Thursday
A break from our regularly scheduled jadedness*
Can't help echoing this sentiment.
*My apologies, "jadedness" is an ugly sounding word.
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*My apologies, "jadedness" is an ugly sounding word.
Wednesday
Hit job
The New York Times should publish more book reviews like this one, in which Robert McFarlane trashes Paul Theroux's latest (and to some extent Theroux). Haven't read the book, or anything by Theroux, so I can't judge whether what it's saying is an accurate description. The excerpts do make a strong case though, and even if false it's very entertaining.
Link via Tyler Cowen.
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Link via Tyler Cowen.
Monday
Mandatory Minimums
What with the Democratic Convention starting today in Denver and the U.S. Open starting today in Flushing, I wanted to talk a little bit about term limits, in particular about New York City's term limits for city-wide officials, and even more particularly about the poor quality of an anti term-limit Editorial in the New York Times (though their 1993 and 1996 anti term-limit pieces were worse). The main problem with the most recent editorial is that it uses a little known form of cost/benefit analysis called, “Ignore all benefits.” It does mention potential positives, but only in the most perfunctory way. The piece says,
If one wants to argue against term limits (link is to an old post in which I suggest that Democrats in Congress should try to pass a constitutional amendment to remove presidential term limits so that Bush could run again and destroy the Republican party, it doesn't discuss the substantive merits of such a proposal), talk about how they go too far in that direction, and that some more limited anti-incumbency reforms would be better. Don't claim that getting rid of incumbents means chaos because no one with experiential knowledge remains since staff below a certain level generally and in some agencies at all levels won't turn over just because an incumbent leaves, talk about actual examples of new officials not having knowledge that the ousted incumbent would have, and ways that hurt the city. But that might be a problematic argument to make, since the Times thought the chaos caused by the term limit laws would start following the 2001 election cycle, but now seems pretty happy with the way things are running. Oh, and don't act like limits on voter choice of candidate which are voted into existence by those very voters are generally wrong because anti-democratic.
I wanted here to provide other examples of restrictions on voter choice which are obviously good, but I'm actually having more trouble thinking of an unambiguously good restriction than I'd expected. Residency requirements seem like the most obvious choice, but the counterpoint that if a non-resident candidate can get the most votes, why not let people elect them seems to apply for at least some offices. So I'll go ahead and say different limits on voter choice are good ideas depending on the characteristics of the office being run for, and in particular the more powerful an office the better an idea term limits are, and the Mayor of New York City is substantively quite powerful and should be term limited.
[Edited for clarity on 9/30]
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Term limits are undeniably seductive. They seem to promise relief from mediocre, self-perpetuating incumbents and from gridlocked legislatures in places like Albany.Everything else in the piece is about how term limits mean that you can't elect someone for more terms than the limited amount, even if they're really good at being mayor, like the sainted Mike Bloomberg. But that's just saying that there are costs to term limits. If it weren't the case that term limits frequently mean that an option voters would prefer (who may also be the best option substantively) couldn't run for office then it would never occur to anyone to put them in place. On the other hand, the three sentences quoted above give scant attention to serious problems with incumbent entrenchment. Because being an incumbent means you can write laws, make decisions, dole out favors and otherwise do stuff you can't do as a mere candidate, it's very difficult for non-incumbents to oust incumbents. It sometimes happens when disasters take place on the incumbents watch (Bush), people don't like the trend the country is going in (Bush), or feel they are otherwise worse off (Bush), but incumbent reelection rates in the United States are in general much higher than can be explained by anything other than various systemic biases which favor incumbents. Anti-incumbent efforts are surely needed.
. . .
The deceptive charm of term limits is that they automatically purge the system of rascally politicians.
If one wants to argue against term limits (link is to an old post in which I suggest that Democrats in Congress should try to pass a constitutional amendment to remove presidential term limits so that Bush could run again and destroy the Republican party, it doesn't discuss the substantive merits of such a proposal), talk about how they go too far in that direction, and that some more limited anti-incumbency reforms would be better. Don't claim that getting rid of incumbents means chaos because no one with experiential knowledge remains since staff below a certain level generally and in some agencies at all levels won't turn over just because an incumbent leaves, talk about actual examples of new officials not having knowledge that the ousted incumbent would have, and ways that hurt the city. But that might be a problematic argument to make, since the Times thought the chaos caused by the term limit laws would start following the 2001 election cycle, but now seems pretty happy with the way things are running. Oh, and don't act like limits on voter choice of candidate which are voted into existence by those very voters are generally wrong because anti-democratic.
