And the winner of the award for most pathetic, self-deluding spin goes to Joe Lieberman, who when he spoke to his supporters tonight was still convinced that his “Joementum” had carried him to a three-way tie for third place in the New Hampshire primary.

Even a politician should be able to do arithmetic better than that. Here are the results, which percentage-wise do not differ from where they stood when Lieberman made his claim to a third-place tie.

No wonder Lieberman told Gore to contest the 2000 election. He’s clearly incapable of accepting a political loss.

Wake up, Joe. You’ve got nomentum.

So for the first time in the Democratic campaign for president so far, I watched one of the debates from start to finish. How depressing.

John Edwards, a senator, doesn’t understand what the Defense of Marriage Act says but knows he would have voted against it.

Wesley Clark, a former general, didn’t have the common sense to say directly that Dubya wasn’t in fact a deserter, as claimed by celebrity endorser Michael Moore.

Al Sharpton, a disgusting human being pretending to run for president, clearly has no clue what the Federal Reserve Board is or does.

Kerry didn’t hurt himself, Dean didn’t help himself, and Lieberman did well in terms of debate points, but it won’t help him any.

And Kucinich?

As president of the United States I would lead this country on a new energy initiative. In the same way that President John F. Kennedy decided to bring the academic and spiritual resources of this country to have the United States reach the moon someday, I intend to have a very infinitely interesting journey to planet Earth.

Yeah, Dennis, let us know when you get here.

The above would probably not run as a headline in your local paper, yet the Chicago Tribune’s Metro section carried a story with a headline just as ridiculous: “Private schools can write own rules.”

“Many operate without scrutiny,” says the subhead to this story by Tracy Dell’Angela and Diane Rado, written in response to the closing of a small Chicago private school for fire code violations. The Loop Lab School obviously faced some scrutiny since it was shut down for not keeping up with code, a likely result of political pressure on the Chicago Fire Department after the E2 nightclub disaster.

But while the story begins with the pretense that parents have little reason to be assured of the physical safety of students in private schools, it quickly morphs into a diatribe against the lack of government regulation of private schools generally, including curricula.

To wit:

There is no state law that requires their teachers to be trained, college-educated or screened for criminal convictions. Private schools don’t have to have an established curriculum — or any curriculum at all. And while all schools must by law keep updated health and vaccination records on every student, government officials rarely try to verify this unless there is a complaint.

The only government inspections that are required at private schools have nothing to do with education — but rather cover fire and building safety codes.

The school, located on North Michigan Avenue, is derided in the story as merely a family-run business with 200 students enrolled and a $100 a week tuition, even though the only parent quoted in the story told the reporters, “I was pleased with what I saw, the way they handled the children.”

Non-parochial schools like my alma mater do seek accreditation from the Independent Schools Association of the Central States, as noted in the story, but about 800 parochial schools seek recognition from the Illinois Board of Education because, the reporters insist, it is a “selling point for private schools, because it suggests to parents that it has undergone the same scrutiny as a public school.”

Ah, yes. I’m sure that most parents in the market for a private school — already desperately seeking to pay twice (once in private tuition, once in taxes) just to get a decent education — want to be assured right off the bat that their child’s new school will be just as great as the government schools they are deserting.

But the process is flawed because it’s “voluntary and the state has no authority to impose public-school standards,” the reporters argue. Gee, if parents really wanted the great standards they’d come to expect from government-run schools, why would they essentially pay a double tuition to send their children to private schools?

“I really had no clue how they are run or what questions I needed to ask,” the Loop Lab parent said. “Even though I know private schools are different than public schools, I didn’t know they had that much leeway. … I just assumed there’s someone they have to answer to.”

Yes, there is someone they have to answer to — you! The government’s virtual monopoly over education in this country has gotten so bad that even some parents who take the initiative to opt out of the failing system don’t have the vaguest understanding of what it means for them to take an active role in choosing a school, and ensuring that it is responsive to their questions, concerns and recommendations.

That stunning development is what needs investigating, not how relatively little control politicians exert over private schools.

Dubya’s proposal for a “temporary worker program” for undocumented people isn’t perfect, but it’s a real step forward.

The closer we get to regularizing the immigration flow, the better off we’ll all be. We’ll be safer, more prosperous, and begin in a small way to live up to the promise of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus.”

Now we send the worst of mixed messages: come here to work for low wages at menial jobs, but don’t expect to open a checking account, build up credit, own a house, be able to travel home for the holidays, get a driver’s license, or be protected under the law.

