A Second Hand Conjecture

The NYT has a nice little interactive diagram of Governor Blagojevich’s web of criminal influence.

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(NYT)

The New York Times has a fascinating little chart today, illustrating the primary sources of nuclear weapons proliferation over time. In looking at the diagram, one cannot escape the overall impression that until recently the West has been the main and long-enduring source for most of the world’s nuclear proliferation. Given our traditional focus on authoritarian rouge states when it comes to proliferation threats –and our obsession with Russia and the former Soviet republics as potential proliferating agents– this might prompt us to reexamine some basic assumptions about where the sources of danger lie in technology transfer.

When considered, it shouldn’t really be surprising that the West is or was the top proliferator. There are several factors we could readily identify which would have made getting nuclear secrets in a Western democracy far easier than within the USSR. Among them might be:

1. Unregulated communications make it easy to operate covert networks with little fear of detection.
2. Relatively open borders facilitate easy transportation of personnel and material.
3. Integrated trade alliances dedicated to industrial products make the shipment of advanced technology between countries relatively unremarkable.
4. A cosmopolitan scientific community which publishes and socializes in a consolidated cross-cultural milieu, in which technical information exchange between countries is also unremarkable.
5. An educational experience and civic culture that encourages individualism which can create rogue actors more easily.
6. A shared lingua franca among an international scientific elite that makes it easy for them to converse and exchange ideas one-to-one, without need of translation services.
7. Being the focal point for scientific and technology origination attracts attention from foreign intelligence services and black market operators.

Closed off and regimented societies prohibit or severely curtail most of these facilitating characteristics, and this fact might represent the disqualifying criteria that made a country like the USSR a virtual non-proliferator. Conditions more commonly associated with proliferation risk in policy debates such as malicious government, poverty and political repression, do not historically appear to be the primary risk points. Indeed, such characteristics might lead us to target the wrong societies for technology transfer such as Russia and North Korea.

But if the above list better reveals vulnerability points to proliferation, the country most likely to proliferate inadvertently or intentionally outside of the West would have to be China, with targets being her integrated East Asian and African alliance states. Increasingly China satisfies almost all of the requirements. Her massive communications architecture is becoming increasingly unmonitorable (even if the government tries), she is expanding her transportation links with the world at a rapid pace and making it easier to come and go, she has a large and increasingly cosmopolitan scientific community that is English speaking and mobile, she is a major commercial technology exporter and an origination point of primary scientific research.

Perhaps it should therefore not be surprising that the most recent proliferation vectors in the diagram above emanate from the PRC. Something to consider.

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Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress is upset Fred Barnes and Dick Morris are blaming Obama for the post-election declines in the stock market. Armbruster’s case is a little defensive and misjudged (he cites the New York Times’ opinion, as if that would mollify critics), but then the transition from implacable critic of a government to determined apologist for a proto-government has been swift for all at TP.

However, in a general way he does have a point to object on I think. People are out to make cash gains where and when they can in this market, and opportunities have been rather few lately. To the extent that there was a specific macro cause, it seems to me the abrupt election day rally was the more likely culprit for the subsequent sell-off. That is what we’ve seen in other isolated spikes on events this year. The Saturnian habit for feeding yourself by eating your children, rather than letting them grow up to sow the fields, if you will.

Although it should be said that Dick Morris’ point that provoked Armbruster’s ire is not entirely unreasonable either. There’s certainly some incentive for selling on a small gain now, if you expect capital gains taxes to be substantially higher later. Comprehensively rejecting that as a buried motive is not reasonable.

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The New York Times is reporting that Obama is developing a plan for all-female rapid-response teams to be sent around the country in an effort to counter Palin as she travels. A wise move.

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RedState finds a better title for a New York Times hitpiece on Sarah Palin: “Newsflash: The people Palin beat don’t like her.”

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Eric Posner looks back at the predictions of the Surge in Iraq failing, and how ignorant they look today.

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On Monday the United States officially returned all security duties for Anbar province to Iraqi police and military. The collapse of the Sunni insurgency there now appears to be almost total, with attacks having declined 90% from only two years ago.

