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Mark Helprin, always an original thinker, thinks an armed Germany can help preserve peace.

Though no longer the chief delinquent of Europe, and though not much thought is given to its strategic position, Germany is still Europe’s center of gravity, territorially contiguous to more nations than any state other than Russia, with compact interior lines of communication, Western Europe’s largest population, and Europe’s leading economy.

Facts like these assert themselves through every kind of historical fluctuation, even if America now sees Germany, the way stop for airlifters en route to Iraq and Afghanistan, as a kind of giant aircraft carrier with sausages. But Germany is no doubt the subject of far deeper consideration on the one hand by Russia and on the other by Jihadists.

The line from Paris to Moscow, which has been traveled from west to east by the French, east to west by the Russians, and in both directions by the Germans, is a road that invariably attracts continental powers on the brink of military predominance whether in fact or the imagination. …

Power Line notes the end of the last ice age might have started Noah’s travails.

Marty Peretz notes some good news about Jimmy Carter.

David Leonhardt of the NY Times has an nice contrarian view of current economic “problems.”

Until Tuesday’s rally on Wall Street, the news on the business pages has sounded pretty grim lately. Stocks are still down 6 percent from their peak this year, and oil is near a record high. The dollar, incredibly, is worth only 96 Canadian cents. And house prices will be falling for a long time to come.

So in an effort to cheer everyone up before Thanksgiving, this column is going to focus today on some good news. Here it is:

Stocks are still down 6 percent from their peak, and oil is near a record high. The dollar, incredibly, is worth only 96 Canadian cents. And house prices will be falling for a long time to come.

Seriously.

As long as the financial system doesn’t have a major meltdown, none of these developments will turn out to be as bad as you think. Some of them are downright welcome. …

Samizdata caught the Economist with its bias showing.

The editors of The Australian think their left and our Dems should stop ignoring some success in Iraq.

IN April, US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq lost, saying the the extreme violence in the country proved the surge was accomplishing nothing. This week Senator Reid is still engaged in the vain attempt to block funding for the war in the US Senate, refusing to acknowledge the extraordinary success of the surge.

Against all the defeatist expectations of the so-called “anti-war” lobby, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this week reported that terrorist attacks, including car bombings, in Baghdad had dropped by 77 per cent since last year’s peak. The dramatic improvement is directly attributed to the surge of 30,000 US troops, their effective counter-insurgency strategy and to the fact that locals are fed up with al-Qa’ida and other extremists. The good news is not just limited to Baghdad. Anbar, once an al-Qa’ida stronghold, is relatively peaceful thanks to the joint efforts of Sunni sheiks and marines. In the south, those willing Iraq to defeat were gloomily predicting that the withdrawal of British troops from Basra would lead to a brutal domination of the city by Iranian-backed terrorists. That hasn’t happened. …

Michael Barone with a way to grasp the possibility of progress in Iraq. He calls it “macrotime.”

When my father returned from service as an Army doctor in Korea in 1953, he brought back slides of the photos he’d shot, showing a war-torn country of incredible poverty. We would have laughed if you had told us that Americans would one day buy Korean cars. But 50-some years later, South Korea has the 13th-largest economy in the world, and you see Hyundais and Kias everywhere in America. Looking at things in microtime frames is not always a reliable guide to the macrotime-frame future. …

Since this is contrarian day, what with Mark Helprin and David Leonhardt above, how about a libertarian’s negative view of the Iraq war? There are a large number of folks like this who, because of the rabid left, keep their counsel close. Tyler Cowen of George Mason’s econ dept. leads the way.

John Fund points to another part of the immigration debate that could bite the Dems.

It’s been less than a week since New York’s Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer had to climb down from their support of driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has moved to kill an amendment that would protect employers from federal lawsuits for requiring their workers to speak English. Among the employers targeted by such lawsuits: the Salvation Army.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a moderate Republican from Tennessee, is dumbstruck that legislation he views as simple common sense would be blocked. He noted that the full Senate passed his amendment to shield the Salvation Army by 75-19 last month, and the House followed suit with a 218-186 vote just this month. “I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it’s discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, ‘I want you to be able to speak America’s common language on the job,’ ” he told the Senate last Thursday. …

Karl Rove has started a column for Newsweek. In his first he tells how Clinton can be beaten.

I’ve seen up close the two Clintons America knows. He’s a big smile, hand locked on your arm and lots of charms. “Hey, come down and speak at my library. I’d like to talk some politics with you.”

And her? She tends to be, well, hard and brittle. I inherited her West Wing office. Shortly after the 2001 Inauguration, I made a little talk saying I appreciated having the office because it had the only full-length vanity mirror in the West Wing, which gave me a chance to improve my rumpled appearance. The senator from New York confronted me shortly after and pointedly said she hadn’t put the mirror there. I hadn’t said she did, just that the mirror was there. So a few weeks later, in another talk, I repeated the story about the mirror. And shortly thereafter, the junior senator saw me and, again, without a hint of humor or light in her voice, icily said she’d heard I’d repeated the story of the mirror and she … did … not … put … that mirror in the office.

It is a small but telling story: …

Bill Kristol slams the boomers.

… There really was greatness in the “greatest generation.” It fought and won World War II, then came home to achieve widespread prosperity and overcome segregation while seeing the Cold War through to a successful conclusion. But the greatest generation had one flaw, its greatest flaw, you might say: It begat the baby boomers. …

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Mark Steyn thinks the world should give thanks for America.

… The New World (The United States) is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union. …

… on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. …

Charles Krauthammer notes the good foreign policy news for the US. Since Bush is supposed to be a moron, how is all this happening?

… France has a new president who is breaking not just with the anti-Americanism of the Chirac era but with 50 years of Fifth Republic orthodoxy that defined French greatness as operating in counterpoise to America. Nicolas Sarkozy’s trip last week to the United States was marked by a highly successful White House visit and a rousing speech to Congress in which he not only called America “the greatest nation in the world” (how many leaders of any country say that about another?) but pledged solidarity with the U.S. on Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. This just a few months after he sent his foreign minister to Iraq to signal an openness to cooperation and an end to Chirac’s reflexive obstructionism.

That’s France. In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder is long gone, voted out of office and into a cozy retirement as Putin’s concubine at Gazprom. His successor is the decidedly pro-American Angela Merkel, who concluded an unusually warm visit with Bush this week.

All this, beyond the ken of Democrats, is duly noted by new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who in an interview with Sky News on Sunday noted “the great change that is taking place,” namely “that France and Germany and the European Union are also moving more closely with America.”

As for our other traditional alliances, relations with Australia are very close, and Canada has shown remarkable steadfastness in taking disproportionate casualties in supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Eastern European nations, traditionally friendly, are taking considerable risks on behalf of their U.S. alliance — for example, cooperating with us on missile defense in the face of enormous Russian pressure. And ties with Japan have never been stronger, with Tokyo increasingly undertaking military and quasi-military obligations that it had forsworn for the last half-century. …

David Broder points out a couple of issues the Dems have to face.

