Stromata Blog

Desktop Fusion

Transterrestrial Musings has an interesting report on Inertial Electrostatic Confinement, a technique that "uses two (or more) nested spherical grids charged to a high relative voltage to accelerate ions towards the common center of the grids, where they collide and fuse". It is still a long way from being a practicable method of power generation but has a number of promising features:

From a purely technological standpoint IEC is attractive because it does not use magnets, so the power requirements are a lot lower than many other fusion schemes. IEC devices are also compact (grid sizes are 1 to 15 cm in radius), which makes experiments much easier to perform. More interesting to me is that IEC devices are evolvable along an economically viable path. IEC devices are already being sold commercially as neutron sources (see the overview pdf from the US-Japan conference [Madison, Wisconsin, October 2002] I linked to above for one example). If the market for neutron sources expands (which it may well, since neutron assay is a very convenient way of remotely detecting the elemental composition of things, particularly convenient if you are looking for nuclear contraband), then companies doing IEC can have a near term revenue stream to fund further development.

Another nice feature of IEC is that the startup costs are relatively small, so that even amateurs can build primitive IEC devices.

Though the author is careful to add, "It's not necessarily a great idea to build neutron sources at home."

Maybe (probably) nothing widely useful will come of IEC, but I really like the idea of putting a fusion reactor on top of my desk!

A New Abu Ghraib Theory

This from a fellow wandering up Michigan Avenue with a bullhorn this afternoon: Russian communists masquerading as American soldiers have infiltrated Iraq, where they commit atrocities in order to smear the reputation of the United States, drive us out and take over the country's oil resources.

Do I believe that idea? Not a jot or tittle of it. But, were it at all serviceable to the Left, you may be sure that Michael Moore would have featured it in Fahrenheit 9/11, than which it is not materially less sane.

The Meaning of "Lost"

Former economist Paul Krugman's column for yesterday's New York Times, a typically bilious screed entitled "Who Lost Iraq?", drew unusual attention from the right side of the blogosphere for its swipes at Ari Fleischer's brother and Michael Ledeen's daughter, whom it accused of using nepotism to get jobs with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. As David Frum, who knows Miss Ledeen personally, put it,

I have to say that I am stunned by the implication that working in Iraq is some kind of sinecure that one obtains by wire-pulling. I wonder how many of Krugman’s dinner party pals are badgering their political connections to get their children internships in Baghdad? Simone Ledeen risked her life in Iraq for her her country. One of her best friends was killed by a car bomb. She herself was frequently fired upon. I can attest first hand that her insights into the situation in Iraq were both shrewd and sensitive. Her intelligence and courage and idealism are the virtues that wartime America most desperately needs.

On other days, Krugman joins those who sneer that advocates of the war in Iraq have not taken risks themselves or that their children have shirked the front line. This is absurd in itself, for in a terror war, we are all on the front line. In Michael Ledeen’s case, it is doubly absurd, for of his three children, one is Simone and another is an officer in the Marine Reserves.

Krugman's journalistic career has for a long time been a long exploration of the different ways a writer might disgrace himself. Yesterday, he may have at last hit bottom: an attack on a gallant young person who volunteered for hazardous duty in the nation’s service. But give the man this: He's persistent. And I'm sure he'll keep digging.

The absurd insult is only one of Krugman's minor points. The major one is summed up in his title: Iraq has been "lost", and the time has come to apportion blame. Predictably it goes to "neoconservative" zeal to bring low taxes, low tariffs and a flourishing private sector to the country.

Mr. Krugman does not, however, explain in what sense he thinks that "lost" is le mot juste for Iraq. Historically, the charge of "losing" a country has been brought forward when a formerly friendly government was overthrown by a hostile one, as in China after World War II, Cuba in 1959 or Iran in 1979. Is that what has happened in Iraq? A vehemently hostile regime, one that tried to assassinate a former U.S. President, fired missiles daily at American aircraft, funded the anti-American Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist groups and erected murals celebrating 9/11 (to select just a few unfriendly acts), has given way to one that is overtly pro-American.

The worst that can be said about the situation is that the new government faces armed opposition, every misdeed of which commands headlines — often tinged with little-disguised admiration — throughout the Western world. Imagine, however, that the sides were reversed, that an anti-American government were facing similar resistance from pro-Westerners. If those hypothetical rebels were as ineffectual as the real-world ones, commentators would, quite rightly, deride them. Roadside bombs and occasional mortar salvos can inflict small quantities of death and destruction, but they are no substitute for successfully attacking troops and gaining territory. The only way that the terrorists can seize power in Iraq is if, first, the United States and its allies withdraw and, second, foreign governments provide enough aid to make it possible for them to win a civil war. If those misfortunes occur, it will make sense to ask, "Who Lost Iraq?". The answer will not be, those who supported its liberation.

Further Reading: Robert L. Pollack, "Half-Full in Iraq":

. . . if the past year couldn't drive Iraq into chaos — and despite what you see on the event-driven nightly news reports, it hasn't come close — probably nothing will. Iraqis have weathered a diabolical campaign of sectarian terror aimed at pitting them against each other; an attempt by a renegade cleric to turn Iraq's Shiite majority against the coalition; and some serious missteps by the occupying powers. If more Americans are having second thoughts about whether the war was worth it, there's little such sentiment in Baghdad. "Saddam Hussein's regime was a car bomb every day," says Barham Salih, the new deputy prime minister. "We can all complain about the uncertainty, but we cannot forget about where we came from." Interim President Ghazi Yawer concurs, describing the past year as "90% good" and only "10% bad" — "we got rid of the most vicious regime."

Better Late Than Never

The Daily Telegraph reports that Pope John Paul II has apologized to the Patriarch of Constantinople for the Latin capture and sack of the city in 1204 A.D.: "We cannot forget what happened in the month of April 1204. How can we not share, at a distance of eight centuries, the pain and disgust?"

