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• October 22 Word

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John Fund on Bobby Jindal’s win in Louisiana.

Bobby Jindal can’t hold down a job: That’s the joke circulating around Louisiana today about the election of Mr. Jindal, a son of immigrants from India, as governor. Mr. Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican congressman from the New Orleans suburbs, won 54% of the vote in Saturday’s election, avoiding the need for a runoff next month.

When he takes office in January he will be the nation’s youngest governor. But he has already held a glittering array of other positions of responsibility in his short career. As an undergraduate he worked as an intern for Rep. Jim McCrery, now the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee. Then he became a Rhodes Scholar, got a master’s degree, and did a stint at McKinsey & Co. Gov. Mike Foster appointed him head of the state’s $4 billion health-care system at age 24. He went on to serve as director of a national commission on Medicare at 26, became president of the University of Louisiana system at 27, and a U.S. assistant secretary of health and human services at 29.

Four years ago, at age 32 ,he narrowly lost a race for governor to Democrat Kathleen Blanco, who dismissed his calls for reform of the state’s creaking bureaucracy as unnecessary. The next year Mr. Jindal won his congressional seat, but he never really stopped campaigning for governor. In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans, and Gov. Blanco’s response was so inadequate that she was effectively forced to retire. …

Michael Barone says 2008 is going to be different.

Things are not working out as Democratic congressional leaders expected. For the first eight months of this year, they struggled to find some way to shut down the American military effort in Iraq.

They took it for granted that we were stuck in a quagmire in Iraq, with continuous high casualties and very little to show for them. They pressed hard to get the Republican votes they needed to block a filibuster in the Senate and were cheered when some Republicans, like John Warner, seemed to lean their way. They worked hard over the August recess to pressure Republican House members to break ranks and vote with them.

But the Republicans mostly held fast. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell skillfully parried their thrusts in the Senate. House Minority Leader John Boehner persuaded most House Republicans to hang on. Then, over the summer, the news out of Iraq started to get better. …

Power Line with a couple of good posts.

Claudia Rosett comments on Kofi’s new job.

Anne Bayefsky tells us what UN membership is worth.

… The UN, we are told, is an essential institution because of its unique inclusivity. The argument goes that the goals and values of democracies on the world scene are dependent on their doing business with dictators as equals. One state, one vote. Regardless of the numbers of real people being subdued in various ways back home. Regardless of the financial contribution made by each member state to the world organization. Regardless of the extent to which the founding principles and purposes of the UN are flaunted by the member state every day of the week. …

Ralph Peters speculates about the Israeli raid in Syria.

ON Sept. 6, Israel struck a remote target in eastern Syria. The story didn’t really break for weeks, and details are still emerging – but the consensus view is that Israeli aircraft attacked a secret nuclear facility.

There’s much more to it than that. The echoes of that strike resound far beyond the Middle East.

Tel Aviv isn’t showing any leg when it comes to exactly who did what to whom. Airstrikes may have been synchronized with commando action on the ground. We don’t know, and, for now, secrets are being kept.

The circumstantial evidence is strong, though, that the terror-affiliated regime in Damascus had embarked on a nuclear-weapons program – with the help of the North Koreans (who, simultaneously, have been teasing us with suggestions that they’ll dismantle their own nuke effort if we pay them lavish tribute).

My own suspicion is that rent-an-expert Pakistanis were involved, too – with or without the blessing of Islamabad’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, an organization with often contradictory and always dubious loyalties. …

Jonathan Gurwitz has more on Pelosi as Sec. of State.

The last time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did her best impersonation of a secretary of state, her amateur performance was merely reckless. This time it is dangerous.

Pelosi’s April visit to Syria should have demonstrated a fundamental about diplomacy — words matter.

Pelosi created an international tempest by claiming to bear a message for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, one stating his country was prepared to engage in peace talks with its longtime enemy without preconditions. That would have marked a significant departure from six decades of Israeli practice.

Olmert did not make such a departure, which forced the Israeli Foreign Ministry to issue a clarification that contradicted Pelosi’s supposed communique. …

… Congress should go on record about the atrocities that claimed 1.5 million Armenian lives. Historical amnesia about the systematic slaughter of Armenians has encouraged many of the genocidal movements that followed. But after nine decades and with a war in Iraq, now is not the time to put U.S.-Turkish relations to a test.

Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, George Shultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell sent Pelosi a letter last month warning her the resolution would endanger U.S. national security interests. A real secretary of state would already know that.

Roger Simon with germane comments on new Redford flick.

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Charles Krauthammer with must-read comments on Pelosi’s Armenian gambit.

“Friends don’t let friends commit crimes against humanity,” explained Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which approved the Armenian genocide resolution. This must rank among the most stupid statements ever uttered by a member of Congress, admittedly a very high bar.

Does Smith know anything about the history of the Armenian genocide? Of the role played by Henry Morgenthau? As U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Morgenthau tried desperately to intervene on behalf of the Armenians. It was his consular officials deep within Turkey who (together with missionaries) brought out news of the genocide. And it was Morgenthau who helped tell the world about it in his writings. Near East Relief, the U.S. charity strongly backed by President Woodrow Wilson and the Congress, raised and distributed an astonishing $117 million in food, clothing and other vital assistance that, wrote historian Howard Sachar, “quite literally kept an entire nation alive.”…

… So why has Pelosi been so committed to bringing this resolution to the floor? (At least until a revolt within her party and the prospect of defeat caused her to waver.) Because she is deeply unserious about foreign policy. This little stunt gets added to the ledger: first, her visit to Syria, which did nothing but give legitimacy to Bashar al-Assad, who continues to engage in the systematic murder of pro-Western Lebanese members of parliament; then, her letter to Costa Rica‘s ambassador, just nine days before a national referendum, aiding and abetting opponents of a very important free-trade agreement with the United States.

Is the Armenian resolution her way of unconsciously sabotaging the U.S. war effort, after she had failed to stop it by more direct means? I leave that question to psychiatry. Instead, I fall back on Krauthammer’s razor (with apologies to Occam): In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

Gerard Baker in London Times has fun with a column saying the US is the greatest place in the world to be anti-American.

