I'm really, really busy today. Don't miss me too much.

For no reason except it's funny, from Old Man Murray:

I found an interview with Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf in the movie. Here's a disturbing quote:

Says Armistead Maupin, the author of the Tales of the City novels and McKellen’s confidant for 20 years: “I think the fact that an openly gay actor is going to have his face all over Burger King cups in a matter of months is really quite significant.”

Believe me when I say that I absolutely do not want to live in a society in which gay people such as Ian McKellen are forced to conceal their sexuality. However, I absolutely do want to live in a society in which old people such as Ian McKellen are forced to conceal their sexuality.

Jeff Goldstein has a good riff on "college students against frontal nudity". I can't believe this detail from the story: "About 500 students petitioned the theater department, unsuccessfully, for a ban on nudity in all productions." Blows my freakin' mind.

This is pretty funny:

TODAY'S FUNNIEST HEADLINE [Michael Potemra]

It's a London Times story linked to by Drudge. The headline says, "Sex scandals may lead US Catholics to defy Rome." This is like a headline saying, "Recent drought may lead frat boys to drink beer."

What he said.

You may have seen Spinsanity criticising Senate Republicans for accusing Democrats of anti-Hispanic bias. "They (Democrats) don’t want Miguel Estrada because he’s Hispanic," Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-MS, said after a White House meeting. Sen. Pete Domenici was quoted as saying, "I want to say to Democrats ... you don’t have to be afraid. They (Hispanics) are good lawyers and great judges." I can't trust my judgement on this, but I'd be interested in meeting the person who doesn't think that Lott and Domenici sound like total assholes.

This doesn't make them look any better.

On the same day Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) accused Democrats of blocking Estrada's nomination "because he's Hispanic," House Republican members of a conference committee on the farm bill rejected a White House-backed proposal to restore food stamp benefits to legal immigrants.

Resurrecting the benefits, which are funded under the farm bill, has been "a top priority" of the Latino community for years, according to Cecelia Muñoz of the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights organization.

She accused GOP lawmakers of "trying to get mileage out of framing themselves as pro-Latino in the places they are most visible, and this Estrada thing was the best example. But behind the scenes, the House Republicans acted in unison to undercut both what the White House is trying to accomplish and what we're trying to accomplish."

A Mississippi judge wrote a letter to a newspaper saying that gays and lesbians "should be put in some kind of mental institute" rather than be given the right to marry.

Here's a real quote from the judge in question, George County Justice Court Judge Connie Wilkerson:

"I've wrote letters throughout my life, and I probably just wasn't thinking about the problems that it might cost my fellow man," he said. "I'm sorry it's caused anybody any problems. I'm trying to help." Donations of clothing and canned goods from grateful homosexuals have not flooded his office.

Argh....

Glenn Reynolds doesn't trust CAIR's online poll. Replace "CAIR's" with "anyone's" and he'd be closer to the truth. You'd be better off consulting a Magic 8-Ball than an online poll.

I feel like picking on Bill Bennett some more, so here's a pile of links. The guy is just what the Republicans don't need- an unsympathetic moralizer and dedicated drug warrior, with a flagrant disregard for the truth and a mile-wide hypocritical streak.

About his book "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators" (this is a particularly good one):

What's a conservative Jeremiah to do? Violent crime is down, divorce is down, the welfare rolls are dwindling, fewer women are having abortions, and SAT scores and charitable giving are on the rise. This is the dilemma facing former education secretary and drug czar William Bennett, who this morning held a press conference in Washington to unveil the second edition of his book The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. Bennett is battling the inconvenient onslaught of good news with three strategems--retreat, partisanship, and dishonesty.

About his passing on the absurd claim that "homosexuality takes 30 years off of your life":

Cameron's method had the virtue of simplicity, at least. He and two co-authors read through back numbers of various urban gay community papers, mostly of the giveaway sort that are laden with bar ads and personals. They counted up obituaries and news stories about deaths, noted the ages of the deceased, computed the average, and published the resulting numbers as estimates of gay life expectancy.

What do vital-statistics buffs think of this technique? Nick Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute sums up the reactions of several of his fellow demographers: "The method as you describe it is just ridiculous." But you don't have to be a trained statistician to spot the fallacy at its heart, which is, to quote Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistician John Karon, that "you're only getting the ages of those who die." Gay men of the same generation destined to live to old age, even if more numerous, won't turn up in the sample....

Moreover, the obits also recorded lots of violent and accidental deaths. From this Cameron and company concluded not that newsworthy deaths tend to get into newspapers, but that gays must experience shockingly high rates of violent death. With a perfectly straight face they report, for example, that lesbians are at least 300 times more likely to die in car crashes than females of similar ages in general...

Throughout the controversy, Bennett has made much of the cause of "truth" with a capital T. His Standard article, portentously titled "Clinton, Gays, and the Truth," accused the Clintonites of scanting that important commodity. Bennett is right to the extent that there's no excuse for telling falsehoods in the course of raising otherwise legitimate issues. He should mind his own lesson.

