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Mark Steyn leads us to a Pakistani newspaper for an honest reporting of the latest honor killing in Canada.

Here is that article from Daily Times, Pakistan.

… Here’s a fact: Aqsa has been murdered. For us, denial is not an option. According to the United Nations Population Fund more than 5,000 women worldwide fall victim to honour killing. Denial is not an option.

According to the UN’s Special Rapporteur “honour killings had been reported in Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey and Yemen”. Egypt is 90 percent Muslim, Iran 98 percent, Jordan 92 percent, Lebanon 60 percent, Morocco 99 percent, Pakistan 97 percent, the Syrian Arab Republic 90 percent and Turkey 99 percent. Of the 192 member-states of the United Nations almost all honour killings take place in nine overwhelmingly Muslim countries. Denial is not an option.

More recently, honour killings have taken place in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Intriguingly, all these honour killings have taken place in Muslim communities of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Denial is not an option. …

Just like the rest of us, Karl Rove thinks this campaign is too long. But, he also points out where it is too short.

… despite the seemingly endless campaign, the nomination contest will be settled quicker than ever. In 2000, there were seven contests in five weeks beginning with Iowa. This time there will be contests in 32 states in roughly the same amount of time. …

 

… Cutting the length of the primary season by more than half by jamming the contests together raises the likelihood of a bandwagon developing for the candidate who wins the first few contests. This would allow a candidate to sweep to victory in the subsequent contests that rapidly follow because all that voters will see is his (or her) face on the evening news and in the papers.

Remember: Few Americans have seen these candidates up close, except voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In an abbreviated primary season, the weight these early state voters carry is even more exaggerated. Both parties could end up with a candidate chosen in haste and repented of at great cost.

If primaries and caucuses were spread out with weeks, not days and hours, between them, then voters in more states could learn more about the candidates. Candidates would have more time to come back from an early loss to a contender who was briefly the flavor of the moment in one state. …

The Captain tells you how the latest Clinton slime machine works.

Hillary Clinton just launched her new site The Hillary I Know, designed to humanize her to draw down her high negatives, amid much fanfare. On the same servers, ABC News discovered a few other websites that Hillary plans to launch. She has set up domains for websites designed to attack Barack Obama and to claim that they attacked her first: …

Robert Ardrey, playwright, screenwriter, wise observer and recorder of discoveries in anthropology and the behavioral sciences, is one of Pickerhead’s favorite authors. A central theme of his books, African Genesis, Territorial Imperative, Hunting Hypothesis, etc., is that the human race has descended from effective killing machines; social predators like wolves or African hunting dogs. Here is some of his prose;

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Ardrey thought Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” is foolishness that has caused much pain; most notably from the ideas of Karl Marx. Ardrey died in 1980, his views scorned by many. According to an article in the Economist, some in the natural sciences are coming around.

… Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence. …

Examiner editors on the spending bill.

If character is what we do when we think nobody is looking, then congressional leaders responsible for the 3,500-plus-page Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 have a lot of explaining to do. They should start by telling us why they posted their “omnibus spending bill” on the Internet only hours before voting on it and in a format that made searching the text laborious, at best. …

However, Club for Growth says there might be hope. Don’t get too excited yet.

President Bush said something earlier today that has fiscal conservatives giddy with potential joy. During a press conference, he announced his disappointment with the number of earmarks in the recent Omnibus spending bill. He said:

“I am instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spelling in the omnibus bill.”

This is president-ese for “through an executive order, I might tell the respective agencies to ignore the earmarks and to spend the money on higher priorities.”

This is a HUGE deal. With his signature, Bush could effectively wipe away almost all of this year’s earmarks. It would easily be the biggest achievement on wasteful spending of all time. …

Cafe Hayek tells us what is really crass.

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David Warren, our favorite Canadian, comments on the Great White Fleet and American power.

… Our children today are taught in school, when they are taught any history at all, that Imperialism “was” an unmitigated evil. Alas, this is an unmitigated lie, and it is to European Imperialism that not only we, but formerly subject peoples, owe lives much longer and less painful than those of our ancestors. For in addition to free trade, and the rule of law at sea, the fleets carried with them ideas, and technology — most significantly, certain principles of hygiene which, more even than the discoveries and techniques of modern medicine, contributed everywhere to longevity, prosperity, and health.

Imperialism is a mixed blessing for both conqueror and conquered, and the whole story is of course complex. It is not an avoidable subject. Notwithstanding the fond dreams of the willfully naive, war will remain a recurring feature of human history. And the power relations upon which war and peace alike are structured have always been with us, and will continue — so long as we are humans formed into large societies. And should we cease to be that, we only return to the conditions of the jungle.

Through the 20th century, the power of America grew and grew. A decade after the Great White Fleet’s circumnavigation, the entry of the U.S. into the First World War confirmed her status as one of the great powers. Her contribution to the Second World War was decisive, over both Atlantic and Pacific. Through the Cold War she provided the shield for the West, and all western allies, against the advance of Soviet Communism. And when that enemy collapsed, from its own internal contradictions, America emerged as the world’s “hyperpower” — a superpower with no plausible rival, whether military, economic, or social. …

Shorts from John Fund.

Howard Kurtz has overview of Clinton coverage.

After weeks of bad news, Hillary Clinton and her strategists hoped that winning the endorsement of Iowa’s largest newspaper last weekend might produce a modest bump in their media coverage.

But on Sunday morning, they awoke to upbeat headlines about their chief Democratic rival: “Obama Showing New Confidence With Iowa Sprint,” said the New York Times. “Obama Is Hitting His Stride in Iowa,” said the Los Angeles Times. And on Monday, Clinton aides were so upset about a contentious “Today” show interview that one complained to the show’s producer.

