Should Blogs Have a Seal of Approval?

April is the 10^th anniversary of the blog, and there is no better indication of how contentious the medium has become than the growing number of calls to regulate it.

The current darlings of wannabe regulators are so-called codes of conduct, guidelines on what is and is not appropriate in online discussions and stuff like whether people are allowed to comment anonymously.

The issue has come to a head because of an epidemic of cyberbullying, mostly infamously the death threats and other vile forms of intimidation directed at Kathy Sierra, who blogs on high-tech issues and found herself in the crosshairs because of a dispute on whether inflammatory comments made on blogs should be deleted.

Leading the charge for codes of conduct is big-time blogger Tim O'Reilly, who perhaps not coincidentally is a PR man. O'Reilly has posted a draft of a sample code on his website.

The draft includes these headings:

Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.

Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.

Consider eliminating anonymous comments.

Ignore the trolls.

Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.

If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.

Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.

On the whole, these guidelines seem reasonable and substantially jive with the comments policy at The Moderate Voice, where I coblog. And as a commenter notes at O'Reilly's blog, this is how people should behave to each other in general, not just in the blogosphere.

O'Reilly says that codes of conduct are not a form of censorship, explaining "That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech. Free speech is enhanced by civility."

Agreed.

But where I part company with O'Reilly is how he would try to enforce good behavior: Through multiple codes of conduct with corresponding logos not unlike movie ratings -- in effect Good Blogkeeping Seals of Approval -- that would indicate whether a blog accepts anonymous comments, obtains second sources for gossip and breaking news and certain other predetermined parameters.

O’Reilly notes that these codes would be voluntary, while David Weinberger tells The New York Times that "The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway."

Weinberger, who is an Internet expert and Harvard Law School fellow, should know better.

Like it or not, codes of conduct will have a constraining effect on a medium that is best when it is free form:

* Will I feel pressure to agree to a conduct code and post a logo at Kiko’s House because my blogging peers do?

* Will merchants and political campaigns be reluctant to place ads on blogs that don’t hew to a code of conduct?

* Will blog host providers like Blogger and WordPad pull the plug on bloggers who don’t sign on?

* Will codes of conduct become springboards to government regulation?

As it is, the legal implications of blogging – most pungently whether a blogger can be sued for a libelous comment left by a reader -- are just beginning to be sorted out, while codes of conduct don't really deal head on with what I believe is the most pressing blog-related issue -- harassment of woman bloggers like that experienced by Sierra.

O'Reilly got Jeff Jarvis's snark up at Buzz Machine:

"This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone — they’ll do us the favor — can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But . . . it’s not. It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor (and thus anyone without that badge is, de facto, a bad neighbor). I didn’t have to pledge to act civilized. I just do. And if I don’t, you can judge me accordingly. Are there rules and laws? Yes, the same ones that exist in worlds physical or virtual: If I libel or defame you on the streetcorner or in a paper or on a screen, the recourse is the same. But I don’t put up another badge on my fence saying I won’t libel you. I just don’t. That’s how the world works. Why should this new world work any differently? Why should it operate with more controls and more controllers?"

Instapundit was one of the first blog that I bookmarked six years ago. Glenn Reynolds is underwhelmed and predicts endless infighting over the terms of the codes of conduct:

"I certainly don't believe that deleting nasty comments is an assault on free speech. Commenters can always get their own blog -- why should they have a 'right' to have their comments appear on other people's blogs. The downside, though, is that once you start deleting comments people will tend to hold you more responsible for any comments that you don't delete."

While Daniel DiRito motors right past these concerns at Thought Theater and uses an everyday analogy to make the same point:

"Anyone who has been blocked from merging into traffic from the onramp or had another vehicle veer suddenly into an opening the size of a small Yugo just in front of them at 60 miles an hour during rush hour or been flipped off by an otherwise perfectly normal looking housewife understands that badges serve little purpose in informing others of the behavior to be expected. . . ."

We’ve got a very slippery slope here, folks, and it doesn't seem like big thinkers such as Reilly and Weinberger are grasping the negative consequences of what on its face seems like doing the right thing – and could end up being all wrong.

Besides which, there already is an alternative available to Good Blogkeeping Seals of Approval. It’s called the DELETE key.

I blog because of the freedom it affords me. Constraints on that freedom no matter how well intended ultimately will have the effect of limiting it.

Image: Interactive map of the blogosphere by Matthew Hurst

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Iran's announcement Monday that it had achieved the capacity to enrich uranium on an "industrial scale" raises the fear that the Islamic Republic could manufacture a nuclear weapon within a year, but was met with deep skepticism from nuclear experts. . . . [who] portrayed the claim as a political statement designed to bolster both its international and domestic stature, rather than an indication that Tehran has reached a significant new milestone in its nuclear program.

