Political Commentary

I Can’t Help But Laugh

Listening to that obnoxious ass, Henry Waxman, saying in opening statements of his show hearing, that Valerie Plame’s identity was “one of our nation’s most closely guarded secrets.” I’ll bet he managed to say it with a straight face, too.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Hyman explains:

Plame had been living in the U.S. for several years when her identity was revealed in Novak’s 2003 column. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was crafted not to protect Plame and other classified employees from the FedEx driver, the Safeway cashier, or from threats commonly found in the school carpool line. The Act was to protect the identities of classified employees (typically known as “case officers”) and their contacts while overseas.

The first person to bust Plame’s identity was likely Plame herself. In using a commercially available data base it took me less then three minutes to learn that Plame had listed “American Embassy, New York, NY 09255” in 1991 as her official address. This, it turns out, was the APO address for the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece. Cover busted.

In addition, Brewster-Jennings & Associates was the name of the fictitious company she used as her cover story that she was a business consultant living and working in Europe. Another three-minute database research revealed that Brewster-Jennings reported annual sales revenues of $60,000 and a work force of only a single employee (presumably Plame). Even the most gullible foreign intelligence service would not swallow the whopper that the so-called Brewster-Jennings company could afford to send its only employee to work in Europe on total revenues of $60,000 a year.

[Update a few minutes later]

Bob Novak is now pointing out the absurdity of a “covert operator of the CIA” who drove to and from Langley every day.

[Update in the late afternoon.]

Tom Maguire, who despite his ongoing desecration of the Instapundit web site, remains the go-to guy on these issues, doesn’t think that the pro-Wilson folks had such a great day. He also thinks that Valerie has some ‘splainin’ to do.

[Update at 4 PM EST]

Cliff May writes that if Valerie Plame did recommend her husband for a Niger trip, it wouldn’t have been the first time she did such a thing.

[OK, one more]

Scott Ott has broken the code.

Media Criticism

Sweatered Dogs

Yesterday’s Lileks Bleat (which went up late, so I didn’t see it until today) is fully screedy goodness, against overprivileged and cynical haters of civilization. Especially that pinnacle of evil–western civilization:

Over lunch I read the local free newspaper; the editorial page had two opinion pieces. One disparaged dog sweaters. I have no love for dog sweaters either, but they don

Media Criticism

Stop The Madness

Well, I don’t miss Glenn all that much.

Yet.

I mean, it’s just been a few days.

But without the all caps intros, it’s just not Instapundit, so that’s how I voted. It does have exactly the grating effect on the eyes that Tigerhawk notes, and who the hell is Tom Maguire to desecrate it in such a fashion?

If you love me, and my blog, you’ll do the same. Particularly since it’s currently in last place.

Weird

Father Of The Year Award?

Probably not:

A man accused of stabbing his 11-month-old son in the back, then throwing the wounded boy out the window of a parked car was still on the loose Thursday, a day after the stabbing, police said.

Hey, at least the car was parked. Give the guy a break!

Humor

Other Things KSM Confessed To

I understand that parts of the transcript were redacted. What is the government hiding? I mean, if he was capable of all of the heinous things described, what else was he capable of?

My few of my guesses as to what else he confessed to:

  • Being the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby
  • Cancelling Star Trek
  • Enron
  • Causing Global Warming
  • Getting Rosie O’Donnell hired on The View
  • Steering Hurricane Katrina
  • Elvis’ death
  • Getting George Bush reelected

Hey, you’ll say anything under duress…

Economics

Going To School

…with Arnold Kling. One example:

Few people appreciate what a profound and disturbing puzzle the Depression posed. The non-economist has no trouble getting her mind around the notion of a shortage of jobs. But for an economist, such a shortage is nonsense. If there is an excess supply of, say, construction workers, then the wage of construction workers should adjust downward. As the wage rate sinks, the demand for construction workers rises, and the supply of people willing to work in construction falls. As the competitive process unfolds, bidding down wage rates, eventually supply and demand will balance.

In theory, at any rate, unemployment — an excess supply of labor — should accordingly be self-correcting. But evidently, as the Great Depression showed, the labor market lacks in practice the adjustment mechanisms that are supposed to work in theory.

There are hundreds of theories that try to explain the apparent inflexibility of labor markets. But I have never forgotten a suggestion made by Robert Solow. He pointed out that you never see an unemployed worker walk up to an employer and say, “If you let me have that guy’s job, I’ll work for 10 percent less money.” There are self-imposed ethical limits on competition.

If you think about it, there are probably countless self-imposed ethical precepts that affect our economic behavior. Chances are, without the habits incorporating these ethical precepts, our market system would collapse altogether. Like the water in which a fish swims, our commercial morality is invisible to us. But it is essential.

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