I wanted here to provide other examples of restrictions on voter choice which are obviously good, but I'm actually having more trouble thinking of an unambiguously good restriction than I'd expected. Residency requirements seem like the most obvious choice, but the counterpoint that if a non-resident candidate can get the most votes, why not let people elect them seems to apply for at least some offices. So I'll go ahead and say different limits on voter choice are good ideas depending on the characteristics of the office being run for, and in particular the more powerful an office the better an idea term limits are, and the Mayor of New York City is substantively quite powerful and should be term limited.
[Edited for clarity on 9/30]
Thursday
Now with actual reporting
Last Thursday morning I was sitting in Grand Central Terminal having breakfast and eavesdropping on the people sitting behind me. I've forgotten most of what was said, but the part which I noted to some friends later in the day, because I was horrified by it, was that one of them was telling the others, who seemed appreciative of this information about how one thing he liked about Sen. Obama (I couldn't tell if he was in favor of Sen. Obama overall or not) was that the Obamas only owned one house, which they had bought with their own money, plus a Condo they were renting in Washington, D.C. He was contrasting this to other candidate's families, not just the McCains, but also the Clintons and others, who he was saying had more than one home and had had homes bought for them, or married heiresses, or used funds donated for their library or for other purposes to buy homes.
I found this both mind-boggling and frightening. The first because he seemed rather fact-challenged, since, while my understanding is that there was no impropriety involving Tony Rezko and the purchase of the Obama's Chicago home, surely the manner of the purchase of his home isn't a point in his favor. I don't think his narratives about how other Presidential contenders (incl. nomination contenders) acquired their homes were accurate either, but I can't remember the details so I'm unsure. The second because I hate being reminded of the actual bases upon which some people vote. I mean, these people were weighting how many homes someone owned as a point for or against them in deciding who to vote for, and even then they didn't know the facts about this.
Anyway, I was reminded of this today when all of my favorite blogs, plus the Obama campaign and the DNC, decided it would be a good idea to spend the whole day talking about how many homes John McCain owns and how funny it is that when asked yesterday he didn't know what the answer was. I've been told there's a difference between saying “It's bad that he has a lot of houses” and “McCain is so out of touch with the common person's economic situation that he doesn't know how many houses he owns,” but I don't see it. I do see the force of “John McCain's tax plans, including his estate tax plan is only more helpful to you if you're very rich, like the McCains,” but that's not what's going on today, it's just stoking resentment. And I understand the Obama campaign's need to hit back against bizarre (tire gauge) and offensive (celebrity) attacks by the McCain campaign, but I don't see why anyone else has to act like it matters.
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I found this both mind-boggling and frightening. The first because he seemed rather fact-challenged, since, while my understanding is that there was no impropriety involving Tony Rezko and the purchase of the Obama's Chicago home, surely the manner of the purchase of his home isn't a point in his favor. I don't think his narratives about how other Presidential contenders (incl. nomination contenders) acquired their homes were accurate either, but I can't remember the details so I'm unsure. The second because I hate being reminded of the actual bases upon which some people vote. I mean, these people were weighting how many homes someone owned as a point for or against them in deciding who to vote for, and even then they didn't know the facts about this.
Anyway, I was reminded of this today when all of my favorite blogs, plus the Obama campaign and the DNC, decided it would be a good idea to spend the whole day talking about how many homes John McCain owns and how funny it is that when asked yesterday he didn't know what the answer was. I've been told there's a difference between saying “It's bad that he has a lot of houses” and “McCain is so out of touch with the common person's economic situation that he doesn't know how many houses he owns,” but I don't see it. I do see the force of “John McCain's tax plans, including his estate tax plan is only more helpful to you if you're very rich, like the McCains,” but that's not what's going on today, it's just stoking resentment. And I understand the Obama campaign's need to hit back against bizarre (tire gauge) and offensive (celebrity) attacks by the McCain campaign, but I don't see why anyone else has to act like it matters.
