I‘ve produced a new Phoenix build for Linux. This build adds support for the Xprint extension, which substantially improves printing under Linux. Download it here in bzip2 format. Like the earlier builds, it also supports the Xft font renderer (which allows subpixel rendering, similar to Microsoft's “ClearType”, for LCD screens) and is built against Gtk 2.0.

Ari Fleischer has just announced that W is addressing the nation at 9:15 CST, approximately 10 minutes from now. It’s on.

Mark Pilgrim has helpfully ported the Textile quick markup system to Python; for more information, see this post at Dive Into Mark.

Behind the scenes, I‘ve added support for it to the LSblog backend (just another new feature in the slouch toward a public release).

Bjørn Stærk today traces overwhelming opposition to war in Norway back to the lack of genuine debate:

[M]uch of the underlying American reasoning behind this war has not actually been presented to the Norwegian people, and when it is, only by those who oppose it. Many remain ignorant about the nature of the fundamental change of perspective that September 11 inflicted on American opinion, believing that the Americans are simply angry and vengeful, that they are gut-level patriots in need of an enemy image. That there might actually be some amount of intellectual activity going on behind the scenes of the Bush administration, activity that is motivated by any higher principles than winning the next election and gaining control of Iraq's oil, would be an utter surprise to many Norwegians - for the simple reason that we haven't been told that any such intellectual activity exists.

Every possible reason for being against this war has, on the other hand, been explored thoroughly and with eagerness. The result has been a debate without meaning, between an articulate anti-war movement and flagwaving strawmen. The peace movement has lost on this, intellectually, as has the war movement. It's an axiom of political debate that there are always intelligent, well-informed people who disagree with you. It's another axiom that the intellectual level of a debate sinks to the level of its dumbest participant, and there are few things dumber than opponents made out of straw.

I suspect that much is the same in most other non-English-speaking countries.

Laurence Simon of Amish Tech Support has helpfully translated the Palestinian Authority’s new civil defense website. Warning for the easily offended: there’s some bulldozer humor.

The Mox has belatedly posted her homeland security parody, too. It’s a hoot.

The VodkaMan will have live coverage of Bush's address. I'm a few minutes behind live TV on TiVo; I honestly don't expect anything new from this speech, though, and I don't expect the green light to be given tonight. But we shall see...

Conrad and Peaktalk ask the same question that I'd been wondering about: what happened to Chris Patten? The only conclusion I can reach is that spending too much time in Brussels has turned him into a Eurocrat drone. As Peaktalk reminds us, Patten once was relatively clueful:

There was a time when I deeply admired Chris Patten. That was when he was still Governor of Hong Kong. I met him a few times when I lived in Hong Kong, the last time when I picked up a few signed copies of his marvelous book “East and West”. You see, Patten was one of the people who promoted free markets and democracy as he so firmly believed in the theory that markets can flourish only in free societies where the rule of law guarantees freedom. That is why he set out to make some drastic changes in Hong Kong’s electoral process while that was still possible before the territory was handed back to China in 1997. He antagonized almost everyone at the time, the Hong Kong and international business community (who were afraid of missing out on deals with China), Hong Kong politicians (afraid of their new masters) and a variety of others who felt the need to be gentle with Beijing. Patten was at the time a lonely crusader supported by only a few. It was brave, it made sense and it was the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, Iain Murray thinks Patten is now eminently qualified to lead Oxford University. If so, let's hope they deprogram him when he crosses the Channel.

One of the few benefits of insomnia is that occasionally you find a TV show on cable that you'd never have found otherwise. Such is the case with TLC's new show “Faking It”, in which a person is recruited to pretend they have experience at something they don't have the faintest clue about; they train for a few weeks and then are presented to a panel of experts who is challenged to find the “faker.” It's sort of like the old game show “To Tell The Truth”, and probably gets its inspiration from the story of Frank Abagnale, the man who gained notoreity as a con artist by pretending to be qualified for jobs he had no training for (recounted in his book Catch Me If You Can and the movie of the same name).

