Those priorities may help win Florida, but they'll come back to haunt a Kerry administration--and the United States--in the Arab world.

Don't take my picking on Kerry as an endorsement of Bush's debate performance, which was boring, repetitive, and superficial--in other words, calculated not to lose but not to advance a policy debate either. His most interesting moments involved the Iranian Moolahs.

The only interesting part was watching Kerry reverse his usual attitude toward alliances when it comes to dealing with North Korea. Maybe Asian allies don't count. Or maybe the problem is that China, Russia, and Japan (not to mention South Korea) actually have a stake in the outcome in North Korea. They aren't just there to lend their moral approval to U.S. actions.

Mr. Haggar teamed with legendary Dallas advertising pioneer Morris Hite to coin the term "slacks," his son said. Pants were largely known as trousers until then.

"During the war years, people tried to get more casual during the weekends, during slack time or down time," [his son] Eddie Haggar said. "Dad and Morris Hite...came up with the name slacks."

Contrary to popular belief, the baby boomers didn't invent casual living. The WWII generation made it the American standard.

Newsweek reports on Starbucks' real estate strategy and expansion plans:

While it may seem that there's already a Starbucks on every corner, chairman Howard Schultz says the company is just getting started. His previous goal of 10,000 stores in the United States, set in 2002, now appears "light," he says, and the company plans to double the current number of domestic stores to nearly 12,000. To meet that target, Starbucks will speed up its rollout of drive-throughs and kiosks at airports and supermarkets. And it will continue challenging one of the prime tenets of retail: don't locate your new stores close to your old ones. Don't be fooled: the key to its success is not the taste of its coffee. "The two things that made them great are real estate and making sure that no one has a bad experience in their stores," says CIBC World Markets analyst John Glass.

Starbucks' unconventional approach to real estate goes back to an impulse decision by Schultz more than 15 years ago. In 1988 he visited the company's first international store, in downtown Vancouver, B.C., and saw what every retailer dreams about: a busy store. But he also saw customers twitching in long lines as they waited for their coffee. He startled his real-estate broker by suggesting they expand to the vacant lot directly across the intersection. "It wasn't a different neighborhood but it had a different vibe," Schultz recalls. He sensed that each side of the street had its own traffic pattern, and that customers are reluctant to alter their routines or delay their day for a cup o' joe they consider a luxury.

Starbucks is, of course, the touchstone example of the trend I document in The Substance of Style. It's been a pioneer in creating economic value not just from coffee and service but from the look and feel of its store environments--so much so that now everybody "wants to be like Starbucks." But the company's strategy demands more than a standard cookie-cutter style, however attractive. It requires the ability to vary the aesthetic from store to store while maintaining a distinctive Starbucks identity. Here's the relevant passage from chapter four of TSOS:

Effective surfaces, whether for people, places, or things, reveal layers of identity and association while preserving a fundamental sense of self. A graphic identity, says [graphic designer Stephen] Doyle, "is like a personality. You need to be able to take the same person to a black tie dinner and then see them at a barbecue, and then hang out in front of the [television] with them in their socks. It's still the same personality, but adapted for different occasions." The days of the unvarying stand-alone trademark and the single corporate color are over--too impersonal, inflexible, and monotonous for the age of look and feel. The challenge for designers, as for individuals, is to be true to the "self" of underlying identity while still allowing appearance to vary with time, place, and circumstance.

Every Starbucks looks like Starbucks, yet every Starbucks is unique, combining in a singular way elements of the company's language of colors, finishes, materials, lighting, and music. "People are amazed that we have stores across the street from each other," says the company's director of business development. "But they're different stores." The Starbucks design language does more than allow stores to accommodate different spaces or traffic patterns. Following the aesthetic imperative, different store environments offer novelty--a change of pace for regular customers--and personalization. If the color of one store "reminds you of something from your childhood that you intensely dislike, you can go three stores down to a different Starbucks and say, 'I like this better. I just feel better here,'" she explains. By developing mix-and-match elements, Starbucks maintains its aesthetic personality while still suiting different tastes.

Americans still love their own cars, but they're sick of everyone else's. The car is blamed for everything from global warming to the war in Iraq to the transformation of America into a land of strip malls and soulless subdivisions filled with fat, lonely suburbanites. Al Gore called the automobile a ''mortal threat'' that is ''more deadly than that of any military enemy.'' Cities across America, with encouragement from Washington, are adopting ''smart growth'' policies to discourage driving and promote mass transit. Three years ago, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new freeway just outside Los Angeles, Gov. Gray Davis declared that it would be the last one built in the state. Standing at the cradle of car culture, he said it was time to find other ways to move people.

I sympathize with the critics, because I don't like even my own car. For most of my adult life I didn't even own one. I lived in Manhattan and pitied the suburbanites driving to the mall. When I moved to Washington and joined their ranks, I picked a home in smart-growth heaven, near a bike path and a subway station. Most days I skate or bike downtown, filled with righteous Schadenfreude as I roll past drivers stuck in traffic. The rest of the time I usually take the subway, and on the rare day I go by car, I hate the drive.

