All shall have prizes

Sometimes things are so cosy on the Rolodex where George VII picks his ambassadors that the diplomacy is just a continuation of private business by other means:

President George W. Bush today announced the designation of a Presidential Delegation to the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin, Italy.

Mrs. Laura Bush will lead the delegation.

Members of the Presidential Delegation are:

The Honorable Ronald P. Spogli, U.S. Ambassador to Italy

Miss Barbara Bush

Mr. Roland Betts, Founder and Chairman of Chelsea Piers, L.P.

Mr. Brad Freeman, Founder Freeman Spogli & Co.

Yes, the founders of the private equity firm Freeman Spogli will be in Turin -- one as the Ambassador to Italy, and one sent along on a junket, and probably updating Ambassador Spogli on the high-jinks around water cooler at his old firm when he gets there. The firm's press release does note that Ron Spolgi had one qualification that many of Bush's diplomatic nominees have not:

"All of us at Freeman Spogli are extremely happy for Ron," said Brad Freeman, co-founder of Freeman Spogli. "With his fluency in Italian, he is extremely qualified for the position and he will serve our country well as Ambassador to Italy.

Dare we predict a future ambassador to Italy, Carlyle Group founder Frank Carlucci?

UPDATE 13 FEB: New etiquette for the corresponding announcement for the closing ceremony?

President George W. Bush today announced the designation of a Presidential Delegation to attend the Closing Ceremonies of the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin, Italy.

The Honorable Rudolph W. Giuliani, Former Mayor of New York City, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Giuliani Partners LLC, and Name Partner of Bracewell & Giuliani LLP will lead the delegation

So Brad Freeman is not a 'Name Partner'?

UPDATE 5 JULY: Freeman in turn is sufficiently close to Bush to be heavily involved in his 60th birthday celebrations.

FINAL UPDATE 4 APRIL 2007: Brad Freeman pops up again, this time as the host of a private Republican party fundraiser in Los Angeles to be attended by George Bush -- after he sticks the taxpayer with the cost of his cross-country trip via a propaganda speech to a captive military audience in Fort Irwin.

The Crow's Egg

Via Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post, criticism of the meaningless ritual of the State of the Union address:

"More like an acceptance speech at a national convention than a candid review of the nation's situation at the outset of a new year, the State of the Union has evolved into a semi-imperial speech from the throne."

What else to expect from an event that is a clear adaptation of the State Opening of Parliament in the UK, with the President the increasingly apt replacement for the monarch?

With friends like these

Iran-Contra playa and general Greater Middle East Co-Prosperity Sphere agitator Michael Ledeen is supporting the pro Denmark non-boycott (the boycott is in response to controversial cartoons that ran in Danish newspapers), and provides a list:

Carlberg (sic) and Tuborg Beers

Michael -- it's spelled properly on Steven Gerrard's jersey.

The Real CIA

Sunday's New York Times has a long story on events surrounding US policy towards Haiti in the final days of President Aristide's government. The main revelation is strong circumstantial evidence that a coup was plotted in a hotel in the Dominican Republic (a hotel owned by exiled Cuban sugar barons) and facilitated by the International Republican Institute -- an organisation with a nominal goal of democracy promotion, but stacked with Republican party operatives and tightly linked to the White House. This led to a situation of two US policies towards Iraq -- an official one from the State Department urging peaceful reconciliation, and a nod-and-wink one run from the White House, via the IRI, pushing for a showdown.

Haiti is in a bigger shambles than ever now, so the level of competence exhibited by this particular policy is at the average for this White House generally. Note also that the IRI's fingerprints are all over the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine. Is it really surprising then that the Russians get a bit nervous about what exactly foreign NGOs are up to in their country?

Hawker Stalker: Recreational edition

Seen emerging from Georgetown's Montrose Park, wearing a fishing vest and walking past the tennis courts in a cloud of cigar smoke: Congressman Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). Which makes us wonder: Was this a celebratory stogie because he thinks he has the majority spot well in hand? And does his wife know he's not smoking Marlboros?

