NPR has made it sound that the authorities are allowing looting in New Orleans

I told my wife what NPR was saying about order dissolving and looting being allowed by authorities in New Orleans. She pointed out the local television coverage, here in Dallas, shows police threatening looters with guns and arresting them. So much for the great NPR news coverage.

Marc Cooper on the Anti-War movement

Marc Cooper is anti-war, but doesn't think much of the current (and past) movement.:

An intriguing factoid has come my way via a piece by Todd Gitlin this week. Back when the war in Vietnam was becoming really unpopular, so did the peace movement:

"...Here’s the rub about 1969: As the war became less popular, so did the anti-war movement. It was hated, in fact—by the end of the decade, the most hated entity in America. In the 1969 Gallup poll I just cited, as Harold Meyerson reminded his Washington Post readers in June, “77 percent disapproved of the antiwar demonstrations, which were then at their height.” To what degree this was because the movement was reputed to be against the troops, to what degree because of confrontational revelries and symbolic anti-Americanism on the left, to what degree because of psychic projection, who can tell? But all this was a gift to Nixon, and it has been the gift to the right that keeps on giving..."

Gitlin cites this superficial anomaly to make a point about the current anti-war movement. A point I have made repeatedly: The movement has to look outward not inward. It must strive to expand and not restrict. It must meet people where they’re at, instead of demanding purity. It must be serious and not self-indulgent.

New Orleans is a disaster of biblical proportions

Yesterday morning, the worst-case scenario for New Orleans happened: the levies broke and flooded the city. Having made 3-4 trips to New Orleans up until 2000, it is hard to imagine that this is real. Each of those trips involved attending an event at the Super Dome, so this is familiar territory. After thinking on Monday night that the big bullet had been dodged, we found out Tuesday morning that it wasn't true.

Wretchard on the failure of the Left to oppose Fascism

There are some ominous parallels between the Left's failure to oppose the current brand of Fascism (Osama Bin Laden and company) and the Left's failure to oppose the rise of Hitler in the 1930's:

Reader DL sends an excerpt from Paul Berman's recent Terror and Liberalism who "puts his liberal credentials on the line ... by critiquing the left while presenting a liberal rationale for the war on terror". Berman believes the Left should have arrived at a logical opposition to radical Islamism independently because:

... Islamism (is) a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism ... Berman delineates how all three movements descended from utopian visions (in the case of Islamism, the restoration of a pure seventh-century Islam) into irrational cults of death.

In a word the Left would logically be expected to oppose Osama Bin Laden because it represents everything Berman thinks the Left has fought against since it's inception. The question Berman tries to answer is why the precise opposite has happened. To get a handle on the problem he dissects the failure of the 1930s French Left to resolutely oppose Hitler. On pages 124-128 Berman says:

Blum and his supporters regarded Hitler and the Nazis with horror ... But mostly they remembered the First World War ... They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil. ... And, having analyzed the German scene in that manner, the anti-war Socialists concluded that Hitler and the Nazis, in railing against the great powers and the Treaty of Versailles, did make some legitimate arguments ... Why not look for ways to conciliate the outraged German people and, in that way, to conciliate the Nazis?

The New Donkey seems to be flogging a dead horse: Jack Abramoff

Yes, the antics of Jack Abramoff are not very nice, but that is not unusual. The New Donkey still hopes to make something out of it:

The headline focuses on shadowy dealings between Abramoff and a Deputy Secretary of the Interior who appears to have intervened in two separate cases to put roadblocks in front of Indian casino plans that threatened the financial interest of Abramoff clients--the clients he was at the same time massively ripping off. Turns out Abramoff was also trying to hire the guy for his lobbying firm.

How about China and Able Danger?

Jack Kelly, at Irish Pennants, writes about Able Danger and China. There is a theory that they were getting too close to Clinton contacts with China, and were shut down.

Sources said the private contractors, using sophisticated computer software that sifts through massive amounts of raw data to establish patterns, came up with a chart of Chinese strategic and business connections in the U.S.

The program wrongly tagged Rice, who at the time was an adviser to then-candidate George W. Bush, and former Defense Secretary William Perry by linking their associations at Stanford, along with their contacts with Chinese leaders, sources said.

The program also spat out scores of names of other former government officials with legitimate ties to China, as well as prominent American businessmen. There was no suggestion that Rice or any of the others had done anything wrong.

Bear in mind that many suspect that the Gorelick "Wall" was erected chiefly to frustrate the FBI's investigation into Chinese espionage in the U.S., and its possible connection to illegal campaign contributions to the Clintons and the Democratic Party.

Marc Cooper on Jane Fonda and George Galloway

Marc Cooper doesn't think that either Jane Fonda or George Galloway will add anything to the current anti-war campaign. Marc does say that Jane Fonda is a nice lady, but that her image is such that she will not help an anti-Iraq war movement. Marc also writes about the blemish's on George Galloway that make him not helpful, either. First his thoughts on Jane:

Take Jane Fonda (please). Now that she’s toured the country pitching her really bad book in which she amply detailed her subservience to a series of strange husbands, and now that she has publicly apologized for her posing on an anti-aircraft gun during the Vietnam War, she’s announced she is now mounting a new tour to oppose the war in Iraq.

I met Jane some years ago and underneath it all she’s a nice lady. She certainly got a bum rap as Hanoi Jane, (though she did make some dumb moves in the way she opposed that war). But you’d think she’d be smart enough to understand that politics is all about perception. And the overwhelming perception regarding her anti-war record –right or wrong – is negative. Very negative. Farcical. Laughable. Painful. Too bad, but true.

Last, he thoughts on George Galloway:

But anti-war activists ought to remember the axiom that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Before the American left rolls out the red carpet for Galloway they may want to note that he’s a rather fundamentalist anti-abortion and homophobic Catholic who supports capital punishment and who has said he cannot imagine living on less than $250,000 a year.

No surprise Galloway has a long and exquisitely documented record as an unctuous sleaze-ball, never very far from a corruption scandal.

