France to ban head scarves in all public places

The story:

France's ruling party says it plans to present a bill to parliament next month, which would ban the wearing of full Islamic veils in all public places. The party says the move should be seen as "a law of liberation."

A redditor comments:

As a French/American dual citizen, I have a possibly different perspective on this.

If this were the United States, I would be very much against this law, for entirely libertarian reasons. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and while there are always various groups trying to claim that their particular immigrant culture is somehow more "American" than someone else's (witness anti-Hispanic sentiment, for example, or the number of people that think that English ought to be legislated as the national language, or whatever) for the most part the concensus that thankfully eventually emerges is that unless you're Native American, you can stuff it -- your particular culture has no particular monopoly on what it means to be American, and no amount of whining will change that.

France, on the other hand, is not America. Unlike the United States, it is not a country of immigrants. There is such a thing, fair or not, as "French culture", and without making any sort of value judgment here, full-veil mandating sects of Islam do not qualify.

France has been relatively willing, despite not being founded on the principles the US was founded on, to welcome immigrants from other countries. Much of this perhaps was not altruistic, but rather fallout from France's ill-advised forays into colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Certainly much of France's muslim population are in France now because they fought for France in the Franco-Algerian war in the 1960s and were forced to abandon their homes essentially because they chose the wrong side in that war -- something that France has been terrible about recognizing, frankly.

But I guess what I'm saying is that ultimately, the sort of "cultural chauvinism" that we have great disdain for here in the United States -- which this law would be an example of, in my opinion -- is a bit different in France (and in the rest of Europe, too). European nations have histories dating back millenia, they didn't develop their cultural heritage by melting together the traditions of myriad peoples over the last 250 years. That mixed character is precisely what makes the United States great, but the whole world is not the US.

Ultimately, if France decides that it wants to draw the line somewhere, if they decide that they want to be a secular society and that they don't like the symbolism they feel the veil represents, why shouldn't they ban it?

It's their country, after all -- and "they", unlike Americans, are a well-defined group.

I tentatively agree.

Nuclear reprocessing

The French do something right...

Used uranium is removed from reactor cores and chemically manipulated to restore its radioactivity. This process creates new fuels—and only small amounts of waste byproducts. The process can be repeated a third time and perhaps a fourth.

Yet in the United States, where reprocessing was invented, used uranium is simply discarded.

The result is highly wasteful: The once-used uranium still retains 96 percent of its energy potential. The result is likewise highly dangerous: That 96 percent potent uranium also retains a corresponding proportion of its toxicity to human life. So why do we not reprocess?

The decision was not made by accident. Back in the 1970s, the U.S. made a conscious policy decision to shut down its reprocessing facilities. The decision had nothing to do with energy policy, and everything to do with that era’s arms control illusions.

One of the byproducts of reprocessing uranium is plutonium. The plutonium produced by a civil reactor is not weapons-grade. It can be used as a fuel itself, and in France it is. But theoretically, this low-grade plutonium could be reprocessed again and again and enriched to a point where it could be used as a weapon.

On the basis of this fact, the Carter administration decided that the U.S. must eschew reprocessing altogether. It reasoned as follows: If the U.S. civil nuclear program permitted any reprocessing, even for fuel purposes only, that would compromise U.S. efforts to persuade other countries not to reprocess. And (the reasoning continued) an across-the-board ban on reprocessing was the only way to ensure against nuclear proliferation.

This reasoning lacked cogency, to put it very mildly.

First, even assuming that other nations cared about the example set by the U.S. civil nuclear program, they were bound to notice that the U.S. also maintained a military nuclear program. "Do as we say, not as we do," is not a principle likely to carry much weight.

Second, the notion that other nations would forgo nuclear weapons because we set them an example was naïve at best, narcissistic at worst. Does Iran care that the U.S. does not reprocess? Does North Korea? States make their nuclear decisions for their own reasons.

States that have drawn back from the nuclear threshold—Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa being the outstanding examples—have done so because a) new, democratic governments replaced nondemocratic governments and preferred to spend their money in other ways; and b) they feared inspiring counter-proliferation by their immediate neighbors. The only other motive that seems to work is c) the direct application of force, as with Israel against Iraq.

Gandhian self-sacrifice, by contrast, has had zero effect.

Neocon humor

Quoth Michael Goldfarb:

In the course of Donald Morrison's review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald's is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine.

I once ate at the McDonald's right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.

(ht Will)

Link blag

TMV: There are legal consequences to defining "life" (really, personhood) to begin at conception. Abortion opponents—particularly Republicans who support a Human Life Amendment—ought to consider the actual ramifications of their quixotic position.

Conor wonders how anyone can insist that Obama is a radical with ties to terrorists who wants to turn the country into a socialist dictatorship and that he should be asserting more executive power.

Daily Beast: Did Rumsfeld ruin Bush? A disturbing profile of what happened when at the highest levels we had an incompetent reporting to an ignoramus—and the reason people like Bush and Palin should never serve at such levels.

LA Times: Kuwait elects women.

Yglesias advocates free market sports.

NYT: Nick Gillespie wants to legalize and tax everything.

The Eiffel Tower at dusk.

Your tax dollars at work: The Social Security Administration has a very special announcement.

Pas comme la France, s'il vous plaît

French culture is amazing. Politics and economy, not so much. (ht Perry)

Decline of US favorability during Bush years

More graphs, charts, tables, and analysis here

Link blag

Mark Thompson: Whaddaya Mean, "Activist"?...