-- RAMIN MOSTAGHIM and BORZOU DARAGAH

If [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales was planning to simply tell the truth, he wouldn't "keep contradicting himself" in practice sessions and he wouldn't need to bring his schedule to a standstill in order to figure out what he's planning to say. He'd just review the appropriate documents to make sure he had his dates straight and then tell Congress what happened.

Obviously, though, that's not quite what he's planning to do, is it?

-- KEVIN DRUM

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes.

Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove’s once-vaunted White House operation.

Democrats say evidence suggests the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.

-- TOM HAMBURGER

Nearly two months into the new security push in Baghdad, there has been some success in reducing the number of death squad victims found crumpled in the streets each day.

And while the overall death rates for all oF Iraq have not dropped significantly, largely because of devastating suicide bombings, a few parts of the capital have become calmer as some death squads have decided to lie low.

But there is little sign that the Baghdad push is accomplishing its main purpose: to create an island of stability in which Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds can try to figure out how to run the country together. There has been no visible move toward compromise on the main dividing issues, like regional autonomy and more power sharing between Shiites and Sunnis.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

For the first time, the U.S. military is treating more head injuries than chest or abdominal wounds, and it is ill-equipped to do so. According to a July 2005 estimate from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, two-thirds of all soldiers wounded in Iraq who don't immediately return to duty have traumatic brain injuries.

-- RONALD GLASSER

I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said.

-- WALTER F. MURPHY

Since Rudy Giuliani and John McCain continue to score well in the polls that match them against the major '08 Democratic players, how come Republicans don't seem to be jumping for joy? . . . Because they know that the prevailing national mood is working against them. And they know that these early polls generally don’t mean squat.

-- DICK POLMAN

I could care less what Romney's conception of God is, as long as it doesn't involve strapping on suicide vests or inducing hundreds of people to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Mormons have lived and thrived in this nation for over a century, and except for a few lunatics who no longer belong to the main Mormon church and insist on polygamy and child marriage, cause no more problems than anyone else. We're not electing an American Pope, we're electing a President, and Romney's choice of religion is neither debilitating nor exotic.

-- CAPTAIN ED MORRISSEY

When all four guests on the Chris Matthews Show agree on something, it is by definition CW--therefore the CW now holds that an immigration bill will pass and be signed into law this year, perhaps without many Republican votes.

-- MICKEY KAUS

I am somewhat overwhelmed by the absurdity of someone apologizing to Al Sharpton for making a bigoted remark, and then Sharpton not accepting the apology. Talk about glass houses! Imus should certainly have apologized for his remark, but not to someone with Sharpton's history.

-- DAVID BERNSTEIN

[W]hy do the Tim Russerts and the Maureen Dowds of the world give [Imus] the time of day? I suspect it's to show they're in touch with the little people -- but they're just so out of touch they have no idea who the little people are any more.

-- WILL BUNCH

I caught the tail-end of that old England — that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior — the English Gentleman — that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.

-- JOHN DERBYSHIRE

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Christ Almighty What a Law School

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Why Madame Bovary Is Not a Feminist Icon

As well read as I have been over the years, including many of the classics of Western literature, I have just gotten around to reading Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

How to account for this gaping hole in a bibliographic odyssey that has included a thousand or so books over four or so decades? I dunno. Maybe I thought this particular classic was a Dr. Zhivago without the snow.

Boy was I wrong.

Emma Bovary was in some respects the prototypical “Desperate Housewife,” a manic depressive spendthrift with eating and panic disorders who makes her life into a novel to escape the emptiness of her existence in rural France.

But like many great books, the message that I took from Madame Bovary resonates even more powerfully today than when Flaubert introduced it in the mid-19th century to a public alternately titillated and shocked by its sexual innuendo.

For me, that message is that there is no lonelier a woman than one who demeans her sex but uses it to get special favors.

Let me try to explain what I mean before the Feminism Police break down my door. Which they may do anyway since I, like Flaubert, might be tarred with that ultimate male pejorative -- misogynist.

Yes, Emma Bovary is a victim of the suffocating patriarcy of the time that demanded she be no more than wife and mother, or alternatively a nun, which she contemplated becoming in her youth and looks back on in fits of “what if” melancholy when she loses her mojo.

Emma is unable to see that her husband, the kindhearted but hapless Dr. Charles Bovary, is the only person who loves her unconditionally. She pursues a fantasy life of high society and sexual escape based on the popular novels of the time that ultimately is as unfulfilling as the bourgeois drudgery of Yonville. That is the provincial village where she and her husband live with their daughter Berthe, whom she had desperately hoped would be a boy and rejects except when she needs to be seen by others as a caring mother.

