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April 9, 2007 (word)

April 9, 2007 (pdf)

David Warren, our favorite Canadian, wonders what’s going on in Britain.

Michael Barone on Nancy’s foreign policy.

Friendship, hope and a determination to be on the road to peace are not enough to protect us in this world. A speedy exit from Iraq might make many Americans less unsettled while watching cable news — for a while. But it wouldn’t make us safer. It will just leave us more likely to face the kind of surprise we had on Sept. 11, 2001.

Excerpts of Hewitt and Steyn from last week.

Debra Saunders on the Flying Imams

Newsweek published something sensible on global warming.

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth’s climate history, it’s apparent that there’s no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week. …

Stuart Taylor one of the country’s finest legal reporters tells us of another rape accusation that’s proved false. … this is a story about how overreaction to the bad old days when real rape victims were not taken seriously has fostered a politically correct presumption of guilt in many rape cases, leading to wrongful prosecutions of innocent men and, probably, the convictions of some. …

Hugh Hewitt comments on a NY Times article on Mormons.

Tech Central on the regulatory state.

Cafe Hayek posts on growth problems in India.

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April 8, 2007 (word)

April 5, 2007 (pdf)

The Brit hostage dénouement draws Mark’s ire.

Watching Tottenham Hotspur fans taking on the Spanish constabulary at a European soccer match the other night, I found myself idly speculating on what might have happened had those Iranian kidnappers made the mistake of seizing 15 hard-boiled football yobs who hadn’t got the Blair memo about not escalating the situation. …

… Europeans and more and more Americans believe they can live in a world with all the benefits of global prosperity and none of the messy obligations necessary to maintain it. And so they cruise around war zones like floating NGOs. Iran called their bluff, and televised it to the world. In the end, every great power is as great as its credibility, and the only consolation after these last two weeks is that Britain doesn’t have much more left to lose.

Charles Krauthammer seconds that emotion.

Claudia Rosett writes on the Pelosi visit.

This is not just nutty politics; it is dangerous. For Pelosi, this may count as interaction. But for Assad’s regime in Syria, this amounts to chumps on pilgrimage. Damascus is infested by a dynastic tyranny in which “dialogue” serves chiefly as cover for duplicity and terror. These traits are not simply regrettable habits that Assad might be charmed out of. They are big business and prime instruments of power.

An example of how visits like Pelosi’s can harm us is in David Brooks’ column.

Power Line has a great post on how media bias is brought to bear on an offending target. This times it’s a renowned hurricane forecaster who takes exception to many of Al Gore’s ideas.

Little bit of the same from Contentions.

And Jim Taranto slays the NY Times and its hypocritical reactions to two recess appointments. One by Clinton and one by Bush. Can you guess which one the Times liked?

Fred Thompson posts at Redstate. Captain with details.

George Will is not impressed.

Back then (1994), Thompson believed, implausibly, that voters are “deeply concerned” about campaign finance reform. Today, many likely voters in Republican primaries are deeply concerned about what Thompson and others have done to free speech in the name of “reform,” as John McCain is unhappily learning.

Corner post on Will’s complaint.

Dick Morris does a tour of dem fundraising.

Mona Charen reviews Thomas Sowell’s autobiography.

This may be the most unlikely tale of a high-school dropout you will ever read—and the most satisfying. Thomas Sowell (he went back to school after testing the market’s receptivity to a skill-free youth of 16) is one of those rare people who is so organized that he kept copies of all of his letters even before the days of e-mail and computers. We are the richer for it. In his new book, A Man of Letters, Sowell has mined his files to offer us keen insights into our nation’s recent history and into the soul of an extraordinary man.
Like most young intellectuals of his generation, Sowell began his adult life as a leftist. But he was prematurely wise. By 1962 he was already showing impatience with the twaddle peddled by left-wing admirers of third-world despots. Responding to an article about Cuba and Ghana, Sowell wrote, “Perhaps there can legitimately be double standards of morality . . . but there can never be double standards of truth. If, for example, we are justified in saying that tyranny in Ghana is serving a noble purpose, we are still not justified in saying that it is not tyranny.” …

Right Coast posts on a Michael Crichton interview. … In response to the question, “What is the most serious threat facing our civilisation?,” he writes:

Loss of classical liberal values in those western societies that embraced them.
England was the first modern state, the first superpower, the first nation to deal with moral issues around the world, and the first nation to install the benefits of what we might now loosely term a liberal society. I mean that in the 19th century sense of liberalism. That notion of liberalism was also present in America, but made it to the Continent only in a pale and limited form. It is a wonderful social conception that must be vigilantly guarded. It is not shared by other nations in the world. Nor is it shared by many citizens in English-speaking countries. Peculiarly, many of our most educated citizens are least sympathetic to classical liberal ideals. …

We know about carbon offsets. A writer at Wired comes up with new types of offsets. Like say, jerk offsets. Fork over the bills and we’ll go out and perform random acts of … kindness.

