Later On

Witnesses, dang ‘em. They just won’t let the police get away with anything! Read this story.

I’m watching Silk Stockings, an Arthur Freedman musical comedy with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. It’s interesting because you can see in the picture that it’s the end of the line and the end of an era. Too many things had changed to continue with the old ways. Charisse in the accompanying documentary said that Freedman hated Cinemascope (one of several somewhat desperate actions taken to fend off the threat of TV as a new entertainment medium—another was Stereophonic sound, and one number in the film actually spells out with more than a hint of bitterness that today a movie must have Technicolor, Cinemascope, and Stereophonic Sound—and it’s a cute song, but it clearly shows an awareness that the divide has been crossed and more than a tone of regret): in Cinemascope, when you’re filming a dance and you back up to get the full height of the principals in frame, you suddenly have a whole lot of dead space on either side of the screen. Freedman filled it up with more dancers, but it obviously isn’t as good—to his mind and to some degree to mine.

At any rate, one of the comic characters is an alcoholic—nothing new, the comic alcoholic was a long-time standby.

But then something changed. I imagine an actor, for example, saying, “My character’s an alcoholic, but you said this was a comedy.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Well, what in God’s name is funny about an alcoholic? About alcoholism? That’s not funny.”

So I got to wondering about why it used to be funny and then later it wasn’t—and more specifically, wondering about what was funny about it back then. I got to thinking of the per-capital alcohol consumption in the US over time, and it struck me that alcoholism was funny at a time when many people wondered, with some justification, whether they might not be an alcoholic. So it’s funniness is a by-product of a unacknowledged fear, and the benefit is that the alcoholic is shown as harmless, lovable, even cute—reassuring to those who are worried.

I haven’t actually looked at the figures yet to see whether there is a marked transition zone sometime in the 80′s, I would imagine.

UPDATE: I was reflecting on my own movie encounters with the comic alcoholic and I vividly remembered the first time I saw the alcoholic and thought, “This isn’t funny at all.” That was Arthur, the eponymous character played by Dudley Moore. I just checked: that movie came out in 1981.

Today I reached the 1-mile mark (total distance). It’s interesting approaching this as working on a habit, not on a walk. Distance and time becomes less important, getting out for at least a brief walk every day becomes more important. But I’ll continue to add a block a day to my outward path until I reach the walk I was taking. The emphasis this time, though, is on creating the habit.

Interesting article at the WSJ on the various forms of local currency created in the last Depression:

To creditors of the state of California who got paid in IOUs instead of money, take it from historians — things could be worse. You could be getting clamshells. Or chunks of plywood.

During the Great Depression, hundreds of communities as strapped for cash as California is today circulated their own temporary currencies. An estimated $1 billion in this scrip was issued by towns and counties, not to mention corporations, school boards, newspapers and a few wealthy individuals. Most promissory notes looked like paper currency, but scrip was also printed on leather, metal, fish-skin parchment and, in Tenino, Wash., on slabs of two-ply Sitka Spruce.

Two towns in California — Crescent City and Pismo beach — circulated scrip printed on clamshells. This 10-cent note [photo at the link – LG] was issued by the Crescent City Chamber of Commerce. It’s worth about $500 today.

In Hood River, Ore., Hal’s Tire Service printed $1 bills on scraps of old tires, briefly giving the rubber check a good name.

Today, collectors treasure remnants of those desperate times: a green-and-gold "sauerkraut note" from Minneapolis; a warrant, beautifully printed with an engraving of a clipper ship, from Cape May County, N.J. Some imagine filling out their collection with Schwarzenegger scrip, circa 2009.

"Every piece tells a story," says Neil Shafer, author of the "Standard Catalog of Depression Scrip of the United States," published in 1984. "It represents a piece of social history."