But I no longer believe that my tastes should be public policy. I've been converted by a renegade school of thinkers you might call the autonomists, because they extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles. Their school includes engineers and philosophers, political scientists like James Q. Wilson and number-crunching economists like Randal O'Toole, the author of the 540-page manifesto ''The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths.'' These thinkers acknowledge the social and environmental problems caused by the car but argue that these would not be solved -- in fact, would be mostly made worse -- by the proposals coming from the car's critics. They call smart growth a dumb idea, the result not of rational planning but of class snobbery and intellectual arrogance. They prefer to promote smart driving, which means more tolls, more roads and, yes, more cars.

Drawing on authorities ranging from Aristotle to Walt Whitman, the autonomists argue that the car is not merely a convenience but one of history's greatest forces for good, an invention that liberated the poor from slums and workers from company towns, challenged communism, powered the civil rights movement and freed women to work outside the home. Their arguments have given me new respect for my minivan. I still don't like driving it, but now when the sound system is blaring ''Thunder Road'' -- These two lanes will take us aaanywhere -- I think Bruce Springsteen got it right. There is redemption beneath that dirty hood.

My friend and former boss Bob Poole, father of HOT lanes and popularizer of all sorts of toll systems (and, interestingly, a major train fan), is mentioned.

Here's the WaPost article on China:

Where once a paycheck, even under harsh conditions, was enough to entice tens of millions of people to leave their villages in China's interior and flock to factories on the coast, workers are beginning to turn their backs on the prospect of laboring in 100-degree heat, living in rat-infested dormitories and being cheated out of their earnings.

They are instead staying in their home villages to take advantage of rising farm wages -- up 15 to 40 percent in the past year as the government streamlines taxes and as growing domestic spending power raises the price of vegetables and meat. Or they are finding jobs closer to home in the factories sprouting up in inland cities along China's expanding road and rail networks.

At bus and train stations here, migrant workers carry belongings in plastic sacks, headed back to villages in the interior. "The wages are too low and the work is too hard," said a 21-year-old man from Guangxi province as he waited to board an all-night bus home. "It's a waste of time."

And here's the NYT on Brazil:

A year and a half ago, Isabel Fátima Bueno and her husband, Ricardo Del Arco Pereira, gave up on São Paulo, a city that has long been a magnet for job seekers from all over Brazil.

Mr. Pereira, an economist trained in corporate finance, had been unemployed more than a year and could not find work anywhere. With two young children at home, the couple struggled to make ends meet on Ms. Bueno's modest salary as an accountant at a trading company. That was tough; after all, Brazil's biggest city is also the country's most expensive.

So they packed their bags and moved to Birigüi, a city of 100,000 people in western São Paulo State with almost no unemployment, in contrast to an 18.5 percent jobless rate in São Paulo. In less than three months, both landed full-time administrative jobs at shoe factories, the town's main industry.

"Ricardo couldn't find a job, and my salary just wasn't enough to raise a family in São Paulo, so we had to go where there was more of a chance for both of us to get work," said Ms. Bueno, 35, who was born and raised in São Paulo. "It wasn't an easy choice, but it was the right choice."

They are far from alone. A growing number of Brazilians are finding it increasingly difficult to get good jobs in big metropolitan areas like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and are looking elsewhere.

Thanks to a boom in agriculture and the emergence in recent years of specialized industrial hubs in small and medium-size towns, Brazil's vast but still sparsely populated interior is generating jobs at a faster pace than urban centers for the first time in generations.

Consequently, rural Brazilians are far less inclined than those of past generations to uproot their families for an often uncertain city life.

Picture:
"AMADEUS", "The Killing Fields", "A Passage to India", "Places in the Heart", "A Soldier's Story"
Actor:
F. MURRAY ABRAHAM in "Amadeus", Jeff Bridges in "Starman", Albert Finney in "Under the Volcano", Tom Hulce in "Amadeus", Sam Waterston in "The Killing Fields"
Actress:
SALLY FIELD in "Places in the Heart", Judy Davis in "A Passage to India", Jessica Lange in "Country", Vanessa Redgrave in "The Bostonians", Sissy Spacek in "The River"
Supporting Actor:
HAING S. NGOR in "The Killing Fields", Adolph Caesar in "A Soldier's Story", John Malkovich in "Places in the Heart", Noriyuki "Pat" Morita in "The Karate Kid", Ralph Richardson in "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes"
Supporting Actress:
PEGGY ASHCROFT in "A Passage to India", Glenn Close in "The Natural", Lindsay Crouse in "Places in the Heart", Christine Lahti in "Swing Shift", Geraldine Page in "The Pope of Greenwich Village"
Director:
MILOS FORMAN for "Amadeus", Woody Allen for "Broadway Danny Rose", Robert Benton for "Places in the Heart", Roland Joffe for "The Killing Fields", David Lean for "A Passage to India"

From that list, you might think 1984 was a forgotten year in film. (When was the last time you heard someone refer to Amadeus?) But it wasn't. With all due respect to The Killing Fields, which was a powerful movie (until that awful use of "Imagine" at the end), the enduring classics of 1984 were Ghostbusters and, that nearly perfect film, The Terminator. The Academy just isn't that good at rewarding art that lasts.

UPDATE: Jesse Walker, a major movie buff, writes, "Ghostbusters -- definitely. The Terminator -- well, OK. But the most enduring classic of 1984 is Repo Man." The only repo'ing Oscar noticed was of farms in debt (The River, Places in the Heart).