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April 5, 2007 (word)

April 5, 2007 (pdf)

Meant to lead with Master’s stuff, but Pickerhead was provoked by Pelosi pranks.

The Captain does a good job.

… Pelosi not only arrogated to herself the role of American foreign policy director — which Condoleezza Rice has as Secretary of State — she did the same with Israel’s foreign policy as well.
Not a bad night’s work for an incompetent.
When diplomats meet with enemies, they make sure to get their positions coordinated with their allies and execute strict message discipline. They do not “wing it” — they check with their elected governments when any questions arise about the directions of talks. Only someone with an ego in inverse proportion to her talent would start making stuff up as she goes when dealing with the Syrian-Israeli relationship, one of the most explosive in the world. …
The Corner weighs in.

WaPo editorializes;

… “We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace,” Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.
Never mind that that statement is ludicrous:As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. …
Here’s how you know Nancy’s stupid – Jimmy Carter thinks she’s done the right thing. Neal Boortz has the details.

Power Line posts on something sweet done by W.

Now for the fun stuff. Of all places, The American Spectator thrills us with someone’s first look at Augusta.

… But 30-something years of watching the Masters could not prepare me for my first view of the course, nor could it prepare me to appreciate so much the panorama of the 6th, known as “Juniper.” A par three hole of 180 yards, Juniper features an elevation drop from tee to green of what must be 50 feet. The mounded green slopes dramatically from back to front. Majestic pine trees loom over the vista. The grass everywhere is a shade of new spring green so pure that it feels somehow sacred. And from a golfer’s sheer shot-making perspective, the effective target area on the correct side of the golf green’s mounds looks small enough to make your throat tighten.

Then, when you walk down the hill toward the green, you look back up the hill from whence you came — and the explosion of color is almost indescribable. The entire hillside is covered in azaleas, of multiple hues. Purples battle pinks while whites peek through and orange-ish blossoms intermittently strut their stuff as well. Not even Matisse’s palette could do justice to the scene if he tried.

You’ve been on the course less than 15 minutes, and already you understand why the Masters announcers always sound like they are in a house of worship. The sun beams through the pines and magnolias and dogwoods as if illuminating the finest of ancient stained glass. …

Slate’s got a couple of good items on the Masters. The first is a guide to watching and the second looks at the technology involved in the course and the coverage.

Even among people of less than conservative persuasion, it was becoming close to settled opinion that Roe v. Wade was foolish in that it took controversy that should have found a political decision, out of the hands of the people and their representatives. In many ways it has poisoned the atmosphere in Washington. Now in a fit of stunning stupidity the court has done it again. David Schoenbrod who was quoted yesterday by John Tierney was in WSJ with a piece today.

And Robert Tracinski with a good effort at Real Clear Politics.

… This ominous decision overturns the basic rule of a free society. In a free society, that which is not explicitly forbidden is permitted. As philosopher Harry Binswanger once put it, in a free society we live in a sea of liberty, a vast realm of actions that cannot be impeded by government–with only a few small islands marked “off limits,” a strictly delimited set of evil actions like armed robbery and check-forging that are banned by government.
In a dictatorship, by contrast, men are mired in a giant, endless quagmire of government controls, and they have to struggle to establish a few small islands of liberty.
Yet that is the meaning of this ruling: unless your economic activity falls within a little island of liberty carved out by a sympathetic EPA administrator, it is automatically assumed that it must be regulated. That which is not explicitly permitted is forbidden. …
Illustrating the mistake, Volokh Conspiracy spotted Justice Stevens’ scientific error.

How ’bout a grownup look at oil. This is from George Will.

