Amanda Knox

Not sure that Americans have any room to criticize the Italian justice system:

　

Man released from prison after 25 years: the Morton case

　

　

John Grisham wrote a great book about one travesty of this type. The research proved to be a revelation to him:

The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions. Something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same-- bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.

A couple of pieces from the past:

Atticus Finch doesn't work here


One, two, one hundred Nifongs

　

Show some remorse or at least say something .

We law and order types want to see public acts of abject contrition when convicted criminals are about to be sentenced. Not that it does them much good. But if we don't get a loud emotionsl "i'm so sorry" we are ready to lock them away forever.

Or use the needle.

Don't you know that absence of a public acknowledgement of guilt is evidence of irredeemable psychopathology? Or something. I'm sure i heard it on the Nancy Grace show.

Yet, we never seem to apply that standard to the prosecutors who send the innocent to jail. Like Nancy herself, they usually refuse to take any responsibilty for the gross injustice they helped create.  And the public accepts that.

　

KVUE spoke with Ken Anderson, the prosecutor in this case 25 years ago. He said he has no statement to make about Morton being found innocent and would leave any comments to be made about this case to the D.A.'s office.

　

This is one of the reasons i can't get behind Rick Perry.

How a Rick Perry Ally Kept an Innocent Man Locked Up

New news about old headlines

Somehow i doubt this story will draw as much attention as the original headlines.

Jamie Leigh Jones Ordered to Pay $145,000 in Court Costs After Failed Rape Claim

　

The last word should go to the side that was vindicated:

In a statement, KBR said, "Because our fees were substantial in defense of this case, and as the jury found Jones' claims to be without merit, we appropriately exercised our rights to recover our costs, as we would do in any such case where the remedy was available."

"Since 2005, KBR was subjected to a continuing series of lies perpetuated by Jones in front of Congress, in the media and to any audience wishing to lend an ear to this story. The outcome of the jury trial as judged by her peers is the same result that the State Department got in the 2005; that the Justice Department found in 2008. We are deeply gratified that the justice system has worked."

Must read

William Anderson:

Eric Holder: Perjury for me -- but not for thee, Roger

Eric Holder wants to put Roger Clemens in jail lying to Congress. So what price should Holder pay for his lies?

The death of Anwar al-Awlaki

Jerry Pournelle has an important and unsettling discussion prompted by the drone strikes in Yemen.

Proscription and Reasons of State

Proscriptions

We find ourselves in a complicated and dangerous world and time. The war with al-Qaeda cannot be fought according to the customs and practices of conventional war. That means we are left to swim in murky legal and constitutional waters.

The president (any president) now has the power to single out and order the death of individuals across the globe. Once some one is identified as an important and dangerous AQ leader, the hunt is on.

So far, it is easy to say good riddance to the people we've killed. Al-Awlaki and bin Laden repeatedly declared themselves at war with America. But as Pournelle notes, no one has laid out the boundaries of these new, extraordinary powers now in the hands of the executive.

Meghan McCain: Spoiled brat or censorious thug?

As Deion might say-- "Both!"

Popehat has the details:

Just How Demeaning Is It To Be A Lawyer? Just Ask The One Working For Meghan McCain.

Amanda Knox

　

Knox verdict leaves long list of questions

The high court ruling upholding his sentence said Guede didn't act alone, though it didn't name Knox or Sollecito as his accomplices.

"The courts agree he wasn't acting alone," the victim's brother, Lyle Kercher, told a news conference Tuesday. "If those two are not the guilty parties, then who are the guilty people?"

　

For my money, Barbie Latza Nadeau's Angel Face is still the best one stop source on this case.

　

Moving forward while looking backward

Nicholas Sparks:

The future arrives wearing the clothes of the past. The first book that came off a printing press - Gutenberg's Bible - used a typeface that had been meticulously designed to look like a scribe's handwriting:

The first TV shows were filmed radio broadcasts. The designers of personal computers used the metaphor of a desk for organizing information. The world wide web had "pages." The home pages of online newspapers mimicked the front pages of their print editions. As Richard Goldstein succinctly put it, "every novel technology draws from familiar forms until it establishes its own aesthetic." It's tempting to look at the early form of a new media technology and assume that it will be the ultimate form, but that's a big mistake. The transitional state is never the final state. Eventually, the clothes of the past are shed, and the true nature, the true aesthetic, of the new technology is revealed.

What the DOJ really thinks about the 9-11 families

Catherine Herridge of Fox News has recently published a book on al-Qaeda and the threat of home grown terrorism. It is well worth reading for its research in AQ's evolution since 9-11. Herridge also gives us a glimpse of what it is like to cover the national security/ terrorism beat for cable news.


There is one shocking episode in the book that seems to have been ignored by almost everyone. Herridge is working on a story about the 9-11 families who are lobbying the Obama administration to get moving on trials for the plotters of the 9-11 attack.

"Catherine, you've done that story a thousand f------- times!" I never thought I would hear a Justice Department offcial use the f-bomb while discussing the 9/11 families. "They are just whiners," the official explained. I think, though I cannot be sure, that the official added "F------- whiners" to punctuate our conversation.