The particular episode I saw was “Ivy League to Big League,” about a 24-year-old self-confessed geek and Harvard graduate (Lesley) who is transformed over three weeks into an Atlanta Falcons cheerleader. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the story isn't so much whether she succeeds or fails, but rather her struggle with an inferiority complex: despite her natural beauty, she still feels unattractive around the “real” cheerleaders. One of the most fascinating (in the Spock-ish, eyebrow-raising sense) things about women is that even most of the ones who don't act like they're obsessed with their appearance are, at least at some level, in a way most guys probably just can't comprehend — in that most guys care about their appearance, but I don't think I've ever met one who wants to look like Brad Pitt, or even compares his appearance to Brad Pitt's. There's probably a life-lesson buried in this fact, somewhere.

For those who aren't familiar with Florida, the state is not all that monolithic. Ocala, where I'm spending the week and finished up high school, is nestled in the hills of Central Florida and just west of the eponympous Ocala National Forest, and is one of the state's oldest cities (before the 1920s, the state was basically unsettled south of Tampa). The past few decades, it's become a retirement community and increasingly Republican.

But, like the rest of the state, it also has a growing Hispanic population, and nearby Orlando has a Univision affiliate with a very slick evening newscast (and, judging from my limited Spanish, a better newscast than the English-language stations). Still, it was somewhat jarring to be at Wal-Mart (waiting for my car's oil to be changed) and hear the following announcement: “Will a Spanish-speaking associate please pick up line two?” You don't hear that much in Mississippi.

That being said, Ocala is a community that has little to offer relatively young people. I suspect that of all those who will be at my 10th high school reunion, none of the ones who went to college will still be living in Ocala. I'm not sure there's much to do about it — notably, nearby Gainesville offers the bohemian life of a relatively large college town, although the cost of living is somewhat higher. Still, it's home (or at least, as much home as anywhere else has ever been for me), for better or for worse, and I'm sure I'll be back — but I probably won't stay until after my hair starts falling out.

You can tell you're completely disorganized when you think a conference is three weeks later than it actually is. Grr. Something tells me this conference paper isn't going to be a work of art...

Dad and I drove down to Mount Dora and the Lakeridge Winery today. On the way back, we passed three people by the side of the road (in southeast Marion County along CR 42 east of Weirsdale, for all zero people who read this blog from Ocala) waving American flags and with a spraypainted sign that read “Iraq then France.” I guess the meme is spreading...

I've decided to take the week off from blogging about the war and politics (mainly because I'm on vacation anyway).

The good news is that I will still be posting some content to the blog. I'm going to brainstorm a chapter of my dissertation online in an effort to nail down a definition of “political sophistication,” and to think about the best way to measure it.

Political sophistication is one of the concepts that lurks out there in the study of public opinion; it basically originates from the desire of rational choice scholars to come up with a summary measure of a person's political savvy, without getting inside the nasty psychological “black box.” We generally hypothesize that people with higher levels of political sophistication think about politics in different ways than the less sophisticated; they use information differently than the less sophisticated when making political decisions (for example, when evaluating candidates and voting).

There is some debate over how different political sophistication and political knowledge are; most contemporary studies treat political knowledge as a proxy for sophistication, if not an exact equivalent. There are some other debates too, which I'll probably touch on later in the week.

No, I'm not taking a position on the popular 80s hairstyle; I'm talking about a new compilation album I just saw advertised on television. I'm speechless.

Tom Friedman was on the CNBC Tim Russert show, not to be confused with Meet The Press, this evening. I was only paying half-attention (I was fighting with the modem on my laptop, which seems to not like this hotel's phone line), but it was quite an interesting interview. At points, Friedman sounded like Steven Den Beste, for example when he described the existing regimes in the region as “failures.”

However, Friedman was critical of the administration for failing to make the case for war, and described the upcoming conflict as “the most elite-driven war in American history.” On that point, I'm not sure any war in American history hasn't been driven by elites, with the possible exception of the Indian wars of the 19th century. Absent a direct threat to America's borders, I'm not sure a war driven by mass opinion is likely.

Having said that, I do think the Iraq war is probably about the hardest war to explain to the American public; the underlying theory — using Iraq as a waypoint to establishing a stable order in the Middle East — doesn't collapse to a nice soundbite, and the surface justifications (the tenuous links from Saddam Hussein to terror, the human rights situation within Iraq, the need for WMD disarmament, Iraq's pattern of evasion with the U.N.) don't make a clear-cut case for going to war. On the other hand, Kosovo exhibited many of the same characteristics, but it too was very elite-driven.