… In the 20 years from 1987 to 2006, Exxon Mobil invested more ($279 billion) than it earned ($266 billion). Five weeks after the company announced its 2006 earnings, it said it will invest $60 billion in oil and gas projects over the next three years. It will, unless a President Clinton and a Democratic-controlled Congress “take” Big Oil’s profits, which are much smaller than Big Government’s revenue from gasoline consumption.
Oil companies make about 13 cents on a gallon of gas. Government makes much more. The federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. Mrs. Clinton’s New York collects 42.4 cents a gallon. … Are we running out? … In 1979 President Jimmy Carter, an early practitioner of the Oh, Woe! School of Planetary Analysis (today Al Gore is the dean of that school), said that oil wells were “drying up all over the world.” Not exactly.
In 1971, according to M.A. Adelman, an MIT economist, non-OPEC countries had remaining proven reserves of 200 billion barrels. After the next 33 years of global economic growth, Adelman says, those countries had produced 460 billion barrels and had 209 billion remaining. As for OPEC countries, in 1971 they had 412 billion in proven reserves; by 2004 they had produced 307 billion and had 819 billion remaining. …

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April 4, 2007 (word)

April 4, 2007 (pdf)

Five years ago 20 Israelis were killed in a massacre at Netanya. We have Mark Steyn’s contemporaneous column.

… In the days after September 11, we were told that Muslims had great respect for their fellow “people of the book” – ie, Jews and Christians. This ought to be so: after all, the dramatis personae of the Koran include Abraham, Moses, David, John the Baptist, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, though the virginity of the last and the divinity of the penultimate are disputed. Still, it’s one thing to believe that the Israelis are occupiers and oppressors and that the Zionist state should not exist. Harder, you’d think, to blow up a Passover Seder. It would seem to mark a new low in the Palestinians’ descent into nihilism – though, as usual, the silence of the imams is deafening, and no doubt another new low will be along any minute. As for the nonchalance of the Europeans, that too should not surprise us: in my experience, the Continent’s Christians and post-Christians find the ceremonies of Jewish life faintly creepy, notwithstanding that these were also the rituals by which their own Saviour lived. …

John Fund sums up Nancy’s trip.

Dick Morris and Michael Goodwin with thoughts on the dem leadership in congress.

The annoying Chuck Hagel gets an lesson in the constitution from the Examiner.

Speaking of annoying people, John Kerry tries to get himself in the news claiming McCain offered himself to Kerry. John Fund and the Captain do a good job of taking that apart.

… However, Jonathan gives far too much credit to Kerry for honesty. Kerry has a long track record as a fantasist. One only need recall the stories about Christmas in Cambodia and the Magic Hat to recall his sometimes distant relationship with reality. He has a habit of rearranging the truth to shine the best possible light on himself. McCain has many faults, but not this one, and one can expect more personal honesty from him than from his erstwhile running mate. …

Power Line has at too and then posts on the “myth” of the Exodus according to Egypt’s senior archeologist.

NY Sun writes on a CEO with cojones.

NY Observer with a long piece on the appeal of Fred Thompson.

Five years ago, former Senator Fred Thompson seemed ready to say goodbye to White House dreams for good. He’d announced his re-election campaign in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, but seemed to lose steam after the death of his daughter a few months later, ultimately abandoning the run in the spring of 2002.

“At the funeral, I went over to him, and he was obviously just drained,” recalled Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee. “And he said to me, ‘I’ve just lost my heart for [public] service. I’ve lost my heart.’”

So, like his fellow Tennessean, Al Gore, Mr. Thompson wound up nursing his psychic wounds in Hollywood’s warm embrace. …

Bill Buckley notes the religious fervor of greens.

John Stossel says we should worry about the right things.

Here’s another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.
Parents don’t know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Walter Williams tells us what he really thinks. Many of our nation’s colleges and universities have become cesspools of indoctrination, intolerance, academic dishonesty and the new racism.

WSJ on preventing malaria.

Because John Tierney is wise he knows what will come of the greens’ win at the supreme court.

My favorite guide to the E.P.A. is David Schoenbrod, who sued to force the E.P.A. to take lead out of gasoline in the 1970s, when he was a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The environmentalists won in court. But as Mr. Schoenbrod watched the agency dither, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, he became convinced that the lawsuit hadn’t really been a victory — that lawmakers at the state and federal levels would have been forced to act sooner if the problem hadn’t been delegated to the E.P.A.

Carpe Diem looks at Michigan students protesting against sweatshops.

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April 3, 2007 (word)

April 3, 2007 (pdf)

Thomas Sowell reacts to the tactics of Pelosi and the dems.

… Until Nancy Pelosi came along, it was understood by all that we had only one president at a time and — like him or not — he alone had the Constitutional authority to speak for this country to foreign nations, especially in wartime.
All that Pelosi’s trip can accomplish is to advertise American disunity to a terrorist-sponsoring nation in the Middle East while we are in a war there. That in turn can only embolden the Syrians to exploit the lack of unified resolve in Washington by stepping up their efforts to destabilize Iraq and the Middle East in general. …
How useless is the UN? Anne Bayefsky counts the ways.

