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Mark Steyn, in Macleans, makes the point we have laws because we are civilized. Laws didn’t create our civilization.

One of my all-time favourite observations on Canada’s brave new Trudeaupia came from the great George Jonas, apropos the good old days when the Mounties’ livelier lads were illegally burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. With his usual glibness Pierre Trudeau blithely responded that if people were upset by the RCMP’s illegal barn-burning, perhaps he’d make it legal for the RCMP to burn barns. As Jonas observed, M. Trudeau had missed the point: barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong. …

… “A society’s first line of defence is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values,” wrote Walter Williams of George Mason University recently. “They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. Policemen and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct.”

“Restraint” is an unfashionable concept these days. I was lunching with an elderly chap in the early stages of dementia recently. He’s someone who in all the years I’ve known him has never used any vulgar language in public or private, but the waitress’s generous embonpoint caught his eye and he said to me (and half the restaurant) with all the blithe insouciance with which one might remark on the weather or the traffic, “I like big tits, don’t you?” Dementia removes inhibition, and so your private thoughts are now publicly expressed. Society at large has lost its inhibitions: whether that is a symptom of civilizational dementia will be for future generations to judge.

Corner post illustrates the above. It is Steyn again writing about the value of the first amendment which makes it difficult for mischievous laws to be written.

Speaking of laws, Jan Crawford Greenburg posts on Gitmo.

When I was getting ready for a trip to Guantanamo Bay last week, I read an article written last year by a young interpreter (and now lawyer) who was working with some of the attorneys for the detainees. Titled “My Guantanamo Diary,” it was a vivid and urgent piece that painted a grim portrait of a place where evil flourishes amid the scrub of the Cuban coastline.

In the article, the interpreter describes the anguish and helplessness she feels after meeting the detainees, most of whom she believes to be innocent. But initially she was conflicted: She admits to one of the lawyers for the detainees that the guards had seemed so friendly.

“Yeah, they’re nice,” the lawyer, Tom Wilner, a partner in the Washington office of Shearman & Sterling LLP, shoots back. “But this whole place is evil — and the face of evil often appears friendly.”

That perfectly captures Guantanamo: The face of evil often appears friendly.

It’s a sentiment shared by almost everyone you talk to, those on both sides of the debate. Soldiers and lawyers, military officers and human rights activists—everyone sees evil at Guantanamo.

They just believe the evil lies within different people. …

John Bolton writes for WaPo on the NIE.

The Captain compares Bolton’s and Cheney’s NIE thoughts.

… Between the two, I’d trust Cheney on this question. He has seen the data and received the briefing; Bolton is out of the loop now. Cheney has no reason to go easy on the ODNI or CIA, especially since the NIE contradicts what he has stated for the last few years on Iran. Cheney has more motivation to go on the attack than Bolton, and yet he seems content to let the NIE analysis stand. That should speak to its credibility.

Both men, however, make the same point about the limit of the intel that formed the basis of this analysis. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Until Iran fully complies with the IAEA and the UN Security Council, we know that we cannot verify their intentions or actions. We have no firm knowledge that Iran — which lied about this program for years until 2003 — has not moved its efforts elsewhere in the country to continue its weapons program. …

And the Captain posts on the problems of the Clinton campaign.

Once seen as an inevitability, Hillary Clinton may not win the first two contests in the primaries — and that may change the entire Democratic race. Having fallen into no better than a tie with Barack Obama in Iowa, Clinton now has lost significant ground in New Hampshire. She now leads by only six points, and her momentum has completely dissipated: …

Couple of good columns on free trade.

Tony Blankley thinks the country needs to have a good debate about free trade.

Other than the fight against radical Islam, the efficacy of free trade may be the most important issue pending before the American people and our government. Since the end of World War II, the principle of free trade has defined U.S. economic policy — and thus, to a large extent, the world’s economy. Globalization is the product of a long half-century of American free-trade policy.

Steve Chapman thinks there’s no debate.

Democrats yearn for the bounteous days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when the economy was flourishing, there were good jobs at good wages, and poverty was on the wane. So it’s a puzzle that on one of his signature achievements — the North American Free Trade Agreement — the party’s presidential candidates are sprinting away from his record as fast as they can. It’s as though Republicans were calling for defense cuts while invoking Ronald Reagan.

Even Hillary Clinton can’t bring herself to defend the deal her husband pushed through. Asked during a recent debate if she thought it was a mistake, she did everything but deny she’d ever met the man.

“All I can remember from that is a bunch of charts,” she chortled, in possibly the least believable statement of the 2008 campaign. “That, sort of, is a vague memory.” In the end, though, Clinton declared that “NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.” …

Allen Barra points out why Heisman candidates rarely succeed in the NFL.

University of Florida sophomore quarterback Tim Tebow is the odds-on favorite to win the 2007 Heisman Trophy this Saturday as the nation’s outstanding college football player. Since the colleges serve as a farm system for the National Football League and Mr. Tebow is the best player in college, he should be a cinch to make it in the pros, right?

Not according to history. In the modern era of the NFL, only a handful of Heisman Trophy winners have enjoyed genuine success in the pro ranks. …

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Power Line posts on Huckabee’s assertion his lack of foreign policy experience is analogous to Ronald Reagan. They think more like Jimmy Carter.

… When it comes to foreign policy, Huckabee more closely resembles another former governor, Jimmy Carter. It was Carter, not Reagan, who viewed foreign policy as an extension of his own character and personal principles. Carter stood for a foreign policy “as decent as the American people.” Reagan stood for defeating our enemies. When Huckabee frets about how Gitmo is making us appear to foreigners, when he asserts that “we broke Iraq,” and when he says he’s qualified to be commander-in-chief because of his character rather than because of his understanding of our enemies, it’s pretty clear that his foreign policy roots extend nowhere near the fertile soil of Reaganism.

The Line also posts on Harry Reid still hoping for defeat in Iraq.

Norman Podhoretz from Contentions starts a long line of posts on the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. Most everybody, except for Mike Huckabee (more on that later) has remarked on this report.

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. …

… I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. …

Max Boot

… So at the end of this NIE you come away knowing not much more than when you started. Basically you are left with the knowledge that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear work that probably won’t result in a bomb in the next couple of years but that could produce a weapon sometime thereafter. And most of those key judgments are delivered with only “moderate confidence.” Given the intelligence community’s consistent track record of being wrong in the past, especially about other nations’ nuclear programs (the CIA has been surprised in the past by, among others, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, India, and Pakistan) that doesn’t inspire much, well, confidence.

Gabriel Schoenfeld

… Without access to the underlying intelligence on which these back-and-forth assertions in this committee-produced document are founded, interpreting them involves groping in the dark. But the peculiar language, and the disclosure of dissenting views expressed by the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council, strongly hint that sharp internal divisions exist about the precise nature of the Iranian halt — if it is a halt at all.

Connecting the Dots, which has been highly critical of leaks of classified information, is left in the uncomfortable position of hoping for a leak of classified information that will resolve all the mysteries surrounding this new assessment of the Iranian nuclear program. Only one thing can be said with “high confidence” about this new NIE: when sharp divisions exist within the U.S. Intelligence Community, leaks are on the way.

Schoenfeld again answering Podhoretz’s suspicions about CIA crossing up Bush.

… There are significant ambiguities in this NIE, and as Max Boot rightly points out, it still leaves ample reason to worry about Iranian nuclear ambitions. But in the current climate of skepticism about the competence of the CIA and other intelligence bodies, the idea that intelligence officials engaged in a coordinated effort to cook the evidence seems impossible to credit. Even if there was a shared desire among all sixteen agencies to do such a thing (which seems implausible on its face) pulling off such a caper would be a hugely difficult task, and almost certainly beyond the capacity even of America’s most ingenious spies — assuming we even have any ingenious spies.

