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John Fund is first today with his column on earmark reform – NOT!

… Pretending that the earmark process will be made transparent and accountable as a result of a phony ethics bill is vital to Congress’s effort to convince voters they’ve sobered up on spending. Among other travesties, the new ethics bill strips out previously agreed-upon language barring members from trading earmarks for votes, and in the Senate vests none other than Majority Leader Reid with the power to determine if an item is subject to earmark-disclosure rules.

Concealing just how the pork-barrel culture works is important to congressmen in both parties, because the process can’t really be defended on the merits. Nothing illustrates that better than the exchange that took place just before Congress broke for its August recess between Democratic Rep. John Murtha, the overlord of spending on the House Appropriations Committee, and GOP Rep. John Campbell, a antipork reformer from California.

Mr. Campbell, a certified accountant, rose to challenge a $2 million earmark for a “paint shield” being developed by the Sherwin-Williams Co. in Cleveland. Since the actual sponsor of the earmark, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, chose not to defend her handiwork, Mr. Murtha took up the cudgel on her behalf. Mr. Campbell simply wanted to know if the Pentagon had asked for the paint shield, since the rationale for the spending was that it would “protect people against microbial threats.”

Mr. Murtha imperiously assured Mr. Campbell that the shield was “a very worthwhile project,” and that “I’m sure the military is interested in this kind of research.”

Mr. Campbell persisted and asked if, “in fact, the military has asked for this kind of technology?” When Mr. Murtha was silent, Mr. Campbell said, “I guess the answer to that is no.” …

Bob Novak on the same issue.

With the midnight hour approaching Saturday Aug. 4 near the end of a marathon session, Democratic and Republican leaders alike wanted to pass the Defense appropriations bill quickly and start their summer recess. But Republican Rep. Jeff Flake’s stubborn adherence to principle forced an hour-long delay that revealed unpleasant realities about Congress. …

Jeff Jacoby reminds us there are worse things than the criminal class in congress. It’s true! There’s the criminal class running countries in Africa. Jeff writes on Zimbabwe.

Debra Saunders noticed the foolish Newsweek piece on global warming skeptics.

NEWSWEEK’s global-warming cover story purports to reveal the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry” which for the last two decades “has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.” It’s the same story run repeatedly in mainstream media: the overwhelming majority of scientists believe the debate on global warming is over — but if there are any dissenting scientists left, they’ve been bought.

Here’s the rub: If dissent is so rare, why do global-warming conformists feel the strong need to argue that minority views should be dismissed as nutty or venal? Why not posit that there is such a thing as honest disagreement on the science? …

Robert Samuelson too. And he writes for Newsweek!

We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. Last week’s NEWSWEEK cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder. It’s an object lesson of how viewing the world as “good guys vs. bad guys” can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story. Global warming has clearly occurred; the hard question is what to do about it.

If you missed NEWSWEEK’s story, here’s the gist. A “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.” This “denial machine” has obstructed action against global warming and is still “running at full throttle.” The story’s thrust: discredit the “denial machine,” and the country can start the serious business of fighting global warming. The story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.

The global-warming debate’s great un-mentionable is this: we lack the technology to get from here to there. Just because Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to cut emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 doesn’t mean it can happen. At best, we might curb emissions growth. …

… But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don’t have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale—as NEWSWEEK did—in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.

George Will shows how common and ordinary Obama is.

Sen. Barack Obama recently told some Iowa farmers that prices of their crops are not high enough, considering what grocers are charging for other stuff: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Living near the University of Chicago, Obama has perhaps experienced this outrage, but Iowans, who have no Whole Foods stores, might remember 1987, when Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis urged Iowa farmers to diversify by raising endive. Said a farmer to a Boston reporter, “Your governor scared me just a hair.”

Obama is not scary, just disappointing. Regarding a matter more serious than vegetables — a judicial confirmation — he looks like just another liberal on a leash. His candidacy kindled hope that he might bring down the curtain on the long-running and intensely boring melodrama “Forever Selma,” starring Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. It was hoped Obama would be impatient with the ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation that degrades racial discourse. He is, however, unoriginal and unjust regarding the nomination of Leslie Southwick to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, whose jurisdiction is Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Southwick, currently a law professor, joined the Army Reserve in 1992 at age 42 and transferred in 2003 to a National Guard combat unit heading to Iraq, where he served 17 months. He is 57 and until last December was a member of a Mississippi appellate court. The American Bar Association, not a nest of conservatives, has given him its highest rating (“well qualified”) for the 5th Circuit.

But because he is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness. Many say his defect is “insensitivity,” an accusation invariably made when specific grievances are few and flimsy.

Obama, touching all the Democratic nominating electorate’s erogenous zones, concocts a tortured statistic about Southwick’s “disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. …

The Captain is the first of some of our favorites to post on Rove’s exit.

… It sounds as if he’s through with political consulting. He’s done it for a couple of decades, and the high-profile and high abuse of the last seven years has burnt him out. That didn’t stop him from putting out a few predictions and valedictory advice for the GOP in the Gigot interview. Among them, he predicts that the Democrats will nominate the “fatally flawed” Hillary Clinton — no great surprise — and that the Republicans will beat her.

CQ readers will remember that I have had the pleasure — and I use that word deliberately — of meeting Karl Rove twice, once in DC and once here in the Twin Cities. On both occasions, Rove kept the room laughing while displaying a remarkable recall of numbers and polling trends. Despite everything that had been launched at him, Rove obviously relished his work and enjoyed talking about it. He pulled no punches, and he answered every question asked of him. Many of us were skeptical of his optimism in 2006, and correctly so, as it turned out, but he never took offense or belittled anyone for it.

His departure will no doubt be the subject of celebration for the president’s most vociferous critics, but I think they’ll wind up missing him more than the president’s supporters. They won’t have Rove to kick around any more, and after the shock wears off, it will become apparent how silly all the Rove-kicking was from the beginning.

Hugh Hewitt is next.

Power Line too.

WSJ editors with nice things to say about Hillary. Seriously!

Hillary Clinton has been catching heat for refusing to swear off campaign cash from lobbyists, with critics accusing her of being a stooge of corporate and special interests. We’d say she deserves some credit.

At last week’s YearlyKos event, former Senator John Edwards stooped for an easy applause line by challenging his fellow candidates to refuse donations from “Washington lobbyists.” Mrs. Clinton refused to take the sound-bite bait. When asked if she’d continue taking such cash, she replied: “Yes I will because, you know, a lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans. They actually do. They represent nurses. They represent social workers. Yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people.” …

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Mark Steyn takes note of a quiet climb down by climate scolds.

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA’s Web site and look at the “U.S. surface air temperature” rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.

Then again, you might not. They’re not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The “hottest year on record” is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America’s Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone’s ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.

Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he’s not even American: He’s Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won’t do, even when they’re federal public servants with unlimited budgets? …

Joshua Muravchik notes the Dems are facing an inconvenient truth.

It’s time to declare victory and go home. That was the formula that Senator George Aiken famously suggested for Vietnam in 1966. Today, it bears relevance to Iraq. No, not to the U. S. military presence in that country, but to the Democrats in Congress.

Since November, the Pelosi-Reid Democrats have demonstrated shocking disdain for the well-being of our country. Their only concern has been to defeat or embarrass George W. Bush. Once, one of the noblest American traditions held that politics stops at the water’s edge. But, for the Pelosi-Reid Democrats, it seems that the inverse is true: namely, that national interests stop when the opportunity arises for partisan point-scoring.

In the last few weeks, however, a number of Democratic voices have been raised to observe that General Petraeus’s surge strategy seems to be working in Iraq. …

Jonah Goldberg writes on the terrorist/criminal debate.

Bank robbers rarely use suicide bombers. Forgers don’t declare war on capitalism, democracy and modernity. Kidnappers rarely behead their victims without asking for a ransom. And when they do ask for ransoms, only rarely do they demand infidels submit to the will of Allah instead of asking for unmarked bills.

These incandescently obvious observations illuminate, in a small way, the resplendent stupidity of the notion that we should treat members of al-Qaida like run-of-the-mill criminals.

Al-Qaida’s business plan is to make money and kill people in order to impose a global caliphate of Islamic rule. The Mafia’s business plan is to make money in order to … make money. Murder is, as Tony Soprano might say, the cost of doing business. Murder for al-Qaida is the business (and if you die in the process, you get to spend eternity at an Islamic Bada-Bing Club). …

Power Line posts on Spitzer’s troubles and NASA’s climate snafu.

The Captain tells a story about an LA hospital.

Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles has one of the worst reputations in the nation among major metropolitan hospitals. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times ran a devastating exposé on the hospital, showing how federal funds went to waste in a mismanaged muddle that spent far more per patient than any other hospital in the area. Yesterday, the federal funding disappeared — and so will MLK Hospital:

Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital shut down its emergency room Friday night and will close entirely within two weeks, a startlingly swift reaction to a federal decision to revoke $200 million in annual funding because of ongoing lapses in care.