UPDATE: Reader Sean Fitzpatrick sends this Amnesty International link, with the note, "he is okay...supposedly..."

No, I haven't either. But he did.

Tuesday, September 28, 7:00 p.m.
Center for Contemporary Art, 2801 Swiss Avenue (map here)
Free and open to the public.
Book sales and signing to follow talk.
Sponsored by Dallas Decorative Artisans Guild.

RAMADI, Iraq -- In the space of four minutes in May, two Humvees in Capt. Nicholas Ayers's unit were hit by roadside bombs. In the chaos, one vehicle was left alone as soldiers, injured and under fire, took cover in a school and radioed for help.

By the time Capt. Ayers arrived on the scene, Iraqis had looted the Humvee's machine gun and high-tech gun sights. Losing equipment to the enemy is a mistake that can ruin an officer's career. Standard Army practice holds that the area should be searched immediately.

Instead, Capt. Ayers, 29 years old, took a risk. He went to the village sheik's house. As a sign of respect, he said, he wouldn't search the village. But he gave the local leader 48 hours to find and return the equipment. "If we don't get the equipment back, I am going to come back with my men and tear apart every house in this village," he recalls saying. If the gear was returned, he promised to reduce patrols in the area.

The gamble ran counter to Capt. Ayers's training, which states that the longer troops wait to search an area, the less chance they'll find what they are looking for. His bosses told him he had made a huge blunder. Two days later, though, the sheik returned every scrap of looted equipment to the Army. Later, he would pay a heavy price for that move.

"I was floored," Capt. Ayers says. "The incident made me rethink the tactics I was using, my relationship with the local sheiks. It made me rethink just about everything."

Fighting the volatile, growing insurgency in Iraq is putting increased responsibility on younger, lower-ranking officers, who are learning through improvisation and error. For the Army, the heavy reliance on officers such as Capt. Ayers is a significant change. As the war in Iraq has turned into a far different kind of battle than the Army expected, it is triggering major shifts in how the service uses and equips soldiers and remaking its historically rigid and hierarchical command structure.

In May 2002, before the Iraq war, a study commissioned by the Army's top-ranking general concluded "the reality in the Army is that junior officers are seldom given opportunities to be innovative, plan training or to make decisions; fail, learn and try again."

Earlier this summer, the same team, led by retired Lt. Col. Leonard Wong, concluded: "Junior officers have become the experts on the situation in Iraq, not higher headquarters." The fast-moving insurgency is forcing lower-ranking officers, who spend more time in the field, to take a more prominent role.

Here's the ending:

Capt. Ayers, who was recently selected by the Army to teach at West Point, has begun to think about how a young soldier could prepare for what he's been through. Before deploying to Iraq, he and his soldiers fought a giant mock tank battle at the National Training Center. It wasn't helpful.

Instead, he says, "I guess I'd drop soldiers in a foreign high school and give them two days to figure out all the cliques. Who are the cool kids? Who are the geeks?" he says. That would be pretty close to what he has been doing in Iraq, he says, with one big exception: There would also have to be people in the high school trying to kill the soldiers.

Read the whole thing. (The link should work for a few more days, even for nonsubscribers.)

This report suggests that the first concern isn't that serious. Patients treat smart cards with care, just as they do driver's licenses and other must-have IDs:

Low-income residents of the New York City borough of Queens are taking active roles in their healthcare by carrying their personal health records on chip-embedded "smart cards," public hospital officials have reported.

Preliminary data presented here last week at the international MedInfo conference on medical informatics found that 99% of returning patients retained their cards during a one-month study period, according to researchers with Queens Health Network (QHN), part of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.

"They've really developed a sense of ownership [of the cards], like they were driver's licenses or state IDs," said lead researcher Glenn Martin, M.D., QHN director of medical informatics. Each smart card is a photo ID with an embedded chip that holds 64 kilobytes of data. QHN gave cards to about 10,000 primary care patients at Elmhurst Hospital.

The ready availability of patient records helped reduce the number of hospitalizations during the study period.

"The relatively high density of healthcare facilities within New York City, the mobile nature of the public hospital patient base, and the relative over-utilization of emergency rooms (ER) rather than primary care doctor or clinic settings, make the need for a portable patient record essential for good patient care," according to a QHN description of the project.

Like credit cards, smart cards are, of course, in danger of being stolen--but they aren't all that valuable to anyone but their rightful owner. This is probably a case where paranoia over medical privacy is far less justified than concern over mistreatment because doctors don't know a full history (or patients aren't in the condition to give one).

For the most part, political blogs act as forums for armchair pundits to deliver often-partisan commentary. But because blogs link to one another with comments and feedback, the buzz around one story can attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of blog readers, who in turn can offer "on the spot" knowledge or expertise. In the CBS case, bloggers raised the initial doubts, analyzed each new wrinkle, and occasionally did original reporting, scooping the professionals.

As I said in the interview, blogs and their readers acted not only as editors, checking the reporters, but as sources with expertise to bear on the story.

Try as I may, I am unable to conjure up a single shred of nostalgia for the once-fabled network evening news programs. Walter Cronkite is a name to me, not a symbol of reassurance or stability. Edward R. Murrow is a historical figure. As for the hallowed idea of "the six o'clock news," it means nothing: In my adult life, I've never had time to watch the daily news at 6 or 6:30, at least not with any regularity. When I watch television at all, I switch without any particular loyalty from CNN to Fox to C-SPAN, depending on who is doing the talking, and I feel reasonably cynical about all of them.

