The NSA Story Should Be Dead... But Don't Bet On It

The Senate confirmed General Michael Hayden to head the CIA today, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 78-15. Since Hayden was the head of the NSA from 1999-2005, at the time the NSA was engaging in the supposedly "illegal" "domestic spying" activities we've heard so much about, shouldn't this mean that that story is now officially dead?

Don't bet on it. Logic and consistency are not requirements for the left-wing of the Democratic Party or for their accomplices in the MSM.

Disconnected at the Old York Times

Here is the opening paragraph from Bob Herbert's column today in the New York Times:

You don't hear much from the American worker anymore. Like battered soldiers at the end of a lost war, ordinary workers seem resigned to their diminished status.

The rest of the article goes on in the same gloomy vein:

The grim terms imposed on them... a permanent state of employment insecurity.... the workplace has become a hub of anxiety and fear.... that increasingly endangered species, the secure job... workers and their families are often emotionally strapped as well. Common problems include depression, domestic strife and divorce... the reality is that there are not enough good jobs currently available to meet the demand of college-educated and well-trained workers in the United States....

Meanwhile, here is the opening paragraph of a report released this morning by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2006, according to preliminary estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

And, here is the opening paragraph from last month's jobs report from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Nonfarm employment increased by 138,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of theU.S. Department of Labor reported today. Industries with notable job gains over the month included financial activities, health care, and manufacturing. Average hourly earnings rose by 9 cents in April.

So, let's see, the economy is booming along at a 5.3% annual growth rate, and unemployment is at 4.7%, which is about the same as it was at this point in Bill Clinton's second term, which appears to have entered liberal mythology as a golden age for the American economy. And yet Bob Herbert is writing columns about how American workers are "battered soldiers at the end of a lost war"?

Bob Herbert commits journalistic malpractice every time he pens a column. Where or where are the editors at the Times? Where are the fact checkers? Doesn't anyone feel an obligation to the truth anymore? Do they, at last, have no shame at all?

Duke Lacrosse - Interesting Data at the Service of a Very Minor, Unrelated Point

The premise of at least some of the pontificating on the Duke Lacrosse rape investigation has been that the alleged assault was part of a history of white men in the South sexually abusing black women. The ironically-named Lynne Duke of the Washington Post is explicit:

The mainstream media have largely tiptoed around the brutal truth that has been discussed among black women in private conversations, in the blogosphere and on college campuses. It is that the Duke case is in some ways reminiscent of a black woman's vulnerability to a white man during the days of slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow, when sex was used as a tool of racial domination..... White men have always been fascinated with black women over the years. That's nothing new," says Peterson, who launched Durham Citizens Against Rape and Sexual Abuse in response to this case. With outlets such as BET and others portraying African American women as highly sexed, "young white boys, they want to touch, they want to see," Peterson says.

Real Clear Politics has taken apart Ms. Duke's "argument" here. The most interesting thing about their evisceration of her reasoning is their citation to Department of Justice statistics on white-on-black and black-on-white sexual assaults.

The statistics are here, and they are, frankly, astonishing. In 2003 there were 131,030 rapes or sexual assaults of white women, of which an estimated 15.5% were perpetrated by assailants identified as black. That's over 20,000 black-on-white assaults. Meanwhile, in 2003, there were 24,010 rapes or sexual assaults of black women, of which 0.0% were perpetrated by assailants identified as white.

Now, 0.0% sounds like not very much, and a footnote says that the estimate is based on a sample size of fewer than 10 incidents. Meanwhile, 87.9% of the sexual assaults on black women were incidents where the perpetrator was identified as black, meaning that there were approximately 21,104 rapes or sexual assults of black women by black men.

(I should note also that white men appear to have committed the largest total number of rapes, since they account for 57.9% of the 131,030 rapes of white women, or around 76,000 rapes. There also could be differentials in reporting crimes between different groups.)