The extraordinary developments mark an end to nearly four years of failed attempts to reform the historic institution, treasured by many African Americans as a symbol of hope and progress after the 1965 Watts riots.

Los Angeles County health services director Dr. Bruce Chernof announced the closure plan Friday afternoon, hours after the hospital learned that it had failed its final test, a top-to-bottom review by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The hospital, formerly known as King/Drew, has shown itself unable to meet minimum standards for patient care since January 2004, according to the regulators.

This is a catastrophe for that area of Los Angeles, and an entirely avoidable catastrophe at that. …

King Corn by Rich Lowry.

Republican presidential candidates flocked to Ames, Iowa, for the Iowa straw poll this weekend, an event that is both an early winnowing process for the GOP presidential field and an object lesson in how one state can hijack the nation’s energy policy.

Ethanol is to Iowans what marijuana is to Rastafarians: a substance that is considered quasi-holy, but only because it delivers really good times. Presidential candidates become fanatical supporters of the corn-based fuel as soon as they begin to compete in the Iowa caucuses. Before it’s over, Mitt Romney might have to promise to use ethanol as pomade and Mike Huckabee — in a naked play for the religious right — to baptize people in the stuff. …

Ilya Somin in Volokh works to set the Che record straight.

Few people still admire Lenin and Stalin. Mao Zedong also has few remaining fans in the West (though he still hasn’t gotten the negative recognition he deserves for being possibly history’s greatest mass murderer). One communist icon, however, still has staying power: Che Guevara. Go to any college campus or hip hangout and you’ll find no shortage of Che T-shirts, Che posters, and even Che cell phone messages. The truth, however, is that Che was no less a brutal killer than other communist leaders. If he failed to rise to the same “heights” as Lenin or Mao, it was largely for lack of opportunity. …

National Review shorts.

Adam Smith tells us how bad the nanny state in England has become.

The nanny state in overdrive was witnessed this week in Urchfont, near Devizes, in Wiltshire. A pensioner, who for eight years has been tending the local flowerbeds (at her own expense), is being told she must stop unless she gets three “men at work” signs, a bright yellow jacket and another person to watch for traffic.

A highways inspector spotted June Turnbull at work and asked the parish council chairman Peter Newell if the council had the necessary “Section 96″ safety license. Apparently the parish has health and safety responsibilities for volunteers on county-owned land. …

WSJ with a nice surprise concerning the level of high school econ knowledge.

Pop quiz. Which has been most important in reducing poverty over time: a) taxes, b) economic growth, c) international trade, or d) government regulation?

We know what our readers would say. But lest you think American young people are slouching toward serfdom, you’ll be pleased to know that 53% of U.S. high school seniors also answered “b.” …

Division of Labour posts on the value of donkeys protecting herds. Would that the political donkeys be good at protection.

Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News runs the (literally) most ass kicking story I’ve read, “Guard Donkeys Used to Protect Texas Herds.” It illustrates some interesting examples of entrepreneurial discovery, tacit knowledge and substitution between animals as productive inputs.

MILANO, Texas – Coyotes and wild dogs were slaughtering calves on Herbie Vaughan’s ranch in the Cedar Creek valley south of Milano until about eight years ago when he took an old-timer’s advice and installed guard donkeys in the herd.

“When I put the donkeys out there, I no longer had a coyote problem,” says Vaughan. “It’s like they disappeared. I don’t know why, but it worked.” …

Jay Ambrose on Newsweek’s abuse of global warming skeptics.

NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a “well-funded,” global-warming “denial machine,” is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance.

The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the “naysayers” to this holy writ: They are part of a “well-coordinated,” heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians. …

John Lott answers Freakonomics with Freedomnomics.

Freedomnomics is John Lott’s free market retort to the wildly popular book, Freakonomics — that pastiche of thin analysis that skims over topics as diverse as sumo wrestling, real estate rip-offs, used car prices, and children’s names.

In particular, Lott disputes the most explosive claim in Levitt and Dubner’s work — that Roe v. Wade was a major factor in the stunning drop in crime in the 1990s. That huge assertion, based on four pages of analysis that included the negative impact of Communist Romania’s no-abortion policy, could easily have been labeled “fewer blacks, less crime.”

Lott argues, by contrast, that the Supreme Court’s legislative fiat in 1973 actually increased crime by boosting out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households. These crime-correlated statistics exploded in the 1970s and ’80s as social sanctions against extra-marital sex disappeared and as the legal but odious option of abortion was rejected by millions of now-pregnant unmarried women.

If abortion isn’t the life-saving procedure that Levitt and Dubner suggest it is, other factors must have caused crime rates to plummet during the last decade of the 20th century. Accordingly, Lott provides evidence that the reinstitution of capital punishment in the early ’90s explains some of the drop — a conclusion that coincides with the findings of other analysts and confirms what most folks, including criminals and police officers, sense intuitively — that people go out of their way to avoid being killed. Stated otherwise: harsher penalties, less crime. …

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Power Line posts on a Journal op-ed we’d previously ignored.

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published a powerful column by the former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. The subject of Pacepa’s column was the destructive effect of the left’s intemperate attacks on the president. Buried in Pacepa’s column is this intriguing paragraph:

During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness. …

Ion Pacepa’s column is here.

During last week’s two-day summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thanked President Bush for leading the global war on terror. Mr. Brown acknowledged “the debt the world owes to the U.S. for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism” and vowed to follow Winston Churchill’s lead and make Britain’s ties with America even stronger.

Mr. Brown’s statements elicited anger from many of Mr. Bush’s domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania–with two death sentences on his head–in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a “liar,” a “deceiver” and a “fraud.”

I spent decades scrutinizing the U.S. from Europe, and I learned that international respect for America is directly proportional to America’s own respect for its president. …

The New Editor posts on Gingrich’s description of the presidential campaign ‘verges on insane.’

Contentions introduces Peter Wehner, a new contributor.

Mr. Wehner with his first post for us. His subject is the phony candidate.

Matt Drudge has posted this headline on his site: “Editor For SC Largest Paper: Edwards Is ‘A Big Phony.’” That claim may qualify as the understatement of the political year. John Edwards has gone from what U.S. News & World Report describes as “the happy-face centrist” to the Candidate from the World of Kos. Has any ’08 candidate traveled so far (to the left), so fast, and in such a transparently false manner?

There are the predictable flip-flops. Today Edwards says the Iraq war was a mistake; in 2002, he insisted that “Saddam Hussein’s regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies. . . . [W]e must be prepared to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, and eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction once and for all.”

Having been an early supporter of the war on terror, he now refers to it as a “bumper sticker.” John Edwards is now a passionate critic of NAFTA—after having had nice words to say about it just a few years ago. …

Jim Lileks with eminent domain thoughts.

Thomas Sowell on collapsing bridges.

… It is not just the people but the incentives that are responsible for the neglect of infrastructure, while tax money is lavished on all sorts of less urgent projects.

In other words, when there is a complete turnover in political leaders over time, the same problem will remain because the same incentives will remain when new leaders take over.

Some people claim that the problem is how much money it would take to properly maintain bridges, highways, dams and other infrastructure. But money is found for other things, including things far less urgent and some things that are even counterproductive.

The real problem is that the political incentives are to spend the taxpayers’ money on things that will enhance politicians’ chances of getting re-elected. …

Jeff Jacoby on scalping laws.

I’M NOT a sports fan; never have been. Maybe that’s why all the atmospherics surrounding ticket scalping raise more questions in my mind than they answer.

For example: Why is someone who sells tickets to a Red Sox fan outside Fenway Park for a heavily inflated price called a “scalper,” while someone who charges the same fan $4 for a bottle of water inside the stadium is called a “concessionaire”?

Another question, admittedly not germane to the transaction itself: How can people who shudder with revulsion when Atlanta Braves fans do the “tomahawk chop,” or who find Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indians’ cheerful emblem, politically offensive, refer so disdainfully to the resale of tickets as “scalping”?

But what I really don’t understand about the scalping brouhaha is why anyone thinks the government should be involved in deciding how much a willing buyer can pay a willing seller for tickets to a lawful entertainment event. …

Sports Illustrated tells us about the latest case for our friends at Institute for Justice.

Carlos Barragan and his son Carlos Jr. don’t torture dogs, don’t inject ‘roids and don’t bet on sporting events they ref. They’ve never run from the law or the tax man or a grand jury.

What they do run is a little boxing gym for kids in National City, Calif., between the Mexican border and the San Diego barrios.

So why is the city trying to shut them down?

Luxury condos, that’s why.