If I may take the liberty of quoting an item that I posted on April 13, 2004:

Today is the anniversary (ignoring the nuisance of calendar changes) of one of the key events in the long conflict between Islam and the West. On April 13, 1204, the army of the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople and embarked on three days of pillage. This self-inflicted wound on Christendom made it impossible to take advantage of a century of internecine strife within the House of Islam and ended the Byzantine Empire as a Mediterranean power. It may well be that Americans are fighting in Iraq today because a Flemish knight seized the throne of Constantine 800 years ago.

Recommended reading: Donald E. Queller & Thomas F. Madden, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, a fair and balanced presentation of an event that arouses strong emotions to this day

A Free Pass for Zarqawi?

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Jacob Levy raises a question about one of the few accusations against the Bush Administration that the media haven't flogged to within an inch of its life:

Has there ever, in the four months since it broke, been a refutation of, an official response to, or even a developed conservative talking point on the story [NBC Nightly News, 3/2/04] that Pentagon plans to take out Zarqawi before the Iraq war were vetoed by the White House, because Zarqawi was more convenient as a living terrorist in Iraq who could help justify the war? . . .

At the time this seemed to me a huge, terrible story. Given a possibility for real pre-emption against one of the worst terrorists out there, the administration said no, for bad reasons. And many hundreds have since died at that terrorist's hands or under his orders.

It was the sort of thing that, had it been asserted by The Nation or Michael Moore or Wesley Clark, would have been trumpeted by the right as evidence of the unhinged conspiratorial thinking of the left. Reported and (apprently reliably though in part anonymously) sourced by NBC, it went, as far as I can tell, entirely unanswered, but also almost entirely unnoticed. At first I assumed that it was so extreme and appalling a claim that there was almost certainly a credible counter-story or at least contrary interpretation to be offered. But I never saw it.

Several points need to be made:

1. Mr. Levy overinterprets his source. What NBC actually said about the motivation for the alleged failure to take out Zarqawi was this:

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

Mr. Cressey (a former top aide to anti-Bush zealot Richard Clarke and therefore possibly not an unbiased commentator) doesn't assert that Zarqawi was left alive as a justification for the war but that an attack on him was regarded as inconsistent with putting together an anti-Saddam coalition. In other words, a preemptive American strike against a target in Iraqi territory, without visible provocation, might have upset governments like France, Germany, Russia and Turkey, which we were then trying to persuade to join our side. Hence, the moral of this story, if it is true, is that it was a mistake to let Jacques Chirac's velleities influence our actions.

2. The story was in fact denied promptly by a responsible official. The day after it was broadcast, a Democratic Congressman questioned Peter Rodman, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, about it and suggested that the motive for inaction was to create an argument in favor of invading Iraq. Here is Secretary Rodman's response [from the FDCH transcript on Nexis; I don't have a Web link]:

I do know something about the planning. We had our eye on that location, Kirma. But I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of the decisions that were made. Any kind of operation is complicated. And I do know that we had our eye on that location. There were discussions in the administration. And obviously no attack was made.

But I don't recall anyone discussing on either side of the discussion anyone saying, well, no, we don't want to do this because it will interfere with a plan to go after Saddam. I mean, you could have made the opposite argument that it would — if we had found something interesting there, it would have — could have strengthened our case.

3. During the past several months, Mr. Cressey has been quoted at least 20 times in the media in connection with Zarqawi. Not once has he repeated the NBC claim. It should be noted that, if one reads the story carefully, one sees that he is not cited as one of its sources. Instead, he is called on the explain the motivation for a decision that he may, for all one can tell, have known about only at second hand. By all accounts, his boss, Richard Clarke, and presumably he himself, were by that time out of the main anti-terrorism loop, concentrating on the risks of attacks against the Internet.

In retrospect, almost any action to kill or capture Zarqawi would have been justified. There may or may not have been golden opportunities to do so in the second half of 2002, but the reasons for missing them were not, so far as one can tell from the public record, sinister or discreditable.

Update: Jacob Levy has commented on various responses to his request for "conservative talking points" on this incident. Regarding Secretary Rodman's denial, he says that it isn't "particularly decisive". There he seems to me to be mistaken. If the Administration's principal motive for not attacking Zarqawi's camp was a desire to keep him alive as a debating point, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs would surely have at least heard that argument bandied about. One is free, of course, to disbelieve the witness, but, if his testimony is accepted as truthful, it seems to dispose of the notion that the White House regarded Zarqawi as "more convenient as a living terrorist in Iraq who could help justify the war". (Incidentally, while Zarqawi's association with Saddam Hussein was part of the Administration's casus belli, it was a secondary part, not the linchpin that it becomes in some of the leftist versions of this tale. Rendering it moot would not, in the eyes of any Administration partisan, have weakened the case for getting rid of the Ba'athist thugs.)

I am not the only one to observe that the theory actually propounded in the original NBC story was that the Administration feared that an attack on Zarqawi would interfere with assembling an anti-Saddam coalition. Professor Levy notes the point but thinks that the speculative hope of gaining additional allies should have given way to a concrete opportunity to nail a leading terrorist. I agree with him there, but he fails to distinguish between that motive, which would have been simply a tactical blunder (at least in retrospect) and the one that he first hypothesized, which would have been dangerous and dishonorable.

"The U.S. is Winning"

The American Thinker doesn't provide a link to the following paragraph's source (apparently a subscription-only French site), but it is worth considering amidst the daily wails about the situation in Iraq.

Antoine Sfeir [editor-in-chief of Les Cahiers de l'Orient], one of the leading experts of the Arab world, who cannot, according to himself, be considered as a pro-American individual, just came back from Iraq. He affirmed that there is no quagmire and that he thinks that the US is winning the battle of Iraq. He is tired of people in the European media claiming that Iraq is the New Vietnam or Somalia. He added that Iraqis are living their lives and making do, and are especially happy to be rid of Saddam.

