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We start with a few items related to globaloney. First a scary item from Protein Wisdom about California’s efforts to control thermostats in homes. “First they came for the thermostats ……. “

Jeff Jacoby has a welcome column. He writes about an article in the Russian news service Novosti that Pickerhead has been wanting to include but was put off by a poor translation. How’s this? “Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.” That’s a literal translation of typical Russian bombast, but it’s not what we want to offer here. Jacoby does better.

… “Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!” advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. “The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012.”

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity – sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time – as having the greatest effect on climate.

“Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change,” Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. “Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind.” …

According to Country Store, NASA has noticed the same changes to the sun as the Novosti article.

Today, the Space and Science Research Center, (SSRC) in Orlando, Florida announces that it has confirmed the recent web announcement of NASA solar physicists that there are substantial changes occurring in the sun’s surface. The SSRC has further researched these changes and has concluded they will bring about the next climate change to one of a long lasting cold era.

Today, Director of the SSRC, John Casey has reaffirmed earlier research he led that independently discovered the sun’s changes are the result of a family of cycles that bring about climate shifts from cold climate to warm and back again. …

OK, back to the contest over who’s going to be in charge of stealing from us.

Since he’s close to the action, Howie Carr’s might be a voice to heed about the vote in New Hampshire today.

John McCain is old – very old.

Which may explain his abject confusion about whether he supports amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens. When you’re 71 years old, short-term memory loss can be part of the package, along with the delusion that Wilfred Brimley’s endorsement is big with the iPod generation.

Last spring McCain and the hero of Chappaquiddick, with the help of La Raza, put together a grandiose scheme to grant amnesty to millions upon millions of foreign invaders. It was so outrageous they refused to hold hearings on it. The bill went down in flames, twice, and so did McCain’s campaign for almost a year.

Now McCain is back, sort of. But his “amnesty” bill is still political poison. So when he’s called on it, as he was by Mitt Romney Saturday night at Saint Anselm College, he speaks with forked tongue: …

Which might be a reason to listen to a Corner post. This begins a series of Corner posts suggesting McCain’s not doing so well. Pickerhead’s theory is McCain does poorly because many independents he counted on have been attracted to the Obama drama. Serves him right. He can only win a GOP primary that is thoroughly polluted by independents.

I’ve just gotten off the phone with Professor David Paleologos, who conducts the Suffolk University/WHDH poll in New Hampshire. I asked him why his poll is the only one showing Romney ahead. Here is what he said, hastily transcribed by me:

We all have different methodologies. I think the difference will be measured in the independents. We believe that this most accurately reflects where New Hampshire is going…I think the difference is there have been broad-brush gifts of independents to McCain. …

Dick Armey, one of the GOP’s grown-ups has Huckabee cautions.

… Of course, his genial demeanor and willingness to overlook both principle and fact is indicative of a distinct and disturbing trend in American politics. Huckabee seemed to come from nowhere in the race, but he is not just a lonely, surprise candidate, but a symbol of the new wave of feel-good conservatism, which seeks not to deal in policy that works so much as policy and rhetoric that provide emotional gratification.

Huckabee comes off as the self-esteem candidate, in which merely feeling good is the core of the message. He’s not the only Republican making a practice of peddling cotton-candy bromides. As FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe recently pointed out, former Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has been pushing a similarly foolish agenda: inspiring, heartfelt–and utterly ineffective.

More than ever, we need to remember that freedom, prosperity, and opportunity are at the center of the limited government vision for America. Ours is an inherently compassionate and positive agenda, and it would be better if more candidates adopted Huckabee’s accessible, upbeat tone. But sunshine rhetoric in the service of liberal fantasies is a political and policy dead end. Allowing Mike Huckabee to become the face of conservatism would trade unity and principle for an ill-advised romance with a flighty, flaky new brand of politics.

Thomas Sowell gives all the candidates a glancing blow.

It was not that long ago that the big political question was how Rudolph Giuliani would do against Hillary Clinton in the November election. The Iowa caucus votes have made that question sound like ancient history, if not science fiction. The results of the Iowa caucus are only a small part of the story of this election year but their implications are significant. One implication that reaches well beyond politics is that a state that is 95 percent white gave its biggest vote total to a black man. More Iowa women voted for Obama than for Hillary. So much for the “race, class and gender” mantra among the intelligentsia. So much also for the “inevitable” or “invincible” candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the biggest story out of Iowa is that 71 percent of Democrats voted against Hillary.

The next biggest story is that no one in either party won a majority. It is still a wide-open race in both parties. …

John Fund comments on the blame Bill Clinton is spreading around.

… Despite fawning media coverage of the “Comeback Kid” in the 1992 campaign and the media’s almost complete failure to cover the fundraising scandals that led to 24 guilty pleas after the 1996 campaign, Bill and Hillary still labor under the delusion that most reporters are biased against them. Their sense of victimization has intensified as they’ve seethed over the favorable coverage Barack Obama has gotten in recent days. Team Clinton is convinced reporters want to write premature obituaries of Hillary Clinton: “Give me a break. This whole [Obama] thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” a frustrated President Clinton told reporters in New Hampshire yesterday. …

Christopher Hitchens is tired of hearing about Obama’s race.

… The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, “uplift,” and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.

IBD Editors show what’s coming for Obama.

… Obama, whose foreign policy includes talking to our enemies while invading our allies, told the assembled veterans at the VFW Convention in Kansas City, “All our top military commanders recognize that there is no military solution in Iraq.” Except, of course for Gen. Petraeus.

Of the current surge, Obama says “our troops have helped reduce violence, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006.” The New York Times reported late last month that “violent attacks in the country had fallen by 60% since June.”

Obama’s idea of change is to spend “at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries.” Wrong again. As we have reported, Iraqi refugees are returning in droves to enjoy the peace and democracy we have established thus far.

Obama is a hard-core liberal whose voting record in the Senate is virtually indistinguishable from Ted Kennedy’s. Half the Democrats in the Senate voted for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts — even Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold. But not Barack Obama. It is doubtful as well his plans for change include less domestic spending and smaller government.

Obama to this point has been a stealth candidate, not hiding but not emphasizing his deep liberal beliefs, content to ride the wave of adulation that has carried him to this point. But is he the next John F. Kennedy, or merely the next Jimmy Carter?

Former Clinton guru Dick Morris thinks he’s the latter — “a Jimmy Carter, running for president on his personal moral outlook, his background and making a virtue out of his limited knowledge of how American government works.” We all know how the Carter administration turned out.

The Captain notes WaPo and WSJ editors are on the Dem scent too, and comments on Clinton crybabies.

How often do the editorial boards of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal not only agree, but coincide on foreign policy? Rarely enough so that today’s twin broadsides on the Democratic presidential contenders is worthy of special notice. Both editorial boards scold the Democrats for not only getting Iraq wrong, but also for seriously misrepresenting the progress achieved through the surge.

The Post’s criticisms get tart indeed: …

… What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures — coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections — a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence. …

…

… Yesterday, Hillary let us know how hard it is to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on a campaign trail. She has to eat fast food, she doesn’t get her exercise, and we should all care about how much she’s sacrificing for all of us! Today, we should pity Mark Penn because he had a bad day, which of course is because of all of us and the media.

Hey, didn’t these people sign up for this voluntarily? Don’t they get to lead the Free World if they win? Will the White House host regular pity parties, or only occasionally?