David Brooks gets us up to date on baby names.

NY Times reports on the next thing ethanol mandates are screwing up.

DEKALB, Ill. — While much of the nation worries about a slumping real estate market, people in Midwestern farm country are experiencing exactly the opposite. Take, for instance, the farm here — nearly 80 acres of corn and soybeans off a gravel road in a universe of corn and soybeans — that sold for $10,000 an acre at auction this spring, a price that astonished even the auctioneer.

“If they had seen that day, they would have never believed it,” Penny Layman said of her sister and brother-in-law, who paid $32,000 for the entire spread in 1962 and whose deaths led to the sale.

Skyrocketing farmland prices, particularly in states like Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, giddy with the promise of corn-based ethanol, are stirring new optimism among established farmers. But for younger farmers, already rare in this graying profession, and for small farmers with dreams of expanding and grabbing a piece of the ethanol craze, the news is oddly grim. The higher prices feel out of reach. …

Slate tells how sunscreen SPF is established.

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The Boston Globe had a stunning article this weekend -The Downside of Diversity.

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts. ….

… His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.

When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation. …

 

… “It’s an important addition to a growing body of evidence on the challenges created by diversity,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser.

In a recent study, Glaeser and colleague Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe — Europe spends far more — can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population. Glaeser says lower national social welfare spending in the US is a “macro” version of the decreased civic engagement Putnam found in more diverse communities within the country.

Economists Matthew Kahn of UCLA and Dora Costa of MIT reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa’s own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.

Birds of different feathers may sometimes flock together, but they are also less likely to look out for one another. “Everyone is a little self-conscious that this is not politically correct stuff,” says Kahn. …

 

… So how to explain New York, London, Rio de Janiero, Los Angeles — the great melting-pot cities that drive the world’s creative and financial economies?

The image of civic lassitude dragging down more diverse communities is at odds with the vigor often associated with urban centers, where ethnic diversity is greatest. It turns out there is a flip side to the discomfort diversity can cause. If ethnic diversity, at least in the short run, is a liability for social connectedness, a parallel line of emerging research suggests it can be a big asset when it comes to driving productivity and innovation. In high-skill workplace settings, says Scott Page, the University of Michigan political scientist, the different ways of thinking among people from different cultures can be a boon.

“Because they see the world and think about the world differently than you, that’s challenging,” says Page, author of “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.” “But by hanging out with people different than you, you’re likely to get more insights. Diverse teams tend to be more productive.” …

John Fund with an overview of the GOP in Congress.

Republicans faced a time for choosing last week, when Senate Democrats brought to the floor an ethics “reform” bill that may make it easier for Congress to dole out pork-barrel spending. In the words of GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, the bill “not only failed to drain the swamp, but gave the alligators new rights.”

Rather than block the legislation and insist on better reforms, image-sensitive Republicans largely backed the bill.

Have they learned anything? They lost control of Congress last year in no small measure because the GOP had become identified with the culture of pork-barrel spending, frittering away the American people’s former confidence in them on fiscal issues.

If 34 Senate Republicans had united and voted against the bill, Democrats would have been forced to draw up more meaningful reforms. They might even have forced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to accept the very “sunshine” provisions the Senate unanimously adopted in January–so at least the public would know who is doling out pork. But when it came down to it, only 17 voted for prolonging debate on the bill. …

Mr. Fund also has words for the Dems in debate.

Seven Democratic presidential candidates squared off last night in front of 15,000 AFL-CIO union members at Chicago’s Soldier Field stadium. Talk about playing to the audience. There was so much obeisance paid to the agenda of U.S. labor unions, every candidate should have been given a “pander bear” at the end as a prize.

“This is no longer Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party on trade issues,” concluded former California Democratic Party chairman Bill Press on MSNBC. “I predict that soon enough Bill Clinton himself will say we have to renegotiate NAFTA, a signature accomplishment of his first term.”

No kidding. Hillary Clinton for her part wasted little time bashing the North American Free Trade Agreement for allegedly hurting workers. …

John Stossel thinks it’s a good idea for Wisconsin to bankrupt itself with universal health care. Then the rest of us can learn from their misery.

… As usual, most of the new taxes will be imposed on employers. Progressives believe money taken from them doesn’t cost anything. Rich corporations will simply waste less on lavish perks and excess profits. But taxes on business are often paid by workers, stockholders and consumers. Businesses that can’t pass the taxes on to someone else will close or move out of state.

But progressives are oblivious to this fact. They see Wisconsin becoming a fairyland of health happiness supervised by the 16-person “authority” that will oversee the plan. Socialism will work this time because the “right” people will be in charge.

Does it never occur to the progressives that the legislature’s intrusion into private contracts is one reason health care and health insurance are expensive now? The average annual health-insurance premium for a family in Wisconsin is $4,462 partly because Wisconsin imposes 29 mandates on health insurers: Every policy must cover chiropractors, dentists, genetic testing, etc. Think chiropractors are quacks? Too bad. You still must pay them to treat people in your state. …

… That’s why America needs “Healthy Wisconsin.” The fall of the Soviet Union deprived us of the biggest example of how socialism works. We need laboratories of failure to demonstrate what socialism is like. All we have now is Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, the U.S. Post Office, and state motor-vehicle departments.

It’s not enough. Wisconsin can show the other 49 states what “universal” coverage is like.

I feel bad for the people in Wisconsin. They already suffer from little job creation, and the Packers aren’t winning, but it’s better to experiment with one state than all of America.

Don Boudreaux uses his column to examine the “progressives” claim to progress.

My son, Thomas, 10, sometimes amuses himself with a game he calls “Opposite.” Whenever he is struck by the fancy to play this game, he announces to my wife and me that all that he says during the next several minutes will be the opposite of what he really means.

“Mommy is ugly” really means “Mommy is beautiful.” “I’m stuffed!” means “I’m hungry.” To indicate that he’d prefer to play rather than do his homework, Thomas declares that, by all means, he wants to do his homework immediately.

Too often when I read newspapers or encounter government in action I feel as though pundits and politicians are playing “Opposite” with me. Except, unlike with my son, these people genuinely hope to dupe me with their verbal stratagems.

An especially galling “Opposite” in the political sphere is the use of the term “Progressive.” Enemies of individual freedom and responsibility, and of the economic dynamism characteristic only of capitalism, routinely call themselves “Progressives.”

These “Progressives” want America to “progress” back to a state of mind that holds that we ordinary men and women are so naturally weak in mind, body and willpower that we must be protected by heroic white knights from nefarious forces intent on destroying us.

Just as feudal lords protected their serfs from being raped and pillaged by invading hordes, so, too, will the modern state protect us helpless and ignorant ordinary folk from unsafe foods, immoral drugs, blackhearted corporations, naughty words and inexpensive foreign products. …

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Theodore Dalrymple reviews ‘Sicko’ for National Review.

According to Sicko, Michael Moore’s current film about health care in America, the British and French live in a world of “we,” while Americans live in a world of “me.” This is reflected in their respective health-care systems: The British and French sunbathe in the cloudless uplands of universal state-funded health care, where everything is free, at least to the consumer if not to the taxpayer, while Americans struggle horribly in a muddy swamp to pay exorbitant costs for themselves, and even then have often simply to die for lack of funds.

One does not, of course, expect films made for specific propaganda purposes, such as The Battleship Potemkin or Triumph of the Will, to present human dilemmas in a subtle or complex fashion; furthermore, no one can pretend that a comparison of health-care systems is an easy, obvious, or exciting subject for filmmakers. A book on the subject would put most normal people to sleep quicker than a sleeping pill, however concerned about their health they might be. I therefore understand Mr. Moore’s need to simplify by means of a dialectic between heartrending and uplifting human stories.

Nevertheless, and even allowing for his need to avoid ambiguities that would bore the pants off an average audience, his portrayal of Britain’s National Health Service, in which I have worked for 20 years as a doctor at intervals over more than a third of a century, irritated me profoundly. In effect, only someone intent on telling a lie could have presented the situation as he presented it — for even the most fervent ideological supporters of the National Health Service would admit that, as it currently exists, it is not exactly problem-free (to put it mildly). To avoid public criticism of the NHS in Britain is like avoiding evidence of dictatorship in North Korea: It is possible only for the willfully blinkered. …

 

… With his film, Michael Moore is trying to foist an untruth upon the American public similar to the historical untruth that has been foisted (with great success) upon the British public. He is trying to persuade the American public that the American system needs to be replaced by one such as the British, or perhaps even the Cuban.

It is clear that the American system leaves a lot to be desired — as do most systems. It is expensive and not particularly effective when viewed from the point of view of public health. It has strengths, never of course mentioned by Moore: for example, that it is by far the most innovative and performs by far the most important medical research in the world.