Although I remain as worried as Norman Podhoretz about the dangers posed by an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and though there is ample reason to wonder about the quality of U.S. intelligence, I would still have to put “low confidence” in his dark suspicions.

Third Schoenfeld;

A day has passed since the release of the new intelligence-community estimate of the Iranian program and the smell of rotting fish is growing stronger. Even the editorial page of the New York Times is wondering if the NIE erred on the side of incaution. It reports that an official “close” to the International Atomic Energy Agency “told the Times yesterday that new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.”

Any careful reading of the NIE makes its obvious that this is true. The report’s stark opening declaration – made with “high confidence” – that Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 is blatantly misleading. The only thing that was halted in 2003 was what the intelligence community calls the military side of Iran’s nuclear program. …

… But in dismissing Norman’s dark suspicions, did I treat his claim “a bit too literally,” as Ben Orlanski has written in the comments section in response to my post? Orlanski goes on to explain:

This isn’t a question of cooking the books to produce bogus information to defeat Bush. It is a question of how this was spun. The NIE report chose to lead with the made-for-headline finding about the halt to the program. But this isn’t really the most relevant part of the report, just the part that was pretty clearly intended to grab headlines. Is saying that a conspiracy? I don’t think so. I think the authors wanted to impact the political debate, and did so not by lying or creating bogus conclusions or reasoning, but simply by choosing to emphasize the part of their overall conclusions that played most pointedly into the political environment. [This] suggest[s] certain political canniness [on the part] of our intelligence agencies, and also suggests that they wanted to have an impact on ultimate policy. That is not their role, and there is something disconcerting about their assuming it.

With this I would entirely agree. If that is indeed what happened here, and the evidence that it did so is in front of our eyes, and if it is indeed what Norman was saying, then, like the intelligence-community’s disavowal of its 2005 NIE, I would have to disavow my previous “low confidence” estimate in Norman “dark suspicions” and join him in voicing equally dark suspicions of my own.

Abe Greenwald, also in Contentions, with the Dem reactions.

If Iran did halt its nuclear weaponization program in 2003, then we can thank the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Yet the Democrats consider the NIE an indication of the effectiveness of diplomacy. Here’s a round-up:

The Captain.

Roger Simon.

The Spectator, UK;

… What on earth is wrong with the American intelligence community? Granted that of necessity it can make public only the bare minimum of information, this report provokes a high degree of scepticism. It asserts:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.

But in 2005 this same intelligence community was saying:

“[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable.”

So are we now to assume that in 2005, Iran was ‘determined to develop nuclear weapons’ despite having ‘halted its nuclear weapon programme’ two years earlier? Were the intelligence community simply wrong in 2005? And if they were that incompetent then, why should we believe what they are saying now? …

Byron York has the last post on the NIE. Finally! This goes full circle to Huckabee’s opinion of the new NIE. He hadn’t heard of it. That’s right!

Power Line with a change of subject. Their view of the detainees at Gitmo is opposite Stuart Taylor’s.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear argument in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, in which foreign detainees challenge the legality and constitutionality of their detention as enemy combatants pursuant to the Military Commissions Act of 2006. To understand the issues in this case, I can’t think of a better source than this on-line debate presented by the Federalist Society. …

The Captain thinks the NY Times is “bailing on Hillary.”

The New York Times offers an unusually pessimistic appraisal of Hillary Clinton’s effect on the 2008 down-ticket races. Carl Hulse reports that Congressional incumbents and candidates have begun to fear that her nomination will energize a dispirited opposition and could cost the Democrats the seats they gained in 2006. It’s not exactly a new thought, but usually it gets expressed as Republican optimism (via Memeorandum): …

John Stossel has more on the tragedy of the commons.

My Thanksgiving column about how the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming but thrived once they switched to private cultivation made some people angry. One commented, “Sharing of the fruits of our labor is a bad thing?”

I never said that.

I practice charity regularly. I believe in sharing. But when government takes our money by force and gives it to others, that’s not sharing.

And sharing can’t be a basis for production — you can’t share what hasn’t been produced. My point is that production and prosperity require property rights. Property rights associate effort with benefits. Where benefits are unrelated to effort, people do the least amount necessary to get by while taking the most they can get. Economists have a pithy way of summing up this truth: No one washes a rental car.

It’s called the “tragedy of the commons.” …

Walter Williams has more on income mobility.

Listening to people like Lou Dobbs, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee lamenting the plight of America’s middle class and poor, you’d have to conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket. According to them, there’s wage stagnation, while the rich are getting richer and the poor becoming poorer. There are a couple of updates that tell quite a different story.

The Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal editorial “Movin’ On Up” reports on a recent U.S. Treasury study of income tax returns from 1996 and 2005. The study tracks what happened to tax filers 25 years of age and up during this 10-year period. Controlling for inflation, nearly 58 percent of the poorest income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005. Twenty-six percent of them achieved middle or upper-middle class income, and over 5 percent made it into the highest income group.

Over the decade, the inflation-adjusted median income of all tax filers rose by 24 percent. As such, it refutes Dobbs-Edwards-Huckabee claims about stagnant incomes. In fact, only one income group experienced a decline in real income. That was the richest one percent, who saw an income drop of nearly 26 percent over the 10-year period. …

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Mark Steyn tells us why we should miss Australia’s John Howard.

… What mattered to the world was the strategic clarity Howard’s ministry demonstrated on the critical issues facing (if you’ll forgive the expression) Western civilisation.

First, the prime minister grasped the particular challenge posed by Islam. “I’ve heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child,” said the Democrats’ Lyn Allison. “If it wasn’t the Greeks, it was the Italians … or it was the Vietnamese.” But those are races and nationalities. Islam is a religion, and a political project, and a globalised ideology. Unlike the birthplace of your grandfather, it’s not something you leave behind in the old country.

Indeed, the pan-Islamic identity embraced by many second and third-generation Muslims in the West has very little to do with where their mums and dads happen to hail from. “You can’t find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad,” said Howard, stating the obvious in a way most of his fellow Western leaders could never quite bring themselves to do.

“Raving on about jihad” is a splendid line which meets what English law used to regard as the reasonable-man test. If you’re a reasonable bloke slumped in front of the telly watching jihadists threatening to behead the Pope or Muslim members of Britain’s National Health Service ploughing a blazing automobile through the check-in desk at Glasgow airport, “raving on about jihad” fits in a way that President George W. Bush’s religion-of-peace pabulum doesn’t. Bush and Tony Blair can be accused of the very opposite of the traditional politician’s failing: they walked the walk but they didn’t talk the talk. That’s to say neither leader found a rhetoric for the present struggle that resonated. Howard did. …

Claudia Rosett keeps us up to date on the UN climate conference in Bali.

… Life’s much too short to read all the documents assembled already (especially when you could be making much better use of your time watching a superb film that did NOT get a Nobel Prize: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”). But just to provide a sample, here’s one of my favorites, found while browsing through so far. It’s an agenda item discussing the ways to ensure UN-style “Privileges and Immunities for individuals serving on constituted bodies under the Kyoto Protocol… .” Translation: They’re looking for a way to ensure that no matter what they do to the rest of us, we can’t do anything about it.

Lotsa election stuff today. George Will is first. He’s spotted a few candidates he doesn’t like at all in “None of the Below.”

… Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism: He wants Washington to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public, show more solicitude for Americans of modest means and impose more protectionism, thereby raising the cost of living for Americans of modest means.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And — 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note — America must have a Christian president.

