Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 25 Word

• September 25 PDF

Some of our favorites express their Ahmadinejad opinions.

The Captain is first.

… No one will learn anything from Ahmadinejad’s visit today that they didn’t know before. He’s an uneducated buffoon who serves as a convenient mouthpiece for the Iranian theocrats who hold the real power in Iran. Unfortunately, Columbia has given the buffoon more prestige for his rambling and disjointed discourse. They have bestowed academic legitimacy to Holocaust denial, as well as to rabid anti-Semitism. Will Bollinger next invite the Imperial Wizard of the KKK to speak as an honored guest at Columbia, and will a rude introduction be seen as enough to justify the appearance? …

John Fund.

… It appears that for too many universities, “intellectual freedom” really represents the freedom to hear ideas the reigning liberals on campus consider acceptable and to flout the sensibilities of ordinary Americans by showing radical-chic tolerance for the likes of Mr. Ahmadinejad. But when it comes to a serious exchange of views with distinguished Americans who happen to differ with them, that’s beyond the pale.

Gabriel Schoenfeld.

… Fortunately, there are other and better solutions being developed than anything in the works at Columbia to deal with Ahmadinejad’s nuclear-weapons program, elements of which are buried deep underground in hardened facilities across Iran.

Defense Daily reports today that Northrop-Grumman is making rapid progress in bringing on board a new weapon. Here is its dispatch based upon an interview with Harry Heimple, a company spokesman:

By next year a 30,000-pound bomb capable of blasting into subterranean tunnels will begin operating in the Air Force’s bomber fleet, according to industry officials. …

Anne Applebaum.

Peter Wehner has more on the MoveOn ad.

Gordon Chang on the obsequious apology by Mattel.

Nicole Gelinas reviews Greenspan’s book for NY Post.

The Economist obits a parrot.

And a better than average humor section.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 24 Word

• September 24 PDF

Robert Tracinski writes for Real Clear Politics on the coming war with Iran.

For more than a year now, I have been arguing that war with Iran is inevitable, that our only choice is how long we wait to fight it, and that the only question is what cost we will suffer for putting off the necessary confrontation with the Islamic Republic.

Now, finally, there is evidence that some of our leaders are beginning to recognize the necessity of this war and are preparing to fight it. And so for past few weeks, as I have been documenting in TIA Daily, the newspapers have been filled with rumors and speculation about an American air war against Iran. …

John Fund says one of the worst of Alaska’s GOP crooks might be at the end of the road.

On Friday Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin ordered the state to prepare a “fiscally responsible” alternative to the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” which made the state a national laughingstock and shone an unwelcome spotlight on the pork-barrel greed of its all-Republican congressional delegation. The $398 million bridge would have connected Ketchikan (population 7,400) to its airport on a nearby island inhabited by 50 people.

The same day, the Associated Press reported that the FBI has recorded two phone calls between Sen. Ted Stevens, who sponsored the bridge, and Bill Allen, a Stevens patron who dominated state politics as the head of the oil-services firm VECO until he pleaded guilty to bribing state legislators this year. Mr. Allen has also testified in open court that he paid some of the bills incurred in the expensive remodeling of Mr. Stevens’s Alaska home. Last month, FBI agents raided the senator’s home to secure evidence about the remodeling work. Few expect Mr. Stevens, who has served since 1968 and rose to become chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, to survive politically. …

Rich Schapiro has the first of three items on NY Times’ giveaway to MoveOn.

… “We made a mistake,” Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for The Times, told the newspaper’s public editor.

Mathis said an advertising representative left the liberal group with the understanding that the ad would run that Monday even though they had been charged the standby rate.

The group should have paid $142,083 to ensure placement that day. …

Roger Simon does NY Times duty for Pajamas Media.

… The question is how systemic is this – how high and deep this bias goes in the paper’s structure?. How long has the Times been showing this kind of favoritism and to whom? More specifically – who knew about the Moveon ad and when did they know it?

Sound familiar? Papers like the Times and the Washington Post make their reputations conducting such investigations. It will be interesting to see if they do one here. We will be waiting. At a moment in history when the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is visiting New York, it is no small matter that the city and the country’s most respected newspaper – or the one that for many years claimed to be – is guilty of unethical behavior that risks jeopardizing our nation’s security.

A few years ago, in a loose-lipped moment that now seems more like projection than anything else, Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, accused blogging of being a “one man circle jerk.” What greater “circle jerk” exists today than the New York Times?

The Captain tells why the NY Times story is important.

Volokh Conspiracy provides four items today on Duke. Why continue with this? The first two posts are Stuart Taylor covering the storm from the media. We just finished discussing the NY Times subsidy of MoveOn,org. How did the Times cover the Duke story? Pickerhead is sooooo glad you asked!

… The first Times reporter to conduct detailed interviewing about the evidence in the rape case was sportswriter Joe Drape, who authored or coauthored articles that appeared on March 29, March 30, and March 31. In each article, he quoted Nifong but also presented a defense viewpoint.

Drape quoted Durham defense lawyer Bill Thomas providing an unanswerable reply to Nifong’s taunts: “Everyone asks why these young men have not come forward. It’s because no one was in the bathroom with the complainant. No one was alone with her. This didn’t happen. They have no information to come forward with.”

The more Drape pushed, the more he came to believe that Mangum was not credible and her rape charge was probably false. Encouraged, Bill Thomas provided all the evidence of innocence then in his possession to the Times reporter, expecting a great article. But in early April Drape called Thomas and said there would be no article because he was “having problems with the editors.”

And soon after Drape privately told people at Duke — and, presumably, at the Times — that this looked like a hoax, his byline disappeared from the Duke lacrosse story. The word among people at Duke and defense supporters, including one who later ran into Drape at a race track, was that the editors wanted a more pro-prosecution line. They also wanted to stress the race-sex-class angle without dwelling on evidence of innocence. They got what they wanted from Drape’s replacement, Duff Wilson, whose reporting would become a journalistic laughingstock by summer, and other reporters including Rick Lyman.

Times editors also got what they wanted from sports columnist Selena Roberts. Her March 31 commentary, “Bonded in Barbarity,” seethed hatred for “a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.” …

KC Johnson covers the Duke administration in two posts on Volokh.

… Brodhead appears to have been cowed by extremists within his faculty. (It’s worth remembering that this case began just over a year after Larry Summers lost a vote of no-confidence in Harvard’s Faculty Council.) A turning point event came in an emergency meeting of the Academic Council on March 30, 2006. The president urged caution and asked faculty to wait for the facts to come in. But the assembled professors, around 10% of the arts and sciences faculty, responded with vitriolic attacks against the team. One speaker claimed that Duke, as an institution, tolerated drinking and rape, and the lacrosse incident reflected a University problem from the top down. Another suggested punishing the team by suspending lacrosse for three years and then making it a club sport. A third asserted that the team embodied the “assertion of class privilege” by all Duke students. A fourth called on the University to do something to help the “victim.”

Three professors overpowered the meeting: Houston Baker stated as a fact that African-American women had been “harmed” by the lacrosse players and claimed that students in his mostly white, female class were terrified of the lack of an administration response. Wahneema Lubiano alleged favoritism by Duke toward the team and demanded a counter-statement from Duke denouncing the players. And Peter Wood asserted that two years previously, the team was out of control, and demanded a hard line against the athletic director, coach, and team. These remarks, according to several people who attended the meeting, received robust applause.

One week later, when Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse season, he appointed a “Campus Culture Initiative” to explore issues raised by the case. Wood chaired one of the CCI’s four subcommittees. Two other subcommittees (race and gender) were chaired by Group of 88 members Karla Holloway and Anne Allison. And one of the four student members was Chauncey Nartey, an African-American student who had sent an e-mail to the Presslers that the former coach’s wife considered a threat against their daughter. The Presslers filed a police report and told the administration what Nartey had done; the appointment went ahead anyway. …

A Volokh post asks whether the blog should be covering the Jena 6. Pickerhead has no idea what’s going on there, but thinks the Wikipedia entry is pretty thorough.

The Captain has a Rather post.

… He can’t stand not having the spotlight. He also can’t admit his own fault in his downfall, and so the only explanation that he can accept is that Les Moonves, Sumner Redstone, Josh Howard, and Don Hewitt of all people are actors in a vast, Bush-based conspiracy to discredit him.

