Via AP, More Changes Said Likely to Iraq Charter:

The U.S. ambassador suggested Tuesday there may be further changes to the draft constitution in order to win Sunni Arab approval, saying he believed a "final, final draft" had not yet been presented.
[...]
"I believe that a final, final draft has not yet been, or the edits have not been, presented yet, so that is something that Iraqis will have to talk to each other and decide for themselves," Khalilzad told reporters.

The law says the version signed off on by parliament Sunday cannot be amended. But Khalilzad said the door could be open for changes declared as "edits" to the approved text. There was no official comment from the Shiite parliamentary leadership on whether it shared that opinion.

However, influential Shiite lawmaker Khaled al-Attiyah, a member of the constitution drafting committee, insisted that "no changes are allowed to be made to the constitution" except for "minor edits for the language."

Shiite leaders consider some of the Sunni objections — especially on federalism and references to the Baath Party — as matters of principle.

An Arab League official in Cairo, meanwhile, said Arab diplomats were urging the Iraqis to amend the constitution to strengthen references to the country's role in the Arab world.

Iraqi Sunni Arabs cited the phrase among reasons they rejected the draft, . Although the law forbids further changes in the draft, the stakes are so high that Iraqis may overlook legalisms in a bid for unity. A Sunni constitution negotiator urged all opponents of the constitution, including radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, to join a national front against the charter.

Khalilzad spoke alongside prominent Sunni leader Adnan al-Dulaimi, who urged Sunnis to reject the constitution in the Oct. 15 referendum as it stands. He also denounced the Shiite-led Interior Ministry for allegedly murdering Sunnis.

It was unclear if negotiations among the factions were actually under way. But the presence of Khalilzad with a respected Sunni figure was a clear sign the Bush administration has not given up on its campaign to win Sunni endorsement before the referendum.

"With regards to the constitution, as I said before, if Iraqis among themselves, in the assembly and those from outside, decide to make some adjustments compared to the draft that was presented three, four days ago, it's entirely up to them," Khalilzad said.

Let's set to one side the awkward detail that the draft has already appeared in the local newspapers and may already have started coming off the printing presses for public distribution.

What seems clear is not just that the Founding Fathers shtick isn't playing very well, in either Baghdad or Peoria. The US is understandably getting mighty uncomfortable being in the position of defending a constitutional process that's seen by many Sunnis, in and outside Iraq, as a declaration of civil war. And of building the capacity of an army and police force that are viewed as already engaged in "soft cleansing." Standing next to a Sunni leader, it's becoming harder for Zal Khalilzad to maintain even a figleaf of an "honest broker" role. Yet the grand irony is that the US military will be fighting "anti-Iraqi forces" to try to ensure security for Sunni voters to get to the polls to defeat the draft constitution.

Meanwhile, the Arab League is, of course, typically late to the party. And futhermore, if the Arab League actually wanted to be relevant to the whole process, they could focus a bit more on substance. The "Arab nation" issue is certainly important and hot-button, but the legitimate problems the Sunni negotiators had with the draft go to the structure of the country, their role in it, and whether the majority is going to steamroll them on a regular basis, not Arab identity. The Daily Star, no fan of Amr Moussa in any event, argues that the League's General Secretary and the League itself are worse than useless.

[Moussa's] current criticism of the Iraqi charter offers no tangible solutions and therefore does little to ease the volatile situation in the country. Given the fact that the only hope for Iraq at this crucial juncture is the political process, Moussa's statement, which undermines that process, only serves to fuel sectarian aggravations in the country.

Sadly, Moussa has never made an effort to take the Iraqis under the wing of the league. This paper urged the Arab League to become actively involved in the drafting of the Iraqi constitution by offering guidance, advice and expertise. Discussions over the draft charter could have taken place under the auspices of the Arab League, but the organization never managed to rise to the level of the challenges in Iraq. For months, as the debate over federalism and Arabism has been raging, the Arab League has said nothing. If these issues were of such great Arab concern, one wonders why Moussa didn't visit Iraq and meet with the various community leaders to urge consensus on the matter.

