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Mark Steyn says since so many of Hollywood’s anti-war flicks are box office bombs, maybe Mel Brooks is involved.

We’re all familiar with the famous plot of Mel Brooks’ The Producers: A wily impresario figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop musical, Springtime for Hitler. To date, Brooks has got a film and a show and a film-of-the-show out of this inspired idea. But, if he’s minded to go to the well a fourth time, he might like to modify the plot and make it the tale of a wily filmmaker who figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop anti–Iraq War movie.

Mark Cuban and Brian De Palma’s Redacted is not exactly Springtime for Saddam, but its flopperooniness is something to marvel at. In its first three weeks, the movie earned $60,456 at the box office. Which would be a disappointing take for your cousin’s summer-stock production of Brigadoon in a leaky barn theater in Maine, but is apparently a respectable haul for an award-winning motion picture ballyhooed for weeks on end in the national press. “The film traffics in, and clearly means to provoke, strong, unbalanced emotions,” declares A. O. Scott in his review for the New York Times. The strongest unbalanced emotion it provokes is a powerful visceral urge to say, “Well, I was thinking of going to the movies this weekend, but I figured I’d stay home and wash my hair.” …

David Warren has more Steyn defense.

… These days in Canada, if you’re feeling down and blue, and you think somebody hates you, you bring your case to a human rights tribunal. And the people you think hate you get that knock on the door, celebrated in the literature of the Soviet Gulag, and wherever else ideology triumphed over humanity in the 20th century’s painful course. Your daddy, your mommy, your brubber, or more likely some newspaper pundit gets dragged before a committee of smug, left-wing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators. After long delays that are costly only to the defendant and the taxpayer (justice delayed is justice denied), you will have the satisfaction of making your enemy squirm, in a kangaroo court where he is stripped of the right to due process, in which there are no fixed rules of evidence, in which the “judges” make up the law as they go along, and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations. …

 

… But to paraphrase the late Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the redneck trolls, and I did not speak out because I was not a redneck troll. Then they came for the male chauvinist pigs, and I did not speak out because I was not a male chauvinist pig. Then they came for Mark Steyn, and I did not speak out because I was not Mark Steyn. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.” …

Some shorts from John Fund.

Don Boudreaux thinks “sweet land of liberty” means petty local tyrants don’t get to run our lives.

… I’ve always understood the boast that America is a “sweet land of liberty” to mean that we Americans — each of us, individually — value our personal space and will tolerate no interference with our individual choices by anyone. As long as I accord others the same rights, I am free to do as I please. That, at least, is the ideal to which Americans traditionally aspire.

According the same rights to others means, of course, that I’m not free to punch my neighbor in the nose (unless he punches me first), take my neighbor’s car without his permission or rape his wife and daughters. I refrain from inflicting material harm on him and he reciprocates. It’s a wonderful arrangement.

Within the boundaries of this arrangement, neither my neighbor nor I am free to dictate the ingredients of each other’s diet or, more generally, each other’s lifestyle choices. I might be convinced — and correctly so — that my neighbor’s habit of smoking, eating lots of salt-encrusted trans fat-laden foods and sitting for hour upon endless hour watching television will likely shorten his life.

I can try to persuade him to make more healthful choices. But that’s it. In a free society, if my neighbor chooses to trade off longer life expectancy for greater gustatory or decadent pleasures, so be it. He is a free man. …

Ilya Somin with yet another example of the war on drugs interfering with the war against fundamental Islamofascists.

National Review shorts.

December 16, 2007

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Mark Steyn has more comments on the folks who think we should have no children.

This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” – or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.”

Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time, and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare that it’s surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it. …

… Last year I wrote a book on demographic decline and became a big demography bore, and it’s tempting just to do an annual December audit on the demographic weakness of what we used to call Christendom. Today, in the corporate headquarters of the Christian faith, Pope Benedict looks out of his window at a city where children’s voices are rarer and rarer. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe. Go to a big rural family wedding: lots of aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas but ever fewer bambinos. The International Herald Tribune last week carried the latest update on the remorseless geriatrification: On the Miss Italia beauty pageant, the median age of the co-hosts was 70; the country is second only to Sweden in the proportion of its population over 85, and has the fewest citizens under 15. Etc.

So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world’s oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade. That’s worth bearing in mind if you’re an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it’ll be his mom and dad’s place. …

Bill Kristol says the Iowa dems might be giving us all a present soon.

…First there was Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife in Iowa, claiming falsely–manifestly and provably–that he had “opposed Iraq from the beginning.” Can’t we move on from rewriting history for the self-aggrandizement of the perennially needy former president?

Then there was the Hillary campaign press release attacking Obama for saying he hadn’t spent his whole life planning to run for president (unlike some other candidates). No! Das Hillary Apparat unearthed one Iis Darmawan, 63, “Senator Obama’s kindergarten teacher [in Indonesia].” She recalled that little Barack had written an essay in kindergarten, “I Want to Become President.” Gotcha!

This is not a joke. The Clinton campaign put out a press release on December 2 trumpeting this discovery. One notes, with open-mouthed wonder, the brazenness of Hillary Clinton’s criticizing someone else for ambition. One marvels at the mind-boggling triviality of this particular nugget mined by the legendary Clinton research operation. One also, incidentally, asks: Do kids actually write “essays” in kindergarten? About becoming president of the United States? In Jakarta? Can’t we move on from ridiculous Clintonian attacks?…

… It will be good for the country to be able to move on, sooner rather than later, from the Clintons and their brand of politics. If the Democratic primary electorate brings this about, THE WEEKLY STANDARD will be first to say something we are not accustomed to saying to the Democratic party–thank you.

Peggy Noonan with a good column on Iowa events.

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge.

The Republican race looks–at the moment–to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress. …

… I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I’m just not sure he’d be pure enough to make it in this party. I’m not sure he’d be considered good enough. …

… A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It’s all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he’s there, and he’s a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife’s fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the ’90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they’ll love seeing him back in the White House. So they’ll vote for Hillary. Because she’ll bring him. “Two for the price of one.”

It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don’t miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don’t actually want Bill back in the White House?

Maybe. But maybe it’s this. Maybe they’d love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don’t want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo’s Nest and they’d love having Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don’t miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come? …

Abe Greenwald thinks Slick Willie has lost his touch.

… Last night, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton grew red-faced and tense as he grasped to defend his wife. He complained that Senator Barack Obama has garnered media support, as if to suggest good press is the Clinton clan’s exclusive entitlement.

