The Curse of Federalism: Isn't there something odd about complaints from conservatives Grover Norquist and David Keene that a DOJ proposal allowing "state and local law enforcement agencies to track down illegal immigrants  ... would set a dangerous precedent by empowering local jurisdictions to enforce many federal laws." Isn't federal law, like, the law? Aren't state and local officials obligated to enforce it, just as they're obligated to enforce the Constitution? ... Local police apparently complain that requiring them to actually enforce these laws "would jeopardize their relations with immigrants" -- and, say Norquist and Keene, "mechanisms already exist to foster federal-local cooperation in this area." But if they were effective mechanisms (e.g. state officials calling in the feds) then they would already have jeopardized relations with immigrants, no? The reason relations aren't jeopardized is that the "mechanisms" are ineffective. .. More damningly, the NYT account  makes it clear that even at this late date the "White House aides" (read, presumably, Karl Rove) are still worried "that the proposal could lead to racial profiling and lawsuits ... and alienate Hispanic voters." ... Note to unnamed White House aides: If you don't pay attention to Ann Coulter and Peggy Noonan, maybe  Nicholas Kristof  is more to your liking ... Even Maureen Dowd is (somewhat inconsistently) arguing that the FBI is too "timid about racial profiling." ... P.S.: We'll know President Bush really thinks there's a "war" on not when he gives a stern speech at West Point but when he's willing to risk Rove's Great Hispanic Suck-up. ... P.P.S.: Norquist's complaint is of a piece with his longtime advocacy of a "leave us alone" coaliton (or, as Arianna Huffington puts it, "the Leva Salon"). But if there is one example of the sort of legitimate expectation that needs to be "reexamined" (i.e., pared back) as terrorists acquire increasingly ready access to means of mass destruction, it's the idea that the government must "leave us alone." ...

The Curse of Separated Powers: Let's see -- Pakistan's government helps us in the war against terrorism, and asks in exchange for lower tariffs on textile imports. The U.S. Congress says "no." Russia helps us in the war against terrorism, and asks in exchange that the Cold War Jackson-Vanik restrictions on trade be repealed. The U.S. Congress says "no". Turkey helps us out in the war against terrorism, and is promised trade benefits in return. But, according to the WSJ's "Washington Wire," Congress last week said "no" despite lobbying from Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Powell. ... Do other nations take our promises of economic rewards seriously? Will they continue to be suckers (falling for promises our executive branch can't make good on) in the future? ... I remember when Nicaraguan voters threw out the Sandinistas. American news reports said the Nicaraguans were hoping for massive U.S. aid.There were pleny of extremely good reasons to throw out the Sandinistas, but hopes for massive aid were not among them. Have we ever really delivered the economic goods as a reward in recent decades -- in the form of either foreign aid or trade benefits -- other than in the cases of Israel and Egypt? ...

What's the flaw in Nina Bernstein's front-page NYT story  that seemingly ties welfare reform to a decline in marriage? The studies Bernstein publicizes looked at single mothers who were on welfare. Of these women, those who kept getting the old-style welfare checks got married at higher rates than those who went through welfare-to-work programs. But the studies didn't look at what happened to women whonever go on welfare in the first placeonce they know that if they do they will have to go to work. Indeed, even if welfare reform mildly discourages those who are on welfare from getting married that factor could be outweighed by the fact that there are less than half as many people on welfare as there used to be. That's why national figures might show, as they do, that a smaller percentage of children are living in single-parent homes, while marriage is increasing among African-Americans. ... Bernstein acknowledges the conflict between her two studies and the national figures, but then suggests that her studies are superior because they "focus on welfare applicants." No! They present an incomplete picture because they "focus on welfare applicants," not on the much larger group of people who might go on welfare -- or, more precisely, who might have gone on welfare under the old system. ... It's the overall national marriage numbers we want to affect, not the numbers for those who happen to be on welfare, and since welfare reform in 1996 the overall national numbers have been going in the right direction for the first time in generations. (Bernstein also implies that the economy caused this effect, but previous good economies didn't.) ...

Nor do Bernstein's two studies of welfare applicants in two states seem well-positioned measure the larger cultural changes that can occur when all potential welfare recipients in all states know the rules have changed acrosss the nation. It matters less if there's a differential between those in welfare programs and those in welfare-to-work programs if both are moving in a pro-marriage direction. Who's to say that even those in the "control" group receiving traditional welfare after the 1996 reform weren't affected by the reform? Did they stop reading the papers or listening to the news or to popular music? ...