Clinton’s senior advisers have grown convinced that the media deck is stacked against them, that their candidate is drawing far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama. And at least some journalists agree. …

Jonah Goldberg has his take on the Clinton campaign.

The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill – and his cult of personality – will go down with the ship, too.

Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America “back to the future.”

Last summer, when he first started hawking Hillary like a door-to-door salesman, he told a crowd: “I know some people say, Look at them. They’re old. They’re sort of yesterday’s news.’ …

“Well,” Slick Willie said, grinning, “yesterday’s news was pretty good.”

Indeed, Hillary’s entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly involves designing a failed health-care plan and unsuccessfully hectoring her husband to move to the left. Still, as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen noted in a column last week, it was her decision to make the choice between her and Barack Obama a “referendum on a decade.”

So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination – heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses – I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: “America to Clinton(s): We’re Just Not That Into You.” …

John Stossel with more of his interview with Ron Paul.

Walter Williams explains how our schools have become so bad.

… How do we get out of this mess of abysmal student performance? Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has proposed an $18 billion increase in federal education programs. That’s the typical knee-jerk response — more money. Let’s delve a bit, asking whether higher educational expenditures explain why secondary school students in 32 industrialized countries are better at math and science than ours. In 2004, the U.S. spent about $9,938 per secondary school student. More money might explain why Swiss and Norwegian students do better than ours because they, respectively, spent $12,176 and $11,109 per student. But what about Finland ($7,441) and South Korea ($6,761), which scored first and second in math literacy? What about the Slovak Republic ($2,744) and Hungary ($3,692), as well as other nations whose education expenditures are a fraction of ours and whose students have greater math and science literacy than ours? …

Michael Lewis says it’s time college football players were paid.

… College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

But between buyer and seller sits the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to ensure that the universities it polices keep all the money for themselves — to make sure that the rich white folk do not slip so much as a free chicken sandwich under the table to the poor black kids. The poor black kids put up with it because they find it all but impossible to pursue N.F.L. careers unless they play at least three years in college. Less than one percent actually sign professional football contracts and, of those, an infinitesimal fraction ever make serious money. But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable.

Put that way the arrangement sounds like simple theft; but up close, inside the university, it apparently feels like high principle. …

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London Times says Iraq is the best story of the year.

By any measure, the US-led surge has been little short of a triumph. The number of American military fatalities is reduced sharply, as is the carnage of Iraqi civilians, Baghdad as a city is functioning again, oil output is above where it stood in March 2003 but at a far stronger price per barrel and, the acid test, many of those who fled to Syria and Jordan are today returning home.

The cheering has, of course, to come accompanied by caveats. Security has certainly been improved, but it remains fragile. Basra and the surrounding areas, handed back by Britain yesterday, are not as violent as they were a few months ago but this comparative peace has been bought at a high price in terms of tolerating intolerance (particularly towards women). …

Bret Stephens tells us why we should care about the 1907 sailing of the great white fleet.

On Dec. 16, 1907, the 16 battleships of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet sailed from Hampton Roads, Va., on a 43,000-mile journey around the world. The occasion was immediately understood as Teddy Roosevelt’s way of declaring that the United States, already an economic superpower, was also a military one. Unnoticed by most Americans, this past Sunday marked its centennial.

There is an enduring, bipartisan strain in American politics (think Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich) that wishes to forgo the military role. As wonderfully recounted by Jim Rasenberger in “America 1908,” the voyage of the Great White Fleet, as it was popularly known, was energetically opposed by members of Congress, who sought to cut off its funding when it was halfway around the world. Sound familiar? Mark Twain considered the venture as further evidence that TR was “clearly insane . . . and insanest upon war and its supreme glories.”

In fact, Roosevelt had sound strategic reasons for putting the fleet to sea. …

David Brooks has Clinton/Obama thoughts.

Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.

If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them.

But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness. …

Stanley Kurtz says Mark will lose in Canada.

Melanie Phillips blogs on Steyn’s case.

The lights are going out on liberal society – and it is the most liberal societies with their fingers on the ‘off’ switch. The thesis of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, that Europe was succumbing to an Islamist takeover, has been proved spectacularly correct — in Canada, and with himself as the designated victim. The New York Post reports that both Steyn and Macleans magazine, which reprinted a chapter of his book, are to be hauled before two Canadian judicial panels to answer the charge that they have spread ‘hatred and contempt’ for Muslims. And what was the heinous view Steyn vouchsafed to occasion such a charge?

…the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada’s liberalized, Western civilization.

Well excuse me, but some of us were under the impression that a global war was currently being waged by a section of the Islamic world in order to write the truth of that assertion in blood.

The irony, of course, is that by this action Canada is thus demonstrating that if any culture is incompatible with liberalised western civilisation, it is clearly Canada’s. The idea that certain arguments must not be made, and that to do so is to find oneself arraigned before a judicial tribunal, is the very antithesis of a liberal society. …

Ed Koch doesn’t think Al Gore should be trashing his country.

I may be old fashioned, but I think it’s wrong to publicly attack and criticize your own country overseas. It is doubly wrong to do so in the presence of those who hate the United States.

Al Gore, a former Senator from Tennessee, a former Vice President of the United States and the 2000 Democratic candidate for president, apparently believes that since, as he said, he is “not an official of the United States,” he is free to attack his native country anywhere.

