HIGH STAKES TESTING....I guess everyone's heard the news about the new prayer study, right? A team of researchers asked several church congregations to pray for heart surgery patients at six different hospitals and then tracked how well they recovered from surgery compared to patients who weren't prayed for. The result was null. Neither group did better than the other.

But I've got a question about this. As I recall from Sunday School, testing God is supposed to be a no-no. In the second of the three temptations of Christ, Satan takes Jesus to the top of a temple and tells him to jump off in order to prove that God will save him from death. Jesus refuses, saying, "It is written, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

It's the same deal for prayer: it works, but not if it's being done for the purpose of testing that it works. It's sort of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Christianity.

So here's my question. Christian doctrine says that testing the Lord won't work, which means a study like this is useless. Scientists say that science isn't meant to test supernatural phenomena, which means a study like this is useless. But if everyone agrees that a study like this is useless, why did the John Templeton Foundation spend $2.4 million on it? What's the point?

UPDATE: Just to make this super-duper clear, I'm not saying the study was useless because I'm an atheist and I don't believe in prayer. I'm saying it's useless because even Christians don't think a study like this would produce any positive results. That's assuming I understand Christian doctrine correctly, of course.

And don't bother suggesting that the folks doing the praying didn't know they were part of a test. Double blind protocols might work for us earthly humans, but they wouldn't fool God.

SECRETS REVEALED!....Jon Chait explains the conservative publishing world in 150 words or less.

JADED?....As Bob Somerby and Peter Daou and Media Matters have all pointed out, it really is remarkable how little attention the confirmation of David Manning's explosive prewar memo has gotten in the past week. Here's what the New York Times reported on Monday:

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second [UN] resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons...."The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

And this is in addition to the news that Bush was brainstorming ideas for deliberately provoking a war since it didn't appear that Saddam Hussein had any actual WMD to give him a legitimate reason for invasion.

And yet as near as I can tell from a search of both Nexis and Google News, a grand total of about a dozen U.S. newspapers bothered to even report this. This is despite the fact that Manning was Tony Blair's chief foreign policy advisor, the Times reviewed an actual copy of the memo, and two "senior British officials" confirmed its authenticity. What's more, the conversation between Bush and Blair took place on January 31, 2003, which means that Bush was flatly lying for six consecutive weeks when he pretended that war could be averted if only Saddam Hussein would cooperate with UN inspectors.

Is the "collective yawn" from the media because everyone figures this is old news? Because it comes from a competitor and no one wants to credit them? Because no one really cares anymore?

Or are we now so jaded by the relentless mendacity of the Bush administration that high level lying just isn't worth reporting these days? What other explanation is there for this not being front page news in Los Angeles and Washington DC as well as New York?

THE SAD STATE OF TODAY'S TEENS....Apparently our educational system really is going down the toilet. Even the creationists are doing a lousy job:

As his students rummage for their notebooks, [biology teacher Al] Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection — in a word, by evolution. The challenges begin at once.

"Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?" sophomore Chris Willett demands. " 'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn't."

With all the resources at their disposal, this is the best that high school rabble-rousers can come up with these days? Nothing about the Second Law of Thermodynamics proving that evolution is impossible? Nothing about irreducible complexity? Just some lame question about a CNN show?

I fear that we're losing our younger generation of creationists. I propose a billion-dollar nationwide intervention program followed up by high stakes testing to ensure that our kids are prepared to talk ID trash at a tenth grade level before they're exposed to high school biology. This is a disgrace.

THE DEATH OF COUPONS?....News you probably didn't know:

Americans took 3 billion coupons to retailers last year, a 33% drop from 2000, according to NCH Marketing Services Inc., a Deerfield, Ill.-based coupon processor. At the same time, the average coupon value has risen from 79 cents to 89 cents.

But now you do.

FOX, MEET HENHOUSE....Hey, guess who President Bush has nominated to head up the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division? That's right: the guy who represented Wal-Mart in trying to prevent a class of 1.5 million women from suing the company for discrimination in pay and promotions! He also appears to oppose pretty much every regulation related to wages and hours ever passed.

What a perfect nominee. If he didn't exist, the Republican Party would have to have invented him.

BRING BACK THE CHAIN GANGS!....Dana Rohrabacher, the insane congressman in the district immediately north of me, suggested yesterday that even if we cut off illegal immigration completely we'd still have a large and cheap labor force available to pick our strawberries for us. "Let the prisoners pick the fruits," he said.