… It has always amused me that the same people who denounce America as a seething cesspit of blind obscurantist bigotry can’t see the irony that America itself produces its own best critics. When there’s a scab to be picked on the American body politic, no one does it with more loving attention, more rigorous focus on the detail, than Americans themselves.

It has always been this way. The fiercest and most effective opponents of US foreign policy in the 1960s were not the students in Paris or the Politburo in North Vietnam. They were Jane Fonda, Bobby Kennedy and Marvin Gaye. …

… Al Gore wants the US to give up its economic autonomy and submit to rule by binding international obligations to curb its carbon emissions. Some of the Democratic candidates for the presidency want to tie down the American Gulliver under a web of global treaties. The British Government, if recent speeches by ministers are to be believed, is now apparently seriously committed to the idea that only the UN has the legitimacy to determine how nations should behave. In other words, that a system that gives vetoes to China and Russia and honours the human rights contributions of countries such as Syria or North Korea should be accorded a full role in the promotion of the dignity of mankind.

There’s a larger irony in all this. Even as the US demonstrates the openness of its own society, its unrivalled capacity for self-examination and self-correction, a free system based on the absolute authority of the rule of law, it is told it must submit itself to the views of Moscow, Beijing, and Brussels.

Fortunately, while the American system may be forgivingly tolerant of people with wild and dangerous ideas, it doesn’t generally let them run the country.

Mark Steyn writes on the Dems “children.”

 

… So what is the best thing America could do “for the children”? Well, it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a system of unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. Most of us understand, for example, that Social Security needs to be “fixed” – or we’ll have to raise taxes, or the retirement age, or cut benefits, etc. But, just to get the entitlements debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities in the United States are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of our gross domestic product. In Greece, the equivalent figure is 25 percent – that’s not a matter of raising taxes or tweaking retirement age; that’s total societal collapse.

So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits.

In France, President Sarkozy is proposing a very modest step – that those who retire before the age of 65 should not receive free health care – and the French are up in arms about it. He’s being angrily denounced by 53-year-old retirees, a demographic hitherto unknown to functioning societies. You spend your first 25 years being educated, you work for two or three decades, and then you spend a third of a century living off a lavish pension, with the state picking up every health care expense. No society can make that math add up.

And so, in a democratic system today’s electors vote to keep the government gravy coming and leave it to tomorrow for “the children” to worry about. That’s the real “war on children” – and every time you add a new entitlement to the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it. …

Power Line with congrats for Bobby Jindal.

The Captain weighs in with good Iraq news.

Bill Kristol thinks the Dems may pay dearly for their rush to defeat.

… last month, over on the Senate side, she couldn’t resist impugning the integrity of General David Petraeus as he testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Clinton said Petraeus’s testimony required a “willing suspension of disbelief.” That is, contrary to all evidence, Clinton accused the commanding general of U.S. troops in Iraq of misleading the American people.

All of this followed by several months the defining statement of the 110th Congress: Harry Reid’s assertion, this past April 19, “This war is lost.” History may well record that statement as the epitaph for the 110th Congress, and the party that led it. The Democrats engaged in endless efforts to make sure the war really was lost. They failed. Now it looks as if the war, despite the Democratic Congress’s best efforts, may well be won. It’s the congressional Democrats who are the losers. And so could be the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee. Are the American people likely to elect the candidate of a party that has tried its best to lose a winnable war?

Ron Cass, former Law Dean at BU, thinks Berger’s access to the Hillary team is significant.

… During Bill Clinton’s administration, there was no shortage of indications that perhaps the Clintons, husband and wife, were a bit casual about legal niceties. Although the accusations fixated many and resulted in convictions for more than a few Clinton associates, in the end, though he was disbarred for five years, Bill Clinton got something of a break because he was personally charming and his accusers seemed less so. Public reaction was that you might not want him around your daughter, but you’d be happy to go have a drink with Bill.

Hillary, whose stiff demeanor won’t garner the same slack, doesn’t just remind us of prior scandals. Sandy Berger didn’t lie about sex or do something ordinary that isn’t strictly in keeping with law – like speeding on a road where citizens regard the posted limits as advisory rather than mandatory. Sandy Berger committed a serious crime, intentionally, and lied about it, intentionally, and put his nation at risk. Hillary isn’t bothered by any of that. Whatever she says about the rule of law – which limits official power to safeguard all of us – she evidently doesn’t believe it was intended to place limits on her.

Picking Sandy Berger tells us something important about Hillary’s character. We should listen now – while it can do some good.

Michael Malone, of ABC News, continues the ongoing saga of the collapse of the NY Times.

Boom! And down goes the biggest newspaper name of all.

As you may have read, yesterday brokerage giant Morgan Stanley dumped its entire stake — $183 million worth — in the New York Times, in which it was the second largest shareholder. Not surprisingly, Times stock immediately slumped, bottoming at a nearly 3 percent drop to $18.28 — the lowest it has been in a decade.

The actual damage is probably even larger than that. The Morgan Stanley sell-off has been expected for some time now. Ever since April, after Hassam Elmasry, managing director of Morgan’s Investment Management Group failed in his attempt to challenge the Sulzberger family’s iron grip on the Times, the market has been expecting Morgan to pull out — and it is probably no coincidence that the stock has been in downward slide ever since. …

WSJ tells us what it’s like to drive a combine.

Slate – How come Patagonia gets all the monster dinosaurs?

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John Fund says maybe the Dems will drop the Armenian bill. John also comments on good GOP showing in Mass.

… Another GOP House member noted that then-House Speaker Denny Hastert “did the right thing” in 2000 when he pulled the resolution from the floor despite promises he had made to the Armenian community that it would come to a vote. …

 

(Hastert pulled the bill in 2000 upon a Bill Clinton request. Bush made the same request of Pelosi Tuesday and she refused. An interesting and telling juxtaposition, especially since in 2000 we weren’t even at war with tens of thousands of our troops at risk.) – Pckrhd

John Stossel will be on ABC’s 20/20 tomorrow with a segment on global warming.

Since Mark Steyn is on the front lines, he can describe our country as in the midst of a “cold civil war.”

