Xrlq is kind enough to donate some of his web space to partisan hack valued former public servant Richard Ben-Veniste to discuss the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing. In other news, partisan hack valued random guy from California who somehow got The Washington Monthly to pay him to be a partisan hack blogger Kevin Drum seems to agree with Ben-Veniste-as-channeled-by-Xrlq, while partisan hack political scientist Steven Taylor disagrees.

Congratulations to Martin Michlmayr on winning reelection as Debian Project Leader; even though I supported another candidate in the election, I think Martin will continue to do good work for the project in this position.

Robert Prather agrees with Jeralynn of TalkLeft that the proposed Victims’ Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a bad idea, and I tend to agree with that assessment.

In general, the amendment seems to be an example of a solution that is in search of a problem. At the federal level, there is nothing in this proposed amendment that couldn’t be guaranteed by statute in federal criminal proceedings. At the state level, there is little evidence that states have failed to consider (and either accept or reject) the need for similar provisions in their jurisdictions, or have deliberately excluded the interests of crime victims from political debate, which is the general threshold I’d say you need to cross to justify a federal intervention into areas of traditional state sovereignty like criminal justice.

In any event, you can read the full text of the proposed amendment at THOMAS and decide for yourself.

I haven’t been “flooding the zone” on Chris Dodd’s idiotic praise of good ole Bobby “The Klansman” Byrd for a variety of reasons—not the least of which is, whatever other faults Dodd has, a history as a neo-segregationist isn’t one of them, which usefully distinguishes him from Trent Lott.

However, Robert Prather has a pretty good post from a less forgiving point of view. Plus, he takes a few well-deserved swings at Hesiod, who’s sort of the downmarket version of Atrios.

If anyone ever tells you to take seriously the comments of a former British cabinet member, here’s a new counterexample to add to your arsenal (along with the ravings of Robin Cook and Claire Short):

[Former Northern Ireland secretary] Mo Mowlam has called on the British and American governments to open talks with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Bear in mind, of course, that Ms. Mowlam’s former bailiwick (i.e. trying to stop the Provos and Loyalists from killing one another and returning responsible government to Ulster) is hardly a model of efficiency and good order, even today. It might also be worth bearing in mind that, to open talks with Mr. bin Laden, first we’d probably have to find him. Even the peacenik Liberal Democrats aren’t buying this lousy bill of goods:

Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell criticised Ms Mowlam’s remarks.

“What possible result would there be from sitting down with al-Qaeda?” he asked.

“Their intention is to destroy the liberal values upon which our way of life is based.

“You cannot negotiate with those whose aim is your own destruction.”

It’s nice to see good sense is alive and well in at least some quarters across the pond.

Link via Jeremy of Who Knew?

Jeff Jarvis gives a pretty good flavor of the complete joke that the 9/11 Commission is. For all the people who say George W. Bush is a moron (and Lord knows I agree with that assessment in a lot of ways), he was certainly correct to resist both this idiotic commission and its pointless cousin foisted on us by Congress, the Department of Homeland Security.

Tim Sandefur gets straight to the heart of things: the commission is simply “a symposium of blowhards.”

Josh Barro (one of the Harvard Republicans) points out the reason only one person died when the City of New Orleans derailed near Yazoo City yesterday: practically nobody was aboard:

[The train carried 68 passengers and 12 crewmembers.] That works out to 7.56 passengers per car and 5.67 passengers per crew member. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few passengers are enticed by a train that can take them from New Orleans to Chicago in just 19 hours and 5 minutes. If this train is any indication of ridership on Amtrak’s routes outside metropolitan corridors, it’s no wonder its director says it needs a $1.8 billion dollar subsidy to continue operating in 2005.

They particularly aren’t enticed by a train that costs $182 to ride round-trip, $320 if you want to ride on the lower level, and a whopping $520 if you want to have a bed to sleep in. By contrast, you can fly non-stop round-trip to Chicago from New Orleans next weekend for $398… or, if you’re willing to do some advance planning, you can fly round-trip for $244 over a weekend in May. Not to mention that your trip will be almost 17 hours shorter in duration.

Or, you can ride Greyhound, completely unsubsidized,* for $138 round trip—and, if you pick the right bus, it doesn’t take much more time than the Amtrak train.

Update: * Both Stephen Karlson and a reader point out that there is a gross subsidy to the highway system (i.e. almost all highways are paid for by the state and federal governments); my point was, however, that the net subsidy is essentially zero, as all highway spending in the United States (except expenditures on low-volume local streets, which are usually supplemented by local property taxes—such streets would be necessary even in a less car-dependent society, mind you) comes from state and federal motor fuel taxes, which are borne by highway users such as Greyhound; in fact, highway taxes also pay much of the budget of the Federal Transit Administration, which is responsible for mass transit in urban areas. Apologies for any confusion.

