Those elections won't be perfect. Heck, they may even be a disaster (though I doubt they will). But they are finally going to happen — and that very fact is amazing.

Heck, he sounds almost polly-anna-ish. Who are you and what did you do with the real Jonah? Fortunately, Jonah does show a bit of his usual self a bit later:

Now, it's true I'm known to be something of a "one-and-a-half cheers for democracy" kind of guy. Then again, I've also been known to eat a brick of cheddar like it was an apple, so feel free to take that with a grain of salt. Anyway, it's not that I don't like democracy, it's just that I believe there are more important things than democracy.

I would rather live in an undemocratic country with constitutional rights, fair courts, and a government that upholds the rule of law than live in a democratic country without those things. I'd also rather live in a republic where democracy is tempered and cooled through deliberation and debate. After all, direct democracy is little more than the rule of the mob with ballots instead of torches.

I happen to agree with this. Democracy isn't innately the highest form of government or anything. It's the worst form of government aside from all the other ones. It works, which is good enough for me.

Mark Steyn takes a low view of extending the Geneva Convention to terrorists:

A third of a decade after 9/11, it's hard trying to maintain a war footing against a nebulous enemy. At the Senate confirmation hearings for the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, Democrats seem to have decided that the very concept of an "enemy" is dubious, cheerfully cranking up their sanctimonious preening for CNN and berating Judge Gonzales for declining to extend the Geneva Conventions to captured terrorists.

To be covered by Geneva, a combatant has to have (a) a commander who is responsible for his subordinates; (b) formal recognizable military insignia; (c) weapons that are carried openly, and (d) an adherence to the laws and customs of warfare.

Islamist terrorists meet none of these conditions, and extending the protection of the conventions to them would simply announce to the world that, from a legal point of view, there's no downside to embracing terror. Blow up a nightclub or a schoolhouse or a pizza parlor and you'll still get full POW status.

Ah-ha, say the Dems. But, if we don't treat our prisoners with respect, America's brave men and women in uniform will pay the price when they fall into enemy hands.

Hello? Does anyone in the Democratic Party still read the newspapers, other than the fawning editorials of the New York Times?

If an American falls into the hands of the enemy, he's going to be all over the Internet having his head hacked off for a recruitment video or dragged through the streets and strung up on a bridge in Fallujah.

The military historian Sir Max Hastings made the point last week that, in an age of overwhelming U.S. military supremacy, for her enemies asymmetric warfare -- i.e., terrorism -- is the only logical way to go. But the urge by the Democrats and the media to raise them to the level of lawful combatants only makes things even more asymmetric: They can decapitate us while screaming "Allahu Akbar!" and clean up on the DVD sales, while we're only supposed to ask name, rank and serial number, two of which they don't have and they're flexible on the first. The wish to gentrify the enemy and, by extension, their tactics will only result in more kidnappings and more decapitations.

I agree. Read the whole thing.

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson is worth reading:

Indeed, from the oscillating analyses of Iraq, the following impossible picture often emerges from our intelligentsia. It was a fatal error to disband the Iraqi army. That led to lawlessness and a loss of confidence in the American ability to restore immediate order after Saddam's fall. Yet it was also a fatal error to keep some Baathists in the newly constituted army. They were corrupt and wished reform to fail — witness the Fallujah Brigade that either betrayed us or aided the enemy. So we turned off the Sunnis by disbanding the army — and yet somehow turned off the Shiites by keeping some parts of it.

