WSJ: Rules v principles

The Wall Street Journal today has a piece on rules versus principles. Thou shall not kill is a principle. If the Ten Commandments were written like accounting rules then they would require many more words and would be difficult to understand and expensive to apply. Principles are easy to understand but require judgment to apply. That's a good thing. Using judgment is more rewarding, psychologically and economically, than applying rules.

LAT threatens Bush

"Congress' vote on Iraq war is only a prelude" says the newspaper. "A September progress report on the troop buildup could turn up the political heat on Bush and Republicans." Well maybe, but what if the surge works?

In a piece by Doyle McManus labeled "News Analysis" on page A12 but not labeled at all on the front page, the LAT claims that Republicans will turn against Bush and vote with anti-war Democrats after Gen. Petraeus makes his promised progress report on the war in September. Obviously, this is speculation. Neither McManus nor the LAT has a crystal ball. No one can predict what Petraeus will report in September. So why speculate? Why not report the news instead?

The best and worst of the LAT

On today's front page, the LAT published two contrasting stories, one wholly political and biased, the other magnificent and riveting.

The political story concerns what the LAT sees as the GOP's "uphill climb for cash and candidates." It could have been written by the Democratic National Committee.

The magnificient and riveting story is about a father and daughter's mauling by a grizzly and their subsequent rescue. The story continues in tomorrow's paper and shouldn't be missed.

Police Shootings in Orange County

A man and women, parents of three, died in a recent police shooting in Laguna Beach, California at a luxury hotel. The district attorney's office is investigating.

A few months ago, Huntington Beach police killed a young woman who threatened them with a knife. Police pumped 15 rounds into the woman's body either before she died, while she was dying or after she died. The district attorney's office investigated that killing too. The results of the investigation have not been made public.

Is this a pattern? Are police killings becoming more frequent with less justification? Should police firearms be restricted more than presently? Perhaps only SWAT teams should be allowed to carry firearms, not ordinary police officers. At the least, results of investigations of police shootings should be released to the public.

LAT: Congress sets terms of Iraq exit

Congress did no such thing. In a political exercise, it wasted several weeks or perhaps months on a bill that will never become law, apparently to impress Democrats' left-wing base.

LAT celebrates Dem victory

The Los Angeles Times today, in an article by Noam N. Levey, seems to celebrate House Democrats' passing the war funding bill which the president has promised to veto. The margin of victory was small -- 218 to 208 with 13 Democrats voting with Republicans against the bill and only two Republicans joining Democrats in favor.

Later, on the Times website, Levey, reporting on the Senate's 51 to 46 passage of the same bill, begins with:

More than three decades after Congress helped force an end to the Vietnam War, a new generation of lawmakers today sent the president legislation mandating that U.S. combat forces come home from Iraq.

The historic Senate vote -- which followed House passage of the measure Wednesday -- came less than four months after Democrats took power on Capitol Hill amid public anxiety over the war.

And it presented President Bush with the most serious legislative challenge of his presidency, thrusting a withdrawal timeline on a fiercely resistant White House.

Separately, the Times reports on the Senate passage with a less celebratory article from Associated Press that cites the president's "Mission Accomplished" speech of May 1, 2003 and suggests that Democrats plan to submit the war funding bill to the president on May 1st as a sort of political stunt.

Is this anything more than political gamesmanship? Democrats pass a bill they know Bush will veto. They know they don't have the votes to override the veto. They're behaving as if they are still in high school, voting for Most Popular Sophomore or Student Council president.

Democrats' winning strategy

Los Angeles Times writer Noam N. Levey says congressional Democrats plan to embarrass congressional Republicans by forcing them to vote repetitively against anti-war legislation. That way, Republicans will have to explain those votes in the lead up to the next election. This is a strategy cooked up by former Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, "widely considered one of Capitol Hill's savviest political tacticians," according to Levey.

Is this a winning strategy? Surely it seems so to the anti-war left but how can a losing war strategy be a winning election strategy?

Gonzales as AG

Prediction: Gonzales will survive. Bush supports him and that's enough. Getting a new AG confirmed would be difficult -- it could take the rest of Bush's term. Anyhow, there's no evidence that the eight USAs were fired for a nefarious reason. Dems and the press have been sifting through documents for months. If there were something to find it surely would have been found by now. So, at this point it appears the investigation of the pseudo-scandal is nothing but politics. The AG and his staff were guilty of bureaucratic bungling, nothing more.