Naturally I just discounted this as the ravings of a madman, but then TChris planted a thought in my mind: does this mean that maybe Jack Abramoff might be sent out to the fields for 10 hours per day of backbreaking work in the blazing sun for the next five years and ten months? And maybe Scooter Libby and Tom DeLay too? And you never know — could even Karl Rove find himself on the business end of a short handled hoe in El Centro if Patrick Fitzgerald ever manages to make sense out of all those missing White House emails?

Maybe Dana is actually onto something this time.

UPDATE: Oh, and Tony Rudy too.

YOUNG REPUBLICANS IN LOVE....Today the Wall Street Journal tells the story of Emily Miller and Michael Scanlon, two aides to Tom DeLay who were engaged to be married until, "with the wedding a few months away, he called off the engagement and started dating a 24-year-old waitress." After the breakup, Miller began pondering the events of the preceding few months:

People who have spoken to Ms. Miller say that after her breakup she began questioning how Mr. Scanlon could afford a lavish lifestyle while working summers as a beach lifeguard and doing seemingly little work at his public-relations firm. She talked about the beach house he had presented to her, the private jet he flew around in and the $17,000-a-month apartment he rented at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

Indeed. That does seem a trifle extravagant, doesn't it? Shortly thereafter, Miller had a chat with federal prosecutors and helped them build a case against Scanlon, and Scanlon in turn helped build a case against his buddy Jack Abramoff. Miller kept her engagement ring.

Read the whole thing. It's fun for the whole family.

UPDATE: Apparently Jason Leopold at Raw Story broke many of the details of this story back in January. His piece is here.

BLEATING AROUND THE BUSH....Ryan Lizza writes today that former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card viewed his job less as running the White House and more as being George Bush's ultimate spear carrier:

As his White House service wore on, this ostentatious modesty morphed even further into creepy masochism. He seemed to delight in the most painful assignments. After his own father died of Parkinson's disease, Card became a supporter of the life-saving potential of stem-cell research. Yet, when Bush limited federal money for the research, it was Card who made the rounds on the Sunday shows to cheerily defend the policy.

But this is less a reflection on Card than it is on Bush. After all, what kind of man would allow (or force?) a loyal retainer to do something like this? Answer: The same kind of insecure blusterer who repeatedly humiliates his aides in public with remarks like, "He's a PhD, see — I'm a C student. Look who's the President and who's the advisor." Or who's so famous for surrounding himself with toadies that it's considered newsworthy when he appoints someone who doesn't decorate his office with pictures of George Bush.

This is the central mystery of George Bush: How does this man-child with such an obviously mediocre mind manage to generate such intense loyalty in so many people? And yet somehow he does. Where's Sigmund Freud when you need him?

KALOOGIAN UPDATE....If you've been following the recent nitwittery surrounding Republican congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian ("Each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it — in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism," he said, but it turned out the picture he posted to show how calm things were in Baghdad was actually taken in Istanbul) — well, if you've been following it you might be wondering just how well Kaloogian is doing in his race to take over Duke Cunningham's seat in California's 50th congressional district. Here's the answer: he's got about 12% of the vote. For now. Somehow I have a feeling those numbers might drop a bit in the next few days.

What's also interesting is that Francine Busby has 45% of the vote compared to 46% for the combined Republicans in this heavily Republican district. Hmmm.

MARKET-STYLE IMMIGRATION REFORM....Over at Tapped, Ezra Klein summarizes an LA Times article explaining how we could go a long way toward cracking down on illegal immigration without thousands of miles of Iron Curtain-style fences or vast mobs of vigilante groups lining the borders. Instead, the single most effective policy would probably be the simplest: enforce the law that prohibits businesses from hiring illegals. The problem, of course, is that this would require Republicans to pass laws that their corporate contributors don't like, and we all know what that means. Let's put up a fence instead!

As for me, I'm basically in favor of a market-style approach that tweaks incentives to increase the cost of immigrating illegally while decreasing the cost of immigrating legally. At some point, if you can enact the right basket of policies to get the costs right, you'll reduce illegal immigration to a point we can live with.

So: crack down on employers because that's probably the the cheapest and easiest way of discouraging illegal immigration. If it's hard to get a job, you're less likely to cross the border. At the same time, make it easier to immigrate legally with a reasonable path to citizenship. This makes "getting in line" more attractive. Do these things right and there just aren't very many people left who find the illegal route more attractive than coming over legally.

