The Press Gang and the Press Gang. According to Bob Herbert, Uncle Sam is having a hard time filling the ranks:

Most Americans want no part of Mr. Bush's war, which is why Army recruiters are failing so miserably at meeting their monthly enlistment quotas. Desperate, the Army is lowering its standards, shortening tours, increasing bonuses and violating its own recruitment regulations and ethical guidelines.

Now at this point, I would quote some facts, figures, or cite cases, but I'm just a pointy-headed academic. Bob Herbert is a journalist, and all journalists know you have to put a human face on the story. So Herbert puts on his fedora and heads for the street, Times Square to be exact, where he finds Vince Morrow:

Vince Morrow, a 10th grader from Allentown, Pa., was interviewed across the street from the recruiting station, on Broadway. He said he had once planned to join the military after graduating from high school, but had changed his mind. "It's the war," he said. "Going over and never coming back. Before the war you'd just go to different places and help people. Now you go over there and you fight."

Young master Morrow is only a sophomore. When he takes upperclass history classes he will learn that although he is right on the traveling part, traditionally armies have been about hurting people--real bad. In addition to Morrow, Herbert also finds the Unknown Mother:

A woman in the affluent New York suburb of Ridgewood, N.J., who has a daughter in high school and a younger son, said: "I would not want my children to go. If there wasn't a war it would be different. I support the war and I think we need to be there. But it's not going well. It's becoming like Vietnam. It's a very bad situation. But we can't leave."

She's rich, she supports the war, but she thinks it's not going well. She ought to read more Belmont Club or Victor Davis Hanson. She will learn that her attitude mirrors that of some Roman matrons at the approach of Hannibal.

Seriously, both views seem to be shaped by very recent history when military actions (Grenada, Panama, Gulf I, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia) were low on casualties and high on humanitarian pretense. Both really should read VDH, or some other history.

The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming. Not as entertaining as his Duel but still a provocative anti-Wilson and pro-German view of America's involvement in WWI.

Imperial Germany is beleagured by the equally aggrandizing, imperialistic, and hypocritical France and England. Wilson is self-righteous and stubborn yet vacillating and unprincipled. And definitely a divider, not a uniter! Wilson constantly complains about hyphenated Americans, who he views as disloyal, and has this to say about his Congressional opponents:

[it was] not their character so much that I have contempt for, though that contempt is thoroughgoing, but their minds. They do not even have working imitations of minds." (p. 347)

Fleming refers to Wilson perjoratively as Phillip Dru: the hero of Phillip Dru, Administrator written by Wilson's alter-ego Colonel House. Dru is an uber-bureaucratic fantasy President who leads a turbulent nation out of chaos. Think of it as a Progressive Era West Wing.

Fleming has worse things to say about the First Lady Edith Galt Wilson--controlling, possessive, minimally educated, with a high self-regard of her political wisdom.

History has revised and re-revised Wilson. However, is bitter opponent, Teddy Roosevelt, is still adored. Yet modern Bull Mooses rarely talk about TR's vigorous war-mongering attempts to push the U.S. into the First World War. Although Fleming is hostile toward U.S,. entry into the war, he treats him lightly. TR's cousin, FDR, is a different story. He is a philandering, back-stabber given to telling Clintonian whoppers: telling a Butte, Montana audience that he wrote the constitution for Haiti.

The Great War was a particularly horrible and stupid episode in history. Fleming's book is the best I have read at evoking the horrible stupidity. One of the great mysteries of history is how Western civilization, at one of its apogees, chose to descend into a period of vicious barbarism.

Although the Progressives were believers in scientific management of society, their administration of a wartime economy were a disaster: inflation, strikes, millions of dollars spent without building a single plane, soldiers without overcoats dying of influeza in U.S. camps. Their efforts descended to the tragicomic when they called on Harvard students to act as strikebreakers. Crimson clad frat-boys and jocks first tried to act as telephone operators, then as replacements for Boston cops. The city's roughnecks beat them to a pulp. (Using students as strikebreakers was common at the time.)

Also egregiously incompetent were American military commanders who apparently did not modify their tactics since the Civil War. (Which is true of most other military commanders at the time.) The tactic of attacking machine guns en masse resulted in 50,300 deaths in six months of combat. Compare this to 259,376 killed over 47 months in WWII, and 57,000 dead in eleven years in Vietnam.

The decline of political violence. Fleming highlights the shocking level of political violence in the U.S. at the time. One example: on the first anniversary of Armistice day, a group from the American Legion, armed with baseball bats and pistols, aims to clear out the nest of Bolsheviks at the IWW local. The union members defend themselves by shooting back. The mob lynches and castrates the union leader Wesley Everett, who is also a veteran.