Victor Davis Hanson has answers beyond Anne’s.

… This “incident” has proved a multilateral trifecta: a patrol sanctioned by the U.N. gets no support from the U.N., a member of the EU is left hanging in the interest of EU trade, a NATO member finds no NATO allies, other than the U.S., to offer support. So what is the purpose of these alphabetic organizations? …

And what is the UN Human Rights Council up to?

The Council also adopted, over the objections and abstentions of nearly half of its members, an Islamic Group-sponsored resolution against “defamation of religions,” an attempt to suppress perceived offenses against Islam and even to justify violent reactions thereto.

And if all of that is not enough, how ’bout The Trouble with Islam from WSJ?

John Fund looks at the money figures and provides a history lesson suggesting they don’t show everything.

Ask Howard Dean. Only days before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, Mr. Dean was anointed the almost certain Democratic nominee by 42 of the 50 Democratic Party insiders surveyed by National Journal. His inevitability was traced to the fact that he had raised a record $15 million in a single quarter of fundraising. Days later his candidacy crashed to earth literally accompanied by a scream.

Bob Novak says Fred Thompson is for real.

Slate tells why Passover’s no pushover.

And, just what is a Seder? The Passover Seder is the second-most-observed holiday ritual among Jewish-Americans. Sixty-seven percent reported that they attend the Seder—the feast held on the first night of Passover, during which the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is retold.

Good posts from Carpe Diem and Club for Growth.

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April 2, 2007 (word)

April 2, 2007 (pdf)

Mark’s NR column is on demography.

Niall Ferguson was in the Sunday Telegraph.

Let that be a lesson. Even before Britain’s politicians and churchmen had finished saying sorry for slavery last Sunday, 15 Britons found themselves temporarily enslaved by the Iranian government. When will our masters ever learn that, in international relations, nice guys finish last?
This is indeed what comes of being too nice. A month before expressing his “deep sorrow and regret for our nation’s role in the slave trade”, Mr Blair had announced his intention to reduce British troop levels in Iraq by 1,600 within a matter of months. “The next chapter in Basra’s history,” he declared, “can be written by Iraqis.” Unfortunately, it looks more likely to be written by Iranians. And somehow I don’t think they’ll be saying sorry afterwards.

Similar thoughts from Jeff Jacoby.

A little fisking of Tom Friedman by Marty Peretz.

The New Editor tells us the LA teacher’s union and the LA School Board have killed expansion of charter schools.

Wasn’t Jesse Jackson worried about young African-American males? Here’s another march for him.The state of too many of the country’s public schools is scandalous — the more one watches, the more the actions of this country’s teachers unions resemble those of protection rackets.

Couple of items on the presidential campaign. Michael Barone looks at likely scenarios. And Dick Morris sizes up Hillary so far.

Sweet story about lost and found love letters from Chi Trib.

Tech Central on “No-Impact Man.”

The mission, he wrote on his blog, was: “No garbage. No greenhouse gasses. No toxins. No water pollution. No air pollution. No electricity. No produce shipped from distant lands. No impact.” (There’s also a blog, a book and a movie, naturally.)

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April 1, 2007 (word)

April 1, 2007 (pdf)

Mark Steyn wonders when the West will fight back.

… So we live today in a world of one-way sovereignty: American, British and Iraqi forces in Iraq respect the Syrian and Iranian borders; the Syrians and Iranians do not respect the Iraqi border. Patrolling the Shatt al-Arab at a time of war, the Royal Navy operates under rules of engagement designed by distant fainthearts with an eye to the polite fictions of “international law”: If you’re in a ”warship,” you can’t wage war. If you’re in a ”destroyer,” don’t destroy anything. If you’re in a “frigate,” you’re frigging done for. …

Mark and Neal Boortz note the UN handling of Iran.

Theodore Dalrymple with a contrarian view of affairs in Iran.

… In the name of gender equality, one is not permitted to refer to spokesmen and spokeswomen, or actors and actresses, and one must disregard altogether the masculinity of military tradition. But as soon as a woman soldier is captured, ill-treatment of her is regarded as especially heinous.
If it is true that women and young mothers are entitled to special consideration when they are captured, merely because they are women and young mothers, then the real coldness and callousness is in having exposed them to capture in the first place. Let us have either mothers of young babies who are entitled to special consideration, or women soldiers, but not both.

