perfidy

For the technology minded...a few weeks ago I had a hi-def satellite system installed at my house (Voom). A few days ago Voom's satellite was sold to EchoStar and the entire service is in a state of flux. It is possible that they will stop transmitting. Good thing I didn't pay for the equipment! In any case, here are a few thoughts...getting HD TV these days is a total pain in the ass, and Voom is the best thing out there at the moment. I hope the service survives in one form or another.
EchoStar knows the limitations of their current sat with respect to HD...they want to achieve rapid leadership in HD, ahead of DirecTV.

By buying the Voom satellite and uplink center, they have a turnkey HD broadcast system, with just about all of the kinks worked out, good and cheap STBs from a well-known provider, a DVR around the corner, and a starting subscriber base of 26,000.

Marketing goes to work selling an all-new EchoStar HD+ service. Yes, if you're an existing EchoStar customer you'll need a new dish, but EchoStar is locking in that customer at higher rates (presumably) over a long term. For existing EchoStar HD customers, bite the bullet and pay for the new install, for them. They'll be eternally grateful. Give them free upgraded HD programming for 3 months, then back to their original subscription. They'll call and buy the upgraded package, and it's one year to payback on the free install.

An upgrading current EchoStar customer keeps everything they have now in terms of channel but now is receiving unbeatable HD capability. EchoStar trashes the Voom originals and condenses the content down to five or six really good HD channels (Rave, Rush, Equator), once again to provide advantage of DirecTV. They can possibly use the spot transmission support to do locals in key markets, and rely on the STB's OTA tuner everywhere else. Remove the SD/HD doubling that Voom inexplicably does and make use of the bandwidth for key locals.

What's not to like about this plan? Ink an agreement with Motorola to ramp up STB (set top box) production, advertise like crazy (starting in a few months) to your own subscriber base, upselling to the new service.

Your turnkey HD operation can include significant parts of the current Voom technical staff for even faster startup time. Get the HD DVR support off and running, fast, and find a way to make it cost half of what D*'s does...then watch the new subscriptions roll in...

Where's the flaw?

EchoStar didn't buy Voom's programming, but Voom's own programming is fairly poor, with a couple of notable exceptions. EchoStar already has contracts with many of the pay channels that it could extend to get their HD versions (it's just more money for HBO, etc). It already has contracts with all the SD channels. With the MPEG-4 compression upgrade in place they could do spot beams to a number of the larger markets with full HD locals (MPEG-4 doubles bandwidth with same PQ, so there are 80 HD channels. That's 40 new ones, plus you can recover 12-14 more by dumping a good slice of Voom content (assuming EchoStar would want to find "showcase" HD programming to put on the remaining Voom channels. That gives you 50-60 HD local channels you can broadcast...Also, I don't know if the bandwidth is limited on the way up, or on the way down...if spot beams are used more channels might be possible.

The Voom technology really does have the possibility of "doing it all" in a very short time frame, if the right deals are cut and the decisions are made...

Slacktivist looks at the social security trust fund one way. I look at it another.

Contributed to a trust fund? Did you really? Hmm. I guess you can look at it that way, and you can also look at it this way:

You're Abe, and you have a son, Ben. You set up two accounts, one for "regular stuff", and one for "retirement". You're worried about the retirement account, so you put extra money in it. But your regular bills are pretty high, so you "loan" the extra cash from the retirement fund to the regular fund, and then you go ahead and spend it anyway. Then you go back to Ben and let him know that he "owes you" the extra cash you put in the retirement fund.

So how much did you really save with that little sleight of hand?

As a not-quite-young-anymore person, I've been in the workforce 20 years, and I've paid plenty of taxes, both regular and social security.

This generation of workers (along with the previous) have _voted_ themselves benefits far in excess of what they've produced. I agree on the nature of the paper -- the government better damn well pay it back, or financial systems all over the world are going to feel the shockwave.

But don't paper it over with an "I paid into this" attitude. You didn't. You didn't pay for the government you got over the last 20 years, you won't pay for what you're getting over the next 10, and as a whole, the citizens of this country have simply decided that screwing over the next generation is the very most important thing to them.

So what to do? Wage-indexed benefits have got to go. You can't attempt to sustain a "20% of average wage" standard for benefits in the face of a 3-to-1 worker-retiree ratio. Convert social security into a truly pay-as-you-go system, on a year-by-year basis. Stop the theft of the surplus by the general fund. Means-test benefits; it's social security _insurance_, not "my check is in the mail". Begin computation of cost-benefit ratios for drugs and employ a harsh test -- the drug is not on an "approved list" unless spending those same drug dollars on less high-tech medicine can't save more lives. Weight these tests towards children and the young. They're paying the bills.

The greatest generation was followed by the greediest generation whose myopic gaze falls upon the desert of its works -- castles made of sand, a loving gift to their progeny...

From the what-the-hell-were-they-thinking department: Two committee members just got the unlimited ability to look at anyone's tax return, through what GOP leaders are (probably truthfully) calling a screw-up.

Makes you wonder about the legislative process in general. What other little time bombs are waiting in these huge bills?

From the best-bands-ever department, the UK's Feeder is sort of becoming my favorite brit-guitar rock band. Like maybe ever? Yeah, ever. Until something better comes along. Grant Nicholas first caught my attention on Junkie XL's latest, on a track called "Broken". Great stuff, so I checked out where he came from and bought Comfort in Sound, Feeder's latest. What shines through every Feeder song are beautiful melodies, against a pretty hard (and perfectly sparse) background.

Moving backwards in time, I picked up Polythene, Feeder's brilliant 1997 debut. Why have I not heard of this band? Every track on Polythene works perfectly. Favorites include "Crash" and "Radiation".

Guess I'm stuck in a dream
Surrounded by coloured leaves on the ground,
As I stare at the trees,
I see one fall down on my hand.
As i start to explore,
I can't ignore a man,
He turn his head around,
His face was all worn by the sun.

I'm going out for a while,
So i can get high with my friends,
I will,
I'm going out for a while,
Don't wait up cause i won't be home,
Today.

Drifting down the road,
Losing myself in a dream,
Feel my hands getting cold,
Sat in a boat on a lake...

You know, now that I read them, the lyrics are pretty damn depressing a lot of the time. Trust me on this: You'll never notice while you're listening, 'cause you'll be too busy singing along in the car, like an idiot. Yeah, you.

Feeder's middle two CDs were never released in America, so I hit Amazon to get'em, and got'em for $15 each from prompt, item-as-described auction zealots. Echo Park is the one I'm not quite into yet, but the fans out there assure me I will be, by the reviews. Yesterday came too soon has the same brilliance as Polythene and Comfort...

Crossing bridges over water
A new reflection creeping in
Got your head so full of traffic
The love pollution's setting in

Let the healing commence.

