[Not "aweigh" because most of these are being pitched over the side. You'll see as you read.]

So the dude mentioned in the previous post, Lance Izumi, is a "senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy". That sounds kewl.

Lance T. Izumi on how high government spending crowds out liberty. Hayek is invoked. Izumi writes:

An expansionist government, even in the pursuit of noble causes, reduces freedom.

Oxblog has some good links on the developing situation in Iran.

Responding to this post Robert Hill writes, via e-mail, to disagree with my assessment of what happened to California Republicans. He takes note of this section:

They pushed a popular Referendum which passed with significant voter support, 187, but Pete Wilson ended up looking intolerant, as did the entire California Republican Party. So they won that issue at the polls but people didn't look at them the same way. Arguably that was the beginning of the end for California Republicans, who dominated State politics prior to that and collapsed after. They're only just now beginning to recover. . .perhaps.

To which I have to disagree. The CA Republican Party is always getting their tail kicked at the local level. I can't remember if we've ever had a state legislature that was dominated by Republicans in the 16+ years I've been living here. It's always been controlled by the Democrats.

Pete Wilson was an ineffective, wishy-washy governor, much like Grey Davis. But Both governors owe their successes to the fact that they were superb campaigners. The recent losses at the gubernatorial level by the Republicans in California were due to the California Republican Party, not Prop. 187.

If you look at the California Republican and Democratic parties, you'll note that they are controlled by the extreme fringe of their parties. Just listen to an interview with the CA Democratic Party Chairperson sometime. He is an utter lunatic. Without a Wilson or a Davis at the helm, both parties lost big time to their opponents.

So I think your analysis of CA is wrong and doesn't support your hypothesis that pushing for an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Constitution will hurt Bush's chances at reelection. I hope he won't do it, but I don't see any evidence that it will hurt him much if it does.

An allusion to this post where I came out on the subject of Gay Marriage.

The Rocky Mountain News has an editorial supporting the Colorado version of the bill, though arguing for some tweaking. It concludes:

Even with these flaws, HB 1315 has much to commend it. Whether some professors like it or not, for example, lawmakers have every right to ensure public colleges and universities have a grievance procedure to protect students from political zealots who belittle, intimidate or even punish them academically for differing views. Such professors no doubt are a small minority, but they exist.

An academic bill of rights is a worthy goal if it is narrowly focused on political discrimination in the classroom. HB 1315 is a good starting point for such a statute.

Daniel Arontstein writes via e-mail to remind that stockpiles and even preemption were irrelevant when it came to the Iraq war, echoing Wes Clark before he became politically ambitious. Daniel points to the text of Resolution 687 and 1441 and points out that:

1 - UNSCR # 687 was principle resolution which set out the terms and conditions for the ceasefire of the 1991 war.

2 - The ISG and others have already proven beyond any reasonable doubt - and to a moral certitude - that Iraq was in flagrant violation of UNSCR # 687 and UNSCR # 1441; therefore a casus belli existed.

This is the entire legal and moral justification for the war. This is true regardless of whether, or not, we ever discover any large stockpiles of WMD. As such, the War in 2003 is not, nor was it ever "preemptive".

On Jauary 28th, 2004, CNN reported that David Kay - in sworn testimony said the following:

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441. Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities -- one last chance to come clean about what it had. We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.

The provisions of UNSCR # 687 which were irrefutably defied or broken were:

8. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:

(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;

(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities; . .

12. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally agree not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material or any subsystems or components or any research, development, support or manufacturing facilities related to the above;

Several provisions of UNSCR # 1441 were violated, too. It should be reiterated that Nowhere in UNSCR # 1441- that is to say not once - does it mention that "large stockpiles" of WMD are the only concern the, the major concern, or even the central concern. In fact, the sixth (6th) paragraph specifically states that any and all WMD activity is specifically prohibited:

Deploring the fact that Iraq has not provided an accurate, full, final, and complete disclosure, as required by resolution 687 (1991), of all aspects of its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles with a range greater than one hundred and fifty kilometres, and of all holdings of such weapons, their components and production facilities and locations, as well as all other nuclear programmes, including any which it claims are for purposes not related to nuclear-weapons-usable material.