Massive construction projects were hogged by gargantuan American firms, ensconced in the Green Zone that did not engage either local Iraqi workers or small companies and thus squandered precious good will. Or, indigenous contractors proved irresponsible and unreliable, evidence for why Iraq was in such bad shape to begin with. And when we did put exclusive reliance on them, it ensured only lackadaisical and half-hearted reconstruction.
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There are many constants in all this pessimistic confusion — beside the fact that we are becoming a near hysterical society. First, our miraculous efforts in toppling the Taliban and Saddam have apparently made us forget war is always a litany of mistakes. No conflict is conducted according to either antebellum planning or can proceed with the benefit of hindsight. Iraq was not Yemen or Qatar, but rather the most wicked regime in the world, in the heart of the Arab world, full of oil, terrorists, and mass graves. There were no helpful neighbors to keep a lid on their own infiltrating jihadists. Instead we had to go into the heart of the caliphate, take out a mass murderer, restore civil society after 30 years of brutality, and ward off Sunni and Baathist fomenters in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria — all the while keeping out Iranian-Shiite agents bent on stopping democracy. The wonder is not that there is violence and gloom in Iraq, but that less than two years after Saddam was removed, elections are still on track.

Second, our very success creates ever increasing expectations of perfection for a postmodern America used to instant gratification. We now look back in awe at World War II, the model of military success, in which within four years an unprepared United States won two global wars, at sea, on the ground, and in the air, in three continents against Japan, Italy, and Germany, and supplied both England and the Soviet Union. But our forefathers experienced disaster after disaster in a tale of heartbreak, almost as inglorious as the Korean mess or Vietnam tragedy. And they did things to win we perhaps claim we would now not: Shoot German prisoners in the Bulge, firebomb Axis cities, drop the bomb — almost anything to stop fascists from slaughtering even more millions of innocents.
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And yet our greatest generation thought by and large they had done pretty well. We in contrast would have given up in despair in 1942, New York Times columnists and NPR pundits pontificating "I told you so" as if we were better off sitting out the war all along.
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All this we cannot see at the present as we in our weariness lament the losses of almost 1,100 combat dead and billions committed to people who appear from 30-second media streams to be singularly ungracious and not our sort of folk. We dwell on unmistakable lapses, never on amazing successes — just as we were consumed with Afghanistan in its dark moments, but now ignore its road to success. But never mind all this: The long-term prospects are still as bright as things seem gloomy in the short-term — but only if we emulate our grandfathers and press on with the third Middle East election in the last six months.

Many, many people have told me that Iraq has been harder than expected. That is wrong. The toppling of Saddam was much easier than expected, it is the post-toppling phase which is harder. It's not that we lost more people than we expected. Our estimates are always pessimistic, but we expected those losses to be front-loaded, not spread out over a year and a half as they were. A painful war that lasted only a few months would have been something the American public would have endured with little complaint, but we don't have much patience when it comes to the long haul. I wish we did.

I've said for a long time we ought to return the favor and take some covert action in Iran, just as they're sending terrorists into Iraq. It looks like we've been doing just that:

The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.

The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.

Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."

One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."

The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
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Hersh reported that Bush has already "signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia."

Of course, I think the operations should be focusing on supporting the democratic movement, but destroying their weapon facilities is good too. Just one question: Why the heck do we know this? This looks like another one of those situations where the news media puts the scoop ahead of the success of our country and the welfare of our troops.

Now this is more than a little disturbing (from Derbyshire in The Corner):

The father of a murdered New Jersey family was threatened for making anti-Muslim remarks online — and the gruesome quadruple slaying may have been the hateful retaliation, sources told The Post yesterday.

Hossam Armanious, 47, who along with his wife and two daughters was found stabbed to death in his Jersey City home early Friday, would regularly debate religion in a Middle Eastern chat room, one source said.

Armanious, an Egyptian Christian, was well known for expressing his Coptic beliefs and engaging in fiery back-and-forth with Muslims on the Web site paltalk.com.
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Armanious' fervor apparently rubbed off on his daughter, Sylvia — who would have turned 16 yesterday.

"She was very religious and very opinionated," said Jessica Cimino, 15, a fellow sophomore at Dickenson HS.

A family member who viewed photos of the bloodbath said Sylvia seemed to have taken the most savage punishment.

"When we saw the pictures, you could tell that they were hurt really, really bad in the face; especially Sylvia," said Milad Garas, the high-school sophomore's great-uncle.

