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Market turmoil suggests a well-timed WaPo op-ed on the dreaded R word – Recession.

When Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle branded economics the “dismal science” in 1849, he gave it a name that would stick. (Some theorize that he picked on economists since, like most Scots back then, Carlyle had never visited a dentist.) Fortunately for economists, 1849 was a pretty good year. If Carlyle had seen how economists behave during recessions, he probably would have dubbed their subject something far worse.

Economists have the same occupational hazard as baseball managers and football coaches: Every person on the street knows their job better than they do. And if you listened to the economic stimulus package talk last week from the White House and Capitol Hill, not to mention Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, you could be forgiven for thinking that the recession is just around the corner. But the main result of all this chatter is that far too many myths about recessions have made their way into popular culture. …

Claudia Rosett says someone from State gave a speech about North Korea and told the truth. Snowball fight in hell!

No, I could not possibly be talking about U.S. special envoy Chris Hill, who has spent the past year purveying the bizarre calculus that as long as the U.S. keeps its side of the bargain in the Six-Party talks on North Korea, we’re half way to success — never mind if North Korea takes everything and stiffs us on its half of the deal. (Note: putting scotch tape across the door to the Yongbyon reactor, for the second time since 1994, does not count as nuclear disarmament).

The envoy who finally stood up and said the right thing is Jay Lefkowitz, special envoy for human rights in North Korea. In a speech delivered Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, Lefkowitz spelled out that after four years of Six-Party talks, we’ve got pretty much nothing. Meanwhile, North Korea has conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test, a nuclear test, and continued brutalizing its own people in ways “deeply offensive to us,” which “should also offend free people around the world.”

Staking out a position not attempted in the Condi Rice State Department since John Bolton left in 2006, Lefkowitz suggested that “Policy should rest on assumptions that correlate with recent facts and events.” He went on to spell out (without mentioning Chris Hill) the ways in which Chris-Hill diplomacy and the Six-Party talks have been a horrifying flop. …

Never Mind says Dept. of State as the speech disappears from their website. Stalin would have approved.

… On Friday, as can still be found in the cached version on google, Lefkowitz’s speech was posted on the State Department web site, as an entry under “Remarks” for 2008.

But today — hey, presto! — the speech has vanished! As I write this, there are no Lefkowitz “Remarks” for 2008. They’re down the Memory Hole.

Hitch wants to know why Huck’s getting a free pass for his Confederate Battle Flag comments.

In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about “race” as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other “sensitivities” as well).

Gov. Mike Huckabee made the following unambiguously racist and demagogic appeal in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week:

You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ‘em what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do. …

Michael Barone posts on the campaign so far.

… Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are now in a rock ‘em, sock ‘em battle. The astute liberal columnist Michael Tomasky characterizes Clinton’s victory as “downright ugly.” A push poll in Nevada four times identified Clinton’s opponent as “Barack Hussein Obama”—imagine the cries of bigotry that would ensue if a Republican had done that! Bill Clinton was in Las Vegas charging the Obama forces with unfair tactics, and pro-Clinton forces were prosecuting a lawsuit against the caucuses held at nine casino worksites where it was assumed that the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union would pitch votes to its endorsed candidate, Obama. Turned out the lawsuit wasn’t necessary and the Culinary Workers couldn’t deliver: Seven of the nine casino voting sites went for Clinton over Obama.

The reason: ethnic politics. Previous contests didn’t have appreciable numbers of black, Latino, and Jewish voters. The Nevada Democratic caucuses did (the fact that many blacks and Latinos could vote was Nevadans’ strongest argument to the national Democrats for having an early caucus there). The entrance poll showed that blacks favored Obama over Clinton 83 to 14 percent, while Hispanics favored Clinton over Obama by 64 to 26 percent and Jews favored Clinton over Obama by 67 to 25 percent. Blacks and Hispanics were 15 percent of the sample, Jews 5 percent (enough to be statistically significant given the large number of respondents). …

George Will too.

Nevada‘s caucuses turned a simmering subtext of the Democratic presidential nomination contest into a dominant narrative. South Carolina winnowed out a Republican candidate, whether Mike Huckabee knows it or not, and the candidate who counted on being winnowed in there, Fred Thompson, wasn’t.

Speaking in the sunshine after her Nevada victory, Hillary Clinton said there were many people to thank but mentioned only one: Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles‘s Hispanic mayor. Her 64 percent of Nevada’s Hispanic vote produced her victory. Although the culinary workers union had endorsed Barack Obama, many of its workers are Hispanic and went their own way.

The 22 Democratic primaries and caucuses of Feb. 5 occur in many states with huge Hispanic populations (e.g., California, New York, New Jersey, Obama’s Illinois), so for Obama’s campaign, the suddenly pressing question is: Will America’s largest minority group, Hispanics, support a candidate from the second-largest minority, African Americans?

Also, Obama seems flummoxed by the Clintons’ Clintonness. When he committed the gaffe (defined as the utterance of a truth in conditions inhospitable to that fugitive virtue) of saying that for many years the Republicans were “the party of ideas,” he was merely repeating something said decades ago by an exemplary Democrat, the senator whose seat Clinton fills — well, occupies: Pat Moynihan.

Clinton promptly resorted to the sort of bilge that the adjective “Clintonian” was created to denote. She said she did not think privatizing Social Security was “a better idea …

Daily Telegraph says Britain’s National Health Service is failing to take care of the nation’s teeth.

In Britain today, you can stuff yourself on deep-fried Mars Bars, drink 20 pints a night, inject yourself with heroin, smoke 60 cigarettes a day or decide to change your sex – and the NHS has an obligation to treat you. You might go on a waiting list, but it will do its best to cure your lung cancer, patch up your nose after a drunken brawl or give you a hip replacement. It doesn’t charge for operations or beds; it may even throw in some half-edible food.

But if you have bad teeth, forget it. You may be rolling on the bathroom floor in agony with an abscess, your gums may be riddled with disease, or people may recoil at the sight of your fangs as you walk down the street, but the NHS doesn’t have to help you.

It is now virtually impossible for many people to find an NHS dentist, and if they do manage to squeeze on to a list, they could still be charged 80 per cent of the cost of treatment – unless they are a child, pregnant or on benefits.

The health service under both the Tories and Labour has victimised the dentally challenged – that is, anyone who hasn’t inherited strong teeth and a perfect picket fence smile. Few can easily afford to go to any dentist now. My husband went to a private dentist after a 15-year gap, and was left reeling after they extracted £2,000 for 12 fillings. My three-year-old son received a bill for £90 after I stupidly asked my private dentist whether she could have a quick look at his teeth.

A survey by Mori for the Citizens Advice Bureau this week found that seven and a half million Britons have failed to gain access to an NHS dentist in the past two years. In one quarter of the country, no NHS dentists are allowing new patients to join their lists. And despite government targets that every child should have his teeth seen by an expert every year, more than one in three children never see an NHS dentist. …

Good post from Cafe Hayek.

Corner post notes volcanoes may be Antarctica’s ice-melting culprit. But, it’s still BushHitler’s fault.

… My other favorite lecture was about how George Bush is causing a rise in global volcanic activity. You see, George Bush failed to sign the Kyoto treaty. Because Bush failed to sign Kyoto global warming has continued unabated. The rise in global temperatures has caused the melting of the ice caps. This, in turn, has caused sea level to rise. The rise in sea level has caused increased pressure at the sea bottom, including subduction zones. The increased pressure on subduction zones has caused more crust material to be forced into the mantle. CAUSING MORE VOLCANOES. Therefore, George Bush is causing volcanic eruptions. QED (quod erat démōnstrandum – [which was demonstrated])

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Bill Kristol – Enough with the Reagan nostalgia.

Conservative editorialists, radio hosts, and bloggers are unhappy. They don’t like the Republican presidential field, and many of them have been heaping opprobrium on the various GOP candidates with astonishing vigor.

For example: John McCain–with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 82.3–is allegedly in no way a conservative. And, though the most favorably viewed of all the candidates right now, both among Republicans and the electorate as a whole, he would allegedly destroy the Republican party if nominated.