That some one who could say such things works in the Department of Justice is a terrible reflection on Eric Holder, the team he put in place, and the man who appointed him.

Solving crimes using crowd sourcing

 

Prof heats up cold cases with student society

A year prior, the students in the course came up with the identity of who they felt was the Grim Sleeper serial killer in Los Angeles. The information was shared with the L.A. police. It may have been coincidence, Arntfield says, but an arrest was made two months later and it was the same man the students suspected to be involved in the case.

 


I'd like to know more about their work on the Grim Sleeper case. When Lonnie Franklin, Jr. was arrested,  the news reports indicated that he was off the police radar until familial DNA testing linked him to the crimes. Now it sounds like there might have been other evidence that pointed to him.

Or the reporter got a little carried away.

The more things change

G. K. Chesterton:

An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful.

Remembering Borders

Ace's morons are having fun dancing on the grave.

　

I have mixed feelings about the end of Borders. I was a loyal, even enthusiastic customer when i first started shopping there many, many years ago. They were still independent and had only a handful of stores. For someone who used to making do at mall outlets like Waldenbooks, the first experience of Borders was almost overwhelming. The selection, the ambiance, the knowledgeable staff that loved books--- it was a marvel. I was hooked.

Come on, how many places have a newsstand that carries the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence? You have to love a place like that, right?

Even when Barnes and Noble came to town, i still preferred Borders. The inventory was vast at both places, but Borders still had a better shopping experience. Less noisy, maybe and they broke up the vast store space better. B&N felt a lot like a warehouse while Borders (at least the two i shopped at) managed to feel more intimate.

I found out what paradise smelled like when i visited the new Borders in Northbrook, Illinois for the frst time. Coffee shops inside the store was not yet common (I'm dating myself again) . As i walked through the store i came to a spot where it all came together. You caught a whiff of new books mixed with fresh brewed coffee. The aroma of fresh baked goods mixed with the aroma of newsprint and ink from the dozes of newspapers on the newsstand.

　

I moved and both companies were on the move as well. Charlotte has a Borders and a Barnes and Noble just a block apart. I was still basically loyal but something was changing. This store was not quite the same as the earlier ones up north. More space for best sellers, less commitment to backlists or serious, specialized subjects. Noisier. Fewer places to sit. The newsstand did not carry as wide a variety of titles.

Barnes and Noble wasn't decisively better, but now it did not seem to matter as much which place i shopped. Stuff like convenient parking mattered more.

And then, Amazon.com came along.

I was an enthusiastic early adopter. Convenience and selection that was unmatched. But i still liked going to bookstores and i kept going to and buying at Borders. At least for a while.

The final straw happened one Saturday morning. I was working a lot of hours at the time so having a couple of hours free to hit the bookstore was a treat. I was also traveling a lot so i bought a lot of books to read on planes, in airports, in my hotel rooms. I skipped the heavily discounted best-sellers and loaded up on books that went for full cover price or maybe a 10% discount. In retail that made me a high-value customer.

Anyway, that morning Borders had some sort of special concert for pre-schoolers going on. Lots of screaming kids. (I could live with that even if it did not make me happy). Even worse, the tots had brought their surly parents and loutish siblings. with them. The store was packed with customers who were mostly killing time while their kids sang along with some local Charlie Waffles. Killing time by shouting back forth between aisles, sitting on the floor between the shelves, arguing about where they would go next. Whining about being bored.

After about 10 minutes i left. It just wasn't the place or place to browse the shelves and grab a cup of coffee. Not when i could be at the Barnes and Noble in less than 10 minutes.

B&N was a relief. No concert. A book buying crowd. I ended up with my usual big bag of books.

I wasn't really mad at Borders. In fact, i even sent them a email to let them know that as a loyal customer i thought that they were losing their unique shopping experience. i got a canned response from some flak-catcher in the home office.

I went back a couple of more times but the decline was still underway. It was becoming a book-related store not a store for book lovers. More space for knick-nacks and (heavily discounted) best-sellers. More activities. Less interesting selection. Less inviting atmosphere.

I moved a couple of more times and ended up in places where the Barnes and Noble stores were far closer than the Borders. So i only have shopped them maybe twice in the last 10 years. I don't know if they got much worse, but i do know they did not get dramtically better. Hence, their bankruptcy was no surprise.

The commenters at Ace's joint are focused on the lefty vibe they detected among the sales staff and the poor customer service. I can say that i never had a problem with the staff's politics. I had no problem finding dozens of partisan books and never detected any disdain when i checked out.

Poor customer service was definitely a problem at the end. I don't blame the employees for that. The problem was their rapid expansion and the decision to compete with Amazon by going low-price/high volume. There just were not enough knowledgeable booklovers available to staff that number of stores. And the one's they did hire found that they were working at K-mart, not the world greatest bookstore.

In the end, Borders sacrificed their distinctive customer experience and tried to fight Amazon on price. That clearly was unsuccessful. Maybe nothing could have saved them (Amazon under Jeff Bezos is a formidable competitor.)

I just know that i miss the old Borders.

