What is the threat posed by a minute group of virulent haters?

Sunday’s Washington Post had an interesting article about how Barack Obama’s candidacy has proven a useful recruiting tool for racist hate groups. They’ve enjoyed a real spike in applications and activity. That’s alarming.

Or is it? As some of the leaders of the white-power movement admit, they’re not exactly on par with the NRA or the AARP, numbers-wise:

Such groups have historically inflated their influence for self-promotion and as an intimidation technique, and they refused to provide exact membership numbers or open their meetings to a reporter. Leaders acknowledged that their numbers remain very small—“the flat-globe society still has more people than us,” Roper said. But experts said their claims reveal more than hyperbole this time.

Yet their existence, and growth, is useful for those at the diametrical opposite end of the spectrum as well: If the threat of neo-Nazis and white supremacists seems to be growing, that’s a powerful recruiting and fundraising tool for organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In some ways the situation seems to have some parallels to the debate over Islamic radicalism and the threat of jihad. There are those who contend the Bush administration has exaggerated the threat from Islamofascism for its own political ends. Just how big is the threat—from white supremacists or islamofascists—in actuality?

In each case you’ve got a bunch of angry young men (and some women) and a lot of websites spewing vitriol by the bucketful. But how many of those who hang out on the fringes of the movement are motivated enough to carry out—let alone competent enough to carry out—a serious plot?

Then again, how many does it take to carry out a serious plot?

On 9/11, it took only a couple of dozen.

In the Oklahoma City bombing, it took only a couple of persons.

Amir Sadollah hails from Richmond. (He went to J.R. Tucker, but lately he’s been taking other folks to school.)

Running around shooting stuff and picking up health and weapons and whatnot is the key to a good ol’-fashioned game like this one.

Today’s column discusses Virginia’s rising sea levels.

29 percent of voters — including 37 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans — favor nationalizing the oil industry.

If you’re not crazy about either Mark Warner or Jim Gilmore for Senate, there’s always William Redpath. A press release from the Libertarian Party says he’s now qualified for the ballot.

Here endeth today’s public-service announcement on behalf of third parties.

On today’s Op/Ed page, former state climatologist Patrick Michaels brings his A game.

An important environmental principle might be coming back to bite environmentalism in the behind.

Some hybrid-vehicle owners claim to be suffering health problems caused by the electromagnetic currents from the vehicles’ batteries.

Sounds dubious, even if The New York Times says otherwise ("There is a legitimate scientific reason for raising the issue. The flow of electrical current to the motor that moves a hybrid vehicle at low speeds (and assists the gasoline engine on the highway) produces magnetic fields, which some studies have associated with serious health matters, including a possible risk of leukemia among children").

But as Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, points out:

Environmental activists routinely use the Precautionary Principle as a weapon against technologies and products they do not like. They assert that until and unless a product they oppose can be definitively proven to be safe, the product must be banned. Now, however, when consumers and some scientists assert that one of the activists’ pet products may be causing serious health harms, the activists act like they have never heard of the Precautionary Principle.

Here’s one explanation of the precautionary principle that seems to suggest hybrid cars should indeed be recalled:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

Seems pretty cut and dried, doesn’t it?

This morning NPR carried a light-news filler about one of the many ways Beijing is sprucing up for the Olympics:

Beijing is preparing for Olympic visitors by changing the names of dishes that don’t translate well. “Beef and ox tripe in chili sauce” might not be the snappiest name, but it may be an improvement on “husband and wife’s lung slice.” And ask for “steamed pullet” instead of “chicken without sexual life.”

The story brought to mind a contest The Washington Post held more than a decade ago asking for examples of fractured English. Readers sent in the following gems:

On a menu in Ljubljana, Slovenia:

“Beef broth with home-made insertion ... 30c”

“Serbian spit ... 65c”

Under Fish and Seafood selections on a menu of the Bae Lu Restaurant in Liaoning Province, People’s Republic of China:

“Juicy Yellow River Crap”

A sign on a cable car in Fengdu, China:

“For your safety the following people don’t take the cable car please:

“1. Drunkard.