Bill seems to be the party coordinator. He’s complaining about underhanded tactics from Barack Obama? Perhaps Bill might want to review which campaign dug up kindergarten essays for a basis of criticism, and whose campaign second talked about how much more black Bill was from Barack. …

A stunning photo of a great white shark tailing a kayak showed up a few years ago. We came across the photographer’s story. How’s that for a change of pace?

… To capture this image I tied myself to the tower of the research boat Lamnidae and leaned into the void, precariously hanging over the ocean while waiting patiently for a white shark to come along. I wanted to shot a photograph that would tell the story of our research efforts to track white sharks using kayaks. When the first shark of the day came across our sea kayak it dove to the seabed and inspected it from below. I quickly trained my camera on the dark shadow which slowly transformed from diffuse shape into the sleek outline of a large great white. When the shark’s dorsal fin broke the surface I thought I had the shot, but hesitated a fraction of a second and was rewarded with marine biologist Trey Snow in the kayak turning around to look behind him. I pressed the shutter and the rest was history. Throughout the day I shot many more images, most showing the kayak following the shark, but all lacked the power of that first image of the great white tracking the kayak. …

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THE BIG STORY of the campaign so far has been the apparent end of Hillary’s hopes. Today is all Clinton collapse day, humor section and all. Borowitz, Scrappleface, and all the ‘toons. Borowitz says Hillary has repackaged herself as a black man.

Peter Wehner sets the tone.

… There are many things to say about the deeper meaning of this moment and what its passing will signify. Suffice it to say that it will be good, very good, for us to say farewell to the couple that brought you Carville, Begala, Blumenthal, and Ickes; the “war room,” the use of private investigators, and attacks on women like Dolly Kyle Browning, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Kathleen Willey; impeachment for perjurious, false and misleading testimony to a grand jury; contempt of court findings; the promiscuous smearing of those whom they viewed as threat to their power; the charges of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and assurances that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”; and so much more.

On the eve of the New Hampshire vote and all it will mean, it’s worth recalling the words of the late, great Michael Kelly:

The lie at the heart of the vast and varied lie that is Bill Clinton’s defense is that lying is a victimless crime – and something that properly exists as a moral concern only between the liar and his maker and a few people immediately affected. But this is not so. Lying corrupts, and an absolute liar corrupts absolutely, and the corruption spread by the lies of the absolutely mendacious Clinton is becoming frightening to behold.

After she loses, Hillary Clinton will remain in the Senate, of course, and Bill Clinton will continue to make millions through his public speeches. They will not completely disappear from the national scene. But their days as a Democratic dynasty, and their center-stage role in American politics, are about to end.

John Fund is next.

Then Noemie Emery. She reviews Sally Bedell Smith’s recent book on the Clintons.

Between January 20, 1993, and January 20, 2001, the Clinton White House was home to three boomers of boundless ambition, high expectations, and vast self-regard, all three of whom thought that they ought to be president. Of these, only one–Bill Clinton–really was president. But the other two–his wife Hillary and his vice president, Albert Gore Jr.–firmly believed that they should be and viewed Bill’s terms in office as the jumping-off place to their own.

Unfortunately, only one–Bill, again–was a born, or even a good, politician, making the two others dependent upon him, first to lift them to within striking distance of power, and then to help them campaign. But Bill, too, had his problems, and so needed them: to keep him focused and disciplined, to impose some sense of order, to reassure voters disturbed by his fast-and-loose manners, and at least in the case of Hillary Clinton, to help him suppress and/or cope with his bimbo eruptions, if and when worst came to worst.

Sensing his needs, Bill picked his running mates carefully, but the resulting arrangements were not without stress. Bill needed both Gore and Hillary, but often resented attempts to restrain him. Gore and Hillary needed Bill, and resented each other. Hillary was in a state of continuous rage over Bill’s chronic adulteries. And Gore, a senator’s son who had been pointed from birth at the White House, and was seen by his friends and possibly by himself as being “more presidential” than Clinton, was in a state of anxiety about his own run.

How this played out is laid out in hair-raising detail in Sally Bedell Smith’s account of an administration and marriage like none other in history, and one that bred the highest level of dysfunctional angst ever seen in the White House–except for those moments when Richard Nixon dined alone. …

… Bill, it was clear, had an array of gifts that most power-seekers would kill for, but even these were frequently undermined by the stunning array of his faults. He was wholly unfocused, completely disorganized, and prey to a set of adolescent compulsions that even he could not start to explain. In his first two years as president (or before the Republican Congress forced focus upon him), his White House was described as resembling a college dormitory, a kindergarten, a free-for-all, or a claque of small children engaged in a soccer game, in a tumultuous scramble to fall on the ball. For no good reason, he would stay up all night, and be so exhausted the following morning he would doze off the next day. (“He can barely stay awake at today’s meeting,” Robert Reich noted, of one early session. “His eyelids droop and his pupils move up under them, leaving nothing but a narrow sliver of white.”)

“Bill’s lifelong inability to set boundaries threw policy making into turmoil,” Smith informs us. “Meetings scheduled for ten minutes routinely stretched to two hours as Bill pursued his favorite digressions. One session on Bosnia lasted seven hours without coming to a resolution. Rather than following a crisp checklist, Bill delayed decisions as long as possible,” endlessly seeking new facts. Every day, said an aide, was “a long road with quite a few detours” as Bill veered off course and off schedule. Everything was delayed, and everyone was kept waiting, from world leaders such as Helmut Kohl and John Major to a group of elderly Holocaust survivors, who were left standing under a tent in a rainstorm for hours while Bill loitered elsewhere. …

… With all of this chaos, Bill was in need of someone to restrain him in order to function, which led to his reliance on Hillary, and to a lesser extent on Al Gore. Bill needed a wife who would allow him to stray and not leave him, but would instead turn her anger against their joint enemies. This Hillary was; but she was also his opposite–disciplined, focused, intense, and pedantic–the essence of order, the Super Ego to his lively and rampaging Id. In Hillary, a woman who shared his intense love of politics but brought an entirely opposing set of skills (and deficiencies) to their joint quest for power, Bill found his corrective, his balance wheel, his apologist, and his true mate.

While they shared the same goals, she was his opposite in mind and in temperament: wholly controlled and rigidly disciplined, with a stolid, linear intelligence as opposed to his free-range, intuitive mind. At the same time, she had poor people skills, disliked campaigning, and found it grinding hard work.

“She is always on, like an assembly line,” Smith quotes a fundraiser. “Every interaction we have had has been identical. .  .  . She is the most controlled and disciplined person I ever met.” Her control slipped only in the case of his scandals, which, as part of their bargain, she was expected both to suppress and excuse. She usually finessed this by redirecting her fury toward Clinton’s accusers, but she remained in a perpetual state of resentment and anger, which spilled over to Bill and his aides.

“Her dissatisfaction could curdle the atmosphere when she directed her ire at his subordinates,” Smith informs us. “Washington advisers found it ‘demoralizing.’ .  .  . The most unnerving aspect .  .  . was their use of profanity, especially ‘f–k’ and ‘s–t.’ ” …

… With a keen sense of self-preservation, Bill Clinton picked his two most important political partners to help himself function, to compensate for his frailties, to atone for his sins. Intuitive, seductive, empathetic, and sometimes inspired, but wholly deficient in focus and discipline, he sought out partners with focus and discipline, and orderly, literal, minds. They served his needs, in that they helped him to function; but as he had his failings, they too had theirs.