Unfortunately, Dan does that well enough on his own, and even his colleagues have to admit it.

Charles Lane in WaPo has some Rather thoughts.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 23 Word

• September 23 PDF

Mark Steyn covers her new health plan with, “Bend Over for Nurse Hillary.”

… Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one’s instant and painless – just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.
Hooray!

And, if you don’t, it will be illegal for you to hold a job.

Er, hang on, where’s that in the Constitution? It’s perfectly fine to employ legions of the undocumented from Mexico, but if you employ a fit 26-year-old American with no health insurance either you or he or both of you will be breaking the law? …

 

… Do you remember the so-called “government surplus” of a few years ago? Bill Clinton gave a speech in which he said, yes, sure, he could return the money to taxpayers but that we “might not spend it the right way.” The American political class has decided that they know better than you the “right way” to make health care decisions. Oh, don’t worry, you’re still fully competent to make decisions on what car you drive and what movie you want to rent at Blockbuster.

For the moment.

But when it comes to the grownup stuff, best to leave that to Nurse Hillary.

Charles Krauthammer on the Israeli raid in Syria.

… This is an extremely high-stakes game. The time window is narrow. In probably less than two years, Ahmadinejad will have the bomb.

The world is not quite ready to acquiesce. The new president of France has declared a nuclear Iran ” unacceptable.” The French foreign minister warned that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst” — and “the worst, it’s war, sir.”

Which makes it all the more urgent that powerful sanctions be slapped on the Iranian regime. Sanctions will not stop Ahmadinejad. But there are others in the Iranian elite who might stop him and the nuclear program before the volcano explodes. These rival elites may be radical, but they are not suicidal. And they believe, with reason, that whatever damage Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic folly may inflict upon the region and the world, on Crusader and Jew, on infidel and believer, the one certain result of such an eruption is Iran’s Islamic republic buried under the ash.

John Fund thinks Ted Stevens might be gone soon.

Bill Kristol finds hypocrites at Columbia.

… Actually, this is a liberal university president at his stupidest. As Powerline‘s Scott Johnson put it, “Columbia’s prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.” …

VDH Corner post on the same subject.

… Still, if one examines the recent shameful treatment of Chermerinsky at Irvine, Summers at Davis, and the idea of inviting a terrorist to Columbia, the lowest common denominator is not even politics, but stupidity on the part of university administrators, who blunder into decisions, then give sanctimonious lectures about free speech, a topic they have rarely have studied and know nothing about, and then usually cave when reminded of how embarrassing they’ve become.

All this is just another reminder how divorced from our common culture and workplace academics have become, and how little respect the public accords them. Proof?

The replacement for the gender-insensitive Summers apparently will be Gov. Schwarzenegger-who fought serial accusations of groping in his first gubernatorial campaign and was once sued for sexual harassment.

 

James Taranto gets in his Columbia licks.

… If the U.S. military executed homosexuals instead of merely discharging them, perhaps Bollinger would welcome ROTC back to Columbia.

Jeff Jacoby says Dems are afraid of MoveOn.

… The only Democratic presidential candidate unafraid to tell off MoveOn was Senator Joseph Biden. Queried on “Meet the Press,” he replied forthrightly: “I don’t buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth.”

So this is what the Democrats’ leading lights have been reduced to — wobbling and weaving for fear of offending the hyperventilators in far left field. Do Clinton, Edwards, and Obama really have no idea of the esteem in which most Americans hold military officers like Petraeus? (From Gallup: “The military remains the top-rated institution of Americans, with 73% saying they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. . . . HMOs, big business, and Congress earn the least amount of confidence.”) Did they learn nothing from the “botched joke” that ended John F. Kerry’s presidential hopes once and for all? Is retaining MoveOn’s good will so important to them that they will look the other way even when the integrity of a distinguished American general is recklessly trashed?

“If you are not tough enough to repudiate a scurrilous, outrageous ad such as that, then I don’t know how you are tough enough to be president of the United States.” So said an indignant Senator John McCain the other day. You don’t have to be a Republican to feel the same way.

Ken Burns has a new series starting tonight. We have two reviews from the WSJ.

Brendan Miniter was published first.

… The film makes clear that World War II was a “necessary war” in which the U.S. was unquestionably on the right side, but one that nonetheless came at a steep price. And that price, as in every bloody military conflict, was paid in two ways. Families at home suffered from the loss of their loved ones. And those on the front lines witnessed–even meted out–brutality they never would have imagined before the war. For example, one U.S. Marine–to the horror of his comrades–robbed a wounded Japanese soldier, using a knife to pry loose his gold teeth.

Asked about a line in the film that revealed this theme early on, Mr. Burns recited it from memory before it could be completely read to him: “The Second World War brought out the best and the worst in a generation–and blurred the two so that they became at times almost indistinguishable.” “The War” isn’t aimed as a commentary on the global war on terror or the war in Iraq–production on it began before 9/11–but Mr. Burns told me that he thinks the timing is good. “It agitates the questions about war” that should arise from viewing the reality that is armed human conflict.

Dorothy Rabinowitz showed up this weekend.

… As history, the series is inarguably valuable not only for its treatment of battles nowadays comparatively unknown, like Salerno and Anzio, but also as potential instruction for the fearfully large population of television-watching 20-somethings — or older — not quite sure whether it was the Chinese or the Italians who bombed Pearl Harbor. The astounding narrative of the Bataan Death March, told by a long-embittered survivor, Glenn Frazier, isn’t exactly boring history, of which there is, in fact, none in these 15 hours — hours which include, in extensive treatment, the internment of Japanese-Americans, segregation of the military, and the crimes of Nazism.

Mr. Burns has made it clear in various interviews that one of his prime intentions in this series, was to undo the notion of World War II as “the good war.” Or, as he told a Newsweek reporter this week, with some abandon, it was time to “just unwrap the bloodless, gallant myth of the Second World War. . . .” Here Mr. Burns has shown himself prone to some mythmaking of his own — specifically the myth that there prevails, in our times, some notion that World War II was bloodless. Americans knew it was not in 1945, and they know plenty more about the war now, as they know, too, that it was not all gallantry and victories. It requires a certain willed distance from reality to believe — despite all the documentaries on the war’s bloody toll, its needless battles and misbegotten strategies, which air regularly on television — that a benighted America is in need today of a rescuer to save it from its illusions about the war.

Mr. Burns’s zealous effort to eradicate any hint of a “good war” aura has come at a cost to his series. Thanks to its scope and ambition, and above all to Americans introduced here — those who went to war and survived to speak for themselves and the others whose lives spoke for them — it is nonetheless a profound and moving work.

The Economist reports on the high tech search for Steve Fosset.

Jonah Goldberg starts the humor section with a Dan Rather piece.

In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why … why … why?

“There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.”

Well, God has not forsaken us. Dan Rather seems divinely inspired to crash more times than a Kennedy driving home from an office party. The multimillionaire semi-retired newsman is suing for $70 million, $1 million for every year he’s been alive since he was 5 years old. Which is fitting, because that’s what he sounds like. The gist of his lawsuit is that CBS used him as a “scapegoat” in the Memogate story to “pacify the White House.” The swelled-headed former anchor, who used to brag incessantly about his toughness and independence, also whines in his suit that the network forced him to apologize under duress when “no apology from him was warranted,” and that the former managing editor of CBS News “was not responsible for any such errors.” …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 20 Word

• September 20 PDF

Power Line posts on “Columbia’s Disgrace.” That would be their invitation to Ahmadinejad.

Mark Steyn Corner posts on the DC dry cleaners who gave up.

John Tierney with a great post on Economists vs. Ecologists.

… The classic example is the “population crisis” of the 1960s and 1970s, when biologists like Paul Ehrlich were convinced humanity was about to suffer massive famines and devastating shortages of energy and other resources because the growing population would exceed the planet’s “carrying capacity.” This concept seemed obvious to biologists who study ecosystems, but economists realized there’s a big difference between animals and humans: Humans are remarkably adaptable and creative. When confronted with shortages and environmental problems, they have a long history of coming up with solutions — new methods of farming, new and cheaper sources of energy, cleaner technologies — that leave them better off in an environment that’s less polluted. .

