Headlines
US clears troops over Italy death
US military investigators have cleared American soldiers of any wrongdoing over the killing of an Italian agent at a Baghdad checkpoint, an official says. Nicola Calipari was killed by US forces as he travelled in a car near Baghdad airport after securing the release of Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena. Ms Sgrena, who had been held by Iraqi kidnappers, was hurt in the incident. The US soldiers were "not culpable" according to the US military report, which Italy has refused to endorse.

Read the rest of the article for why the Italian government won?t endorse the findings. The short version is that we can?t get the stories to come out the same. The troops say the car was speeding toward a checkpoint, the Italians say their car had passed a parked military vehicle on the road and were far ahead of it when it fired on them. Underground sources indicate that the U.S. was unhappy with Ms. Sgrena?s propensity for telling reporters how many Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start our occupation.

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US closes book on Iraq WMD hunt
The US chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, has said inquiries into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have "gone as far as feasible". Mr Duelfer also said an official transfer of WMDs to Syria ahead of the Iraq war was not likely. The CIA adviser reported last year that neither expected stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, nor evidence of recent production had been found.

Please note, if you have not already done so, this guy is the US weapons inspector, not the UN. This is our guy ? a CIA ADVISOR ? going in there and saying, ?Dude, can?t find shit.?

Really makes me feel like the whole Iraq war-thing was worth it, huh?

And, damn, you know what I love? That our guys, the marines and the national guard and all our people over there STILL don?t have enough body armor, STILL have to be brought back as wounded at night so that no one will see them, Bush STILL hasn?t attended a funeral for any of the fallen soldiers, we STILL have an insurgent problem, there STILL isn?t a plan for getting out of there, the Iraqi people STILL see us as occupiers (and let?s face it, who?s surprised by this?) and Bush STILL can?t say that they were wrong about the WMDs and that maybe, just maybe it wasn?t that great of an idea to go into Iraq.

Bolton Bandwagon
Okay.

So let me get this straight. Tom Hubbard, a Bush-appointed and now retired ambassador to South Korea contacted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to express concern for the Bolton nomination.

In fact, When he heard Bolton?s testimony before the Senate panel on April 11, Hubbard said, ?I was not pleased? and he then decided to contact the panel on his own to correct the record.

In the first instance raised by Hubbard, Bolton erupted in anger and slammed down the phone when he learned that the ambassador hadn?t arranged a meeting for him with the president-elect of South Korea during a trip to Seoul in early 2003, according to an account Hubbard says he provided in recent days to staffers on the foreign relations panel.

That?s what you want: a man with the same ability to deal with disappointment and frustration as a toddler.

The second issue Hubbard has is with a speech Bolton gave in which he described life in North Korea as a ?hellish nightmare? and described ?Dear Leader? Kim Jong Il as a ?tyrannical dictator,? comments that prompted the North Korean government to denounce Bolton as a ?bloodsucker? and ?human scum.?

Now, do not assume that Kim Jong Il is my number one guy. However, it should be within the realm of a diplomat to, you know, not piss off any dictators who have nuclear ambitions.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary (a.k.a. dancing monkey), insists that Bolton has answered these allegations over and over again, but in fact, if you read the testimony, he keeps ?declining to comment? on anything.

And now we have Senator Frist trying to bring us back to the Reformation Europe. It may surprise some of you to know that we founded the United States based on the principal that Church and State should be separated. Why did we do it this way? Because zealots in Europe were trying to tell people that if they didn't believe what they were supposed to believe they would not only go to hell, but be unsuitable to hold any governmental power.

Sound familiar? Because some democrats feel that religious convictions have no place in government, somehow the Right has decided that those democrats are "against people of faith."

Senator Frist, the sentance is too short. We are not against people of faith, we are against people of faith running our lives.

The Founding Fathers were deists. What is the definition of a deist? "One who believes in the existence of a God or supreme being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason."

Look it up if you don't believe me, but don't pretend that you have my best interests at heart.

Romanian hides stolen mobe in vagina
This has got to be the funniest thing I?ve seen in a long time.