With their rigor and discipline went a lack of intuition and nuance–the je ne sais quoi that makes a political talent, and that no amount of effort and diligence can ever supply. Bill loved campaigning; Gore found it a struggle, and his torment was obvious. Hillary is an unhappy warrior–at best, a grim one–and her description of the anticipated evisceration of Barack Obama as the “fun” part was a chilling moment that surprised no one who has looked into For Love of Politics.

Unlike Bill, Gore and Hillary have no sense of how they appear to others, and seldom fail to make the wrong gesture–Hillary’s cackle, the grating “caw” she unleashes in efforts at levity, is on a par with the sighs, eye-rolling, and other strange efforts at intimidation that helped Gore lose the election in the 2000 debates. With their conspicuous lack of political talents, neither Gore nor Hillary would ever have reached the top tier of candidates if they had not been elevated by being chosen by Clinton. But if they had been more graceful, and less pedantic and heavy-handed, they would not have been chosen, as they would not have supplied what Bill lacked.

It was a bargain that worked well for Bill, but ended in heartbreak for Gore, and may do the same thing for Hillary Clinton. This story is not over yet.

NY Times reports on the Clinton campaign.

Is this what it would have been like had Elvis been reduced to playing Reno?

Former President Bill Clinton has been drawing sleepy and sometimes smallish crowds at big venues in the state that revived his presidential campaign in 1992. He entered to polite applause and rows of empty seats at the University of New Hampshire on Friday. Several people filed out midspeech, and the room was largely quiet as he spoke, with few interruptions for laughter or applause. He talked about his administration, his foundation work and some about his wife.

“Hillary’s got good plans,” Mr. Clinton kept saying as he worked through a hoarse-voiced litany of why his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, is a “world-class change agent.” He urged his audience to “caucus” on Tuesday for Mrs. Clinton, before correcting himself (“vote”). He took questions, quickly worked a rope line and left. …

The Captain comments on the Times story.

Karen Tumulty of Time adds more.

The scope of Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa has shaken the Clinton machine down to its bolts. Donors are panicking. The campaign has been making a round of calls to reassure notoriously fickle “superdelegates” — elected officials and party regulars who are awarded convention spots by virtue of their titles and positions — who might be reconsidering their decisions to back the candidate who formerly looked like a sure winner. And internally, a round of recriminations is being aimed at her chief strategist, Mark Penn, as the representative of everything about her pseudo-incumbent campaign that has been too cautious, too arrogant, too conventional and too clueless as to how much the political landscape has shifted since the last Clinton reign. One adviser summed up the biggest challenge that faces the campaign in two words: “Fresh thinking.”

Specifically, those inside the campaign and outside advisers fault Penn for failing to see the Iowa defeat coming. They say he was assuring Clinton and her allies right up until the caucuses that they would win it. Says one: “He did not predict in any way, shape or form the tidal wave we saw.” In particular, he had assured them that Clinton’s support among women would carry her through. Yet she managed to win only 30% of the women’s vote, while 35% of them went for Obama. …

Back to the Weekly Standard as Dean Barnett looks at the Clinton camp with skepticism.

… On Thursday night, Iowans acknowledged the patent hollowness of Senator Clinton’s campaign by rebuking her with an embarrassing third-place finish. Nonetheless, the senator, like a true political warhorse, greeted the setback with a strange “victory” speech. It went on and on, and was filled with empty, awkwardly worded platitudes:

What is most important now is that, as we go on with this contest, that we keep focused on the two big issues, that we answer correctly the questions that each of us has posed. How will we win in November 2008? By nominating a candidate who will be able to go the distance and who will be the best president on Day One.

The emptiness of her campaign was never more apparent. As she delivered these meaningless comments, assorted relics from the 1990s hovered like ghostly apparitions. To her right stood a beaming but ashen Wes Clark. Madeleine Albright mourned immediately behind her. And to her left stood the former president. As the New York Times’s Adam Nagourney aptly put it, President Clinton’s “face [was] frozen in a smile.” It was never more obvious that the House of Clinton’s hour had passed. …

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John Tierney starts us off with the expected doom and gloom climate predictions for 2008.

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels. …

Peace in the Mid-East after three generations? Max Boot says ask the Scots and the English.

… The accession of a Scottish monarch to the throne of England in 1603 as King James I might have been expected to end the strife. Yet the two realms clashed again during the English Civil War in the 1640s. The conflict did not truly end until 1745, when a revolt by mainly Scottish supporters of the Stuarts (descendants of James I), was put down–449 years after the start of Anglo-Scottish hostilities. …

A few great blog posts on the BS we get from the mainstream media. NewsBusters catches the NY Times with their phony GOP letter writer.

The quickest way to get the liberal media to pay attention to you is to claim to be a Republican who hates Republicans. It’s an almost infallible public relations strategy that of late has worked well for “Republican” Monica Green.

It’s also done wonders for “lifelong Republican” Henry A. Lowenstein, who has managed to get 20 different letters published in the New York Times since 2003, a remarkable feat when you consider that the Times (by its own admission) receives around 1,000 letters a day and prints only 15 on its letters page. …

A blog named NewsMeat.com tracks down Henry Lowenstein’s contributions – all to Dems.

Bizzy Blog with the last of the MSM BS. Remember just before the 2006 elections when the Lancet published a study that showed deaths in Iraq were 10 times the previous totals. National Journal found out it was all lies. Lies funded by George Soros.

….. Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros’s Open Society Institute. …..

Mark Steyn comments on Iowa.

… Way back a gazillion years ago, when Mrs. Clinton was first exploring the exploration of exploring the possibility of an exploratory committee, some wily Gompers were suggesting the Republicans trump her history-making first-woman-president card by drafting Condi Rice. It turns out we dead white males on the right wing were worrying unnecessarily: The Democrats trumped themselves. Liberal voters want desperately to cast a history-making vote and, if that’s your priority, Barack Obama is a much more appealing way to cast it than Hillary. Don’t worry about this “Change You Can Believe In” shtick. Obama doesn’t believe in it, and neither should you. He’s a fresh face on the same-old-same-old – which is the only change Democrats are looking for.

As for Huckabee, the thinking on the right is that the mainstream media are boosting him up because he’s the Republican who’ll be easiest to beat. It’s undoubtedly true that they see him as the designated pushover, but in that they’re wrong. If Iowa’s choice becomes the nation’s, and it’s Huckabee vs. Obama this November, I’d bet on Huck. …

… Where I part company with Huck’s supporters is in believing he’s any kind of solution. He’s friendlier to the teachers’ unions than any other so-called “cultural conservative” – which is why in New Hampshire he’s the first Republican to be endorsed by the NEA. His health care pitch is Attack Of The Fifty Foot Nanny, beginning with his nationwide smoking ban. This is, as Jonah Goldberg put it, compassionate conservatism on steroids – big paternalistic government that can only enervate even further “our culture.”

So, Iowa chose to reward, on the Democrat side, a proponent of the conventional secular left, and, on the Republican side, a proponent of a new Christian left. If that’s the choice, this is going to be a long election year.

The Narcissist says Hillary had to go negative because the media weren’t doing their job. The Captain knows better.

Bill Clinton wants people to know that Hillary doesn’t do divisiveness — it’s thrust upon her. In a truly bizarre statement coming from the Clintons, they claim that the media forces Hillary to go negative against her opponents. She had to attack Barack Obama’s kindergarten essays, the former president informs us, because the media wouldn’t do it (via Memeorandum): …

Charles Hurt, NY Post DC bureau chief with Clinton analysis.