The progress is perhaps best illustrated by this dramatic chart from the New York Times:

(NYT via BlogsforVictory)

Is 2006, 1968? The year the antiwar movement stopped paying attention to developments on the ground in the war, as Creighton Abrams’ Vietnamization strategy or Petraeus’ “Iraqification” approach later worked so spectacularly well? With their continued opposition to ongoing stabilization efforts, it certainly seems like a great many in the antiwar left are still captives of that dramatic and pivotal year.

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Michael F. Cannon at Cato blogs about a NYTimes article on the rife fraud found and covered up at Medicare. A confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report claimed that the behavior they found at the Medicare Administration was rife with irregularities.

Medicare reported to Congress that, for the fiscal year of 2006, AdvanceMed’s investigations had found that only 7.5 percent of claims paid by Medicare were not supported by appropriate documentation. But the inspector general’s review indicated that the actual error rate was closer to 31.5 percent.

Law makers called it “tantamount to corruption”. Michael ends his piece with some great quotes:

[One] congressional watchdog had seen it all before:

“This report doesn’t surprise me,” said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. He has pushed to cut improper Medicare spending. “To look better to the public, you cook the books,” he said. “This agency is incompetent.”

Of course, Pete Stark’s solution for Medicare’s incompetence is to force you to enroll:

There is a road map laid out for us…Medicare. Medicare has lower administrative costs than any private plan on the market…Medicare has shown us the power of simplicity; we need only expand its promise to the rest of our population.

Medifraud for all!

heh, indeed.

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Every day, Professor Keith Burgess-Jackson reprints a Letter to the Editor from the New York Times.  This offering left me gape-jawed.

The Professor’s first point is well-taken.

Where is the evidence that Barack Obama is more intelligent than John McCain? Have they taken intelligence tests?

One might argue that because Obama performed better in college than McCain, he is the more intelligent of the two.  Yet, we all know many people where one individual had a superior college record to another, but the first is not more intelligent than the second.  Perhaps Obama is smarter than McCain.  But, I do not know of any overwhelming evidence that this is so.

In any case – let us grant the writer this point.  So what?  While a certain level of intelligence is assuredly required for someone to be a good President – it is but a necessary condition, and not a sufficient one.  A wide variety of other factors matter:  character, experience, leadership, voting record, viewpoints on issues and more.  Essentially, this is Keith’s second point:

Americans want an intelligent president, but not at the cost of good character and good judgment.

If people believe that Obama is a superior candidate to McCain – that is their decision.  Yet, their choice should be based upon this entire set of qualities – not simply which man is smarter than the other.

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I would call this ignorance, but it is worse than that. The Times reporters just believe corporations are such a honey pot they didn’t even stop to think. They just wrote.

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James Traub has written a magnificent survey of the events leading up to the current war in Georgia, and the personal contest between Mikheil Saakashvili and Putin.

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One can always count on the New York Times for publishing pernicious editorial advice on foreign policy.

To duty, Helene Cooper is eager for the US to seize the opportunity of the South Ossetia invasion to…throw Georgia under the bus and forge a closer relationship with Russia. Clearly makes sense under the circumstances right? Why wouldn’t we want to ally with an increasingly nondemocratic state that is now engaged in aggressive territorial expansion through the military conquest of her neighbors.

But if that sounds too crazy for you (that is, if you’re human), she offers an alternative policy from George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor. He advises that the United States should just “shut up” and ignore the invasion of a close ally.

With such advice careers are made, and we can only wonder why.

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(photo: photosan0)

Yesterday I suggested that it was unwise for Obama to have titled and predicated a video on a line from a rather slanted New York Times editorial, given the growing public perception of media bias in his favor. But he has now built an entire microsite and subcampaign on the title of that editorial, which was and is called the “Low-Road Express” (Times editorial | Obama campaign microsite). It’s a natural question to ask which preceded which in authorship, or whether this sort of thing is now coordinated, or just the inadvertent consonance of devoted admirers.

The phrase itself is fourteen hours old in penetrating the leftblogs and is doing well. Ironically enough it was a pro-McCain blog (citing the Times) that can claim inauguration of the trend.

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The Obama campaign has a new video response to McCain. It’s an interesting approach. The heart of the ad is the beginning, in which quotes from major pro-Obama media editorials are superimposed over McCain, calling his (unspecified) criticism “baseless,” “baloney,” etc.

Since there is some evidence in the polls that the positive press attention Barack has been receiving may be having a counterproductive effect, might it be unwise to let your press advocates perform your defense in your own ad? Given the situation, it might seem like a further blurring of the separation lines between independent media and political campaign. Naming the spot for a line taken from a profoundly and explicitly partisan New York Times editorial can’t help either.