Or take Mike Huckabee. He was a well-regarded and successful governor of Arkansas, reelected twice, the second time with 40 percent of the black vote. He’s come from an asterisk to second in the national GOP polls with no money and no establishment support. Yet he is supposedly a buffoon and political naïf. He’s been staunchly pro-life and pro-gun and is consistently supported by the most conservative primary voters–but he is, we’re told, no conservative either.

Or Mitt Romney. He’s a man of considerable accomplishments, respected by many who have worked with and for him in various endeavors. He took conservative positions on social issues as governor of Massachusetts, and parlayed a one-term governorship of a blue state into a first-tier position in the Republican race. But he, too, we’re told, is deserving of no respect. And though he’s embraced conservative policies and seems likely to be steadfast in pursuing them–he’s no conservative either.

One could go on. And it’s true the Republican candidates are not unproblematic. But they are so far performing more credibly than much of the conservative commentariat. Beyond the normal human frailties that affect all of us, including undoubtedly the commentators at this journal, there is one error that is distorting much conservative discussion of the presidential race. It’s -Reagan nostalgia.

It’s foolish to wait for another Ronald Reagan. But not just because his political gifts are rare. There’s a particular way in which Reagan was exceptional that many of us fail to appreciate: He was the only president of the last century who came to the office as the leader of an ideological movement.

Reagan gave “The Speech” in October 1964, inherited the leadership of the conservative movement after Goldwater’s loss, defeated a moderate establishment Republican two years later to win the GOP nomination for governor of California, and then defeated the Democratic incumbent. He remained in a sense the leader of conservatives nationally while serving two terms as governor, ran unsuccessfully against Gerald Ford in 1976, and won the presidency in 1980. He was a conservative first and a politician second, a National Review and Human Events reader first and an elected official second.

This is exceedingly unusual. The normal American president is a politician, with semicoherent ideological views, who sometimes becomes a vehicle for an ideological movement. …

Hugh Hewitt counts delegates.

Ann Coulter weighs in on the GOP race.

Unluckily for McCain, snowstorms in Michigan suppressed the turnout among Democratic “Independents” who planned to screw up the Republican primary by voting for our worst candidate. Democrats are notoriously unreliable voters in bad weather. Instead of putting on galoshes and going to the polls, they sit on their porches waiting for FEMA to rescue them.

In contrast to Michigan’s foul weather, New Hampshire was balmy on primary day, allowing McCain’s base — Democrats — to come out and vote for him.

Assuming any actual Republicans are voting for McCain — or for liberals’ new favorite candidate for us, Mike Huckabee — this column is for you.

I’ve been casually taking swipes at Mitt Romney for the past year based on the assumption that, in the end, Republicans would choose him as our nominee. My thinking was that Romney would be our nominee because he is manifestly the best candidate.

I had no idea that Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire planned to do absolutely zero research on the candidates and vote on the basis of random impulses.

Dear Republicans: Please do one-tenth as much research before casting a vote in a presidential election as you do before buying a new car.

One clue that Romney is our strongest candidate is the fact that Democrats keep viciously attacking him while expressing their deep respect for Mike Huckabee and John McCain.

This point was already extensively covered in Chapter 1 of “How To Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)”: Never take advice from your political enemies. …

 

Carl Hiaasen writes on the FL primary.

It wasn’t so long ago that Florida’s primary seemed doomed to irrelevancy, thanks to the meat-heads in the Legislature who moved up the vote to Jan. 29.

What a clever idea, they said, leap-frogging ahead of all those other big states!

To no one’s surprise but their own, this enthusiasm failed to rub off on the Democratic and Republican leaderships. As punishment for breaking the rules, Florida’s GOP was stripped of half its delegates to the nominating convention, while the state Democratic party forfeited the whole slate.

Thus, the stage was set for a pretend primary, a largely pointless beauty contest in which even the media showed only a half-hearted interest.

Floridians from the Panhandle to the Keys breathed a secret sigh of relief. Having had a bellyful of the political limelight — and ridicule — in 2000, we were thrilled at the prospect of being ignored this time, at least until November.

Yet now, with the primary only nine days away, the threat of actual significance has raised its head, minus the comb-over, in the person of Rudy Giuliani.

For reasons difficult to fathom, the former mayor (and self-proclaimed savior) of New York has chosen to bank his presidential ambitions on a victory in Florida, which is full of people who bailed out of New York as soon as they could afford to. …

The Captain posts on the FL contest too.

… Given Florida’s status as the first fully closed primary, this will provide a bellwether for Republicans going into Super Tuesday. McCain won two states with help from crossover voters, but with Rudy in the race, Rudy could dilute enough support from other candidates to give McCain an opportunity to win.

I’d guess that Rudy wins Florida. It’s tailor-made for him, with plenty of Northeastern retirees and an active Cuban-American base that wants to see hard-nosed policy rather than moderation. If that happens, we can forget clarification, and Super Tuesday becomes a delegate hunt, pure and simple, with everyone viable and a brokered convention more and more likely. If McCain wins Florida, it turns into a two-man race, with Romney becoming the improbable conservative standard-bearer.

And on the Hillary Papers uncovered by Judicial Watch.

After last week’s release by Judicial Watch of internal documents of Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Task Force, many of us waited to see the national news media cover their disturbing contents. No surprisingly, none of them did so. Despite the proposals to use smears against critics of the government and to turn the DNC into a domestic espionage unit for the White House against its opponents, the mainstream news media has shown little interest in even noting the fact that this evidence appeared in a microscopic sample of the three million documents that have been blocked from public scrutiny. …

The Captain also posts on Obama’s discovery that Bill Clinton lies. Who knew?

I guess you know this means war. Fans of Bugs Bunny will recognize that line, but fans of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama may not enjoy it as much as Republicans will over the next few weeks. In an interview that will air on ABC’s Good Morning America today, Obama makes it clear that he will not stand silently while Bill makes arguments that could politely be called factually deficient (via Memeorandum):

“You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Obama said. “He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts — whether it’s about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas. …

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter covers some Dems’ unhappiness with Bill.

Prominent Democrats are upset with the aggressive role that Bill Clinton is playing in the 2008 campaign, a role they believe is inappropriate for a former president and the titular head of the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, both currently neutral in the Democratic contest, have told their old friend heatedly on the phone that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Sen. Barack Obama, according to two sources familiar with the conversations who asked for anonymity because of their sensitive nature. Clinton, Kennedy and Emanuel all declined to comment. …

Power Line’s send-off of State’s Nicholas Burns.

Among the numerous items on Burns’s resignation, only Andrew McCarthy’s Corner post recalls Burns’s defense of Yasser Arafat on the occasion of one of Rudy Giuliani’s great moments in office. As mayor of New York City Giuliani ejected Yasser Arafat from Lincoln Center when he crashed a private event held in connection with the UN’s fiftieth anniversary. In the face of the Clinton administration’s criticism of him for his action, Mayor Giuliani responded:

[T]he Mayor, explaining his decision yesterday, called Mr. Arafat a murderer and terrorist, and said he was not impressed by the fact that Mr. Arafat had twice been invited to the White House to sign the Middle East peace accords, or that he shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

“I would not invite Yasir Arafat to anything, anywhere, anytime, anyplace,” Mr. Giuliani said at a news conference yesterday. “I don’t forget.”

As McCarthy notes, Burns spoke up on Arafat’s behalf: …

Fred Dicker, NY Post’s Albany chief interviewed by WSJ.

… Mr. Dicker uncovered a particularly colorful moment soon after Mr. Spitzer’s inauguration. In a January 2007 telephone call, Republican State Assemblyman and minority leader Jim Tedisco complained to Mr. Spitzer that he had been shut out of discussions on a new ethics law. According to Mr. Dicker’s report, Mr. Spitzer then screamed into the phone, “Listen, I’m a [bleeping] steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else.” Continuing his telephonic tirade, Mr. Spitzer shouted, “I’ve done more in three weeks than any governor has done in the history of the state.”

