Cato's CHIEF's Wisdom: || Globalization # || Apple Clobbers Dell?

BuzzMachine: "Nya, nya, nya http://www.buzzmachine.com/
January 13th, 2006
Read More: Apple, Dell

Apple is now worth more than Dell.

Dell makes a lot more computers. But they are worth a lot less.

Apple makes better computers. And that is worth much more. Even Wall Street figured that out. MacDailyNews reports [via my son]:

On October 6, 1997, in response to the question of what he’d do if he was in charge of Apple Computer, Dell founder and then CEO Michael Dell stood before a crowd of several thousand IT executives and answered flippantly, “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

A little more than a month later, on November 10, 1997, new Apple iCEO Steve Jobs responded, speaking in front of an image of Michael Dell’s bulls-eye covered face, “We’re coming after you, you’re in our sights.”

Today, after a little more than eight years of hard work, Apple Computer, Inc. passed Dell, Inc. in market value. That’s right, at market close Apple Computer ($72,132,428,843) is now worth more than Dell ($71,970,702,760).

I told you to sell."
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http://www.tomgpalmer.com/

I'm presently a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and director of Cato University. In addition to my work at the Cato Institute, I'm on the board of trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education and work with a number of other organizations. I frequently lecture in America and Europe on the history of liberty and constitutionalism, globalization and free trade, individualism, public choice, and the moral and legal foundations of individual rights
Bienvenue à la Franceland!

BBC Correspondent Allan Little has an excellent report on affairs in France, “France’s ‘pursuit of harmony’.” I’m a big fan of virtually everything French — language, poetry, food, ambience (even the word), geography, architecture, etc., etc., but not of French statism, which is strangling a great nation. (I got some rather tart emails from French diplomats after I remarked, in an interview on the ABC News Special “Is America No. 1?,” that France was turning into a giant theme park: “Franceland.”) A good comparison of French economic policy and its effects (as well as the policies of Germany and Italy) with those of the U.S. can be found in Olaf Gersemann’s truly eye-opening book, Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality.

Update: Some people who are trying to change France have organized together as Liberté Chérie.

Posted by Tom Palmer
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Jonathan Rauch rings the warning bell about civil liberties and the rule of law in his latest column in the National Journal, “Bush’s Battle Endangers The War.” After a brief review of the effects of past wars on civil liberties, Rauch notes,

Bush, in contrast, seems determined to treat the war on terror as a permanent emergency. The administration says the 2001 use-of-force resolution allowed the government to collect battlefield intelligence here at home, superseding FISA. Invoked immediately after an enemy attack, that argument makes legal and strategic sense. Warrantless domestic surveillance and legal improvisation seem fine for four days, four weeks, or even four months.

But four years — with no end in sight? Bush seems to have had no intention of regularizing his surveillance program by building a legal framework for it. Instead, his plan apparently was to run a secret domestic spying program outside the boundaries of conventional law for, well, how long? Decades? Forever?

Posted by Tom Palmer
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Mayan Glyphs

My eye was caught by the announcement of the discovery of the earliest known Mayan glyphs in San Bartolo, Guatemala. The story of the Mayan glyphic writing system is told quite brilliantly in Michael D. Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code. Coe not only tells the story of the deciphering of Mayan, but he has a lot to say about the problem of deciphering ancient scripts generally. (For example, for an ancient text to be read, one needs not only a key — such as the Rosetta Stone, but also a living spoken descendant of the language being deciphered, as Coptic is for the Egyptian hieroglyphs and contemporary Mayan is for the Mayan glyphs.)

Posted by Tom Palmer
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For the Financially Inclined

A friend has forwarded a presentation from Patrick Byrne, the Founder and CEO of Overstock.com (and of the rather cool Worldstock.com), on allegations of shenanigans in the way that stocks are traded in the U.S. The presentation takes two parts: Party I and Part II. (They’re both high-tech-but-user-friendly slide shows.) I don’t know that much about stocks (my investing is through mutual funds, since I don’t have the kind of specialized knowledge that would give me the courage to invest in particular stocks), but I pass them on to all the more sophisticated economists, market mavens, and others out there I know.

