It's Lockyer's job to try to enforce California law. It's not his job to make law through frivolous lawsuits.

• In 2005, the Justice Department charged 226 defendants with aggravated identity theft.
• In 2006 (through the end of July 2006), the Justice Department charged 432 defendants with aggravated identity theft.
• The FBI reports that it has 1,587 pending identity theft-related cases. It opened 662 identity theft-related cases in 2005, and has opened 272 identity theft-related cases to date in 2006.
• The USPIS reports that it opened 1,530 identity theft-related cases and made 2,277 arrests in Fiscal Year 2005, and opened 1,012 identity theft-related cases and made 1,294 arrests in Fiscal Year 2006 (through June 30, 2006).
• The SSA OIG Office of Investigations reports that it opened 1,566 cases involving SSN misuse in Fiscal Year 2005, and 812 cases involving SSN misuse in the first half of Fiscal Year 2006.

And yet, Symantec's recent Internet Threat Report suggests that Internet fraud is increasing (i.e., phishing scams up more than 80% year of year). 

The spectacle of Deutsche Oper's decision to cancel "Idomeneo" suggests that the West's dealings with Islam have entered a new phase. Yesterday, we waited until after the Muslims took to the streets before capitulating; today, it appears we have moved on to pre-emptive capitulation.

 

Where will it end? I suppose that depends on how much we really care about the liberty and freedom we champion with words. Freedom, as some wit observed, is not free. Will we have the gumption to pay the cost? The jury is still out on that question. I hope and pray that the answer will be yes. "There is," G.K. Chesterton noted nearly 100 years ago, "a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped."

• In a 60-question multiple-choice test on American history and civics taken by college seniors, 53.2 percent receive a failing grade.
• Only 47.9% of those taking the test correctly identify the quotation: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" as coming from the Declaration of Independence.
• More than half did not know that the Bill of Rights forbids the governmental to establish an official religion.
• 55.4 percent did not recognize Yorktown as the final battle of the American Revolution to an end (more than 25% thought the Revolution ended at the the Civil War battle of Gettysburg).

• Since the second half of 2005, there have been 2,249 new documented vulnerabilities, an increase of 18%;
• There are approximately 6,110 DoS attacks per day;
• The United States is the target of most (54%) DoS attacks;
• China has the higher number of bot-infested computers (20% of the worldwide total);
• The United States is the largest originator of Internet attacks (37% of worldwide total);
• Homes are the chief target of Internet attacks (86% of total); and
• There were 157,477 unique phishing messages, an increase of 81%.

There are several "anti-phishing" bills pending in the state legislatures.  Look for an upcoming white paper on the topic in the next week or so. 

A proposal to amend the state constitution to ban affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes. 

Plaintiff's attempt here to widen the range of common-law public nuisance claims in order to reach the legal handgun industry will not itself, if successful, engender a limitless number of public nuisance lawsuits by individuals against these particular defendants .... However, giving a green light to a common-law public nuisance cause of action today will, in our judgment, likely open the courthouse doors to a flood of limitless, similar theories of public nuisance, not only against these defendants, but also against a wide and varied array of other commercial and manufacturing enterprises and activities.

 

All a creative mind would need to do is construct a scenario describing a known or perceived harm of a sort that can somehow be said to relate back to the way a company or an industry makes, markets and/or sells its non-defective, lawful product or service, and a public nuisance claim would be conceived and a lawsuit born. A variety of such lawsuits would leave the starting gate to be welcomed into the legal arena to run their cumbersome course, their vast cost and tenuous reasoning notwithstanding. Indeed, such lawsuits employed to address a host of societal problems would be invited into the courthouse whether the problems they target are real or perceived; whether the problems are in some way caused by, or perhaps merely preceded by, the defendants' completely lawful business practices; regardless of the remoteness of their actual cause or of their foreseeability; and regardless of the existence, remoteness, nature and extent of any intervening causes between defendants' lawful commercial conduct and the alleged harm.

Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put on quite a show at the United Nations this week, and it's tempting to dismiss it all as mere bombast. Except that their assertiveness can't be separated from the more important U.N. story this week, which is its continuing failure to come to grips with Iran's open defiance of the Security Council's demand that it suspend uranium enrichment.

 

At issue is whether the U.N. can have any role in enforcing collective security--and the mystery is why the very nations that say the U.N. must do so are doing the most to undermine it.