The heartless killer not only slit Sylvia's throat, but also sliced a huge gash in her chest and stabbed her in the wrist, where she had a tattoo of a Coptic cross.

The fact that Sylvia was the one who took the brunt of the punishment indicates to me that it's more likely someone who knew the family personally rather than through the chatroom. This is vicious, and I want to see those who did this caught and punished. This isn't organized terrorism, but in a way, it's what the terrorists are all about: fear and intimidation, making people afraid of being too open about any beliefs other than the terrorists'. By the sounds of it, Armanious was outspoken to the point of rudeness, but rudeness and murder are orders of magnitude apart, and a tolerance for uncivil discourse is a truer test of one's appreciation of free speech than a tolerance of learned academic debates.

The article gives fewer clues as to why someone might have hated Sylvia so much, and like I said, it seems more like it was someone who knew Sylvia who did this, but still, if it wasn't through personal contact, this article raises another concern. It is ridiculously easy to track someone down through the Internet. I don't post my address online, but my full name's there, and with online whitepages, business directories, and a few hints about my life, it shouldn't be hard for someone to find where I live. I doubt I've done anything to tick someone off enough to incite murder, but give me time: I'm not shy about my opinions. And it's not as if I'm rich enough to have any real protection. The same applies to most bloggers, even the high traffic, famous ones. If some violent group wanted to seriously intimidate the blogosphere, to make it dangerous to be an outspoken blogger, it could. In that case, how many blogs would just go quiet?

Update: CNN has more on this incident:

Authorities insist a theory that a Muslim angry over Internet postings was responsible for the slaying of an Egyptian Christian family is just one of several under investigation.

But the theory — embraced as fact by some — has touched off a new round of anti-Muslim sentiment in a city still stinging from a post-September 11 backlash.
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Investigators are looking into the possibility that Hossam Armanious, 47, his 37-year-old wife, Amal Garas, and their daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8, were slain by someone angered over postings that Armanious, a Coptic Christian, wrote in an Internet chat room. The Coptic Orthodox Church is one of the oldest communities in Christendom, believed to have been founded in the first century A.D. by the apostle Mark.

Authorities say the killings could have occurred during a robbery since no cash or valuables were found in the home. Prosecutor Guy Gregory said the father's wallet was found empty.

This article is pretty standard CNN. "Murders? Who cares? But look, there's anti-Muslim sentiment!" The information about valuables and the father's wallet seems to contradict the earlier reports, but early reports are often unreliable, so the latter information is more likely accurate. Does that mean it was just a robbery? My thinking is that it's just too brutal for a robbery. You shouldn't rule it out entirely, and I'm glad the police haven't, but my gut instinct says no.

David Rogers at the New Editor is also defending Amstrong Williams:

But the question arises - was the apology necessary or even appropriate? Williams was paid to advertise on his talk show for legislation that he already supported, and had supported for years. How is this fundamentally different from CBS taking money from John Kerry?

As Williams says, he is an entrepreneur. He takes money from customers. In exchange, like radio hosts all across the world, he endorses their products. Sometimes he endorses products for which he is not paid. As long as the advertisements for the No Child Left Behind Act were labeled as such, there seems to be no conflict on interest. Certainly, this behavior doesn't warrant the Tribune company's cancellation of Williams' column.

Some have labeled this a "failure of disclosure." But when you run paid advertising, that is disclosure.

As the New York Times noted, the Clinton administration was more active than the Bush administration in planting prepared news. Are ALL of the reporters across the country who cooperated with the Clinton administration now going to be fired? Will every newspaper that endorsed a candidate and subsequently (or previously) accepted advertising from that candidate now cancel itself?