“2. Neuropath, idiot and easily dizzy people.

“3. Very old and deformed man whose action is unconvenient.”

From a doorway in Seoul:

“NOTICE: No more whore house! In the future we try to be laundry house. Thank you.”

From a menu at a Chinese restaurant in Italy:

“Chopped Suzy.”

Outside a Freiburg, Germany, bakery:

“Get your buns in here.”

From the YMCA in Huntington, W.Va., circa 1980:

“Please do not leave stools in showers.”

P.S.—Check out Engrish.com for many, many more examples of things that get lost (or found) in translation.

An excellent commentary: Yes or no?

You might have seen these remarks from Weather Channel founder John Coleman about climate change:

It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline.  All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth.  What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

They’re making the rounds, and a friend recently sent them my way. But even ignorami such as your humble servant can see Coleman makes several claims that are not only dubious, but flat-out wrong. Here are two examples:

(1) He claims to have “dug through thousands of pages of research papers” and insists that “the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels.  They don’t have any other issue.  Carbon Dioxide, that’s it. . . . “.

Nope. Methane and other compounds also contribute to climate change. See here and here, for instance.

Then there’s the contribution to climate change from the deforestation of carbon sinks in, e.g., the Amazon—which has led to the promising notion of carbon ranching:

One hectare (about 2.5 acres) of forest cleared and converted to ranchland or crops produces a piece of land worth, on average, $200 to $500. But that’s nothing compared to the value of preserving the rainforest as a sponge for carbon dioxide.

On European markets, the right to emit one ton of carbon dioxide trades today at more than $20. With each hectare of intact rainforest storing around 500 tons of carbon dioxide, that means that each hectare has a value of $10,000 as carbon dioxide storage, far more than the value of even the most productive tea or soy plantation.

(2) Coleman also says “Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares.  That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline.  Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years.”

But again, this is easily checkable and refutable. See here ("The eight warmest years on record (since 1850) have all occurred since 1998, with the warmest year being 2005") and see this chart (reproduced in smaller format above).

When are climate-change skeptics going to bring their A game?

Do they have an A game?

The always enjoyable Shankar Vedantam has unearthed some new research suggesting that the most aggressive drivers are those who have lots of bumper stickers and other “territorial markers”:

It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are about peace and love—“Visualize World Peace,” “My Kid Is an Honor Student”—or angry and in your face—“Don’t Mess With Texas,” “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.”

[snip]

Szlemko and his colleagues at Fort Collins found that people who personalize their cars acknowledge that they are aggressive drivers, but usually do not realize that they are reporting much higher levels of aggression than people whose cars do not have visible markers on their vehicles.

Drivers who do not personalize their cars get angry, too, Szlemko and his colleagues concluded in a paper they recently published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, but they don’t act out their anger. They fume, mentally call the other driver a jerk, and move on.

“The more markers a car has, the more aggressively the person tends to drive when provoked,” Szlemko said. “Just the presence of territory markers predicts the tendency to be an aggressive driver.”

The Bush administration is planning a major expansion of ADA regulation.

But it’s not demanding that everyone comply as of yesterday. Inevitable result: Nobody’s happy!

The Bush administration is proposing a safe harbor for small businesses. They could meet their obligations in a given year if, in the prior year, they had spent at least 1 percent of their gross revenues to remove barriers.

Curtis L. Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, a coalition of legal advocates, said: “Safe harbors make us very nervous. A small business could spend the requisite amount of money and still not be accessible.”

Randel K. Johnson, a vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, said the proposed rules “are so long and technically complex that even the best-intentioned small business could be found out of compliance by a clever lawyer looking to force a settlement.”

In case you’ve been wondering, here’s an update on Elian Gonzalez, who is now 14 and being used by Cuba’s regnant goons:

Clinton sent the jackboots to seize the boy at gunpoint and sent the child back to Cuba. From there, he didn’t live with his father and, contrary to the false assurances of Clinton, he did become a propaganda tool, just as the Miami relatives had warned. They, of course, were ridiculed and reviled.