An UnGreat War

While George VII loves analogies of the GWOT with World War II, there are more than a few parallels with World War I. Consider for instance the rising tension with Iran. Despite attempts to paint the dispute as part an inevitable geopolitical clash, there are considerable elements of clumsy rhetoric and strategic miscalculation in the dispute. This article in Spiked Online looks especially at the "axis of evil" designation -- a phrase written on the fly for the King's Speech, but which has been a straitjacket for US policy towards Iran ever since [thanks to reader KH for the link].

And then there's the matter of the proximate cause of the current nuclear crisis -- the fact that it was the US call for a boycott of last year's presidential election in Iran that brought the current radical to power (in Iran). This point is reiterated in an excellent NYT op-ed piece today by Hossein Derakhshan:

That's right: with what appeared to be the endorsement of President Bush and dozens of American-backed satellite television channels that broadcast in Farsi, the disillusioned young people of Iran effectively took one of the world's most closely watched nuclear programs out of the hands of a reformer and placed it into the hands of a hard-line reactionary.

Can anyone now doubt that Iranian elections, however flawed, really do matter? ... But the real problem here is that boycotting semi-democratic elections ultimately will not make such a system more democratic.

The rise of Mr. Ahmadinejad, and the threat he poses to the stability of a volatile region, demonstrates that promoting apathy in a semi-democratic system can only strengthen the radical anti-democracy forces. And it raises a question as to whether that is what hawks in Washington actually wanted.

It's hard to be optimistic when the choices for interpreting the administration's behaviour towards Iran come down to carelessness, miscalculation, or lust for confrontation. Not to mention the grand unified theory of US-Iran relations: that Republican Presidents always, always, seem to do what Iran wants.

UPDATE: Powerline doesn't see the contradition in their analysis of Iran:

The election in Iran was a sham, conducted by the mullahs and largely boycotted by reformist forces. The election didn't cause the "rise of Islamic parties;" the mullahs have controlled Iran since 1979.

So what's their scenario if reformist forces had not boycotted the election?

Breaking the Law is Settled Law

Saturday's Wall Street Journal carries an interview with Dick Cheney, written up by James Taranto (subs. req'd, free link). The article is mostly an excuse for Taranto to recycle daily spin from his OpinionJournal column, but there are a couple of interesting exchanges with Cheney. One turns on the question of whether the President is bound by legislation in the conduct of war or foreign policy; Cheney leans in the negative:

That lesson was reinforced for then-Rep. Cheney in 1987, when he was the ranking Republican on the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. Democrats accused President Reagan of violating the Boland amendment, intended to prevent aid from reaching Nicaragua's anticommunist guerrillas. "If you go back and look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-Contra report, you'll see a strong statement about the president's prerogatives and responsibilities in the foreign policy/national security area in particular."

Several things to note. First, it's clear that in Cheney's view, the arguments justifying the National Security Agency domestic spying program in terms of the 9/11 War Resolution passed by Congress are moot, because he believes that the President has those powers within his national security and foreign policy prerogatives anyway, and not just when war has been formally declared.

Second, Cheney believes that the Iran-Contra scandal was not a scandal, which is something that ace TV pundits might want to ask him about in his next TV appearance -- in particular as the abject failure of the plan (it was supposed to get hostages in Lebanon released) should be a caution about the problem of unconstrained executive branch scheming.

Finally, while analysts have corrected focused on the resilience of the careers of the people implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, Cheney's quote makes clear that it was a formative experience for him as well, from the outside looking in. One wonders if he thought less of George H.W. Bush for having claimed to be out of the loop on such a fine enterprise?

Noted Without (Much) Comment

Is Bono branching from fronting U2 and all his other activities to motivational speaking? We're sure not sure how to interpret this event:

Nation's Capital Distinguished Speakers Series

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2006 - Bono

The Future in Front of Us: Living a More Involved Life

Award-winning lead singer and front man for U2, one of the most successful and highly regarded rock bands in history, Bono uses his immense popularity and influence to draw attention to the crises of poverty worldwide and HIV/AIDS in Africa. Gaining access to the world’s most powerful politicians he has almost single handedly drawn public attention to debt burdens in the poorest of countries, helping to get wealthier nations to forgive billions of dollars of debt. He also works tirelessly to build greater worldwide response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic facing Africa. Join this legendary rocker and extraordinary activist for a powerful evening focused on the impact one can have by choosing to live a more purposeful life.

