Minor Thoughts from me to you

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Do you think that still applies? I don't. Not when a family can have their car seized and held by the police, before anyone was even convicted of a crime.

Take this story, for example.

The Chicago Sun-Times tells the story of Erasmo Palacios, who, after dropping off his six-year-old daughter at school, was with his wife Rocio and their 22-year-old daughter, all on their way to breakfast when they saw a woman waving her arms. Thinking she was in distress, they approached her in the car, at which point...

...the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo’s restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.

The couple laughed, realizing this wasn't a woman in distress after all.

But within seconds, Chicago police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute.

His daughter, who had just run in to exchange her coffee for a hot chocolate, screamed, while his wife cried in fear.

Eight hours later, Palacios, who has no criminal record, was released from custody. And weeks later, charges against him were dropped.

The police report improbably charged that Palacios solicited sex from the undercover officer, even as his wife sat in the passenger seat, and his daughter was on her way out from getting a beverage. Makes you wonder how many men have been wrongfully arrested for solicitation who didn't have their wives and daughters nearby to vouch for them. Also makes those websites cities put up posting mugshots of suspected (not convicted) johns all the more invidious.

The punchline: Though the charges were dropped, the city seized the family's car under laws allowing the forfeiture of automobiles used in the solicitation of prostitutes. The city won't return the car until the Palacios pay $4,700 in towing and storage fees.

Here's another example of how we're making progress in Iraq. Operation Alljah: The Swarm

Commenced on May 29 and ending last week, Operation Alljah was the latest and most successful bid to achieve security in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, marrying projection of force with aggressive civil affairs outreach. During the operation, the city was subdivided into 10 neighborhoods in efforts dubbed "the swarm," a coordinated series of counterinsurgency components: US troops and Iraqi Security Forces rolled into a neighborhood and established security, cordoned it off with concrete barrier checkpoints, created a local police precinct, recruited a neighborhood watch, provided employment for day laborers, conducted an information campaign to inform the citizenry of the operation, arbitrated any claims against Iraqi or US forces, distributed food and began meetings with neighborhood leaders to address infrastructure concerns.

More and more Fallujans are signing up to become members of the Iraqi Police or of the local neighbor watch teams.

When asked about how security had changed so drastically, what they think of Americans and IPs, and why so many Fallujans had formerly backed the insurgency, one volunteer had this to say: "I want to be neighborhood watch to protect the city and 150 dinars is good pay, and I want to {become an] IP. And when I become an IP, I'll have 750 dinar. Like you said, four, five, seven months ago, the city was not good. But the reason the city is now good is because of us, we protect the city, because we're from this city; we know who's the good guy, we know who's the bad guy. So, the bad guy? To jail or get out [of] my city. The good guy? You're welcome, you can stay here."

What turned this situation around? Well, the locals realized how evil Al-Qaeda was and the Army smartened up.

Asked why it took so long for Fallujans to switch sides or rise up against the insurgency, another volunteer said, "Before, we had the terrorists, they controlled the city, so they had the power to do what they wanted to do. But you can say we woke up right now, we were asleep. We woke up to move the bad guy, to push him out, to kill him or to put him in jail. We were waiting for help from the government."

Several volunteers expressed that the key to building security momentum was the empowerment of the Iraqi Police with cover from Marine firepower. Their opinion of US troops has changed:

"At first, Americans were not doing a good job, because if they were attacked, they would kill [civilians] in the surrounding area, but now they are good to the people and trying to help. They are going out sooner or later, and it is a good gesture of them to try to help us before they leave."

Iraq has been a disaster for many years. But it'd be a mistake to write off the country now when we've finally learned how to fight and -- more importantly -- how to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi citizens.

Read the whole thing. My excerpts don't do it justice.

The situation in Iraq is changing so rapidly, it can be hard to keep up with. For instance:

Thomas Ricks' Fiasco is one of the most influential books about the war in Iraq. It was published just over a year ago, to considerable acclaim. It was only a few days ago, however, that I began to read the book.

One of the first things is noticed is a map that precedes the title page. The map is entitled "The Sunni 'Triangle': Heart of the Insurgency". That title speaks volumes about the dramatic changes in Iraq over the past six months.

A year ago, when Fiasco was published, it seemed delusional to hope that the US and its Iraqi allies could ever take back the Sunni provinces of Western Iraq. We understood the war in Iraq as essentially a civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Since we had taken the side of the Shi'ites after the fall of Saddam, it seemed perfectly logical to assume that the most heavily Sunni parts of Iraq were the natural home of the insurgency.