But with Elian performing yet another propaganda stunt for the Castroites, praising Castro’s revolution, it’s pretty clear who was right all along.

This latest incident again proves that Elian isn’t living some normal life with his father as Clintonites promised. Every year or so, the child is trotted out as a propaganda pony for the Castro regime. Singled out, he’s forced to make pro-Castro, pro-communist statements, whether it’s Che Guevara’s birthday or a Cuban-regime-assisted CBS interview. It doesn’t matter what he thinks or feels, because his lifelong role will be to shill for the regime.

From the left-leaning Virginia Organizing Project, which disdains gasoline taxes because of their regressivity:

The Virginia Organizing Project has proposed as an alternative a two-part transportation funding plan. First, we would raise new revenue by imposing a small income tax surcharge. A five percent surcharge (not a 5 percent rate increase but a 5 percent charge added to existing tax liabilities) would raise approximately $450 million. We recommend using up to $400 million of this amount to finance ongoing maintenance deficits, with the balance dedicated to interest payments on newly issued revenue or general obligation bonds in the amount of $600 million. The proceeds from these bonds should be sufficient to finance the new transportation investments for Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads and throughout the Commonwealth. Such an approach would also finance these investments as they should be financed—on the basis of ability to pay—and it would rely on the state’s sterling credit where it should be counted upon—to finance relatively long-lived state assets.

Well, it’s an idea. Trouble is, Virginia’s tax structure also is “regressive and outdated,” according to . . . the Virginia Organizing Project.

A simple tank game.

An editorial in today’s New York Times notes that

The right of habeas corpus is so central to the American legal system that it has its own clause in the Constitution: it cannot be suspended except “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

Yup.

Of course, the right to keep and bear arms is so central to the American legal system that it has not just its own clause but its own Amendment, which is even more absolutist in affording no exceptions to the stipulation that the right “shall not be infringed.”

Pity The Times isn’t willing to grant law-abiding citizens as much constitutional protection as alleged enemy combatants. But then there’s a lot of that going around.

According to this piece in The Economist,

Two in every three people on the planet—some 4 billion in total—are “excluded from the rule of law.”

But not those on U.S. soil. Even at Camp Delta.

. . . is about Father’s Day.

In the inevitable foofaraw that will follow today’s Supreme Court ruling about the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, it would be worthwhile to remember what the case is and is not about.

It is not about whether the detainees are good guys or bad guys. The Nazis, to use the equally inevitable analogy, were bad guys, and they were still given their day in court at Nuremburg.

It is about the rule of law. One blogger summarizes the ruling thusly:

it appears to hold that Guantanamo detainees have habeas rights, that these rights can only be denied through a valid suspension of habeas rights (under the Suspension Clause of the Constitution), that the procedures created by the Detainee Treatment Act were not an adequate substitute for habeas, and therefore Section 7 of the Military Commission Act is an unconstitutional suspension of the detainees’ habeas rights.

As one wiseacre cracked, “You give prisoners habeas rights, and soon everybody is going to want them.”

It also would be useful if folks understood something about the combatant status review tribunals that were used to determine who should and should not be in Guantanamo, and some of the Kafkaesque details of the case. This is from the Boumediene petition:

Petitioners are six natives of Algeria who emigrated to
Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s. Five acquired
Bosnian citizenship, while the sixth (Mr. Lahmar) acquired
permanent residency. At the time of the brutal attacks of
September 11, 2001, each Petitioner was living peacefully
with his family in Bosnia.1 No Petitioner traveled to Afghani-
stan during the time that the United States has been engaged
in hostilities there. No Petitioner has waged war or committed
belligerent acts against the United States or its allies.
Petitioners were arrested by Bosnian police in October
2001, purportedly on suspicion of plotting to attack the U.S.
Embassy in Sarajevo. The Bosnian authorities had no evidence
for this charge. Rather, they acted under pressure
from U.S. officials, who threatened to cease diplomatic relations
with Bosnia if Petitioners were not arrested.