The facts are incontrovertible: UNSCR # 1441 & 687 were violated. Resumption of war was therefore right and necessary. WHY?! Because for international order and peace to flourish, despots, tyrants and genocidal terrorists must know that violating our laws, our UNSCR resolutions, and our treaties has very serious consequences - consequences they shouldn't risk, because they won't survive them.

The WSJ on Barnard Lewis and America's War:

As mentor and informal adviser to some top U.S. officials, Mr. Lewis has helped coax the White House to shed decades of thinking about Arab regimes and the use of military power. Gone is the notion that U.S. policy in the oil-rich region should promote stability above all, even if it means taking tyrants as friends. Also gone is the corollary notion that fostering democratic values in these lands risks destabilizing them. Instead, the Lewis Doctrine says fostering Mideast democracy is not only wise but imperative.

After Sept. 11, 2001, as policy makers fretted urgently about how to understand and deal with the new enemy, Mr. Lewis helped provide an answer. If his prescription is right, the U.S. may be able to blunt terrorism and stabilize a region that, as the chief exporter of oil, powers the industrial world and underpins the U.S.-led economic order. If it's wrong, as his critics contend, America risks provoking sharper conflicts that spark more terrorism and undermine energy security. . .

A faction led by political strategist Karl Rove believed soul-searching over "why Muslims hate us" was misplaced, Mr. Frum says. Mr. Rove summoned Mr. Lewis to address some White House staffers, military aides and staff members of the National Security Council. The historian recited the modern failures of Arab and Muslim societies and argued that anti-Americanism stemmed from their own inadequacies, not America's. Mr. Lewis also met privately with Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Mr. Frum says he soon noticed Mr. Bush carrying a marked-up article by Mr. Lewis among his briefing papers. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Says Mr. Frum: "Bernard comes with a very powerful explanation for why 9/11 happened. Once you understand it, the policy presents itself afterward."

Update: Helps to include the link. Fixed that, sorry.

Ralph Peters writes on the bombings in Kurdish Iraq as an attack on freedom and a desecration of faith:

Terrorists who pervert their religion to justify atrocities aren't waging holy war. Islam doesn't permit the slaughter of the innocent. And the Koran certainly doesn't advocate murdering fellow Muslims.

Yet the bombers in Irbil attacked during celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid. Doubtless, they convinced themselves with a few twists of logic that they were doing a blessed deed - the human beast can rationalize anything.

But consider the act: The bombers used the generous traditions of the Eid holiday to penetrate celebrations open to all - and the killers reportedly entered dressed as mullahs.

Imagine if Christian extremists dressed as priests exploded suicide bombs on Easter Sunday - to drive us back to 13th-century intolerance.

These bombers didn't sacrifice their lives for their faith. They blasphemed horrendously against it. Even if their organization proves to have secular aims, the killers insulted not only the faith of the majority of Iraqis - Sunni or Shi'a - but the fundamental values of civilization.

The truth is that, far from sliding into chaos or heading towards civil war, Iraq is beginning to become a normal society. And all normal societies, as de Villepin might acknowledge, face uncertainties, just as do all normal human beings.

One should welcome the gradual emergence of a normal political life in Iraq after nearly half a century of brutal despotism, including 35 years of exceptionally murderous Ba'athist rule.

The central aim of the war in Iraq, as far as I am concerned, was to create conditions in which Shi'ites can demonstrate without being machine-gunned in the streets of Baghdad and Basra, while the Kurds are able to call for autonomy without being gassed by the thousands.

It is good that Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani can issue fatwas, as he never could have under Saddam. It is even better that those who disagree with the grand ayatollah can say so without being murdered by zealots.

Reformist Party to boycott elections as not being fair & free. Hopefully it's moving towards a political crisis that will ultimately result in the peaceful or near-peaceful (not too bloody) deposing of the Mullahs and replacement with a true representative democratic system.