The same post recounts an incident, reported by staunchly anti-American Le Monde, that doesn't fit the Angry Left paradigm: A man from Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit risked his life to save four wounded American soldiers. The paper quotes him thus:

The Americans did not, after all, come alone to Iraq. They were supported by four million Iraqis in exile and by millions here. The proof is that no one fought to defend Saddam Hussein. Today an honorable Iraqi citizen can only desire the departure of the Americans and the end of the occupation. But I believe that we must help them withdraw in peace. The guerillas just destroy. They undermine all of the efforts to reconstruct Iraq.

Less Than Worthwhile Canadian Result

Experts like David Frum can divine the True Meaning of today's Canadian elections, which the Conservatives entered with what now appear to have been extravagant hopes. There was talk of a Parliamentary majority for the reunited CPC. Instead, the party won about 95 (out of 308) seats and about exactly 30 percent of the popular vote. The Liberals, despite impressive scandals, held onto a plurality, c. 135 seats and a 37 percent vote share. They'll be able to form a government with the socialist New Democratic Party (22 seats, 15 percent), and we can expect our northern neighbor to move further and faster toward a Third World political stance. It is already the first Western country to grant legal jurisdiction (limited but effective within the Moslem community) to shari'a courts. Likewise, the economic regime will likely tend toward higher taxes, more welfare and fewer incentives for progress. From the narrowly selfish American point of view, we can look forward to an increasing trickle of Canada's best and brightest across our common border.

A tiny company called 80 Dimensional Software brought out a Canadian election computer game, oddly named Prime Minister Forever (as if this poll would be the last), just a couple of weeks ago (only $11.99, with the promise of a free Australian add-on in the near future). Two playings prepared me for disappointment this evening. In the first, my Conservatives got all the breaks: bad economic news and almost continual Liberal scandals − which yielded a plurality of 116 seats but brought me nowhere near the 155 needed to govern. In the second, I was confident of my chances, having deciphered a few of the secrets of successful campaigning, and strategized astutely enough to gain the coveted "Big Mo" in the final week. But the economy was strong, the scandals were weak, and I got only 88 seats to the Liberals' 130. A good game; I wish that it had proven less accurate as a prognosticator.

Update: The final results: Liberals 135 (36.7%), Conservatives 99 (29.6%), Bloc Québécois 54 (12.4% [contested seats only in Quebec, where they won 48.8% of the popular vote]), New Democrats 19 (15.7%), unaffiliated 1. The combined Liberals and NDP thus fall one vote short of a majority, which will roil Paul Martin's life. David Frum is philosophical: "Canadian conservatives have become so used to heartbreak that mere disappointment can feel almost like good news."

Bill Clinton: Closet Homophobe?

The Wall Street Journal's subscription-only Political Diary has a fascinating trivium about Bill Clinton's contribution to weightlifting apparatus. A homosexual friend of co-editor John Fund started perusing the index to see what the ex-President had to say about various "gay" members of his Adminstration and found − nothing.

He reports that all the major gay players who served in the Clinton administration go unmentioned in the book. "I stumbled across this when I wanted to find out what President Clinton had to say about David Mixner, his most famous openly gay aide. No mention of Mixner, even though he played a significant role in Clinton's life and presidency and the book tosses thousands of names around like confetti."

My friend also checked for mention of James Hormel − whom Clinton appointed as ambassador to Luxembourg, creating a major political dispute in Congress. Nothing. Then Roberta Achtenberg, the first openly gay person to win a Senate confirmation vote. No mention. Bob Hattoy, a White House personnel aide. No mention. Richard Socarides, a special assistant to Mr. Clinton on gay issues. Nada. Keith Boykin, an aide who set up the first meeting between a sitting president and gay and lesbian leaders. Zip. The list goes on and on, and so does Mr. Clinton's failure to mention any of his gay appointees.

Omitting to specify officials' sexual preferences would be sensible, but the men and women themselves have vanished in a remarkable "straightening" of the Clinton Presidency. I won't speculate on why or how this purge happened, but it is certainly curious.

The CPA's Side of the Story

You won't see it treated seriously in your local newspaper, and parts are doubtless painted in rosy hues, but, as the interim Iraqi government takes over from the Coalition Provisional Authority, it is constructive to review the CPA's own account of its tenure. As a baseline, here is a comparison of the accomplishments of the Allied occupation authorities in Germany after World War II.

Selected points of interest from the CPA document:

• Despite the fact that for so many years police were feared as political weapons of the former regime, public trust in Iraqi police is on the rise. A recent survey conducted by the US State Department Office of Research, shows that nearly 80 percent of Iraqis feel that, in general, local Iraqi police are trusted by most members of their communities. A percentage almost as large – 70 percent – believe that local Iraqi police are accessible to help resolve problems.

• Most schools throughout Iraq were open very shortly after liberation allowing for the administration of the critically important national exams in June 2003.

• Textbooks were revised and propaganda was removed. More than 8 million new, propaganda free textbooks had been printed last year. With the announcement of the new World Bank grant, 72 million new text books will be purchased for the coming year

• Pre-conflict, there was limited service, with 3,000 Internet and 8,000 e-mail only accounts in 2002. In 2003, there were 5,000 Internet and 10,000 e-mail only subscribers. By January 1, 2004, there were 12,372 accounts, with both e-mail and Internet access. As of June 11, there are 60,000 users.

• There are now 788,682 active landline telephone subscribers in Iraq, compared to 833,000 subscribers pre-war. The total number of telephone subscribers in Iraq, including the cell phone subscribers is 1,245,509 which is 49.5 percent greater than the number of active landline subscribers pre-war. Cell phone service was very limited pre-conflict. . . . Cell phones are selling at the rate of over 15,000 per week. Demand has outstripped supply. Consumers are placing deposits just to reserve a spot on the next shipment of phones.

• On June 20, 2004, the Coalition reached a record high electrical peak, surpassing the 4,900 MW mark for the first time – a full 10% increase above pre-war levels. And while Iraq’s peak electricity output is soaring past pre-war levels, the MW hours have also increased substantially to over 103,000. This means that more people are receiving more power across the grid daily. And, because the Coalition and the Ministry have spent more than a year rebuilding Iraq’s neglected electrical infrastructure, the system is now far more stable than before. With multiple redundancy systems in place, pre-war blackouts that could once take weeks to fix are in many cases returned to service within hours.