Is there anyone who thinks this plan is a good use of time and resources?* I realize that the fungibility of resources (a fancy way of saying the ability to “walk and chew gum at the same time”) is often overrated, that DOJ‘s “porn surfers” wouldn’t be much help in the War on Terror, and there is a bit of a dark side to the “legit” pornography industry that takes advantage of young (but legally adult) women from abusive backgounds, but a crackdown on dirty movies seems like a pretty stupid idea nonetheless. I personally would have no beef with a crackdown on “kiddie porn” and the like, but as Glenn Reynolds points out the Ashcroft plan goes far beyond this eminently reasonable target to go after such examples of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Porn” as Skinemax and Spectravision.

But, if we must do this, I think David Adesnik’s solution of having the ex-Taliban Gitmo detainees do the, er, heavy lifting seems appropriate. And I suspect the reaction of Josh Barro of the Harvard Republicans reflects that of most young conservatives: a healthy dollop of “what the hell are they thinking?”

Everyone’s favorite ex-Klansman, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), is back in the news, on the occasion of casting his 17,000th vote in the United States Senate (rumors that the vote was the one completing the wholesale transfer of the federal government to West Virginia are greatly exaggerated).

As when Trent Lott got a bit effusive in praising the longeivity of Strom Thurmond, though, this has become an event where a number of Senators decided “to heck with nuance,” and got a bit too enthusiastic about all of Sen. Byrd’s life.

One such quote is from Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Ct.). Unfortunately, there’s a bit of controversy regarding the provenance of the quote. So, to set the record straight, here is the complete text of Sen. Dodd’s remarks, from Thursday’s edition of the Congressional Record:

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I add my voice as well to my seatmate, if I may. I sit in this chair by choice. Senator Byrd sits in his chair by choice as well, but he makes the choice before I do. I wanted to find out where he was going to sit so I could sit next to him. I did that because I wanted to sit next to the best, to learn everything I possibly could about the ability of this institution to provide the kind of leadership I think the country expects of us.

Several thoughts come to mind. This is a day of obvious significance in the number of votes that have been cast, 17,000, but it is far more important to talk about quality than quantity. Quantity is not an insignificant achievement, but the quality of my colleague and friend’s service is what I think about when the name ROBERT C. BYRD comes to my mind.

I carry with me every single day, 7 days a week, a rather threadbare copy of the United States Constitution given to me many years ago—I can’t even read it well now; it is so worn out—I may need a new copy—given to me by my seatmate, ROBERT C. BYRD. I revere it. I tell people why I carry it because it reminds me of the incredible gift given to me by the people of Connecticut to serve in this Chamber, to remind me of the importance of an oath we all made, and that is to do everything we can to preserve, protect, and defend the principles upon which this Nation was founded. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my mind, is the embodiment of that goal.

It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation’s 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.

I join my colleagues in thanking the Senator from West Virginia for the privilege of serving with him. He has now had to endure two members of my family as colleagues. Senator Byrd was elected to the Senate in 1958 along with my father. He served with my father in the House. I have now had the privilege of serving with Senator Byrd for 24 years, twice the length of service of my father. That is an awful lot of time to put up with members of the Dodd family. We thank Senator Byrd for his endurance through all of that time.

There is no one I admire more, there is no one to whom I listen more closely and carefully when he speaks on any subject matter. I echo the comments of my colleague from Massachusetts. If I had to pick out any particular point of service for which I admire the Senator most, it is his unyielding defense of the Constitution. All matters come and go. We cast votes on such a variety of issues, but Senator Byrd’s determination to defend and protect this document which serves as our rudder as we sail through the most difficult of waters is something that I admire beyond all else.

I join in this moment in saying: Thank you for your service, thank you for your friendship, and I look forward to many more years of sitting next to you on the floor of the Senate.

I yield the floor.

In any event, you can find potentially embarassing quotes from about half the Senate in the series of effusive comments about Sen. Byrd.

David Bernstein, among my co-blogger’s least favorite Volokh Conspirators, links a New York Times piece on the passage of the House version of the transportation reauthorization bill.

Now the article is written by “David Stout,” whose job apparently is to rewrite AP copy for the NYT website; to my knowledge, “his” articles never appear in print (and “he” may just be a pseudonym for a group of copy editors). What’s weird about the article? Let’s pull out some excerpts:

Regardless of the real figure, President Bush has threatened to veto the measure as too costly at a time that he and Congressional Republicans are supposed to be serious about holding down the federal deficit.

I believe this is a run-on sentence, to begin with. And the second half of the sentence looks like an editorial comment, not news reporting.

