Month: September 2002

So there’s been much fuss made about Candidate, the FX network’s planned reality series in which contestants will jostle for position in a battle to become the winning candidate for President.
A thought occurred to me, however: where exactly does this effort fall with respect to campaign finance laws? Or network must-carry provisions?
The show might slip around these restrictions because, if I understand correctly, the whole thing takes place essentially outside of the normal campaign process — the show is over in July 2004, at which time its simply up to the winning candidate to decide whether they actually proceed to enter the real race for President. So perhaps that gets them off the hook.
But perhaps not. Questions for the (numerous) lawyers in the neighboorhood:
1) Do campaign finance laws apply in the case of a candidate who is clearly running for office, but has not “officially” declared their candidacy?
2) Do must-carry provisions (the regulations demanding that a television network provide ‘equal time’ to candidates if they provide any time to one) apply to a cable channel like FX at all?
3) Could you make a case that must-carry provisions would apply in this case?
Inquiring minds want to know…
Update: In response to FX’s play, Lair has announced his own candidacy for President, and has decreed that he’ll have an all-Blogger Cabinet.
Put me down for Secretary of State, Lair. Sounds like a great job, ‘cept for all the foreigners, of course.

As I mentioned below, I found myself quite impressed with the Security Strategy released by the Bush administration today.
I suspect, though, that many on the left, particularly those who presently oppose military action against Iraq, are likely to be less enthusiastic.
And so, I’d like to pose a challenge, in all seriousness and respect to my colleagues and opponents on the left in the Blogosphere: I ask that you write your own National Security Strategy, and show us where you would differ from the President.
I am interested far less in criticisms of Bush’s document, than I am in seeing a positive declaration of what your vision of a strategy to ensure the safety and security of our nation is.
Obviously, I don’t expect a 35-page document — but if you write it, I promise to read it. My only requirement is that it be written not as a reaction to Bush’s vision; not as a critique of it, but as a standalone, self-contained summary of your vision. Essentially, I want to see statements written as if you were President. Criticism is easy: the tough part comes in articulating what you would do, rather than pointing out the negatives in others proposals. And it is that challenge that I propose here.
I’ll promise a link to anybody who wants to participate on the front page, and as I said before, I’ll also commit to reading any entries, for whatever that’s worth.
I look forward to seeing responses…
-NZB

You may have noticed that little Store link on the left-hand navigation bar.
Maybe you’ve even clicked on it, and perused the fine, fine, merchandise that you can find therein.
But I’m sad to say that I know for sure you haven’t bought anything. Because, well, nobody has.
Kinda depressing, really. Doesn’t anybody want a spiffy TTLB mug? A stylish TTLB golf shirt? Or for the ladies, the always-sexy Baby Doll T-Shirt?
Not interested in material possessions, you say? Well then, I’ve just the thing for you. You can now advertise on The Truth Laid Bear. For just a few dollars, you can have an ad run on the front page — and all individual entry pages — for a week or more.
Yes, all this is thinly veiled shameless begging; and yes, I’ve been thinking it would be nice to see some sort of return from the investment of time and energy I put into the site (breaking even on hosting costs would be a start). So if you’ve enjoyed my work, and have a little spare change, go get yourself a mug. Or buy an ad to drum up traffic for your own site. You won’t be disappointed, and you’ll have my sincere thanks.
PS – At the moment, I’m still finalizing the setup of my Blogads, so you’ll see some test ads there. Sign up now and get yours to replace them!