Tuesday
It's free
I'm linking the above old xkcd mostly because it's funny, makes a good point which I hadn't given much thought to, and I'd never seen that particular comic (which is especially strange because the one immediately prior to it is pretty well known), but also because I want to criticize it. And I want to criticize it by asking rhetorically if it's any funnier than the following:
A Dialogue on Dreaming
Xerxes: Are you coming to dinner?
Yvonne: Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and then maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
Xerxes: Ok, cool.
I don't really think it loses anything by just being translated into text, which forces one to ask why it's being presented in webcomic form. I also want to add, if it isn't obvious, that this critique does not generalize to all xkcd strips, many of which are essentially visual.
This post contains 66% of your recommended daily allowance of links
Still don't find either Presidential campaign particularly interesting to talk about, mostly for the reasons discussed in the “Narcissism” post and also because I live in a state which has gone Democratic for the Presidency ever since Reagan's massive 1984 landslide over Mondale, done so by a very wide margin in all of those years except for when it voted for Dukakis over Bush, and will clearly do so (538 gives a 2% chance of McCain winning New York, as of this writing) this year. Which is another reason to support the National Popular Vote bill in your state legislature, it's truly odd that once a candidate has a solid plurality in your state persuading other voters loses almost all value. But despite not wanting to talk about campaign stuff in general, I did think that Henry Farrell's reaction to the following bit of David Brooks's column was smart enough, and not just in a point-scoring fashion, that it's worth passing on.
Brooks says,
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Brooks says,
“McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule.”And Farrell responds,
“[L]et’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that they are right to say that the only way to win, this year, is by taking the low road. Would that mean that they have to take it? Of course not. That means you have a choice between honor and ambition; between running a decent campaign and a sordid one; between being a candidate the country can be proud of and being a candidate who contributes to the degradation and trivialization of political discourse.Let me make a fearless prediction: if McCain loses the Presidency in November, as I think he will, he will apologize for his behavior in this campaign, in much the same way he apologized for his equivocation on the Confederate Battle Flag after losing the 2000 Republican Presidential nomination to George W. Bush. The apology will be worth less than the paper it's written on.
You would have no choice only if you assumed that your own ambitions were more important than your honor.”
Well, anybody can be just like me, obviously
I've found the below map useful, though I don't know anything about its sourcing, so a grain or two of salt is recommended. It's especially helpful because if you try to use the street map view in Google Maps for Georgia you'll find that it's essentially virgin territory as far as Google cartography is concerned.
View Larger Map
When I said yesterday that “Russian aggression in Georgia is evil” I meant that Russian aggression in Georgia is evil, and I was reacting to news of Russian war aims outside of simply taking away Georgia's ability to use force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in particular to their troop movements in incontestably Georgian territory, their naval blockade, and demands for a new regime in Tbilisi. That, in combination with news of Russian provocations which led Georgia to begin it's original offensive against Tskhinvali had me very disposed to see things as Russian aggression. I still see those as Russian aggression, and still don't trust Russia's motives, but Dan Nexon's post is a useful corrective on the difficulties in keeping a detached perspective on developing events before making judgments of them.
Another example of this difficulty with perspective, or the mendacity of many U.S. conservatives if you're feeling less charitable, can be found at the Weekly Standard blog, here, in which the blogger says that, “[Obama] seems to have internalized the cult of celeb-worship” and throws a couple of similar insults in for good measure. He cites as evidence the following facts: his children were interviewed on Entertainment Tonight and he appeared with them, he gave an interview to US Weekly, he exchanged e-mails with Scarlett Johannson (a story I've covered here before, though Jaime Sneider is, as far as I know, making up the idea that the e-mails were controversial. No controversy about them ever took place.), and a number of other celebrities support Obama and have offered to fund raise for him, including George Clooney, who, according to anonymous sources in the Daily Mail, regularly advises Obama. Anyway, what I want to say about that isn't really about that absurd post, but rather that I worry that I too let the fact that I support one candidate and oppose another cause me to view otherwise neutral and/or trivial events in the progress of the campaigns as more interesting and damning than they actually are.
