perfidy

Because paying off the sheriff to keep your dive open is exactly like driving a truck bomb down the Vegas Strip. Or at least's that's the lesson I glean from this story of the PATRIOT Act being used against a strip-club owner in Vegas who got caught bribing politicians.

Because making porn is almost as good as printing your own money.

Fox news is reporting a new reality series based around finding new porn talent:

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,102247,00.html

Profits from this show will be massive, especially once the DVD is for sale. The $100k prize for the winner would be chump change by comparison.

There's a reason why companies like Vivid Entertainment Group are $150 million+ entities.

This story from the UK is interesting - some physicists from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth have figured out how much damage Guy Fawkes' barrels of gunpowder would have caused had his dastardly plot not been foiled. Apparently, he would have "devastated much of London as well as blowing the palace of Westminster sky-high."

"Using explosion physics the team deduced that streets up to one-third of a mile from the centre of the palace of Westminster would have suffered severe structural damage and windows would have shattered within a radius of two-thirds of a mile from the centre of the blast."

Dr Geraint Thomas, head of the Centre for Explosion Studies, (now there's a cool job title) said that the 2,500kg of gunpowder Guy Fawkes was found with, would be equivalent to the same amount of TNT due to the fact that explosives expert Fawkes had carefully packed the gunpowder tightly in barrels.

Here's a summary of the plot for those in need of one.

On the group-blog Crescat Sententia, Amy Lamboley describes the blog-world as "a clubhouse for rightwing nuts." Okay, context is everything, so that's not what she said, exactly.

Which is good, because it could never be true, could it?

[wik] According to Kim DuToit (link above, on the word "could"), American men have become "a nation of women." "Ooh, In my day, men were men! We drank whiskey! Women didn't vote! And we cut our firewood by hand! And we liked it!" Yes, and today I'm a man who knows that some whiskey goes better with a touch of soda, is very happy that women vote (even if they push the country to the left (please!)), and is smart enough to heat my home with gas so I don't have to moisturize my hands and face every ten minutes in the dry heat of a wood fire.

My message to Mr. duToit: Get a life, queen bee. It's my world, you just live in it.

[alsø wik] The highlight of Mr. duToit's self-parodying rant is this gem about Queer Eye For The Straight Guy (which according to him airs on the Homo Network): "what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?"

Very clever, Kim. But I ask you, [by your own lights,] what kind of girly-man [would I be to] allow [my] masculinity to be called into question by a Canadian gun nut with a woman's name?

Nothing can stop it! No force can turn it aside! No elixir can save you! No bromo can cure you! Their awesome force shall not be denied!

Unless it's by a cabal of whiny pissant conservatives who claim to be marginalized and use their ostensibly nonexistent soapbox to scream "the Gipper wuz libeled!" over an effing television show thereby causing a national network, the very bastion of the Pablum-Puking Liberal Media Juggernaut, to hastily pull said show off the air and apologize abjectly like puppies who just fouled the rug.

Liberal effing media, my ass. That insurgent-conservative schtick don't play no more if you can call the shots. Go cram it, with walnuts.

/*shuffles sullenly leftward, hands in pockets.

[wik] My message to the chattering conservative set: Seriously, folks, a hatchet job on the Gip isn't the end of the universe. You already got the guy a freaking airport, f'r crying out loud, and he's not dead yet! (he's not?(no!)) If you're so exercised about it, go make one of your own and show it on Fox. I'm sure there's no shortage of hagiographers you can find to write the script, and I would welcome an effort that avoided Streisand connections.

A little while back I mentioned a story about Fox News suing the Simpsons.

Despite that it sounded like just the kind of thing that might actually happen, Matt Groening says that he was kidding about that.

Dammit! I was punk'd!

An early contender for the November 2003 Perfidy Prize for Inadvertant or Vertant Asshattery is our own President's staff. From Calpundit:

THE MEMORY HOLE RE-REVISITED....First we had the White House scouring their website for headlines that said "combat operations" in Iraq were over and changing them to say "major combat operations" were over. You know, because the original got kind of embarrassing when American soldiers kept dying.