This inaction on the part of the Arab League is also nothing new. The league was silent when thousands of Sudanese were being slaughtered by government-backed militias in Darfur. It did nothing to help resolve the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia over their shared border, nor did it act to reduce tensions between Syria and Lebanon after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

A harsh assessment, yes. But unfortunately, a fair one. With Khalilzad openly taking the risk of keeping a crack open for some accommodation with the Sunnis, it remains to be seen whether outsiders like the Arab League can avoid the temptation to grandstand and instead play a useful role. Based on past performance, the odds aren't good.

Of course, if our pal Zal were listening to Jim Hoagland do his best Charlie McCarthy imitation, channeling the voice of Ahmad Chalabi, Zal wouldn't be making another "risky intervention" like the President so foolishly did last week with his famous phone call to Shi'a leader Hakim. Instead of sticking his neck out for Sunni participation, Khalilzad really ought to be joining in with the Iraqi spirit of democracy and self-governance. Instead of standing next to a Sunni leader, he ought to be signing on to the strategic alliance between Najaf and Washington advocated by another DC pundit, David Ignatius, who thinks Washington should place its bets on the Shi'a version of a "grand plan" for democracy, even if it does involve a bit more untidiness for another decade or two.

Count me a cynic, but I won't complain if Bush can relinquish his typical "we've got the votes so we call the shots" approach to politics and show some sympathy for the importance of consensus. More power to Khalilzad if, by tinkering a bit with the Iraqi democratic process, he can obtain an outcome that at least a portion of the Sunnis might be willing to endorse. Unfortunately for the US, its leverage is increasingly weak. And the position in which the US is finding itself is being dictated by local contending factions, not by US choice.

A couple of months ago, Joe Biden offered four options for the future course of the US engagement in Iraq: (1) stay the course/muddle through, (2) withdraw with or without a timetable, (3) limit US losses by throwing in with the Kurds and Shi'a, or (4) "do more, better." Biden was advocating steps he thought would make up the fourth option, but he recognized that the third option "may end up being our only option if we don't do the right thing in the near term." Increasingly, it's looking like Door No. 3 by default.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

Ogged has come up with a term for the phenomenon Dave Schuler (The Glittering Eye) noted in an earlier comment on the response of Londoners to this week's bombings. Dave points out:

A critical difference between the Brits and the Americans is that the British have the stubbornness and tenacity to bear up under incredible adversity. Americans, on the other hand, are more inclined to remove the adversity than to bear up under it.

Ogged notes that the distinction has wider applicabiilty than just Brits vs Americans, and he's looking for a term to describe it.

Some way to group together what a nation expects, accepts, tries to change, control, destroy, create. I think this will be the "That's How It Is Index." The U.S., has a low THIS Index, and you can see it in annoying things like frivolous lawsuits, but also in fantastic things like the moon mission, or the remarkable record of air safety. Near the other extreme, you have a place like Iran, where planes crash regularly, the roads are deathtraps, and people basically shrug. And the Europeans are somewhere in the middle. I've heard them described as "knowing what's important," but I wonder if they're just less motivated to keep making things "better" and so are able to do the things that people generally enjoy, like eating, drinking, and talking with friends (that is to say, no special knowledge of what's important required).

The stubborness of the Brits that Dave highlights suggests that the THIS Index may reflect one of those hallmarks of cultural identity that each group is rather attached to and, at least in both the British and American cases, embraces with a certain pride.

Regulars you'll find hanging around chez Nadezhda include --

• praktike {praktike [at] gmail [dot] com}
• MCMasterChef {mc [dot] masterchef [at] gmail [dot] com} -- infrequently now he's graduated BU
• nadezhda {cheznad [hyphen] info [at] yahoo [dot] com}.

praktike has now moved to Cairo to study Arabic. He's blogging primarily at American Footprints, where I can also be found with a number of other bloggers. prak's humongous and invaluable blogroll -- with an especially extensive list of interesting bloggers from and about MENA -- is still to be found in the sidebar of praktike's place here at chez Nadezhda.