Bush may not be dumb-dumb, but he's still playing catch up in waging the war of ideas according to Mark Ginsberg:

No one has articulated a more far-sighted vision of engagement with the Middle East than President Bush. In November, he outlined a "forward strategy of freedom" aimed at fostering democracies throughout the Muslim world. He acknowledged that "this strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before."

But for all Bush's sweeping rhetoric, the White House seems to shrink from mounting an intellectual defense of its policies in the region. It shuns Al Jazeera and other Arab media, botches the effort to get a credible Iraqi television station going, and ignores innovative recommendations for reorganizing its public diplomacy. Given the challenges we face in realizing the president's vision, this is the time to rebuild a bipartisan consensus from which to wage a more effective battle of ideas.

I've written before about rather wealthy Democratic politicians acting as if they're the vanguard of the proletarian revolution. The whole thing is getting more attention now, especially with the husband of a heiress and the standard-bearer of the disadvantaged trial lawyer community bringing it up on the campaign stump on a continual basis.

Tonight's a Democratic night with the Super Tuesday Primaries, but here's a little counter-programing in the form of a piece on whether or not they hand out Harvard MBAs to simpletons. Key section:

Having attended Harvard Business School at the same time as the President, graduating from the two-year program a year after he did, and then serving on its faculty after a year’s interval spent writing a PhD thesis, I am intimately familiar with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their performance did not make the grade.

There is simply no way on earth that the son of the then-Ambassador to China, or anyone else, could have coasted through Harvard Business School with a “gentleman’s C.” I never, ever heard of a case of an incompetent student being allowed to graduate, simply because a certain family was prominent. On the contrary, I did hear stories of well-born students having to leave prior to graduation. The academic standards were a point of considerable pride.

Well, Joe Lieberman goes out as a class act. A generous speech.

Ricin in the Capital Building. Of course, no proof it came from Saddam's stash.

James Dunnigan on on what the Army's doing to speed up the process of getting new technologies into the hands of troops in the field.

Of course it couldn't happen to a more deserving fellow, but the French corruption scandal is starting to get close to him.

I shoulda blogged this earlier, but it got lost in the shuffle. It's another article that Trent Telenko gave the heads-up on. In his mail pointing to the piece, Trent wrote:

What I find interesting is we have a US government bureaucracy acting faster, more effectively and more efficiently than the NGOs who supposedly specialize in this kind of work.

"It's no accident that OTI was in Fallujah, one of the most difficult places in Iraq for Americans to work. Sometimes known as the "Marines of AID," OTI staffers often are the first development workers on the ground in countries that have just emerged from war or prolonged political conflict. In East Timor, after the Indonesian military leveled the capital city of Dili in the summer of 1999, OTI set up its office in a couple of shipping containers. OTI specializes in highly visible, explicitly political development - support for free media, grants to women's groups and the like - intended to nudge fledgling governments toward democracy and stability. Created in 1994, the office is the brainchild of former AID Administrator J. Brian Atwood, who believed the existing AID bureaucracy, with its focus on long-term development, was ill-equipped to help countries in the pivotal days after a conflict. Where AID missions can take two years to get started in a country, Atwood wanted OTI to begin operations almost overnight. He persuaded Congress to give it "notwithstanding authority," a powerful clause in the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act that allows the office to bypass normal rules for procurement and hiring.

OTI accomplishes its work through small grants to host-country groups. Many grants are worth $100,000 or less (the cap on an OTI grant is $250,000). OTI tries to select grantees the way a venture capitalist picks promising companies, but instead of fledgling firms, the office funds nascent organizations that show potential to support democracy. In the early stages of a program, grants generally are awarded without competition. Of the 436 grants OTI had issued through Nov. 24 in Iraq, none was competitively awarded."

In Iraq, OTI's ability to move money quickly has endeared it to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The authority turned to OTI to refurbish government ministries ransacked by looters after Baghdad fell in April. "They're very effective in supporting CPA objectives," says a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "CPA loves [them]for that." Iraq is uncharted territory for OTI. In size and political significance, Iraq dwarfs the agency's previous programs. What's more, OTI is just one of many agencies and contractors rebuilding Iraq under the aegis of the provisional authority. Some observers question where OTI fits in the effort. For example, OTI can renovate Iraqi schools. But so can Army civil affairs officers; Bechtel Corp.; Research Triangle Institute, a North Carolina firm doing local governance work under a $170 million contract with AID; and five nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are administering AID's community action program. The grassroots civil society effort is modeled on an old OTI program in Macedonia. "It's not really clear what exactly OTI's niche is, because first of all you have the civil affairs teams of the military that are doing a lot of the work that OTI normally would do," says Marina Ottaway, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "In Iraq the situation is extremely confusing because there are far too many actors."