When the economist Julian Simon pointed this out and predicted that humanity wouldn’t run out of food or energy or other resources in an article in the journal Science, the journal was widely criticized by ecologists and other scientists for publishing the work of an ignorant outsider. Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, said that economists like Dr. Simon were members of a “space-age cargo cult.” Trying to explain to these economists that commodities must inevitably become more scarce and expensive, the Ehrlichs wrote, “would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.”

So Dr. Simon challenged the supposed experts to pick any resource that was going to become scarce, and offered to bet them it would instead be cheaper in the future. Dr. Ehrlich and two specialists in energy and natural-resource issues, John Harte and John Holdren, picked five metals and bet $1,000 in 1980. Ten years the supposed experts in natural resources had to pay up, because all five metals were cheaper, just as Dr. Simon had predicted. (You can read more about this in my New York Times Magazine article on the bet.) …

Don Surber with more proof Twain was right when he said, “There is no native American criminal class, except for congress.”

You bought Google at $100 and 3 years later is nearing $600 a share? Big deal. Microsoft has gone up 28-fold over the last 20 years? Yawn. You want to make the big bucks? Rent a congressman. Your return on your investment can be as high as $75 for every dollar invested.

Just ask the good folks at PMA Group, a lobbying firm. They sank $1,333,074 into the campaigns last year of 3 Democratic members of the House defense appropriations subcommittee and walked away with $100.5 million in defense earmarks for PMA clients, Roll Call reported.

That means for every buck they spent, their clients got back $75.39. In less than 1 year.

The 3 Democratic rent-to-own congressmen are John Murtha, Jim Moran and Peter Visclosky. These antiwar Democrats see nothing wrong with steering military money to PMA clients. …

John Fund with a short reminder just what a creep Jim Moran is.

IBD Editorial on Canadian Health Care.

Those who hold up Canada’s nationalized system as a model for the U.S. have another piece of evidence that maybe it’s not: Those who are sick and have a choice go to the U.S. for their care.

The most recent example of this trend is Belinda Stronach, a Liberal Party member of Canada’s Parliament and daughter of Canadian billionaire industrialist Frank Stronach. …

Stuart Taylor posts at Volokh on Mike Nifong’s tactics.

… Nifong’s unethical media campaign, his willful blindness to the facts, his rigged photo lineup, his lies to the public and the court, and his concealment of proof of innocence are a rare study in how to frame innocent defendants by using procedural violations to construct a phony case out of whole cloth.

The DA also had accomplices who joined or assisted in his crimes, including some police officers and others, plus enablers who helped him get away with his flagrant misconduct for so long. Subsequent posts will examine some of the enablers. As for Nifong, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper called him a “rogue prosecutor” in April, while declaring the three wrongly indicted defendants “innocent.” The DA lost his law license in a bar disciplinary hearing in June. He was convicted of criminal contempt and jailed for a day this month. And he still faces possible investigation for crimes that could bring serious prison time, including obstruction of justice and violating the lacrosse players’ civil rights.

KC Johnson posts on the fine folks on Duke’s faculty.

Professors like to think of themselves as aggressive defenders of due process. In theory, the academy exists for the pursuit of truth. And faculty members are, in an ideal world, more inclined to embrace the dispassionate evaluation of evidence than the passions of the mob.

The behavior of activist members of the Duke arts and sciences faculty during the lacrosse case contradicted all of these myths about the academy. And most other professors at Duke elected to remain silent as their extremist colleagues rushed to judgment and refused to reconsider their actions.

In March 2006, less than a week after Crystal Mangum’s rape allegation became public, Houston Baker, a professor of English and African-American Studies, penned an open letter demanding the immediate expulsion from Duke of all 46 white players on the lacrosse team. (Several lacrosse players, in fact, hadn’t even attended the party.) Baker mocked the “tepid and pious legalism” that resulted in “male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.”

Two days after Baker’s missive, the former dean of faculty, History professor William Chafe, published an op-ed in the campus newspaper, the Chronicle. Entitled “Sex and Race,” Chafe’s op-ed suggested that the whites who kidnapped, beat, and murdered Emmett Till provided the appropriate historical context through which to interpret the behavior of the lacrosse players. In an unintentional commentary on the article’s intellectual seriousness, Chafe (a historian of civil rights) misidentified the year for Till’s murder, one of the crucial events in the development of the civil rights movement. …

Mr. Johnson with the today’s last Duke post. This continues on the fine faculty of Duke.

While the Group of 88 led a faculty rush to judgment against the lacrosse team, the most striking aspect of the Duke faculty’s reaction to the lacrosse case came in the professors’ utter closed-mindedness as Mike Nifong’s case collapsed in late 2006. For instance:

–History professor Peter Wood claimed, in an interview with the New Yorker, that a lacrosse player advocated genocide against Native Americans. His evidence: an anonymous student evaluation in a class of 65.

–Literature professor Grant Farred published an October 2006 op-ed accusing Duke students of “secret racism” for seeking to vote Nifong out of office; in April 2007, he publicly deemed unnamed lacrosse players guilty of “perjury.”

–Houston Baker, by this point having been hired away by Vanderbilt, suggested that the lacrosse players might have been guilty of other rapes (he supplied no evidence) and e-mailed one player’s mother that her son and his teammates were “farm animals.” …

… Even now, with Nifong’s case having been exposed as a fraud, only one member of the Group of 88 has publicly apologized. Another privately admitted that she was sorry for signing the statement, but wrote that if she apologized publicly, “my voice won’t count for much in my world.” The Economist recently concluded: “The only people who, it seems, have learned nothing from all this are Mr. Nifong’s enablers in the Duke faculty. Even after it was clear that the athletes were innocent, 87 faculty members published a letter categorically rejecting calls to recant their condemnation. And one professor, proving that some academics are as far beyond parody as they are beneath contempt, offered a course called ‘Hooking up at Duke’ that purported to illustrate what the lacrosse scandals tell us about ‘power, difference and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US.’”

New Editor says tobacco is making a comeback with American farmers.

Thomas Sowell continues his book review with part III of “Mugged by Reality.”

… It would be wonderful to have free and democratic nations throughout the world, and that would very likely reduce military conflicts, as Sharansky and others say. But we do not ensure freedom by holding elections. According to John Agresto, in Iraq “the ‘democratic’ government now entrenched is as sectarian and incompetent as we ever could have feared.” He is unwilling to say that the invasion of Iraq “as originally conceived” was a mistake but he fears that it has become “a tragedy.” This is not a plea for withdrawal. Whatever the situation when we went in, international terrorists have chosen to make this the place for a showdown battle. We can win or lose that battle but we cannot unilaterally end the war.

It is the terrorists’ war, regardless of where it is fought.

Paul Greenberg with good miscellany.

David Bernstein, who blogs at Volokh, with a LA Times Op-Ed on Larry Summers’ dinner date at UC.

The saga of controversial liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky’s on-again, off-again deanship at the new UC Irvine law school was highly unusual in two ways. First, the pressure to enforce political orthodoxy at Chemerinsky’s expense came from the right, not the left, and second, academic freedom and 1st Amendment values won a resounding victory when Chemerinsky was ultimately rehired. A more typical example of how academic freedom remains in jeopardy across the country is the UC Board of Regents’ treatment of Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University.

The regents had invited Summers to be the keynote speaker at a dinner tonight in Sacramento. They then uninvited him last week after some UC faculty protested that “inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California.” …

The Captain posts on the Rather/CBS fun.

… That’s not the only concession Rather makes about his integrity. Not only did he purportedly allow CBS to use his outsize reputation on a badly-sourced hit piece, but Rather also argues that he didn’t want to apologize for the Guard story after it collapsed. Rather specifically and personally apologized in a written statement released on 9/20/04, and later emphasized his personal regrets on that night’s broadcast. If he didn’t mean it, why did he say it? Has he always been in the habit of reading text on air in which he doesn’t believe, and then emphasizing his personal endorsement of it?

Now, just as the statute of limitations is running out for a lawsuit, Rather now argues that CBS damaged his reputation. He wants $20 million in real damages and $50 million in punitive damages. In reading Rather’s submission to the court, his own admissions paint him as a hack of the first order who had little reputation left to damage. …

Beldar Blog on Rather/CBS.