I'm not a statistician or social scientist, and I don't want to make too big a point of this, because the points one might make wouldn't be very attractive. (You could, for instance, argue that white men are racists, but in a different way than Ms. Duke argues... they appear vastly more likely than black men to discriminate in their choice of victims for their sexual assaults.) It does seem to me that it is at least obvious that there is literally no statistical basis for Ms. Duke's argument that white men present some heightened or even very significant threat to the "vulnerability" of black women. But that's not my point.

Rather, my simple point is that... isn't it amazing that average fellows sitting at their computers can access this kind of hard data to refute an unfounded argument made by a writer at the most prestigious newspaper in the most important capital in the world? Whatever your views on the Duke Lacrosse case or on any other political issue we might disagree about, you have to admit that the Internet, used correctly, i.e., for disseminating respectful opinion and, even more importantly, for accessing primary documents and basic factual data, is a great boon to democratic discourse.

Insane Admissions Policy at Wisconsin Universities

The University of Wisconsin system has announced a new admissions policy that will substitute race and socioeconomic status for academic achievement in judging applications. It is insane. Here is the story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel describing the insanity.

Look, everyone is entitled to a free public education. But, if after 12-18 years of education, counting Head Start, publicly-subsidized preschools, 4-K (didn't exist when I was growing up), 5-K (we just called it kindergarten), grade school, middle school and high school, all on my dime -- I pay taxes, but my children go to Catholic schools -- if you haven't achieved a level of proficiency academically that is sufficient to get you into one of the umpteen Wisconsin universities, many of which aren't too rigorous to begin with, then that's too bad.

In case we haven't noticed, we are in a global economic competition with China and India, both of whom are much larger than us, growing much faster than us, whose economies are growing very fast, and who don't seem to have the psychological fixation we seem to have about not rewarding excellence and instead rewarding mediocrity or, it seems, incompetence. Our university system that is paid for, again, with my tax dollars, should be about excellence in academic achievement, period. Anything else is cultural suicide.

We are not too demanding academically from our high school seniors, we are not demanding enough.

Anti-Politics

I recall picking up a long time ago (in graduate school) a book by the Hungarian writer George Konrad called Anti-Politics. Like so many books I have read, I can hardly remember a thing about it years later, but my almost visceral memory is that his point was that we have become too obsessed with politics, the yin and yang of party, taking sides on every issue until all of life begins to appear to us simply as political issues upon which one is called to take a side; while real life, life as it is lived by real people, escapes.

Blogging, of course, feeds the political obsessions of many people, myself included. But today I thought I'd just -- as a heuristic exercise -- try to identify things that aren't political that mean a lot to me and make life, real life, worth living.

1. My wife. Best person I know.
2. My children. The adventure of a lifetime.
3. My parents. Lifelong exemplars of how to live purposefully.
4. My mother-in-law. Saintly.
5. Home improvements... is Home Depot great, or what?
6. Working in the yard on the weekend... ditto.
7. Neighbors with small children playing whiffle ball in their yards with my kids. Neighbors who build ice rinks in their backyards in the winter.
8. Neighborhoods like ours with sidewalks, and neighbors walking their dogs, and children learning how to ride their bikes.
9. Our parish... walking to church, walking to school, seeing people we know at every step.
10. Little League games.
11. Piano lessons.
12. Memorial Day soccer tournaments.
13. Reading Alan Furst novels.
14. Listening to all 162 Cardinals games on the Internet.
15. Albert Pujols.
16. Shrimp on the barbecue.
17. My wife's new iPod (which she lets me borrow sometimes).
18. Playing catch with the little man.
19. Reading Little House on the Prairie to my daughters.
20. Legos.
21. Eggos.
22. Blackberries from the supermarket at a price an average person can afford.... we are living in miraculous times when luxuries like that are commonplace.
23. The birch tree over my patio.
24. The spotlight that shines on our statue of the Virgin Mary at night, and then on our rose bushes, and then on our American flag, and then on the cupola on the top of our garage, and the weathervane at its peak.
25. The two cardinals who fly around our backyard in the morning... we have named them Harry and Hermione.
26. Watching Pride and Prejudice (the Jennifer Ehle version).
27. Watching Pride and Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version).
28. Duke basketball.
29. Springtime in Wisconsin after a long long winter.