Defender of the Faith
From Slate?s Newspaper Roundup:

Everybody leads with the new pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, or as he now prefers, Benedict XVI. "After the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble worker in the Lord's vineyard," said Benedict, a 78-year-old German, who was Pope John Paul II's enforcer for ideology.

Benedict has long inveighed against what he sees as lax standards on morality, doctrine, and the primacy of Catholicism. He's disciplined priests who've pushed for reform, in the 1980s purging liberation theologists; in a letter he issued in 2000, titled Dominus Jesus, he dubbed other faiths "gravely deficient;" and as the Los Angeles Times editorial page details, he wrote that pro-choice politicians should be denied communion.

~~

Well that's just great. I'm thinking that Catholics from all corners of the world will come flocking back to church now that we have this shepherd to lead us.

Down the Toilet
Everything is going down the toilet in one swift flush...

I had a great entry all set and then the computer ate it. Maybe tomorrow.

(Links can be found at the Center for American Progress.)

HOMELAND SECURITY ? ALL THE NEWS THAT'S UNFIT TO PRINT: Every year since 1985 the State Department has published an annual report on international terrorism, described as "the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world." There will be no such report this year. The State Department has stopped publication of the 2004 report "after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985." According to both current and former officials, "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered 'Patterns of Global Terrorism' eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism." The State Department now says terrorism numbers will be provided by the new National Counterterrorism Center, but don't hold your breath: Asked when that report would be released, spokesman Richard Boucher admitted, "Don't have a date yet. They've agreed to do it; don't have a date yet?. I don't know when."

NORTH KOREA ? BALL IN U.S. COURT: North Korea has shut down its nuclear reactor and plans to remove the fuel to make bombs and "increase our deterrent" against a possible U.S. attack, an official said yesterday. The CIA has estimated the country possesses from two to eight nuclear weapons; reprocessing this reactor fuel could give it an additional six. "The ball is in the U.S. court," said North Korean Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Han Songryol. "We asked the United States to change its hostile policy." As to what America will do with the ball, one less than ideal development would be the confirmation of U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton. Bolton insulted North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and generally mishandled talks with North Korea so badly as undersecretary of state that he had to be recalled from talks by the Bush administration. He is known in Pyongyang as a "human scum and bloodsucker," as well as the "most undesirable person" that could possibly be named U.N. envoy.

HOMELAND SECURITY ? BUT AT LEAST THEY'LL LOOK GOOD: For the second time in three years, the Transportation Security Administration will be getting new uniforms, "not because the old ones wore out [but rather] as part of its evolving identity." The apparel reform comes as the agency is floating a "plan to possibly cut 400 screeners at Atlanta's busy airport ? just before the busy summer travel season," even though "a much-needed new system to screen passenger records and tag suspicious travelers isn't ready yet." The uniforms are not the only things at TSA being replaced; the agency "is preparing to hire its fourth director in three years." Uniforms aside, two upcoming government reports ? one from the Government Accountability Office and the other from the Homeland Security Department's inspector general ? are expected to state that "the quality of screening at U.S. airports is no better now than before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks."

PATIENTS' RIGHTS ? THE FIGHT TO PROTECT PLAN B: The continued struggle to combat pharmacists seeking to impose their moral beliefs on customers has heated up. There are now "at least 23 states, legislators and other elected officials [who] have passed laws or are considering measures" pertaining to a pharmacy's obligation to fulfill prescriptions for the "morning after" pill, which has yet to be approved for over the counter sale by the Food and Drug Administration. In Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) has "ordered pharmacies to fill prescriptions for women wanting the new 'morning after' pill," but the conservative leader of the state's Senate is encouraging pharmacists to disobey that order. The FDA could go a long way towards solving the impasse by making Plan B available for over the counter use, a move the agency has resisted for political reasons despite the near-unanimous recommendation of its own panel of medical experts.

Tax Returns for the Richie Riches
In case anyone is still unconvinced about the ?alleged? tax cuts for the wealthy, allow me to illuminate the situation with hard dollars and cents.

According to their own tax returns,

President and Mrs. Bush reported $784,219 in total income on their tax return. They paid $207,307 in income tax, $28,846 less than under the pre-Bush tax law.