… A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shriveled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can’t thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he’s playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he’s playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can’t do that if the guy you’re talking to doesn’t believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town — home to the nation’s best and brightest, allegedly — you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory (“01/20/09″ — the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane (“Buck Fush”) to the myopically self-indulgent (“Regime Change Begins At Home”) to the exhibitionist paranoid (“9/11 Was An Inside Job”). Let’s assume, as polls suggest, that next year’s presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it’s another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It’s not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized. …

Daniel Henninger’s Thursday column does a good job summarizing Gen. Sanchez’s Jeremiad. Pickerhead’s favorites are those directed at the media.

The media. “It seems that as long as you get a front-page story there is little or no regard for the ‘collateral damage’ you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct. . . . You assume that you are correct and on the moral high ground.”

“The speculative and often uninformed initial reporting that characterizes our media appears to be rapidly becoming the standard of the industry.” “Tactically insignificant events have become strategic defeats.” And: “The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war.”

Christopher Hitchens makes the case for the Anglosphere in City Journal. He starts with an Arthur Conan Doyle visit to the US in the 1890′s.

Doyle’s visit coincided with the height of this anti-British feeling, and at a dinner in his honor in Detroit he had this to say:

You Americans have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting. She is an Empire, and you will soon be an Empire also, and only then will you understand each other, and you will realize that you have only one real friend in the world.

After Detroit, Doyle spent Thanksgiving with Kipling and his American wife, Carrie, in Brattleboro, Vermont. It is of unquantifiable elements such as this that the Anglo-American story, or the English-speaking story, is composed.

Jonathan Gurwitz writes a good column on the Dem attack on Limbaugh.

Neal Boortz notices a campus protest you’d like.

Times, UK reports possible home price collapse in Britain.

James Taranto notes problems for Iraqi undertakers.

Corner posts on new blog by editors of NY Times. Good start for the humor section.

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Mark Steyn was in The Australian commenting on the ubiquitousness of Gore and his horror flick.

… A school kid in Ontario was complaining the other day that, whatever subject you do, you have to sit through Gore’s movie: It turns up in biology class, in geography, in physics, in history, in English.

Whatever you’re studying, it’s all you need to know. It fulfils the same role in the schoolhouses of the guilt-ridden developed world that the Koran does in Pakistani madrassas. Gore’s rise is as remorseless as those sea levels. I assumed Gore’s clammy embrace would do for the environmental movement what his belated endorsement had done for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential candidacy: kill it stone dead. But governor Dean was constrained by actual humdrum prosaic vote tallies in Iowa and New Hampshire. The ecochondriacs, by contrast, seem happiest when they’re most unmoored from reality.

That’s where Gore comes in. No matter how you raise the stakes (“It might take another 30 Kyotos”, says Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research), Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. “We are,” warns Gore, “altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe”.

Wow. It’s not just the Maldive Islands, but the balance of energy between Earth and the rest of the universe. …

Power Line posts.

Corner post says Belgium might break up.

Thomas Sowell on crime and politics.

Student speaks common sense and the school wants a psychological evaluation. Sounds like the Soviet Union to me.

ST. PAUL, Minn., October 10, 2007—Hamline University has suspended a student after he sent an e-mail suggesting that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been stopped if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus. Student Troy Scheffler is now required to undergo a mandatory “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school. Scheffler, who was suspended without due process just two days after sending the e-mail, has turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

Yahoo News says folks in England have resorted to pulling their own teeth. Does Michael Moore know?

Falling numbers of state dentists in England has led to some people taking extreme measures, including extracting their own teeth, according to a new study released Monday.

Others have used superglue to stick crowns back on, rather than stumping up for private treatment, said the study. One person spoke of carrying out 14 separate extractions on himself with pliers.

More typically, a lack of publicly-funded dentists means that growing numbers go private: 78 percent of private patients said they were there because they could not find a National Health Service (NHS) dentist, and only 15 percent because of better treatment. …

IBD editorial on socialized medicine.

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UVA poly sci prof thinks the Dems have taken over the moniker previously reserved for the GOP: that of the stupid party.

Twice during the past half century, the Democratic party has faced a challenge from its left wing. In the late 1960s, it was the mass movement of the New Left that rose up to defy the party’s liberal-progressive core. Following a contest of ideas and of wills, the liberal center collapsed and briefly yielded control to its radical critics. The struggle today is strikingly different in tone, with the party’s mainstream being bullied by a network of techno-thugs, spearheaded by MoveOn.org. Nothing remotely resembling an idea or a sustained argument has surfaced in this conflict, and there is no danger that one ever will.

 

…

 

Today, the Democratic party mainstream has its values, its instincts, and, as usual, more than its share of 10-point programs. It even has its “isms,” represented by its leading troika: the pragmatism of Hillary Clinton, the idealism of Barack Obama, and the populism of John Edwards. Yet its intellectual reservoir has shown itself to be lacking in depth and confidence. Today’s Democratic mainstream is no more willing or able to stand up to the party’s present leftist insurgency than the older mainstream was to stand up to the New Left. The tenor of the current left is best captured by something Lionel Trilling said in 1949 about conservatives: They do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

 

…

 

What emerges from Bai’s study of the coalition is that the tone of MoveOn’s recent New York Times ad assailing General Petraeus as “General Betray Us,” far from being exceptional, is perfectly typical of the discourse preached and practiced by this so-called progressive coalition. The ad stood out because it exposed to the world at large the ugly style the new radicals have developed for use among themselves–and because it forced the main Democratic presidential candidates, who declined to disavow it, to show publicly their fealty to the movement.

The Democratic party, its prowess renewed by a taste of success in 2006, is riding the crest of a political wave. It is the stupid party triumphant. What serious Democrats must now consider is whether to accept this state of affairs–or begin to think deeply enough to find a principled ground for rejecting a faction in their midst that is not only stupid but dangerous as well.

Thomas Sowell calls a spade a spade.

… Too many Democrats in Congress have gotten into the habit of treating the Iraq war as President Bush’s war — and therefore fair game for political tactics making it harder for him to conduct that war.

In a rare but revealing slip, Democratic Congressman James Clyburn said that an American victory in Iraq “would be a real big problem for us” in the 2008 elections.