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That’s the general sentiment expressed at the Washington Post. Glenn Greenwald:

The Washington Post Editorial Page — keeper of all establishment Washington wisdom — today advocates that low-level CIA interrogators who went beyond John Yoo’s torture guidelines, and only them, be criminally investigated and prosecuted by the Justice Department:

We reject the distorted interpretations that underpin the OLC memos and that serve as legal justification for harsh interrogation techniques that either border on or constitute torture. But those who relied on the memos and shaped their behavior in the good-faith belief that they were following the law should not be subject to prosecution. It is an entirely different story for those who went well beyond the often-extreme measures authorized by the memos.

In 2004, the Pentagon reported that 34 deaths had occurred in detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan; at that time, nine deaths were classified by military medical examiners as homicides. . . .

We continue to believe that an independent commission would best be able to shed light on a wide range of questions regarding detainee detention and treatment policy.  It would help to ensure that such mistakes are never repeated.  But some acts, including the violent deaths of detainees at the hands of U.S. personnel, must be investigated and addressed by law enforcement.

That, in a nutshell, is the twisted Washington mentality when it comes to lawbreaking:  when political crimes become so blatant and extreme that they can no longer be safely excused (Watergate, Iran-contra, Abu Ghraib), then it’s necessary to sacrifice some underlings who carried out the crimes by prosecuting them, but — no matter what else happens — the high-level political officials responsible for the crimes must be shielded from all accountability.  In ordinary criminal justice, what typically guides prosecutions is the opposite mindset:  namely, a willingness to immunize low-level soldiers in order to ensure that the higher-level criminals suffer the consequences of their crimes.  But when it comes to crimes committed by political officials in America’s Versailles culture, only the pawns are subjected to the rule of law while the monarchs and their highest royal court aides are immunized.

Note the distortions on which the Post Editors rely in order to justify their two-tiered justice system… 

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Very interesting piece by Radley Balko at Reason. It begins:

The arrest of Harvard African-American Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates has certainly got everyone talking. Unfortunately, everyone’s talking about the wrong issue.

Responding to a 911 call from a woman who observed Gates prying open the door to his own home, Cambridge, Massachusetts police Sgt. James Crowley confronted Gates, and asked him to prove his residency. What happened next is disputed, but it now seems clear that Gates mistakenly presumed that Crowley had racially profiled him, and hurled a barrage of invective at Crowley in response. Crowley has since been backed up by other officers, some of them black, and it turns out he was appointed to teach a clinic on profiling by a black former Boston police commissioner.

This has given law-and-order conservatives cause to crow: A liberal academic and friend of President Barack Obama wrongly accuses a cop of racial prejudice. None of this means racial profiling doesn’t exist (law-and-order types seem torn between arguing that profiling is a myth, and arguing that it works). It just means that the story in Cambridge was about something else.

The conversation we ought to be having in response to the July 16 incident and its heated aftermath isn’t about race, it’s about police arrest powers, and the right to criticize armed agents of the government.

By any account of what happened—Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between—Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest.

He won’t be, of course. And that’s ultimately the scandal that will endure long after the political furor dies down. The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abused. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights…

Continue reading and read the whole thing. It shows the degree to which authoritarianism is taking root in this country. (And, of course, read the excellent (free) book (PDF) The Authoritarians.)

Worth reading. Check it out.

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for the pointer to this article by Dave Philipps:

Before the murders started, Anthony Marquez’s mom dialed his sergeant at Fort Carson to warn that her son was poised to kill.

It was February 2006, and the 21-year-old soldier had not been the same since being wounded and coming home from Iraq eight months before. He had violent outbursts and thrashing nightmares. He was devouring pain pills and drinking too much. He always packed a gun.

“It was a dangerous combination. I told them he was a walking time bomb,” said his mother, Teresa Hernandez.

His sergeant told her there was nothing he could do. Then, she said, he started taunting her son, saying things like, “Your mommy called. She says you are going crazy.”

Eight months later, the time bomb exploded when her son used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.

