"Crossfire" is now a metaphor for politics in Washington. There are two teams, each with its own politicians, think tanks, special-interest groups, media outfits and TV personalities. The requirement of this world is that you must always be reliably left or right. If you are an analyst "on the right" you must always support what the team does. If President Bush invades Iraq, you support it. If he increases the deficit, you support that. If he opposes stem-cell research, you support that, too. There's no ideological coherence or consistency to these positions. Republicans are now fervent nation-builders, but only two years ago scornfully opposed the whole concept. You must support your team. If you don't, it screws up the TV show.

The problem is much larger than television. Any policy proposed from the left is sure to meet an instant avalanche of criticism from right-wing think tanks, talk shows, political groups and, of course, politicians. This is less true of the left, but just wait. Liberal donors are forming groups of their own, hoping to mirror the right's success at this game. All of which means that honest debate, bipartisanship and, hence, governance become close to impossible.

I would put it somewhat differently. "Left" and "right" have lost much of their Cold War coherence and have been replaced not with more meaningful intellectual or cultural categories but with "Democrat" and "Republican." That suits two constituencies: 1) People seeking entertainment. 2) People seeking election. TV shows like Crossfire and all those bestsellers by partisan provocateurs (and provocateuses) serve both.

In reality, Washington's "right-wing" think tanks offer plenty of intellectual diversity (including a range of intellectual quality and integrity, sometimes within the same organization). You just won't see that diversity reflected in television bookings. There, as in party politics, the goal is predictability and message discipline. The lack of "honest debate" and "bipartisanship" isn't a bug; it's a feature. And it will remain a feature until a political crisis sends one or both parties looking for policy entrepreneurs or until media patrons decide that intellectual exploration and genuine debate are more interesting than talking points. In the meantime, the long-term debate will take place offstage.

Yesterday I walked out my front door at around 2:30 to do some errands and came back a couple of hours later. The door looked like this:

Someone had jimmied the steel door open enough to break the locks. Fortunately, nothing was taken, probably because the would-be robbers were scared off by the tweeting of the alarm system. (The alarm itself was not set at the time.) We got off easy, but coming home to a break-in was a scary experience, especially since Steve is teaching night classes this term. I was pretty shaken.

And it was a big hassle. I couldn't leave the house yesterday, and I spent this morning with a locksmith, who replaced the broken lock with a high-security Medeco deadbolt that seems screwdriver-proof. At least the steel door means we didn't have to buy a new door as well. Since Dallas is crime-ridden, and property crimes are a low priority, the police took only a phone report.

By selecting points of distinction, Kerry's campaign does, however, largely define what "Bush" and "Not Bush" mean. The election isn't a referendum on Bush's wetlands policies or his view of U.S.-Mexico relations. Nor is it about such hot-button issues as immigration or gay marriage, for the simple reason that John Kerry hasn't made a big deal of these topics and has generally sought to blur any distinctions between himself and Bush.

It's primarily about three questions, in order of priority:

1) Does George Bush have the right temperament to be president? Is he a strong, decisive leader? Or is he close-minded and afraid to listen to disagreements or admit mistakes? Is he a focused manager who chooses his priorities and sticks to them? Or is he a dimwit who can't keep up with more than a few issues? Is his religious faith a plus or a minus? Is he too confrontational at home and abroad? Does he give you the creeps? That last question may be the most important of all.

2) Is the war in Iraq right or wrong? You can complicate this question by adding nuances about exit strategies, troop levels, or the broader strategy of preemptive attack. But those nuances won't decide the election, nor will they be the focus of post-election analysis.

3) Is Bush too friendly to corporations and rich people? Contrary to what you might think from reading some libertarian-leaning bloggers, John Kerry is not running against George Bush's extravagant new Medicare entitlement or his expansive domestic spending. He is running against "tax cuts for the rich" and prescription drugs without price controls. Voting for "Not Bush" means voting for "not enough domestic spending" and "not enough taxes on the rich."

By this reasoning, a Bush victory will be interpreted as public approval (a majority's, at least) of his executive style and personality, of the war in Iraq, and of his economic policies, particularly the tax cuts. A Kerry victory will be interpreted as public rejection of Bush's temperament, of the war in Iraq, and of his tax cuts and of his pro-business (and in some cases pro-market) policies.

You've probably received a thousand of these, but the Opener script discussed on MacInTouch doesn't replicate, so it's not a virus. It might be part of a Trojan though--be careful of what you install. MacInTouch reported only one instance so far.

And here's one that hurts, from Sean Gilligan:

Love your writing (on non-tech topics) [ouch--vp]! Opener is a "root kit" and is only useful after you have taken control of a machine with a virus or other method. At least for the time being, OS X users do not have to worry about viruses.

At any rate, I'd rather have my OS X machine back and worry about Opener than stick with the old OS. Thanks to everyone who wrote to correct me.

Disputes over content related to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have been growing since August, prompting the popular reference site's administrators to warn users last month that election-related entries may be the focus of "contention and debate," possibly diminishing their neutrality.

Wikis like Wikipedia are web sites that encourage users to share information by allowing them to freely write and edit content.

Wikipedia community members held an online town hall meeting last month to try to solve the disputes over the entries, to no avail. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's administrators are periodically "freezing" contentious pages--locking out any edits for brief periods of time. Since May, Wikipedia's Mr. Kerry entry has been frozen at least seven times, while its Mr. Bush page has been locked down almost as often.