You get the picture. Life is good. Be not afraid.

Duke Lacrosse -- The Key Insight

OK. My thought experiments have demonstrated: (a) that at least some of the other 17 or so young men at the Duke Lacrosse stripper party must have been eyewitnesses to the crime; and (b) that, if they were eyewitnesses, to the crime, then they would have come forward with evidence either because their parents made them do it, or because they thought it was the right thing to do. Since they didn't, that suggested to me that there was no crime.

But now let's do the final thought experiment.

1. Assume the crime did happen as the accuser says it did.

2. Assume the other lacrosse players at the party were eyewitnesses and/or know that it happened the way the accuser says it did.

3. Assume that at least some of the parents of these lacrosse players know that the rape happened the way the accuser says it did, because they wheedled the truth out of their sons under threat of taking away money, cars, tuition, etc.... i.e., all the things that parents can threaten kids with.

4. And yet, no one has come forward to give any evidence against the perpetrators of this heinous crime.

5. The only logical explanation is that all of these players, and many of their parents, are in a vast conspiracy to obstruct justice, to suborn perjury, and to aid and abet the coverup of a heinous rape and kidnapping.

6. But... hey, wait a minute... those are all crimes too!

Do we really believe that all of these other highly successful young men from good families, and even some of the parents, are going to commit a crime that can send them to jail for a long time to save three rapists? It doesn't make sense.

Finally -- and here's the point that really clinches the analysis -- why wouldn't Mike Nifong, the Durham D.A., drag all of these players and parents into the Grand Jury and give them immunity and demand that they testify about what they know? Do we really believe that these parents and these boys are going to commit perjury -- and risk the Scooter Libby treatment -- to save three rapists?

They wouldn't. All of which leads me to believe strongly that the rape could not have happened the way the accuser says it happened.

Thoughts?

Duke Lacrosse - The Next Step in the Analysis

OK. Now that we have our threshold insight that at least some of the other 17 or so Duke Lacrosse players in attendance at the infamous stripper party in that small Durham house are actual eyewitnesses to the crime, let's do a second thought experiment. The second key insight here is... these are all Duke students.

1. Duke costs a lot of money.

2. Duke parents care a lot about their kids' education, enough to spend the $35-40,000 a year to send them there. (Even if the Duke Lacrosse players are on scholarship, I still assume that those Duke parents also care a lot about their kids' education, enough that they did well enough in high school to get into Duke.)

3. Duke students care a lot about their own education and futures. They don't want things marring their resumes. They are looking forward to law school, business school, Wall Street, Washington, medical school, etc. These are achievers, or else they wouldn't be at Duke.

4. Duke students are also good kids generally. They volunteer. Many and probably most are regular churchgoers. They come from good families, and usually two-parent families. They may party when they are 18-22, but they also buckle down when they have to study, and generally become highly successful, responsible adults.

5. The Duke Lacrosse team is not atypical of the student body. The Duke Lacrosse team has a 100% graduation rate from a very tough academic school. The Duke Lacrosse team has more of its members on the ACC Academic Honor Roll than all of the other schools combined. The Duke Lacrosse team has a demonstrated commitment to charity work and volunteerism. All of this has been shown in a recent, comprehensive report on the lacrosse team.

6. In short, the Duke Lacrosse team is made up of kids who are above-average academically, above-average in their commitment to volunteer work, above-average in their achievement in extracurricular activities -- they were a favorite to win the national championship this year, and were runners-up last year. They are, in short, based on all of the evidence prior to the stripper party, exemplary young men. Rowdy? Sure. But to put it bluntly, smart, tough, good-hearted, rowdy young men won World War II for America. These are the types of guys you'd get in a foxhole with.