Gen. Petraeus has up-ended that logic and shown that we can turn many of Iraq's Sunnis into our most effective allies -- more effective than most Shi'ites. This strategy has its perils, but those perils are almost infinitely preferable to the status quo of July 2006.

A 75% reducation in attacks in what was once the heartland of the insurgency. Is there any hope of extending that progress to the rest of Iraq? There are good reasons to say 'no'. Whereas Anbar is all-Sunni, Baghdad is a mixed metropolis with vicious Sunni-Shi'ite violence. How can any US strategy succeed on such dangerous terrain?

A year ago, we were asking the same question about Anbar.

In "The Music Man", con-man "Professor" Harold Hill was nearly run out of town on a rail for trying to sell the town members on a non-existent boys band. He was saved by a good singing voice, the love of a librarian, and the unexpected appearance of a real boys band -- put together by someone other than Hill.

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle is trying to accomplish the same feat. Instead of a boys band, Governor Doyle is attempting to sell a non-existent college scholarship program. I'm not kidding about the non-existent part. The Wisconsin Covenant program exists only in Governor Doyle's fevered imagination -- it hasn't even been introduced as a bill in the state legislature. Sadly, the governor has conned nearly 10,000 high school students into signing up for this pretend program.

With just days left before the Friday sign-up deadline, nearly 10,000 ninth-graders have committed to the proposed Wisconsin Covenant, which promises a route to college if they fulfill a pledge.

A spokesman for Gov. Jim Doyle's office said the Democratic governor's new program is succeeding in getting thousands of students to start thinking early about college. But Republican lawmakers point out that thousands of students have now signed up for a supposed guarantee that hasn't been approved by, or even introduced in, the Legislature.

"Thousands of students across the state now have a clear road map for what they need to do to go to college, and in addition, the state has committed to ensure there's a place for these students in higher education," Doyle spokesman Matt Canter said of the program, which Doyle hopes will boost the number of low-income students in college.

Doyle and first lady Jessica Doyle have been crisscrossing the state in recent days touting the covenant program and urging students to participate.

Doyle first proposed a year ago that the state guarantee a place in a college and adequate financial aid to any eighth-grader who pledges to do well in school and keep out of trouble. The first class of students started making the pledge last spring. Those eighth-graders are now ninth-graders and the program would apply to their first year in college in 2011, Canter said.

It's like something out of a farce. Only, sadly, true.

Several weeks ago, journalist Michael Yon posted a series of dispatches from Iraq, entitled "The Ghosts of Anbar". I recently read through them and was struck by several passages. I'm offering them here as a teaser and as an advertisement for the full series.

Michael uses lots of pictures set the mood throughout the series. His captions are more than merely descriptive. They offer a wealth of information in their own right. He also intersperses quotes from the Army's counterinsurgency manual. These quotes illustrate the model that the Army and Marines strive daily to implement.

The overall tone of the series is both reflective and hopeful. Michael offers the tantalizing vision of a strong, free Iraq as a friend of the United States -- if only we will learn the lessons of Anbar. He paints a picture of an Iraq that wants to be free -- but desperately needs us to model both the military and civil side of a functional democracy.

Here's Michael.

Michael Yon : The Ghosts of Anbar, Part I of IV

Better Business Partners

Anbar was the special provenance for al Qaeda, the one place in Iraq they could establish and maintain a robust and largely unchallenged dominance. To achieve this, al Qaeda had used the stick of terrorism and the carrot of promises to gain allies. A lot of carrots, actually, in the form of promises that they would cast out the Americans, and reward the people of Anbar with ministries in the new government.

Ironically, in Anbar al Qaeda has become our best ally for killing al Qaeda. They've managed to do this directly, just by being al Qaeda. Despite the promised carrots, what al Qaeda consistently delivered here was mostly stick, and with a special kind of hypocritical contempt that no sensible person would believe possible. (Not unlike the notion of baking the children of resistant parents or ordering shepherds to diaper the corrupting genitals of goats.)

Al Qaeda has a management style--doing drugs, laying up sloppy drunk, raping women and boys, and cutting off heads, all while imposing strict morality laws on the locals--that makes it clear that they have one set of principles for themselves, and another for everyone else.

In that kind of scheme, it didn't take long before people in Anbar realized that any benefits from al Qaeda having control would not be distributed equally. Once that realization spread, the tribal sheiks--almost all Sunni--had to consider the alternatives.

The sheiks of Anbar turned against al Qaeda because the sheiks are businessmen, and al Qaeda is bad for business. But they didn't suddenly trust Americans just because they no longer trusted al Qaeda. They are not suddenly blood allies. This is business, and that's fine, because if there is one thing America is good at, it's business.