That said, it's not crazy to think that greater self-sufficiency for single mothers might lead to less marriage. (Women in these programs are often told "Yes, you can make it on your own!") It's just that this effect doesn't seem to be winning out over the other pro-marriage effects of welfare reform (like wanting to have someone to help you out, if you're going to have to juggle work and parenting). ... Nor can Bernstein have it both ways -- if welfare reform is making women less likely to marry because it is making them richer and more self-sufficient, then it can't be making them less likely to marry because they "are now doing much worse" economically than before. (Bernstein skillfully tries to fudge this contradiction in the first paragraph on this Web page. She's still "the Advocates' Advocate"!). ...

Click here to see the anti-reform broadside that is the press release for the larger study from which Bernstein plucks her marriage angle. The release mentions that "[i]n Connecticut, for example, women participating in the state's Jobs First program showed a lower marriage rate." But the study also looked at Florida and California. Hmmm. What happened to marriage rates there? Answer: Only Connecticut appears to have had a "control group" of women who stayed on old-style welfare. Still, in California and Florida, as far as I can see, two different "waves" of interviews, two years apart, were undertaken, and the text says "self-reported marital status did change significantly between waves 1 and 2, rising from ...7% to ... 12%." This statistically-signifcant increase is then waved away as a possible "artifact of sampling design and mother age." But is it? ... The full 102-page PDF-format study is here. You, the reader, decide whether my suspicion -- that if indicia of marriage had gone down they would have made a huge deal of it and maybe gotten Nina Bernstein interested! -- is correct. (See esp. page 60.) ... P.S.: The share of these single mothers who lived in "a household with one other adult" also rose, from 29% to 34%. ...

Final note: Contacted by Bernstein, Bush HHS official Wade Horn doesn't even put up a fight. That's apparently because Horn sees the studies as serving his purpose of getting $300 million in "marriage promotion" money. "What those two studies say to me is, if you up the work requirement and do nothing to support healthy marriages, you get less healthy marriage," Horn says.... In other words, we need "marriage promotion" to undo the supposed bad effects of work requirements! Aaargh! The administration's "marriage promotion" idea has already done more than $300 million in damage if it means that officials like Horn will no longer bother to defend the 1996 welfare reform and its positive effect on marriage. ... Note that Bernstein doesn't call on someone (Bruce Reed?) who would have an unambiguous ideological interest in knocking down the study. Instead, she brilliantly quotes a Bush official who has an interest in agreeing with her, knowing that having contacted a Bushie she'll appear to have discharged the obligation to 'call both sides.'...

What, sunup already?

AFSCME v. Jeb: "Labor leaders have started a multi-pronged campaign" against Florida governor Jeb Bush, reports the Florida Times Union, which cites three issues that have particularly angered the unions. ... It turns out, somewhat predictably, that a) "labor leaders" means mainly "[p]ublic sector unions, such as teachers and state workers;" and b) of the three contentious issues cited by reporter Jim Saunders

1. "vouchers so that students can leave chronically failing public schools and attend private schools"
2. making it easier to fire and hire state civil servants, and
3. "plans to shift state jobs to private contractors"

Jeb Bush is almost certainly right on at least 1 and 2.  ... [Are you charging Saunders with "bias"?--ed. No. The story's straight.] ... (Thanks to kf reader A.E.)

Too Good to Check: "Startled marines find Afghan men all made up to see them," The Scotsman. (Sample: "The hardened troops, their faces covered in camouflage cream and weight down with weapons, radios and ammunition, were confronted with Afghans wanting to stroke their hair. 'It was hell,' said Corporal Paul Richard, 20.")...

Friday, May 31, 2002

NRO's Jonah Goldberg is onto Slate's little secret, namely that one reason this site gets so many visitors (over 3 million a month) is that it's constantly being plugged and linked on the Microsoft Network (MSN) and on MSNBC. Goldberg writes:

I would bet a big share of Slate's readers (half? Two-thirds?) have never bookmarked Slate.com and rarely if ever type out the URL. Instead they see a tease somewhere in MSN.com or MSNBC – something like "Is Torture Good?" or "Was Spock Gay?" --- and click on it.