He raised his own standing. He got the world to look at him. He emerged in the speech as heir to the dying Fidel Castro, who he was careful to note is still alive and kicking. Chavez doesn't want to be the current Fidel, the old man in soft fatigues, but the Fidel of 1960, who when he went to the U.N. pointedly camped in a hotel in Harlem, and electrified the masses. Chavez even followed his speech with the announcement he was giving heating oil to the needy of the Bronx. You know what they said in the Bronx? Thanks! It went over big on local TV.

 

He broke through the clutter. Everyone this weekend will be discussing what he said--exactly what he said, and how he said it.

 

He shook things up. His speech was, essentially if implicitly, a call to resistance, by any means, to the government of the United States.

 

He broadened his claimed base. Chavez made the argument that it is not America versus Saddam or America versus terrorists but the American Empire versus all the yearning people of the world. He claimed as his constituency everyone unhappy with the unipolar world.

We need to stop treating Muslims like children, and viewing our public diplomacy with Islamic countries as popularity contests. Given what's happened since 9/11, a dialogue of civilizations is certainly in order. To his credit, Benedict has at least tried to approach the invidious issues that will define any helpful discussion. For 200 years, the West has, for better and worse, helped create the intellectual framework within which all Muslims think. Muslim saints, like the Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, or Muslim devils, like Ayatollah Khomeini, have Western ideas profoundly within them. If we withdraw from this civilizational debate, the decent men and women of the Middle East, most of whom are faithful Muslims, will have a very hard time defeating those who have brutalized and coarsened their culture and religion. Westerners are doing Muslims an enormous disservice--a lethal bigotry of low expectations--by telling the pontiff to be more diplomatic. This isn't how anti-Western Islamic theocrats, holy warriors and ordinary teachers in much of the Muslim world act. They're having a real, vibrant discussion. We should turn it into a debate.

Muhammad was not just a man claiming that God spoke through him; he was also a political and military leader. Driven out of Mecca and taking the reins of power in Medina, Muhammad and the Muslims spread their faith not just via da`is (missionaries), but by the sword; in fact, Jews in Medina who refused to accept Muhammad’s prophethood (and who, to be accurate, were accused of plotting against King Muhammad) were killed or enslaved. The conquest of Mecca in 630 CE was accomplished at swordpoint, not by persuasion. The creation of a huge Islamic Empire by the first four caliphs, the Umayyads and the Abbasids (between 632 and the end of the first millennium CE) was carried out via conquest—not by handing out brochures. Granted, Jews and Christians within the Muslim-ruled territories from the Pyrenees to the Indus were not all forced to convert—but the relegation to second-class status known as dhimmah led, eventually, to the majority of people in North Africa and the Middle East converting to Islam.

 

The initial phase of Islamic conquests resulted in about half the territory of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire switching hands. For several centuries the borders stabilized and the Byzantines ruled a state pushed back into Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula. But in the 14th century CE a new wave of Muslim jihadists, the Ottoman Turks, were again moving on Byzantine lands. This was the situation facing Manuel II, and no doubt his view of Islam as “evil and inhuman” was in no small measure influenced by watching what was left of his empire disintegrating. (Indeed, less than three decades after his death Constantinople would fall to the Ottoman ruler Mehmet II.) One might ask how many Muslims setting fire to Christian churches, or to effigies of the pope, are even aware of this? I suspect that even if they were, it would make no difference.

 

For, in the view of some Muslims, it is not unreasonable to spread their religion by violence, for two reasons: 1) it is the final revelation of God to humanity and 2) the Qur’an enjoins it. To paraphrase Dr. Henry Jones (Indiana’s father): “goose-stepping morons like yourselves should be reading your holy book instead of burning churches.” If they did, they would discover that:

• Surah Muhammad [47]:3 says “When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads….
• Surah Anfal [8]:12 says “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the tips of their fingers.”
• Surah al-Nisa’[4]:74 says “Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God….”
• Surah al-Nisa’[4]:56 says “The true believer fights for the cause of God, but the infidel fights for the devil.”
• Surah al-Nisa’[4]:101 says “The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies.”
• Surah al-Ma’idah [5]:51 says “Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends.”

Only in a truly Bizarro world can those passages NOT be an incitement for some to violence, to “evil and inhuman” acts.