I skimmed a web design book at Barnes & Noble today that said you should underline your links. Rather than slavishly follow that advice, I've simply underlined the links in blog entries and left the rest alone. (The entry links are the most important ones to pick out, since they're buried in text. Underlining every link would be ugly.)

I also am experimenting with an alternate stylesheet that produces a “run-in” look like that used on a lot of Blogger blogs. If you have Mozilla or the Phoenix alternate stylesheet switcher plugin (it may also work in Camino™), you can play with it. You can also choose the so-called “serif look,” which uses a Serif font (like this) for entries. Unfortunately, these styles don't persist between page visits in Moz or Phoenix, so the usefulness is pretty limited for now.

Finally, behind the scenes, the front page is now moved over to a pure mod_python implementation using the Publisher handler. The main advantage (beyond a further speedup in the page rendering and cleaner code — no more fiddling with the FieldStorage class) is that it can properly deal with If-Modified-Since headers again; real CGIs did it automatically, but mod_python's CGI emulation doesn't handle them right for some odd reason. Still slouching toward a code release; the next step is to convert all the other backend scripts.

Colby Cosh considers the same question I considered here: is a transition to full-blown liberal democracy likely to produce a stable regime. He concludes:

If it takes an army to protect my most basic liberties, I'm comfortable with that, irrespective of what the rabble thinks. Would majoritarian democracy, free of army constraints, be the best thing for Turkey? Don't ask me: I'm not a Turk. I don't think there's much question about whether it would be good for Europe (no) or for international order generally (nope).

In a more general vein, Daniel Drezner discusses “illiberal democracy” worldwide, talking about The Economist's review of Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

I can't add much to either account, although I will say that generally upholding the rule of law is much more important to preserving liberty than the mechanisms of democracy. One of the sure signs of erosion of liberty in Hong Kong has been the gradual increase in arbitrary meddling from Beijing, while the undemocratic nature of the SAR government has had relatively little to do with it (for even in a democratic Hong Kong, there would still be plenty of levers for Communist Party meddling from outside the SAR).

Bill Hobbs has a post over at the Political State Report on an investigation into the contract between Tennessee and the Internet service provider that provides high-speed Internet access to 97% of Tennessee public schools, apparently part of a broader probe of the Sundquist administration's no-bid contracts with politically-connected companies. The Memphis Commercial Appeal has has a similar report.

Eric Muller apparently received a phone call from Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) this morning to discuss Rep. Coble's rather questionable remarks on Japanese internment.

While Muller comes away fairly impressed with Coble as a person, he still has some concerns:

It was also clear to me, though, that Mr. Coble does not yet appreciate that he was mistaken when he said that Japanese Americans were placed in camps for their own protection. He explained during our discussion that he'd heard from people, including Japanese Americans alive at the time of Pearl Harbor, who reported to him that Japanese Americans felt unsafe on the streets. From this information he's received, he concludes (and I jotted these words down) that "in some instances, Japanese Americans were beneficiaries of the internment." "There were some," he reiterated, "who became beneficiaries by being in the camps."

In some ways, this strikes me much as the Trent Lott Syndrome; it's not so much that Coble said something offensive, it's that he doesn't understand why what he said was offensive.

Even accepting Coble's premises — if the government's policy been justified as “protective custody” and a large percentage of Japanese Americans approved of it as protective custody — throwing the rest of them in camps hardly seems reasonable, fair, or just. And bearing in mind the historical record — that Japanese Americans had their property stolen, that internment had nothing to do with protecting them, and that they were arbitrarily imprisoned — his views seem remarkably callous and misinformed.

Then again, I'm not sure Coble's behavior is on the order of Lott's. But it does call for some repudiation; perhaps the House can do a bulk censure of him, Jim McDermott, and Marcy Kaptur to clear up the past few months' books, at least.

Link via Eugene Volokh.

David Adesnik is pissed off at the New York Times. And, frankly, I'd be too, if my nation was just described as part of a “motley ad hoc coalition.” If I were Howell Raines, I'd steer clear of Poland for the next, um, rest of my life. Then again, if I were Howell Raines I'd have a lot more problems than the Poles to deal with.