• With more than half a million new jobs created, new industries and new factories coming on line and with the sale of thousands of home appliances such as washing machines and air conditioners, Iraq has experienced a rapid increase in electricity demand. The increase in demand is a good sign of a thriving economy emerging out from three decades of isolation. As demand continues to increase, the Ministry of Electricity will continue to work to increase the nation’s available power. Nearly one billion dollars has already been allocated with several billion more coming from Congress to help improve the supply of electricity throughout Iraq.

• The number of locomotives available for service has more than doubled, not counting over twenty new locomotives received in the past year.

• Iraq's 2004 budget for health care is $950 million. ($40 per person). Saddam Hussein's regime provided only $16 million for the Ministry of Health in 2002 (less than $0.75 per person). The entire country is at pre-war capabilities for providing health care - 240 Iraqi hospitals and more than 1,200 primary health centers are operating. Doctors' salaries have increased to between $120 a month and $180 a month, in comparison to $20 a month before the war.

• The Ministry [of Health] is working to immunize the country's 4.2 million children under the age of five against preventable diseases such as polio, tetanus, diphtheria, measles, and tuberculosis. More than 30 million doses of children's vaccinations have been procured and distributed. Routine vaccinations are available to newborns, children, and mothers every day at Ministry of Health facilities across the country and are promoted nationally through immunization days on the 22nd of each month.

• Oil production: Production capacity has exceeded pre-conflict levels and currently stands at approximately 2.5 MBPD [million barrels per day, 25% above the 2002 level] with a year-end objective of 2.8-3.0 MBPD. . . . Daily exports have exceeded pre-conflict levels and are averaging 1.65 MBPD. Daily export income averages approximately $55 million. As of the 30 June, crude oil export revenue is estimated to reach $7.9 billion for the first six-months of 2004 and $15 billion for the full year. Iraq met rising demand for benzene, diesel, kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) despite sabotage, an aggressive insurgency, and obsolete refineries.

Perhaps the "Iraq is a mess" meme needs, if not retirement, at least a considerable degree of refinement.

Further Reading: Arthur Chrenkoff, "Good News from Iraq" - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Michele Catalano, "Words from Iraqis on This Day"

Divorced from Reality

Tit for tat being a fundamental principle of political action, it isn't surprising that a clamor is now rising for access to John Kerry's sealed divorce records. After Republican Jack Ryan was driven from the Illinois Senate race by the disclosure of (uncorroborated and implausible) charges made by his ex-wife in the course of their divorce proceedings, it is only symmetrical to subject a Democratic candidate to the same ordeal.

Symmetrical – maybe even fair in some sense – but still a bad idea. Divorce testimony, given under emotionally trying circumstances, is notoriously full of half-truths and outright lies. Using it as a basis for form judgements about a man's fitness for high office is folly.

Senator Kerry has been a public figure for at least 33 years, since he returned from Vietnam to charge that American troops routinely committed war crimes and to lend his assistance to the fabricated "Winter Soldier" propaganda stunt. He has a long record of statements and positions, from which I imagine that one can learn all that is pertinent to his character. Adding his first wife's description of how he acted as a husband would not increase our knowledge, nor does it seem at all humane and reasonable to subject the woman to a public controversy about the accuracy of what she said in court years ago. We can only hope the the Massachusetts judiciary (in which there is, alas, little reason for confidence) will let this sleeping dog slumber in peace.

A New Front

The theory that the Constitution is a suicide pact has received a ringing endorsement from six Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, who today, in Rasul v. Bush [PDF file], held that non-citizens captured under arms in Afghanistan are entitled to challenge their detentions through habeas corpus proceedings. Predictably, every enemy whom we nab will take advantage of this right, with financial and legal assistance from leftist "charities", thus opening a new civilian front in the War on Terror. All of the time, manpower, energy and money that the Justice and Defense Departments expend defending against these claims, demonstrating to the satisfaction of the courts that Mohammed was shooting at Americans when taken prisoner, not, as he claims, out on a duck hunt, will, let us remember, be resources not available to defend against terrorism. Moreover, an occasional judge will doubtless order prisoners freed, thereby encouraging petitions to continue flowing.

The only countermeasure that I can see is for Congress to exercise its Constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus for persons captured in the Middle Eastern war zones. Unfortunately, left-wingers in Congress and the media can probably frustrate any such action, and anti-American commentators would quickly incorporate it into their propaganda litany. The effort should nonetheless be made. Otherwise, we risk winning on the battlefield and losing in our own courts.

Why "Saddam Delendum Est"?

Everybody in the blogosphere has linked to Christopher Hitchens' evisceration of Fahrenheit 9/11, but it is a long, long review, and one passage deserves singling out. Mr. Hitchens succinctly summarizes why deposing Saddam Hussein was not just an arbitrary whim of George W. Bush:

Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)

Are those the sort of facts that a responsible American leader is expected to ignore? Many of the anti-war crowd argue that, because the United States can't and won't rid the world of every depot, it had no right to go after this one. That strikes me as absurd — an argument against doing what good one can in a world where perfection is impossible — but, even if it were persuasive, Saddam Hussein was no ordinary despot.

Azkaban in 15 Minutes

For those who don't have time for 2½ hour flicks, here is a PG-13 rated abridged version of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban".

A Rising Tide of Evidence

Remember the allegation that Ba'athist Iraq was negotiating to buy uranium from Niger? The allegation that supposedly was based on forged documents and thoroughly discredited to President Bush's deep embarrassment? The Financial Times is now reporting that the forgeries were only late and peripheral confirmation of facts uncovered by European intelligence agencies.

Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being negotiated with five states including Iraq at least three years before the US-led invasion, senior European intelligence officials have told the Financial Times.

Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq. . . .

European intelligence officials have for the first time confirmed that information provided by human intelligence sources during an operation mounted in Europe and Africa produced sufficient evidence for them to believe that Niger was the centre of a clandestine international trade in uranium. . . .