Maybe I'm cocooned, but even the altercations of Anne Coulter, Al Franken, et al. rarely reach such levels of violence. Maybe the answer is economic. Maybe the opportunity cost of mob violence has risen. After all, potential members of the rabble have to drive to the assembly place and find parking for their SUVs. And between taking the kids to soccer practice, and working out the gym, who has time to join a mob?

The decline, yes decline, of ethnic politics. German-, Irish-, and Italian- Americans all campaigned vigorously against Wilson and the Versailles treaty because it shortchanged their ancestral homes. What would Michelle Malkin make of that?

The decline of the politics of personal destruction. You have probably already heard that during the 1920 presidential election Democrats circulated a pamphlet written by a history professor alleging that Warren Harding had "Negro blood." However, Republicans slimed back. They alleged that vice-presidential candidate FDR's handling of a Navy sodomy scandal while he was assistant secretary of the Navy demonstrated a lack of "the qualities of frankness and manliness," i.e. he was gay.

The decline of the German-Americans. In the research for my book, I constantly ran across evidence of the power of the German-American community. Affluent and educated, they constantly fought against state school systems to preserve their language and culture. If a group opposed the expansion of the local common schools, it was either the Germans or the Catholics. German was once the most common modern langauge taught as a second langauge in the schools. This struggle climaxed during WWI as Americans were incited to a pitch of vicious war hatred against their German neighbors. This is often glossed over with a reference to Liberty Cabbage, but it often resulted in violence, murder, and even suicide.

Finally,there is the bizarre, Kurosawa-like climax to the era as the First Lady, with the complicity of the President's doctors, close aides, and reporters, attempts to deceive the nation into believing that Wilson, paralyzed and incapacitated by a stroke, still has the capacity to manage the country and even run for a third term.

Sigh...Once again Jon Talton does not let facts get in the way of his prejudices:

The ongoing rail bottleneck into Phoenix is another example of how private enterprise alone can't create a diverse, big-city economy. The Union Pacific Railroad spent years obsessed with mergers and cutting capacity. The result: trouble for shippers and worry that inadequate rail infrastructure could hurt growth.

Too bad regional leaders didn't use public-private partnerships to solve the problem, including saving and upgrading the direct line to Los Angeles. Oh yeah, they were too busy fighting over keeping the name Phoenix off anything.

In LA, the 20-mile Alameda Corridor was built with $2.4 billion from public and private sources to speed freight trains to the ports.

How good is a journalist who writes the same three columns over and over, and who can be contradicted by the results of a two-minute search on Google.

Conceived of over 20 years ago, the corridor has not completely lived up to the planner’s expectations. It was designed to handle up to 100 train trips per day, with an expansion capability of 150, however today it averages only 35. Traffic congestion at the port has not been alleviated on the highways leading out of the port, as was expected. One of the problems is that the economics of the shipping industry have moved away from trains in the last 20 years, and have shifted from the warehousing of goods downtown to a more specialized system using trucks to separate cargo and divert it to large distribution hubs in Riverside and San Bernardino where it is organized for the more precise on-time delivery that companies now expect. An additional phase is now being considered to extend the corridor to the eastern industrial suburbs, and implement a “shuttle” train type system that could better accommodate the new logistical models.

[Emphasis added] Anyone who drives along the 710 can attest to the truck traffic. Let's repeat: modern, hi-tech, efficient supply chain management has moved the distribution of goods from downtown warehouses to the heart (oops! wrong metaphor) the outer limbs of sprawltown in Riverside and San Berdoo.

Two from the Steynmeister...

They will get my Ginsu when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

Hearts of Oak

Organisers of a re-enactment to mark the bicentenary of the battle [of Trafalgar] next month have decided it should be between “a Red Fleet and a Blue Fleet” not British and French/Spanish forces.

Otherwise they fear visiting dignitaries, particularly the French, would be embarrassed at seeing their side routed.

Even the official literature has been toned down. It describes the re-enactment not as the battle of Trafalgar but simply as “an early 19th-century sea battle”.

Don't be too smug. Across the nation for years re-enactors have staged battles between the "Blue and the Gray" or between Unions and Confederates. But would you bet that the average person could tell you that the actors were representing Georgians shooting at Pennsylvannians, and vice versa? The whole myth of the Lost Cause was generated and accepted to assuage the bitterness of the war and re-unite the nation.

Democrats are Shocked! Shocked! over Republican junketeering. (And you should be shocked as well over my use of the stale, stale reference.)

It is likely that the D's can have no problem being self-righteous on this since probably very little of the junket gravy has been flowing their way in recent years. Not only have they been firmly out of power, but Democratic interest groups just can't offer the glamor trips that traditionally Republican interest groups can. Sure a union can fly a congressman to Orlando for some golf and a "study session" or fly some staffers to Thailand to visit some "sweat shops." And environmental groups can take them to Colorado for some whitewater rafting and tree hugging.