Slate's got a little guide and questionnaire regarding potential Canadian residents. See how you fit in!

Remember, pot's legal! ;)

It's a few days after the election, and I've had time to calm down. I'm sorry Buckethead's offended by what I wrote. I regret the tone of the piece, but it accurately reflects what I was feeling at the time. I am bitterly disappointed. I'll try to be as clear as possible as to why.

Based on my examination of the issues in this campaign and the track records of the candidates, I felt that Kerry represented the best choice. The policy documents on his web site contained solid ideas to address a number of problems in the country, and were for the most part in line with my own ideas to repair the situation.

Fundamentally, you can vote your heart, or you can vote your head. Sometimes, when you're lucky, you get to vote both.

I am essentially a two-issue person: I am concerned with the financial structure and mechanisms of the federal government, and with war. As readers here know, I know a reasonable amount about the first, and little about the second.
No credible support of Bush's first term financial policy exists. A good number of the expert, fiscally conservative Republicans publicly departed the party over this issue. The only economists left on the supply-side bandwagon are spending what remains of their credibility at a tremendous rate. I have pleaded, time and again, for any substantive discourse on this topic. What I unfailingly receive are declarations that "taxes are lower", or some such. On who? By how much? And at what cost? A one-dimensional analysis of Bush's two tax cuts yields the not-quite-astonishing fact that a lot of people paid slightly less in tax, and a very few people paid a lot less in tax.

If I offered to pay you $300 now on the condition that I also get to put $2000 on your credit card balance (and I get the cash), would you take the deal? No rational person would.

This administration (and rose-glassed Republicans) have argued that "deficits don't matter". Deficits do matter, when the difference between deficit growth and economic growth becomes too great. There are numerous examples throughout the world (and in American history) of what happens when governments go bankrupt.

This administration has the worst record on spending in modern times. They increased discretionary spending at a record 7% per year, and that does not include huge expenditures on the military, primarily due to Iraq, which will inflate the true deficit by hundreds of billions more.

Republicans defend Bush's policies with two arguments: First, tax cuts for the wealthy will lead to economic growth, which will make up for the spending. The second is "numbers don't matter".

I have repeatedly addressed the first, here on Perfidy. I have done so with facts, and with numbers, and with references. In return I have seen nothing other than a repetition of supply-side mantras, usually prefixed by "everybody knows that...". Well, it just ain't so. Supply-side economists are the laughingstock of the profession for a very simple reason: The predictive quality of their models hovers around zero. When you put forward a theory that theory will make predictions, based on observations and actions, of outcomes. The relatively tame predictions of the supply-side economists have suffered greatly at the hands of reality. The outlandish claims and predictions of the political class with respect to the same ideas have no identifiable relationship to reality.

The "numbers don't matter" argument is unnerving, to say the least. If numbers don't matter, why bother altering the taxes at all? Hell, why bother paying taxes at all? Why don't we just drive the deficit up into the stratosphere? Economic growth will take of it, right?

It is very rare to encounter someone of either party that believes that we can run a federal government without any taxation at all, if the government is to continue performing its current set of functions. So the numbers do matter after all, and we are in agreement. What we're really arguing are where the lines are. What constitutes acceptable taxation, spending, and deficit? The deficit-as-percentage-of-GDP argument simply does not hold; by that measure we are a year or two away from record debt. A continuation of Bush's massive spending increases guarantees that it will occur. Further tax cuts will exacerbate the problem.

But this isn't really a place where I'm going to argue the numbers because I've done it before. And from what I can see, speaking to my Republican friends, you're not interested. I am perplexed as to the source of your continued support for supply-side fiscal policy, tilted towards the very wealthy. I wish it were otherwise.

The war in Iraq is an extraordinarily complex creature. Let me simplify to this: Polls have found that 75% of registered Republicans believed, in the runup to the election, that Saddam Hussein was responsible at least in part, for 9/11. It follows that if you believe that, a war in Iraq makes sense. Amongst the other 25%, the prevailing attitude seems to be that although the public reasoning given for the war was proven wrong, there were other perfectly good reasons for the war. I place value on the public statements of a politician, in the political process; I hold them to those statements. If we do not, where is the incentive to govern in the light?

The best available information on the Iraq-9/11 link at this time was and is the report of the 9/11 commission, which dimissed the possibility. The Bush Administration did not take the country to war directly on the issue of Saddam's role in 9/11. That role was continuously intimated, though -- and a trusting GOP party base took their leader's subtext at face value. The claimed direct support for the war was weapons of mass destruction.

I was a fence-sitter on the decision to go to war. The public evidence simply did not support war on the WMD issue. But...there was the President and his top advisors on television, advocating forcefully for war, and using phrases like "we know he has them". In a democracy you need to put some trust in elected leaders, and that led me to assume that Bush must have been in possession of evidence that had to stay secret. It was the only thing that made sense at the time -- intelligence must have shown proof positive that there some incredibly bad things going on there, and it was time to go in.

What we know now is that no such hard evidence ever existed, or was ever presented to the President. What weak evidence remained has since been demolished by internal collapse, or by the reality of what we have found in the country, now that we "own" it.

The President gambled that he would find WMD in Iraq. If we assume that he placed faith in his top advisors and only they were in possession of the details that would have led to a different decision, we must conclude that the President has a poor ability to pick solid people for his team. A lot of liberals (come on, let's admit it) have accused the President of being a liar. I do not. I feel utterly comfortable with calling him a gambler, though.

On the financial issue, the President engaged a tax cut policy with no likely positive outcome for anyone other than the wealthiest citizens in the country. The tax cut did come with serious, destructive side effects; these risks were well-known, in advance.

So on the two issues that matter the most to me, this President engaged policy that came with massive, dangerous, and well-known risks. He did so to achieve a very limited up-side outcome; to achieve even that limited outcome required dozens of known problems to break in the President's favor. They did not.

We can argue all day long about Iraq and whether long-term success is possible there. What we should not be arguing about is this: The outcome in Iraq is not what the President and his core team expected. As combat opened in Iraq, the working plan, authorized by the President, was to have force levels drawn down to below 60,000 troops within 90 days.

I will not make the argument that the outcome on tax cuts was not what the President expected, because I do not believe the President expected anything remotely resembling the outlandish claims of various GOP politicians to come true.

Let me return to the disappointment of democrats, and to the disappointment of this liberal. Bush's victory has been a bitter pill. Why? Based on my view of policies and supporting evidence, it reveals a fundamental flaw in this democracy's ability to make rational decisions. On the two issues I have highlighted here, I simply cannot find any rational, factual support for his decisions, now or at the time he made them. And that, friends, is disappointing as hell.

