Last word (?) on the site name

Based on my impotence as far as deleting comments, I figure that if I change the site name it’ll just change itself back. So I’m just going to leave it as is. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

Maybe now the haunting by dead comments will stop.

I see dead comments

Wouldn’t you know it

…coldest day of the year and the furnace goes out. It’s going to be a chilly night.

The annual prison population update and reformation of the conservative agenda

It’s that time again:

A record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.

Normally shortly after the release we get an article in the NYT or LAT bemoaning the rise in the prison population, particularly given the drop in crime. Then conservatives respond with the causal argument, pointing out that it’s more likely that crime is dropping *because* more criminals are incarcerated.

This is typical for these discussions: liberal commenters are concerned about fairness and equity in society and in the justice system, while conservatives are concerned about the execution of justice and public safety and order. Steven Levitt’s controversial theory that abortions are the cause of reduced crime has been about the only interesting innovation in the debate in the last decade. But I’d prefer not to get into that here; besides, I have yet to unpack the box with Freakonomics in it.

Reformation of the Conservative Agenda. What I *would* like to discuss is the desirability of modifying the conservative approach to the justice system. As I mentioned to a commenter a few weeks ago, one of my themes going forward is addressing the necessary reformations of the conservative agenda. I touched on the subject of reformation in the Is health care a “right?” post, but I’ll be more explicit and thorough in this and future posts.

The impatient castrator

From ABC News:

A mental patient who threatened to castrate President Bush was sentenced to federal prison…

He should have just waited until January, when Pelosi will do it for him.

It’s always comforting knowing the Immigration Service is on the job

From the Washington Post:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has lost track of 111,000 files in 14 of the agency’s busiest district offices and processed as many as 30,000 citizenship applications last year without the necessary files, congressional investigators reported yesterday.
…
“It only takes one missing file of somebody with links to a terrorist organization to become an American citizen,” said Grassley, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

But wait, there’s hope:

An agency official said workers probably checked most of the files but failed to make note of it.

They’re talking here about the 30,000 applications which have no record of primary file access. Very comforting. Until you find out why they were checking in the first place:

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s audit arm, conducted the review at the request of Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) after U.S. authorities granted citizenship in 2002 to a man without checking his primary file. The file, which was lost, indicated ties to the militant Islamic group Hezbollah.

I’m puzzled by the AP’s defense

The blogosphere has been abuzz over the possibly fake story of the six Sunnis being burned to death last week. Flopping Ace’s and the military both questioned whether the source AP used for the story, Captain Jamil Hussein, really existed. The AP came back with a vigorous defense, stating:

The police captain cited in our story has long been known to the AP reporters and has been interviewed in his office and by telephone on several occasions during the past two years.

He is an officer at the police station in Yarmouk, with a record of reliability and truthfulness. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.

So here’s my question: Yarmouk is a wealthy Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad. Hurriyah, the slum where the burnings allegedly occurred, is in northern Baghdad. Take a look at this map of Baghdad to get an idea of how far apart they are (click on map for better view):

And since the Shiites basically took over Hurriyah and are strongly affiliated with Moqtada al Sadr, it is unlikely that many Sunnis would be visiting. Or patrolling there.

And let’s take a look at a day in the life of a police officer in Yarmouk:

There is a police station in Yarmouk but the police are holed up inside, powerless to intervene, because the insurgents are better armed. (10/29/06)

Is it really likely that this Police Captain had any sort of first-hand knowledge of events in Hurriyah? And if not, why didn’t the media make that clear?

UPDATE: Now we hear (via Flopping Aces) that the Iraqi government is going to declare that Capt. Jamil Hussein is not a police officer or member of the Ministry of the Interior. I think the AP should be given a chance to investigate the story and explain to the world exactly how they were taken in by this guy.

UPDATE II: Another version of the AP rebuttal states that Hussein was formerly stationed at Yarmouk, but is now at al-Khadra (thanks to See-Dubya for pointing this out at Flopping Aces). Al-Khadra, eh? Here’s a snippet about al-Khadra:

In al-Khadra, a Sunni neighbourhood in west Baghdad, for instance, the insurgents are waging two wars at the same time, one against the Americans and the other against Shia militiamen, some of whom work for the Ministry of the Interior. (3/20/06)

Hmmm. I keep trying to update the Baghdad map to show Al-Khadra, but it seems to have cached the old one. Maybe it’ll cure itself.

In any case, al-Khadra is closer than al-Yarmouk to al-Hurriyah, but still very distant in politics and police jurisdiction.

Site Maintenance

I’ll be unable to post in 18 minutes due to WordPress maintenance of my database. I wasn’t going to anyway, but at least this way it looks like I’m not lazy. Hope they don’t screw everything up.

Daily Debunking: The Interstate Highway System

I was wrong about this one until I ran across this DoT site:

Myth: Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System.