Reframed thus from a position of strength, this stage of the Anbar-war is more a sort of business transaction, where alliances beneficial to all sides--except al Qaeda--are formed. From this perspective, there is now a moment of genuine ground-floor opportunity in Anbar, if the people here can see that by doing business with the Coalition, everyone benefits--except al Qaeda, an exclusion that most can live with.

Michael Yon : The Ghosts of Anbar, Part II of IV

Media -- The Key to Victory

Many people know the old adage about restaurant kitchens: to know if the kitchen is clean, check the bathroom. The same holds true for Soldiers, only it calls for checking windows. If you are going on a combat mission and Soldiers have not cleaned all their windows to a sparkle (during times when it is possible to do so), do not go with them. Soldiers with dirty windows are not watching for tiny wires in the road, nor are they scanning rooftops. They are talking about women, football, and the car they will buy when they get home. I will not go into combat with Soldiers with dirty windows.

On the command level, there are other indicators. In counterinsurgency, as our Vietnam veterans will vouch, press has both strategic and tactical influence. Commanders who are afraid of the press or who cannot handle it cannot win this fight. They are often the same people who alienate Iraqis. I remember one captain who had allowed his men to ransack an Iraqi home, much later shouting in my face while his lip quivered with anger, "You are a piece of shit!" He could not handle having press around, and resented the very air they breathed, and he made sure they knew it. Of course anyone whose idea of winning is to bully Iraqis would not want media around. I watched him for months as a study in how not to do certain things. Tactically, he was competent and knew how to win the gun battles, but he was incompetent and inadequate for counterinsurgency.

Dealing with the press is just a reality, like the weather. We would never put a commander in the field who refused to make plans for fighting in the cold or heat. Although it's just a reality, cold weather, for example, could destroy a unit overnight if they had not prepared for it. As with the weather, the press also influences the enemy. Cold weather freezes everyone's toes; bad press stalls progress. In either instance, he who is better-suited and more adaptable has a supreme advantage. There was a time when many of our enemies in Iraq were beating us in the press, both their press and ours, but now that is changing.

Changing Enemies into Allies

In mid-May, 2007, days before I arrived, the Iraqi Army and Police had conducted a "Combined Medical Exercise" in the village of Falahat, wherein Iraqi doctors saw about 200 villagers. About two days after that, the Iraqi Police opened a police station at the Falahat train station. That was just about the same time I was driving out to stay with a small team of Marines who were assigned as "MiTT 8" (Military Training Team 8)

The men of MiTT 8 are living along with their Iraqi protégées in filthy shipping containers on a highway. Several months ago they were attacked by a car bomb. But at about 0900, while I was traveling to their location with Marines in a Humvee (with sparkling glass) some Falahat villagers went to the new police station to report the presence of a culprit they knew to emplace bombs on the road.

It happened that quickly.

Within mere days of opening the station, people spoke up. The Iraqi Police (some of whom freely admitted to having been recent insurgents) called the tip into the Iraqi Army who were living with the Marines of MiTT 8. The Iraqi Army in turn told Marine Captain Koury, whose Command Operations Center is conjoined with the Iraqi Army unit there. Finally, CPT Koury told Staff Sergeant Rakene Lee to take care of the developing situation.

Michael Yon : Ghosts of Anbar Part III of IV

Respecting Justice

Iraqis respond to a sense of justice. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated, and it is this sense of justice on an international scale that gets undermined when people are held in prisons without being charged with any crimes.

To many of the Iraqis I've spoken with, terrorists are fair game. Kill them. But if we kill justice while doing so, we will create terrorists out of farmers. Here the Marines are creating farmers, police officers, shepherds, and entrepreneurs out of insurgents. To do that, they have to be seen as men who respect and honor legitimate systems of government and justice.

The Value of Character

Iraqis in every province I have traveled all respond to strong leadership. It's a cultural touchstone. A man like SSG Rakene Lee is not someone they would overlook. Physically, the man is amazingly strong. But what is most amazing is the strength of his moral fiber. Whatever the man talked, he walked. After all of al Qaeda's false promises, the people here have learned a hard lesson about the true value of character.

Over the next several days, I saw how much the Iraqis respected Rakene Lee and the other Marines who were all courageous, tactically competent, measured, and collectively and constantly telling even the Iraqis to go easy on the Iraqis. It's people like Rakene Lee who are winning the moral high ground in Iraq. It is people like this who are devastating al Qaeda just by being themselves. Over those same several days, I would also see the Iraqi Lieutenant Hamid treat prisoners with respect and going out of his way to treat other Iraqis the way he saw Americans treating them. Lieutenant Hamid, in his young twenties, seemed to watch every move of the Marines and try to emulate them.