We also have a rather eclectic collection of linkblogs (see Home page sidebar). Each linkblog is a del.icio.us tag with an RSS feed --

• Eurasian Quadrangle (China, India, Iran & Russia)
• Global Economy & Financial Markets
• Development
• carte du jour chez Nadezhda.

The linkblog for American Footprints (including clippings by MCMasterChefand Stygius), is in the sidebar on both sites.

At American Footprints you'll also find lots of good stuff from other bloggers, as well as links to resource sites.

[update: Newsweek has posted an interview with Wolfensohn that covers some of the specific issues.]

Jim Wolfensohn is now fully engaged in what will be one of the toughest jobs in the world in the coming few months -- helping the Israelis and Palestinians navigate the Gaza withdrawal and prepare for its aftermath. At Gleneagles, he received support from the G8 for something, but exactly what the G8 promised is somewhat unclear. The relevant text from the G8:

We support Mr Wolfensohn’s intention to stimulate a global financial contribution of up to $3bn per year over the coming three years. Domestic and international investors should be full partners to this process. We are mobilising practical support for Mr Wolfensohn’s efforts and look forward to further development of his plans and their presentation to the Quartet and the international community in September. We note the strong interest of Arab States and members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, and encourage them to provide substantial additional support.

This is a somewhat different formulation from the headlines from Blair's press conference at the close of the meetings. The pres generally heralded a G8 "commitment" to provide (up to?) $3 billion over several years. The "commitment" (to support a plan) was echoed in the "news story" produced by the State Department:

Progress was also made on promoting peace in the Middle East, with the G8 leaders agreeing to support a plan to provide the Palestinian Authority up to $3 billion over three years to help spur economic development and governance necessary for the Palestinians to capably govern themselves and provide stability in Palestinian territories.

To tease out from all of this the probable reality. The official document refers to a Wolfensohn plan to mobilize around $9 billion over a three-year period, with funding to come from Arab and Muslim countries and the private sector, not just from the G8. And the only official agreement from the G8 members is to "mobilize practical support" and meet in September. So in effect, they've given JDW a green-light to put a package together, and they seem to have penciled in somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of the financing he's proposing to raise. But it's his plan to go raise all this money, not theirs.

Now a green light like that is all that a world class dealmaker needs to get going, and remember that Wolfensohn made his fortune as an investment banker. So taking full advantage of the headlines ($3 billion commitment, yahoo!), Wolfensohn has just begun a six-day trip to the region by meeting with Mohammed Dahlan, who is currently the Palestinians' civil affairs minister.

[...]Wolfensohn... described his meeting with Dahlan as "a very pragmatic and frank discussion" that dealt with all aspects of social and economic matters.

"I was asked by the G8 to come back (at the end of September) with a plan devised with the Palestinian Authority (PA) for this economic support," he said.

"We are looking very carefully at tangible evidence that will be shown to the Palestinian people a day after the withdrawal," he said. "We're talking about programmes which will be implemented immediately."

[...]Wolfensohn's visit will see him meeting with top Israeli and Palestinian officials in a bid to focus on six areas that require coordination, a statement from his office said.

They include: border crossings and trade corridors, connection of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, freedom of movement in the West Bank, the establishment of an airport and sea ports in Gaza, the houses which will be evacuated by the Gaza settlers, and the settlers' greenhouses.

He was also to work with the Palestinians on three key economic and developmental issues: resolution of the PA's fiscal crisis and establishment of a new social safety net programme; a package of "rapid impact" initiatives for dealing with unemployment immediately after the withdrawal, and a three-year plan for Palestinian development. [emph added ed.]

Lots of questions up in the air, such as where the funding is to come from for "immediate" projects, or whether Congress will continue to hamstring the Bush Administration by forbidding any monies to pass through the hands of the PA. Perhaps State is hoping that Congress will ease up once there's an overall international plan, with effective oversight mechanisms, through which the US contributions would flow.