Clinton tried to be elusive about trashing Obama for his lack of experience, but the bitterness was front and center. …

George Will thinks it would be a good idea to paralyze the Federal Election Commission.

… The six-person FEC — three members from each party — enforces the rules it writes about how Americans are permitted to participate in politics. You thought the First Amendment said enough about that participation? Silly you.

The FEC’s policing powers may soon be splendidly paralyzed. Three current FEC members, two Democrats and one Republican, are recess appointees whose terms will end in a few days when this session of Congress ends — unless they are confirmed to full six-year terms.

Four Senate Democrats decided to block the Republican, Hans von Spakovsky. Republicans have responded: “All three or none.” If this standoff persists until Congress adjourns, the three recess appointments will expire and the FEC will have just two members — a Republican vacancy has existed since April. If so, the commission will be prohibited from official actions, including the disbursement of funds for presidential candidates seeking taxpayer financing.

Democrats oppose von Spakovsky partly because when he served in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department he overruled staffers in the voting section who wanted to block a Georgia law requiring voters to present a government-issued ID before voting, as Americans do before boarding airplanes, entering many buildings, renting movies, etc. Von Spakovsky’s critics say the law is a way of suppressing voting by poor, mostly minority, citizens. Eighty percent of Americans — racists all? — favor such laws. The Supreme Court probably will settle the issue in a case concerning Indiana‘s voter ID law. …

Michael Barone with a short on the GOP wins last week.

… The minority party often does well in special elections; a voter knows that his vote will not determine which party controls the House. The fact that Democrat Nikki Tsongas won by only 51 to 45 percent in the very seriously contested race in October in Massachusetts 5 (a 57-to-41 John Kerry district in 2004) was bad news for Democrats. This week’s results were not bad news for Republicans. Yes, Latta ran 4 points behind Bush’s 2004 percentage, but that’s not as much as the 6 points Tsongas ran behind Kerry’s 2004 percentage. To me this suggests that the low job approval rating for Congress poses more problems for Democrats than for Republicans in 2008.

Howard Fineman’s views on the campaign so far.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is teetering on the brink, no matter what the meaningless national horserace numbers say. The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is a fantasy, and she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina – probably to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now, in momentum terms, the Democratic frontrunner.

On the Republican side, meanwhile, the race is shaping up in an even more unexpected way: a contest between two former Northern moderates (Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney) for the right to take on a Southern Baptist preacher, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture but not in Darwinian evolution. …

The Captain notices more fabrication from Clinton. He also posts on USAspending.gov and defends the CIA against some of its critics.

… I have had a lot of criticism for the intel community, but in this case they have a real grievance. For three years after the 9/11 attacks, they got overwhelming criticism for their inability to “connect the dots” and stop the terrorist attack before it started. Some of that criticism was justified, but a lot of it related more to bureaucratic hurdles in allowing communication between law enforcement and intelligence agents, as well as interagency barriers that had long stood in the way of cooperative intelligence. Instead of addressing these issues, the 9/11 Commission surfed that wave of recrimination to establishing even more bureaucratic obstacles rather than streamlining intelligence.

The failure to connect the dots came from bureaucratic interference. Failure to collect dots came from a lack of resources and poor prioritization. In the case of the former, America demanded a much more robust effort to collect intel that could prevent another 9/11. The administration and its agencies responded with aggressive tactics that have prevented dozens of attacks and identified hundreds of terrorists abroad. For six years, despite the bloodthirsty appetites of our enemies, we have not suffered another attack on our soil, and not even one against our diplomatic or military assets around the world, save in Iraq.

What have we done to celebrate that success? We have newspapers like the New York Times exposing the programs that have kept us safe and that have identified and caught major terrorists before they could strike. We have people in Congress like Nancy Pelosi screaming for prosecutions against the agents and the administration for efforts she personally witnessed and to which she never objected until years later. …

NY Post editors defend Steyn.

… Of course, a ban on opinions – even disagreeable ones – is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the “crime” of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about. …

Division of Labour points to evidence polar bears will be able to take care of themselves.

Borowitz and Scrappleface are here too. Andy says Clinton revealed Obama was a bed wetter at 3 years old.

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It is little noticed now, but an Examiner editorial calls attention to an important change in DC. One that will help us get the government under control.

It’s not just another day in the nation’s capital. At 11:30 a.m., Office of Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., will throw the switch on a new landmark of government, USASpending.gov. Mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA), which was co-sponsored by Coburn and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., USASpending.gov is a searchable, Googlelike database that puts most federal spending within a few mouse clicks for every American. (Obama won’t be present at today’s activities because he is on the presidential campaign trail.)

Today is a milestone because, as President Bush noted when he signed FFATA into law Sept. 26: “We spend a lot of time and a lot of effort collecting your money, and we should show the same amount of effort in reporting how we spend it. … Taxpayers have a right to know where that money is going, and you have a right to know whether or not you’re getting value for your money.” Taxpayers can know because USASpending.gov brings federal spending into the Internet age. It’s the place to go, for example, if you’re interested in how much the government spent last year on “consultants” or the number of federal contracts given to the company owned by your congressman’s biggest contributor. …

… it may take a few years before the good effects of USASpending.gov are fully felt, but here’s fair warning to the old-school politicians who thrive on pork-barrel politics: It’s no longer just the dwindling ranks of the mainstream media covering the big spenders. Starting today, legions of citizens and professional watchdogs have access to an unprecedented amount of information and data on where tax dollars are going. And they’re all connected via the Internet. The pig roast with tax dollars as the main course is coming to an end.

Byron York writes about when waterboarding works.

About a year ago, I had dinner with a man who played a key role in the U.S. war on terror. The talk turned to allegations of torture. He said that our policy should be that we do not torture. And we should adhere to that policy. Unless, that is, a truly special situation comes up and we decide that we have to violate that policy in an extremely narrow set of circumstances.

Then, we explain what we did — by that, I think he meant the executive branch would be open with members of Congress — and move on. What he couldn’t understand was the determination, on the part of some lawmakers, to pass a law that would deal with any and all situations in the future. It’s just not possible. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld tours the ideas floated about the CIA.

Boston Phoenix wonders if Huck is the new Jimmy Carter.

For the past 25 years or so, Republicans have made Jimmy Carter and his presidency one of their favorite punching bags — the modern equivalent of what the Democrats did to Herbert Hoover two generations ago. “Look what happens when you nominate someone without much experience, who comes out of nowhere,” they’ve said. Or, “He was just a little too odd or unconventional to be an effective president.”