As the Democratic presidential race finally gets down to brass tacks, two issues are becoming paramount. But only one of them is clearly on the table.

That is the issue of illegal immigration. A very smart Democrat, a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me that he expects it to be a key part of any Republican campaign and that he is worried about his party’s ability to respond. …

Dick Morris says, even though CNN gave her a pass, Hillary still has Iowa problems.

Under Wolf Blitzer’s gentle questioning, Hillary was able to avert another debate meltdown in the Nevada Democratic debate held last night, November 15. Asked about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, a compliant, even subservient, Blitzer accepted Hillary’s one word answer, “No,” with no follow up. Had a better journalist been asking the questions — like Tim Russert — he would have followed up the bland negation with probing questions about why she is yet again flip flopping on the issue.

The Drudge Report today highlights that a “senior adviser to the Hillary campaign” said, earlier today, that Blitzer “was outstanding, and did not gang up like Russert did in Philadelphia. He avoided personal attacks, remained professional and ran the best debate so far.” And Blitzer checked his journalistic instincts at the door.

The debate also had a pro-Hillary bias in the amount of time allocated to Bill Richardson — who had the third longest face time in the debate. Since Richardson is auditioning for Vice President on Hillary’s ticket, using his time to plead for unity among Democrats (i.e. don’t bash Hillary), giving him the mike was the same as giving it to Hillary. …

Another grown-up from the National Journal, William Powers, writes on race-gender issues.

Race and gender are journalistic standbys, familiar old hot buttons that reliably lend themselves to news stories, though in today’s world they’re not half as newsy as they once were. To the informed news consumer, these buttons are barely warm. …

 

… The media are always at least a decade behind real life. …

 

…. In February, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that race and gender have lost much of their political relevancy. “According to voters,” the Post reported, “being over the age of 72, a Mormon, twice divorced, or a smoker all are bigger drags on a candidate’s support than is gender or race.” The same poll found that although small percentages of voters would be less likely to support a woman or a black candidate, they are offset by those who are more likely to support such candidates.

If smoking is really a bigger negative with voters than gender or race, shouldn’t Obama’s cigarette habit — which he’s been trying to kick with nicotine gum — be just as controversial, newswise, as his skin color or Clinton’s sex?

One reason the media lag society is that they rely on precedent. Smokers have been elected president before, but no woman or African-American ever has. The past sets the tune for the present, no matter how much the culture has changed. …

In a Corner post, Mark Steyn has interesting thoughts about the American electorate.

Jonah, I think Americans beat themselves up way too much over “low” voter turnout. For a start, the nature of American democracy is profoundly different: If you live in Hampshire, England, you can vote for just three offices – a local councillor, a Member of Parliament, a Euro-MP – every five years. If you live in New Hampshire, New England, you can vote for hundreds of folks – President, Governor, Senator, Congressman, State Representative all the way up to County Commissioner, Sherriff, Register of Probate, Town Clerk, School District Treasurer, Cemetery Commissioner, Library Trustee, Sexton, etc. If you factor in the multiple officers, America has the highest rate of civic participation in the developed world. …

So how’s Eliot Spitzer doing these days? WSJ Editors have some thoughts.

… The only real difference between Mr. Spitzer now and then is that as Governor he is obliged to govern, as opposed to merely bringing charges amid a PR offensive and then settling before having to prove anything in court. His heavy-handed approach to the drivers license plan shows the limits of such behavior in a job where he actually has to persuade people.

It remains far from clear whether Mr. Spitzer has drawn the right lessons from his recent failures. At Wednesday’s announcement on the licensing plan, he said that leadership was “not solely about doing what one thinks is right,” a curious formulation. There may be more damaging revelations to come out of Troopergate too. But assuming Mr. Spitzer survives that scandal, he could do worse than enroll in anger management class and take a pledge not to try to ruin everyone who disagrees with him.

Ronald Baily of Reason wants you to relax about the coming oil glut.

… Interestingly, despite a four-fold increase in the price of oil, world economic growth has been pretty robust. For example, the U.S. economy grew at 3.9 percent rate last quarter and inflation and unemployment remain low. Why? In September 2007 paper entitled, “Who’s Afraid of a Big Bad Oil Shock,” Yale University economist William Nordhaus speculates that the reaction of consumers and businesses to steep oil price increases is muted because they regard them as temporary. In addition, the cost of energy is less important to the budgets of businesses and consumers.

In 1980, when oil reached $101.70 per barrel in real terms, spending on gasoline was 4.5 percent of GDP, 7.2 percent of consumer expenditures, and 6.2 percent of personal disposable income, according to a March 2005 report by Goldman Sachs. If oil prices reach $105 per barrel, the report noted that gasoline spending would reach 3.6 percent of forecasted GDP, 5.3 percent of consumer expenditures, and 5.0 percent of personal disposable income. Prices would have to rise to $135 per barrel to equal 1970s levels. In addition, it takes only half as much energy to produce a dollar of GDP today than it did in 1980. …

Politico has the story of African Bishops who lobby congress. They don’t understand. For congress, money speaks, not moral suasion.

As domestic agriculture constituencies elbow for big chunks of federal money in the farm bill, three men made the rounds of the Senate offering a different message, from a different continent: Crop subsidies must be curbed because they are hurting African farmers.

“By subsidizing some of the most prosperous U.S. farmers, the farm bill affects the meager livelihoods of 10 million of our fellow Africans,” Bishop Thomas Kabore of Kaya, Burkina Faso, said at a news conference. …

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Milton Friedman passed away one year ago tomorrow. You will remember why he is missed if you click on his name and hear him answer a question about greed from Phil Donahue.

Victor Davis Hanson notes the lack of news out of Iraq.

There’s an old expression about war: “Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan.” But in the case of Iraq, it seems the other way around. We’ve blamed many for the ordeal of the last four years, but it is the American victory in Anbar province that now seems without parents.

Over the last few months, the U.S. military forced Sunni insurgents in Anbar to quit fighting. This enemy, in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, had been responsible for most American casualties in the war and was the main cause of unrest in Iraq. Even more unexpectedly, some of the defeated tribes then joined in an alliance of convenience with their American victors to chase al-Qaida from Iraq’s major cities.

As President Bush recently told U.S. troops about Anbar province: “It was once written off as lost. It is now one of the safest places in Iraq.”

But that dramatic turnabout in Iraq is rarely reported. We know as much about O.J.’s escapades in Vegas as we do about the Anbar awakening or the flight of al-Qaida from Baghdad. …

Max Boot says send the State Department to war.