Dave Kopel on coverage of Cindy Sheehan

Dave Kopel, in a column in the Rocky Mountain News (the more conservative of the two Denver papers), writes about how the mainstream media has censored Cindy Sheehan. They have omitted the really inflammatory things she has said, so that she appears more mainstream than she really is.:

Cindy Sheehan claims the media are "a propaganda tool for the government." A New York Post editorial (Aug. 16) argued that Sheehan's statement was self-evidently false, given the overwhelming and almost exclusively positive media attention paid to her in the last several weeks. But in a broader sense, Sheehan has a point: Almost all the news stories and columns in Denver dailies, like the vast majority of the rest of the mainstream media, have failed to inform their readers about what Sheehan really thinks.

The night before Sheehan began her Crawford, Texas, vigil, she spoke at the convention of Veterans for Peace (transcript at www.veteransforpeace.org).She told the crowd about a sympathetic e-mailer who warned that her profanity offended "people on the fence."

Dave concludes:

At the Veterans for Peace rally, Sheehan called George Bush a "lying bastard" and a "maniac." She showed her path to peace: "You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism." (The Crawford "Peace" House, which Sheehan has used to coordinate her protest, has a photo on its Web site depicting "Palestine" as including the entire state of Israel. That Sheehan urges the extermination of the Jewish state does not necessarily mean that she is anti-Semitic; there are some extreme-left Jews who agree with her position.)

In an Aug. 11 blog conference call, Sheehan stated, "Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state." Even if one does not entirely agree, the last several weeks do show that that the mainstream media sometimes mislead the public by refusing to print statements that sharply challenge the status quo.

I still get aggravated with Firefox in Windows XP

I use the Firefox browser in Windows XP. I have had ongoing troubles with copying and pasting content from Firefox. Right now, there is selected text that can't be unselected. Firefox has lost its mind, again. The text is highlighted, but must not really be selected as copy is disable. When I try to select into the page, the text stays highlighted. The ultimate way to solve the problem is to shut down Firefox, which is unacceptable. The only reason I still use Firefox is that IE6 is worse. It offers "smart copying" which is not only not smart, but that does bad things to text that I paste into a Word document, after copying from a webpage. There no real alternatives to Firefox and IE6, sadly.

Razib writes at Gene Expression about traits such as skin color

Razib has a long post in response to a paper by Heather Norton. One thing I take away is that there is a great deal that we don't really know about the transition from earlier hominids to modern man. Razib writes:

I finally read Heather Norton's review of worldwide MC1R polymorphism. In case you forgot MC1R is a locus that has been implicated in the expression of pigment in human beings, and mutations on it are often correlated with the various phenotypes we see around us (red hair, light skin, etc. etc.). The major take home point of Heather's paper is there is more than meets the eye than MC1R.

You would need to read what Razib wrote, but he concludes:

Overall, skin color is a messy polygenic trait. It is almost certainly not a nice Fisherian topography, but we have mapped the rugged gene-gene interactions at work so generalizations are hard to come buy that add any value to our knowledge-base. Additionally, some loci like MC1R are likely to have particularly strong effects because they lay at the nexus of various regulatory pathways. Finally there is the hypothesis that Greg Cochran and others have put forward which opines that perhaps some of these alleles (look at how many Europeans carry!) "jumped" from other ancient hominid lineages and were under selection subsequent to the hybridzation event. Related: Blonde Australian Aboriginals. Black and strawberry. What controls variation in human skin color? Genetics of Hair Color (again). Genetics of hair color. It's better on fire. An email Heather sent me. Evolutionary speculations.

Marc Cooper is not a fan of Donald Rumsfeld

Marc Cooper comments on Donald Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration's intervention in El Salvador in the early 1980's. Marc writes:

But there was Rummy lecturing the press on how we must stay the course in Iraq because, alas, it is freedom itself that is at stake. In making his case, Rummy pointed to the now legendary 1982 Potemkin elections in El Salvador:

In 1982, when El Salvadorans battled an insurgency in their country, a grandmother was -- reported that when she was told that she would be killed if she dared to vote, she replied, saying "You can kill me, you can kill my children, you can kill my neighbors, but you can't kill us all." That suggests the power of freedom's appeal in the struggle against tyranny.

Now, a couple of quick facts. Just about every serious observer now concedes the 1982 Salvadoran elections (which I witnessed in the midst of a bloody gun battle) were farcical. Indeed, lots of people were getting killed at the time – the overwhelming majority of them by the Salvadoran government which was promoting the elections – not by the insurgency that was opposing them.

Megan McArdle on oil prices

Megan McArdle has a piece prompted by Kevin Drum (of the Washington Monthly) betting that oil prices will keep rising. My sense is that much of the current rise is driven by speculators who are manipulating the world market. Megan makes that point that we don't have accurate crystal balls and that we tend to expect that whatever the current trend is will continue forever. Megan's writes about economics, and she writes:

Predicting the peak

Kevin Drum is looking to bet John Tierney that oil prices will stay high.

Personally, I think Kevin's being foolish. Oil company internal forecasting generally assumes an inflation adjusted oil price of about $30-$40, or so I'm told. Kevin's posts on oil are very well informed, but permit me to suggest that the good folks at BP and ExxonMobil are also pretty well informed about the state of the world's oil supply, and have a much larger financial incentive to be right than does Mr Drum.

It's not that I disagree with Mr Drum's basic thesis--that current reserves are being exhausted. They are; that's a law of nature. But I am reliably informed that oil companies think they can get oil out of Canada's tar sands at a profit with prices well under where they are now. The tar sands alone contain more oil than all Saudi Arabia. Moreover, higher prices will spawn conservation, exploration, and so forth.

Why would Iran be lying about their nuclear weapon progress?

If this article pointed out by Daniel Drezner is correct, why are the Iranian's claiming to be further along towards nuclear weapons? That is the question Dan asks:

Iran's smoking gun goes poof

Three weeks ago today Dafnia Linzer had a Washington Post front-pager on an National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran wasn't nearly as close to developing nuclar weapons as previously thought.

Three weeks later, Linzer pours even colder water on Iran's WMD progress:

Traces of bomb-grade uranium found two years ago in Iran came from contaminated Pakistani equipment and are not evidence of a clandestine nuclear weapons program, a group of U.S. government experts and other international scientists has determined.