Posted by Tom Palmer
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Saturday :: January 14, 2006
NY Times Smacks King Bush

The New York Times takes a swipe at President Bush in its Sunday editorial, Our Imperial Presidency at Work. First he gamed McCain over the Torture Amendment with his signing statement. Then he tried divest the Supreme Court of jurisdiction in the detainee cases.

The Times astutely observes:

Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.

The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

[graphic created exclusively for TalkLeft by CL.]

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http://vicesquad.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

"Kids Helping Kids": A Bizarre Drug "Treatment" Program
- posted by Jim @ 3:35 PM

What is it about Milford, Ohio? That's where an outrageous, $60,000 undercover sting operation was pulled off in a high school by the District Superintendent. Now we find that it is the home of Kids Helping Kids, an odd, and troubling, drug treatment program for kids.

I highly recommend that you watch the video available at this local TV news webpage. The sound starts a few seconds before the video, and it has some unfortunate local TV elements, but it is also quite informative.

One parent offers a sentiment that sounds about right to me: "No one should be abused emotionally or physically in the name of treatment." Incidentally, there don't seem to be any doctors involved in this "treatment".

Kids Helping Kids doesn't seem to be the worst treatment program out there.

Update: Radley Balko has more, a whole lot more, first here and then here. It's worse than I thought.
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James W. Fogal

H&R Block has a link for a free download of their software DeductionPro. While this is last year's version, it supports 2005 taxes - once installed, an update is available. Hopefully it will help you find tax deductions you didn't know about.

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Government Debt Has No Upside

Robert Murphy

In order to consume in the present, resources must be used in the present. When the government runs a deficit, politicians don't use a time machine to literally steal TVs and pizzas from people in the year 2050 and bring them back for our own consumption. Government deficits siphon savings from the private sector and thus divert real resources from potential investment and waste them on unproductive lines. This means that the structure of physical capital goods that the next generation inherits will be less developed than if the government had refrained from deficit spending. FULL ARTICLE

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Why Johnny Can't Read

Tim Swanson

Stupid in America: How We Are Cheating Our Kids:

Education reformers like Kevin Chavous have a message for these parents: If you only knew.

Even though people in the suburbs might think their schools are great, Chavous says, "They're not. That's the thing and the test scores show that."

Chavous and many other education professionals say Americans don't know that their public schools, on the whole, just aren't that good. Because without competition, parents don't know what their kids might have had.

And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement.

John Stossel, the effervescent investigative journalist, put together yet another one of his trademark exposés -- this time on public schools. Reminiscent to Penn & Teller's exploits on their hit Showtime show, Stossel peppers his findings with interviews from all the players involved in the schooling industry, including teacher's unions, administrators and both foreign and domestic students. Have a question regarding international test scores? Well, his uncanny "as-a-matter-of-fact" approach not only provides various metrics comparing scores, but also the often overlooked monetary aspects involved in operating schools and financing teachers. Readers of Mises.org will never guess what he discovered. (Video clips: 1 2 3 - ABC's message board)

Addendum: a number of the comments have mentioned that Stossel did in fact promote "vouchers." Unfortunately behind the smoke-and-mirrors, behind the rhetoric of independence and of choice - vouchers are yet another welfare entitlement scheme shrouded behind a rubric of free-market principles. For more on this tomfoolery: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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The Real Reason Why M3 is Abolished

Stefan Karlsson

I have so far not commented on one of the strangest developments in the world of statistics-how the Federal Reserve have decided that the M3 measure of money supply will be "discontinued" without saying why . Since they came with no explanation there have been lots of speculation as to why they did it.

It certainly wasn't because the Fed Governors on aprioristic essentialist grounds decided M2 better reflected true money supply. Nor was it because M3 correlates less with GDP and financial market activities than M2, in fact it usually correlates more.