The ongoing lack of Clue™ of the “let inspections work” crowd, and their enablers at the Times, is simply mindboggling. Here's the Franco-Prussian solution to the Iraq crisis, in a nutshell:

1. Continue inspections.

2. Continue sanctions.

That's it. Never mind that the Franco-Prussian alliance has been trying for the past five years to evade and dismantle the sanctions regime. Never mind that for inspections to continue to “work,” in the limp sense that they do so, someone has to have 250,000 troops poised to invade Iraq indefinitely — and I don't see the freaking French or Germans volunteering to do that. So, the sum of Franco-Prussian foreign policy is to impose their idea of how to deal with Iraq by using the money and soldiers of Great Britain and the United States, which might be a good deal for Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, but is a thorougly rotten one for Tony Blair and George Bush, not to mention U.S. and U.K. taxpayers.

The entire point of collective security is for countries to work together to contain threats to the international system — not for some countries to freeload off the efforts of others while having the gall to tell the countries actually doing the work how they should do it.

Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh has some words for those who think Iraq and North Korea are interchangeable.

Matthew Yglesias comments on a proposal by Michael Walzer, which would have been a good idea a few months ago — and which would largely have obviated the need for the above rant. However, given France's withdrawal from enforcement of the “no-fly zones” in the late 1990s and their diplomatic efforts to undercut the sanctions regime, I'm not sure how Bush and Blair would have sold Chirac on the plan. If Chirac had gone along with a similar plan, though, France's credibility on Iraq would be much less questionable.

You can tell you're a complete idiot when even the freaking Iraqi government won't put up with your dumb ass anymore:

[Senior Iraqi official Abdul-Razzaq al-Hashimi] said the five who had been told to leave had set themselves up as representatives of the group and had been "holding unnecessary meetings, wasting time, knocking on doors at midnight...(and) asking stupid questions".

Meanwhile, Salam Pax isn't any happier with them than he was before:

"Basically, they said we are not going to feed you any longer," said John Ross, an American who has been active in radical causes since he tore up his draft card in 1964.

Excuse while I wipe the tears from my eyes. Outoutout. He could have at least say something more in line with his “radical cause”. This is a bit insulting actually for some reason I feel offended. FEED YOU? Why does the Iraqi government have to friggin’ feed you, you have volunteered to “help” in country which can’t feed its own population properly (well it could if it spent a bit less on itself and on people like you).

Meanwhile, the numb-nuts who transported many of the idiots to Baghdad has run into some trouble of his own, in that lovely vacation spot known as Beirut:

Two red double decker buses and a white London taxi that ferried anti-war activists to Baghdad to serve as "human shields" are stranded in Beirut with their owner short of the $5,500 it costs to ship them home.

The buses and taxi, dusty after a six-week overland journey that began at London's Tower Bridge, were plastered with signs saying "No to a war on Iraq" and "No to war, Yes to peace".

Apparently it hasn't occurred to this maroon that he could sell the buses and taxi in the Middle East, and buy replacements when he gets back to Britain. With “friends” like this, Saddam and the gang don't need enemies.

One of the pleasures of the Blogosphere is Howard Bashman's “How Appealing,” a weblog that discusses issues relating to appelate courts. His summary of today's four U.S. Supreme Court decisions is a classic; here's a sample:

Gary Ewing had been convicted of ten previous criminal offenses before he committed the crime that gave rise to yesterday's decision in Ewing v. California, No. 01-6978 (U.S. Mar. 5, 2003). Had each of those offenses counted as a strike, in baseball he would have had more than three outs and his side would have been retired. But four of those offenses did count as "serious" or "violent" felonies, subjecting Ewing to a twenty-five years to life sentence for his next felony conviction.

Perhaps aware of that fact, and undoubtedly growing tired of the life of crime, Ewing apparently decided to try his luck as a professional golfer. Successful golfers earn lots of money and don't have to resort to petty thievery just to stay afloat. Ewing's plan, however, had a minor hitch that revealed itself when he was apprehended while attempting to limp away from a golf pro shop with three golf clubs stuffed down his pant leg. As they say in the biz, "Strike Three."

And where else would you find out about both the use of kitty litter in the railroad industry and the mysterious properties of crystal formation in the same day?

Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of reaction to the press conference; I listened to it on the radio (well, technically the XM Radio simulcast of Fox News Channel, so it was TV without the pictures), and I think it came off about as well as a Bush speech ever seems to, which is to say that the ideas were solid and the tone was right (as in the State of the Union), but W will never go down in history as a great public speaker.