… it would be fun to watch CBS be forced to justify its putting of Rather out to pasture in a not-quite-firing by showing all of the grounds it had. Usually in a good juicy family court spat, you find yourself in sympathy with at least one litigant. But here’s a case in which I can just cut loose and enjoy the misery and embarrassment of all concerned! …

Mark Steyn with a Corner post that has fun with Dan Rather’s lawsuit.

Dan Rather was awarded Gay Patriot’s JECBOMA (James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award). Notice was made in July 1st Pickings. We repeat that today.

After much deliberation, we at GayPatriot are pleased to announce that Dan Rather has been selected to be the first recipient of the prestigious James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award (JEC BOMA). Named in honor of the nation’s thirty-ninth president, the JEC BOMA honors those men over 70 who, in their dotage, by the very bitterness of their manner, follow in the footsteps of the nation’s worst president. …

Dilbert read about firemen using a lift truck to get a 900 pound man out of his house.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 19 Word

• September 19 PDF

Michael Goodwin says it’s time for Spitzer to try the truth.

He tried bravado, he tried apologies and he tried silence. Sooner or later, Eliot Spitzer is going to have to try the truth.

That’s the loud-and-clear message from the latest voter survey on what New Yorkers think about the dirty tricks plot cooked up in Gov. Spitzer’s office. His Plans A, B and C about how to fudge and duck the Eliot Mess didn’t work. Big doubts about Spitzer’s honesty are sticking in voters’ throats, and they won’t go away until he raises his right hand and swears to tell the whole truth.

A whopping 70% of those responding to a new Siena College poll not only want the rookie Democrat to testify – they want him to do it publicly. A mere one in four believes he has been honest so far. That’s a resounding “NO SALE” response to the governor’s efforts to make the issue go away without first coming clean. …

Peter Wehner connects some dots.

… Let’s now connect these dots and draw some conclusions from them, shall we?

MoveOn.org—an angry, far-left, antiwar group—views the modern Democratic Party and its leadership as its cat’s-paw, and there’s little reason to dispute this judgment. The problem for many Democrats is that a Great Unmasking is taking place. For one thing, it’s difficult to say they oppose the war but support the troops when they train their fire on the commanding general of the troops, whose main transgression appears to be that he’s helping America succeed in an epic struggle against radical Islam.

Beyond that, the Democratic Party’s aversion to any (authentic) good news from Iraq, when combined with their effort to accelerate a premature withdrawal from that traumatized country, would lead to an American defeat and a victory for jihadism. This would be reckless—and it would reinforce the view among many Americans that the Democratic Party cannot be trusted on national security matters.

When MoveOn.org says jump, the Democratic Party asks, “How high?” There should be, and eventually there will be, a political price to pay for this ugly alliance.

Robert Samuelson adds a note of caution to the market’s euphoria.

… Unfortunately, disinflation’s benefits — the huge drop in interest rates, the big increases in stock and home values — can be enjoyed only once. This favorable cycle has ended. Indeed, it has left a hangover, as higher stock prices and home values both inspired damaging speculative “bubbles.” Good times often foster their own undoing. People become overly optimistic, giddy, careless, complacent. Businesses become sloppy and sometimes criminal in pursing growth and profits. Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, has inherited the hangover.

As for Greenspan, his outlook is decidedly somber. Oil prices have already soared, reversing globalization’s impact on inflation. He sees little relief. He thinks productivity growth will slow at best to 2 percent annually, down from about 3 percent from 1995-2005. He fears that inflation will gradually move to 4 percent to 5 percent and, in the process, raise interest rates and hurt stock prices. He worries that the nation hasn’t faced the costs of an aging baby boom. If he is right, the age of tranquility may slowly become his age of turbulence.

Law prof gives Yale Law the contempt it deserves.

Thomas Sowell has a part II to the column on “Mugged by Reality.”

Anne Applebaum comments on Putin’s moves.

… The identity of the next president of Russia doesn’t actually matter. Though a lot of analytical effort has already been wasted on careful pre-electoral scrutiny of the potential candidates, their opinions, views, alleged pragmatism, or alleged chauvinism are much less important than the nature of the coming presidential selection process itself.

If Zubkov (or someone else) becomes president following an orchestrated media campaign, falsified elections, and with Putin hovering constantly in the background, we’ll know he really is a place-holder. If Zubkov (or someone else) manages to garner some genuine support, both among voters and within the Kremlin, we’ll know to take his views seriously. If Putin remains president—well, we’ll know what that means too. Already, the fact that no one outside the Kremlin’s inner sanctum has any idea what the succession will look like is a bad sign. It’s hard to talk about “rule of law” in a country where power changes hands in such a thoroughly arbitrary manner. …

John Stossel continues his series on health care describing the problems with socialized care.

Last week I pointed out that Michael Moore, maker of the documentary “Sicko,” portrayed the Cuban health-care system as though it were utopia — until I hit him with some inconvenient facts. So he backed off and said, “Let’s stick to Canada and Britain because I think these are legitimate arguments that are made against the film and against the so-called idea of socialized medicine. And I think you should challenge me on these things.”

OK, here we go.

One basic problem with nationalized health care is that it makes medical services seem free. That pushes demand beyond supply. Governments deal with that by limiting what’s available.

That’s why the British National Health Service recently made the pathetic promise to reduce wait times for hospital care to four months.

The wait to see dentists is so long that some Brits pull their own teeth. Dental tools: pliers and vodka.

One hospital tried to save money by not changing bed sheets every day. British papers report that instead of washing them, nurses were encouraged to just turn them over. …

Division of Labour provides the example of member of Canadian parliament who went to LA for treatment.

Hugh Hewitt posts on the end of TimesSelect.

NY Times editors have figured out ethanol is a loser.

Slate writer tries golf.

… During my brief immersion in the world of golf, I determined that gloom is an essential golf component, as befitting a game that started on the moody moors of Scotland. When tennis players get thoroughly beaten, they come off the court sweaty and smiling. Their endorphins have shot up, and they look cute in their outfits. Even skiers being carried off the slope on a stretcher seem bizarrely thrilled about the elemental encounter between body and mountain. But golf induces despair. Take the observations in the book The Bluffer’s Guide to Golf, by Peter Gammond, “The golfer [is] a miserable wretch at the best of times.” “A golf match is designed to make as many people as possible unhappy.” There are very few golf jokes, he writes, that do not mention “death and destruction.” …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 18 Word

• September 18 PDF

Jim Taranto makes the point that Frank Rich cannot be expected to know any better if his only source for news is the NY Times.

… Frank Rich is an opinion columnist, and as such he is entitled to express the tendentious view that this out-of-context quote “was all you needed to take away from last week’s festivities in Washington.” But it’s embarrassing to the Times that its news judgment is in line with the politics of one of its shrillest columnists.

John Fund on Barry Manilow and health care coercion.

What is it about liberals that makes them want to avoid debates about their views? Take Oscar-winner Al Gore, who refused to allow Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg to appear with him on the Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss global warming. Earlier, Mr. Gore backed out of a previously agreed joint discussion with Mr. Lomborg hosted by Denmark’s leading newspaper. Nor would Mr. Gore even allow Mr. Lomborg to appear on the same panel when both were called to testify before Congress this year.

Now Barry Manilow, a major Democratic fundraiser who is currently God’s gift to the Las Vegas lounge act, has cancelled a scheduled appearance to promote his new album on “The View,” the daytime chat show hosted by Barbara Walters. It appears that Mr. Manilow views conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a fervent supporter of the Iraq War, as “dangerous” and “offensive.” …

Richard Cohen takes Hillary to task for not repudiating the BetrayUs ad.

If there is a phrase more closely associated with both Hillary and Bill Clinton than “the politics of personal destruction,” it does not come to mind. All the others — “It’s the economy, stupid,” for instance — belong to one or the other, but “the politics of personal destruction” is a phrase both Clintons have used repeatedly — so much so, it seems, that for Hillary it has lost all meaning. When, for instance, Gen. David Petraeus was slimed as “General Betray Us,” Hillary Clinton looked the other way. This was the politics of personal expediency.