Opponents of Dubya’s modest measure claim it rewards illegal acts. They confuse the law with morality. What’s illegal here? Sneaking across an artificial line to scratch out an honest living, to chase a dream?

That’s not illegal. That’s America. Love it or leave it!

Most of the entries for MoveOn.org’s Bush in 30 Seconds competition are so narrowly targeted toward the group’s leftist audience that it’s hard to imagine they’d be very persuasive to the middle-of-the-road voters who decide American elections.

I do think the best of the bunch is “Child’s Pay,” both in terms of artistry, production values and message. Check it out — low bandwidth, high bandwidth.

It is of course very good news that Saddam Hussein has been captured alive by U.S. forces in Iraq.

However, as Jesse Walker notes, the circumstances of the capture casts doubt on the notion that Hussein was somehow leading the resistance. Thus, while his capture is hugely symbolic, the anti-occupation guerilla warriors have already answered Dubya’s call to “bring it on.”

And they are unlikely to stop now that Hussein has been captured. I hope I’m wrong about that.

The big question is what, if any, useful information can be extracted from Hussein. Walker says nothing he says can be taken seriously, but interrogators have been able to glean good intelligence from Tariq Aziz and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, among others.

Will Hussein finally reveal the mystery of the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction? Why didn’t he open everything up to U.N. inspectors or work out a last-minute exile deal for himself and his family? Why didn’t he just skip the country during the chaos of the war?

Unfortunately, I think the answers to these questions won’t be self-serving but confused. Reports from top Hussein associates are that his mind had deteriorated badly in the last couple of years.

We shall see.

Last week, police discovered the bodies of three teen-aged boys encased in concrete in the Hammond, Ind., basement of David Maust. He has been charged with one count of murder so far.

Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn correctly notes that Maust “had no business being free given his criminal history. And the fact that he was is an outrage that should prompt a thorough round of soul searching about the priorities and practices of our criminal and military justice systems.”

Maust had previously been convicted twice of killing teen-aged boys. In 1974, Maust, then serving in the U.S. Army in Germany, tied a teen-aged boy to a tree and beat him with a wooden board until he was dead. Then he left the body in the woods after perfunctorily covering it up with leaves.

He served three years in federal prison for the crime.

In 1981, Maust was convicted of stabbing 15-year-old Donald Jones of Elgin, Ill., to death. He served 17 years for that crime. He was released in 1999 and may have other victims buried elsewhere.

“More than a dozen times David Maust found himself with either a knife or a rope in his hand, ready to kill a teenage boy he had lured with alcohol or drugs,” according to a diary Maust turned over the investigators in 1983 and which was excerpted in today’s Tribune.

Family members quoted in the Trib’s story weren’t surprised by Maust’s latest atrocities:

His stepmother, Rose Maust, said the man she once remembered as a cute little boy should be locked up forever.

“I can’t believe he’s out on the streets, what’s wrong with our laws?” Rose Maust said from her Fredricksburg, Va., home. David Maust’s younger brother also believes he should never walk the streets again.

“It’s crazy that anyone let him out of prison,” Jeffrey Maust said. “He should have been put to death. … It doesn’t hurt me to say that. I believe my brother did more damage to other people’s lives and he should be put to an end.”

Even Maust, in his diary, had a good sense of the punishment he deserved:

I have ben thinking about Donald Jones a lot, and what I did to him on that Sunday, in August, and I have ben thinking about the bad thing I did in my life, and now I would like to have the death sentence, I would like to die. [sic]

Yet he was freed, repeatedly, after committing brutal murders and admitting in writing how close he came to piling up an even more monstrous record.

Illinois’ convicted murderers serve about 13 1/2 years in prison on average, according to state statistics.

Now there is talk of a “murderers registry” akin to the sex-offender registries widely used to keep tabs on criminals after they are released from prison.

But why is such a move even necessary? Zorn points to the real culprit:

As a society it seems we are so consumed with the idea of punishing offenders — including ever more youthful “adults” and those who find themselves somehow or another caught up in the web of illegal drugs — that we’ve lost focus on one of the key reasons we have prison system: incapacitation.

We lock up, or we should lock up, dangerous people for our own safety. And every reform and every dollar we can direct toward identifying sociopathic predators who simply can’t be trusted to walk among us will pay major safety dividends.