We hope the last few words in the promo don't indicate that Bono is getting into this.

Hawker Stalker: Gentleman's edition

Seen today grabbing an early lunch at the rather downscale Georgetown eatery Furin's: pretty boy George Will, who apparently doesn't deem it necessary to help a woman with a stroller get through an awkward doorway. Because his business is his business, of course.

[first entry in this series]

The straw man in the mirror

George VII today at the National Security Agency in Maryland:

Now, I understand there's some in America who say, well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack. All I would ask them to do is listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously. When he says he's going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it. I take it seriously, and the people of NSA take it seriously.

His then National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, in 2002 explaining the White House reaction to the memo "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US":

... it was not a warning. There was no specific time, place or method mentioned .. I would say that most of it was actually historical. It was not a catalogue of, they might use this, they might use this, they might use this, they might use that. That was not the character. But it was mostly historical, going back to things that happened in '97, things that happened in '98, kind of methods of operation in the embassy bombings, might they return to some of those methods. It was that kind of thing.

Birds of a feather

Slightly short of blogging steam (and time) these days so just a pointer to some unusual associations. We learn via Slugger O'Toole that Brokeback Mountain won't be showing in Ian Paisley's hometown, Ballymena, meaning that the War on Brokeback as chroncicled by James Wolcott has gone trans-Atlantic.

Also, the extensive biographies for Michael Wharton, for years the scribe behind the Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph, make reference to his interest in Irish affairs, in which his outlook helped him to see links that others would have more trouble with:

[Times of London]
Among the causes he championed were the Welsh and Irish languages, and particularly those peoples that left-liberals found it fashionable to ridicule and despise: white Rhodesians, Ulster Protestants and the Serbs — whom he regarded as the guardians of civilisation (against the Turk).


[Telegraph] Wharton supported the white Rhodesians, and had some sympathy for the aims of the Irish Republic; but he knew that the former were doomed, and felt that the latter was bent on turning itself into a uniformly socialist state no different from any other member state of the United Nations. He had no answers, no hope.

There is an obscure link to present day events in another bit of the Telegraph obit:

Particularly after anthologies of the columns started appearing in book form, he attracted a few distinctly sinister "fan" letters. These welcomed, at last, somebody who could "understand" their conspiracy theories about Social Credit, international Jewry or Satan's Second Coming.

Social Credit is a theory linking the printing of money with growth and income distribution and had its main political life in Canada; the party is now gone but its latent support base is still around, particularly in Western Canada -- not least with the strength of the Conservatives in the recent election.

The War on Scotland

One of the weirder diversions of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy these days is Scotland-bashing. It's looking like Niall Ferguson will father nearly as many op-ed pieces as his mythical Irish namesake fathered children, because Mark Steyn is at it in Tuesday's Telegraph:

And it means the Scottish National Party is going through the motions: nobody needs a Scottish nation if there are no more Scottish nationals ... Scottish nationalism [] has achieved all the features of a failed nation state without achieving the status of a nation state ... Scotland has become a minor member of the axis of extinction: Germany, Japan, Russia - once great nations now recording net population loss...

This directly takes the baton from Fergie on Sunday:

Scotland, which in certain respects really is - as I remarked here a few weeks ago - the Belarus of the West. So whatever became of Progress with a capital P? Why, after around a century of sustained improvements, is public health in some developed countries deteriorating?

The obvious answer is, of course, that Russians and Scots alike lead unhealthy lives. They smoke too much tobacco. They drink too much alcohol. They eat too much high-cholesterol food. (Do they have deep-fried Mars bars in Moscow? An enterprising Scot could make, er, a killing by exporting that particular delicacy.)

