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.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is being re-released to theaters.

Perhaps as a double-feature with Passion of the Christ?

Is it just me, or is David Bernstein striving to single-handedly turn the Volokh Conspiracy into Little Green Footballs?

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.

Last week I asked readers to submit Schelling points for Memphis: places that you would go to meet somebody if you had prearranged the meeting time but not the place, and you just had to guess where that person would be (knowing that the other person would be guessing where you would be). I also asked about Schelling points for the U.S. and the world.

I myself would choose the gates of Graceland for Memphis, the steps of the Capitol for the U.S., and the top of the Eiffel Tower for the world.

In Memphis, Scott Hayes and Mike Hollihan would meet me at the gates of Graceland.

Randal Woodland would miss me, because he would be in the lobby of the Peabody, “even though I’m resigned to the fact that the person I’m meeting will probably be at Graceland.” Alexander Ignatiev and Chip Taylor will be there as well.

For the U.S., there will be no successful meeting. Scott Hayes will at least be in the same city as I will, but at the Washington Monument. Alexander Ignatiev will be in New York at Madison Square Garden. Chip Taylor and Scott Hayes will also be in New York, at the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, respectively.

In the world, Skip Perry will meet me at the Eiffel Tower. Alexander Ignatiev will be at Trafalgar Square, and Scott Hayes will be at the Taj Mahal.

Thanks to everyone who submitted answers!

Brian Doherty, in the American Spectator, writes a eulogy for Dave Sim’s comic book epic Cerebus, which ended this month with the 300th issue.

Digging back through my comic boxes, I see that I stopped reading Cerebus at issue 206, at which point the mysogyny and general pretentiousness became too much for me. Doherty’s article makes me think I didn’t really miss anything in the last 94 issues.

But I highly recommend picking up a copy of High Society.

Hat tip to Hit and Run.

Via John Gorenfeld, I learned that my Congressman, Harold Ford, Jr., was present at last night’s “Crown of Peace” awards dinner, hosted by none other than the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Moon himself received an award for “lifelong public service.”

Harold Ford, Jr., as Chris has noted before is “Congressman-for-life-if-he-wants-it,” and I doubt his Republican opponent for the Senate in 2008 will be able to make much of this, given the closeness of Moon to certain prominent Republicans. But Ford is rumored to have even higher ambitions, and an association with the loathsome Moon would not be something I would want on my resume if I were running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 or 2020.

Hat tip to Wonkette.

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.