Which brings me to my second key insight on the Duke lacrosse situation.... assuming as I have that the rape took place as the accuser says it did in a small house in Durham during a party and assuming that the 17 or so other young men at the stripper party are basically good kids from good families who have solid careers ahead of them and assuming that at least some of the young men were eyewitnesses to the rape.... assuming all that, does it at all stand to reason that none of the young men came forward at a time when all of them were under suspicion to give evidence to the police regarding the truth of that night? Does it at all stand to reason that none of the parents of these achievers ever got into their son's face and said, you tell me the truth right now or you can forget about me paying for your law school?

Now, let's put it even more bluntly. If these kids are witnesses, does it make sense that none of them would want to testify truthfully? Do we really think that these otherwise exemplary young men condone the rape?

Go further: if these kids are witnesses, do we really believe that none of their parents would by now have forced them to testify truthfully? Does it make sense that all of these parents, at least some of whom are probably lawyers themselves, are willing to let their sons, in whom they have invested not only money but the hopes of their lives, commit perjury to save friends who are rapists?

To me, the fact that none of these kids has come forward to testify truthfully about a heinous crime committed by their teammates strongly suggests to me that they all believe that no such crime occurred.

To me, the fact that none of these kids has been forced by their parents to give truthful testimony about a heinous crime committed by their teammates even more strongly suggest to me that these parents -- intelligent, responsible, successful adults -- also strongly believe that no such crime occurred.

Duke Lacrosse - The Threshold Insight

Let's try a thought experiment.

1. Assume the Duke Lacrosse rape happened as the accuser says it did. In the midst of a party of 20 or so Duke student athletes in a small house, three of the boys dragged a 27 year old stripper into a bathroom and repeatedly raped, sodomized, strangled, and beat her for 30 minutes.

2. Does it stand to reason that none of the other 17 or so young men saw: (a) the other boys go into the bathroom with the stripper; or (b) the other boys come out of the bathroom afterwards.?

3. Does it stand to reason that, in a small house, none of the other 17 or so young men heard (a) the sounds of struggle; (b) the sounds of demonic laughter or crude encouragement (wouldn't a gang rape of drunken boys be accompanied by some noise? would they perpetrate this heinous crime as silently as if they were Ethan Hunt of Mi:III breaking into Langley?); (c) shouts of pain or anger from the stripper?

4. Does it stand to reason that none of these 17 or so young men noticed that Seligmann, Finnerty, and their captain, Dave Evans, had disappeared for a half an hour?

5. Does it stand to reason that none of these 17 or so young men noticed that the stripper -- who, after all, was the primary focus of their attention at the party -- had also disappeared for a half an hour?

6. Does it stand to reason that none of these 17 or so young men ever went to look for any of these people during that half an hour? (If the white male Duke Lacrosse players are all such awful, drunken, spoiled, rich kids, as the initial press seemed intent on saying, then why wouldn't the others have wanted to find the stripper and join in, or at least egg the perpetrators on?)

7. Does it even stand to reason that none of these 17 or so young men, who were drinking beer throughout the evening, had to go to the bathroom for 30 minutes? That none of them knocked on the door or stood outside and listened? (Unless I'm mistaken about small off-campus houses in Durham, I would bet that the house only had one bathroom.)

8. Does it stand to reason that, if any of these 17 or so young men on a tight-knit team had heard or seen anything, that they wouldn't have told others on the team?

It's a small house. This threshold insight leads me to the logical conclusion that, if the rape happened the way the accuser says, then at least some of the other 17 or so Duke Lacrosse players heard something or saw something. That is, my threshold insight leads me to the conclusion that there are numerous eyewitnesses to the crime.

McCain Heckled

John McCain was heckled when he tried to give an address at commencement for "The New School" in New York. Heckled!

Look, I am no John McCain guy. To me he is a bit of a phony, a guy who appears permanently enamored with his own wonderfulness. I hated McCain-Feingold -- which I continue to view as unconstitutional -- and I hated his "Gang of 14" position on confirming judges. On the other hand, he's reliable on Iraq and reliably pro-life, so that's in his favor. So he's a guy who's on my team, but not somebody I'd pick to be my quarterback, if you know what I mean.