But while Fergie at least writes of a place he grew up in, Steyn -- the Canadian who lives in New Hampshire -- is projecting other concerns onto the Scots:

The Scottish Executive would like Scotland to have control of its own immigration, as the province of Quebec does. Quebec's collapsed birth rate has also cost it its dreams of nationhood and, like Scotland, it looked to immigration to save it, since when it has attracted a lively range of jihadist cells for whom Montreal offers the advantage of being a terrorist-indulgent neighbourhood only a stone's throw - or a bomb's - from the Great Satan's border. As the estate agents say, it is location, location, location. Glasgow has no such unique selling point.

Something we thought might happen -- those awful Quebeckers have kept Canada's Conservatives from forming a majority government, so work them into the slam, and better still, imply that Quebec's pursuit of Francophone immigrants around the world is the inverse of the US harbouring all those Fenians in the 19th century. On the other hand Steyn is fine with the present day Fenians:

Scotland is the canary in the United Kingdom's coal mine, but, given that three of the four component parts of the realm are mired in the same bloated, dead-end dependency culture, it would be foolish for the English to assume they won't get stuck with the bill for a Celtic fringe decaying into a long-term geriatric hospice. I doubt any Scot with an eye to electoral viability would want to run on anything that smacked of American conservatism, but surely they could at least learn something from Ireland, where, you will recall, Braveheart was filmed.

That sentence, with its implication that 1/4 of the UK = Republic of Ireland shows that Steyn is nowhere near ready for this Venn Diagram, let alone an entry in United Irelander's Rename the British Isles competition. But aside from the buffoonery, one thing going on here is the adoption of Scotland as a case study for the Eurabia shite of the right. They tried that on France, but the messy facts -- namely France's healthy population growth -- got in the way. Then again

If that you will France win,
Then with Scotland first begin.

UPDATE: On 2nd reading it's not clear what the above Steyn passage means regarding the constituent parts of the UK, but the sweeping statements therein contribute to that problem. But he does seem to know that the Republic of Ireland is a separate country.

Cheeseheads and Cheesebrains

George VII likes to talk about how great people are outside of that awful place, Washington DC. Alas!

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Is that a Washington National [baseball] hat?

Q Wisconsin, actually.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, yes.

Q W is for Wisconsin. You're a rancher. A lot of us here in Kansas are ranchers. I was just wanting to get your opinion on "Brokeback Mountain," if you've seen it yet? (Laughter.) You would love it. You should check it out.

THE PRESIDENT: I haven't seen it. I'll be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven't seen the movie. (Laughter.) I've heard about it. I hope you go -- you know -- (laughter) -- I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm is what I'm about to say. I haven't seen it. (Laughter and applause.)

And we have no idea what his comment about Brokeback means.

Out to pasture

Amidst the dodgy assertions great and small in George VII's speech in Kansas on Monday, contemplate for a moment the central role of the USA in global energy policy when it's run by someone who says this:

When we were driving through the beautiful country coming here, I told the Governor and I told the two senators [from Kansas] I firmly believe a day is coming when we're going to be able to grow saw [sic] grass and convert that into energy

The Company of Wolves

Today, on National Review's group blog, The Corner:

INTO THE REALM OF CHAOS [John Derbyshire]
In the matter of Iran: I've been reading the recent Iran-war speculations by Clayton Cramer, Niall Ferguson, et al. Are things as bad as all that?

I think they are. The week after 9/11 the excellent and prescient Irish columnist Kevin Myers (cont'd p 94)

[Old post about Myers here]

The Flaubert Report

Could it be that Christopher Hitchens is slyly using his book reviews to express his doubts about the neocon Middle Eastern project to which he has so eagerly attached himself? Because in his NYT review of Bouvard and Pécuchet, an unfinished novel by Flaubert, he says:

This novel was plainly intended to show its author's deep contempt, however comedically expressed, for all grand schemes, most especially the Rousseauean ones, to improve the human lot. Such schemes founder because the human material is simply too base to be transmuted.

Or is it that the grand schemes shouldn't be left in the hands of fools?