I hasten to add that I am not writing this because I believe my viewing habits are interesting -- quite the contrary -- but because I suspect that they are typical, and growing more so all of the time. There is little to be said about the amorphous post-baby boomers -- anyone born after about 1960 or so -- but it's pretty clear that as a group we have no emotional attachment to ABC, NBC and CBS....

What became clear, as the story wound down to the inevitable apology on Monday night, was that Rather and his fellow network newsmen are stuck in a Vietnam/Watergate-era time warp. Most of us regard network anchors as faintly pompous talking heads, people who read other people's prose off teleprompters. But the anchors, rather extraordinarily, still regard themselves as the conscience of the nation. They aren't mere "journalists" who have to use authentic documents to prove their allegations but rather people whose fame and large paychecks and unchallenged power entitle them to some kind of automatic credibility, even if their documents are fake.

Read the whole thing.

Coming home today from New York, I was a little more prepared. I still didn't have "government-issued i.d.," but at least I knew I was headed for trouble. I got to JFK several hours early. The young security guard wasn't sure what to do with me and asked a more senior guard. The elder guard sternly insisted that I must have a photo.

"This is a little weird," I said to the young guard, as I opened my bag and pulled out one of the extra paperbacks I'd snagged from my publisher. "I wrote this book, and here's my photo in it." He laughed and let me through. This time, they didn't even search my bags.

If "elevating the debate" means a sort of good-government, League-of-Women-Voters focus on where candidates stand on health care, etc., that's mostly true, I suppose. But I think it misconceives what blogs are about. There certainly are bloggers posting on healthcare and other issues -- see, for example, Jeff Jarvis's Issues 2004 posts and this post by Ann Althouse on medical malpractice -- but the political blogosphere is to a large degree about media criticism. If the Big Media were talking more about issues, and less -- to pick Ra^therGate as the example which I think inspired this conversation -- about Bush's National Guard service, probably bloggers would be talking about issues more, too.

It's true that many bloggers, including Glenn, do a lot of media criticism. Media criticism is relatively easy, and Web links are ideally suited to it. But it's hardly true that "the political blogosphere isto a large degree about media criticism." Many of the best policy blogs have almost no media criticism, nor do they go looking for political scalps. They don't even constantly write about the superiority of blogs. That's why you almost never read about them. Reporters and media critics are bored, bored, bored by the very sort of discourse they claim to support (a lesson I learned the hard way in 10 long years as the editor of Reason). They, and presumably their readers, want conflict, scandal, name-calling, and some sex and religion to heighten the combustible mix. Plus journalists, like other people, love to read about themselves and people they know.

Hence, newspapers don't writes stories about how blogs like Volokh Conspiracy elevate the debate over legal issues or how blogs like Marginal Revolution improve the public's understanding of economic scholarship. You won't read any articles about comparing the military policy discussions on Intel Dump and Belmont Club. Education blogs, science blogs, and foreign-policy blogs all engage in excellent issue discussions, but you'll never, ever hear them held up as examples of the blogosphere at work. Even Glenn forgets they exist.

Elevating the debate is not a story. News reporters do not write about the growth of good, analytical or explanatory journalism. Media critics do not praise such work. It does not get attention, and rarely wins the praise it deserves. That doesn't mean it's unimportant, however. Serious discussion does change people's minds and improve their understanding over time, and blogging has proven a marvelous source of "elevated" discourse. Fortunately, there are some great bloggers out there (many of them scholars using blogs to popularize otherwise academic debates) who don't seem to care whether they ever get invited to go on TV or whether Howard Kurtz ever writes about them.

"It's not personal pique," Mr. Brokaw said. "Obviously I would have liked to have done one of the debates. But my big outrage is that they excluded our entire network. And I just think that's unconscionable. ... Even our competitors say, 'What? They left out NBC?' Tim [Russert] has the No.1-rated Sunday show, I've got the No. 1-rated evening news broadcast, and we've done more debates than any other news division in the course of the past year."

The commission has declined to comment on its choices, other than executive director Janet Brown telling The New York Times that a star anchorman might "overshadow" a debate.

Now that a CBS moderator will surely "overshadow" the debate--Bush advisers are reportedly protesting that the network will be out for revenge--it would be a good move for all concerned to replace CBS's Bob Schieffer with Tim Russert. The Kerry campaign should make the recommendation.

The Heavenly Bed, for example, is one example of a partnership between the Simmons Corp., which began selling 95-cent mattresses made with coils in 1876, and Westin Hotels, owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

In four years, Westin hotels in the United States and Canada have sold former guests 4,000 of the "Heavenly Bed" setups, which cost about $3,000 for an entire ensemble; and 30,000 of its feather pillows ($65 to $75 each). During a recent sales promotion, "the phones were ringing off the hooks," said Bill Yetman, director of sales and marketing for the two Westins in Washington.