Then the White House webmasters blocked Google from caching all Iraq-related documents, but they seemed to have a good explanation for that so I let it slide.

But yesterday there was more historical revision: an interview in which an administration official said reconstruction would cost no more than $1.7 billion was mysteriously deleted from the USAID website.

Now, today, Josh Marshall reports that the White House altered the transcript of a presidential speech in a way that completely changes the meaning of what he said. Just one teensy little letter, though!

Is there an innocent explanation? Sure, maybe. But considering the track record here, I'm sure as hell not giving these guys the benefit of the doubt on it anymore.

Me either. My favorite thing this weekend was watching Rumsfeld on the news shows. I have never seen a man so adept at making me feel so stupid, so stupid! for remembering things differently than him, with his strained grin hinting at barely restrained contempt sitting there trying to work a Jedi Mind Trick on the whole nation. Breathtaking!

[wik] Mark A. R. Kleiman writes more about this. He notes that the change-- which made "We see a China that is stable and prosperous" into "We seeK"-- merely follows a similar formulation elsewhere in the article. But this is a public document, and my sense is that Bush's people tend to treat the historical record like a poorly-run weblog, editing text and changing arguments where convenient without a thought of flagging that the update was made. Not a hanging offense, but not something I want in a President either.

In a belated ceremony, the October 2003 Perfidy Prize in Inadvertant or Vertant Asshattery goes to the clearly deserving Food and Drug Administration for this genius move:

FDA considers forcing restaurants to provide nutrition information.

The state's job is not to save people from themselves. And yet here we are discussing seriously whether every diner, sandwich cart, and restaurant in the country should tot up fat, calories, and vitamin content for their offerings. And how, exactly, will this work for places who change the menu every day? And what if a restaurant runs out of the salmon special mid-shift and has to toss together a substitute? Will they be fined for serving Undocumented Food?

How long until no small business can survive under the weight of the American Nanny-Regulatory State? "Welcome to America. Here's your helmet and leash. Would you like your nose wiped?"

Jesus Horatio Christ. I need a cookie.

The Economist has an article (graciously reprinted online) on the reconstruction of Iraq.

They see the glass as half full-- many utilities have been restored to prewar levels, oil is flowing-- which is valid. But I don't think that's too great. While I get that it will take time, "prewar levels" just aren't that great a benchmark. We can be doing better.

The entire article is worth a read, and the most interesting bit is at the end. It suggests that big oil companies aren't biting at Iraqi oil contracts, because such interests "tend nowadays to look at the lifetime capacity of a field, not at the chance of a quick profit. 'You're talking about a horizon of 10-12 years, minimum,' says a European businessman searching for deals. Despite the high technical calibre of Iraq's oil ministry, outsiders are not yet confident that long-term contracts will be watertight."

So, even if it was all about the oil (and yes, let's not kid ourselves that the economics of oil aren't a big piece of the Whole General Sort Of Mish-Mash), it's not really about the oil now, for better or worse. Ironic.

Of course, until sabotage is minimized, infrastructure upgraded, pipelines re-established, and stable operations established, investing in Iraqi oil is a fool's game suitable only for sinking giant sums of US government money. That's ironic too, and unfortunate.

In this issue:
The CPI Follows the Money Trail To Nowhere
Stone Cold Thuggin'
Afghanistan's Steps Toward Constitution
Happy Kitten Sunshine Story Time

Read on, below the fold!
The Money Trail To Nowhere

The Center for Public Integrity has released "Windfalls of War," their report on the correlation between cronyism and contracts in Iraq. You know, the Halliburton thing. Daniel Drezner riddles the report with too many holes to fly. Drezner's central rebuttal is that by asserting a statistical correlation between campaign contributions and size of Iraqi reconstruction contracts, the CPI put themselves in the position of arguing from no evidence.

