There’s a lot of blather in their John Kerry profile and the accompanying “editorial”:http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2941610 but some interesting things came out as well. They claim that with him as leader:

pre-emption would remain a policy, Ariel Sharon would be backed unflinchingly. Reading between the lines a little, the Kyoto Protocol would remain unjoined; so in all likelihood would the International Criminal Court

I don’t support any of those policies and I didn’t think they were Kerry’s but I suppose I can overlook those in light of his main domestic plank – ‘rescinding a tax cut on people earning more than $200,000 and spending the proceeds on a goodish health-care plan’.

It would be nice to have a president who, as The Economist puts it,

…marshals material exhaustively, immerses himself in details, and forms judgments on a balance of competing evidence…

(they seem to see this as a weakness).

In passing I find it startling that according to an Economist poll they cite 60% of the American public finds Bush “intelligent” and 55% find him “knowledgeable” (Kerry’s numbers in these categories are at least higher on both ratings!)

“Henry Farrell”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/ and “Daniel Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/ have published a first draft of a paper on politics and blogs on Crooked Timber. It includes some analysis of the link distribution of such sites and also, crucially, acknowledges the importance of the early blogger journalists as a way to legitimise the blogosphere for ‘mainstream’ journalists to use it. It includes a survey of American journalists (including elite journalists) indicating which weblogs they read (more on that survey “here”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001321.html and raw data “here”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/Blogsurveypublic.xls.

It would be interesting to know what the power positions of the respondents were within their news organizations…

There were some minor nits I picked in a comment to the Crooked Timber posting but otherwise I think it’s shaping up to be a valuable contribution to the debate about political weblogs.

Here’s something truly hair-raising I’m glad I didn’t know about at the time. Remember in all those movies where the nuclear missiles require a top-secret code to launch? It turns out for about a decade in the US the secret code was 00000000. Apparently, ‘Strategic Air Command remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders.’

A Slate columnist (Chris Suellentrop) suggests that Douglas Feith – the Pentagon’s No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – is implicated with many of the more serious Iraq problems.

Or to put it more simply, according to “General Tommy Franks”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2100899/ Doug Feith is “the f*cking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”

There’s also audio available of “Suellentrop making similar charges on NPR”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1908107 and “Feith subsequently responding to the criticism”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1909390.

Interestingly, I checked out links to the Slate article on “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fslate.msn.com%2Fid%2F2100899&sub=Go%21 – none of the twenty were from people trying to defend Feith. Perhaps there is something to the notion that people in the blogosphere tend to read stuff that reinforces their world view? And interestingly too perhaps thanks to the blogosphere the Slate article about Feith is #2 on Google after his official Pentagon page.

P.S. Sorry this is rather old and the blog hasn’t been updated in a while – my wife and I have been off in Sicily for a week or so (which also explains why I haven’t returned your email if you have written recently).

US radio show “The Connection”:http://www.theconnection.org/ had an hour-long “show recently”:http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/05/20040517_b_main.asp about gun violence in the US which kills more Americans than the war in Iraq. The main guest was a middle-class black guy who chose to remain in the wrong neighborhood and whose son (who wasn’t involved with gangs) was senselessly killed by one. An LA Times reporter who covered the incident was also on the programme – the story she wrote about it is here.

She revealed some interesting facts on the programme (though without references it is difficult to vouch for their accuracy).
* The homicide rate for white women across the US is 2-3/100,000 but for young black men in LA it is 275/100,000.
* For all the concern about gun violence generally in the US, white people there are as safe as Europeans – it’s predominantly black people in poor neighborhoods who are dying.
* It isn’t just about teens killing teens either – black men in their 40s have a higher homicide rate than under-18s.
* Deaths due to gang violence are predominantly a problem for blacks – not nearly so much of a problem for whites or latinos even when they are in gangs.

Picking two facts at random from the April index – only 3% of Afghans have registered to vote and when the president was asked questions about his tax cut proposals on Meet the Press in 2003 none of the questions related to their inequality.

I just finished Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.

After a quick overview of the day of 9/11 itself he went back to 1979 and started to work forward. It seems he (along with many others) finds the Saudi government to be duplicitous and often unhelpful to Western interests. More interestingly he seems convinced that Iran from 1979 to 1996 was responsible for a large number of attempted terrorist attacks on western interests and he doesn’t seem at all mollified by the election of Khatami. He suggests (p. 129) that they are still supporting terrorism in Israel and helping al Qaeda. I have the (admittedly ill-informed) impression that Iran is stumbling slowly towards a freer society and I thought they were no longer supporting terrorism despite their often bloodthirsty rhetoric. I guess if he’s right it helps to explain why Iran is one of the countries of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”.

It’s also interesting to have all the al Quaeda terrorist attacks against the US pre-9/11 collected together in one place. I always had the impression that there really hadn’t been much activity but it certainly becomes alarming if you add it all up as Clarke does – especially when you start finding out about the plots that were foiled – not all of which became public. I didn’t know that Ramzi Yousef in 1994 plotted to kill the Pope and Clinton in the Phillipines and in 1995 he had a reasonably well-advanced plot to blow up US airliners in the Pacific for example.

One thing I do wonder about though – he talks a lot about the relative unpreparedness of both the CIA and the FBI (and we all know now about their intelligence failures with 9/11 and WMD in Iraq). And he insists (for example) that the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan really was making chemical weapons. So why should we believe what he says about any US intelligence?

According to “CNET”:http://news.com.com/2100-1034_3-5193926.html?tag=nefd.lede The Mayor of Salt Lake City declined to provide support for a plan for an open broadband network infrastructure in the city, saying:

“I just don’t see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files”

Fortunately here in the UK things policy makers are somewhat more receptive…
Thanks to Werblog and “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/20/mayor_of_salt_lake_c.html for the links.

But it seems that one of the best-known conservative bloggers has come to the same uneasy conclusion that I have about the Iraq war.

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.

I backed the war originally (though I held my nose – I certainly wouldn’t call it noble). Unfortunately, I don’t think the aftermath of the war could have been managed worse by the US.

I am relieved to find early pictures showing Brits also abusing Iraqi prisoners “were false”:http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/20983.htm, though it seems there “may have been some bad apples after all”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=521760.

I’m used to the New Yorker cartoons being wry looks at the worlds of work and everyday life but in this week’s issue I found a couple of rather scathing comments on current events:

.