Mr. Dicker broke the story, and public perceptions of the new governor began to shift. “A few times in my career I’ve had some sit-down moments, when I hear something so incredible that even I can’t believe it,” says Mr. Dicker. “And I’m prepared to believe almost anything around here.”

Looking back almost a year later, Mr. Dicker adds, “I’m still amazed by it. The governor almost seems kind of proud of it. It was consistent with what was being alleged about Attorney General Eliot Spitzer . . . when Spitzer was in the AG’s office. The claim was that he was browbeating, menacing, bullying people and I think a lot of people were skeptical without seeing proof of it. Here was the governor himself, describing himself as a [bleeping] steamroller.”

Mr. Spitzer is not the first pol to find out that when it comes to media scrutiny, New York City can feel like Triple-A ball compared to Mr. Dicker’s Albany. Mr. Dicker sits in an office adorned with a mock New York Post with the headline, “Dicker Quits — Cuomo Declares Holiday.” The dummy front page hangs on his wall next to an actual front page with a picture of a sprawling Mr. Dicker. A state official, so incensed by Mr. Dicker’s aggressive questioning, had just thrown him to the floor of a statehouse hallway.

A ’60s radical who led chapters of the fringe Students for a Democratic Society in college and graduate school, Mr. Dicker long ago abandoned left-wing politics. He remains an idealist. Though raised in the Bronx, his passion now is the upstate. And he’s had it with rich governors based in Manhattan and Westchester who occasionally venture north when duty requires it. He displays a zero-tolerance policy for corruption. …

Samizdata notes the left has a new way to keep Africans poor. Saying;

… Thank you for trying to offer us high quality, low cost agricultural products. However I am sorry but we would prefer it if you remain dependent on tax funded handouts from First World governments and their anointed NGOs. …

BBC has “nanny state” news.

A Cornish village drama group has had to register a toy gun with the police to comply with health and safety rules. Carnon Downs drama group in Cornwall have also had to keep their plastic cutlasses and wooden swords locked up for the play, Robinson Crusoe. Producers of the show called the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) rules “farcical”.

A spokesman for the HSE said the rules were designed to make risks “sensibly managed”. The climax of the show is a fight in which actors use replica 4ft long plastic cutlasses. There is also a toy gun which produces a flag saying “Bang”. The directors contacted police after receiving advice from the HSE and the National Operatic and Dramatic Association.

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Anna Schwartz who, with Milton Friedman, co-authored the seminal A Monetary History of the United States was interviewed by the London Daily Telegraph.

As rebukes go in the close-knit world of central banking, few hurt as much as the scathing indictment of US Federal Reserve policy by Professor Anna Schwartz. The high priestess of US monetarism – a revered figure at the Fed – says the central bank is itself the chief cause of the credit bubble, and now seems stunned as the consequences of its own actions engulf the financial system. “The new group at the Fed is not equal to the problem that faces it,” she says, daring to utter a thought that fellow critics mostly utter sotto voce.

“They need to speak frankly to the market and acknowledge how bad the problems are, and acknowledge their own failures in letting this happen. This is what is needed to restore confidence,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “There never would have been a sub-prime mortgage crisis if the Fed had been alert. This is something Alan Greenspan must answer for,” she says.

Schwartz remains defiantly lucid at 92. She still works every day at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where she has toiled since 1941. …

 

Mark Steyn on the fictional horrors of war.

Have you been in an airport recently and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”

No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” – that’s right, a whole series – “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it:

“Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time:

“Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon.”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture? The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in the war zones, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

It was the work of minutes for the Powerline Web site’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not.

Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about one-fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-to-34-year-old American male. …

No surprise that Christopher Hitchens finds “identity politics” tiresome.

Let us give hearty thanks and credit to Rudy Giuliani, who has never by word or gesture implied that we would fracture any kind of “ceiling” if we elected as chief executive a man whose surname ends in a vowel.

Yet actually, it would be unprecedented if someone of Italian descent became the president of the United States and there was a time — not long ago at that — when the very idea would have aroused considerable passion. Now that it doesn’t, is it not possible to think that that very indifference is the real “change”? …

… People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of “race” or “gender” alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

Madeleine Albright has said that there is “a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton? Would this mean that Elizabeth Edwards and Michelle Obama don’t deserve the help of fellow females? If the Republicans nominated a woman would Ms. Albright instantly switch parties out of sheer sisterhood? Of course not. (And this wearisome tripe from someone who was once our secretary of state . . .) …

Charles Krauthammer on the same subject.

… The nation has become inured to the playing of the race card, but “our first black president” (Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton) and his consort are not used to having it played against them.

Bill is annoyed with Obama. As Bill inadvertently let on to Charlie Rose, it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with entitlement. He had contemplated running in 1988, he confided to Charlie, but decided to wait. Too young, not ready. (A tall tale, highly Clintonian; but that’s another matter.) Now it is Hillary’s turn. The presidency is her due — the ultimate in alimony — and this young upstart refuses to give way.

But telling Obama to wait his turn is a tricky proposition. It sounds patronizing and condescending, awakening the kinds of racial grievances white liberals have spent half a century fanning — only to find themselves now singed in the blowback, much to their public chagrin.

Who says there’s no justice in this world?

The Captain posts on the Clinton campaign.

Lotsa Corner posts on the campaign the growing reality of McCain. Here’s Mark

… One lesson of the McCain candidacy is you have to compete. I’m no fan of the Senator, but unlike every other campaign his supporters don’t send out emails explaining why this midwestern evangelical state or that northeastern libertarian state or this decaying rustbelt state or that Mormon-infested patch of southwestern desert or this or that Bible Belt swamp isn’t typical of the real Republican base and so it makes sense not to compete there. Even Iowa, which McCain dissed, he managed to do in a way that made it look like a principled stand (“Thanks, but I ain’t drinkin’ your stinkin’ ethanol”), thereby mitigating any poor result – and in the end he performed relatively impressively anyway. What I mean is, unlike Rudy or Mitt, he somehow manages to get rewarded even for flippin’ the bird at some of these electorates. …

And VDH.

Some observations:

1. McCain is starting to show a certain attraction to many bedrock conservatives that must be based on his war record and service, and this trumps their worries about his less than conservative fides — or at least allows them to accept McCain’s won’t-make-that-mistake-again changed views on closing the border, tax cuts, etc. Privately many conservative voters have looked at the polls and know McCain does best against the Democrats.

2. While those conservatives who support either McCain or Giuliani would probably vote for a Republican ticket headed by Romney or Thompson (not sure entirely about Huckabee), the inverse is not necessary true at this point. In these angry emails I receive, there are the usual threats that if McCain is nominated, they will sit out. I doubt that, but right now that seems to be the braggadacio.

3. It seems that Romney, Thompson, and Huckabee supporters might at least consider that there is a chance that McCain will be nominated and these “I’ll sit it out” conservatives should begin thinking of the consequences of Presidents Hillary and Bill. My guess is that McCain could still unify the party, if he …

Samizdata points out a cheerful note from a practitioner of the dismal science.

Slate’s Explainer on crash landings.

An idiot congressperson (26 years worth) leads off the humor section. Courtesy of The New Editor.

Ah, behold that most humorous of all species — the Vacuous, Grandstanding Member of Congress.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony today before the House Budget Committee provided another insight into the deep grasp of economic policy and the details of who the Administration’s major economic players are from our elected representatives, courtesy of Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), a 13-term member of the House. (via The Corner) …

… The Tribune’s James notes that Kaptur, confusing Bernanke with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, continued:

“… Seeing as how you were the former CEO of Goldman Sachs….’” …

According to World Net Daily, it’s not the first time Kaptur has played the fool. This from 2003.

… “One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, told the Toledo Blade. …

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David Warren on Ezra Levant and Canada’s Human Rights Commissions.

… Though appalled, I am not myself surprised by the nature of the cases now being brought before Canada’s “human rights” commissions, with a view to extinguishing free speech in Canada. I have seen this coming for decades, and have argued all along it would come to this. My only surprise is that it took more than three decades for the ideology behind “multiculturalism” and collective “human rights” to bear this kind of fruit.

