This isn’t writing, it’s typing.

Come back, little Bashar?

Another bombing in Beirut today:

A loud explosion was heard in the Lebanese capital of Beirut on Saturday, and Arab TV stations cited security officials as saying it was caused by a bomb. There was no word on casualties.

The nature of the explosion was not immediately known, but witnesses said the blast, coming on the eve of the Easter holiday, occurred in the predominantly Christian northeastern Beirut suburb of Dekweneh.

Other witnesses said the blast took place in the Bouchrieh-Dekweneh industrial zone area.

Arab satellite stations Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera cited unidentified Lebanese security officials as saying the cause of the explosion was a bomb. Local LBC station said at least one building was on fire.

Ambulances were heard rushing to the scene and witnesses reported seeing a fire in the area of the explosion. A cloud of smoke was seen rising over the Dekweneh area.

Two bombs have rocked Christian areas in Lebanon in the past week, killing two people and injuring more than 10, sparking fears of the return of the sectarian violence that plagued Lebanon during the 1975-1990 civil war.

The motive behind the attacks wasn't immediately clear, but Lebanese opposition leaders have blamed Syrian security agents and pro-Damascus Lebanese authorities, saying they wanted to sow fear in the community.

Meanwhile, the U.N. fact-finding mission has issued its report on the assassination of Rafik al-Hariri. For a U.N. document, the conclusions are quite damning:

After gathering the available facts, the Mission concluded that the Lebanese security services and the Syrian Military Intelligence bear the primary responsibility for the lack of security, protection, law and order in Lebanon. The Lebanese security services have demonstrated serious and systematic negligence in carrying out the duties usually performed by a professional national security apparatus. In doing so, they have severely failed to provide the citizens of Lebanon with an acceptable level of security and, therefore, have contributed to the propagation of a culture of intimidation and impunity. The Syrian Military Intelligence shares this responsibility to the extent of its involvement in running the security services in Lebanon.

It is also the Mission's conclusion that the Government of Syria bears primary responsibility for the political tension that preceded the assassination of former Prime Minister Mr. Hariri. The Government of Syria clearly exerted influence that goes beyond the reasonable exercise of cooperative or neighborly relations. It interfered with the details of governance in Lebanon in a heavy-handed and inflexible manner that was the primary reason for the political polarization that ensued. Without prejudice to the results of the investigation, it is obvious that this atmosphere provided the backdrop for the assassination of Mr. Hariri.

It became clear to the Mission that the Lebanese investigation process suffers from serious flaws and has neither the capacity nor the commitment to reach a satisfactory and credible conclusion. To find the truth, it would be necessary to entrust the investigation to an international independent commission, comprising the different fields of expertise that are usually involved in carrying out similarly large investigations in national systems, with the necessary executive authority to carry out interrogations, searches, and other relevant tasks. Furthermore, it is more than doubtful that such an international commission could carry out its tasks satisfactorily—and receives the necessary active cooperation from local authorities—while the current leadership of the Lebanese security services remains in office.

It is the Mission's conclusion that the restoration of the integrity and credibility of the Lebanese security apparatus is of vital importance to the security and stability of the country. A sustained effort to restructure, reform and retrain the Lebanese security services will be necessary to achieve this end, and will certainly require assistance and active engagement on the part of the international community.

Finally, it is the Mission's view that international and regional political support will be necessary to safeguard Lebanon's national unity and to shield its fragile polity from unwarranted pressure. Improving the prospects of peace and security in the region would offer a more solid ground for restoring normalcy in Lebanon.

Don't expect the same Bashar al-Assad who told Rafik al-Hariri last August that he would "break Lebanon" rather than accede to a Syrian withdrawal to go gentle into that good night.

I have little doubt that Syrian intelligence is prepared to keep up the bombings in an effort to justify their continued presence in Lebanon.

An era of exploitation?

… or an era of opportunity?

Here's Bob Herbert in The New York Times …

President Bush believes in an "ownership" society, which means that except for the wealthy, you're on your own. The president's budget would cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps, education, transportation, health care for veterans, law enforcement, medical research and safety inspections for food and drugs. And, of course, it contains big new tax cuts for the wealthy.

These are the new American priorities. Republicans will tell you they were ratified in the last presidential election. We may be locked in a long and costly war, and federal deficits may be spiraling toward the moon, but the era of shared sacrifices is over. This is the era of entrenched exploitation. All sacrifices will be made by working people and the poor, and the vast bulk of the benefits will accrue to the rich.

