* Liberal Oasis has a series of quotations from John Ashcroft, who turns out to be a huge fan of special prosecutors.

* A story about the ties between Ashcroft and the administration:

“On Wednesday, Justice Department officials would not rule out the possibility of Mr. Ashcroft appointing a special counsel, or recusing himself from the case.

“We’re leaving all legal options open,” said Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman.

And the associate of Mr. Rove said of the attorney general, “He’s going to have to recuse himself, don’t you think?””

* And, via Unfogged, this story would appear to assuage remaining good-faith doubt about whether Plame was undercover or not. (Bad-faith doubt, of course, is more tenacious than Jason Voorhees.)

“Valerie Plame was among the small subset of Central Intelligence Agency officers who could not disguise their profession by telling friends that they worked for the United States government.

That cover story, standard for American operatives who pretend to be diplomats or other federal employees, was not an option for Ms. Plame, people who knew her said on Wednesday. As a covert operative who specialized in nonconventional weapons and sometimes worked abroad, she passed herself off as a private energy expert, what the agency calls nonofficial cover.

But that changed over the summer, when her identity as a C.I.A. officer was reported in a syndicated column by Robert Novak.”

Note: this story also does a number on the “everyone knew she was C.I.A.” defense.

My conscience has been telling me that I should write about something in addition to Ambassador Wilson’s wife. So here are a few thoughts:

* Ross from Bloviator has two posts (here and here) about the growing population of Americans without health insurance. 2.4 million more people were uninsured in 2002 than in 2001.

“The CBO believes that in looking at 1998 data from two different studies (the last best data sets available) between 21-31 million people (~9%-13% of the nonelderly) were uninsured for the whole year, 40 million or so (~18% of the nonelderly) were uninsured at the time of the 1998 Census “snapshot,” and about 60 million people a year (~25%) went uninsured for at least part of the year.”

* I’m not a huge fan of the Chemical Brothers, but I think that their video for “Let Forever Be” is one of the five best I’ve ever seen. Maybe even three best.

* I think that Arthur Silber has a good take on Rush Limbaugh’s alleged drug abuse. I wouldn’t cheer a sting operation to catch an ordinary citizen who was abusing pain pills. And if the sting was conducted by the National Enquirer (I can’t tell from the Drudge headline), that’s really, really low.

Daniel will be pleased to note that his post discussing the Ambassador’s wife who must not be named was judged by the content filter on Canterbury airport’s coin-operated Internet terminal to contain material of an adult nature unsuitable for a public environment. If only Karl Rove had been using one of these things when he sold Wilson’s wife down the river.

This should be classified as “playing with numbers” rather than serious economic analysis, but I found it interesting at least. Basically, following on from Chris’s demographics post earlier in the week, I thought I’d follow up an idea I’ve had for a while and carry out some “financially adjusted demographics”. The idea is quite simple; there’s two ways in which you can add to a country’s effective labour power:

1. Increase the population
2. Acquire overseas assets, effectively giving you a claim on the population of other countries.

It’s always struck me that demographic analyses (particularly those carried out by people looking at pensions issues) tend to fixate on the first and ignore the second. Turns out that it doesn’t make a huge difference to the numbers, but it does make a difference.

[click to continue…]

It seems like so much longer than four days since Henry wrote:

But I’m disturbed by the tone of triumphalism coming from a few left blogs and their commenters. It’s understandable that some see this as an opportunity to stick it to the warbloggers. It’s still a mistake. This story is too important to be turned into a cheap gotcha. There’s a growing groundswell of outrage on the right as well as the left. People should be building on this, rather than using the affair to score short-term ‘told you so’ points.

But it isn’t. Anyway, I think we can agree that by now, that this water-source has been well and truly pissed in, so I feel less guilty than I ought in taking what is, after all, a pretty decent opportunity to stick it to the warbloggers. One has to say, the opposition have performed pretty dreadfully on this one. Bereft of any unifying theme from the top, they’ve failed mightily to improvise material. Below I offer a few suggestions …

[click to continue…]

This seems a little late to matter now, but NBC has adopted the following policy regarding references to Amb. Wilson’s wife. (See end of this piece.)

NBC News has decided not to report the name of the woman whose identity was revealed in Novak’s column. MSNBC.com has removed her name from its coverage.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who Kevin Drum quotes goes out of his way to follow the same policy in the extracts Kevin has. It’s hard to believe that anyone who had an interest in her activities could have missed the story by now, or could pick it up from any of us, but it’s not obviously a bad policy.

Two quick hits:

1. Greg Greene makes a strong argument that the independent counsel statute was a bad law, and we shouldn’t be pining for it. I’m pretty sure that I agree; the general de-armament of US politics is good for all sides in the long term, and the independent counsel sure looked like bad government a few short years ago.

2. Tim Dunlop helps clear up the confusing question, “who thought (Wilson) could be trusted with the Niger mission to begin with.” (Answer: the office of the Vice President).

I’m starting to get very angry about attacks on Joseph Wilson. Even if he’s wrong about everything, it doesn’t justify going after his wife, and it certainly isn’t relevant to the criminal inquiry about the release of classified information.

[click to continue…]

is the title of a not bad article in The Age today on time travel. They give too much credence to branching universe hypotheses for my tastes, but there’s some fun quotes from some leading thinkers, and a relatively straightforward description of Paul Davies’s time machine plan.

Related to Ted’s point below, could I just clarify that there are only two ways in which it can be true that X is “not a covert CIA operative”.