I'm not sure I agree with everything that David says (read the whole thing), but like I said, I appreciate seeing defenses. I am still keeping neutral on the nature and extent of Williams's wrongdoing, but I'll link to any defenses of Williams I see (or someone e-mails to me). Why? Well, the blogosphere is supposed to be a place for discussion, so I think it's necessary to highlight both sides of the debate. Since you shouldn't have any trouble finding posts condemning Mr. Williams (see, for example, my first post on this issue), you hardly need my help to find more articles calling for his head. On the other hand, as defenses of Mr. Williams are few and far between, I believe I'm doing a public service by pointing them out. So I'll continue to do so. Let me know if you see any more I should link to.

Jeremy Pierce of Parableman is defending Armstrong Williams:

Here's what Amstrong Williams did. He accepted money from Ketchum, an independent PR firm, to do two things. One was to run an advertisement they had created to promote No Child Left Behind. The other was to talk about his views on NCLB and encourage other black conservatives to do so, something he already would have done, though perhaps this encouraged him to do it more. I see no problem with the first. A PR firm can buy as many ads as they want, and he is not unethical to accept their money for it. The second is at most a gray area. He's a pundit with a view. They included with their ad money a request to talk more about it and ask others to do so. I don't see how that's corruption of the sort people keep pretending this is. It's just a request to get him to talk more about something he already feels very strongly about and to request that others who also feel strongly about it would talk about it too. If someone paid me money to talk more about abortion on my blog, I'd accept it. It's fairly common in the media, in fact. NPR does that sort of thing all the time. Their donors stipulate coverage of certain issues. The only worry here is whether he should have said someone was paying him money to talk more about that issue. He probably should have, but I don't see that as a major ethical problem. Being a little more honest would show more character, but this isn't corruption of the more serious kind that people are accusing him of.

Now I haven't said anything about the role of the government in this. That's because he didn't know about that until he saw the headlines. I don't think he can be blamed for not knowing that Ketchum had been hired by the Department of Education (which is not to be identified with the Bush Administration, as some headlines have mistakenly done, though it is a branch of the Bush Administration, mainly because saying it was the Bush Administration gives the implicature that the Bush Administration as a whole was behind it rather than some small group within one department, as is most likely). There's little more to say about that.

The one other factor that's worth looking into is whether there was wrongdoing from the governmental end of things. Most people who have attributed less wrongdoing to Williams have insisted that Bush is at fault here. Even ignoring what I just said about those misleading claims of Bush's involvement, I'm not so sure that the Education Department officials who initiated this were wrong to do so. This is a longstanding government tradition. When Reagan was president, the government hired PR firms to run ads in favor of their drug policies, which were certainly popular among many people but not without controversy. Bush's father and Clinton did the same sort of thing. Perhaps it goes significantly before Reagan even. I have no idea. I do know that it's a fairly normal practice. That the Department of Education would hire a PR firm to run ads promoting the No Child Left Behind program is pretty much in the same vein.

So across the board we've got people saying false things and assigning moral wrondoing that goes well beyond what actually happened. None of it is in accord with the facts. Saying that the White House or the Bush Administration paid him to argue its case is misleading in two ways. Most people reading that statement will assume it was a direct payment, and he knew the source, which is false. Most people would also assume that he wouldn't have already made the case for that program, which is false. That means that those saying that are making misleading statements. Calling it a bribe is equally misleading (and probably just false).

As is usually the case, there's more to this than the mainstream media reports. None of the articles which I had read had information this detailed. Does it change my view? Yes and no. Based on what Jeremy has said, I've decided that I don't really know enough about this situation to judge what happened, so I'm drawing back and withholding my judgement. More to the point, I don't plan on doing the research necessary to reach a sound judgement right now. Maybe later, once the passions die and all the cards are on the table.

At the least, I am glad to see someone defending Mr. Williams. You can expect liberals to go after any conservative they dig up some dirt on, but when one of their own is criticized, even when he does something appalling, they circle the wagons and defend him to the death. With most of the mainstream media on their side, they can get away with it. Conservatives are among the first to turn on one of their own. This can be both good and bad--there needs to be a bit of internal discipline and self-policing in a movement--but mostly it's just a response to their relationship with the media. A liberal can defend a fellow liberal who's done wrong without being tarred with the wrongdoing, but a conservative defending another conservative always suffers for it. (Incidentally, the roles are reversed when it's a situation of ideas rather than ethics. Conservatives are much more tolerant of heretical ideas, while liberals can be quite dogmatic.) I admire Jeremy's courage.