Here's Myron Magnet in The Wall Street Journal …

Supporters of the old paradigm are naturally apoplectic over such a transformation; and their outrage reveals just how sweeping a welfare state they really champion. As Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman, who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the president's signing of the 1996 welfare reform, told columnist William Raspberry: "For virtually all of my adulthood, America has had a bipartisan agreement that we ought to provide some basic framework of programs and policies that provide a safety net, not just for the poor but for a large portion of the American people who need help to manage." How large a portion? Well, figures Mr. Raspberry, "the lower third of the economy." Think about that: nearly 100 million Americans as clients of the federal government. This is not temporary assistance but a European-style "social-democratic" (that is, socialist) welfare state. It is the political culture of America's old cities, with their hordes of government-supported clients, employees, and retirees—a culture that has produced slow or negative job and population growth. And this is exactly what the Bush administration does not want.

The failure of the European model, explicitly based on the belief that free-market capitalism is dangerous and needs to be tied down with a thousand trammels, like Gulliver, is one of the signal facts of our era, along with the failure of communism. In Europe, the idea that capitalism creates a permanently jobless class has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as strict regulation and the high taxes needed to pay lavish welfare and unemployment benefits have resulted in half the U.S. rate of job creation, twice the rate of unemployment, and thus little opportunity.

Opportunity and ownership … or welfare state and trampling of property rights?

Three decades ago, another Republican President observed, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." Our government is now dangerously approaching that tipping point, just as many of the socialist governments of Europe already have.

Will we have the courage to change direction and enlarge the horizons of American opportunity, or will we continue the pursuit of a failed "war on poverty"?

The legislative agenda of the next four years will likely spell the answer.

And his mommy dresses him funny …

Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post reviews Richard Bradley's Harvard Rules and finds a scathing indictement of embattled Harvard president Larry Summers:

Though Bradley goes through the motions of giving Summers the benefit of the doubt—"an inspiring teacher," a "successful" mover and shaker in upper-echelon Washington, a survivor of near-fatal cancer—the book is in fact a sustained attack on him, if not an outright hatchet job. Summers in his view is "arrogant, patronizing, disrespectful, and power-hungry," repeatedly guilty of "bad manners," a "prodigious and sloppy eater" with "the general problem of eating and talking at the same time, which sometimes resulted in Summers' spraying saliva on his audience," all in all a man who had failed to cultivate "the social niceties that most people in high-profile jobs possess—gracious manners, a gift for small talk, a knack for putting people at ease."

I knew his table manners were less than perfect—but spraying saliva? My, my. I thought that sort of thing only happened at Yale.

UPDATE: More on the ol' saliva-spewer from an article by Mr. Bradley in Boston Magazine:

When visitors came to his office, Summers propped his feet up on a table, sometimes with his shoes off. He often appeared in public with a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He repeatedly mangled the names of people he was greeting or introducing. If someone said something he deemed uninteresting or foolish, he would conspicuously roll his eyes. Other times Summers would stare into space when being spoken to, as if no one else were in the room. "Larry's always looking away," says one junior professor. "At first you think he's scanning the room for someone more important, but no, he's just looking away." And then there was the recurring problem of his eating and talking at the same time, during which Summers sometimes sprayed saliva on his audience.

Toothpick dangling? Name mangling? Faculty wrangling? I think there's a country-and-western song in here somewhere.

The new "Arab street"

Iraqis have taken a page from the playbooks of their neighbors in Lebanon and Qatar in demonstrating against terrorism:

Hundreds of power workers shouting "No, no, to terror!" marched through Baghdad on Thursday to protest attacks that have killed dozens of their colleagues, while demonstrators in the south demanded that the new petroleum minister be from their oil-rich region.

The demonstrations came as negotiators for the two biggest factions in the new National Assembly worked out details of an Iraqi government that U.S. officials hope will pave the way for the eventual withdrawal of coalition forces.

As Arthur Chrenkoff notes, "the 'Arab street' is no longer an entity that rises up to protest every instance of American imperialism, but one which now agitates for freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East. How much difference two years can make."

Blind justice

The Feds have finally indicted the laser-wielding David Banach under the Patriot Act. The New York Post reports:

A New Jersey man accused of pointing a laser at an airplane, temporarily blinding the pilot and co-pilot, was indicted yesterday under an anti-terror law.

David Banach also was accused of lying to the FBI about the Dec. 29 incident, in which a small passenger jet's windshield and cabin were hit three times by a green laser as the plane readied to land at Teterboro Airport.

The charges in the three-count federal indictment were similar to those filed against Banach in a complaint by the FBI in January. The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in Newark, replaces the FBI complaint.

Banach's lawyer, Gina Mendola-Longarzo, said her client was using the laser to look at stars with his daughter when the plane was hit by the beam.

"I think it's an absolute abuse of prosecutorial discretion to charge my client under the Patriot Act for non-purposeful conduct," Mendola-Longarzo said.

"We take the alleged actions of Mr. Banach very seriously, and we will not condone lying to federal agents," U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said.

So far, the Loony Left has been slow off the mark in voicing its outrage over this trampling of Mr. Banach's civil rights.

But—once they get they get done crowing over their Terri Schiavo victory—I'm sure they'll come around.

