Yesterday’s post on new voting machines speculated that fears about technical glitches might help avert technical glitches.

So much for that theory. The Washington Post reports that “James Webb’s last name has been cut off on part of the electronic ballot used by voters in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville because of a computer glitch. . . .”

Can transportation departments learn anything from phone companies? As Marge Gunderson would say in “Fargo,” you betcha. Today’s column explores the issue.

Occasionally letter-writers ask questions that require a direct response. But for every one who sends in a question, there are likely several more wondering the same thing. This venue seems an appropriate place to expand the discussion.

Today the paper received this query from a reader ticked off about Sunday’s endorsement of George Allen:

Why is it necessary for a news oganization to take a position, and moreso, why do you deem it necessary to publish it? With what purpose, to influence readers, advertisers? Did you take a vote of all your employees and associates and determine the majority favor George Allen, or is this endorsement self-serving to the executives at the Times-Dispatch?

As the personal reply to the author explained, the Allen endorsement—like our other editorials—is produced by the staff of the Editorial Department, with guidance from the publisher, who has ultimate authority over everything in the paper. That’s how The Washington Post produced its endorsement of Jim Webb, and how all other papers make their endorsements, too.

Not only newspapers, but also many other organizations—from the Virginia Education Association to the Fraternal Order of Police to the Chamber of Commerce—make endorsements. Strictly speaking, it isn’t “necessary” for them to do so, either, but we think they should have the freedom to do so if they please. Surely the paper should, too.

The endorsements are written, of course, to influence readers. We hope people find them persuasive—or, if not persuasive, at least thought-provoking. For some, Times-Dispatch editorials act as nothing more than a whetstone against which they will sharpen their own arguments. Happy to oblige: They also serve who only stand and whet. (There’s a difference, of course, between engaging the editorial’s points and reflexively disagreeing with anything the paper says, without taking the intermediate step of rational thought.)

The Editorial Department does not (thank goodness!) have to concern itself with advertising. We have been told that, occasionally, advertisers will object to an editorial (just as other advertisers would object if the editorial had taken precisely the opposition position). But smart businessmen care far less about what the newspaper says on a given subject than they do about how many people read the paper—about, that is, how many eyes will view their promotional material. It’s in a company’s economic interest to disregard what editorials say. A car dealership that yanks its own ad because it doesn’t like an editorial doesn’t achieve anything but sending customers to the competition. (If you’re still not convinced, compare advertisements in papers around the country. No matter the editorial stance, you’ll find the same advertisers again and again. Why? Because they’re buying space to communicate with readers, not to support or oppose an editorial stance.)

As the earlier post on the subject noted, an endorsement is simply a choice among available options—not a declaration of unconditional love.

For those who aren’t yet bored with this issue, the Virginian-Pilot just published an explanation of its own endorsement process. You can read it here.

As the saying goes, politics is a contact sport. Even so, this certainly seems like unsportsmanlike conduct—the political equivalent of click fraud (or vandalizing yard signs, for those who prefer).

Click fraud and vandalism are illegal; manipulating search engines is not. But it nevertheless is wrong. It is wrong for some of the same reasons it is wrong to, say, take every available copy of a free publication such as Style in order to keep others from reading it.

Free societies cannot pass laws to govern every conceivable circumstance; they depend to a huge degree on social norms, such as “Thou Shalt Not Cut in Line.” More than perhaps most other venues, the Internet relies on social norms to facilitate the information marketplace. Wikipedia, for instance, has had to step up its policing of the communally written encyclopedia because some—again, predominantly those with partisan motives—have been treating it as a propaganda tool.

Search engines are designed to help people find information they want. Sometimes they fail, but the failures are not intentional. Someone looking for, say, information about People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals probably wants to visit a PETA site, or at least a site sympathetic to animal rights. She isn’t looking for a jeremiad from the Cattlemen’s Association on all the reasons PETA members are a bunch of godless commie hypocrites. Now, perhaps everything the Cattlemen say is true; perhaps they do nothing but quote news stories about PETA’s shock tactics. Nevertheless, manipulating search engines to lead people seeking info on PETA to the cattlemen’s screed is mis-leading in the most basic sense.

It is also profoundly un-democratic. There’s considerable irony inherent in a site touting “direct democracy” that doesn’t trust people to make the right decision without a hefty shove.

Buried in a recent New York Times article, “New Laws and Machines May Spell Voting Chaos,” lies a helpful reminder from Charles Stewart, identified as the head of the political science department at MIT. According to an analysis he published this year, new voting technology helped reduce the number of mismarked ballots by roughly 1 million between 2000 and 2004. “If you think things are bad and worrisome now, they were much worse before 2000,” he says. The difference is that, post-Florida, people are paying more attention to the issue.