Sheraton Hotels, also part of Starwood, sells its Sweet Sleeper beds and bedding to former guests through a toll-free telephone number. And Tempur-Pedic has its own partnerships. Its Web site sends potential customers to a selection of hotels around the country -- the Hyatt Regency in Washington, plus two Holiday Inn properties in Fredericksburg and Williamsburg -- where they can buy themselves a night of sleep on the foam mattress.

This relatively new kind of symbiosis allows hotel guests to "test drive" products from beds to lighting to showerheads to hand lotions -- and then buy the products for their homes. It also allows companies to pitch their products in a relaxed and sometimes luxurious atmosphere.

About four years ago, Moen Inc. asked the Marriott Courtyard across the street from its North Olmsted, Ohio, headquarters to let the faucet company test out its Revolution Massaging Showerhead in some of the guest rooms. Consumer reaction was so positive, the company said, that the hotel asked Moen to let it sell the showerhead right at the front desk before it was released to the market at large. The Revolution was introduced through Home Depot stores in late 2001.

It's Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new "Antiterrorism" legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats' wish lists. They will be things that wouldn't have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That's what happened in 1996. Let's not let it happen again.

Some things are too predictable.

Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient's wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth.

"I said 'Did he pick?' and she said 'No, I picked for him,' " Swerdloff said. "I felt bad. She essentially voted twice" in the Florida election, which gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory and the White House.

As swing states with large elderly populations such as Florida gear up for another presidential election, a sleeper issue has been gaining attention on medical, legal and political radar screens: Many people with advanced dementia appear to be voting in elections -- including through absentee ballot. Although there are no national statistics, two studies in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island found that patients at dementia clinics turned out in higher numbers than the general population

About 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia. Florida alone has 455,000 patients, advocates estimate.

While it's easy to say patients with dementia shouldn't be able to vote, the story makes clear how difficult drawing such lines would be. But reports like that do start to enforce a social stigma: You are a bad citizen if you are voting twice by taking advantage of your loved one's or client's dementia.

None of this should be surprising to those of us raised on Hayek. After all, this is nothing more than the intellectual version of "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." Or better yet, it is Michael Polanyi's work on "The Republic of Science" transferred to current events. Even in the blogosphere, the commentary has talked about the "distributed intelligence" of the Net, or "open source journalism," or even the "hive mind" (a bit too Borg-ish for my taste, but it makes the point). The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively (e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become sloppy as a result.

In case you missed them, traditional journalists (and, remember, I am one) are starting to dig around on the forgery story--and are finding CBS's professional standards wanting. Here's the USA Today piece and here's the Baltimore Sun.

Good journalists care intensely about avoiding mistakes, and, despite all the blogosphere media bashing, there are a lot of good journalists. (You tend to notice the ones who get stuff wrong, for obvious reasons.) Reporting is a hard job, much harder than it looks from the outside. Digging out stuff people don't want you to know--not my sort of journalism at all--is particularly difficult. But even routine feature writing or explanatory journalism is a bit of a high-wire act. By definition, you know less than your sources. The profession has, after all, been called "getting your education in public," which is one thing I love about it. But every time I write a Times column, I worry that I've gotten something wrong. The editing process can catch some errors, but not ones that require a great knowledge of the subject. For that, I have to be careful and then hope that when the article hits print neither my sources nor some Hayekian fact checker out there in reader land finds something factually wrong. (Interpretations are another matter; there, reasonable plausibility is the standard, not certainty.) Fortunately, I have a good track record--in large part because I'm paranoid about making mistakes.

I read your blog regarding the TXANG memos. I agree with you. I believe the memos are fakes, but I'm also certain GWB got special treatment.

I have lived in Texas all my life. I became eligible for the draft in 1968. No way, no how could I have gotten into *any* National Guard unit back then. We all knew the Guard was for special guys, and everyone could else was hosed.

I also remember there was no way ordinary guys could sign up in Reserve Units (Naval, or otherwise). Has anyone asked Kerry how he managed to get into a Naval Reserve unit???? Who pulled strings for him? I haven't read anything about that.

Actually, I don't care about any of this one way or the other. I'm voting for Bush because I think he believes *something*, which is more than I can say about Kerry.

On Lone Star Reality, Scott Harris, a self-described "die-hard Republican," posts a hypothetical script for how Bush might have gotten into the Guard. It doesn't even contradict the White House's statements.

Reader James Ingram writes:

The dirty little secret here that no-one is discussing is that in 1968 nobody got in the National Guard without "special treatment." The connections necessary were not necessarily the high-powered kind that GWB could bring to bear. The Guard was an organization with a small town feel, kind of like the volunteer fire company, in many communities. Often the connection needed was, say, a father in the Guard, an uncle who ran a corner drug store and also served as first sergeant of the local Guard company or a teacher who was friends with someone in the Guard. But nobody who was of draft age during this period believes you could go down to your local recruiting office and join the Guard. Its a LOL idea.

Of course, Bush's Guard duty wasn't risk-free, as Lawrence Rhodes notes:

Peripheral to your recent blog entry, I haven't read any discussion of this point: while joining the National Guard might have kept Bush out of Vietnam (not a foregone conclusion at the time), training as a fighter pilot is one of the riskier things you can do. If you recall the first couple of chapters from "The Right Stuff," washing out often means a closed casket funeral. This risk is not significantly smaller than serving in Vietnam, though it does sound like a lot more fun. So you can't really infer a relative lack of physical courage on Bush's part, unless, I suppose, you contend he wasn't smart enough to realize the risk...