Now, though, the Republicans may want to keep their opinions of Carter (for whom I worked in the 1976 presidential campaign) to themselves. That’s because if they nominate Mike Huckabee — who this past week was unexpectedly leading the field in at least one national GOP poll and in Iowa — they’re going to be lining up behind someone who looks awfully similar to their bête noir. If nothing else, Carter’s experience as a candidate in 1976 may provide the Republicans a convenient handbook on what’s likely to happen to Huckabee as the campaign progresses. …

Professor Bainbridge lays out the case against Mike. Says if he’s the pick, we’re Hucked.

In my continuing quest to decide which (if any) of the GOP candidates to support in the 2008 Presidential primaries, we come back to the case of Mike Huckabee. I’ve joked in the past about never giving Hope, Arkansas, another chance at the presidency, but more serious and substantial reasons for eliminating Huckabee have now become apparent. Here’s a few in no particular order: …

The Captain posts on the Clinton campaign.

… No one practices the politics of personal destruction like the Clintons. The difference now is that Hillary has proven so ineffectual as a candidate that they have to push harder than normal to get the message out. It also explains the sudden and mystifying meltdown that occurred after the November debate when Hillary got caught switching positions on illegal alien drivers licenses. She proved incapable of containing the damage, and so the campaign panicked and started lashing out in all directions as a distraction, using material they had previously kept for whispering-campaign use. …

… We all watched in amazement as Howard Dean melted down in the snows of January 2004, in Iowa and New Hampshire. Dean, however, was a novice on the national stage. The Clintons are supposed to be grand masters of politics, and their meltdown thus far is far more compelling — and far more revealing of their character.

News.com from Australia says get yourself out in the sunshine.

PEOPLE should sit outside in the middle of the day to help stave off potential deadly medical conditions, an Australian researcher says.

Current recommendations about when people should be exposed to the sun the most were wrong and did not allow people to get enough vitamin D, according to David Turnbull, a research fellow at the University of Southern Queensland’s Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health.

Vitamin D, when absorbed through the skin from UV rays, has been found to help prevent various cancers, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. …

Remember Kelo? That was when New London condemned land for transfer to developers. So how has that worked out? Ilya Somin posts in Volokh.

When the Supreme Court upheld the condemnation of private property for transfer to other private parties in Kelo v. City of New London, it was in large part on the theory that courts should defer to local governments’ judgments about when the use of eminent domain is needed to promote “economic development.” However, two and one half years after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city and some seven years after the condemnation proceedings were first initiated, little or no economic development has occurred on the condemned land. …

… If the Kelo condemnation ultimately ends up creating more economic costs than benefits, that would not be a surprising development. For reasons I have explained in great detail in several articles (e.g. here and here), economic development takings often harm local economies more than they benefit them. …

… What is striking about the Kelo takings is that this pattern held true even in a case where intense nationwide media scrutiny was focused on the local government and its chosen developer. The Day also deserves credit for providing some excellent local coverage of the controversy. In more typical cases, where there is much less media attention, local governments have even less incentive to actually produce the “economic development” that supposedly justified condemnation in the first place.

Daily Mail says the Pope is a globalony skeptic. What will Al say?

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. …

Fox News reports on the holes in the globalony theories.

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate “models” — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions. …

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In a Hill op-ed, Ron Christie says the polls are so yesterday, and lists some of W’s recent wins.

Recent polls placing President Bush’s approval numbers near 30 percent miss an important distinction: The policies and positions the president has advocated since 2001 have led to significant results in recent days. In short, the presidency of George W. Bush is surging, rather than waning, with little more than one year remaining in his term.

On the domestic front, the tax cuts the president pushed through the Congress have led to remarkable economic growth, low unemployment and record-high tax receipts that members of Congress can hardly wait to spend. New data released last week showed that America added 94,000 jobs in November 2007 — capping a remarkable 51 straight months in which jobs have been created in our economy. Despite partisan claims that the economy is soft, more than 8.3 million jobs have been created since August 2003 and unemployment remains low (4.7 percent). America remains open for business. …

Claudia Rosett says the UN is about to do a rerun of the 2001 trash America and Israel conference in Durban.

In its abuse of American taxpayer dollars and trust, the United Nations has come up with many creative projects over the years, ranging from terrorist schoolhouses in Gaza, to procurement fraud, to per diems for pedophiliac peacekeepers. Now, the U.N. is on the brink of channeling millions in U.S. funds to pay for an encore of its notorious America-bashing, Israel-trashing conference held six years ago in Durban, South Africa.

That U.N. jamboree, which opened in late August, 2001, was supposed to be all about the worthy cause of ending racism. Instead, it turned into such a frenzy of despotic and Islamofascist hatred, targeting America and Israel, that both countries walked out. A few days later, those events were overshadowed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States — hijackings driven by the same kind of hate stoked at the Durban conference.

Instead of saying “never again,” the U.N. is now preparing a repeat performance, which has acquired the nickname of Durban II. Masquerading as a “review” of Durban I, it is already shaping up as another hate-fest. Among the prime planners of this pow-wow are the despotisms of Libya, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

Stuart Taylor wonders about the efficacy of the Clinton camp’s complaints about Obama’s honesty.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?

The irony of her potshots at Barack Obama’s character has hardly gone unnoticed. Nor has the idiocy of her December 2 press release breathlessly revealing that “in kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President.’ ” This, the Clinton release explained, gives the lie to Obama’s claim that he is “not running to fulfill some long-held plans” to become president. Hillary was not, it appears, joking. …

 

… let’s take a trip down memory lane — from the tawdriness of the 1992 presidential campaign through the mendacity of the ensuing years — to revisit a sampling of why so many of us came to think that Hillary’s first instinct when in an embarrassing spot is to lie. …

Politico has the story in the GOP two wins last night.

Republicans retained two House seats in special elections Tuesday, including a hotly contested Ohio race that the two parties spent nearly $700,000 trying to win.

Republican officials immediately pointed to the issue of immigration, an increasingly pivotal theme in contests across the nation as well as in the presidential primary race, as a key factor in their Ohio victory. …

Shorts from John Fund.

The Captain was on a roll today. He posts on the GOP election success, Clinton, the National Review support of Mitt Romney, Hitch’s call for the end of the CIA, and concealed carry.