Drezner's argument is pretty persuasive, though some commenters disagree. What is not said, though, is that the CPI chose a piss-poor way of measuring cronyism. All the CPI report's research shows is that campaign contributions played little role in determining who won contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.

Drezner himself makes the salient point in a footnote: " the primary thrust of Windfalls of War is that the process is riddled with malfeasance rather than disorganization. The notion that there was a conscious effort to reward Bush cronies with lucrative government contracts would require a lot more centralized coordination than the CPI report uncovers."

As Godwin's law runs, "never chalk up to malice what may be attributed to stupidity." The more likely scenario as regards reconstruction contracts is this: there are maybe ten construction companies in the US large enough to undertake the rebuilding of Iraq, and fewer than that of companies who specialize in oil infrastructure (Halliburton among them). In the evident administrative chaos that surrounded the Administration's run-up to the aftermath, Occam's Razor suggests that Cheney, Condi, etc. said "Hey, I know a guy...." and the calls went out.

If they're serious, the CPI needs to do a much more detailed investigation into whether cronyism played a role here, because by using the numbers they did, they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of the beast.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that cronyism played no role in getting Halliburton, Bechtel, etc their phat contracts, but CPI sure haven't found any smoking gun yet.

Stone Cold Thuggin'

David Brooks has an op-ed piece in the New York Times today which argues that the "opposition" we're fighting in the Sunni Triangle are the remnants of Saddam Hussein's thug brigades for which the delicious money/power teat has dried up. He doesn't actually use the phrase, "delicious money/power teat"-- that's my innovation-- but that's the gist of it. He argues that making progress in the next few months is crucial, so that by the time Iraqi police, mayors, and so on are ready to take over they just have to mop up instead of fight a well organized crime syndicate.

It would indeed be grand if the Iraqis would hunt the killers. They know the territory. They can get the intelligence sources.

But the administration would be making a mistake if it sent the signal to the American people that the hard work from here on out would be done by the Iraqis themselves. After all, is it realistic to think barely trained policemen can, over the next six months, deliver blows against bands of experienced mass murderers? Is it realistic to think that a local Iraqi mayor will take on the terrorists and so risk his own death, when the most powerful army in the history of the earth is camped just nearby?

Cori Dauber, guest-posting at the Volokh Conspiracy, links to Brooks' piece commenting

It is also important to keep reminding ourselves that for many Iraqis the pain of the old regime is still front and center, which puts comparisons between the situation before and after the war in a slightly different light. How is the situation in Iraq today? Too often when that question is asked we forget to begin the answer with, "well, the torture chambers are closed and there are no new mass graves."

Damn right. And that's the legacy that our agents in Iraq need to be very, very careful not to resemble in any way even by accident. This is part of that "hearts and minds" campaign that we have been posting about in this very venue, and I say again I think it's the most important fight of all in the greater war.

Afghanistan's Steps Toward Constitution

The Afghani draft Constitution was unveiled this week. It features a unitary government led by a President, makes no mention of the Shari'a laws, codifies Islam as the religion of Afghanistan, and makes provisions for the speedy replacement of a deceased President in order to prevent coups.

This is great news. While it's true that you rarely get more than one shot at a Constitution, what I've seen seems encouraging.

That being said, the problems that plague Afghanistan are deep and cultural. Violence is a way of life there. The Atlantic Monthly carried a story last year that underscored how deeply the language, ways, and ethos of violent reprisal suffuse the entire culture, affecting even aimable relations against neighbors. Paraphrasing a bit from the article, I remember one woman in the mountains who told the writer that she was in the market for a rocket launcher because her neighbor up the mountain-- with whom she had no particular quarrel-- had one too.

In a country that has never really known stability in the sense we understand it, fostering goodwill and cooperation for a new Constitutional government will be a huge challenge, especially with the Taliban still mounting attacks.

Happy Kitten Sunshine Story Time

Look at the kitties! Look at them!

And that's it for today. Have a cromulent day.