The Baseball Crank has a pretty good analysis of the Clinton-Bush response to terror prior to 9/11. Key graf:

Bottom line: yes, in hindsight, both the Bush and Clinton Administrations, with more foresight, could have done more on both counts [Iraq and al-Qaeda]. Yes, they should have done more. Yes, I hand Clinton the larger share of the blame, at least as far as the failure to develop a long-range offensive strategy is concerned – whereas it appears that Bush was at least thinking in that direction. On the defensive question (i.e., having the homeland on alert), there’s less to fault Clinton and a bit to question about Bush, but I regard the failings as mostly institutional – the problem was the inability to pursue evidentiary leads and get urgent warnings up the ladder, rather than a failure of leadership.

Elsewhere: The Belgravia Dispatch finds The New Republic in November 2001 saying much different things about Richard Clarke than it is today (scroll down to “Interesting Update” – link via Glenn Reynolds), while Steven Taylor and Dan Drezner, as always, have interesting things to say.

Sean Hackbarth notes that widespread dissatisfaction with the efficiency of the government’s airline screening may lead to over 100 (of 429) commercial airports ditching TSA screeners once the government screening monopoly ends in mid-November.

The bad news first: two more Φ letters today. Neither, however, had the audacity to take the opportunity to tell me how great the person they hired is; for that, I am happy.

The good news: it looks like I’ll be spending about a week in France this summer at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, working on printing stuff for free software, like the semi-stalled Foomatic-GUI and the Debian Foomatic packages, thanks to the meeting’s sponsors (as I couldn’t afford the trip myself, that elusive tenure-track job still not having shown up at my door). It’s hard to believe I haven’t been to France in 14 years; I probably should brush up on my French, n’est-ce que pas?

Congratulations to Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida on finishing his port of Textile 2 syntax to Python. I’ll be shunting it in “behind the scenes” here at Signifying Nothing shortly.

Eugene Volokh points out a law professor who’s integrating a blog into the classroom experience. I’ve personally wondered whether that would be appropriate for an undergraduate course; presumably, the privacy issue isn’t problematic (or, at least, no more problematic than requiring students to give oral presentations). I guess the main issue is whether a professor can expect students to be technically competent enough to use a blog properly—though I suspect the undergraduate who can’t use a word processor, a harder task than blogging, is few and far between.

Of course, before a practical implementation for LSblog, I’d have to add all the security code I’ve been meaning to add behind the scenes (to make a distinction between users and administrators—at the moment, anyone with a login can hose the blog). Projects, projects…

My more immediate concern, however, is writing a paper for the Midwest conference. I figure if Dan Drezner can spin his blog posts into an article in Foreign Affairs, I can spin this into a conference paper. I’ll post more about it when I actually accomplish something on it…

Tyler Cowen points out new research that indicates no-fault divorce laws have led to lower levels of domestic violence and suicide among women.

Jacob Levy has a very good post on the Pledge of Allegiance and its contemporary meaning. I tend to agree with Levy that “[i]f the words are not serious—and they’re not, anymore—if they’re just mindless blather, then they demean something that shouldn’t be demeaned.” When something is said by rote rather than with conviction—as the Pledge is, daily, in public schools—I think it is inherently devalued.

Not that this has much to do with the constitutionality of including “under God” in the pledge, mind you, as Jacob acknowledges. And I’m not sure what exactly to make of Jacob’s suggestion of “a one-time citizenship oath sworn at age 18” as an alternative to the Pledge. But I do think that people who take God seriously ought to wonder whether His name ought to be included as a footnote of something that our society treats as nothing more than a ritual incantation.

Kelley is shocked to learn that the Georgia legislature is proposing a law that will ban not only the barbaric practice known as “female genital mutilation” or FGM (which I’ll spare you the details of), but also female genital piercings.

I think the general reaction to today’s Richard Clarke testimony can be summed up as something of a redux of the David Kay testimony a few months back: everyone was able to take away something to reinforce their preexisting views, and a few blowhard politicos got to spend a lot of time listening to themselves talk.

What’s pretty obvious is that Clarke is saying significantly different things today than he was in 2002. And, as Steven Taylor and Stephen Green note, Clarke wasn’t exactly winning friends and influencing people up on the Hill during either the Clinton or Bush administrations; the normally mild-mannered Chris Shays had this, in part, to say about Clarke’s help to his subcommittee on national security:

Before September 11, 2001, we held twenty hearings and two formal briefings on terrorism issues. Mr. Clarke was of little help in our oversight. When he briefed the Subcommittee, his answers were both evasive and derisive.