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View Larger Map
When I said yesterday that “Russian aggression in Georgia is evil” I meant that Russian aggression in Georgia is evil, and I was reacting to news of Russian war aims outside of simply taking away Georgia's ability to use force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in particular to their troop movements in incontestably Georgian territory, their naval blockade, and demands for a new regime in Tbilisi. That, in combination with news of Russian provocations which led Georgia to begin it's original offensive against Tskhinvali had me very disposed to see things as Russian aggression. I still see those as Russian aggression, and still don't trust Russia's motives, but Dan Nexon's post is a useful corrective on the difficulties in keeping a detached perspective on developing events before making judgments of them.
Another example of this difficulty with perspective, or the mendacity of many U.S. conservatives if you're feeling less charitable, can be found at the Weekly Standard blog, here, in which the blogger says that, “[Obama] seems to have internalized the cult of celeb-worship” and throws a couple of similar insults in for good measure. He cites as evidence the following facts: his children were interviewed on Entertainment Tonight and he appeared with them, he gave an interview to US Weekly, he exchanged e-mails with Scarlett Johannson (a story I've covered here before, though Jaime Sneider is, as far as I know, making up the idea that the e-mails were controversial. No controversy about them ever took place.), and a number of other celebrities support Obama and have offered to fund raise for him, including George Clooney, who, according to anonymous sources in the Daily Mail, regularly advises Obama. Anyway, what I want to say about that isn't really about that absurd post, but rather that I worry that I too let the fact that I support one candidate and oppose another cause me to view otherwise neutral and/or trivial events in the progress of the campaigns as more interesting and damning than they actually are.
Monday
Banal but true
Things I know: Russian aggression against Georgia is evil and will cause needless death and suffering. A legitimate system of international cooperation requires that the norm against aggressive war be enforced, moving towards such a system requires steps on the margin to enforce it.
Things I don't know: What the U.S., EU, NATO, China, the UN or any other actor can do to enforce it, because I don't know what they can plausibly threaten this nuclear power with, nor do I know what those actors can offer Russia which would motivate it to stop this attack without encouraging attacks in the future.
Rob Farley has been writing up a storm on the “Confrontation in the Caucasus,” both detailing the most recent strategic and military developments in South Ossetia and rest of Georgia (that last bit is, of course, intentionally political) over past the four days and and giving some good perspective on what it means for the future. All his posts are still on the frontpage over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, if you want to read them in chronological order, start here.
For what the experience has been like for a british expatriate living in Tbilisi, see this blog, starting with her post here, skipping to this one, and then almost all of the subsequent posts. The progression of the posts is fascinating, and it illustrates one of the amazing things about blogging, that the man or woman on the street in an area of news interest has a forum to post their impressions of what day to day life is like, assuming they have access to the internet and the skill set to use it, and that those postings can find an audience. Katrina hitting New Orleans was another example of this phenomenon, as were many of the Iraqis blogging from Iraq during the early phases of that war, or for that matter the military bloggers now. As you can see from the most recent posts, she's now being evacuating from the country.
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Things I don't know: What the U.S., EU, NATO, China, the UN or any other actor can do to enforce it, because I don't know what they can plausibly threaten this nuclear power with, nor do I know what those actors can offer Russia which would motivate it to stop this attack without encouraging attacks in the future.
Rob Farley has been writing up a storm on the “Confrontation in the Caucasus,” both detailing the most recent strategic and military developments in South Ossetia and rest of Georgia (that last bit is, of course, intentionally political) over past the four days and and giving some good perspective on what it means for the future. All his posts are still on the frontpage over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, if you want to read them in chronological order, start here.
For what the experience has been like for a british expatriate living in Tbilisi, see this blog, starting with her post here, skipping to this one, and then almost all of the subsequent posts. The progression of the posts is fascinating, and it illustrates one of the amazing things about blogging, that the man or woman on the street in an area of news interest has a forum to post their impressions of what day to day life is like, assuming they have access to the internet and the skill set to use it, and that those postings can find an audience. Katrina hitting New Orleans was another example of this phenomenon, as were many of the Iraqis blogging from Iraq during the early phases of that war, or for that matter the military bloggers now. As you can see from the most recent posts, she's now being evacuating from the country.