It's called leveraging monopoly power, buddy! You got a problem with that? ... Actually, I suspect Slate will one day be profitable even if you subtract from its revenues what it would have to pay to buy the placement it gets on MSN and MSNBC. ... And Goldberg's analogy of Slate's readership numbers with the readership numbers of USA Today, which are inflated by that paper's practice of selling in bulk to hotels, seems inapt. The hotel guests who unknowingly pay for USA Today "may read it or they may chuck it in the trash," as Instapundit (whose site tipped me off to Goldberg's post) notes. (In fact, in many hotels at which I've stayed, they just stack the USA Todays in a corner of the lobby, where they often sit until they are replaced with the next day's stack.) But people who click on an article entitled "Was Spock Gay" are presumably people who want to read an article on whether Spock was gay. They're as legitimate as any other readers lured by a teasing hed. Who cares if they bookmark? They may not be part of the demographic group some advertisers want to target (I suspect they like Britney Spears more than the typical kausfiles "legacy reader," whom I see as more of a Wedding Present  man). But that's a different question. ...

Here's a calm, useful AP survey  of the state of research into Dr. Judah Folkman's now apparently passe cancer-fighting idea (anti-angiogenesis). There's some evidence that supports the decriers of Folkman "hype" -- patients clamored to get to use Folkman's first drug, which turned out not to work (at least by itself). But overall the outlook isn't discouraging, despite the herd negativism of investors and drug mavens. And Folkman's idea was still front-page news! Doctors will just have to get used to dealing with patients clamoring to get new drugs they read about in the papers. As for investors -- if they're driven by hype and then by excessive pessimism, that's mainly their problem, no? ... [Thanks to alert kf reader E.Y.] 

Meanwhile, Prof. Glenn Reynolds, the envy-inspiring Instapundit, who bestrides the blogosphere like a colossus, has some pithy and sensible things  to say about the current Supreme Court majority's crusade to expand that mighty bulwark of freedom, the Eleventh Amendment. (Reynolds doesn't think much of it, even though he's more or less a conservative. But he points out that today's Court was "just following a long line of stupid decisions" that date back to 1890. He's even written a law review article about it.) ...

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Robert Kuttner gets a very basic fact about the current welfare reform debate completely wrong. In the Boston Globe, he writes:

[T]he administration's new welfare reform bill is punitive and mean-spirited. ...The administration, against the advice of most Republican governors, would tighten the screws and limit the funds. Specifically, the bill requires most mothers receiving benefits to work a 40-hour week in paid employment. This would make it impossible for most low-income single mothers to enroll in part-time classes or training programs - the very strategies that have allowed many to escape poverty.

False! The administration bill, which passed the House, requires only 24 hours in paid employment, reserving the remaining 16 hours for the training programs Kuttner likes. You can look it up here. (Go to "Sec. 110. Work Participation Requirements." Search for "countable hours" and go to the second hit you get.) ... Kuttner says it makes "more sense to allow welfare mothers to work part time while they [get] training." He's right! But that position -- work part-time while getting training -- is the Bush administration position (and the Republican position) in the Congressional debate now going on. The liberal, Democratic, anti-Bush position is generally that vocational training should completely substitute for even part-time work for up to two years.

Can I say that Kuttner's howler reveals some deeper problems with the politics of his foundering The American Prospectmagazine? TAP could be going great guns as a no-BS, generally pro-Democratic defender of affirmative government and New Dealish values, which include the value of work. Specifically, it could take the position that "Everybody has to work, but let's go about giving everybody who works a decent life." The Prospect is, after all, on the right side of the issue of the future, namely health care.  But Kuttner is a toady for Democratic interest groups -- sorry, I mean he believes in constituency-based politics! And in the welfare debate some key Democratic interest groups -- specifically unions, nonprofit antipoverty bureaucrats, and the education-training blob -- are anti-work (and anti-New Deal). Kuttner must have been too lazy to check their party line before he wrote his welfare op-ed, and he seems to have automatically assumed the Dems must have taken the common sense, work-while-you-train position, when in this case it's the "mean-spirited" Republicans who take the common sense position. ... The Prospect could maybe be a great magazine if it had the balls to admit it when the Dems are wrong and the GOPs are right. [Isn't that why we have The New Republic?--ed. So because TNR has the "honest" market covered TAP has to go after the dishonest market? That's niche branding for you! If you're TAP, why not distinguish yourself from TNR on substantive grounds -- e.g., in the debate over affirmative government, TAP could make the anti-market arguments while TNR would be more susceptible to, say, opening up Medicare to capitalism. Plus TAP would be free of  TNR editor-in-chief Martin Peretz's Israel/Cold War/foreign policy/pro-Gore/biotech chazerai(not that he's always wrong!)] ...