So why did they do it ? Hard money writers have offered a variety of possible reasons, but I think it all comes down to one thing: M3 have during the last few years increased more than M2. Just like the Fed and pro-administration pundits makes sure to focus on whatever consumer price measure increases the least (currently the "core" PCE deflator), the Fed wants people to focus on a money supply measure which increases less.

We can see that during the latest year, M3 increased 8.4% versus only 4.8% for M2. This discrepancy is not new, as during the last 10 years, M3 increased at a average annual rate of 8.2% versus 6.3% for M2. These numbers really say everything we need to know about the Fed's motive.

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January 12, 2006

The Adam Smith Myth

Mises.org Updates

In an essay that made his masterpiece on the history of thought famous, Murray Rothbard argues that Adam Smith's should not be called the founder of economics, nor a theorist who improved on economic science, nor even a consistent defender of the market economy. Rothbard sees him as unoriginal, confused, opportunistic, vastly overrated, and even dishonest. Yet this except is only a tiny bit of what you will find in this 2-volume wonder ($45). FULL ARTICLE

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The Economist quotes Mises

Mises.org Updates

Here: "Part of America's current prosperity is based not on genuine gains in income, nor on high productivity growth, but on borrowing from the future. The words of Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist of the early 20th century, nicely sum up the illusion: “It may sometimes be expedient for a man to heat the stove with his furniture. But he should not delude himself by believing that he has discovered a wonderful new method of heating his premises.”

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vice and virtue without a soul

Gil Guillory

While I have not read Hidden Order by David Friedman, he offers up this selection today on hawk-dove equilibria. I regard it as an error for such analysis to be silent on internal motives for behavior. In particular, lots of people wish to be virtuous, and work at it; and lots of people struggle against their vices. A great number of people are religious, and regard it as a duty to God to be virtuous. There are also many non-religious people that regard virtue as end in itself -- goodness is a good, go figure. The equilibrium suggested by Friedman, I think, is more of an internal struggle than an external one. This internal/external dichotomy has problems, but there is certainly a role for ideology, broadly considered -- and this is what Friedman is not considering. While there is an external, non-ideological struggle that takes place, and the incentives one faces are important in molding character and specific choices, it is more appropriate to use the hawk-dove equilibrium as a rough hypothesis or starting point in further inquiry, not a deduction from economic theory.

So, while his conclusions seem strong, I think they follow from weak premises.

What a minute! Did I, an Austrian, just criticize Friedman, a neoclassical, for being too a priori / not empirical enough? I think I did.

Link post | 07:49 AM
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http://www.globalizationinstitute.org/blog/

The intellectual revolution in international development

By Alex Singleton | 11 January 2006 | Comments (0)

For too long the Left has held a monopoly over people's hearts and minds when its comes to international development. It is true that the Make Poverty History campaign is a worthy campaign. It has done a great deal of good by putting Africa at the top of the agenda But the fact it is wedded to outdated trade ideas about protecting infant industries and top-down approaches to aid shows how free marketeers have failed to influence the public debate.

One reason for the Left's monopoly on international development is that we have allowed ourselves to be portrayed as entirely negative, as against everything. Free-marketeers have, on the whole, failed to express in practical terms how free-market ideas can actually help people. There have been too many green ink letters to the editor (correctly) pointing out the problems of poor governance and corruption in Africa, but written without also putting forward a positive and practical way forward. If your younger brother does something foolish and gets into serious trouble, do you just harangue him for his foolishness, or do you help him get back on his feet?

A lesson from 1980s Britain is that free markets are good but it is better to be in favour of practical ways that free markets can help people. Helping people living in council homes to own their own home actually meant something to people - it helped people climb the economic ladder. And similarly, an enterprise-based scheme like microcredit has an important part to play in helping create an thriving economy in Africa and in encouraging the governmental reforms and recognition of property rights that are so desperately needed. Although four billion people live on less than $1,400, only a fraction have access to basic financial services. Microcredit enables an African, for example, to buy a mobile phone and then set up a business renting it to his village. The phone can then be used to call other towns and villages to find out prices and demand for crops that have been grown, enabling growers to get the best prices. Another enterprise-based scheme, Technoserve, helps identify and encourage entrepreneurs in developing countries. Technoserve helps them find gaps in the market, develop business plans, raise investment, run a small-scale pilot and then expand their businesses. These enterprise-based approaches to development are vastly more effective than the top-down help of which the government, unfortunately, is still far too fond.