Counting Chickens
In a post below I said I thought that Ron Suskind's allegations about the White House forgery of a letter connecting Iraq to al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atta were probably true, and if true constituted a sufficient reason to impeach whomever was revealed to be responsible for the forgery. Since I endorsed it as probably true, I feel like it's my responsibility to note that his two named sources for the allegation are denying it and that Suskind says he's fine with that, since he has them saying it on tape and they're just feeling a lot of pressure right now to retract. Further, another reporter has come forth with a story saying the forgery did happen but that Suskind is wrong in some details, including about the White House instructing the CIA to do it, and that they instead used the Pentagon Office of Special Plans. I don't revise my estimate of the truth of the allegation that the White House caused such a forgery to be created, but to give some sense on where I'm coming from on this issue, I remember that in February of 2003 I was absolutely certain that if the U.S. invaded Iraq we would find weapons of mass destruction because they'd either be there or we would put them there to be found. And I was wrong about that and nevertheless haven't come to trust the White House any more just because they didn't plant weapons to be found.
To expand on my mention that such a forgery is sufficient for impeachment, a couple of points. First, I hope that wasn't taken to mean that I actually expected such impeachment, or even a serious movement for it. It's been clear for a long time that for whatever reason the vast majority of Democrats in Congress have no interest in impeachment proceedings, and there's no prospect of that changing now. Among other things having all political news shift to focusing on Obama and McCain, and the fact that Obama in his reconciling mode would never hint at suggesting at thinking about impeachment completely preclude it.
Second, I'm of the view that the torture memoranda (and giving the orders to carry out the tactics permitted by said memoranda), the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, and the Libby pardon all constituted sufficient independent bases for impeachment, which should give an idea of where my standards for impeachable offenses currently stand.
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To expand on my mention that such a forgery is sufficient for impeachment, a couple of points. First, I hope that wasn't taken to mean that I actually expected such impeachment, or even a serious movement for it. It's been clear for a long time that for whatever reason the vast majority of Democrats in Congress have no interest in impeachment proceedings, and there's no prospect of that changing now. Among other things having all political news shift to focusing on Obama and McCain, and the fact that Obama in his reconciling mode would never hint at suggesting at thinking about impeachment completely preclude it.
Second, I'm of the view that the torture memoranda (and giving the orders to carry out the tactics permitted by said memoranda), the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, and the Libby pardon all constituted sufficient independent bases for impeachment, which should give an idea of where my standards for impeachable offenses currently stand.
Friday
Narcissism
Two days ago, I read this James Fallows post, where he talks about what purpose his blog serves as opposed to writing he does for magazines and books, and skimmed the archives of this blog, where the blogger, Andrew, is somewhat regularly bringing specialized (historical) knowledge into his posts or otherwise writing more analytically than I've tended to in my recent posts here. This led me to think some about what I'm doing writing a blog where the plurality (almost certaily majority, but I don't want to count) of the posts consists of my reacting fairly superficially to events in recent broadly political news or linking to other people's reactions to that news.
I have a partial answer to that: I think I have a (very) few readers who aren't reading the same blogs I am or following the political news as closely as I am, and I want to share some of what I'm reading that I think is worth bringing to their attention. But I could do that just by posting links and a one sentence summary. I another purpose I had for the blog is that writing about a topic at times forces me to think more deeply about it than I otherwise would (because I try to imagine which facts I believe others would question, and look into why I believe them), but I'm not so sure posts about events that take place in the course of a political campaign really serve that purpose. For instance, say I link to Marc Ambinder's post which says, in full (odd formatting in original):
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I have a partial answer to that: I think I have a (very) few readers who aren't reading the same blogs I am or following the political news as closely as I am, and I want to share some of what I'm reading that I think is worth bringing to their attention. But I could do that just by posting links and a one sentence summary. I another purpose I had for the blog is that writing about a topic at times forces me to think more deeply about it than I otherwise would (because I try to imagine which facts I believe others would question, and look into why I believe them), but I'm not so sure posts about events that take place in the course of a political campaign really serve that purpose. For instance, say I link to Marc Ambinder's post which says, in full (odd formatting in original):
If there were a group of questionable donations all with the name AbdullahI'm not going to think any more deeply about the topic of unfair campaign coverage, nor am I going to reconsider my support, or the particular intensity of my support, for Barack Obama. And I don't think it's something that other Obama supporters, or at least the ones who might read this blog, are particularly benefited by reading, except to the extent it creates a pleasant sensation of loathing towards the people who would hypothetically turn this into a huge deal for Obama. All I can do is suggest that some people who do support John McCain should consider what they think the answer to that question is, and what it means if they think it would be a bigger deal. But no one who supports McCain is ever going to read this, as far as I know, so I'm back to wondering why I post that, or things like it, at all.
that were funneled through a guy in Jordan
who is a Jordanian national
who is under investigation for war profiteering
and it were Barack Obama
instead of John McCain
would this be a bigger deal?