THE State Department has announced that it will force 50 foreign service officers to go to Iraq, whether they want to or not. This is the biggest use of “directed assignments” since the Vietnam War, and it represents a long-overdue response to complaints that diplomats aren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient the department and the government as a whole for the global war on Islamic terrorism. Yes, this is a war, but it’s a very different war from conventional conflicts like World War II or the Civil War. It is, in essence, a global counterinsurgency, and few counterinsurgencies have ever been won by force alone. …

It’s Hillary’s bad luck her troubles coincided with Camille Paglia’s monthly Salon.com piece.

… Hillary’s stonewalling evasions and mercurial, soulless self-positionings have been going on since her first run for the U.S. Senate from New York, a state she had never lived in and knew virtually nothing about. The liberal Northeastern media were criminally complicit in enabling her queenlike, content-free “listening tour,” where she took no hard questions and where her staff and security people (including her government-supplied Secret Service detail) staged events stocked with vetted sympathizers, and where they ensured that no protesters would ever come within camera range.

That compulsive micromanagement, ultimately emanating from Hillary herself, has come back to haunt her in her dismaying inability to field complex unscripted questions in a public forum. The presidential sweepstakes are too harsh an arena for tenderfoot novices. Hillary’s much-vaunted “experience” has evidently not extended to the dynamic give-and-take of authentic debate. The mild challenges she has faced would be pitiful indeed by British standards, which favor a caustic style of witty put-downs that draw applause and gales of laughter in the House of Commons. Women had better toughen up if they aspire to be commander in chief. …

Which brings us to two Hillary posts from the Captain.

For a candidate whom everyone expected to march confidently to her party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton has begun stumbling and cannot seem to right herself. First came a disaster of an answer at the last presidential debate, and the breathtaking attack on Tim Russert for having the temerity to question her about an immigration issue in her home state. Next came the revelations of question planting at campaign events. Now Drudge reports that the Clinton campaign warned Wolf Blitzer not to get tough in this week’s debate, or else:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer has been warned not to focus Thursday’s Dem debate on Hillary. ‘This campaign is about issues, not on who we can bring down and destroy,’ top Clinton insider explains. ‘Blitzer should not go down to the levels of character attack and pull ‘a Russert.” Blitzer is set to moderate debate from Vegas, with questions also being posed by Suzanne Malveaux…

The Clinton team has forgotten the First Rule of Holes: stop digging. No one except the most ardent of the netroots bought the explanation that Tim Russert was a right-wing plant at MS-NBC. If the Clintons expect that anyone will believe them when they hang the same jacket on Blitzer, they’re not just mistaken, they’re delusional.

Today, CNN also notes that the explanation given for the Grinnell University incident doesn’t quite wash, either: …

John Podoretz explores the reasons the Clinton folks are unhappy with Tim Russert.

… There is a history here. Tim Russert moderated the only debate in 2000 between Senate candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival, Rick Lazio. While most remember that debate because Lazio crossed the stage to hand a piece of paper to Mrs. Clinton and was upbraided, preposterously but effectively, for somehow “violating her personal space,” Hillary and her people were enraged at Russert for what they took to be an extraordinarily hostile approach to her. …

Neal Boortz has a couple of shots.

Mickey Kaus says John Edwards’ tough talk is a “pathetic bluff.”

But Mark Steyn likes it.

Debra Saunders on how Diane Feinstein is being punished by the netroots for her rare votes supporting Bush nominees.

The new Democratic-led Congress has a 16 percent approval rating — no better than the rating of the Republican-led Congress a year ago — no doubt because voters see members clamoring to score points in the never-ending game of partisan gotcha, instead of working to do what is best for the country. When a politician does try to do what is right, there is too often more downside than upside.

Consider the cheap shots that have come the way of Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Chuck Schumer of New York because they voted to confirm the nomination of now-Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey last week. New York Times columnist Frank Rich compared the Feinstein and Schumer vote to Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf’s arrests of judges, lawyers and human-rights activists. A group of Democrats from the left wing of the party is trying to get the California Democratic Party’s executive board to censure Feinstein for the Mukasey vote, as well as her vote to confirm federal judge Leslie Southwick in October. …

Carpe Diem posts on income inequality and mobility.

… almost everything we hear in the media about increasing income inequality, the disappearing middle class, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and the lack of income mobility is either flawed, deficient, incorrect, incomplete or wrong. …

New York Observer on the return of Imus.

“I think I’ve had some history of defending friends of mine that have been in uncomfortable circumstances,” said James Carville. “I defend the speaker, not the speech. If there’s no redemption, what are we here for?”

Mr. Carville, speaking by phone to The Observer on Monday, was referring to his former boss, President Clinton, but also to another public figure undone by his own indiscipline: Don Imus, the irreverent, sensitive, occasionally boorish, and strangely compelling radio talker who in April was fired from CBS for referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as–remember 2007?–“nappy-headed ho’s.”

Redemption! Since the dark days of April, Mr. Imus, 67–a denizen of Central Park West, and one of the paradigmatic radio heroes of the 90’s–has accomplished the beginnings of a media resurrection. Last month, he signed a 5-year deal with Citadel Broadcasting, through which he’ll return to the radio on December 3rd, as the host of a morning drive time show on the company’s WABC, the top-ranked AM radio station in New York City. The agreement, which will end Mr. Imus’ six-month sabbatical, is reportedly worth between $5 and 8 million annually—a pay-cut from Mr. Imus’ $10 million annual salary at CBS.

Still, his freedom will be curtailed: CBS kept him on only a five-second tape delay, which it rarely used, according to Martin Garbus, Mr. Imus’ lawyer. But a wary WABC told The Observer they’ll have him on a 21-second delay, giving them ample time to bleep out anything…troublesome. It may not be pure democracy, but at least he hasn’t abandoned the wide-open spaces of AM radio for the paywall of XM. …

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Stuart Taylor lets fly at the left in the Academy.

… the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.

Another hyperbolic, conservative rant about liberals in academia? Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.

They are also ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don’t like; are eager to censor such views; and in many cases are determined to push their own political views on students, who have few reality checks in their course material and are often too innocent of the world to understand when they are being fed fatuous tripe. …

… Academia’s “diversity” obsession is founded on hostility to diversity of opinion. To most academics, “diversity” is a code word for systematic preference of minorities and women over white males in all walks of life. The preferred groups include many faculty members who are manifestly unqualified for their positions and whose websites read like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of wacky professors. …

WaPo op-ed commends the changes in crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and suggests retroactivity.

Today the United States Sentencing Commission holds a hearing on its recent decision to reduce the disparity in federal sentencing guidelines for crack and powder cocaine offenses. As a former federal judge and chairman of the federal judiciary’s Criminal Law Committee, I believe the change in guidelines was long overdue, and, to maximize its impact as an important first step toward restoring the credibility of federal drug sentences, it should be applied retroactively. …

Mark Steyn with a Corner post that stirs up a lot of stuff here at Pickings.

Mark linked to this column by Dennis Prager about the language of the left.

The current issue of Rolling Stone magazine, its special 40th anniversary issue, reveals almost all one needs to know about the current state of the cultural left. The issue features interviews with people Rolling Stone considers to be America’s leading cultural and political figures — such as Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Cornel West, Paul Krugman, Kanye West, Bill Maher and George Clooney, among many others.

