Back of the Envelope

Dean Esmay has some interesting thoughts on conservative and liberal stereotypes:

[B]oth of America's major parties have caricatures of each other. The primary rap against Republicans for any number of years has been that they are stupid, and the primary rap against Democrats has been that they are weak and ineffectual. Conservatives and liberals (who aren't the same as Republicans and Democrats, but there's a lot of overlap) map to roughly similar cartoonishness: Conservatives are authoritarian, nasty, and rather stupid, and liberals are wishy-washy pansies with their heads in the clouds.

How and why we got here is a fascinating question, but let's posit this: there's a kernal of truth to most stereotypes, otherwise, they wouldn't be stereotypes. As it happens, many American white guys do look funny dancing, fancy spinning tire rims are quite popular among young black men, and there really are an awful lot of "Asians" in the nation's math departments. I've known a few accountants and lawyers in my day, and by golly, an awful lot of them do seem to be Jewish!

I've heard, although I'm not going to look it up at the moment, that people with bachelor's degrees tend to be Republicans, while both those without a college education and those with advanced degrees tend to be Democrats. There's something to be said for Dean's suggestion that those with Republican tendencies pursue degrees for a purpose, in order to join the workforce, while those with Democratic leanings are more interested in academia itself. I myself have a Ph.D., but I have very little interest in academia. I knew I wanted to do R&D, and I knew that a Ph.D. would help me to do that. Thus I followed Republican principles to get a "Democratic" degree.

So, what's new in Mauritania recently? Here's what a search of the news shows:

• The President of the African Union has some tough words for the military junta, asking it to abolish slavery and help fight terrorism. It's good to hear that the African Union isn't quite as uncritical of the junta as earlier articles suggested.


• The junta has banned its members from running for elections. It had said they wouldn't run, but this step does seem to indicate that they're serious about that. We'll see whether this holds until the elections.


• A pro-democracy group, Democrats without Borders, has called for the return of President Taya, with a number of conditions:
  

  It suggested that upon resuming duties, Ould Taya should step down as chairman of his party, promise to no longer lead, support or be a member of any political party, and appoint a transitional government with a Prime Minister who is not a member of any political party.
  
  Chaired by Ahmed Ould Saleck, DWB maintained that its proposals were based on the "universally accepted principle that putsches [coups] can in no way, whatever the motives, be a means to access and devolve power."

  
  They seem sincere enough, if a bit naive believing that it's possible to let Taya back into power. No one's suggesting we return Saddam to power with promises that he step down in a few years.


• And the junta has succeeded in winning more people to supporting the transition, including the OIF (the International Francophone Organization) and the RDU (the Rally for Unity and Democracy), both organizations whose Acronyms get all scrambled in translation.


• I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that the junta is expanding oil exploration. It's too soon to tell what to make of it.


• Qatar, which you will remember offered asylum to Mauritania's ex-President Taya, is praising the military junta as well. Hmm, whose side are they on?

And that's all for today. I'll report more next week.

Scrappleface is a satire blog, although blog may be the wrong term for it. It's a satirical news site, releasing fictional news stories which parody real ones. As it's written by Scott Ott, a conservative, it usually parodies the Left, although it sometimes makes fun of conservatives as well. Recently Scott posted this article, which is most definitely not parody. It's beautiful. It's what we all wish Bush would say. If the White House is looking for any speechwriters, they could do worse than Scott Ott.

How rich is JK Rowlings, the author and creator of the popular Harry Potter series? You've heard the rumors: She's richer than the Queen of England. She's the richest woman in the UK. She's the richest woman in the world. She's catching up with Bill Gates! Well, there's an easy way to find out the truth, as Forbes magazine annually puts together a listing of the richest people in the world. As this list can be sorted by country, it's a breeze to check the UK listing and see where JK Rowlings falls on that. She's at the very bottom of the UK list, but even the bottom of the list of the world's richest people means she has 1.0 billion dollars to her name, which is nothing to sneeze at. I don't know of any other writers who have that much money, but then, I haven't gone through the list thoroughly. So are there any women in England who are richer? Well, some of the families are richer, with Philip & Cristina Green at the top with $6.8 billion. But Cristina lives in Monaco, not the UK, and she's the only other woman listed by name, so I guess it's fair to say that JK Rowlings is the richest woman in England.

