Iraqi election produces some hope

Although it was certainly marred by violence -- 35-38 dead depending on which counts you believe -- the election in Iraq came off reasonably successfully, at least initially and on the surface. The Sunnis voted in numbers this time, and the two leading coalitions seem to be PM Maliki's State of Law Party and former interim PB Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National Alliance. Though both are Shia, they bill themselves as secular and non-sectarian. As I predicted in my run-up piece no coalition is likely to get enough votes to form a tgovernment, so there is likely to be a period of wheeling and dealing that could take up to several months before a government is formed. If that leads to instability, it could lead to more violence. Let's hope it's resolved with a minimum of bloodshed. Getting U.S. combat troops out on a timely basis could depend on it.

For more background, Marina Ottaway, head of Middle East studies at the Carnegie Endowment, who was very helpful to me in preparing my piece, provides helpful context. Carnegie has been monitoring the Iraqi media -- fiverse and surprisingly free-wheeling -- for onths now.

More teacher persecution

It's happened again. a Burbank teacher, 33-year-old Amy Beck, has been arrested for having sex with a student. Why is this a crime? I can understand a school policy and that there can be authority issues, and that teachers who engage in sex with students might be disciplined, even fired. But where's the crime that has to involve government authorities? For there to be a crime there has to be a victim, and I can virtually guarantee that the 14-or 15-year-old boy in this case did not consider himself a victim. If he's anything like most 15-year-old boys -- it's been a while, but I remember -- he figured he won the lottery, not that he was victimized. And the teacher is not at all bad looking, either. The chances that he will be traumatized now or later in life are close to nil. So where's the victim?

The handling of this case was -- so far -- utterly absurd. The teacher apparently felt guilty and turned herself in. The prosecutor wanted bail of $175,000 but the judge said oh, no, it's going to be $400,000. This lady's life is ruined for a mistake in judgment that to my way of thinking doesn't qualify as a crime. She faces a maximum sentence of up to -- get this -- 7 years in state prison! She's unlikely to be good-looking when she comes out if she gets that kind of sentence.

I learned about this from Tim Conway Jr. (son of that Tim Conway from the old Carol Burnett show) on radio KFI. He was outraged too, and good for him. It takes a certain amount of cojones to take that stance in public, on the radio. But this prissy self-righteous attitude that sex is something close to the worst thing people can do to a young man needs to be challenged.

Plenty of social critics have noted that modern America is one of the few societies in world history that artificially extends childhood with adolescence (some would say many Americans extend childhood well into their 40s). My grandfather was sent out on his own to make his way in the world at 15 (he ended up working on the railroad and later became a civil engineer).

Aaarrrrggghhh!!

What makes you share writing?

John Tierney, science writer at the NYT (and my very favorite NYT writer) suggests in this piece that the kind of things most likely to be shared with others through e-mailing tend to be "articles with with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics." Perhaps most surprisingly, readers like to share an inordinate number of science article, especially those that inspired awe or were on large-scale topics or had to do with surprising research results.

How does anybody know? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania checked the NYT's list of most-e-mailed articles every 15 minutes or so for more than six months and did their best to correct for placement in the paper or on the Web page. They had expected articles with practical tips to be most prominent, or maybe stuff about sex. But they found science articles disproportionately predominant, and not the practical applied-science stuff but the pathbreaking eye-opening, mind-expanding stuff, stuff that invites you to see the world in a different way, on things like paleontology and cosmology.

Maybe there's hope for humankind after all.

So was Eric Massa set up?

The default position for any statement from a politician should be skepticism. However, having listened to most of this somewhat rambling radio comment from Eric Massa, the NY Dem Rep. who announced his resignation last Friday, I'm inclined to think that at he believes that he was set up to some extent by the House leadership because he was a vote against ObamaCare who wasn't likely to be swayed. However, history doesn't entirely hold together either. He says he decided to resign because he has had a recurrence of cancer and his doctor recommended getting away from the stress of being in Washington. But then a story was bandied about that he was under an ethics committee investigation for making sexual comments to a male staffer. He claims nobody told him about any ethics investigation and Steny Hoyer lied about it -- which I'm not disinclined to believe. And the supposed sexual comment to a staffer was a joke at a fairly drunken wedding party that the guy did not find offensive. Then there was that cool story about a naked Rahm Emanuel "son of the devil's spawn," confronting him naked in a shower at the House gym. Delicious stuff.

Still, if he's so all-fired opposed to ObamaCare, why not stick around a while longer and vote against it? Can his cancer be all that invasive that a couple of weeks doing what he thinks is right would threaten his life or recovery? Maybe so. But the case just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Iraqi elections encouraging in a preliminary way

It doesn't change the fact that invading Iraq was a huge mistake that killed thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis unnecessarily, only to create a regime that is more likely than not to be a de facto ally of, or at least not a buffer against Iran. But there was something almost inspiring about the willingness bordering on eagerness of most Iraqis to go to the polls Sunday and at least make an effort to bring a semblance of democratic governance to their country. Given that no party or faction is likely to get a majority or even a strong enough plurality to form a government quickly, it is likely to take months to form a government, there is likely to be a period of instability that will require forbearance that we might not have a right to expect. But we should hope that the Iraqis get through this and form something resembling a stable government if we want U.S. troops to leave on schedule -- or even, if certain factions end up being influential, ahead of schedule. I'm hoping for he best but prepared for something less.