It brings me no pleasure to say that, with few exceptions, the interviews reveal a superficiality and contempt for cultural norms (as evidenced by the ubiquity of curse words) that should scare anyone who believes that these people have influence on American life.

First, the constant use of expletives. …

Which led to another Steyn Corner post, and then a post from Gateway Pundit which reported on a blog that actually surveyed the profanity of left and right blogs. Using as a standard of measure, George Carlin’s “seven words.” “They must be reeeeallllly baaaaad!!!!!!!”

This is what happened when the students at News Buckit compared nutroots profanity with profanity on the right:

And this is what I found, using what I deemed — through a mix of TTLB and 2006′s Weblog Award lists — to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. (Not counting this one. :)) I couldn’t account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn’t make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin’s “seven words” versus the Right?

According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Here are the data tables. …

We get all done with that, and WSJ has a Peter Berkowitz column on Bush hatred.

Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. The people, or various factions among them, have indulged in Clinton hatred, Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred, FDR hatred, Lincoln hatred, and John Adams hatred, to mention only the more extravagant hatreds that we Americans have conceived for our presidents.

But Bush hatred is different. It’s not that this time members of the intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition. Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene. …

… Many [Bush haters] seem not to have considered that in 2000 it was Al Gore who shifted the election controversy to the courts by filing a lawsuit challenging decisions made by local Florida county election supervisors. Nor [have many of them taken] into account that between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, 10 of 16 higher court judges–five of whom were Democratic appointees–found equal protection flaws with the recount scheme ordered by the intermediate Florida court. And they did not appear to have pondered Judge Richard Posner’s sensible observation, much less themselves sensibly observe, that while indeed it was strange to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide a presidential election, it would have been even stranger for the election to have been decided by the Florida Supreme Court.

Walter Williams writes about the tax burden and turns up scary numbers.

… What about any argument suggesting that the burden of taxes have been shifted to the poor? The bottom 50 percent, earning $30,000 or less, paid 3 percent of total federal income taxes. In 1999, they paid 4 percent. Congressmen know all of this, but they attempt to hoodwink the average American who doesn’t.

The fact that there are so many American earners who have little or no financial stake in our country poses a serious political problem. The Tax Foundation estimates that 41 percent of whites, 56 percent of blacks, 59 percent of American Indian and Aleut Eskimo and 40 percent Asian and Pacific Islanders had no 2004 federal income tax liability. The study concluded, “When all of the dependents of these income-producing households are counted, there are roughly 122 million Americans — 44 percent of the U.S. population — who are outside of the federal income tax system.” These people represent a natural constituency for big-spending politicians. In other words, if you have little or no financial stake in America, what do you care about the cost of massive federal spending programs? …

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, was the subject of a profile in last Sunday’s business section of Times, YUK.

THIS is yet another story about a clueless but obtrusive boss — the kind of meddlesome manager you might laugh at in the panels of “Dilbert,” the daily comic strip. …

… “THE most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.” …

… “THE purpose of a plan is to disguise the fact that you have no idea what you should be doing.” …

… He adds that running a restaurant complements his life nicely. “It’s a source of stress, but it adds such richness and happiness to my life,” he says. “The problem with being a cartoonist is that if you don’t have someplace else to go, your life just gets so small.”

At the very least, Scott Adams is getting fresh insight into Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss

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Pete Du Pont writes on the Utah school voucher loss.

… Utah citizens voted down the voucher plan by 62% to 38%. That is too bad–educational choices by parents for their children is an important concept–but not surprising. While there are successful school choice programs operating in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, 10 state referenda on various voucher proposals have been defeated since 1972, including two defeats each in California, Michigan and Colorado.

One reason for these defeats has been the work of the teachers unions, which oppose school choice of any kind because it limits their power. Passage of the Utah school choice statute earlier this year prompted a union call to arms. The national teachers unions went to war in Utah and won.

When the choice bill was passed by the Utah Legislature last winter, Nancy Pomeroy of Parents Choice in Education enthusiastically recited the score: “Parents and Children 1. Unions and Educrats 0.” Unfortunately the score flipped on Tuesday. …

Michael Barone too.

Education is not ordinarily thought to be in the purview of a Federal Reserve chairman. So it’s striking when Alan Greenspan in his memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” raises the subject.

“Our primary and secondary education system,” he writes, “is deeply deficient in providing homegrown talent to operate our increasingly complex infrastructure.” The result: “Too many of our students languish at too low a level of skill upon graduation, adding to the supply of lesser-skilled labor in the face of an apparently declining demand.”

So if you’re concerned about widening disparities in income, Greenspan tells readers attracted to his book by its publicists’ promise of criticism of George W. Bush, then what you need to do is to “harness better the forces of competition” in educating kids. …

Good Power Line post on what’s in a name.

One might have thought that after the Democrats’ electoral victory last November, the ideology that dare not speak its name might come out of the closet. But no: Politico points out that the Democrats still won’t let on that they are liberals:

These are heady days for Democrats. The party is favored by almost all measures in the coming presidential contest.

But while Democrats are emboldened, they remain wary of the term “liberal.” …

James Taranto covers David Brooks column on the tiresome folks that also write at the Times,YUCK. Remember the London Times is Times, UK. We needed a designation for the paper of Walter Duranty and defeat.

What’s black and white and red all over? A New York Times blood feud! On Friday David Brooks of the Times devoted his column to debunking a “distortion” that “has spread like a weed over the past few months”:

An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia [Miss.] to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side.

“The truth,” Brooks notes, is more complicated. Reagan had planned to spend the week after the 1980 GOP convention courting black voters: …

Taranto also spots gay-baiting Dems including, would you believe, Andrew Sullivan.

And Jim reports on Hillary’s thin skin according to The New Republic.

George Will talks some economic sense.

… Presidential elections are always epidemics of economic illiteracy and hysteria, for two reasons: The party not holding the White House has an incentive to talk gloomy nonsense, and the media, for whom the phrase “good news” is an oxymoron (“We don’t report the planes that land safely”), love crises. In 2004, Democrats spoke of “the worst economy since Hoover” and “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” Republicans will, in time, have their wilderness season for spouting nonsensical pessimism.

That can, however, be self-fulfilling: Worried people curtail consumption, wary businesses defer investments. Everyone should remember the witticism that the stock market has predicted nine of the last three recessions.

Terry Teachout, writing in The National Review, gives us a 50 year look at Atlas Shrugged.