It also goes a long way toward solving the wage problem. There's no question that immigration from Mexico drags down wages for unskilled labor, but today it drags it down even more than it has to because illegal immigrants have no bargaining power. An increased supply of legal immigrants would still put downward pressure on wages, but not nearly as much as illegal immigrants do.

And remember: one of these days we're all going to retire. When we do, we're going to be glad we let our population grow by adding a large number of citizens whose sole motivation for coming here was to work and make money. That's the same reason my ancestors came over, after all, and that all turned out pretty well in the end.

IMMIGRATION....Knight Ridder's Kevin Hall provides a sensible take on the economic impact of immigration:

"The consensus view is it is a net benefit to the country," said Tim Jim Smith, a senior economist and immigration expert at the Rand Corp., a research center in Santa Monica, Calif.

....Yet while immigration is a net economic benefit, it's one so modest that Smith cautioned that it "would not be on my top 10 list" of what's driving the U.S. economy.

Harvard University economist George Borjas recently published a study on the economic effects of immigration. He thinks the costs and benefits are a wash. Small gains to the broader economy are offset by social and fiscal costs such as providing health care to poor immigrants and schooling children who don't speak English.

"It would not be farfetched to say there would be zero gain from this," he said in an interview.

There's more, but this seems to be a fair summary. Immigration has some modest benefits and some modest costs, and overall is probably a small net positive in the short term and a larger net positive in the long term. At worst it's a wash.

CLONES....Responding to a PZ Myers post making the point that a cloned dog wouldn't be the original dog, Kieran Healy says:

I’ve half-joked before that, purely because of this basic point, sociologists should welcome human cloning with open arms. Technically achieving the sort of things many people imagine they could do with cloning — recreate a lost child or relative, produce a new version of themselves — would in fact have just the opposite effect. It would show just how important social structure, local environment and historical contingencies are to forming people. And that’s without even getting in to the metaphysical questions of what’s essential about people’s identity. Some people are going to be really upset when they realize that the genome is not some kind of magic essence of self. I hope public understanding catches up with the reality before actual cloned people are subject to the resentment of their creators.

Is that really the current state of public understanding, though? It's true that the last few years have produced a flood of headlines about the genetic basis of various personality characteristics, but surely very few people believe that genes are the sole basis of personality, do they?

I'm genuinely sort of curious about this. One of the things I find annoying about the whole nature/nurture debate is that both sides have a tendency to portray the other side in its maximalist version, whereas I've never read a single book, article, pamphlet, or blog post that suggested personality was anything other than some mysterious combination of both. The maximalist position (all nature, all nurture) just doesn't exist today in mainstream discourse.

In any case, we already know the answer to the clone question. Identical twins are clones, and although twins can be remarkably similar, any parent of twins can tell you that they also have very distinct personalities. It's not all in the genes.

On the other hand, it might be different for cats and dogs. I mean, I'd like to pretend that Inkblot has such a distinct personality that I could tell him apart from his hypothetical clone, but I wonder if I really could? Just for starters, he's only conscious for four or five hours out of every day, and the rest of the time he mostly just sits around and looks sort of puzzled. I'll bet a clone wouldn't be much different.

Or would he?

HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY....Which will make you happier: a pay raise or a boss you like? A pay raise or an interesting job? John Helliwell and Haifang Huang at the University of British Columbia claim to know the answer:

Say you get a new boss and your trust in management goes up a bit at your job (say, up one point on a 10-point scale). That's like getting a 36 percent pay raise, Helliwell and Huang calculate.

....Having a job that offers a lot of variety in projects, Helliwell and Huang found, is the equivalent of a 21 percent hike in pay.

Having a position that requires a high level of skill is the equivalent of a 19 percent raise.

And having enough time to finish your work is the equivalent of an 11 percent boost in pay.

Let's see. I like the management at the Washington Monthly; I get to write about lots of different things; my job requires a fair amount of skill; and I get to work at my own pace. Put this all together and it means that the Monthly gets to pay me about half of what they'd have to if this were a lousy job and I got treated badly. Not bad, eh?

ANDREW SULLIVAN NEEDS A NEW AWARD....Hugh Hewitt, in the process of grilling Time's Michael Ware about his reporting from Iraq, says he doesn't buy Ware's argument that reporting from behind enemy lines is a good thing. Then he lets loose with this:

MW: ....Let's look at it this way. I mean, you're sitting back in a comfortable radio studio, far from the realities of this war.