True enough on the risks, but the fun matters a lot too. There wasn't much fun in Vietnam, even if you had relatively safe Al Gore-style duty. And young GWB had a classic fighter pilot personality.

I think the reason this story can't get any traction as a scandal is that nobody thinks George Bush came from obscure poverty. And everyone old enough to care about the Vietnam-era draft knows that most young men were eager to find alternatives not only to Vietnam but, if possible, to the disruption of their life plans by conscription. The draft is a really bad idea, incompatible with both a free society and an effective, professional military.

The foundation helps families with autistic children, a cause I've come to understand better since the young daughter of my friend (and former Reason correspondent) Michael Lynch was diagnosed with autism. Even under the best of circumstances, raising a child with autism is difficult and expensive. From the foundation's website:

The Foundation focuses on using Tracy’s expertise in Autism and visibility with the media to raise awareness of Autism and further to provide education, training and financial support to families with autistic children to better equip them to be more self sufficient and effective as parents. By taking a targeted approach through the Foundation’s Pilot Outreach Program, the Foundation can help those families where the impact can be the greatest so donations are most efficiently utilized, and also add much needed research on the effectiveness of cutting edge therapies including the platform Tracy has developed in her work at the New School.

Thanks for weighing in on the CBS memos and pointing out (aside from the controversy) how much our expectations about aesthetics have changed. The Substance of Style continues to show you were writing about something genuinely profound. I still think about it all the time. You know you've hit a real subject when it shows up in so many different and completely unrelated contexts.

Yep. I read a lot about typefaces when I was researching TSOS. I wrote a bunch, too, but left 90% on the cutting room floor.

As to the memos, I honestly have no idea who to believe. But there certainly is a sound case against them. I looked at the .pdf of the memo, itself, and something I haven't seen mentioned came to mind. It's got a lot of little dots on it, as if it had been copied many times over, or something. This is fairly typical copy-degrading, I think.

But wasn't this supposed to have been "newly discovered" because it had been in Killian's personal files all these years and has only just now come to light? Doesn't that suggest the memos would have been originals, or have been touched infrequently, if at all? Maybe it is a carbon copy, and that would explain the dots. But I could certainly see someone thinking they were making it look older by copying copies of copies of it.

Another friend mentioned this as well. You're both smart and not big Bush promoters, so maybe I should actually make the point.

I think the memos are big fakes. I also think that Bush got special treatment, probably without anyone having to ask for it. Given his family's connections and the way Texas operates like a small town, people would have looked out for him.

My Democratic friend's reply to my response makes an important point that, judging from some of my email, is getting lost in the partisanship of this discussion:

I think you're right on - the memos are Big Fakes AND Bush is a Child of Privilege. We have such a hard time accepting the Certsian Philosophy. Yes, it's a breath mint, and yes, it's a candy mint. It's two, two, two mints in one. Much of life is Certsian, but we so love our fights that we'll gin them up if we have to. It's a candy mint, damnit!

The reason this story doesn't resonate with me is that it doesn't do anything more than reiterate the obvious. Of COURSE Bush got political help in getting into the reserves and -- most likely -- took advantage of his privilege to avoid some of his duties. I don't even think Bush's biggest supporters actually believe otherwise. They generally just focus on micro-points, like whether he was honorably discharged (check) or actually put in flying time (check) or such. His spokespeople have done a brilliant job in the Ben Barnes debate by asserting time and time and time again that Bush's father NEVER EVER asked Barnes to get his son into the reserves. Which Barnes, himself never says; instead, Barnes tells what I think is probably the truth (which is, itself, never refuted by the White House) that a family friend was the one who did the asking. And the White House responds with its own micro-truth -- George HW Bush NEVER asked Ben Barnes for such a thing. And the media just completely ignore the fact that what Barnes is saying and what the White House is denying are not contradictory.

So much of these peripheral debates now are about micro-points like this: Where, exactly, was Kerry on Christmas Eve (latitude and longitude, if possible)? Was he throwing medals or ribbons? Proportional spacing is one thing, but what about the kerning? This, if you'll remember, is how OJ won his criminal trial, too -- by atomizing the relevant arguments into obscurity. We'll lay out dots of truth for you to follow. Ignore that big picture over there, please. It's misdirection taken to a level that a magician would envy.

And what it all comes down to is a Seinfeldean nothing. I so hope the Kerry campaign isn't behind all of this. It would be such a waste.

But even a great editorial team has only a few people assigned to any given story, and those few people necessarily have limited knowledge. What CBS has learned over the past few days is that its editors aren't good enough. Nowadays when stories go public, they get checked by after-the-fact editors with expertise in every field imaginable, and that checking gets published to the entire world via the blogosphere. Bloggers may not have editors, but they serve as editors themselves.

What's so devastating for CBS is that it didn't make an esoteric mistake, requiring rare expertise. It made a boneheaded mistake on a big story. It's my professional opinion that any decent journalist over 30 years old would have immediately suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1972. In fact, any decent journalist over 30 would have suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1982. (That year, I paid The Daily Princetonian $20 to cover the film cost of a resume that looked like what you can dash off on Microsoft Word; it was produced on an expensive compositing system by a graphics professional.) That those memos managed to get on national television without a caveat about their reliability suggests a complete breakdown of both journalistic instincts and journalistic process.