Then again, I'm not sure that many politicians these days are. Clinton was a decent public speaker (at least by comparison to the Bushes, Ross Perot, and Bob Dole), and Reagan of course was a master; on the other side of the pond, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher have it, but John Major decidedly didn't. And, for all the talk of congressional oratory, most of the representatives and senators I hear these days can't talk their ways out of paper bags, although I recently had a chance to hear John Spratt (D-S.C.) in person, and he did a fairly good job. Clearly being a good speaker is not a requirement for political success — although sometimes it can help.

I do wonder at some level who the speech was really aimed at. Several of the comments at Glenn's suggest that it was primarily for foreign consumption, while some of the commentary I heard on FNC suggested it was more pointedly aimed at the U.N. My gut feeling is that the place it will have the most effect is in Britain: the nuance won't get lost in translation, so there's a limited opportunity for spin, particularly if it doesn't get sound-bited to death.

I'm not sure that in the end it much matters, though; Blix will give a report that everyone can take something away from, some sort of resolution will be presented in the form of an ultimatum which will probably pass, and there will either be an internal putsch or a war. In six weeks, Chirac and Putin will be scrambling to make sure they are on good terms with a new Iraqi government, while Schröder will be preoccupied with domestic concerns, namely trying desperately to keep the Greens in government.

Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz has dug up an interesting Walter Mead piece on French anti-Americanism and its historical roots; it may help U.S. readers understand what's going on in the minds of the French intellectual elite. Meanwhile, I think Dan Drezner's update to his earlier “Dark Day” post is on-target:

I strongly suspect that France has grossly miscalculated the administration's willingness to act regardless of what transpires at the Security Council this week.

Chirac and de Villepin think U.S. foreign policy is not that different from that of the French. In that, they have indeed “grossly miscalculated.”

By the way, $20 says that the increasingly batty Helen Thomas hasn't been credentialed for tonight's primetime press conference.

Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered has been tracking the evolution in the Grizzlies boycott story in the pages of the Commercial Appeal over the past few days. Having waged my own quixotic battles against the Memphis media in the past (both the divine ra-ra sisterhood of the CA — the URL isn't the boosterish “GoMemphis.com” for nothing — and the holier-than-thou Memphis Flyer), I certainly recognize the pattern.

Meanwhile, Bill Hobbs rhetorically asks why the Oak Ridge TABOR story isn't getting any traction. I think we all know the possible answers to that, at least from the CA's perspective (circle the ones you think apply):

• The CA doesn't want uppity Memphians — or heaven forbid, the dreaded suburban voters — getting any ideas about asking for a charter commission.

• The CA doesn't think any part of Tennessee exists east of Lebanon.

• The CA didn't receive a press release on it.

• The CA isn't as good a newspaper as their fellow Scripps-Howard rag, the Knoxville News-Sentinel.

• The CA can't figure out how to write one of its classic “we take absolutely no position on this issue, but feel like blathering on for several hundred words” editorials about it.

By the way, you can choose more than one option...

Mike circles all of the above, and adds some possible answers of his own for good measure, while Bill helpfully informs that the CA does at least know about the story, although it wasn't in the form of a press release so technically (c) is still on the table as a viable answer.

Daniel Drezner describes today as a depressing day for U.S. foreign policy, an assessment I largely agree with, even if it may be a necessary day for our foreign policy — in the sense I'm not all that sure that there's much that could have been done differently*, short of calling the whole thing off. As Dan says:

The U.S. has to deal with the resentment that comes with being the global hegemon, China, Germany, France and Russia acting like spoiled teenage brats, and a lot of trouble spots in the globe. The Bush administration has not been dealt the best of diplomatic hands. That said, today is one of those days when I think the administration could be husbanding its valuable cards a little better.

In a better world, we could do right by the Mexicans, but 9/11 changed the domestic calculus there (erroneously, in my opinion — Mexican immigrants are no more a threat to America's way of life than Canadians are). In a better world, China and South Korea would be stepping up to the plate to deal with North Korea, the latter's bluster aside. On the other hand, American global hegemony is the only viable global order for the forseeable future — and the actions of France and Germany in this crisis, much to their eventual dismay, will perpetuate that hegemony (a hegemony that most Americans would just as soon have no part in leading, by the way) by further demonstrating to the world that the European Union's alleged leaders do not take their responsibilities toward global security seriously.

* We're firmly in the could have been done stage; what we're witnessing now is very much the calm before the gathering storm.