Nor is it even a complete public-health disaster: Life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from 75.4 years in 1990 to 77.5 in 2003 (not, incidentally, that people go down the street humming happily about it, suggesting that, within limits, public health is not a major determinant of happiness). And it certainly does not follow from the fact that the American system has weaknesses that the U.S. ought to follow Britain or Cuba, as Moore suggests. As for France: Despite Moore’s dithyrambs, its population consumes by far the highest doses of tranquilizers and antidepressants in the world. There must be some reason for it.

Sicko is a slickly made and compelling piece of propaganda masquerading as a serious documentary. You could write an entire book about its errors and omissions. America going to Canada for medical treatment indeed! Just as Italians go to Norway for the sunshine.

Also from England, a blogger who thinks the law is an ass.

Claudia Rosett says there are a lot of enterprising folks at the UN.

Let no one fault the UN for lack of enterprise and ingenuity. A series of federal investigations over the past few years have been delving into the activities of a growing list of UN officials engaged in all sorts of lively and creative endeavors, from setting up secret offshore front companies, to laundering money meant to buy UN peacekeeping supplies, to allegedly keeping counterfeit U.S. $100 bills in a UN Development Program (UNDP) office safe in North Korea.

Today brings the arrest of a UN employee, Vyacheslav Manokhin, alleged by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan to have taken part in a scheme using the UN letterhead to help “numerous non-United States citizens” enter the U.S. on fraudulent grounds. …

The Captain says the NY Times is ready to back down on their pay-to-read firewall.

Two years ago, the New York Times provided on-line readers with a strong disincentive to read their columnists. TimesSelect, which I called the Firewall of Sanity, charged $50 per year for people who just couldn’t get enough of Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich. Now the New York Post reports that Pinch Sulzberger has finally realized that he has marginalized his own columnists in an on-line universe (via Memorandum): …

The Captain also posts on the New Republic/Scott Thomas story which he has ignored. As has Pickings. Turns out ‘Scott Thomas’ Beauchamp is a fraud and the venerable magazine has been had again.

… Don’t get me wrong. If Beauchamp fabricated these stories, then he deserves his obloquy. The editors at TNR have to face some tough questions about their standards for publication in the aftermath of this collapse. They have damaged their credibility and the bloggers have rightly called them out for a retraction.

Still, there is something of an overkill about this story that bothers me. It’s not as if we can argue that cruelty doesn’t occur in war. Of course it does; when it happens, our military investigates and punishes it. Baldilocks talked about this at length earlier in the story, and she’s right. That’s what separates us from our enemies. We prosecute cruelty, while they encourage it. …

Roger Simon posts on the New Republic also.

Mark Steyn with a Corner post.

Hugh Hewitt interviews Max Boot.

HH: Pleased to welcome back now Max Boot. He is a senior fellow at the Council On Foreign Relations, author most recently of War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, about to come out in paperback, by the way. He also blogs at Contentions, the blog of Commentary Magazine. Max Boot, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

MB: Thanks for having me back.

HH: Max, your colleague over at Contentions, your new colleague, Pete Wehner wrote today that the O’Hanlon and Pollack op-ed in the New York Times of last week was “climate changing.” You’ve also posted on that. Is that an accurate characterization?

MB: It certainly is for the time being. I think it’s had a tremendous impact, really, as much as any op-ed that I can remember in history. It really has exploded like a bombshell in the Washington debate, and has put opponents of the war on the defensive. But of course, we have to be realistic and understand here that like any potent weapon, this one is not going to win the war all by itself, and it has a limited half-life. And ultimately, events are going to move on. And if events keep moving in a positive direction in Iraq, I think it will reinforce the sense of the Pollack-O’Hanlon op-ed that things are improving and that this war is in fact winnable. But of course, if we suffer more setbacks, if there are a lot more suicide bombings, if there are a lot more deaths, then the impact of the op-ed will dissipate. So I think we really have to wait and see whether it does mark an inflection point or not. I think it’s too early to say, although it’s certainly a positive development. …

National Review shorts.

Editor of a South Carolina paper looks into John Edwards’ soul.

MONTHS ago, I observed on my blog that I think John Edwards is a phony — a make-believe Man of The People.

Ilya Somin in Volokh reminds the Nazis were of the left. Not the right.

The idea that Nazism was an extreme form of “capitalism” and Hitler primarily a tool serving the interests of “big business” is a longstanding myth that even now retains a measure of popularity in some quarters. This, despite the fact that the full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and that Nazi political strategy was explicitly based on combining the appeal of socialism with that of nationalism (thus the choice of name). Once in power, the Nazis even went so far as to institute a Four Year Plan for running the German economy, modeled in large part on the Soviet Union’s Five Year Plans.

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John Fund with an overview of the excitement in the House last week.

The House of Representatives almost turned into the Fight Club Thursday night, when Democrats ruled that a GOP motion had failed even though, when the gavel fell, the electronic score board showed it winning 215-213 along with the word FINAL. The presiding officer, Rep. Mike McNulty (D., N.Y.), actually spoke over the clerk who was trying to announce the result.

 

In the ensuing confusion several members changed their votes and the GOP measure to deny illegal aliens benefits such as food stamps then trailed 212-216. Boiling-mad Republicans stormed off the floor. The next day, their fury increased when they learned electronic records of the vote had disappeared from the House’s voting system.

 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made matters worse when she told reporters, “There was no mistake made last night.” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had to rescue her by acknowledging that, while he thought no wrongdoing had occurred, the minority party was “understandably angry.” …

 

Michael Barone reports on changing attitudes towards the war.

It’s not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when The New York Times printed an opinion article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq.

Yes, progress. O’Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — Pollack even wrote a book urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein — but they have sharply criticized military operations there in the ensuing years.

“As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq,” they wrote, “we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory,’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”

Their bottom line: “There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.” …

… Gen. David Petraeus, the author of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual and the commander in Iraq, is scheduled to report on the surge in mid-September. The prospect of an even partially positive report has sent chills up the spines of Democratic leaders in Congress. That, says House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, would be “a real big problem for us.”

The Democratic base has been furious that Democrats in Congress haven’t pulled the plug on the war already, and Democratic strategists have been anticipating big electoral gains from military defeat. But if the course of the war can change, so can public opinion. A couple of recent polls showed increased support for the decision to go to war and belief that the surge is working. If opinion continues to shift that way, if others come to see things as O’Hanlon and Pollack have, Democrats could find themselves trapped between a base that wants retreat and defeat, and a majority that wants victory.

The Captain thinks a USA TODAY poll will also find growing support for the war.

… This follows a similar result from a New York Times poll two weeks ago. At the time, war opponents called it an anomaly. It looks like a trend now, one prompted by good news from the surge. If the news continues to improve, the Democrats may find it difficult to insist on the withdrawal in September.

Gabriel Schoenfeld posts on the possibility the NY Times will be indicted.

Is it possible that the New York Times could still be indicted for revealing the existence of the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program in a December 2005 front-page story?

Shortly after the revelation appeared, a federal grand jury was empanelled to investigate the leak. A range of government officials, including Jane Harmon, then the ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed to the severe damage that the Times story did to our efforts to intercept al-Qaeda communications and thwart a second September 11. Shortly thereafter, President Bush called the newspaper’s conduct “shameful.” …

Max Boot posts on the problems of the weak horse.

Christopher Hitchens wonders when Oakland, CA police are going to protect their citizens.

… My question was answered last Friday, when the Oakland Police Department finally did storm the premises, along with three neighboring homes, and arrested seven people, including Yusuf Bey IV. This, however, was too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey, the well-liked editor of the black-owned Oakland Post, who had decided to take up where the East Bay Express had left off and to investigate the finances of YBMB. He was shot dead last Thursday in broad daylight on an Oakland street. A young handyman from YBMB named Devaughndre Broussard has been charged in the Bailey case, and other members of the group are being investigated for involvement in the earlier crimes. The “bakery” itself owes more than $200,000 in back taxes and filed for bankruptcy protection last October. …

Neal Boortz noticed the media in “muscular” lockstep.

Tony Harris of CNN, Jake Tapper of ABC, Mara Liasson from NPR, and CNN’s Candy Crowley all used exactly the same word in referring to Obama’s shallow foreign policy address. The same word … and it’s probably a word you’ve never heard before in your entire life used to describe a speech.

Now think back a bit … think back to the Gettysburg Address if you wish. What the hell, let’s go all the way back to the Sermon on the Mount. We can call that a speech, can’t we? Are you working on this? Are you conjuring up each and every speech you’ve ever heard or read about? Fine … now tell me; how many times have you ever heard of a speech being called “muscular.” That’s right … muscular.