You shouldn't need bloggers to catch errors like this. But it helps.

But the experts interviewed by CNSNews.com honed in on several aspects of a May 4, 1972, memo, which was part of the "60 Minutes" segment and was posted on the CBS News website Thursday.

"It was highly out of the ordinary for an organization, even the Air Force, to have proportional-spaced fonts for someone to work with," said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Agfa Monotype in Wilmington, Mass. "I'm suspect in that I did work for the U.S. Army as late as the late 1980s and early 1990s and the Army was still using [fixed-pitch typeface] Courier."

The typography experts couldn't pinpoint the exact font used in the documents. They also couldn't definitively conclude that the documents were either forged using a current computer program or were the work of a high-end typewriter or word processor in the early 1970s.

But the use of the superscript "th" in one document - "111th F.I.S" - gave each expert pause. They said that is an automatic feature found in current versions of Microsoft Word, and it's not something that was even possible more than 30 years ago.

"That would not be possible on a typewriter or even a word processor at that time," said John Collins, vice president and chief technology officer at Bitstream Inc., the parent of MyFonts.com.

"It is a very surprising thing to see a letter with that date [May 4, 1972] on it," and featuring such typography, Collins added. "There's no question that that is surprising. Does that force you to conclude that it's a fake? No. But it certainly raises the eyebrows."

Which is more likely--that bleeding-edge technology was used to produce routine documents, or that someone who doesn't remember what documents looked like in 1972 hacked together a forgery? Download the memo from the CBS site and judge for yourself. It certainly looks like Microsoft Word to me. And do read the entire CNS piece, which rounds up some well-qualified typography experts to comment. (By way of background, here's today's NYT report on the "newfound documents.")

With this paradox in mind, latest NYT column looks at the shift from buying things to buying experiences:

LISTEN to the jobs debate carefully, and you might get the idea that the problem with the economy is that Americans just are not materialistic enough.

We spend too much of our income on restaurant meals, entertainment, travel and health care and not enough on refrigerators, ball bearings, blue jeans and cars.

Manufacturing employment is sluggish because of rising productivity - making more with fewer people - and foreign competition. But that's not the whole story, especially over the long term. Production is changing, but so is consumption.

As incomes go up, Americans spend a greater proportion on intangibles and relatively less on goods. One result is more new jobs in hotels, health clubs and hospitals, and fewer in factories.

In 1959, Americans spent about 40 percent of their incomes on services, compared with 58 percent in 2000. That figure understates the trend, because in many cases goods and services come bundled together.

Read the rest here, and related articles here and especially here.

And for an experience embodied in a good, buy (and read) the new paperback edition of The Substance of Style.

No, this isn't a spa. It's a design for a outpatient oncology center, created by Wirt Design as a contest entry at Neocon West (an interior design trade show, not a gathering of policy wonks). I saw it there and, like many other attendees, voted it a winner.

After all, why shouldn't an outpatient oncology center look like a spa? Chemotherapy is unpleasant enough already without requiring patients to be treated in depressing, ugly surroundings. "The space responds to basic human needs for patients by providing comfort, convenience and safety," says the Wirt Design website. The space also provides beauty, a bit of pleasure in unpleasant circumstances. (For a better look at the space, see the Wirt Design page.)

Of course, that's just a theoretical design, cooked up for a contest. This NYT feature reports on the trend toward incorporating aesthetics into health care environments:

If there is one universal truth about hospitals, it is that they are drab, dismal places, not at all designed to soothe and heal.

The furniture is industrial-grade, cookie-cutter. Lights are fluorescent and harsh. Noise, according to one recent study, can reach jackhammer proportions. Windows open onto concrete jumbles. And then there is the smell of antiseptic infused with cafeteria grub that inspires in visitors a kind of anti-madeleine moment.

But a sprinkling of architects and designers around the world are working to greatly change hospitals by humanizing their design, a concept that is slowly gaining influence in Europe and the United States.

The idea is obvious: Build inviting, soothing hospitals, graced with soft lighting, inspiring views, single rooms, curved corridors, relaxing gardens and lots of art, and patients will heal quicker, nurses will remain loyal to their employers and doctors will perform better.

"The environment of a hospital contributes to the therapy of the patients," said Tony Monk, a British architect who specializes in health care design and recently published a glossy book called "Hospital Builders'' (Academy Press).

"People are happy to be there, to help themselves to get better," he said. "People are mentally vulnerable when they come in, and if they are beaten down by an awful, dreadful, concrete, uninteresting, poor building with poor colors, it makes them even worse."

You have to be pretty obtuse to define hospital "function" without paying any attention to how the environment makes patients feel--but that's exactly how hospitals have historically viewed the problem. Aside from the sheer ugliness of most health care environments, lots of them are also extremely confusing to navigate, adding that extra dollop of stress that patients and their loved ones so need and want.

This may be yet another case in which the disconnect between consumers (patients) and payers (insurance companies and the government) distorts health care provision.