The work of the Centre for Social Justice has shown just how effectively a think tank can transform the debate on an issue. Three years ago, social justice was a left-wing term, about redistributing income and socialism. Now it means things like welfare reform and community entrepreneurs. That is quite an achievement. And that sort of achievement is what is needed now in the area of international development. The Department for International Development needs an intellectual revolution. We need to turn development policies upside down: we need to change to helping Africa from the bottom up.

Owen Barder, Tony Blair's former Economic Affairs Private Secretary, replies here.

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Corruption getting worse

By Alex Singleton | 3 January 2006 | Comments (0)

The BBC's Patrick Smith is scathing about corruption:

Corruption deals in Africa are getting bigger. The crooks are getting smarter and doing ever greater damage to Africa's economies - sucking out resources meant for health, education and clean water.

Unlike their Asian counterparts, Africa's robber-barons prefer to take their booty to Europe or the United States, far from prying eyes.

It's a system run by an international network of criminals, involving corrupt bankers laundering money, lawyers and accountants setting up "front companies" and trusts to collect bribes, contract-hungry company directors, local middlemen in Africa and the corrupt officials in African governments.

After announcing in 2002 that Africa was losing $150bn a year to corruption, the African Union drew up a convention to outlaw bribe-taking and bribe-giving. So is corruption a big concern for governments? Well, no.

No wonder people like Bob Geldof are saying things like this:

How do we stop the pornography of poverty that is paraded across our television screens every night? How much can we do to stop that and how much can be achieved while there is such egregious corruption in many African governments? The success or failure of our efforts depends heavily on the willingness and ability of African governments to govern effectively and tackle corruption.
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China now richer than Britain

By Alex Singleton | 21 December 2005 | Comments (0)

The British government is unlikey to underestimate economic growth any time soon, but thanks to difficulties in collecting data, that's exactly what China has been doing. In 2004, it overlooked $285 billion in output. As the Times of London explains: "its economy overtook Italy's two years ago, has cruised past France and, with the new figures, has also surpassed Britain. That puts China in fourth place, behind the US, Japan and Germany." Goldman Sachs estimates that China will leapfrog the US to become the world's biggest economy by 2035.

Pessimists view the rise of China as deeply worrying. They complain that everything now seems to be made in China. In the United States, Wal-Mart is getting attacked for the crime of selling too many Chinese goods. Such pessimists frown at the knowledge that, symbolically, IBM's personal computer business is now owned by the Chinese firm Lenovo. The worrying is needless: IBM is being profit-maximising: it realised that its capital would be more profitably invested in other business areas, rather than cut-throat PC manufacturing. This is good for America. The truth is that there is no conflict between American prosperity and Chinese prosperity: increases the GDP in one country will tend to lead to GDP increases in the other.

Some people are worried that the rise of China will lead to war. But surely people can't really think that putting China in an economic cage, leaving 160 million people living on less than one dollar a day, is a good way of promoting peace? As both Richard Cobden and Thomas Friedman have argued, economic linkage tends to bind countries together in bonds of peace. The economic linkage of America and Europe with China should thus be seen as a vital foreign policy objective.