HH: Actually, Michael, let me interrupt you.

MW: If anyone has a right...

HH: Michael, one second.

MW: If anyone has a right to complain, that's what...

HH: I'm sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I'm sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target. Because in downtown Manhattan, it's not comfortable, although it's a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America. So that's...civilians have a stake in this. Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago.

This just might be the most fatuous thing I've ever heard. But it does make me wonder: do you think he really means it? Do you think Hugh literally, genuinely thinks of himself as being on the front lines every time he visits New York City?

As for Hugh's broader question, look at it this way: if the Western media had pulled out of Moscow during the Cold War we would have spent several decades thinking that the GUM department store was a treasure trove of consumer goodies instead of the cheerless and barren place it really was. In other words, of course it's a good idea to have someone providing us with a pro-Western view of what our enemies are doing — especially when enemy propaganda is already available 24/7 just by watching al-Jazeera or surfing the web or reading non-American newspapers. You'd think a guy who broadcasts on the radio, extols the virtues of the blogosphere, and supposedly understands the global nature of the war on terrorism could figure that out.

THE NEWS FROM BAGHDAD....Riverbend watches the news on Iraqi TV:

I was reading the little scrolling news headlines on the bottom of the page.... Suddenly, one of them caught my attention and I sat up straight on the sofa, wondering if I had read it correctly....The line said:

The translation:

“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

That’s how messed up the country is at this point....The situation is so bad on the security front that the top two ministries in charge of protecting Iraqi civilians cannot trust each other. The Ministry of Defense can’t even trust its own personnel, unless they are “accompanied by American coalition forces”.

Are we making progress in Iraq that the defeatist American media routinely ignores because they've been overwhelmed by their single-minded loathing of George Bush? Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY....Chevrolet now has a website that allows you to create your very own commercial for the Chevy Tahoe. Imagine the possibilities! I don't know how long they'll leave this one up — not long, I imagine — but it should give you a laugh if you manage to click through before they deep six it. I'd say its creators followed Chevy's recommendations to "entertain" and "inform" exceptionally well.

THE ISRAELI ELECTIONS....As an outsider who generally finds Israeli politics too byzantine to truly understand, I was a little surprised to hear that turnout for Tuesday's election had been so low. In the LA Times today, Yossi Klein Halevi suggests that it's because there's not much left for anyone to argue about anymore:

Tuesday's election marked the end of the two visions that together animated Israeli political debate for the last three decades: the left-wing dream of a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians that would bring Israel the first real peace in its 58-year modern history, and the right-wing dream of a "Greater Israel" that would fulfill an ancient longing to return to the biblical land and, at the same time, give Israel the safety it needs to survive.

This was the first campaign in memory in which talk of peace was nearly absent. Previously, even right-wing politicians felt obliged to argue that their hard-line politics would bring a more durable peace. But now, with the rise of the Hamas in the Palestinian territories, even the left couldn't manage to sing the old peace songs.

Halevi argues that although the old arguments were a form of "fantasy politics," the new politics are scarcely better: a universally gloomy acceptance of a walled-off country permanently at war with it neighbors, with no real belief that things will ever get any better. The arguments now are only over the details, and that makes voting barely worthwhile.

FISA SPEAKS....So what do FISA judges themselves think of the NSA's domestic spying program? On Tuesday several of them testified in front of Congress:

In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel also voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They also suggested that the program could imperil criminal prosecutions that grew out of the wiretaps.

Judge Harold A. Baker, a sitting federal judge in Illinois who served on the intelligence court until last year, said the president was bound by the law "like everyone else." If a law like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is duly enacted by Congress and considered constitutional, Judge Baker said, "the president ignores it at the president's peril."

Bound by the law like anyone else?!? That's treason talk. Why does Judge Baker care more about the rights of Osama bin Laden than he does about the security of the American people?

THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE, CONT'D....From the Los Angeles Times this morning:

Following four years of study, senior EPA scientists came to an alarming conclusion....

I hardly need to tell you how this story turns out, do I? We all know how the Bush administration feels about senior EPA scientists and their pansy ass whining about carcinogens and birth defects.

My favorite quote comes from Raymond DuBois, the Defense Department fellow who accidentally admitted why the Pentagon and the White House were fighting the EPA's conclusions about a chemical called TCE: "If you go down two or three levels in EPA, you have an awful lot of people that came onboard during the Clinton administration, to be perfectly blunt about it...."