This is the ideology of Canada’s “liberal” elites. (I stand it in quotes because it is another Orwellian reversal of a term: the contemporary liberal has views directly opposed to those traditionally associated with liberalism.)

Every society contains people who are seething with resentment against some individual or class — sometimes with cause, and often without it. The creation of any quasi-legal bureaucracy to purge notional sins plays into their hands. If that bureaucracy also subsidizes complaints, and strips all defendants of due process, of course it will be used for execrable motives. The complainant can’t lose, the defendant can’t win, under such a system. Canada’s “human rights” commissions were designed to be abused.

There are many, many other examples of the same principles at work in the Canadian bureaucracy: where the victim is “tried” before a secretive chamber, often in absentia, or without proper representation. Where the charges are vague; where he cannot face his accuser; where there is no presumption of innocence; where there are no rules of evidence, or of procedure; where there are no fixed penalties; where he will be shaken down financially and put under extreme stress whether or not he is nominally “cleared” at the end of the day; where there is no recourse against a frivolous suit. The tax system and family law in Canada are now riddled with just such arrangements, and grant-giving bureaucracies run them in reverse.

Re-establishing the rule of law in Canada is a huge task. But it has to start somewhere, and getting rid of the obscene “human rights” commissions is a good enough place to start.

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of the flesh and blood Reagan.

… Ronald Reagan has been beatified into some sort of saint, as if he were above the petty lapses and contradictions of today’s candidates. The result is that conservatives are losing sight of Reagan the man while placing unrealistic requirements of perfection on his would-be successors.

They have forgotten that Reagan – facing spiraling deficits, sinking poll ratings and a hostile Congress – reluctantly signed legislation raising payroll, income and gasoline taxes, some of them among the largest in our history. He promised to limit government and eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy. Instead, when faced with congressional and popular opposition, he relented and even grew government by adding a secretary of veteran affairs to the Cabinet.

Two of his Supreme Court appointments, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, were far more liberal than George W. Bush’s selections, the diehard constructionists, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Reagan’s 1986 comprehensive immigration bill turned out to be the most liberal amnesty for illegal aliens in our nation’s history, and set the stage for the present problem of 12 million aliens here unlawfully.

Republicans forget all this – but so do Democrats, who for their own reasons want to perpetuate an unflattering myth of Ronald Reagan as an extremist right-wing reactionary. …

Obama was caught saying nice things about Reagan. Peter Wehner fills us in.

… Senator Obama’s words are not only true, they are a reminder of what an intriguing political figure he is. In the midst of an intense Democratic primary battle, he had good words to say about President Reagan, a very popular figure with most Americans, while he succeeded in linking (and properly so) Nixon and Clinton in terms of their impact on our country.

But Obama’s words also reflect on him. So far his campaign is largely about capturing a mood rather than about advocating a set of ideas–and at the end of the day, changing the trajectory of America depends on ideas and policies, not sentiment. Reagan was an optimistic person–but that is not his lasting achievement. And if Reagan’s policies had failed rather than succeeded, his optimism would have looked badly misplaced and would now be used against him. Barack Obama, who so far has shown himself to be an utterly orthodox liberal (as has Hillary Clinton), now has to take the next step and show that he is bold and creative in the realm of ideas and policies, which was a hallmark of Reagan. So far Obama hasn’t–and that has been the glaring weakness in his otherwise impressive campaign.

Obama’s problem is he’s up against the slimiest two in the country. Margaret Carlson explains.

At approximately 6 p.m. on Jan. 15, three hours before a Kumbaya interlude at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, I saw Al Sharpton defending Senator Barack Obama from charges of youthful drug abuse.

As we all know by now, the accusation arises from Obama’s own admission in his modern Horatio Alger tale, “Dreams From My Father,” published long before he became a presidential candidate, that he tried cocaine as a teenager.

The hoopla over this has validated the judgment of George W. Bush eight years ago to refuse to answer questions about his own alleged drug use, which many believe continued well beyond his teen years. This is why honesty isn’t considered the best policy by political consultants. But I digress.

Sharpton has done things to redeem himself in recent years, but his presence is a one-way ticket back to Tawana Brawley, boycotts, shakedowns and good old-fashioned, in-your-face confrontational race-based politics. Seeing him in that box on TV, I realized that the Clintons had done what they needed to do to stop Obama’s historic surge in its tracks.

From the start of his career, Obama wanted, and needed, to remove the race card from the political deck. While it isn’t clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn’t from the person with the most to lose.

If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern, with Clinton’s former New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, Representative Charles Rangel, Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson all getting into the act. …

Debra Saunders defends John McCain. We’ve picked on him a lot, and think he deserves it. However, Debra is one of our favorites and worthy of a listen. We still prefer Clinton to McCain.

Rush Limbaugh launches daily rants against John McCain. Fellow conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham dismissed the Arizona senator on Wednesday as “the Democrats’ favorite Republican.” Hugh Hewitt blogged on Townhall.com that a vote for McCain “is a vote for an old warrior way past his prime and the prospect of three debates against Barack Obama in which the age and energy gap goes unremarked upon while devastatingly obvious.”

A washed-up old warrior? McCain deserves more respect for risking his life in Vietnam and enduring five years in a Vietnamese POW camp, as he refused his captors’ offer to free him. Of course, engaged Republicans have a right to criticize McCain on the issues — but they go too far, and they are sabotaging their party’s chances in November. …

More of Monica Week from Mark Steyn.

… She was never very happy with the designation “First Lady” and determined, on her arrival in the White House, to redefine the role. In the end, she hasn’t, but her husband has. It used to refer to her status as First Lady of the United States. Under the Clinton presidency, it’s more proprietorial – the First Lady of Bill Clinton: as in some ramshackle sultanate, it now suggests the faded precedence accorded someone otherwise long since superseded by fresher concubines.

In the past week alone, the First Lady has had to contend not only with The Other Woman (Monica Lewinsky) but also The Other Other Woman (Shella Lawrence, widow of disgraced Clinton ambassador and make-believe war hero, M. Larry Lawrence), The Other Widow (White House aide Kathleen Willey, who told Paula Jones’s lawyers that, on the day her husband committed suicide, Clinton groped and fondled her, saying: “I’ve always wanted to do that”) and The Other Intern (another perky, chipmunk-cheeked college girl who supposedly is about to come forward).

Faced with a White House that’s now all mouth and trousers, the President’s dwindling band of cheerleaders is down to a group of starry feminists whose main reason for supporting him in ’92 was that he was married to Hillary. “He’s a terrific President,” says Hollywood actress Mary Stuart Masterson. “I’ve met him. He never hit on me.” That would make Miss Masterson and Mrs Clinton the only two women in America that he hasn’t tried to have sex with (or, as he sees it, non-sex with) in the past month. …

Turns out Liberals are better at some things. They are really good at hate. Arthur Brooks in WSJ with details.

A politically progressive friend of mine always seemed to root against baseball teams from the South. The Braves, the Rangers, the Astros — he hated them all. I asked him why, to which he replied, “Southerners are prejudiced.”

The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, “The right wing, that is not where America’s at . . . It’s just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots.” …

Times,UK Editor thinks complaints about Bill Kristol’s Times,YUK column are foolish.

… The most remarkable aspect of this bizarre controversy has been the performance of the paper’s ombudsman Clark Hoyt. Well, it was remarkable to me at least. Mr Hoyt argued that Kristol should not have been appointed (or at least that he, Hoyt, wouldn’t have appointed him) because Kristol had been a fierce critic of the NYT, and had argued, at one point, that the paper should be prosecuted for an aspect of its coverage.

The job of a reader’s editor, surely is to defend the rights of its readers, all of its readers. It is not to start picking a “Fantasy Columnist” team to reflect his own politics. What of people who agree with Kristol? Do they not deserve the protection of the reader’s editor?