Most liberals looked at this election with hope and faith. They were not looking at their party, and they were not looking at their candidate when they felt these things. They were looking at their entire system of government. Surely now, in the face of such poor decision-making, such obvious division, such disparity between predicated and actual outcomes, the rationality of democracy would exert itself. We were confident that enough Republican moderates (and I consider Mr. and Mrs. Buckethead to be two of them) would look at the same facts, the same speeches, and come to something close to the same conclusions. All across the country, the serious, moderate Republican columnists (who also appeal to moderate Democrats) made substantial criticisms of the Bush administration, and many of them publicy declared their intention to vote for Kerry, based on Bush's performance.

We were waiting, held breath, for the relief that would come as the elections would yield a basic assurance that most of us saw the same facts and reasoned the same way.

It has been devastating to watch "liberal" goals be discarded, one after the other, by this Administration. I refuse to call them conservative, because they are not. At least, they are not conservative in any positive sense I care to associate with the word.

We really care about the environment; Bush threw Kyoto and the EPA in the trash and never came up with an alternative. We care about equality; Bush voters believe that racial equality and the equality of homosexuals are disjoint issues. We believe that the best foreign policy and outcome comes from cooperation and trust; Bush has alienated virtually the entire world with a bullying attitude, squandered lives and vast resources on a pointless exercise of cultural engineering. We care deeply about freedom; Bush's embrace of religion and his integration of it into the secular decision making process and apparatus scares us, because the past and the present show us where highly public religion leads. We care about the fiscal stability of our government; Bush has recklessly gone where no budget has gone before, while inexplicably proclaiming that he has done the opposite. We think that the future our children will inherit will involve the environment, religion, equality, globalization and fiscal stability; Bush has jeopardized virtually all of it, for no discernible reason.

Nowhere in Buckethead's missive has he put forward reasons for a Bush vote. In the absence of such I can only speculate, and my honest speculation goes something like this:

1. Terrorism is the greatest problem facing the country. Bush is "better on terror", because he will take the fight to the enemy and prevent future disasters; Kerry would focus more at home, and with him as President there will be a higher probability of a terrorist attack.

2. Fighting Arabs/Iraqis in Baghdad is better than fighting them here.

2. "Activist" judges are destroying the American Way of Life. Tolerating certain behaviors is fine; giving deviants official recognition is unacceptable. Kerry would force homosexuality into everyday lives, and homosexuals would "take control".

3. Higher medical costs are due to a tort system out of control. Bush would reign in medical malpractice; Kerry would make the problem worse because of "trial lawyer support", or socialize medicine in some way, which would mean a drastic reduction in service and availability.

4. Tax cuts for the wealthy help the economy, spur job growth, and "raise all boats"; Kerry would roll back the tax cut and choke off the economy.

5. A "liberal elite" has dominated the political scene. This liberal elite "despises" regular Americans and is trying to socially engineer the country . George Bush brings regular-guy, common sense to the job; Kerry is a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.

6. The "liberal media" lies about almost everything. George Bush can be trusted to tell the truth.

7. Republicans run a tight ship; Democrats would tax and spend.

8. Bush has had four years experience in the job, in tough times. Kerry has no experience as a leader.

9. A President with solid "moral values", and public Christianity is the best measure of this; a vote for Kerry is a vote for immorality.

10. Environmental science is bogus, and full of crazy predictions from liberal scientists who just want to make money. George Bush is right to roll back environmental controls, Kerry would wreck the economy with regulations to protect us from problems that don't really exist.

Am I somewhere close to correct with this? These particular ten points strike me as rationally demonstrable to be false; that argument is not relevant at this time.

I think Dan Drezner put it best, when he declared his intention, as a lifelong Republican, to vote for Kerry. He said that he just couldn't understand Bush's decision-making process, and while he disagreed with some of John Kerry's policies, he could understand how he made them.

We are dismayed because we do not understand how George Bush and his administration make decisions. We despair when a majority in this country support something we do not understand, and offer no additional reasoning for that support. We despair when, as in this year of issues that seemed dramatically simplified and obvious, far more so than in decades past, that our policies and beliefs are so mercilessly discarded by the tyranny of a majority that is actively hostile towards the personal freedom, collective responsibility and tolerance that we cherish. We are additionally left with the ugly aftertaste of intolerance, knowing that intolerance for sexual preference tipped the balance in this election.

You claim the existence of a massed heartland of reasoned conservatism. I have perhaps claimed something similar, a wide bastion of reasoned liberalism.

I despair because neither exists. I do not understand how this electorate makes decisions. Countless conversations with dozens of Republicans have come to naught; careful shared discussion of facts and policy which often led to fragile consensus on courses of action are discarded in a matter of seconds before a raised fist of misdirected anger, as tribal urges render that discourse meaningless, powerless in a new tangled context of emotion-driven, faith-driven political power.

Have I not been open to other views? I believe that I have been. I have admitted when I have been wrong, and if I have been demanding in the nature of discourse, it has not been to create a separate standard for myself.

I find it telling that in years of discussions on recent Republican policy with dozens of those on the other side, none has ever sought to convince me of their correctness; it was for me to be informed of that correctness. Perhaps I am not worth the investment. More likely, it is that some form of faith lies at the heart of these policies, and my good friends have simply been humoring me, knowing that unless that faith was present in me, no conversion could take place.

A missionary spends years in the field; good, enjoyable years of toil bringing truth, a desire to help, and the will to leave the world a better place than he found it. If his works are "writ in water" and without effect, does he not doubt? When does a man decide to turn inward, and for what reason?

I claim a right to decide it, when and where I choose.

Matthew's got it right. United States of Canada! Jesusland!

I think it can work.

I have several hours worth of negative commentary on yesterday's test for gravity, but I'll condense it. There doesn't seem to be much point in exploring facts or numbers or doing realistic extrapolations. I guess I held a foolish hope that, to some extent, the American political system was self-correcting. I was wrong.

At least the popular vote broke for Bush, this time. He has legitimacy he did not, after 2000. It also appears that the election was clean, this time. I don't know how many black "felons" were denied an opportunity to vote in Florida; let's hope it isn't the 45,000 that we saw last time. Bush's margin in Florida is several hundred thousand, which puts him safely (and legitimately) in the lead.

It's not that John Kerry was a great candidate; he wasn't. But Bush represents the certainty of an economic death spiral, the affirmation of xenophobia (and just about every other phobia, including homo-), and the sunsetting of liberty. He's got a four year track record to prove it. At least with Kerry there was a chance for fiscal discipline and for cooperation on the international level; no such chance exists now.

So I sit here, perplexed. All the graphs and charts and analysis I've done, countless discussions conveying the facts, everything written and done and said...it all means pretty much nothing. I think that it means that my focus has to change; I think it means that there simply isn't any point in trying to work and hope for change that is good for everyone. It turns out they're not interested.