"The biggest smoking gun that everyone was waving is now eliminated with these conclusions," said a senior official who discussed the still-confidential findings on the condition of anonymity.

He concludes:

U.S. officials have privately acknowledged for months that they were losing confidence that the uranium traces would turn out to be evidence of a nuclear weapons program. A recent U.S. intelligence estimate found that Iran is further away from making bomb-grade uranium than previously thought, according to U.S. officials.

The IAEA findings come as European efforts to negotiate with Iran on the future of its nuclear program have faltered, and could complicate a renewed push by the Bush administration to increase international pressure on Tehran.

Link via David Adesnik, who asks, "The question, then, would seem to be the same one as we now ask about Iraq: Why would a government with nothing to hide constantly lie to international inspectors?"

Perhaps Juan Cole really is a responsible person

Juan Cole, far-left professor at the University of Michigan, has been rhetorically beaten up, and has deserved it, most of the time. Marc Cooper points out that Juan Cole is taking a responsible position on the situation in Iraq. Juan Cole says that an abrupt pull-out from Iraq would have very bad consequences. Marc writes:

Juan Cole has elaborated a similar but more detailed plan. Cole is the anti-war left’s most quoted and favorite source when it comes to explaining what’s really going on in Iraq. Will they now listen to his well-thought out argument as to why rally cries for “Out Now” aren’t gonna cut it? Cole:

I think "US out now" as a simple mantra neglects to consider the full range of possible disasters that could ensue. For one thing, there would be an Iraq civil war. Iraq wasn't having a civil war in 2002. And although you could argue that what is going on now is a subterranean, unconventional civil war, it is not characterized by set piece battles and hundreds of people killed in a single battle, as was true in Lebanon in 1975-76, e.g. People often allege that the US military isn't doing any good in Iraq and there is already a civil war. These people have never actually seen a civil war and do not appreciate the lid the US military is keeping on what could be a volcano.

The Vioxx suit against Merck

Megan McArdle has a piece about the outcome of the suit against Merck over Viozx. She was bothered by the fact that the disconnect between the science and the outcome. Vioxx has never been shown to cause arrythmia, yet that was the basis of the suit.

Who decides--and how?

I find the Merck verdict pretty disturbing. Regardless of what you think of the modern torts system, the jury doesn't seem to have done a very good job assessing the evidence:

Merck argued that Vioxx couldn't have caused Mr. Ernst's death because, according to his death certificate, he died of an arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat, not a heart attack. While scientific evidence suggests Vioxx can promote blood clots leading to a heart attack, no data have linked the drug with arrhythmias.

Jurors who voted against Merck said much of the science sailed right over their heads. "Whenever Merck was up there, it was like wah, wah, wah," said juror John Ostrom, imitating the sounds Charlie Brown's teacher makes in the television cartoon. "We didn't know what the heck they were talking about."

According to the Wall Street Journal, jurors were swayed by things that simply shouldn't have been a factor--an irrational belief that the CEO should attend the case (Merck is sued hundreds of times a year; should the CEO stop running the company so the jurors can feel special?), and even more disturbingly, a desire to get on Oprah. You only get on Oprah if you find for the plaintiff.

Paul, at Wizbang, on the Daily Kos vs. the DLC

Paul, blogging at Wizbang, comments on the Daily Kos (in the person of Kos, himself) attack on the DLC. The DLC is the wing of the Democratic Party that won two presidential elections after 1976 (1992 and 1996). The other wing (other than in 1776, when Jimmy Carter was a stealth candidate) has not won an election after 1976. Kos is on the attack against any signs of moderation, which is what the DLC represents. Paul is egging on Kos:

Remember, since Kennedy the only non-DLC Dem to win was the one who came in after Nixon. (Carter) If not for Watergate they would have lost that one too. The DLC represents the last bastion of rationalism in the Democratic party; if the kooks declare war on it, you can kiss the party good-bye..

I never thought I'd say this but I wish Kos luck. Now you'll pardon me whilst I go enjoy the train wreck that is the Daily Kos comment section.

Jeff Jarvis gives his assessment of the Cindy Sheehan circus

Jeff Jarvis, writing at Buzz Machine, gives his assessment of the Cindy Sheehan circus in a piece called "Three-ring war".

I haven’t so much as mentioned Cindy Sheehan because I think it’s a story about both sides using her and vice versa. It’s a hall of mirrors and PR, this story. A clear illustration of that comes when you read Frank Rich in the New York Times alongside Patrick Frey (aka Patterico) in the LA Times.

Brian Maloney and Michelle Malkin on Air America and Lizz Winstead

There are many bizarre aspects to the Air America business operation. Brian Maloney, of The Radio Equalizer, along with Michelle Malkin, have a piece about Lizz Winstead's suit against Air America. This is just another case where the Air America operation at best seems amaturish and at worst case, is unethical or illegal. Air America seems to lurch from one business disaster to the next. The principals behind the business have stated that they will keep changing parent companies to escape the apparent financial misdeeds from previous incarnations.

On May 20, 2005, comedian Lizz Winstead filed suit in New York, detailing a laundry list of allegations against Air America Radio parent Piquant LLC. Accusing the company of failing to pay wages, promotional fees, accrued holiday compensation and severance, Winstead is seeking $290,716, plus interest. You can download her entire complaint here.

Jay Tea (at Wizbang) writes about Jamie Gorelick

Jay Tea has a piece about what has been found about Jamie Gorelick's activities in the Clinton Administration. It is not pretty.

Over a year ago, when it first came out that 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick (appointed by Democrats) was a former Clinton Administration Justice Department lawyer who had helped formulate the policies that controlled just how we gathered intelligence against terrorists -- and how that information could and could not be shared. I wrote about it at the time, but never really followed up on it.

It turns out that what had me so outraged about Ms. Gorelick's participation in the 9/11 Commission's investigation was merely the tip of the iceberg. Daffyd ab Hugh of Captain's Quarters has been doing some more digging, and it's not pretty.