Yes, Madame Bovary is a work of fiction, albeit a breakthrough in realism. But Emma’s self emancipation from an unsatisfying marriage – which some scholars say heralded the dawn of feminism – probably would have been undermined no matter what. And she is most certianly not a prototypical feminist.

This is because of her most un-feminist like determination to use the power of her sexuality and the perceived weakness of her gender as cudgels to get her way, which ultimately undermines her few praiseworthy goals in life. These include becoming a writer of the stature of the contemporaries whose novels she escapes into. As it is, her own writing consists of nothing more than letters to her lovers, and these are nothing more than means of stringing them along.

The manipulations of this high-maintenance heroine result in unfulfilling liaisons with men who like her aspire to the finer things in life but are as shallow as she is. They include Rodolphe, an icily manipulative local landowner who tires of her once the initial thrill is gone and throws her over on the eve of their planned elopement, and Léon, a law student whom she fits for a cuckold’s suit but eventually tires of her insatiable demands.

The mountain of debt that Emma has accumulated through loans from the crafty Monsieur Lheureux, who plays to her femininity to make her buy things on credit, comes crashing down on her. She is tarnished by villagers with that ultimate female pejorative – slut. Then Léon and finally Rodolphe reject transparent invitations to climb back into the sack with her if they would only float her reputation-saving loans.

It is then that Emma finally realizes she can not live on come-hither looks and orchestrated swoons.

In a final act of selfishness that leaves her daughter an orphan, she swallows arsenic. But she is unfulfilled even on her death bed. The romance that she saw in this ultimate act is supplanted by grotesque pain, and she is for the last time rendered as a caricature of herself and not the feminist that she could have been.

Iraqis Thank U.S. For Never Ending War

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Photograph by Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters

Regent Univ.: Christ Almighty What a Pal

One of the back stories of the U.S. attorney scandal -- you know, the one that Republicans said would quickly fade -- is the major role that graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University law school have played in the Bush administration.

Some 150 Regent University alumnae have signed on with Bush, but that is what televangelist founder Robertson intended. The school's motto is "Christian Leadership to Change the World" and the express goal is, as Slate scribe Dahlia Lithwick puts it:

"Not only to tear down the wall between church and state in America but also to enmesh the two."

This bring us to Regent alumna Monica Goodling, who until Friday was senior counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department liaison to the White House. Monica is spending more time with family these days after resigning because of her insistence on taking the Fifth Amendment when called to testify before a Democratic-controlled congressional committee regarding the scandal. This, she explains, is because she is concerned that she will get into big trouble for telling the truth.

More from Lithwick:

"Is there anything wrong with legal scholarship from a Christian perspective? Not that I see. Is there anything wrong with a Bush administration that disproportionately uses graduates from Christian law schools to fill its staffing needs? Not that I see. It's a shorthand, no better or worse than cherry-picking the Federalist Society or the American Bar Association. I can't even get exercised over the fact that Gonzales, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers had their baby lawyers making critical staffing decisions. The baby lawyers had extremely clear marching orders.

"No, the real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God's work with the president's. Probably not a lesson she learned in law school. The dream of Regent and its counterparts, such as Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, is to redress perceived wrongs to Christians, to reclaim the public square and reassert Christian political authority. And while that may have been a part of the Bush/Rove plan, it was only a small part. Their real zeal was for earthly power. And Goodling was left holding the earthly bag.

"In the end, Goodling and the other young foot soldiers for God may simply have run afoul of the first rule of politics, codified in Psalm 146: 'Put not your trust in princes, in mere mortals in whom there is no help'."

More here.

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Expend more than a minute thinking about high heels and you realise what a bizarre, useless, damaging and dangerous part of women's fashion they are; yet bring it up with females and they tend to go two ways.

"I hate them and won't wear them (except on special occasions!)" and "You get used to them and, anyway, they make me feel more feminine"; which is kind of like me saying driving fast without a seat belt makes me feel more like a man.

-- SAM DeBRITO

We seem to have discovered a new stage in the traditional Kübler-Ross process:

1. Denial: "The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq."

2. Anger: "The treasonous far-left liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq."

3. Bargaining: "If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours."

4. Depression: "Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta."

5. Advanced Literary Theory: "The hegemonic binary of 'success' and 'failure' traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq."

-- GAVIN M.

There are two Iraq wars being waged, according to military officers on the ground and defense experts: the one fought in the streets of Baghdad, and the war as it is perceived in Washington. . . .