That being said, Wolfensohn already knows his portfolio well -- a significant part of the assessments and planning that he will be drawing on has been produced by the organization he headed for ten years until just a month ago, the World Bank. A considerable number of studies and reports on the specific issues he listed have been produced over the last several years by the Bank's staff, working closely with both Israelis and Palestinians. And on security issues with others, especially the Egyptians.

Wolfensohn's intimate knowledge of the politics, the players, and the technical issues, his ability to use the media adeptly, and his dealmaking skills when it comes to raising money from both public and private sources -- plus the sheer force of his personality -- make him uniquely qualified for this almost impossible task. The main risk -- other than the general explosiveness of the whole situation -- is that JDW sure is fond of personal glory, as Sebastian Mallaby has amply detailed. But JDW has learned a lot of lessons over the past ten years, and in the final analysis, he's also a realist.

Here's hoping that being the Quartet's envoy won't be a totally thankless task.

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

One of my favorite personal diarist bloggers is a droll EMT with the London Ambulance Service. Funny about reading blogs -- the first thought that crossed my mind when I saw the emergency vehicles on BCC was, I wonder whether "Random Acts of Reality" is in one of those. Turns out he wasn't on duty, but he headed in to handle back-up for the "normal" work of the LAS while others were busy with handling the bombings. Among his end-of-the-day reactions:

Once the shock had settled, I started to feel immense pride that the LAS, the other emergency services, the hospitals, and all the other support groups and organisations were all doing such an excellent job. To my eyes it seemed that the Major Incident planning was going smoothly, turning chaos into order.

And what you need to remember is that this wasn't a major incident, but instead four major incidents, all happening at once.

I think everyone involved, from the experts, to the members of public who helped each other, should feel pride that they performed so well in this crisis.

London won't be beaten, we spent 20 years under the shadow of the IRA, and are used to terrorists.

That seems to pretty much sum up the general sentiment of most British bloggers and their commenters.

Stygius passes me the DVD library movie meme. Just one small problem -- I don't own any movies on DVD (or on any other medium, for that matter). Culturally deprived luddite, and all that. And a few years back, when I had three back surgeries in a 10-month period, I sort of got out of the habit of sitting in movie theaters.

So I guess I'll just have to improvise, with apologies to Stygius and the meme originator.

• Total number of films I own: zero
• Last movie I bought: uh, never
• Last movie I saw: Pirates of the Caribbean (hey, my nieces were in town and brought it with them -- they couldn't bear to be parted from Johnny and Orlando for a week!)
• Five favorites: I suppose this should be translated as -- "what are the five DVDs you would own if you owned any." This sort of open-end exercise -- infinite possibilities and such a tiny number of answers -- is quite a challenge. I can't even do "what's your favorite in each genre," because there are certainly more than five genres. So here's a first crack at a list.

  • Bringing Up Baby -- the perfect ensemble "domestic" farce
  • The Producers -- on my "favorite" list a few decades before the stage show
  • Blade Runner -- "seminal" is too often used used with gay abandon, but Scott defined an aesthetic for an entire generation
  • Notorious -- my favorite Hitchcock, and yes, Cary Grant can show up twice on my top five any day of the week
  • 8 1/2 -- Fellini's masterpiece is either an overwhelming experience or it simply doesn't speak to you

  And I still haven't done any Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot) or an action-adventure (French Connection) or spy thriller (The Third Man) or stage musical (Cabaret) or social comedy (Alfie the original, puh-leez!) or historical (Gladiator -- yeah, I'm a Ridley Scott fan bigtime), or stage-to-screen (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) or political thriller (Z) or... yeah, I know, I'm cheating. I'm well into my third "top five" list, and there are more genres to go. Sigh.