The discovery of the bodies of James Raganyi, 16, Michael Dennis, 13, and Nick James, 19, in Hammond comes hard on the heels of the apparent abduction and murder of University of North Dakota student Dru Sjodin, a story that seems to prove the same point.

The suspect in that case, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., 50, has prior convictions for rape, attempted kidnapping and aggravated assault, and was such a manifest threat to others that his own sister reportedly pleaded with police to keep tabs on him.

One of the problems with one-size-fits-all and mandatory sentencing is that it looks too much at the crime and not enough at the criminal. So hapless, nitwit accomplices to stick-ups gone wrong, septuagenarians who committed murder in their teens and others who are at worst a minor threat stay locked up while human monsters cycle through the system.

It’s dumb and it’s deadly.

Here’s an idea for a comprehensive violent offender registry that actually works: the prison roll. We know where they are, who they are, why they’re there and most importantly we know that they can no longer hurt anyone on the outside.

Twenty percent of those held in the 50 state prison systems in 2001 were there for drug offenses, and due to federal mandatory-minimum sentencing guidelines, they are held there for grossly extended periods of time — often longer than the time actually served by murderers and rapists.

“I just hope nobody will make fun of me because of what I said in this statement, because it is not funny,” Maust concluded in his 1983 diary. “I wish I did not have to tell anybody about this.

“And I only blame myself.”

For the crimes Maust committed, no one else should be blamed. But for the repeated opportunities our system gave David Maust to commit this heinous series of murders, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Dubya & Co. seemed to taking a page out of Da Mare‘s book when they awarded a $1.7 billion, no-bid, ongoing contract for Iraqi reconstruction work to Halliburton, which the veep used to run before re-entering “public life.”

But now they’ve really got the idea. Echoing Chicago-style practices of ensuring that political enemies (or simply apolitical types) don’t get their fingers on any government dough, the Pentagon announced it wouldn’t award any reconstruction contracts to companies whose countries that opposed the war in the first place.

It’s wonderful what a little war can do for the practice of good government.

It’s not every day someone proudly proclaims his love of busybody snitches. Leave that to a liberal like Chicago Tribune metro columnist Eric Zorn, who gives a merry “Ho, ho, ho!” to the nosy next-door neighbors in today’s column.

The city recently fined more than 1,000 drivers who did not have the required city sticker displayed on their cars. The ticket, the sticker and the late fee add up to $165 for these drivers who have traditionally avoided the fines by parking in private garages both at home and work.

Zorn cheers:

Heaven and nature might not be singing at the plight of those who’ve been skulking around from private garage to private garage trying to avoid paying the $75 annual sticker fee, but I sure am.

And knowing that calls from informants to 773-742-9217, the tip line at the clerk’s office, have lately increased from between five and 10 a day to approximately 40 fills me with great cheer.

Prompting the surge was a City Council ordinance passed last month authorizing law enforcement to search for sticker violators in nearly all privately owned parking garages. …

And all the surrounding publicity has inspired keen-eyed citizens to call 773-742-9217 — What? I already gave the number? Well, then I repeat myself–to offer suggestions to inspectors where to find mother lodes of violators.

It’s not that those without stickers are lawbreakers that’s making my days merry and bright. It’s that they’re freeloaders who for years have been taking a ride on the sleigh pulled by those of us who ante up and get our stickers and who have occasionally paid the “failure to display” fine when missing the deadline to install the new sticker.

Never mind the theoretical issue of fairness — ultimately, those who follow the law make up the shortfall caused by those who ignore it. If there were true justice in the system, authorities would cross-reference these new tickets with old vehicle registration, voter registration and tax records, then charge fees and fines dating back as far as the statute of limitations allows.

No tender and mild treatment for the wicked. Let ’em pay, let ’em pay, let ’em pay.

Never mind that the city sticker — or sucker sticker, as a friend of mine dubbed it — has no valid purpose and is simply a way to generate revenue. Gas is already taxed by Chicago and Cook County of 11 cents per gallon. If that is not enough to maintain the road infrastructure of the area (doubtful), then the gas tax should be increased.

The sucker sticker isn’t necessary for vehicle identification, of course. We have license plates for that, another $85, if I recall correctly. No, it’s not an easy pass to get you through the tolls faster. It doesn’t even verify that your car has passed the environmental inspection. It just sits there, with some kid’s ugly drawing on it (there’s a contest every year, see), and is impossible to scrape off the window, which you must do because it’s also against the law to put your new sticker above the old sticker, as that would make it too hard for the police to notice you’re scoffing the law.