Another pious populist who was annoyed by Darwin — William Jennings Bryan — argued that William Howard Taft, his opponent in the 1908 presidential election, was unfit to be president because he was a Unitarian, a persuasion sometimes defined as the belief that there is at most one God. The electorate chose to run the risk of entrusting the presidency to someone skeptical about the doctrine of the Trinity.

If Huckabee succeeds in derailing Romney’s campaign by raising a religious test for presidential eligibility, that will be clarifying: In one particular, America was more enlightened a century ago.

Lee Harris in Tech Central thinks Rudy was too rough and should listen to the boos.

… We don’t want our President to lose his head while all about are losing theirs, to paraphrase Kipling.

We don’t want them acting mean either. That is why I suggest that Mayor Giuliani, who has so much to commend him, should pay attention to the boos he received in the last debate. They may have been the best advice that he could have possibly receive at this point in his campaign: stay tough, but don’t play too rough. Many of us like the guy, and we don’t want him to give us reason not to.

Michael Barone with an Iowa overview.

Every so often, I page through my copy of the Constitution, searching for the section that says Iowa and New Hampshire vote first. I’ve yet to find it. But Iowa and New Hampshire are set to lead off the presidential voting on January 3 and 8. Right now, Iowa, where about 200,000 people–around 10 percent of registered voters–are expected to attend the party caucuses, is producing great ruction in both parties’ races. …

Now, as to the tactics Clinton learned in kindergarten. “I know you are, but what am I?”

James Taranto.

As Democratic primary voters experience pre-emptive buyer’s remorse–that is, second thoughts about Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability”–a desperate Mrs. Clinton stands on the brink of losing all dignity. This is from a press release she put out last night: …

Captain comments.

… I can see where Hillary might be offended by someone with overactive ambition. Imagine what it would be like to have someone stick with a philandering husband/politician, accuse political opponents of vast partisan conspiracies, carpetbag into another state to win a walkover Senate election, all just to maintain one’s political viability for a Presidential run! My goodness, we wouldn’t want that kind of overwhelming, avaricious desire for power succeeding in grabbing the White House, would we? …

Couple of Corner posts.

Extraordinary. She’s lost some altitude nationally, and a little ground in Iowa where it’s always been a pretty close race, so nothing seems to suggest a need to break the glass—as in “break the glass in case of emergency.” But there’s broken glass scattered over the place and she’s taking the fire ax to Obama’s campaign. What does the Clinton campaign know about this race that we don’t? …

Writing in The Freeman, Walter Williams reminds us of the morality of free markets.

All too often defenders of free-market capitalism base their defense on the demonstration that free markets allocate resources more efficiently and hence lead to greater wealth than socialism and other forms of statism. While that is true, as Professor Milton Friedman frequently pointed out, economic efficiency and greater wealth should be seen and praised as simply a side benefit of free markets. The intellectual defense should focus on its moral superiority. Even if free markets were not more efficient and not engines for growth, they are morally superior to other forms of human organization because they are rooted in voluntary peaceable relationships rather than force and coercion. They respect the sanctity of the individual. …

It’s Getting Better All the Time says humpback whales are making a comeback.

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Nat Hentoff says when it come to Sudan, the UN and Africa have disgraced themselves.

The American draft of the resolution before the U.N. General Assembly could not have been any clearer or more vital, especially since an increasing number of governments and their murderous militias are using rape as a political weapon. As reported in The New York Times (Nov. 17), America intended to condemn “rape used by governments and armed groups to achieve political and military ends.”

But, as often happens at the spineless, rampantly disingenuous United Nations, the final resolution — after itself being savaged by many self-protecting revisions — stated that, in general, rape is not acceptable, but stripped out rape as an “instrument to achieve political objectives.” There was no mention left of government “soldiers and militia members.”

Instead, the United Nations weakly says that rape should not be used “in conflict and related situations.”

Who crippled the original American draft language? Not surprisingly, it was the 43-nation African Group Coalition. Said South African ambassador Dumisnai Kumalo, America had created two categories of rape and the African delegates wanted “to balance the text by making certain that there was no politicization of rape.”

Huh? …

Stuart Taylor is regarded highly here at Pickings. He has harshly criticized Bush’s policy regarding detainees. Seems like it ought to be here.

Lakhdar Boumediene was abducted almost six years ago from his home in Bosnia and flown to Guantanamo. He may be a bad guy. Or he may not be. We have no idea. The reason is President Bush’s continuing war on due process, which has blighted the lives of some unknown number of innocent men while doing vast damage to America’s standing in the world.

Boumediene’s petition for release, and those of 62 other Guantanamo detainees, will come before the Supreme Court on December 5. Based on the Court’s previous war-on-terrorism decisions and its unusual alacrity in agreeing on June 29 to hear these detainees’ appeals, Bush seems likely to get his fourth drubbing from the justices since 2004.

Bush deserves to lose. But even the wisest Court decision could barely begin to fix the mess that Bush has made of detention policy. And a judicial over-reaction — along the lines urged by left-leaning human-rights groups — could tie the hands of Bush’s successors. No would-be successor has suggested a sensible alternative policy. And most in Congress punt to the courts (or to Bush) the little-discussed, quintessentially legislative question of what our policy on detaining suspected foreign combatants should be.

So here’s my hope for a three-step quick fix: …

David Warren cruises the world looking for bullies like mobs in Sudan and diplomats from Saudi Arabia.

… My third example of bullying is a more subtle one. It is from the conference at Annapolis this week, and could be seen on television, by any perceptive person. Naturally, it was widely noticed in Israel, but not elsewhere. The royal Saudi delegates not only did not politely applaud, as is the genteel custom, after the Israeli delegate spoke. They had declined to put in their earphones, to hear the translation while that delegate spoke. From a party to actual peace negotiations, comes this rude gesture to announce that nothing a representative of Israel could say would be worth hearing.

After the conference, the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, whose national affiliation is compounded by the fact she is a woman, made an unprecedented public complaint. She said that none of the Arab foreign ministers would shake her hand; that she was treated as a pariah. Or as Frans Timmermans put it — a Dutch government minister who was in attendance — they “shun her like she is Count Dracula’s younger sister.”

The questions should ask themselves: Why do we treat Arab foreign ministers diplomatically, who are themselves incapable of diplomacy? Why do we confer dignities upon Saudi royalty who will confer no dignity upon our friends? …

NY Times editors agree about the Saudis. That’s right, a Times editorial here.

Pickings has recently praised Dianne Feinstein. Barbara Boxer, however, is a creep. John Fund has the story.

How much more partisan and petty can Washington get? California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer is refusing even to allow a hearing for a judicial nominee who has the backing of prominent Democrats, in part because she harbors a decade-old grudge about the Clinton impeachment. …

 

… Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to President Clinton, is disappointed in the Boxer rebellion against Mr. Rogan. “This is a man who would make a great judge,” he told the Washington Post, adding that if Ms. Boxer “got to know Jim Rogan since the impeachment days as I have, [she] would reconsider her opposition.”

Many California legal figures are shocked at Ms. Boxer’s sudden animus. In 2001, the Bush administration struck an agreement with Sen. Boxer and her California colleague, Dianne Feinstein, to create a panel to fill federal district court vacancies in the Golden State. Known as the Parsky Commission after Bush adviser Gerald Parsky, it is composed of members appointed separately by President Bush and both senators. Since 2001, its members have unanimously approved 27 candidates for judicial vacancies, all of whom have been later approved by Sens. Boxer and Feinstein. Indeed, Ms. Boxer recently praised the committee’s picks as “the best of the best.” At least one Democrat who has served on the committee told me of their profound disappointment that Ms. Boxer has now decided to second-guess its work: “This sends a bad message to good people who should be on the bench, since it shows the rug can be pulled out from under them at a very late stage.” …

The Captain says Clinton is going after Obama’s character. Say what?

