One of the Chinatown buses caught fire on the MassPike yesterday (check out the accompanying photo, which appears to be credited to one of the passengers). The article buries two of the best parts of the story at the end:
- Passengers were rescued when a state trooper "flagged down a Greyhound bus, whose driver took the stranded passengers to South Station." If Greyhound is smart, they'll launch an advertising campaign based on this one.

- "[A]s the fire intensified, [a passenger] said, [the driver] tried to run away by jumping over a steel barrier between the traffic lanes." Run away! This will work well in the Greyhound commercial ("Our brave bus drivers put passengers first!").

The title of this post is the conclusion that David Gerstman reaches after reading the conclusions of the EU's self-investigation of whether "European Union aid was diverted to fund Palestinian suicide bombers." I'm equally skeptical, noting that the Jerusalem Post also reports that the statement says:

"Some of the practices of the past, such as the payment of salaries to convicted persons or the financial aid given to the families of "martyrs" as well as the Fatah contributions by PA staff, are liable to be misunderstood and so to lead to allegations that the PA is supporting terrorism," it said.

"These issues should be raised with the PA."

The Israeli Foreign Ministry went even further, criticizing the report as a whitewash: "[t]here is specific, detailed, incontrovertible evidence that shows the contrary is the case." The belief that a commission like OLAF or the UN's (Volcker-led) internal Oil-for-Food investigation can release a public report condemning its own sponsor has never made much sense to me. It's one thing when the investigation is forward-looking, examining ongoing activity. But when it's a historical account and all the harms are in the past (conveniently, the PA has a new prime minister who everyone is crediting, right now at least, with cracking down on the PA's support for terror), it's all-too-easy for everyone to believe the only harm that can be done is to the organization's future interests.

That's the charitable view, of course. The other way to look at it is to believe that many in the EU believe that Palestinian terrorism is justified and intend to support it in the future. And that skepticism drives the organizational harms that whitewashing commissions always fail to recognize.

It appears that Orin Kerr has fallen for the Harvard faculty's preferred spin on the no-confidence vote. The spin? It's not that the faculty disagrees with him, or is uncomfortable with his public remarks. It's just, as the Crimson column that Prof. Kerr quotes says, "he's a schmuck."* I saw a similar sentiment voiced in a faculty interview on local TV yesterday.

The Crimson column uses this thesis to argue that the University should give Summers "three months" to undergo a personality transplant and "make nice" to the faculty, before facing a second no-confidence vote, with the expectation that he would resign if he loses.

The only problem with the "it's a personality conflict" is that it's not true. Oh, I won't deny that, by all accounts, Larry Summers is a pain-in-the-keister. He's not about to become Mr. Armed and Fabulous. But there are good reasons why David Bernstein and I think that one needs to resort to more-sophisticated explanations.

First, complaints about Summers' personality have been a steady drip. But they'll never boil over, or even affect most faculty members enough to care. He's the university president, not some department head. It's not like faculty members need to sit through a weekly meeting with him. The personality complaint sounds appealing when you think about "bosses you hate," in a regular job. But being the "boss" of tenured faculty isn't like that at all. When CEOs have cantankerous or abrasive personalities, the senior VPs don't get together and stage a revolt. Why? Because they don't have to put up with him on a daily basis like the secretaries do.

Second, the faculty knows the context in which this vote is being held. They're well-aware that their initial claims that Summers' remarks were outrageous (and their complaints about his positions on subjects like ROTC and divestment) have not been well-received in the media or by the public at-large. These are well-educated people, who are willing to risk negative public perceptions. The most plausible reason is some combination of a desire to actually fight for the left-wing causes they believe in and some visceral irrationality, driven by something more than a personality conflict.

In the end, the "he's annoying" rationale is a risky one for faculty (and other members of the university community) to promote, because it makes it more likely that President Summers will go. When he goes, those on the faculty who admit to the political motivations behind their actions will see it as a victory. And the public at-large will see it that way, too, even if the "spinners" prevail in some narrow community of intellectual elites.