A huge story that everyone ignored

Felix Soloman:

　

How macroeconomic statistics failed the US

Here’s one big reason why the current economic weakness in the US has come as such a shock. It’s not the only reason, but it’s an important one, and it hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves: the state of macroeconomic data-gathering in the US is pretty weak.

　

In January 2009 the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 3.8%. That number has been revised downward ever since and the current number is -8.9%

All the political punditry and economic "debates" are suffering from a huge GIGO problem.

Imagine if the networks devoted 10% of this effort to the Gunwalker scandal

Knox Case Nears Its Gaudy End

　

Big names in news—NBC’s Matt Lauer, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, CBS’s Peter Van Sant—on the streets of Perugia make this story seem more like the trial of a diplomat than that of a college student.

The satellite trucks are already lined up outside the Capanne prison where Seattle native Amanda Knox has spent nearly four years of her life. The city of Perugia has once again been transformed into a giant circus stage complete with white tents and an abundance of spectators. For those of us who covered the final verdict of Knox’s first murder trial in December 2009, it is an eerily familiar scene. Only the season has changed....

"Watergate didn’t have a body count. Gunwalker has hundreds."

Way Past Watergate

Our watchdog press seems to be sleeping through this scandal.

"Troy Davis is guilty"

You mean, Alec Baldwin and Kim Kardashian didn't know what they were talking about?

But it’s one thing to argue your case in the court of public opinion; it’s quite another to do so in a real court, with sworn testimony offered and cross-examined by both sides.


And when Davis had that opportunity, in a special hearing last year ordered by the Supreme Court, the judge rejected his claim, declaring flatly that “Davis is not innocent.”

RTWT here.

"Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Joe Guzzardi thinks Alfred Lord Tennyson best summed up the Pirates 2011 season.

Pondering the Pirates

I have to say, it was fun to watch the Pirates play good baseball in meaningful games in June and early July.

Brian Kelley, R.I.P.

　

An Honorable CIA Man Passes Away

That was Brian: a giver, not a taker. But he had taken a lot, in the ironic sense of the word, from the FBI, whose gumshoes mistakenly suspected him of being a Russian mole instead of the real one, Robert Hanssen, one of their own. For years they turned the lives of him and his family into a living nightmare.

Brian Kelley, veteran counterspy, dies at 68

Retired CIA officer Brian J. Kelley, a veteran counterspy who broke the code on how Moscow secretly communicates with deep-cover agents and who mistakenly was hounded by the FBI as a suspected KGB mole, has died.

In memory of Brian Kelley : The loss of a national treasure
Brian was generous in his readiness to organize extracurricular lectures and to other special events. He was an inspiring leader who brought an extraordinary esprit de corps to our community, for which I will be eternally grateful. I know that, in the few hours since his death, many of our students and alumni have used such phrases as "an American hero," "a true patriot," "an incredible professor," and "an inspiration" in describing Brian. America has lost one of its greatest sons, but it is clear that Brian's legacy will live on through his students and their continuing service to the nation.

I posted on Kelley and the misguided mole hunt here. Ronald Kessler writes about Kelley and the FBI here.

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

UPDATED:


Welcome Instapundit readers. While you're here, why not check out the archives and blogroll? And maybe add this blog to your RSS reader (pretty please?)

On this week's Reliable Sources Howard Kurtz had a brief (i.e. typically superficial) discussion with Politico's Ben Smith on journalists, Twitter, and blogging.


Kurtz did not address a question that i've been pondering for some time: why did journalists flock to the new technology of Twitter when they spend years denouncing the slightly less new technology of weblogs? I find the question especially interesting because Twitter seems to have all the bad aspects of blogging and none of its strengths. Smith offers two reasons why he tweets so much despite being paid to blog: Twitter is faster and it is now the dominant medium of online political “conversation”.

KURTZ: We're back with Politico's Ben Smith. And Ben, you're a pretty prolific blogger, but you told "Adweek" that writing on Twitter, as so many of us in the news racket do, is sort of draining the life from the blog. Explain.

SMITH: Well, I mean, I love writing my blog, and plan to keep doing it. But in 2008, during the presidential election, the quickest way you could find out a new piece of information was often to hit "refresh" on my blog or on Mark Anvander's (ph) blog, or on somebody else's blog, because we were working kind of directly from, say, the event we were at. We were typing the notes up faster, we were getting information faster than anybody else, and putting it online. So, you know, it was incredibly intense, but incredibly fun, because you just had the sense people were hitting "refresh" on your blog to find out what had just happened and what was going to happen next.

KURTZ: And now?

SMITH: And now that is on Twitter, the sort of central conversation about what just happened, what's happening next, what did somebody say, what's the response? That's either being reported on Twitter or actually just being tweeted by the players themselves. And so I think --

KURTZ: So if the blog is where you earn your paycheck, and on Twitter you're basically giving it away for free to your 50,000 followers, why tweet so much?

SMITH: Well, I mean, because it's where the action is, because it's where -- you know, politics hopefully (ph) is this conversation, fundamentally. And Twitter isn't just this place where you're kind of having this conversation with your fellow reporters, or this sort of side conversation. It's become, I think, kind of the central conversation, and so you just sort of have to be there.