But, holy cripes, John McCain is a seventy-year old United States Senator who was once shot down over North Vietnam and spent seven years in a prisoner of war camp. What on earth makes the yahoos at the "New School" -- what the heck is the New School anyway? -- think that heckling someone like that is an appropriate thing to do? When did atrocious manners become a mode of political discourse? Why weren't the other students telling them to sit down and shut up?

If Bob Kerrey -- the former Nebraska Senator, Medal of Honor winner, and President of the New School -- were thinking clearly, he would have said something like the following:

"Well, it appears that some people here don't have the manners of tomcats, don't respect their elders (and betters), and don't appear to have learned anything about civil discourse in a democracy. So I guess we'll just have to cancel commencement. Too bad that you people who aren't heckling won't get your degrees this year, and too bad that we'll have to notify the graduate schools, law schools, business schools, medical schools, etc., that you've applied to or the businesses that you've gotten jobs at that you won't be able to come because you don't have a degree. Seriously, it's unfortunate. But I don't believe in governments or institutions trying to shackle free speech, I believe in social stigmatization and peer pressure as a means of teaching people how to behave in public. And you haven't done your part to put pressure on your peers.

"Also, by the way, in order to graduate next year, you will all have to reapply and be admitted, and (not incidentally) pay another year's tuition. Otherwise, you can forget about getting a diploma from the New School.

"Thank you. And... see you in September!"

Here's the point. Dissent masquerades as courageous in America today. But it isn't courageous, because there are no consequences... we are all Civil Disobedience nowadays, but Thoreau never gets thrown in the hoosegow. If you said to graduating seniors at the New School that we will have procters at the ccommencement ceremony and anyone who heckles anyone will be expelled, not just from the commencement, but from the school... then standing up and heckling would be an act of political courage. Without those consequences, it has all the courage of a little boy kicking a cat. They know that they won't suffer any consequences, not even a punch in the nose from McCain himself.

Duke Lacrosse Update

David Evans was indicted today. Evans is the captain of the Duke lacrosse team. Surprisingly, his lawyers (and his parents, at least one of whom and probably both of whom are lawyers too) let him go out and make a public statement. While I am not a criminal defense attorney, I know enough to know that this is a high-risk strategy, and one that they wouldn't have done if they had any doubt about his innocence.

Here is an article about his public statement today. There is a link to the video of his statement, which is compelling viewing.

Look, people with exemplary family backgrounds and a history of accomplishment through high school and college can commit crimes, even rape. People with those kinds of backgrounds can lie too. But this fellow doesn't seem like a liar to me. Judge for yourself.

Libya -- The Good News That No One Will Notice

Forget about Iraq for just a second. Forget about the dispute over whether Saddam had WMDs, or whether he wanted to restart his WMD program, or whether he could have restarted his WMD program fairly quickly had sanctions been lifted, had the France-USSR goalong-getalong attitude prevailed, had President Bush not led the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam's regime.

No one disputes that Qaddafi and Libya had a WMD program. No one disputes that Qaddafi and Libya were dangerous. And no one disputes that the reason that Qaddafi and Libya gave up their WMD program in 2003 was in reaction to the American invasion of Iraq. Qaddafi didn't want to be next, plain and simple.

So, now, when Libya has given up its WMDs and has cooperated enough with the US to be in a position that we will restore normal diplomatic relations, shouldn't it be said that this is a remarkable achievement of Bush's foreign policy team? Shouldn't he get some credit for it? Will he?

My prediction... do a Lexis-Nexis search tomorrow and the next day and the next day and then on Friday. By the end of the week, there will be zero news stories about Libya.

The Latest Non-Story from the Non Story Agency

The NSA -- National Security Agency -- used to be referred to by Beltway wags as the "No Such Agency," because its very existence was secret. No longer. So I am now going to start a new trend of referring to the NSA as the "Non Story Agency," because it appears that the media is fixated on breathlessly reporting as news things about the NSA that aren't remotely newsworthy, other than the fact that someone has committed treason in revealing them.

