Think there are no new options on Iraq? Here’s a really bad one, courtesy of Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times: Bring back Saddam Hussein. Chait explains:
‚”The disadvantages of reinstalling Hussein are obvious, but consider some of the upside. He would not allow the country to be dominated by Iran, which is the United States’ major regional enemy, a sponsor of terrorism and an instigator of warfare between Lebanon and Israel. Hussein was extremely difficult to deal with before the war, in large part because he apparently believed that he could defeat any U.S. invasion if it came to that. Now he knows he can’t. And he’d probably be amenable because his alternative is death by hanging.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
I was reminded of the “Thank You for Smoking” movie (which is pretty funny) when I read about a new study on the “anti-smoking” advertising. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, concluded that ads done by tobacco companies aimed at discouraging kids from smoking were not effective. What’s more, teenagers were more likely to smoke if they saw ads encouraging parents to discourage their kids from smoking. A New York Times editorial notes that the study’s conclusions are in line with District Judge Gladys Kessler of the District of Columbia, who concluded that the anti-smoking programs were not about preventing smoking but about heading off a government crackdown.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
If you want to cut down on crime, you put away the crooks, right?
Wrong, according to this story in the Washington Post, which notes that in three states where prison populations swelled by about 170 percent over a decade, crime also increased, by as much as 14 percent. New York City, on the other hand, has seen a 70 percent drop in homicides — all while reducing its prison population by about one-third. A similar trend has emerged in San Diego and in Canada.
Even the experts aren’t sure why more prisons can mean more crime, although there are a number of possibilities: locking up drug offenders instead of treating them, the tendency of prisons to be crime incubators, and the social restrictions on released felons that appear to encourage recidivism.
We’ll always need prison cells, but the numbers suggest we may not need as many as we thought.
Posted by Dave Knadler
As Katha Pollitt of the Nation magazine counts the reasons voters gave Congress to Democrats, in a piece in the current issue headlined “Why they lost,” Kansas comes up: “They lost because women don’t want to be forced to bear their rapists’ babies, even in South Dakota, and they don’t want the attorney general investigating their abortions, even in Kansas.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Guided by the hindsight of the 2006 election, the husband-and-wife columnist team of Steven and Cokie Roberts offered five rules of presidential politics and drew an interesting conclusion: that Gov. Kathleen Sebelius fits them all right now.
The rules: History matters. Campaigns matter. Stories matter. Location matters. And ideology matters. Sebelius is a “Democrat who won re-election by 17 points in a deeply red Midwestern state,” they noted, and “a gun-owning, budget-balancing mother of two sons who grew up in Ohio” and “married into an old Republican family (her late father-in-law succeeded Bob Dole in Congress and served 12 years). You heard it here first.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
When you consider means, motive and opportunity, the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko looks a lot like murder — and the Kremlin looks a lot like a suspect.
Consider the means: Polonium 210, a radioactive substance that is deadly when ingested and very hard to detect. It also happens to be one of the world’s rarest elements — something only a state might possess.
Motive: Litvinenko has defended the Chechen separatists battling Moscow’s rule. He was a longtime critic of the Russian government in general, and President Vladimir Putin in particular.
Opportunity: Litvinenko fell ill after meeting with a contact who claimed to have information connecting the Kremlin with the October slaying of another critic, journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Posted by Dave Knadler