The ironic thing is that Bush's policies are fine, or even good, for me personally. His tax cuts go to people like me. The crash and burn of the medical system doesn't affect me; I can afford it, whatever happens. Expensive oil? Doesn't bother me. The forthcoming rise in social security taxation rates (to "fix" social security) won't be much of a factor for me; my income extends past the social security range. All these things are going to screw over the average 30k/year guy in America; that guy just voted for Bush, so my sympathies are limited.

We're really entering a new era, now. If you're a smart, wealth-producing, socially liberal, fiscally conservative person, you need to start thinking about protecting yourself and your family from this lunacy, and you need to start doing it right now. The bible-wielding welfare-staters are coming for us. They want to spend our tax dollars on things we don't agree about, like stupid wars. They want to force everyone to hate gays. They want to take away a woman's right to choose. They do not believe the environment should be protected. They want to swagger around the playground, declaring that the opinions of those who live elsewhere in the world don't matter. They talk financial discipline, but implement the largest discretionary spending increases in modern times. They hand huge breaks to the buddies of the people in charge of their "party", and they hand the bill to us, and to the next generation.

So how do you protected yourself and your family against this lunacy? I don't know yet. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm not sure it's possible; at least, not in America.

The baby boomers start retiring in five years. Demand for treasury bonds is dropping dramatically. America's position in the world is the weakest it has been in modern times. The federal government is running 6% of GDP deficits and is two years away from the highest percentage-of-GDP deficits ever recorded (exceeding the record set after World War II). Dislike and distaste for America is causing increases to trade deficits. Oil prices are likely to double (from their current record-high levels) over the next two years, which will have a massive ripple effect on America's remaining, highly dispersed manufacturing infrastructure.

The very idea of trying to deal with a longer-term problem, like global warming, is foolish.

Is this who you are?

Rationality has prevailed, and GOP Party Officials in Ohio have told challengers to observe, rather than actively challenge voters on the spot. Since I criticized the decision to challenge, it's only fair that I mention their decision to observe. Nobody has a problem with observation. It was the active process of challenging voters in the act of voting that was highly problematic.

GOP functionaries scream on one hand about activist judges. Then they run to federal Circuit Court to get local judges overruled when they want to "challenge" voters in minority and democractic districts. The Times has the story. What, exactly, are these challengers going to do besides look at the same photo ID that the election supervisors are looking at?

Nothing. That's not why they're there. They're there for one purpose: To slow down the process of voting in heavily democratic areas. When the lines grow to a certain point, frustrated people are going to give up.

Let's hope they don't succeed.

This would be a great time for Bush supporters (as opposed to Republicans) to make the case for their guy. I'll make it easy for you. Just discuss one major policy initiative that's been a success. Specifically, somewhere the administration has done the following: Identified a problem, described policies to solve the problem, publicly predicted the effects of those policies, implemented them, measured the results, and found them to be in line with public pronouncements.

Offhand, I can't think of anything. What have I missed?

We desperately need Republicans in this country to be Republicans again.

Third party politics is alive and well. This third party came into being by gestating inside another, then eating it from the inside out. The GOP of today has only labels in common with traditional Republican principles. The GOP of today is a slouching, awkward beast; dead wires for tendons, the flesh of its policies rotting under bright light, a painful puppet-walk of leprosy. The sponsors of its hate-core are aging, dying -- the young do not share their opinions on color, sexuality, and forced religion. Disastrous fiscal policies have led to questions from even the most faithful, the efficiency-core, who have been asked to turn their backs on the fiscal policies that truly differentiated Republicans. What is left, raging, is the fear-core of the party, whose policies ironically make far more likely the very scenarios they claim to prevent. The last, best hope of the new third party politics is to create a fear-state, a police-state, one in which fear can fill in for the dying strength of the hate-core.

Take back your party. Be for personal liberty, fiscal discipline, and states' rights. Regain the realism that is the GOP's primary contribution to American discourse.

I've got news for you, mis amigos americanos. You are a few days away from testing gravity. It seems that a certain set of alignments has been reached. Various spheres -- planetary, political, ideological, teleological -- have arrayed themselves conveniently before you. You may study, think, and decide.

Do you believe America is evolving towards an endpoint? That might, perhaps, explain the lack of long term focus so exuberantly exhibited by the populace and its current leadership. Why plan for or even acknowledge the presence of gravity, when the rapture is coming? Surely a kind God, or at least one with strong feelings about inconveniencing his chosen followers, intends the enjoyment of a steady-state American universe, right up until the end.

Or perhaps you believe, in the finest traditions of ancient drama, that a forthcoming deus ex machina will pluck the myriad emergent thorns from the furry hide of our franchise-driven society. The crashing disaster of federal finances and the oppressive reality of an aging population are nothing in the face of such powerful means. We have only to turn loose the unlimited power of The Market (tm) and magic will present itself! Ingenuity (one special kind in particular -- born right here) will fix it all.

You Americans seem to be Pretty Darn Scared of terrorists right now, you've made it a central issue in this campaign. Observe this secular heresy: Terrorism is the least of your worries. There are other, far larger and scarier issues that any rational analysis rapidly reveals. You can't fight a war on terrorism if your economy won't support one. You can't fight terrorism if your force capabilities are committed to other purposes, such as Iraq. You can't fight terrorism if you alienate and zero out the resources that are best positioned to deal with threat. We often refer to these resources as "the people who live there".

Threats to your life are all around you. Deal with it. It's the actions we take every day; it's the mutant cell in your bloodstream, or the renegade DNA you inherited, or "safe" chemicals you ingest over decades, chemicals that make it economically possible for you to consume more of products that can damage your health in their impure forms. Tons of steel and composites fly past and beside you in your daily commute; you're a hundred times as likely to die and have your death investigated by NHTSA as investigate by the NSA.

If you're a resident of Baghdad, tons of steel and composites might fly past you for a variety of reasons; most an unwelcome consequence of propulsive, expanding gases and fireballs. The antecedent actors, whether they be purveyors of improvised or non-improvised devices, matter little as life and hope are singed away, singled out and pinned against a black backdrop of crude "democratic" experimentation, like butterflies.

This election should be about the economy, the structure of taxation, halting the death spiral of the medical system, and the best mechanisms to deal with demographic shifts and changing energy costs. Those are the short term issues that will most affect residents and citizens, over the next decade. Longer term, a wise citizen will consider the role of government in the information age and the deeper question of the true meaning of freedom and democracy in an electronic world.