The Big Pharaoh on Bangladesh and bombs

The Big Pharaoh writes about the bombs in Bangladesh. He writes:

Go Home Bangladesh

More than 350 small home-made bombs exploded Wednesday in almost every town and city in Bangladesh, the world's third largest Muslim majority nation. Two people were killed and more than 100 suffered slight injuries. A Bangladesh madrassa student found with a video of speeches by Osama bin Laden' name and military training tactics was among 100 people held after a nationwide wave of bombings linked to Muslim extremists, police said.

Bangladesh should leave Iraq now!

Ops, are there Bangali troops in Iraq anyway? Raise your hand up if you can even locate Bangladesh on a map?

Marc Cooper in Las Vegas: feer and loathing, all over again

Marc Cooper is in Las Vegas to play poker. He comments, though, on how the Democrats in Califormia are indistinguishable, in bad ways, from the Republicans. I at first thought he was criticizing Republicans, but he was talking about people like Nancy Pelosi. This is part of what Marc wrote:

First note this front-pager on how a bi-partisan group of California legislators -- led by Democrats-- successfully lobbied the Federal Elections Commission to permit runaway fundraising to block proposed redisctring reform in California. So locked-up is our political system that not a single one of the 153 California legislative or congressional seats changed parties in the last election. One of the only sensible proposals that Governor Arnold is putting forward would take reapportionment out of the parties' grubby hands and let a panel of judges do the work.

Racial politics in Dallas

An FBI probe that involves black officials in Dallas has created outrage in at least portions of the black community (especially from the effected officials). Given the nature of Dallas politics, a great deal of the outrage is directed at Mayor Laura Miller, who is a liberal Democrat, but who is white. Laura Miller represents the white, progressive community in Dallas, such as the GLBT crowd in the Oak Lawn neighborhood. Laura Miller also started as a columnist for the alternative weekly The Dallas Observer. Her husband, last time I looked, was a Democratic state legislator. Much of the conflict in Dallas stems from the black reaction to the growing Hispanic community, which now outnumbers the black population. That conflict has played out both on the city council and the school board.

The Al-Qaeda connection in Bangladesh

The Gateway Pundit says that there is an Al-Qaeda connection with Bangladesh. The way the story was played on NPR show "The World", the attacks didn't sound as serious as they now seem. It is particularly nasty if it is the case that Bangladesh has worse security than even Nepal. This is part of what the Gateway Pundit wrote:

Police in eastern India said on Thursday they were questioning two suspected Bangladeshi nationals arrested in connection with distributing leaflets and raising money for an organization which had al Qaeda as part of its name.

One arrested suspect admitted having ties with Jamayetul Mujahideen, the banned terrorist organization in Bangladesh:

Some leaflets also warned Britain and the United States to "get out of Muslim countries," police said. Many of the improvised bombs were placed in front of government offices, courts, hotels, and bus and railway stations.

"We launched a nationwide crackdown and so far we have arrested 87 people," Abdul Kaiyum, Bangladesh's Inspector General of Police, told AFP. "Our forces are everywhere. We are on the highest alert."

Bombs in Bangladesh

I listened to "The World" on NPR, last night. I heard about the 300-plus explosions in Bangladesh, attributed to a radical Islamic group. The bombs were said to be primarily symbolic, as they were small, homemade, and caused small loss of life. This can't be a good thing, but it may be more of a small group trying to get attention.

"Howard Dean's Party"

Posted at The American Princess is a piece called "Howard Dean's Party". It speaks to the problem that the Democratic Party is having: they hate President Bush and the Republicans, and will say anything to discredit them. They also are having their cherished beliefs shattered. The result is:

Dean's attempts to corral and focus the Democratic machine have been woefully unsuccessful. The interest groups have drawn their swords and gone off to do battle against Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, the Senate Democrats are more interested in posturing and running for President, the Democratic fringe has succumbed to their own propaganda and are caught in an endless do-loop of Bush-Rove world domination plots (currently coalescing around the anti-war crowd and--sadly--the grieving anti-war mom, Cindy Sheehan), and the media...honestly I think liberals in the media, despite serving as the unpaid PR wing of the Democratic party, are rather fed up with the party as well.

The writer (guestblogging) concludes:

It is a continuous cycle, one that Democrats seem ripe to keep repeating. And why? Because they're trapped. They are trapped between a reality they cannot face and the world they have invented to contain all of their security-blanket fantasies. And even though the public does not want to go there, it doesn't look like Democrats are capable of breaking this habit any time soon.

Apparently, Bill Richardson has presidential ambitions

So, I guess we all knew that Bill Richardson had presidential ambitions. Just One Minute has a post that mentions that Bill Richardson allegedly has a checkered background, with respect to women. The blogger then goes on to catalog Bernard Kerik's activities, as Bill Richardson was said to have carried on more than Kerik:

The LA Times profiles New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, and notes his Presidential ambition. Our two cents - at a dinner party last Christmas, a Dem fundraiser assured me that Richardson had no hope as a Presidential candidate, because his personal life made Bernie Kerik look like a choir boy.

But what do I know?

David Adesnik (Oxblog) is guest blogging at Democracy Arsenal

David Adesnik, who is blogging this week, at DemocracyArsenal.org, has a piece about whether the Democrats can react more forcefully to perceived Republican slights and any faux pas. David suggests that they will have trouble reacting until the Democrats can agree among themselves:

From a longer-term perspective, the Democrats need to ask themselves whether it is possible to attack Bush's foreign policy more viciously and more effectively without slipping into a position, such as Durbin's, that can easily be labeled as anti-American or unpatriotic. As I see it, the problem isn't that Democrats are afraid to bare their fangs, but rather that the party is so divided that it can't agree on how to attack Bush.

The left wing of the party would be glad to aggressively cast the war in Iraq as another Vietnam, but the centrist wing of the party is committed to promoting democracy in Iraq regardless of whether the invasion was justified in the first place. The centrists would be glad to attack Bush more forcefully for his failure to win the war in Iraq, but that would imply that America should commit more resources to the confict, rather than pulling out (as the Vietnam analogy suggests).

Michael Vassar asks about why all these low intelligence people are in so many decision-making positions and getting credentials

Michael Vassar, writing at Gene Expression, asks "why so many people with low intelligence are getting credentials and moving into decision-making positions?"