About his frequent denunciations of Clinton's inattention to drugs:

But what about those awful 1990s, when the government was ignoring the problem, as compared to Bennett's 20-month reign? "The statistical differences are negligible," says University of Maryland's Reuter, when I tell him of Bennett's boast. "The budget [for drug control] kept on growing, and the percentage going to enforcement didn't change at all. Two-thirds went to enforcement and one-third for treatment and prevention. Prison numbers kept going up. I don't know what he means."

About his casual disregard for Bush's drunk-driving conviction and lying:

Then there was William Bennett. The apostle of windy rectitude was completely untroubled by Bush's arrest, telling host Christopher Matthews that it would only be an issue if he lied about it. (I don't know what Bennett is saying now that it appears that Bush did lie, but I don't think he'll be rushing to his computer to start writing "The Death of Outrage II." There are Republican lies and Democratic lies, and in the exalted nostrils of St. William, only the latter stink.) Somehow, it's hard to imagine Trent Lott or Rush Limbaugh or any of the harrumphers of the right taking this live-and-let-live line if it was Clinton or Al Gore who had been arrested for drunken driving. Then, the very fate of the republic would be at stake.

Two excellent Daily Howlers about Bennett playing fast and loose with the facts in "The Death of Outrage."

Finally, something funny:

I found the following correction in this week's New Yorker (9/14):

"Rough Trade"

Editor's Note: A mistake made by a transcription service mangled a quotation from William Bennett in Michael Kelly's July 17 Letter from
Washington. In criticizing the political views of Patrick Buchanan, Mr. Bennett said "it's a real us-and-them kind of thing," not, as we reported, "it's a real S & M kind of thing."

Picky, picky...

One day, historians are going to look at the late 90s. They're going to say, "This Clinton guy- he had an affair with an young aide and lied about it! How in the world did his opponents manage to lose seats in the mid-term elections, push his approval ratings through the roof, and let him off without even a censure?" Then they'll read "The Death of Outrage" and say, "Oh."

Shamed makes a damn good point:

By the way, what does it mean that so many "fundamentalist" Muslims don't care when teenage women are sent to kill Israelis, but go apeshit when they demand a chance to be educated, drive a car, or be seen in public without being beaten?

Wish I'd said that.

William Bennett is one of my least favorite public "intellectuals", which makes pieces like this such a delight.

Great detail, which goes easier on Bennett than I would have:

In one sense, Bennett is admirably consistent: His blanket prohibition on Western self-criticism extends to himself. Chatterbox felt certain that a book aimed at stiffening America's spine to fight a war would relate the story of Bennett's own failure to serve in the military during the Vietnam War. In 1987, the Associated Press reported that Bennett flunked a draft physical while he was in graduate school because of a bad back he'd gotten playing football. But it's clear that Bennett didn't want to go. As an undergraduate at Williams (class of '65), he'd nearly joined Students for a Democratic Society, and, he told the AP, if he'd been called he would have had to "examine my conscience." There is nothing dishonorable in any of this. The Vietnam War was a dubious moral enterprise and, even if it hadn't been, there would be no shame in a young man's hesitating before placing his life at risk for his country. But this episode is surely relevant to any book Bennett might write under the title, Why We Fight. It isn't here, though. Instead, you'll find Bennett excoriating a college student for telling a journalist after 9/11 that he did not want to join up (there is, of course, no longer any risk of being drafted) because there are "people who are more willing to fight." Self-righteousness and hypocrisy, it seems, pose no threat to America's war on terrorism.

Media Whores Online has another take on Bill Bennett:

"Sometime during Dick Cheney's Middle East trip," NR's editor Rich Lowry writes, "the U.S. began to budge. The Arab governments felt us move. And we've been getting rolled ever since."

So far, no comment from Ayatollah Bill Bennett. Where is his right-wing front group Americans for Victory Over Terrorism? Until now, Bennett's group has slammed everyone who has dared criticized Bush foreign policy as unpatriotic. But, for some reason, Bennett's fellow right-wingers now get a pass!

Is harsh right-wing criticism of Bush patriotic, whereas liberal criticism is unpatriotic?

Now that is an interesting question.

UPDATE: Before someone else calls me on it, I think it's inappropriate to call Bennett "Ayatollah." For the record.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Elton at Busy Busy Busy emailed me to let me know that the photo accompanying the article is of Bill's brother, Bob Bennett.

Charles Murtaugh has a good post on tort reform. The punch line sounds just right to me.

It's interesting that so many libertarians (e.g. the Overlawyered.com crew) tend to be such proponents of tort reform, when it strikes me that the fundamental argument against frivolous lawsuits is a paternalistic, even communitarian one: i.e. even if you do convince this jury, you still can't be allowed to win, because of the damage your lawsuit would do to society at large.

Osama Bin Laden shown in previously-unseen video. (It may or may not be "new".) Hmmm.

My late, who-cares-anymore take on Bush's extensive polling: I can't think of any way to use opinion polling that is not in the national interest. Put it another way: I can't think of a form of opinion polling that I wouldn't defend if my team was using it. Judging from the reactions of conservatives who moaned about Clinton's polling, the same is true of them. (Push-polling is a different animal entirely; it's a particularly obnoxious form of telemarketing that abuses the trust of the public.)