Does this change what I said about my personal policy? No. Anytime someone offers me money to say something on this blog, I'll tell you about it. As the sum of money I've been offered thus far would be exhausted buying dinner at McDonald's, this isn't a large concern at this time, but it's policy and I'm sticking with it.

It doesn't take a Republican to see the damage abortion absolutism has done to the Democratic party. I've said this before--if the Democrats would relax their views on abortion, they'd have a decent chance at the moral values vote. Apparently, Democrats are beginning to realize that as well, from the blog formerly known as The Kerry Spot:

Roemer also said, "I'm not going to try to let people steer this party left, nor would I steer it right. It needs to be bigger, George. We need more Democrats on the bus, more connection to the values of the American people that our party holds dear and we need to express those values."

Roemer can attempt to downplay his abortion views, but it is hard to believe that if he wins, that none of the media coverage will note that "PRO-LIFE DEMOCRAT WINS DNC CHAIR."

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Benjamin Wittes, a Washington Post editorial writer who says that he "generally favors permissive abortion laws," declares that "the Democratic Party's commitment to preserving Roe v. Wade has been deeply unhealthy for abortion rights, for liberalism more generally, and ultimately for American democracy." He writes that he looks forward to the day that Roe v. Wade is struck down, and the fight over abortion returns to the legislative branch of government. (He thinks there will be little public support for abortion bans.)

Meanwhile, Sarah Blustain writes in the American Prospect that "Abortion is a right that ends in sorrow. Democratic rhetoric in the future must acknowledge this fact."

Over in the Washington Monthly, Amy Sullivan declares that "it's long past time for the Democratic Party to realize that they continue to lose voters who aren't one-issue abortion voters but who feel unwelcome in the party because of their beliefs."

NARAL will be up in arms, but it's good to see the Democratic party moving to the right on abortion.

Since this is in my own backyard, I ought to comment on it (while I've seen the article previously, thanks to Instapundit for the link):

Top Metro executives used vile racist language at company meetings of the freebie newspaper chain, horrifying some attendees while at the same time drawing hoots of laughter from other Metro bigshots.

The company, meanwhile, is paying thousands of dollars to settle charges by a former employee in Boston who described a racist corporate culture at the giveaway tabloid.
...
Former insiders describe an arrogance among the European executives running the Metro chain. Wilpers and others say that instances of crude racism were common.

Metro International claimed Nylund was merely translating into English a joke that had been handed to him by another Metro employee and was dismayed when he "unintentionally" made an offensive racial reference. Nylund apologized yesterday.

I'll admit that I don't read the Metro, although you can see copies of it all over the place on the subway. I shouldn't pass judgement on the execs, but it doesn't surprise me that they were European. Partly, it could be a language barrier, but another reason is that Americans are much more sensitive to racism than most other nationalities. When people tell you that America is a terrible racist country, please keep in mind that while other countries don't talk much about racism, it's definitely present.

This makes me feel disappointed all around:

The White House said Monday that the case of the Education Department paying a conservative commentator to plug its policies was an isolated incident, not a practice widely used by the Bush administration.

With the Education Department still defending its $240,000 contract with syndicated columnist and TV personality Armstrong Williams, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was cautious in choosing his comments.
...
The contract required Williams' company to produce radio and TV spots featuring one-minute "reads" by Education Secretary Rod Paige and to allow Paige and other department officials to appear as studio guests with Williams. The commentator also was to use his influence with other black journalists to get them to discuss No Child Left Behind, a centerpiece of President Bush's domestic agenda, which aims to raise achievement among poor and minority children and penalizes many schools that don't make progress.