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: "ALITO AND CAP: A Princeton grad thinks I'm missing something:

I graduated from Princeton in the mid-1980s and remember CAP and Prospect well. While that particular article may have been satire (and ask yourself, what exactly were they satirizing? Who is laughing at whom here?) the viciousness of CAP's language throughout its existence was apparent to everyone who saw it. That is why the organization had no support on campus, even from conservatives. CAP didn't oppose affirmative action, it opposed the admission of women, people of color, gay men and (doubly) lesbians, to Princeton. As far as I can recall, CAP existed solely for the purposes of spreading this ugly rhetoric. They did nothing aside from publishing Prospect, nothing except for finding various ways to express their bigotry.
Why does this matter for Judge Alito? Of course there is no reason to think he is personally a bigot. But in order to get a job he was willing to say “yeah, I’m with those bigots over there.” Should someone like that have a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court? This is not guilt by association – Alito is the person who chose to do the associating. He volunteered a connection to an extremist organization and it is reasonable and appropriate to ask him about why he threw his lot in with these people. While Judge Alito may not have signed off on each and every word, he did sign off on the group as a whole at a time when very few Princeton alumni did. And it really is shameful.
Duly noted.
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THE SADDAM DOCS: Hard to disagree with Bill Kristol on this one. We haven't really had a thorough investigation of the documents from the Saddam regime that may or may not confirm Saddam's extensive relationship with international terrorists. They're not classified. Maybe there's so much that it would take an age for government officials to comb through them. So here's an idea: throw them to the blogs! Have the army of Davids scramble through every detail. Whatever side of the debate you're on, we should all want to find out the truth, no?
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WHISPERS FROM THE NSA: I've got an interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice just up at Reason. He's got to speak in pretty general terms or hypotheticals for most of the conversation, but I did want to flag this bit:

That would lead one to ask the question: "Why did they omit the FISA court?"

I would think one reason that is possible is that perhaps a system already existed that you could do this with, and all you had to do is change the venue. And if that's the case, and this system was a broad brush system, a vacuum cleaner that just sucks things up, this huge systematic approach to monitoring these calls, processing them, and filtering them--then ultimately a machine does 98.8 percent of your work.

A huge, computerized "vacuum cleaner" system that already existed, but that needed its "venue" changed for domestic surveillance, huh? That sounds a hell of a lot like the Echelon program to me. It seems like it would've been very tempting—and, I imagine, relatively easy—to just turn a system developed for mass analysis of foreign communications inward.
—posted by Julian
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GEN. GEOFFREY MILLER: He's the key figure in the decision to introduce torture and abuse of detainees in the U.S. military. He's the one who set up the abuse program at Guantanamo Bay and was then sent by Rumsfeld to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib. He's the one who told General Karpinski to treat detainees "like dogs." He's the one who organized the framing of Muslim chaplain James Yee, after once confiding in Yee that he had problems with Muslims in general. As usual, the Bush administration has done all it can to protect Miller, because he could explain who, higher up in the administration, sanctioned torture and abuse. Secure that no one in the real chain of command would contradict him, Miller has, in the past, cooperated with Pentagon investigations. Even so, the Fay report concluded that he had recommended policies that contravened the Geneva Conventions, which were supposed to apply in Iraq. But now, he's gone silent. Hmmmm. Money quote:

General Miller's decision to invoke his right not to incriminate himself came shortly after Col. Thomas M. Pappas, whose military intelligence unit was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib, was granted immunity from prosecution and ordered to testify in the dog handlers' coming courts-martial. Major Crawford said she and General Miller were not aware that Colonel Pappas had immunity protection when General Miller invoked his military Article 31 rights.

Yeah, right. The good news is that, with painful slowness, even the military investigatory apparatus may eventually uncover the high-level policies that crafted the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and then blamed them on a few reservists. And hold someone accountable. Higher up, I hope, than General Miller.
- posted by Andrew
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QUOTE FOR THE DAY: "I am at a loss to know how creationism has got mixed up with conservatism. I have always thought of conservatives as the cold-eyed people, unafraid to face awkward facts, respectful of rigorous intellectual disciplines, and decently curious, but never dogmatic, on points of metaphysics. Conservatism thus understood is, in my view, the ideal outlook for free citizens of a free society. Contrariwise, pseudoscientific fads, metaphysical dogmas like "dialectical materialism," magical explanations for natural phenomena, and slipshod word-games about "agency" and "design" posing as science, arise most commonly in obscurantist despotisms. The old USSR was addled with such things, Lysenkoism being only the best known. You may say that an obscurantist despotism can be conservative in its own way, and you may have a terminological point; but that's not the style of conservatism I favor." - John Derbyshire, NRO, in an exchange with Tom Bethell.