Paul Greenberg writes for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Before that he was with the Pine Bluff Commercial. He has long experience with the Narcissist and thus is uniquely qualified to write about slick Willie.

… Bill Clinton tends to bet for and against any political proposition that involves taking a risk, then recall only the position that proved popular. That way, he can’t lose. Principle has nothing to do with it; he’s just betting across the board.

An escape hatch is almost standard equipment on any Clinton assertion. By now there’s even a term for it – the Clinton clause. It’s a kind of art form, really, and connoisseurs of the Clintonesque will be able to remember the exact moment they caught on to it. …

Tim Rutten, media critic of the LA Times has the harshest criticism of CNN’s debate performance.

… Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday’s debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN’s performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent. …

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Mark Steyn thinks the best defense is being offensive.

The holiday season is here, and that means it’s time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition. Australia is a gazillion time zones ahead of the United States – it may even be Boxing Day there already – so they got in first this year with a truly fantastic headline:

“Santas Warned ‘Ho Ho Ho’ Offensive To Women.”

Really. As the story continued: “Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say ‘ha ha ha’ instead, the Daily Telegraph reported. One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use ‘ho ho ho’ because it could frighten children and was too close to ‘ho’, a U.S. slang term for prostitute.”

If I were a female resident of Sydney, I think I’d be more offended by the assumption that Australian women and U.S. prostitutes are that easily confused. As the old gangsta-rap vaudeville routine used to go: “Who was that ho I saw you with last night?” “That was no ho, that was my bitch.”

But the point is that the right not to be offended is now the most sacred right in the world. The right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, all are as nothing compared with the universal right to freedom from offense. …

Gerard Baker of the London Times looks at the celebrity Clinton dragged out to counter Obama’s Oprah.

… Streisand long ago crossed the blurry boundary between celebrity and politics. She is yesterday’s news, proudly waving the banner of liberal preposterousness since 1965. Her only memorable recent cinematic performance, for all the wrong reasons, was as the oversexed sexuagenarian alongside Dustin Hoffman in the utterly tasteless Meet The Fockers sequel.

Her intervention this week is fitting, though, precisely because it captures what looms as the largest impediment to the increasingly troubled ambitions of Mrs Clinton, that what the former First Lady is offering is a better yesterday. Mrs Clinton’s campaign might in fact be summed up in the lyrics of Streisand’s most famous locution, back when she was still a bona fide celebrity:

Memories, like the corners of my mind,

Misty, water-coloured memories

Of the way we were.

Despite her efforts to portray herself as something new, voters know well enough that Mrs Clinton represents a restoration rather than a revolution. …

The Captain posts on the Iraqi cleric Ali Sistani.

Earlier this week, the leading Shi’ite cleric in Iraq issued a fatwa that has largely gone unnoticed by the world media, but could have an impact on reconciliation and the political gridlock in Baghdad. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani forbade the killings of Sunnis by Shi’ites on Tuesday while meeting with Sunni clerics in an ecumenical council, and called for a renewed sense of Iraqi nationalism to replace sectarian divides in the country (via SCSU Scholars): …

And he posts on the dénouement for the latest New Republic fabulist.

John Fund reports Tom Lantos has fun with Dutch Euro-weenies.

And Mr. Fund will kick off the coverage of the debacle created by CNN at the YouTube debate.

… The debates so far have largely been political theater. Polls show that voters are most concerned about Iraq, the economy and Washington corruption. But most of the debates featuring GOP candidates have been loaded up with questions on God, guns, gays and abortion that, while important, do not make the list of pressing issues news outlets such as CNN routinely compile. In the wake of the Kerr fiasco, a full autopsy of just how these debates are put together is called for. I would never have thought I would be pining for the days when PBS sponsored GOP debates, but that’s where we are now.

Hugh Hewitt has a phrase; “premeditated mediocrity.”

… this [is] premeditated mediocrity. The network had months to prepare and consider and execute. But even with all that time, it lacked the minimal talent necessary to produce a serious debate about important issues using new technology. All it could deliver was a carnival of bad taste, trick questions, and full frontal left wing bias.

Hugh’s interview with Mark Steyn touched on the debate.

MS: Yes, and I think in fact, CNN behaved disgracefully. I don’t know, I mean, you’ve been on CNN before. I find CNN a very tiresome network in part because when you, when they try to book you on something, they want to have these pre-interviews, which are big time wasters, and I never agree to do them, where they want to discuss your views for an hour beforehand, before you do your two minute on-air bit with whoever the host is. So it seems to me incredible on its face that for example, this gay general who’s supporting Hillary, that they couldn’t have done the minimal amount of work necessary to find out that this guy is not Mr. Undecided Voter, but he is in fact on the Hillary campaign, that the woman who asked the abortion question is not, you know, Little Miss Undecided Feminist Voter, but in fact an explicit John Edwards supporter. I simply don’t buy the fact that even the overmanned, deadbeat production staff at CNN simply were incapable of finding out the truth of this thing.

Howard Kurtz with CNN comments.

The Captain weighs in.

… Memo to CNN: quit trying to excuse this away. No one tried “extremely hard” to vet these questions. Obviously, no one tried vetting them at all. The continuation of the pretense only damages your credibility even further than the debate did.

What a shame, too, because the questions themselves weren’t so bad. The plants revealed their own prejudices against the GOP, and the candidates did a good job of swatting them aside. The worst inclusions didn’t come from the plants, but from CNN’s decision to include insulting questions about Confederate flags and the Bible, which revealed CNN’s prejudices about Republicans. Mitt Romney gave the best response to this when he asked contemptuously why the flag question even got selected for a presidential debate. Otherwise, with just over 30 questions in the debate, most of them focused on policy in substantive ways and provoked perhaps the best intramural exchanges in the debates this year.

CNN blew it, and blew it big — and they didn’t try extremely hard to avoid it. They got extremely sloppy and careless, and they got caught. …

The New Editor.

Stephen Green from Pajamas Media.

… What didn’t happen was a real debate, although what we saw was certainly, if only occasionally, entertaining. What we saw tonight was the usual for a presidential “debate.” In other words, it was a joint press conference, the only real difference being that, this time, it was punctuated by cute videos made by “real Americans” “just like you.” That’s the hype, anyway.

What we really saw was CNN playing out its own agenda in front of a couple million viewers and seven or eight candidates, without anyone calling them on it. …

Phil Valentine from the Tennessean is back with more on the marxists in the globalony movement.

Apparently, I hit a nerve with a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago on global warming. Many of you took umbrage with my daring to connect the global warming movement to Marxism. Don’t get me wrong. I do not believe everyone involved in the global warming movement subscribes to Karl Marx’s philosophy. However, make no mistake about it. Those at the epicenter of this movement have ulterior motives, many of them socialist or even Marxist. What I wrote that caused such a fuss was that global warming is being used as a template to rob from the rich nations and give to the poor ones. …

American Thinker posts on a Brit who’s compiled a list of all the calamities caused by global warming, according to the media.

… The site’s stated mission is to expose all the “scares, scams, junk, panics and flummery cooked up by the media, politicians, bureaucrats and so-called scientists and others that try to confuse the public with wrong numbers” Professor Brignell’s motto is “Working to Combat Math Hysteria.” …

James Taranto finds another calamity.

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Victor Davis Hanson notes three individuals who have changed history; Nicholas Sarkozy, Gen. David Petraeus, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

… What do all these mavericks who have changed the status quo have in common? First, they not only followed their beliefs with action, but also were willing to endure the inevitable criticism to follow. Second, although they have strong beliefs, none are overtly partisan; all instead seek a common good.