An examination of Linda Gottfredson's "why g matters" and of its references, leaves several important questions unanswered. The most striking, in my mind, is "why are all these semi-literate people getting through graduate school"? The average person with a graduate degree is appearently closer to the average BA than the BA is to the average person with an associates degree. Average graduate degree holders just barely make the cut-off for NALS level 4, and are much (as in, by more points than the difference between themselves and holders of associates degrees) closer to the average high school graduate than they are to the people who can complete the most difficult listed tasks, yet none of the listed tasks are very difficult. They are all simply every-day instances of the sort of analysis that middle school students are supposedly taught to do.

He concludes with some questions:

At any rate, this data suggests to me that and IQ of 120-125 is basically a threshold for the highest levels of socio-economic success (remember the two recent presidential candidates, for instance) but is actually too low to make high level reasoning possible. It may be that IQ tests are not inaccurate when they place the average executive half way between the average Ivy League student (who generally can't reason very well either, can't complete a Wason selection task, and doesn't know what causes the seasons) and the average cashier.

I am left with one important question. What is Le Griffe's "Smart Fraction" actually doing? Relatedly, if the average engineer or chemist only has an IQ of 116, how does anything work? This question seriously confuses me. How is it possible to get a technical degree, using sciences that require calculus etc, and not be able to summarize a newspaper article, read a bus schedule, or calculate the gas milage a car is getting? Finally, how much weight should I give to the results of large government surveys which were carried out by such people?

I heard Lee Hamilton say on NPR he didn't hear anything about Able Danger

Again, last night, I heard Lee Hamilton on NPR say that he had not heard about Able Danger and Mohammed Atta. Now, he is telling a different story. Ed Morrissey, as usual, has the details:

Now we hear Hamilton say the exact opposite. The Commission heard about Atta -- they just ignored it, claiming now that the evidence shown at the briefing did not match up with their timeline for Atta's first entry to the US. That would have been an interesting claim had Hamilton made it when first asked. Now, with his categorical denial still ringing in our ears, it sounds more like another excuse to wriggle out of a debacle they themselves made.

The only development this gives us is an admission that the Commissioners themselves had awareness of Able Danger's assessment of Atta as a terrorist a year before the 9/11 attacks -- and they didn't bother to mention it at all in their report, not even to refute it as contrary information that they could refute. For a group which wound up berating two administrations for only listening to that evidence and intelligence which fit their policies, it at least smacks of the pot calling the kettle black. At worst, it smells much worse than that.

Ed Morrissey has a set of consolidated links to Able Danger posts

The Able Danger story is another case where Ed Morrissey (of Captain's Quarters) has led the coverage. The bizarre thing, is after all we know, Lee Hamilton (of the 9/11 Commission) was professing ignorance in an All Things Considered piece on NPR, today. This is Ed's post:

A Guide To Able Danger Posts At CQ

In order for CQ readers to access the new posts covering the emerging scandal surrounding the revelations about the Able Danger data-mining project that accurately identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers, I have created a new category for these posts called 9/11 Commission. Here are the posts so far that have gone into this category: 9/11 Cell Identified In 2000 Dafydd: Tangled Webs, Contrasting Countdowns Confirmation Of Able Danger Raises Even More Questions 9/11 Commission Acknowledges Briefing On Able Danger The Second Half Of 9/11 9/11 Commission Changes Its Story -- Again Rethinking Prague After Able Danger The Wall, The White Memo, And The DoD

NEW: Another Detail The 9/11 Commission Seems To Have Missed

Later on, I will try to update older posts relating to the 9/11 Commission to put them in this same category. This will be a subcategory of the War on Terror category, so all of these posts will remain within that group as well. Hopefully this post will provide a quick guide to the coverage of Able Danger here at CQ in the meantime.

UPDATE: WorldNet Daily notes some of my analysis in their overview on Able Danger and the collapse of the 9/11 Commission's credibility. Darn, no hyperlinks, but a very nice summary of a few of the above posts.

Daniel Drezner doesn't think much of our ongoing negotiations

The two biggest foreign policy issues that are not actively exploding are North Korea and Iran. We are trying to deal with them through negotiation. Daniel Drezner has a piece that examines the reasons why we are proceeding that way. It may be the approach that John Kerry and his buddies like, but it is not a good thing. Dan writes:

So my point is this -- the U.S. is favoring negotiations right now not because they're such an alluring alternative -- it's because given our resource constraints and the countries we are dealing with, the negotiation option is the best of a rotten set of alternatives.

Paul, at Powerline, has more about the 9/11 Commission omission

Paul, at the Power Line blog, says that John Podhoretz has another theory about the 9/11 Commission report omission about Mohammed Atta. He says that they were trying to defend the notion that there was no connection between Iraq and the attacks on September 11th:

But the Commission may be worse than even I suspected. I'm referring to the Able Danger scandal, as reported here by AP. It is now confirmed that the Commission "knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report." The admission that it had this information comes on the heels of its claim that, to the contrary, the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. That position became "inoperative" after Rep. Curt Weldon exposed it as false.

What's the significance of the Commission's admission that it had the information on Atta? Primarily, it resides in the intelligence "wall" I referred to above that prevented intelligence agents from comparing notes with criminal investigators. As John Podhoretz and Andrew McCarthy at NRO's Corner note, that wall, essentially a footnote in the Commission's report, may well have caused the linchpin of the 9/11 attacks to evade capture by American law enforcement.

Podhoretz also speculates that the omission of the information on Atta may have been an attempt by the Commission to "protect its timeline" on the whereabouts of Atta in 1999. That time line purported to debunk the Atta-Iraq connection, a task that, in Podhoretz's words "was of vital importance to Democrats, who had become focused almost obsessively on the preposterous notion that there was no relation whatever between Al Qaeda and Iraq."

Shock: the 9/11 Commission was politicized?

Sorry. I confess that I am not surprised that the 9/11 Commission Report ignored information that was damaging to the Clinton Administration. Ed Morrissey has the story at Captain's Quarters.