1. Had the Republicans lost their two special election contests to replace deceased GOP House members, one would see the papers filled with analyses of the coming debacle for Republican hopes in 2008. Now that they have won both handily, expect most to either ignore the races altogether or chalk up the wins to local Republican strength. However, pundits cannot easily dismiss the lessons from the race in Ohio: …

 

2. Hillary Clinton has begun to shift resources to New Hampshire as part of a firewall strategy after seeing Iowa slip from her grasp. However, it may be too late for the Granite State to contain the collapse of her once-invincible primary campaign. CNN shows a dead heat now in New Hampshire, as Hillary has squandered her lead: …

… A loss here would prove devastating to Hillary. She has had a consistent lead in the state that breathed new life into her husband’s faltering campaign in 1992, and a loss to Obama would have the opposite effect. It would give the one-term Senator national credibility and access to even more fundraising than the prodigious amounts he has already accumulated. It leaves the myth of her inevitability in tatters, and opens the door to the harder Left that supports Obama. …

3. The endorsement season seems in full swing now, and this time Santa’s dropped a big gift to Mitt Romney — the National Review endorsement. When William F. Buckley’s venerable journal speaks on effective conservatism, people listen, and Mitt’s team has reason to cheer: …

4. Christopher Hitchens proposes a radical solution to the problem of spin-cycle NIEs and interagency feuding. Rather than continue with efforts to reform the intelligence community, Hitchens argues for the elimination of the CIA and rebuilding our intel efforts from the ground up. It seems like a radical step during a time of war, but the agency may now have angered enough people on both sides of the aisle to make it possible: …

5. Jeanne Assam carried her pistol with her to church on Sunday. She did so legally, having received a license to carry a concealed weapon. If a weapon in church seems incongruous, it also became providential on this particular Sunday, as Assam stopped an assault that may have killed many more people than it did (via Memeorandum and many CapQ readers): …

IBD editors like concealed carry.

Every time there are multiple shootings, like those that occurred over the weekend at the Youth With A Mission missionary training center in Arvada, Colo., and later at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, we are lectured about the easy access to firearms in the U.S. and the dangers it creates.

But many are thankful today that Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard at New Life, had easy access to a gun when Matthew Murray entered the east entrance of the church and began firing his rifle. Murray was carrying two handguns, an assault rifle and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

If Jeanne Assam had not had a gun at her side, dozens more might have died in Sunday’s shooting at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. …

John Stossel goes mano a mano, libertarian to libertarian with Ron Paul.

Over the last few months, I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from people asking me to interview Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, so I did.

It’s refreshing to interview a politician who doesn’t mince words. It’s even more refreshing to interview one who understands the benefits of limited government. …

Walter Williams thinks the NAACP has been around long enough.

… The major problems confronting a large segment of the black community have little or nothing to do with racism — problems such as unprecedented illegitimacy, family breakdown, fraudulent education, crime and rampant social pathology. If white people became angels tomorrow, it would do nothing to solve problems that can only be solved by blacks.

But I’m somewhat optimistic. More and more blacks are seeing through race hustlers such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Doc Cheatham. An even more optimistic note is the financial decline of the NAACP. Declining black support is good evidence that the civil rights struggle is over and won. That’s not to say there are not major problems but they are not civil rights problems. …

John Tierney on how fishermen and Manhattan drivers can prevent the “tragedy of the commons.”

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Caroline Glick reacts to the NIE on Iran’s bomb.

The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.

The NIE begins with the sensationalist opening line: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Teheran halted its nuclear weapons program.” But the rest of the report contradicts the lead sentence. For instance, the second line says, “We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Teheran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, contrary to that earth-shattering opening, the NIE acknowledges that the Iranians have an active nuclear program and that they are between two and five years away from nuclear capabilities.

The NIE’s final sentence: “We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so,” only emphasizes that US intelligence agencies view Iran’s nuclear program as a continuous and increasing threat rather than a suspended and diminishing one.

But the content of the NIE is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the opening line – as the report’s authors no doubt knew full well when they wrote it. With that opening line, the NIE effectively takes the option of American use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons off the table. …

Bret Stephens says the NIE didn’t forecast the insertion of Soviet ICBM’s in Cuba either.

“The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.”

–Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, Sept. 19, 1962

Twenty-five days after this NIE was published, a U-2 spy plane photographed a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. It’s possible the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program will not prove as misjudged or as damaging as the 1962 estimate. But don’t bet on it.

Free market think tanks in Europe? John Fund has the details.

Mark Steyn gives a link to the Islamocreeps in Canada.

Stanley Kurtz on the complaint against Steyn.

… If this complaint carries, public discourse on the war on terror, Muslim immigration, and related topics would be transformed beyond all recognition (in Canada). It is as if, instead of simply rebutting or railing against conservatives and Republicans, liberal Democrats went to the Supreme Court and had the right side of the blogosphere, and nearly all conservative opinion magazines, placed into receivership. It is evident that the complainants are aware of this. They are determined to fundamentally reshape a kind of journalism “that has become increasingly pervasive in Canada in the last few years.” So this is not really a complaint against any particular factual claim or rhetorical move. It is instead a request that vast sections of heretofore legitimate reporting and opinion journalism be altogether banned. …

WaPo op-ed on what it is like to be on a campus and of the GOP persuasion.

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities’ role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote “God and Man at Yale” — in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others — making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views — commonplace in American society and among the political class — are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light. …

Daily Mail, UK wonders if Al Gore is doing good, or just doing well.

Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 a minute to deliver a poorly received speech.

The former American Vice-President was also accused of being “precious” at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming.

Many of the audience at last month’s Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000. …

Dilbert retails the argument for adding a recent president to Mt. Rushmore. And actually, he’s not joking.

News Biscuit says Brit wind farmers are facing competition from cheaper African wind.

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John Fund interviews one of the members of Zimbabwe’s opposition.

Zimbabwe is in the news this weekend as its 83-year-old strongman, Robert Mugabe, arrives in Lisbon to attend his first European Union summit meeting in seven years. His appalling human-rights record has led British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to boycott the meeting.

While the spotlight has not recently been on this deeply troubled land, there are dissidents who do not want the world to forget. Earlier this year I met with one of them, a tall, charismatic 41-year-old who attended the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual chatfest of thinkers and well-heeled idealists sponsored by the Aspen Institute.

But Arthur Mutambara, who leads one of the main opposition groups fighting the Mugabe tyranny, wasn’t in the Colorado Rockies to exchange pleasantries. He startled the crowd with blunt language that isn’t normal parlance for politicians from the developing world.