According to a senior counter-proliferation official, meetings between Niger officials and would-be buyers from the five countries were held in several European countries, including Italy. Intelligence officers were convinced that the uranium would be smuggled from abandoned mines in Niger, thereby circumventing official export controls. "The sources were trustworthy. There were several sources, and they were reliable sources," an official involved in the European intelligence gathering operation said.

The Belgravia Dispatch, apparently the first blog to pick up this story, has further analysis but is pessimistic about the impact of this news:

But, of course, in the cretinous intellectual and political climate we inhabit (where the likes of Michael Moore parade about playing noble dissident and are applauded by our estimable "cultural" arbitrators--from Tarantino's Cannes to Weinstein's Ziegfeld bash); how many will read this critical update to the yellowcake chronicles in the august pages of the FT (or Instapundit!)?

Let's see. Chemical weapons turn up in Iraq. The president of Russia discloses that his intelligence services warned the U.S. in February 2003 that Saddam Hussein was plotting terrorist attacks of his own. Further data about ties between the Ba'athist regime and al-Qa'eda emerge daily. The "BUSH LIED!!" shibboleth steadily grows shriller and falser. How long will it take the New York Times and Associated Press to notice?

Update, 7/8/04: The Financial Times is now reporting that "A UK government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger."

Update, 7/10/04: The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war Iraqi intelligence discloses further evidence that Iraq did indeed try to buy uranium from Niger. Moreover, some of the confirmation comes from Joe Wilson, whose famous New York Times op-ed seems to have told less than the whole truth. As summarized by the Associated Press:

Wilson told the committee that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki reported meeting with Iraqi officials in 1999. Mayaki said a businessman helped set up the meeting, saying the Iraqis were interested in "expanding commercial relations" with Niger - which Mayaki interpreted as an overture to buy uranium, Wilson said. [Niger's only export products are uranium and goats. - ed.]

Wilson's public account was that his days of drinking sweet tea with Niger officials produced no information to support the Iraq-Niger story. The anti-war crowd believed him, but perhaps he lied to the Senators rather than the Times. The Washington Post now seems to be skeptical about his rectitude. Little Green Footballs caught on months ago.

WMD - Oh, Who Cares?

The belief that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed no "weapons of mass destruction" has hardened into a dogma so impervious to fact that discordant evidence is passed over without registering. In an interview with Fox News, the head of the Iraq Survey Group stated that "10 or 12 sarin and mustard gas shells have been found in various locations in Iraq". Not long ago a shell containing nearly a gallon of sarin was rigged into a bomb placed by terrorists. Yet not even many supporters of President Bush's policies bother to argue any longer that Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, readily available for terrorist operations, were a threat that justified deposing the Ba'athist regime. There seems to have been a widespread expectation that, upon entering Iraq, our troops would find WMD's neatly lined up and labeled, and that the Ba'athists would make no effort to conceal or disperse them. When that scenario didn't materialize, the media world lost interest. Now, as Saddam's arsenal slowly comes to light, the molders of public opinion just don't care.

Update, 7/1/04: According to Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in an interview yesterday, Polish troops recently chanced upon more Saddam-era chemical munitions:

I was with the Polish minister of defense this weekend in Istanbul, Turkey at the NATO Summit. And in the course of that, he pointed out that his troops in Iraq had recently come across — I’ve forgotten the number, but something like 16 or 17 — warheads that contained sarin and mustard gas.

Now these are weapons that we always knew Saddam Hussein had that he had not declared and they have tested them and I have not seen them and I have not tested them, but they believe that they are correct that these, in fact, were undeclared chemical weapons — sarin and mustard gas — quite lethal and that is a discovery that just occurred within the last period of days. If you think about — most people remember the image of where Saddam Hussein was captured in that hole — that pit that he was living in. That pit, that hole in the ground was probably big enough to hold chemical and biological weapons sufficient to kill tens of thousands of people. And therefore, it is not hard to hide things in a country the size of California. It’s quite easy to hide things. In fact, we finally found a bunch of jet aircraft that they’ve buried underground.

Update, 7/3/04: More on the Polish discovery: "Polish Troops Discover Iraq Bio-Weapons"

Hero Worship for Bill

Is this an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Contest?

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.

Or is it the first sentence of William Jefferson Clinton's autobiography?

I haven't bothered to read the ensuing sentences, so I don't know whether My Life maintains this acme of literary craftsmanship for all of its 957 pages. But I do know that tens or hundreds of thousands of liberals have parted with cash for a book that most reviewers have evaluated as turgid and commonplace. Why?

The Clinton Presidency was not an exciting or crucial period in our country's history. It was peaceful and prosperous: the Twenties without jazz, flappers, Prohibition or a literary renaissance. And Bill Clinton was an interesting President only because he fit the era so perfectly: self-indulgent, sentimental, oblivious to dangers developing on the periphery of a comfortable world. Judging by the reviews, his autobiography continues in the same vein. Nonetheless, lots of his countrymen are eager to read - or at least own - it.

The explanation, I suppose, is simple hero worship, abundantly in evidence in one of the rare favorable reviews, Larry McMurtry's for the New York Times (headlined "Confessions of a Policy Wonk", though the reviewer says barely a word about any issue of public importance). To a significant portion of the public, Clinton is a secular demi-god, and his memoirs are less words to read than a relic to cherish.

Only three 20th Century Presidents have received comparable adulation: Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Kennedy was an anomaly, canonized by his shocking death. Roosevelt and Reagan had immense accomplishments to their credit (or detriment, if one disagreed with their policies). But what is Bill Clinton that fervent liberals should glorify him?