Click the link if you've already had your coffee this morning. Otherwise you might want to skip it.

THAT SINKING FEELING....So how is the Republican Party doing since George Bush started his second term? Charles Franklin doesn't merely crunch the numbers to find the answer, he batters them into submission — and eventually delivers the goods:

Between January 1, 2005 and March 12, 2006, Republican partisan identification declined by an estimated 3.6%. The percentage of the adult population calling themselves Independent rose by 4.6%, and the percentage of Democrats declined by a statistically insignificant 0.4%.

It turns out that not only has party ID shifted a fair amount in the past year, but also that party ID differs wildly between polls. Fox News, for example, asks "Do you think of yourself as a Democrat or a Republican?" while Pew asks "Do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat, or Independent?" Just adding the option to the question increases the number of people who respond "Independent" from 17% (Fox) to 31% (Pew).

Both of the linked posts are long and eye glazing, but the bottom line is that party ID is surprisingly hard to measure. Keep that in mind the next time someone swears a poll must be wrong because its party weighting doesn't match the exit polls from a year and a half ago.

THE MARKET SPEAKS....The State Department is raising its payscale for serving in Iraq:

Starting this month, U.S. government civilians serving in Iraq and in Afghanistan outside of Kabul are receiving an extra 35 percent above their base salaries for hardship and another 35 percent for danger. Previously, they were paid 25 percent extra for each category, the limits the government had set decades ago for any foreign post.

...."The idea was to recognize service at our most difficult and dangerous posts, and foremost among those posts are Iraq and Afghanistan," said a senior State Department official.

But I thought things were going fine in Iraq and it was only the traitorous fifth columnists in the media who were making it look dangerous?

RELIGION UPDATE....Hey, remember that post last week where I suggested that we atheists "don't suffer much serious social ostracism"? Well, it turns out that was pretty stupid. Andrew Sullivan reports:

Eugene Volokh has just written a law article on how atheist fathers and mothers are routinely discriminated against in child custody cases. He cites over 70 recent cases across the country — and these were only the ones which were appealed, so they probably represent a fraction of the actual cases.

Eugene's article is here. I'm actually willing to concede that 70 incidents out of millions of custody cases over the last decade isn't exactly a sign of the apocalypse (so to speak), but it's still pretty discouraging news.

Meanwhile, among the religious demographic that isn't routinely discriminated against in custody cases, the "War on Christians" conference presents us with the wingnut Bill of Rights — a full 29 items long, including all the usual greatest hits. And as Steve Benen says:

Remember, before you laugh these folks off as fringe activists that no credible person should take seriously, take a look at the conference's guest list, which includes three leading House Republicans (Tom DeLay, Todd Akin, and Louis Gohmert) and two leading Senate Republicans (John Cornyn and Sam Brownback), the latter of which is considered a credible presidential candidate in 2008.

Elsewhere, Steve makes the following observation:

You wouldn't know it from watching the major news networks, but progressive religious leaders are more articulate and thoughtful on the key issues of the day than anyone in the religious right. Before a TV producer calls James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson to comment on a story, they might also put a call into Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, or Barry Lynn.

Unfortunately, television producers aren't very interested in "articulate and thoughtful." They're interested in provocative and influential. If our guys were more willing to spout obviously unhinged opinions, maybe they'd get more air time. That's good TV!

NEW BOSS....Apologies for the lack of posting this morning. I woke up sick, and now that I'm down at the computer I just can't work up any excitement over today's big news: the resignation of Andy Card and his replacement by Josh Bolten. However, feel free to sneer in comments while I try to find something else to write about.

A GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCY....Jonathan Morgenstein and Eric Vickland write in the Boston Globe today that the insurgency in Iraq — and our lack of success in defeating it — is a microcosm of the broader global struggle against terrorism:

This global insurgency can only be defeated by severing the insurgents' connections to populations that sustain them. We must isolate and smother an enemy who thrives by delivering empowerment and vengeance to populations drowning in poverty, social humiliation, and political marginalization. These masses in return sustain the enemy — passively with cover and actively with fighters. We have to convince those who passively support the insurgency that we are not their enemy. Unfortunately, our current strategy overemphasizing military force drives undecided millions into the insurgents' arms. Not only are we fighting the war wrong, we are fighting the wrong war.

This is not very sexy, but it's quite likely correct. Is anyone listening?