  So to pass the virus along. First, to Haggai, who I know first-hand is the compleat film freak. I'm quite curious what his choices would be. Haggai's not been blogging much recently, but he's welcome to post his response here if he wants to play. And then:

  • Brad Plumer, who clearly needs a diversion from his current addiction.
  • Needlenose's Swopa -- maybe fubar will let Swopa feature a DVD list in the next installment of the SRIPOTW.
  • Eric Martin (Total Information Awareness -- I'm still hanging on to another baton he passed me earlier and Eric, I promise, I will get to it later this weekend).
  • My list is woefully light on foreign films, so let's go across the pond to Emmanuel of Ceteris Paribus, who can provide his list in the language of his choice. After the events of the past week, maybe Emmanuel also needs a diversion to maintain his Europtimisme.
  • And for a bit more geographic diversity, from down-under Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion.

Gene Sperling has penned the best simple explanation I've read of how a pension and disability system should be structured, and where private accounts would fit into such a system. His pre-obituary for the bamboozlepalooza, "Bush Private Accounts Are Dead Shark" (HT Woody Allen), will be read mainly for its assessment of GOP and Dem tactical maneuvering. But it is actually a tidy little essay on the principles of a "three-legged stool," which should underpin the logic of any scheme if it is to be supported by Democrats and reasonable Republicans.

Sperling expresses far more succinctly the key points I made more than three months ago, when last I took up the dreaded Social Security topic.

Social Security is simply the wrong vehicle for pushing the worthy and important goal of increasing ownership and savings among working Americans. In our three-legged retirement system [government benefits, employer-based pensions, personal investments]... Social Security is the only leg free of market and economic risk.

When communities were devastated by corporate scandals or bankruptcies in 2001 and 2002, many families saw not only their pensions dissipate, and retiree health benefits evaporate, but even their housing values decline as their hard-hit neighborhoods spiraled down.

The only part of their financial package that didn't join this spiral was Social Security. With privatization, those families would have seen their Social Security benefits drop, as well. That is why those of us who support new investment incentives like Universal 401(k)s should be the ones most adamant about the importance of keeping the Social Security leg of our retirement system completely risk-free.

Sperling then proceeds to outline why it's important for the three legs to be kept separate and distinct.

The second substantive rationale for a hard "no" on privatization is that virtually every private-account plan is designed to make Americans undervalue the social-insurance benefits of Social Security and overvalue their private accounts.

To see why, imagine a father who decides to invest $5,000 in the market and $5,000 in a combination of fire insurance, life insurance, and auto insurance. After one year, he happily notes that his market investment has risen 6 percent. Yet, because he neither died, saw his house burn down nor experienced a serious auto accident, he concludes he got a negative annual return on his $5,000 insurance investment and, therefore, cancels all of his insurance policies.

Of course, this father would be a fool. No rational person measures the value of insurance by an annual return. Yet, when Bush tells Americans to compare the return on their private account with the return they get with a Social Security system -- which provides valuable insurance against poverty, devastating disability, and the early death of a provider -- he encourages exactly that foolish comparison.

And here's the pernicious effect over time of Bush's political "optics" in action:

Bush leads Americans to ignore the value that goes to the recipients of survivor and disability insurance -- almost a third of all Social Security beneficiaries -- and the almost 100 percent of workers who can go to bed knowing that if such misfortune occurs, Social Security will help their families maintain a modicum of economic dignity.

Bush's plan is designed to even further exacerbate this false comparison. By requiring borrowed funds for private accounts to be paid back not from the accounts themselves but by reducing Social Security benefits, his plan is designed to make private accounts seem deceptively large and Social Security benefits appear deceptively small.

This absurd design serves only one purpose: to encourage the healthy and the well-off to misconstrue Social Security as a bad deal.

Now, you may say, it may or may not be a bad deal for the healthy and well-off. But isn't the real point that the current program is more than is necessary to provide a safety net to keep folks from really falling through the cracks. Wouldn't it do the trick to provide a means-tested small safety net for everyone, with a bigger private investment portfolio portion that varies for each individual by the size of his or her contributions? And I would respond, that depends what's happening with the other legs of the stool -- not merely from the vantage of individuals but for the overall structure of the economy.