Speed is an established measure for score-keeping among journalists. I'm not sure that it means much to the “political conversation” in the country at large (See It's Only a Game). Nonetheless, I can see how a reporter can get caught up in the “urge to be first” among his peers. And by that standard, tweeting beats blogging hands down.

Not every reporter thinks Smith's game is worth playing. After he won a Pulitizer at the New York Times, David Halberstam left the paper to go to work for Harper's magazine. There, he was overworked, underpaid, and liberated.

The real tyranny of journalism has always been the lack of time and lack of space to break away from the pack. And then suddenly we were working for Harper's and we had six weeks on a piece! Six thousand words if need be! And emancipation from all those dopey rules which inhibit real reporting.

(Willie Morris, New York Days)

 I've argued before that the blogosphere (and enterprising, aspiring reporters) were wrong to take speed as the primary advantage blogs had over the MSM. (See here and here).


I wrote this about the decline of blogging and I think it helps explain why the MSM is happy to see the “conversation” shift to Twitter.

All in all, this is good news for the MSM. They may shrink in size and profitability, but they will still control the narrative. Both posts note that Twitter and Facebook have dented the growth in blog readership. Neither of these present the same challenge to the MSM as blogs. Snarky tweets about MoDo or Howard Kurtz are quick and easy but they don't change many minds. They are just background noise.


Blogs, especially the long-form blogging that Den Beste did or that Neo-neocon still does, has the potential to break the MSM's monopoly on "explanation space". That's what KC Johnson did in the Duke lacrosse case, what Powerline did in Rathergate, and what 2d Amendment bloggers have been doing for years.

Blogging was a direct attack on MSM hegemony at both the micro (fisking) and macro levels (explanation space). I just don't see Twitter as the same threat. It is a flood of unmemorable chatter that is easy to ignore. Blogging had the potential to break the power of the MSM guild. Bloggers, at their best, presented arguments. Arguments can both change minds on the immediate subject and undermine the credibilty of those establishment pundits who present weak cases on a regular basis. (Yes, i'm looking at you Brooks and Frum).

At a minimum, blogging brought a lot of outsiders to the pundit/editor game. Twitter seems more useful as a way for insiders like Kurtz to extent their brand and magnify their voice.

It is one of those quirks of history. One new thing is revolutionary. The next new thing consolidated the position of the powers that be.

UPDATE:  Don Surber (Thanks for the link!) has the line of the day:  "Just like Goliath preferred the Army of ADHD Kids over the Army of Davids."

Ace on Fire

This post on David Brook's "second thoughts" is today's must read.

 David Brooks Admits: "I'm an Obama Sap"

Supposedly he's a "conservative," at least on fiscal matters, and ergo should have opposed Obama on those grounds. But for David Brooks, the idea of a man with an impeccably-creased trousers, who spoke with a Bluffer's Guide fluency about Reinhold Niebuhr, who would make our national dialogue possibly sound more like Firing Line than Crossfire, trumped all tangible political goals such as keeping government spending down and limiting government's expansion into new areas which it could screw up.


But no. For David Brooks, a sharp trouser crease trumped a sharp demarcation of the boundary of government intrusiveness.


Consider what this says about David Brooks.

UPDATE:

Don Surber:

In blasting ideology, what David Brooks is saying is that having values, principles and beliefs that you openly state and you defend is somehow wrong. What David Brooks is saying is that we should all have no values, principles or beliefs and just go along to get along because to believe in something is to “paralyze this country.”

What a loathsome, cynical outlook on life. I do feel sorry for him but I also laugh at him because the more he tries to present himself as being above the fray, the more he illustrates that he is below the fray. Two sets of Americans have opposing world views that they are willing to fight for, while David Brooks believes in nothing but political expediency. There is a cowardice in not being willing to fight for something — anything.

G. K. Chesterton: "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions."

Two new books on the anthrax attacks

Edward Jay Epstein reviews them in the Wall Street Journal:

 When Death Came Hand-Delivered

It's been ten years since the attacks and there aree still many unanswered questions. The FBI "closed" the case three years ago only to have their scientifc evidence called into question. Even if they are right that the attacks were carried out by Bruce Ivins (I have my doubts), their investigation was a mess.

For instance, we can add Perry Mikesell to the list of innocent men (Brian Kelly, Richard Jewell, Steven Hatfill) whose lives were ruined by Bureau:

One early suspect was microbiologist Perry Mikesell, who had worked in 1999 at Battelle. Under the pressure of the FBI's scrutiny, he drank heavily and had a fatal heart attack in October 2002. According to family members, he had drunk himself to death.

Ivins emerged as the final suspect by a process of elemination.

Among the anthrax samples collected from different labs, only one matched the "fingerprints" of the killer anthrax in the letters. It was from flask RMR-1029 in Ivins's lab. This anthrax had been created in 1997 at the Dugway Proving Ground and sent to Ivins for tests. The FBI considered all the other scientists whom Ivins had given access to RMR-1029, then eliminated them as suspects for one of three reasons: They had not worked solo in their labs and thus lacked the privacy needed to process the wet spores into dry powder; they lacked the skills to do the job; or they were too far away to mail the letters in Princeton. Through this process of elimination, the FBI arrived at Ivins, who worked alone in his lab, had the skills and could have driven the nine-hour round trip from Frederick, Md., to Princeton and back.