Unwilling to take responsibility for ending the war by cutting off the money to fight it, as many of their supporters want them to, Congressional Democrats have instead tried to sabotage the prospects of victory by seeking to micro-manage the deployment of troops, delaying the passing of appropriations — and now this genocide resolution that is the latest, and perhaps lowest, of these tactics.

Jed Babbin with more on the Turk/Armenian maneuvering that perfectly illustrates how many Dems have lost their minds.

… Speaker Pelosi is apparently so intent on forcing an end to American involvement in Iraq that she is willing to interfere in our tenuous friendship with Turkey. When she does, it will be an historic event: the House of Representatives will be responsible for alienating a key ally in time of war and possibly interdicting supplies to US troops.

Richard Cohen, who must be one of the most decent people in DC, gives needed perspective on Turkey.

Jim Taranto with a new look to an old candidate.

The Captain and Real Clear Politics say Harry Reid might get what he deserves.

Mark Steyn thinks we need a coherent ideological framework for our culture to prevail in our war on ……. whatever.

… In Britain in the 1960s, the political class declared that the country “needed” mass immigration. When the less-enlightened lower orders in northern England fretted that they would lose their towns to the “Pakis”, they were dismissed as paranoid racists. The experts were right in a narrow, economic sense: The immigrants became mill workers and bus drivers. But the paranoid racists were right, too: The mills closed anyway, and mosques sprouted in their place; and Oldham and Dewesbury adopted the arranged cousin-marriage traditions of Mirpur in Pakistan; and Yorkshire can now boast among its native sons the July 7th London Tube bombers. The experts thought economics trumped all; the knuckle-dragging masses had a more basic unease, convinced that it’s culture that’s determinative. …

Ben Stein has misc. advice.

ABOUT a week ago, I was swimming in my pool when I had serious difficulty breathing. “Uh-oh,” I said to myself, “now I am about to die.” My wife was upstairs reading, way out of earshot and, anyway, if I were about to have a lethal heart attack, I wouldn’t be able to scream.

It turned out to be a nasty but short-lived bronchitis, and as I was lying in bed recovering, I thought, “I will die someday, and before I do, I would like to share with you the best possible thoughts I can, in gratitude for the many insightful letters I have received over the years from my readers.” …

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Ralph Peters call the Dems on one of their more disgusting stunts.

… This resolution isn’t about justice for the Armenians. Not this time. It’s a stunningly devious attempt to impede our war effort in Iraq and force premature troop withdrawals.

The Dems calculate that, without those flights and convoys, we won’t be able to keep our troops adequately supplied. Key intelligence and strike missions would disappear.

The Pentagon might be able to improvise other options. But the loss of the base and those routes would definitely hurt our troops. Severely. And we’d be more reliant than ever on a single, vulnerable lifeline running from Kuwait. …

Gary Becker has a go at finding an answer to the never ending question of why intellectuals dislike market solutions.

… In his 1950 book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, discussed exactly this question when asking why intellectuals were so opposed to capitalism during his time? His answer mainly was that businessmen do better under capitalism, whereas intellectuals believe they would have a more influential position under socialism and communism. In essence, Schumpeter’s explanation is based on intellectuals’ feeling envious of the success of others under capitalism combined with their desire to be more important.

I do believe that Schumpeter put his finger on one of the important factors behind the skepticism of intellectuals toward markets, and their continuing support of what governments do. Neither the unsuccessful performance of the US government first in Vietnam and now in Iraq, which they so strongly condemn, nor even the colossal failures of socialism and communism during the past half century, succeeded in weakening the faith of intellectuals in governmental solutions to problems rather than private market solutions. …

The Captain has a post that is apropos to the previous item about anti-capitalistic mentalities.

George Will takes a look at the requirements for today’s students of social work — and discovers a political commissariat worthy of the Soviet Union. Universities have required pledges of loyalty to liberal political thought as a requisite for success in their social-work programs, failing students who object to being told what to think (via CapQ reader Sandeep Dath):

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice “from local to global levels.” A widely used textbook — “Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill” — declares that promoting “social and economic justice” is especially imperative as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Clearly, in the social work profession’s catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism. …

Everyday Economist has a good quote for the day.

Yuval Levin and Peter Wehner with interesting NY Sun OpEd.

Conservatives today are in a funk. The strains of governing, the challenges of war, and the frustration of an unsuccessful mid-term election have contributed to unease and unhappiness. But deeper than these issues is an intellectual fatigue and uncertainty about where the attention of the conservative movement now should be directed.

What domestic issues can unite and motivate conservatives to great political exertions, and can win the allegiance of the public?

In this respect, the right is partially a victim of its own successes. If 25 years ago you had asked an American conservative to name the preeminent domestic policy challenges of the day, you probably would have gotten back, along with a general worry about cultural decline, some combination of welfare, taxes, and crime.

Few conservatives today would name any of these three as the foremost problems, and even on the cultural front they could point to some advances. This is due, in large part, to a series of conservative successes that have transformed American politics and made conservative theories of economics, law enforcement, and welfare the accepted wisdom. Success has not been complete in any of these areas, of course, but the struggle over first principles, over which way to go in general, has been won.

Today the left — which for decades fought vigorously on all three fronts — offers scant opposition on any of them. No leading Democrats are arguing that we undo conservative achievements on welfare and crime. And even on taxes, which liberals want to increase, no Democrats are arguing that we return to the days when the top rate of taxation was 70%.

Bill Kristol with a similar message.

Peter Bronson of Cinn. Enquirer says giving Gore peace prize like literature awards for comics.

Here’s an inconvenient truth: Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize thanks to a movie that needs more warning labels than a carton of unfiltered Camels.

This is puzzling. There are soldiers in Iraq who do more for peace on their day off than Gore does in a year of save-the-planet rock concerts. But I guess they gave him the Peace Prize because they didn’t have one for Politically Correct Mendacity. His Oscar-winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” should be listed as Science Fiction. …

William Gray, a serious meteorologist gives an important speech in NC and we have to read about in an Australian paper.

ONE of the world’s foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize “ridiculous” and the product of “people who don’t understand how the atmosphere works”.