On January 17, 2002, the Supreme Court of the Federation
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, acting with the concurrence
of the Bosnian prosecutor, ordered Petitioners released because
a three-month international investigation (with collaboration
from the U.S. Embassy and Interpol) had failed to support
the charges on which Petitioners had been arrested.
On the same day, the Human Rights Chamber
for Bosnia and Herzegovina—a tribunal established under the
U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement and staffed by
judges from several European countries—issued an order
forbidding Petitioners’ removal from Bosnian territory.
. . .
Late that day, however, as Petitioners were being released
from the Central Prison in Sarajevo, Bosnian police—
acting again under pressure from U.S. officials and in defiance
of the Human Rights Chamber’s order—seized Petitioners and
delivered them to U.S. military personnel stationed in Bosnia.
The U.S. military transported Petitioners to Guantanamo,
where they have been held ever since. . . .

The Human Rights Chamber later determined that the
Bosnian government violated Bosnian law and European law
(directly applicable in Bosnia) by allowing the United States
to remove Petitioners to Guantanamo. Bosnia
has since repeatedly stated its willingness to accept Petitioners’
return. . . .

The CSRT procedures departed in numerous ways from
the basic requirements of due process. Most of the evidence
the government presented to the CSRT panel was classified
and, therefore, concealed from Petitioners under CSRT regulations.
The following colloquy from the
CSRT hearing of Petitioner Ait Idir (charged with “associat[
ing] with” an unnamed but “known al Qaeda operative”
(CAJA 493)) is illustrative (Pet. App. 83a-84a):

Detainee: Give me his name.
Tribunal President: I do not know.
Detainee: How can I respond to this?
Tribunal President: Did you know of anybody that
was a member of Al Qaida?
Detainee: No, no.
Tribunal President: I’m sorry, what was your response?
Detainee: No.
Tribunal President: No?
Detainee: No. This is something the interrogators
told me a long while ago. I asked the interrogators
to tell me who this person was. Then I could tell you
if I might have known this person, but not if this
person is a terrorist. Maybe I knew this person as a
friend. Maybe it was a person that worked with me.
Maybe it was a person that was on my team. But I
do not know if this person is Bosnian, Indian or
whatever. If you tell me the name, then I can respond
and defend myself against this accusation.
Tribunal President: We are asking you the questions
and we need you to respond to what is on the
unclassified summary.
Detainee: Why? Because these are accusations that
I can’t even answer. I am not able to answer them.
You tell me I am from Al Qaida, but I am not an Al
Qaida. I don’t have any proof to give you except to
ask you to catch Bin Laden and ask him if I am a
part of Al Qaida. To tell me that I thought, I’ll just
tell you that I did not. I don’t have proof regarding
this. What should be done is you should give me evidence
regarding these accusations because I am not
able to give you any evidence. I can just tell you no,
and that is it.

Petitioners were also prevented from offering documentary
or testimonial evidence unless the CSRT panel concluded
that it was “reasonably available” (Pet. App. 82a)—a standard
that, in practice, excluded much readily-accessible evidence.
For instance, Petitioner Boudella requested the January 2002
order of the Bosnian Supreme Court ordering him released
from custody. CAJA 576, 582. The CSRT panel concluded
that the decision was “not reasonably available” (id. 582),
even though the decision had been filed in the district court
and served on counsel for the government.5 Petitioner Nechla
sought testimony from his supervisor in the Bosnian office of
the Red Crescent. His CSRT panel held the witness not reasonably
available (see id. 520) even though counsel easily located
him by calling the Red Crescent number listed in the
Sarajevo telephone directory.

At least when it comes to educational innovation:

New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.

For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers—critics call them opportunists—seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other’s top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.

The approval of the Patrick Henry charter school is just a first step.