Marquez was the first infantry soldier in his brigade to murder someone after returning from Iraq. But he wasn’t the last.

Hear the prison interviews with Kenneth Eastridge.

Marquez’s 3,500-soldier unit — now called the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team — fought in some of the bloodiest places in Iraq, taking the most casualties of any Fort Carson unit by far.

Back home, 10 of its infantrymen have been arrested and accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter since 2006. Others have committed suicide, or tried to.

Almost all those soldiers were kids, too young to buy a beer, when they volunteered for one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Almost none had serious criminal backgrounds. Many were awarded medals for good conduct.

But in the vicious confusion of battle in Iraq and with no clear enemy, …

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Very good piece in New Scientist by Terence Kealey:

My story starts with a theory that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sold us. It is called "supply-side economics", and it claims that economic growth depends, first, on the rich (not the poor) being rewarded with tax cuts; and second, on markets being freed from regulation.

Clearly the theory is flawed. The rush by bankers to pay themselves large bonuses, even as their failing banks were being nationalised, reveals the true function of this bloated remuneration – to benefit only its recipients – while the banks failed precisely because their regulation was too lax.

Supply-side economics was buttressed by two further theories: "rational expectations" and "efficient markets". As their names imply, these assume that traders do not make systematic errors when predicting the future, and that the prices of financial products such as shares, bonds and property accurately reflect all relevant information.

Yet traders do make systematic errors of prediction, and the prices of financial products can actually reflect misinformation. The real function of these economic theories was manifestly to help the rich justify the methods by which they grew even richer.

This is not the only false theory around. While bankers were busy promoting models of market success, research-based enterprises were equally hard at work promoting their own false model of "market failure" to justify government subsidies for their endeavours. They are, in my book, as culpable as the bankers. Let me explain why.

We scientists tend to find economics hard to penetrate because economists work in an unexpected way. In science, facts tend to be collected and a theory constructed to explain them. Of course, hunches can sometimes drive science, but the wildness of our hunches is as nothing compared to the wildness of the economists’.

As Nobel laureate Milton Friedman wrote in 1953 in his Essays in Positive Economics, theories can be based on any assumptions, however bizarre. As Reagan noted, "an economist is someone who, on being shown something that works in practice, wonders if it would work in theory".

The economists’ most bizarre theory is that of "perfect markets"…

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I’ve been wondering that myself, and now George Marshall tackles the question in New Scientist:

At a recent dinner at the University of Oxford, a senior researcher in atmospheric physics was telling me about his coming holiday in Thailand. I asked him whether he was concerned that his trip would make a contribution to climate change – we had, after all, just sat through a two-hour presentation on the topic. "Of course," he said blithely. "And I’m sure the government will make long-haul flights illegal at some point."

I had deliberately steered our conversation this way as part of an informal research project that I am conducting – one you are welcome to join. My participants so far include a senior adviser to a leading UK climate policy expert who flies regularly to South Africa ("my offsets help set a price in the carbon market"), a member of the British Antarctic Survey who makes several long-haul skiing trips a year ("my job is stressful"), a national media environment correspondent who took his family to Sri Lanka ("I can’t see much hope") and a Greenpeace climate campaigner just back from scuba diving in the Pacific ("it was a great trip!").

Intriguing as their dissonance may be, what is especially revealing is that each has a career predicated on the assumption that information is sufficient to generate change. It is an assumption that a moment’s introspection would show them was deeply flawed.

It is now 44 years since US president Lyndon Johnson’s scientific advisory council warned that our greenhouse gas emissions could generate "marked changes in climate". That’s 44 years of research costing, by one estimate, $3 billion per year, symposia, conferences, documentaries, articles and now 80 million references on the internet. Despite all this information, opinion polls over the years have shown that 40 per cent of people in the UK and over 50 per cent in the US resolutely refuse to accept that our emissions are changing the climate. Scarcely 10 per cent of Britons regard climate change as a major problem.