1) X is not a CIA operative
2) X is a CIA operative who is not covert

If you are making the claim “X is not a covert CIA operative”, then it may be helpful to your audience if you explain which of the two claims above you are making. I can draw a Venn diagram if it makes things clearer.

If I were to say:

Nobody at Domino’s called me to sell me Cinnamon Sticks. In July I was speaking to a Domino’s employee about a large pizza when he told me that I could get free Cinnamon Sticks with my order. Another Domino’s employee told me the same thing.

then no one in their right minds would try to summarize me by saying:

Ted Barlow says the Cinnamon Sticks didn’t come from Domino’s.

Right?

“Glenn Reynolds deplores”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/011754.php :

bq. the excessive gleefulness and point-scoring of the anti-Bush bloggers in general on this topic, [which] only serves to make this matter look more political, and less serious, than it perhaps is.

I’d just like to endorse that sentiment, and look forward to the bright future of Instapundit, freed from all that excessive gleefulness and point-scoring on serious matters.

There’s “an interesting communication on Brian Leiter’s site about the price of the notoriously expensive philosophy journal Synthese”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000311.html#000311 . The incapacity of academics for any kind of concerted collective action has long been demonstrated by the failure of university libraries to organized a boycott of Kluwer (publishers of Synthese and a number of other overpriced journals). [Update: See also “Brian Weatherson’s site”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002184.html and Leiter’s comment there.] But I wanted to comment on this paragraph in order to report something I heard in Belgium last year:

bq. With respect to the institutional pricing, things aren’t quite as simple or as bad as the raw number implies. The way things stand now, the number of paper subscriptions from institutions is slowly decreasing. However, the number of libraries buying electronic subscriptions to a bundle of journals (including Synthese) now outnumbers those subscribing to the paper copy. As libraries stop renewing their paper copy, they have tended to shift to the online version as part of an arrangement where they subscribe to all or a selection of the Kluwer journals. Consequently, the price that libraries pay for the e-version of Synthese is considerably less than €/$1652. I can’t give you a precise figure because the price varies depending on the arrangement that libraries or consortia of libraries make with Kluwer. Chances are, if your library now carries the print version of Synthese, they will soon within the next few years and will adopt it in electronic form as part of an electronic bundle of journals instead.

[click to continue…]

1. Andrew Northrup is a phat, phat young man. (That’s what you kids say, right? Phat?)

2. Every day, Jim Henley wins my heart anew.

Come to think of it, a fun Washington fact I learned years ago from my buddy Toiler, who really is an analyst for the CIA. If someone asks him where he works, he has to tell them he works for the CIA. He is not to lie or dodge the question. Why? So he won’t ruin it for the people that do have to lie or dodge the question.

This is about the millionth reason to believe that Valerie Plame really was employed in the Agency’s clandestine services division: in all the times that Wilson, who surely knows the rules, and spokesmen for the White House and CIA have been asked about Plame’s employment, they have not said, “She’s an analyst.” But if she were indeed an analyst, that’s what they would say. So, can we please retire the Administration apologist defense “we don’t know whether Plame was really a ‘covert’ employee or not”?

He’s got a bunch of good posts; just keep scrolling. I’m especially partial to this one.

If I ever turn libertarian, I’m buying him a pizza. Arthur Silbur, too.

Via “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106487652773758854, an interesting story about the new Transport and Security Administration (TSA). CAPPS II program, which aims to hoover up personal data from all airline passengers. The TSA has appointed a certain David S. Stempler, head of the “Air Travelers Association,”:http://www.1800airsafe.com/ as passenger advocate in the CAPPS II process. The trouble is that there’s no evidence that the “Air Travelers Association” consists of more than a fancy website, a customer loyalty program, a couple of flacks, and a bunch of letterheaded stationary. Moreover, there’s strong circumstantial evidence “to suggest”:http://www.dontspyon.us/stempler.html that the “Air Travelers’ Association” has close and intimate connections with Cendant Corporation, a data processing company that stands to make a lot of money if CAPPS II is implemented. In other words, it looks as though the “passenger advocate” may well be a corporate shill.

This is a perennial problem for interest group politics in the US. It’s very hard to tell “real” grassroots organizations from fake ones; private interests often set up astroturf associations to peddle a particular line and pretend that it’s emanating from a real constituency. Even when the US government wants to know who’s for real and who’s not (doubtful in the present instance), it’s hard put to distinguish the genuine from the ersatz. Many European countries do things differently; they give quasi-official status, and a privileged voice, to interest associations that they consider to be “genuine.” This has its own problems – it often gives rise to worryingly comfortable relations between governments and consumer watchdogs. But it’s still an improvement on the US approach.

Recently, however, US consumer groups have begun to organize – thanks to the EU. The EU and US set up a cross-Atlantic organization called the “Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue”:http://www.tabd.org a few years back, to push the common interests of EU and US business. The Europeans insisted that there be a similar organization for consumer associations too, the “Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue”:http://www.tacd.org, or TACD. Since its inception, TACD has not only represented EU-US consumer interests, but has served as an umbrella group to organize US consumer groups into a quasi-official lobby. Amazingly, nothing of the sort existed before (many US consumer associations had fallen out over NAFTA, and weren’t talking to each other). TACD also serves as a sort of vetting procedure for genuine consumer associations – if you’re a member of TACD, you’re undoubtedly the real thing. That said, it’s not surprising that the TSA didn’t invite a “real” consumer organization to provide an advocate. If you want to provide the appearance of consultation, but not the reality, astroturf groups have their advantages.