True bathos requires a slight interval between the sublime and the ridiculous, but no sooner have our clowns embarked on a project than we see the bucket of whitewash or the banana skin.

Or is it just a bid for Pseuds Corner?

Actionable intelligence indeed

Confirmation today via an Associated Press report of what Pakistani newspapers hinted a week ago: that a key lead in the identification of a specific house as a target for the CIA Predator drone attack that killed civilians came from one of the USA's off-the-books detainees:

Two Pakistani intelligence officials said Libyan-born Abu Farraj al-Libbi, who was captured in Pakistan in May 2005, told interrogators that had met al-Zawahri last year at one of the homes that was hit.

The two are believed to have met at the house of Bakhtpur Khan, who is listed among the 13 civilians believed to have died in the airstrike.

One of the intelligence officials said al-Libbi's statement was later verified and it was confirmed that he met al-Zawahri in Damadola. The intelligence officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.

Al-Libbi is accused of masterminding two attempts to assassinate Musharraf over Pakistan's alliance with the United States. After his arrest, he was turned over to Washington for further investigation.

U.S. and Pakistani intelligence — helped by tribesmen and Afghans — began monitoring Khan's home after al-Libbi's confession, the intelligence officials said.

Asked and answered

Since various people including Christopher Hitchens want to know whether it's true that King George VII wanted to bomb al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar, consider the present state of mind of Vice President Dick Cheney, who wasn't even directly asked about al Jazeera today, but couldn't help himself:

Q [from Hugh Hewitt] All right. Yesterday on CNN, Jack Cafferty suggested that the administration may be timing the release of the Osama tape whenever bad news rears its head. A little bit crazy, but what do you react -- what's Dick Cheney's reaction when commentary like that comes out of a major network?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: We don't control the release of the Osama bin Laden tapes, Al Jazeera does, or seems to. And they were the source of this most recent tape. I think they've been the source of virtually all of these tapes. When the al Qaeda organization has something to say, they tend to say it through or release it through Al Jazeera primarily in Doha, in Qatar. And that's where we get out information, as well, is when it goes public from Al Jazeera.

Note especially that whereas most people would think of Osama Bin Laden as the source of tape of Osama bin Laden, Cheney went out of his way to say that al Jazeera was the source. A guilty mind, or a conspiratorial one?

Pajamas Media comedy hour

The finding that an Iron Age Meathman used hair gel has set the blogosphere alight to such an extent that it even penetrated the fact deflector shield of Pajamas Media, in the form of charter member Tammy Bruce ("her name was Bruce, but her manner was Frank"). Bruce makes the leap from Clonycavan Man using the gel to him being a metrosexual, and riffs:

I sense Hollywood is now putting together a "Gay Ancient Irish Bogmen" movie. You know, a classic, poignant tragic love story just like "Titantic." An American classic as a matter of fact. Except it's Irish. The only real difference is that the water where the tragedy occurs will be more shallow, like a, well, like a bog instead of the ocean. George Clooney and Liam Neeson will star, along with Natascha McElhone (excuse me I just got distracted there for a moment ;) playing the confused and frustrated tribal "girlfrend." Or at least that what she thinks she is...

Can you say "Brokeback Peatbog"?

[... pin drop ...]

Apart from anything else, she botched the link to Natascha McElhone, though that may have been a deliberate part of the ogling shtick. We're not sure what film she has in mind when she ascribes that role to Natascha, but for us the only one that matters is her performance in the brilliant Ronin. Which actually contains a very usable line of dialogue for Tammy's screenplay" "You stupid shite ... you're a dead man."

Probably unrelated events

Canadian media company CanWest has this week announced its intention to sell its 45 percent stake in the Irish independent broadcaster TV3 while buying a partnership in the Crimson New Republic magazine. It's odd that the rationale for selling the TV3 stake is disposal of assets 'no longer strategic to the company', yet the company does not seem to have much of a specialty in opinion magazines either. It also means swapping having to deal with U2's personable manager, Paul McGuinness, another TV3 investor, for dealing with New Republic supremo, Martin Peretz. It remains to be seen whether they know what they're getting into.