And as for Hoyt’s statement that:

This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

Isn’t this the most pompous sentence you have ever read in your life? …

Speaking of liberal foolishness, Tech Central examines Tom Friedman’s reaction to the $2,500 car. You already know where this is headed, don’t you?

… New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reacted to the first news of the Nano’s planned introduction with a hysterical call of “No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us“—us being the industrialized West and the place to not follow into being access to one’s own wheels.

“We have no right to tell Indians what cars to make or drive,” Friedman admits. “But we can urge them to think hard about following our model, without a real mass transit alternative in place.” And how might those alternatives come about? India, he says, “should leapfrog us, not copy us. Just as India went from no phones to 250 million cellphones—skipping costly land lines and ending up with, in many ways, a better and cheaper phone system than we have—it should try the same with mass transit.” …

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Mark Steyn has a Monica week. He starts us off with something he wrote ten years ago for The Spectator, UK.

… Clinton’s presidency now resembles a deranged version of La Ronde, in which he staggers from one girl to the next without ever managing to shake off any of their predecessors: if his aides hadn’t stupidly revealed her identity, Paula Jones wouldn’t have sued; if she hadn’t sued, he wouldn’t have had to give a sworn deposition admitting to the affair with Gennifer Flowers; if he’d settled the suit, her lawyers wouldn’t have taken testimony from Kathleen Willey, the woman who says he groped and fondled her on the day her husband committed suicide; if his lawyer hadn’t trashed the reputation of Mrs Willey’s corroborating witness Linda Tripp, Miss Tripp wouldn’t have set about getting her revenge; if the President had only managed to keep his hands off Monica Lewinsky, they wouldn’t have had to move her to the Pentagon, where she became friends with Miss Tripp; if he’d been able to steer clear of Shelia Lawrence, Miss Lewinsky wouldn’t have become jealous….

 

The more worldly commentators bemoan the fact that America isn’t like France, where M. Mitterrand was buried with both his wife and mistress in attendance. But, if Mr Clinton’s funeral applies the same admission criteria, it’ll be the biggest windfall for the nation’s charter buses since the Million Man March. Mrs Clinton has done her best to surround her husband with only the most fearsome specimens of the fairer sex, from Madeleine Albright to Janet Reno. But you could nail a government health warning to the White House door – `Abandon hope all ye who intern here’ – and some impressionable young coed would always break through. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez with a Corner post on what Rush is up to lately.

Rush issued a warning about Huckabee and McCain: “I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it. A lot of people aren’t going to vote. You watch.” …

According to Peter Wehner, things are getting personal in the Dem race.

… It’ll be interesting to see how Obama’s “politics of hope” responds to those who have perfected the Politics of Personal Destruction. Will he be able to respond persuasively and aggressively without getting himself filthy in the process? Will he be able to turn the chapter on the divisive politics of the past–or will he merely add to what we have seen before?

Regardless of the results, after this nomination process it may be a lot harder for either Clinton or Obama to put forward the argument that they are figures who can bring America together, especially if they succeed in driving various constituencies within the Democratic Party apart. The politics of unity aren’t, apparently, as easy as people think.

Captain comments on Clinton and the current baby boomlet.

IBD editors remind the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1967 because of the GOP.

Hillary Clinton gives credit for the 1964 Civil Rights Act to President Lyndon Johnson, while Barack Obama accuses the wife of the “first black president” of rewriting history. Actually, they both are. …

The Times hiring of Bill Kristol has the paper roiled. Gabriel Schoenfeld comments for Real Clear Politics.

Was it wrong for the New York Times to install William Kristol as an op-ed columnist? The move to put an outspoken neoconservative in such a visible position is roiling the newspaper, inside and out. First, a hailstorm of hate mail arrived at the paper for hiring a “war criminal”–one of the milder epithets hurled in Kristol’s direction by some 700 letter-writers, all of whom but one were venting against the appointment. Then, taking note of this groundswell of reader opinion under the headline, “He May Be Unwelcome, But We’ll Survive,” the newspaper’s own ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, called the decision a serious mistake: not because Kristol is an “aggressive unapologetic champion” of the war in Iraq–but for something else.

That something else is remarks uttered by Kristol on Fox News Sunday in June 2006. “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of the New York Times is what Kristol told a television audience shortly after the newspaper splashed details of the highly classified Terrorist Finance Tracking Program on its front page. …

John Stossel writes on the folks who hate free markets.

Why are so many people so hostile to free markets?

Markets provide miracles that we take for granted. Clean, well-lighted supermarkets sell 30,000 products. Starvation has largely vanished from countries where private property and economic freedom are permitted. Free markets have rescued more people from poverty than government ever has.

And yet, when innovators propose extending this benign power, people shriek in fear.

This was clear reading The Wall Street Journal not long ago.

The “Letters” section led with complaints about Bob Poole’s column on well-maintained private highways that keep traffic moving. One writer complained that such highways exist for “the privileged … who can afford surprisingly large … fees … to drive a very boring 45 minutes around metropolitan Toronto. Highway 407 is certainly a great success — for its bondholders.”

Surprisingly large fees? Only if you are clueless about what you pay for “free” roads. And why is success for the bondholders a bad thing? Is the writer envious? If the ride is boring, he doesn’t need to take it. No one forces anyone to use a private highway. Why do so many begrudge the successes that voluntary private exchanges bring? …

Walter Williams caught up to light bulbs and thermostats.

Last December, President Bush signed an energy bill that will ban the sale of Edison’s incandescent bulb, starting with the 100-watt bulb in 2012 and ending with the 40-watt bulb by 2014. You say, “Hey, Williams, what’s wrong with saving energy, reducing our carbon footprint and stopping global warming?” Before you get too enthused over governmental energy-saving efforts, you might ponder what’s down the road.

The California Energy Commission has recently proposed amendments to its standards for energy efficiency (www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-400-2007-017/CEC-400-2007-017-45DAY.PDF). These standards include a requirement that any new or modified heating or air conditioning system must include a programmable communicating thermostat (PCT) whose settings can be remotely controlled by government authorities. A thermostat czar, sitting in Sacramento, would be empowered to remotely reduce the heating or cooling of your house during what he deems as an “emergency event.” …

Amity Shlaes visits the Panama Canal.

… One glimpse of the light as I arrived at the Miraflores Locks, and I forgot all of that dark­ness. Visitors coming to inspect the canal expect to see a generous stretch of blue through which ships move majestically. They are imagining the way liners navigate New York Harbor. And there are parts of the canal that look like that. Here, however, you find a narrow line of green-blue water through which a ship is pulled forward, like a sedated whale through a tight tank. Only a foot or two of water stands between the ship and the lock chamber’s wall. The ship moves into the holding area and the gate shuts; when the water level is high enough, toy-like locomotives pull the ship out the other side.

The best news of the day came in a press brief­ing after the Miraflores inspection: the new locks that can accommodate larger container ships will be opening in 2014. Just before my visit, the Canal Authority had celebrated the ground­breaking of the locks. If the U.S. Congress approves the FTA, the canal will be better able to serve the superstores of the East Coast.

One of the best parts of infra-tourism is the lexicon. “Panamax” is the designation for the biggest ship that can fit through Panama’s locks. I learn that the new locks that will serve a larger class might be called “Maxipan.” A guide gave us the figures for the Panamax class and I wrote them down in my notebook: 965 x 105 feet.

Around these proportions, the world once configured itself. Within a decade of the canal’s opening in 1914, 5,000 ships a year were passing through Panama. Annual toll revenues soon ran in the millions. …

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Everyone’s for change, but Mark Steyn knows the only real agent of change is capitalism.

… If you’re like me, you’re reminded yet again why you love capitalism. It’s dynamic. And the more capitalist your economy, the more dynamic it is. Every great success story is vulnerable to the next great success story – which is why teenagers aren’t picking their CDs from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. There’s a word for this. Now let me see. What was it again?

Oh, yeah: “change.” Innovation drives change, the market drives change. Government “change” just drives things away: You could ask many of the New Hampshire primary voters who formerly resided in Massachusetts.