I do not accept that this continuing rejection of the science is a reflection of media distortion or scientific illiteracy. Rather, I see it as proof of our society’s failure to …

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Some guys who try gourmet shaving quickly find a soap, brush, razor, and blade that they like and settle down, using those tools daily. Others—and I’m one—continue to explore even after they’ve found a set-up that works well. And in a restaurant I’ll always opt for a dish I’ve never had over one I know. From New Scientist:

In a restaurant, do you order the dish you know you love or try a new one, in case you like it better? The level of the reward chemical dopamine you have in a brain region may determine your reply.

The COMT gene codes for an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. People with a less efficient version of COMT have more dopamine in this region, and this makes them good at storing multiple ideas in the short term.

To see if COMT affects decision-making too, Michael Frank and colleagues at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, asked volunteers to stop a stop-clock hundreds of times in exchange for points. Sometimes stopping it early garnered most points, while at other times a late response did best. This forced volunteers to keep changing their strategies.

When people were clocking up points, and so could be fairly confident in their current strategy, those with the inefficient version of COMT were more likely than people with the active version to switch strategies to try to do even better (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2342). The team concludes that high levels of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex make people more adventurous, even when the status quo is fine.

Interesting article by Lisa Grossman in New Scientist:

IF YOU regularly turn to a search engine to find out whether, say, you should put ice on a twisted ankle, you’re far from alone. Sixty-one per cent of American adults seek out health advice online, according to a survey published last month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Around a third of those surveyed admitted they changed their thinking about how they should treat a condition based on what they found online. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that much online health information is unreliable.

"My overall impression is that the quality of health information varies wildly, almost ridiculously wildly," said Kevin Clauson, a pharmacologist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "If [a website] is treated as an authoritative source, and there’s evidence that it isn’t, then it’s potentially dangerous."

Several studies to be published in medical journals this year highlight the issue. Pia López-Jornet and Fabio Camacho-Alonso of the University of Murcia, Spain, found that information on oral cancers on the top websites gathered by Google and Yahoo searches was "poor" (Oral Oncology, DOI: 10.1016/j.oraloncology.2009.03.017). Among other things, the websites failed to attribute authorship, cite sources and report conflicts of interest. And a study by a team at the Charité University Medical Centre in Berlin, Germany, of googled advice on how to deal with heartburn found that "the evidence for most of the recommendations is weak to nonexistent" (European Journal of Integrative Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.eujim.2009.05.001).

While these and other studies examined dozens of websites, most agree that the site to watch is Wikipedia. Popular and easy to browse, the user-generated encyclopedia is the eighth most visited site on the internet, and the first stop for many seeking health information.

Wikipedia articles appear in the top 10 results for more than 70 per cent of medical queries in four different search engines, according to a study in this month’s Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (DOI: 10.1197/jamia.M3059). It also gets more hits than corresponding pages on the US National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus service.

This is worrying, and perhaps an indicator that some people’s search engine strategies may not be up to scratch. A 2002 study found that most searchers use only one term in their searches and rarely look past the first page of results – though internet users may have improved the way they search since then (BMJ, vol 324, p 573). More disconcerting is the percentage of doctors who turn to Wikipedia for medical information: 50 per cent, according to a report in April by US healthcare consultancy Manhattan Research.

How does Wikipedia fare as a medical reference? …

Continue reading. The article does include a list of trustworthy Web sources:

Health websites you can trust:

• MedlinePlus http://medlineplus.gov A directory of articles from the US National Library of Medicine

• NHS www.nhs.uk The website of the UK National Health Service. Its other website, NHS Direct www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk, now focuses primarily on the swine flu outbreak

• Mayo Clinic http://mayoclinic.com A not-for-profit medical practice with hospital and research facilities across the US

• WebMD www.webmd.com Written by doctors and reviewed by an independent board

The signs seem increasingly obvious. From an article in New Scientist titled "Fertile Crescent ‘will disappear this century’"L

Is it the final curtain for the Fertile Crescent? This summer, as Turkish dams reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a trickle, farmers abandon their desiccated fields across Iraq and Syria, and efforts to revive the Mesopotamian marshes appear to be abandoned, climate modellers are warning that the current drought is likely to become permanent. The Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation seems to be returning to desert.