Quote of the Day

"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." -- John Quincy Adams

It's too bad this wisdom no longer guides U.S. foreign policy. We would be freer and more prosperous if it did.

Trying to control the Internet

The government has wanted to control the Internet ever since it began to achieve prominence in American life. It makes the bureaucrats crazy that there is this enormous area of relative freedom that it simply doesn't/can't control. Well, the Federal Communications Commission, the federal government's most prominent organ of censorship -- which wouldn't exist if they took the First Amendment seriously -- is making a bid to do just that. The way it seeks to get the camel's nose under the tent, as this Register editorial explains, is by subsidizing broadband for rural areas. This makes almost no sense as a critical task for the federal government -- broadband is spreading faster than any previous communications technology without "help" from the government. It might never achieve 100% penetration in rural areas, but that's not really the point. The FCC's broadband initiative, which includes not only subsidies for rural broadband -- which will inevitably bring "he who pays the piper" regulations -- but mandates for "net neutrality," a vision of what should be that differs only slightly from what is developing, but that might provide the rationale for more federal regulation.

A free Internet is one of the great achievements of our time. It would be tragic if the feds started regulating it; you know regulation would increase. I'm a little surprised that more Netizens aren't expressing alarm at the FCC's power play.

Quote of the Day

"Of all enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few." -- James Madison, Father of the Constitution

Remembrance of pianos past

Years ago, when I was married to my first wife, we came across a little museum in western Pennsylvania -- I think it was just west of Franklin -- full of jukeboxes and music boxes. It turned out that a small-scale farmer and his wife were fascinated with them and started collecting, and after a while they had more than they could keep in the barn. So they built a building and shared their obsession with others. I don't remember if they charged a small fee or had a voluntary donation box at the door, but whatever we paid it was worth it. Hundreds of jukeboxes and music boxes, of every shape and size, decorated in a vast variety of ways. Who knew?

It turns out, as this Slate story demonstrates, that people with obsessions who end up opening private museums are all over the country. Michael Frederick and his wife bought an 1830-era British Stodart piano in 1976 and he restored it -- and thus began an obsession. His private museum is in Ashburnham in mid-Massachusetts. It has 24 pianos, all kept in concert-ready shape, including names like Graf, Boesendorfer, Streicher, Pleyel, Bluthner, some of whom aren't making pianos any more. The phenomenon allows Jan Swofford to muse on the variety of pianos past -- a variety of personality of instruments we may have lost even as our standardized modern pianos are in some ways technologically superior and on balance better. He reminds us that Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Chopin, etc., all had different pianos they used for compsition, and in some sense the pianos are co-creators -- and unless we hear compositions played on the pianos of the era we aren't hearing the music as the composers heard it.

Click on the article. It includes excerpts of pieces played on pianos of different eras to demonstrate just how different they sound.

Toward private arts support in Europe

In an article on health care last year, I remarked the irony that even as countries in Europe are discovering some of the shortcomings of nationalized health care and seeking to remedy them by moving toward a more market-based system, progressives in the United States are going all-out to bring us European-style health care. I think Mark Steyn understands why -- once statist health care is in place it will almost certainly never be repealed, one-sixth of the economy will be effectively socialized, and an individualist order will increasingly be but a dim and distant memory.

Or maybe not. There are those moves away from total government control of health care in Europe, and it turns out there are also moves away from complete government sponsorship and subsidization of the arts as well. The shadow culture minister for Britain's Tory party promises to usher in"a U.S.-style culture of philanthropy" abnd move toward tax breaks rather than government subsidies for the arts. In France Sarkozy is replacing two museum workers who retire with only one. If the museums want to hire more workers, they'll have to raise money through donations. Although some have noticed that when culture is liberated from market forces it tends toward the mediocre and then becomes subject to political and bureaucratic forces, for the most part this liberalization comes from desperation -- the welfare states running out of money -- and is widely resisted: "It gives the impression that culture is merchandise." But it's happening nonetheless.

Iraqi elections and U.S. withdrawal

The elections in Iraq have gotten very little attention until the last few days -- the military cares about Afghanistan and the media care about health care and the implications for elections -- the only thing in American life the media get really excited about, policy being pretty boring. But they'll be quite significant, given that they are unlikely to be decisive. It will probably take months for the Iraqis to form a government. Given that there's been serious violence -- at least 40 dead in the last couple of days -- instability is likely to lead to more violence, which could lead to civil war. I did a piece for the Register's Sunday Commentary section that tries to describe the stakes and the players. If I do say so, I haven't seen anything better, and I read most of what's out there in preparation. Hope for the best but don't necessarily expect it.