Banging the drum slowly, or at least regularly on this topic. Bruce Berkowitz argues that we collected a little and assumed a lot in our intelligence efforts:

But when combined with our inability to crack Iraqi secrecy, these hibernating programs and Iraq's past behavior gave the impression of a much bigger and more successful clandestine effort. When U.S. intelligence spotted an illegal sale, hidden transaction or remnant of a program that had been shelved, our analysts concluded -- correctly -- that Iraq still planned to develop the weapons.

It did not help matters that U.S. intelligence had underestimated Iraq's nuclear programs in the early 1980s and '90s. Analysts -- lacking hard information -- concluded the worst. Indeed, nearly everyone was taken in -- officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, our British allies, and even French and U.N. officials. Almost no one denied that the Iraqis were hiding something. The question was always what to do about it, and when.

The ultimate irony was that Saddam Hussein -- who might have put all questions to rest -- was so intent on maintaining his power at home and his stature abroad that he could never let inspectors discover for themselves that his weapons programs had been shelved. He is now paying the price for what appears to have been a colossal bluff.

This problem will likely get worse. Not only is it hard to detect chemical and biological facilities, even nuclear weapons programs today have a small "footprint." Where the Manhattan Project required the equivalent of small cities, more recent programs, such as the one South Africa ran in the 1980s and Pakistan built in the 1990s, require only a few large buildings. Much of the North Korean program appears to be hidden in caves, and until recently we knew little of the Iranian and Libyan programs -- which ran for decades.

That's why we need to focus even harder on improving collection and on understanding the true limits of our information at any given moment. Even the best analyst can't make intelligence out of whole cloth.

Sorry for the double post earlier today.

As I blogged this weekend, pre-war intelligence was not slanted. But it doesn't seem accurate, either. Even if we end up finding Iraq's WMD somewhere (Syria, Syria's satrapy Lebanon), it's still a problem. I posted last week a piece in the Christian Science Monitor that also points out that the intelligence community underestimated Libya's WMD programs, and asked "just what are we getting for our intelligence dollars?"

The good news is that consumer spending was up in December. The not so good news is the 2.4 Trillion dollar budget proposal:

The president's plan for the 2005 budget year, which begins next Oct. 1, proposes spending $2.4 trillion for all government activities, up 3.5 percent from the current year. Revenues will total $2.04 trillion, a sizable 13.2 percent increase that the administration forecasts will occur from growing tax receipts powered by a stronger economy.

To battle the soaring deficits, Bush proposed squeezing scores of government programs and sought outright spending cuts in seven of 15 Cabinet-level agencies. The Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency were targeted for the biggest reductions.

For those who aren't used to there being weekend posts, I posted Sunday on Iraq, Iran, and academic freedom that you might find worth reading.

I'd like to extend my gratitude to all the people who wrote with their support and encouragement in my job search, and offers of help.

One such person suggested I post my curriculum Vitae. I have posted a resume at Monster.

As John Facenda once said for NFL Films. I would have preferred the Packers being there and winning (not being there and losing, natch), but we had a good Super Bowl with two decent teams.

here is a good example of why the Academic Bill of Rights is needed. Read Cecile's whole post detailing the ridicule and abuse she was subjected to for expressing her opinion in class discussion when it was asked of her. Crushing of dissent indeed.

Reform MPs are showing some fight, resigning and doing so with some rhetorical fire:

In a speech on behalf of fellow lawmakers - carried live on state radio - Mohsen Mirdamadi spoke of an "ugly body of dictatorship" in Iran.

First, the bad as terror bombings continue, this time striking Kurdish political parties in Northern Iraq.