While Washington appears headed toward a political endgame on Iraq, with the White House and Congress sparring over benchmarks and pullout dates, the war on the ground is at an ebb tide. All sides -- including U.S. military strategists and Iraqi sectarian leaders and insurgents, as well as regional players such as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey -- are waiting to see whether the new U.S. approach to make the Iraqi capital safer will work. Soldiers on the ground tend to see the Washington debate as irrelevant, and the perspective of many politicians in Washington is that the military schedule is simply too slow.

"The time scale to succeed is years," said John J. Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary, while "the time scale for tolerance here is 12 months for Democrats and 18 months for Republicans."

-- THOMAS E. RICKS

Why exactly was the resolution of the latest Iran hostage crisis a "success" for Iran and a "humiliation" for Britain, as the hawkish Charles Krauthammer argues . . . ? The hostages were released in a one-day propaganda stunt, maybe in exchange for the release of an Iranian we were holding and Iranian visitation rights for some others. But the Iranians were also looking at an awful lot of aircraft carriers steaming around their neighborhood. Didn't they blink? If that's humiliation, it's not far from what a U.S.-U.K. victory in the crisis would look like.

-- MICKEY KAUS

There is at least one point on which we and the critics of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Damascus can agree: It is the White House, not the speaker of the House, that should be taking the diplomatic lead. But the Bush administration has far more appetite for scoring political points than figuring out whether talking to Syria might help contain the bloodletting in Iraq or revive efforts to negotiate peace.

So long as Mr. Bush continues to shun high-level discussions with this troublesome but strategically located neighbor of Israel, Lebanon and Iraq, such Congressional visits can serve the useful purpose of spurring a much needed examination of the administration’s failed policies.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

The U.S. attorney firings scandal has laid bare the administration's -- and particularly Karl Rove's -- preoccupation with prosecuting voter fraud. But there's a flip side to this coin. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has virtually abandoned its traditional role, undertaken since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, of actively protecting African American voters from discrimination.

-- PAUL KEIL

When former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged President Bush to make Bernard B. Kerik the next secretary of homeland security, White House aides knew Kerik as the take-charge top cop from Sept. 11, 2001. But it did not take them long to compile an extensive dossier of damaging information about the would-be Cabinet officer.

They learned about questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption. Most disturbing, according to people close to the process, was Kerik's friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime. . . .

Alarmed about the raft of allegations, several White House aides tried to raise red flags. But the normal investigation process was short-circuited, the sources said. Bush's top lawyer, Alberto R. Gonzales, took charge of the vetting, repeatedly grilling Kerik about the issues that had been raised. In the end, despite the concerns, the White House moved forward with his nomination -- only to have it collapse a week later.

-- JOHN SOLOMON and PETER BAKER

Sunday Fat Hamster Blogging (*)

Photograph by Jan From Essex. More photos here.

(*) Formerly known as The Gratuitous Kitty Shot of the week

Dick Cheney Before He Dicks You

Just when you thought the nutbags occupying the right wing of the Republican Party couldn't get any loonier comes an editorial in the New York Sun that states with dead seriousness that Vice President Cheney should run for president because it would be good for what ails the GOP.

Ezra Klein summarizes the piece thusly:

"A Cheney candidacy would serve to defend Bush on the campaign trail and force a greater fealty to and respect for George Bush's record from the other candidates. Which is quite a window into the current conservative mindset: Bush isn't unpopular because his policies have been historic failures, he's unpopular because he lacks sufficiently vigorous defenders. . . . Place a constant reminder of George W. Bush on the campaign trail [and] wreck the Republican Party for a generation. Make that reminder Dick Cheney, and we may as well resuscitate the Whigs."

More here.

Meanwhile, the veep was doing Oxycontin shooters with Rush Limbaugh on his radio show the other day and made a case for why Iraq has become George Bush's Forever War:

"[The Democrats] seem to think that we can withdraw from Iraq and walk away from it. They ignore the lessons of the past. Remember what happened in Afghanistan. We'd been involved in Afghanistan in the eighties, supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviets and prevailed. We won. Everybody walked away, and in the nineties, Afghanistan became a safe haven for terrorists, an area for training camps where Al-Qaeda trained 20,000 terrorists in the late nineties, and the base from which they launched attacks on the United States on 9/11. So those are very real problems, and to advocate withdrawal from Iraq at this point, it seems to me, simply would play right into the hands of Al-Qaeda."

In other words:

No withdrawal. No end in sight ever. And no regrets.

More here.

Image courtesy of Blognonymous

It's Time For a Nuclear Power Comeback

Is nuclear power ready to make a comeback in the U.S.? I hope so, and that's saying something coming from an environmentalist who was downwind from Three Mile Island during the infamous partial meltdown in 1979.