“We Africans are responsible for our problems, and we must take charge of our lives,” he said in a commanding, deep voice reminiscent of James Earl Jones. “We must move away from aid to genuine investment. We must ensure that after getting rid of a dictator we plant deep roots for the rule of law and actually improve the lot of the people. So when we who believe in democracy triumph, I ask you to judge us harshly if we fail to live up to our promises.” …

Paul Greenberg on Russia’s election.

The latest election results out of Russia are more Russian than ever, more’s the pity.

The latest czar had no problem arranging a victory that would have made old Mayor Daley or Boss Crump look like a piker. The outcome was so forgone a conclusion that the usual European election monitors didn’t even bother to show up. Besides. Vladimir Putin’s regime had delayed granting them visas for so long they were denied a chance to witness all the preparations for the big show. …

Stanley Kurtz posts at The Corner on the attempts by a Canadian Islamic group to censor Mark Steyn.

… This is a big deal. The blogosphere has so far largely missed it, but this attack on Mark Steyn is very much our business. There may be an impulse to dismiss this assault on Steyn, on the assumption that it will fail, that Steyn is a big boy and can take care of himself, and that in any case this is crazy Canada, where political correctness rules, rather than the land of the free. That would be a mistake. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s war on Mark Steyn and Maclean’s is an attack on all of us. I’ll say more in a moment about how a Canadian case can reach into America, but let’s first take a look at the goings on up north. …

One of Steyn’s critics is caught with his pants down. Cool thing is Mark does the honors.

…Hello, Mr Henley? Anybody home in there? Those are quotation marks, because they’re someone else’s words – not the blatant racism of the racist douchebag Steyn but of a prominent Scandinavian imam. It’s tempting to say to Jim Henley, “Douchebag, douche thyself”, and leave it at that. However, in an attempt to divine his thinking on the subject, I’d like to ask him this: …

David Warren comes to Mark’s defense.

… For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant’s right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers — for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

My hope is that this case against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s will be fruitful. It will be, if it inspires enough people — especially journalists, of all political persuasions — to express outrage at what has been done; and inspires Canada’s free citizens into the necessary political action to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves. The worst possible result is if the case fails to produce this response.

Ayann Hirsi Ali notes the times when Muslims are tolerant like when they tolerate the fundamentalist thugs.

… It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? …

Jeff Jacoby is not reassured by the Iran NIE.

… The intelligence agencies’ record for accuracy doesn’t inspire confidence. Not everyone embraced the NIE’s startling judgment. Even the UN’s nuclear inspectors were dubious. “We are more skeptical,” an official close to the inspection agency told The New York Times last week. “We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”

Given the history of US intelligence blunders, such skepticism is well warranted. The intelligence community badly underestimated Saddam’s nuclear progress before the first Gulf War and badly overestimated his stock of WMDs — a “slam-dunk,” George Tenet insisted — on the eve of the 2003 war. It was taken by surprise when Pakistan went nuclear in 1998s, just as it had been stunned when the Soviets went nuclear in 1949. The intelligence agencies didn’t expect Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. They didn’t foresee North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. They were blindsided by Sept. 11.

Now they conclude that the Iranians have shelved their nuclear weapons program. Two years ago they concluded the opposite. “Across the board,” the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission found in 2005, “the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors.” Considering their track record, that sounds about right.

Power Line spots a photo from Iran.

Division of Labour learning to love the big box store.

Coyote Blog provides perspective on wealth.

Hit and Run calls Bill Buckley on his love for smoking nazis.

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IBD editorial tells us how the UN cooked the books on sea level changes at the globalony confab in Bali.

… We have no problem with the IPCC taking control of its meeting destinations. But we do oppose the intellectual dishonesty of seizing control of data and torturing them into the outcome IPCC scientists are looking for.

The possibility of such fraud has been raised by Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. According to his June interview with the British Telegraph that was revisited on a Telegraph blog last week, the IPCC might have doctored data to show a sea- level rise from 1992 to 2002.

“Suddenly it changed,” Morner said of the IPCC’s 2003 sea-level chart, which is intended to convince the public that warming due to man’s activities is melting ice that will cause the oceans to rise to dangerous levels.

The change “showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 millimeters per year,” which just happens to be the same increase that was measured by one of six Hong Kong tide gauges. Morner said that particular tide gauge is “the only record which you shouldn’t use” because “every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment.”

A simple error by the IPCC? Not in Morner’s mind. “Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that,” he said. “It is a falsification of the data set.”

But what about Vanuatu, that little South Pacific island that’s supposedly drowning because Americans selfishly burn too much fossil fuel to drive their SUVs and heat and cool their McMansions?

“There is absolutely no signal that the sea level” around that island is rising, Morner said. “If anything, you could say that maybe the tide is lowering a little bit, but absolutely no rising.”

Because he’s at odds with the IPCC, Morner would be about as welcome at this year’s meeting as the International Climate Science Coalition has been. That group of international scientists, skeptical of the global warming theory, was told it could not present its information at the conference. …

Power Line posts on the subject and on an Alan Dershowitz appearance at the Hudson Institute.

Charles Krauthammer thinks the Mormon flap has some Huckabee origins.

… Huckabee has exploited Romney’s Mormonism with an egregious subtlety. Huckabee is running a very effective ad in Iowa about religion. “Faith doesn’t just influence me,” he says on camera, “it really defines me.” The ad then hails him as a “Christian leader.” …

 

… Every mention of God in every inaugural address in American history refers to the deity in this kind of all-embracing, universal, nondenominational way. (The one exception: William Henry Harrison. He caught cold delivering that inaugural address. Thirty-one days later, he was dead. Draw your own conclusion.) I suspect that neither Jefferson’s Providence nor Washington’s Great Author nor Lincoln’s Almighty would look kindly on the exploitation of religious differences for political gain. It is un-American. It is unfortunate that Romney has had to justify himself in response.

Mark Steyn was in the OC Register. He suggests we need a free market for housing and religion.

James Taranto has opinions about the worth of the youth vote.

Sorry, but if there’s one subject about which the cynics are always right, it’s the “youth vote.” It is a myth. Young people, by and large, simply do not vote, and there is no reason to think that will ever change. Candidates pursuing the “youth vote” are like Charlie Brown kicking that football–this time, every time, they’re sure it will be different. But it always ends with a WHAM!

The myth of the youth vote is a product of baby-boom liberalism, an extension of the urban legend that the “1960s generation” were a bunch of idealistic activists who vanquished racism and war. The truth is that the civil rights movement had already won by the time the first baby boomer came of age, in 1964; and while there was something of a youth movement against the Vietnam War, it was motivated principally by selfishness–i.e., fear of the draft–not idealism.