Nevertheless, between Iowa and New Hampshire, almost every presidential contender found himself lapsing into boilerplate assertions that he was the “candidate of change” – or even, as both McCain and Hillary put it, an “agent of change,” which sounds far more exotic, as if they’re James Bond and Pussy Galore covertly driving the Aston Martin across some international frontier, pressing the ejector button and dropping a ton of government regulation on some hapless foreigners.

But it’s capitalism that’s the real “agent of change.” Politicians, on the whole, prefer stasis, at least on everything for which they already have responsibility. That’s the lesson King Canute was trying to teach his courtiers when he took them down to the beach and let the tide roll in: Government has its limits. In most of the Western world, the tide is rolling in on demographically and economically unsustainable entitlements, but that doesn’t stop politicians getting out their beach chairs and promising to create even more. That’s government “change”. …

Christopher Hitchens wonders why we would want those people back.

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn’t it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn’t some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her “greatness” (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. …

… Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don’t show her enough appreciation, and after all she’s done for us, she may cry.

David Brooks on Dems identity politics.

… Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

Fair enough. The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners. …

Mary Anastasia O’Grady tells what helps countries grow.

Are the world’s impoverished masses destined to live lives of permanent misery unless rich countries transfer wealth for spending on education and infrastructure?

You might think so if your gurus on development economics earn their bread and butter “lending” at the World Bank. Education and infrastructure “investment” are two of the Bank’s favorite development themes.

Yet the evidence is piling up that neither government nor multilateral spending on education and infrastructure are key to development. To move out of poverty, countries instead need fast growth; and to get that they need to unleash the animal spirits of entrepreneurs.

Empirical support for this view is presented again this year in The Heritage Foundation/The Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom, released today. In its 14th edition, the annual survey grades countries on a combination of factors including property rights protection, tax rates, government intervention in the economy, monetary, fiscal and trade policy, and business freedom. …

Thomas Sowell explains how environmentalists drive blacks out of their communities.

… runaway housing prices in California did not just happen for no reason.

Prior to 1970, California housing prices were very similar to housing prices in the rest of the country. In more recent times, it has not been uncommon for California homes to cost three times what homes cost nationwide.

What happened in the 1970s was that severe government restrictions on building became common in coastal California. With supply restricted and demand not restricted, it was inevitable that prices would soar beyond many people’s ability to pay.

The main impetus behind severe restrictions on building is environmentalist zealots who demand that vast amounts of land be set aside as “open space” on which nothing can be built.

It is not uncommon for substantial proportions of all the land in an entire county — sometimes more than half — to be set aside as “open space.”

Environmentalists often talk as if they are trying to save the last few patches of greenery from being paved over, when in fact 90 percent of the land in the United States is undeveloped and forests alone cover more area than all the cities and towns in the country combined. …

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Bill Kristol’s second Times column is on the Dems’ surge opinions.

… When President Bush announced the surge of troops in support of a new counterinsurgency strategy a year ago, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Democratic Congressional leaders predicted failure. Obama, for example, told Larry King that he didn’t believe additional U.S. troops would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there.” Then in April, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, asserted that “this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.” In September, Clinton told Gen. David Petraeus that his claims of progress in Iraq required a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

The Democrats were wrong in their assessments of the surge. Attacks per week on American troops are now down about 60 percent from June. Civilian deaths are down approximately 75 percent from a year ago. December 2007 saw the second-lowest number of U.S. troops killed in action since March 2003. And according to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of day-to-day military operations in Iraq, last month’s overall number of deaths, which includes Iraqi security forces and civilian casualties as well as U.S. and coalition losses, may well have been the lowest since the war began.

Do Obama and Clinton and Reid now acknowledge that they were wrong? Are they willing to say the surge worked?

No. It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq. When asked recently whether she stood behind her “willing suspension of disbelief” insult to General Petraeus, Clinton said, “That’s right.” …

Financial Times interviews Christopher Hitchens.

I never thought I would say this but Christopher Hitchens has been good for my health. When we were negotiating which restaurant to choose, the famously nicotine-bitten enfant terrible of Anglo-American letters inquired whether I smoked. “I’m sorry to say that I’m almost as bad as you,” I replied and we both chuckled throatily.

And thus we meet on a sunny afternoon at the Bombay Club – a popular restaurant across Lafayette Square from the White House. We chose it not because we especially like Indian food – although Hitchens is as fond of it as I – but because we can sit outside and so sidestep Washington’s blanket ban on indoor smoking.

Plus, the staff there recognise and like Hitchens, whose bestselling books (most recently God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) bring frequent television appearances. “I’ll have my usual,” says Hitchens, meaning a Johnnie Walker. On two further occasions during the two-hour meal he holds up his empty tumbler and says: “Xerox”. The staff understand him. Not wanting to appear wimpish I order a Kingfisher beer and nurse it parsimoniously until the end.

After the drinks arrive I offer Hitchens one of my Marlboro Lights. Then something life-changing happens. Cool as a cucumber – and with no hint of remorse – Hitchens announces that he has given up smoking. “I got up yesterday morning in Madison, Wisconsin, and I just threw my pack away,” he says.

That’s wonderful I reply, without betraying a hint of my inner turmoil. But other thoughts race through my mind: “This is the writer who smokes on television,” I tell myself. “Hitchens is the last of the Mohicans.” It doesn’t take long for it to dawn on me that the Mick Jagger of modern letters is now in a healthier category than me. He is officially a non-smoker and I am not.

“I’ve tried many different methods over the last few months – everything, absolutely everything; therapy sessions, various classes and groups – none of them worked at all,” Hitchens continues, oblivious to what he has unleashed. “Then I woke up yesterday and said: ‘Enough.’ By the way, don’t let me stop you from smoking,” he adds airily. “Doesn’t bother me. I feel no temptation at all.” …

Jeff Jacoby has more on the fraud from The Lancet.

… Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR’s Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, “Right before the election you’re making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it’s not politically motivated.” Burnham told Newsweek the same thing: “There’s no political motivation in this. I feel very confident in the numbers.”

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid. The study’s authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of “data-heaping” — that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud. …

American.com reports on India’s $2,500 car.

The automotive world is abuzz about what might be the next Model T Ford or Volkswagen Beetle—an entry-level sedan to be built in India by Tata Motors Ltd. for about $2,500.

That would be about half the cost of the low­est-priced car now available in India—the bare-bones Maruti 800, which is essentially unchanged from its introduction in 1983. If Tata pulls this off, it would be one of the cheapest cars ever built, and it could have a huge impact not only on India’s growing car market but also all over the semideveloped world.

Tata hopes to begin selling the car by this fall, almost exactly 100 years after Henry Ford intro­duced the vehicle that defined “people’s car”—the world-changing Model T. And there are interest­ing parallels and lessons in what was happening in the automotive world one century ago and what might be happening in India right now.

Many have said Tata’s goal is impossible. The so-called “One Lakh” (equaling 100,000 rupees) car is a four-door compact sedan with a small luggage compartment under the front hood and a rear engine producing 33 horsepower. It will be a base model by all means, but it will not be one of those go-kart or jitney-like vehicles so com­mon throughout India and Southeast Asia. “It is not a car with plastic curtains or no roof—it’s a real car,” Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors and the dreamer behind the One Lakh, assured Forbes magazine. …

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Two Steyn Corner posts and a post from Contentions bring you up to date on the chilling speech actions by the state in Canada.

“The tyranny of the administrative state”

…That’s how Powerline’s Scott Johnson characterizes Ezra Levant’s inquisition for the crime of publishing the Danish cartoons in Canada. Ezra has posted another sharp exchange with Alberta “human rights agent” Shirlene McGovern. He explains the wasted time and money (not to mention the broader “chilling effect”) these “human rights” pseudo-courts impose on editors and publishers. There’s then a short pause before Agent McGovern, licensed to chill, responds blandly, “You’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure.”

The accused replies that he wishes that were the case. But in Canada today you’re only entitled to your opinions if Agent McGovern says you are. That’s the issue – “for sure”. …

Charles Krauthammer’s glad the Obama drama is over.