Bonus anti-Kuttner tidbit: Another high-level defection from Kuttner and TAP will be announced shortly! ...

Bonus Kuttner welfare blooper: Because of the economic climate, Kuttner says, "Caseloads are rising again" in the welfare system. Not according to the most recent data -- they actually fell a bit in the last quarter of 2001, according to HHS, contrary to the predictions of liberals who reflexively contended that the dramatic caseload decline since the 1996 welfare reform was merely the product of a good economy (and hence would reverse itself in a recession). ... If you don' t believe Tommy Thompson, believe Robert Pear. ...

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Rick Brooks of the WSJ busts one of the great public sector frauds of our time: "Priority Mail" from the U.S. Postal Service. It takes longer to get there, they don't guarantee it, and it costs ten times as much as a first class stamp! [sub. required] ...

Will no one defend President Bush against Peggy Noonan's attacks? Noonan says, of Bush, "No one really remembers the meaning of his acceptance speech in the summer of 2000." Hey, I do! The Philadelphia acceptance speech was important, and even moving, because it at least briefly cleansed Bush's "compassionate conservatism" of its condescending, noblesse oblige overtones.. In the speech's most memorable graf, Bush said he wanted to "tear down that wall" between the mainstream economy and the underclass. ... If the Philadelphia speech doesn't resonate today, that may be because Bush didn't follow it up rhetorically (even if, arguably, some of his initiatives follow it up substantively). ...

Anthony "QuasiPundit" Adragna takes issue with my suggestion  that the solicitude shown by civil libertarian Democrats (such as Sen. Patrick Leahy) for the "privacy rights of non-citizens produced a statute with what now seems an excessively high standard of 'probable cause' " -- which in turn limited the F.B.I.'s ability to search alleged terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui's computer and connect him with the 9/11 plotters before 9/11.  Adragna says the problem wasn't the statutory standard of 'probable cause' but the way federal bureaucrats interpreted it. He also cites, in Leahy's defense, a March, 2000  statement Leahy issued  supporting reforms of the FBI in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee debacle.

But Leahy's statement makes my point. Most of it is taken up with a tortured and disingenuous defense of Justice Department bureaucrats' refusal to agree that the evidence against Lee amounted to "probable cause." (Leahy insists, for example, that when DOJ sent the F.B.I.'s surveillance request back for "further investigation" it wasn't a "rejection.") Leahy also suggests that Lee was the victim of ethnic profiling. You don't think the DOJ lawyers were encouraged in their strict interpretation of "probable cause" by the knowledge that senators such as Leahy, who chairs the Judiciary committee, were ready to defend that strict interpretation (and, presumably, criticize a looser reading of "probable cause" that would permit more searches)? 

It's also not clear that the statute  isn't to blame. Why should it have required that Moussaoui be an "agent of a foreign power"? Why not just say a) he's not a U.S. citizen; b) he's visiting this country; c) we think he's involved in some sort of crime; and maybe d) he's in fact legitimately under arrest, therefore  we get to search his computer? What was known about Moussaoui might not be enough, maybe, to justify search of a U.S. citizen (such as Wen Ho Lee). But so what? Moussaoui wasn't a citizen. The idea that visiting aliens have presumptively all the same rights as citizens seems like just the sort of liberal constitutional dogma that needs some strict scrutiny in a world of easy access to terrorist technology. ... P.S.: Ann "Too Far" Coulter goes just far enough in this column  pointing out that many of the Democrats who now criticize Bush and Ashcroft for not combing the flight schools for possible Arab terrorists were mainly complaining about ethnic profiling in the immediate wake of 9/11. ... Update: The Man Without Qualities, who has apparently been prosecuting the case against Sen. Leahy and QuasiPundit for some time, offers valuable backup. ...

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Four FBI-9/11 Angles: Seymour Hersh has just published a big  New Yorker piece  on why "the F.B.I. and the White House" didn't uncover 9/11. Meanwhile, Time has posted an edited version of  the  Rowley "whistleblowing" memo. Here are four points you didn't already read in William Safire's column:

1) Hersh makes a big deal of the actor James Woods' belief that he saw at least two of the 9/11 hijackers on a pre-9/11 flight. (This shows, Hersh says, that they were dumb enough to travel in groups.) "When he was shown photographs, Woods thought he recognized two of the hijackers," Hersh reports. But that fudges a crucial point -- did Woods pick the faces out of a sea of photographs (which would be highly probative) or was he just shown pictures of the hijackers, two of which looked familiar (not highly probative)?