Well if you were listening to Liasson, Tapper, Harris and Crowley last week, you heard each one of them refer to Obama’s foreign policy address as “muscular.” In the case of ABC’s Tapper it was “obviously very muscular.” Not only that, but Tapper also told us it was “strikingly bold.” So … there’s the “bold” word also. The same word used by the Associated Press in their coverage. …

American Thinker with a great post on the global-warming propaganda factory.

I have often wondered how the media are in such lock step on Global Warming. Well, I wonder no more. Recently, I came across a website for the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). http://www.sej.org/ This website is veritable tool box for any budding reporter assigned to the global warming beat. If you’re an editor at the Palookaville Post, all you have to do is send your cub reporters to this site and they’ll have everything they need to write an article that fits the template and action line perfectly.

The SEJ was founded in 1989. The association is considered an indispensable resource among many reporters. The SEJ proclaims their mission to be the creation of a formal network of reporters that write about environmental issues. To that end, they maintain a website, run a listserv and send out regular email alerts to coordinate the coverage and make sure no one deviates from story template and action line. To reinforce this, they regularly conduct conferences and workshops teaching propaganda writing techniques and holding indoctrination seminars. To promote hands on discipline, they offer a “mentoring program.”

In January of this year, the SEJ published what they call Climate change: A guide to the information and disinformation. The guide is neatly organized into twelve chapters. Except for the seventh chapter titled with the freighted descriptive: “Deniers, Dissenters and Skeptics”, the guide is a one sided presentation that resoundingly affirms global warming and puts down anyone with a different point of view. The site is a virtual digest of the global warming industry. If you’re looking for a road map to the special interest groups behind the hysteria, this is the place to go. The journalist members of this association have obviously abandoned all pretense of objectivity. …

 

Carpe Diem posts on trouble for folks who make their own fuel. Is it called “carshine?”

“Bob Teixeira of Charlotte, NC, decided it was time to take a stand against U.S. dependence on foreign oil. So last fall the Charlotte musician and guitar instructor spent $1,200 to convert his 1981 diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil. He bought soybean oil in 5-gallon jugs at Costco, spending about 30 percent more than diesel would cost.

His reward, from a state that heavily promotes alternative fuels: a $1,000 fine last month for not paying motor fuel taxes. He has been told to expect another $1,000 fine from the federal government.

San Diego Union-Tribune contributor with experience with Britain’s NHS comments on ‘Sicko’s’ proposals.

… “Sicko” depicts a perfect NHS, the answer to all of our prayers, equipped with pristine and beautiful hospitals, friendly doctors, helpful pharmacists and happy patients, all getting the care they need in a timely manner – and all for free. But the image is inaccurate and Americans should be careful not to fall for it when determining our own priorities when it comes to fixing health care in this country.

In creating “Sicko,” Moore must have overlooked some of the major news stories about the NHS from recent years. Stories such as one from the BBC stating that in September 2006 more than 6,000 patients in eastern England had to wait more than 20 weeks to begin treatment already prescribed by their doctors. Or a BBC story, also from 2006, noting that over 40,000 patients in Wales had to wait more than six months between being referred for, and actually having, an outpatient appointment. Or the recent London Times story regarding an admission, by Britain’s Department of Health, that some patients will have to wait more than a year for treatment, and that 52 percent of hospital inpatients are currently waiting more than 18 weeks to receive treatment. …

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Rolling Stone takes off after ethanol.

The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn’t that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after “solutions” that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.

Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America’s future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to f–k off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, “Everything about ethanol is good, good, good.”

This is not just hype — it’s dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. …

… Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 — that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That’s a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 – making it practically worthless as an energy source. “Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas,” says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog. …

Senator Dianne Feinstein did a fine thing last week. Manchester Guardian with details.

California’s Senator Dianne Feinstein on Thursday committed an act of decency that offers at least a slim hope that Congress might become slightly more functional in the autumn than it has been up until now. The United States desperately needs such functionality.

What Feinstein did was to step away from her Democratic colleagues on the Senate judiciary committee by voting in favor of Mississippi appeals court judge, Leslie Southwick for a spot on the US fifth circuit court of appeals. By sending the eminently qualified Southwick to the floor by a one-vote margin (all committee Republicans voted yes and all other committee Democrats voted no), Feinstein did more than just advance the cause of a single nominee. She also re-established the precedent that senators can put merit and evidence over partisanship. …

Bill Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard on the defeatists week of defeat.

… The New York Times was so shocked to discover in late July that public opinion hadn’t continued to move against the war that it redid a poll. The answer didn’t change.

This last incident, though minor, is revealing. On July 24 the Times reported that a new survey had found an increase in the number of Americans retrospectively backing the liberation of Iraq:

Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. . . . Support for the invasion had been at an all-time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the invasion of Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out.

In the Times’s view, as explained on its website, this result was “counterintuitive”–so much so that the editors had the poll repeated to see whether they had “gotten it right.” Turns out they had.

As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto commented: “Well, two cheers for the paper’s diligence, but this also seems to be about as close as we’re going to get to an admission of bias: an acknowledgment that those at the Times are flummoxed that the public is not responding the way they expect to all the bad news they’ve been reporting.”

What’s striking is that the Times was flummoxed. In the real world, the news from Iraq had been (relatively) good for a couple of months. General David Petraeus’s military success had been followed with striking political achievements in Anbar province. At home, a mood of annoyance at the Bush administration’s conduct of the war had started to yield to a realization that we were approaching a choice of paths on Iraq, and that the consequences of embracing defeat would be severe. But that’s not the world the Times editors live in. In their world, this is a war that should never have been fought and that has long been irretrievably lost–and everyone should simply accept those settled facts.

In the real world, the public is skeptical of the administration’s stance on Iraq–but not overwhelmingly or irretrievably so. Here’s what a new Rasmussen poll says: “Twenty-five percent of voters now say the troop surge is working and another 26 percent say it’s too soon to tell. A month ago, just 19 percent considered the surge a success and 24 percent said it was too early to tell.” This means that 51 percent are now at least open to giving the policy more time. That’s up from 43 percent a month ago. …

John Fund posts on the YearlyKos convention and Zimbabwe. Sounds about right.

Nicole Gelinas in City Journal has more on infrastructure problems.

It’s not clear why a major section of the nation’s interstate highway system collapsed Wednesday night over the Mississippi River in Minnesota, causing a still unknown number of fatalities and indefinitely severing an important transportation link. But one thing has been all too clear for decades: America is neglecting its vital physical infrastructure, and the bill is coming due.

As a nation, we’ve long borrowed from our future; everybody knows about the inevitable Social Security and Medicare crises that will happen in the next three decades as the number of retirees expands in relation to the number of workers. Far fewer people understand that we’ve also been borrowing from our past. The federal highway system, the backbone of America’s modern economy, turned 50 last year. But, as I wrote in Forbes magazine in April, we haven’t spent enough, or thought enough, to keep it—and other physical assets that previous generations built—in good working order. We spend only 60 percent of what’s needed to keep roads in good condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. In New York State, for instance, 35 percent of major roads are in “poor or mediocre condition,” the ASCE says, while 38 percent of bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” …

 

Fred Thompson on eminent domain abuse.

… Our Founders placed respect for private property as a key principle when writing our nation’s Constitution, and the protection of private property resulted in the United States becoming the greatest economic power in the world and a beacon of freedom to all. This principle is even more important today, as homeownership has become an increasingly integral part of our citizens’ aspirations for a better future for themselves and their loved ones. If the Supreme Court will not protect our right to ownership, then political leaders must step up to the challenge.

Edwards caught bloviating again. The Captain does the honors.

… He had no trouble working with Murdoch’s publishing empire when they dangled $800,000 in front of him. Had he found Murdoch so offensive, he could have taken his book elsewhere; it’s not like another publisher would have hesitated to get the book. Edwards simply took the best offer and didn’t care who wrote the check.

Edwards has transformed himself from an ambulance chaser to a substanceless suit, and now to a classless hypocrite. Even Ann Coulter can’t save this embarrassment.

American Thinker posts on NY Times and law prof at Harvard who team up to slur orthodox Jews.

Noah Feldman has a lot of explaining to do. The Harvard Law School professor published an article in the New York Times Magazine slamming Orthodox Judaism, taking as its departure point the cropping of Feldman and his Korean-American wife from a picture run in the alumni bulletin of the Maimonides School, the Orthodox yeshiva he attended in Brookline, MA. Both Richard Baehr and Ralph M. Lieberman took issue with his approach and the journalistic ethics of the Times in publishing such material.

Now it turns out that there is a bit of a scandal underlying the article, which created a clearly misleading impression of what transpired. And both the author and the New York Times knew that they were misleading readers in order to create a falsely unfavorable impression of the Maimonides School. …

City Journal starts off a couple of comments on the News Corp. purchase of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.