Vice-president and Mrs. Cheney reported $2,173,892 in total income on their tax return. They paid $365,840 in income tax, $81,336 less than under the pre-Bush tax law.

In percentage terms, the Bushes paid 12 percent less in income tax due to the President?s tax cuts. The Cheneys paid 18 percent less.

And in case you were wondering, the average American paid $742 less than last year.

Three Miscellaneous Thoughts
Liner struck by wave sails again
A luxury cruise liner has completed emergency repairs in the US after being hit by a giant wave in the Atlantic.
THIS is why I don't sail. EVER.

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On This Day, 1955: Albert Einstein dies
Albert Einstein has died in hospital in Princeton, New Jersey, aged 76.
Einstein has been a hero of mine since childhood and I thought today, of all days, we should remember that while he was without a doubt one of the most brilliant minds of his - or possibly our - time, he was also a pacifist. As a German Jew, he fled Europe in 1933 when Hitler was elected Chancellor and he spent the rest of his life in Jersey. I wonder what Einstein would have thought about our current foreign policies.

~~

Support the Troops
Since I spend so much time railing against the "President" and his Cabal of non-thinking followers, I thought I'd post this link. Let it be known that I love my country, but fear my government. The troops are just doing their job and that's all we can ask of them. The fact that our government has shown them so little respect with regard to health care and job security is reprehensible.

Two Op-Eds Worth Reading
Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time
By FRANK RICH

Published: April 17, 2005

A scandal is like any other melodrama: It can't be a crowd pleaser unless the audience can follow the plot. That's why Monica Lewinsky trumped Whitewater, and that's why of all the story lines ensnaring Tom DeLay, the one with legs is the one with the craps tables. It's not just easy to follow, but it also has a combustive cultural element that makes it as representative of its political era as Monicagate was of the Clinton years. As the lies and subterfuge of the go-go 1990's coalesced around sex, so the scandal of our new "moral values" decade comes cloaked in religion. The hair shirt is the new thong.

This time the plot begins with money. Two K Street fixers, a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff and a flack named Michael Scanlon, managed to snooker six American Indian tribes into handing over $82 million in exchange for furthering their casino interests. According to The Washington Post, some of their tribal takings, cycled through a nonprofit center for "public policy research," helped send Mr. DeLay golfing in Scotland. The pious congressman, a gambling foe, says he had no idea of his trip's sinful provenance. Never mind that Mr. DeLay was joined abroad by Mr. Abramoff, whom he has described as one of his "closest and dearest friends," or that Mr. Scanlon had once been his spokesman. Mr. DeLay was as innocent of the goings-on around him as a piano player in a brothel.

Beltway cronyism, dubious junkets, loophole-laden denials are all, of course, time-honored Washington fare. The few on the right backing away from Mr. DeLay, from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page to Newt Gingrich, make a point of reminding us of that. As they see it, more in sorrow than in anger, the Gingrich revolutionaries who vowed to end the corruption practiced by Congressional Democrats have now been infected by the same Washington virus as their opponents. That's true, but this critique of Mr. DeLay and company by their own camp all too conveniently sidesteps the distinguishing feature of this scandal. Democratic malefactors like Jim Wright and L.B.J.'s old fixer Bobby Baker didn't wear the Bible on their sleeves.

In the DeLay story almost every player has ostentatious religious trappings, starting with the House majority leader himself. His efforts to play God with Terri Schiavo were preceded by crusades like blaming the teaching of evolution for school shootings and raising money for the Traditional Values Coalition's campaign to save America from the "war on Christianity." Mr. DeLay's chief of staff was his pastor, and, according to Time magazine, organized daily prayer sessions in their office. Today this holy man, Ed Buckham, is a lobbyist implicated in another DeLay junket to South Korea.