Last week, Iraqi ministers called for urgent talks with upstream neighbours Turkey and Syria, after the combination of a second year of drought and dams in those countries cut flow on the Euphrates as it enters Iraq to below 250 cubic metres a second. That is less than a quarter the flow needed to maintain Iraqi agriculture.

Tensions have been growing since May, when the Iraqi parliament refused to approve a new much-needed trade deal with Turkey unless it contained binding clauses on river flows. But Turkey appears in no mood to compromise. In July, it announced the final go-ahead for yet another dam, the Ilisu on the Tigris.

Meanwhile, according to Hassan Partow at the UN Environment Programme, Iraq’s hydrological misery is compounded by Iran, which is also building new dams on tributaries of the Tigris. "Some of these rivers have run completely dry," he told New Scientist. And Iraq itself is set to worsen the problem with its own dam building, he says. This year construction is set to begin on another Tigris tributary at Bekhme Gorge in Iraq’s northern province of Kurdistan. At 230 metres it will be one of the world’s tallest dams…

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From New Scientist:

The powers that be at Guy Robinson’s place of work insist that employees tell the office if they’re "working from home". Human laziness being what it is – sorry, we meant to say "the employees being committed to maximising productivity in a forward-looking sense" – the welter of emails on Monday mornings got shortened to the three letters "WFH". Then someone was stuck working at an airport and sent the message "WFA".

Then, given the insistence by the virus that is language on mutating whenever possible, the changes poured in and escaped the limitations of the alphabet: "WFT" working on a train, "WF\__" working from a sunlounger (not being smug or anything) and "WF\_O__/" working from a plane (ditto).

Guy’s colleagues suggest "WF#" for "working from prison", but they have not needed to use this, yet. Feedback suggests a few others: "WF=====" for working at a linear accelerator and "WF() – -()" for working in a laser lab (with lenses).

Now the phenomenon just needs a sciency name. It has to be "ergotopography", from the Greek words for "work", "place" and "writing". Do readers have more examples – preferably those captured in the wild, as it were?

When I read the story, I thought immediately that the "disorderly conduct" charge was in fact simply that an African-American talked back to a white Irish cop in Boston—and in that situation it makes no difference whatsoever has happened, the cop is going to feel disrespected and act aggressively.  Constant Reader forwarded me a link to this column by Stanley Fish in the NY Times, which has some interesting background:

I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different…

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My next cat is a Scottish Fold mail with unfolded ears. Here’s Maru:

Just guessing, but I bet he doesn’t like it. See whether I’m right:

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he’d been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless—they call it Whispernet—he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper did. “Jeff Bezos”—Amazon’s founder and C.E.O.—“has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution,” Weisberg said. “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

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Interesting book:

The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies
by Nicolas Wey-Gomez

A review by Neil Safier

Nicolas Wey Gomez opens his learned and incisive study of cosmography and colonialism in the Age of Columbus with a simple observation: Christopher Columbus did not just sail west across the Atlantic in his search for a maritime passage to the Orient; he sailed south as well. The Genoese sailor’s westward movement across the Atlantic has long been seen as the essential vector in leading Europe toward its greatest colonial venture. But not enough attention has been paid to the fact that Columbus made a conspicuous move in a southerly direction, which allowed him to encounter the islands of the "Indies" and, on later voyages, the South American continent. By reconstructing the routes Columbus took, and by carefully analyzing his diaries and the manuscripts that he read and annotated, Wey Gomez shows in convincing detail how it came about that Columbus turned his prow toward the tropical portions of the globe as he conducted his famous voyages of discovery. His reasons for heading south and the geopolitical consequences of that move are the twin subjects of The Tropics of Empire, a hefty and impressive study executed with erudition, skill and considerable insight.