This month in Bali, Indonesia, the United Nations held a conference on global warming for the purpose of extending the Kyoto Protocols, which will formally end in 2012. The United States — concerned about Kyoto’s effect on economic growth — has refused to ratify the Protocols. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate rejected then Vice President Gore’s advice and voted 95-0 to reject the Kyoto Protocols

Last week Al Gore appeared at the Bali conference and said, “I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that.” …

Cafe Hayek on how good weather forecasts help stores keep prices low.

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Mark Steyn says since so many of Hollywood’s anti-war flicks are box office bombs, maybe Mel Brooks is involved.

We’re all familiar with the famous plot of Mel Brooks’ The Producers: A wily impresario figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop musical, Springtime for Hitler. To date, Brooks has got a film and a show and a film-of-the-show out of this inspired idea. But, if he’s minded to go to the well a fourth time, he might like to modify the plot and make it the tale of a wily filmmaker who figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop anti–Iraq War movie.

Mark Cuban and Brian De Palma’s Redacted is not exactly Springtime for Saddam, but its flopperooniness is something to marvel at. In its first three weeks, the movie earned $60,456 at the box office. Which would be a disappointing take for your cousin’s summer-stock production of Brigadoon in a leaky barn theater in Maine, but is apparently a respectable haul for an award-winning motion picture ballyhooed for weeks on end in the national press. “The film traffics in, and clearly means to provoke, strong, unbalanced emotions,” declares A. O. Scott in his review for the New York Times. The strongest unbalanced emotion it provokes is a powerful visceral urge to say, “Well, I was thinking of going to the movies this weekend, but I figured I’d stay home and wash my hair.” …

David Warren has more Steyn defense.

… These days in Canada, if you’re feeling down and blue, and you think somebody hates you, you bring your case to a human rights tribunal. And the people you think hate you get that knock on the door, celebrated in the literature of the Soviet Gulag, and wherever else ideology triumphed over humanity in the 20th century’s painful course. Your daddy, your mommy, your brubber, or more likely some newspaper pundit gets dragged before a committee of smug, left-wing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators. After long delays that are costly only to the defendant and the taxpayer (justice delayed is justice denied), you will have the satisfaction of making your enemy squirm, in a kangaroo court where he is stripped of the right to due process, in which there are no fixed rules of evidence, in which the “judges” make up the law as they go along, and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations. …

 

… But to paraphrase the late Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the redneck trolls, and I did not speak out because I was not a redneck troll. Then they came for the male chauvinist pigs, and I did not speak out because I was not a male chauvinist pig. Then they came for Mark Steyn, and I did not speak out because I was not Mark Steyn. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.” …

Some shorts from John Fund.

Don Boudreaux thinks “sweet land of liberty” means petty local tyrants don’t get to run our lives.

… I’ve always understood the boast that America is a “sweet land of liberty” to mean that we Americans — each of us, individually — value our personal space and will tolerate no interference with our individual choices by anyone. As long as I accord others the same rights, I am free to do as I please. That, at least, is the ideal to which Americans traditionally aspire.

According the same rights to others means, of course, that I’m not free to punch my neighbor in the nose (unless he punches me first), take my neighbor’s car without his permission or rape his wife and daughters. I refrain from inflicting material harm on him and he reciprocates. It’s a wonderful arrangement.

Within the boundaries of this arrangement, neither my neighbor nor I am free to dictate the ingredients of each other’s diet or, more generally, each other’s lifestyle choices. I might be convinced — and correctly so — that my neighbor’s habit of smoking, eating lots of salt-encrusted trans fat-laden foods and sitting for hour upon endless hour watching television will likely shorten his life.

I can try to persuade him to make more healthful choices. But that’s it. In a free society, if my neighbor chooses to trade off longer life expectancy for greater gustatory or decadent pleasures, so be it. He is a free man. …

Ilya Somin with yet another example of the war on drugs interfering with the war against fundamental Islamofascists.

National Review shorts.

December 16, 2007

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Mark Steyn has more comments on the folks who think we should have no children.

This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” – or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.”

Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time, and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare that it’s surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it. …

… Last year I wrote a book on demographic decline and became a big demography bore, and it’s tempting just to do an annual December audit on the demographic weakness of what we used to call Christendom. Today, in the corporate headquarters of the Christian faith, Pope Benedict looks out of his window at a city where children’s voices are rarer and rarer. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe. Go to a big rural family wedding: lots of aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas but ever fewer bambinos. The International Herald Tribune last week carried the latest update on the remorseless geriatrification: On the Miss Italia beauty pageant, the median age of the co-hosts was 70; the country is second only to Sweden in the proportion of its population over 85, and has the fewest citizens under 15. Etc.

So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world’s oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade. That’s worth bearing in mind if you’re an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it’ll be his mom and dad’s place. …

Bill Kristol says the Iowa dems might be giving us all a present soon.

…First there was Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife in Iowa, claiming falsely–manifestly and provably–that he had “opposed Iraq from the beginning.” Can’t we move on from rewriting history for the self-aggrandizement of the perennially needy former president?

Then there was the Hillary campaign press release attacking Obama for saying he hadn’t spent his whole life planning to run for president (unlike some other candidates). No! Das Hillary Apparat unearthed one Iis Darmawan, 63, “Senator Obama’s kindergarten teacher [in Indonesia].” She recalled that little Barack had written an essay in kindergarten, “I Want to Become President.” Gotcha!

This is not a joke. The Clinton campaign put out a press release on December 2 trumpeting this discovery. One notes, with open-mouthed wonder, the brazenness of Hillary Clinton’s criticizing someone else for ambition. One marvels at the mind-boggling triviality of this particular nugget mined by the legendary Clinton research operation. One also, incidentally, asks: Do kids actually write “essays” in kindergarten? About becoming president of the United States? In Jakarta? Can’t we move on from ridiculous Clintonian attacks?…

… It will be good for the country to be able to move on, sooner rather than later, from the Clintons and their brand of politics. If the Democratic primary electorate brings this about, THE WEEKLY STANDARD will be first to say something we are not accustomed to saying to the Democratic party–thank you.