The conservative Sarkozy appointed a socialist as his foreign minister. To this day, partisans can’t figure out whether Gen. Petraeus is a Republican or Democrat. Hirsi Ali wants equality for women and greater tolerance of diverse opinion in the Muslim world – and thereby a better understanding between the West and Islam.

Fearless iconoclasts like these three really can make an enormous difference. They remind us that history is not faceless, but can still be changed by just a few brave people after all.

John Fund explains why common sense won’t work in DC.

Should the Salvation Army be able to require its employees to speak English? You wouldn’t think that’s controversial. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding up a $53 billion appropriations bill funding the FBI, NASA and Justice Department solely to block an attached amendment, passed by both the Senate and House, that protects the charity and other employers from federal lawsuits over their English-only policies.

The U.S. used to welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Since 1906, for example, new citizens have had to show “the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English.” A century later, this preference for assimilation is still overwhelmingly popular. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 87% of voters think it “very important” that people speak English in the U.S., with four out of five Hispanics agreeing. And 77% support the right of employers to have English-only policies, while only 14% are opposed.

But hardball politics practiced by ethnic grievance lobbies is driving assimilation into the dustbin of history. The House Hispanic Caucus withheld its votes from a key bill granting relief on the Alternative Minimum Tax until Ms. Pelosi promised to kill the Salvation Army relief amendment. …

Meanwhile, Jeff Jacoby has a history lesson on the “know nothings.”

WHO WOULD HAVE guessed two years ago that as the 2008 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary hove into view, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani would be leading an effort to turn the 21st-century GOP into a party of anti-immigration Know-Nothings? …

Peter Wehner in Contentions will start our look at yesterday’s Bill Clinton lie. How can you tell of Bill’s lying? Watch and see if his lips move.

Slick Willie is at it again. This time it comes in the form of his assertion that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. You can see new contributor Abe Greenwald’s post below for details about Clinton’s claims.

What ought we to make of this?

First, if it’s true that Bill Clinton opposed the war but held his tongue because it would have been “inappropriate at the time for him, a former President, to oppose—in a direct, full-throated manner—the sitting President’s military decision,” one might ask: Why then would it be appropriate to criticize now—in a direct, full-throated manner—the same sitting President’s military decision? In fact, it would have been more responsible to voice his objections before the war, when it was being debated, rather than now, when the decision has been made.

Beyond that, Bill Clinton, unlike George H.W. Bush, has not been shy about criticizing the actions of the President who followed him. Bill Clinton has been a constant critic of President Bush, on a range of issues, including the Kyoto Treaty, the withdrawal of U.S. support for the International Criminal Court and the ABM Treaty, tax cuts, education funding, homeland security, and more. …

Abe Greenwald next.

… So what happened yesterday? At an Iowa campaign stop, Bill Clinton claimed he “opposed Iraq from the beginning. . .”

Never mind that Clinton practically birthed “the beginning” with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. The bald lie is nothing new. But his failure to finesse the gaffe is. …

Then the Captain.

… Those who profess an indefinable discomfort with a Clinton return to power may find more definition for that discomfort after this display. It’s not the equivocation that has people squirming; it’s the ease with which Bill Clinton can issue flat-out lies. In fact, the fact that he issues such researchable and exposable lies and still has the chutzpah to use them on the stump that may worry people most of all. Does he really think that the media will allow those statements to go unchallenged?

The pattern here is really unmistakable. In the early days of the war, Bill had no problem climbing onto the Bush bandwagon, claiming support for the war. Now that it has proven as unpopular as it is, Bill wants to rewrite history and claim that he always opposed it, despite his record of public support. He will say anything to match up with the public sentiment of the moment, showing himself as a man completely without reliable principles.

That’s the problem for Hillary, who almost completely lacks his campaigning skills and needs his assistance in connecting to voters. Her reliance on his campaigning winds up associating herself with his lack of honesty and credibility. When his slickness combines with her high negatives, Democrats should consider the likely result — a general-election disaster. …

Ron Fournier of AP.

As only he can do, Bill Clinton packed campaign venues across eastern Iowa and awed Democratic voters with a compelling case for his wife’s candidacy. He was unscripted, in-depth and generous.

He also was long-winded, misleading and self-absorbed.

“Good Bill” and “Bad Bill” (his nickname among some aides) returned to the public arena Tuesday as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton brandished her double-edged sword of a husband to fend off rivals in the Jan. 3 caucus fight.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Clinton told 400 Iowans at the start of his three-city swing, “I have had a great couple of days out working for Hillary.”

In the next 10 minutes, he used the word “I” a total of 94 times and mentioned “Hillary” just seven times in an address that was as much about his legacy as it was about his wife’s candidacy.

He told the crowd where he bought coffee that morning and where he ate breakfast.

He detailed his Thanksgiving Day guest list, and menu.

He defended his record as president, rewriting history along the way.

And he explained why his endorsement of a certain senator from New York should matter to people.

“I know what it takes to be president,” he said, “and because of the life I’ve led since I’ve left office.”

I, me and my. Oh, my. …

ABC News wants in on the fun.

Peter Wehner ends this section with another post.

City Journal with a look at the oil-boom town – Moscow.

… Oil may prop up the Russian economy, but no market can stay on a rising curve forever, Milov concludes. Sooner or later, prices will begin to fall. As things stand, Russia will not be able to cope.

The sale of oil and gas brings in $150 billion every year; arms sales, a mere $6 billion. Is the oil boom a new Russian curse, or a restoration of national sovereignty? Moscow’s youth lives it up. But some Russians believe that the KGB has never really left the dreaded Lubianka, the city’s dark heart.

In 1991, the people pulled down the statue of Felix Djerzinski, the founder of the KGB. Since then, it has lain on its side in the courtyard of Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art, corroded and covered with weeds. In the same museum, a retrospective is devoted to Oleg Kulik, a video artist who epitomizes new Russian art. Kulik became famous after he walked naked on the streets of Moscow, wearing only a necklace, barking or jumping on passersby to lick or bite them. “Today,” Kulik says, “Russian artists have complete freedom to do what they want—provided that they don’t criticize Putin or the Orthodox Church.”

Thus Moscow 2007: newly prosperous, only partially free—and precarious.

Jim Taranto has some “zero tolerance watch stories that will make you ill. How does our society create these ninnies?

… A 9-year-old boy from a Phoenix elementary school has been suspended after the school determined he engaged in racial harassment by using the term “brown people.” …

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John Stossel starts us off today.

Another global warming skeptic has dared speak up. Meteorologist John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, calls global warming “the greatest scam in history”.

“Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them … create this wild ‘scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. … I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. …There is no runaway climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. … In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious.”

I suspect he’s right.

But what if he’s wrong? …

John Podhoretz has taken over as editor of Commentary. And he has brought new attention to the magazine’s blog Contentions where he and Noah Pollak have an exchange on the Annapolis confab which provides some context and understanding for this most recent Mideast peace effort.

Andrew McCarthy’s NRO article was referenced by Pollak above. So it’s here.

The thug Assad regime of Syria will apparently take a couple of days off from murdering Lebanese democrats and enabling the anti-American jihad in Iraq to attend this week’s Annapolis summit … or “conference,” or “meeting.” It’s difficult to say how we should describe Condoleezza Rice’s pie-in-the-sky confab. After all, the main principals — an Israeli prime minister hanging on by a thread and a Palestinian “president” whose only constituency seems to be the U.S. State Department — cannot even agree on what to call it, much less on an agenda.

I’m going with “farce.” …

George Will entertains with speculation on vice-presidential running mates.

A high-priced lawyer, a low-priced lawyer and the tooth fairy are sitting at a table on which rests a $100 bill. The lights go out briefly, and when they come back on the bill is gone. Who took it? Obviously, the high-priced lawyer—the other two are figments of our imaginations.