The swipe at Petraeus was contained in a full-page ad the anti-war group MoveOn.org recently placed in The New York Times. It charged that Petraeus was “cooking the books” about conditions in Iraq and cited statements of his that have turned out to be either (1) not true, (2) no longer true, (3) possibly not true, or (4) like everything else in Iraq, impossible to tell. Whatever the case, using “betray” — a word associated with treason — recalls the ugly McCarthy era when, for too many Republicans, dissent corresponded with disloyalty. MoveOn.org and the late senator from Wisconsin share a certain fondness for the low blow.

Almost instantly, though, it got pretty hard to find a Democratic presidential candidate willing to dispute MoveOn.org. To his credit, Joe Biden did. “I don’t buy into that,” he said. “This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth.” But lonesome Joe, whose virtues have yet to come to the attention of the vast and apathetic electorate, was seconded only by Joe Lieberman, not a presidential candidate, and John Kerry, a man whose tomorrow is yesterday. When Clinton was asked about the ad, she avoided answering. …

Jonah Goldberg reacts to Cohen.

Mark Steyn, in the Western Standard, on cultures that refuse to protect themselves.

… I wonder how long these pieties can endure. A recent study of terrorist suspects arrested in Britain between 2001 and 2005 revealed that one in four of them was admitted to the country as an asylum seeker. They included, for example, Muktar Said Ibrahim, one of the four men who attempted unsuccessfully to self-detonate on the London Tube two weeks after the July 7th slaughter. In other words, young men taken in and given sanctuary by Britain thank their hosts by trying to kill them. Will any changes be made to immigration procedures? Or will the British simply accept that a one-in-four terrorist/refugee ratio is simply part of the privilege of being a progressive social-democratic society? Just as we accept that allowing parts of Toronto to, in effect, assimilate with Kingston, Jamaica is the price we pay for being able to congratulate ourselves on our boundless, boundless tolerance.

Thomas Sowell touts a book on Iraq.

In a world where the tragedy that is Iraq is usually discussed only in media sound bites and political slogans, it is especially gratifying to see an adult, intelligent, and insightful account of life inside Iraq by someone who lived there for nine months in the early days of the occupation in 2003 and 2004, and who saw the fundamental mistakes that would later plague the attempt to create a viable Iraqi government.

John Agresto, a career American academic and former college president who volunteered to go help create a better higher education system in Iraq, learned a lot about Iraqi society in general and about American attempts to create a better society there.

His recently published book is titled “Mugged by Reality” and is subtitled: “The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions.”

What is refreshingly different about this book is that it does not take the Bush administration line, the Congressional Democrats’ line or anybody else’s line. …

Theodore Dalrymple says the marxism of our time is Islam.

… All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. Had Fritz G. and Daniel S. grown up a generation earlier, they would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists. The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths’ personal angst.

This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us.

Speaking of marxism, LA Times Op-Ed explains why Pete Seeger’s obedience to Moscow’s line is still important.

… Eventually everyone — the remnants of the communist left included — took to ritualistically denouncing Soviet communism before joining whatever argument was going on later. But at the same time, those victimized by McCarthyism — in particular the Hollywood Ten and the rest of the show-business blacklistees — were elevated to heroic status. In the years that followed the 1947 HUAC hearings that led to their dismissal from the movie industry (for a 1st Amendment absolutist like me, a very bad idea), they have been celebrated in an endless series of books and tributes. As if by magic, the unapologetic defenders of a deadly doctrine have been transformed into martyrs to liberal belief — which none of them embraced in their day.

This is a massive, apparently unresolvable disconnect — and communism’s one lasting American triumph. Frankly, it makes the anti-communist left crazy. Mountains of new documents — notably the Venona transcripts, records of the cable traffic between Soviet spies and Moscow — prove beyond doubt the conspiratorial nature of American communism. But still its apologists stand beaming on the heroic heights, untouched by inconvenient scholarship, mere “dissidents” who paid an awful and unfair price for expressing their opinions.

One of these expressions of opinion was an obituary tribute to Stalin when he died in 1953, signed by 300 American communist intellectuals. It said, in part: “Glory to Stalin. Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands.” I don’t really want to defend to the death anyone’s right to that kind of insanity. Maybe we can afford to leave poor old Pete Seeger in peace — but not, I think, his co-religionists.

Karl Rove does a health care op-ed for WSJ.

… In short, the best health reform proposals will be those that recognize and build on the virtues of our market-based medical system. Sick people around the world come here because they can’t get quality care in their home countries. Many health-care professionals come here to practice, leaving behind well-meaning health-care systems where government is in charge, bureaucrats make the decisions, and where the patient doesn’t have the choice he or she does in the U.S.

Mrs. Clinton may think Americans want to trade freedom and innovation for the illusory security of government regulation and surrender control of their health decisions to government bureaucrats. My bet is 2008 will teach us something different if Republicans make health care a centerpiece issue.

Power Line suggests we perform due diligence when we hear quotes from long ago speeches.

… So, I urge you to be careful. When someone quotes a president, go back and read the whole speech. You may find that the president’s words have been hijacked, and attached to thoughts the great man never intended.

Presidential speeches are on the internet. It’s not too much of a chore, and you’ll maintain your political purity.

Paul Greenberg on politicians and the economy.

… But it’s not a waste of ambitious politicians’ efforts. They get to posture before the cameras and demand ACTION! — even if it’s precisely the wrong kind.

The pols may be wrong again and again, year after year, but think of the advantages. They’re able to strike while public anger is at its zenith, appease their louder and less thoughtful constituents, and they never have to say they’re sorry by the time gas prices fall and the public’s interest in the subject has waned. (Somehow they never get around to demanding a probe when gas prices go down.)

That’s the way it is with wild accusations; the facts may never catch up. Or if they do, the story is relegated to the business section. Ho hum.

The price of gasoline may rise and fall and rise again, like that of any other commodity, but the market for demagoguery remains remarkably stable.

Dilbert comments on the guy suing God.

… I sure hope it goes to trial. Imagine how interesting that would be. First, how do you select a jury of God’s peers? Compared to the Almighty, even Buddha is just a guy who should use the stairs more often. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 17 Word

• September 17 PDF

Mark Steyn comments on Pete Seeger’s mea culpa.

… James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, once offered this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger: “‘If I Had A Hammer’? Well, what’s stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they’re about a buck-ninety, tops.”

Very true. For the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul, and Mary revival, you could buy half a dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself. Yet in a sense Lileks is missing the point: Yes, they’re dopey nursery-school jingles, but that’s why they’re so insidious. The numbing simplicity allows them to be passed off as uncontentious unexceptionable all-purpose anthems of goodwill. Which is why you hear “This Land Is Your Land” in American grade schools, but not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The invention of the faux-childlike faux–folk song was one of the greatest forces in the infantilization of American culture. Seeger’s hymn to the “senselessness” of all war, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” combined passivity with condescension — “When will they ever learn?” — and established the default mode of contemporary artistic “dissent.” Mr. Seeger’s ongoing veneration is indestructible. But at least we now know the answer to the question “When will he ever learn?” At least half a century too late.

Ed Morrissey in Heading Right clarifies one of the mis-reported Greenspan remarks.

George Shultz deals with the “Israel lobby” canard.

… those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support are wrong. They are wrong because, to begin with, support for Israel is in our best interests. They are also wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they are wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts, not any other state or any of the myriad lobbies and groups that battle daily—sometimes with lies—to win America’s support.

Contentions’ Noah Pollack on Brzezinski’s bs.

… The true lesson of the Egypt-Israel rapprochement is actually the opposite of what people like Brzezinski would like it to be: It is a lesson in the sometimes irrelevance of American diplomacy in forging peace between nations, and more importantly it is an example of the reality that peace between implacable foes is usually only possible when one has so thoroughly beaten the other on the battlefield that the defeated party is left with only one option, to sue for peace. People like Brzezinski would like us to believe that heroic diplomacy in 1978 midwifed a peace treaty. Candidate Obama will be ill-served listening to this nonsense.

Pajamas Media speculates on what Israel was doing visiting Syria.

It is clearly difficult to be an Israeli journalist with good military sources this week. You can palpably feel the frustration on the page as you read news articles and sense that the writers know so much more than they are telling.