Nuclear power went into eclipse in this country not because it was a fundamentally unsafe and unreliable technology, but because the chuckleheads who ran TMI and other nuclear plants made a compelling case that they were not to be trusted. That, more than any other reason, is why no nuke plants have been built in the U.S. since forever and some older plants are being taken offline.

But because of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which considerably streamlines the licensing process, it is possible that new nuke plants could be built in coming years. New designs would make such plants inherently safer.

Irony of ironies, there is a second reason as well:

Global warming.

This bring us to the Supreme Court’s smackdown of the Environmental Protection Agency this week in Massachusetts v. EPA.

A divided court found that the EPA has the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and ruled that the agency must provide a sound scientific rationale if it chooses not to regulate them in the future.

As TCM Daily notes, nuclear power is the big beneficiary of the ruling:

"The irony is that the beneficiary of [the] ruling won't be wind power, solar power, or any of the other renewable technologies favored by the Green establishment. Their economic and technological limitations are too severe for them ever to occupy more than a small niche in the American energy economy. Instead, one of the winners from Massachusetts v. EPA just may be something that many of the environmentalists who brought the suit have long abhorred: nuclear power. Like renewables, nuclear power generates electricity with no pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions. But unlike renewables, nuclear is capable of generating reliable power on a massive scale, which is what our country's future energy demands will require."

More here.

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

From our friends at EPI, here's our chart of the day. It compares the current economic expansion with past economic expansions.

Basically, everything sucks. GDP growth has been mediocre, employment growth has been terrible, and investment in equipment and software has been pitiful. And of course, we already know that median wages have been completely flat. The average worker has gained exactly nothing from five years of economic growth.

But guess what? One sector of the economy has gone like gangbusters: corporate profits. Even skyrocketing executive pay hasn't been enough to make a dent. Good times indeed.

If you're a corporation, that is. If you're not, then not so much. And if you think this is just a coincidence, you haven't been paying attention.

-- KEVIN DRUM

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with Al Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report.

-- R. JEFFREY SMITH

The U.S. Senate is a conservative place by design. Every two years the entire House of Representatives has to face the voters. However, a third of the senators that voted to authorize force against Iraq have, to this day, never had to face the voters. Their turn comes in 2008. Some, like John Edwards, will recant their vote . . . .

But 2007 is a different time. In 2007 the Senate needs to decide whether what the Bush administration has done to our nation is criminal. And I don't mean low crimes, like lying about furtive and rushed extramarital blow-jobs. I mean the biggest crimes that can be committed. Crimes that lose people their lives, that weaken the national defense, that dishonor our nation for posterity and in the eyes of the world . . . But the Senate hasn't fully learned the lesson. If they do not learn soon that this administration has dishonored themselves and our nation and must go, the Senate we elect in 2008 will look quite different from the one we have today. Rather than 49 Republicans senators, it may have fewer than 40.

-- THE BOOMAN

For most Americans, the Iraq war is both distant and never ending. For Private Matthew Zeimer, it was neither. Shortly after midnight on Feb. 2, Zeimer had his first taste of combat as he scrambled to the roof of the 3rd Infantry Division's Combat Outpost Grant in central Ramadi. Under cover of darkness, Sunni insurgents were attacking his new post from nearby buildings. Amid the smoke, noise and confusion, a blast suddenly ripped through the 3-ft. concrete wall shielding Zeimer and a fellow soldier, killing them both. Zeimer had been in Iraq for a week. He had been at his first combat post for two hours.

-- MARK THOMPSON

President Bush resorted to an old political trick this week, using recess appointments to evade Senate confirmation votes that he was sure to lose. All three are extraordinarily bad appointments — and three more reminders of how Mr. Bush’s claims of wanting to work with Congress’s Democratic leadership are just empty words.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

Fifty-nine years ago this week — on April 3, 1948 — President Truman signed the legislation establishing the Marshall Plan, which contributed so much to the rebuilding of postwar Europe. Now, more than half a century later, the U.S. can’t even rebuild New Orleans.

It doesn’t seem able to build much of anything, really. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the U.S. infrastructure is in sad shape, and it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars over a five-year period to bring it back to a reasonably adequate condition.

If there’s a less sexy story floating around, I can’t find it. It certainly can’t compete with the Sanjaya Malakar saga, or with the claim by Keith Richards that he snorted his dad’s ashes with "a little bit of blow."

-- JURRASICPORK

The plain truth is that the Clinton campaign has failed its first big test. The early ’07 goal was to blow Obama (and John Edwards) out of the water by demonstrating implacable money mastery. Instead, Obama in particular has served notice that the rookie is fully capable of slugging it out, over the long haul, with the Friends of Bill and the other well-wired inhabitants of Hillaryland. . . . The bottom line is that, at least for now, she has lost the right to be considered the preemptive Democratic favorite.