I have three little tests I like to apply to policy: Equality, fairness, and "tellin' other people what to do". Policies should possess the first two, and minimize to the extent that is possible the third. I suggest that you come up with your own tests, if you don't like mine. We can trust the weighted wisdom of democracy, but democracy needs traction into ideas to function, and there's where your responsibility as a citizen comes into play. You can't just choose, friend. You've got to decide, and that's a very different process. Choosing is flippng a coin. Deciding has method.

Do not use 9/11 as a reason to choose, instead of decide. Too much is at stake. It's no secret that I think the current occupant of the Oval is a chooser, not a decider. Aspire to more. Find your own test for gravity. Here's a hint: You don't need a cliff. Ignore the people you see using that mechanism.

Conservatives, please...unite. Join hands with me now, as we pray to the Lord Almighty for deliverance. Or deliveries, as it were. Let the good works, the fine brown trucks of UPS continue to flourish across this glorious land which you have given us. Spare us from the distasteful inconveniences of the sciences, whose conclusions embrace the fallen.

Our brethren, who art in Amman, honoured are thy contracts. Lord provide unto them captured sunlight, the guise of dead life. Give us our texas tea, and forgive those whom we crush, as we forgive them for our trespasses. Lead us not, and deliver us from reason.

Dear Biblical Scholars: Did the bible ever cover the fiscal signs of the apocalypse?

It's finally happened! After years of delays, the Light Sport Aircraft regulations have finally been published by the FAA. Light Sportplanes are small, two-seat planes with significant limits on engines, payload, and gross weight. They have very low stall speeds, are comparatively easy to fly, and are dramatically less expensive than conventional certified aircraft.

With any luck this will usher in a new age of innovation in the small aircraft business, and make flying much more affordable for members of the general public. American kitplane manufacturers have been doing fantastic design work for a long time now, but have never been able to sell their creations in finished form to the public, who will now be able to buy at least some of them. The market so far has been occupied by European companies, whose aviation regulations permitted the "advanced ultralight" designation.

Aero-News has a good summary.

It's nice to see the jobs being created, and the cost of flying lowered.

You can read the entire text of the 2003 State of the Union speech, at the White House's site. The "16 words" have been a real political football. How well does the rest of the Iraq portion of the speech hold up?

Read on to find out!

Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq. A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth, will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States. (Applause.)

Documented ties to terrorism are few and far between. Hussein's support of Palestinian suicide bombers certainly counts. Beyond that, though...not much out there.

Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction. For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement. He pursued chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, even while inspectors were in his country. Nothing to date has restrained him from his pursuit of these weapons -- not economic sanctions, not isolation from the civilized world, not even cruise missile strikes on his military facilities.

It is clear in hindsight that the sanctions regime was very effective, and that Iraq was simply unable to pursue anything beyond pen and paper, once the sanctions regime had firmly taken hold. "Nothing has restrained him" implies that there is current WMD activity, contemporaneous with the speech. We know now that there was no firm evidence of this, because it wasn't happening.

Almost three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations, and for the opinion of the world. The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct -- were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq's regime is disarming. It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see, and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.

There were no weapons for the inspectors to find, of course. Iraq could not have complied with the standard Bush was holding it to; the weapons he was demanding did not exist. I do not doubt that Bush felt Iraq probably had WMD. The language used here does not reflect that doubt.

The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it.

No anthrax has been found in Iraq. UN inspectors had been over Iraq, searching. What was their current estimate of Iraq's capability? Bush doesn't tell us that. Instead, he gives us an old estimate.

The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it.

"Materials sufficient to produce" means "he doesn't have any, but listen to my scary word botulinum".

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

500 tons isn't going to be the easiest thing to hide. None of these materials or actual WMD has been found.

U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

None of these munitions has been found. The "30,000" number is pulled out of the air -- we don't know its sourcing or how accurate it is. We do know that Iraq had these kinds of shells at one time, and used them in its war with Iran. It is therefore unsuprising that some of them are still lying around. Is the factual basis underlying "30,000 munitions" still applicable?

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

No such labs have been found, and Powell's UN speech support for them has been withdrawn by the administration.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

There's some pretty major implications that Iraq's nuclear research is dangerous and ongoing. The IAEA's conclusions, in 1998: "This is compounded by Iraq's lack of full transparency in the provision of information, which has resulted in uncertainties about the extent of external assistance to Iraq's clandestine nuclear programme and some aspects of the programme's actual achievements. However, the IAEA has found no indications that Iraq has retained the physical capability -- in terms of hardware and facilities -- to produce weapon-usable nuclear material. Nor are there any indications of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons. The IAEA has indicated nevertheless that it cannot provide absolute assurance of the absence of readily concealable items such as components of centrifuge machines. It is also clear that Iraq had made significant progress in weaponisation technologies prior to April 1991 and that there remains in Iraq a cadre of experienced personnel who were employed in the clandestine nuclear programme.". The last known serious weapons programme in Iraq was 1991 and earlier. The juxtaposition of "advanced weapons program" and "sought uranium" is intended to convey danger, pure and simple.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.

Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations. Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.

It's a little hard to see how Iraq could have stopped surveillance flights from happening, given US control over the airspace.

Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack.

Really? In which years did Saddam Hussein spend "enormous sums", and "build" WMD? What is the factual basis for this assertion?

With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

No public details of contact between Iraq and al Qaeda have been disclosed, other than a brief, decades-old meeting that may or may not have taken place. Bush also asserts, here, that weapons exist and are hidden, without any factual basis to do so.

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes. (Applause.)

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option. (Applause.)

It's really all about finding the right balance, isn't it? We don't want the threat to "emerge fully", and yet, we can't simply go around invading countries and killing people just because we think we're in danger. Proof needs to exist. The President himself questioned the WMD evidence when it was first presented to him; what was shown was nowhere near the quality or confidence level that had been implied to him.

The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages -- leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. (Applause.)

"Is assembling" needs justification.

And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. (Applause.) And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation. (Applause.)

The world has waited 12 years for Iraq to disarm. America will not accept a serious and mounting threat to our country, and our friends and our allies. The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraqi's legal -- Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempt to hide those weapons from inspectors, and its links to terrorist groups.

All significant areas of Powell's speech have since been recanted, as the evidence supporting them collapsed. I distinctly remember thinking, after Powell's speech, that there probably were WMD in Iraq. The evidence presented in the speech wasn't convincing, but I strongly felt that there simply had to be more to it -- that the Administration must have secret information, and because they had seen what I could not, they were much more certain about this. It turns out they did not have anything more; the war in Iraq was essentially a gamble that we would find what we claimed we knew was there.

We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him. (Applause.)

There you have it. Draw your own conclusions! And when you do so, I hope they're more accurate than the ones Bush's war team drew from the evidence they were given...

This was too big to fit in a comment, and is maybe deserving of its own post. Consider this a continuation:

I think Blixa wrote early on that maybe both sides are correct, more or less.