Awaiting her coronation here last night, Hillary Rodham Clinton instead faced a seething revolt within her own party. More than 70 percent of Iowa Democrats rejected her bid to get back into the White House. And so, after 15 years of domination, the Clinton dynasty has finally lost its grip on the Democratic Party.

More than anything else, Clinton’s campaign was built upon the aura of inevitability. That’s now shattered and left in Iowa’s frozen cornfields. What’s devastating to her is that she lost so badly to such a political novice. …

Andrew Ferguson says the banning of incandescent bulbs was not a bright idea, and no shining moment in the history of our struggle against the state.

On December 19, President Bush signed an energy bill that will, among many, many other things, force you to buy a new kind of light bulb. He did this because environmental enthusiasts don’t like the light bulbs you’re using now. He and they reason, therefore, that you shouldn’t be allowed to have them. So now you can’t. …

 

… The mind reels at the joke-like possibilities: How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a CFL (compact fluorescent)? As many as it takes to screw American consumers! But the Bushies aren’t the half of it. In creating the ban, Bush and his environmentalist allies were joined by Philips Lighting, which is–you should probably sit down–the world’s foremost manufacturer of CFLs. The phased-in ban will position Philips to crowd from the market any troublesome competitors. It’s a perfect confluence of interests: the Big Environmental Lobby, Big Business, and Big Government Conservatives.

But back to the screwees–those American consumers, also known, not so long ago, as the citizens of the United States, a free people, rulers of the world’s proudest self-governing nation. Will there be protests of some kind, expressions of disgust at least? And what if there aren’t? What if, as the ban slowly tightens, we hear nothing, not a howl, not a peep, just a long mellow moo? Then maybe it really will be time to turn out the lights.

Tim Carney in the Examiner says in Missouri ethanol comes from corn, corruption, and capitalism. Tim needs an econ course so he can understand when government picks winners and losers it’s called mercantilism, not capitalism. Big government conservatism has nothing to do with free markets.

Missouri drivers, starting this week, no longer have any choice in the matter — they must put ethanol in their gas tanks. Republican Gov. Matt Blunt says the state’s ethanol mandate that went into effect New Year’s Day will be good “for our farmers, consumers, [and] the environment.”

Time will tell if Blunt’s claims are correct for everybody else, but for his family, the benefit is clear: His brother’s significant investments in ethanol will appreciate.

The story of Matt and Andy Blunt and Missouri’s ethanol subsidies is not a case of criminal corruption, but it is certainly an illustrative case. It highlights the conflicts of interest, ulterior motives and opportunities for corruption inherent whenever government picks winners and losers in the marketplace.

London Times with news of significant flu vaccine developments.

A vaccine that could help to control a flu pandemic has shown encouraging results in its first human trials.

The vaccine, made by Acambis, based in Cambridge, should protect against all strains of influenza A, the type responsible for pandemics. Unlike existing vaccines it does not have to be reformulated each year to match the prevalent strains of flu, so it could be stockpiled and used as soon as a pandemic strain emerges. Nor does it need to be grown on fertilised chicken eggs, as the existing vaccines do, but can be produced by cell culture. …

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Jim Taranto with a good take on the campaign.

If it seems as if the presidential campaign has gone on forever, that’s because the presidential campaign has gone on forever. If we conservatively estimate that it began the morning after the Democrats’ victory in the 2006 midterm elections, we’re already 14 months into the campaign, with only 10 months to go (assuming no 2000-style overtime). So you can breathe a sigh of relief that this thing is more than half over. Just try not to think about 2012.

As we said, that is a conservative estimate. We can remember writing about Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects as early as February 2005: “Only 1,348 days until the presidential election . . .” It’s now a scant 306 days. We also have a dim recollection–and if you do too, you’re a political obsessive–that George Allen and Rick Santorum were once discussed as serious contenders for the Republican nomination. (In case you’ve forgotten, they were U.S. senators from Virginia and Pennsylvania, respectively.) That part of the “campaign” must have predated Nov. 7, 2006. …

Mark Steyn introduces David Warren. Our two favorite Canadians.

Here, from my great compatriot David Warren, is the best Bhutto column of all. …

Here’s Mr. Warren’s column.

… Those who thought Ms Bhutto the agent of democracy and progress, because she was young and a woman and told them in fluent English exactly what they wanted to hear, should know that she, like every other woman who has risen to power in the region, including a prime minister of India, two in Bangladesh, and now two in Sri Lanka — inherited dynasties founded by powerful men. The (murderous) “Good Queen Bess” did not rise to the throne in 1558 on a wave of democracy and feminism in late mediaeval England. She rose as the daughter of the (murderous) Henry VIII. It is the failure to grasp such simple facts that makes so much Western journalism ridiculous.

I have been reading much rubbish in celebration of Ms Bhutto’s life. A number of my fellow pundits have further provided personal memoirs: it seems dozens of them were her next door neighbour when she was studying at Harvard or Oxford or both.

She was my exact contemporary, and I met her as a child in Pakistan, so let me jump on this bandwagon. I remember her at age eight, arriving in a Mercedes-Benz with daddy’s driver, and whisking me off for a ride in the private aeroplane of then-President Ayub Khan (Bhutto père was the rising star in his cabinet). This girl was the most spoiled brat I ever met.

I met her again in London, when she was studying at Oxford. She was the same, only now the 22-year-old version, and too gorgeous for anybody’s good. One of my memories is a glimpse inside a two-door fridge: one door entirely filled with packages of chocolate rum balls from Harrod’s. Benazir was crashing, in West Kensington, with another girl I knew in passing — the daughter of a former prime minister of Iraq. They were having a party. It would be hard to imagine two girls, of any cultural background, so glibly hedonistic. …

WaPo Op-Ed provides needed perspective.

The country is in a funk. Oil prices are at record highs, and the dollar is plummeting. Foreigners are buying out leading U.S. business assets. Environmentalists say the world is headed toward an ecological crackup of biblical proportions.

Today’s headlines? Well, yes. But for those of us old enough to remember, they could just as easily be bulletins from one of the grimmest decades in recent U.S. history: the ’70s.

That decade, when all the promise of the 1960s fizzled into disappointment, holds up a mirror to our contemporary pessimism. Then as now, Americans felt uncertain about the present and insecure about the future. But we found a way out of the gloom — and if that decade is our guide, we’re likely to do it again. …

Adam Smith posts on the energy war futility.

London Times columnist goes ballistic on the ArchDude of Canterbury.

The Archbishop of Canterbury told the faithful on Christmas Day that unless human beings abandon our greed, we will be responsible for the death of the planet.

Hmm. I’m not sure that I can take a lecture on greed from a man who heads one of the western world’s richest institutions. As we huddle under a patio heater to stay warm while having a cigarette in the rain, his bishops are living in palatial splendour with banqueting halls, wondering where to invest the next billion.

And are the churches open at night as shelter for the homeless and the weak? No, they are locked lest someone should decide to redress the inequalities of western society by half-inching a candelabra and fencing it to buy Christmas presents for his kiddies. …

… I would like Rowan Williams to come out from behind his eyebrows and tell us how many people have been killed by greed-induced global warming. Because even the most swivel-eyed lunatic would be hard pressed to claim it’s more than a few dozen.

