Casualties And Numbers

Have we been drastically under-estimating the number of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Bob Woodruff believes so. Money quote:

While the U.S. Department of Defense says that there have been about 23,000 nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq, Woodruff discovers — through an internal VA report — that more than 200,000 veterans have sought medical care for various ailments, including more than 73,000 diagnoses for mental disorders.

I’m not sure what the significance of these numbers are, but they bear looking into.

Does The Welfare State Kill Religion?

It’s an interesting hypothesis. If welfare states make church social services unnecessary, do churches cease to have a deep role in people’s lives/ Do they appear increasingly irrelevant to the poor? Here’s a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of a recent study on the subject. Money quote:

There’s a statistically significant relationship between a Christian country’s welfare spending as a percentage of GDP and the percentage of people in it who report attending church weekly, even when controlling for such variables as education and whether the country is Catholic or not. The weakness of the study comes not from its lack of data, but from flaws in how the variables are defined, failure to look for alternative explanations, and problems with individual case studies.

Blogger “Scalping”

I hadn’t heard this term before. Neither had Ann Althouse. Right-wing bloggers allegedly

pick a target and harass that person and his or her employer until the person either jumps or is pushed out of the public eye.

Marcotte is the alleged victim in this case. But isn’t the left just as guilty in hounding campaigns? Or are they too disorganized? Personally, I’m all for making life difficult for bloggers who have whored themselves out as paid propagandists for campaigns. But it’s always best just to expose ugliness and dishonesty, not punish it.

The Romney-Dobson Summit

The former governor of Massachusetts went on bended knee to Colorado Springs last week to kiss the ring of the man who controls the GOP base. He’s working hard to win them over. But the Christianist movement is not happy right now:

"I don’t think any of the three are remotely acceptable, and I don’t think I’m an outlier," says Michael Farris, a top Christian activist who organized meetings between Bush and evangelical leaders for his first presidential run. "Giuliani holds the opposite view of the Republican platform on social issues, Romney has held both sides of those issues, and McCain picked fights with us the last time he ran for president."

An early February meeting of the Council for National Policy, a club of powerful social conservatives whose members include Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, was thick with fretting over ’08. "I’ve never seen more disillusionment at this point in the election in 30 years," says a source close to the Council for National Policy, which prohibits members from discussing meetings with the media. "There’s a revolt out there, a feeling these top three are being pushed on us by Republican leadership in D.C."

The View From Baghdad

A mixed bunch of impressions from Mohammed – some encouraging, some less so. But his bottom line is that the "surge" should continue for a while:

Calling for halting the operation isn’t realistic and is of no good to us, I think asking for more judges and a bigger role for the judiciary in supervising the work of the military would’ve been a better demand; one that can really help the people.

I admire his optimism. But I see no evidence from his account that the surge isn’t cosmetic, almost impossible to do right, or aimed primarily at Sunni insurgents, while allowing the Shiite militias free rein, and a chill-zone in Iran while the U.S. helps Maliki fight Sunni terrorists. Don’t get me wrong: fighting these Sunni/al Qaeda forces is important and worthwhile. But it doesn’t solve the fundamental political problem that is the root of all the violence.