Asked and answered

Dick Cheney, in a puff-piece interview with Fox News numbskull Neil Cavuto:

Q And what do you think of the administration dragging its feet on Iran?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't think that's true at all. I think we're there dealing with these issues and have been now for five years.

Attention time.com newbies

Readers of Time magazine's website are getting used to their new web logger, or "blogger", if you will, in the form of Andrew Sullivan's blog, recently moved over to their site in Time's biggest acquisition since the purchase of AOL, and we all know how well that turned out.

Anyway, in a well-timed promotional appearance, Sully was on the The Colbert Report on Tuesday night, and turned in a pretty feisty performance, including the announcement to the TV audience that he is engaged (the BF is from Michigan). But there were a couple of weird moments, one when Sully seemed to go on much longer than Colbert had intended -- which turned into the engagement announcement -- but also right at the end of the show, when Colbert said (working from memory)

"See you tonight in your dreams, America, I'll be the shirtless one riding bareback on a white stallion"

Which is an interesting choice of word having just had Sully on the show; go to Sullywatch to see why.

One other thing time.com readers should know. When Andrew provides a link to the video of William Shatner doing a spoken word performance of Elton John's Rocket Man, the beagles must have stepped on the delete key at the part where he provides the customary hat-tip to Gawker, where like everyone else, he saw that link.

UPDATE: Colbert quote slightly adjusted following 2nd viewing of the segment.

Niall of the Nine Zeroes

Today's New York Times reports on the genealogical research at Trinity College Dublin which hypothesizes the actual existence of an Irish King, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was previously seen as mythical. The NYT report is in the Metro section, playing on the implication that a significant number of New Yorkers would also be descended from Niall.

This is interesting research, but it's useful to be clear that it has two parts: a scientific part finding that a large number of Irish people have a common paternal ancestor, with especially high clusters of such people in Derry and Mayo -- and then speculation that to have such a common ancestor from so far back (5th century) would require that the ancestor have been a powerful person with a reputation for having been able to look around the room and say, like Karim Bey in From Russia With Love -- "He too is my son." Niall fits the bill.

But we feel that the media tend to overemphasize the significance of these common ancestral findings, much as these occasional reports that appear about King George VII being related to Queen Elizabeth, Che Guevara to Jack Lynch (yes, we're that old) and so on. Look at it this way. This P O'Neill has two parents, 4 grandparents, 8 greatgrandparents. Or, if we go n generations back, 2ⁿ ancestors. Go back 1500 years, which is the time horizon for this research, and assume a new generation every 30 years. That's 50 generations back, meaning 2⁵⁰ = 1,125,899,906,842,620 ancestors.

So pick any Irish person, go back 1500 years and try to fit that pretty large number into the actual population of Ireland at the time -- think there's some chance of overlap between any two of us? [As it happens, the calculation is not quite as tight for P O'Neill, due to a family tree detour in Ipswich, but we're saving that detail for our truthy memoir]. It's good fun and good science, but we don't want Ireland's new royalty getting anxious about a resurgence of claims from an old one.

The Commander-in-Chief didn't do it

As Fi Fie Foe Fum points out in the context of pro-GWOT Irish blog commentary on the botched missile strike on Ayman al-Zawahiri in Pakistan, there's not much need for snark because the commentary speaks for itself. In that tradition, Wednesday's Wall Street Journal editorialises (subs. req'd):

It's still unclear if the operation killed any prominent Al Qaeda leaders, but the mission did reportedly kill Pakistani civilians. Of course, in this kind of war it's hard to know who is and isn't a non-combatant. General Musharraf has warned Pakistani citizens not to shelter terrorists, but then it's not easy to deny shelter to men with guns. If Islamabad stepped up its own efforts to root out militants along the Afghani border, the U.S. military might find it less necessary to enter Pakistani air space to seek them out.