Peggy Noonan with a good column on Iowa events.

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge.

The Republican race looks–at the moment–to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress. …

… I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I’m just not sure he’d be pure enough to make it in this party. I’m not sure he’d be considered good enough. …

… A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It’s all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he’s there, and he’s a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife’s fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the ’90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they’ll love seeing him back in the White House. So they’ll vote for Hillary. Because she’ll bring him. “Two for the price of one.”

It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don’t miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don’t actually want Bill back in the White House?

Maybe. But maybe it’s this. Maybe they’d love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don’t want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo’s Nest and they’d love having Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don’t miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come? …

Abe Greenwald thinks Slick Willie has lost his touch.

… Last night, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton grew red-faced and tense as he grasped to defend his wife. He complained that Senator Barack Obama has garnered media support, as if to suggest good press is the Clinton clan’s exclusive entitlement.

Clinton tried to be elusive about trashing Obama for his lack of experience, but the bitterness was front and center. …

George Will thinks it would be a good idea to paralyze the Federal Election Commission.

… The six-person FEC — three members from each party — enforces the rules it writes about how Americans are permitted to participate in politics. You thought the First Amendment said enough about that participation? Silly you.

The FEC’s policing powers may soon be splendidly paralyzed. Three current FEC members, two Democrats and one Republican, are recess appointees whose terms will end in a few days when this session of Congress ends — unless they are confirmed to full six-year terms.

Four Senate Democrats decided to block the Republican, Hans von Spakovsky. Republicans have responded: “All three or none.” If this standoff persists until Congress adjourns, the three recess appointments will expire and the FEC will have just two members — a Republican vacancy has existed since April. If so, the commission will be prohibited from official actions, including the disbursement of funds for presidential candidates seeking taxpayer financing.

Democrats oppose von Spakovsky partly because when he served in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department he overruled staffers in the voting section who wanted to block a Georgia law requiring voters to present a government-issued ID before voting, as Americans do before boarding airplanes, entering many buildings, renting movies, etc. Von Spakovsky’s critics say the law is a way of suppressing voting by poor, mostly minority, citizens. Eighty percent of Americans — racists all? — favor such laws. The Supreme Court probably will settle the issue in a case concerning Indiana‘s voter ID law. …

Michael Barone with a short on the GOP wins last week.

… The minority party often does well in special elections; a voter knows that his vote will not determine which party controls the House. The fact that Democrat Nikki Tsongas won by only 51 to 45 percent in the very seriously contested race in October in Massachusetts 5 (a 57-to-41 John Kerry district in 2004) was bad news for Democrats. This week’s results were not bad news for Republicans. Yes, Latta ran 4 points behind Bush’s 2004 percentage, but that’s not as much as the 6 points Tsongas ran behind Kerry’s 2004 percentage. To me this suggests that the low job approval rating for Congress poses more problems for Democrats than for Republicans in 2008.

Howard Fineman’s views on the campaign so far.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is teetering on the brink, no matter what the meaningless national horserace numbers say. The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is a fantasy, and she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina – probably to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now, in momentum terms, the Democratic frontrunner.

On the Republican side, meanwhile, the race is shaping up in an even more unexpected way: a contest between two former Northern moderates (Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney) for the right to take on a Southern Baptist preacher, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture but not in Darwinian evolution. …

The Captain notices more fabrication from Clinton. He also posts on USAspending.gov and defends the CIA against some of its critics.

… I have had a lot of criticism for the intel community, but in this case they have a real grievance. For three years after the 9/11 attacks, they got overwhelming criticism for their inability to “connect the dots” and stop the terrorist attack before it started. Some of that criticism was justified, but a lot of it related more to bureaucratic hurdles in allowing communication between law enforcement and intelligence agents, as well as interagency barriers that had long stood in the way of cooperative intelligence. Instead of addressing these issues, the 9/11 Commission surfed that wave of recrimination to establishing even more bureaucratic obstacles rather than streamlining intelligence.

The failure to connect the dots came from bureaucratic interference. Failure to collect dots came from a lack of resources and poor prioritization. In the case of the former, America demanded a much more robust effort to collect intel that could prevent another 9/11. The administration and its agencies responded with aggressive tactics that have prevented dozens of attacks and identified hundreds of terrorists abroad. For six years, despite the bloodthirsty appetites of our enemies, we have not suffered another attack on our soil, and not even one against our diplomatic or military assets around the world, save in Iraq.

What have we done to celebrate that success? We have newspapers like the New York Times exposing the programs that have kept us safe and that have identified and caught major terrorists before they could strike. We have people in Congress like Nancy Pelosi screaming for prosecutions against the agents and the administration for efforts she personally witnessed and to which she never objected until years later. …

NY Post editors defend Steyn.

… Of course, a ban on opinions – even disagreeable ones – is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the “crime” of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about. …

Division of Labour points to evidence polar bears will be able to take care of themselves.

Borowitz and Scrappleface are here too. Andy says Clinton revealed Obama was a bed wetter at 3 years old.

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It is little noticed now, but an Examiner editorial calls attention to an important change in DC. One that will help us get the government under control.

It’s not just another day in the nation’s capital. At 11:30 a.m., Office of Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., will throw the switch on a new landmark of government, USASpending.gov. Mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA), which was co-sponsored by Coburn and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., USASpending.gov is a searchable, Googlelike database that puts most federal spending within a few mouse clicks for every American. (Obama won’t be present at today’s activities because he is on the presidential campaign trail.)