This ad may hint that a system of mutual reinforcement has emerged between the Obama campaign and certain media organizations that is essentially ineluctable and indissoluble. If so, the more pressure and stress that is put on that relationship as symmetry, the more brittle and uncomfortable it may become for both parties. Were I McCain, I’d attack that point harder than he is.

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For those of you who love New York Times bashing, I am in rant mode at Risk and Return. What a bunch of balderdash.

Also, if you want a good idea of where housing prices may go, I also have this. Charts, I have lots of charts!

Finally, I really hate the housing bill.

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Copious Dissent has the goods. And they are pretty good. (Video at link).

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Story here [via: Instapundit]

After reading the story, you will probably need a new one of these:

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Many of my liberal friends believe that the line “Fox News; Fair and Balanced” is a joke. I happen to think it’s pretty accurate, but – who knows? Perhaps it is indeed my bias that lends me to that opinion.

I defy my friends on the left, however, to read this post by Ed Morrissey and then be able to tell anyone with a straight face that their beloved New York Times is “fair and balanced.”

The Times may have the slickest, sharpest advertising around, in depth feature articles and quality bridge columns. “Fair and balanced,” however, has not been associated with news reporting at the Times for a while.

Think that may be a factor in this?

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THE LATEST non-issue hyped by (who else?) the New York Times is that “some” people are questioning whether or not John McCain is eligible to be a sitting President:

The question has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president? In the case of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the issue is becoming more than a matter of parental daydreaming.

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

[...]

“There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” said Sarah H. Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively. “It is not a slam-dunk situation.”

Mr. McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a Navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that Mr. McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

I don’t think the writer of this article, Carl Hulse, could be more melodramatic (”The question has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president?” — really, Carl? That’s what’s been nagging them?). But then again, there’s not much “there” there, as noted by Dr. Steven Taylor, so I suppose he had to make it at least somewhat suspenseful:

While I will allow that I am not a conlaw scholar, this strikes me as a non-issue. The child of US citizens is a citizen, regardless of where he or she was born. As such, someone like McCain was a citizen by virtue of birth, not via naturalization, and hence he is a “natural born citizen.” Any other interpretation seems ludicrous on its face, to me.

Dr. Taylor points to where Congress previously considered the issue, and quotes the Hulse article:

Quickly recognizing confusion over the evolving nature of citizenship, the First Congress in 1790 passed a measure that did define children of citizens “born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States to be natural born.” But that law is still seen as potentially unconstitutional and was overtaken by subsequent legislation that omitted the “natural-born” phrase.

[...]

Mr. McCain’s citizenship was established by statutes covering the offspring of Americans abroad and laws specific to the Canal Zone as Congress realized that Americans would be living and working in the area for extended periods.

Curiously, despite penning the paragraphs above, Hulse still seems to think McCain’s ability to be President is an issue. Ann Althouse disagrees (emphasis in original):

The real constitutional interpretation is taking place right now, as we decide whether to accept a man with this problem as the nominee, and later, as the candidate. I think we as a people have already answered the question as to McCain. None of his opponents are using disqualification as an argument and no one is concerned about it. Think of how different it would be if Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for President. The issue would be debated and argued, and I think we’d see him as disqualified and, because of that, he’d never reach the point of nomination. Can you picture Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton trying to defeat McCain by making the argument that his birth in the Canal Zone disqualifies him? They’d only make themselves look bad. The argument is so unattractive that no one serious will make it, and therefore the question, for all realistic purposes, has already been answered.

For those keeping score, the NYT has in consecutive weeks (a) smeared the likely Republican candidate for Election 2008 with a story based on mere innuendo, rumor, and decades old news, and (b) raised the non-issue of McCain’s status as a natural-born citizen of the United States. But never fear, for this is all the news that’s fit to print. [/eyeroll]

UPDATE: April Gavaza manages to write what I was thinking but somehow forgot to jot down:

I may not like McCain, but these attacks on him are ludicrous and forcing me into the uncomfortable position of defending him. First the NYT article about nothing and now this, a parsing of the phrase “natural born”. It smacks of desperation.