But as every Hill staffer knows, the sweet, sweet junkets are on the Republican side. Defense contractors can send you to the Paris air show, and the military uses its hardware to provide thrill rides to twenty-something Hill staffers. (Remember the Ehime Maru, the Japanese training ship sunk in 2001 by a Navy sub giving its 15 civilian guests an e-ticket emergency surfacing drill?)

When I did my Hill stint ten years ago we Republicans were more circumspect. We were fresh in power and stoked on Gingrichian rhetoric and Heritage Backgrounders on the abuses of the Democratic Imperial Congress. I recall one time there was Hill-wide angst over the proper disposition of pies delivered by some interest group. If I remember right, Tom DeLay's staff announced in Roll Call: "We ate the pie."

Mark Felt is Jack the Ripper! One reason to be simpatico toward die hard debunkers of Mark Felt (such as this one by Edward Jay Epstein) is the seemingly extraordinary cupidity of the Felt progeny:

In the spring of 2002, I first became virtually certain that Felt was Deep Throat. As the 30th anniversary of Watergate loomed, I was one of several People reporters to do a story examining Deep Throat speculations by former Nixon White House counsel John Dean.

I tracked down a telephone listing for a W. Mark Felt near Miami. The man who answered told me he was not the former FBI deputy director - he was his son, Mark Felt Jr.

...

...Felt Jr. told me that Woodward had visited his father several times in Santa Rosa. Junior also said he was writing a book about his father but was still waiting to finish the final chapter.

When will you publish it, I asked?

"We don't know yet. We're waiting for a visit from Bob Woodward to figure out what to do."

Felt Jr. assured me that when the time was right, I would get the story about his father.

That time came about six months later, just as I was accepting the managing editor's job at this newspaper. I pitched the story to People and the magazine's top editor jumped aboard.
...

Ultimately the story died because of money. The Felt family and their attorney wanted a lot of money, and People magazine - with my blessing - backed away in what would have been a case of "checkbook journalism."

Given Todd Foster's description of the old man's dementia, the Felts can roll him out to explain many more unexplained mysteries. (It's all via Kaus.)

Kaus also has comforting words for the other Throat candidates: Gergen, Haig, Buchanan, who are going to lose that much more attention. Not needed! Given DC-poli-pundits capacity for self-delusion, the composite theory still gives them ample margin not only to mislead others but to believe deep in their inflated heads that they actually were Deep Throat!

Goldwater was right! Barry, and other conservatives, have always said that the welfare state destroys individual initiative and self-reliance. Now David Brooks points to new evidence from across the pond:

Over the last few decades, American liberals have lauded the German model or the Swedish model or the European model. But these models are not flexible enough for the modern world. They encourage people to cling fiercely to entitlements their nation cannot afford. And far from breeding a confident, progressive outlook, they breed a reactionary fear of the future that comes in left- and right-wing varieties - a defensiveness, a tendency to lash out ferociously at anybody who proposes fundamental reform or at any group, like immigrants, that alters the fabric of life.

But which comes first: the welfare state, the stagnant economy, or the ennervated, risk-averse population? This paper by Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote starts with the welfare state.

Europeans worked more than Americans as late as the 1960s. In this paper, we argue that European labor market regulations, advocated by unions in declining European industries who argued "work less, work all" explain the bulk of the difference between the U.S. and Europe. These policies do not seem to have increased employment, but they may have had a more society-wide influence on leisure patterns because of a social multiplier where the returns to leisure increase as more people are taking longer vacations.

Here is a different take from Linda Bell and Richard Freeman.

We show that differences in hours worked [between Germany and the U.S.] are related to differences in earnings inequality across countries, and hypothesize that the high rewards to success in the U.S., lack of job security, and low social safety net compared to Germany or other European countries may explain the cross-country differences in an extended supply model.

But why did the labor regulations and safety net get there in the first place?

Do as We Say, Not as We Do...When the line forms to divide up the proceeds of a public interest lawsuit, first in line are the lawyers; second come government agencies and activist organizations; and dead last come the little people whose injuries at the hands of Big (Tobacco, Food, Guns, Business) the lawsuit was purportedly designed to remedy.

In April 2003 Wall Street investment banks, being sued for giving investors misleading information, arrived at a $1.4 billion settlement of which $85 million was set aside for investor education programs. May 26's WSJ describes the resulting fight between the feds and the states for the booty. The federal program, run by the SEC, has fallen apart. The state share was given to the Investor Protection Trust which doles out grants to the states. It has also lost $80,000 on its investments, and has paid $816,000 to Beltway consultants for outdated and erroneous financial education curriculum.

Hey Sailer! Mickey Kaus finds Steve Sailer creating a powerful new slogan "Affordable Family Formation." It is supposed to epitomize the Republican edge in the family-friendly suburbs of the Sun Belt. But Kotkin was there first!