-- DICK POLMAN

Despite the major record labels’ best efforts to kill it, the single, according to recent reports, is back. Sort of.

You’ll still have a hard time finding vinyl 45s or their modern counterpart, CD singles, in record stores. For that matter, you’ll have a tough time finding record stores. Today’s single is an individual track downloaded online from legal sites like iTunes or eMusic, or the multiple illegal sites that cater to less scrupulous music lovers. The album, or collection of songs — the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years — is suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way of the shoehorn.

-- TONY SACHS and SAL NUNZIATO

Nobody who reported the Anna Nicole Smith story or viewed it on TV need apologize. The Anna Nicole Smith death trip didn't catch fire on cable just because she was a bosomy, semifamous blonde who checked out at the age of 39. For 15 years, she had been gathering chunks of fame the same way a successful World of Warcraft player gathers gold, armor, and potions: again and again.

-- JACK SHAFER

Barbara Walters of television’s 20/20 did a story on gender roles in Kabul, Afghanistan several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands.

She recently returned to Kabul and observed that women still walk behind their husbands. From Ms. Walter’s vantage point, despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime, the women now seem to walk even further back behind their husbands and are happy to maintain the old custom.

Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked, "Why do you now seem happy with the old custom that you once tried so desperately to change?"

The woman looked Ms. Walters straight in the eyes, and without hesitation, said, "Land Mines."

-- MARC SCHULMAN

Beautiful Medieval Japanese Art du Jour

"The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments" by Oguri Sokei (16th century)

"Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan" will be one of the stops that the Dear Friend & Conscience and I make when we do a big cultural dump in New York City in May.

The show is on display through June 17 at the Japan Society at 333 East 47th Street in Manhattan.

Click here for more.

'An Administration's Epic Collapse'

Time magazine's Joe Klein is one of the most influential political commentators out there, which makes his pronouncement that George Bush is unfit to govern a rather large -- if belated -- development.

Writes Klein in a commentary titled An Administration's Epic Collapse:

"The three big Bush stories of 2007 -- the decision to 'surge' in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons -- precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys). "When Bush came to office -- installed by the Supreme Court after receiving fewer votes than Al Gore -- I speculated that the new President would have to govern in a bipartisan manner to be successful. He chose the opposite path, and his hyper-partisanship has proved to be a travesty of governance and a comprehensive failure. I've tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration -- arrogance, incompetence, cynicism -- are congenital: they're part of his personality. They're not likely to change. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead."

More here.

Photograph by Brooks Kraft/Corbis

'We Won't Get Fooled Again' -- Again

Jurrasicpork has put up an encore presentation of a word-and-photo post themed to The Who's classic "We Won't Get Fooled Again" over at Welcome to Pottersville.

His is one of the best blogs going, especially if you also have a case of the ass about the Mess in Mesopotamia -- as well as Washington.

Click here.

It's Nat'l Poetry Month: An Ode to Dubya

(President Bush softly sings.)

I miss Arafat in the Springtime,
I miss Saddam in the fall,
Lebanon's a mess, it's in splinters,
I had no idea at all.

Our one time pal, Saudi's being squeezed cause of Palestine,
And Iran's shows no respect, what gall,
Oh boy, thank God, they fight less in the winter,
I had no idea at all.

Condi says this mess is a great opportunity,
Some laugh, but what constitutes reality, is my call,
Every planetary wide entity hates us, look Mom, I am a 'Uniter',
Bombs Away, bombs away, you'all.

-- Craig Johnson

Meanwhile, Out in Diyala Province

A U.S. soldier beats the bush in Buhriz, Diyala Province

The mainstream media has tended to obsess on how the war is going in Baghdad while giving short shrift to the rest of Iraq except for coverage of suicide bombings and other forms of carnage.

But most U.S. troops are deployed outside the capital, including Diyala Province where they have been engaged in a methodical campaign to flush out Al Qaeda insurgents.

Bill Roggio over at the Fourth Rail offers an account of nitty-gritty aspects of the operation.

Money quote:

"Citizens in Diyala are asking the Iraqi government to fight Al Qaeda and prevent the province from 'turning Diyala cities [into the next] Taliban emirate,' notes Al Saabah. "Citizens said that the situation in the cities of Baqubah, Muqdadyia, Khalis and Bald Ruz are turning into a major humanity disaster, especially after Al Qaeda issued a list of all forbidden activities including working at governmental offices, ownership of satellite and Internet sets, as well as the destruction of mobile phone towers.