Help, the sky is falling! So say the pro-regulation media agitators at Free Press, which fired off what is sure to be the first of many hysteria-ridden press releases about Rupert Murdoch’s successful acquisition of the Wall Street Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones & Co. “This takeover is bad news for anyone who cares about quality journalism and a healthy democracy,” argued Robert W. McChesney, president of Free Press. “Giving any single company—let alone one controlled by Rupert Murdoch—this much media power is unconscionable.”

The argument that the Murdoch–Dow Jones marriage will have a significant impact on American journalism or democracy is absurd. …

… What Murdoch is really after is the value that goes with the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal brand names. Those brands, and the enormous talent behind them, will give Murdoch a fighting chance in his ongoing push to expand into financial journalism and develop a financial-news cable channel. Anything that degrades those brands, or drives away the companies’ talent, will hurt Murdoch’s chances of capturing the sophisticated audience that he’s seeking. …

The Australian (owned by News Corp.) has some comments too.

… Then there is the fact that Murdoch’s acquisition of the Journal is a poke in the eye for The New York Times. I am only slightly motivated by malice in making this comment.

The Times is a great newspaper, which I have been reading, with fairly brief gaps, for close to 50 years, frequently spluttering with rage over its soft left biases but full of admiration for its vast reach across news spectrums.

However, under the direction of its publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr, who took over the paper in 1992, the fourth generation of the Sulzberger family to hold the job, the paper’s soft leftism has, so to speak, gradually thickened. …

… There are penalties to be paid for watching Fox, such as getting stuck with the windbag strutting of Bill O’Reilly. But O’Reilly’s blathering is a minor test of endurance compared with the poison pen of New York Times oped columnist Frank Rich.

It was Rich who deemed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ homoerotic, having led the Times’s virulent, year-long assault on the movie and its maker, which was based initially on a fragment of a draft script, probably stolen. Last week Rich displayed his talent for venomous hyperbole under the oped column headline “Who Really Took Over During That (Bush’s) Colonoscopy?” Rich’s answer: General David Petraeus.

Competition from another national elitist general interest paper will be good for the Times.

Murdoch’s Journal will undoubtedly dent its smugness, most recently exposed by its incredulity when a New York Times-CBS opinion poll showed a slight increase in support for Bush’s Iraq strategy.

Outraged that people weren’t following its lead, the Times had the poll repeated, with the same result. Reporting this, the Times declared not that the poll was right but that “we” were. …

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Imprimis, published by Hillsdale College, was added today to Pickings’ Most Often Visited Links or Blogroll. June’s issue by Arlan Gilbert was a short history of the College, and of Imprimis. It’s first up today. Use the link to the archives of thirty-five years. You will never run out of things to read. Things written by people who love liberty.

Hillsdale College was founded as Michigan Central College in Spring Arbor, Michigan, and began classes in December 1844. The College moved to Hillsdale and assumed its current name in 1853. Its original financial support was secured by Ransom Dunn, a preacher and professor of moral theology, who raised thousands of small donations for the College during the early 1850s by riding 6,000 miles on horseback through the Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota frontiers. …

 

… Hillsdale became an early force for the abolition of slavery and several of its professors were involved in founding the new Republican Party in Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854. During the antebellum and Civil War years, the College became a stopping place for such leading anti-slavery speakers as Frederick Douglass, Edward Everett, Senators Charles Sumner and Lyman Trumbull, Carl Schurz, Owen Lovejoy and William Lloyd Garrison. And except for the military academies, no college or university sent a greater proportion of its young men to fight for the Union. Of the more than 400 Hillsdale men who served in the Civil War, half became officers, four won the Medal of Honor, three became generals and many more served as regimental commanders. Sixty died. …

… The second great crisis in Hillsdale’s history began in the late 1950s, when the federal government— following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957— made its first experiments in funding and regulating higher education. By 1962, Hillsdale College president J. Donald Phillips and the College’s Board of Trustees were faced with deciding whether to accept federal aid along with their competitors or take a stand for independence that would place them at a great financial disadvantage. They took the latter course, issuing a “Declaration of Independence” …

Now some serious stuff. As in World Serious. The Cubs are in first place.

Debra Saunders is here writing about the confusion at the NY Times, when, for all their effort a perverted 42% of Americans still think the invasion of Iraq was the correct thing to do. Pickerhead cannot get enough of this story and Debra’s take is outstanding.

When a New York Times poll found that the number of Americans who think it was right for the United States to go to war in Iraq rose from 35 percent in May to percent 42 percent in mid-July, rather than promptly report the new poll findings, the paper conducted another poll. As the Times’ Janet Elder wrote Sunday, the increased support for the decision to go to war was “counterintuitive” and because it “could not be easily explained, the paper went back and did another poll on the very same subject.”

Round Two found that 42 percent of voters think America was right to go into Iraq, while the percentage of those polled who said that it was wrong to go to war had fallen from 61 percent to 51 percent. The headline for Elder’s piece read, “Same Question, Different Answer. Hmmm.” But it should have read: “America’s Paper of Record Out of Touch With American Public.” …

… On Sunday, the Times also ran an opinion piece, “A War We Just Might Win,” by war critics Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, which has prompted Beltway biggies to notice that the surge is paying off.

Well, not everyone inside the Beltway. Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., dismissed the piece as “rhetoric.” “I don’t know what they saw, but I know this, that it’s not getting better,” Murtha told CNN. Since this war began, there always have been people rooting for failure.

With the death toll of U.S. troops surpassing 3,560, Americans have cause to be wary and distressed. They may tell pollsters that they are pessimistic, but that does not mean that they are prepared to lose.

Gabriel Schoenfeld notes the NY Times attempts to enlist George Kennan in the paper’s war against the war.

… So how does it follow from the history of the cold war that we should now abandon military means in the struggle against al Qaeda and simply try to contain it? In fact, we tried something like that approach in the 1990’s, and on September 11, 2001, it led to one of the worst military disasters in American history.

That there are now voices telling us to abandon the military fight against Islamic terrorists and win by setting an example of moral rectitude shows only that there is no limit to the human desire to cut and run.

Marty Peretz noticed the same thing.

The robbing by Thompson of Kennan’s grave is pilferage disguised as homage. And who actually cares what Kennan thought? Is this what the op-ed page thinks is significant opinion?

John Fund on the intemperate Leahy.

… Rather than at least grant Mr. Roberts has an honest disagreement, Mr. Leahy has chosen to smear him. As for President Bush, the Vermont Democrat was openly contemptuous of his court choices. “I am not sure the president realizes what he has done with the court. He was told by Dick Cheney and others, ‘This is what you are going to do.’” …

NY Sun editors on Stevens.

… Though the matter must await the outcome of the law-enforcement process, a note of caution is in order. It has been corruption more than any other issue that has dragged the Republican Party down in recent years. Having been given a majority in 1994 to root out the corruption of the Democratic Congress, all too many Republicans who came to Washington to do good stayed to do well. Despite the war, “corruption/ethics” ranked highest in voters minds, according to exit polls, when voters threw the GOP out of power. …

Power Line posts on “Obama’s War.”

… In sum, this is your standard Democratic attempt to sound tough while effectively advocating defeat in Iraq and ignoring the mounting threat posed by Iran. Obama is smart enough to know that his speech is nonsense. But the fact that he would indulge in this sort of posturing should disqualify him from the presidency. …

VDH too. With a Corner post.

Many have jumped all over Sen. Obama’s suggestion that as Commander-in-Chief he might well cross the border, asked or not, into Pakistan, with beefed-up ground troops, to destroy the purported al-Qaeda sanctuaries. Apart from the notion that it would be as hard to distinguish civilians in a Waziristan from terrorists as it is in Iraq, which the senator has written off, other questions arise. As a US Senator why not now introduce an October 11, 2002-type resolution, authorizing such an invasion? Or why hasn’t he in the past? …

Instapundit points to a Lileks round-up of bridge news from Minnesota.

… “I’ve driven across this bridge every few days for thirty years. There are bridges, and there are bridges; this one had the most magnificent view of downtown available, and it’s a miracle I never rear-ended anyone while gawking at the skyline, the old Stone Bridge, the Mississippi.” …

Popular Mechanics with important background to the bridge collapse.

… The nation’s bridges are being called upon to serve a population that has grown from 200 million to over 300 million since the time the first vehicles rolled across the I-35W bridge. Predictably that has translated into lots more cars. American commuters now spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, at a cost to the economy of $63.2 billion a year.

It is not just roads and bridges that are being stressed to the breaking point. Two weeks ago New Yorkers were scrambling for cover after a giant plume of 200-degree steam and debris shot out of the street and into the air. The mayhem was caused by the explosion of a steam pipe, installed underground in 1924 to heat office buildings near Grand Central station. In January 2007, Kentuckians and Tennesseans woke up to the news that the water level of the largest man-made reservoir east of the Mississippi would have to be dropped by 10 ft. as an emergency measure. The Army Corps of Engineers feared that if it didn’t immediately reduce the pressure on the 57-year-old Wolf Creek Dam, it might fail, sending a wall of water downstream that would inundate communities all along the Cumberland River, including downtown Nashville.