Sorry, Karl, Bush did lie

I haven't read the book yet, though I've requested a review copy. But the NYT did a pretty good summary of Karl Rove's new book, "Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight" -- rather telling subtitle. It's not a journey of persuasion and argument, but a fight, which is the context in which one should view his WSJ columns and Fox appearances. It's hardly a surprise that he defends the Bush years. But it's not a physical fight but a vicarious one. I met him when he was pimping Bush during the run-up to 2000 and he's not a fighter.

The headline seems to be that he admits not finding weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's Iraq "badly damaged Mr. Bush's presidency," as the NYT puts it. But he insists that Bush didn't consciously lie during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and (NYT again) "he blames himself for not countering the narrative that 'Bush lied.'"

Sorry Karl, that would have been a difficult one to counter, for the simple fact that Bush lied serially. Now it may be that Bush did not consciously lie about believing Saddam had WMD. There are fairly credible accounts that he confronted then-CIA director George Tenet in December 2002, suggesting that the intelligence was pretty thin, and Tenet told him it was a "slam-dunk." So maybe Bush convinced himself -- but the evidence is that he has always been able to convince himself of self-flattering narratives.

Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews.com has helpfully provided once again the evidence of one of Bush's repeated post-invasion lies -- one the MSM never challenged him about. Again and again, once he noticed nobody challenged him, he said that Saddam refused to let the IAEA inspectors in to check for WMD, so since he acted so guiltily, there was no choice but to invade.

The truth, of course, is that Saddam did let the IAEA inspectors in for months in late 2002 and gave them full access to anything they wanted to see. The IAEA inspectors kept reporting they had found nothing and urged US intelligence, who seemed so convinced those weapons must be somewhere in Iraq (after all, Chalabi and Curveball said so), to provide them with leads. Nothing panned out. Finally Bush informed thje IAEA inspectors that they should get out of Iraq, not quite saying ec-licitly that the decision to invade had been made, but everybody got the message. So Bush invaded after the IAEA inspectors had been in Iraq for months and found nothing, and he knew that. And every time he told the story afterward, he lied and said Saddam denied access. He may even have c0nvinced himself it was true --he seems to have quite a capacity for self-deception -- but in fact he lied and lied and lied.

Quote of the Day

"It does not take a majority to prevail . . . but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams

Getting some serious hits

It was a most interesting day at the office today. In the morning I posted a little blog noting just how curious -- well, I said breathtaking -- that with the public solidly opposed to the kind of health care reform that has been on offer to date, Obama and the congressional leadership would decide to double-down and just push it, regardless. Without our doing much of anything except that Will put it in the "A" box on the page, RealClearPolitics picked it up and put it at the top of their page today. Well! By the time I left the office today it had more than 5,000 hits and as of tonight - just checked it and approved about 20 more comments -- it had 100 comments. That is far more than is usual for an Orange Punch blog. We're generally fortunate if we get a few hundred hits and a dozen comments. But these came from all over the country. Many of the comments were commenters flaming one another, having forgotten what the original post was about, but that's not all that unusual. Anyway, it was a strangely exhilarating experience. And it might not be done. I think I'll pimp my Sunday column on the Iraqi election to RealClear in the morning.

Why Chile's earthquake was not so devastating

A number if people have remarked on the dramatic differences, especially in death tolls, between Chile, which actually experienced a far larger earthquake, and Haiti. Chile had fewer casualties and fewer buildings collapsing -- though it is apparently still experiencing aftershocks. But not many got to the most important reasons. Some cited building codes in Chile, but Haiti could have had the strictest building codes in the universe and they would have been ignored because most people are too poor to build to them. The biggest key is wealth, and Chile is wealthier not only because it has a history of being relatively civilized, whereas Haiti's history is unspeakably tragic, but it had something of a free-market revolution in the 1980s that laid the groundwork for a democratic revolution.

Don Boudreaux at George Mason U also expounded on the differences in property rights. Chile's are relatively secure, while in Haiti property rights are less secure than in almost every country. Who has the incentive to build to high standards when your property can be taken away on a whim?

Welcome to the jungle, Jerry

Heaven help me, I am actually rather pleased that old Jerry Brown -- who now that he is bald looks like the spittin' image of his father -- has finally exerted himself to get into the governor's race in California. Of course, having scared off most of the other Democrats with the rumor of his likely candidacy -- and in the case of Dianne Feinstein being too smart to try fro a job no sane person should want given the mess the politicians have made of the state -- he didn't have much choice if he didn't want to cede the job to Meg Whitman. Unless he's completely lost his touch in his old age, he should at least make the race and, if he wins, the government and all its follies interesting. I expect I'll disagree with some 80% of his policy positions, but it will be fun to have him around. MOst politicians are so careful not to say anything that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as controversial that they are b-o-r-r-r-i-n-g.

Quote of the Day

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action." -- Bertrand Russell