Today is a milestone because, as President Bush noted when he signed FFATA into law Sept. 26: “We spend a lot of time and a lot of effort collecting your money, and we should show the same amount of effort in reporting how we spend it. … Taxpayers have a right to know where that money is going, and you have a right to know whether or not you’re getting value for your money.” Taxpayers can know because USASpending.gov brings federal spending into the Internet age. It’s the place to go, for example, if you’re interested in how much the government spent last year on “consultants” or the number of federal contracts given to the company owned by your congressman’s biggest contributor. …

… it may take a few years before the good effects of USASpending.gov are fully felt, but here’s fair warning to the old-school politicians who thrive on pork-barrel politics: It’s no longer just the dwindling ranks of the mainstream media covering the big spenders. Starting today, legions of citizens and professional watchdogs have access to an unprecedented amount of information and data on where tax dollars are going. And they’re all connected via the Internet. The pig roast with tax dollars as the main course is coming to an end.

Byron York writes about when waterboarding works.

About a year ago, I had dinner with a man who played a key role in the U.S. war on terror. The talk turned to allegations of torture. He said that our policy should be that we do not torture. And we should adhere to that policy. Unless, that is, a truly special situation comes up and we decide that we have to violate that policy in an extremely narrow set of circumstances.

Then, we explain what we did — by that, I think he meant the executive branch would be open with members of Congress — and move on. What he couldn’t understand was the determination, on the part of some lawmakers, to pass a law that would deal with any and all situations in the future. It’s just not possible. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld tours the ideas floated about the CIA.

Boston Phoenix wonders if Huck is the new Jimmy Carter.

For the past 25 years or so, Republicans have made Jimmy Carter and his presidency one of their favorite punching bags — the modern equivalent of what the Democrats did to Herbert Hoover two generations ago. “Look what happens when you nominate someone without much experience, who comes out of nowhere,” they’ve said. Or, “He was just a little too odd or unconventional to be an effective president.”

Now, though, the Republicans may want to keep their opinions of Carter (for whom I worked in the 1976 presidential campaign) to themselves. That’s because if they nominate Mike Huckabee — who this past week was unexpectedly leading the field in at least one national GOP poll and in Iowa — they’re going to be lining up behind someone who looks awfully similar to their bête noir. If nothing else, Carter’s experience as a candidate in 1976 may provide the Republicans a convenient handbook on what’s likely to happen to Huckabee as the campaign progresses. …

Professor Bainbridge lays out the case against Mike. Says if he’s the pick, we’re Hucked.

In my continuing quest to decide which (if any) of the GOP candidates to support in the 2008 Presidential primaries, we come back to the case of Mike Huckabee. I’ve joked in the past about never giving Hope, Arkansas, another chance at the presidency, but more serious and substantial reasons for eliminating Huckabee have now become apparent. Here’s a few in no particular order: …

The Captain posts on the Clinton campaign.

… No one practices the politics of personal destruction like the Clintons. The difference now is that Hillary has proven so ineffectual as a candidate that they have to push harder than normal to get the message out. It also explains the sudden and mystifying meltdown that occurred after the November debate when Hillary got caught switching positions on illegal alien drivers licenses. She proved incapable of containing the damage, and so the campaign panicked and started lashing out in all directions as a distraction, using material they had previously kept for whispering-campaign use. …

… We all watched in amazement as Howard Dean melted down in the snows of January 2004, in Iowa and New Hampshire. Dean, however, was a novice on the national stage. The Clintons are supposed to be grand masters of politics, and their meltdown thus far is far more compelling — and far more revealing of their character.

News.com from Australia says get yourself out in the sunshine.

PEOPLE should sit outside in the middle of the day to help stave off potential deadly medical conditions, an Australian researcher says.

Current recommendations about when people should be exposed to the sun the most were wrong and did not allow people to get enough vitamin D, according to David Turnbull, a research fellow at the University of Southern Queensland’s Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health.

Vitamin D, when absorbed through the skin from UV rays, has been found to help prevent various cancers, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. …

Remember Kelo? That was when New London condemned land for transfer to developers. So how has that worked out? Ilya Somin posts in Volokh.

When the Supreme Court upheld the condemnation of private property for transfer to other private parties in Kelo v. City of New London, it was in large part on the theory that courts should defer to local governments’ judgments about when the use of eminent domain is needed to promote “economic development.” However, two and one half years after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city and some seven years after the condemnation proceedings were first initiated, little or no economic development has occurred on the condemned land. …

… If the Kelo condemnation ultimately ends up creating more economic costs than benefits, that would not be a surprising development. For reasons I have explained in great detail in several articles (e.g. here and here), economic development takings often harm local economies more than they benefit them. …

… What is striking about the Kelo takings is that this pattern held true even in a case where intense nationwide media scrutiny was focused on the local government and its chosen developer. The Day also deserves credit for providing some excellent local coverage of the controversy. In more typical cases, where there is much less media attention, local governments have even less incentive to actually produce the “economic development” that supposedly justified condemnation in the first place.

Daily Mail says the Pope is a globalony skeptic. What will Al say?

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. …

Fox News reports on the holes in the globalony theories.

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate “models” — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions. …

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In a Hill op-ed, Ron Christie says the polls are so yesterday, and lists some of W’s recent wins.

Recent polls placing President Bush’s approval numbers near 30 percent miss an important distinction: The policies and positions the president has advocated since 2001 have led to significant results in recent days. In short, the presidency of George W. Bush is surging, rather than waning, with little more than one year remaining in his term.