Williams claims that he did and still does believe in the No Child Left Behind Policy, and that the money did not influence his opinion. I'm not familiar with Williams, so I can't comment on him. I do like Bush and I've liked some of the things Rod Paige has said in the past, but this really does make me feel ill. On the surface, there's nothing illegal about what happened. The radio and TV spots themselves don't sound as if they're even unethical, although Williams should have disclosed that he was being paid by the Education Department to produce them. However, requiring him to have certain guests and try to influence other journalists doesn't sound good. My gut reaction is that the Education Department shouldn't have asked and that Williams shouldn't have agreed to those conditions, although I'd be hard-pressed to tell you exactly why. I am absolutely certain, however, that if you're going to agree to something like that, you owe it to your audience to tell them about it. Check out La Shawn Barber's reaction for some serious righteous anger.

This has brought up a lot of questions about whether bloggers can or should accept money, both in order to present certain opinions or to work as paid or unpaid consultants on campaigns. Believe it or not, I have a policy on this, although it has yet to be needed. I won't say that I wouldn't accept money if someone did offer me money to espouse an opinion I agreed with. Heck, if they offered me money to write in support of an idea I disagreed with, I'd at least ask how much. I will, however, disclose that I have been paid to do so, and will not accept any contract where I'm not allowed to disclose that information. Meanwhile, if anyone wishes to make such an offer, Amazon will accept your payments. (Be sure to click the option to e-mail me on the thank you page so I know who the money's from.)

While I'm browsing NRO anyway, Mac Owens has an interesting story on Rumsfeld, now the target of much criticism (hasn't he always been?):

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld has ruffled feathers from the very beginning of his tenure as secretary of Defense. He has been called a "takedown artist" and a "control freak" who exhibits little patience with the niceties of military protocol. His critics say he thinks nothing of insulting general officers and running roughshod over those with whom he disagrees. Anti-Rumsfeld leaks to the press have been unprecedented during his time as secretary. For four years, hardly a week has gone by without a story sourced by anonymous officers characterizing Rumsfeld as the reincarnation of Robert Strange McNamara or trashing him in some other way.

The main source of the problem is Rumsfeld's commitment to the president's agenda of "transforming" the U.S. military — reshaping it from a heavy, industrial-age force designed to fight the USSR during the Cold War to a more agile, information-age force capable of defeating future adversaries anywhere in the world. While all the services have undertaken transformation policies, Rumsfeld's demand for more rapid change — and a particular model of transformation — has put him at odds with the uniformed military, especially the U.S. Army.

It's an interesting read, and fairly balanced.

Conservatives don't give the UN a lot of love. Jonah Goldberg explains why:

I don't have any objection to the U.N.'s technocratic functions. As a practical matter, if it makes sense to have a central clearinghouse to organize the building of water treatment plants in the third world, OK, fine. Most of us agree that helping victims of natural disasters, inoculating children, feeding the starving, and so forth are good things — just as we all agree it's a good thing for our garbage to be collected.

But it is a huge intellectual leap to go from saying garbage should be collected to saying that the government should collect it. Similarly, you need to demonstrate that United Nations noble efforts cannot be carried out by someone else.

More to the point, it's an even grosser intellectual stolen base to claim or suggest that because the United Nations does good things in Somalia or Sri Lanka that we should assume its political motives are just as pure. The Nazis were brilliant at delivering social services. Hamas's "political wing" builds hospitals and inoculates babies, but that doesn't make it any less of a terrorist organization.

Now, the United Nations isn't a hotbed of Nazis and terrorists, by any stretch. But it's not a democratic, representative body either. Absolute power resides in the Security Council, whose core members originally included two brutal totalitarian regimes, China and the Soviet Union — both of which remain (in altered form) authoritarian regimes to varying degrees. Meanwhile, the larger General Assembly is chockablock with kleptocratic lickspittles working on orders from their dictatorial paymasters in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The UN is not a world government. It is a debating body representing the executive branches of their governments, executives who, as often as not, are illegitimate tyrants. It not only lacks authority, but it is dangerous to give power to such an organization, which is unaccountable to the people it's supposed to govern. It destroys balance of power in those countries which actually have it, by giving their executive branches the lone voice in a world governing body with judicial and legislative power over the country. (I personally think the accumulation of legislative and judicial power in the executive branch, in the form of regulatory agencies, is a significant problem in any case, but the accumulation of legislative power in the judicial branch bothers me more.)