“Thirty billion, when you are cutting the deficit in half in five years, is real money,” Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the other day, apparently with no humor intended.

“The other day” seems rather imprecise for dating a quotation for a newspaper article. And the statement that this was said “apparently with no humor intended” is a complete non-sequitor. (The quote appears to have been cribbed from this Carl Hulse article dated April 1.)

The highway-spending bill enjoys wide support among Democrats and Republicans alike because the members of both parties have something in common: their constituents use highways (and bridges and bike paths and other incidentals wrapped into the bill.)

Again, another strange paragraph; this one isn’t even punctuated correctly—the “incidentals,” by the way, include the entire Federal Transit Administration; a rather large “incidental,” wouldn’t you think? Strange.

(Hulse’s article in Saturday’s paper is far more coherent.)

I ought to make this a daily feature… today’s lowlights:

• Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) thinks his November election opponent looks like Uday or Qusay Hussein. Only if Dr. Mongiardo is loading his patients in the wood-chipper, methinks.
• UW-Madison sophomore Audrey Seiler was responsible for her own alleged kidnapping.
• Oh, yeah, well-connected Democratic party hack/consultant Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is subhuman scum.

Josh Chafetz and Andrew Sullivan have been having a bit of a back-and-forth over whether the gas tax should be raised. As Josh pointed out yesterday, such a tax would be highly regressive, particularly hitting the working poor in rural communities that don’t have mass transit.

It would also be bad policy for another reason: the gasoline tax is essentially a user fee. Most of the revenues of the federal gas tax are returned to the states (according to a rather arcane formula that just happens to shift funds from rural America to the Northeast) to pay for the federal share of major highway construction and resurfacing projects, while the rest of the money helps pay for the federal mass transit subsidy (thus, Mr. Sullivan, who doesn’t operate his own vehicle, receives a massive subsidy from those of us who drive). Diverting gas tax revenues to the general fund would arguably be even more crooked than diverting money from the Social Security tax to pay for the defense budget, or taking FICA receipts and using those to operate the postal service.

And, while I generally share their dislike for the sport utility vehicle (though am puzzled why comparably gas-guzzling vehicles like minivans escape their wrath), raising the gas tax would be a very crude instrument for reducing demand for SUVs: while people do respond to price signals over the long term, over the short run the demand for gasoline is rather price inelastic. But if your animus for the SUV is motivated by its gas-guzzling properties, rather than its appearance, you’ll be happy to know that Toyota will be introducing a hybrid gas-electric SUV next year, the Highlander Hybrid, which will provide “the fuel economy of a four-cylinder compact sedan.”

Update: Stephen Karlson properly takes note of the market-distorting effects of the rather arbitrary division between cars and trucks in the CAFE standard, which “effectively preclude some sport-ute and minivan drivers from substituting one size downward” to station wagons and large sedans.

Von in pondering the continual PR nightmare that is the Bush administration observes:

Thank God there’s some good economic news—and that Kerry is so freaking weak as a candidate.

I suppose if you’re a Republican, that might be worth being thankful for. But, it seems to me, the completely lackluster nature of John F. Kerry would be a serious drawback if you wanted to be able to vote for a credible alternative to Bush this fall without holding your nose.

Since Sebastian Holsclaw is reposting some of his early stuff at from his own blog at Obsidian Wings, I’ll take the opportunity to repost my response to his post. I wrote:

Sebastian Holsclaw says that many pro-lifers "muddy the waters of the abortion debate". Those on the pro-choice side, on the other hand, "poison the well of the debate".

Now that’s not fair and balanced, is it?

But anyway, Sebastian is a good addition to Obsidian Wings, which has of late become one of my three favorite blogs (pushing out the Volokh Conspiracy).

James Joyner of OTB notes the debut of the apparently sincerely-named “Air America Network,” the much vaunted left-wing alternative to right-wing talk radio, featuring such noted radio personalities as Al Franken and Janeane Garafalo (no sarcastic comments about “faces made for radio,” please!).

The good news is, if you’re a lefty excluded from the Air America commercial broadcast footprint (for example, in such minor broadcasting markets as Washington, D.C.), is that this fine programming is also available nationwide on XM Radio Channel 167, under the slightly less stupid (and more honest) name “XM America Left.” I may or may not tune in (I generally despise talk radio as a format, so bet on “may not”; plus, you’d have to pry me away from XM’s great music offerings, not to mention ESPN Radio), but if I do I’ll probably post a review. At least the morning lineup looks like it has some potential…

Russell Arben Fox has a lengthy summary of an article from February’s American Political Science Review, “Election Time: Normative Implications of Temporal Properties of the Electoral Process in the United States,” by Dennis F. Thompson.