As I write these words, the 146th best-selling book on Amazon.com is the trade-paperback edition of a 1,200-page-long, 50-year-old mystery novel about a physicist, two industrialists, and a South American playboy with four (count ’em, four) middle names. Though the novel in question contains a fair amount of sex, its centerpiece is a 56-page monologue about the modern-day implications of Aristotelian philosophy. The author, a squat, vain Russian émigré, was so sure she’d penned a masterpiece that she refused to let anyone change a line of it, and so stubborn that she managed to impose her will on her publisher, who readily admitted to finding her philosophy “absolutely horrifying.” Be that as it may, Random House’s Bennett Cerf had been in the book-selling game long enough to know a cash cow when he saw one, so he ordered up a first printing of 100,000 copies — and sold them all.

Cerf recalled his friendly but uneasy professional relationship with Ayn Rand in At Random, his genial autobiography:

I remember when Atlas Shrugged was being edited by Hiram Haydn. The hero, John Galt, makes a speech that lasts about thirty-eight pages [sic!]. All that he says in it has been said over and over already in the book, but Hiram couldn’t get her to cut a word. . . . I said, “Ayn, nobody’s going to read that. You’ve said it all three or four times before, and it’s thirty-odd pages long. You’ve got to cut it.” She looked at me calmly and said, “Would you cut the Bible?” So I gave up.

Cerf dictated that anecdote to an oral historian in 1968. …

Long Range Weather gives us a graph of 4,500 years of global temps. Shows Al Gore is full of it. But you knew that.

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Maimon Schwarzschild posts in Right Coast on Armistice Day.

It was 89 years Sunday since the Armistice that ended the First World War in 1918 – the day the guns finally fell silent on the Western Front (and on all fronts) at precisely 11-11-11: 11.00 am, November 11.

In Britain and Commonwealth countries every year, there are remembrance ceremonies on the Sunday that falls nearest November 11 – Remembrance Sunday – but this year November 11 itself is Sunday, which will make these remembrance events somehow especially poignant.

Even now, 89 years later, there is a lot more emotion about all this in Europe and in the countries that were British dominions than in the US. …

Suzanne Fields on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Nearly 20 years ago, the Berlin Wall finally came tumbling down. If Humpty Dumpty had been foolish enough to sit on it, that’s where he would have had his fatal fall. Not all the East German guards nor all the Stasi operatives who spied on everyone could have put poor Humpty together again.

It was a defining moment for mankind, exposing the ultimate failure of the brutal and goofy Marxist economic system. As John F. Kennedy noted on his visit to the Wall in 1963: “There are some who say communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.” …

Three folks, Peggy Noonan, Dick Morris, and Michael Goodwin comment on Hillary’s problems.

Noonan;

The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they’d like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, “I will have beef.”

Yes, said the waiter. “And the vegetables?”

“They will have beef too.”

Too good to check, as they say. It is certainly apocryphal, but I don’t want it to be. It captured her singular leadership style, which might be characterized as “unafraid.”

She was a leader.

Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender. …

Morris;

During the Bill Clinton presidency, it became obvious that the president and the first lady were locked in a zero sum game of perception. The stronger people perceived her, the weaker they felt he was. Early in his tenure, news stories were rife about Hillary’s extraordinary influence on appointments, policy and political strategy. Each of these leaks sapped confidence in Bill Clinton’s strength and led to a drop in his ratings.

The solution was to exile Hillary from the White House. She stopped attending strategy meetings, no longer had a direct or public role in policy formulation and redoubled her schedule of foreign travel and writing.

Now, as Hillary runs for president and Bill speaks out on her behalf, the Clintons’ zero sum conundrum has returned. His stout defense of his wife saps her credibility and raises doubts about her potential strength as a president. With his every speech and utterance, the question grows: Can she stand up for herself or does she need to hide behind her husband? …

Goodwin;

Hillary Clinton has a man problem. No, no, not that kind of man problem. And not the man problem she had in mind when she accused her rivals of “piling on” at the debate debacle. Her man problem comes from her friends.

Friends like Gov. Spitzer, who has thrown her the hottest political potato of the year with his plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Friends like booster Charlie Rangel, the Harlem congressman whose massive tax-hike proposal is fast becoming a millstone around her political neck.

And the biggest man problem of all is Hubba Bubba, who is developing a habit of saying stupid things. A bimbo eruption would almost be comic relief compared with his nonsense of saying that critics who blast wifey’s habit of ducking tough issues are practically “Swift-boating” her. He followed that turkey with a free-association ramble to an Iowa audience that seemed to suggest the rough and tumble of the immigration debate resembled Al Qaeda tactics.

Tech Central Station has a side of Mexican immigration you might not have considered.

I wish my American friends who fret about Mexican immigrants could be here with me. Listening to Emiliano Zapata, a laborer who happens to be the grandson and namesake of the legendary Mexican revolutionary, they perhaps would get a clearer sense of how the migration of Mexicans originated a few decades ago and why it continues today. …

American Thinker likes the Hugo Chavez put-down.

Power Line has Chavez thoughts too.

Contentions posts on the U of Deleware PC programs.

Bjorn Lomborg was in the Sunday Telegraph.

This week, the United Nations’ climate scientists will release a major report synthesising the world’s best global warming research. It will be the first time we’ve heard from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore.

The IPCC’s Assessment Report will tell policy-makers what to expect from man-made climate change. It is the result of rigorous and painstaking labour: more than can be said for the other Nobel Prize winner. The difference between Gore’s claims and IPCC research is instructive.

While Gore was creating alarm with his belief that a 20-foot-high wall of water would inundate low-lying cities, the IPCC showed us we should realistically prepare for a rise of one foot or so by the end of the century. Beyond the dramatic difference, it is also worth putting that one foot in perspective. Over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot – yet, did we notice?

Most tellingly, while Gore was raising fears about the Gulf Stream halting and a new Ice Age starting, the scientists discounted the prospect entirely. …

Speaking of green, Jonah Goldberg comments on NBC’s new program.

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Mark Steyn has Pakistan thoughts.

… Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: Gen. Musharraf should do this; he shouldn’t have done that; the State Department should lean on him to do the other.

“It is time for him to go,” pronounced Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach. Every foreign policy genius has his Hollywood pitch ready: “If we’re not careful, we’re going to see the same thing happen that happened in Iran,” warned Dan Burton, R-Ind. Pakistan 2007 is a remake of Persia 1979 with the general as the shah, etc.

Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad.

Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that’s because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives. In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush told the world that you’re either with us or against us. Musharraf said he was with us, which was jolly decent of him considering that 99.9999 percent of his people are against us. In the teeth of that glum reality, he’s rode a difficult tightrope with some skill. …

Bill Kristol makes sure we don’t overlook Lieberman’s recent speech, or Lieberman himself. Here’s the Senator;

. . . [T]here is something profoundly wrong–something that should trouble all of us–when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base–even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.

For me, this episode reinforces how far the Democratic Party of 2007 has strayed. . . . That is why I call myself an Independent Democrat today. It is because my foreign policy convictions are the convictions that have traditionally animated the Democratic Party–but they exist in me today independent of the current Democratic Party, which has largely repudiated them. …

Samizdata quote reminds us idiots reside in business too.