The Character of Our Enemy

In August, when people were groping for answers as to why about 400 Yazidis were murdered with bombs during an attack in Nineveh, the BBC and others asked me why I thought the Yazidis had been targeted.

Al Qaeda and related groups do not need reasons. They buy press with blood.

Michael Yon : Ghosts of Anbar, Part IV of IV

The Importance of Learning Lessons

Fortunately, everyone had gone in easy and not blown doors off with explosives. Those mistakes also happen sometimes. Sometimes our own guys blow down doors to the wrong homes. Back in the early days of the war, this might have seemed like an innocent "Oh well that's war" type mistake, but after spending all this time with Iraqis I now see that it was in part actions like that which also blew open the door in Iraq for al Qaeda to come in.

Counterinsurgency is all about perception. Perception is how reality gets interpreted by people. It can be shaped, cajoled, hardened or distorted by innumerable influences

Differences Between Americans and Iraqis

At one of the houses, Iraqi Soldiers said that there had been a lot of shooting on a recent night. What had all the shooting been about? Were insurgents trying to take over? No, the old man said, it was just a couple of brothers having a shootout over a small land dispute. "Okay," the Iraqi Soldiers shrugged it off. It was just a shootout between brothers. Nothing more to ask about.

There are many similarities between Iraq and home, but at the end of the day, a Cain and Abel shootout is not even something that warrants paperwork. Tribal law. This is not Kansas. Some things are very different.

The problem with eating only locally grown food is that locally grown food may not always be available.

Jai Kellum stands -- stunned yet smiling -- in front of a channel of dirty water, as she describes the catastrophe that destroyed Avalanche Organic farm, which she owns with her partner, Joel Kellum.

The smile, like the voice -- sing-song, almost laughing -- is deceptive, because the words she uses in this video are not happy ones. The nine-minute production, "Flooded Midwest Organic Farms," by Madison filmmakers Gretta Wing Miller and Aarick Beher, is making the rounds on the Internet.

Miller, who made a much-admired documentary film on Wisconsin organic farms two years ago, made this short followup after the floods of August turned a season of plenty into a season of survival. The video is featured extensively in a large fundraising effort, Sow the Seeds Fund, which will be used to help organic farmers.

Miller, a Madison filmmaker since 1994, became familiar with the farmers in the Viroqua, Gays Mills and Soldier 's Grove area in southwestern Wisconsin from her earlier documentary, "Back to the Land ... Again," and because her brother, Jeff, lives in Viroqua.

"We got to know all those farms back then, and after the rains we heard everything was washed away, " she said. "People couldn 't get out of their farm yards, driveways were gone.

"So a week ago we just grabbed our camera and went out there, just showed up at Avalanche Organics. We were horrified. Here was this beautiful farm we had spent months at shooting over and over again for two summers ... "

Jai Kellum had, coincidentally, started filming activity on the farm earlier, so the video features some sad before-and-after views of the farm, which is not in Avalanche but in rural Viola along Highway 131, about 80 miles northwest of Madison.

Avalanche is a major supplier of salad greens to the Willy Street Co-op in Madison, and Miller wasn 't sure the co-op's customers were aware of the scope of the flood damage. The disaster caused ruin in one of the nation 's biggest collections of certified organic farms.

Most also run fully subscribed Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, a popular feature in the Madison area in which customers buy shares in a farmer 's harvest and get boxes of produce every week or two.

Toy manufacturers want to regulate toys coming into the United States, looking for dangerous materials like lead paint. But what's the real cause of dangerous toys?

Design flaws, not Chinese manufacturing problems, are the cause of the vast majority of American toy recalls over the last two decades, according to a new study by two Canadian professors.

The study, which looked at toy-recall data going back to 1988, showed that some 76 percent of the recalls in that period involved design flaws that could result in hazards like choking or swallowing small parts, while 10 percent were caused by manufacturing flaws, like excessive levels of lead paint.

The study, written by Hari Bapuji, a professor at the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba and Paul W. Beamish, from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, suggests that while China's manufacturing troubles were a serious problem, toy companies needed to take more responsibility for the growing number of recalls.

"I'm not saying there is no problem with Chinese manufacturing," Professor Bapuji said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I'm just saying there is a bigger problem with designs."

Sounds like regulation wouldn't help nearly as much as the big companies want you to think it would. But it would still hurt their competitors plenty.

Needless to say, I'm still opposed to the idea.

The New York Times published a long story last week on the sub-prime mortgage "crisis". Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town? - New York Times. As I read through it, there were a few points that jumped out at me.