… It is fitting that New Hampshire should have turned on a tear or an aside. The Democratic primary campaign has been breathtakingly empty. What passes for substance is an absurd contest of hopeful change (Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry change (John Edwards playing Hugo Chavez in English).

One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Obama’s pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner’s. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Obama gets a free pass from the press. …

Similar observations from Mort Kondracke.

A door-to-door canvasser here for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) told me all during the weekend before Tuesday’s primary that his team was encountering independent voters torn between Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

Surely an anomaly, I thought. Then I ran into such a voter, a teacher taking her young daughter to campaign events. I asked her, “What about Barack Obama?”

“I’ve seen him five times,” she said. “What he says sounds great, but it’s all fluff. There’s no meat there.”

And that, I think, is one reason Clinton pulled out a campaign-saving victory over the Illinois Democrat here.

Welling tears may have helped “humanize” Clinton, especially with women voters, but I think she also made a dent with her updated version of Walter Mondale’s 1984 taunt of his “new ideas” challenger, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.): “Where’s the beef?” …

The Captain says Bill’s campaigning is creating discord in South Carolina.

Bill Clinton has gotten a lot of mileage out of the notion that he was somehow the nation’s first black president, but that may be coming to an end. The tone he and Hillary have taken when criticizing Barack Obama has begun to generate a reaction among black politicians, and the New York Times reports that the first salvo in return may come soon. Rep. James Clyburn may reverse himself and endorse Obama before the South Carolina primaries after listening to the Clintons in New Hampshire: …

Mike Allen of Politico reports on Bill’s damage control.

On the GOP side, Mark Levin looks at the McCain record.

There’s a reason some of John McCain’s conservative supporters avoid discussing his record. They want to talk about his personal story, his position on the surge, his supposed electability. But whenever the rest of his career comes up, the knee-jerk reply is to characterize the inquiries as attacks.

The McCain domestic record is a disaster. To say he fought spending, most particularly earmarks, is to nibble around the edges and miss the heart of the matter. For starters, consider:

McCain-Feingold — the most brazen frontal assault on political speech since Buckley v. Valeo.

McCain-Kennedy — the most far-reaching amnesty program in American history.

McCain-Lieberman — the most onerous and intrusive attack on American industry — through reporting, regulating, and taxing authority of greenhouse gases — in American history.

McCain-Kennedy-Edwards — the biggest boon to the trial bar since the tobacco settlement, under the rubric of a patients’ bill of rights.

McCain-Reimportantion of Drugs — a significant blow to pharmaceutical research and development, not to mention consumer safety

Pickings of Jan. 6 had a BizzyBlog post on the fraud committed by The Lancet, a Brit medical journal. WSJ Editors weigh in too.

Three weeks before the 2006 elections, the British medical journal Lancet published a bombshell report estimating that casualties in Iraq had exceeded 650,000 since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.

It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident. You can find the fascinating details in the current issue of National Journal magazine, thanks to reporters Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. And sadly, that may be the only place you’ll find them. While the media were quick to hype the original Lancet report — within a week of its release it had been featured on 25 news shows and in 188 newspaper and magazine articles — something tells us this debunking won’t get the same play. …

Paul Greenberg takes a grown-up look at the water-boarding debate.

It’s been eclipsed in the news for just a moment by all the hubbub over the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire presidential primary, but earlier you may have noticed the latest suggestion in Congress and Medialand over how to conduct the war on terror: Go after the good guys. Honest. Not the enemy. But the CIA. Not its chief but the lower-downs. Maybe even the grunts. The foot soldiers who do the real work, take the real risks, and who get their hands and maybe even their consciences dirty. Because they’ve got a real war for fight, not another Power Point presentation to prepare or computer projection to analyze. Besides, you can be sure the higher-ups long ago took every precaution to assure what used to be called Plausible Deniability. You see their names and pictures in the paper from time to time — the well-tailored bureaucrats with clean fingernails who sit in air-conditioned offices at Langley issuing memos designed to cover their precious backsides. Just in case, as they say, Questions Arise. …

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Samizata blogs on the attempt to control thermostats in CA.

Hillary has had the bad luck to attract the attention of Camille Paglia again.

… Hillary’s willingness to tolerate Bill’s compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause — which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

It’s no coincidence that Hillary’s staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary’s rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let’s not forget Hillary, the governor’s wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock. …

…

… The Clintons live to campaign. It’s what holds them together and gives them a glowing sense of meaning and value. Their actual political accomplishments are fairly slight. The obsessive need to keep campaigning may mean a president Hillary would go right on spewing the bitterly partisan rhetoric that has already paralyzed Washington. Even if Hillary could be elected (which I’m skeptical about), how in tarnation could she ever govern?…

…

… Hillary herself, with her thin, spotty record, tangled psychological baggage, and maundering blowhard of a husband, is also a mighty big roll of the dice. She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark (“Cue the tears!”). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary’s real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same.

The Captain says Kerry announced for Obama.

…This seems strange on a couple of different levels. Kerry hardly ran as the insurgent candidate in 2004; that was Howard Dean. Kerry represents the Establishment in the Democratic Party, a quasi-Brahmin who has remained in the Senate largely through the offices of Ted Kennedy instead of any legislative accomplishments of his own. The man who authored six whole bills in twenty years hardly qualifies to speak about transformational change. What has he ever done to affect it himself? …

Karl Rove’s New Hampshire analysis was in the WSJ.

What would Shakespeare’s Jack Cade say after the New Hampshire Democratic primary? Maybe the demagogue in “Henry VI” would call for the pollsters to be killed first, not the lawyers.

The opinion researchers find themselves in a difficult place after most predicted a big Obama sweep. It’s not their fault. The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary. The unpredictability of who will turn out and what the mix of voters will be makes polling a primary election like reading chicken entrails — ugly, smelly and not very enlightening. Our media culture endows polls — especially exit polls — with scientific precision they simply don’t have.

But more interesting than dissecting the pollsters is dissecting the election returns, precinct by precinct. Sen. Hillary Clinton won working-class neighborhoods and less-affluent rural areas. Sen. Barack Obama won the college towns and the gentrified neighborhoods of more affluent communities. Put another way, Mrs. Clinton won the beer drinkers, Mr. Obama the white wine crowd. And there are more beer drinkers than wine swillers in the Democratic Party.

Mrs. Clinton won a narrow victory in New Hampshire for four reasons. …

Gail Collins gets in for just one line.

Whatever your politics, people, you have to admit this is one great presidential race. What next? Fred Thompson takes Florida on a sympathy vote from retirees? (They like a leader who’s really, really rested.) John Edwards finds a new emotion for South Carolina? (Anger is so cold weather.) I don’t think anyone can top Mike Gravel’s speech to the New Hampshire high school students when he told them to avoid alcohol and stick with marijuana. But really, we’re ready for anything.

If you’re a fan of democracy, Hillary Clinton’s primary victory this week has to be a good thing. You don’t want the whole election decided on the basis of a strange ritual in Iowa that resembles Red Rover with votes, along with the considered opinion of a small state full of idiosyncratic New Englanders. We want a turn! South Dakota wants a turn!

George Will on the campaign so far.

Like the Roman god Janus, from which this godforsaken month takes its name, the two parties’ voters in two states have looked in different directions. After six months of intense campaigning, in just six transformative days Iowa spoke and contrarian New Hampshire said: On the other hand …

These states perhaps started a marathon — it might not reach a decisive crescendo on Feb. 5 when 22 states choose — between two formidable Democratic candidates with ardent constituencies. Meanwhile, Republicans, illustrating this year’s elemental asymmetry, may be contemplating a choice among John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. …

John Fund notes nothing says Bush has to spend the earmark money.

This week President Bush will make one of the most important decisions of his remaining time in office. It won’t get headlines or lead the news, but it could play a major role in deciding whether this country ever gets any kind of grip on the constantly growing federal budget.