Karl Rove had an op-ed about the Dem congressional leadership in WSJ.

This week is the one-year anniversary of Democrats winning Congress. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid probably aren’t in a celebrating mood. The goodwill they enjoyed after their victory is gone. Their bright campaign promises are unfulfilled. Democratic leadership is in disarray. And Congress’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest point in history.

The problems the Democrats are now experiencing begin with the federal budget. Or rather, the lack of one. In 2006, Democrats criticized Congress for dragging its feet on the budget and pledged that they would do better. Instead, they did worse. The new fiscal year started Oct. 1 — five weeks ago — but Democrats have yet to send the president a single annual appropriations bill. It’s been at least 20 years since Congress has gone this late in passing any appropriation bills, an indication of the mess the Pelosi-Reid Congress is now in. …

Peter Wehner in Contentions comments on Pelosi’s latest “end the war” stunt.

… In Iraq we’re also seeing some encouraging news on the economic front and very encouraging, even dramatic, progress on the local political front; “bottom-up” reconciliation is continuing apace. The main problem in Iraq lies with the central government and its unwillingness, still, to share power. Nevertheless, almost every important trend line in Iraq is positive. And yet to the likes of Speaker Pelosi, it matters not at all. She and her colleagues are ideologues in the truest sense—zealous and doctrinaire people committed to a path regardless of the evidence. And the fact that good news in Iraq seems to agitate her and other leading Democrats is astonishing, as well as unsettling.

Nancy Pelosi’s effort to subvert a manifestly successful (if belatedly implemented) strategy in Iraq is reckless and foolish—and it may succeed in driving down Congressional approval ratings, already at record lows, to single digits. Which is about where they belong.

Joshua Muravchik, also in Contentions, examines awards by something in DC called the Churchill Centre.

… If you find the Baker-Hamilton legacy incongruent with that of Churchill, the Churchill Centre is out to reshape your memory of him, much as various academics lately have redefined Ronald Reagan as a liberal or moderate in noble contrast to the odious conservative, George W. Bush. The Centre explains: “The political precept that won Churchill respect from all sides was his belief that in difficult times the best results follow when people of differing beliefs and backgrounds come together, the greatest example of which was the ‘Grand Alliance’ of World War II.” In other words, Churchill’s great feat was not his resistance to Hitler but his embrace of Stalin.

Next, perhaps, the Centre will create a Churchill Award for Appeasement.

Speaking of Churchill, a Power Line post on new books centering on his relationship to Jews.

Cafe Hayek says Bill’s taking the fall for Hill.

Speaking of those two, Marty Peretz wonders if Bill wants her to fail. And Peretz is not reassured by her Mid-east thoughts.

American Thinker has a peek inside the academy’s fundraising.

Higher education, one of the biggest industries in America, has gotten wealthy beyond the dreams of previous generations of academics. Tuition increases at more than double the rate of inflation for a decade, taxpayer funding of research, tuition loans and scholarship, and tax exempt donations by the wealthy have all added enormous sums.

Wrapped in mantle of virtue and knowledge, the actual business of extracting the annual hundreds of billions of dollars it devours remains in the shadows. But a recent event has made public a perfectly normal, yet mildly disturbing practice related to fundraising.

To paraphrase a campaign slogan of yore, it’s not what’s illegal that’s the problem; it is what is normal. …

The Angry Economist posts on the drug war.

One of the funniest things ever in the New Yorker. Showed up four and a half years ago. Time for a redo.

People are surprised when I tell them that I, by temperament and by avocation, am a naturalist. I don’t look like a naturalist. No pair of field glasses dangles from my sunburned neck (which isn’t sunburned), and I don’t wear hiking boots or an old bandanna, and my arms are not laden with specimen bags and notebooks and tweezers—the tools of the naturalist’s trade, you are thinking, but not of mine. I don’t live in a tent, not even for part of the year. I don’t own a canoe or a kayak or any kind of net. The shelves in my study? I can tell you truthfully that they are not lined with large jars containing the well-preserved bodies of dead squirrels and such, or with old birds’ nests, or with a dozen or so different types of ferns that are indistinguishable to you but not to me. No. …

Paul Greenberg provides more entertainment.

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Instapundit shows us Michael Yon’s new great photo.

Belmont Club likes the photo too.

The Guardian reminds us the Berlin wall fell 18 years ago tomorrow.

Remember, remember the 9th of November. But who does? If you had not seen the headline to this column, would you instantly have known that I refer to the day the Berlin wall came down, 18 years ago tomorrow? Dates age faster than we do, said the poet Robert Lowell, and most of the time that is true.

For an older generation of central Europeans, November 9 meant the Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in 1938, when Nazi thugs left the streets of this city strewn with the smashed glass of Jewish shopkeepers’ windows. For those still older, it recalled Hitler’s attempted putsch on November 8-9 1923. Each November 9 supplants the last. Perhaps – heaven forbid – in a few years’ time there will be an attempted terrorist attack in Berlin (foiled, let us hope) on a November 9 and Germans will have to work out whether to call it 9/11, European style, or 11/9, American style. …

Jonah Goldberg leads the way for Mark Steyn’s review of a book published 20 years ago.

So, here’s Steyn marking 20 years of “The Closing of the American Mind.”

I don’t really like the expression “popular culture.” It’s just “culture” now: there is no other. “High culture” is high mainly in the sense we keep it in the attic and dust it off and bring it downstairs every now and then. But don’t worry, not too often. “Classical music,” wrote Bloom, “is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archaeology. Thirty years ago [i.e., now fifty years ago], most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids.” Not anymore. If you’d switched on TV at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 you’d have seen President and Mrs. Clinton and the massed ranks of American dignitaries ushering in the so-called new millennium to the strains of Tom Jones singing “I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour/ That’s when my love comes tumblin’ down.” Say what you like about JFK, but at least Mrs. Kennedy would have booked a cellist.

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner. …

Maimon Schwarzschild in Right Coast gives a précis of a Melanie Phillips City Journal article on anti-Semitism in Britain. Happy to have this synopsis. Wanted to include this, but it was too long. There’s a link for download.

Melanie Phillips gives a chilling, detailed, and all too convincing report on the spread of anti-Semitism in Britain. Overt anti-Semitism is rife in Britain’s large Muslim community. But it’s not only among Muslims by any means:

[A]nti-Semitism has also become respectable in mainstream British society. “Anti-Jewish themes and remarks are gaining acceptability in some quarters in public and private discourse in Britain and there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream,” reported a Parliamentary inquiry last year. “It is this phenomenon that has contributed to an atmosphere where Jews have become more anxious and more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any other time for a generation or longer.”

At the heart of this ugly development is a new variety of anti-Semitism, aimed primarily not at the Jewish religion, and not at a purported Jewish race, but at the Jewish state. Zionism is now a dirty word in Britain, and opposition to Israel has become a fig leaf for a resurgence of the oldest hatred. …

 

Samizdata finds some of the good news in the election this week.