Once again, I find myself in complete agreement with the old codger. How can that be? Once you get past his prejudices, which he proudly displays, Derbyshire is actually a recognizable old-style conservative. His description of the conservative temperament and attitude toward reality is absolutely something I share and, as he puts it, absolutely consonant with deep religious faith. I can see now what will be a main line of criticism of my book: that its understanding of conservatism is an English one, not American. Maybe that's the origin of my detente with the Derb. But if our shared conservatism draws inspiration from English tradition and history, it is also a philosophical argument, available for universal inspection and debate. The point is not whether such a skeptical, empirical, practical, limited government conservatism can survive in today's America. The point is whether it offers an attractive politics for the West in modernity. I agree with Derb that it is the ideal outlook for free citizens of a free society. I also believe it is the best politics for maintaining our freedom in modernity. Which is why fundamentalists of all kinds - Muslim and Christian - feel so threatened by it. - posted by Andrew.
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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

EVANGELICALS VERSUS DISPENSATIONALISTS: Here's a document from some evangelical leaders specifically attacking the notion that the current state of Israel is Biblically mandated. These leaders differ from the increasingly popular and now mainstream fundamentalist notion of the End-Time, the Rapture, and the role that a unified and expansionary Israel will play in such a moment. Evangelical protestantism is not monolithic, but the dispensationalists are clearly gaining ground, as the astonishing success of the "Left Behind" books shows. I should add that dispensationalism is a relatively recent development. Like much that now passes for ancient truth (like the Catholic church's insistence on the human person present in the zygote), its origins are actually very modern. In this new and modern brand of absolutist faith, the more extreme Christian fundamentalists are similar to many Islamic fundamentalists.
- posted by Andrew.
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BUSH AND TORTURE: If he has to break the law he signed, he will. The consequences of presidents doing this to clear legislative intent are profound. I have no doubt that, for all his platitudes yesterday, the fundamental reason Alito was nominated was to remove one check from the president's assumption of new and permanent powers. In an issue like the McCain Amendment, Roberts and Alito will back the president against the veto-proof vote of the Congress. That's why they're there.
- posted by Andrew.
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MORE FROM BREMER: The Weekly Standard has a great summary of some of the juicier bits from the Bremer memoir (and by 'memoir,' I don't mean the current publishing view that this includes complete fiction). Both Bremer and Powell - let's call them the Sanity Chorus - were insistent that an occupation that couldn't even control Baghdad was woefully under-manned. Powell emerges as a real hawk in arguing to take out Moqtada al-Sadr. Rumsfeld seems absolutely indifferent to reality on the ground, contemptuously unresponsive to Bremer, and eager to downsize the mission at every moment. The evidence is beginning to mount, it seems to me, that Rumsfeld ran this war. His arrogance, pig-headedness, ideological fixations, and sheer incompetence are what have led us into our current knife-edge position, and are indirectly responsible for the deaths of the 30,000 innocent civilians who died because the occupying power decided - yes, consciously decided - to let mayhem rule. In this, Bush is responsible. He appointed Rumsfeld. And he has kept him on. I don't see how anyone can have much confidence in war-management until he is removed.

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A PAIR OF QUIBBLES: A reader cites Albert Mohler as an example of a religious right leader who doesn't think that God intervenes directly to punish sin - via hurricane, for instance - and Andrew replies:

Mohler differs from Robertson in not seeing a specific weather event as God-induced. But he shares with him the notion that all bad things in the universe stem in part from human sin.

Well, of course he does - because that's one of the basic tenets of Christianity, no? Not that your sin or mine causes Hurricane Katrina, but that death and suffering are a result, ultimately, of the Fall of Man, and that this primordial catastrophe is responsible for the wounded quality of the world. It would be pretty odd if Mohler, or any Christian leader - Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, whatever - didn't think that human sin, understood generally, has a strong relationship to human suffering and death.