On the domestic front, the tax cuts the president pushed through the Congress have led to remarkable economic growth, low unemployment and record-high tax receipts that members of Congress can hardly wait to spend. New data released last week showed that America added 94,000 jobs in November 2007 — capping a remarkable 51 straight months in which jobs have been created in our economy. Despite partisan claims that the economy is soft, more than 8.3 million jobs have been created since August 2003 and unemployment remains low (4.7 percent). America remains open for business. …

Claudia Rosett says the UN is about to do a rerun of the 2001 trash America and Israel conference in Durban.

In its abuse of American taxpayer dollars and trust, the United Nations has come up with many creative projects over the years, ranging from terrorist schoolhouses in Gaza, to procurement fraud, to per diems for pedophiliac peacekeepers. Now, the U.N. is on the brink of channeling millions in U.S. funds to pay for an encore of its notorious America-bashing, Israel-trashing conference held six years ago in Durban, South Africa.

That U.N. jamboree, which opened in late August, 2001, was supposed to be all about the worthy cause of ending racism. Instead, it turned into such a frenzy of despotic and Islamofascist hatred, targeting America and Israel, that both countries walked out. A few days later, those events were overshadowed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States — hijackings driven by the same kind of hate stoked at the Durban conference.

Instead of saying “never again,” the U.N. is now preparing a repeat performance, which has acquired the nickname of Durban II. Masquerading as a “review” of Durban I, it is already shaping up as another hate-fest. Among the prime planners of this pow-wow are the despotisms of Libya, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

Stuart Taylor wonders about the efficacy of the Clinton camp’s complaints about Obama’s honesty.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?

The irony of her potshots at Barack Obama’s character has hardly gone unnoticed. Nor has the idiocy of her December 2 press release breathlessly revealing that “in kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President.’ ” This, the Clinton release explained, gives the lie to Obama’s claim that he is “not running to fulfill some long-held plans” to become president. Hillary was not, it appears, joking. …

 

… let’s take a trip down memory lane — from the tawdriness of the 1992 presidential campaign through the mendacity of the ensuing years — to revisit a sampling of why so many of us came to think that Hillary’s first instinct when in an embarrassing spot is to lie. …

Politico has the story in the GOP two wins last night.

Republicans retained two House seats in special elections Tuesday, including a hotly contested Ohio race that the two parties spent nearly $700,000 trying to win.

Republican officials immediately pointed to the issue of immigration, an increasingly pivotal theme in contests across the nation as well as in the presidential primary race, as a key factor in their Ohio victory. …

Shorts from John Fund.

The Captain was on a roll today. He posts on the GOP election success, Clinton, the National Review support of Mitt Romney, Hitch’s call for the end of the CIA, and concealed carry.

1. Had the Republicans lost their two special election contests to replace deceased GOP House members, one would see the papers filled with analyses of the coming debacle for Republican hopes in 2008. Now that they have won both handily, expect most to either ignore the races altogether or chalk up the wins to local Republican strength. However, pundits cannot easily dismiss the lessons from the race in Ohio: …

 

2. Hillary Clinton has begun to shift resources to New Hampshire as part of a firewall strategy after seeing Iowa slip from her grasp. However, it may be too late for the Granite State to contain the collapse of her once-invincible primary campaign. CNN shows a dead heat now in New Hampshire, as Hillary has squandered her lead: …

… A loss here would prove devastating to Hillary. She has had a consistent lead in the state that breathed new life into her husband’s faltering campaign in 1992, and a loss to Obama would have the opposite effect. It would give the one-term Senator national credibility and access to even more fundraising than the prodigious amounts he has already accumulated. It leaves the myth of her inevitability in tatters, and opens the door to the harder Left that supports Obama. …

3. The endorsement season seems in full swing now, and this time Santa’s dropped a big gift to Mitt Romney — the National Review endorsement. When William F. Buckley’s venerable journal speaks on effective conservatism, people listen, and Mitt’s team has reason to cheer: …

4. Christopher Hitchens proposes a radical solution to the problem of spin-cycle NIEs and interagency feuding. Rather than continue with efforts to reform the intelligence community, Hitchens argues for the elimination of the CIA and rebuilding our intel efforts from the ground up. It seems like a radical step during a time of war, but the agency may now have angered enough people on both sides of the aisle to make it possible: …

5. Jeanne Assam carried her pistol with her to church on Sunday. She did so legally, having received a license to carry a concealed weapon. If a weapon in church seems incongruous, it also became providential on this particular Sunday, as Assam stopped an assault that may have killed many more people than it did (via Memeorandum and many CapQ readers): …

IBD editors like concealed carry.

Every time there are multiple shootings, like those that occurred over the weekend at the Youth With A Mission missionary training center in Arvada, Colo., and later at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, we are lectured about the easy access to firearms in the U.S. and the dangers it creates.

But many are thankful today that Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard at New Life, had easy access to a gun when Matthew Murray entered the east entrance of the church and began firing his rifle. Murray was carrying two handguns, an assault rifle and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

If Jeanne Assam had not had a gun at her side, dozens more might have died in Sunday’s shooting at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. …

John Stossel goes mano a mano, libertarian to libertarian with Ron Paul.

Over the last few months, I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from people asking me to interview Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, so I did.

It’s refreshing to interview a politician who doesn’t mince words. It’s even more refreshing to interview one who understands the benefits of limited government. …

Walter Williams thinks the NAACP has been around long enough.

… The major problems confronting a large segment of the black community have little or nothing to do with racism — problems such as unprecedented illegitimacy, family breakdown, fraudulent education, crime and rampant social pathology. If white people became angels tomorrow, it would do nothing to solve problems that can only be solved by blacks.