Here is another such figment: People who vote for a presidential candidate because of that candidate’s running mate. There may be such people, but have you ever met one?

Still, it is neither pointless nor premature to wonder who each of the four most likely nominees—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney—might choose to run with. The question illuminates the different challenges the candidates face in cobbling together 270 electoral votes. …

Mark Steyn comments on Dem candidates as “change agents.”

What do you think is the critical issue in this election season? Personally, I blow hot and cold. I used to think the key issue facing the nation was “hope.” But now I wonder if perhaps it isn’t “change.” It was only last year that I bought The Audacity of Hope by this fellow called Barack Obama. How audacious hope seemed back then! How bold, how courageous! But now, a mere twelve months later, hope seems cheap, glib, easy.

“There has been a lot of talk in this campaign about the politics of hope,” said this guy in Iowa the other day. “But understand this: The politics of hope doesn’t mean hoping that things come easy.” It turned out to be the same Barack Obama who’d been going on about the audacity of hope. But now he’s fine-tuned his campaign, and he’s running on “change.”

No, don’t yawn. Hillary Clinton may be running around New Hampshire on her “Ready for Change” tour, but that kind of facile focus-group change is just the same-old-same-old. “Change can’t just be a slogan,” says Senator Obama, who’s committed to a Democratic party “that doesn’t just offer change as a slogan but real, meaningful change, change that America can believe in. That’s why I’m in this race, that’s why I’m running for the presidency of the United States, to offer change that we can believe in.”

Any cynical hack pol can offer change as a slogan, but Senator Obama’s offering “Change You Can Believe In” as a slogan. …

BBC News reminds us this month is the 75th anniversary of the start of the Soviet’s terror famine in Ukraine.

… The “Holodomor” or “famine plague” as it is known in Ukraine, was part of Joseph Stalin’s programme to crush the resistance of the peasantry to the collectivisation of farming. When in 1932 the grain harvest did not meet the Kremlin’s targets, activists were sent to the villages where they confiscated not just grain and bread, but all the food they could find. The confiscations continued into 1933, and the results were devastating. No-one is sure how many people died, but historians say that in under a year at least three million and possibly up to 10 million starved to death. The horrors Ekaterina saw live with her still.

“We didn’t have any funerals – whole families died,” she tells me. “Of our neighbours I remember all the Solveiki family died, all of the Kapshuks, all the Rahachenkos too – and the Yeremo family – three of them, still alive, were thrown into the mass grave.”

Ekaterina, her mother and brother, survived by eating tree bark, roots and whatever they could find – but she says starvation drove others to terrible deeds. “One day mother said to us, ‘children, you can’t take your usual shortcut through the village anymore because the grandpa in the house nearby killed his grandson and ate him – and now he’s been killed by his son… And don’t go near the priest’s house either – because the neighbours there have killed and eaten their children.’” …

Townhall columnist, Michael McBride, muses on John Kerry’s swift strategy with T. Boone Pickens. Since it’s Kerry, we start the humor section here.

… Most people recognize that the truth lays somewhere between what the Swiftboaters claim and what Kerry claims. What is also clear though is that swinging back four years later, will not clear the decks of this issue entirely. For Kerry to do that he HAS to have DOD release the entirety of his record for full public scrutiny. Only then will we know if his reputation has been diminished by a Swiftboating, or overly enhanced by MSMboating.

Whatever comes of it, we certainly know Kerry is no boxer. If he pursues this, I predict a second round knockout.

Kathleen Parker writes about folks who sterilize themselves to the save the planet.

On a lighter note, we might have avoided all such concerns if only the mothers of (these people) had been as “virtuous” as their progeny.

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David Brooks says we shouldn’t listen to America’s pessimists like Lou Dobbs.

… And if Dobbsianism is winning when times are good, you can imagine how attractive it’s going to seem if we enter the serious recession that Larry Summers convincingly and terrifyingly forecasts in yesterday’s Financial Times. If the economy dips as seriously as that, the political climate could shift in ugly ways.

So it’s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear — the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.

And that’s just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world. …

… Every quarter the U.S. loses somewhere around seven million jobs, and creates a bit more than seven million more. That double-edged process is the essence of a dynamic economy.

I’m writing this column from Beijing. I can look out the window and see the explosive growth. But as the Chinese will be the first to tell you, their dazzling prosperity is built on fragile foundations. In the United States, the situation is the reverse. We have obvious problems. But the foundations of American prosperity are strong. The U.S. still has much more to gain than to lose from openness, trade and globalization.

Mark Steyn notes the “courage” of the Hollywood set and sees it as metaphor for the submission of the West.

Here is part of the opening chapter of Daniel Silva’s new novel The Secret Servant: professor Solomon Rosner, a Dutch Jew and author of a study on “the Islamic conquest of the West,” is making his way down the Staalstraat in Amsterdam, dawdling in the window of his favourite pastry shop, when he feels a tug at his sleeve:

“He saw the gun only in the abstract. In the narrow street the shots reverberated like cannon fire. He collapsed onto the cobblestones and watched helplessly as his killer drew a long knife from the inside of his coveralls. The slaughter was ritual, just as the imams had decreed it should be. No one intervened — hardly surprising, thought Rosner, for intervention would have been intolerant — and no one thought to comfort him as he lay dying. Only the bells spoke to him.”

They ring from the tower of the Zuiderkirk church, long since converted into a government housing office:

“A church without faithful,” they seemed to be saying, “in a city without God.”

Obviously, professor Rosner is an invented character playing his role in an invented plot. But, equally obviously, his death on the streets of a Dutch city echoes the murder in similar circumstances of a real Dutchman for the same provocation as the fictional professor: giving offence to Islam. Theo van Gogh made a movie called Submission, an eye-catching take on Islam’s treatment of women that caught the eye of men whose critiques on motion pictures go rather further than two thumbs up or down. So, in the soi-disant most tolerant country in Europe, a filmmaker was killed for making a film — and at the next Academy Awards, the poseur dissenters of Hollywood were too busy congratulating themselves on their bravery in standing up to the Bushitler even to name-check their poor dead colleague in the weepy Oscar montage of the year’s deceased. …

Speaking of courage, Jack Kelly has Sanchez opinions.

… It does seem odd that Democrats would excoriate Gen. David Petraeus, architect of the strategy that has turned things around in Iraq, and embrace Gen. Sanchez, especially since it was Democrats in Congress who led the criticism of him during the Abu Ghraib affair.

But then, Democrats have a history of preferring losers to winners. In 1864, they were sharply critical of Generals Grant and Sherman, who were leading the Union to victory, and nominated as their presidential candidate Gen. George B. McClellan, who Robert E. Lee had beaten like a drum on numerous occasions.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson likens Gen. Sanchez to other “whistleblowers” such as former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke who were failures at their jobs.

“In all these cases there is a dismal pattern: a mediocre functionary keeps quiet about the mess around him, muddles through, senses that things aren’t going right, finds himself on the losing end of political infighting, is forced out or quits, seethes that his genius wasn’t recognized, takes no responsibility for his own failures, worries that he might be scape-goated, and at last senses that either a New York publisher or the anti-war Left, or both, will be willing to offer him cash or notoriety — but only if he serves their needs by trashing his former colleagues in a manner he never would while on the job,” Mr. Hanson said.

Amir Taheri works to give a balanced appraisal of Iraq news.

‘A TORRENT of good news”: So The New York Times described the reports of a significant fall in violence in Iraq. But reducing all Iraqi news to measures of violence can hamper understanding of a complex situation.