If you haven’t done so already, you should really read Bush’s National Security Strategy, released today.
It’s a remarkable, brilliant document, and spells out about as clearly as could be what the United States must do in the coming years. Anybody who still thinks this President doesn’t have a clear vision and plan for our foreign policy would be well advised to rethink that position.
Let us all hope that we can deliver on the fine words the document contains…

Playing with the site design again. I’ve revived the “Bite Sized Truth” concept, which I toyed with briefly about a month back. This time, I did it right, using Moveable Type categories to allow me to differentiate between “bites” — to appear in the right hand column — and normal full-length posts, to appear in the main body.
I continue to explore different aspects of blogging, and as I do so, the site evolves. Hopefully it should be obvious to regular readers of TTLB that I’m aspiring to create worthwhile original material; be it ” pieces,” silly satires, or both. (And oh yeah, every now and then I’ll try and bust into a completely new category.) In recent times, though, I’ve found myself holding back from the linky-linky thing, mainly from a reluctance to distract attention to whatever allegedly-profound piece of my own writing I’ve currently got sitting atop the front page.
“Bite-Sized Truth” is meant to solve that issue, by providing me with an easy spot to put links to the quality stuff I find elsewhere, while at the same time allowing me to keep my own work front-and-center for the world to see.
Anyway, we’ll see how it goes, as with everything. And yes, Lair, I know you don’t like the right-hand-column that Bite Sized Truth sits in, but I guess I’ll just have to ask you to deal, won’t I?

There’s much talk these days about “muscular” inspections being an answer for Iraq: inspections backed up by significant military force and a no-funny-business attitude towards Iraqi prevarication. Both Galt and Lileks have intelligent things to say this morning about why those who are optimistically cheerleading such inspections should, well, stop.
It occurred to me, though, that there are real-world examples of exactly what we’re discussing here. They’re called the West Bank and Gaza — perhaps you’ve heard of them?
Consider the parallels. Israel has been trying for ages, and quite aggressively for the past year, to locate and neutralize any explosives and weapons possessed by Palestinian terrorists that might be used against Israel.
While the aggressive stance of the past year has arguably provided a greater measure of safety for Israel, it has by no means prevented all attacks, as today’s murders underscore.
Furthermore, “success” to Israel generally means “no successful attacks” — which is a considerably easier goal than “no weapons left unfound.” I feel fairly confident that even the most optimistic IDF commander would never claim that Israel has come anywhere near identifying and destroying all of Palestinian terrorists’ caches of weapons and explosives — despite their sincere efforts to do so.
So when thinking about inspections of Iraq, I think we have to ask ourselves: why do we think inspectors will be able to succeed there in a task that the IDF has failed at?
Viewed in comparison with Israel’s task, inspectors in Iraq face a dramatically worse challenge. The area to be searched is many, many times larger. And the weapons are far deadlier — anything less than 100% success is unacceptable when we’re talking about nuclear and biological weapons.
Furthermore, Israel has the full force and might of its military stationed quite literally next door to their search zone. And they have demonstrated repeatedly that they are not afraid to use it.
Are those who support aggressive inspections prepared for U.N. troops to be more aggressive than the IDF in the search for weapons? How many Iraqi houses are they prepared to support being bulldozed, exactly?
It’s a fools game. And we can all be thankful that it is highly unlikely we’ll ever have to pin our hopes on inspections alone — because the Bush administration knows it.
Update: Martin thinks I’ve got a point, but counters:
Point taken, but there is a distinction. At least for now, weapons of mass destruction labs are more difficult to hide than the ones that make exploding bomb belts. Certainly the nuclear ones would be.
True enough; some components of WMD production are indeed harder to hide than your standard conventional explosive kitchen lab. But the following items, I think, would not be any harder:
– Stores of already-manufactured biological weapons
– Stores of already-manufactured chemical weapons
– A functional nuclear weapon
Basically, I’d agree that production facilities will be hard to find in some cases, but once the weapons are completed, they become pretty easy to hide I would think. (And since Saddam is agreeing to inspections now, might that clue us in that he is indeed ready for inspections — meaning, he’s confident he can hide his WMDs because he’s amassed a sufficient store of them?)
Martin’s right when he says ” if robust inspections were conducted they would find some WMD.” But I don’t think 95% is acceptable in this case; nor is 99% — and even if they were, I highly doubt we’d get anywhere near those percentages…
Update 2: Hesiod says: “With muscular inspection teams crawling all over Iraq, back by a tough UN resolution and willing and able US and British forces available to pound Saddam is he so much as drives a jeep across the path of these inspectors, his ability to actually USE said weapons will be, for all practical purposes, nil.”
Er, no, Hesiod. His ability to to actually use such weapons while the inspectors are still there will be nil.
Unfortunately, were we ever to get to the end of an inspection regime, all the trusting souls on the planet would say “Look! No WMDs for Saddam! Or at least, only those over there that we found, and we destroyed them, and besides, he said he’s really sorry and anyway he’s a rational actor and would never use them and what was the question again? Oh yeah, now let’s bring those inspectors home and let poor Iraq go about its business!” (not that I’m naming any names, here).
Once the inspectors are gone, then he’d be quite free to use the hidden stores with impunity, and somehow I doubt there would ever be consensus for a second round of inspections — that would be violating his sovereign rights, you see, and we can’t have that…