The Economist has interesting thoughts about food prices. Their thought is that costlier food provides a chance to get rid of farm subsidies and at the same time right the balance between rural and urban.

… Over the past few years, a sense has grown that the rich are hogging the world’s wealth. In poor countries, widening income inequality takes the form of a gap between city and country: incomes have been rising faster for urban dwellers than for rural ones. If handled properly, dearer food is a once-in-a-generation chance to narrow income disparities and to wean rich farmers from subsidies and help poor ones. The ultimate reward, though, is not merely theirs: it is to make the world richer and fairer.

WSJ contributor wonders if it makes sense to give to Harvard.

Bill Gates has $56 billion to his name. What would you do if he called your home asking you for some money? You’d hang up on the prankster, of course. Now, what would you do if Harvard, with its $35 billion endowment, called begging for cash? My wife and I take out our checkbook. But maybe we should be hitting up Harvard instead. …

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Mark Steyn, in Macleans, makes the point we have laws because we are civilized. Laws didn’t create our civilization.

One of my all-time favourite observations on Canada’s brave new Trudeaupia came from the great George Jonas, apropos the good old days when the Mounties’ livelier lads were illegally burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. With his usual glibness Pierre Trudeau blithely responded that if people were upset by the RCMP’s illegal barn-burning, perhaps he’d make it legal for the RCMP to burn barns. As Jonas observed, M. Trudeau had missed the point: barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong. …

… “A society’s first line of defence is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values,” wrote Walter Williams of George Mason University recently. “They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. Policemen and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct.”

“Restraint” is an unfashionable concept these days. I was lunching with an elderly chap in the early stages of dementia recently. He’s someone who in all the years I’ve known him has never used any vulgar language in public or private, but the waitress’s generous embonpoint caught his eye and he said to me (and half the restaurant) with all the blithe insouciance with which one might remark on the weather or the traffic, “I like big tits, don’t you?” Dementia removes inhibition, and so your private thoughts are now publicly expressed. Society at large has lost its inhibitions: whether that is a symptom of civilizational dementia will be for future generations to judge.

Corner post illustrates the above. It is Steyn again writing about the value of the first amendment which makes it difficult for mischievous laws to be written.

Speaking of laws, Jan Crawford Greenburg posts on Gitmo.

When I was getting ready for a trip to Guantanamo Bay last week, I read an article written last year by a young interpreter (and now lawyer) who was working with some of the attorneys for the detainees. Titled “My Guantanamo Diary,” it was a vivid and urgent piece that painted a grim portrait of a place where evil flourishes amid the scrub of the Cuban coastline.

In the article, the interpreter describes the anguish and helplessness she feels after meeting the detainees, most of whom she believes to be innocent. But initially she was conflicted: She admits to one of the lawyers for the detainees that the guards had seemed so friendly.

“Yeah, they’re nice,” the lawyer, Tom Wilner, a partner in the Washington office of Shearman & Sterling LLP, shoots back. “But this whole place is evil — and the face of evil often appears friendly.”

That perfectly captures Guantanamo: The face of evil often appears friendly.

It’s a sentiment shared by almost everyone you talk to, those on both sides of the debate. Soldiers and lawyers, military officers and human rights activists—everyone sees evil at Guantanamo.

They just believe the evil lies within different people. …

John Bolton writes for WaPo on the NIE.

The Captain compares Bolton’s and Cheney’s NIE thoughts.

… Between the two, I’d trust Cheney on this question. He has seen the data and received the briefing; Bolton is out of the loop now. Cheney has no reason to go easy on the ODNI or CIA, especially since the NIE contradicts what he has stated for the last few years on Iran. Cheney has more motivation to go on the attack than Bolton, and yet he seems content to let the NIE analysis stand. That should speak to its credibility.

Both men, however, make the same point about the limit of the intel that formed the basis of this analysis. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Until Iran fully complies with the IAEA and the UN Security Council, we know that we cannot verify their intentions or actions. We have no firm knowledge that Iran — which lied about this program for years until 2003 — has not moved its efforts elsewhere in the country to continue its weapons program. …

And the Captain posts on the problems of the Clinton campaign.

Once seen as an inevitability, Hillary Clinton may not win the first two contests in the primaries — and that may change the entire Democratic race. Having fallen into no better than a tie with Barack Obama in Iowa, Clinton now has lost significant ground in New Hampshire. She now leads by only six points, and her momentum has completely dissipated: …

Couple of good columns on free trade.

Tony Blankley thinks the country needs to have a good debate about free trade.

Other than the fight against radical Islam, the efficacy of free trade may be the most important issue pending before the American people and our government. Since the end of World War II, the principle of free trade has defined U.S. economic policy — and thus, to a large extent, the world’s economy. Globalization is the product of a long half-century of American free-trade policy.

Steve Chapman thinks there’s no debate.

Democrats yearn for the bounteous days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when the economy was flourishing, there were good jobs at good wages, and poverty was on the wane. So it’s a puzzle that on one of his signature achievements — the North American Free Trade Agreement — the party’s presidential candidates are sprinting away from his record as fast as they can. It’s as though Republicans were calling for defense cuts while invoking Ronald Reagan.

Even Hillary Clinton can’t bring herself to defend the deal her husband pushed through. Asked during a recent debate if she thought it was a mistake, she did everything but deny she’d ever met the man.

“All I can remember from that is a bunch of charts,” she chortled, in possibly the least believable statement of the 2008 campaign. “That, sort of, is a vague memory.” In the end, though, Clinton declared that “NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.” …

Allen Barra points out why Heisman candidates rarely succeed in the NFL.

University of Florida sophomore quarterback Tim Tebow is the odds-on favorite to win the 2007 Heisman Trophy this Saturday as the nation’s outstanding college football player. Since the colleges serve as a farm system for the National Football League and Mr. Tebow is the best player in college, he should be a cinch to make it in the pros, right?

Not according to history. In the modern era of the NFL, only a handful of Heisman Trophy winners have enjoyed genuine success in the pro ranks. …

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Power Line posts on Huckabee’s assertion his lack of foreign policy experience is analogous to Ronald Reagan. They think more like Jimmy Carter.