The fact is that Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us by earlier generations. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we behave as though we have no idea what is required to sustain the quality of our daily lives. …

Times, UK tells how organic farmers in Africa may be in trouble because of phony carbon concerns.

As she proudly surveys a plantation of avocado trees and bananas, surrounded by pools of fresh cow manure, Jane Kimani cuts an unlikely figure as an ecological villain.

Like other farmers in this village, about 15 miles (25km) outside Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, she lives in a modest dwelling of brick walls and a corrugated-iron roof only yards from cow sheds, a new apiary and vegetable plots. She does not own a car and uses little electricity.

She farms organically without knowing it, simply because, like many people in a country where two thirds of the population live on less than 50p a day, she could not afford fertilisers and chemical sprays. Her carbon footprint is insignificant.

Yet Mrs Kimani and her husband, Charles, face economic ruin because of the alleged environmental impact of their modest farm. The Soil Association, which certifies about 80 per cent of organic produce in the United Kingdom, has threatened to take away the organic certification from farms in East Africa because their produce is transported to Europe by air, contributing to global warming. …

American Thinker tells how Chirac’s doing.

Jacques Chirac certainly received a lot of front-page coverage when he was criticizing George Bush. But his his own serious scandal is being almost completely ignored in the American press. …

Times, UK with another horror story from the Health Service.

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Michael Barone gets the lead again. This time he picks up on the NY Times article by O’Hanlon and Pollack, and the Hewitt interview with John Burns.

But there is evidence—just a little evidence so far—that opinion may be changing. The New York Times and CBS took a poll and found that support for going to war in Iraq had risen to 42 percent from 35 percent from May to July. The percentage of those thinking it was the wrong decision fell to 54 percent from 61 percent. This was a statistically significant difference and indicated a very different political balance. …

T… he Times and CBS News didn’t believe the 42-54 result, for the good reason that the poll didn’t show movement on opinion on Iraq and for (I suspect) the bad reason that they couldn’t imagine there could be any rise in the percentage favoring the policies of Bushchimphitler. So they took another poll—an unusual step, because it costs money to take polls, and news organizations, particularly those with declining audiences like the Times and CBS, have limited budgets. Presumably they expected to get a different result. But they got pretty much the same numbers.

Interesting. We’ll be able to see if there are similar shifts in other polls. Maybe there will be; maybe there won’t. The nightmare scenario for Democrats is that increasing numbers of Americans will see progress in Iraq and will not want to accept defeat when they could have victory. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, according to the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza, is already having such a nightmare. He said that a positive report by Gen. David Petraeus in September will be “a real big problem for us”. …

… The “us” in question is of course the House Democratic leadership. A political party gets itself in a bad position when military success for the nation is a “real big problem for us.” Voters generally want their politicians to root for the nation, not against it. We’re still a good distance from this nightmare scenario for congressional Democrats, and we may never get there. But it seems that Jim Clyburn, a highly competent politician and from everything I’ve seen a really nice man, is worried about it. …

Max Boot in Contentions gives us an overview of the Hewitt interview with John Burns. Pickings passed on it only because it is 10,000 words.

Say what you will about reporters in general or the New York Times in particular: John Burns breaks all the stereotypes. As the Times’ longtime Baghdad bureau chief, he has been a fearless and honest chronicler of the war. He has presented plenty of evidence of disasters, but he isn’t afraid to highlight successes when they occur, and to warn of the dangers of American disengagement. …

… Given the positive assessments coming from such dispassionate analysts as John Burns and the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, the chances of just such a positive report from Petraeus seem to be growing—and hence leftist activists’ hopes of abandoning Iraq seem to be fading. At least for the time being.

Thomas Sowell comments on the O’Hanlon/Pollack piece.

If victory in Iraq was oversold at the outset, there are now signs that defeat is likewise being oversold today.

One of the earliest signs of this was that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he could not wait for General David Petraeus’ September report on conditions in Iraq but tried to get an immediate Congressional mandate to pull the troops out. …

… Another revealing sign is that the solid front of the mainstream media in filtering out any positive news from Iraq and focusing only on American casualties — in the name of “honoring the troops” — is now starting to show cracks.

One of the most revealing cracks has appeared in, of all places, the New York Times, which has throughout the war used its news columns as well as its editorial pages to undermine the war in Iraq and paint the situation as hopeless. …

Tony Blankley, as he often does, puts the Iraq debate in interesting historical perspective.

On June 25, the following resolution was tabled in the House:

“That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces … in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war.”

That would be June 25, 1942. The House would be the House of Commons in London, England. And the government in which no confidence was expressed was that of Winston Churchill.

Almost three years into World War II, repeated military failures had induced considerable war fatigue in Britain. In February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese with 25,000 British troops being taken prisoner. In March, Rangoon fell. This was vastly damaging to Churchill’s prestige in Washington as Rangoon was the only port through which aid could be shipped to China’s Chiang Kai-shek — a very high priority for the United States in Asia.

In April, the Japanese Navy drove the Royal Navy all the way back to East Africa and shelled the British Indian coastal cities.

Then on June 21, 1942, Tobruk in North Africa fell to Gen. Rommel, with 33,000 British prisoners taken and the Suez Canal (Britain’s lifeline to her Asian empire and oil) threatened. …

Corner post on an important anniversary.

Rush Limbaugh celebrates his 19th year on the air today. People love him and people hate him and just like my post on Bill Bennett yesterday, I’ll get the predictable ridicule for praising Rush today. But you know what? People love Rush and people hate Rush because he matters and he matters because he is effective. He has a wildly successful radio show (see Byron) that works because he’s good at what he does. He’s a smart entertainer — he’s funny and he’s clearly having fun those three hours daily. And so you want to listen. For 19 years now. …

Marty Peretz posts on Deval Patrick, another NE liberal governor in some trouble.

John Fund posts on Murtha, the Dem version of the GOP pig Stevens.

John Stossel’s weekly column is on economic illiteracy.

When I speak on college campuses, students often ask what can be done about the “problem” of young people who don’t care enough to vote. I always say that I don’t see it as much of problem “because most of you don’t know anything yet. I’m OK with you not voting!” The students laugh, but I’m not joking.

It wasn’t until I was about 40 that I started to believe I had acquired a good sense of what domestic policies might serve people well. (I still have no clue about international affairs.) I only started to think I knew what ought to be done after years of reporting and reading voraciously to absorb arguments from left and right. The idea that most voters vote without having done much of that work is, frankly, scary. …

Walter Williams, as if on cue, writes on economic thinking about costs and benefits.

… The only costs relevant to decision-making are what economists call marginal or incremental cost; that’s the change in costs as a result of doing something. That cost should be compared to the expected benefit. Think about pollution. Getting rid of pollution is a no-brainer. All that the authorities of, say, Los Angeles would have to do is to mandate that all pollution-emitting sources shut down. That would mean no driving, no manufacturing, no airplanes, no power generation and no lawn mowing. Angelenos would have perfectly clean air, but I doubt whether they’d agree that it’s worth the costs. That means perfectly clean air is non-optimal, and so is perfectly dirty air. The question is, how much clean air do we want and at what cost? In other words, we should compare the additional benefit of cleaner air to the additional costs of getting it.

The idea of weighing the costs of doing something against its benefits are part and parcel of intelligent decision-making. If we only look to benefits, we’ll do darn near anything because everything has some kind of benefit.

As if Stossel and Williams were not enough, Volokh posts with a good definition of “rent seeking”.

… The difference between these methods of gaining wealth — between, say, competing to build a better restaurant and competing to get to the treasure first (rent seeking) — is that the first one creates wealth, or better-offness, for the world. Customers are made happy, and restaurants gradually get better. Fighting over who gets the treasure isn’t like that. The treasure doesn’t get bigger as a result. In a sense it gets smaller because wealth is eaten up in the effort to lay hold of it.

Think of this on a larger scale and you can see that the more a society spends on rent seeking — on quarrels over who gets what — the poorer it becomes. If that’s all that anyone did, everyone would starve in due course.

Apply the point to politics. To adapt the oversimple dichotomy to this arena: one can gain wealth in two ways — through the marketplace (by creating things people want) or through the political system (by lobbying for handouts or favored treatment). The latter is a type of rent seeking. Notice not only the temptation to try it but also that Politicians might like creating rents, because they encourage the attentions of the rent seekers known as interest groups. …

Steve Forbes tells us how to get 90% off on open heart surgery.