Meanwhile, I reckon the number of people killed over the years by religious wars is around 809m. I tell you this, beardie. Many, many more people have died in the name of God than were killed in the name of Hitler. …

… This is a man who was arrested in the antinuclear protests of the 1980s. Who refused to call the 9/11 terrorists evil and said they had serious moral goals. Who thinks that every single thing bought and sold is “an act of aggression” on the developing world. Who campaigns for gay rights but wouldn’t actually appoint a homosexual as a bishop. And who recently said in an interview that America was the bad guy and that Muslims in Britain were like the good Samaritans.

In other words, he’s a full-on, five-star, paid-up member of the loony left, so anything that prevents the middle classes from having a Range Rover and a patio heater is bound to get his vote. …

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Ralph Peters chronicles the 2007 the terrorists’ failures in Iraq.

AS 2007 drew to a close, embarrassed journalists sought to play down American military successes and avoided questioning Democratic presidential contenders about their predictions of inevitable failure in Iraq.

Magically, Iraq disappeared from the headlines – except on those rare occasions when a problem could be reported. At the close of a year of stunning progress, media stories on New Year’s Eve leapt to report that 2007 had been the deadliest year for US troops.

You had to read deep into the columns to learn that those casualties occurred in the first half of 2007, as we battled and defeated the terrorists and militias – or that, in recent months, American and Iraqi casualties have plummeted as a relative peace broke out.

Still, all that was just hushing up dirty family secrets in the media clan and an effort by left-leaning journalists and editors to protect the politicians they favor.

The greatest media story of 2007 was the one you never read (unless you read The Post): The year was a strategic catastrophe for Islamist terrorists – and possibly a historic turning point in the struggle against al Qaeda and its affiliates. …

The Editors of Investor’s Business Daily collect eight possibilities for 2008. Not predictions, mind you, but possibilities. Pickerhead loves # 2.

… 2. Global Warming ‘Consensus’ Fades

If 2007 was the Year of Al Gore, with his movie, Academy Award and Nobel Prize, 2008 just might be the year the so-called scientific consensus that man is causing the Earth to warm begins to crack. …

Rich Lowry shares him impressions of four candidates.

Good Spine posts.

Power Line with a couple of posts on Clinton’s Pakistan misstep.

… In an email message alerting us to his report, Smith writes that he “can’t believe we all missed this at the time.” It remains to be seen whether anyone but Smith will take note. In the meantime, at Hot Air Bryan expands on the revelations vouchsafed in Ms. Hillary’s interviews and concludes:

So Hillary Clinton, smartest woman in the world and veteran of flying into the world’s dangerous hot spots alongside comedian Sinbad, got the Pakistani elections entirely, completely and utterly wrong in all respects. …

One of CNN’s blogs notes Biden picked up on Clinton’s gaffe.

… The Delaware senator was responding to news that Clinton suggested in two recent interviews that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is up for reelection this month.

Musharraf was actually reelected in October, and the upcoming Pakistani elections are parliamentary, not presidential.

“We have a number of candidates who are well-intentioned but don’t understand Pakistan,” Biden said at a campaign event Tuesday. “One of the leading candidates — God love her.”

“There are good people running,” continued the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has made his foreign policy credentials a centerpiece of his long shot presidential bid. “But to say Musharraf is up for election! Musharraf was elected — fairly or unfairly — president six months ago. It’s about a parliamentary election!” …

Walter Williams on greed and need.

Demagoguery about greedy rich people or greedy corporate executives being paid 100 or 200 times their workers’ salaries is a key weapon in the politics of envy. Let’s talk about greed, starting off with Merriam-Webster’s definition: “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.”

That definition is a bit worrisome because how does one know what a person really needs? It’s something my economics students and I spend a bit of time on in the first lecture. For example, does a family really need one, two, three or four telephones? What about a dishwasher or a microwave oven? Are these excessive desires? If you say these goods are really needed, then I ask, how in the world did your great-grandmother and possibly your grandmother, not to mention most of today’s world population, make it without telephones, dishwashers and microwave ovens? “Need” is a nice emotional term, but analytically, it is vacuous. …

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Josh Patashnik wonders what various Dems think about Darfur.

Did Hillary Clinton criticize her husband for not intervening in Rwanda? Mike Crowley blogged about this on The Stump last week. Then George Stephanopoulus asked her about Rwanda on his Sunday morning show, and Crowley went back to the Rwanda issue, again on The Stump, yesterday.

I’m always interested in history, and particularly in the history of mistakes. But, frankly, I’m more interested in saving the living than in figuring out who’s responsible for the dead long ago. You know, that’s why I’m more interested in Israel than in the Holocaust. There are living Jews in Israel who need to be allowed to defend themselves. The Holocaust, that’s about dead Jews. Nothing can be done for them.

So I am interested in what Hillary thinks about intervening in Darfur. Is she for it? And, if she is, just how much is she for it? The sad truth is that she isn’t for it at all. There’s a silent agreement among the Democrats not to talk seriously about Darfur. But, about Africans living and threatened with death, Darfur is–how shall I put it?–more salient than Rwanda. I’d be interested also in what Barack Obama thinks about Darfur. …

Want a clue about Iowa? Read John Fund.

The trouble with the Iowa caucuses isn’t that there’s anything wrong with Iowans. It’s the bizarre rules of the process. Caucuses are touted as authentic neighborhood meetings where voters gather in their precincts and make democracy come alive. In truth, they are anything but.

Caucuses occur only at a fixed time at night, so that many people working odd hours can’t participate. They can easily exceed two hours. There are no absentee ballots, which means the process disfranchises the sick, shut-ins and people who are out of town on the day of the caucus. The Democratic caucuses require participants to stand in a corner with other supporters of their candidate. That eliminates the secret ballot.

There are reasons for all this. The caucuses are run by the state parties, and unlike primary or general elections aren’t regulated by the government. They were designed as an insiders’ game to attract party activists, donors and political junkies and give them a disproportionate influence in the process. In other words, they are designed not to be overly democratic. Primaries aren’t perfect. but at least they make it fairly easy for everyone to vote, since polls are open all day and it takes only a few minutes to cast a ballot.

Little wonder that voter turnout for the Iowa caucuses is extremely low–in recent years about 6% of registered voters. Many potential voters will proclaim their civic virtue to pollsters and others and say they will show up at the caucus–and then find something else to do Thursday night.

All of which means that the endless polls on the Iowa caucuses are highly suspect. …

Want to think Iowa is silly? Read Hitchens.

… So, once you subtract the breathless rhetoric about “surge” and “momentum” and (oh, Lord) “electability,” it’s finally admitted that the rest of the United States is a passive spectator while about half of 45 percent of 85,000 or so Republican caucus voters promote a provincial ignoramus and anti-Darwinian to the coveted status of “front-runner” or at least “contender.”

Now, something as absurd and counterdemocratic as this can be so only if the media say it is so, and every four years for as long as I can remember, the profession has been promising to swear off the bottle and stop treating the Iowa caucuses as if they were a primary, let alone an election. Credit Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post for being the first writer this year to try to hold his fellow journalists to that pledge:

Without that massive media boost, prevailing in Iowa would be seen for what it is: an important first victory that amounts to scoring a run in the top of the first inning.

“It stinks,” says veteran political reporter Jack Germond. “The voters ought to have time to make a considered decision, and the press ought to be a little less poll-driven, and we’re not.” Between the coverage and the hyper-compressed campaign calendar, he says, “the whole system this year is absolutely a disgrace.” …

Jim Taranto was on a roll. He posts on Clinton as his Dem choice and the NY Times pick of Bill Kristol for Op-Ed columnist. And he slaps around the NOW girls.