The latest non-story that has blown up into a media hissy fit is the report that the NSA receives records of telephone calls made in the U.S. from three major phone companies, then "data mines" those enormous sets of information for patterns of calling that could link to al Qaida. Here is the money quote from the Washington Post story about the program:

Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent Americans, their sheer scope, the number of "transactions" being tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real time.

The italics are mine, and the italics are all that really matters, because the italicized qualification that says that there is "no evidence" of any illegality or abuse related to the program means, well, that there's no evidence. Where I practice law, "no evidence" means no evidence, nada, zippo, case is over, go home. What it should mean to a newspaper editor is "where's the story, here, you lame-o, how about going out and finding some real news!"

What it apparently means nowadays, however, is that "although there is nothing to report that news organizations in the past would have judged to be 'news,' we are going to report on paranoid suspicions of things that might happen sometime in the future, because we don't like the President and want the Democrats to win Congress in 2006 so they can impeach him and get back at the GOP for Monica Lewinsky."

This NSA program is entirely legal -- see the 1979 Supreme Court case of Smith v. Maryland, where the Court held that information about telephone numbers called is essentially billing information, which the customer has no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding, and which, in fact, belongs to the phone companies, not to the customer. However, it is (was) classified, so the real story, if the WaPo wanted to go this route, would be to ask who committed a very serious crime that threatens our national security by revealing the existence of a classified NSA program. Fat chance.

Hollywood's Self-Defeating Ideology

Much has been said about the left-wing, post-1960s ideology of Hollywood that shows up in the kinds of movies that are made and (like The Passion of the Christ) the kinds of movies that Hollywood refuses to make and that only come to be made through heroic efforts by individuals. But it's worth noting that the left-wing ideologists who make these decisions are acting irrationally from an economic standpoint.

Consider: here is a list of the all-time box office winners in the American domestic market adjusted for inflation. What jumps out for me is the pro-American, pro-Christian, or pro-family themes of many of the box-office champions from before the 1960s:

• The Sound of Music (inflation-adjusted domestic gross of $911 million);
• The Ten Commandments (inflation-adjusted domestic gross of $838 million);
• Ben-Hur ($627 million);
• Mary Poppins ($500 million);
• The Robe ($419 million);
• The Bells of St. Mary's ($401 million);
• Swiss Family Robinson ($344 million);
• Sergeant York ($308 million).

Notably, I am leaving out a number of Disney cartoon features that dot the list as well, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 101 Dalmations, Fantasia, and The Jungle Book, all of which are in the top 27 films of all time in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Notably, too, these figures are inflation-adjusted, but not population-adjusted. A pro-Christian film like The Robe or Ben-Hur that grossed $400 or $600 million in the 1950s would gross closer to $1 billion in a country that, today, is twice the size.

The question I have is the following: aren't most major studios owned by publicly-traded corporations? And, don't the boards of directors of those publicly-traded corporations owe fiduciary duties to their stockholders to try to maximize their profits? It sure seems to me that the boards of directors who ultimately run the studios aren't doing their jobs very well if they are ignoring opportunities for profit represented by pro-Christian, pro-American films.

Economic News

Polipundit notes that President Bush needs to start "talking up" how good the economy is doing.... for instance, this Business Week story that tax receipts due to the raging economy are way up, so that the federal budget deficit for 2006 will come in far below prior estimates. Good point. But why does the President have to "talk up" things that are simply facts that the news media should report accurately without having to be prompted? Unemployment is very low, interest rates on home mortgages remain historically quite low, home ownership is way up, the economy is growing robustly, tax revenues are streaming into the federal government coffers despite Bush's tax cuts (or, more accurately, because of them... but that's thinking too far outside the static box much of the media is in), etc., etc., etc. Shouldn't most Americans simply know these facts by reading the papers?

Oh... I remember why not. Because there is a rule against reporting good news if it redounds to the benefit of Republicans or conservative policies.