Let me try and find some middle ground here. Each side accuses the other of lying. Rights say Wilson is a liar. Lefts say Bush lied in the State of the Union.

If we start by assuming that both men were acting on the information they had, there's a pretty reasonable construction of events available to us. If we put it in context, I think the problem sort of goes away.

First have a look at Ari's July 7 press gaggle: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030707-5.html.

He specifically says this:

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm sorry, I see what David is asking. Let me back up on that and explain the President's statement again, or the answer to it.

The President's statement was based on the predicate of the yellow cake from Niger. The President made a broad statement. So given the fact that the report on the yellow cake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the President's broader statement, David. So, yes, the President' broader statement was based and predicated on the yellow cake from Niger.

Q So it was wrong?

MR. FLEISCHER: That's what we've acknowledged with the information on --

Q The President's statement at the State of the Union was incorrect?

MR. FLEISCHER: Because it was based on the yellow cake from Niger.

Q Well, wait a minute, but the explanation we've gotten before was it was based on Niger and the other African nations that have been named in the national intelligence --

MR. FLEISCHER: But, again, the information on -- the President did not have that information prior to his giving the State of the Union.

Q Which gets to the crux of what Ambassador Wilson is now alleging -- that he provided this information to the State Department and the CIA 11 months before the State of the Union and he is amazed that it, nonetheless, made it into the State of the Union address. He believes that that information was deliberately ignored by the White House. Your response to that?

MR. FLEISCHER: And that's way, again, he's making the statement that -- he is saying that surely the Vice President must have known, or the White House must have known. And that's not the case, prior to the State of the Union.

Q He's saying that surely people at the decision-making level within the NSC would have known the information which he -- passed on to both the State Department and the CIA.

MR. FLEISCHER: And the information about the yellow cake and Niger was not specifically known prior to the State of the Union by the White House.

Bush was told by his intelligence guys that there was a deal between Niger and Iraq to buy uranium. Tenet tells him it's true. Based on this pretty scary fact the white house decides it rises to a level where it can be included in the State of the Union. They include it.

Did Bush deliberately lie here? No. And, given that his statement is likely correct (sought uranium from africa) from a factual standpoint, does it in retrospect represent a lie? Nope.

Bush does have two problems, though. First, there was a breakdown in the vetting process. At the point of the state of the union, it was known that the deal didn't happen, and the documents were forged (this doesn't mean that Iraq didn't seek uranium -- only that the deal hadn't happened).

We can't seem to see Ari Fleischer's July 9 press briefing on the White House site. It's been removed. But we can still see it elsewhere:

http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/press/2003/july/071002.html

In it, Ari says this:

MR. FLEISCHER: No, because the regime is gone. The regime is gone. You know, just because something didn't make it to the level where it should have been included in a presidential speech, in hindsight, doesn't mean the information was necessarily inaccurate. It means it should not have risen to his level.

I think it's right there in a nutshell. Wilson felt at the time (and others did as well), that the uranium information "didn't make it to the level" of a presidential speech, based on his trip. Had Bush known that the central piece of intelligence underlying that line of the speech was bogus (or had his speechwriters known), it wouldn't have made it in the speech.

What made Wilson mad was that someone on the white house staff deliberately (or inadvertently) outed his wife to get back at him. Once again, there are shades of gray on the motivations of the person who did it. They might have thought that everybody already knew, or thought that they weren't committing a crime; maybe it was a total slip of the tongue. Regardless, it brought Wilson's wife into the equation fairly deliberately, broke the law doing so, and may have had some effect on past or present intelligence issues.

There's a standard of truth being put forward on both sides that just isn't really achievable, by anybody.

Wilson fired back at the administration with everything at his disposal. The only part of his story that can really be contested is what he said about his wife's involvement. It's clear that this was a tricky area for him, and he was boxed in a bit. He's not allowed to talk about what his wife does, since she's an intelligence operative. He knows that she didn't make the decision to send him. He's being accused to nepotism, but knows that he wasn't paid to go on the trip.

It results in a little fuzziness in his public statements about her. But...if we completely separate her involvement, is he still "a liar"? No. Even if we put the quote from his book in place, it's clear that he wasn't hiding anything, as he publicly responded to, on more than one occasion, the existence of the memo from his wife. How did he respond? He responded by saying he wouldn't discuss that. When you know you're not supposed to talk about something and you're a politician, how do you respond? You say that you are unable to discuss it.

Bottom line is this: Bush was let down by his security people (inside the circle or outside), who knew that the central bit of intelligence underlying the line in the speech was false. So no lie there. Somebody in the White House took revenge, committed a crime, and outed Wilson's wife. Wilson should have found a better way to characterize his wife's involvement, if he was unable to say exactly what it was; he should have made no statement at all rather than a misleading one.

So maybe there's common ground in all of this. I don't know.

The question we all have to ask ourselves is this: What kind of standards do we want to apply to all of these public statements? Do the Bushies _really_ want us to apply their Wilson standard to everything he's ever said? More to the point, _should_ we?

Language is a loose thing. Maybe we all need to keep that in mind. In this case we've been reduced to parsing the various grammatical and contextual forms of sentences -- this is a silly way to have a discussion.

Occam's razor gives us the simple path; the path upon which people make mistakes, sometimes, in what they say.

Nerd alert: This is an idea that I wanted to put in a public place, for reference!

One of the most common schemes on the big bad internet is called a phish. I'm sure you've received them -- it's an email that says something along the lines of "famous organization X would like you to confirm your account information, please click on this link and enter your credit card, etc". They're a pretty huge problem, and a lot of web users have been caught unaware, which is absolutely not their fault. It can be very difficult for even an experienced web user to verify that a given web page really comes from the entity described in the contents. Various web browser bugs have contributed to this, over time.

As a general rule, you should never click on a link in an email and enter any important information in the resulting forms. We all break this from time to time; as the schemes become more and more sophisticated, even an experienced user might get fooled.

So here's my idea. Credit card numbers, social security numbers, and often bank account numbers are unusual. They follow well known patterns. If you enter a credit card number that is off-by-one, it will often be rejected by a site because it failed to pass validation.

To increase security, we modify the browser to do the following: If the contents of any input field look like a credit card number (or social security number, or expiry date), we do not submit that information to the web site unless certain conditions are met. Conditions can include presence of a secure connection for the frame containing the edit fields as well as the target of the form submit; presence of the target ip address in a well-known database of acceptable sites, certified by credit card companies; presence of the site in a list of sites personalized for that user.

Credit card numbers can be broken up into multiple fields within the HTML. We check for this by combining all fields to see what's present. Further, we check all fields on the page, whether they have been submitted or not -- this prevents use of scripting languages to extract and encode information entered in one field and supply it to another.