Also, I think that Andrew's last Malkin Award nominee - a pastor named Herbert Lusk who said, "my friends, don't fool with the church because the church has buried a million critics" - probably wasn't threatening to actually kill or do violence to his critics. It's a pretty commonplace piece of Christian rhetoric to point out that the faith has outlasted most of its critics over the last two thousand years, and that this is perhaps a sign of God's favor and ought to give would-be opponents pause. (Here's how Chesterton put this line of argument, rather more eloquently.) But I admit Lusk's comments are open to Andrew's interpretation as well.
posted by Ross
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ISRAEL POLLING: Here's the best I can find:

Fully 44% of Americans believe that God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people while a substantial minority (36%) thinks that "the state of Israel is a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy about the second coming of Jesus." White evangelical Protestants and, to a lesser degree, African-Americans accept both of these propositions. Significantly fewer white Catholics and mainline Protestants believe Israel was granted to the Jews by God or think that Israel represents a fulfillment of the Bible's prophecy of a second coming.

When a poll of all adults finds over a third holding the view that the state of Israel is fulfilling the prophecy of the imminent Second Coming, you can see that pre-millenarianism is not some fringe idea, touted by Robertson. It's fundamentalist orthodoxy. Robertson is cruel and tactless, and many evangelicals would agree. Their compassion forbids them from making personal attacks as Robertson does. But he didn't make up his theology. And it's mainstream.

- posted by Andrew.
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CORRUPTION AND CONSERVATISM: In one sense, the current bout of corruption in Washington is explicable enough: politicians, Democrat or Republican, who hold power long anough succumb to its temptations. But in another, it's a function of the degeneracy of Bush-DeLay conservatism. When conservatives have embraced big government, massive increases in spending, huge new entitlements, a blizzard of earmarks, and an increasingly complex tax code, they have merely increased the incentives for sleaze. As David Broder also points out, some states - Texas stands out, as do many other parts of the South - have a very long history of federal government largess, cronyism and back-door quid pro quos. All we're seeing is a shameless political culture being nationalized. That used to be LBJ's mojo. Now, it's DeLay's.
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MOHLER AND ROBERTSON: I asked readers to prove me wrong about a major religious right leader dissenting from Pat Robertson's view that the End-Time will lead to a rapture of the faithful and destruction of the unfaithful; and that God intervenes directly in our lives ot punish sin. Here's Albert Mohler with a more nuanced position:

God created the world as the theater of His own glory. It is a world of great beauty and wonder; a world that allows crops to grow and provides everything that we physically need. Yet, it is also a world of terrible storms and natural disasters. In part, all this is the result of the devastating effects of human sin. As the Apostle Paul makes clear, the whole creation anticipates the redemption that is to come. But, as we experience the reality of weather after the Fall, we should not trace any particular weather pattern to contemporary human sins. Jesus explained that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. The weather is not fair.

Mohler differs from Robertson in not seeing a specific weather event as God-induced. But he shares with him the notion that all bad things in the universe stem in part from human sin.
- posted by Andrew.
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DIVIDING ISRAEL: A reader writes:

To quote David Barry, I swear, I am not making this up.

A few years ago, I was sitting in the galley of the Naval Training Center in Illinois. There was a television playing CNN headline news. The program gave the results of a poll about Americans' views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. I forget the exact numbers as to which side people supported, but what struck me was a second poll - if you support Israel, why? As I recall, the plurality said they supported Israel because of terrorism, but a pretty substantial majority said they supported Israel because of its "biblical claim to the land". Perhaps inadvertently, I scoffed slightly. Another sailor asked me what I was thinking, and when I told him, he said something to the effect of, "What's wrong with that? Unless you don't believe in the Bible ..."