John Stossel doesn’t think the government is capable of doing anything about global warming.

Larry Elder doesn’t think much of the guv either.

The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the bureaucrats.

A few months ago, I met a contractor in a bar. He told me about his business, and I asked him how many people he employed. He said, “Forty-nine. If I have one more, then the federal Family Medical Leave Act and the California Family Rights Act kick in. Then if somebody goes out, I have to hold his job open for months, whether I can afford to keep him or not. That’s bull—-.” So here we are. A man that wants to hire more people refuses to do so, because an additional hiree takes a hammer to his profit margins.

I recently visited a friend who lives in the Bay Area. I got through security at Los Angeles International Airport, even through my carry-on toiletry bag included hair paste, toothpaste and deodorant. All went through the security screening, no problem.

On my return flight through San Francisco Airport, however, security made me open my toiletry bag, and I received stern instructions to — in the future — place stuff like shampoo, hair paste, toothpaste, sunblock and deodorant in a zip-lock plastic bag. “No one told me to do that on the way up here,” I said. The security screener said, “Those are the rules. Somebody simply didn’t follow them.” …

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Mark reacts to Al’s prize.

Apparently there are still one or two holdouts who decline to prostrate themselves before Al Gore. As ABC reporter David Wright fretted, “Even the Nobel Prize is not going to be enough to silence the naysayers . . .”

Ah, so true. Say what you like about Al’s predecessor in the pantheon of glory, the late Yasser Arafat, but there was a guy who knew how to silence naysayers and, when he needed to, he didn’t leave it to the luster of his Nobel.

To escape the wall-to-wall Adulation I jumped in the truck and found myself going past a Vermont dairy farm I drive by every couple of years. Only this time the Holsteins were gone. The field was still there, well mown, but the soft low of cattle came there not. I asked a friend of mine in the dairying business and she told me the farm had gone under, but don’t worry, she added dryly, the folks who bought it put the land in “conservation easement.” And then she rolled her eyes, and we moved on to other subjects. The cows have gone, the farmers have gone, but the pasture will be preserved in perpetuity. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between “conservation” and the neutron bomb. …

Samizdata considers a freedom-fighter award.

John Fund with shorts on yesterday’s election.

Editors of National Review too.

It’s safe to say that liberals fared a bit better than conservatives in the mishmash of Tuesday’s elections: They turned back an important school-choice measure in Utah and applauded Democratic victories in the Kentucky gubernatorial race and the Virginia legislature. Pundits who search for a national meaning in these results, however, will search in vain, because local issues and factors dominated. …

Christopher Hitchens says the jihadists are not created by our foreign policy.

I call your attention to the front-page report in the Oct. 30 New York Times in which David Rohde, writing from the Afghan town of Gardez, tells of a new influx of especially vicious foreign fighters. Describing it as the largest such infiltration since 2001, Rohde goes on to say, “The foreign fighters are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies.” They also, it seems, favor those Taliban elements who are more explicitly allied with al-Qaida, and bring with them cash and resources with which to sabotage, for example, the opening of schools in the southern provinces around Kandahar.

Now, if this were a report from Iraq, we would be hearing that it was all our own fault and that the Bin Ladenists would not be in that country at all if it were not for the coalition presence. It’s practically an article of faith among liberals that only the folly of the intervention made Iraq into a magnet and a training or recruiting ground for our foes. One of the difficulties with this shallow and glib analysis is that it fails to explain Afghanistan and, in fact, fails to explain it twice.

We have fairly convincing evidence that a majority of Afghans do not, at the very least, oppose the presence of NATO forces on their soil. The signs of progress are slight but definite, having mainly to do with the return of millions of refugees and an improvement in the lives of women. There are some outstanding stupidities, such as the attempt to spray the opium poppies, but in general the West has behaved decently, and a huge number of Afghans resent the Taliban and its allies if only on the purely nationalist ground that it represents a renewed attempt to turn Afghanistan into a Pakistani colony, as it was before 2001. …

Duane Patterson in Hugh Hewitt wonders if the MSM can protect Dems from victory in Iraq.

Anne Applebaum explains the new form of radical chic.

Thomas Sowell looking at all the folks who want to save the world says, “Go make a difference someplace else.”

John Stossel says government money has strings.

Walter Williams reports a U of Delaware program that has since been cancelled. At least until we’re looking elsewhere.

In last month’s column “Academic Cesspools,” I wrote about “Indoctrinate U,” a recently released documentary exposing egregious university indoctrination of young people at prestigious and not-so-prestigious universities (www.onthefencefilms.com/movies.html). I said the documentary only captured the tip of a disgusting iceberg.

The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a frontline organization in the battle against academic suppression of free speech and thought, released information about what’s going on at the University of Delaware, and probably at other universities as well, that should send chills up the spines of parents of college-age students. The following excerpts are taken from the University of Delaware’s Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document. The full document is available at www.thefire.org.

Students living in the University’s housing, roughly 7,000, are taught: “A racist: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)” This gem of wisdom suggests that by virtue of birth alone, not conduct, if you’re white, you’re a racist.

Dilbert’s Scott Adams was in the WSJ.

I spend about a third of my workday blogging. Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases my income by 1%. I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it.

As with most of my life decisions, my impulse to blog was a puzzling little soup of miscellaneous causes that bubbled and simmered until one day I noticed I was doing something. I figured I needed a rationalization in case anyone asked. My rationalization for blogging was especially hard to concoct. I was giving away my product for free and hoping something good came of it.

I did have a few “artist” reasons for blogging. After 18 years of writing “Dilbert” comics, I was itching to slip the leash and just once write “turd” without getting an email from my editor. It might not seem like a big deal to you, but when you aren’t allowed to write in the way you talk, it’s like using the wrong end of the shovel to pick up, for example, a turd.

Over time, I noticed something unexpected and wonderful was happening with the blog. I had an army of volunteer editors, and they never slept. The readers were changing the course of my writing in real time. I would post my thoughts on a topic, and the masses told me what they thought of the day’s offering without holding anything back. Often they’d correct my grammar or facts and I’d fix it in minutes. They were in turns brutal and encouraging. They wanted more posts on some topics and less of others. It was like the old marketing saying, “Your customers tell you what business you’re in.” …

WSJ celebrates Starbucks.

Starbucks, the Onion once reported, “continued its rapid expansion Tuesday, opening its newest location in the men’s room of an existing Starbucks.” In real life, it hasn’t come to that–yet. But Starbucks has seemingly caffeinated the U.S. and the world. There are now 10,000 stores spread across North America (more than 170 in Manhattan alone) and an additional 4,000 in more than 40 countries, stretching from Bahrain to Brazil. Starbucks stores have become a retail icon, a daily habit and a late-night punchline. “The only way the oil companies could make more money,” Jay Leno quipped a couple of years ago, “would be if they were drilling for oil and struck Starbucks coffee.” In “Starbucked,” Taylor Clark sets out to explain such scorching success. He offers, along the way, an entertaining, instructive and refreshingly even-handed account of the company’s life so far. …

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Mark Steyn goes for the grown-up when looking for a president.