Mark Steyn has a few words for those who accuse the US of stinginess in aiding the tsunami victims (via Instapundit):

Mr Eddison concluded with a stirring plea to the wicked Americans to mend their ways: "If Washington is to lay any claim to the moral, as distinct from the military, high ground, let it emulate Ireland and Norway's prompt and proportionate attempts to plug South-East Asia's gaping gap of need and help avert a further 80,000 deaths from infection and untreated wounds."

If America were to emulate Ireland and Norway, there'd be a lot more dead Indonesians and Sri Lankans. Mr Eddison may not have noticed, but the actual relief effort going on right now is being done by the Yanks: it's the USAF and a couple of diverted naval groups shuttling in food and medicine, with solid help from the Aussies, Singapore and a couple of others. The Irish can't fly in relief supplies, because they don't have any C-130s. All they can do is wait for the UN to swing by and pick up their cheque.

The Americans send the UN the occasional postal order, too. In fact, 40 per cent of Egeland's budget comes from Washington, which suggests the Europeans aren't being quite as "proportionate" as Mr Eddison thinks. But, when disaster strikes, what matters is not whether your cheque is "prompt", but whether you are...

So American personnel in American planes and American ships will deliver American food and American medicine and implement an American relief plan, but it's still a "UN-led effort". That seems to be enough for Kofi. His "moral authority" is intact, and Guardian columnists and Telegraph readers can still bash the Yanks for their stinginess. Everybody's happy.

Read the whole thing.

I don't know what to think about this article by Rich Lowry:

Long ago we decided as a society that the mentally retarded are people too. But our public policy doesn't yet fully reflect the fact that, as people, they have the same aspirations as the rest of us — namely, to work, to save, to have as much control as is possible over their own lives.
...
Supplemental Security Insurance, for instance, is a trap. The disabled rely on it heavily, even though it provides a relative pittance. The program hasn't been indexed for inflation since its creation in the 1970s. But supplementing SSI with work income is almost impossible. Under SSI, a recipient begins to lose $1 for every $2 earned once he makes just $65 a month. He can't have more than $2,000 in savings. The thrust of the program is to keep recipients dependent, in what Nerney calls a policy of "forced impoverishment."

The president's committee proposes creating savings accounts that wouldn't count against SSI, and streamlining the process whereby states can get a waiver from the federal government so SSI and Medicaid funds can be used more flexibly. Florida has secured such a waiver. The Center for Self-Determination helped the state design a program that will allow the disabled to escape bureaucratic rules and use public dollars to build more independent lives.

It sounds good in theory, but will it work? Many of the mentally disabled lack the money management skills and mental focus on work to effectively earn and spend money. However, if there's some way to end the helpless dependency, I'd like to see it.

In what I presume is his last column before going on hiatus, Dave Barry gives his usual, extensive end-of-the-year round-up (free registration may be required). I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing, but I did skip to November since I wanted to read what he had to say about the election results:

... the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign, which has been going on since the early stages of the Cher Farewell Tour, finally staggers to the finish line. John Kerry easily sweeps to a 53-state landslide victory in the exit polls and has pretty much picked out his new Cabinet when word begins to leak out that the actual, physical voters have elected George W. Bush. Democrats struggle to understand how this could have happened, and, after undergoing a harsh and unsparing self-examination, conclude that red-state residents are morons. Some Democrats threaten to move to Canada; Republicans, in a gracious gesture of reconciliation, offer to help them pack.

Read the whole thing. I intend to do so once I get a chance.