But what about the Queen? Royalty isn't included on this list, because of a number of caveats involved:

Be warned: Valuing these folks is a tricky business. For starters, one must figure out what actually belongs to them and what belongs to their throne or their country. For instance, Forbes does not count the crown jewels or Buckingham Palace as part of Queen Elizabeth II's net worth. She enjoys these riches, but they technically belong to the British state, much like the White House belongs to the U.S. government.

But Forbes makes the attempt, and values Queen Elizabeth at $330 million. So JK Rowlings is richer than the Queen.

But is she the richest woman in the world? Not quite. That honor is held jointly by Helen and Alice Walton, the widow and daughter, respectively, of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, who are each worth $18.0 billion. The wealthiest self-made woman is Rosalia Mera of Spain, worth $2.0 billion.

As for Bill Gates, I think it will be a long time before JK Rowlings can catch up to him, as he's currently at $46.5 billion.

(Hat tip to Ask Yahoo who did much of the heavy lifting identifying women on Forbes' list.)

So what's happened in Mauritania since I posted last week? Well, this sounds promising, although it doesn't necessarily mean much in itself:

Leader of the opposition Progressive Popular Alliance (APP) party, Messaoud Ould Belkheir, said Friday that he has discussed the 1989 turmoil that shook the country concerning its humanitarian record, especially problem of slavery and expulsions, with the new military rulers here.

According to Belkheir, Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who is the chairman of the ruling Military Council for Justice and Democracy (MCJD), initiated the Thursday meeting.
...
Observers said this was the first time that an opposition official had evoked the humanitarian issue and the question of slavery with a Mauritanian president, a move likely to "break the ice."

The new leader did not give a firm pledge, but mere listening to Belkheir`s views was a positive development compared to ousted President Ould Taya`s attitude, according to observers.

Meanwhile, former president Taya has left Gambia and gone to Qatar, where he's reportedly been offered asylum. Although he's gone, his political party has been reorganizing, while the junta has at least recognized the legitimacy of other opposition parties. One thing I noticed while doing my news search is that most of the articles that come up are about the famine there. The nation's cereal crop is 36% lower than the five-year average.

If you're looking for more news about Mauritania, one of the quick and easy ways is to do a search on "Mauritania coup" on one of the news search engines. When I did it, the first article to turn up was that the President of Nigeria is urging the coup leaders to restore democracy, from, interestingly enough, Al Jazeera. Lexis-Nexis is probably the best engine for this, but it's not free and you probably only have access if your institution does.

Meanwhile, I've heard from other bloggers who've been covering this, including Elizabeth at Military Christians. She takes a look at the ethical questions concerning coups. Jason Coleman, whom I mentioned in my previous posts, also has lots on this.

Update: Armchair Capitalists has more, and Dean Esmay recommends Freedom House's report.

This month's most underreported news story has got to be the military coup in Mauritania, a West African country whose president had aligned it with the US in the war on terror. I only know about the coup because a co-worker mentioned both it and its lack of coverage in the media, and I decided to look into it. The coup took place on Wednesday, August 3rd, while President Taya was attending the funeral of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. The former President has since gone into exile in Gambia, while the military and security forces which seized control installed Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall as the new leader.

Now, before we all side with the rightful president, it should be noted that Taya is no great prize. He came to power in a coup in 1984, and was confirmed by seriously flawed elections in 1997 and 2003. He has a history of jailing political opponents, some of whom have been freed since the coup, claiming that they are plotting the overthrow of his government and labelling them as Islamic extremists. While many experts dispute that these opponents are violent extremists, apparently someone in the military Taya tried so hard to purge was plotting his overthrow. His failure to root out his enemies may have something to do with his purges being more about racism than ideology, such as when he emptied his military of black Africans in the nineties.