Belmont Club's analysis is astute, as are many of the comments that follow it:

Little public analysis has been devoted to options realistically available to Vladimir Putin in response to the massacre of schoolchildren in Ossetia. The fact is that the world has been spoiled by looking at the world through the prism of the American media. When President Bush stopped to consider his response to September 11, he had a range of options available only to a nation as unimaginably powerful as the United States of America. Japanese newspapers reported that President Bush was offered the nuclear option immediately after the attack, probably as an extreme in a range that included filing a diplomatic protest on the opposite end of the spectrum, which he rejected, choosing instead to do what no other country could do: take down the state sponsors of terrorism and pursue the terrorists to the four corners of the earth. America's unmatched power allowed President Bush to select the most humane course of war available. No European power, nor all of them put together, could have embarked on such a precise campaign for lack of means. It was a rich man's strategy, a guerre de luxe.

But no one who has seen the rags and hodgepodge of equipment issued to the Russian Special Forces can entertain any illusion that Vladimir Putin can go around launching raids with hi-tech helicopters, or follow around perps with robotic drones before firing, or use satellite-guided bombs to wipe out enemy safe houses that have been seeded with RFID chips. Nor will those detained by Russia gain weight the way detainees have done at the "inhuman" Gitmo prison. That's an American way of war which even Europeans can only regard with envy. The poor must respond with less. When the Nepalese saw the video of their 12 compatriots executed by terrorists in Iraq, they did what you could do with a box of matches: they burned the mosque in Kathmandu. To paraphrase Crosby, Stills and Nash, 'if you can't hit the one you should then hit the one you're with'.

While Russia can do better than a box of matches, the reality is that its poverty and low-tech force structure will make any response that Putin may choose a brutal and largely indiscriminate affair unless it is subsumed into the larger American-led Global War on Terror. The real price of the European vacation from history is its abandonment of the first principle of civilization. Unless there is common justice, there will be vigilante justice.

Expect Putin to use the escalating terror war as a reason for more authoritarian domestic measures, some possibly justified, many not.

The paperback edition of The Substance of Style is now available.

On a similar note, James Dao's short Week in Review piece on the weird political effects of the concentration of swing states in the Rust Belt is also worth a glance. Best graf:

"Anyone campaigning in that part of the world is going to be torn between two worlds," said Richard Feinberg, an economist at the University of California at San Diego and a former Clinton administration official. "For a national audience, the candidates talk about economic modernism, global mobility and open markets. But in that part of the world, there is a temptation to appeal to the romanticism of the industrial Midwest, with its memories of a faded golden era when they had a virtual global monopoly."

Meanwhile, kids are looking to design for future jobs. This Sunday Styles article focuses on fashion, but everywhere I go people tell me their college-age kids are studying graphic design.

I wish him the best and, like most people, fully expect he'll be fine. It's amazing how routine and effective these once-extraordinary operations are.

The most striking thing about Bush's speech was that he not only made audience members cry but teared up himself, here: "And I have met with parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag, and said a final goodbye to a soldier they loved. I am awed that so many have used those meetings to say that I am in their prayers--to offer encouragement to me. Where does strength like that come from? How can people so burdened with sorrow also feel such pride?"

Has Zell Miller been mad a long time? I'm not so sure. Bill Shipp, who knows Georgia politics about as well as anyone, wrote a column a few months ago where he said that it's impossible that Miller didn't figure out until 2001 that the national Democratic Party was a lot more liberal than he was.

Miller has a huge chip on his shoulder about being a "hillbilly" raised in house without running water, and he's easily offended. Witness his bizarre overreaction to the proposed CBS reality show that would update the Beverly Hillbillies.

Shipp says that once he got to Washington, Miller felt, rightly or wrongly, that his fellow Democrats were looking down their noses at him. And that's where his pique really began.

I talked to a long-time friend of Miller who said that there's something to Shipp's theory, and that the condescension Miller felt from the Washington Democrats was very real.

But he also adds that isn't all there is to it. Miller really does think the Democrats are soft on defense. From what I've seen, he probably thinks the Republicans are soft too.

I think Miller really is representative of the Jacksonian strain in American politics, and I don't regard that as a compliment.

Miller's most Jacksonian moment came after the speech, when he told Chris Matthews he'd like to challenge him to a duel--and he seemed to mean it. He's definitely a throwback, far removed different from the prosperous, satisfied (even smug) Republicans of suburban megachurches.

It was interesting to hear a fellow Georgia Democrat make an unqualified, and contemptuous, reference to Jimmy Carter's "pacifism": "They claimed Carter's pacifism would lead to peace. They were wrong." I'm guessing Miller's been mad for a long time.

Unfortunately, I doubt that the film is that faithful. If the ads are to be believed, the movie turns that great amoral user Becky Sharp (who makes Scarlett look like Melanie) into some kind of enterpreneurial/feminist hero. Better to read the book.

UPDATE: Reader Joe Gusmano writes that you can get Vanity Fair for free at Project Gutenberg. Of course, you won't get binding with that.

Watching this election season on the blogs, I'm struck by the generation gap among people who hold basically the same political views--say, Dan Drezner and me. Children of the 1970s, like Glenn and me, may not exactly be Republican partisans but we don't trust Democrats, especially those from the liberal wing of the party, with national security or the economy. Youngsters like Dan are less cynical, or more naive (take your pick), about the Dems and more likely to vote on social issues. This isn't simply a matter of priorities. It's also a product of associations and culture: What personalities and issues define the parties in your mind?