Shays, as Taylor notes, is no Republican firebrand—he was one of the few GOP congressmen to not support Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, and has been somewhat marginalized in the caucus for that stand.

The substance of Clarke’s criticisms seems to actually be refuted by the evidence (not to mention his own words from 2002 and earlier)—the administration was formulating an aggressive policy to go after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda even prior to 9/11, administration officials Clarke criticizes (most notably, Condoleeza Rice) were well versed in the threat that al-Qaeda posed to the United States,* and the administration kept Iraq on the “back burner” for over a year after the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan.

Dowingba has a rather ridiculous viewpoint on the SCO/Linux dispute:

Now, I haven’t been following the SCO vs Linux debate very closely, but the MyDoom DDOS attack automatically made me lose sympathy for the Linux argument. Only children and terrorists act that way when they have run out of arguments. Admit you’re wrong, make a new OS, or shut up.

As I pointed out in his comment section, MyDoom (and its variants) was almost certainly the product of a few immature “script kiddies,” and while a few morons at Slashdot cheered it on, they don’t represent the Linux community at all. I recommend reading the background on the SCO/Linux dispute, rather than casting aspersions based on the behavior of idiots who have little, if anything, to do with Linux.

Update: Dowingba has updated his post, explaining his position a bit better. For my part, I think the statement that Linux advocates should “admit you’re wrong, make a new OS, or shut up” is what really set me off: SCO is clearly in the wrong and is grasping at straws because its own efforts to promote Linux under its former name “Caldera” foundered—so now it’s shaking down everyone and anyone who actually had a decent business plan.

Amanda Butler has a first-hand report on the oral argument of Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (a.k.a. the Pledge of Allegiance case). Like Amanda, I think Newdow has the better argument here; however, I doubt that will be enough to sway 5 justices to strip “under God” from the pledge.

The idea of “Deliberation Day” is back in the press, and Steven Taylor—a former student of James Fishkin at UT-Austin—finds the whole idea rather wanting:

There is also the problem of what will be told to the citizens-for-hire during that 24 hour period. I know for a fact that both Ackerman and Fishkin are both rather focused on the issue of distrbutive justice (read: economic distribution) in the context of the liberal state (and not, specifically a classical liberal state but the liberal-welfare state that emerges as a strain of liberalism in the twentieth century). For example, Ackerman’s Social Justice in the Liberal State (1980) while well-written, highly readable, and fun to discuss in class, is a remarkably impractical (and, to me, utterly unpersuasive) attempt to justify economic egalitarianism (at least at the start of each generation).

As for civic competence in general:

Further, if we want better citizens, how about just providing better and more complete American Government classes in High School? How about having someone other than the basketball coach teach government and history? These seem more auspicious places to start.

You can read Brendan Conway’s critique of Ackerman and Fishkin at OpinionJournal (or, quite possibly, in the actual Wall Street Journal), which contains this rather devastating passage:

To test things out, Messrs. Ackerman and Fishkin conducted experimental “deliberative polls” to simulate DDay. To be sure, the weekend-long events seemed to make participants know more. But they also ended up as more vocal advocates of government activism. Perhaps this wasn’t a coincidence.

Foreign aid, energy-conservation schemes, the United Nations and revenue-sharing all became more popular over the course of the polls. Is this because smarter, more informed citizens arrive at activist, liberal positions? It is impossible to avoid the impression that the authors think so. “Participants entered the Deliberative Poll as citizens of the United States and left, to some measurable degree, as citizens of the world,” they write approvingly. Maybe the briefing materials had something to do with this transformation. They were “typically supervised for balance and accuracy by an advisory board of relevant experts and stakeholders.”

This claim raises an interesting question: Just who decides who it is who decides what is balanced and accurate? Maybe Messrs. Ackerman and Fishkin do, or experts they trust. But isn’t that in itself a problem? Indeed, the whole notion of DDay is, in its essence, nondeliberative. Its rules and forms and structures—not to mention those briefing materials and the advisers who supervise them—are handed down from on high rather than arrived at through democratic, um, deliberation. This is a rich irony of which the authors are seemingly unaware.