So, clearly Taya is an unsavory type, going so far as to side with Saddam in the first Gulf War. However, he also knew which way the political winds were blowing, and decided to align himself with the US in the late nineties. He even established diplomatic ties with Israel six years ago, making Mauritania one of only three Arab League nations to do so. Mauritania has assisted the US in the War on Terror, and US troops have trained Mauritanian forces.

Now this military junta, calling itself the Military Council for Justice and Democracy, has taken over, and it promises to hold elections within two years, not only allowing opposition political parties but promising that no member of the 17-man junta will run for office. They have also said that they will honor all international obligations currently in place--although what they may have in mind are the oil contracts for the offshore drilling that has begun there more than anything else.

The spread of democracy is good, and if the military junta can be trusted to keep to its promises, then the removal of Taya isn't in itself a bad thing. However, the leaders of coups don't often make a successful transition to democracy. Equally troubling is that the things which have made Taya so unpopular recently were his attempts to get on our good side, especially his recognition of Israel: some of the leadership in the new government is calling that a mistake. The new leadership seems to be aligning itself with the Islamic political parties, which loudly claim that they are not extremist. This may be true, but if the recently freed political prisoners are the brothers which the terrorist organization Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat claimed to be supporting in their June 4th attack which killed dozens, they're probably not what we would call moderates.

Originally, the US, the UN, and the African Union strongly condemned the coup. Since then, however, the African Union has been thoroughly won over, and the US has begun negotiating with the new government, which says it is still committed to the War on Terror. While I have my qualms about the new government, I think that this is probably the right thing to do. Democracy has a better chance of happening under it than it did under Taya.

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers. When I was looking for information about the coup in my favorite blogs, I discovered that Glenn was one of the few to have noticed it, and he linked to a couple of other blogs with more information, including Gateway Pundit and Publius. Glenn even links to an eyewitness account. Jason Coleman has also been following it. I'm glad it didn't pass the blogosphere by entirely, but it has received so little attention that I had overlooked these posts until after I had written this and gone looking for more information. I would have expected significant debate over whom the US ought to support when there's no one who's clearly aligned with our interests and ideals.

I haven't said much about Plame, mostly just quoting others. It just isn't that interesting to speculate on when we don't know anything yet, and most of the speculation has turned into dead ends. My only real thought is that the fact that Plame worked at the CIA is not secret level information. The fact that she was once a covert agent might be. But it seems like the only one who actually shared that information was Wilson when he gave an interview to Vanity Fair. It would be the supreme irony if, after all is said and done, the person indicted for his role in the Plame affair is Joseph Wilson. In terms of politics, the media would scream bloody murder, but it would be satisfying, wouldn't it?

I know I wouldn't want to come home to this:

Kris Bryan couldn't believe it when she came home and realized strangers were taking away her stuff — including her 7-week-old kitten. A legal notice in the Lawrence Journal-World for unclaimed property mistakenly listed Bryan's address. The notice said the items would be thrown out if they weren't picked up from the apartment.
...
Police are still trying to find her possessions. Despite the ad's confusion, those who took them could also face charges.

"Just that ad in the newspaper doesn't give someone permission to go in and take items," Bryan said.

I'd love to blame Kelo for this, but I don't think it's really connected.

Mark Steyn was in rare form yesterday. Well, okay, so it wasn't that rare for him--he's usually like this:

Fortunately, the Dems have found a new line of attack to counter the evil election-stealing moron. A few days ago, the Democratic National Committee put out a press release attacking Bush for being physically fit. It seems his physical fitness comes at the expense of the nation's lardbutt youth. Or as the DNC put it:

"While President Bush has made physical fitness a personal priority, his cuts to education funding have forced schools to roll back physical education classes and his administration's efforts to undermine Title IX sports programs have threatened thousands of women's college sports programs."

