Jesse at Pandagon finds Kathryn Jean Lopez wondering why the media isn’t covering an Amnesty International report on terrorism in Iraq. He notes, among other things, that “this may constitute the first time since September 11th that any conservative commentator has honestly admitted that Amnesty writes anything that isn’t a direct attack on America.”

Publius at Law and Politics has a marvelous look at Hitchens’ “sister cities” article.

I understand the emotional need to attack those who you don’t care for anyway. But the idea that the anti-war Left and the sister city program have one damned thing to do with our problems in Iraq is nothing short of full-blown delusion (though it is interesting from a psychological perspective)…

You may hate the Left so bad that you’d like to wring all their necks. But that hatred has exactly zero relevance to the larger truth that you may or may not be willing to confront – if this war is lost, then Bush lost it.

I’m afraid that we might be having this argument a lot more in the future.

Beautiful Horizons is a just a terrific blog that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, because few other bloggers can talk on Randy Paul’s level about Central and South America.

During the Vietnam war, John Steinbeck was writing to the White House with ideas about weapons and tactics, including the idea for a baseball-sized napalm weapon. Funny old world.

Living in Texas can drive a liberal crazy, but the people here do some things right.

Finally, Brad DeLong has the Concord Coalition’s plausible forecast of budget deficits.

Orin Kerr recently proposed a useful simplified framework of possible outcomes in Iraq:

1) The U.S. beats back the insurgency and democracy flowers in Iraq (call this the “optimistic stay” scenario),
2) The U.S. digs in its heels, spends years fighting the insurgency, loses lots of troops, and years later withdraws, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war (the “pessimistic stay” scenario);
3) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out relatively soon, and things in Iraq are about as best as you could hope for, perhaps leading to a decent amount of democracy (optimistic leave), and
4) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out soon, and plunges Iraq into a bloody and disastrous civil war with the bad guys assuming control eventually (pessimistic leave).

Speaking only for myself, I’m entirely confident that we could achieve outcome 4, believe that staying the course will continue to lead to outcome 2, and can scarcely imagine outcome 3. What about outcome 1? Is it achievable?

There’s been some good discussion among some war supporters who believe that the situation in Iraq is dire, but salvageable. They aren’t spending a lot of time flailing against a stab in the back from the press or from tricksy liberals. They’re disturbed by the dialing down of expectations, and by official talk of troop withdrawls. See Charles and von at Obsidian Wings, Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard, Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch (also here).
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How fitting that the greatest sporting moment (so far) of the 21st century, and one of the greatest comebacks of all time, should be commemorated “thus”:http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0500liverpoolfc/0100news/tm_objectid=15870300%26method=full%26siteid=50061%26headline=night%2dof%2dtriumph%2dcaptured%2din%2dlego%2d-name_page.html :

bq. WITH a triumphant look on his face, Steven Gerrard can be seen standing next to the Champions League Trophy flanked by his manager, Rafael Benitez.

bq. But look again. For this is not an image from the historic final between Liverpool and AC Milan in Turkey earlier this year – it is a re-creation of the scene made entirely from Lego.

bq. Artists Darren Neave and John Cake – who are known as The Little Artists – have built the work from the toy bricks and it will go on display at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery later this week.

The September Project was launched last year to encourage libraries to engage citizens in discussions related to freedom and democracy on September 11th. This year the project continues its mission and has already attracted hundreds of libraries from 20 countries to participate. The organizers are hoping to attract even more. This map shows participating libraries in the US (e.g. the entire Chicago Public Library system has signed up), this one shows international venues (e.g. libraries in Cuba, India, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.). Any CT readers in the vicinity of Universidad Cienfuegos? I’d be curious to hear a report from that discussion.

The site offers a description of the events that occured at libraries on 9/11 last year. The Project has a blog where people can follow updates.

A point of occasional confusion for people linking to, or commenting on CT – “Henry Farrell” is not the same person as “Harry Brighouse” . When a post is by “Henry,” it’s written by me, and when it’s by “Harry,” it’s him. I’m not really complaining about this, as I get much the better end of the deal – while I get to “author books on political theory”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/13/more-brighouse-promotion/#comment-89465 without actually having to write them, he “gets attacked”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006239.php for saying rude things about Robert Conquest that he didn’t in fact say. But still, perhaps better to keep things straight.

Mike Baker (who declares an interest) explains the incredibly complex new University tuition fee system. I think he gets it exactly right (but am not sure because…it is so complicated). His final paragraph:

So it is somewhat ironic that the greatest concern over the new fees system has been on behalf of students from the poorest homes.
This is a Robin Hood-style, redistributive scheme: taking from the better-off graduate in order to give to the student from a poor home. Government ministers have always been nervous of spelling this out for fear of sounding like socialists. Yet, this obfuscation, like the terminology of “variable fees” rather than “graduate taxes”, could threaten the success of the scheme if it deters the very people it is meant to help.

The government has a big explaining job to do.

Spotted yesterday morning at the Amish Market in Battery Park, NYC.