One of those loans belonged to Audrey Sweet, a Maple Heights resident and a first-time home buyer who borrowed $118,000 from Countrywide in late 2004 without putting any money down. Because of Mrs. Sweet's poor credit history and lack of assets, the adjustable loan's rate was 10.25 percent, but she says she was told that if the couple "just proved themselves," they could quickly refinance at a lower rate.

Mrs. Sweet says Countrywide advised her that the monthly property tax bill would be $100, but it turned out to be $230 and the Sweets quickly fell behind. Countrywide stepped in and paid $3,493 in back taxes in March 2007, and the next month raised the Sweets' monthly mortgage bill to $1,713 from $1,055.

That was far beyond the budget of the couple, so ... working with a local lender, Third Federal Savings and Loan, the Sweets managed to refinance the loan at a fixed rate of 7.2 percent, and the original $1,055 monthly payment now covers the property taxes the Sweets couldn't afford before.

Notice the main points of this little sob story. The Sweets did not put any money down on their house. In effect, they were on a rent-to-own plan with their house. Even if they had defaulted on the mortgage, they would not have lost any money -- they never put any down in the first place. They were only making monthly payments, no different from paying monthly rent.

Note also that the couple had a poor credit history and no assets. Countrywide took a big risk in loaning money to them. For this, Countrywide is demonized throughout the article. (What a great way to encourage companies to take risks!)

It is also clear that the Sweets bear some responsibility for their predicament. "I do blame myself a little bit," Mrs. Sweet acknowledges. "I feel dumb." She explains that she was focused on the monthly payment when she borrowed from Countrywide, not the interest rate or taxes due. "Once we got the loan documents at the closing, I just came home and stuck them in a drawer."

Wow. Just ... wow. I just took out a mortgage recently. I know for a fact that you have to sign a stack of documents that state in very plain language exactly what your monthly payment covers and exactly what the terms of the loan are. The Sweets don't just bear "some responsibility" for their predicament. They bear all of it. They signed the paperwork, the saw the terms, they chose to ignore the terms. End of story.

They had a lender give them a chance, even though previous evidence (and this story!) shows that Countrywide was taking a huge risk. They very nearly threw that chance away.

[Mr. Stefanski, CEO of Third Federal Savings and Loan] never offered no-money-down loans, piggyback mortgages, exploding adjustable-rate mortgages or the other financial exotica that ultimately tripped up the Sweets and millions like them.

[Mr. Stefanski] does not hide his feelings about just what went wrong in places like Maple Heights. "The whole system was based on raping the public," he says, matter-of-factly. "Not everyone should own a home -- just those who can afford it."

Mr. Stefanski is just dead wrong. The system was not out to "rape the public". Indeed, I find it hard to see how someone can "rape" another person by giving them free money and risking not getting any of it back. How, exactly, does the lender make out in that situation? If any "raping" is going on, it seems to be that the borrower is raping the lender.

Secondly, Mr. Stefanski's attitude is 100% discriminatory. He only favors giving loans (and taking chances) on borrowers who are supremely well qualified and well-off. In other words, existing middle-class Americans. If everyone had the attitude he did, no one would ever move up from the low-income ranks to the middle-income ranks.

I'm grateful that lenders across the country chose to take risks on low-income, high-risk borrowers. Many people proved unable to handle those loans. Many other people were able to get ahead, thanks to those loans. I'd rather focus on the people that got ahead instead of shutting down lenders because of the people that didn't. Wouldn't you?

Mattel, Hasbro, and Lego have figured out how to use the government to hurt their competitors. They'll ask for more government regulation.

Acknowledging a growing crisis of public confidence caused by a series of recent recalls, the nation's largest toy makers have taken the unusual step of asking the federal government to impose mandatory safety-testing standards for all toys sold in the United States.

The toy manufacturers, of course, claim that they're only doing this in the interests of public safety and in reassuring the public before the Christmas shopping season. Of course, they're might be another reason.

Instead, companies would be required to hire independent laboratories to check a certain portion of their toys, whether made in the United States or overseas. Leading toy companies already do such testing, but industry officials acknowledge that it has not been enough.

... Small companies that currently do little or no testing would be required to pay for testing as well.

So, the large companies already do testing. Recent events have proven that testing isn't always enough to catch dangerous toys. No matter. They'll use the cover of recent events to force their smaller competitors to pay for testing as well. This won't necessarily do anything to improve the safety of toys, but it will do a lot to raise the manufacturing costs (and retail prices) of toys from their competitors.

How clever.

You know, if Mattel, Hasbro, and Lego believe in stronger testing, they could start doing it all by themselves, without the force of the federal government behind them. They could then run an intensive ad campaign talking about their new testing system and what they're doing to make their toys safe for children. This would accomplish their stated goals, they wouldn't have to wait for the government to act, and they could probably increase sales as well.