P.S. I've self-consciously started a new post-chain on President Summers, as the last one had become unwieldy in length.


Update:I've cut an irrelevant chunk of this post (whining about Blogger), to keep it simple, as a reader has alerted me to this Robert Musil post with a more-sophisticated version of the same argument:

My contacts at Harvard - which include senior members of the science faculty - are adamant in insisting that President Summers' problems are mostly the result of what is seen by the faculty as constant, unprecedented meddling in departmental affairs, abuse of traditions and faculty input, and other serious managerial deficiencies. The political issues are a flashy side-show.

Musil goes on to argue that this represents the same character failure as the reaction to his gender speech, namely, the "[i]nability to understand the likely reactions to his acts."

Now, I can't claim to have had the same sort of conversations with senior Harvard faculty members that Musil recounts in his post. But I've heard secondhand (and, to be fair, thirdhand) accounts of several incidents of "meddling" and ignoring faculty opinion. It may be that only certain types of stories make it my way, but in most of these stories, the issues which faculty defenders are rushing to label as non-political had strong overtones of either politics or political-correctness to them. One of the faculty contacts quoted in Musil's post argues that Summers has overruled faculty "without providing cogent and well explained reasons." If the public responses to Summers' gender speech tell us anything, it's that we might hesitate before taking the word of the faculty on what constitutes "cogent and well-explained."

As I've written before, I don't think any one explanation will capture what's going on here. But a theory based on a power struggle can't dismiss the origins of that power struggle in substantive disagreements just because the faculty isn't monolithically Marxist.

Wondering what to toast for today's holiday? You could offer cheers to President Bush and Senator Kennedy for shunning Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. It's about time that Adams received the Yasser Arafat treatment from the White House. And it's good to see Sen. Kennedy on the right side of a foreign policy issue. Mark Steyn has a good column placing this in the larger context:

When President George W. Bush declared his "war on terror" after September 11, most of us assumed it was a euphemism. As the eminent British historian Corelli Barnett endeavored to explain: "It is misleading to talk of a 'war on terrorism'... You cannot in logic wage war against a phenomenon, only against a specific enemy."

But it seems the president begs to differ... when he sees Adams, he gets him – which is more than can be said for the British and Irish governments.

Of course, not everyone agrees. At least three Massachusetts congressmen plan to meet with Adams anyway. I'm glad to see that our local repersentative, Michael Capuano of the 8th District, doesn't appear on that list.

So Happy St. Patrick's Day and enjoy your Guinness (or Patrick Belton's Guinness brownies, if you're adventurous).

I already posted a comment to David's post below to the news story on the Summers no-confidence vote outcome. After reading John Hinderaker's comment that "Summers is liberal, but not, apparently, liberal enough," I remembered this thought, sparked by the Paul Krugman/Joe Klein face-off on "Meet the Press."°

We've heard all sorts of reasons for the antipathy between President Summers and the Harvard faculty: particular policy issues (divestiture, tighter academic standards), general political views (liberal vs. far-left), clashes of personal style. Here's a possible contributing element: post-Clinton backlash. Think about the expectations that Harvard faculty members must have had when President Clinton was elected. Liberal, Rhodes Scholar, policy wonk. When reelected, he became the first twice-elected Democratic president since FDR, right? And that big-government health care plan with pages of academic detail wrapped around socialist ideals. And think about the letdown. Six years of triangulation, after 1994. Incremental policy initiatives. Treaties like Kyoto and ICC signed, sure, but submitted for ratification? Even after the left rallied to save him from his weaknesses, again and again. I just wonder whether, in addition to the aforementioned reasons, Larry Summers hasn't been caught in an anti-Clinton (Bill) backlash. Summers has the close association with the most moderate parts of the Clinton years, and he's a target that's well within reach.