Whether or not reporters know the precise details of what happened in Syria on September 7, when Israeli planes attacked a mysterious target near the Syrian-Turkish border – the extremely tight censorship rules forbid them to report any of it – and Israeli officials are publicly, and uncharacteristically – silent.

So the Israeli press clenches their teeth and carefully does what they are permitted to do – repeat the reports that are emerging from overseas media and add their commentary as best they can. Meanwhile the public has had no way of knowing for certain whether the raid was “merely” an attempt to stem the flow of weapons from Syria to Hezbollah – or something of historic significance, a meaningful blow against an Axis of Evil. …

A London Times story was referred to above. Here it is.

Michael Barone says Iraq is the over-lawyered war.

… In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress passed laws that criminalized military and civilian officers who broke the rules on electronic surveillance and detainee treatment: “the criminalization of warfare.” Its ban on political assassination deterred the Clinton administration from gunning down Osama bin Laden. The CIA has become so wary of possible criminal charges that it urges agents to buy insurance. Developments in international law, especially the doctrine of universal decision, also threaten U.S. government officials with possible prosecution abroad. All of this creates a risk-averseness that leaves us more vulnerable to terrorists.

The CIA today employs more than 100 lawyers, the Pentagon 10,000. “Every weapon used by the U.S. military, and most of the targets they are used against, are vetted and cleared by lawyers in advance,” Goldsmith notes. In this respect, the national security community resembles the larger society. As Philip Howard of Common Good points out, we are stripping jungle gyms from playgrounds and paying for unneeded medical tests for fear of lawsuits. …

KC Johnson posts in Volokh on Nifong before the lacrosse team showed up. Johnson who is Stuart Taylor’s co-author will be guest posting for the week. This is his first.

… What kind of man would try to send three innocent young men to prison for 30 years to win an election? How could a career prosecutor not previously known as a nut or a rogue go so bad, so fast? How could he have thought he would get away with it?

Stuart Taylor and I (who jointly wrote this post, and one later today) have found widespread curiosity about these questions, especially among lawyers, while working on our new book, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. So this first post in a week of guest-blogging focuses on Nifong’s background, character, and the months of escalating misconduct that have brought him down. Subsequent posts will examine the misconduct (as we see it) of dozens of Duke professors, many journalists, the Duke administration, and the Durham law enforcement establishment. …

Bill Kristol has interesting commentary on the presidential campaign.

What a way to begin the fall! Perennial college-football power University of Michigan was ranked No. 5 in the preseason polls. It paid little Appalachian State University of Boone, N.C., about $400,000 to have its football team visit Ann Arbor to serve as a season-opening tune-up for the Wolverines. In a stunning upset, Appalachian State won 34-32– kicking a field goal with 26 sec. left, then blocking a Michigan field-goal attempt on the game’s last play.

Lesson: the improbable sometimes happens. And what’s true in sports is true in politics. There hasn’t been a major upset in a presidential-nomination race since Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976. We’re due. And the 2008 presidential campaign is an especially good candidate to provide a surprise. …

John Fund recaps the problems in the FAA. Says it should be privatized.

If you think there are more airport delays and cancellations than ever, you’re right. The percentage of late flights has doubled since 2002. And as bad as things are now, they’re about to get worse. The Federal Aviation Administration predicts there will be 36% more people flying by 2015. If the U.S. doesn’t dramatically expand the capacity of its overburdened air traffic control system, the airlines won’t be able to keep up with demand and ticket prices will skyrocket.

It ought to be an issue in the presidential campaign that the FAA isn’t equipped to clean up this mess. “The FAA as currently structured is impossible to run efficiently,” says Langhorne Bond, who ran the agency from 1977 to 1981. BusinessWeek reports the air traffic control network runs on software that is so outdated that there are only six programmers left in the U.S. who are able to update the code. The FAA’s efforts to move to a satellite-based system have been plagued by cost overruns and performance shortfalls. …

Power Line notices good environmental news.

Dilbert has OJ remarks.

… Unfortunately for O.J., his old attorney Johnny Cochrane has passed away. He’s the one who coined the phrase “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” In my opinion, that rhyme freed O.J. I recall reading a study that says people perceive things that rhyme to be more persuasive than things that don’t. Who will create the new rhyme that sets O.J. free? I have a few suggestions. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 16 Word

• September 16 PDF

Mark Steyn reacts to Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick’s description of the “mean and nasty and bitter” attacks of 9/11.

… At some point in the future, some of us will find ourselves on a flight with a chap like Richard Reid, the thwarted shoe-bomber. On that day we’d better hope the guy sitting next to him isn’t Gov. Patrick, who sees him bending down to light his sock and responds with a chorus of “All You Need Is Love,” but a fellow who “understands” enough to wallop the bejesus out of him before he can strike the match. It was the failure of one group of human beings to understand that the second group of human beings was determined to kill them that led the crew and passengers of those Boston flights to stick with the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late.

Unfortunately, the obsolescent 1970s multiculti love-groove inclinations of society at large are harder to dislodge. If you’ll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn’t about “them,” it’s about “us.” The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Gov. Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can’t blame them for seeing the opportunity: In that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Gov. Patrick understands them. …

Gerard Baker with today’s history lesson.

The ethnic origins of General David Petraeus are apparently Dutch, which is a shame because there’s something sonorously classical about the family name of the commander of the US forces in Iraq. When you discover that his father was christened Sixtus, the fantasy really takes flight. Somewhere in the recesses of the brain, where memory mingles hazily with imagination, I fancy I can recall toiling through a schoolboy Latin textbook that documented the progress of one Petraeus Sixtus as he triumphantly extended the imperium romanum across some dusty plain in Asia Minor.

The fantasy is not wholly inapt, of course. General Petraeus was the star turn in Washington this week, testifying before Congress about the progress of the surge by US forces in Iraq. Some evidently see America’s wearying detention in the quagmire of Mesopotamia as a classic example of imperial overreach of the kind that is thought to have doomed Rome. Who knows? Perhaps 1,500 years ago one of the forebears of General Petraeus was hauled before the Senate to explain the progress of some surge of Roman forces to defeat the insurgents in Germania. …

… It is helpful to think about Iraq this way. Imagine if the US had never been there; and that this sectarian strife had broken out in any case – as, one day it surely would, given the hatreds engendered by a thousand years of Muslim history and the efforts of Saddam Hussein.

What would we in the West think about it? What would we think of as our responsibilities? There would be some who would want to wash their hands of it. There would be others who would think that UN resolutions and diplomatic initiatives would be enough to salve our consciences if not to stop the slaughter.

But many of us surely would think we should do something about it – as we did in the Balkans more than a decade ago – and as, infamously, we failed to do in Africa at the same time. And we would know that, for all our high ideals and our soaring rhetoric, there would be only one country with the historical commitment to make massive sacrifices in the defence of the lives and liberty of others, the leadership to mobilise efforts to relieve the suffering and, above all, the economic and military wherewithal to make it happen.

That’s the only really workable analogy between the US and Rome. When Rome fell, the world went dark for the best part of a millennium. America may not be an empire. But whatever it is, for the sake of humanity, pray it lasts at least as long as Rome.

Gordon Chang in Contentions with more on the Israeli strike in Syria’s desert.

… Yet the Times seems to suggest that the raid targeted a Syrian nuclear weapons program linked to Pyongyang. “The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” an unidentified Bush administration official, referring to fissile material, is quoted as saying. Thursday’s Washington Post states that an unidentified former Israeli official had been told that the attack on Syria was intended to take out a facility that could make unconventional weapons. The paper also reported that satellite imagery has revealed a Syrian facility that could be part of a nuclear weapons program. North Korea, known to merchandise any dangerous item it possesses, has been doing its best to appear guilty. Departing from its usual practice of not commenting on world affairs, Pyongyang on Tuesday denounced Israel’s raid. …

WSJ reporters get an early look at Greenspan’s book.

In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles.

In “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” published by Penguin Press, Mr. Greenspan criticizes both congressional Republicans and President George W. Bush for abandoning fiscal discipline.

The book is scheduled for public release Monday. The Wall Street Journal bought a copy at a bookstore in the New York area.

Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a “lifelong libertarian Republican,” writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb “out-of-control” spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush’s failure to do so “was a major mistake.” Republicans in Congress, he writes, “swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.” …

John Fund with interesting Reagan background.