In Columbus’s day, ideas about the tropics were much influenced by the conceptions of ancient geographers and cosmographers, who viewed the earthly sphere as split into broad bands of temperature-specific climates: the frigid polar regions, a searing "torrid" belt around the equator, and between them, two comfortable temperate zones. These climatic zones were thought to determine human actions and characteristics, from the ethnic behaviors of diverse peoples to the contours of theological events, and it was understood that only the mildest climates were capable of supporting human habitation. Thus the civilized inhabited world lay in the temperate zone. Sub-Saharan Africa and India, which were in the torrid zone, "were…imagined as the hot, infertile, and uninhabitable fringes of the world."

But was habitation in these more "torrid" climes truly unimaginable at the time of Columbus’s first voyage? …

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As one The Eldest’s friends wrote: "Sarah Palin. Remember that name. At some point, you’ll need it for a trivia contest." Sarah now has taken her leave, and Suzy Khimm has a good article to send her off:

When Sarah Palin abruptly announced that she was planning to leave office, it was clear whom she blamed for her early exit. "I wish you’d hear MORE from the media of your state’s progress and how we tackle Outside interests—daily—SPECIAL interests that would stymie our state," she said in her July 3 resignation speech, which she later posted on her website. Blasting her adversaries for paralyzing the Alaska governor’s office with charges of "frivolous ethics violations," Palin and her representatives accused these unnamed "Outside interests" of harming her ability to govern after returning from the presidential campaign. "There were some complaints that were filed under pseudonyms that we believe came from down in the lower 48," Palin’s lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, told Fox News. "There is a connection to the Democratic Party in the lower 48."

There’s no doubt that Alaska’s state government has been paralyzed since Palin’s return, with anger and frustration emanating from both the governor’s office and the state legislature. All of Palin’s major bills failed to pass this year’s first 90-day session. But conversations with both Republican and Democratic legislators reveal that Palin’s inability to get anything done has little to do with the media attacks the Alaska governor claims drove her from office. The lawmakers say it has more to do with how national exposure changed her, moving her much further to the right than she had been and making her nearly impossible to work with. And state Republicans seem just as incensed about it as the Democrats.

Before Palin left the state to become John McCain’s running partner, she cultivated a good, if not exactly chummy, working relationship with Alaskan Democrats by pushing for an oil-tax increase and ethics reform. And state Republicans embraced Palin as the new face of a party that had been tarnished by scandal-ridden politicians like Ted Stevens. But upon returning to Juneau last fall, "she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of [the Alaska] House and Senate," says Larry Persily, an aide to state Republican Representative Mike Hawker. "It wasn’t a matter of burning bridges—she blew them up."

Palin made it clear that she wasn’t going to back away from the hard-line conservative ideology that had propelled her to national prominence—and her first high-profile target was

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Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly:

It took only a couple months and about 100 CIA operatives and Special Forces troops, supported by U.S. air power, to chase the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001.

In contrast, the only thing the four-year-old Directorate of National Intelligence seems to be accomplishing is hiring more Washington bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee has found that at least some of the spy agencies under DNI’s purview have not been reporting their true numbers of employees.

The revelation is buried in a new report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2010, examined adroitly Wednesday by my CQ colleague Tim Starks.

"The legislation grants several DNI requests for flexibility to move personnel, and an explanation of the bill expresses an inclination to support the removal of a DNI personnel ceiling," Starks wrote.

Of course, the DNI has all sorts of rationales for removing the ceiling, among them one of official Washington’s favorites: It will actually save money.

"Exercise of this authority should result in an actual reduction of the number of contract personnel and not a shift of resources to hire other contract personnel," the bill says.

Right.

Starks noted that the DNI is claiming …

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