Charles Krauthammer has fun with the folks who have “good” wars and “bad” wars.

The Captain and IBD comment on Africa’s response to Mugabe’s deprivations.

… The moral failure of these African nations is complete. Even South Africa’s Mbeki collaborated in this shameful display, despite his nation’s courageous fight for its own representative government. I recall when people around the world boycotted his nation in solidarity with their struggle for freedom. Now South Africa aids and abets a bloody and incompetent tyrant, even to the point of scolding the same nations that supported his cause for not selling out to a thug. South Africans should feel shame and embarrassment for not assisting their real neighbors — those whom Mugabe has impoverished and oppressed for more than 27 years.

Fascinating WSJ piece about the benefits immigrants bring to cities.

Slate writes on how the world’s poor live on $1 a day.

According to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” reports, the poorest countries often boast red tape that means it takes months and costs a small fortune to set up in business.

Michael Barone with some of Larry Sabato’s projections for the swing in house votes by region.

Jonah Goldberg reminds we do have some notable victories.

… Considering how badly things have been going for conservatives, right-wingers, Republicans and anyone else whose brain doesn’t explode like one of those guys from the movie Scanners at the thought of another Republican president, it’s worth noting that one of the greatest conservative victories of the last 40 years is quietly unfolding right in front of us. On March 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an epochal ruling. The court found that the Second Amendment actually protects the right to bear arms for individuals.
Now, that in and of itself is huge. For decades, the courts, the legal and academic establishments, the press and all right-thinking people everywhere have been arguing that not only is the Second Amendment a chestnut from a bygone age, but that enlightened judges should just go ahead and void the darn thing like a bad parking ticket.

Lots of posts from Division of Labour. First is a good illustration of tax-cut impacts. Then we learn about a Penn & Teller episode about Wal-Mart and sweatshops.

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March 29, 2007 (word)

March 29, 2007 (pdf)

We have lots of stuff on Iran from many of our favorites. First David Warren from Ottawa Citizen.

Then Gerard Baker from Times, UK.

This weekend, Britain will mark the 25th anniversary of the start of the Falklands War, when Argentine forces invaded the small group of British islands in the South Atlantic, 1,500 miles off the coast of Argentina.
It was inevitable, given the coincidence of timing and the circumstances, that comparisons would be drawn between that conflict, which ended in a triumphant recovery of the islands by UK forces two months later, and the humiliation heaped on Britain in the last week by the seizure of 15 British sailors in the waters near the Persian Gulf. …

Mark Steyn, although in Chicago for the Conrad Black trial, provided some entertaining Corner posts.

… Back at the start of Jimmy Carter’s hostage fiasco, I think it was Andrei Gromyko who remarked that, if the students had pulled the same stunt at the Soviet embassy, Tehran would have been a crater by lunchtime. The Iranians believed him so he never had to do it (though, as Chechnya indicates, the Russians are generally prepared to walk the walk crater-wise). …

… Further to my Gromyko reminiscence above, I’ve been getting a lot of sneery e-mails like this:
So, the wise course would have been to bomb Teheran in 1979? What is the wise course today? Turning Teheran into a crater?
You’re missing the point. Because Gromyko credibly threatened to turn Teheran into a crater, he didn’t have to. That’s how deterrence works. …

Austin Bay provides a military man’s look.

Power Line and Dean Barnett at Hewitt comment on congress.

Jim Taranto finds a Joe Biden/Chuck Hagel op-ed for WaPo back in 2002. They wrote then we would have to be prepared to be in Iraq for a decade after Saddam fell. You gotta love the internet! It makes it easy to spot the grandstanding cowards. Then Jim writes on the Saudi back stabbing.

We have an item from Der Spiegel that takes Germans to task for their anti-Americanism.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the American historian who in his 1996 book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” deprived the Germans of the belief that they didn’t know what was going on back in the day, is currently studying the history of genocides in the 20th century. One of the things he has noticed is that the politicians or military leaders who planned genocides and had them carried out rarely concealed their intentions in advance. Whether the victims were Hereros, Armenians, kulaks, Jews or later Bosnians, the perpetrators generally believed that they were justified and had no reason to hide their murderous intentions.
Today, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks about a world without Israel while dreaming of an atom bomb, it seems obvious that we — as Germans of all people — should be putting two and two together. Why shouldn’t Ahmadinejad mean what he says? But we Germans only know what we believe.
The Americans are more dangerous than the ayatollahs? Perhaps the Americans should take the Germans at their word for a change. It’s high time for a new round of re-education. The last one obviously didn’t do the job

Debra Saunders writes on the congressional dems.