What beautiful and winged life …

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festal board,—may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).

(See also Soxblog's eloquent A Life Worth Living? and keep up with developments at TerrisFight.)

UPDATE: Jim Manion passes along these links to Terri's "exit protocol" at the Suncoast Hospice. As Jim correctly observes, it reads "like notes from the Third Reich."  (And if her passing is to be so painless, why are they administering morphine?)

Was Pittsburgh the steroid tipping point?

Former NFL rookie of the year and current coach of the New Orleans Saints Jim Haslett has joined the list of professional sports figures who've admitted to using steroids.

But here's the real news: He claims (in an article in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) that the steroid epidemic started in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, during the heyday of the four-time Superbowl champs:

Haslett estimated that half the NFL players, including all the linemen, used steroids in the 1980s when they were not banned by the league and legal if prescribed medically. He claimed steroids began in the NFL with the Steelers' players in the 1970s and mentioned Barry Bonds as having tell-tale signs of use.

Haslett said it wasn't long after he was drafted by Buffalo in the second round in 1979 that he felt he needed to take steroids to stay competitive in the league.

"They tossed you around, they were strong. So everybody wanted an advantage, so you tried it; I tried it. I mean I tried it, everybody tried it.…"

"It started, really, in Pittsburgh. They got an advantage on a lot of football teams. They were so much stronger [in the] '70s, late '70s, early '80s ... Steve [Courson], Jon [Kolb] and all those guys. They're the ones who kind of started it."

Was Pittsburgh the tipping point of the steroid epidemic? Was the legendary Steel Curtain really just the Steroid Curtain?

Say it ain't so, Jim. Say it ain't so.

Take it with a grain of salt

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio," Hamlet remarked, "than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

To wit, this item from The New Scientist:

Madeleine Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

Go figure.

Dems' democracy dilemma

An excellent column in The Yale Daily News by Yale law student Nicholas Stephanopoulos highlights the Democrats' current conundrum:

For many people who opposed President Bush's re-election, myself included, foreign policy was the single most important reason for our opposition. We believed that Bush had led the nation to war on false pretenses, by fabricating (or at least greatly exaggerating) the danger posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. We were convinced that the Bush administration had disastrously bungled the postwar occupation of Iraq. We were appalled by the deterioration of the United States' relations with its traditional European allies. And, most importantly, we did not trust the Bush administration to effectively manage American foreign policy in the future. We were sure that four more years of President Bush would result in further fraying of transatlantic alliances, continued chaos in Iraq and more setbacks for American influence and values.

In the time since Election Day, I for one have lost my certitude. Over the past few months, a cavalcade of extraordinary developments has shaken the landscape of global politics, in particular in the Middle East. First, Ukrainians refused to accept the stealing of their presidential election, launching an "Orange Revolution" to ensure that the rightful victor won. Next, Palestinians elected the moderate Mahmoud Abbas as president, resulting in the best Israeli-Palestinian relations in years. The successful Palestinian vote was followed by the Iraqi election in late January, in which millions of Iraqis defied the bloody insurgency and dramatically improved the odds that a legitimate government will emerge. More recently, massive anti-Syrian demonstrations rocked Beirut after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, causing the collapse of Lebanon's puppet government and a Syrian pledge of partial military withdrawal. Saudi Arabia also held elections for local government positions last month, and Egypt announced that a multiparty presidential election will take place later this year.

So, what's left for a Bush basher to do?

Stephanopoulos recommends that Democrats should: (1) applaud the fact that the United States is seeking to associate itself with democratic movements rather than dictatorial regimes; (2) point out that democracy, while crucially important, is not the only value that matters in U.S. foreign policy-making; and (3) emphasize the importance of competence.

Strikes me as more sensible advice than Democrats are getting from most of their party's leaders these days.

How it looks from Iraq

A new blog (new to me, at any rate), Democracy in Iraq, reflects on two pivotal years in that nation's history:

Iraqis see the finish line, the finish line of freedom and democracy and a functioning nation. We can smell it, taste it, and like a sprinter, one who has broken his legs, but who has a heart full of passion, we will crawl there no matter what the cost. No matter what we must endure, we have realized what we can become, and that is the biggest result of the last two years.

No one can take that from us. Not the terrorists, not those who want to question the good of the removal of Saddam, not those who want to reduce our glory for politics, none.

We have been brought from darkness to light. And not only has the future been made better for Iraq, but the martyrs of our nation, their blood is watering the roots of democracy across the world. We are watching our neighbors come closer to the light, and this only pushes us more, and makes us stronger in our burning desire to reach the finish line, to realize the dream that our people have had for so long.

No, we will not give up, and we will not say that the last two years were a waste. They for all their trouble have been momentous. They for us, have been a turning point in history. Whether or not you agree, this is how it looks from Iraq.