Would somebody else please go deal with awful BBC piece properly? I just don’t have the energy…

Sure, they’ve utterly failed to create a viable political party, but the aren’t all bad:

Thanks to CNN’s Crossfire for the link; apparently Ms. Rachel Mills (the Libertarian candidate who is selling the calendars, and, indeed, is pictured within them) will be on the show tonight.
The Crossfire program page asks: “Is becoming a political pin-up the best way to earn campaign cash?”
Well, for Ms. Mills, looks like it might be viable. It’s a darned good thing Janet Reno didn’t try it though…

Why hasn’t the revelation tucked within article received any play in, say, the New York Times today?
“…today it emerged that the offer only applied to military bases – which could let Saddam hide chemical and biological arms stockpiles elsewhere…
The disclosure that restrictions were, after all, attached to Saddam’s offer was made by the London ambassador of the Arab League which brokered the deal in the first place.
Ali Muhsen Hamid claimed Iraq was being sincere, but he stipulated that civilian sites would not be available to the inspectors. ‘We support anywhere, any military site (for inspections), but not as some people have suggested for inspections against hospitals, against schools.'”
I’ve checked the New York Times and WaPo’s Iraq stories today, and find no mention of it. This piece ran yesterday in the online version of the London Evening Standard.
Have the NYT/WaPo followed up on this and found the quote from Ali Muhsen Hamid to be inaccurate? (And if so, wouldn’t that be news as well?)
Are we just seeing a delay in cycle time — have the American media just not noticed it yet? (And if so, shouldn’t they be hiring some bloggers who are paying closer attention than they are — say, this one and this one, both of whom had this story).
I’ll cut the NYT and WaPo one more day of slack on this before I cry “bias”, but the TTLB radar is up and humming… stay tuned…
Update: OK, this isn’t looking any better. Henry Hanks points out that this article was referenced in yesterday’s Best of the Web from WSJ’s OpinionJournal and FoxNews (I can’t seem to locate the FoxNews citation). Those aren’t exactly, er, low visibility spots to hide something. (And its right at the top of BOTW, too). Hanks also mentions that Ali Muhsen Hamid claims to have been misquoted — but that there is a transcript that disproves that claim.

I’m leaning towards dropping the Iraq Discussion Forum. It was an experiment, really, but I don’t think it’s attracting terribly much interest.
I was curious to see if there might be demand out there for a forum like this, but so far, looks like not. I suspect most weblog folks prefer to post on their own blog — and frankly, have had to force myself to post to the forum rather than TTLB proper myself. And those folks that don’t have blogs… well, if you don’t have a weblog at this point, you probably don’t care to write much and won’t like a forum either.
Anyway, if Andrew Sullivan, The Corner, Glenn, and Mickey all want to link to the forum and steer a huge amount of traffic at it, maybe it’ll take off, but if it stays at the current level of minimal posting, it’ll be gone by the end of the week.
Vote with your posts, if you want it to stay!
-NZB

Okay, is it me, or does passage from William Shatner’s new nonfiction book (scary phrase, that) “I’m Working On That” — which purports to examine future scientific advances — sound a bit familiar?
THE UNIVERSE IS big, really big!
But don