But it wouldn't hurt their smaller competitors like government regulation would. So, they won't do it. Government regulation -- it's just another way to say "legal mugging".

Should nursing mothers get longer breaks on tests?

One test stands between Sophie Currier and her Harvard medical degree and a prestigious residency.

But Ms. Currier says she runs a high risk of failing the test unless the National Board of Medical Examiners gives her additional break time to pump breast milk for her 4-month-old daughter.

The board has refused the request, and on Thursday, Ms. Currier asked a Massachusetts Superior Court judge to order it to give her extra time on each of two days of testing, plus a private room with a power outlet so she can express her milk in private with an electric pump. (The nine-hour exam, on clinical knowledge, allows 45 minutes for breaks.)

I don't know what's fair in this situation. Students have a strict time limit to take the test and consider their answers. Giving this mother extra time might give her an edge through extra time to consider answers or relax. Then again, is it fair to give up all chance of a career because of a welcome but ill-timed pregnancy. So, I don't know what the answer is.

I do know this. The National Board of Medical Examiners is the only organization that can license students to practice as doctors. The NBME has a state monopoly on licensing and accreditation. As long as they have this monopoly, no other licensing organization can offer tests with different rules or opportunities. Students are limited to the options offered by one, inflexible organization. Is this any way to run a healthcare system?

I'd like to see multiple, competing accreditation organizations. Students would be able to choose who to take test from. Employers would be able to choose who to accept licenses from. If one organization proved to be unfair or inflexible, both students and employers would have a choice to use someone else's services.

Wouldn't that be the more American way to run healthcare?

More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, much of New Orleans still lays in ruins. There are those that would blame that on the federal government. They are the same people that blame President Bush for their uncut lawns and unweeded gardens.

Instead, there are two things to consider: one, where are the local leaders who should be stepping up and rebuilding; two, should New Orleans be rebuilt?

There are some leaders stepping up in the city, but they're not from the government.

In Waveland, Mississippi, for example, the manager of the local Wal-Mart worked with the company's corporate officials to open a store under a tent in the parking lot, then later opened a convenient, easily accessible "Wal-Mart Express"-the first-ever store of its type-designed especially for post-Katrina Mississippi.

Down the road in Bay St. Louis, I spoke with resident Alicia Cool, who told me she reopened her flower shop because "without business you can't have people wanting to come back and stay here." Despite the devastation all around her, her perseverance paid off. Her sales went through the roof.

One example is Doris Voitier, the superintendent of the St. Bernard Parish Schools. Voitier became something of a local hero when she realized that functional schools were critical to getting residents to move back to the parish. She decided she'd figure out a way to open them, bureaucracy be damned. ... For her heroic efforts to reopen her schools, Voitier would later be investigated for misappropriation of federal property.

Neighborhood associations are a good example. LaToya Cantrell, who by day works for an education non-profit, turned the 75-year old Broadmoor Improvement Association into a leading example of how to organize a neighborhood to rebuild. ... The neighborhood association wants to open a charter school in an abandoned school building. The parish school board, fighting further the decay of its authority, is doing everything it can to prevent them.

Get the government out of New Orleans and residents might be able to accomplish more. But we should also ask whether it's even worth rebuilding New Orleans.

The Democratic debate over the future of New Orleans somehow passed over the instructive example of Valmeyer, Ill. In 1993, the town of 900 was swamped, not for the first time, by a rain-swollen Mississippi River. It hasn't been swamped since, because it's not there anymore. Rather than remain in a vulnerable spot, the residents voted to relocate their village to a bluff 400 feet above the river.

But no one wants to suggest similar discretion in Louisiana.

The cost of the levee system envisioned by Sen. Clinton is tabbed at $40 billion. Restoring other infrastructure would increase the cost. The question is whether that's the best use of our resources. For $40 billion, you could give more than $61,000 to every Louisianan displaced by Katrina -- nearly a quarter of a million dollars for a family of four.

Here's the question that ought to be considered: Would those people prefer that the money be spent shoring up dikes around a natural lake? Or would they rather get the money themselves and decide whether to stay or migrate to less soggy terrain?

Living in soggy terrain is expensive. It's expensive to keep out the water and it's expensive to rebuild after the water forces its way in. Many residents are finally starting to see that cost.

The extensive damage done by the storms of 2005 has sharply raised the cost of homeowners' insurance in the region, for those who can find a policy at all. Those costs have become a major impediment to recovery.

"It makes it very difficult for people, particularly those of marginal means, who want to come back, to rebuild," said Lawrence Ponoroff, the dean of the Tulane University School of Law here. "It is very tough on institutions and on attracting new business to the area."