Another day, another story seems to be the containment strategy for the defunct and now discredited 9/11 Commission. The AP reports that the Commission's spokesperson, Al Felzenberg, now admits that the Commission knew full well that the secret Army program Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda operative along with three other men in Brooklyn, but left it out of their final report:

The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.

Al Felzenberg, who had been the commission's chief spokesman, said Tuesday the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence. ...

The arms race in Iraq

What is apparently happening is an arms race between the American armed forces and the Iraq insurgency. Wretchard, at Belmont Club, apparently believes that this is one race that the insurgents can't win.

By engaging America in a technological arms race of sorts they are playing to its strengths. The relative decline in IED effectivity suggests the enemy, while improving, has not kept up. The move to bigger bombs may temporarily restore his lost combat power, but the advent of new American countermeasures plus increasing pressure on the bombmakers, means he must improve yet again. It is far from clear whether the insurgents can stay in the battle for innovation indefinitely. The logic of asymmetric warfare suggests the enemy will at some point abandon the direct technological weapons race and find a new paradigm of attack entirely. That is essentially what they did when they abandoned the Republican Guard tank formation in favor of the roadside bomb in the first place.

Daniel Drezner has a piece about GM in China

Daniel Drezner has a piece that says more about GM's management, than the good things that had been done in China by a guy who is no longer with them. (I would have pasted some text here, but Firefox is busy doing smart copying, so it would first let me copy, and then not paste, and then would not let me copy). Now, when it finally behaved, I've gone with the last part, which was the point that was telling:

The depressing fact is that, naturally, GM is punishing the guy that came up with the process and product ideas behind the minivan in the first place:

Their development was led by an American, Philip F. Murtaugh, a native of Ohio and a maverick executive who was willing to zig while the rest of G.M. was zagging. Mr. Murtaugh was able to create in China the kind of innovative environment that G.M. has struggled for decades to achieve in its American operations. But whether G.M. can duplicate elsewhere its achievements in China or even keep its pace here is unclear.

In what may be a telling sign of the corporate culture at G.M., Mr. Murtaugh's success in China led not to promotion but to his departure from the company. G.M. declined to discuss personnel matters, but both it and Mr. Murtaugh said he resigned and was not dismissed.

A soft-spoken man in a company known for autocratic leaders, Mr. Murtaugh ran the China operations for more than nine years from his base in Shanghai, repeatedly making some of the best calls in the industry. Now he finds himself unemployed and living in a small community in rural Kentucky.

Marc Cooper on "Dissent and Demonization"

Marc Cooper writes about his friend, and the phenomenon of Hard-Left demonization of those who would otherwise be their allies, but who dissent from the party line.

Catching up on some of my reading I came across another good piece written last weekend by British journo Nick Cohen, a worthy exponent of the pro-war Left. Cohen can ably argue for himself so I am not going to recap the piece – you can read it through the above link.

One graf that jumped out at me was one in which Cohen refers to a verbal attack launched against him by his long time friend and former New Statesman editor, Peter Wilby. Wilby had berated Cohen for what he called a “rightwards lurch” i.e. Cohen’s decision to support the war in Iraq. Cohen expresses his dismay at how some on the Left simply refuse to accept a disagreement as a simple…uh…disagreement or a clash of principles.

Fortunately, there are progressive thinkers who can carry on a discussion without demonizing those who disagree:

More sophisticated minds, fortunately, can readily accept that some of their opponents can be quite principled; that they are neither nuts nor mercenaries nor turncoats. They are just other people acting on their own principles. Look at Michael Kazin’s review in Dissent magazine of Christopher Hitchens’ latest anthology to glimpse the way political debates should happen.

John Hinderaker writes about Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is on a continual crusade against the Bush Administration. John Hinderaker comments, at Powerline, about Krugman on the economy. Paul Krugman operates under a handicap, in that he doesn't know much about the US outside of his own area. John writes:

Well, if we believed anything Krugman writes, we'd be worried all the time. Or at least until we have a Democratic administration, when everything will be rosy again. Krugman's description of the housing bubble is amusing for what it reveals about how Krugman views the country:

When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns [Ed.: Huh? I don't think Krugman gets out here much.], just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.

I don't doubt that some people in places like San Francisco and San Diego have paid too much for their houses. But it isn't clear, and Krugman doesn't even try to explain, why that constitutes a bubble or why level or declining home prices in selected areas around the country will somehow imperil the economy. Here are Krugman's reasons for claiming that a housing bubble exists:

John concludes:

There are, of course, obvious differences between houses and stocks. Most people own only one house at a time, and transaction costs make it impractical to buy and sell houses the way you buy and sell stocks. Krugman thinks the fact that James Glassman doesn't buy the bubble theory is evidence in its favor, but if you read Glassman's article on the subject, you'll see that he actually makes some of the same points that Krugman does. But he argues, persuasively in my view, that there is little reason to fear a catastrophic collapse in home prices

The main point is that homes have an intrinsic value. Another factor, which is in accord with what Paul Krugman argues: in high density areas, there is a fixed amount of land, and no one will be manufacturing more. That, and restrictive zoning, such as in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and in their suburbs, building restrictions have caused the price of housing to soar.

Razib, at Gene Expression, has a long piece about the progress of mankind

Razib has written a long piece about progress, and how people looking back, would glamorize the past. One example would be the Greeks of 650 BC looking back at the previous age in the region, from which they had declined. The past became the "age of heroes". This is just a small part of what he writes (to see his notes, look at the "below the fold notes"):