Election officials are scrambling to hire people with tech experience to head off potential problems. The question, then, is whether the alarmism helps to avert a crisis. If people weren’t worried about ballot problems, ballot problems could be epidemic. But since they are worried (and doing something about it) there might not be any, so there’s nothing to worry about. Maybe.

The Washington Post isn’t nearly as left-leaning as those who don’t actually read it presume it to be. But every once in a while someone has a bad day. (It happens here, too.)

Jeffrey Smith must have been having a bad one when he wrote this gem, which has been sitting on the get-to file for a few days now: “Bush Counfounded by the ‘Unacceptable’.”

Smith is worked up by the way the President has used the word “unacceptable” with increasing frequency. And he’s gone to the trouble of combing through speeches to find examples. He starts off with the classic “at a time when"* trope: “Bush’s decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd time, a phase of his presidency in which all manner of circumstances are not bending to his will,” Smith writes, before proclaiming:

[T]he president’s worsening political predicament has actually stoked, rather than diminished, his desire to proclaim what he cannot abide. Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush’s rising frustration with his declining influence.

In the first nine months of this year, Bush declared more than twice as many events or outcomes “unacceptable” or “not acceptable” as he did in all of 2005, and nearly four times as many as he did in 2004. He is, in fact, at a presidential career high in denouncing events he considers intolerable.

And so on. There’s nothing factually incorrect about the piece, and it doesn’t hurl invective, aside from saying the president “hurled the term ‘unacceptable’ at actions by Iraqi insurgents,” etc. But the piece is so dripping with contempt for Bush that it really should have come with a wet-nap.

p.s.—The article was a fine bit of writing, qua writing. It ended with this graf: “Bush’s proclamations are not the only rhetorical evidence of his mounting frustrations. One of his favorite verbal tics has long been to instruct audiences bluntly to ‘listen’ to what he is about to say, as in ‘Listen, America is respected’ (Aug. 30) or ‘Listen, this economy is good’ (May 24). This year, he made that request more often than he did in a comparable portion of 2005, a sign that he hasn’t given up hope it might work.” Smith doesn’t conclude, “. . . even though he really should abandon that hope,” because by the end of the piece, the reader has reached the same conclusion. Nicely done.

p.p.s.—Still, it was a nicely done column, parading as news. The Post didn’t even slap the “news analysis” fig leaf on it. Sheesh!

__________
* The rhetorical device of “comes at a time when” is a kissing cousin to “comes from the same people who,” and sets up an implied contextual rebuff. (E.g., “The president’s upbeat speech on the economy comes at a time when food pantries and homeless shelters across the country report a sharp uptick in business. . . .")

Today’s diversion is simple and mesmerizing.

The post below refers to the discussion of the Military Commissions Act as a sparring match, but calling it a civil exchange comes closer to the literal truth. By now the notion that the blogosphere is filled with nothing but bilious tirades, vituperative name-calling, and scurrilous rumor has seeped into the national drinking water (to borrow a phrase from Jim Comey). But as the exchange with Rob from Say Anything shows, it’s still possible to disagree in cyberspace about some fairly profound questions without descending to the level of brutes (or trolls, as they’re generally called in blog vernacular). The unfiltered nature of the medium lets more people have a say, and some of them need to be pitied more than listened to. But as Rob’s version of the Serenity Prayer says:

Grant me the serenity to ignore the trolls,
the courage to debate with honest opponents,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s a good way to be.

Rob Port responds to my riposte to his rebuttal of my earlier take on the Military Commissions Act.

I won’t prolong this disagreement with further point-by-points--except for one that seems crucial. Port writes: “I cannot fathom an American citizen being denied access to the civilian courts by a military tribunal.” But that was precisely the question at issue in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which was a principal impetus for the MCA. Here is a summary by the Fourth Circuit’s Diana Gribbon Motz:

For more than a year, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, has been labeled an enemy combatant and held in solitary confinement in a Norfolk, Virginia, naval brig. He has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. The Executive [the president] will not state when, if ever, he will be released. Nor has the Executive allowed Hamdi to appear in court, consult with counsel, or communicate in any way with the outside world.

It’s tempting to assume the best intentions all around, and there are many in federal agencies (Jim Comey, formerly John Ashcroft’s No. 2 at Justice, for instance) whose intentions and integrity are beyond question. But cases of individuals such as Hamdi, Maher Arar, Murat Kurnaz, and other innocents wrongly held induce skepticism about others in this administration and future ones. And even if those cases didn’t, historical episodes such as the 1918 Red Scare and the Japanese internment in WWII ought to remind us of the dangers of overreaching in the name of security. If fellows such as Rob and other liberty-loving patriots were always in charge, I might be more complaisant. But the smarter course is to ask what those in power with less common sense and fewer noble intentions might do with the power granted to them--and how many more miles they might take if given another inch.