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.” …

Alright. We’ve had a lot of serious stuff, how ’bout Paul Greenberg with Mudfight in the Media. In the tone of – a plague on both your houses, Paul covers Wesley Clark’s smear of Rush.

Some of us can vaguely remember a time when Wesley Clark was going to be the next Eisenhower – a general above the fray, a former supreme commander of NATO who had met the great challenges of his time, someone who would Bring Us Together, lift the tone of national politics, a champion of unity above the usual divisive politics, The Nation’s Hope, and all the rest of the nominating speech.

But that was long ago in another country, and, besides, that Wesley Clark is no more – if he was ever real. His appeal as a presidential candidate peaked the moment he announced back in 2003, if not before, and it steadily deteriorated with every roundhouse swing he took and missed. Sad. …

… Now he’s down there among the Michael Moore/Bill O’Reilly bottom-feeders. …

Rob Bluey with a great piece on the strength of the economy. News the media ignores.

The U.S. budget deficit fell to the lowest level in five years last week, but three of America’s leading newspapers — the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times — couldn’t find the space to mention the dramatic drop.

Journalists who have spent years trashing President Bush’s tax cuts appeared to suddenly lose interest when the budget picture brightened. That’s not surprising, however, considering that mainstream reporters frequently ignore upbeat economic news.

For 49 straight months, dating back to August 2003, the U.S. economy has added jobs. More than 8 million, in fact. Yet the only time economic news seems to hit the front page is when there’s something bad to report. No wonder Bush gets little credit.

A study by the Business and Media Institute last month revealed the “past four years of media coverage on jobs have been marred by pessimistic predictions, omissions, lack of economic context and focus on job losses instead of gains.” One of the biggest offenders was Katie Couric of the “CBS Evening News,” but she’s hardly alone. …

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Many of our favorites have columns and posts on the peace prize.

Claudia Rosett is brilliant.

So, beyond the Nobel Prize, what is it that Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, the United Nations, Mohamed El Baradei and Al Gore all have in common?

The flip answer is that they have all in their time pushed out enough hot air to melt the polar ice caps on Mars, and if anyone thinks that’s an exaggeration about Mars, check out this 2003 report from NASA. (Yes, it seems that even on a planet where homo sapiens has never exhaled at all, let alone fired up an SUV or hopped a longhaul airline flight, ice caps can suffer a volatile existence).

More seriously, here on planet earth, what those on the list above all have in common is that they have all in pursuit of their own ambitions pushed agendas that corrode the real basis for building a better life for all on this planet — which, in a nutshell, is freedom.

Free societies may produce more CO2 (whatever that actually adds up to — or not — in the context of a world climate that was changing long before we got here, and will go on changing long after we are gone). But that’s because they also produce more, per capita, of just about everything good — including ideas, inventions, contraptions and once-undreamt-of ways not only of sustaining human life, but of making it healthier, longer, easier and better. That happens when individuals have the liberty to make their own choices and tradeoffs.

That is not the world envisioned by the list of Nobel laureates above. …

Bjorn Lomborg

WSJ Editors

Power Line

When did the Nobel Peace Prize go off the tracks? Today’s award to Al Gore and the IPCC “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years …

Jim Taranto comments.

… Gore became only the second former U.S. vice president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The first was Theodore Roosevelt, 101 years ago. (A sitting veep, Charles Dawes, also won in 1926.) A comparison between Roosevelt’s prize and Gore’s shows how far the Nobel Peace Prize has strayed from its original purpose: Roosevelt won the prize for negotiating a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. Gore won it for something that has nothing to do with peace. …

The Captain

… Who else could have won the Nobel prize, if the committee wanted to promote peace and freedom rather than political allies? Well, perhaps they may have considered the hundreds, if not thousands of monks in Burma who just sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of non-violent regime change. One or more of the people involved in the six-nation talks that has avoided war over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programs would have also seemed a more germane choice.

Those choices would have actually focused on real efforts to bring peace and freedom to millions of people. That’s what I thought the Nobel Peace Prize meant to honor. Instead, they chose to honor a hysteric with a polemic on meteorology. And why? Do you suppose the Nobel committee wants Al Gore to try a different job in the near future, and hopes to boost his chances to get it?

Club for Growth with Milton Freidman quote.

Quotes you’ll love in a Michael Ledeen Corner post.

WSJ editors note Ohio teachers’ unions quietly working to kill charter schools.

The concept of charter schools is popular enough that even most liberals won’t attack them openly. Yet the national political assault continues behind-the-scenes, most recently in Ohio, where unions have now been caught giving orders to Attorney General Marc Dann, who has duly saluted.

Last week the Columbus Dispatch published emails showing that Mr. Dann and the Ohio Education Association are in cahoots to close down certain charter schools in the state. Mr. Dann was elected last November in a Democratic sweep that included Governor Ted Strickland and was helped by Big Labor. As a token of his appreciation, Mr. Strickland earlier this year proposed placing a moratorium on new charter schools and restrictions on private-school vouchers, only to be rebuffed by the Legislature. Now it’s Mr. Dann’s turn to send a thank-you. …

Charles Krauthammer thinks of Hillary.

… The Post correctly called Hillary’s retreat from free trade ” opportunism under pressure,” the pressure being the rampant and popular protectionism of her presidential rivals, particularly in protectionist Iowa. But while “opportunism under pressure” suggests ( pace Hemingway) cowardice, the better description of Clintonism is slipperiness. Adaptability. Cynicism, if you like.

Note her clever use of terms. Reassessing NAFTA sounds great to protectionists, but it is perfectly ambiguous. It could mean abolition or radical curtailment. It could also mean establishing a study commission whose recommendations might not reach President Hillary Clinton’s desk until too late in her second term.

The Post editorial noted “a perverse kind of good news” in Hillary’s free-trade revisionism: “There’s little chance that her position reflects any deeply held principle.” And there lies the beauty not just of Clinton on free trade but of the Clinton candidacy itself: She has no principles. Her liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs.

I could never vote for her, but I (and others of my ideological ilk) could live with her — precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband’s — flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated — always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e., self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason. …

Power Line posts on the Dems’ spokesboy.