Yes, it's a bit of a stretch. But perhaps it explains why Summers' critics seem to have the sort of venom we've only usually seen when President Bush and Judge Starr are mentioned.

In the post I linked above, Hinderaker also writes that "[o]f the educational institutions with which I have been associated, the one for which I have the least affection is Harvard." I'll go one step better: I'm willing to say that there's no school (in the United States) to which I've dedicated an hour's thought for which I have less affection. President Summers has his work cut out for him if he hopes to move the university to the point where I might think about making a donation.


°For those who missed it, here's the relevant part:

Krugman: I dread the prospect of a Clinton run just because I think that would be--it would be an attempt to recreate the politics of the '90s when you had Bill Clinton, who was a president who managed to sort of triangulate. And I think we ought to have an election that's really about what what kind of country we're going to be and we won't have that if it's Hillary Clinton running.

Klein: Paul, I have a question for you: What was it about the peace and prosperity of the eight years of the Clinton administration that you didn't like?

Update: David Bernstein, meanwhile, thinks this was a vote against President Bush:

The far left at Harvard is extremely frustrated with political trends in the U.S. Their votes and activism against Bush were not only completely ineffectual, but they don't even have a Democratic governor in one of the most liberal states in the country. So they pick on the closest thing Harvard has to a powerful right-winger: moderate Democrat and university president Larry Summers, who becomes a stand-in for all evil conservative white men, from Bush on down.

Maybe. His theory certainly has the virtue of explaining why the vote against Summers was much stronger than people expected - over 50%, rather than just 1/3 or so. I'm willing to attribute the unexpected boost to anti-Bush feelings. But even in 2004 and earlier, when almost everyone on the faculty believed that a.)President Bush was "never elected", and b.)that he would be defeated in 2004, that 1/3 or so already exhibited intense animosity towards Summers.

Ex Parte reader Mike points out this tidbit in an article in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette on 2L Lauren Willig's romance novel: the book has risen to "No. 21 on Barnes & Noble's list of best-selling hardcover adult fiction books for the week ending Feb. 20." Pretty impressive. Maybe now when Eugene Volokh plugs student writing, you'll listen, although I'm sure "The Secret History of the Pink Carnation" isn't exactly what he has in mind.

Besides being aware of license-plate cameras at Logan, Ex Parte readers with cars in Cambridge should be aware that Cambridge is raising its parking fines, effective April 1.

Those $15 expired-meter tickets go to $20. Forgot to renew your resident sticker? That'll be $30, up from $15. Parking in front of a hydrant? To $50, from $25.

It's a smart move by Cambridge. Maybe now they'll be able to provide their enforcement officers with hot coffee.

You go away for a week, and it can take a long time to work your way through the madness in just one issue of the Boston Globe. On Sunday, the paper reported on Logan Airport's new, high-tech parking technology:

The Logan system relies on old and new technologies and a bit of old-fashioned shoe leather. When a car enters a garage, a camera snaps a picture of the vehicle's license plate and, using optical character recognition, feeds the license plate number and time of arrival into a database.

On a nightly basis, airport employees fan out on foot to the various garages to conduct a vehicle inventory. Using handheld devices, they input into the same database the license plate and location of each car in each garage...

[A]bout 20 to 25 people a day fly into Logan and can't remember where they parked their vehicles.

With the new system, officials can quickly locate any vehicle that has been parked overnight. Car locations are also automatically printed on parking receipts issued at kiosks inside the terminals.

Logan's system also can thwart parking fraud and auto thefts. Massport can now verify how long a vehicle has been parked in the garage, even if the driver says he lost his parking ticket. The system also photographs license plates of cars leaving the garage and automatically checks to make sure the exiting car and parking ticket match the ticket and car that entered.

The system also features illuminated overhead signage in the garage that informs drivers of which rows have parking spaces available — a system similar to that employed at Baltimore's BWI airport for the past few years.