It now turns out that the National Academy of Sciences panel found that   "it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the B. anthracis in the mailings based on the available scientific evidence alone." As Epstein notes: "without a scientific basis for tracing the killer anthrax to Ivins's lab, the FBI's case against him was reduced to inferences from his behavior."

 Inferences from behavior is notoriously unreliable in crime solving. (See here and here).

Remembering Malcolm Wallop

He wasn't a famous senator but he was an important one.  Steven Hayword gives a good man his due:

Malcolm Wallop, RIP

I've waited years for this book

The Nathan Heller mysteries are hard-boiled novels with a twist-- Heller has a knack for finding himself in the middle of infamous crimes and mysterious deaths where he is surrounded by celebrities and American icons. Heller starts his career (and the book series) in Chicago where he rubs shoulders with Capone, Dillinger, and Elliot Ness. Since then he has found (and lost) Amelia Earhart, solved the Black Dahlia case, and got to the bottom of the Roswell crash.

Collins is a master of the hard-boiled genre. (Hey, Mickey Spillane picked his friend Max to finish his uncompleted work, so you know Collins is good). The Heller novels will stand on their own for a reader who does not care about the historical background.

For those who do care, the books are a treat. Collins does his research and gets the facts and context right.

The latest book-- Bye Bye Baby-- finds Heller in Hollywood helping out friend and client Marilyn Monroe. It is the summer of 1962. Before you know it, Heller is is hip-deep in mobsters, cops, and Kennedys as he tries to find out how and why Monroe died.

Collins plans to write two more Heller mysteries that will take on the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. I just hope we don't have to wait ten years like we did for this one.

Obama and FDR

Megan McCardle strikes a fatalistic note to explain why President Obama has disappointed progressives and liberals.

 Why Obama Was Never Going to Be the Next FDR
So it's not surprising that many Democrats assumed that financial crises and recessions are, well, good for Democrats and/or progressive policy advocates. I always thought this was nonsense: financial crises and recessions aren't good for Democrats; they're bad for whoever happens to be in charge, which merely means they're good for whoever isn't in charge by default. Hoover was indicted by history not because he'd done nothing--he had actually done quite a bit--but because the Depression had continued to worsen despite the things he did do.

From a strictly economic viewpoint, there is a great deal of merit in that argument. The crisis of 2008 was going to be a drag on the economy no matter what polices Obama put in place. McCardle's piece, however, fails completely as political analysis. She seems to think that Obama's political problems are almost entirely due to circumstances beyond his control. If he was not FDR II it was not his fault and besides FDR wasn't all that anyway.

As I read her post I thought of a passage from David Gelernter's brilliant book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair:

It is tempting when we study history to mistake accidents of personality for big, abstract principles. In the thirties, Americans tolerated an enormous expansion of the federal government. The depression and Franklin Roosevelt's character were the main reasons they did.

 Actually they did more than tolerate it. They enthusiastically endorsed it. Not only did they vote for FDR in a landslide in 1936, they gave the Democrats a resounding victory in his first mid-term election: Democrats held the Senate 69-25 and the House 322-103.

McCardle's “big abstract principle” does little to explain why Obama was repudiated in 2010 while FDR enjoyed monumental success in 1934. After all, as conservatives love to point out, the New Deal did not end the depression. Why did voters punish Obama for a bad economy but not Roosevelt?

 I've argued before that one key reason is that the Obama administration displayed a bizarre combination of cynicism and naivete in their handling of the economic crisis. (“Never let a crisis go to waste.”) Instead of a laser-like focus on the economy, they pushed for a host of items on the progressive wish list (healthcare reform, “green” energy, cap-and-trade, civilian trials for the 9-11 terrorists, etc.). FDR, in contrast, used his first 100 days to pass legislation that directly attacked the depression and its causes. The public saw- rightly- that Roosevelt was concentrating on the issue that was their number one concern.

Gelernter gets at something important about FDR here:

[Robert] Moses and La Guardia were brilliant and even visionaries in a way that FDR was not. They may have been in the strictest sense more talented than he. But the element all three shared, Roosevelt above all, was ferocious will. In an age of authority, they were the authorities. They light up the high thirties like fireworks.

In the Hundred Days Congress did little more than rubber stamp the legislation that flew from the White House to Capitol Hill. That might not be the best way to govern, but it left no doubt that Roosevelt was the Man with a Plan (actually many plans). FDR also used the new medium of radio to connect with voters via his fireside chats. He was at the center of the public debate-- at once the towering authority figure in the White House and the reassuring voice in everyone's living room.


Obama often seemed to disappear off-stage during the major battles of 2009. He deferred to congress and let them craft most of the major legislation. He allowed Reid and Pelosi to move at a glacial pace on important issues like financial reform. The White House was unable or unwilling to find a modern equivalent of the fireside chat that would let Obama sustain public support for his programs.