Note by the way the upside of the assertion that al Qaeda fails to distinguish itself from civilians -- you get to dodge the Geneva Conventions on detainees and bomb the civilians! But cheer up Pakistan:

General Musharraf's government is working to give Pakistanis better opportunities through economic reform -- a trend noticed by stock market investors, who pushed the Karachi benchmark bourse up over 50% last year.

Miracalously, there is no claim that tax-cuts contributed to the stock market boom.

Brussels get muscled

King George takes Belgium seriously:

PRESIDENT BUSH: You're probably wondering what the [Belgian] Prime Minister is sharing with me. First of all, welcome. We're talking mountain biking -- actually, he's talking about the Tour de France. He's a huge advocate and a follower of the bike scene around the world. He's also an avid mountain biker. And one of these days he and I are going to ride; he's going to give me a lesson on how to ride a mountain bike.

Seriously enough to decisively deal with the long-stalled nomination of C. Boyden Gray -- one of his favourite judicial nomination fixers, but with no obvious credentials to be Ambassador to Belgium the European Union, based in Brussels:

The President recess appointed C. Boyden Gray, of the District of Columbia, to be the Representative of the United States of America to the European Union, with the Rank and Status of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary.

As a recess appointment, Gray can only serve for one Tour de France. Aside from the slight to BelgiumBrussels, could it be that Dubya knows he really needs Gray for something special in 2007?

UPDATE: Note that Gray's previous and presumably future job is being a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, which has offices in Brussels.

FINAL UPDATE: Bush seeks to get Gray's recess appointment extended in the new Democratic Senate. It's unlikely that ill-will towards his management of Bush's judicial nominees has faded sufficiently for it to go through.

Howard Stern in reverse

When Andrew Sullivan was yet again, successfully, baiting National Review's The Corner by describing Fred Barnes' book about King George as "fellatial," was he thinking, inter alia, that he only has a few hours left to use words like that before he moves inside the PG-13 umbrella of time.com?

UPDATE: Sullywatch assesses Sully's new home at Time.

All the other stuff was fine

Glenn Reynolds does one of his above-the-fray sighs about Iran:

I think our big error was in not preempting Iran in 1979. Everything since has been an effort to rectify that dreadful mistake.

Note the trick of passing off partisan shite as world-weary "analysis." Somehow, it's all Jimmy Carter's fault -- installing the Shah, sticking with him too long, not invading in 1979 to overthrow a popular revolution, cutting arms deals with the Ayatollahs in the 1980s, supporting Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, getting rid of Iran's two biggest regional enemies (the Taliban and Saddam), and in so doing, exhausting any ground-based option for dealing with Iran now. Jimmy Carter is a very bad man.

The rights of small nations

It's a sign of the cynicism induced by an expectation that King George needs some warmongering in 2006 that we can't take a seemingly good article in Monday's Wall Street Journal at face value. The article (subs. req'd) by Frederic Grare and Georges Perkovich discusses the unhappy state of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, the least well-known of the country's four provinces and the one which has the strongest case that it is exploited by the central government:

The government replies that Baluchistan's resources are national property and has made only nominal concessions. The conflict, it says, is the fault of a few greedy obscurantist tribal leaders opposed to the development of the province.

This argument resembles that which the Punjabi-dominated central government made in the early 1970s toward East Pakistanis before massive violence and war with India erupted, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.

Now while the authors argue that this means that the US should push for democratization in Pakistan, one complication with agitating for Baluchi rights in Pakistan is that they are also across the border in Iran. And aside from ethnic differences with Persians, there are also religious differences since most Baluchi are Sunni.

And what does a war, or at least lots of talking about war, need more than the adoption of a minority group as part of the cause? It doesn't help that sitting on the opposite page is the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin, Lincoln PR cash-recipient, arguing explicitly for action against Iran. Sometimes bad causes drive out good ones.

Fruit of the poison tree

The Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, in its report on the botched CIA strike against Ayman al-Zawahiri, says:

A senior security official said foreign militants had frequently been visiting Bajaur and even Abu Faraj al-Libbi, said to have been No. 3 in Al-Qaeda hierarchy, had told interrogators that he had lived in Bajaur.