But it's not merely Christian denominations that figure in the religious plumage of this crowd. Mr. Abramoff, who is now being investigated by nearly as many federal agencies as there are nights of Passover, is an Orthodox Jew who in his salad days wore a yarmulke to press interviews. In Washington, he opened not one but two kosher restaurants (I hear the deli was passable by D.C. standards) and started a yeshiva. His uncompromising piety drove him to condemn the one Orthodox Jew in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, for securing "the tortuous death of millions" by supporting abortion rights. Mr. Abramoff's own moral constellation can be found in e-mail messages in which he referred to his Indian clients as "idiots" and "monkeys" even as he squeezed them for every last million. A previous client was Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, unlike Senator Lieberman, actually was a practitioner of torture and mass murder.

Another Abramoff crony is the political operative Ralph Reed, whom Mr. Abramoff hired for his College Republicans operation in the early 1980's. Mr. Reed, who has called gambling "a cancer on the body politic" and is running for lieutenant governor in Georgia, is now busily explaining that he, like Mr. DeLay, had no idea that some of his consulting firm's Abramoff-Scanlon paydays ($4.2 million worth) were indirect transfers of casino dough. Mr. Reed, of course, is best known for his stint as the public altar boy's face of Pat Robertson's political machine, the Christian Coalition.

It was at a Christian Coalition convention in Washington in 1994 that I first encountered yet another religious figure who pops up in this tale, the South African-born Rabbi Daniel Lapin. He was regaling the crowd with scriptural passages proving that high taxes are "immoral." Now the show rabbi of the Christian right, Rabbi Lapin has moved on to bigger broadcast pulpits. When he's not preaching the virtues of "The Passion of the Christ," he is chastising "Meet the Fockers" for promoting "vile notions of Jews" that "are not too different from those used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels." He apparently didn't like the idea that Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman played characters who enjoy sex.

Rabbi Lapin, according to Slate, is the networker who jump-started the mutually beneficial business relationship of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay by introducing them in the early 90's. That was some mitzvah. As Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition lobbyist who later jumped to the Democratic Leadership Council, told me recently, "We now see the meaning of Judeo-Christian values."

The values alleged so far in this scandal - greed, hypocrisy, favor-selling, dissembling - belong to no creed except the ruthless pursuit of power. They are not exclusive to either political party. But the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets.

It's not for nothing that Mr. DeLay's nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a "body bag." The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right's anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope's funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, "Death solves all problems; no man, no problem." The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get "a few more bodyguards." It wasn't necessarily a joke.

You can see why Dick Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay's threats of retribution against judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric, they've got a political Armageddon on their hands. Mr. DeLay got the message, sort of. At his Wednesday news conference, he tried to dial back some of his words, if only as a way of changing the subject from Indians and his own potential outings in a court of law. Unlike Bill Frist, he has yet to sign on to next Sunday's national Christian right telecast bashing what its organizer, the Family Research Council, calls "out-of-control courts."

Many believe that Mr. DeLay's legal fate is tied to that of Mr. Abramoff, whom the congressman has now downsized into one of "hundreds of relationships I have in Washington, D.C." Mr. Abramoff, intriguingly enough, hasn't always been a creature of the capital. He was raised in Beverly Hills, the town that is supposed to be anathema to every value that Republican theocrats stand for. And he returned there for a time in the late 1980's, when he produced an anti-Communist action film called "Red Scorpion." Once it was reported that extras and military equipment had been supplied by South Africa's racist government, Arthur Ashe's Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid condemned the film, and no major studio would touch it. But it opened nationwide nonetheless, to few customers and many protesters.

In 1992 Mr. Abramoff, eager to prove that he was unlike secular show-business Democrats, told The Hollywood Reporter that he was starting a Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment to emulate Christian anti-indecency campaigns. (He didn't.) But "Red Scorpion," on which Mr. Abramoff shares the writing credit, has many more four-letter words than "Meet the Fockers," as well as violence, bloodied beefcake (Dolph Lundgren's) and crucifixion imagery anticipating "The Passion of the Christ."

Though Mr. Abramoff has closed his yeshiva and is now being sued for back wages by its former employees, his cinematic creation survives on DVD. "Red Scorpion" is seriously Godawful, but, unlike the Ten Commandments displayed in Tom DeLay's office, it may yet endure as a permanent monument to what these people are about.