Maybe, just maybe, the voters did not sour on Obama because he confronted problems that were beyond the powers of government. Perhaps, remembering Roosevelt, they fault him for not trying hard enough to solve the problems they care about most. If i am right, then progressives owe the president an apology. It is not that he did too little for them, it is that he tried to do too much.

Flight 93

Jonathan Last:

Despite the national memorial now emerging in Shanksville, I don’t think America has fully begun to appreciate where Flight 93 fits into the pantheon of great moments in American history. I’d argue that–for a host of reasons–it belongs somewhere in the same neighborhood as Little Round Top and Revere’s ride. It’s fitting that we mourn the World Trade Center and Pentagon dead on 9/11, but properly understood our commemorations every year should start there and build toward reverence and appreciation for the men and women of Flight 93. That field in Pennsylvania, not the hole in Manhattan, should be our enduring symbol of the day.

Steve Sailer has additional comments that are worth reading.


UPDATED:

Lexington Greene:

The only part of the American national security establishment that successfully defended America on 9/11 was the portion of the reserve militia on board Flight 93, acting without orders, without hierarchy, without uniforms or weapons, by spontaneous organization and action.

9-11

Two Three pieces i really liked:

Michelle Malkin: 10 years ago: My generation’s bloody wake-up call

Mark Steyn: Let's Roll Over

Christopher Hitchens:  Simply Evil

His finest hour.

It's easy to forget that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in the direct line of fire ten years ago.

9/11 anniversary: Donald Rumsfeld on how he survived the September 11 Pentagon attack

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Reflects On Changes Caused By 9/11

See also this earlier post:

9-11-01: Remembrance

All gaffes are not equal

Big Media Pounces On Lincoln Gaffe

Obamateurism of the Day

Amanda Knox

Ann Coulter takes on "Foxy Knoxy" and her media defenders.

AMANDA KNOX: THE NEW MUMIA!

Despite liberals' desperate need for Europeans to like them, the American media have enraged the entire nation of Italy with their bald-faced lies about a heinous murder in Perugia committed by a fresh-faced American girl, Amanda Knox.

The facts aren't elusive: In December 2009, the Italian court released a 400-plus page report detailing the mountains of evidence that led the judges and jury to conclude that Knox, along with her Italian beau, Raffaele Sollecito, and a petty thief of her acquaintance, Rudy Guede, had murdered Knox's English roommate, Meredith Kercher, on the evening of Nov. 1, 2007.

Who knew?

I'm a big fan of Waffle House, but i never knew they were such disaster recovery ninjas.

How to Measure a Storm's Fury One Breakfast at a Time

Disaster Pros Look to 'Waffle House Index'; State of the Menu Gives Clue to Damage>

Quarterback Ratings

It is always dangerous to compare players using the popular statistics compiled by the NFL. Cold Hard Football Facts shows why with this look at quarterback ratings and strength of schedule.

I wish there was a way we could make the football "analysts" read CHFF each week before they were allowed on the air.

Good question

How is Casey Anthony's prosecutor's book not called "I Suck At My Job"?

Tweeted by Andy Levy

“I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.”

Mark Steyn:

The Desperation-of-Deprivation Myth


Television, we’re told, favors strong images — Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard’s analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no “impoverished society.” The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in “deprivation,” and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.” We’ve so accepted the correlation that we don’t even notice that they’re no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.

Taman Shud: The world's most mysterious cold case?

Nice write-up at the Smithsonian's site on a real puzzler.

The Body on Somerton Beach


And the only thing that seems to have changed since then is that a story that began simply—with the discovery of a body on the beach on the first day of that southern summer—has become ever more mysterious. In fact, this case (which remains, theoretically at least, an active investigation) is so opaque that we still do not know the victim’s identity, have no real idea what killed him and cannot even be certain whether his death was murder or suicide.


What we can say is that the clues in the Somerton Beach mystery (or the enigma of the “Unknown Man,” as it is known Down Under) add up to one of the world’s most perplexing cold cases. It may be the most mysterious of them all.

History

Today marks the anniversary of the Miricle on the Vistula when Poland defeated the Red Army at Warsaw. More here.

"By being in Afghanistan we have prevented something on the order of the Rwandan genocide. "

This is the sort of thing that never makes it into the day to day punditry:

Casualties in Afghanistan: How To Think About Them?

I'd say "yes, but..."

Kaus poses a question that might get him in hot water with the MSM and Journolisters:

Is Obama intellectually incurious?

Both Bush and Obama seem to be incurious but in very different ways.

I think that GWB shared this trait with Sir Robert Peel:

Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

Obama strikes me as one of those people who divide knowledge into two categories: those things he knows, and those things that are unimportant. After all, he is the candidate who reportedly told a key staffer:

"I think I'm a better speech writer than my speech writers. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm a better political director than my political director."

On the specific issue of the economy, i think we are seeing the result of a curious mixture of cold cynicism and naive faith. I discussed the cynical part here. The naive faith was the belief that the economic problems of January 2009 would take care of themselves (with maybe a little help from Keynes). He, and his team,thought the economic crisis provided more opportunity than danger.