The primary justifications for the Interstate System were civilian in nature. In the midst of the Cold War, the Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and Congress added the words “and Defense” to its official name in 1956 (“National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”). However, the program was so popular for its civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even if defense had not been a factor.

What’s the word for dining-and-dashing?

Swedging

Now hie ye yon

Iraq the Model is back online after the 4-day curfew and the insanity in Baghdad. It’s worth a visit to see Mohammed’s ground-eye view of events there.

The right to self-defense

Ace just put up a post trying to help Jackie Danicki find the two thugs who assaulted her on the London Tube. Amid the sympathy generated for Ms. Danicki, the incident stimulated a secondary discussion concerning the lack of a right of self-defense in the UK. Since I was going on about rights the other day, I figured this would be a good time to revisit the subject of the right to self-defense.

Most of my quotes will come from an article by the Cato Insitute entitled “Self Defense: An Endangered Right.” I encourage you to read the whole article.

Note to self: Don’t leave bomb-like device in trunk of rental car

I’m absent-minded, but hopefully it never causes me the grief that this guy’s undoubtedly catching:

A bomb-like device was found in a rental car Sunday morning at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, shutting down part of the Lindbergh terminal parking ramps for about two hours.

The Bloomington police bomb squad examined and blew up the device. FBI agents interviewed the man who rented the car after he arrived on the West Coast on Sunday. He said that the device was not a bomb and that he didn’t mean to leave it behind, said Pat Hogan, airport spokesman.

So what is a “bomb-like device” that is “not a bomb?” Here’s the description:

The device, which was loose in the compartment, included tubes, wires and shrapnel, airport officials said.

Shrapnel? Doesn’t sound like a straightforward electronics device. Of course now that they blew it up, he’s probably in hot water back at the company as well.

So, about that site name

Thanks to everybody for their suggestions, constructive comments, and humorous derision (Ha. Ha.). Here’s the summary of possible names for this site:

• No change ==> Uncommon Misconceptions
• Change to Geoff’s Blog
• Change to Geoff’s Bloj
• Change to Big Trouble
• Change to Intelligent F’n Answers
• Other possibilities:
  • Cavalier Assumptions (I kinda like that one – it sounds so dashing)
  • Conservative Plots (‘cuz I use so many graphs, so it’s like a pun, see?)
  • Pundito Bandito (that’s not really serious, but I thought it was a funny variant of all the “Instapundit” type clone names)

Tried to set up a poll, but it spazzed, so I’m sticking with the medieval approach of using comments. [I'm usually a pretty early adopter, really I am, so I hope to get up to speed in the not too distant future.]

Hie ye hence

to Flopping Ace’s, who is looking at the sourcing for many of the MSM’s most discouraging reports on violence in Iraq. As has become commonplace, the integrity of their sources and their diligence as reporters is found wanting.

UPDATE: Scroll down to the most recent updates at Flopping Ace’s. AP’s been had.

UPDATE II: In this interview with John Roberts, E&P give us this headline: John Roberts Tells Kurtz: Iraq Worse Than Media Shows, which seems to oppose the point made above.

Reading the interview, however, shows that the headline misrepresents Roberts’ statements. He does say that the media doesn’t show the gore, and he does say that it’s difficult for the media to convey the level of chaos that exists. He also points out that adequate progress toward stabilizing and democratizing Iraq would bring public opinion back to supporting the war, regardless of the media’s presentation.

But he never claims that the media is doing a decent job of reporting reconstruction efforts, nor does he show how reporting accurately reflects conditions for the country as a whole. What he is saying is: “it’s hard to bring the reality of the violence and brutality home, and it’s hard to show the pressure of the constant threat of violence.” I don’t think Americans harbor any illusions about the reality of either of those conditions.

There’s a bit of bait-and-switch going on here as well. The complaints about the MSM go back to the invasion – the violence that Roberts is talking about has existed since about April of this year. The claim that the situation is worse than reported is based on current levels of violence, not the violence as it existed previously. The fact that Roberts may have a case at this point in time should not allow him to paint a picture of a fair media since 2003, particularly when the media hasn’t changed its reporting at all (a point he inadvertently makes when he talks about the public’s weariness of violence reports).

And certainly it should be acknowledged that the damage of media bias is two-fold: it saps the commitment of the American public and encourages the media-manipulating insurgents and terrorists. And that’s the point of the Flopping Ace’s story. The terrorists have been feeding the MSM stories of burned people and mosques, callous acts involving collateral damage, and other gruesome deaths, and the MSM has been passing them along without vetting them. And those stories have been heard not only by the American public, but by Iraqi citizens and all the people of the Middle East.

We don’t need that anchor around our necks.

Criminal Dim-Bulbs: Initiation Rites

Digital Brownshirt has the story.