Mr. Sullivan, I had a fairly decent Christian education. So I retorted something like, "Why do they have a claim? Because God promised the land to Abraham? Well, Abraham had 8 sons. Why are you going with the second son? Okay, fine, let's take Isaac. He had two sons - why do you give the whole land to the second son? Well, fine, let's take Jacob. There were 13 tribes of Israel (everyone forgets Levi) - why are you only counting Judah for the whole land? Surely Tel Aviv wasn't part of the original tribe of Judah. But, okay, let's take Judah. Well, didn't the Babylonian captivity pretty much end the Jewish claim to the land? Didn't Jesus say that he could raise children of Abraham from the stones, that being a child of Abraham didn't count for much?" The guy I was talking to paused for a second, then said, "Wow. You're gay, aren't you?"

Yes, I probably was playing a bit fast and loose with those biblical references. It was 5:30 am - what do you want from me?

I wonder if there is a poll out there explaining American attitudes toward Israel along these lines. Let me know.
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MANSFIELD ON THE EXECUTIVE: My former teacher is, as always, worth reading. The American executive is indeed designed to be able to act as a unitary actor in emergencies. War is such an emergency. Secrecy is, in part, essential in that function. The difficulty in our current moment, however, is that the emergency has been defined as permanent. And so instead of ceding extra-legal power to the executive in extremis, we are in danger of shifting the entire emphasis of government toward a routine executive power unrestrained by law. There is a balance we need to restore here - because this war is indeed different, in its longevity and involvement of American citizens. I see no reason why a revised FISA law wouldn't be a prudent response to this problem. Especially when we have a war-president deeply distrusted by around half the country.

ZYGOTES: More discussion over at the Corner. I think all we can say with absolute certainty is that a majority of zygotes never make it to become grown-ups. I call them "human beings" and "unborn children" because, according to natural law philosophy, that's what they are. To quote Robert P. George, the grandfather of theoconservatism:

A human being is conceived when a human sperm containing twenty-three chromosomes fuses with a human egg also containing twenty-three chromosomes (albeit of a different kind) producing a single cell human zygote containing, in the normal case, forty-six chromosomes that are mixed differently from the forty-six chromosomes as found in the mother or father.

All I'm doing to taking the arguments of the theocons and following their logic.
- posted by Andrew
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OPEN SECRETS: I'd been meaning to reply to an exceedingly silly PowerLine post that strained to bolster Bush's claim that, somehow, national security was compromised by the revelation that the NSA was eavesdropping on them without warrants as well as with them. (As Frank Rich points out today, behind the Times' irrelevancy firewall, the Showtime drama Sleeper Cell beat the New York Times to the punch on this anyway.)

Fortunately, Glenn Greenwald has a quite thorough response posted already, so I can just reiterate the highlights:

• The notion that Osama bin Laden stopped using his sat phone because press accounts tipped him off that we could track it is probably bogus.
  
• The claim that it's "extremely unlikely" that al-Qaeda terrorists were aware of FISA until now because "few Americans knew anything about FISA before the current controversy arose" is, well, mindboggling. I guess it could be that they only just started reading the New York Times, but even ignoring the fact that FISA's been prominently discussed in the news since the early debates on the Patriot Act, it seems as though hardened terrorist might, you know, have somewhat more of a personal incentive to learn about American wiretap policy than the average Joe. Bush apologists need to make up their minds: Are these guys such a fiendishly clever and unique threat that they require massive expansion of executive power to defend against, or are they some sort of darkside Qeystone Qops so inept that disclosing the obvious gives them new information?
  
• It's similarly hard to imagine that terrorists had been previously counting on the by now hyper-debunked assumption that "it would take days, weeks or months to obtain a FISA order." If they were minimally attentive, they'd know that FISA allows law enforcement to initiate a tap immediately and then submit a retroactive request for authorization up to three days later.

• ===/oops 75% done, but gotta goh, van go============http://analysis.typepad.com/analysis/

• Paul Starr does his best Orwell impersonation

  "Unlike conservatives, we believe that the people can enlarge their freedom through the only power that they share in common, which is their government. Taxes are the price we pay for that expanded vision of freedom."

  Read the whole article here.