Those who opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 prefer to focus on violence, for it has seemed to confirm their claim that the war was wrong. They’ve downplayed all good news from post-Saddam Iraq – the end of an evil regime that had oppressed the Iraqi people for 35 years; the return home of a million-plus Iraqi refugees in the first year after liberation; the fact that the Iraqis got together to write a new constitution and hold referendums and free elections – for the first time in their history – and moved to form coalition governments answerable to the parliament.

The drop in violence is certainly a good thing. But other Iraq news, both good and bad, needs to be taken into account. …

Thomas Sowell with more on his series on income distribution. This time focusing on the “top one percent.”

… Who are those top one percent? For those who would like to join them, the question is: How can you do that?

The second question is easy to answer. Virtually anyone who owns a home in San Francisco, no matter how modest that person’s income may be, can join the top one percent instantly just by selling their house.

But that’s only good for one year, you may say. What if they don’t have another house to sell next year?

Well, they won’t be in the top one percent again next year, will they? But that’s not unusual.

Americans in the top one percent, like Americans in most income brackets, are not there permanently, despite being talked about and written about as if they are an enduring “class” — especially by those who have overdosed on the magic formula of “race, class and gender,” which has replaced thought in many intellectual circles. …

Ever wondered how all the stupid structures get built? WSJ book review has some answers.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has just filed suit against the architect Frank Gehry, whose wavy, odd-angled metallic forms infiltrate the skylines of many American cities and not a few abroad (like Bilbao, Spain). The suit seeks unspecified damages for “design and construction failures” at the Stata Center, a two-towered structure that opened three years ago, housing computer-science labs on MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus. Mr. Gehry’s response? “M.I.T. is after our insurance.”

John Silber’s “Architecture of the Absurd” might serve as an amicus brief for MIT. It is a thoughtful argument against the excesses of “designer” architects and urban-planning utopians. Mr. Silber, the former president of Boston University, may seem, as he notes, “an unlikely person to write a book on architecture.” But he is an architect’s son and a professional philosopher who, as the president of a major university for 25 years, directed the construction of buildings totaling 13 million square feet of floor area — more than most clients, to say the least. His critique of today’s architectural culture has a hard-nosed clarity that is seldom found in today’s writing about architecture. …

… The great enablers of Genius architects have been nonprofit corporations, especially museums and universities, where “decisions are made by persons who are not spending their own money, who take no personal financial risk, and who often lack the knowledge and experience in building necessary to ensure that the needs of the institution are met.” Such clients become the gullible victims of jargon-spouting architects and their critical sycophants.

Mr. Silber comes down especially hard on Daniel Libeskind, the architect who won the competition for the replacement tower at the World Trade Center site. Mr. Libeskind had claimed that the angled incisions, or cuts, on the surfaces of his Jewish Museum in Berlin referred to locations where Jews flourished in pre-Nazi times. Yet later, when he designed the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, he used similar patterns of surface cuts, only this time they served to make, in the architect’s words, a “crystal, a structure of organically interlocking parts prismatic forms” that “asserts the primacy of participatory space and public choreography.” Of course, no one quite knows what he means. Mr. Silber writes: “How many times, one wonders, will Libeskind be able to impress clients and critics with his metaphysical spin-doctoring of senseless contrivances?” …

… Mr. Silber eloquently describes the absurdities of buildings such as Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitories at MIT, a profoundly ungainly structure that the architect himself said was meant to resemble a sea sponge. It’s an example of what nonprofit institutions allow themselves to be talked into by architects whose “Theoryspeak” proves irresistible to boards of culturally insecure trustees. …

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Ever since the 1940′s, the Arab world has made sure its refugees have remained a festering sore in the Middle East. Bernard Lewis has the history lesson.

… During the fighting in 1947-1948, about three-fourths of a million Arabs fled or were driven (both are true in different places) from Israel and found refuge in the neighboring Arab countries. In the same period and after, a slightly greater number of Jews fled or were driven from Arab countries, first from the Arab-controlled part of mandatory Palestine (where not a single Jew was permitted to remain), then from the Arab countries where they and their ancestors had lived for centuries, or in some places for millennia. Most Jewish refugees found their way to Israel.

What happened was thus, in effect, an exchange of populations not unlike that which took place in the Indian subcontinent in the previous year, when British India was split into India and Pakistan. Millions of refugees fled or were driven both ways — Hindus and others from Pakistan to India, Muslims from India to Pakistan. Another example was Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when the Soviets annexed a large piece of eastern Poland and compensated the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. This too led to a massive refugee movement — Poles fled or were driven from the Soviet Union into Poland, Germans fled or were driven from Poland into Germany.

The Poles and the Germans, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.

The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation. …

Claudia Rosett says there is an inconvenient truth for the UN. Their latest globalony scare shows up just as they need to climb down from their overblown AIDS rhetoric.

Just as Ban Ki-moon is warming up to climate change as “the defining challenge of our age,” with the UN describing as absolute and unequivocal the “dire report” of the UN’s IPCC (picked for the Nobel prize courtesy of the Norwegian parliament, whose wisdom, we must infer, is similarly absolute), along comes the news that — whoops! — the UN in its earlier apocalyptic warnings about another issue has, in the words of the Washington Post, “long over-estimated both the size and course” — in that case of the AIDS epidemic. …

The Captain noticed Richard Holbrooke auditioning for State by retailing some Balkan nonsense.

… Where to start with this litany of foolishness? First, Holbrooke leaves out a few little details about why the Bush administration didn’t make Kosovo its highest priority. In September 2001, we had this little incident with terrorists and a few airplanes that focused our attention elsewhere. We also had a military commitment that long preceded the Balkans that the UN couldn’t handle for twelve years, one that involved a lot more hot-war actions than the Balkans. The notion that Kosovo should have been a high priority between 2001-2006 is patently absurd, and Holbrooke shows intellectual dishonesty for not pointing out the valid reasons this got back-burnered. …

Adam Smith knew 250 years ago what modern science is just discovering about empathy.

Michael Barone says the 2008 race has a wide range of possibilities.

… What about the general election? Consider two poll results: When the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked voters which party they preferred to win the race for president, Democrats led 49 percent to 36 percent. When the FOX News poll asked which of two specific candidates would do the better job of protecting the country, Rudy Giuliani came out ahead of Hillary Clinton by 50 percent to 36 percent. Those numbers suggest to me that the range of possible outcomes in November 2008 is much wider than it was in November 2004.

What we have not seen yet is a debate between the two parties on ideas. The Democratic candidates have been busy pounding George W. Bush, who will not be on the ballot. The Republican candidates have been busy pounding Hillary Clinton, who may or may not be on the ballot. And candidates in each of the parties have gotten started pounding each other. These arguments are mostly about the past. We haven’t heard much yet about the future.

Ted Olson is the WSJ Weekend Interview. By James Taranto.

Rudy Giuliani doesn’t always follow Ted Olson’s advice. “I remember conversations with Rudy before he became mayor when he was thinking about running,” Mr. Olson says. “I was asking him, ‘Why in the world would you want to do this? A, you can’t get elected. You’re a Republican; it’s New York City. And B, there’s nothing that can be done about New York City. It’s too big; the problems are too deeply engrafted onto the city; the city’s in the grip of labor unions, crime, high taxes, heavy burdens. The city’s a terrible place, and it’s too big to govern.’ “

Just as Mr. Olson was sure Mr. Giuliani couldn’t get elected in New York because of his party, it has been a common assumption that the former mayor cannot win the Republican presidential nomination because of his liberal positions on social issues, particularly abortion and guns. Mr. Olson is one of the nation’s top conservative lawyers, having represented President-elect Bush in Bush v. Gore and served as Mr. Bush’s solicitor general. As chairman of Mr. Giuliani’s Justice Advisory Committee, he intends to help the candidate defy conventional wisdom again. …

Cafe Hayek starts an interesting thread on the globalization v. localization debate.