We need to take Sperling's analysis one step further -- to what's happening with the second leg of the stool, employer-based pensions. This is the story of the rapid demise of the defined-benefit system. Business has been shifting to defined-contribution plans at an accelerating rate, leaving the financial risks with the employees. According to Business Week:

The number of defined-benefit pension plans has plunged from 112,000 in the mid 1980s to fewer than 30,000 today. The tally of workers earning a pension has fallen more slowly, but their ranks now total just 17 million, down from 22 million 20 years ago.

Where defined-benefit systems have survived, they are increasingly endangered species. Many plans are experiencing crises in funding, and they remain most common in "legacy" industries like the older airlines and autos. These industries simply cannot continue their previous levels of employee benefits and stay in business.

The result has been a growing crisis at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, where it is rapidly losing its ability to fund its liabilities from premiums. To compound the difficulty, as the GAO just reported this week, the government's current pension accounting rules allow companies to use techniques that can mask significant funding shortfalls. Any "cure" for the PBGC's own balance sheet will undoubtedly accelerate the move away from defined-benefit plans, even as the mopping up of old problems grows more expensive by the year.

Give the Bush Administration credit in one sense -- they have proposed to address the PBGC issue head-on rather than continue to temporize, despite screams from many industries. The PBGC problem is frequently described as an "S&L crisis" in the making, and the Bush Administration seems to have taken the lesson from the S&Ls to heart. Continuing to tinker with the rules to accommodate an arrangement that no longer makes much economic sense is simply running up the costs while delaying the inevitable. The PBCG isn't going to "grow out of" its dilemma any more than the S&Ls did. And make no mistake about it -- the outcome will be the same in both cases -- the disappearance of a type of financial service that has lost its economic logic as the structure of US competition has shifted. The only question is when, at what cost, and who will bear those costs.

The Bush Administration's approach to the PBGC is an implicit acknowledgment that global competition has made defined-contribution arrangements -- those that shift financial risk to employees -- the only realistic option for most individual employers. But when we look at this shift in financial risk from the view of American business as a whole, the picture is becoming far less attractive. A system without predictable levels of retirement income is a system in which a considerable portion of the consumer confidence and spending power of the American middle class would be subject to the volatility of investment portfolios. In three-legged stool terms, over the past few decades one of the legs of the stool has started to change length frequently and is coming loose -- making for a rather wobbly stool.

Now why would we compound this financial uncertainty, exacerbate business cycles, and reinforce financial crises, by cutting the size of the one leg that is fixed and steady? This is one of the reasons why most captains of industry and finance (other than the sell-side guys in the brokerage firms) have been noticeably missing in action on the score of privatizing Social Security. They understand that the health of the American economy and American business depend on a secure, confident middle class. They know full well that over the past decades financial risks have been shifting from business to individuals. Few but the true-believers see much virtue in shifting more risk onto individuals from a widely-accepted, easily administered government program.

Shouldn't Democrats, as well as US business and labor together, be supporting policies that strengthen both legs of the stool?

For the employer-based-leg of the stool, it's time to face up to the fact that defined-benefit plans are going to be phased out over the coming years. The costs to both individual employees and taxpayers may be extremely high if corporations and unions persuade Congress to delay the day of reckoning. Shouldn't we be pushing for the orderly conversion of existing defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans in the private sector?

And as the financial security of the employer-based-leg of the stool decreases, shouldn't we be strengthening, not weakening, the Social Security leg of the stool?

Well I'm back from an extended but unplanned break. I've been pretty much out of commission, other than an occasional appearance at praktike's Liberals Against Terrorism and my continued addiction to producing del.icio.us clippings (see sidebar).

I'd reached a point where posting here wasn't fun -- I found myself in a constant state of irritation with the blog's setup. Probably also reflected a lack of focus with what we should do with the site more generally, especially how to handle my predeliction for long-form blogging.

Guess I'm one of those folks who keep searching for the perfect combo. I want a system that's not super heavy-duty, with features I'll never need, or overly intimidating for the technology-challenged. It's not enough to have a basic publishing device that handles comments etc without constant spam hassles. I also want the blog to be a decent content management system that satisfies my magpie instincts, displays uniformly well in all browsers and sizes without requiring constant tending by a professional webdesigner, etc etc. Beauty, multi-functional, simple, and cheap. Like I don't want much, eh? So I've been off exploring lots of options, and we're now working on a better solution, probably WordPress.