I previously took issue with Ackerman and Fishkin’s idea here and here.

Update: Robert Musil has more.

As James Joyner notes, the Invisible Adjunct is leaving the building: both the halls of academe and the world of blogging. As someone who’s seriously considered departing the academy himself (although for financial rather than career-related reasons—though, if I don’t have a job lined up for the fall by the end of next month, it could very well be for both), I wish IA all the best in whatever she finds to do post-academe.

Michael Jennings ponders who pays who to include the trial versions of Norton AntiVirus on laptops. My guess is Norton supplies the software either gratis or at a low, lump-sum price.

I’m most unlikely to pay for an anti-virus subscription on my new laptop, as I have a virus scanner that processes all my mail anyway, and I really don’t download much software for Windows (except essential stuff like Adobe Reader and the like); I do most of my real work in Linux, and have done for going on a decade. If I see a Norton Utilities 2004 bundle (which includes an annual Norton Anti-Virus subscription) especially cheap at Costco, however, I might reconsider.

I was sort-of thinking in the back of my mind that if incoming Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero wanted to prove he was serious about terrorism, he’d reassign those troops he’s talking about removing from Iraq to Afghanistan. As Edward of Obsidian Wings notes, that’s pretty much what he plans to do. Good for him.

Now, if he’d actually been smart enough to announce this proposal at the time he was talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq, he might have been spared the blistering treatment he got from this side of the pond.

David Adesnik writes:

But when it comes down to getting votes, I think there are only two questions that really matter: Did Bush ignore (and then withhold) compelling evidence that Al Qaeda was preparing a major attack? And did Bush knowingly lie about Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological (not nuclear) weapons? Unless Clarke can answer one or both of those questions in the affirmative, his revelations won’t amount to much more than a very loud footnote.

I think that’s just about right.

Update: Dan Drezner has a roundup and a more expert reaction.

One thing I will say: the sum total of my international relations training is four graduate courses, and my scholarship focuses on mass political behavior (public opinion, voting behavior, political parties, things like that) and legislative behavior, not IR theory or practice. I’ll defer to Dan and James Joyner on the substance of IR policy—though, to the extent the discussion has an impact on electoral politics or public opinion, I’m probably a decent judge.

Both Chelle and Steven Taylor have come to know the bliss that is Mozilla Firefox.

Shouldn’t the real story in this account be that Aggie football player Geoff Hangartner was charged with driving while intoxicated—a criminal offense that endangers the lives of others, I might mention—and not whether or not he used “racial slurs”—a form of vile and offensive behavior that might have endangered his own life but doesn’t lead to physical danger to others?

Eric Lindholm and Wind Rider think the results of Malaysia’s latest election are cause for celebration and a repudiation of fundamentalist Islam by that country’s voters. While undoubtably the incoming National Front coalition government (led by the UMNO) of Abdullah Badawi will continue to pay lip service to western governments’ fight against Islamic terror, I would be most cautious in characterizing any electoral outcome in Malaysia as reflecting popular opinion—graft, patronage, corruption, gerrymandering, and other undemocratic ills are rife in Malaysian politics, and while the departure of Badawi’s predecessor, the vile Mahathir Mohammed, from the public scene is welcome, it is unlikely that his hands are very far from the levers of power in Kuala Lampur.

For more background on Malaysia’s electoral process, I strongly recommend The Economist’s coverage ($). According to the piece, the UMNO wasn’t exactly shy about its religious credentials during the campaign:

At campaign rallies around the state [of Kedah, which borders Thailand in the northwest part of the country], leaders from both parties [UMNO and the Islamic PAS] harp on about the Koran and utter incantations in Arabic. Mr Badawi's father was a respected religious scholar, and he himself studied Islam at university. Compared to his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, who took it upon himself to interpret the true meaning of the faith despite a relatively secular upbringing, Mr Badawi is the very image of learned and measured piety.

And, the election was essentially rigged from the get go:

The electoral rules are also heavily stacked in the National Front's favour. Malaysia's first-past-the-post system translates small margins of victory into big parliamentary majorities. The eight-day campaign period has left the opposition with almost no time to raise its profile with the electorate. The media is unashamedly biased, with adulation of the ruling party interrupted only by dismissive digs at the opposition. The Election Commission, too, has redrawn districts in a manner that favours UMNO. In Kedah, for example, it helpfully moved an area that UMNO had won by over 5,000 votes in 1999 into a constituency that PAS had won by 3,000 votes. Of 26 new parliamentary seats, not one was awarded to Kedah, Kelantan or Terengganu, the states where PAS is strongest. The government, it seems, has more influence than god, even in a god-fearing state like Kedah.