Note: Abu Faraj al-Libbi is one of the seemingly endless supply of al Qaeda #3s, now one of the CIA detainees who is being held at an undisclosed location somewhere around the world. It seems that his conditions of detention lead him to tell interrogators what they want to hear.

UPDATE 9 SEPTEMBER: Abu Faraj al-Libbi is one of the 14 secret CIA detainees now moved to Gitmo. [He should not be confused with Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whose whereabouts are unknown; see also here]. And the Washington Post reports that al-Libbi's interrogation was a key source for the bombing.

SIM City

Our daily tour around the loony end of the blogosphere brings word of a new threat to America: pay-as-you-go cellphones. Powerline propagates a story from internment advocate Michelle Malkin (no links please, we're sane):

suspected terrorists have begun buying disposable cell phones in bulk. I take it that such phones are difficult if not impossible to trace. What makes the story potentially explosive is that the current buying spree seems to have begun suddenly, in various locations around the country, possibly as a reaction to the New York Times' blowing the secrecy of the NSA's cell phone intercept program.

To be fair to Hindrocket (yes, he really uses that moniker), he does provide some updates noting the dubious nature of the document on which Malkin's claim is based, but there is no exploration of the basic preposterousness of the claim itself. Consider for instance the impreciseness of the terminology: All cellphones are "disposable", it's the SIM card that gives them a number and makes them unique. So what they can only mean is that there's a surge in phones using SIM cards that have been paid for in cash, and thus can't traced back to a specific person.

Which presents several additional issues. First, it's not that easy to find cash-only pre-paid phones; most outlets in the USA (where Malkin's report originated) want to see some plastic. But more importantly, even when the name on a cellphone can't be traced, the phone can. Which is kind of obvious, since the phone achieves its functionality by having at least one radio tower know where it is.

So you'd think al Qaeda might have figured this out? Indeed. Because the previous, more truthy version of this scare story is that al Qaeda was using anyonymous SIM cards from Swisscom to escape detection. But:

[New York Times] For two years [as of March 2004], investigators now say, they were able to track the conversations and movements of several Qaeda leaders and dozens of operatives after determining that the suspects favored a particular brand of cellphone chip. The chips carry prepaid minutes and allow phone use around the world.

Investigators said they believed that the chips, made by Swisscom of Switzerland, were popular with terrorists because they could buy the chips without giving their names.

"They thought these phones protected their anonymity, but they didn't," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe. Even without personal information, the authorities were able to conduct routine monitoring of phone conversations.

Furthermore:

They also said they had strong indications that terror suspects, alert to the phones' vulnerability, had largely abandoned them for important communications and instead were using e-mail, Internet phone calls and hand-delivered messages.

Apparently the word to stop using pre-paid phones must be arriving to US operatives by carrier pigeon. There's another interesting incidental point in the NYT article:

During the American bombing of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001, American authorities reported hearing Osama bin Laden speaking to his associates on a satellite phone. Since then, Mr. bin Laden has communicated with handwritten messages delivered by trusted couriers, officials said.

This timing conflicts both with King George's claim that Osama stopped using his satellite phone in 1998 following a media leak, and the supposed debunking thereof on the grounds that he had already stopped using it by then. Of course it also conflicts with Republican General Tommy Franks' claim that Osama was not at Tora Bora in 2001, but that story is for another day.

Anyway, back to "disposable phones":

Last year, Switzerland's legislature passed a law making it illegal to purchase cellphone chips without providing personal information, following testimony from a Swiss federal prosecutor, Claude Nicati, that the Swisscom cards had become popular with Qaeda operatives. The law goes into effect on July 1 [2004].

One senior official said the authorities were grateful that Qaeda members were so loyal to Swisscom.

Another official agreed: "They'd switch phones but use the same cards. The people were stupid enough to use the same cards all of the time. It was a very good thing for us."

Almost two years later, would the terrorists be stupid enough to do the same thing again -- or would rightwing bloggers be stupid enough to believe that they would?

UPDATE: More from Mike Power and Tbogg, both of whom are much better with photos than us. Also Crooks and Liars.