We didn’t need to lock up Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants to win WWII; we won with Fat Man and Little Boy and a lot of blood and guts on places like Mt. Suribachi. I’d rather win the war on terror the same way, without compromising the principles we’re fighting for.

See if you can find any rational reason for the disparate treatment of Howard Daniel, whose situation is discussed in today’s column.

The often excellent Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine makes an excellent point concerning environmentalists, who in general support tax abatements for conservation easements—which provide compensation to landowners for voluntary restrictions on private property use—but who also tend to oppose eminent-domain proposals based on the Takings Clause to compensate landowners for involuntary restrictions on private property use. Go figure.

It’s tempting to conclude current events have rendered satire inoperative; how you lampoon that which is already extravagantly absurd? Such reasoning might explain why the late, great Satire Wire is no more (though the site is still online). Andy Borowitz does what he can, as does Scott Ott at Scrappleface.

Here are two more fine contributions to the genre—“Iraqi Leaders Call for Moment of Violence During Ramadan” from The Onion, and “It’s the Homos, Stupid” from Iowahawk. Enjoy.

Via Andrew Sullivan, author of The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back. The graph represents the growth of congressional earmarks, commonly known as pork. There was a time when conservatism was synonymous with limited government and frugality. That reputation now lies in tatters.

Say Anything’s Rob Port—whom I was beginning to think might be a long-lost twin brother— takes issue with the previous post, “What Is Conservatism?” He writes:

While it is undoubtedly true that a guarantee of habeas corpus has been a founding principle of both this country’s laws and the English common law the framework of our legal system is based on, what is not true are these things:

(1) That the Military Commissions Act “weakens” the constitutional guarantee of of habeas corpus.  I’d point out that the MCA, in section 7, states the following: No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.” Clearly this does not do anything weaken the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus for U.S. citizens, who are the only people afforded the protections of the constitution.

(2) There is absolutely no tradition of extending constitutional protections, specifically habeas corpus relief, to war detainees.  America has never, ever done that in any of the wars or conflicts we’ve fought in the past.

To put it bluntly, all supporters of the Military Commissions Act want is for the detainees in the war on terror to be treated as though they were detainees of any other war we’ve ever thought.

At the risk of diving into one of those endless discussions that go on so long the original point gets lost, I’d make the following assertions.

(1) Conservatives should be leery of any expansion of government power. To that end, they should ask themselves not what a law is intended to do, but what power it actually grants. More about that in a sec.

(2) In fact, it is true that the Military Commissions Act (MCA) weakens habeas rights. Otherwise, there would be no need for the language brother Port cites denying courts jurisdiction to hear habeas appeals. Before the MCA, courts could hear habeas claims from resident aliens detained as unlawful enemy combatants. Now the courts can’t. Even if one says this is the proper course of action, it still constitutes a weakening of habeas rights. (So why not just say, “MCA weakens habeas rights for noncitizens, as it should”?)

(3) Mr. Port then writes: “U.S. citizens . . . are the only people afforded the protections of the Constitution.” That this is not so is plainly evident from the Fourteenth Amendment, which distinguishes betweeen citizens and persons ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"). The government cannot seize the property of a resident alien on a whim, merely because he is not a citizen. It must follow due process. Likewise, the guarantees of the Bill of Rights are properly considered restraints on federal power—not privileges extended to certain classes of residents.

(4) The MCA permits the indefinite detention of individuals found to be unlawful enemy combatants. It defines as unlawful enemy combatants not just those who have taken up arms, but also those who have “materially supported” hostilities against the U.S. What constitutes material support is a matter of some dispute. Should conservatives simply trust the federal government to interpret the phrase narrowly?

(5) The MCA also defines as an unlawful enemy combatant anyone “who has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.” In other words, if a military tribunal decides you’re an enemy combatant, that’s it. You are one. Should conservatives trust government to wield such arbitrary power wisely?

(6) Brother Port is certainly right that American citizens presumably can challenge their detention in civilian court. How, precisely, that would work is an interesting question. Suppose you tell your guard, “Hey, Im an American citizen, I deserve my day in court,” and he says, “Oh, yeah? Prove it.” The Act seems to create a catch-22: In order to challenge your detention by a military tribunal in a civilian court, you first must convince a military tribunal you deserve access to a civilian court. And military tribunals need not abide by all the legal niceties extended to defendants in civilian courts.