Of course, if your primary concern isn’t democracy but global government “support” for the War on Terror, I guess you could see this as good news.

This is my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

Update: Glenn Reynolds is also (unjustly) enthused about the results.

Much blogospheric virtual ink has been spilled over Richard Clarke’s new book revelations about internal administration discussions about the response to 9/11. I am generally compelled to agree with Steven Taylor and James Joyner, who generally characterize the revelations as “old wine in new bottles,” to borrow a phrase.

Nevertheless, the political risk to the Bush administration is substantial. Not just because of the flood-the-zone coverage that Kevin Drum has applied or the widespread optimism that this scandal will stick to the Teflon Shrub, but also because it dovetails nicely with the Lisa Myers spin on the reactions of the Bush and Clinton administrations to Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11: Clinton was “too weakened by scandal” to attack Osama (in the two years after impeachment, mind you), so the blame necessarily falls to Bush—who, you might recall, didn’t exactly have the strongest of mandates from the electorate—in the eight months of his administration prior to 9/11.

Nonetheless I think the political argument for using Dick Cheney as the fall guy is stronger than ever—not right away, but a mid-June announcement that Mr. Cheney’s ticker isn’t 100% seems increasingly likely (particularly if Cheney v. U.S.D.C. District of Columbia looks like it went badly).

Update: Dan Darling points out Clarke’s role in the decision to attack the Sudanese al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998, which was based on allegations that Osama bin Laden was working with Iraq to produce VX nerve gas precursors at the facility.

Heidi Bond feels as if she is “being nibbled to death by cats.” Somehow that seems oddly appropriate given her running battle with Will Baude over the merits and demerits of ducks.

Well, it’s not quite as exciting as the demise of Osama—or even al-Zawahiri—but if you’re a friend of Israel (or just an enemy of terror), the departure of Hamas ringleader Sheik Ahmed Yassin from this earth will be quite delightful news.

If you haven’t had your quota of hysterical laughter today, I recommend perusing the reaction of Ahmed Qureia, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority:

This is a crazy and very dangerous act. It opens the door wide to chaos. Yassin is known for his moderation and he was controlling Hamas and therefore this is a dangerous, cowardly act. [emphasis added]

Of course, this is a perfectly understandable reaction once you realize that Yassin’s death puts Mr. Qureia’s boss at the head of the Israelis’ list.

Steven Taylor’s bracket is hosed. So is my entry in The Kitchen Cabinet’s annual tourney, as I picked Kentucky to win it all. Damn that siren Ashley Judd!

In other NCAA news, the Ole Miss Lady Rebels got beat by Villanova in the first round of the NCAA Womens’ Tournament tonight. The good news: the Rebel baseball team swept Vandy in this weekend’s three-game series, improving their record to 17–1 on the season. Oh, and I heard that Starkville A&M Mississippi State got their asses kicked by Xavier too.

Here’s the bracket update.

Kelley of suburban blight is suitably excited about her discovery of the assorted writings of Bill Bryson. I think my favorite Bryson book is Notes from a Small Island (perhaps, in part, because I shared the experience of being an American who lived in Britain), but they’re all excellent.

Mike Hollihan pretty much sums up my feelings about the Madison Avenue trolley light rail line, a taxpayers’ boondoggle to end all boondoggles and a classic example of GNDN. Of course, the worst—a $400 million extension to the airport, with $100 million to come from both state and local government (and $200 million from Uncle Sam via your federal 18.4¢/gal gasoline tax)—is yet to come.

There is one bit, though, that I disagree with Mike on: he says the project is “a windfall for road builders.” Considering that the $100 million the state could kick in would match $400 million of federal money for a highway project (rather than $200 million for light rail), any sensible roadbuilder would favor building a highway. At $10 million per mile, the going rate for a rural Interstate highway, $500 million would build most of I-69 between Memphis and Dyersburg—and leave Memphis and Shelby County with $100 million in capital improvement funds for something else, like pretty much every road project on the Memphis/Shelby County long-range transportation plan. And, of course, the road-builders are getting their cash either way.