Remember when Japan was going to have us for lunch? Then it was China. Well,according to a LA Times op-ed, China isn’t the economic dragon we’ve been sold.

The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.

The story’s unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China’s economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.

About 40% smaller.

China, it turns out, isn’t a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

What happened to $4 trillion in Chinese gross domestic product? …

Michael Barone with lessons from the surge.

There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq.

Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done.

We have seen this before in American history. …

Kansas City has cool walls on the library’s parking garage.

John Fund has interesting background on “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

“Charlie Wilson’s War,” the film treatment of how a party-hearty Texas congressman teamed up with other Cold Warriors to humiliate the Soviet Empire and hasten its end, is a box-office success. After the failure of preachy political films, like “Lions for Lambs” and “Rendition,” Hollywood will credit the movie’s appeal, in part, to its witty dialogue and biting humor. Fair enough. But the film offers another lesson, for both Hollywood and Washington: Good things can happen when principle trumps partisanship.

I met Charlie Wilson in his heyday in the 1980s. He was an operator and a carousing libertine. But he was honest about it, promising constituents that, if he were caught in a scandal, “I won’t blame booze and I won’t suddenly find Jesus.” He called himself a Scoop Jackson Democrat, after the hawkish senator from Washington state. Mr. Wilson was fiercely anticommunist.

In 1981, two years after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson visited refugee camps in Pakistan at the prodding of Joanne Herring, a conservative Houston socialite he’d been dating. There he saw starving families and Afghan children whose arms had been blown off by explosives disguised as toys. “I decided to grab the commie sons o’bitches by the throat,” he told me in a recent interview. …

Pickerhead apologizes for missing three days last week. Time was filled with family and celebrating.

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Adam Smith.org provides a chance for some nanny state humbug.

As Santa Claus sets off to drop presents down the chimneys of innumerable households on Monday night, let’s hope that he has got the right paperwork.

Claus, of course, is just an alias. He’s really Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, on the southern cost of Turkey. The EU (foolishly) isn’t admitting Turkey to the Union, so Claus needs a visa and a work permit to run his Christmas delivery service in the UK.

His elves, of course, would be bound by the child labour regulations. Working at midnight on 24 December would be right out. And Claus would have to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau in order to work with young people. …

Time for serious stuff. Some of our favorites have Bhutto thoughts. John Burns of NY Times is first.

Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at age 54 on Thursday in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, spent three decades navigating the turbulent and often violent world of Pakistani politics, becoming in 1988 the first woman to be democratically elected to lead a modern Muslim country.

A deeply polarizing figure, the self-styled “daughter of Pakistan” was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office amid a swirl of corruption charges that ultimately propelled her into self-imposed exile in London, New York and Dubai for much of the past decade. She returned home only two months ago, defying threats to her life as she embarked on a bid for election to a third term in office, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy. …

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today’s events a horrible inevitability. As I always say when I’m asked about her, she was my next-door neighbor for a while – which affects a kind of intimacy, though in fact I knew her only for sidewalk pleasantries. She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be – though in practice, as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world’s most corrupt political classes. …

Christopher Hitchens.

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan’s military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her. …

John Podhoretz in Contentions.

… American politics would dearly love to take a holiday from history, just as it did in the 1990s. But our enemies are not going to allow us to do so. The murder of Bhutto moves foreign policy, the war on terror, and the threat of Islamofascism back into the center of the 2008 campaign. How candidates respond to it, and issues like it that will come up in the next 10 months, will determine whether they are fit for the presidency.

Ralph Peters.

FOR the next several days, you’re going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

Her country’s better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and “hardheaded” journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.

In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency. …

There’s still an election season. Peggy Noonan reviews the candidates.

By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.

But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.

Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They’re the reason we get up in the morning. “What happened?” “Who won?”

This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. …

Corner post on Clinton’s roles in Bill’s administration.

Express, UK calls for school vouchers. Seems the educrats are busy ruining their schools too.

… The state must play an enabling role by giving parents vouchers worth the average educational spending per pupil and the freedom to spend them at any school which will take their youngsters for that price.

Bad schools must be allowed to wither on the vine and good ones to expand. Headteachers must be free to innovate without having to first get the say-so of White­hall bureaucrats. Educ­at­ion ministers must in future do much, much less.

Opponents of enhanced par­ental choice, such as Mr Balls, say what most parents want is for their local school to be a good school. That is the ideal situation but, as Lib Dem education spokesman David Laws has noted, that is an aspiration, not a policy. A policy choice through a voucher Parental requires a mechanism for making it happen. scheme is precisely such a mech­anism.

A continuation of commandments from Mr Balls is not.

Division of Labour posts on global climate change – circa 1907. Seems the ice industry was in trouble because of a cool summer.

… Why no Congressional calls for subsidies for ice farmers? Oh yeah, in 1907 the United States hadn’t yet experimented in a big way with the narcotic effects of government subsidies.

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In honor of Mary, Pickings has another Ladies’ Day. We begin with The Motherland is Calling. This is the iconic image of Russia at war. We also included a picture of the memorial the Soviets placed on a famous hill in Stalingrad (now Volgograd)

Claudia Rosett starts off Ladies Day with a piece on the next UN hate-fest against Israel and the U. S.

At the United Nations, ‘tis the season to bankroll hatred of Israel and America — via pricey preparations for a 2009 gathering dubbed the “Durban Review Conference,” or Durban II. Right now, plans have advanced from general talk of funding this jamboree out of the U.N. regular budget, and have homed in on a figure of $6.8 million which the U.N. budget committee is poised to approve. Unless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes it her business to somehow block the money — and fast — this means that Americans, as top contributors to the U.N. budget, can look forward not only to being vilified at Durban II along with our democratic ally, Israel, but also to picking up the biggest share of the tab for this next landmark U.N. exercise in bigotry.

Durban II is of course being planned as the follow-up to the U.N.’s notorious 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa. Convened under the pretext of fighting racism, that conclave erupted into a frenzy of malice toward America, and even more specifically, Israel. Colin Powell, then secretary of State, had the integrity to withdraw the U.S. delegation, and publicly tell the U.N. organizers: “You do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of ‘Zionism equals racism;’ or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world — Israel — for censure and abuse.” …

Remember how poorly Israel did in the 2006 war with Hizbullah? Caroline Glick discovered why. Olmert put the lawyers in charge.

… The legal establishment’s ardor for the Second Lebanon War was exposed on Tuesday with the publication of the testimonies of Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit before the Winograd Committee which the Olmert government established to research the war’s failures. In their testimonies both men shared their perception of the war as a great victory of lawyers in their campaign to “lawyerize” – or assert their control – over Israeli society.

In his opening statement, Mazuz extolled the war as “the most ‘lawyerly’ in the history of the State of Israel, and perhaps ever.” He explained, “The process didn’t begin in Lebanon 2006. It… is a gradual process of ‘lawyerizing’ life in Israel.”

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.

As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was “the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can’t identify any confrontation… or … demands to ‘Let the IDF win.’” …

… What has changed is the focus of military and political leaders in conducting war. Before the advent of legal dominance, commanders and political leaders devoted themselves to winning wars. Today they concentrate their efforts on avoiding criminal indictments. …

Suzanne Fields says Anne Frank would be 78 now.

Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, and the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy. — Diary of Anne Frank

AMSTERDAM — I climbed the narrow, steep steps to the attic of the Anne Frank House to look out the window at the tree that gave a young girl hope. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez names the real men of the year.