… When it comes to foreign policy, Huckabee more closely resembles another former governor, Jimmy Carter. It was Carter, not Reagan, who viewed foreign policy as an extension of his own character and personal principles. Carter stood for a foreign policy “as decent as the American people.” Reagan stood for defeating our enemies. When Huckabee frets about how Gitmo is making us appear to foreigners, when he asserts that “we broke Iraq,” and when he says he’s qualified to be commander-in-chief because of his character rather than because of his understanding of our enemies, it’s pretty clear that his foreign policy roots extend nowhere near the fertile soil of Reaganism.

The Line also posts on Harry Reid still hoping for defeat in Iraq.

Norman Podhoretz from Contentions starts a long line of posts on the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. Most everybody, except for Mike Huckabee (more on that later) has remarked on this report.

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. …

… I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. …

Max Boot

… So at the end of this NIE you come away knowing not much more than when you started. Basically you are left with the knowledge that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear work that probably won’t result in a bomb in the next couple of years but that could produce a weapon sometime thereafter. And most of those key judgments are delivered with only “moderate confidence.” Given the intelligence community’s consistent track record of being wrong in the past, especially about other nations’ nuclear programs (the CIA has been surprised in the past by, among others, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, India, and Pakistan) that doesn’t inspire much, well, confidence.

Gabriel Schoenfeld

… Without access to the underlying intelligence on which these back-and-forth assertions in this committee-produced document are founded, interpreting them involves groping in the dark. But the peculiar language, and the disclosure of dissenting views expressed by the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council, strongly hint that sharp internal divisions exist about the precise nature of the Iranian halt — if it is a halt at all.

Connecting the Dots, which has been highly critical of leaks of classified information, is left in the uncomfortable position of hoping for a leak of classified information that will resolve all the mysteries surrounding this new assessment of the Iranian nuclear program. Only one thing can be said with “high confidence” about this new NIE: when sharp divisions exist within the U.S. Intelligence Community, leaks are on the way.

Schoenfeld again answering Podhoretz’s suspicions about CIA crossing up Bush.

… There are significant ambiguities in this NIE, and as Max Boot rightly points out, it still leaves ample reason to worry about Iranian nuclear ambitions. But in the current climate of skepticism about the competence of the CIA and other intelligence bodies, the idea that intelligence officials engaged in a coordinated effort to cook the evidence seems impossible to credit. Even if there was a shared desire among all sixteen agencies to do such a thing (which seems implausible on its face) pulling off such a caper would be a hugely difficult task, and almost certainly beyond the capacity even of America’s most ingenious spies — assuming we even have any ingenious spies.

Although I remain as worried as Norman Podhoretz about the dangers posed by an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and though there is ample reason to wonder about the quality of U.S. intelligence, I would still have to put “low confidence” in his dark suspicions.

Third Schoenfeld;

A day has passed since the release of the new intelligence-community estimate of the Iranian program and the smell of rotting fish is growing stronger. Even the editorial page of the New York Times is wondering if the NIE erred on the side of incaution. It reports that an official “close” to the International Atomic Energy Agency “told the Times yesterday that new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.”

Any careful reading of the NIE makes its obvious that this is true. The report’s stark opening declaration – made with “high confidence” – that Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 is blatantly misleading. The only thing that was halted in 2003 was what the intelligence community calls the military side of Iran’s nuclear program. …

… But in dismissing Norman’s dark suspicions, did I treat his claim “a bit too literally,” as Ben Orlanski has written in the comments section in response to my post? Orlanski goes on to explain:

This isn’t a question of cooking the books to produce bogus information to defeat Bush. It is a question of how this was spun. The NIE report chose to lead with the made-for-headline finding about the halt to the program. But this isn’t really the most relevant part of the report, just the part that was pretty clearly intended to grab headlines. Is saying that a conspiracy? I don’t think so. I think the authors wanted to impact the political debate, and did so not by lying or creating bogus conclusions or reasoning, but simply by choosing to emphasize the part of their overall conclusions that played most pointedly into the political environment. [This] suggest[s] certain political canniness [on the part] of our intelligence agencies, and also suggests that they wanted to have an impact on ultimate policy. That is not their role, and there is something disconcerting about their assuming it.

With this I would entirely agree. If that is indeed what happened here, and the evidence that it did so is in front of our eyes, and if it is indeed what Norman was saying, then, like the intelligence-community’s disavowal of its 2005 NIE, I would have to disavow my previous “low confidence” estimate in Norman “dark suspicions” and join him in voicing equally dark suspicions of my own.

Abe Greenwald, also in Contentions, with the Dem reactions.

If Iran did halt its nuclear weaponization program in 2003, then we can thank the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Yet the Democrats consider the NIE an indication of the effectiveness of diplomacy. Here’s a round-up:

The Captain.

Roger Simon.

The Spectator, UK;

… What on earth is wrong with the American intelligence community? Granted that of necessity it can make public only the bare minimum of information, this report provokes a high degree of scepticism. It asserts:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.

But in 2005 this same intelligence community was saying:

“[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable.”

So are we now to assume that in 2005, Iran was ‘determined to develop nuclear weapons’ despite having ‘halted its nuclear weapon programme’ two years earlier? Were the intelligence community simply wrong in 2005? And if they were that incompetent then, why should we believe what they are saying now? …

Byron York has the last post on the NIE. Finally! This goes full circle to Huckabee’s opinion of the new NIE. He hadn’t heard of it. That’s right!

Power Line with a change of subject. Their view of the detainees at Gitmo is opposite Stuart Taylor’s.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear argument in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, in which foreign detainees challenge the legality and constitutionality of their detention as enemy combatants pursuant to the Military Commissions Act of 2006. To understand the issues in this case, I can’t think of a better source than this on-line debate presented by the Federalist Society. …

The Captain thinks the NY Times is “bailing on Hillary.”

The New York Times offers an unusually pessimistic appraisal of Hillary Clinton’s effect on the 2008 down-ticket races. Carl Hulse reports that Congressional incumbents and candidates have begun to fear that her nomination will energize a dispirited opposition and could cost the Democrats the seats they gained in 2006. It’s not exactly a new thought, but usually it gets expressed as Republican optimism (via Memeorandum): …

John Stossel has more on the tragedy of the commons.

My Thanksgiving column about how the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming but thrived once they switched to private cultivation made some people angry. One commented, “Sharing of the fruits of our labor is a bad thing?”

I never said that.

I practice charity regularly. I believe in sharing. But when government takes our money by force and gives it to others, that’s not sharing.

And sharing can’t be a basis for production — you can’t share what hasn’t been produced. My point is that production and prosperity require property rights. Property rights associate effort with benefits. Where benefits are unrelated to effort, people do the least amount necessary to get by while taking the most they can get. Economists have a pithy way of summing up this truth: No one washes a rental car.