"We have noted for some time the Diyala Salvation Council will be formed shortly, and all signs point to this development. The U.S. military is ahead of the game in Diyala, and learned a valuable lesson from Marine operations in Anbar province."

More here.

Photograph by Air Force Staff Sergeant Stacy L. Pearsall

Justin Bailey: 'They Gave Him the Bullet'

If you think that the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal was just the tip of the iceberg, you’re right.

Federal and local officials are investigating the recent deaths of five men who were being cared for in residential rehabilitation programs or emergency housing by the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center.

One of the five served in Iraq: Marine Corps veteran Justin Bailey, 27, who checked himself into the VA hospital after Thanksgiving because of his addiction to prescription and street drugs.

Bailey, who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and a groin injury, was found dead in his room Jan. 26, a day after he got prescriptions filled for methadone and other drugs.

Despite his drug history, he had been allowed to administer the drugs himself.

"My son had made a decision to get help, and they didn't help him. They gave him the bullet,'' Gulf War veteran Tony Bailey, 47, of Las Vegas told the Los Angeles Times.

Click here for more.

Hat tip to Will Bunch at Attytood

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

By now most farmers know what they’ll be planting this spring. And all across the country the answer is the same: corn, corn, corn. The numbers are surprising. Farmers will plant some 90.5 million acres of corn this year — 12 million more than last year and the most since 1944. Soybean acres are down by more than 10 percent, and there are similar decreases in wheat and cotton. The reason for this enormous shift is, of course, the ethanol boom and the corn rush it has created.

If it were just a matter of shifting the balance in already planted acreage — more corn, less wheat — a point of economic equilibrium might be found soon enough. The real trouble comes at the edges. This corn boom puts pressure on land that has been set aside as part of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program. Since the mid-1980s, farmers have enrolled some 37 million acres of farmland in the program. This is land that has been returned to nature, and it is part of what Americans pay for through the farm bill. Much of it is unsuitable for crops — too hilly, too wet, too valuable as wildlife habitat — but when corn prices are this high, the idea of suitable changes swiftly.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

Iran has pulled off a tidy little success with its seizure and release of those 15 British sailors and marines: a pointed humiliation of Britain, with a bonus demonstration of Iran's intention to push back against coalition challenges to its assets in Iraq. All with total impunity. Further, it exposed the impotence of all those transnational institutions -- most prominently the European Union and the United Nations -- that pretend to maintain international order.

-- CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

[T]he road to liberal democracy in the Middle East is likely to be extremely disappointing in the near to medium term, and the Bush administration's efforts to build a regional policy around it are heading toward abject failure.

-- FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

Now we know why Pelosi was wearing that head scarf in Damascus yesterday. It wasn’t in deference to Muslim tradition. It was to keep her brains from dribbling out of her ears. Obviously, she should have tied the scarf a little tighter given the copious amounts of gray matter that must have oozed out during her visit to the Middle East. Or perhaps she should have used a tin foil hat.

Anyone who believes any “assurances” from that murderous thug Assad obviously needs some additional Reynolds Wrap on their tin foil beanie to deflect all the rays marked “stupid” from penetrating their skull.

-- RICK MORAN

The top United States intelligence official said that his position lacks the authority needed to run the country’s 16 intelligence agencies.

The official, Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, said he was responsible for developing agencies’ budgets and ensuring that intelligence employees did not break the law. But many of the agencies are under the control of the Defense and Justice Departments, he said, and the intelligence director has no power to get rid of poorly performing people.

-- BLOOMBERG NEWS

[Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds] is a fairly doctrinaire conservative, with just a little socially-liberal trim added to differentiate him from the currently overstocked pool of Bill O’Reilly impersonators. The Perfesser tumbled early to right-wing market realities: for example, that while Rush Limbaugh’s politics was a factor, it was his self-presentation as a callous, self-satisfied douchebag that reminded suburban burghers enough of themselves that they made him a god. But the crafty Perfesser has aimed slightly higher: between newsy bits, he rattles on about high-end coffee-makers and hand dryers and cars, portraying himself very convincingly as exactly the sort of shopaholic dink he wants to draw to his site. They’re a demographic bonanza, after all — moneyed, acquisitive, and fundamentally insecure.

This persona requires another innovation on the Limbaugh formula: while Rush’s white dreamers of disenfranchisement relate well to authority, the Perfesser’s target auditors are a little more urbane and feckless. So while rightwing politics must stay in the mix — one cannot dispense entirely with authority, nor with the narrative of liberal betrayal, lest the audience drift away — it must be a cooler version of rightwing politics, less beefy-faced and sweaty, more accomodating to people who, in the depths of their soullessness, really just don’t give a shit about anything except their own personal comfort and primacy.