2) Hersh also says that in the "late nineteen-nineties, the C.I.A. obtained reliable information indicating that an Al Qaeda network based in northern Germany had penetrated airport security in Amsterdam and was planning to attack American passenger planes by planting bombs in the cargo." The C.I.A. and German police went on a warpath. But the air-traveling public was apparently not told of the seriousness of the threat. Shouldn't it have been? Isn't this a bit of a scandal? Hersh lets it go.

3) Rowley actually underplays the extent to which the F.B.I. might have disrupted the 9/11 plot if it had pursued and been granted the right to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer, which contained the phone number of Mohammed Atta's roommate. Rowley seems to assume that if the feds had captured one or two of the hijackers, the others would have proceeded with their 9/11 operation (but with fewer people). Isn't it just as likely that they would have panicked, and either called off the operation or done something riskier or stupid? It's not inconceivable that a simple call to Atta's roomie might have produced some panicky behavior.

4) Instead of trying to silence Democratic critics as per se unpatriotic, why don't the Bushies forcefully point out how misguided leftish ideology -- supported over the years mainly by Democrats and the media --contributed greatly to the 9/11 failure. Exhibit A: The FBI appears to have been actually deterred by the prospect that it would have been accused of ethnic profiling if it had searched all U.S. flight schools for Arab terrorists. In particular, it seems to have been stung by Wen Ho Lee's highly-publicized charges that he was singled out for prosecution because of his ethnicity. Exhibit B: Dukakis-like civil-libertarian concern with the privacy rights of non-citizens produced a statute with what now seems an excessively high standard of "probable cause" the FBI had to meet before it could obtain the Moussaoui search warrant. Why do I suspect that some of the alien-defending, privacy-protecting statements of .. oh, let's say Senator Leahy on this subject might prove embarrassing if publicized today? Again, the FBI can be faulted in large part for actually (and unexpectedly) internalizing the ACLU's values. ...

McCainiacs Inflitrate DLC? More evidence that if McCain ran for president he might take much of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council with him -- WaPo notes  that the May-June DLC magazine Blueprint has an article by McCain cheerleader  Marshall "Bull Moose" Wittmann and another on why McCain's "national greatness" appeal splits the Republicans. ..The latest issue of Blueprint has yet another McCainiac pitch  from Wittmann. Not that there's anything wrong with it! If anything, it's the need to stay "Democratic" that has hemmed in the DLC. To pick a non-random example, the DLC unconvincingly endorsed  the tepid House Democrats' welfare reauthorization bill instead of the House Republicans' bill, even though the latter was closer in spirit to the DLC's own Senate bill (sponsored by Senators Carper and Bayh) and even though passage of the Democrats' House bill would have doomed the DLC approach in conference. But it would be highly embarrassing for the Democratic Leadership Council to admit that it agreed with the GOP on an important issue. Admitting when it agrees with McCain is a promising first step. ... 

Monday, May 27, 2002

WSJ's "Washington Wire" (sub. required) reports that the Democrats  may wind up holding their 2004 convention after Labor Day -- they want to come after the Republicans, who have scheduled theirs for August 30. That means the traditional post-convention campaign will be compressed by weeks. ... It's a wonder they didn't think of this years ago. Since nominees are typically chosen long before the convention, but conventions still provide a "bounce." it's in the interest of each party to get its convention, and its bounce, as close to Election Day as possible. ... No doubt the prospect of an autumn convention will cause much traditionalist handwringing about the American people not having enough time to make a considered judgment of the candidates in this age of shrinking sound bites, etc. etc. (Take it away, David Broder!) But, in reality, the new schedule is rendered harmless by the Feiler Faster Thesis  -- which holds that voters, thanks to the speeded up flow of information, are quite capable of comfortably processing political information much more quickly than previously. The parties could probably move their conventions to mid-October and still leave enough time for voters to make a considered judgment. Given the incentives favoring late conventions, that's probably what will happen. ... Now if only New Hampshire could be talked into holding the first-in-the-nation primary in July, we might wind up with a presidential campaign of reasonable length. ...