Not to be overlooked is Mugabe’s latest stunt. The Captain with the details.

We recently featured a Sun-Times piece by Jesse Jackson worrying about the prospects of young African-American males. Yesterday we wanted him to march on Albany. Today it’s Columbus, Ohio. We’d have thought that with Ohio’s many other problems, a new Governor would have better things to do than deny opportunity for poor kids to escape the worst schools in the state.

Lileks is here.

Having signaled the desire to court defeat in Iraq, the Democrats have passed a goody-laden bill that shows their desire to lose the battle against wasteful spending.
Pork: It’s the other white flag!

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• March 25, 2007 (word)

• March 25, 2007 (pdf)

Mark Steyn on Pakistan.

If you had to draw one of those organizational charts of the world’s problems, Pakistan would be at the center of them. We speak of the northwestern tribal lands as some of the most remote places on Earth. But, in fact, when they wanted to, the Saudis had no problem getting to them, spreading a ton of walkingaround money, and utterly transforming those villages: In Waziristan, you’ll find goatherds with GPS systems and a quarter-million dollars in U.S. currency, which is a lot for a goatherd. From the North-West Frontier Province, the Saudi money and Wahhabist ideology seeped through the country, into the mosques of the cities, radicalizing a generation of young Muslim men. From there it moved on to new outposts of the jihad, to Indonesia, Thailand and beyond. The flight routes from Pakistan to the United Kingdom are now the most important ideological conduit for radical Islam. The July 7 London bombers were British subjects of Pakistani origin. Last week, two more were arrested in connection with the Tube bombings at Manchester Airport as they prepared to board a plane to Karachi.

Good post on the Edwards from Dean Barnett at Hewitt’s blog.

… THROUGH THE YEARS, I’VE COME TO VIEW SERIOUS and progressive illness as an ever constricting circle with oneself at the center. The interior of the circle represents the contents of one’s life. As the circle gets smaller, things that were inside get forced out. Some of these things are dearly missed; other items that were once thought precious get forced to the exterior and turn out to go surprisingly unlamented.At the innermost point of the circle are the things that really matter: Family, faith, love. These things stay with you until the day that you die. At the very end, because the circle has shrunk down to its center, they’re all you have left. …

Post from Contentions on our aging population.

… Here’s a hint for anyone hoping to run for President ten years from now: learn everything you can about long-term care.

The dénouement at Duke is coming soon. John Podhoretz points out the “gang of 88″ faculty members will pay none of the costs.

Great post from Samizdata on the ignorance of the media.

Debra Saunders in good form.

… Bush Lied is the Big Lie. It takes the controversy over one aspect of U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s WMD — the nuclear program question — to argue that the whole WMD argument was bogus. That is, the president’s accusers are guilty of the very sort of dishonest selectivity that they accuse Bush of using.
Now the Bush-lied lie is boomeranging on those Democratic presidential hopefuls — Sens. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and former Sen. John Edwards — who voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution.
By going along with the Bush-lied spin, by refusing to acknowledge that the intelligence community presented strong reasons to vote for war, these Democrats have boxed themselves into a corner. They now have only one rationale for their vote that they can use — they were duped by the nincompoop Bush — or one rationale that they cannot use — they sent U.S. troops to Iraq against their better judgment, but out of naked ambition. …

Jonah Goldberg does a number on Gore.

… But when asked this week about the enormous and unwise costs his plan would impose on the U.S. economy (according to the global consensus of economists), Gore said that his draconian emissions cuts are “going to save you money, and it’s going to make the economy stronger.”
Wait a second. This is the gravest crisis we’ve ever faced, but if we do exactly as Gore says (but not as he does), we’ll get richer in the process as we heal Mother Earth of her fever? Gore’s faith-based initiative is a win-win. No wonder so many people think it’s mean to disagree.

Roger Simon too.

After viewing the movie I was less troubled with the global warming issue and more troubled by Gore’s narcissism – not exactly the result intended. In fact, the reverse.

Environmentalists helped kill nuclear power three decades ago. Now they are rethinking. It is wrong to listen to them because they are “watermelons.” Green on the outside and red on the inside. Captain has the details.

John Stossel on the trend of naming buildings after crooks when they are still alive.

Tyler Cowen with a grown-up look at what eliminating the “big bad middleman” will mean to health care.

Carpe Diem says Wal-Mart is more selective than Harvard.