And if you don’t buy the sticker, that’s a great opportunity for the city to make you pay yet again. All taxes deserve some “avoision,” as Kent Brockman put it, but this one’s a real stinker that ought to be reduced or scrapped altogether, not cheered on and enforced by busybodies like Zorn.

One last note. While the conceit is that mostly the well-to-do who park in private garages are being hit by this stepped up enforcement of the sucker sticker, this is yet another unnecessary tax that everyone has to face, and it obviously has a disproportionate impact on the poor folks liberals like Zorn claims to care so much about. He should be explaining how the city’s cronyism and wasteful bureaucracy make taxes like this necessary — that’s what a real journalist would do, anyway.

I guess it’s OK if a few families have to pass on toys for the kids this Christmas, so long as the busybodies can feel good about themselves.

American conservatives who fret that God has been taken out of the public square ought to take a look at what is happening in France right now, where leaders in parliament have called for a ban of any visible religious symbol in the schools there.

Meanwhile, supposed defender of Muslim sovereignty French President Jacques Chirac said in a speech that the head scarves and veils Muslim girls wear to school “ostentatious signs of religious proselytism” that are “aggressive” in nature.

The focus in the United States is, as it should be, on ensuring that the government does not endorse or establish any particular religion or religious expression. France wants to rid public life of any religious expression, period. Muslims here may be targets of counter-terrorist snoops, and they may be deproted just for registering with the government, but at least their daughters can wear their scarves to school.

Whatever actually happened in the ambush at Samarra, the U.S. military’s newfound love for enemy body counts should be disturbing to everyone, for or against the Iraq war.

“We’ve been killing and capturing bushels of these guys, but no one was talking about it,” one senior military officer told a Los Angeles Times reporter. “For a while there it was beginning to look like only Americans were being killed.”

An obsession with what things “look like” is beginning to opress all facets of the Iraq occupation. Touting enemy-kills in a war defined by the asymmetric nature of the opposing forces is beyond useless. And given the difficulty of differentiating between the warriors and the noncombatants, the numbers will be grossly overinflated and tragically overlook the real impact on Iraqi civilians of the occupation.

Here are some figures that do matter in evaluating the success of the occupation:

• Is the number of daily attacks going up or down?
• Is the unemployment rate going down?
• Is the number of well trained Iraqi police going up?
• Is the number of U.S. troops going down?

U.S. forces have been put in a very tough position. Do we really want “Kill as many as you can” to be publicly defined as part of their mission in Iraq? It’s bad for morale, it’s bad for the occupation, it’s bad for average, innocent Iraqis.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)

The Democrats may feel they’ve been steamrolled by the GOP on the ginormous Medicare prescription-drug bill, but the Republicans are the ones who are truly lost.

What a stunning role reversal — well, it would be stunning if weren’t so damned predictable. Senate Democrats overwhelmingly vote against the biggest expansion of the welfare state in nearly 40 years, while the GOP rams it through and Dubya twists every arm to make sure it goes his way.

Supposedly it will cost $400 billion over 10 years, but that’s a vast understatement of the actual costs, as Doug Bandow points out:

Any legislator who takes fiscal responsibility seriously should be particularly concerned about the latter. Pegged at a ten-year cost of $395 billion, the real increase in the government’s presently unfunded liability will be several trillion dollars: Estimates ranged from $6 trillion for the House bill to $12 trillion for the Senate measure, with the compromise likely falling somewhere in between. The latter number is 40 percent of Medicare’s current projected future red ink.

Nor does anyone take the $395 billion figure seriously; if a private company offered that estimate, its officers would be headed for jail. For one thing, that number stops before the baby-boomer wave starts retiring, after which costs will explode. Leonard Burman of the Urban Institute projects the second decade’s costs will run $1 trillion, and even that figure, given current cost trends, “is likely to be an underestimate,” he says. But why should today’s elected officials worry? Many will be out of office when Medicare’s fiscal house collapses.

It’s OK, though. The Republicans stand for “freedom,” so a victory for them must be a victory for liberty. I should get that through my thick head already.

I keep mistakenly thinking that in the end principles don’t amount to much compared to the lure of political power. Silly me.

The only bright spot that could be found in any of this is that, along with the good economic news, whoever the Democratic presidential nominee is will have to lean heavily on foreign affairs in attacking Bush. Right now, that’s where he seems to be most vulnerable, and that’s where the Democratic nominee is most likely to have something of value to say.

It’s a long shot, perhaps, but what else have we got?