It’s called the “tragedy of the commons.” …

Walter Williams has more on income mobility.

Listening to people like Lou Dobbs, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee lamenting the plight of America’s middle class and poor, you’d have to conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket. According to them, there’s wage stagnation, while the rich are getting richer and the poor becoming poorer. There are a couple of updates that tell quite a different story.

The Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal editorial “Movin’ On Up” reports on a recent U.S. Treasury study of income tax returns from 1996 and 2005. The study tracks what happened to tax filers 25 years of age and up during this 10-year period. Controlling for inflation, nearly 58 percent of the poorest income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005. Twenty-six percent of them achieved middle or upper-middle class income, and over 5 percent made it into the highest income group.

Over the decade, the inflation-adjusted median income of all tax filers rose by 24 percent. As such, it refutes Dobbs-Edwards-Huckabee claims about stagnant incomes. In fact, only one income group experienced a decline in real income. That was the richest one percent, who saw an income drop of nearly 26 percent over the 10-year period. …

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Mark Steyn tells us why we should miss Australia’s John Howard.

… What mattered to the world was the strategic clarity Howard’s ministry demonstrated on the critical issues facing (if you’ll forgive the expression) Western civilisation.

First, the prime minister grasped the particular challenge posed by Islam. “I’ve heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child,” said the Democrats’ Lyn Allison. “If it wasn’t the Greeks, it was the Italians … or it was the Vietnamese.” But those are races and nationalities. Islam is a religion, and a political project, and a globalised ideology. Unlike the birthplace of your grandfather, it’s not something you leave behind in the old country.

Indeed, the pan-Islamic identity embraced by many second and third-generation Muslims in the West has very little to do with where their mums and dads happen to hail from. “You can’t find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad,” said Howard, stating the obvious in a way most of his fellow Western leaders could never quite bring themselves to do.

“Raving on about jihad” is a splendid line which meets what English law used to regard as the reasonable-man test. If you’re a reasonable bloke slumped in front of the telly watching jihadists threatening to behead the Pope or Muslim members of Britain’s National Health Service ploughing a blazing automobile through the check-in desk at Glasgow airport, “raving on about jihad” fits in a way that President George W. Bush’s religion-of-peace pabulum doesn’t. Bush and Tony Blair can be accused of the very opposite of the traditional politician’s failing: they walked the walk but they didn’t talk the talk. That’s to say neither leader found a rhetoric for the present struggle that resonated. Howard did. …

Claudia Rosett keeps us up to date on the UN climate conference in Bali.

… Life’s much too short to read all the documents assembled already (especially when you could be making much better use of your time watching a superb film that did NOT get a Nobel Prize: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”). But just to provide a sample, here’s one of my favorites, found while browsing through so far. It’s an agenda item discussing the ways to ensure UN-style “Privileges and Immunities for individuals serving on constituted bodies under the Kyoto Protocol… .” Translation: They’re looking for a way to ensure that no matter what they do to the rest of us, we can’t do anything about it.

Lotsa election stuff today. George Will is first. He’s spotted a few candidates he doesn’t like at all in “None of the Below.”

… Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism: He wants Washington to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public, show more solicitude for Americans of modest means and impose more protectionism, thereby raising the cost of living for Americans of modest means.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And — 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note — America must have a Christian president.

Another pious populist who was annoyed by Darwin — William Jennings Bryan — argued that William Howard Taft, his opponent in the 1908 presidential election, was unfit to be president because he was a Unitarian, a persuasion sometimes defined as the belief that there is at most one God. The electorate chose to run the risk of entrusting the presidency to someone skeptical about the doctrine of the Trinity.

If Huckabee succeeds in derailing Romney’s campaign by raising a religious test for presidential eligibility, that will be clarifying: In one particular, America was more enlightened a century ago.

Lee Harris in Tech Central thinks Rudy was too rough and should listen to the boos.

… We don’t want our President to lose his head while all about are losing theirs, to paraphrase Kipling.

We don’t want them acting mean either. That is why I suggest that Mayor Giuliani, who has so much to commend him, should pay attention to the boos he received in the last debate. They may have been the best advice that he could have possibly receive at this point in his campaign: stay tough, but don’t play too rough. Many of us like the guy, and we don’t want him to give us reason not to.

Michael Barone with an Iowa overview.

Every so often, I page through my copy of the Constitution, searching for the section that says Iowa and New Hampshire vote first. I’ve yet to find it. But Iowa and New Hampshire are set to lead off the presidential voting on January 3 and 8. Right now, Iowa, where about 200,000 people–around 10 percent of registered voters–are expected to attend the party caucuses, is producing great ruction in both parties’ races. …

Now, as to the tactics Clinton learned in kindergarten. “I know you are, but what am I?”

James Taranto.

As Democratic primary voters experience pre-emptive buyer’s remorse–that is, second thoughts about Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability”–a desperate Mrs. Clinton stands on the brink of losing all dignity. This is from a press release she put out last night: …

Captain comments.

… I can see where Hillary might be offended by someone with overactive ambition. Imagine what it would be like to have someone stick with a philandering husband/politician, accuse political opponents of vast partisan conspiracies, carpetbag into another state to win a walkover Senate election, all just to maintain one’s political viability for a Presidential run! My goodness, we wouldn’t want that kind of overwhelming, avaricious desire for power succeeding in grabbing the White House, would we? …

Couple of Corner posts.

Extraordinary. She’s lost some altitude nationally, and a little ground in Iowa where it’s always been a pretty close race, so nothing seems to suggest a need to break the glass—as in “break the glass in case of emergency.” But there’s broken glass scattered over the place and she’s taking the fire ax to Obama’s campaign. What does the Clinton campaign know about this race that we don’t? …

Writing in The Freeman, Walter Williams reminds us of the morality of free markets.

All too often defenders of free-market capitalism base their defense on the demonstration that free markets allocate resources more efficiently and hence lead to greater wealth than socialism and other forms of statism. While that is true, as Professor Milton Friedman frequently pointed out, economic efficiency and greater wealth should be seen and praised as simply a side benefit of free markets. The intellectual defense should focus on its moral superiority. Even if free markets were not more efficient and not engines for growth, they are morally superior to other forms of human organization because they are rooted in voluntary peaceable relationships rather than force and coercion. They respect the sanctity of the individual. …

It’s Getting Better All the Time says humpback whales are making a comeback.