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Mr. Bush, Take a Look at MTV
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 17, 2005

When Turkey was massacring Armenians in 1915, the administration of Woodrow Wilson determinedly looked the other way. The U.S. ambassador in Constantinople sent furious cables to Washington, pleading for action against what he called "race murder," but the White House shrugged.

It was, after all, a messy situation, and there was no easy way to stop the killing. The U.S. was desperate to stay out of World War I and reluctant to poison relations with Turkey.

A generation later, American officials said they were too busy fighting a war to worry about Nazi death camps. In May 1943, the U.S. government rejected suggestions that it bomb Auschwitz, saying that aircraft weren't available.

In the 1970's, the U.S. didn't try to stop the Cambodian genocide. It was a murky situation in a hostile country, and there was no perfect solution. The U.S. was also negotiating the establishment of relations with China, the major backer of the Khmer Rouge, and didn't want to upset that process.

Much the same happened in Bosnia and Rwanda. As Samantha Power chronicles in her superb book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," the pattern was repeated over and over: a slaughter unfolded in a distant part of the world, but we had other priorities and it was always simplest for the American government to look away.

Now President Bush is writing a new chapter in that history.

Sudan's army and janjaweed militias have spent the last couple of years rampaging in the Darfur region, killing boys and men, gang-raping and then mutilating women, throwing bodies in wells to poison the water and heaving children onto bonfires. Just over a week ago, 350 assailants launched what the U.N. called a "savage" attack on the village of Khor Abeche, "killing, burning and destroying everything in their paths." Once again, there's no good solution. So we've looked away as 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur, with another 10,000 dying every month.

Since I'm of Armenian origin, I've been invited to participate in various 90th-anniversary memorials of the Armenian genocide. But we Armenian-Americans are completely missing the lesson of that genocide if we devote our energies to honoring the dead, instead of trying to save those being killed in Darfur.

Meanwhile, President Bush seems paralyzed in the face of the slaughter. He has done a fine job of providing humanitarian relief, but he has refused to confront Sudan forcefully or raise the issue himself before the world. Incredibly, Mr. Bush managed to get through recent meetings with Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and the entire NATO leadership without any public mention of Darfur.

There's no perfect solution, but there are steps we can take. Mr. Bush could impose a no-fly zone, provide logistical support to a larger African or U.N. force, send Condoleezza Rice to Darfur to show that it's a priority, consult with Egypt and other allies - and above all speak out forcefully.

One lesson of history is that moral force counts. Sudan has curtailed the rapes and murders whenever international attention increased.

Mr. Bush hasn't even taken a position on the Darfur Accountability Act and other bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senators Jon Corzine and Sam Brownback to put pressure on Sudan. Does Mr. Bush really want to preserve his neutrality on genocide?

Indeed, MTV is raising the issue more openly and powerfully than our White House. (Its mtvU channel is also covering Darfur more aggressively than most TV networks.) It should be a national embarrassment that MTV is more outspoken about genocide than our president.

If the Bush administration has been quiet on Darfur, other countries have been even more passive. Europe, aside from Britain, has been blind. Islamic Relief, the aid group, has done a wonderful job in Darfur, but in general the world's Muslims should be mortified that they haven't helped the Muslim victims in Darfur nearly as much as American Jews have. And China, while screaming about Japanese atrocities 70 years ago, is underwriting Sudan's atrocities in 2005.

On each of my three visits to Darfur, the dispossessed victims showed me immense kindness, guiding me to safe places and offering me water when I was hot and exhausted. They had lost their homes and often their children, and they seemed to have nothing - yet in their compassion to me they showed that they had retained their humanity. So it appalls me that we who have everything can't muster the simple humanity to try to save their lives.

Crime and Abortion
From today's New York Times:

The Miracle That Wasn't
By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: April 16, 2005

It is an inspirational urban lesson from the 1990's: take back the streets from squeegee men and drug dealers, and violent crime will plummet. But on Thursday evening, the tipping-point theory was looking pretty wobbly itself.

The occasion was a debate in Manhattan before an audience thrilled to be present for a historic occasion: the first showdown between two social-science wonks with books that were ranked second and third on Amazon.com (outsold only by "Harry Potter"). It pitted Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point," against Steven D. Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago with the new second-place book, "Freakonomics."