Why we still hate Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda and Her Friendly North Vietnamese Intelligence Officer



The point here is not that Jane Fonda was a witting agent of the North Vietnamese communists, because there is absolutely no evidence for such a charge. It is that she knowingly placed herself in a position in which a hostile intelligence service could exploit her fame and her contacts for both covert intelligence collection and covert propaganda operations, and that, according to the North Vietnamese themselves, one of her close contacts was a covert intelligence officer whose entire purpose in 1972 was to exploit people just like her. To imagine that he would not at least try to manipulate and exploit her is naive in the extreme.

Sometimes the slope really is slippery

Miriam's Ideas points out that George Orwell warned gun registration in Britain would eventually lead to confiscation and citizen disarmament.

George Orwell was right

Rachel Maddow endorses the Hollywood blacklist

I admit, i wasn't paying a lot of attention to cable "news" when Juan Williams got borked at NPR. I caught this gem from MSNBC when Williams did an interview last month with CSPAN.


First i just love the arrogance of the handoff between Big Keith and his dashing protege.

KEITH OLBERMANN, “COUNTDOWN” HOST: And now to explain the NPR firing Juan Williams and how that is anything but a First Amendment issue, the 4,932nd time this has come up in the last two years—ladies and gentlemen, here is Rachel Maddow.
Good evening, Rachel.
RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: I intend to just keep repeating it and eventually it will stick.
OLBERMANN: We have to stamp it on people‘s foreheads backward so they can read it in the mirror.

Apparently only stupid people had a problem with NPR's actions. The whole controversy was nothing more than a misunderstanding of the first amendment. Lucky for us, Rachel Maddow will keep setting us straight no matter how long it takes.

MADDOW: The short-hand headline for what happened with Mr. Williams today is Juan Williams fired from his job because of those comments about Muslims.


To be more precise about it, to be more accurate, it should be noted that Juan Williams had two jobs and he lost one of them. He lost his job on National Public Radio, which said his comments were, quote, “inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices.”


So, Juan Williams is no longer working for National Public Radio. That‘s true. But he most certainly did not lose his job at FOX News. In fact, today, Juan Williams was given a raise at FOX News as a result of this whole thing. Quote, “FOX News handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary.”


Well, nearly $2 million. Mazel tov.


FOX News chief executive, Roger Ailes, said of Mr. Williams, quote, “He‘s an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by FOX News on a daily basis.”


If you mean freedom of speech in a legal sense, constitutional sense, let‘s be clear here. This is not a First Amendment issue. Juan Williams has the right, every American citizen, has the right constitutionally to say anything that he wants. All of us do. That‘s what the First Amendment does.


The First Amendment does not guarantee you a paid job as a commentator to say what you want. Your employment as a person paid to speak is at the pleasure of your employer. In this case, it displeased Juan Williams‘ employer, at least one of them, for him to have reassured the FOX News audience he too is afraid of Muslims on airplanes and that‘s not a bigoted thing. That comment did not fly with one of the people who was paying one of the organizations that was paying Mr. Williams to say what he thinks. And so, Juan Williams lost that job.


This is not a First Amendment issue. This is an issue of what your employer is OK with.

"This is an issue of what your employer is OK with."

For sixty years the left has wailed about the horrible injustice of the Hollywood blacklist. Now, thanks to Maddow, we can see that there really was nothing to worry about.




"This is an issue of what your employer is OK with."


That really cuts to the heart of the matter with the Hollywood 10. The studios and their customers decided that they were NOT "OK with" employees who were slavish followers of bloody Joe Stalin. No big deal according to the standard set down by Rachel Maddow.


Or so one might think. As this post points out, Maddow has a somewhat schizoid take on the blacklist seasoned with a shaky grasp of the historical facts.


Maddow does exhibit some serious chops when it comes to side-stepping hard questions while pretending to answer them. She reduces the whole question to a narrow legalistic point. The questions about NPR's liberal bias and lack of ideological diversity get shunted aside. The broader issue of free discussion versus "thought crimes" is never addressed. And then she just marches right into a nice piece of Fox bashing.


The sad thing is, she is supposed to be the reasonable, smart lefty at MSNBC.

NOW defends Michelle Bachman

Little Miss Atilla is not really impressed.

Here Comes NOW . . .

Guess merging with Arianna's plantation wasn't a magic bullet after all

AOL reports disappointing ad growth

AOL Inc reported a surprise second-quarter loss on Tuesday, citing weaker-than-expected advertising growth that sent shares of the company plummeting as much as 31 percent on Tuesday.

Another chapter of history now needs a re-write

Leftist Terrorist Turned Neo-Nazi Says Was Stasi Informant Too

Horst Mahler, a former far-left lawyer now doing time in prison for Holocaust denial, has admitted to another strange twist in his head-spinning political career: He worked as an informant for East Germany's secret police -- the Stasi -- from 1967 to 1970.


Mahler has made a point of outraging the German public since the '60s. A former lawyer for the radical-left Red Army Faction (the "Baader-Meinhof gang"), he now belongs to the NPD, Germany's largest far-right party. On Sunday evidence emerged that he was an "inoffizieller Mitarbeiter" (IM), or unofficial collaborator, for the Stasi during three crucial years of his left-wing agitation. He's reportedly admitted to state investigators that the reports are true.

