When a politician makes likability a substitute for authority, his opponents make hatred a substitute for opposition.

The Vanishing

"This is a major step forward to keep these predators off the Internet," McDonnell said. "We want to be a leader with legislation to protect kids."

Here's how the plan would work: After the state obtained a predator's e-mail addresses, officials would turn them over to MySpace. The company, using new software, would then block anyone using that e-mail address from entering the site.

Did somebody say new software? It's Sarb-Ox all over again.

"We are certainly going to put public safety ahead of these civil liberties concerns," said McDonnell.

"Public safety" is code for "business opportunity" and political "self preservation".

Dare anyone ask why there is suddenly such urgency?

Shouldn't we have a registry for terrorist e-mail addresses? I mean, no one wants a child talking to a predator, but EVERYONE is at risk when terrorists go Friending.

Virginia Proposal Aims to Keep Sex Offenders Off Networking Sites

Sex sells.

"It's a kind of blog that has turned into a crime-fighting resource."

"Every waking minute he’s on that computer," said his mother.

"I have a low opinion of men in general," he said.

The group's collaboration with “Dateline” has been lucrative. ... NBC [is] paying the group roughly $70,000 for each hour of television produced. Six new episodes are planned for the first half of 2007.

I am reminded of this quote:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Cha-ching!

We are a mere step away from live-televised, ad-supported street-level drug busts, filmed Candid Camera style, with a goofy sidekick popping out of nowhere to exclaim, with hands on cheeks in mock shock, "Oops!" as the sucker is handcuffed and deposited into the back of the police cruiser. The show could be called "Live Raid", or simply "Busted". Think of it as Room Raiders meets Cops meets Deal or No Deal.

You could also do a riff on Elimidate, wherein four women are paired with a convicted offender, then simply let the cameras roll! (With a uniformed bust crew in tow, of course. Can't be too cautious ...) The twist here is that three of the women are confederates, and paid professional actors; the fourth woman is in the dark, and so she is the real contestant on the show. The viewer's challenge is to identify the contestant among the women before she learns the true identity of her 'date' and ruins the party. The actors' challenge is for each to be eliminated in turn, so that in the last stage, the contestant "wins"; but in doing so, they should not prematurely reveal themselves to the audience as confederates.

You could also do a "suspense" version where the viewers are "in" on the conspiracy, and the question is whether the contestant will learn the truth before the date is done.

For safety and insurance reasons, of course, you might want to just use an actor for the male role, too.

Web Site Hunts Pedophiles, and TV Goes Along

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said he would seek legislation to require convicted sex offenders there to register their online identities with the state to help MySpace and other Web sites frequented by teenagers more easily block access. Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona., announced plans for similar federal legislation last week, but theirs would apply only to those on probation or parole. Mr. McDonnell’s plan for Virginia would apply to all convicted sex offenders. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, applauded the Virginia announcement. “This legislation is an important recognition that the Internet has become a community as real as any other neighborhood and is in need of similar safeguards,” Mr. Nigam said.

Virginia: Registry of Sex Offenders’ Online Identities

"Protect the children." Over the years that mantra has been applied to countless real and perceived threats. America has scrambled to protect its children from a wide variety of dangers including school shooters, cyberbullying, violent video games, snipers, Satanic Ritual Abuse, pornography, the Internet, and drugs.

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent protecting children from one threat or other, often with little concern for how expensive or effective the remedies are—or how serious the threat actually is in the first place. So it is with America’s latest panic: sexual predators.

Eventually this predator panic will subside and some new threat will take its place. Expensive, ineffective, and unworkable laws will be left in its wake when the panic passes. And no one is protecting America from that.

Have you seen Little Children?

Predator Panic

This puts a new spin on Rumsfeld's exit.

The situation in Iraq has been evolving, and U.S. forces have adjusted, over time, from major combat operations to counterterrorism, to counterinsurgency, to dealing with death squads and sectarian violence.

In my view it is time for a major adjustment. Clearly, what US forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.

You have to think about who is leaking the memo and what their objectives might be, though it certainly gives the appearance that he was dropped for disloyalty ... and perhaps a perceived unwillingness to "stay the course."

Not that this memo was actually a trigger for Bush; he was already interviewing Gates and had possibly made his decision. But it makes clear that a critical eye on Iraq was quite unwelcome.

The ideas collected here are not especially original; one gets the impression that the memo was drafted after a Pentagon skull session, based on an hour or so of brainstorming and a Lexis-Nexis search.

You'll even find some variations on Gary Brecher's ideas in the list:

Provide money to key political and religious leaders (as Saddam Hussein did), to get them to help us get through this difficult period.