The higher premiums have made buying a house -- or selling one -- here more difficult, said Lynda Nugent Smith, who has been selling real estate here for 34 years. "All of a sudden your insurance goes from $2,000 a year to $6,000 a year," Ms. Smith said. "It's just that cherry on top that makes the whole pile of ice cream and whipped cream fall over."

New Orleans residents should make the decision to stay or go for themselves. But they should do so with a full understanding of the costs and risks inherent in staying. It is not the responsibility of the other 49 states in the Union to rebuild New Orleans every time it floods. Nor is it a constitutional right to live in a flood plain and have your home rebuilt each time it floods.

I'm glad to see local leaders stepping up and helping to bring life back to New Orleans. They're proving their commitment to the city by working on the city. But I'm also glad to see insurance prices rising. Those that stay in the city should bear the costs of doing so, not push those costs onto you and me. Insurance is just a way of making those costs visible. It would be criminal to attempt to hide those costs or force others to shoulder them.

Local Oregon homeowners were flooded out last month. Six properties, worth about $1 million total, were significantly damaged. Now the homeowners want the village government to buy their properties -- at their pre-flood value -- so they can start over in a new house.

What?

Johnson said he'll be happy if the village makes him an offer that comes close to what he could get if he sold his house under normal circumstances.

"We know that's a problem area," Staton said of the low-lying section where the homes were built in the mid-1960s. "If I lived there, or if my kids lived there, I'd want to be bought out and be able to live someplace else, " he said.

Mark Below, Oregon 's director of public works, said the developers who put up the homes evidently felt the area was dry enough to build on. "There was no floodplain mapping done at that time, " he said.

Village Trustee Jon Lourigan said if federal and state funding falls through, the village should use taxpayer dollars to buy the homes.

...buying the properties without outside assistance would be an enormous purchase for a village whose operating budget this year is $4.8 million.

This is what flood insurance is supposed to cover. Apparently, none of these homeowners had flood insurance. They gambled that their homes would never flood. They lost that bet. Now they want someone else to cover their losses.

These homeowners want to potentially increase the village budget by 25%, so that they can get out of their existing homes and into new ones with zero financial loss? What selfishness! Taxes would have to go up for the entire rest of the village in order to accomplish this.

At least have the guts to walk through the village door by door demanding $125 from each person in the house. Because that's what you're doing here, Mr. Johnson. And if you'd be too ashamed, embarrassed, or scared to that, you should be too embarrassed and ashamed to ask for tax handouts.

Many people want to limit immigration in order to provide more jobs to Americans. They theorize that without lots of immigrants willing to work for cheap labor, farmers and businesses will be forced to employ more Americans, at higher wages.

It's a nice theory. But that's all it is. The law of unintended consequences applies even to immigration policy. Rather than accepting a loss of Mexican field hands, farmers are being to move their fields to Mexico.

Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50-million business growing lettuce and broccoli in California's Imperial Valley, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexicans and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

"I'm as American red-blood as it gets," Mr. Scaroni said, "but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue."

Oops.

A Toast to Mom and Dad -- The family that wines together, shines together.

Observant Jews, for example, traditionally serve children small glasses of wine during Friday night Sabbath ceremonies. Other cultures also begin socializing children into drinking at an early age--including Mediterranean societies such as Italy, Greece and Turkey (and non-Mediterranean societies such as China).

As for the second, two international surveys--one conducted by the World Health Organization--revealed that these Mediterranean countries and Israel had the lowest binge drinking rates among European adolescents.

Several studies have shown that the younger kids are when they start to drink, the more likely they are to develop severe drinking problems. But the kind of drinking these studies mean--drinking in the woods to get bombed or at unattended homes--is particularly high risk.

Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004 found that adolescents whose parents permitted them to attend unchaperoned parties where drinking occurred had twice the average binge-drinking rate. But the study also had another, more arresting conclusion: Children whose parents introduced drinking to the children at home were one-third as likely to binge.

Why do you donate to charity? Is it because you truly want to help others or do you just want to feel better about yourself? For many people, it's feeling better about themselves.

Many people donate hair to make wigs for children with cancer. It turns out that donating money would be better.

Perhaps they would be less adamant if they could visit Ms. Coffman in the Locks of Love office in Florida. Every day the hanks of hair arrive, filling some 10 postal bins, representing the best intentions of donors, but so much of it destined for the trash.

"A check would be easier for me," Ms. Coffman said. "But would the donors get out of it what they do? No."

I think people going on missions trips to build houses in third world countries suffer from the same problem. Ideally, they'd donate a week's worth of pay rather than a week's worth of time. That money would then be used to hire local workers. The money would stretch further, help more homes to be built, and boost the local economy.