Intellectual historians often sketch out a dichotomy between a "cyclical" conception of human history and a "linear" (usually progressive) one. The latter is typically classified as "modern," and is associated with the Abrahamic religions and science,¹ while the former is usually associated with Eastern cultures or "primordial" civilizations (like the Greeks). This dichotomy, like most, obscures more than it illuminates. Every schoolboy knows that the ancient Greeks conceived of the world as moving from a Golden Age down to their own Iron Age via the Silver and Bronze Ages. And yet if you examine the character of the Ages of Man² as exposited by Hesiod, those who have read Genesis, in the supposedly linear Judeo-Christian tradition, will note that there are similarities. I suspect that the idealization of the past is a bias of any society, just as old men and women often glamorize the time of their youth, so the scholars who interpret the history of their people tend to suffuse their works with the same glow about the days of yore. If, like the Greeks circia 650, you have a recent historical memory of a "Dark Age," all you need to do is keep on pushing back to remember a time when things weren't so bad, ergo, the "Age of Heroes," which seems cognate with the period of massive Bronze Age citadels ~1200. Nevermind that these citadel cultures were characterized by a functionally illiterate society (linear B script was the preserve of the scribal class) which seems to have practiced human sacrifice (see the Pylos tablets), and was arguably artistically impoverished in comparison to the Classical Greeks and their Minoan predecessors. One can see the same mindset manifest during the Renaissance, which dismisses the "Medieval" period and looks to the era of Classical Civilizations as the exemplars of learning and knowledge. Nevermind that for science to progress one had to dismiss and move beyond Galen or Ptolemy.³

If this is real, and it seems to be, it is really good

Because I got to this from Jack Kelly (Irish Pennants), it has more credibility. It claims to be a trip report of Barry McCaffrey, now an adjunct professor at West Point. He visited Iraq and then filed the trip report. He gives a glowing appraisal of our military leadership in Iraq. He is no friend of the Bush administration, so it gives this added credibility.

Eric S. Raymond, on "Bush Lied, People Died"

Glenn Reynolds pointed out that Eric S. Raymond has returned to blogging. Eric is a software guy who is a libertarian. He has a piece about the "Bush Lied, People Died" bit.

Today’s entry in the Belgravia Dispatch does an excellent job of demolishing the “Bush lied, people died!” canard so popular among the anti-war left — Greg Djerejian echoes my own conclusions when he writes: “But if you dig into the weeds of the investigations that have taken place – one must judiciously conclude that he didn’t.”

But let’s suppose that George W. Bush had in fact lied about Iraqi WMD during that State of the Union address. I long ago concluded that I would not care if he had lied. To see why, let’s try looking at this from George Bush’s (simulated) point of view…

I really would like to include all he wrote, as it is good, but it is too long for that. Just go and read the whole thing. Eric is worth bookmarking for future reference.

The Friday Night "Fresh Air"

On Friday night, Fresh Air, on NPR, usually replays a Terry Gross interview. Tonight, it was with Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland. Brian Holland wrote lyrics, while his brother Eddie wrote music. Apparently, Lamont did both, although Brian talked about him as one of the two songwriters for whom he wrote lyrics. It was a nice change from leftist politics. These guys wrote the songs that a generation of young, white kids from Michigan listened to on the AM radio (and at sock hops), in the 1960's and early 1970's. The roots might have been in gospel, but we did not know that at the time. I never knew what happened in black churches until the late 1990's. It is a great religious and musical heritage.

Ace calls George Galloway a traitor, and that seems about right

Ace, at Ace of Spades HQ, calls George Galloway a traitor for his incitement against the West. Ace writes:

No kidding, this is must-watch. I am absolutely dumbfounded. He is actually inciting warfare against his own country. And ours, of course.

Key quotes:

"Two of your daughters are being held prisoner by the West. Two of your beautiful daughters are crying, and no one will do anything about it. Jersusalem and Baghdad -- the foreign invaders have captured your daughters, and they're having their way with them."

"America set out to terrorize the world with its military power... but its power cannot go any further than the range an RPG."

By this he means (smiling) that the brave resistance can always shoot down our helicopters with RPG's.

He praises Muslims entering Iraq to fight America and Britain. And he also claims that most children killed and most buses and schools bombed were killed or bombed by Bush, not Zarqawi.

Must watch. The "treason" word is tossed out lightly at times, but I can't imagine that this would not have been considered outright sedition in any age except the current politically-correct one.

Thanks to Compos.

This looks really promising...

Wretchard, at the Belmont Club, writes about what appears to be an American success in Iraq, along the Euphrates river.

Commenter CJR draws our attention to the following New York Times report as a collateral indication that a major operation against insurgents along the Euphrates line is in progress.

Most of those fighters are believed to enter the country north of the where the Euphrates river crosses into Iraq. Because the American military presence has until recently been on the south side of the river, the north side has become something of a sanctuary for insurgents moving foreign fighters south along the river to Baghdad and north across desert tracks to Mosul. There are only a few bridges across the Euphrates between the Syrian border and Haditha ... even fewer of the bridges are substantial enough to allow coalition forces to safely move armored vehicles from one side of the Euphrates to the other.

I don't usually like to post long quotes, but this one seems worth having:

Making it harder for the enemy to move around while making it easier for US units has the effect of lowering apparent enemy numbers while correspondingly increasing apparent American troop strength; but this is only a means to an end. Another LA Times report on the Rawah operation, Rebels on the Run, Locals Too describes some of its effects as observed by the correspondent.

Since arriving in mid-July, the 2nd Infantry Division's 2nd Squadron of the 14th Cavalry Regiment has defeated the fighters here and will now spread out to seal the border with Syria, said Lt. Col. Mark Davis, the unit's commander. ... Having wrested control of Rawah, the division's Stryker Brigade Combat Team now hopes to press westward toward the border and, for the first time, gain control of a broad swath of the land north of the Euphrates that has eluded the U.S.-led coalition for more than two years. On Thursday and Friday, soldiers searched every one of the town's estimated 3,000 to 5,000 homes, capturing some suspected insurgents and a bounty of weapons, including mines, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, bomb-making equipment, sniper rifles and rockets.

"Since then, there has been no enemy attack, no explosions, nobody shooting at us in Rawah," Davis said. The town might be quiet now, but it's not necessarily friendly. On an outer school wall, spray painted in Arabic, is a note of defiance: "Praise the people of Fallouja" — a former insurgent stronghold where U.S. and Iraqi forces prevailed in November. Davis acknowledged that most Iraqis had left town but said they didn't leave under instructions from U.S. troops. The insurgents apparently had held the town hostage, American officials said. There were no police, a dormant city council, a compound of schools with no children and no teachers inside.