This guides a user towards well-known payee sites, but still allows them to enter their own. When they do enter their own payee, we can thoroughly warn them that what they are doing is dangerous. We can also submit the IP address of the payee web site to credit card companies, so they know which sites are accepting credit card numbers.

I think this scheme is, if not bulletproof, pretty good protection against most phishing scams. It takes a measure of judgement out of the hands of the user and makes an evil site operator jump through quite a few hoops. If nothing else, it would likely result in a dramatic drop in the number of successful phishes.

Dan Darling writes a few brief conclusions on the Senate Report. I decided to pull apart his comments on Joe Wilson, and this is what I found.

Dan, on the Wilson matter: You call the man a "liar and not a particularly good one at that". Then you've got a few paragraphs from which we're supposed to infer exactly that, I suppose. I don't get there from what you've written and the publicly available documents.

After some pointless characterization of Wilson's public image, you state: "Even more so, I would argue, if only for the fact that he was making claims about a number of issues, for example the forged documents referring to Niger, of which he had no actual knowledge - a very polite way of saying that the man was blowing smoke out his ass."

The Senate report is available at http://intelligence.senate.gov. It is a little awkward to deal with, as it does not contain a text layer (it's image only). I refer to page numbers in the document, not in the PDF file.

According to the Senate report, page 36, the first CIA report on the Iraq-Niger deal was written on Oct. 18, 2001. The first CIA report referred to a report from a foreign government's intelligence service. Per the Senate report, page 37, the second CIA report was issued on February 5, 2002. This second report "provided what was said to be the 'verbatim text' of the accord". In other words, the second report contained the alleged contract between Iraq and Niger.

On page 40 of the Senate report, we learn that Wilson participated in a February 19, 2002 meeting "to discuss the merits of the former ambassador travelling to Niger". On page 41, of the SR:

"The INR analyst's notes also indicate that specific details of the classified report on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal were discussed at the meeting, as well as whether analysts believed it was plausible that Niger would be capable of delivering such a large quantity of uranium to Iraq. The CIA has told committee staff that the former ambassador did not have a 'formal' security clearance but had been given an 'operation clearance' up to the Secret level for the purpose of his potential visit to Niger."

In other words, Wilson was present at a meeting during which specific details of the CIA's reports on the alleged Iraq-Niger deal were discussed, and he had clearance to be there. We know that the second report contained the "verbatim text" of the agreement, which presumably would mean it contained the names of those who signed it. It is entirely possible that the names were discussed or seen at that meeting.

Page 45 of the SR notes:

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have 'misspoken' to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were 'forged'. He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself."

Note the remarkably minimal text that is directly attributable to Wilson himself. The 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' is in fact the entire extent of the quote, in the June 13, 2003 Post story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A46957-2003Jun11&notFound=true). We are then told only TWO WORDS of Wilson's testimony: 'misspoken' and 'forged'. What did Wilson actually say? This is summary of summary of summary, and isn't evidence of a damn thing.

The Washington Post article says this:

"After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong,' the former U.S. government official said."

Note that Wilson is not QUOTED as saying that the documents were forged; he is quoted as saying 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong'. The March 2003 IAEA report concluding that the documents were forged and that they had the wrong names on them had already been published at that point, and Wilson had likely already seen it. Note that the SR indicates that the word 'forged' is a quote from wilson, in the context of the Post article. It is not; that is the reporter's verbage. So all we have here is that in June 2003, Wilson told a reporter that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong', which was both true and public knowledge. That the documents were forged was ALSO public knowledge.

I encourage you to be more specific about "making claims about a number of issues, for example the forged documents referring to Niger, of which he had no actual knowledge". Back it up with a specific claim that Wilson has made, quoted in his OWN words if you please, rather than a multiple levels of indirection.

Next, you state "the name of Wilson's wife was leaked to the press in order to punish him for having "debunked" the administration's claims with respect to Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Africa. As the report very clearly indicates, this was simply not the case". Where do you see this in the Senate report? By "simply not the case", do you mean that Wilson's wife's name was leaked, or do you mean that his report did NOT in fact "debunk" the Iraq-Niger deal? On the first, there's no text in the SR concluding anything about whether the administration leaked her name; we're therefore talking about whether Wilson's report "debunked" anything. Why, then, do you lead your sentence mentioning the leak of Plame's name? Perhaps you have inadvertently connected the SR and this conclusion.

On the SR, page 43, we learn that Wilson was debriefed after his trip on March 5, 2002. Pages 43 and 44 contain summarizations of the report that resulted from that debriefing. It is quite clear that Wilson came to the conclusion, during his trip and his meetings with Nigerien officials who would have had to have been involved at the time, that the Iraq-Niger deal was bogus. But did this "debunk" the theory? On page 73:

"Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to unranium to Iraq."

Some analysts believed him, and some did not. In Wilson's mind, the Iraq-Niger deal was a done deal. In the minds of at least some analysts (INR), his report further affirmed what they thought. I find nothing in the SR contradicting wilson's claim that his report "debunked" the Iraq-Niger deal; please point out where you see it. I don't mean to be combative, here -- with over 500 pages of image-only data you may have seen something that I didn't. My point is that nothing in the SR makes it inconsistent for Wilson to have claimed to have debunked the Iraq-Niger story.

You conclude that "Wilson's trip to Africa did not 'debunk' the administration position that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger - in fact it strengthened this position on the basis of Wilson's claim that an Iraqi delegation had traveled to Niger in 1999". The only fact in Wilson's report that bolstered any part of the original claim was that it placed an Iraqi delegation in Niger in June of 1999. Everything else went against it. As noted in Conclusion 13 above, the information "did not change" assessments.

Wilson clearly believed he had shown the Iraq-Niger deal was false. We know now that he was correct. The Senate report shows us that wilson's report may have had less effect on analysts' opinions than he thought. Does that make him "a liar and not a particularly good one"?

You link to Instapundit, who claims that Joe Wilson lied in that linked article. Specfically, Instapundit is referring to the recent Susan Schmidt article that stirred this particular pot. Schmidt's article is available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html?referrer=emailarticle. Instapundit tells us to "read the whole thing", but he presumably means for us to read Schmidt's article instead of the Senate report upon which it is based. When we go to the Senate report Schmidt has professed to "summarize" for us, we find something rather different.

I've discussed the one of the differences above -- the difference on the document forgery and names. The Senate report discusses this on page 45. I struggle to see how this difference impugns Wilson in any way; the information is accurate, it was public when he said it, and it was a sentence fragment embedded into a much more general paragraph. The contested implications are generated by the reporter.

