CapitalistImperialistPig

Former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt, 91, came out as "Deep Throat" today. The nation owes him a debt of gratitude for putting truth and country first at considerable personal risk. Without him, it is entirely possible that Nixon's lies and subversion of the constitution would have gravely injured the Republic. We could use some more brave souls to reveal all the crap the current group is pulling? Of course it would help to have a press that cared. Getting rid of the independent counsel statute turned out to be a big mistake. I hope that if Dem's ever regain control, they will reinstitute it, possibly with some safeguards against frivolous fishing expeditions like Ken Starr's.

George Bush must love America's enemies - he's made so many of them. From the WaPo's story on his Press Conference today. President Bush today dismissed as "absurd" a charge by Amnesty International that his administration has created "the gulag of our times" at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and he asserted that allegations of mistreatment have originated from detainees who "hate America" and are trained to lie And, oh yeah, American soldiers, the FBI, the Red Cross...

From the NYT contiuing coverage of Class in America . Increasingly, the nation's richest are spending their money on personal services or exclusive experiences and isolating themselves from the masses in ways that go beyond building gated walls. These Americans employ about 9,000 personal chefs, up from about 400 just 10 years ago, according to the American Personal Chef Association.

No doubt the most controversial chapter in Freakonomics , reviewed below, concerns the link between Roe vs. Wade and the huge drop in crime that occurred in the 1990's. Leavitt make the case that a large fraction of that drop was due to Roe vs. Wade's legalization of abortion, and the resulting boom in abortions among precisely those women whose children are most likely to go on to criminal careers: poor, uneducated, unmarried and otherwise disadvantaged. His argument rests on the following points: 1)The chronological correlation - crime started dropping precisely when that cohort of children would have entered their peak criminal years, moreover, in states that legalized abortion about 3-4 years earlier, the decline started about 3-4 years earlier. Similar effect were found in other countries. 2) The observed fact that those women whose children were statistically most likely to become criminals were those who had most of the abortions. 3) The decline in crime was observe...

Freakonomics , a Review. Book Title: Dumb Book Subtitle (A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything): Dumber Chapter Titles: Really Dumb Italicized text: An obnoxiously effusive paean to the first author, presumeably written by the second. This stuff would make Rush Limbaugh or a Rap Star blush. The rest of the book: To my surprise, very good, packed with interesting tidbits of information giving insight to much of ordinary life. One prominent theme is the way information and circumstance lead to incentive structures different from the ostensible ones. Examples include explaining how it can pay a real estate agent to get the buyer to offer a lower bid or why it can pay Sumo wrestlers to throw matches. Sometimes the discussion involves the results of applying statistical methodology to unconventional subjects (drug dealer earnings, honor system bagel sales) and sometimes just a rousing good story (how Superman helped rout the Ku Klux Klan). I recommend it. Skip any...

From time to time I push the "next blog" button and cruise random climes of the blogosphere. I am often surprised by how many good writers there are out there, public diaries, literature, and poetry. Of course there is also an infinite sea of clutter, in which category I include all the stuff in languages that I can't read. I can't quite decide if I should mention some of those I like or not - many of them seem so personal that I sort of hate to intrude - on the other hand, the authors are publishing them for the world to see. Many have lamented the decline of the private literary forms of yore - the letter and the diary - but I suspect that they would be reassured if they clicked on the old "next blog" link once in a while.

One of the more annoying affectations of columnists is addressing their columns to the President. Tom Friedman of the NYT apparently thinks his key role as an Iraq War enabler should entitle him to be heard by the Pres. In this, his latest folly he asks the President to shut down the Gitmo torture center. Fat chance. Of course he does have some rather good arguments: If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantánamo has become for America's standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press. Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press. It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London that begins, "An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guant...