Wow. I noticed my gal had put on a few pounds but I had no idea it was Bush's fault. That sonofabitch chicken hawk. Just for the record, "his cuts to education funding" are cuts only in the sense that Hackett's performance in the Ohio election was a tremendous victory: that's to say, Bush's "cuts to education funding" are in fact an increase of roughly 50 percent in federal education funding.

Some of us wish he had cut education funding. By any rational measure, a good third of public school expenditures are completely wasted. But instead it's skyrocketed. And the idea that Bush is heartlessly pursuing an elite leisure activity denied to millions of American schoolchildren takes a bit of swallowing given that his preferred fitness activity is running. "Running" requires two things: you and ground. Short of buying every schoolkid some John Kerry thousand-dollar electric-yellow buttock-hugging lycra singlet, it's hard to see what there is about "running" that requires increasing federal funding.

He finishes with an important, and telling observation:

Republicans may see the increasingly arthritic, corpulent, wheezing, flatulent Democratic Party as a boon for them, but I don't. Two-party systems need two parties, not just for the health of the loser but for that of the winner, too. Intellectually, philosophically, legislatively, it's hard to maintain the discipline to keep yourself in shape when the other guy just lies around the house all day.

I concur. Serge at Imago Dei is worried that the Republicans are unable to stand on their principles, and may very well become a minority party. The problem is, as long as the Democrats have no discernible principles at all, I don't see that happening. But without the pressure to compete against an opposing ideology, the Republicans are becoming ever more amorphous in their attempts to please everybody who can't be pleased by pure obstructionism, which seems to be all the Democrats have to offer these days. The Republicans need some healthy competition to be a worthwhile party which follows through on its ideas.

When it comes to the recent rescue of a Russian submarine in which the US and Britain assisted, RedState had this to say (via Instapundit):

The Russians are our friends now. We join with them in cheering that the men are alive and well. Just as we joined with them in weeping as events unfolded in Beslan.
...
I'm not sure what the lesson is here... but I am certain it is something we need to keep in mind as we go about the War on Terror. The day will come when we will all rush off to aid Iranians trapped in a mine, and we will cheer when they are rescued.

But wait, didn't we already do that? It was a while ago, but surely folks haven't forgotten this, have they? It wasn't a collapsed mine, it was an earthquake, and the US didn't hesitate to send help.

U.S. physicians and a rescue crew trained to search for survivors amid the wreckage of terrorist attacks and natural disasters are headed to Iran to help in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake.
...
The magnitude 6.5 earthquake hit early Friday just outside the ancient Iranian city of Bam. Tens of thousands of people were feared dead in the rubble of homes and buildings, most constructed with unreinforced mud brick.

The most surprising thing about this effort was that it wasn't a surprise. Oh, the news reports at the time made a big deal over the U.S. sending help despite "chilly relations" and all that, but did anyone really think that we wouldn't make that offer? Friends or enemies, in a disaster like this, if we can help, we do, and that's really all there is to it. The only question is whether our enemies and our more reluctant allies will accept our help, which they did in this case. They accepted help from everyone who was offering--except Israel. And that tells you a lot about the difference between them and us.

Jeremy Pierce of Parableman tells me that Roberts is not a true originalist in the Scalia mode. However, if he still believes what he did at 28, that's good enough for me:

"A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for 25 or 30 years was a rarity then but is becoming commonplace today," Roberts wrote. "Setting a term of, say, 15 years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence."

Roberts, then 28, offered his views while analyzing a Senate resolution that called for limiting members of the federal bench to 10-year terms, after which they could be reappointed.

The Reagan administration opposed the proposal, arguing in part that lifetime tenure protected judicial independence. Though Roberts did not formally object to that position, he saw merit in set terms. He accepted an open-ended federal appeals court seat in 2003.

Ending lifetime tenure would "provide a more regular and greater degree of turnover among the judges," Roberts wrote 20 years earlier. "There is much to be said for changing life tenure to a term of years, without the possibility of reappointment."

In the same memo, Roberts railed against what he described as an overreaching federal judiciary. He suggested that lifetime tenure was defensible only if judges stuck to interpreting - rather than making - law. It was a frequent complaint through his writings of the time.