Wednesday
Overton window
Just because I haven't said it, or seen it said enough, and it should be, outrage fatigue be damned: If the claim in Ron Suskind's new book
that the White House directed the forgery of a letter discussing Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda is true, whichever individuals in the White House Suskind means by the term “White House” should be impeached if they're cabinet-level or higher and therefore impeachable, otherwise fired. Criminal proceedings should be commenced against them. Also, taking such an action is an intentional subversion of democracy (misleading or lying to voters in order to create false beliefs in them so that they'll vote for you is always in conflict with democratic principles, and is obviously and deplorably common, it's just not usually done on such a grand scale) and similar ethically, though not legally, to treason.
The claim is probably true.
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that the White House directed the forgery of a letter discussing Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda is true, whichever individuals in the White House Suskind means by the term “White House” should be impeached if they're cabinet-level or higher and therefore impeachable, otherwise fired. Criminal proceedings should be commenced against them. Also, taking such an action is an intentional subversion of democracy (misleading or lying to voters in order to create false beliefs in them so that they'll vote for you is always in conflict with democratic principles, and is obviously and deplorably common, it's just not usually done on such a grand scale) and similar ethically, though not legally, to treason.The claim is probably true.
Tuesday
Here's to you, Mr. Robinson
As a somewhat pretentious person1, I don't in general read gawker. But last night I was out to dinner and there was a semi-famous person whom I didn't recognize (because I'm a swp, see fn. 1) having a private party in the same restaurant I was eating in. I was curious whether the semi-famous person was eating with other famous people, so I went to gawker. And thank god I did, because otherwise I wouldn't have heard about MSNBC's absurd claim to the Columbia Journalism Review that every Tuesday is now Super Tuesday and it no longer refers to a particular day in the primary election season. Astonishingly dumb, since it makes the term less useful by causing confusion both as to what it refers to in general and, for people who only rarely watch MSNBC, why a particular Tuesday is a Super one when they tune in. Once again makes me glad that I don't watch cable news, or any televised news other than the fake one (again, swp), for that matter.
Gawker didn't have anything on the dinner, maybe everyone there was in a privacy respecting mood. But I'm probably being naïve and instead there's some less-uplifting explanation for why it wasn't reported. Oh, he's there all the time, that explains it.
1. Hereinafter “swp” and not to be confused with “swipple,” an adjective meaning “the kind of thing featured in Stuff White People Like.” E.g., “Recycling is so swipple.”
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Gawker didn't have anything on the dinner, maybe everyone there was in a privacy respecting mood. But I'm probably being naïve and instead there's some less-uplifting explanation for why it wasn't reported. Oh, he's there all the time, that explains it.
1. Hereinafter “swp” and not to be confused with “swipple,” an adjective meaning “the kind of thing featured in Stuff White People Like.” E.g., “Recycling is so swipple.”
Monday
Olympics in four bullets
- China attempted to change the name of the team to Taiwan to mean that Taiwan was a subdivision of China, which would have caused the Taiwanese team to pull out, then retracted the attempt.
- The New York Times accidentally reveals the identity of a Uighur source who was willing to discuss Chinese mistreatment with the reporter.
- James Fallows reports on the improvements in transportation in Beijing, but notes (with illustrations) that the promised reductions in pollution have not taken place, or at least not to the degree needed.
- Actual Olympic sports content, basketball in particular.
Friday
And that's a case you don't want to catch, redux
The government researcher who was going to be accused of being behind the 2001 anthrax mailings killed himself. Glenn Grennwald has a long post discussing the role of ABCnews in disseminating the false claim that the anthrax was sourced from Iraq and wondering why ABC won't reveal who told them that in the first place, since either their source was lying to them or their source was themselves lied to. The importance of the story lies in the connection between the anthrax mailings and support for the war with Iraq. Update III to the post is intriguing, though overly conspiratorial.
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