If I were the editor of Time magazine, I’d have three men on the famous year-ending issue. My men of the year would be Gen. David Petraeus, with Sen. John McCain and Joe Lieberman as his Beltway wingmen.

Not to crowd the cover too much, but the mission takes a few good men: I’d make sure that George W. Bush (the commander in chief who put Petraeus where he is) and the American soldier (who does the work every day) got in the picture as well.

When Mitt Romney appeared on “Meet the Press” a week before Christmas, there wasn’t even five minutes of an hour-long program devoted to Iraq. That wouldn’t have happened had Romney been on as recently as last spring and summer. Just ask the Senate candidates who were on the same program in the run-up to the November 2006 elections if they were asked about Iraq, and how often. …

Noemie Emery with good Clinton profile.

What is one to make of Hillary Clinton, now that her front-running campaign seems to be foundering? Pretty much what one made of Al Gore when his campaign faltered.

2008 has barely begun, but already it seems quite a lot like 2000. There is a sense of deja-vu-all-over-again as Bill Clinton’s over-ambitious First Lady replays his vice president’s fate. The former VP and the former first lady have remarkable similarities. Both Gore and Hillary wanted to be president for a most of their lives, and with an uncommon ferocity. Each one’s rise through the ranks came about via family members — his father; her husband. Both rose to fame on the wings of Bill Clinton, who is proving to be a mixed blessing for both. Each began a campaign in a position of almost impregnable power, which each one subsequently (and quickly) undermined by errors of judgment and character. In short, what we see here are two campaigns that began with a huge amount of familial and institutional support for candidates who rose exclusively through the power of their respective situations, and who, in the end, are inept politicians and thus in over their heads in a high-stakes campaign. …

Maureen Dowd is back on the Clintons.

Once it was about Hillary, but now, of course, it’s about Bill.

Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let’s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we’re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We’ll be heroes.

It worked for Bill and Hillary in ’92 and ’96. It didn’t work in the health care debacle. Will it work in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

“For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,” said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.” …

Kimberley Strassel takes a long look at Huck. She doesn’t like what she sees.

As pigs in pokes go, the Democratic Party bought itself a big one in 1988. Michael Dukakis was relatively unknown, but he was also the last man standing. Only too late did his party, along with the rest of the country, realize Mr. Dukakis was a typecast liberal–a furlougher of felons, and a guy who looked mighty awkward in a tank.

This is what happens when a party takes a flyer, and it could be Republicans’ turn with Mike Huckabee. The former Baptist minister and governor of Arkansas is surging in Iowa, and is tied with Rudy Giuliani in national polls. He’s selling his party on a simple message: He’s not those other guys, with their flip-flops and different faiths, and dicey social positions. As to what Mr. Huckabee is–that’s as unknown to most voters as the Almighty himself.

Mr. Huckabee is starting to get a look-see by the press, though whether the nation will have time to absorb the findings before the primaries is just as unknown. The small amount that has been unearthed so far ought to have primary voters nervous. It isn’t just that Mr. Huckabee is far from a traditional conservative; he’s a potential ethical time bomb. …

Neither did Peggy Noonan.

I didn’t see the famous floating cross. What I saw when I watched Mike Huckabee’s Christmas commercial was a nice man in a sweater sitting next to a brightly lit tree. He had easy warmth and big brown puppy-dog eyes, and he talked about taking a break from politics to remember the peace and joy of the season. Sounds good to me.

Only on second look did I see the white lines of the warmly lit bookcase, which formed a glowing cross. Someone had bothered to remove the books from that bookcase, or bothered not to put them in. Maybe they would have dulled the lines.

Is there a word for “This is nice” and “This is creepy”? For that is what I felt. This is so sweet-appalling.

I love the cross. The sight of it, the fact of it, saves me, literally and figuratively. But there is a kind of democratic politesse in America, and it has served us well, in which we are happy to profess our faith but don’t really hit people over the head with its symbols in an explicitly political setting, such as a campaign commercial, which is what Mr. Huckabee’s ad was. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez rounds out the Huckabee hat-trick suggesting politics makes strange alter-fellows. That in reference to whose church he visited Sunday before Christmas.

… The problem with this particular church is its pastor. It is no secret that evangelicals and Catholics have their theological differences. If we didn’t we’d all be under the same church roof like once upon a time. But Hagee has been particularly outspoken beyond his Cornerstone Church, as a supporter of Israel and a prolific writer. His activism has brought some attention to his views on the Catholic Church.

In Hagee’s “black history” of the Catholic Church, for example, Catholics were far from only guilty of sins of omission when it came to the Nazis, they also gave Hitler his blueprint, according to Hagee. In a speech this year, Hagee pointed to the Catholic Church as having provided the jumping-off point for the Holocaust, claiming: “That was really drawn by the Roman church. [Hitler] did not do anything differently. He only did it more ruthlessly, and on a national scale.” The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has long been concerned about Hagee’s rhetoric, calling him a “veteran bigot,” accusing him of distorting Catholic teachings and misrepresenting Church history. The League has cautioned that, “Tone matters … and Hagee’s tone is nothing but derisive.” …

Sarah Lueck in WSJ reports on the one senator who works for us.

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday afternoon, when most senators were preparing to leave Washington for the holiday recess, Tom Coburn was declaring his intention to stick around.

“The floor’s going to be open,” said the 59-year-old Oklahoma Republican. “I’m going to have to be here…to try to stop stuff.”

Stopping stuff is Sen. Coburn’s specialty. In a Congress that has had trouble passing even the simplest legislation, Sen. Coburn, who proudly wears the nickname “Dr. No,” is a one-man gridlock machine. This year, the senator, who indeed is a medical doctor, single-handedly blocked or slowed more than 90 bills, driving lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to distraction.

He blocked a ban on genetic discrimination by health insurers. He thwarted a bill to set up a program to track patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Also nixed: an effort to promote safe Internet use by children and a resolution to honor the late environmentalist Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth. …

Melanie Phillips with outstanding post on the crumbling of the globalony idea.

And now for some good news. Geophysicist David Denning writes:

‘South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In north-eastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered. …

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The next couple of nights are very full. Just as well, since Pickerhead will be traveling and posting is uncertain for Christmas day and Wednesday. Lots of good stuff both nights.

Jeff Jacoby on the Muslim war against women. We lead with this because tomorrow we honor Mary with Ladies’ Day. A day when all contributors will be female. This will be a perfect example of one of the reasons the Islamic world is so backward, since half the citizens are not allowed to fully participate in their culture. Of course, don’t look for the left-leaning ladies of NOW, or any other part of the West’s “feminist” movement to protest the treatment of Muslim women.

THE “QATIF GIRL” won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier, Sudan’s president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly demanding her execution.

In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in nonmarital sex.)

The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor. But for every “Qatif girl” or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes. …

Mark reviews the candidates’ Christmas ads.

This guy Huckabee is some kind of genius. A week ago, you had to be the pope or the queen to do your own big televised Christmas message. But now, since Huck climbed into his red sweater and hired George Lucas to do the notorious “floating cross” effect, every single-digit nickel ‘n’ dime presidential candidate is donning his gay apparel and trolling the ancient Yuletide carol. I haven’t seen so much festive knitwear since “The Andy Williams Christmas Show” 1973.