Just before Christmas, Congress sent Mr. Bush a $516 billion omnibus spending bill stuffed with 8,993 special-interest earmarks. To make matters worse, most of the earmarks aren’t even in the language of the law itself. They were slipped into a 900-page “committee report” that represented the wish-lists of the Senate and House appropriations committees. Almost no one got a chance to read that report before the budget was passed late at night and with barely a day for members to review it.

Mr. Bush agreed to sign the budget but said he was disappointed at Congress’s failure to overcome its earmark addiction. He announced he was asking his budget director, Jim Nussle, “to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill.”

What Mr. Bush knows, and Congress doesn’t want the taxpayers to know, is that the vast majority of the offending earmarks–the ones that aren’t part of the actual budget law and were instead “air-dropped” into the committee report–aren’t legally binding. A Dec. 18 legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service found that most of the committee reports have not been formally passed by both houses and “presented” to the President for signing, and thus have not become law. “President Bush could ignore the 90% of earmarks that never make it to the floor of the House or Senate for a vote,” says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has read the CRS report. “He doesn’t need a line-item veto.” …

So how do they count tigers in the wild?

Wild tigers in India are under increasing threats from poachers, and seven of the country’s 28 reserves can barely sustain a breeding population, according to a Sunday article in the Miami Herald. The article went on to note that “no one is sure how many wild tigers remain in India, but most estimates put the total at only 3,000 to 3,500. Some believe it’s closer to 1,500.” How do wildlife researchers count tigers? …

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Couple of Slate columnists explain last night. Mickey Kaus first.

I’m as flummoxed as everyone else, having gone along with the near-universal consensus that Obama would win. Mystery Pollster has his work cut out for him. But I’m confident that soon enough there will be so many powerful explanations for what feels like an out-of-the-blue event that it will seem overdetermined. It’s important to memorialize this moment of utter stupefaction.

That said, here are four possible factors: …

Then John Dickerson.

Democrats like a fighter. Maybe that’s the simplest reason Hillary Clinton pulled out a surprise victory in New Hampshire. Before her campaign even arrived here, her aides were promising they’d take the fight to Obama. In the five days between the two contests, the Clinton campaign worked hard to bring Obama down to earth. Direct mail and phone calls attacked Obama on issues from abortion to taxes. Hillary Clinton upped her criticisms considerably at Saturday’s Democratic debate, in her stump speeches, and in heavy rounds of press appearances. Her central charge was that Obama was all talk. Voters who elected him would make the same know-nothing mistake they made in 2000 when they picked George Bush because they thought they’d rather have a beer with him than the other guy.

No one thought the strategy was working, including the Clinton staff. …

Maureen Dowd wonders if Hillary can cry her way back to the White House.

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and stay on message. …

For WSJ, Fouad Ajami writes on George W. and his effect on the Mid-East.

It was fated, or “written,” as the Arabs would say, that George W. Bush, reared in Midland, Texas, so far away from the complications of the foreign world, would be the leader to take America so deep into Arab and Islamic affairs.

This is not a victory lap that President Bush is embarking upon this week, a journey set to take him to Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, the Saudi Kingdom, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Bush by now knows the heartbreak and guile of that region. After seven years and two big wars in that “Greater Middle East,” after a campaign against the terror and the malignancies of the Arab world, there will be no American swagger or stridency.

But Mr. Bush is traveling into the landscape and setting of his own legacy. He is arguably the most consequential leader in the long history of America’s encounter with those lands.

Baghdad isn’t on Mr. Bush’s itinerary, but it hangs over, and propels, his passage. A year ago, this kind of journey would have been unthinkable. The American project in Iraq was reeling, and there was talk of America casting the Iraqis adrift. It was then that Mr. Bush doubled down–and, by all appearances, his brave wager has been vindicated. …

 

…

As is their habit, the holders of Arab power will speak behind closed doors to their American guest about the menace of the Persian power next door. But the Arabs have the demography, and the wealth, to balance the power of the Persians. If their world is now a battleground between Pax Americana and Iran, that is a stark statement on their weakness, and on the defects of the social contract between the Sunnis and the Shiites of the Arab world. America can provide the order that underpins the security of the Arabs, but there are questions of political and cultural reform which are tasks for the Arabs themselves.

Suffice it for them that George W. Bush was at the helm of the dominant imperial power when the world of Islam and of the Arabs was in the wind, played upon by ruinous temptations, and when the regimes in the saddle were ducking for cover, and the broad middle classes in the Arab world were in the grip of historical denial of what their radical children had wrought. His was the gift of moral and political clarity.

In America and elsewhere, those given reprieve by that clarity, and single-mindedness, have been taking this protection while complaining all the same of his zeal and solitude. In his stoic acceptance of the burdens after 9/11, we were offered a reminder of how nations shelter behind leaders willing to take on great challenges.

We scoffed, in polite, jaded company when George W. Bush spoke of the “axis of evil” several years back. The people he now journeys amidst didn’t: It is precisely through those categories of good and evil that they describe their world, and their condition. Mr. Bush could not redeem the modern culture of the Arabs, and of Islam, but he held the line when it truly mattered. He gave them a chance to reclaim their world from zealots and enemies of order who would have otherwise run away with it.

John Fund alerts us to today’s important Supreme Court argument on voter ID.

Supporters and critics of Indiana’s law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls square off in oral arguments before the Supreme Court today. The heated rhetoric surrounding the case lays bare the ideological conflict of visions raging over efforts to improve election integrity.

Supporters say photo ID laws simply extend rules that require everyone to show such ID to travel, enter federal office buildings or pick up a government check. An honor system for voting, in their view, invites potential fraud. That’s because many voting rolls are stuffed with the names of dead people and duplicate registrations–as recent scandals in Washington state and Missouri involving the activist group ACORN attest.

Opponents say photo ID laws block poor, minority and elderly voters who lack ID from voting, and all in the name of combating a largely mythical problem of voter fraud.

Some key facts will determine the outcome, as the court weighs the potential the law has to combat fraud versus the barriers it erects to voting. The liberal Brennan Center at NYU Law School reports that a nationwide telephone survey it conducted found that 11% of the voting-age public lacks government-issued photo ID, including an implausible 25% of African-Americans. …

Rob Bluey too.

All eyes will be on New Hampshire Wednesday morning for the first true primary in the 2008 elections. But even as hardy New Englanders trudge to the polls, something at least as consequential will happening in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major case on election law.

In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, the court will tackle the issue of vote fraud. The arguments will revive the debate over voter disenfranchisement that raged after the contested presidential election of 2000.

This time the controversy surrounds Indiana’s requirement that voters show photo identification when they cast their ballot. At a time when Americans are asked to show photo ID for routine things such as buying alcohol or getting on an airplane, it hardly seems unreasonable to do the same before voting. There’s also overwhelming public support for voter ID requirements; Rasmussen puts the number at 77 percent approval nationally.

In Indiana, however, a coalition of left-leaning groups — led by the state Democratic Party and ACLU — has brought suit against the state, claiming that requiring photo ID at polling places disenfranchises low-income citizens, minorities and seniors — constituencies considered key to Democratic electoral success. …

Thomas Sowell on the myths of 1968.

This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth.

The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves.

The first of the shocks of 1968 was the sudden eruption of violent attacks by Communist guerillas in the cities of South Vietnam, known as the “Tet offensive,” after a local holiday.

That this sort of widespread urban guerilla warfare was still possible after the rosy claims made by American officials in Washington and Vietnam sent shock waves through the United States.

The conclusion that might have been drawn was that politicians and military commanders should not make rosy predictions. The conclusion that was in fact drawn was that the Vietnam war was unwinnable.

In reality, the Tet offensive was one in which the Communist guerilla movement was not only defeated in battle but was virtually annihilated as a major military force. From there on, the job of attacking South Vietnam was a job for the North Vietnam army.

Politically, however, the Tet offensive was an enormous victory for the Communists — not in Vietnam, but in the United States.

The American media, led by Walter Cronkite, pictured the Tet offensive as a defeat for the United States and a sign that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. …

Detroit Free Press says crime drops when more folks carry guns.

Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold. But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics. The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined. …