Sailer may have learned how to calculate correlation coefficients, but he must have skipped the lesson that instructs you that correlation does not imply causation:

[I]mmigration increases the population density, which raises land prices, which both makes non-Hispanic whites more Democratic and discourages those Hispanics who successfully assimilate to the norms of local non-Hispanic whites from becoming as Republican.

...

Non-Hispanic whites became sharply less Republican as their marriage and fertility rates plummeted.

...

Meanwhile, those California Hispanics who succeed in assimilating fully now find themselves in a state where most role models vote for Democrats for President. So, Hispanics in California have stayed well to the left of Hispanics in Texas—where the white elite fervently Republican.

The same thing has happened to Asian-Americans, who tend to cluster in crowded Blue States.

So immigrants come to town looking for jobs, which drives up the cost of housing, which lowers family formation. This is simple economics. Now we turn to fantastic political theory. This causes the white population to turn liberal. The immigrants, seeking for political role models, look to whitey for guidance, and vote Democratic.

Where to start with this...

First, a large number of the young families in Sun Belt suburbia who are busily forming families are immigrants. Jose is the most popular name for babies in Arizona.

Second, Sailer's statistics are squidgy. As a measure of marriage, he uses length of time married, which could just be a proxy for age. For "fertility rate" he uses babies per white woman, which could also be a proxy for age. The fact that both are proxies for some other underlying factor is shown by the fact that combined they have little more explanatory power than taken separately.

Finally, which political persuasion is really more family friendly? Republicans are for safe streets and keeping naughty things off TV, but Democrats are for spending more on public schools and subsidizing health care. The right has tried to sell vouchers and medical savings accounts as alternatives, but no one has been buying.

Partners in Crime by J.A. Jance. I picked this one up because the book's protagonist is sheriff of Cochise County, and a lady sheriff at that. The "partners" are the lady sheriff and the hero of Jance's other series of books: a Seattle-based cop. Their relationship starts with smoldering hostility and ends in smoldering passion!

In between the two spend most of their time moping about the events that have taken place in previous novels, fuming about politics inside and outside the office, worrying about family crises, and...oh yeah solving crimes. But thanks to a fortuitous clue being dropped in their laps two-thirds of the way through, they can soon get back to moping, fuming, and worrying.

The book's accumulation of stale, predictable emotiongs is foreshadowed in the beginning with an attempt at pathos that is near-comic. Here is the Young Artist with a Mysterious Past. Here is one of her picture's. It's of an old man--her uncle--who died of jaundice! Here is another picture of a young boy and his dog. It's her brother who died of leukemia! And the dog, it was run over by a car while chasing the ambulance rushing the boy to the hospital! And here is a picture of her new, understanding boyfriend. But she's going to break up with him because she has a Mysterious Past, and it's just not fair to him. And by the end of the chapter, she's dead!

And here's a plot you'll see next season on Law and Order. A killer identified by his victim's final entry on his blog. (Via Good Morning Silicon Valley.) Trent Lott, Dan Rather, and now Jin Cheng Lin caught by the blogosphere. Time for another round of self-congratulation!

Fool me once...This makes two years in a row that the legislature has been rolled by the governor. Last year, you may remember, the governor was able to use line-item vetoes to actually increase spending! From last year:

But Bennett said legislators will approach negotiations with a more "suspicious" eye. Some of Napolitano's vetoes were to "lump sum" budget reductions that Bennett said were intended to give agencies discretion in spending cuts. The vetoes kept higher funding for the agencies intact.

"We're not going to get suckered again by doing something that she has requested in the name of flexibility for her agencies that has been abused," he said.

Emphasis added.

The unbearable emptiness of the urban core. In his May 8 essay on Phoenix's attempts to jolt its downtown to life, Joel Kotkin cites my favorite economist: me. In the article he is referring to, I suggested that if Phoenix really wanted a lively downtown, it should officially designate the Camelback corridor as downtown and declare victory.

It is half a joke and half a strong argument against the idea that the region--nay the state's--economic future hinges on downtown Phoenix.

If Phoenix needs a square mile or so of vibrant yuppie playground to prosper in the 21st century, why does it have to be in a mile radius from the offices of the Republic? You the reader can probably name several spots that are hopping on a Saturday (or any other) night. Why can't these other pieces of real estate serve as magnets to the creative class? Is there such a thing as an urban G-spot? Hit it and you reach economic nirvana, miss it and you're livin' in nowheresville daddy-o.

The absurdity of this line of reasoning is taken to new levels in today's paper by who else...Jon Talton! Spend $84 million to subsidize downtown businesses you're a visionary, spend it to subsidize businesses on a piece of dirt not five miles away, and you're guilty of ruinous business as usual.