In the meantime, however, I have succumbed to blog-envy, just looking at all the shiny new editions of my favorite old sites. So I decided that the least I could do was some quick remodeling of the old homestead with a reskin. I'm now in the process of tidying up the backend, which had gotten decidedly messy indeed -- like the upstairs linen closet where you stick all the odds & ends and suddenly one day can't find anything in it. The categories are partially reorganized -- still not finished but everything should be there -- and the old mammoth blogrolls are getting a major update and facelift. It's still a construction site, so mind your step.

Before there was email, before there were hyperlinks, before we tagged items of interest to share with others, or posted opinions about articles. or attached our own comments along with others' to someone else's post, there was a revolutionary breakthrough in how we communicate. Though a technological innovation, it was remarkable in its simplicity and flexibility. Its take-up had more to do with how users kept coming up with new ways to put the thing to use. Network effects were critical to its success. Marketing relied more on "viral" techniques than advertising.

The controlled circulation magazine for Minnesota, The Rake, celebrates Minnesota's greatest invention by recounting the compleat history of the Post-It Note.

In the wake of the Post-it Note’s huge commercial success and enduring popularity, its development is often cited as a classic example of business innovation. Most of the time, though, the tale is synopsized, elided, reduced to a few efficient paragraphs. On the face of it, this is fitting for a product that helped usher in the era of PowerPoint presentations and instant messaging.

But the story of 3M engineer Art Fry’s invention is a grand chronicle of post-industrial American enterprise. It encompasses skeptical bosses, last-ditch marketing campaigns, and that old Hollywood crowd-pleaser, “inherently tacky elastomeric copolymer microspheres.” It deserves a more in-depth telling than it typically gets.

And a delightful in-depth telling this tale receives, indeed.

Courtesy 3quarksDaily, my favorite eclectic link-blog, dedicated to "science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating."

Courtesy praktike's burrowing into the bowels of legal reform programs. From the American Bar Association's program on promoting the rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East, the Judicial Reform Index:

Factor 5: Judicial Review of Legislation
A judicial organ has the power to determine the ultimate constitutionality of legislation and official acts, and such decisions are enforced.

Factor 6: Judicial Oversight of Administrative Practice
The judiciary has the power to review administrative acts and to compel the government to act where a legal duty to act exists.

Factor 7: Judicial Jurisdiction over Civil Liberties
The judiciary has exclusive, ultimate jurisdiction over all cases concerning civil rights and liberties.

Factor 8: System of Appellate Review
Judicial decisions may be reversed only through the judicial appellate process.

Brought to our attention by Digby (and Avedon Carol posting on Eschaton), via a post on judicial review on ars technica. From a Congressional Research Service summary of the provisions of the REAL ID Act, which Sensenbrenner in the House has attached to the supplemental budget for Iraq and Afghanistan.

II. Waiver of Laws to Facilitate Barriers at Border44

Section 102 of the IIRIRA generally provides for construction and strengthening of barriers along U.S. land borders and specifically provides for 14 miles of barriers and roads along the border near San Diego, beginning at the Pacific Ocean and extending eastward. IIRIRA § 102(c) provides for a waiver of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA)45 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA)46 to the extent the Attorney General determines is necessary to ensure expeditious construction of barriers and roads...

H.R. 418 [the Real ID Act of 2005] would provide additional waiver authority over laws that might impede the expeditious construction of barriers and roads along the border. H.R. 418 would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any and all laws that he determines necessary, in his sole discretion, to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads under IIRIRA § 102...

Section 102 of H.R. 418 would amend the current provision to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any law upon determining that a waiver is necessary for the expeditious construction of the border barriers. Additionally, it would prohibit judicial review of a waiver decision or action by the Secretary and bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages alleged to result from any such decision or action.

Hey, prak, maybe it is time for you to get shrill again, after all.