But I’m somewhat optimistic. More and more blacks are seeing through race hustlers such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Doc Cheatham. An even more optimistic note is the financial decline of the NAACP. Declining black support is good evidence that the civil rights struggle is over and won. That’s not to say there are not major problems but they are not civil rights problems. …

John Tierney on how fishermen and Manhattan drivers can prevent the “tragedy of the commons.”

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Caroline Glick reacts to the NIE on Iran’s bomb.

The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.

The NIE begins with the sensationalist opening line: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Teheran halted its nuclear weapons program.” But the rest of the report contradicts the lead sentence. For instance, the second line says, “We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Teheran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, contrary to that earth-shattering opening, the NIE acknowledges that the Iranians have an active nuclear program and that they are between two and five years away from nuclear capabilities.

The NIE’s final sentence: “We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so,” only emphasizes that US intelligence agencies view Iran’s nuclear program as a continuous and increasing threat rather than a suspended and diminishing one.

But the content of the NIE is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the opening line – as the report’s authors no doubt knew full well when they wrote it. With that opening line, the NIE effectively takes the option of American use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons off the table. …

Bret Stephens says the NIE didn’t forecast the insertion of Soviet ICBM’s in Cuba either.

“The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.”

–Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, Sept. 19, 1962

Twenty-five days after this NIE was published, a U-2 spy plane photographed a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. It’s possible the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program will not prove as misjudged or as damaging as the 1962 estimate. But don’t bet on it.

Free market think tanks in Europe? John Fund has the details.

Mark Steyn gives a link to the Islamocreeps in Canada.

Stanley Kurtz on the complaint against Steyn.

… If this complaint carries, public discourse on the war on terror, Muslim immigration, and related topics would be transformed beyond all recognition (in Canada). It is as if, instead of simply rebutting or railing against conservatives and Republicans, liberal Democrats went to the Supreme Court and had the right side of the blogosphere, and nearly all conservative opinion magazines, placed into receivership. It is evident that the complainants are aware of this. They are determined to fundamentally reshape a kind of journalism “that has become increasingly pervasive in Canada in the last few years.” So this is not really a complaint against any particular factual claim or rhetorical move. It is instead a request that vast sections of heretofore legitimate reporting and opinion journalism be altogether banned. …

WaPo op-ed on what it is like to be on a campus and of the GOP persuasion.

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities’ role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote “God and Man at Yale” — in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others — making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views — commonplace in American society and among the political class — are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light. …

Daily Mail, UK wonders if Al Gore is doing good, or just doing well.

Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 a minute to deliver a poorly received speech.

The former American Vice-President was also accused of being “precious” at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming.

Many of the audience at last month’s Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000. …

Dilbert retails the argument for adding a recent president to Mt. Rushmore. And actually, he’s not joking.

News Biscuit says Brit wind farmers are facing competition from cheaper African wind.

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John Fund interviews one of the members of Zimbabwe’s opposition.

Zimbabwe is in the news this weekend as its 83-year-old strongman, Robert Mugabe, arrives in Lisbon to attend his first European Union summit meeting in seven years. His appalling human-rights record has led British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to boycott the meeting.

While the spotlight has not recently been on this deeply troubled land, there are dissidents who do not want the world to forget. Earlier this year I met with one of them, a tall, charismatic 41-year-old who attended the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual chatfest of thinkers and well-heeled idealists sponsored by the Aspen Institute.

But Arthur Mutambara, who leads one of the main opposition groups fighting the Mugabe tyranny, wasn’t in the Colorado Rockies to exchange pleasantries. He startled the crowd with blunt language that isn’t normal parlance for politicians from the developing world.

“We Africans are responsible for our problems, and we must take charge of our lives,” he said in a commanding, deep voice reminiscent of James Earl Jones. “We must move away from aid to genuine investment. We must ensure that after getting rid of a dictator we plant deep roots for the rule of law and actually improve the lot of the people. So when we who believe in democracy triumph, I ask you to judge us harshly if we fail to live up to our promises.” …

Paul Greenberg on Russia’s election.

The latest election results out of Russia are more Russian than ever, more’s the pity.

The latest czar had no problem arranging a victory that would have made old Mayor Daley or Boss Crump look like a piker. The outcome was so forgone a conclusion that the usual European election monitors didn’t even bother to show up. Besides. Vladimir Putin’s regime had delayed granting them visas for so long they were denied a chance to witness all the preparations for the big show. …

Stanley Kurtz posts at The Corner on the attempts by a Canadian Islamic group to censor Mark Steyn.

… This is a big deal. The blogosphere has so far largely missed it, but this attack on Mark Steyn is very much our business. There may be an impulse to dismiss this assault on Steyn, on the assumption that it will fail, that Steyn is a big boy and can take care of himself, and that in any case this is crazy Canada, where political correctness rules, rather than the land of the free. That would be a mistake. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s war on Mark Steyn and Maclean’s is an attack on all of us. I’ll say more in a moment about how a Canadian case can reach into America, but let’s first take a look at the goings on up north. …

One of Steyn’s critics is caught with his pants down. Cool thing is Mark does the honors.

…Hello, Mr Henley? Anybody home in there? Those are quotation marks, because they’re someone else’s words – not the blatant racism of the racist douchebag Steyn but of a prominent Scandinavian imam. It’s tempting to say to Jim Henley, “Douchebag, douche thyself”, and leave it at that. However, in an attempt to divine his thinking on the subject, I’d like to ask him this: …

David Warren comes to Mark’s defense.