Professor Levitt considers the New York crime story to be an urban legend. Yes, he acknowledges, there are tipping points when people suddenly start acting differently, but why did crime drop in so many other cities that weren't using New York's policing techniques? His new book, written with Stephen J. Dubner, concludes that one big reason was simply the longer prison sentences that kept criminals off the streets of New York and other cities.

The prison terms don't explain why crime fell sooner and more sharply in New York than elsewhere, but Professor Levitt accounts for that, too. One reason he cites is that the crack epidemic eased earlier in New York than in other cities. Another, more important, reason is that New York added lots of cops in the early 90's.

But the single most important cause, he says, was an event two decades earlier: the legalization of abortion in New York State in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court.

The result, he maintains, was a huge reduction in the number of children who would have been at greater than average risk of becoming criminals during the 1990's. Growing up as an unwanted child is itself a risk factor, he says, and the women who had abortions were disproportionately likely to be unmarried teenagers with low incomes and poor education - factors that also increase the risk.

It's a theory that doesn't sit well with either liberals or conservatives, and Professor Levitt hastens to add that the reduction in crime is not an argument for encouraging abortion - he personally has mixed feelings on whether abortion should be legal. But he says the correlations are clear: crime declined earlier in the states that had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, and it declined more in places with high abortion rates, like New York.

Some criminologists have quarreled with his statistics, but the theory was looking robust at the end of the debate in Manhattan. Mr. Gladwell, while raising what he called a few minor quibbles, seemed mostly persuaded by the numbers.

"My first inclination," he joked at the beginning of his rebuttal, "is to say that everything you just heard from Steven Levitt, even though it contradicts things I have written, is true."

That's my inclination, too, as a less successful exponent of the same theory. (In 1995 I explained the crime decline with my version of the tipping point, the Squeegee Watershed, which became neither a buzzword nor a best seller.) In retrospect, the New York crime story looks like a classic bit of conventional wisdom, as the term was originally defined by John Kenneth Galbraith: an idea that becomes commonly accepted because it is "what the community as a whole or particular audiences find acceptable."

Unlike the abortion theory, which was raised in the 1990's and angrily dismissed, the tipping-point idea jibed reassuringly with everyone's beliefs and needs. Urbanites and politicians welcomed a new reason to crack down on street nuisances. Journalists wanted a saga with heroes. Criminologists and the police loved to see their new strategies having dramatic results.

I still think the police made some difference, and not merely because there were more of them on the streets. The new computerized crime-tracking strategies put new pressure on them.

One veteran cop told me that traditionally only a quarter of the officers had done their jobs, and that the heroic achievement of Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had been to get that figure up to 50 percent.

But it now looks as if the good guys did not take back the streets all on their own, and the moral of the story is less about safe streets than safe beliefs. Professor Levitt's abortion theory is not appealing. But the ideas that make us comfortable are the ones to beware.

~~

I have nothing to add; it's what I've been saying all along with regard to low-income women with poor educations raising unwanted children.

Mission...Accomplished?
I thought we had a flight suit demonstration to prove that the mission was accomplished two years ago. Mr. Bush, why have sixty people been taken hostage?

From the article:
The majority Shi'ites, long-oppressed under Saddam, have gained power along with Kurds while the Sunni minority has watched vast privileges from past years vanish.

Iraqi officials say they want Sunnis to play a role in the new government, hoping it would help end the insurgency, but there have been no tangible signs of this happening.

Bombs targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces killed at least four people on Friday.

A roadside bomb near the central city of Samarra killed two Iraqi soldiers, an army source said.

A car bomb designed to hit a U.S. military convoy passing through Baghdad's Mansour neighborhood killed at least one person and wounded five, including an American soldier, police and the U.S. military said.

Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq said one of its suicide bombers drove his vehicle into a convoy of American "cross worshippers" in Mansour and inflicted casualties.

"They are still gathering their dead and wounded," the group said in a statement posted on a Web site used by Islamists.

Elsewhere in the capital, a bomb targeting the Iraqi National Guard killed a civilian and wounded three, police said.

~~

I thought we were going to be welcomed with open arms....