I wanted to give a lawyer’s perspective to the discussion of judicial activism the decision has spawned between William, John, and E.D., arising in part due to Mr. Sullum and Mr. Whelan. To be sure, I think E.D. is wrong to the extent he argues that the Iowa decision is justified because it reaches a rights-enhancing, morally just result; William is exactly right in arguing that the process by which the Court reached its decision is more important than whether the result is just.

Politico: Defense cuts deepen old wounds...

It took a while for the magnitude of the cuts to sink in, but once it did, the ritualistic wailing from congressional leaders and defense contractors that always accompanies Pentagon budget-slashing began with unprecedented fury.

And that’s because the cuts proposed Monday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates — axing six major defense weapons systems, including missile programs, helicopters, fighter jets and a communications satellite — were themselves unprecedented. Or to borrow an Obama term, audacious.

[...] “I strongly support Secretary Gates’ decision to restructure a number of major defense programs,” McCain said. “It has long been necessary to shift spending away from weapon systems plagued by scheduling and cost overruns to ones that strike the correct balance between the needs of our deployed forces and the requirements for meeting the emerging threats of tomorrow.”

This is McCain's best area of expertise, so hopefully Congress can get some of that elusive bipartisanship going. Other Republicans don't seem very cooperative, however, preferring to milk "you're cutting defense!" for political points when from a cost-benefit standpoint many programs should be cut.

Yglesias: Praise for the New Defense Budget...

For more analysis on yesterday’s defense budget analysis see Robert Farley, Spencer Ackerman, Fred Kaplan, and James Fallows. All are impressed, and all rightly so.

This is the move that justifies the decision to keep Robert Gates on at the Pentagon. Any new Defense Secretary, no matter how brilliant, would have had to have spent his first three months in office building relationships with the top military commanders and focusing on filling out the DOD civilian staff. Only a Secretary who’s already been in office could have the ability to propose sweeping change. But only a president who’s brand new could have the popularity and honeymoon effect necessary to have any hope of driving the changes through congress. Hence the appeal of the odd alignment of new president and old defense secretary.

Mark Lynch: Obama scores again, but the game is just starting...

Obama's speech in Turkey's Parliament has gotten heavy coverage and rave reviews across the Arab political spectrum. Even influential newspapers and personalities who are usually quite critical of American foreign policy have expressed frank admiration. Despite the disarray in the public diplomacy bureaucracy (where there is still no nominee for the Under-Secretary of State), I would say that Obama has already succeeded at the initial public diplomacy phase of his effort to transform America's relations with the Muslim world. And he's not done -- I'm fairly sure that despite the fact that he has lived up to his promise to give a major address from a Muslim capital, this was not even "the" speech to the Muslim world that he promised during his campaign. But now will come the real challenge: transforming the words into deeds and delivering on the promise.

Obama has conquered Europe? Video of town hall in Turkey

Overcoming Bias: occupational licensing sucks.

Digg: Man commits suicide while watching Watchmen...come on, it wasn't that bad, was it?

Gay comedy: SNL, Fast & Furious ...and this:

Link blag

The Post: Gates Planning Major Changes In Programs, Defense Budget...

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday the restructuring of several dozen major defense programs as part of the Obama administration's bid to shift military spending from preparations for large-scale war against traditional rivals to the counterinsurgency programs that Gates and others consider likely to dominate U.S. conflicts in coming decades.

Gates's aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making his announcement more of an opening bid than a decisive end to weeks of sometimes acrimonious internal Pentagon debate.

Yglesias: European aid to Afghanistan...

Obama’s haul looks pretty modest—about 3,000 extra troops to provide election-related security plus about 2,000 troops to do embedded police trading, plus $100 million more for training and $500 million more for humanitarian aid. Still I’d say the negative tone of the press coverage suggests the perils of expectations more than anything else. The Bush administration has been trying to get more out of the Europeans for years and failing. Obama tried and he’s got something.

[...] the real time to ask for additional European support in Afghanistan would have been 2002 and 2003 when many countries were eager to cooperate with the United States. Instead, the Bush administration leaned on America’s best friends in Europe and around the world to contribute tens of thousands of soldiers to Iraq.

NYT: Liberty, Equality, Envy...

The feeling in Europe, and especially in France, about Barack Obama’s presidency is as clear as day: we are envious.

The Reality-Based Community:

A. A. Gill reports from London that "Mr. Obama is the only popular politician left iin the world. He could win an election in any of the G-20 countries, and his fellow world leaders will do anything to take home a touch of that reflected popularity."

If that's true, it's a substantial foreign-policy advantage.

The Post: The Radicalization of Ben Bernanke...

Timothy Geithner and his predecessor Henry Paulson have been the public faces of the U.S. government's battle against the global economic crisis. But even as the secretaries of the Treasury have garnered the headlines -- as well as popular anger surrounding bank bailouts and corporate bonuses -- another official has quickly amassed great influence by committing trillions of dollars to keep markets afloat, radically redefining his institution and taking on serious risks as he seeks to rescue the American economy. Without a doubt, this crisis is now Ben Bernanke's war.

And why are Asian kids so good at math? Curiouser and curiouser

French town hall

The applause at closing Guantanamo and not torturing is pretty gratifying. There was a time when America held the moral high ground and could deliver "tear down this wall"-style speeches to real, positive effect. Are we getting our groove back?

BBC poll from January:

Le Café

Apparently it'll kill ya.