A fast-growing phenomenon–”medical tourism,” which will be a $40 billion industry by 2010–is showing how we can “solve” the health care financing crisis.

More and more Americans are choosing to go abroad for elective and/or major surgeries. What entrepreneurs began more than a decade ago by constructing world-class facilities to lure patients from the U.S. and around the world into traveling for cosmetic surgery has now blossomed into freshly built foreign hospitals offering a wide array of other types of medical procedures. India, Thailand and Singapore are among the countries heavily involved. Panama and others are just entering this arena. …

The Guardian reports on 108 year-old woman in Great Britain who has to wait 18 months for a new hearing aid.

A 108-year-old woman has been told she must wait at least 18 months before she receives a new hearing aid.

Olive Beal, who has failing eyesight and uses a wheelchair, finds it difficult to hear with her five-year-old analogue aid and needs a digital version that cuts out background noise and makes conversation easier. Mrs Beal, a former piano teacher who was involved in the suffragette movement, would be 110 by the time she gets her new hearing aid. “I could be dead by then,” she said yesterday.

WSJ on Bill Walsh, 49ers coach.

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Michael Barone has nice news that affects us all. Pickerhead thinks we all need some good news.

… there’s good news here. The number of traffic fatalities is going down—down 2 percent from 2005 to 2006. The relevant figure here is the number of traffic fatalities per 1 million miles driven. In 2006, that number was 1.42, the lowest number in American history, according to NHTSA’s 2006 Traffic Safety Annual Assessment. …

… There were 37,819 traffic fatalities, nearly 90 percent of the 2006 figure, as long ago as 1937, and the rate per million miles of travel was 14.00, nearly 10 times the rate for 2006. The peak years for traffic fatalities were 1969, 1972, and 1973, with 55,043, 55,600, and 55,096. But a lot more people were driving then than in 1937, and the fatalities per million miles driven had fallen to 5.18, 4.41, and 4.20, respectively. Now it’s down to 1.42 per million miles driven—a huge change. …

Thomas Sowell with an interesting take on Bob Novak’s new book.

Many, if not most, college commencement addresses are essentially special interest advertising.

Politicians, political activists, judges and bureaucrats tell the graduating students how it is nobler to go into “public service” — that is, to become a politician, political activist, judge or bureaucrat, instead of going into the private sector and producing goods and services that people want enough to spend their own money for them. …

… Parents who want to counteract politically correct commencement speeches — often after four years of politically correct indoctrination on campus — might include among the things they give their graduate a new book titled “The Prince of Darkness” by columnist Robert Novak.

This book gives Novak’s eyewitness accounts of the numerous Washington politicians and bureaucrats he has dealt with as a journalist for more than half a century.

There is no way you can come away from this book thinking that there is something nobler about “public service,” as it actually exists, rather than the pretty picture painted by those who want to puff themselves up as members of a high-toned profession. …

… While older people with much experience in life may be better able to appreciate this outstanding book, it should be especially valuable to the young in presenting a realistic and three-dimensional picture of the world.

They can get a lot of enlightenment from a prince of darkness.

Robert Samuelson’s Newsweek column highlights an issue our corrupt political class and it’s entourage in DC won’t address.

If you haven’t noticed, the major presidential candidates—Republican and Democratic—are dodging one of the thorniest problems they’d face if elected: the huge budget costs of aging baby boomers. In last week’s CNN/YouTube debate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson cleverly deflected the issue. “The best solution,” he said, “is a bipartisan effort to fix it.” Brilliant. There’s already a bipartisan consensus: do nothing. No one plugs cutting retirement benefits or raising taxes, the obvious choices.

End of story? Not exactly. There’s also a less-noticed cause for the neglect. Washington’s vaunted think tanks—citadels for public intellectuals both liberal and conservative—have tiptoed around the problem. Ideally, think tanks expand the public conversation by saying things too controversial for politicians to say on their own. Here, they’ve abdicated that role.

The aging of America is not just a population change or, as a budget problem, an accounting exercise. It involves a profound transformation of the nature of government: commitments to the older population are slowly overwhelming other public goals; the national government is becoming mainly an income-transfer mechanism from younger workers to older retirees. …

Speaking of corruption, John Fund writes on the good news about Ted Stevens, the man who probably did more to cost the GOP the congress than any other of the creeps we have sent to Washington.

Perhaps the entire Alaskan Congressional delegation should be quarantined before it spends our tax dollars again or has one more questionable relationship with the state’s pork barrel-industrial complex. GOP Senator Ted Stevens, who has spent 39 years in Congress raiding the federal Treasury on behalf of Alaska, has long dismissed complaints about his questionable investments and ties to shady lobbyists as jealousy over his ability to make his state No. 1 in federal pork. (He brought in over $1000 worth for every resident last year.) But yesterday, the raid that was in the news was the one on Senator Stevens’ house near Anchorage by FBI and IRS agents.

The probe of the senator’s ties to the oil-services company Veco is connected to a probe of Alaska Rep. Don Young, the former chairman of the House Transportation Committee. He and Mr. Stevens are being investigated to see if they took bribes, illegal gratuities or unreported gifts. Two former top executives of Veco have pleaded guilty to bribery.

Another political figure under investigation is Ben Stevens, the senator’s son, who retired from the legislature last year just before federal agents raided his office. …

The Captain has a great post on partisanship. It grows out of a WaPo analysis of who votes with their party the most often. Of the top 20 positions in the house and senate, 19 went to one party – the Dems.

Both parties like to blame the other for failing to exercise independence in Congress. Their supporters blame the members of the opposite side for excessive partisanship which keeps Washington DC from accomplishing anything for the people. The Washington Post decided to take a look at the 110th Congress to see which party exercises the most partisanship — and the Democrats win the prize. …

… Democrats — They put the party in partisanship!

Ed Morrissey also posts on the optimistic Times piece from yesterday. We liked that story so much we’ll get the bloggers’ take on it today.

Power Line’s take is here too.

… These are basically the same observations that most visitors to Iraq have made lately. Yet, some think this piece is significant, because of who wrote it–two liberals from Brookings–and the fact that it appeared in the Times. We discussed the column on the radio with Bill Bennett this morning, and he is of that view.

Maybe so. My fear, though, is that the leadership of the Democratic Party sees progress on the ground in Iraq as bad news, not good. I think many Congressional Democrats are committed to defeat, for political and ideological reasons. If so, they won’t be swayed by this kind of report. It could help, of course, if voters perceive progress in Iraq and hold politicians accountable if they fail to sustain it. But not many rank and file voters, either Democrat or Republican, read the op-ed pages of the Times.

As if on cue, The Dem House Majority Whip says a positive report from Petraeus “would be a big problem for us.” Power Line has the details.

… As significant as what Clyburn said is the way he said it. According to Clyburn, a strongly positive report by Petraeus would be “a real big problem for us.” Clyburn’s candor may be commendable, but it’s unfortunate that the Dems regard strongly positive news from Iraq as a problem.

Contentions’ take on Eliot.

… Predictions that the scandal will force Spitzer from office are probably off the mark (unless Spitzer is caught lying about what he knew and when), but there’s no doubt the governor is badly damaged, and that his presidential aspirations are for the moment in tatters. The best thing he can do now for himself, and for the people of New York, is to return to the reform agenda he was elected to implement. More likely, though, we can anticipate another three years of a badly-damaged governor’s limping along, while Albany continues to legislate the Empire State’s decline.

Roger Simon thinks about Edwards.

A post on Politico reminded me of why I find John Edwards one of the most shallow politicians of our era. And not just because of the hair. Or even the 28,000 square foot house when he yammers on about the two Americas.

My problem is that it’s “all about him.” Sure, politicians are narcissistic by nature, but Edwards takes it to a special level. …

Adam Smith reminds us it’s Milton Friedman’s birthday today.

Wall Street Journal celebrates too.

Today, in cities across America, events are being held to celebrate the ideas, vision and influence of the late, great economist and Nobel prize-winner Milton Friedman. This would have been his 95th birthday.

The occasion gives us a chance to look back on many of the questions Friedman contemplated during the course of his productive career. In particular, why do people in some countries prosper, while those in other countries live in poverty? Is it luck? Is it something that their governments do? Or perhaps it’s something that their governments don’t do?

Friedman knew that the answers depended on the extent to which governments supported personal freedom, political freedom and economic freedom. And thanks to his advocacy, many countries around the world have come to see the connection between freedom and prosperity. …

Discover Mag thinks maybe sun is not so bad.

James Lileks with a Bleat post on ocean cruises.

… The sight of the fellow passengers was quite remarkable; if you could sum it up, you’d have to say this is a boat full of small whales looking to catch sight of a larger one. Everyone waddles to and fro, slowly, panting with the effort of transporting the stored energy of previous meals to the location of the next one. …