In seasonal market-share terms, the former Arkansas governor remains the Huckabing Crosby, the pioneer in whose footsteps all others scamper to play Perry Como and Harry Belafonte. Barack Obama’s message is warm and fuzzy and carefully poised, with one of his kids saying “Merry Christmas” and the other “Happy Holidays.” If he had a third, she’d presumably be wishing you a hearty Kwanzaa or or hailing Bob Kerrey with a cheery “Allahu Akbar!”

Ron Paul is the only candidate with the courage to be filmed in front of an artificial tree. Hmm.

In Sen. Clinton’s Christmas message, Hillary is bundling up presents for all of us. They’re beautifully wrapped, but oddly, instead of putting the name of the intended recipient on the gift tag, she’s written out what’s in them: “Universal Health Care,” “Alternative Energy,” “Middle-Class Tax Cuts.” Strange. “Where did I put ‘Universal Pre-K’?” she says. “Ah, there it is.” If you thought Christmas at the mall was too materialistic, this is bonanza time. Message: It Takes A Santa’s Village Staffed By Unionized Government Elves To Raise A Child, and I’m Santa and you’re gonna need a much bigger chimney for all the federal entitlements I’ll be tossing down there. Your stocking’s gonna be packed tighter than Monica in fishnets.

And yet it’s a strangely cheerless message. Less Santa than Frosty the Snowqueen. …

John Podhoretz puts polls in context.

… Turnout in the Iowa caucuses is expected to be somewhere around…this is serious…five percent. That means five percent of the state’s universe of Republicans will attend a Republican caucus meeting, and five percent of the state’s Democrats will attend a Democratic caucus meeting. According to Blumenthal of pollster.com, “The historical high for turnout in the Iowa Caucuses was 5.5% of adults for the Democrats in 2004 and 5.3% of adults for the Republicans in 1988.”

Now here’s what this means. For a poll to achieve a measurable degree of scientific accuracy, a pollster “would need to screen out nineteen out of twenty otherwise willing adults in order to interview a combined population of Democratic and Republican caucusgoers strictly comparable in size to past caucus turnouts.” Because no pollster can afford to do such a thing — to reach thousands of people and then discard the results from 95 percent of the phone calls — each polling firm has to come up with its own theory of how best to locate and identify likely voters in sufficient numbers. That’s why, Blumenthal says, the results of each poll vary so wildly. …

The Captain posts on the chance Bush might kill a lot of the earmarks.

The omnibus spending bill made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue this week, and it could have slid all the way down on the grease it contains from over 9,000 earmarks. In remarks yesterday, George Bush warned that his budget director will look at ways to eliminate wasteful spending, and thanks to Congressional dishonesty, he may have a way to do it:

The White House threatened yesterday to cancel thousands of pet projects that Congress inserted into a massive spending bill before leaving town this week, a move that could provoke a fierce battle with lawmakers in both parties who jealously guard their ability to steer money to favored purposes. …

And he has the goods on the media Iraq bias.

Pew Research Center issued a stinging indictment on Wednesday regarding the press coverage of Iraq this year, one that shows a subtle but clear editorial bias. The news media gave plenty of attention to the war in Iraq when they could show it as a failing enterprise, with half of all their coverage focusing on anecdotal stories of violence. When the success of General David Petraeus made even that coverage difficult, media outlets simply stopped reporting on Iraq (via Wake Up America): …

He also posts on the Bill Clinton column from Gene Robinson.

… reporters who have tallied his words say that he talks more about himself than about his wife — at a ratio of about 9 to 1.

 

And Michael Goodwin says to Bill Clinton, “It’s about Hillary, stupid!”

Something was bugging me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it hit me. While I was reading about the campaign, the realization came like a thunderbolt: I’m tired of Bill Clinton.

Tired of his half-truths and full lies about where he stood on Iraq. Tired of his bull, as when he says he’d campaign for Hillary “if we weren’t married” and calls her a “world-class genius.” Tired of his whining, as when he says the media has been too tough on her and too soft on Barack Obama.

All of this is as real as the lovey-dovey, hug-and-smile photo ops of them in Iowa. It’s theater, staged for maximum political impact. We’re being played again on the two-for-the-price-of-one angle.

But, as always, the game for him is about him. A vote for her is a vote for him. Vanity is a big part of it, with her victory the succession legacy he was denied when Al Gore lost.

All true, but I fear there is more to it now. He wants to be The Man, again. He wants it so much that it’s not clear which President Clinton would be the President. The way he hogs the spotlight, the way he’s trotted out to rescue her when she’s in trouble and the way he sets the talking points mark him as the lead dog in the Clinton pack. Would he also make the decisions in the White House? All of them? Some of them? …

Power Line has another Clinton post.

One of the things that makes the Clintons such tiresome public figures is the low opinion in which they hold the American people. They know they’re incredibly smart and they think we’re incredibly stupid. The credulity of the press has frequently confirmed the Clintons’ perceptions of the American people.

To some extent, however, the spell is wearing off this year, as the Clintons’ calculations have become so transparent. Today’s Los Angeles Times reports, for example, with a mocking headline, “Gee, what a coincidence on the trail with Clinton.” Don Frederick and Andrew Malcolm write: …

Michael Barone has an overview of the GOP field.

… the preference for smaller rather than larger government is not as ample as it used to be. The strongest case against big government has been its failures in the 1970s, typified by gas lines and stagflation. But the median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1964, so he or she never sat in those gas lines or struggled to pay rising bills with a paycheck eroded by inflation. That demographic factor helps explain why Democrats today are promising big-government programs, unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, when the median-age voter remembered the 1970s very well.

America has enjoyed low-inflation economic growth for 95 percent of the 2008 median-age voter’s adult life. This is a record unique in history, which neither party is addressing particularly well. Democrats promise tax increases on at least some high earners (by not extending the Bush tax cuts past 2010), though tax increases are not the usual prescription for an economy that may be headed toward recession.

Republicans, facing an electorate half of which doesn’t remember the 1970s and most of which has not appreciated the generally good economy we’ve had since 2001, have yet to muster persuasive arguments for their policies.

WSJ op-ed explains why all the religious stuff is poaching on this week’s celebrations.

Christmas famously “comes but once a year.” In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, “Silent Night” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Jingle Bells” is quite another.

But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused. Religious Christians condemn taking “the Christ out of Christmas,” while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of “A Christmas Carol.”

A little history can clear things up. …

Fluorescent foolishness from feds.

A New Yorker cartoon from several years ago shows a vast, cubicle-filled office, with a manager explaining that the “dim fluorescent lighting is meant to emphasize the general absence of hope.”

Fluorescents aren’t all that bad. In fact, they’ve steadily gained market share in recent years. But from now on their popularity will rest not on consumer preferences, but on the force of law. If there’s anything about fluorescents that involves the general absence of hope, it’s that Congress has been able to mandate them with so little opposition. …

NY Times says somethings are on the job keeping rodents away from delis and bodegas in NY. Or course the government creeps are not happy.

Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.

Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.

When a bodega cat is on the prowl, workers say, rats and mice vanish. …

… But as efficient as the cats may be, their presence in stores can lead to legal trouble. The city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption. Fines range from $300 for a first offense to $2,000 or higher for subsequent offenses. …

Country Store posts on inconvenient incandescent illumination.

The last time the Donks controlled Congress we got the Gore-Toilet, the wimp flusher that saved no water because it required extra flushes and led to toilet smuggling. Well, the Donks are back in control of Congress and guess what? Now it’s Gore-bulbs: …