Unlike my usual practice when it comes to the APSR (which is to scan the table of contents, find nothing of immediate interest to my research agenda, and then dump it onto the stack of journals—yes, I’m a bad political scientist when it comes to journal-reading), I actually read the article, and while I’m not quite as enthusiastic about Thompson’s conclusions as Russell is (particularly because I don’t at all buy the argument that campaign finance regulations, no matter how strict, will put an end to the “permanent campaign”), I agree that Thompson does make some worthwhile contributions to the debate, including a strong argument that partisan gerrymandering is fundamentally antidemocratic.

I do wonder, however, where one buys a single copy of the APSR, as Russell implores his readers to do. My advice: go to your local college’s library and read it for free.

Dean Esmay points out this interesting post by Citizen Smash, in which he talks to his local congresswoman, Susan Davis, about requiring government contractors to obey the law on the treatment of guardsmen and reservists when they return from active duty, or risk losing their government contracts.

There’s more at Phil Carter’s Intel Dump website:

In an ideal world, we’d have nothing but good corporate citizens, and there’d be no need for this kind of law. Indeed, I believe that most American corporations do the right thing when it comes to their reservist-employees. Yet, there are companies out there that don’t do the right thing, and it adds insult to injury when we allow those companies to profit from taxpayer money.

I concur with Phil: write your representative and your senators and tell them you want them to support this proposal. Better yet: call either their Washington office or local field office.

Robert Garcia Tagorda helpfully notes the geographic illiteracy of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, who somehow managed to include the Philippines and Thailand among a list of countries aiding and abetting terrorists in one of those stupid “fundraising polls” that are included in letters soliciting donors.

Robert’s right: the only fitting word is “idiotic.” Especially when you consider that, as Conrad of The Gweilo Diaries points out, the Philippine government just broke up a major terrorist plot involving Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda affiliate group.

Dan Drezner assesses Richard Clarke’s book thusly:

Richard Clarke is the perfect bureaucrat. I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word. In the best sense, it’s clear that Clarke was adept at maximizing the available resources and authority required to do his job, given the organizational rivalries and cultures that made such a pursuit difficult. In the worst sense, Clarke was a monomaniacal martinet whose focus on his bailiwick to the exclusion of everything else is phenomenal.

Dan also provides more ammunition for those of us who think Dick Cheney should get the boot—not just because he’s deadweight on the ticket, but also because he “ha[s] inserted himself into the National Security Council process in a way that deliberately or accidentally sabotaged the decision-making process.”

As Glenn Reynolds might say: double-ouch.

Update: Hei Lun of Begging to Differ has more on Clarke’s alleged Republican credentials (frankly, mine are better). Special bonus: yet another takedown of Josh Marshall’s risible assertion that “I have no stake in Richard Clarke.”

Colby Cosh ponders whether or not the new Conservative Party north of the border is properly thought of as “Tory.” Colby notes the key problem:

The problem is that by equating “Conservative” with “Tory” we basically discard the useful 20th-century concept of a “Tory” as someone who is Anglophile, monarchist, elitist, ceremony-loving, truly conservative about certain institutions, and committed to property and the existing class order.

Canadian Conservatives, he argues, haven’t really been “Tories” since John Diefenbaker’s rule in the 1950s, and, indeed, the new “Conservative Party” is even further from the Tory ideal. Of course, arguably, it’s not even conservative any more, at least in the sense of defending the established Trudeauian order. Neither are the Liberals very liberal, for that matter, except when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money on boondoggles like the $1 billlion CDN national gun registry.

Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered links a pretty good Nashville Scene bio/interview of Memphis’ Harold Ford, Jr., a likely candidate for U.S. senator in 2006.

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.

Over at Freespace, guest blogger Erik Peterson writes:

If you’ve seen Roger and Me, you know its about Moore’s attempts to get an audience with General Motors CEO Roger Smith. This was supposed to show how aloof and uncaring and inaccessible corporate dictators can be.

Moore has met with Smith a couple of times since then, including once on his short-lived show TV Nation, where Smith came down and changed the oil in a truck to demonstrate CEOs can do what their employees do.

I don’t know whether Roger Smith has ever met with Moore or not, but it was not Roger Smith who won the “CEO challenge” on TV Nation. I remember watching that episode, and it was the CEO of Ford.

every schoolchild in America, every one who doesn't make a spectacle of him or herself by conscientiously objecting, is expected every schoolday to

pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America And to the Republic for which it stands One nation under God, indivisivible, with liberty and justice for all

which is, really, an awful lot like an oath of loyalty and citizenship.

Alex Tabarrok, however, goes a bit over the top in opposing the pledge for similar reasons. You've heard of Godwin's Law, haven't you, Prof. Tabarrok?