Whether or not Clinton was, by some standard, a "good" or "great" President, he didn't do anything that would predictably set liberal hearts beating more rapidly. The significant elements of his domestic record were the adoption of NAFTA (a Reagan initiative primarily supported by Republicans in Congress), welfare reform (a conservative goal that Clinton vetoed twice before signing under the pressure of the 1996 election campaign) and a steady reduction in government spending as a percentage of GDP (not a traditional Democratic priority). Abroad he was successful in Kosovo, where he ignored the United Nations and waged a Rumsfeldian high-tech war, and failed in North Korea and the Middle East, where he followed the traditional liberal program of accommodating diplomacy. His overall record may be defensible, but the defense has to be minimalist. To paraphrase Will Rogers: He did nothing, and nothing was what needed to be done.

The only reason for liberals to adore Clinton is that a lot of conservatives despised him. Fundamentally, I think, they love him for the enemies he has made. In the liberal world view, conservatism is not a set of alternative opinions about how best to organize society and govern the country; it is an intrinsically evil, conspiratorial force, motivated by equal parts of greed, religious mania and fanatic imperialism. He whom the demons annoy must be a saint. The overlap between buyers of My Life and people who think that Fahenheit 9/11 is sober and plausible is undoubtedly extremely large.

It doesn't matter that this demonization is irrational even from a liberal point of view. If the most retrograde policies favored by a combination of National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page were all to be enacted, the country would return to the status quo circa 1970. I was alive and an adult then, and, while I may not be acutely observant, I did not notice that American society was in those days conspicuously oppressive. We were not living under the right-wing Christian regime for which the "Taliban wing of the Republican Party" allegedly yearns. A reasonable liberal ought not to be horrified by the prospect of a conservative resurgence, just as reasonable conservatives don't denounce the Clinton Administration as a socialist juggernaut. Unfortunately, reasonable liberals don't set the tone of contemporary liberal politics.

As I have argued before, the United States in the early 21st Century resembles the Roman Republic of the 1st Century B.C. in one ominous respect: the factional hatred that potentially could tear it apart without any aid from external enemies. The motives for Clinton worship are unhappily consistent with that fear.

You Know You're in Kentucky When. . .

the first sign that you see upon disembarking at the Covington (nominally Cincinnati) Airport reads, "SMOKING PERMITTED". Beneath, in much smaller type, doubtless to comply with some federal law, is "in designated areas only". It's easy to infer where the locals' hearts reside.

Saddam and Osama in the 90's

The New York Times reports today that -

Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq.

American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before Al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization. He was based in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, when that country forced him to leave and he took refuge in Afghanistan.

The document states that Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and that a request from Mr. bin Laden to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered. There is no further indication of collaboration.

The final sentence and some later hemming and hawing about the document's provenance (there's nothing to suggest that it isn't authentic, and the content isn't spectacular enough to furnish a motive for forgery) are typical NYT spin. The key point is that Ba'athist Iraq and al-Qa'eda had no scruples about cooperating even before Osama bin Laden declared war on Saddam Hussein's primary enemy, the United States. Are we to suppose that they shunned each other after al-Qa'eda began attacking Americans?

Further Reading: Andrew McCarthy "Times Games":

Today, the Times concedes that the Defense Intelligence Agency is in possession of a document showing that, in the mid-1990s, the Iraqi Intelligence Service reached out to what the newspaper euphemistically calls "Mr. bin Laden's organization" (more on that below) regarding the possibility of joint efforts against the Saudi regime, which was then hosting U.S. forces. To be clear, the document records that it was Iraq which initiated the contacts, and that bin Laden finally agreed to discuss cooperation only after having spurned previous overtures because he "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative[.]"

Why does it matter who was enticing whom? On June 17, when, despite having this document [which it had obtained several weeks earlier, according to its own account], it was trashing the whole notion of an Iraq/Qaeda connection, the Times asserted without qualification that: The 9/11 Commission had found that any collaboration proposals had come from bin Laden's side; all such proposals had been declined by Saddam; and this scenario undermined the Bush administration's rationale for deposing the Iraqi regime.

Quote of the Day

From the first issue of Simulacrum, John Kula's delightful "Journal of Board Wargame Collecting and Accumulating" (April 1998):

Admittedly, you must sell a small part of your soul when you buy a computer, a modem, a communications package and time on an Internet Service Provider [but] . . . you are not so much selling a part of your soul as mechanizing it. Computers have soul. In fact, all inanimate objects have soul, which is why it's important never to let them know when you're in a hurry.

Iraq: Then and Now

Today's terrorist killing spree in Iraq's "Sunni Triangle" will doubtless be taken by anti-war commentators as further "proof" that deposing Saddam Hussein was a terrible idea and that the Bush Administration has compounded its original sin by bungling the aftermath. Over and over we hear the shrill cry, "Bush didn't have a plan!", as if a plan were a panacea rather than something that, in von Moltke's well-known formulation, doesn't survive its first contact with the enemy.

Reasoning with the Coalition of the Wild-Eyed is a Sisyphean task, but let's make an attempt by comparing the state of Iraq and the world today with the probable situation if the Iraqi Ba'athists had remained in power.

In one respect the two scenarios are identical: Innocent Iraqis are and would be in danger of sudden, arbitrary death. One difference is that, in Saddam's Iraq, Ba'athist thugs carried innocents off to Abu Ghraib for torture, and there was no one to intervene against the horrors. In liberated Iraq, the thugs are pursued by the Coalition military, have been killed in large numbers and have almost no ability to act outside of a constricted region. The other difference is that, under Saddam, the Western media kept silent about what was happening in the country, self-censoring the news to remain in the tyrant's good graces. Now the press can report what it sees (and much that it doesn't). Hence, life is better for the Iraqi people but, unless one sifts the news carefully (as Arthur Chrenkoff has been doing), it sounds worse.

In the real-world scenario, the principal target of the Islamofascists is the United States. Again, it was the same when Saddam held sway. Then, however, he openly subsidized Hamas and Islamic Jihad, gave sanctuary to other terrorists (e. g., the man who manufactured the bombs that exploded in the World Trade Center in 1993) and pursued active chemical and biological weapons programs (as the Kay Report amply documented) that, whatever progress they had or hadn't made by April 2003 would in time have produced weapons of great use in terrorist attacks. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who opposed ousting the Ba'athists and therefore has no obvious reason to lie, Russian intelligence agencies passed on to the U.S. evidence that Saddam was planning his own round of terror attacks against America. Whatever he planned, the invasion stopped it.