… As for phony energy, consider Bill Clinton. Back in 1998, when he was fending off the first few months of the Monica business, President Clinton used to say that much as he’d like to resign, hand over to Al Gore and sit on the beach all day, he had no choice but to accept the burdens of office and “get back to working for the American people.” There wasn’t a single morning, he assured the public, that he didn’t wake up thinking about how he could make life better for the American people. I’m a foreigner, so it’s hardly my place to tell the American people that the best response to this is: “oh, bugger off, you neo-monarchical narcissist.” The founding principle of the republic is that the American people are perfectly capable of making life better for themselves, and all you wannabe-king types need to do is get out of the way. That goes for the Canadian people, and the British people, and the Spanish people, and pretty much any other reasonably competent citizenry. The height of Bill Clinton’s indestructible belief in his own indispensability came in his “tribute” to the victims of 9/11. “The people who died represent, in my view, not only the best of America,” he said, “but the best of the world that I worked hard for eight years to build.” It seems even the dead of Lower Manhattan are a testament to Clinton’s “hard work.” Showbiz types like to say that the hardest work is making it look easy: Gene Kelly skipping down the street singin’ in the rain doesn’t work unless it’s blithe and carefree, and that takes plenty of rehearsal. On the other hand, when some Vegas lounge act does that untying-the-bow-tie unbuttoning-the-tux look-how-hard-I’m-working shtick, it’s usually a good sign he isn’t. President Clinton was the Lounge-Act-in-Chief.

Stuart Taylor has a great analysis of the waterboading flap in the senate.

The surge of Democratic opposition to President Bush’s nomination of former Judge Michael Mukasey to be attorney general says a lot about certain Democrats, especially after the initial bipartisan applause for a superbly qualified man who has clearly repudiated Bush’s previous claims of near-dictatorial powers.

It is especially telling that the main congressional objection to Mukasey has been his unwillingness to declare illegal an interrogation technique that Congress itself has assiduously and repeatedly declined to declare illegal.

The technique, called “waterboarding,” involves simulated drowning. Congress could seek to explicitly ban it, along with other highly coercive techniques. It has not done so, because it does not want to take the blame for any future terrorist attacks that might have been prevented by highly coercive interrogation.

The attacks on Mukasey are an exquisite example of Congress’s penchant for avoiding accountability by leaving the law unclear and then trashing the executive for whichever interpretation it adopts whenever something goes wrong.

The Captain posts on Hillary’s defenders.

What exactly have they put in the water at The New Republic? First its leadership can’t seem to find an exit strategy with both hands and a flashlight for publishing fabulism, despite TNR having written the book on it in 1998 with Stephen Glass. Now Linda Hirshman, in defending Hillary Clinton from the big Y-chromosomed meanie at Meet The Press, decides to go the Pastor Niemoller route and winds up implying that Tim Russert is some kind of Nazi: …

Captain also posts on the Dem problem with good Iraq news.

… Why resist good news? Some of our media and political class put their chips on defeat, and have begun to realize how victory will destroy their credibility. Not everyone acted as foolishly as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid when he declared victory for the terrorists this past spring, but most of the Western media has relentlessly highlighted every setback while ignoring most of the advances made in Iraq — until the progress became too obvious to ignore any longer.

The (London)Times notes that the defeatists have changed tactics. Where they previously argued that every piece of bad news meant that we should flee Iraq, now they argue that the decline in violence gives us a final opportunity to declare defeat and run away. They want to walk away from a strategic victory just to salvage their own credibility, ignoring what a stabilized and democratic Iraq could mean not just for the Iraqis but for the entire Middle East. …

Kansas U. prof notes the freedoms we lost to campaign finance reform. Thank yewwwwww John McCain.

TODAY, voters in six states – including New Jersey- will decide 38 ballot measures covering such hotbutton issues as school vouchers and stem-cell research. Issues like that invite public comment, but chances are that people in those states have unwittingly violated state campaign-finance laws just by speaking out about them.

Under the First Amendment, every citizen should have an unfettered right to participate in public debate. But try to get involved in political life, and you will soon see how far we have come from the time of anonymous pamphleteers holding forth on the great issues of the day. Apparently, it takes a lot of bureaucracy and red tape to oversee free speech, even when it involves relatively straightforward debate for or against a clearly defined ballot measure. …

BIG GLOBALONEY SECTION TONIGHT.

Debra Saunders.

Sen. Barbara Boxer of California delivered a speech in the Senate last week in which she linked global warming to the San Diego wildfires, Darfur, the imminent loss of the world’s polar bears and even a poor 14-year-old boy who died from “an infection caused after swimming in Lake Havasu,” because its water is warmer. Forget arson. Forget genocide. Forget nature. There is no tragedy that cannot be placed at the doorstep of global-warming skeptics.

Oh, and there’s no need to acknowledge that the regulations or taxes necessary to curb emissions by a substantial degree might damage economic growth. According to Boxer, laws to curb greenhouse gases – this country would have to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half over 12 years to meet the latest international community goals – will do good things for the American economy and create lots of jobs. It’s Nostradamus Science wedded to Santa Claus economics.

It is rhetoric such as Boxer’s – an odd combination of the-end-is-near hysteria and overly rosy economic scenarios – that keep me in the agnostic/skeptic global-warming camp. …

John R. Christy.

I’ve had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don’t think I will add “0.0001 Nobel Laureate” to my resume.

The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that’s another story. …

NewsBusters.

Did Al Gore win his Nobel for “peace,” or did it perhaps come in a new category: comedy? I ask in the wake of his rib-tickling routine on this morning’s “Today.” Al, that inveterate card, actually claimed that the MSM’s coverage of global warming is . . . too balanced. View video here. …

Claudia Rosett posts twice on “important” UN globaloney confab on the island of Bali.

The would-be regulators of the world’s climate (and your wallet) will be jetting to Bali this December for Ban Ki-Moon’s next UN weather fest: “UN Climate Change Conference 2007.” UN policy allows even the lowlier UN staffers to travel business class on long-haul flights (your tax dollars at work), the better to arrive wined, dined and ready to hit the ground …and the beaches … and the golf courses … and the tennis courts — running. Apparently there is so much to discuss that the conference will run for a full fortnight, from Dec. 3-14, at Bali’s seaside luxury resort of Nusa Dua. …

…

 

… Quick Multiple Choice Quiz on the UN system: Will the UN release for the perusal of Joe-average taxpayer a detailed post-conference breakdown of staff expense accounts for Ban’s bash on Bali?

A. Ha

B. Ha-ha

C. You’ve got to be kidding

D. In order to operate, the UN must preserve its confidentiality in such matters. Tennis, anyone?

The Great Wheel of China.