American Spectator says NY Times is very selective when accepting “special advocacy” ads.

The New York Times in the past has rejected “advocacy” ads from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, as well as from the National Right to Life Committee, despite the fact that both would have qualified for the same “special advocacy, stand by” rates that the radical, left-wing organization MoveOn.org was given for its smear ad of Gen. David Petraeus. …

James Taranto wonders if the Times has given a political contribution with the discount.

Thursday we wondered if the New York Times had made an illegal campaign contribution to the MoveOn.org political action committee. The Times, you’ll recall, published a full-page ad Monday in which it attacked Gen. David Petraeus in McCarthyite terms. The New York Post reported that the Times had given MoveOn.org a $102,000 discount from its usual $167,000 rate–which, if true, would be an illegal in-kind contribution under campaign finance laws.

The Times offers this explanation in a news story today: …

Debra Saunders argues for environmental common sense rather than radical measures for a faux problem.

… America’s sacrifices could be for naught, as long as China — which is or is about to be the world’s greatest generator of greenhouse gases — is exempt from any global warming pact.

To go the distance supported by global warming alarmists requires big changes.

If the alarmists are right, the whole world will have to change and it will be onerous. If the global warming alarmists are wrong, much of the sacrifices they demand will have been for nothing.

WSJ Op-Ed illustrates the cancer care available in the US.

Last week the American Cancer Society announced it will no longer run ads about the dangers of smoking and other cancer-causing behaviors and the benefits of regular screenings. Instead, the Society will devote this year’s entire advertising budget to a campaign for universal health coverage. John Seffrin, the Society’s chief executive, said, “[I]f we don’t fix the health-care system . . . lack of access will be a bigger cancer killer than tobacco.” …

 

… International comparisons establish that the current method of financing health care in the U.S. is not a bigger killer than tobacco. What is deadly are delays in treatment and lack of access to the most effective drugs, problems encountered by some uninsured cancer patients in the U.S. but by a far larger proportion of cancer patients in the U.K. and Europe. Cancer patients do well in a few small countries with national health insurance, such as Sweden and Finland, but they do better in the U.S. than anywhere else on the globe.

With a track record like that, the American Cancer Society should continue its lifesaving messages about prevention and screening instead of switching to a political agenda. The goal should be to ensure that all cancer patients receive the timely care our current system provides, not to radically overhaul the system.

American Thinker tracking the continued collapse of NY Times stock.

… This represents a 60%+ loss in shareholder value since the peak in 2002.

Arnold Kling in Tech Central has a go at explaining Hayek’s concept of “spontaneous order.”

One of the most important ideas of the late Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek was the concept of “spontaneous order.” This can be a difficult concept to explain.

When spontaneous order exists, we take it for granted and make little effort to understand it. If your body is healthy, you do not need to think about how your muscles work, how your heart and brain function, or how your metabolic processes operate. You only notice it when order breaks down, and you are sick or in pain.

Similarly, when the economy is functioning properly, we do not notice all the behaviors that are required to make it work. We go to the supermarket and find grapes available, and we do not wonder why or how.

In theory a central grape distributor could be at work. …

In practice, there is no grape-distribution czar. …

… In The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier points out that countries with a lot of wealth concentrated in a natural resource, such as oil, tend to function poorly. When people have to work to earn wealth, there is order. When wealth is there for the taking, then people focus on exactly that–taking. The rewards go to those who know how to use violence and power. Ironically, countries that are rich in resources are “cursed,” because the disorder caused by the fight over ownership undermines the wealth of the resources themselves.

Foreign aid can have the same impact as a resource. It can foster disorder by creating a climate in which ambitious people, instead of engaging in productive activity, fight for control over the distribution of aid. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 13 Word

• September 13 PDF

Mark Steyn provided more to mark the six years. His column the day after 9/11 for Canada’s National Post was reproduced Tuesday on his website. It is interesting to see how consistent Mark has been.

This is what I wrote six years ago, on Tuesday, September 11th 2001, for the following morning’s National Post in Canada and that week’s Spectator in Britain. This version is from The Face Of The Tiger, with second thoughts at the foot of the page:

 

You can understand why they’re jumping up and down in the streets of Ramallah, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful Presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska, by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America’s enemies do.

And, for those on the receiving end, that “money shot”, as they call it in Hollywood – the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as condemned chimneys at an abandoned sawmill – represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure by the US and a worse moral failure by the west generally.

…

There are cowards elsewhere, too. The funniest moment in the early coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that “the United Nations building has not been hit”. Well, there’s a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the west were in Durban holed up with the smooth, bespoke emissaries of thug states and treating with them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how grovelling the west’s apology for past sins should be. Yesterday’s sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward: they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word. We should also cease dignifying them by pretending that the foreign ministers of, say, Spain and Syria are somehow cut from the same cloth.

There is also a long-term lesson. The US is an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. Britain, France and the other old powers believed in projecting themselves, both territorially and culturally. As we saw in Durban, they get few thanks for that these days. But the American position – that the pre-eminent nation on earth can collectively leap in its Chevy Suburban and drive to the lake while the world goes its own way – is untenable. The consequence, as we now know, is that the world comes to you. Niall Ferguson, in his book The Cash Nexus, argues that imperial engagement is in fact the humanitarian position: the two most successful military occupations in recent history were the Allies’ transformation of West Germany and Japan into functioning democracies. Ferguson thinks the US, if it had the will, could do that in Sierra Leone. But why stop there? Why let ramshackle economic basket-cases like the Sudan or Afghanistan be used as launch pads to kill New Yorkers?

…

Let us hope that America doesn’t show the same lack of will. This is, as the German government put it, an attack on “the civilized world”, and it’s time to speak up in its defence. Those western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world’s future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after Tuesday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: whose side are you on?

John Tierney’s last item here was about his sojourn with Bjorn Lomborg. He makes his blog available for his readers to take on Dr. Lomborg.

I’m going to take a wild guess that a few readers differ with Bjorn Lomborg’s message in my Findings column. Here’s your chance to disagree. But first let me present a little more of his argument, and tell you why I like his new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.” …

Victor Davis Hanson with a warning.

Who recently said: “These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War (1). Why? Only to build Israel.”

Some holdover Nazi?

Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as “bacteria” — controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: “The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs.”

A conspiracy nut?

Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: “I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel. . . . It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery.” …

Anne Applebaum analyzes bin Laden’s vid.

… It is legitimate, of course, to ask whether it matters what is said by a man who is no longer thought to be in control of his organization, even if he still has access to a video camera inside his cave. But that’s precisely the point. Osama will sooner or later die or be captured. But he, or someone close to him, is now trying to ensure that his ideology lives on. And he, or someone, wants it to survive in a form that will appeal to Americans and other Westerners disillusioned with their own political system. To put it bluntly, someone with an Irish or Hispanic name could have a better chance of slipping past the FBI, or through airport security, than someone named Mohammed. In a world in which counterintelligence and security procedures will slowly, slowly improve—that’s the future.

Corner posts with more Hsu puns. Mark Steyn makes a good point about the media. Then the Corner posts on the new transportation and housing bill’s earmarks.

Club for Growth posts on the bill’s peace gardens and baseball stadiums.

The Captain weighs in too.

Gay Patriot has the story of UC Irvine reneging on its offer of law school deanship to liberal Erwin Chemerinsky because he was “too controversial.” Two of our favorites, libertarian Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and conservative Hugh Hewitt, rose to the defense of Chermerinsky.

Michael Goodwin says the battlefield has shifted. The important battlefield – Congress.

… For Democrats, the hearings were a disaster. They don’t have the votes to force a withdrawal and many were left sputtering mad over their inability to get a usable quote out of Petraeus or Ambassador Ryan Crocker that would allow them to declare defeat for Bush’s strategy. Never before has it been so clear that some – Ted Kennedy, for example – are putting partisanship ahead of country.

Indeed, their performance was so shockingly awful that I am inclined to believe charges that some Democrats actually hope we lose. Up to now, I’ve always viewed such charges as rancid partisanship that demonized legitimate differences. Now I’m not so sure.