[From the AP, via Bench Memos]

I like that kid. He reminds me of a younger version of myself--except that I was a Grad student at 28, while he was serving in Reagan's White House.

Aitken's biography of Chuck Colson that I mentioned is a fascinating read. It had this interesting tidbit from the 2004 election, where President Bush asked Colson for political advice:

As the discussion moved to the upcoming debates with John Kerry, Colson offered George W. Bush some prescient advice: "Whatever you do, Mr. President, don't make the mistake that my boss made in 1960. Before his first debate against JFK, Nixon got tired. He made his tiredness worse by campaigning on the morning of that debate. As a result, Nixon looked exhausted. That was why he lost the first debate in the eyes of the television audience. So please, don't overtire yourself, Mr. President."

George W. Bush was politely dismissive of Colson's counsel. Brushing it aside, his response in effect was that tiredness wasn't a problem for him. In reality, however, the forty-third president did allow his campaigning schedule to overtax him. Ignoring Colson's advice, he added to his fatigue on the morning of the first debate against John Kerry by taking time out for a visit to Florida victims of the September hurricanes. The net result was that on the night of the debate Bush came across as tired, tetchy, and more than a touch petulant. Opinion polls declared that he had been outscored by John Kerry. "How we wished that Colson's warning had been listened to by the president," a senior White House aide told this biographer. "From that time on he took Colson's advice and changed his schedule to make sure he rested up properly before the next two debates. That made a big difference."

The first paragraph is a bit misleading, as according to the biography, Colson wasn't working for Nixon during the 1960 campaign, but for Republican Senator Saltonstall. In fact, he mounted a successful "Massachusetts for Kennedy and Saltonstall" campaign, convincing voters to split their tickets between the Democratic Presidential candidate and the Republican Senatorial one in what some viewed as a betrayal of Nixon. It wasn't until later that Colson became Nixon's right hand man.

Anyway, it was good advice, and I wish Bush had followed it. He lost momentum in that first debate that he never really regained. It wasn't enough to cost him the election, but I think he would have won by a wider margin if he'd done better in that first debate.

Steven Vincent, an American journalist in Iraq and a frequent contributor to National Review Online, was murdered in Basra today. CNN has the details:

An American freelance journalist was found shot to death in the Iraqi city of Basra early Wednesday, officials said.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman confirmed Steven Vincent's body was found, and that his family has been notified.

A Western official said Vincent suffered multiple gunshot wounds. He had been abducted earlier by unknown gunmen.

A Basra police official said Vincent and his female interpreter, Nuriya Tiays, were abducted about 12:30 a.m. (4:30 p.m. Tuesday) in the Ashar area of central Basra.

Vincent's body was found about a 10-minute drive from where the abduction took place, the official said. Tiays suffered a gunshot wound to the chest and was being treated in a hospital.

Kathryn Lopez at the Corner has a listing of his articles which have appeared at National Review Online.

I didn't hear about this until I read Mark Steyn's column:

If it were only the bomber, it would be relatively easy. The more we know about the events of July 7, the more it seems likely that at least some of the suicide bombers were set up, that they were happy to kill others but not themselves. That's good news: it suggests that the jihad has limited appeal in Leeds, at least as a participatory sport. If, as the clichés have it, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were really creating "a thousand bin Ladens" every day, there'd be bombs on the Tube every day. But, if you have to sucker suicide bombers into signing up for the gig, that indicates a certain operational weakness.

More details can be found at Fox News:

They bought roundtrip train tickets and paid for long-term parking — two of the details that are prompting the intelligence community to question if the four London bombers intended to die.

While some experts point to these and other tidbits that hint that they weren't intending to die (they had ID on them, did not leave any suicide notes, and had jobs), others say that they did these things simply to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. After all, if you're going to kill yourself, there's no reason to save money.

My take is that they did intend to kill themselves. The second group certainly did. While Mark Steyn might hope that they were unwitting suicide bombers, I think he's mistaken.