The infantilization of American politics is nearly complete. Exhibit A is the Democrats’ use of a 12 year-old to give the party’s radio address. Exhibit B is much of what E.J. Dionne writes.

These exhibits come together in Dionne’s latest column. It’s called “Meanies and Hypocrites,” which could be the title of roughly 80 percent of his columns. The meanies and hypocrites are always Republicans and conservatives who disagree with Dionne’s views. Today, they are conservatives bloggers, including the Power Line crew.

We stand accused of “assaulting” the family of the 12 year-old boy the Dems selected to give their radio address. The boy is Graeme Frost, who urged President Bush not to veto the expansion of the SCHIP program, which subsidizes health care to children in low income families. …

Carpe Diem with a post Mikey Moore should note – cancer survival rates tops in US.

National Review editors against ethanol.

It’s a depressing ritual. Every four years, as Iowans prepare to cast the first votes in the presidential-primary season, candidates descend on the corn-covered state and discover the miraculous properties of ethanol. The latest convert is Fred Thompson, who voted against ethanol subsidies when he was a U.S. senator but now says that ethanol is “a matter . . . of national security.” What he means is that he supports increasing federal assistance for ethanol production, on the grounds that this will reduce American dependence on oil from the Middle East. But, like most arguments for ethanol subsidies, this one is spurious. …

VDH Corner post on Carter.

The inconsideration of Jimmy Carter never ceases to amaze. Apparently, he is convinced that his Christian piety provides a pass for an ungenerous disposition, that comes across as self-centered and -absorbed—whether campaigning for a Nobel Prize by publicly attacking his president at a time of war, or smearing democratic Israel, or snide comments about his successors. But that being said, I’m surprised at his latest quip: …

Marty Peretz says, “What another Carter book?”

Clearly Jimmy Carter writes more books than he reads.

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Christopher DeMuth who ran the American Enterprise Institute for 21 years does his swan song.

… Think tanks are identified in the public mind as agents of a particular political viewpoint. It is sometimes suggested that this compromises the integrity of their work. Yet their real secret is not that they take orders from, or give orders to, the Bush administration or anyone else. Rather, they have discovered new methods for organizing intellectual activity–superior in many respects (by no means all) to those of traditional research universities.

To be sure, think tanks–at least those on the right–do not attempt to disguise their political affinities in the manner of the (invariably left-leaning) universities. We are “schools” in the old sense of the term: groups of scholars who share a set of philosophical premises and take them as far as we can in empirical research, persuasive writing, and arguments among ourselves and with those of other schools.

This has proven highly productive. It is a great advantage, when working on practical problems, not to be constantly doubling back to first principles. We know our foundations and concentrate on the specifics of the problem at hand. We like to work on hard problems, and there are many fertile disagreements in our halls over bioethics, school reform, the rise of China, constitutional interpretation and what to do about Korea and Iran. …

Victor Davis Hanson was in Iraq for a few weeks and gives his prognosis.

Iraq for most Americans is now a toxic subject — best either ignored or largely evoked to blame someone for something in the past.

Any visitor to Iraq can see that the American military cannot be defeated there, but also is puzzled over exactly how we could win — victory being defined as fostering a stable Iraqi constitutional state analogous to, say, Turkey.

But war is never static. Over the last 90 days, there has been newfound optimism, as Iraqis are at last stepping forward to help Americans secure their country.

I spent last week touring outlying areas of Baghdad and American forward operating bases in Anbar and Diyala provinces, talking to Army and Marine combat teams and listening to Iraqi provincial and security officials.

Whether in various suburbs of Baghdad, or in Baqubah, Ramadi or Taji, there is a familiar narrative of vastly reduced violence. Until recently, the Americans could not find enough interpreters, were rarely warned about landmines and had little support from Iraqi security forces.

But now they are being asked by Iraqis in the “Sunni Triangle” to join them to defeat the very terrorists the locals once championed. Anbar, a province that just months ago was deemed lost by a U.S. military intelligence report, is now in open revolt against al-Qaida. …

Mark’s Corner posts. One with perceptive thought.

… If one looks at recent history, the Republican nominee with the fullest, most profound political philosophy, the one who’d thought most seriously about the role of government and its relationship to individual liberty, was Ronald Reagan, who formed his views while doing other stuff. If instead of spending the Fifties doing movies and TV and speechifying for GE (and reading National Review), he’d been a Congressman or Senator, I doubt he’d have developed any kind of coherent worldview.

Thomas Sowell on the Taylor/Johnson Duke book.

… “Until Proven Innocent” also tells us about one of the forgotten victims of the Duke rape case — the African cab driver who cast the first doubt on the indictment, by saying publicly that one of the accused young men was with him in his taxi at the time the rape was supposedly happening.

A flimsy charge against that cab driver from three years earlier was suddenly resurrected, and District Attorney Michael Nifong had him picked up by the police, indicted and put on trial — where he was quickly acquitted by the judge.

Could this country survive as a free nation if every District Attorney used the power of that office to intimidate any witness whose testimony undermined the prosecution’s case?

How long will we in fact survive as a free nation when our leading universities are annually graduating thousands of students each, steeped in the notion that you can decide issues of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, by the “race, class and gender” of those involved?

That is what a large chunk of the Duke University faculty did, while few of the other faculty members dared to say anything against them or against the Duke administration’s surrender to the lynch mob atmosphere whipped up on campus.

In much of the media as well, the students were treated as guilty until proven innocent, and those who said otherwise were often savaged. …

Times, UK reports the British court decision against Gore’s book.

John Fund posts on Gore’s Nobel problems. Drudge is reporting Gore’s canceling appointments for today and flying to Europe. What will Bubba say?

Want to make micro-loans to third world entrepreneurs yourself? AdamSmith tells how. If you follow the link, you’ll find they have enough lenders at this time. Pickings will repeat this in three months to see if things have changed.

… a friend emailed me yesterday about Kiva, a non-profit organization that allows you to lend money to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world. So like Professor Muhammad Yunus – the pioneer of microfinance and recent Nobel Prize winner – you too can become a banker to the poor. All it will cost you is some foregone interest, and apparently Kiva’s entrepreneurs have a less then one percent default rate. …

Good news. WSJ says the bloom is off the rose for ethanol.