-- DR. EDROSO

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

British sailors and Marines arrive at Heathrow Airport from Iran

We'll have to see what actually happened behind the scenes in the welcome release of British soldiers before we can figure out who blinked and when.

But the spectacle today is one of Ahmadinejad milking the moment for all its worth. The public apologies by the sailors, the choreographed television shots, the use of the word "detainee" to describe the Brits, and the Easter "gift": this is all propaganda for the Tehran thugocracy. . . .

I don't see how the U.S. benefits from this fiasco in any way. Tehran successfully weaned Britain away from its ally, the U.S., and its EU partners, proved how alienated the British public is from the war in Iraq and the U.S. administration, managed to look more humane in prisoner treatment than the U.S. and distracted from the growing international pressure on Tehran's nuclear ambitions. That's a pretty shrewd set of moves, though it pains me to say so.

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

Photograph by Associated Press Television News

Is That A Light At the End of the Tunnel?

The fact that the Iraq war has now slouched into its fifth year with no end in sight is all you need to know about how well it is going. Recall also that George Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in May 2003 and his handlers boasted that the American liberators would be home by Christmas.

They thought they knew which Christmas that would be, but they didn’t. And still don’t.

Yet as someone who believes that the Mess in Mesopotamia must end sooner rather than later, I find myself in the unusual position of seeing a faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

This is because:

* Congressional Democrats, with an assist from a small but growing number of Republicans, finally have figured out how to harness that mid-term election mandate and are no longer cowed by the president's imprecations that they are "undercutting" the troops by trying to end the war.

That would be by setting a funding-dependent timetable for getting the hell out of Iraq with the support of a majority of American who see through the White House's flag waving.

Yes, Bush will veto every bill that reaches his desk that has such a provision. But the upshot will be to paint a wounded president even further into an already tight corner because he is unable to articulate an alternative to the congressional initiatives other than the tired blah-blah about staying the course and tired assertions that people who do not support staying the course are unpatriotic.

Iraq has become Bush's Forever War, and he is well along a most cowardly course – to bump through his last 16 months in office and then dump his mess into the lap of the next president.

* A not insignificant number of Republicans are well aware that the president stands between them and their political survival, and survival is their top priority, not saving the "soul" of their party, trying to bolster the president's battered legacy, or any other high fallutin purpose.

In an orchestrated series of leaks, some Senate Republicans are said to be setting a timetable of their own: They’ll withdraw their support for the war in August unless there is indeed "real progress," and apparently have told General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, as much.

Why August? I dunno. Maybe it’s as simple as Congress reconvening in September after its summer recess and the 2008 congressional campaign shifting into a higher gear.

Or maybe it's just that they too are finally willing to contemplate drawing a line in the sand, something that George Bush remains adamantly opposed to doing in the face of a surge that is not likely to succeed by this August or next, as well as a deeply courrupt and Shiite-coddling Iraqi government that continues to thumb its nose at Washington and the American troops bogged down in its midst.

FACT CHECKING THE DECIDER

Political columnist Dick Polman got it exactly right at his American Debate:

It’s time yet again to fact-check President Bush. This has become one of life’s more onerous but necessary chores - the journalistic equivalent of chopping ice or cleaning the cat box – and I’d frankly prefer to focus on something else. But no. I’d be remiss if I failed to address Bush’s fact-defying remarks yesterday in the Rose Garden.

So much of what he said about Iraq and the Democrats was so far removed from empirical reality that I am tempted to recall what the writer Mary McCarthy once said about her contemporary Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the." With respect to the president, that’s probably too harsh. He did, after all, start by saying "good morning," and it was indeed a nice morning. He also vowed again to veto any congressional bill that includes a U.S. troop withdrawal timeline, and we can probably believe that, too.

It’s the other assertions that seemed problematic. To be charitable, let's just say that he repeatedly engaged in highly selective semi-truthiness. . . .

Bush still seems unwilling to acknowledge that he is out of sync with prevailing American sentiment. . . . And speaking of public opinion, consider this remark, uttered yesterday: "You are not having a success in the hearts and minds of Iraq. There’s simply too many killers there, too many factions that don’t want democracy. And I’m not sure, no matter what surge you have, that you can overcome the Iraqi people not cooperating."

A hostile reporter berating Bush? A Senate Democrat pleading for a U.S. surrender?

No, that was Bill O'Reilly.

'SENATOR McCAIN, YOUR GROCERIES ARE READY'

Twenty-one Shiite market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of Baghdad.

The victims came from the market visited the previous day by presidential wannabe John McCain, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress after a widely ridiculed walked through the market during which he was accompanied by 100 heavily armed troops as five helicopters flew overhead.

More here.