(7) Rob concludes by saying, “all supporters of the Military Commissions Act want is for the detainees in the war on terror to be treated as though they were detainees of any other war” [emphasis added]. Quite reasonable. But—going back to point (1) above—that is not all that the law permits. In previous wars, an individual was detained if he was captured on the battlefield. Now he can be detained if, for instance, he gives money to a suspect charity, or—as in one case cited by Georgetown law professor David Cole—he was a college student whose website linked “to other websites which in turn featured speeches by Muslim sheikhs advocating violent jihad. The prosecution’s theory was that the student was providing ‘material support’ in the form of expert advice or assistance by running the website and linking it to such statements. On that understanding of the law, The New York Times could be prosecuted for featuring a link to Osama bin Laden’s latest taped statement.”

Would that ever happen? Perhaps not. But a good conservative shouldn’t just take Washington’s word for it.

(Okay, Rob—your turn!)

Is conservatism

(a) Agreeing with anything President Bush says, or

(b) Upholding eternal verities and practices that have proven their worth over time?

Too many these days seem to think the answer is (a). It ain’t. And if the answer is (b), then the ACLU is not out of bounds to call itself in a recent ad “the most conservative organization in America” for opposing the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

That act, so eagerly sought by the Bush administration, weakens the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus—a right whose recognition in common law goes back to before the Magna Carta of 1215. The ease with which some Republicans have been willing to cast aside almost eight centuries of legal tradition can be called many things, but it cannot be called “conservative.”

Is Chief Justice John Roberts a political liberal? In one important sense, he is. And (up to a point) so should the rest of us be.

Shouldn’t social-service agencies be trying to encourage self-sufficiency rather than discourage it? One would think so--but one would be wrong.

An earlier post discussed California’s efforts to sign up illegal immigrants for food stamps, and Virginia’s efforts to impose dependency on working-class families. Courtesy of the lads at Say Anthing comes this insult atop the previous injuries: Ohio is trying to convince the Amish that they should start accepting food stamps. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer explains:

Accepting public assistance is verboten within the Amish culture. It simply is not done.

But Taylor is under orders to at least try to get them enrolled.

The Ohio Department of Job & Family Services is more concerned with food-stamp participation rates—meeting bureaucratic quotas, in other words—than with respecting the wishes of the Amish. Which lends yet more credence to the postulate that government programs eventually become focused chiefly on their own self-perpetuation. 

Ruminating on the controversy in Britain over the propriety of the Muslim niqab, along with earlier controversies over the Pope’s speech at Regensburg University and Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet, raises the question as to whether it is true (as some have said) that every major religion incorporates some form of the Golden Rule. Perhaps those with more theological training can offer some insight on the matter.

But the reactions in parts of the Islamic world to the Pope’s speech (everything from calling it “insensitive” to “We shall break the cross and spill the wine. . . . God will [help] Muslims to conquer Rome. . . . God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen") stands in contrast to the widespread indifference in the Islamic street over the trial of Abdul Raman—the Afghan who faced execution for converting to Christianity (before Afghanistan’s supreme court dodged the question by citing evidentiary problems).

As an excellent essay in U.S. News earlier this year noted:

Although only a few states—Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and, possibly, Afghanistan—endorse capital punishment for apostasy, many other Muslim nations, including Jordan and Egypt, have subjected apostates to lesser punishments that include imprisonment and exile, according to Georgetown University historian Yvonne Haddad. Even Muslim nations that officially embrace religious tolerance, like Pakistan, often turn a blind eye to widespread and unofficial persecution of apostates., a crude village justice carried out by supporters of a narrow construction of sharia.

All of which leads windingly to the need for a corollary to the Golden Rule. With typical modesty, let’s call it Hinkle’s Law. A first draft goes something like this: A party to a dispute is not allowed to invoke principles he or she does not embrace.

For example, if you think it is fine to murder a person because he adheres to a different faith, you cannot insist that others extend to you any kind of religious tolerance.

Hinkle’s Law could come in handy in all kinds of situations. In the Virginia senatorial contest, for instance, it would prohibit backers of George Allen who do not support the presence of women in combat from criticizing Jim Webb’s failure three decades ago to support the presence of women in combat.

Whaddayathink?

Max Boot, that is. Along with Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. They have an excellent suggestion: Grant immigrants citizenship in exchange for military service.

A mad purge of files turned up this old gem. Anyone who has ever felt put upon by The Man will enjoy it. (Anyone contemplating ways to exact revenge upon The Man for all the putting-upon will want to take notes.)

Remember the study from the National Center for Education Statistics released back in July—the one purporting to show private schools perform no better than public schools? Surely you do; The New York Times ran a story about it on page A-1.

Remember the study from Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance disputing the first study? You don’t? Don’t feel bad. It came out in August, but The Times has yet to give it a mention.