It would be a far more generous and effective way to donate. But people wouldn't feel nearly as good about themselves. And, often, that's what really matters.

Bad news from Madison. First of all, we're suffering from lots of hungry mosquitos. Secondly, the Madison City Council is in session. Hold on to your wallets.

City Council backs RTA

The Regional Transportation Authority endorsement that the Madison City Council passed 18-2 at 2 a.m. today opens the door to an enhanced regional bus system and using some of the potential sales tax revenue for property tax relief.

Falk and Cieslewicz have said the RTA would not be created unless approved by voters in a referendum. Also, the new panel would have to have its taxing authority approved by the Legislature. If approved, it is expected to raise the county sales tax by 0.5 percent and use the revenue for transportation improvements.

I have little faith that Madison and Dane County will actually lower my overall tax burden. No, the blood sucking mosquitos of local government are hungry for more. I think I prefer nature's own on this one.

Telecommuting -- the next generation. This is how I need to work from home.

Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do.

He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers' offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks.

About the only thing he can't do is drink the coffee or eat the snacks -- or touch anything, for that matter.

It's not that Bowman doesn't have hands or a mouth; they're just in Halifax, along with the rest of his body.

In fact, it's not really Bowman in the Waterloo office at all. It's IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues in Waterloo from his home office 1,350 kilometres away.

Survey: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.

It used to be that DUI citations were given out for actually driving while under the influence of alcohol. Increasingly, they're being given out for simply being "under the influence". This strikes me as a gross violation of civil liberties. Since when did it become illegal to simply have alcohol in your system?

The first story comes from Hamburg, New Jersey.

A New Jersey appellate court yesterday upheld the principle that convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) can be imposed on individuals who were not driving. David Montalvo, 36, found this out as he responsibly tried to sleep off his intoxication in his GMC pickup truck while safely stopped in the parking lot of the Market Place Deli on a cold February morning last year. At around 5am he awoke to see a Hamburg Police Department patrolman standing over him. The officer had opened the door of Montalvo's truck to rouse the man and insist that he take a breathalyzer test. Montalvo refused.

For his attempt to follow the law and drive responsibly, David Montalvo now owes the city more than $4000, plus legal fees. Punishing people for doing the right thing in an effort to motivate them to do the right thing. I think New Jersey has discovered an entirely new principle of human behavior.

Next up, Rochester New Hampshire. Dover man arrested for taping his DWI investigation

A 48-year-old Chestnut Street man was arrested early this morning for wiretapping for allegedly recording police while they were investigating him for driving while intoxicated.

Police say they were patrolling the downtown area at 2:54 a.m. when they discovered Christopher A. Power of 52 Chestnut St. sitting in the driver's seat of a vehicle with its motor running at the Rochester Common.

After speaking with Power, police began investigating him for driving while intoxicated and arrested him. During the arrest an audio recording device was discovered.

Not only is it apparently illegal to sit in a parked car while alcohol is in your blood, it's also illegal to record police in the performance of their duties.

Err, since when? They work for the public, in the public good. Shouldn't the public be allowed to monitor that that's actually what they're doing? What are the police trying to hide? I thought the government line was that only criminals should be afraid of surveillance. Are the New Hampshire police hiding something?

The impossible dream - Los Angeles Times

The vast majority of my dreams are completely impossible: owning Mars, traveling to the future, writing a book. So when -- thanks to the magical economics of failed television pilot writing -- I got to buy a house, and that house needed a new bathroom, I was about to realize one of my lifelong dreams: owning a home urinal.

My contractor, obviously, thought this was the best idea anyone had ever come up with, and immediately went shopping with me for a classy, retro porcelain model, the kind you can saunter up to in a tux and slap a highball on. But then my neighbor, Holly Purcell, a very successful real estate broker, informed me that I absolutely could not install a urinal of any kind if I ever hoped to resell my house. Noting my confusion, she slowly explained that urinals, to my shock, gross women out.

I spent the next few weeks asking women, many of whom I barely knew, what they thought about urinals. The results were not good. First of all, it's got an unfortunate name. Toilets would still be kept outside if they were called crapinals. Also, my female friends said urinals conjured images of large, impersonal institutions such as prisons. They felt like the lidlessness was unsanitary. Basically, what I learned is that women have vastly overestimated the precision of peeing into a toilet bowl while standing up.

When I countered with the clear advantages of the urinal -- toilet seat always down, decreased water use, saved time, ease of cleaning, the option to pour in ice and play the most fun game in the entire world -- the truth came out. Urinals, these women eventually conceded, are simply too aggressively male.