My distress began with a smear on Petraeus from Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), who declared his testimony not credible – before Petraeus had even spoken! Far worse was the scandalous newspaper ad by MoveOn.org that shouted “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” There is a special place in hell for such vile people.

And there is a special place for a political party that obeys them – minority status. Democrats are flirting with an electoral disaster next year with their strident anti-military tone. It’s almost as though our success in Iraq has driven them to desperation – calling our military leaders liars, shills and traitors. …

Max Boot posts in Contentions on Petraeus.

Peter Wehner, also in Contentions, wishes for more consistency from George Will.

… Prior to the war to liberate Iraq, then, George Will thought Iraq and the Arab world were quite ready for democracy. He was a strong advocate for regime change and nation building. And he thought Iraq would be an easier undertaking than Afghanistan.
It’s fine—it can even be admirable—for an individual to change his mind in the face of new facts and circumstances. But some appreciation for one’s previous views should also be taken into account.

George Will ranks among the finest columnists ever to pick up a pen (quill or otherwise). Over the years his arguments and words have shaped a generation of conservatives, including me. And I wish the best thing I have ever written were half as good as the worst thing George Will has ever written. But it’s fair to ask that he not write as if he always knew better, as if any conservative worth his Burkean salt should have known that the effort to spread democracy to Iraq was Wilsonian foolishness that was fated to fail.

It wasn’t (and isn’t)—and once upon a time George Will thought so, too.

Tech Central’s editors interview Ken Fisher who says the sub-prime mess is not that big.

TCS: Let’s talk about the current status of the subprime mortgage market. Are you worried?

KEN FISHER: The only thing I fear about the subprime mortgage market is what politicians might do, because fundamentally everyone gets this backwards.

TCS: You don’t see major long-term economic consequences?

KEN FISHER: I think intuitively everybody knows that in the long term, this is not a big deal for the economy and the stock market. I don’t think it’s big enough to matter.

…

Tech Central uses Shakespeare to show the link between Larry Craig and the Sermon on the Mount.

… Shakespeare got what so many commentators missed: Jesus as pundit, wisely (and it turns out accurately) predicting the implosion of the two great political parties of His day. The same holds true for us. The Democrats can’t fly around the world in gas guzzling charter jets to give pious sermons about exceeding our carbon footprints. Republicans can’t go on and on about Idaho family values and then cruise men’s rooms for anonymous hook-ups. It’s not just a matter of ‘hypocrisy’. Hypocrisy is inevitable, any standard worth having is a standard that we will sometimes miss. It’s more a matter of reality. You can’t build a political coalition of lasting viability on leaders who trash by their actions the standards the profess with their mouths. The Prophet and the playwright tells us that it just won’t work.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 12 Word

• September 12 PDF

Boston Globe with an op-ed by a former Clinton and Bush advisor on the MoveOn.org BetrayUs ad.

… Let us be clear. It is legitimate to grill Petraeus on his testimony and to ask him tough questions about the strategy he has been pursuing. It is legitimate to disagree with him, or to conclude that an alternative course of action has a better chance of advancing US interests in the region. Healthy civil-military relations do not depend on accepting uncritically anything a senior military officer says. Quite the opposite, they depend on a full and frank exchange of views.

It is not legitimate, however, and it is exceedingly corrosive of healthy civil-military relations to question the general’s patriotism when his views differ from yours and are inconvenient for one’s political agenda.

This is a defining moment for the antiwar faction. They can continue on the path on to which they have veered, repeating some of the worst mistakes in American history. Or they can make a clean break with the past, police their own ranks, and promote a healthy, critical, public debate about the best way forward in Iraq.

NewsBusters tells us the discount the NY Times gave to MoveOn.org ad. Would you believe 62%? This from a newspaper whose earnings are in the tank.

… For a paper that has been paying its investors back with lead weighted returns I’d be a little irritated if I had a stake in a venture that puts the subjective political agenda of the editorial staff above the fiduciary duty of the corporation to its investors. Especially considering that MoveOn.org could easily afford the going rate and likely would have run the ad without such a lavish discount. But then again advocacy as a business plan is exactly what the newspaper is about.

When trying to explain how the New York Times Co. managed to shave 50% off the bottom line between 2002 and 2006 some analysts felt that editorial content was not the problem. They looked at other indicators such as poor cost control.

They were wrong in my eyes. The arrogance of the people running the New York Times Co. is a reflection of the paper and its approach to journalism. I’d consider this an example of how editorial persuasion reflects much of the back room operations at the newspaper if not the company as a whole. …

… Yesterday the New York Times Co. reached a simultaneous low while its crown jewel newspaper reached a new low by running a personal attack ad against a war hero. Their stock reflected their standing in the world of character by ending the day with a five year low of $20.72. What a perfectly deserving reflection of the quality of the product coming out of the nation’s biggest clearing house for advocacy journalism.

Roger L. Simon reviews Norman Podhoretz’s new book.

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

I kept thinking of that line – often attributed to Trotsky – when reading World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Norman Podhoretz’s analysis of the evolution of our current situation.

Not interested, indeed. What normal person would be? Like a lot of people, I was hoping Francis Fukuyama was right back in 1992 when he proffered the “End of History.” No such luck.

Podhoretz might be considered the anti-Fukuyama. His work – published today for the sixth anniversary of 9/11 and amplifying an essay he did for Commentary in August 2004 – posits a view of modern history as one long sequence of sometimes overlapping global wars from World Wars I and II through the Cold War (World War III) to the confrontation with Islamofascism (World War IV), which may be the most intractable and endless conflict of all. Not to pick on Fukuyama – who has long since abandoned his theory – at the present moment, unhappily for all of us, Podhoretz seems to be correct. …

John Fund on the slick Clinton money machine.

Marty Peretz caught John Kerry speaking up.

Jerusalem Post tells us what Israel’s air force was doing in Syria’s far eastern desert. This is the first of three items on the raid.

The Israel Air Force jets that allegedly infiltrated Syrian airspace early last Thursday apparently bombed an Iranian arms shipment that was being transferred to Hizbullah, CNN reported Tuesday.

A ground operation may also have been part of the foray, according to the network. Neither Jerusalem nor Damascus have confirmed the report. But Damascus has denied the presence of any Israeli ground forces on its territory. …

Contentions too.

The Captain closes out the subject.

… Israel would not risk war with Syria just to test out an air defense system that Iran might get. They would risk war to stop Hezbollah from rearming to the point where they would launch another attack on Israel and provoke another war in the sub-Litani region, and they would have every right to do so.

Under the terms of the UN cease-fire, Hezbollah is supposed to disarm and the only armed force in Lebanon is supposed to be the national army. Any resupply of Hezbollah is a violation of that resolution. Syria’s complaint to the UN could backfire, if the Security Council decided to take a closer look at Syria’s complicity in arming Hezbollah.

Unlike the last time, Israel appears to have few qualms about acting in its own interest in stopping the arms flow into southern Lebanon. It also has few reservations about the entire world understanding this. Perhaps that may unsettle Bashar Assad most of all.

Tech Central takes another look at the study that dissed diversity.

… As a champion of multicultural diversity, Putnam finds his results disturbing and he has been reluctant to publish them. The only place to find them is in a speech reprinted in the academic journal Scandinavian Political Studies. And even there the data is not provided, only summarized. Putnam told the Financial Times that he “had delayed publishing his results until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.”

Slate answers the question, “What’s up with all those plane crashes?”

Millionaire Steve Fossett has been missing since last Monday, when he took off from a Nevada airstrip for a short flight. Rescue crews have yet to find the famous adventurer or his plane, but according to news reports, they’ve discovered at least six “uncharted wrecks” across a 17,000-square-mile swath of the Sierra Nevada—or nearly one a day since the search began. Why are there so many undocumented crash sites around the Sierra Nevada? …

Dilbert comments on the study showing liberals and conservatives have different ways of thinking.

… During this time of presidential elections, the story turned into “Scientists prove conservatives are simple-minded.”

I’m guessing this is how the process went down: The scientists (usually liberals) report their findings to their university bosses (usually liberals) who call their public relations people (usually liberals) to sex up this story and feed it to the media (usually liberals). There wasn’t much to slow it down.

Still, you have to give props to the PR person who put the lipstick on this turd. Someone earned his or her money this week. Nice work. …