Indeed, entries for Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have become the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia, said Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikipedia Foundation, which is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have created even more debate than entries for sex and religion. As of October 8, Wikipedia's President Bush entry had been tweaked 3,953 times. Its entry for Senator Kerry had been modified 3,230 times. By contrast, Wikipedia's article on Jesus has only been edited 1,855 times since the site's inception in 2001.

The whole article is here and includes an interesting chart of contentious Wikipedia entries.

I'm working on an article (not election-related) on the Wikipedia as a model of social organization. If you've got thoughts on the subject, or relevant experiences, please drop me a line.

In this context, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on whose board I serve has issued a useful statement reminding students and administrators of the principles involved.

In recent weeks, FIRE has seen a sharp increase in the number of inquiries regarding so-called "partisan" speech on campus. These inquiries have corresponded with reports of speakers being "un-invited" because college and university administrations feared that their speech would be "too partisan." For example, FIRE has received reports that the president of Florida Gulf Coast University cancelled a planned speech by Professor Terry Tempest Williams, fearing that Williams would be critical of President Bush's environmental policies. Similarly, California State University at San Marcos recently canceled a university-sponsored appearance by Michael Moore on the grounds that his speech would be "too partisan." FIRE has also received multiple requests from students asking us to intervene to prevent the use of student activity fee funds for politically-themed speeches.

It is deeply distressing and unfortunate that universities (and even students) are attempting to stifle political speech in the weeks before a Presidential election. If the First Amendment means anything at all, it means that speech must be free to influence the political process in this country. The founders of our nation considered the Bill of Rights essential because they recognized that true democracy would be impossible if one were not free to advocate political positions, whether they be mainstream, revolutionary, conservative, or anywhere else on the ideological spectrum. It is hardly an argument that speech should be censored because it might be used to change a person's point of view so close to an upcoming election. Speech often serves its greatest societal function when it is used to change minds through reasoned debate and discussion. The concern of college administrators should not be the maintenance of an artificially-imposed "balance" but instead the protection of open discussion, expression, and candor.

While various state and federal laws prevent public and private university officials from explicitly campaigning for or against candidates on university time or through the use of university resources, not all speech regarding a political candidate is considered unacceptable "partisan" campaigning. The U.S. Constitution puts profound limits on the ability of public university administrators to suppress student-sponsored speech, even if that speech explicitly and purposefully endorses a political candidate.

Read the rest here.

FIRE does great work, and deserves your tax-deductible financial support. You can donate here (or find out how to do so offline). And each dollar you donate to FIRE's defense of free speech on campus will be matched one-for-one by the John Templeton Foundation, which has pledged a challenge grant of $100,000. Don't miss this great end-of-the-year philanthropic opportunity.

While deeply concerned about potential U.S. laws, I don't share this site's fear of international conventions without enforcement power. Their roundup (via Instapundit is, however, a useful reminder that this issue never goes away.

Meanwhile, thanks to Senate rules and constitutional checks and balances, cell-cloning remains legal in the United States. Although clinical applications are still far away, scientists at Harvard want to clone cells for basic research. From the Boston Globe account (reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

The cloning experiments proposed at Harvard represent the next step in the evolution of embryonic stem-cell research, a controversial field that has emerged as an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. The two teams want to use cloning to produce embryonic stem cells that precisely match the genetic material of patients with juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's disease and a range of other maladies.

Researchers believe that comparing the development of these cloned cells with healthy cells will give them a powerful new tool to study disease and possibly suggest new avenues for treatment.

Both teams are part of the recently formed Harvard Stem Cell Institute, set up by the university earlier this year to fund embryonic and other types of stem-cell research.

"This is exactly the kind of work that we envisioned for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute," said Harvard biologist Douglas Melton, the senior researcher on one of the teams. "We want new ways to study and hopefully cure diseases."

Background on the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is here.

An experimental vaccine can slash the risk that children will get malaria, apparently offering the first effective way to inoculate youngsters against one of the world's biggest, most intractable killers, researchers reported yesterday.

An eagerly awaited study involving 2,022 children in Mozambique, in east Africa, found the vaccine cut by one-third the likelihood of getting malaria and reduced by more than half the risk of developing serious, life-threatening cases of the disease.

"We're very excited," said Pedro Alonso of the University of Barcelona, who led the study. "This is the first conclusive evidence that a vaccine that can protect African children against malaria is possible."

While additional hurdles remain, if follow-up studies confirm the findings the vaccine could be available for widespread use within five years, marking the achievement of one of the most elusive goals in modern medicine. The effort to create a vaccine against the mosquito-borne parasitic killer has been marked by repeated failure....

The malaria parasite infects about 300 million people each year and kills between 1 million and 3 million, mostly children -- making it the most common infectious disease and among the top three killers. Although malaria has been largely eliminated from the United States and Europe, it remains a major public health scourge in the developing world. In Africa, malaria is the No. 1 killer of children younger than 5, claiming the life of one child every 30 seconds by some estimates....

Scientists have spent decades trying to develop an effective vaccine but have been repeatedly stymied, in part because of the complexity of the parasitic protozoan that causes malaria and its multistage life cycle. Experts had begun to wonder whether it would ever be possible to create an effective vaccine.

"Malaria has had a sense of hopelessness and intractability about it," said Melinda Moree, director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is promoting development of malaria vaccines with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "These results bring hope to us all that a malaria vaccine might at last be within our grasp."

Although the vaccine so far seems far less powerful than most childhood shots, researchers said it could prove more effective when tested in younger children, who need it the most. Even if it proves no more effective, it still would provide a powerful weapon.

Posted by Virginia at 10:18 PM