According to left-wing mythology, our attack on the Ba'athist regime generated immense anger in the Arab world, rage that has translated into a recruiting bonanza for al-Qa'eda and its blood brothers. If so, the multitude of new recruits have been singularly inert. The State Department's annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, after correcting for much publicized data errors, shows that terrorist attacks in 2003 barely inched up from the prior year, to 208 incidents from 2002's 198. Throughout the pre-9/11 years, as far back as 1970, the annual number was quite a bit higher (ranging from 274 to 440 per year under the Clinton Administration, for example).

Looking at the broader international scene, Hugh Hewitt has summarized "The War Dividend" that we reaped from Saddam's overthrow: Most significantly, Libya has abandoned its nuclear weapons program (explicitly out of fear of American action), which turns out to have been much closer to building atomic bombs than anyone suspected. Had the status quo ante continued, we might soon have been facing a nuclear-armed Colonel Qaddafi. He is still a madman, but a less lethal madman.

The perception of "failure" in Iraq derives, I think, entirely from the refusal of critics to compare the actual situation to anything except Utopia. The real world gained vastly from American action, and the gains haven't been vitiated by the need to continue fighting holdouts against liberty.

The Social Security Un-Fund

This being an election year, we have already begun hearing laments about how tax cuts drain money from the Social Security trust fund and thus threaten the retirement income of future generations. I've tried to explain elsewhere that the "trust fund" is merely an fiction designed to account for the fact that Social Security payouts will one day (2019 is now the estimated year) exceed FICA taxes, at which point the government will have to fill the gap by raising taxes, cutting other spending, reducing benefits or borrowing. Those choices will be the same - and will be of the same magnitude - regardless of the size of the federal budget deficit in 2004. David Hogberg ("Trust Fund Babies") makes a stab at getting the same point across. It isn't abstruse. Maybe, if enough of us repeat it, it will sink in.

Jack Ryan: The Lessons

Reactions to the disclosures about Jack Ryan (the Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, not the real Jack Ryan chronicled by Tom Clancy) confirm three not very surprising hypotheses about the current political universe.

1. The double standard for conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats is blatant. Ryan's ex-wife claimed that, on at most four occasions in an eight-year marriage, her husband asked her to engage in sex with him in places where strangers could watch. She refused, and nothing further occurred. If wanting to have overly public relations with one's wife is a disqualification for public office, what about Bill Clinton's adulteries? If President Clinton had done exactly what candidate Ryan is accused of doing, would the major media have endorsed his impeachment? If the two actual cases were treated differently, was that because exhibitionism is worse than infidelity, because a Senator holds a more responsible position than a President, because lying to fellow politicians is worse than lying under oath to a court, or perhaps because Republicans' sins are serious matters and Democrats' are not?

Also pertinent is the media's willingness to believe. Uncorroborated allegations in divorce proceedings are not the gold standard of evidence, but none of the media question them in the case of the Ryans. Starkly contrasting is the skepticism (initially not unreasonable) that greeted stories about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (not to mention Paul Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Juanita Broaddrick and lots of other women). If it weren't for the DNA evidence salvaged from the famous blue dress, the Lewinsky affair would probably still have the status of "unproven slander by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy".

Then there is lying. Jack Ryan wasn't forthcoming in advance about what was in his court papers. Perhaps he was being dishonest. Perhaps he didn't think that Jeri Ryan's charges were credible enough to set off a firestorm. In either case, he is not getting the benefit of the "everybody lies about sex" excuse that was sufficient in the last President's case to mitigate indubitable falsehoods in both the public arena and court testimony.

2. Conservatives are completely spooked by allegations of sexual misconduct, apparently afraid that any defense of an accused Republican - even the defense of innocence - will be taken as proof that all complaints about Clinton were unjustified. Hence, they cooperate in perpetuating the double standard. A telling example is a post by Kate O'Beirne in the NRO Corner. She refers to a Democrat whose divorce papers revealed a scandal as "an alleged wife beater" and to Jack Ryan as "a lying exhibitionist" (no "alleged"). Yet the first man admitted that the allegations were true, while those against Ryan rest on the words of a single interested witness with motives to shade the truth.

3. Once again, the dominant Thompson-Edgar-Topinka wing of the Illinois Republican Party displays that political acumen that has led to the loss of the governorship, most other statewide offices and both houses of the legislature in the course of the past ten years. Without pausing to think about the quality of the evidence, they have rushed to condemn their party's candidate as a liar, thus pulverizing whatever chance he had of recovering from this setback. Their public clumsiness also pretty much makes it impossible to supersede Ryan gracefully. Either he will stumble on in a hopeless cause (which his own party helped render hopeless) or his withdrawal will leave behind bitterness that will doom any successor nominee.

I have no objection to holding Republicans to higher standards than Democrats. Fairness should, however, place limits on the asymmetry. At the very least, GOP candidates should not be burdened with a presumption of guilt.

Michael Moore: Free Speech Martyr?

Fahrenheit 9/11 is, judging from what its creator himself incessantly says, a collage of lying agitprop. Nonetheless, one need not be a First Amendment absolutist to believe that Michael Moore should be free to show it in theaters to any sucker who will come, even if - indeed, especially if - his purpose is to influence the outcome of an election. The Wall Street Journal's subscription-only Political Diary (invaluable, but you can get it for $3.95 a month) reports, however, that the film may be caught in the trammels of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Hoping that I'm not violating the DMCA, here is what John Fund says about this bizarre development:

Six members of the Federal Election Commission will meet in Washington today to decide whether it's legal for Michael Moore to advertise his Bush-bashing "Fahrenheit 9/11" film on TV or radio without breaking federal law.