UPDATE II: Jim Lindgren weighs in with the legal history behind “natural-born citizens,” and concludes:

According to even the most technical meaning of “natural born” citizen in the 1780s, John McCain is a natural born citizen of the United States, but George Washington and Thomas Jefferson may not have been (since they were born before 1776), though they would have been generally treated as such at the time.

Of course, when slinging mud as the NYT is doing the arguments don’t need to be sound, some of the mud just has to stick.

UPDATE III: Via the comments below, Roland Dodds notes the right-wing genesis for this dubious knock on John McCain:

Upon trolling through far right websites today, I found one of the more interesting arguments made against McCain’s candidacy from the right: he apparently isn’t a natural born citizen. From the American Voice, a right wing radio network associated with Bo Gritz (the right wing survivalist associated with the Christian Identity movement, and worked fervently to stop Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube from being removed in 2005) …

And should I found it the least bit surprising that the American Voice is advocating Ron Paul?

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Every good smear deserves a plea to stop the smearer and the dirty apes who support them…

One does have to wonder why the New Yawk Times would first endorse a candidate, and then publish what I would assume was to them, a scandalous article about that very candidate. One hand not knowing what the other is doing? Or perhaps, it’s just plain partisan politics on the part of the paper?

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I am not a fan of John McCain, but the rumor-based smear leveled at him by the New York Times is more than a little unfair.

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

[...]

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

The source of this putative scandal is two disgruntled former aides, who are flatly contradicted by both McCain and Iseman, as well as by McCain’s real “top advisers” Mark Salter and Rick Davis:

Mr. Davis and Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s top strategists in both of his presidential campaigns, disputed accounts from the former associates and aides and said they did not discuss Ms. Iseman with the senator or colleagues.

“I never had any good reason to think that the relationship was anything other than professional, a friendly professional relationship,” Mr. Salter said in an interview.

The real purpose of rehashing old rumors is to undermine McCain’s image as a fighter of political corruption. Most of the meat in the story actually has to do with the Keating Five scandal, in which McCain was implicated, and which the NYT seems to think is news despite being two decades old. John Hinderaker sums up the NYT’s journalistic judgment this way:

On Fox News tonight, Bob Bennett, who is representing McCain with respect to the Times story–that doesn’t mean that he will sue the newspaper, as that is impossible under current law–said that the Times had lowered its standards by printing this rather absurd smear. That is incorrect, of course. The Times is a mouthpiece for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, nothing more. Its smear of McCain–not the last, to be sure–is entirely consistent with the editorial policies it has maintained for many years. Tomorrow’s story is just one more reminder of why no sophisticated person takes the Times seriously as a news source.

I think that’s about right. My guess is that the entire story was meant to do nothing more than cast some easily negotiated hurdles into McCain’s path so that the still-battling Democratic candidates have a chance to catch up. The Democrats are certainly disadvantaged by not having their nominee wrapped up yet. Anything that slows down McCain’s momentum helps the eventual Democratic candidate. This thinly-sourced, highly inferential NYT smear job sure seems designed to do just that.

Judging by the copious amounts of commentary on the non-story, perhaps the NYT succeeded in its goal. However, in this age of blogging, formidable push back is also available.

Aides to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have released a remarkable 1,500-word document outlining what his campaign calls “some of the facts that were provided to The New York Times but did not end up in the story.”

Politico has the full statement, and lots more.

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The New York Times lengthy and favorable look at Michael Yon’s extraordinary efforts in Iraq is well worth reading today.

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Except instead of suicide, now they are murderers to boot. Armed Liberal takes a bat to the NY Times.

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(Listening notes: Magnetic Fields, Husker Du, Queen, Soft Cell, Indigo Girls, The Smith’s, REM, Pet Shop Boys, B-52’s, Scissor Sisters. A homage to Andrew Sullivan of sorts.)

I am here to step into the breach and defend Glenn Reynolds from two people I admire a lot. This week I visited Belgravia Dispatch and came upon this:

I don’t think of Reynolds as a political animal. He has independent integrity. But when push came to shove, Reynolds never challenged in any serious way the abuses of power in this administration nor the extremism of the Malkinesque blogosphere. When a libertarian finds any excuses to ignore or minimize government-sponsored illegality and torture, then he has truly ceased to be a libertarian in any profound sense. If my opinion weren’t so high of his abilities, my disappointment wouldn’t be so deep.

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