… Opposition to the ethanol industry’s goals has grown significantly stiffer. The so-called barnyard lobby — representing the meat, livestock and poultry industries — says high corn prices are hurting its profits. The price of corn-based animal feed has increased about 60% since 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Our single biggest priority is for Congress to reject a new renewable-fuels mandate,” says Jesse Sevcik, vice president of legislative affairs at the American Meat Institute, a meat and poultry trade association.

Other groups that were originally sympathetic to ethanol are drifting away. They fear that the fuel’s advantages are outweighed by the rise in corn prices, which they say increases the cost of foods ranging from steak to cereal. “Many policy makers were seduced by ethanol,” says Cal Dooley, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. He opposes increasing federal support for ethanol.

The Agriculture Department says consumers can expect to pay as much as 4.5% more for groceries and restaurant meals this year over last, up from a 2.4% rise the year before. …

Max Boot with a cautionary tale about abuse of Wikipedia.

Are there people out there who take Wikipedia seriously as a source of objective information? There shouldn’t be, but unfortunately there are. In fact, lots of students use it a source of first resort. It’s so popular, that whenever you type almost any subject into Google, the first hit is usually for a Wikipedia entry.

Yet disinformation abounds, often motivated by animus or prejudice. There is, for instance, the by-now famous story of a former assistant to Robert F. Kennedy who was brazenly—and completely without foundation—accused on Wikipedia of complicity in the assassinations of both JFK and RFK. (For this sorry tale, see his article.)

A friend has now called my attention to another bizarre distortion, this one an attempt not to besmirch the character of one man but of an entire country. If you look up the Philippine War (1899-1902) you get this entry. And in the very first paragraph you get this statement: “The U.S. conquest of the Philippines has been described as a genocide, and resulted in the death of 1.4 million Filipinos (out of a total population of seven million).”

I was pretty startled to read this. I have written a whole chapter on the war in my book, The Savage Wars of Peace, and I have never once heard that the U.S. was guilty of genocide. How could it have entirely escaped my attention? …

John Tierney continues the fracas on fat and food fads with a blog post on cascades.

I suspect a few readers — and diet researchers — will take issue with my Findings column about Gary Taubes’ new book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” and his debunking of the myth that low-fat diets will prolong your life. I’ll be happy in subsequent posts to debate the low-fat diet as well as other issues raised in his book, like the causes of obesity and the case for low-carb diets. But before we start the food fight, I’d like to delve into the question of why scientists and other groups fall prey to the fads called “informational cascades.” …

Dilbert has fun with Tierney’s cascades.

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Christopher Hitchens says we need to help Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

… Suppose the narrow and parochial view prevails in Holland, then I think that we in America should welcome the chance to accept the responsibility ourselves. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a symbol of the resistance, by many women from the Muslim world, to gender apartheid, “honor” killing, genital mutilation, and other horrors of clerical repression. She has been a very clear and courageous voice against the ongoing attack on our civilization mounted by exactly the same forces. Her recent memoir, Infidel (which I recommend highly, and to which, I ought to say, I am contributing a preface in its paperback edition), is an account of an extremely arduous journey from something very like chattel slavery to a full mental and intellectual emancipation from theocracy. It is a road that we must, and for our own sake as well, be willing to help others to travel. …

John Tierney says forget everything you thought you knew about fat. And have some Rocky Road.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

Power Line added dittos to Barone’s piece on “higher education.”

… Elite private colleges are even less constrained. They face little if any competition from colleges that don’t fit the post-modern leftist mold. No one likely to break that mold has much chance of being entrusted to run such an institution, and the demise of Larry Summers at Harvard illustrates the fate that awaits even a mild iconoclast who manages to crash the party. And a hypothetical college that somehow succeeded in breaking the mold would likely be punished, plummeting in college ratings that rely on the views of entrenched academics to assess “academic reputation.”

In theory, alumni should be able to act as a voice of sanity. But colleges have structured themselves (or in Dartmouth’s case, restructured itself) in a way that deprives alumni of any real voice. The only thing they get to say is “yes” or “no” to requests for donations. With only a dim sense of what’s going on, a critical mass continues to say “yes.”

Thus, the rot continues to spread, with no end in sight.

Thomas Sowell adds part 2 to his comments on Clarence Thomas.

… The really fatal fact about Anita Hill’s accusations was that they were first made to the Senate Judiciary Committee in confidence, and she asked that her name not be mentioned when the accusations were presented to Judge Thomas by those trying to pressure him to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Think about it: The accusations referred to things that were supposed to have happened when only two people were present.

If the accusations were true, Clarence Thomas would automatically know who originated them. Anita Hill’s request for anonymity made sense only if the charges were false.

Washington Examiner says there are a lot of meetings on global warming.

John Stossel tells how medical care can work properly.

Health-care costs overall have been rising faster than inflation, but not all medical costs are skyrocketing. In a few pockets of medicine, costs are down while quality is up.

Dr. Brian Bonanni has an unusual medical practice. His office is open Saturdays. He e-mails his patients and gives them his cell-phone number.

“I need to be available 24 hours a day,” he says. “I want to be there when a patient has questions, and I want to be reachable.”

I’ll bet your doctor doesn’t say that. Bonanni knows he has to please his patients, not some insurance company or the government, because he’s paid by his patients. He’s a laser eye surgeon. Insurance rarely covers what he does: reshaping eyes so people can see without glasses.

His patients shop around before coming to him. They ask a question that people relying on insurance don’t ask: “How much will that cost?”

“I can’t get away with not telling the patient how much exactly it’s going to cost,” Bonanni says. “No one would put up with it. And the difference of a hundred dollars sometimes makes their decision for them.”

He has to compete for his patients’ business. One result of that is lower prices. And while the procedure got cheaper, it also got better. Today’s lasers are faster and more precise. …

NY Times takes exception to the bashing of the Dems 12 year-old spokesman. Even thought ther’re carrying Dem water, it’s here for balance.

Mark Steyn answers the Times.

WaPo editors are not happy with Hill’s trade ideas.