Rumsfeld’s Memo of Options for Iraq War

Rangel is making an important point, even if his argument for the draft does not work. War is a special activity of society. It is one of the few in which the citizen is expected -- at least in principle -- to fight and, if necessary, die for his country. It is more than a career. It is an existential commitment, a willingness to place oneself at risk for one's country. The fact that children of the upper classes, on the whole, do not make that existential commitment represents a tremendous weakness in American society. When those who benefit most from a society feel no obligation to defend it, there is a deep and significant malaise in that society.

Perhaps. Certainly the nature of political discourse has evolved (for the worse, most would agree) since World War II.

I might argue that the apparent absence of obligation can be easily explained. "Those who benefit most" are not compelled to defend because they do not really feel threatened and do not feel that running around Ramadi in a HMMWV is really protecting Americans. If the mood of the general public reflected the sense that America faces an existential threat, I think plenty of people would be ready to make an existential commitment.

So when "those who benefit most" display no feeling of obligation, they are reflecting a general disregard not for the fundamental existence of America, but for the chronic plight of the rest of the world. This disregard is quite widespread and does not split along class lines. Why should Americans feel more obligated to prevent civil war in Iraq than in Sudan? That's easy; because Americans actively established the conditions for civil war in Iraq, but merely failed to act in Sudan.

The reasons given by enlisted volunteers are as various as the volunteers themselves, but broadly, the Army is seen as both an opportunity and (perhaps ironically) as a (financial) "safe harbor". As evidenced by the "who's Rumsfeld?" comment, the motivations of volunteers are not necessarily political. If you polled new Army recruits about their reasons for joining up, I think you'd find very few who refer to the prevention of African genocide or to the encouragement of women's literacy.

There is room among the arguments against leaving Iraq for something about not creating a "haven" for anti-American terrorists. But this does not translate into an argument for going to Iraq. By staying in Iraq to suppress civil war, we accomplish very little toward eliminating the existential threat to America, to the extent it is even real. There is little reason to expect successful businessmen to join the Army when the threat is sufficiently abstract that the most accessible means to understanding it is a RAND monograph.

If, as the RAND monograph suggests, "deny[ing] sanctuaries to terrorists" is a pillar of the war on terror, and if civil war zones are assumed to create such sanctuaries, then the war strategy now obligates the US to intervene in all future civil wars. Clearly our (in)actions indicate that we do not believe in our own strategy -- neither in its merits nor in its practicality.

This is amusing:

If you can play tennis as well as you claim to for as long as you say, you can patrol a village in the Sunni Triangle.

As for Friedman's claim that

There is no inherent reason why enlistment -- or conscription -- should be targeted toward those in late adolescence.

I wonder about the futility of trying to train a 50-year-old bankruptcy attorney how to hunt terrorists in the caves of Afghanistan. Something about old dogs ...

Stratfor (and Rangel) on the Draft

A 22:24 minute audio speech attributed to the Emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, and titled: “There is No Judgment, but that of Allah,” was issued by the Ministry of Information of the Islamic State of Iraq today, Friday, November 10, 2006. Within his message, Muhajir speaks in the regard of recent events, including the establishment of the Islamic State, American elections in which the Democratic Party gained power within Congress, and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as the U.S. Secretary of Defense. These events, he believes, are portents of the victory of the Mujahideen, but on this he does not dwell. Rather, he speaks at greater length to the Mujahideen, specifically calling for the first time to those in Ansar al-Sunnah, the Islamic Army in Iraq, and the Mujahideen Army for their unity with the Islamic State, and continuity of jihad until they grab hold of the White House.

Rita Katz offers the audio, but not to you:

The Arabic audio clip and transcript are provided to our Intel Service members.

An Audio Speech from Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq, “There is No Judgment, but that of Allah” – 11/10/2006

The head of al Qaeda's Iraq operations yesterday ... praised US voters ...

It's worth noting that this statement is coming from al-Masri. We still have not heard from Zawahiri since the madrasa attack. The clock is ticking ...

In neighboring Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also expressed satisfaction with the Democratic gains in the US vote, calling them a boon for Tehran.

"This defeat [the thumpin'] is actually an obvious victory for the Iranian nation."

A vote against Christian conservatives is a vote for militant Islam? Were you thinking about that when you decided to punish them for Brownie's ineptitude?

On Tuesday, you were mujahideen, and your Diebold was your Kalashnikov.

Al Qaeda gloats over US election

Rumsfeld was never a neoconservative; he was an obstreperous contrarian, committed not to putting forward any particular philosophy but to aggressively challenging whatever ideas his bureaucratic opponents and critics put forward.

That's the spirit I always liked about Rumsfeld's Rules. Unfortunately, on Iraq he viewed the uniformed military as his opponents and critics. Things might have gone much differently if he had decided to challenge Wolfowitz and Cheney instead.

Understanding Gates