… For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant’s right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers — for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

My hope is that this case against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s will be fruitful. It will be, if it inspires enough people — especially journalists, of all political persuasions — to express outrage at what has been done; and inspires Canada’s free citizens into the necessary political action to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves. The worst possible result is if the case fails to produce this response.

Ayann Hirsi Ali notes the times when Muslims are tolerant like when they tolerate the fundamentalist thugs.

… It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? …

Jeff Jacoby is not reassured by the Iran NIE.

… The intelligence agencies’ record for accuracy doesn’t inspire confidence. Not everyone embraced the NIE’s startling judgment. Even the UN’s nuclear inspectors were dubious. “We are more skeptical,” an official close to the inspection agency told The New York Times last week. “We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”

Given the history of US intelligence blunders, such skepticism is well warranted. The intelligence community badly underestimated Saddam’s nuclear progress before the first Gulf War and badly overestimated his stock of WMDs — a “slam-dunk,” George Tenet insisted — on the eve of the 2003 war. It was taken by surprise when Pakistan went nuclear in 1998s, just as it had been stunned when the Soviets went nuclear in 1949. The intelligence agencies didn’t expect Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. They didn’t foresee North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. They were blindsided by Sept. 11.

Now they conclude that the Iranians have shelved their nuclear weapons program. Two years ago they concluded the opposite. “Across the board,” the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission found in 2005, “the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors.” Considering their track record, that sounds about right.

Power Line spots a photo from Iran.

Division of Labour learning to love the big box store.

Coyote Blog provides perspective on wealth.

Hit and Run calls Bill Buckley on his love for smoking nazis.

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IBD editorial tells us how the UN cooked the books on sea level changes at the globalony confab in Bali.

… We have no problem with the IPCC taking control of its meeting destinations. But we do oppose the intellectual dishonesty of seizing control of data and torturing them into the outcome IPCC scientists are looking for.

The possibility of such fraud has been raised by Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. According to his June interview with the British Telegraph that was revisited on a Telegraph blog last week, the IPCC might have doctored data to show a sea- level rise from 1992 to 2002.

“Suddenly it changed,” Morner said of the IPCC’s 2003 sea-level chart, which is intended to convince the public that warming due to man’s activities is melting ice that will cause the oceans to rise to dangerous levels.

The change “showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 millimeters per year,” which just happens to be the same increase that was measured by one of six Hong Kong tide gauges. Morner said that particular tide gauge is “the only record which you shouldn’t use” because “every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment.”

A simple error by the IPCC? Not in Morner’s mind. “Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that,” he said. “It is a falsification of the data set.”

But what about Vanuatu, that little South Pacific island that’s supposedly drowning because Americans selfishly burn too much fossil fuel to drive their SUVs and heat and cool their McMansions?

“There is absolutely no signal that the sea level” around that island is rising, Morner said. “If anything, you could say that maybe the tide is lowering a little bit, but absolutely no rising.”

Because he’s at odds with the IPCC, Morner would be about as welcome at this year’s meeting as the International Climate Science Coalition has been. That group of international scientists, skeptical of the global warming theory, was told it could not present its information at the conference. …

Power Line posts on the subject and on an Alan Dershowitz appearance at the Hudson Institute.

Charles Krauthammer thinks the Mormon flap has some Huckabee origins.

… Huckabee has exploited Romney’s Mormonism with an egregious subtlety. Huckabee is running a very effective ad in Iowa about religion. “Faith doesn’t just influence me,” he says on camera, “it really defines me.” The ad then hails him as a “Christian leader.” …

 

… Every mention of God in every inaugural address in American history refers to the deity in this kind of all-embracing, universal, nondenominational way. (The one exception: William Henry Harrison. He caught cold delivering that inaugural address. Thirty-one days later, he was dead. Draw your own conclusion.) I suspect that neither Jefferson’s Providence nor Washington’s Great Author nor Lincoln’s Almighty would look kindly on the exploitation of religious differences for political gain. It is un-American. It is unfortunate that Romney has had to justify himself in response.

Mark Steyn was in the OC Register. He suggests we need a free market for housing and religion.

James Taranto has opinions about the worth of the youth vote.

Sorry, but if there’s one subject about which the cynics are always right, it’s the “youth vote.” It is a myth. Young people, by and large, simply do not vote, and there is no reason to think that will ever change. Candidates pursuing the “youth vote” are like Charlie Brown kicking that football–this time, every time, they’re sure it will be different. But it always ends with a WHAM!

The myth of the youth vote is a product of baby-boom liberalism, an extension of the urban legend that the “1960s generation” were a bunch of idealistic activists who vanquished racism and war. The truth is that the civil rights movement had already won by the time the first baby boomer came of age, in 1964; and while there was something of a youth movement against the Vietnam War, it was motivated principally by selfishness–i.e., fear of the draft–not idealism.

The Economist has interesting thoughts about food prices. Their thought is that costlier food provides a chance to get rid of farm subsidies and at the same time right the balance between rural and urban.

… Over the past few years, a sense has grown that the rich are hogging the world’s wealth. In poor countries, widening income inequality takes the form of a gap between city and country: incomes have been rising faster for urban dwellers than for rural ones. If handled properly, dearer food is a once-in-a-generation chance to narrow income disparities and to wean rich farmers from subsidies and help poor ones. The ultimate reward, though, is not merely theirs: it is to make the world richer and fairer.

WSJ contributor wonders if it makes sense to give to Harvard.

Bill Gates has $56 billion to his name. What would you do if he called your home asking you for some money? You’d hang up on the prankster, of course. Now, what would you do if Harvard, with its $35 billion endowment, called begging for cash? My wife and I take out our checkbook. But maybe we should be hitting up Harvard instead. …