Near the end of the Cold War, conservatives claimed that the Soviet Bloc was sponsering terrorism. All the right-thinking people pooh-poohed the idea.


Now, after the fall of Stalin's empire, the evidence of Soviet support (if not direction) grows and grows.


Turns out the smart guys were wrong.


A lot of people owe Claire Sterling an apology.

Like a drunk stumbling through a maze in the dark

Sometimes I despair when I listen to what passes for political debate read what passes for political journalism. We are mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression, yet neither party has the vision or courage to address the grave problems that we face. Instead, they cling to their talking points and tired nostrums.

Tax the rich!
Reagan! Tax cuts!

This piece in the New Yorker suggests that the problems we face are deep-seated and novel (at least for this generation).

Mastering the Machine
How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund

Dalio was one of those who saw disaster earlier than most:

Searching for historical precedents, Bridgewater put together detailed histories of previous credit crises, going back to Weimar Germany. The firm’s researchers also went through the public accounts of nearly all the major financial institutions in the world and constructed estimates of how much money they stood to lose from bad debts. The figure they came up with was eight hundred and thirty-nine billion dollars. Armed with this information, Dalio visited the Treasury Department in December, 2007, and met with some of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s staff. Nobody took much notice of what he said, but he went on to the White House, where he presented his numbers to some senior economic staffers. “Ray laid out the argument that the losses he foresaw in the banking system were astronomical,” a former Bush Administration official who attended the White House meeting recalled. “Everybody else was talking about liquidity. Ray was talking about solvency.”


His warnings ignored in Washington, Dalio issued more jeremiads to his clients. “If the economy goes down, it will not be a typical recession,” his newsletter said in January, 2008. Rather, it would be a disaster in which “the financial deleveraging causes a financial crisis that causes an economic crisis. . . . This continues until there is a reflation, a currency devaluation and government guarantees of the efficacy of key financial intermediaries.” As the crisis deepened, Dalio continued to assess it far more accurately than many senior policymakers did. When the government allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse, he despaired. “So, now we sit and wait to see if they have some hidden trick up their sleeves, or if they really are as reckless as they seem,” the newsletter said on September 15, 2008.

What's worrisome is that he is convinced that the current problems are not going away any time soon:

This spring, he told me that economic growth in the United States and Europe was set to slow again. This was partly because some emergency policy measures, such as the Obama Administration’s stimulus package, would soon come to an end; partly because of the chronic indebtedness that continues to weigh on these regions; and partly because China and other developing countries would be forced to take drastic policy actions to bring down inflation. Now that the slowdown appears to have arrived, Dalio thinks it will be prolonged. “We are still in a deleveraging period,” he said. “We will be in a deleveraging period for ten years or more.”


Dalio believes that some heavily indebted countries, including the United States, will eventually opt for printing money as a way to deal with their debts, which will lead to a collapse in their currency and in their bond markets. “There hasn’t been a case in history where they haven’t eventually printed money and devalued their currency,” he said. Other developed countries, particularly those tied to the euro and thus to the European Central Bank, don’t have the option of printing money and are destined to undergo “classic depressions,” Dalio said.

If leverage got us into this mess, then it makes sense explore ways in which we can avoid such problems in the future. Simon Johns suggests reforming the tax code which now favors debt over equity.

Could Tax Reform Make the Financial System Safer?

Loose lips sink ships

In From the Cold raises a delicate but important question.

Too Much Chatter


But did recent disclosures about the bin Laden raid give the Taliban an edge in downing that Chinook? So far, a definitive link hasn't been established. Indeed, our enemies in Afghanistan have been observing our special forces for almost a decade, and they've clearly learned a great deal about our tactics and techniques. We also know that Taliban gunners routinely attempt to engage our helicopters with RPGs, their preferred weapon-of-choice. Unfortunately, the enemy gets lucky once in a while, with deadly consequences for our troops.




Still, we can't completely dismiss the notion that the recent focus on special ops missions has at least affirmed our operational tendencies for enemy planners. For example, The New Yorker piece explains the use of quick reaction forces (QRFs) to supplement the primary team, providing additional airlift and fire support as necessary. When one of the HH-60s crashed while attempting to insert SEALs inside bin Laden's compound on 1 May, a Chinook from the QRF was quickly dispatched to pick up the operators and the chopper crew, once the raid was complete.

There is plenty of evidence that our enemies use open source intelligence when they plan operations. (See two examples here and here.) The attack on FOB Chapman in December 2009 demonstrated that even al Qaeda gangs in remote Waziristan have fairly sophisticated intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.


The never-ending victory lap for taking out bin Laden has put much once secret information into the public record. This puts our forces at risk.


It is time for it to stop.

Heads on pikes

This leaker deserves a public horsewhipping.

The Harm of Leaking KIA Information to the Press

One of the most despicable reactions I have seen from the US to this incident was the fact that the initial press reports quoted an unnamed government official as confirming that the KIAs were from Seal Team 6 and the 160th Avn. Bde., which is the special ops aviation unit. This unnamed person requested anonymity because the families of the KIAs had not yet been notified.