According to an opinion by the FEC's legal counsel, the movie's producer, Lions Gate Films, should be prohibited from running ads for "Fahrenheit" after July 30 because the McCain-Feingold campaign law prohibits any corporation (with a narrow exception for the news media) from running ads that even identify a candidate for president or Congress within 30 days of a primary election and within 60 days of a general election. Because Mr. Moore has publicly said the film is designed to defeat George W. Bush, there's no way it could be construed as other than a political effort.

Congressional members who voted for McCain-Feingold's restrictions on the First Amendment were no doubt assured that broad exemptions would exist for political speech. They were wrong. The FEC counsel's opinion is quite pointed in noting that the 2003 Supreme Court opinion upholding McCain-Feingold made clear that "the media exemption was 'narrow' and drew a distinction between 'corporations that are part of the media industry' as opposed to 'other corporations that are not involved in the regular business of imparting news to the public.'" Print and broadcast companies with news divisions meet the exemption standard; documentary film companies do not.

No one knows how the FEC will deal with this hot potato at its meeting today but the fact that the proposed muzzling of Michael Moore is on the agenda at all should be cause for concern. David Broder, the Washington Post columnist who championed the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law for years, has finally admitted it is unworkable. What the legal opinion of the FEC's general counsel proves is that it's also potentially dangerous to our freedoms.

McCain-Feingold was a favorite liberal cause. There would be nice irony if Michael Moore were its first victim. Better yet would be if this threat led to the law's quick repeal.

Loony Left Dems

For years the Democratic Party has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Trial Lawyers Association. Now, it appears, a takeover by Loony Left Inc. is under weigh. Little as one may like ATLA's agenda (the very quintessence of greed), the change of masters is not an improvement.

Yesterday Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went with other leading Democrats to see Michael Moore's nutcase anti-American schlockumentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. Afterwards he gushed about one of its numerous conspiracy theories. As reported first-hand by Byron York:

McAuliffe called the film "very powerful, much more powerful than I thought it would be." When asked by National Review Online if he believed Moore's account of the war in Afghanistan, McAuliffe said, "I believe it after seeing that." The DNC chairman added that he had not heard of the idea before seeing the movie, but said he would "check it out myself and look at it, but there are a lot of interesting facts that he [Moore] brought out today that none of us knew about."

A short time later, McAuliffe was asked by CNN, "Do you think the movie was essentially fair and factually based?" "I do," McAuliffe said.

Moore, who openly supports pro-Ba'athist terrorists against the United States (though I suppose that it would violate the canons of politically correct discourse to call him "unpatriotic"), has this "account of the war in Afghanistan":

Fahrenheit 9/11 devotes a significant amount of time to a fantastical theory that the war in Afghanistan was not part of a wide-ranging U.S. retaliation for the terrorist attacks of September 11, but was in fact undertaken for the financial benefit of Texas oil interests, specifically the vice president and Kenneth Lay.

The real aim supposedly was to make it possible for U.S. interests to construct a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan from the Caspian Sea, a popular idea on far-left Web sites.

Hitherto, mainstream Democrats have avoided including the overthrow of the Taliban in their litany of President Bush's sins. That restraint appears to be fading.

John Kerry has so far been walking demurely one step behind people like McAuliffe. He was for deposing the Iraqi Ba'athists when they were against, then against the war when they were calling for an American bug-out. Now he is edging toward the bug-out position, having decided that Saddam was a non-terrorist who should have been left in power. So his associates are moving on, toward the view that the War on Terror was all a mistake and America ought to go back to sleep. One wonders whether Senator Kerry will follow them there, too. A sign of his direction will be whether he has any response to his party chairman's increasing radicalism.

Mandatory disclaimer: Senator John Kerry served in Vietnam, and the preceding remarks are not intended to question his patriotism.

Media Bias and Cash Balance Plans

If you pay any attention at all to news about employee benefits, but don't have a professional interest in the area, then you "know" that cash balance pension plans are a dubiously legal scheme for bilking workers out of promised retirement benefits. You have certainly read about Cooper v. IBM Personal Pension Plan, in which a District Court judge (in Madison County, Illinois, the country's most plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction) ruled earlier this year that cash balance plans violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and that IBM owes plan participants a gigantic, not yet calculated sum. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and every other major newspaper ran the story as front page news, and it was reported by all the networks. The general tone of the coverage was that the case was a major legal landmark, even if a few "employer representatives" were stubbornly resisting Judge Murphy's self-evidently irrefragible logic.

On June 10th, another District Court, this one in Maryland, addressed the same issue and reached the opposite conclusion. In Tootle v. ARINC Inc. [PDF file], Judge Catherine Blake rejected the arguments that had so impressed her Illinois colleague and held that ARINC's conversion of its "traditional" pension plan into a cash balance plan was perfectly legal.

This morning I checked Nexis. No publication in that massive database has carried even one story about Tootle. A search on the Wall Street Journal site likewise uncovered no coverage, though that paper's crusading anti-cash balance reporter Ellen Schultz had much to say about Cooper.

Is there reason to suspect that media bias extends beyond Iraq?

Further Reading: ERISA Industry Committee, "Hybrid Plan Research Studies" (a summary of empirical research on cash balance plans, showing that companies have been adopting them to meet employees' needs, not to cut costs surreptitiously)

Update: On July 11th, the Washington Post got around to mentioning Tootle v. ARINC, at the tail end of an article about privacy rules for medical records. I have been told by someone in a position to know that the reporter had previously prepared a separate story about the case, but the Post never ran it. The silence of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business Week et al. remains impressively uniform.

Quick Explanation

First off, this blog has nothing to do with Clement of Alexandria. It is an offshoot of my Web site, Stromata, where I post odds and ends (what "stromata" means in Greek) on politics (conservative), religion (orthodox and Orthodox), science fiction, ERISA (if you don't know what that means, you don't need to know), Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis, wargaming and sundry other topics. I've been posting there in a quasi-blog fashion for a couple of years, but the site is getting large, and publication can be quite a chore, with small changes taking a long time to upload to the host and go through processing. Spinning off the transient commentary is my device for coping.

To see what I was writing up to yesterday, click here.