!http://nicoleandhenry.smugmug.com/photos/32473971-S.jpg!

So “we now know”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4157892.stm that the young Brazilian electrician gunned down by police as a suspected suicide bomber was not wearing a heavy jacket, paused to pick up a newspaper on his way to the tube, used his travelcard to pass the barrier, did not run from the police, who did not warn him, found a seat and was restrained before being shot. This, in addition to having been allowed to board a bus earlier.

What did Sir Ian Blair know when “he said that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707509,00.html the Metropolitan Police were “playing out of their socks” ? If he knew at that stage that this was an disastrous catalogue of incompetence then he surely ought to resign. And who told the papers, and with what authority “that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707779,00.html de Menezes

bq. decided to run away from police, vaulting the ticket barrier and running down to the platform. ?

They ought be identified and made to resign too.

I’ve gone through the “comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/12/trahisons-des-clercs/#comments to my previous post, and found a quite considerable number of people who appear to have made egregious claims about opponents of the war rooting for the other side. I’ve excluded people who don’t fit the criteria for being well-known etc (including a couple of bloggers). I’ve included both Glenn Reynolds and Hindrocket of Powerline, who both seem to me to qualify as well-known individuals beyond the blogosphere. Where there’s some real degree of ambiguity, I’ve not included the links; where (as with the _Wall Street Journal_ editorial board’s slur-in-passing), I think that any reading other than the obvious one is simply making excuses for the inexcusable, I’ve included them. Which is not to say that I don’t fully expect some of our regular commenters to engage in aforementioned excuse-making, special pleading etc. The links are below the fold.
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Good catch from Tristam Shandy– Bob Dole’s tears for the persecuted journalists, and his grave concerns that “dozens of whistle-blowers [won’t be able to] share information about government wrongdoing”, are of quite recent vintage. (Apparently, the term “kerfuffle” hadn’t yet been adopted by Republicans when Dole made his Watergate speech.)

Not being an American, I’ve followed the whole Cindy Sheehan thing from afar. I’d been noting, with growing disgust, the whole slime-and-defend operation mounted by O’Reilly, FrontPageMag, Michele Malkin and points rightwards. Now I see that Christopher Hitchens “has joined in”:http://www.slate.com/id/2124500/fr/nl/ and that his invective against Sheehan has been “endorsed by Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/ventriloquizing.html . I guess there are two views on this kind of thing. There’s the view that citizens, whatever their background, are fair game for personal attack as soon as they open their mouths and should be treated in the same hardball manner as any machine politican or professional pundit. And there’s the view that grieving mothers should should be shown consideration, kindness and respect. Geras and Hitchens clearly take the first of these views.

Just over a year ago “I posted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/26/katharina-blum/ about Schlondorff’s film of “The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ and commented:

bq. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events.

[There’s good coverage of earlier episodes of the anti-Sheehan slime campaign at the Media Matters site: “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508100009 , “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110002 and “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120006 . ]

I’m a firm believer that the pictures are normally much better on radio. But today I’d rather be where Norm is, lucky sod.

UPDATE: if you’re not watching or listening, and you can, you must.

Britain, France and Germany are busy trying to persuade Iran to abandon efforts to develop nuclear weapons, so far with little success. Cajolery and bribery having tried and failed, how about a bit of leadership by example? Two of the three parties in this effort have nuclear weapons of their own, even though they don’t face any conceivable threat of invasion[1]. Perhaps if they agreed to disarm themselves, the Iranians would be impressed enough to follow suit.

OK, I’m joking about Chirac and France. There’s no way that France is ready to admit that it is no longer a Great Power, and certainly Chirac is not the man to start the process. But, why shouldn’t Blair do something like this? It’s a perfect example of the non-ideological willingness to embrace radical alternatives to established dogma that New Labour is supposed to symbolise. And even if it didn’t produce any immediate payoff with Iran it would have to help the cause of non-proliferation in the medium term.

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Bribery is a good thing because it helps the bribed to learn what is best! So argues law & economics professor Thomas W. Hazlett “in today’s Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/61a388f6-0ce3-11da-ba02-00000e2511c8.html :

bq. Payola was made famous by scandals in the 1950s, when “cash, drugs and women” were traded to rock and roll disc jockeys in exchange for airtime, but the practice has a richer history. In both Britain and the US, 19th- and early 20th-century performers ­collected side-payments from music publishing houses for singing their songs.

bq. Ronald Coase, the Nobel Prize­winning economist, explained the practice in 1979. Radio stations own something valuable: songs played more tend to sell more. Competition for airtime develops, but how one conducts the best auction – given that station revenues come primarily from selling audiences to advertisers – is complicated.

bq. One view is that radio stations should be faithful to listeners and make choices based only on their DJs’ honest musical appreciation. But how do they know what gangsta rap track is top quality? Payola helps them learn, because record companies will tend to value airtime the most for releases for which they have the highest expectations of future sales.

I’d love to read commentary on this over at “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ . Tyler?