HEALTHCARE AND INNOVATION....Andrew Sullivan is unhappy at the prospect that someday the federal government may be allowed to negotiate prices with drug manufacturers. This strikes me as nothing more than the way free enterprise normally works — i.e., both buyer and seller negotiating prices rather than one side dictating to the other — but Andrew predicts doomsday:

We'll soon shift to a system of fantastically expensive free drugs of all kinds for all seniors and a crippling of the pharmaceutical industry's research and development arm. The trade-off will be complete: a collapse in research in return for free drugs for the most pampered senior generation in history.

That's an odd argument, isn't it? Are these drugs going to be fantastically expensive, or are they going to be so cheap they cripple the pharmaceutical industry's R&D efforts? I'm confused.

At any rate, big customers in the private sector routinely negotiate low prices with their suppliers, and it's not clear to me why things would be much different in this case. In fact, I can't think of any good reason to believe that the notoriously inefficient federal government should prove to be a steelier negotiator than, say, Blue Cross, which also buys in enormous volumes and has the added advantage of being a private company with plenty of incentive to negotiate the lowest prices possible. Ezra Klein has further arguments along this line here.

In the meantime, it occurs to me that there must be some natural experiments that could provide us with some data on this very legitimate question: does centralized control of healthcare spending reduce innovation? In the United States, Medicare funds healthcare for everyone over 65, so if single-payer healthcare really does stifle innovation, we should expect less innovation (and slower adoption of innovative technology) for new procedures and new drugs that are useful predominantly for older patients.

Surely someone has found some clever way to test this? I'll take a look around and see if I can find anything. Comments are open if you know of any relevant data.

MOUSSAOUI SPEAKS....The latest from the Moussaoui trial:

Zacarias Moussaoui testified in an Alexandria courtroom this morning that he was tapped by Osama bin Laden to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House as part of the terrorist attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

....He said he was supposed to head a five-man crew that also would have included Richard Reid, a British citizen who tried to set off explosives in his shoes aboard a transatlantic flight two months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Well, that testimony certainly explains why his attorneys thought he'd be wise to stay off the stand, doesn't it?

MAKING THINGS WORSE....Is a continued U.S. presence in Iraq necessary to prevent full blown civil war? Over at MaxSpeak, Barkley summarizes the latest bunch of botched military operations and concludes exactly the opposite:

I have had some sympathy with the idea that maybe, just maybe, US forces were necessary to prevent a complete degeneration into a full-scale bloodbath. But if this is the sort of stuff our troops are going to do, for whatever reason, then they should get the hell out as soon as possible. They probably should anyway, but this insanity is simply the final straw. Even the supposedly pro-US parts of the media in Iraq are enraged. Get out now!

Can I ask something very politically incorrect? There's no question that the fiasco in Iraq is primarily the fault of our civilian leadership — primarily George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — but what about our military leadership? Conventional wisdom suggests that we should all refrain from criticizing "the troops," but surely this stricture doesn't apply to the senior officer corps, which even now, 30 years after Vietnam and three years after the beginning of the Iraq war, appears not to understand how to fight a counterinsurgency. Or, for that matter, to even universally accept the fact that we are fighting a counterinsurgency.

Why? Either we're fighting this war very badly, in which case our military leadership deserves criticism, or else the kind of large-scale counterinsurgency we're fighting in Iraq is simply impossible for a country like the United States to win. Which is it?

CONGRESS AND CREDIT FREEZES....A reader emails to remind me of something that happened a couple of weeks but never made it into the blog: on March 16 the House Financial Services Committee approved the "Financial Data Protection Act of 2005" on a 48-16 vote.

Nothing wrong with that, is there? We're all in favor of protecting data, after all.

I hardly even need to finish this story, do I? The FDPA is sponsored by Ohio Republican Steve LaTourette, and the theory behind it is that instead of 50 different state laws on data protection we should have one nationwide law — something that would be a great idea if FDPA actually did a good job of protecting data. Unfortunately, what it mostly does is bring broad smiles to the faces of credit industry lobbyists by enacting an industry-friendly federal law that does less to protect data than most state laws. As the Senate Democratic Caucus of California puts it:

First, it only allows people to freeze their credit reports — widely touted as the most effective identity theft prevention tool — after they’ve become an identity theft victim. Second, it only requires businesses to notify their customers when a security breach happens if the breach is “likely to result in substantial harm.”