Makes parking easier. Helps drivers find lost cars. Prevents auto theft. What could be the problem? Of course:

David B. Liroff, the chief technology officer at WGBH, had a Big Brother moment recently when he flew into Logan International Airport after a business trip.

He paid his parking bill at a kiosk inside the terminal and discovered that his receipt not only showed how much he had paid but the precise location of his car (Level 4, Row 8Q)...

''I should have a right to be an 'educated consumer' so I can make an informed decision for myself about the personal trade-offs in each situation," he said.

Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said Massport should have a privacy policy in place. ''They need to tell you how they're using that information," she said.

Ah, the informal alliance of public broadcasting and the ACLU. If it collects information, the ACLU must be against it. In this case, however, it seems to just be reflexive. First, as the Massport spokesman in the article points out, this system is gathering data on cars, not people. It seems clear that people don't have Fourth Amendment protections in their license plates (cf. New York v. Class, 475 U.S. 106 (1986) ("[I]t is unreasonable to have an expectation of privacy in an object required by law to be located in a place ordinarily in plain view from the exterior of the automobile."). Moreover, the people parking at Logan Airport are headed into an airport, where they will voluntarily give their names, financial information, submit to searches, etc. to be able to fly. The question of whether they can keep track of your car's license plate is minor. For that matter, since several of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center parked in the Logan Airport garage, there are probably (this is just speculation here, folks) facial-recognition programs attached to the surveillance cameras in that same garage right now.

At least they're not demanding that Massport turn off the license-plate readers, just that they provide you with a "privacy policy" — so you can, what, turn around, leave the garage, and avoid taking your flight? Asking for a privacy policy sounds innocuous, but to create any reasonable consumer choice here, they'd have to allow parkers to individually opt out of the license-plate recognition system. Massport has a near-monopoly over parking at Logan Airport, and anyone who has taken the Blue Line to the airport and seen the gorgeous new T stop, then endured the interminable wait for a bus and the lengthy bus trip recognizes that public transportation provides no real alternative, either.

I'm picking on the ACLU, but we all do this - liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike (or, as Dee would put it, "extremists alike") - staking out a familiar position without regard for the merits. Me, I look forward to pulling into the Logan Airport garage (as soon as I graduate and can afford to avoid the Blue Line again), and knowing that it'll be hard for anyone to drive away with my car.

This quote caught my eye in a Boston Globe story on the added complexity same-sex couples face in filing tax returns:

Many same-sex couples are, for the first time, turning to professionals to prepare their taxes. Watertown financial planner Debra Neiman is warning gay clients to expect more cumbersome and expensive tax returns this year. She may charge up to twice her standard fee of $250 to $350, due to the extra work. "It's the price you pay to change civil rights," she said.

Now that Homer has married everyone in Springfield, it looks like he can make another mint doing their taxes.

You did realize that the number of ships in the U.S. Navy has diminished by over half - in just fifteen years. In 1991, when President George "41" Bush was in office, the Navy reported a fleet size of 594 ships. As of last month, that had shrunk to just 289.

Well, the pirates have, targeting a methane tanker and a tugboat in recent days in the Straits of Malacca.

Is this a real connection? You bet. The world's oceans go unpoliced. They may not be lawless in theory, but outside the protection of blue-water naval ships, they are lawless in fact. Because of the United States' global interests in trade, and its willingness to aid ships operated by foreigners, the U.S. fleet has long served as the protectorate of world trade. While today's fewer ships may be more capable than those they have replaced, so far, we haven't found a substitute for numbers for preventing (and deterring) crimes like piracy.

And with construction of just four ships funded in the 2006 budget, it doesn't look like the pattern will change anytime soon.

In the proposed defense budget, we've taken care to think about how to ensure that we have the right capabilities to win the war against terrorism. But are we maintaining the other capabilities we need to ensure our security, and the security of foreign trade? And are we sure that we can separate the threat posed by pirates from that posed by terrorists?

Hat tip: Brent Anderson.