On page 44 of the SR, there is a brief discussion of the other differences. The first concerns whether Wilson's report discounted BOTH an actual sale of uranium to Iraq AND that Iraq had approached Niger to buy uranium; the intelligence report generated from wilson's debriefing "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium". That's a pretty microscopic difference; Wilson's report indicated that a meeting with the Iraqi delegation had taken place but that only "commercial interests" had been discussed. The Nigerien representative inferred that uranium could have been what the Iraqis were interested in, but that discussion did not happen. So, in the context of Wilson's report, an approach to buy uranium did not happen. The analyst writing the report may have wanted to include the possibility that the meeting concerned more than Wilson was told, or that there were other meetings.

Continuing on page 44, the committee found that "the former ambassador said that he discussed with his CIA contacts which names and signatures should have appeared on any documentation of such a deal". The Senate committee noted that the intelligence report "made no mention of the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal or signatures that should have appeared on any documentation of such a deal". I don't think we can draw too much of a conclusion from this particular statement. Wilson was sent to Niger to examine whether an Iraq-Niger uranium deal had taken place. The resulting debriefing report (not transcript) doesn't contain any mention of the deal he was sent to investigate? Seems to me that a debriefing report about a trip to examine a uranium deal would mention that deal. I think we're seeing fragments here, and far too many conclusions are being drawn.

The third "difference" on page 44 is this:

"Third, the former ambassador noted that his CIA contacts told him there were documents pertaining to the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium transaction and that the source of the information was the --redacted-- intelligence service. The DO reports officer told Committee staff that he did not provide the former ambassador with any information about the source or details of the original reporting as it would have required sharing classified information and, noted that there were no 'documents' circulating in the IC at the time of the former ambassador's trip, only intelligence reports from --redacted-- intelligence regarding an alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal."

What we have here is a debriefing officer saying that he didn't tell Wilson any details about the originating report. He probably didn't; as the Senate report itself says on page 41 (and discussed above),

"The INR analyst's notes also indicate that specific details of the classified report on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal were discussed at the meeting, as well as whether analysts believed it was plausible that Niger would be capable of delivering such a large quantity of uranium to Iraq. The CIA has told committee staff that the former ambassador did not have a 'formal' security clearance but had been given an 'operation clearance' up to the Secret level for the purpose of his potential visit to Niger."

so we have Wilson, participating in a CIA meeting, where "specific details of the classified report" ... "were discussed". So if Joe Wilson says that CIA contacts told him that information, how exactly is that a lie? It's not. This particular officer was simply indicating that he had not told Wilson. Wilson had already learned that information through the February 19, 2002 meeting.

Instapundit also raises the issue of Joe Wilson's statements about his wife. Apparently it is brand new news that there was a memo from Plame, February 12, recommending Wilson for the trip. The clear implication is that Wilson lied about his wife's involvement in his selection. The public quote, from Wilson's book, is given almost everywhere as:

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

So what did he actually write? Here's where you can see a fuller excerpt from his book: http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E27%257E2163873,00.html.

"Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger's uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter. Though she worked on weapons of mass destruction issues, she was not at the meeting I attended where the subject of Niger's uranium was discussed, when the possibility of my actually traveling to the country was broached. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

Wilson's clearly referring to the meeting where the decision got made. Note that according to the Senate report, page 39, Wilson had made at least two other trips to Niger on behalf of the CIA; his name was not unknown to that organization. Still, "definitely had not proposed" doesn't seem to square entirely. Looking a little further, we can see an interview that Wilson gave, October 28, 2003, to Talon news (http://www.gopusa.com/news/2003/october/1028_wilson_interview.shtml). Quoting from that interview:

"Wilson: Those were the premises under which I argued that we ought not to rush into an invasion, conquest, occupation, war. That said, that all took place well after my trip. I was selected to go to Niger because there was maybe one other person in the U.S. government who knew those who had been in office at the time this purported agreement memorandum was signed, and his credibility was somewhat damaged not by anything he did, but by the fact that he had been an ambassador out there and as a consequence, he had to be the daily point of friction with the military junta during the time he was out there. I was senior director for African affairs at the time. I started my career in Niger and had a whole series of relationships and a great credibility with that group of people who had been in power at the time.

I also happen to know a fair amount about the uranium business, having served in 3 of the 4 countries in Africa that produce uranium, including having been ambassador to the Gabonese Republic which is also a uranium exporter.

TN: Did your wife suggest you for the mission?

Wilson: No. The decision to ask me to go out to Niger was taken in a meeting at which there were about a dozen analysts from both the CIA and the State Department. A couple of them came up and said to me when we're going through the introductory phase, "We have met at previous briefings that you have done on other subjects, Africa-related."

Not one of those at that meeting could I have told you what they look like, would I recognize on the street, or remember their name today. And as old as I am, I can still recognize my wife, and I still do remember her name. That was the meeting at which the decision was made to ask me if I would clear my schedule to go.

TN: An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?

Wilson: I don't know anything about a meeting, I can only tell you about the meeting I was at where I was asked if I would prepare to go, and there was nobody at that meeting that I know. Now that fact that my wife knows that I know a lot about the uranium business and that I know a lot about Niger and that she happens to be involved in weapons of mass destruction, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we know of each others activities."

This reporter talks about a meeting where Plame may have suggested Wilson's name; the Senate report speaks of a memo. The bottom line is that this is old news; in this interview Wilson clearly indicates that his wife was not part of the decision-making process. He also clearly acknowledgehat s that his wife knows what he does and about his background, that that they know of each other's activities.

Wilson is publicly acknowledging here that his wife may have contributed to his selection; he also is clearly indicating that she had nothing to do with the decision. Criticism of Wilson on this point is, to my mind, requiring of unfair precision on his part.

The lesson in all of this is that quotes matter. By choosing parts, by displaying words without context or by supplying context and attributing it to the target, you can bend things around quite a bit.

Do I think that Joe Wilson stretched things a little? Probably; it seems to me that he felt his report was more dispositive of the Iraq-Niger deal than it actually was, to the analysts involved. But that is not a lie.

Criticize, by all means. Call a spade a spade. But recognize that your third-degree source on a matter may be inaccurate or be a mischaracterization.

One more time: On being anti-american, WoC refers to Schuler's bit
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A few nice thoughts in there, but...From the anti-gay constitutional amendment people, we've learned that we love the sinner, not the sin.

It seems highly appropriate to apply that to America itself.

We can love a child, but a child is not a perfect being.

Didn't the Bible have something to say about pride? Why is pride so often associated with patriotism?

Personally, I think pride should be taken, at most, in something you've done or earned. Taking pride is something you simply are is, well, kind of pompous. Schuler said:

"If you look down on or despise your fellow Americans (or anyone else for that matter) you may have a lot of great and wonderful qualities but you are not pro-American."

Taking pride in something you are is looking down on other people, who aren't.