I'll let others deconstruct the notification issues, but credit freezes are one of my hobbyhorses because they're the best known defense against identity theft. Basically, a credit freeze is a simple option that prevents lenders from reviewing your credit history without your permission. Since lenders won't issue credit without first seeing a credit report, this prevents ID thieves from opening fraudulent accounts without your knowledge.

Why does the credit industry hate credit freezes? Because it puts an end to instant credit: when you apply for credit, it can't be approved until the credit agency notifies you and you tell them that it's a legitimate credit application. (That is, it's a credit application that you filled out, not someone else.) Unfortunately, the idea that some people would choose to accept this minor inconvenience in return for protection from identity theft terrifies them, which is why they want to limit the option only to people who have already been hit by identify theft. As Debra Bowen, the author of California's credit freeze law, says, this doesn't make sense:

Preventing people from freezing access to their credit reports unless they’re an identity theft victim is a little like saying people can’t buy flood insurance until their house is six feet underwater. The whole purpose of the freeze is to let people take a pro-active, preventative step to ensure they don’t get ripped off. Why Congress wants to tell people, ‘Hey, there’s this great thing that will help you from becoming an identity theft victim, but you can only use it if your identity has been stolen and the thief has racked up thousands of dollars worth of bills in your name’ is beyond me.

Far from overruling state laws on credit freezes, Congress should be doing just the opposite: passing laws making credit freezes even easier and cheaper than they are now. The credit industry, despite their predictable howls of anguish, would undoubtedly adapt with procedures that allowed fast notification and near-instant credit, and of course consumers who didn't want even this modest level of inconvenience would be free to keep their credit reports as free and unprotected as they are now.

But the credit industry doesn't want to bother themselves about identity theft since it's mostly consumers who pay the price anyway, and Congress is happy to oblige them. It's yet more evidence of Republican subservience to business interests even when it harms their own constituents.

UPDATE: More here on the notification aspects of this bill.

BUSH AND BLAIR....Anyone who's paid even the slightest attention to George Bush's personality understands that he values loyalty above all else. But there's always been a catch: although he values loyalty to George Bush, it's never been a two-way street. It's not wise to expect anything in return.

I've always wondered just how long it would take until Tony Blair finally blew his stack over this, but the man seems to have superhuman patience and has never publicly revealed any cracks in the facade of his eternal friendship with the president. Lately, though, as Alex Massie reports in TNR, other pro-American Brits have begun asking the question that one of them finally voiced publicly during a recent visit to America: "What do we get out of it?"

On a range of issues, the Americans have upset the British, politely listening to their concerns and then, more often than not, simply ignoring them. A British offer to send 6,000 troops into the caves of Tora Bora to hunt for Osama bin Laden was rejected in November 2001. British proposals for postwar Iraq were, according to a senior Foreign Office official quoted by Coughlin, "dumped ... in the dustbin." The initial round of primary reconstruction contracts went exclusively to U.S. firms; British companies had to complain before they were allowed a bigger piece of the action. Moreover, despite Bush's stated commitment to free trade, he imposed tariffs on European steel imports for over 20 months. And, ignoring repeated British pleas, the administration refused to engage on global warming or to make a priority of the Middle East road map.

Lately, Massie, says, two new slights have taken center stage. The first is the American refusal to pass a bilateral extradition treaty even though the British approved their end of it three years ago. The second is American refusal to allow technology transfers related to Britain's agreement to buy 150 Joint Strike Fighter planes. Blair has raised this issue with Bush several times, but Bush has apparently declined to spend any of his precious political capital on the issue.

It sure is a special relationship, isn't it? Very, very special.

SCALIA'S MOUTH....The Supreme Court is about to hear a case that will test whether the government is required to provide detainees at Guantánamo Bay with special military tribunals. At a talk a couple of weeks ago, Antonin Scalia made it clear that he's already made up his mind on this case:

"War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by Newsweek. "Give me a break."

Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don't have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: "If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy."

Will Scalia recuse himself following this blunder? I'm going to take the underdog bet on this one and say that he does. Even Supreme Court justices are susceptible to peer pressure, and I have to figure that he's going to feel some heat from his fellow Supremes in this case.

Which could be a real problem for the government. As the Newsweek piece notes, John Roberts has already recused himself because he heard the case as an appellate judge, and if Scalia does the same it means the court will have lost two of its most conservative, pro-administration judges. In other words, the government will probably lose. And all because Scalia couldn't keep his mouth shut.