You know you're struggling as Defense Secretary when one of the prominent military websites, defensetech.org, begins calling you out on budgetary malfeasance.

From the site's main blog today:

Since the fall, Rumsfeld & Co. have been dipping into the Army's day-to-day funds -- like money for soldiers' paychecks -- and then daring Congress not to make up the difference with a second, "supplemental" pile of cash.

The tab comes due this Spring, Defense Daily reports. The Army needs $41 billion of that supplemental kitty by then, or else it is going to go broke, without cash left to pay G.I.s.

The rest of the post works out the math, but the point is simple: to ensure that congress had to pass their supplemental bill, the pentagon used funds congressionally-earmarked for soldiers' pay for other purposes.

Maybe I've been in Austria too long, but furchtbar is the word that springs to mind.

Of all the resonant photographs I've seen in the last few years, this picture, taken by Reuter's Ali Abu Shish after today's bombing in Hilla, has to be just about foremost among them.

What makes the photograph so affecting is the banality of the action it captures -- a street-cleaner sweeping the street -- juxtaposed with the sheer horror of what he is sweeping, which is literally a river of blood.

Whose lives is he sweeping away?

And how in the world did their bomber come to the point where he no longer cared?

Assuming you actually return to this site in the future, I expect you'll find one of my pet subjects to be economic and political development throughout Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa specifically.

In that regard, evidently the new book by Jeffrey Sachs, "The End of Poverty", is already having an impact: the International Herald Tribune concludes its massive, full-page editorial on African poverty today by reciting verbatim a key excerpt.

Whether or not people will listen remains an open question, but congratulations to the Tribune for having the courage to at least pass on the message. African development makes sense not only for the obvious moral reasons, but also for important economic and geo-political ones as well.

Glenn Reynolds, the conservative avatar of the internet, recently posted a brief notice about the Plame investigation.

For those who have forgotten about Valerie Plame, she's the CIA spy whose identity was published by columnist Robert Novak nearly two years ago. Since Plame's husband is Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who publicly contradicted President Bush's assertion that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa, the conspiracy theory goes that Plame was outted as retaliation for her husband's remarks.

What bothers me about the Glenn Reynolds post is that it falls into the trap of conflating two very separate issues. Whether a crime was committed in publicly publishing Plame's name is quite a different matter from whether two reporters, namely Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, ought to be jailed for failing to disclose their confidential sources after being subpoenaed.

Yet from reading Reynolds' post, which appears in full below, you would never know that:

PLAME UPDATE: Tom Maguire observes:

There is nothing like the prospect of an imminent hanging to concentrate the mind; apparently, the prospect of having one of their reporters go to jail for eighteen months has concentrated the minds of the NY Times editors on the legal subtleties of the Valerie Plame leak investigation.

Shockingly, the leak may never have been a crime! And thus does the NYT catch up to a theory that has been circulating on the blogosphere for a year. As I've said before where the Times is concerned, better late than never!

If you actually read the Times' editorial in reference here, you would be quite aware that Maguire and Reynolds are horribly mangling two widely disparate subjects.

And I wonder, too, whether Reynolds would be this glib about the naming of a covert operative if the operative were a staunch conservative and the reporter a liberal. Regardless of political affiliation, the matters at hand -- only national security and the freedom of the press -- deserve more respect than that.

I've gotten a few emails about the Summers controversy from former classmates, and even a few from some friends who have returned there.

The general consensus seems to be that regardless of what he actually said, he rather gravely confused his various professional roles. Bear with me as I explain.

In general, President Summers has three occupational personas: the professorial persona, the administrative-presidential persona, and the public-presidential persona.

The first is, clearly, an academic one. In this role, Summers can speak on economic matters with the full authority of someone who is widely revered in his field, has held a rather staggering array of professional positions (including Secretary of the Treasury), and in essence is one step shy of being an academic god. Thus the professorial Summers can say more or less whatever he wants, because as radical or provocative as his views may be he has the track record to back them up.

Summers' second role, the administrative-presidential, is to lead and to attend to the internal dynamics of the university. In this role, he is to fulfill the mandate set by the board when he was tapped to be president. Here too he can be provocative, because he has the authority of the board behind him and the board as much as said that they chose him precisely because he had such a domineering personality.

His third role, however, is to be Harvard's face to the outside community. Here Summers can most decidedly not be provocative. In this role he is not to air his own personal views but to present the views of the university itself. Consequently, he can only be radical or incendiary if the consensus within the university already is so.

The mistake Summers made was to speak as an academic to a party that had invited him as a university president. In addressing the audience as a university president, he should have done no more than rehash the standard views espoused by members of his university's faculty.

The conclusion this leads to is that if in fact Summers' invitation to speak urged him to be provocative, then he should never have accepted the invitation. He was invited as president of Harvard University to an event outside of the Harvard community, and being provocative is not a part of his public presidential role.

Perhaps I'll get into what he actually said later. But before any arguments themselves there is always context, and it's patently disturbing that such a prominent figure should have so erroneously misconstrued his own.

Anyone looking for examples of courage in the contemporary world could do far worse than start with today's article in The New York Times about female politicians in Rwanda.

I actually met several women parlamentarians when I lived in Kigali for a month several years ago. Among them was Odette Nyiramirimo, who is quoted in the piece; like the others, the stories she has to tell leave you utterly dumbfounded. Not only because she displayed such courage in the past, but because in retelling them she seems so visibly determined to continue carrying that courage into the future.

Please read it if you get the chance.

All those who accuse Bush of being too dogmatic should look closely at his meeting yesterday with Putin.

For a supposed hard-liner, the event had compromise written all over it. As a gesture of his disapproval, Bush refused to meet Putin on Russian soil; yet as a gesture of goodwill, Bush refused to discuss political differences and stuck instead to areas in which American and Russian interests coincide.

No doubt many on both sides of the political aisle will undoubtedly disparage Bush's complaisance towards Russia, as either disgustingly hypocritical (indignant leftists) or unforgivably soft (idealist conservatives). Yet lost in such instinctive commentary is an irony which I think needs to begin getting a lot more attention in American public debate.

The irony I'm referring to is the stark discrepancy which has emerged between the dissimilarity of Russian and American public policy as compared with the analogous personas and administrative styles of Putin and Bush themselves. Never mind that the former is overtly dismantling his country's democratic architecture, while the other has made a past-time of spouting utopian rhetoric about the glories of constitutional democracy; the fact remains that each aspires to as much direct control as possible over both their own public image and, more importantly, the government at-large.

The disturbing implication here -- which is why I'm so concerned about the discrepancies above -- is that on a personal level, Putin is likely the European leader Bush relates to best and perhaps even trusts the most.

A good friend of mine just interviewed Reverend Cecil Murray, who was a pastor in LA for 27 years and is now a visiting professor at USC.

The whole transcript is great, but I found this particularly relevant and articulate:

I think the beauty of America has always been its debate forum where people are free to set options on the table. The ugliness is when one side takes the stick and becomes a bully force rather than a moral force, or an intellectual force. And it's even worse when the side that takes the stick, takes the religious stick. So here you have the bible in one hand and a stick in the other hand and you are certain that your way is the only way. That your way is "God's way." And that you can bully or condemn anyone with any other way. That's when debate becomes disaster. We're flirting with that right now with what has come to be known as "right wing conservative religion." The separation of church and state are not an option with our democracy, it is a necessity.

Why aren't more clergy and church leaders echoing this?

Or is it that they are -- Jim Wallis comes to mind -- but that the media are weary of moving away from the "religious = conservative" mentality?

Let the fun begin!