(Speculation alert) There are probably many similar operations that are taking place along the river and to its north, as per the Di Rita briefing. One of them may have been undertaken by the US Marines at Haditha, during which 21 Marines were killed. One possible reason why this operation has been kept low key, despite its size, is that it may be literally ripping up the insurgent base of support along the upper Euphrates. If the LA Times article is accurate, the insurgents essentially took the whole population of Rawah with them; if the phenomenon is being repeated elsewhere, the displacement of the Sunni population must be huge. To the north there is the unsustaining desert; to the south across the river there is the sweep of the Marines; for the insurgents to leave the population in place would risk leaving intelligence in the hands of the Americans. This has got to hurt and it is only the beginning. The LA Times notes the abandonment of RPGs, sniper rifles, mortars -- stuff you wouldn't leave behind -- not willingly. The whole point of strangling the enemy lines of communication while building support bases is to set up the stage for pursuit. And they will be pursued. The focus of newspaper coverage in the coming days may abruptly shift from 'poor helpless Marines from Ohio' to 'we're slaughtering them! We're killers!' These are the hard choices of war, and as Hemingway once wrote "all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

Pajamas Media

I have been sorry to see the big bloggers hammer Pajamas Media, but I can understand that they are happy with their present advertising arrangement. Everyone wants to advertise on the high-volume blogs, and I can understand that Pajamas Media would want to be prominently placed. Ann Althouse has a long post on the subject, in her continuing series. Ann has noticed a phenomenon, however:

It's quite striking that so many people keep telling me to decide on my own whether to take it or leave it and not blog about it. People keep saying they don't understand why I'm blogging about it. Here's one of my (many) responses to this doggedly repeated point ("It's not like PM is with a gun to a blogger's head saying join with us or else. Isn't that what a free market is all about?") Ann, as well as other prominent bloggers seem to want to trash Pajamas Media, and do it where everyone can see. She had an answer to those of us who would prefer not to witness the trashing, but I don't buy it. Those of us who are under the 1,000 Sitemeter visits a day are not having our doors beaten down by BlogAds or Pajamas Media. We are left to deal with Google Adsense or lesser competitors.

Michael Heraghty talks about Internet trends

Michael Heraghty has not been posting very often this year. His expertise includes things like search engine optimization (for your website). He has a new post about trends on the internet. He is based in Ireland. These are some of his trends that interested me:

1. More and more sites are moving to a “third generation” design — that is, designing around CSS rather than tables; designing with user behaviour in mind, rather than simply imitating print marketing materials.

2. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are less likely to contain “spam” results than this time last year (even though there’s probably a lot more SE Spam on the web than there used to be).

3. Most big sites seem to use a Content Management System (CMS)

4. Many more people are paying for Google Adwords (and the cost of Adwords is going up accordingly).

6. In general, sites are becoming more usable.

9. More and more of the sites that are showing up highly in organic search results have clearly been optimised (i.e. they are there by design, not luck).

Daniel Drezner seems to be OK with John Bolton

Daniel Drezner, not a right-wing idealogue, has some good comments about John Bolton's recess appointment as UN ambassador. The UN has finally shown that it is a morally bankrupt organization, so someone as hard-nosed and anti-UN as John Bolton works pretty well as ambassador:

President Bush made the first-ever recess appointment of a UN Ambassador and named John Bolton today. Essentially, this means that Bolton will serve until January 2007.

The myriad political responses to the decision include a lot of apoplexy from Democrats. Ted Kennedy said:

The abuse of power and the cloak of secrecy from the White House continues. ... It's a devious maneuver that evades the constitutional requirement of Senate consent and only further darkens the cloud over Mr. Bolton's credibility at the U.N.

I am shocked to report that Lincoln Chafee -- never thought of as the sharpest tool in the shed -- had the most sagacious comment: "We filibustered the nomineee. We exercised our perogative under the law. He [Bush] exercised his perogative under the law."

Ed Morrissey writes about the NYT revelations about Robert Novak

Ed Morrissey writes about the revelations in the New York Times that explain how Robert Novak found out about Valerie Wilson (Plame) from Who's Who in America. This just caps a silly month of ranting by our leftist and democrat buddies:

The New York Times finally noticed in its wall-to-wall coverage of the Valerie Plame leak case that Plame hardly equated to the deep-cover agent her husband, Joseph Wilson, claimed her to be. Far from learning the name and occupation of Wilson's wife from a Deep Throat inside source at the White House, it turns out that all Robert Novak had to do was read a book:

One of the most puzzling aspects of the C.I.A. leak case has had to do with the name of the exposed officer. Why did the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak identify her as Valerie Plame in exposing her link to the C.I.A. in July 2003 when she had been known for years both at the agency and in her personal life by her married name, Valerie Wilson?

Mr. Novak offered a possible explanation for the disconnect on Monday, suggesting in his column that he could have obtained Ms. Wilson's maiden name from the directory Who's Who in America, which used that name in identifying her as the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador.

Ed concludes:

This just caps an already-ridiculous meme, one started by the media and one which indicts no one but themselves. The media demanded to know who leaked Plame's name to Novak, but none of them wanted to reveal their inside sources to resolve the mystery. Now we know why. None of them can read a book or do their own research, except for Robert Novak -- which explains why Patrick Fitzgerald seems to have lost interest in him.

Ann Althouse is against electing Supreme Court justices

I agree with Ann Althouse that electing Supreme Court justices is a mistake. She writes:

I was much more negative toward Davis's proposal in my NYT review of the same book: Where would the candidates come from? Davis suggests the president could nominate a slate of candidates, and he imagines the Senate holding hearings and issuing reports. But what would the campaigns look like? And what would stop these elections from degenerating into referendums on, say, abortion?One searches vainly in the pages of this book for any discussion of the changes elections might work on the Court's own conception of its role. It is already accused of being too political. Currently, at least there is an effort to appoint highly qualified jurists who will uphold the rule of law. Even if political ideology underlies the process, the nominee is still generally someone steeped in the legal culture who is going to profess faith in legal principles. Electing justices would not just change the selection phase, it would reshape how justices thought about their role. What would happen to the culture of law once the justices had their own constituents?

She was commenting on a post by Glenn Reynolds about the book Electing Justice.