By their reaction to the pope's speech, some Muslim leaders showed again that Islam has a problem with modernity that is going to have to be solved by a debate within Islam. The day Muslims condemn Islamic terror with the same vehemence they condemn those who criticize Islam, an attempt at dialogue--and at improving relations between the Western and Islamic worlds--can begin.

" . . .  has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world.  . . . It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.

 

Benedict, the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks, is going down in history for his words. . . . He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as (Adolf) Hitler and (Benito) Mussolini.

By the time he indicted Mr. Libby on Oct. 28, 2005, Mr. Fitzgerald knew two conflicting facts about the classified nature of the Niger trip: since at least early May 2003, Mr. Wilson was discussing his Niger trip with the press (Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times) and claimed in his July 2003 NYT op-ed that his mission was "discreet, but by no means secret." Yet, the indictment states that around June 9, 2003, the CIA sent "classified" documents to the vice president's office discussing "Wilson and his trip to Niger." If the trip was classified for the vice president, why was it declassified for Mr. Wilson? Did Mr. Wilson violate any law by revealing his trip or did Mr. Fitzgerald choose not to know?

 

Did Mr. Fitzgerald subpoena Ms. Plame? He could have asked her why, if she were truly covert, was she attending an Eastern Shore meeting in May 2003 with Democratic senators. The first journalist to reveal Ms. Plame was "covert" was David Corn, on July 16, 2003, two days after Mr. Novak's column. The latter never wrote, because he did not know and it was not so, that Ms. Plame was covert. However, Mr. Corn claimed Mr. Novak "outed" her as an "undercover CIA officer," querying whether Bush officials blew "the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in . . . national security." Was Mr. Corn subpoenaed? Did Mr. Fitzgerald subpoena Mr. Wilson to attest he had never revealed his wife's employment to anyone? If he had done so, he might have learned Mr. Corn's source.

 

It is not just Mr. Armitage who should apologize. So should Joe Wilson and Pat Fitzgerald.

“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) of part of the dialogue carried on -- perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara -- by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the "three Laws": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran.

In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point -- itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself -- which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason," I found interesting and which can serve as the starting point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation ("diálesis" -- controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels," he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably ("syn logo") is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...."

The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused--not just overseas but in this country also--of making or at least of implying a "partisan" point. I debate with the "antiwar" types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been "war-weary" ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is "the war" that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not "antiwar" at all.

The debate on what to do about captured terrorists has taken place largely in the courts and has been conducted by lawyers whose default assumption seems to be that unlawful combatants should be entitled to all the protections given criminal defendants in domestic courts.

 

Arguments are made that defendants, not just their lawyers, should have access to secret evidence and that they should get Geneva Convention protections though they are classed as unlawful combatants under those conventions. Bush's narrative gives us reason to think about the consequences of indulging such abstract concerns. Consequences like what we saw on Sept. 11.

 

. . . . .  The emerging narrative of foiled terrorist plots puts the issue squarely before Congress: whether it should prohibit practices that have successfully protected us against terrorist attacks.

The action against Random House also reflects an absurdly consumerist attitude toward reading: when the book -- or author -- isn't what you expected, demand your money back! Bob Woodward presents himself as a crusading muckraker -- can I get a refund for the book in which he acts as a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration? And how about all those novels and memoirs that are billed by publishers as "poignant" and "evocative" when they're actually tedious tripe? Can we send in our receipts for those, too?

 

A book is usually a layered, ambivalent and highly subjective experience; it's not like an iPod or a car, which either works or doesn't. Some disappointment -- even rage -- is inevitable in a well-read life. Serious, mature readers embrace and engage such reactions; they don't seek to punish anyone for them. Book buyers of America, get a grip.

His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing. And they are failing for three reasons.

 

(1) They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be. (2) They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized. (3) They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals.

Is it too much to ask that judges and legislatures acknowledge the difficulty of this debate by leaving it to normal democratic processes? In fact, the more passionate an issue, the less justification there often is for constitutionalizing it. Constitutions tempt those who are way too sure they are right. Certainty is, to be sure, a constant feature of our politics -- some certainties endure; others are fated to be supplanted by the certainties of a succeeding age. Neither we nor the Framers can be sure which is which, but the Framers were sure that we should debate our differences in this day's time and arena. It is sad that the state of James Madison and John Marshall will in all likelihood forsake their example of limited constitutionalism this fall. Their message is as clear today as it was at the founding: Leave constitutions alone.

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.