… Ironic, isn’t it, that “Progressives” advocate a return to the economic arrangements of the dark- and middle-ages?

Which led to a post by Coyote Blog.

… By the way, one reason this food-mile thing is not going away, no matter how stupid it is, has to do with the history of the global warming movement. Remember all those anti-globalization folks who rampaged in Seattle? Where did they all go? Well, they did not get sensible all of a sudden. They joined the environmental movement. One reason a core group of folks in the catastrophic man-made global warming camp react so poorly to any criticism of the science is that they need and want it to be true that man is causing catastrophic warming — anti-corporate and anti-globalization activists jumped into the global warming environmental movement, seeing in it a vehicle to achieve their aims of rolling back economic growth, global trade, and capitalism in general. Food miles appeals to their disdain for world trade, and global warming and carbon footprints are just a convenient excuse for trying to sell the concept to other people. …

And then to a post at American Thinker.

… Along those same lines comes this release out of Bali that the airport there is expecting so many private jets for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference that local officials will be making most attendees ferry their planes to four other airports in the region for parking as the local airport can only accommodate 15 planes. The closest airport to provide parking space for such jets is about 60 miles away, the furthest about 600. …

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Mark Steyn looks over the candidates.

… Let me ask a question of my Democrat friends: What does John Edwards really believe on Iraq? I mean, really? To pose the question is to answer it: There’s no there there. In the Dem debates, the only fellow who knows what he believes and says it out loud is Dennis Kucinich. Otherwise, all is pandering and calculation. The Democratic Party could use some seriously fresh thinking on any number of issues – abortion, entitlements, racial preferences – but the base doesn’t want to hear, and no viable candidate is man enough (even Hillary) to stick it to ‘em. I disagree profoundly with McCain and Giuliani, but there’s something admirable about watching them run in explicit opposition to significant chunks of their base and standing their ground. Their message is: This is who I am. Take it or leave it.

That’s the significance of Clinton’s dithering on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. There was a media kerfuffle the other day because at some GOP event an audience member referred to Sen. Clinton as a “bitch,” and John McCain was deemed not to have distanced himself sufficiently from it. Totally phony controversy: In private, Hillary’s crowd liked the way it plays into her image as a tough stand-up broad. And, yes, she is tough. A while back, Elizabeth Edwards had the temerity to venture that she thought her life was happier than Hillary’s. And within days the Clinton gang had jumped her in a dark alley, taken the tire iron to her kneecaps, and forced her into a glassy-eyed public recantation of her lese-majeste. If you’re looking for someone to get tough with Elizabeth Edwards or RINO senators or White House travel-office flunkies, Hillary’s your gal.

But tough on America’s enemies? Thatcher-tough? Not a chance.

Charles Krauthammer on progress in Iraq and the Dem denial. The Democrats confuse process with results which has become a metaphor for government thought and action at all levels; local, state, and federal.

It does not have the drama of the Inchon landing or the sweep of the Union comeback in the summer of 1864. But the turnabout of American fortunes in Iraq over the past several months is of equal moment — a war seemingly lost, now winnable. The violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. Political allegiances have been radically reversed. The revival of ordinary life in many cities is palpable. Something important is happening.

And what is the reaction of the war critics? Nancy Pelosi stoutly maintains her state of denial, saying this about the war just two weeks ago: “This is not working. . . . We must reverse it.” A euphemism for “abandon the field,” which is what every Democratic presidential candidate is promising, with variations only in how precipitous to make the retreat.

How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks — mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government — that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation. …

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Gerard Baker on the strength of the U. S. economy.

The Captain with a series of posts on the candidacy of HRC.

1. And here I thought that the dumbest statements of this extended political season would come in the quiz shows presidential debates. The latest kerfuffle in the Democratic primary centers on whether living abroad as a child carries more weight on foreign policy than being First Lady. It’s akin to watching two guys in a bar debate whether playing Pop Warner football gives more credibility than playing Madden 2007 when criticizing NFL head coaches: …

 

 

2. InfoUSA now faces an SEC probe, one that could indirectly, at least, involve Bill and Hillary Clinton in the middle of an election campaign. The data processing company spent millions on Bill Clinton as a consultant and has flown Hillary around on its corporate jets. Now the SEC wants a look at the company’s books, spurred on by stockholders who sense something amiss in the benefits showered on the former First Couple: …

 

 

3. This story challenges the boundaries of satire. Hillary Clinton captured the vital corrupt-foreign-leader constituency with Bernadette Chirac’s endorsement yesterday. The wife of the French ex-president said that she thought Hillary had the makings of a president, although her personal experience at that may not play too well on the campaign trail (via Memeorandum): …

Kimberley Strassel gives her perception of Clinton’s weakness.

You might not think one lousy debate performance, or one silly planted question, would jolt a storming campaign. Then again, you might not be Hillary Clinton. If the last few weeks have shown anything, it’s that Mrs. Clinton has some weak spots. What isn’t yet clear is whether her Democratic opponents have the time, or the will, to exploit them.

Until recently, the biggest thing going for Hillary is that she has appeared “inevitable.” This is no accident. Mrs. Clinton may not be as naturally gifted as her husband, but she does have access to his playbook. One of Bill’s more brilliant strategies when he ran in 1992 was to campaign as if he were already the nominee. It gave an otherwise little-known governor the legitimacy to sideline his opponents.

Mrs. Clinton has made this tactic a cornerstone of her campaign, and it had been working. During debates she frequently speaks on “behalf of everyone” on the stage. She chooses moments wisely to make statements no Democrat disagrees with (“George Bush is ruining this country”), leaving the competition nodding in miserable agreement. Her insistence that she and her Democratic colleagues should keep this race focused on their arch-enemy was equally savvy. With everyone piling on Dubya, nobody was piling on her.

Add to this Mrs. Clinton’s stash of money, the vaunted infrastructure, the endorsements and her superstar status. The Clinton campaign has flogged all of these to leave the impression she’s the only player in the game.

The trick is that there’s little room for error. The media hates a winner as much as it hates a preordained election, and so it has seized on her missteps to blitz the papers with stories suggesting she’s not Teflon. For a campaign betting so much on perception, this new doubt is not good. ..

Ann Coulter wants all Dems reading the NY Times.

Here’s a story that may not have been deemed “Fit to Print”: In the six months that ended Sept. 25, The New York Times’ daily circulation was down another 4.51 percent to about a million readers a day. The paper’s Sunday circulation was down 7.59 percent to about 1.5 million readers. In short, the Times is dropping faster than Hillary in New Hampshire. (Meanwhile, the Drudge Report has more than 16 million readers every day.)

One can only hope that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are among the disaffected hordes lining up to cancel their Times subscriptions.

The Times is so accustomed to lying about the news to prove that “most Americans” agree with the Times, that it seems poised to lead the Democrats — and any Republicans stupid enough to believe the Times — down a primrose path to their own destruction.

So if you know a Democratic presidential candidate who doesn’t currently read the Times, by all means order him a subscription. …

Denver Post with a story that’ll make you sign on to every lawyer joke you’ve heard.

The New Editor has a govemnment waste story that’ll amaze you.

Here’s a story that seems to illustrate in spades the ridiculous inefficiency of government: (via Don Boudreaux)

After Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Audubon Aquarium needed to restock its collection in order to replace losses resulting from the storm, and did so at a cost of about $100,000. However, when aquarium officials sought disaster-relief compensation for the loss from FEMA, they were turned down because the agency said they should have spent more than $600,000 in order to replace the fish. …

Samizdata on one of the ways socialism kills.