… Yet Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) seems to have forgotten her husband’s winning formula. Campaigning for president, she has been busily repudiating his legacy on free trade, voting against the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement in the Senate and backing away from NAFTA. In an interview published yesterday by USA Today, she called for a “timeout” on further trade agreements until their impact can be fully studied. Ms. Clinton even suggested that it might be time for NAFTA to be “adjusted.” Her reasoning was not terribly clear: This is a candidate, after all, who has voted in favor of free-trade deals with Singapore and Chile. She suggested that perhaps something changed between the end of the 20th century, when “trade was a net positive for America and American workers” and now, when we need to have “a serious conversation about that.” …

AdamSmith has ethanol thoughts.

Even the most politically profitable, and therefore highly government-protected, industries are subject to market forces. Ethanol, a bio-fuel grown from corn, is supported by huge US government subsidies (not entirely unrelated to the importance of the Iowa Caucus) and this has led to overproduction on a massive scale. Transportation services cannot keep up to supply the coasts and few gas stations even supply it. …

Slate says the monks are going to beat out Al for the Nobel. Too bad. Pickerhead always thought it would be neat if Gore scored, when all Bill did for has last few years was pursue Monica and the Prize. That’s why he wouldn’t move against Osama, and why he turns up the heat whenever criticisms head his way.

Dilbert dreams up names for bands.

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Melanie Phillips gave us a short yesterday on Ayaan Ali’s new danger. We add two items today. The LA Times has an op-ed co-authored by Salman Rushdie.

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world. The details of her story bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West. …

Anne Applebaum in Slate.

And now we come to what may be a truly fundamental test, maybe even a turning point, for that part of the world generally known as the West. The test is this: Are prominent, articulate critics of radical Islam, critics who happen to be citizens of European countries or the United States, entitled to the same free speech rights enjoyed by other citizens of European countries and the United States?

Legally, of course, they are. In practice, they can say what they want—and then they can be murdered for doing so. That means that Western governments have a special and unusual responsibility to them, as many have long acknowledged. It is no accident that the writer Salman Rushdie, upon whom Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Feb. 14, 1989, is still very much alive. Though details are not publicized, it is assumed that Rushdie remains, one way or another, under the protection of the British police and secret services, both in Britain and abroad. …

John Fund posts on vote harvesting in ethanol rich Iowa and Sandy Berger’s work in Hillary’s campaign.

Pickings has been quick to criticize Pinch Sulzberger’s tenure at the NY Times. Marty Peretz gives another view in this tribute to the reporting of John Burns. Now if the Times would please give back the Pulitzer awarded in the 1930′s for the lies of Walter Duranty – Ukrainian Famine denier.

Gabriel Schoenfeld allows us to post something positive about Jimmy Carter. We did that last year when Panamanians approved proposed improvements to the canal. So once a year we’ll say something nice about Billy Carter’s bro.

Is Jimmy Carter a saint? As James Kirchick has argued, the former President does deserve applause for the courage he displayed last week in the Sudan. He may be our worst ex-President ever, as Joshua Muravchik has irrefutably demonstrated, but it does not follow that every single thing he does today is bad.

The same thing can be said of his presidency. Reviewing Carter’s book, Living Faith, in the Wall Street Journal in 1996, I made the case that he was one of the worst Presidents of the 20th century. Carter read my review and took umbrage. The Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted him saying about me: “The guy, and I don’t know him, was vituperative about everything. He even condemned the poem I wrote about Rosalynn, which is one of the most popular parts of the book.”

Carter did, and does, have many appalling defects–the least of them his execrable poetry. But let’s give him his due. Even a terrible leader sometimes does some good things. Let me recall a tiny and ancient sliver of the past. …

Mark Steyn was here two days ago with a Corner post on the Dems 12 year-old spokesman. There have been a series of posts since. It gets a little long, but they’re fun.

Over the weekend, I posted a couple of things re Graeme Frost, the Democratic Party’s 12-year old healthcare spokesman. Michelle Malkin reports that the blogospheric lefties are all steamed about the wingnuts’ Swiftboating of sick kids, etc.

Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it’s incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you’re welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.

But one thing is clear by now: Whatever the truth about this boy’s private school, his family home, his father’s commercial property, etc, the Frosts are a very particular situation and do not illustrate any social generality – and certainly not one that makes the case for an expensive expansive all-but universal entitlement.

A more basic point is made very robustly by Kathy Shaidle: Advanced western democracies have delivered the most prosperous societies in human history. There simply are no longer genuinely “poor” people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you’re poor today, it’s almost always for behavioral reasons – behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the “needy” out there that only the government can rescue.

Thomas Sowell writes about Clarence Thomas.

… Clarence Thomas’ own experiences shocked him into a realization that “affirmative action” and other policies being pushed by civil rights organizations and by liberals generally were doing more harm than good, both to blacks and to American society.

In an era when so many people have neither the time nor the patience to examine arguments and evidence, critics have tried to dismiss Clarence Thomas as someone who “sold out” in order to advance himself.

In reality, he was in far worse financial condition than if he had taken the opposite positions on political issues.

As late as the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas’ net worth — everything he had accumulated over a lifetime — was less than various civil rights “leaders” make in one year.

Nobody sells out to the lowest bidder. …

NewsBusters posts parts of Howard Kurtz asking Robin Wright of WaPo and Barbara Starr of CNN why they didn’t report some good Iraq news. Incidentally, this type of interview is why Howard Kurtz’s show Reliable Sources is the pick of Sunday morning. It’s on CNN at 10:00 am Eastern.

… Wow. Numbers shouldn’t be reported because they’re “tricky,” “at the beginning of a trend,” and there’s “enormous dispute over how to count” them?

No such moral conundrum existed last month when media predicted a looming recession after the Labor Department announced a surprising decline in non-farm payrolls that ended up being revised up four weeks later to show an increase.

And, in the middle of a three and a half-year bull run in stocks, such “journalists” have no quandary predicting a bear market every time the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls a few hundred points.

Yet, when good news regarding military casualties comes from the Defense Department, these same people show uncharacteristic restraint in not wanting to report what could end up being an a anomaly.

Isn’t that special? …