If polls are used to find popular policies to get behind, fantastic- we've got a government that more perfectly represents the will of the people. Hooray, democracy! Sometimes the right decision isn't the most popular one, and poll-happy Clinton certainly didn't always make the most popular decision. But there's certainly nothing wrong with measuring public opinion.

If polls are used to sell a decision that has been made, regardless of popularity... well, positioning a position in the best light is part of the game, and forever shall be. Bush isn't slavishly responding to the wishes of the energy lobby, he's Protecting America's Energy Security. Daschle didn't promote a dumb-ass ethanol bill for agribusiness special interests, he's Standing Up For America's Heartland. These spins are often cloying and dumb, but they're not going away. You could spend your whole life griping about them, but it just looks churlish. Polling didn't create spinning, and less polling won't mean less spinning. If done correctly, it just means that spin insults your intelligence a little less.

We libs could complain that Bush was being dishonest when he kept insisting he didn't need a poll to know his own heart, blah blah blah. But honestly, it didn't even occur to me that he was telling the truth. I was positive that he was polling. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, politicians gotta poll.

Two tough posts from Josh Marshall:

On the tax cut, which Bush now says he wants to make permament. Wow, who would have guessed?

On Bush's apparent lack of knowledge of his own administration's policy in the Middle East.

Has anyone else commented on the similarities between link-heavy blogging and sample-heavy music? Making art out of a value-added collage of other people's work? I don't want to be unoriginal.

Stephen Den Beste is wicked smaht. Good post about two cartels, the De Beers and OPEC, and how we'll probably see them fall sooner rather than later. When they do, I'm going to climb into a bathtub full of crude oil and diamonds, and laugh and laugh. It'll be just like Dynasty.

For an interesting look at CAFE (the fuel efficiency standards that didn't pass), check out Jane Galt, a libertarian blogger who argues for a fuel tax instead of increased fuel standards. The comments section is particularly interesting. She takes it seriously and makes a good argument, but I'm not totally convinced.

In particular, I think that she's making three big assumptions:

1. More fuel efficient cars will have to be more expensive. I don't know about that. They're only more expensive if the fuel efficiency is acheived with expensive technology instead of by simply reducing size and weight. During the fuel crisis in the 70s, consumers reacted by buying smaller imports, which happened to be cheaper than the boats Detroit was making. I don't see why that wouldn't happen again.

2. Smaller cars are not as safe as larger cars. Kinda, sorta. They definitely get the short end of the stick when they crash into an SUV. But you can make a pretty good case that SUVs are not as safe as passenger cars overall. Light trucks actually have worse crash ratings than passenger cars.

3. Smaller cars contribute to externalities, especially congestion, as much as larger cars. This one, I believe, is demostrably untrue. According to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an SUV is the equivalent of 1.4 passenger cars in an intersection.

Having said all that, Jane makes a pretty good argument that environmentalist goals could be better acheived by a hike in fuel taxes if price elasticity of gasoline is low. But it is never, ever, ever, ever going to happen with this administration. Bush will hand Jenna and Barbara to Ludacris's roadies before he hikes federal gasoline taxes, so I can't get too excited about it.

Metablogging: Instapundit was saying last week or so that he didn't trust, and wouldn't link to, Media Whores Online because they were anonymous. Two points:

1. I completely understand why people would want to do this anonymously. When I started this blog, I considered doing it anonymously; I still worry every once in a while that I may be laying a huge stink bomb for my future. ("Mr. Barlow, this Congressional hearing would like to know why you saw fit to link to gay Transformer pornography.") I happened to use my real name, but I have no reason to believe that everyone else does. If they weren't, how would I ever know, and what possible difference could it make to me?

2. Glenn Reynolds can't really care that much about anonymity, because he links to anonymous sources all the time, most notably "Sgt. Stryker". "Charles Dodgson" and the Bull Moose produce swell commentary behind the veil of anonymity.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Patrick Nielsen Hayden informs me that the Bull Moose is actually Marshall Wittman of the Hudson Institute. He provides a link that's pretty convincing. Sorry.

I don't have a hell of a lot to say about what seems like the only story that counts, Israel. But I do have a bit to add about ANWAR drilling, which will probably come up for a vote and probably fail this week.

This point was made in the New Yorker some months ago, but after I heard some of the disingenuous arguments that pro-drillers were making, it's worth making again. A lot of people who ought to know better are making the argument that drilling in Alaska will reduce our dependence on Mideast oil (ten years from now, they don't add.) Sometimes they will come right out and claim that Alaskan will directly displace Mideast oil. But this is nonsense; it assumes that the Alaskan oil drilling project is part of a Soviet-style five-year plan.

If we were to drill in ANWR, the oil doesn't go into the Team USA account. Oil is a commodity with an international market, and the oil companies who got the contracts on ANWR wouldn't give Americans any favors when the oil was ready to sell. All it would do for oil consumers is depress the price of oil by a few cents. (For oil producers, of course, it would be an incredible boon worth billions.)

We could have achieved the same goal far more easily by mandating better fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. But that is unpatriotic or something.