Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Slim Pickings today.

Three items on Hugo Chavez. First is from WaPo on the remark of King Juan Carlos.

King Juan Carlos of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to zip his lip on Saturday and the Spanish-speaking world went nuts.

Overnight, the king’s “Por que no te callas?” — Why don’t you shut up? — became a YouTube sensation and a downloadable ring tone. One industrious composer turned the king’s choice words into new lyrics, giving the old warhorse “Que viva Espana” new, and somewhat amusing, life. …

Real Clear Politics gives another review.

A few days ago, Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero of Spain hosted a conference of leaders of Spanish-speaking countries in Chile. Among those attending was that democratically-elected gangster Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela (but soon to be dictator). Mr. Chavez loves to make long anti-American leftist harangues, and
when his turn came to speak, he decided to go after former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a long-time ally of the U.S. who, when in office, supported President Bush in Iraq. Mr. Zapatero, a socialist, defeated Mr. Aznar (and the two remain bitter opponents), but he found himself defending his rival to Mr. Chavez as “a man who was elected by the Spanish people.” Mr. Chavez does not care about this principle (he said he will sidestep the Venezuelan constitution to stay in office beyond the alloted two terms), and kept interrupting Mr. Zapatero
(a fellow socialist) in a most boorish fashion.

Finally, a man seated next to Mr. Zapatero, leaned over and in a loud vice said to Mr. Chavez, as if they were two men in a working class tapas bar in the Madrid rastro (flea market), “Why don’t you shut up?” (“Por que no te callas?”)

The man, of course, was the Spanish head of state, King Juan Carlos, and not one known for crude talk. Nevertheless, his riposte has now become a cheer throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and in not a few other places as well. ..

WSJ reports on the milking of the Citgo cash cow by Chavez.

In 1997, one of every 10 gallons of gasoline U.S. drivers bought came from a Venezuelan-owned refiner, Citgo Petroleum Corp. That year, a student at Oxford University wrote a thesis saying Citgo was cheating Venezuela’s people by investing too much in the U.S., and should send more cash home.

The student, Juan Carlos Boué, drew scant attention until four years ago, when Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chávez, took control of the state oil apparatus. Today, Mr. Boué is an influential member of Citgo’s board. And Citgo, which Venezuela bought two decades ago to market its hard-to-refine heavy oil, now has a different focus: feeding cash to Mr. Chávez’s program to build socialism in Venezuela.

In recent years, while other U.S. refiners have invested heavily to take advantage of historically wide profit margins in the business, Citgo has been slimming down. It has slashed its investment and sold off U.S. assets, most recently by agreeing last week to shed a unit that turns crude oil into asphalt. In keeping with Mr. Boué’s nostrums, Citgo has sent the extra money to its sole shareholder, the Venezuelan government. Citgo has raised its annual dividend to more than $2 billion, from $225 million in 2000.

The changes at Citgo are altering the U.S. fuel landscape. Citgo owns 5% of U.S. refining capacity, a significant chunk at a time when U.S. demand for fuel is growing faster than domestic production, and no new refinery has been built in three decades. Citgo’s production will stagnate, adding to pressure on pump prices and fuel imports. …

The Captain wonders why there is not more outcry.

Jackson Diehl takes note of the undiplomatic smackdown delivered by King Juan Carlos of Spain to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez last week, but turns the question around. Rather than just applaud the king’s public chastisement in asking Chavez, “Why don’t you just shut up?”, Diehl wants to know why more of the world’s leaders haven’t spoken up against Chavez’ scheme to transform Venezuela into a Cuba with oil. Chavez will accomplish that in less than a fortnight:

Crude and clownish, si, but also disturbingly effective. Borrowing the tried-and-true tactics of his mentor Fidel Castro, Chávez has found another way to energize his political base: by portraying himself as at war with foreign colonialists and imperialists. Even better, he has distracted the attention of the international press — or at least the fraction of it that bothers to cover Venezuela — from the real story in his country at a critical moment. …

Maureen Dowd with a good column on Obama/Clinton flap.

Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he’s boxing in the wrong weight class. But Monday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut.

At a news conference, the Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton’s attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator had touted her own know-how, saying that “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — that’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed that she was referring to Obama.

Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”

Everybody laughed, including Obama.

It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point. …

Download Full Content

• Word

• PDF

Mark Steyn comments on Hollywood’s Bush derangement syndrome. They hate Bush so much, they’ve come to hate the country.

A few months back, Peter Berg attended a test screening of his new film in California — not Malibu or Beverly Hills, but out in farm country. The Kingdom is about FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, etc.) investigating a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia, and finally, about two hours in, the star talent gets to kill a bunch of jihadists. As Entertainment Weekly described it, “the packed house went completely bonkers, erupting in cheers” — and poor old Berg was distraught. “I was nervous it would be perceived as a jingoistic piece of propaganda, which I certainly didn’t intend,” the director agonized. “I thought, ‘Am I experiencing American bloodlust?’ “

You really want an answer to that? Okay, here goes: No. It’s not American bloodlust. As they say on Broadway, the audience doesn’t lie, and, when they’re trying to tell you something, it helps not to cover your ears. For all Mr. Berg’s pains, The Kingdom was dismissed by the New York Times as “Syriana for dummies.” That’s to say, instead of explicitly fingering sinister Americans as the bad guys, it merely posited a kind of dull pro forma equivalence between the Yanks and the terrorists. It came out, oh, a week and a half ago and it’s already forgotten in the avalanche of anti-war movies released since. There’s Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah and Redacted — no, wait, Rendition. No, my mistake. There’s a Redacted and a Rendition — one’s about American soldiers being rapists, one’s about American intelligence officials being torturers. Every Friday night at the multiplex, Mr. and Mrs. America are saying, “Hmm, shall we see the movie where our boys are the torturers? Or the one where our boys are the rapists? How about the film where the heroic soldier refuses to fight? Or the one where he does fight and the army covers up the truth about his death?” And then they go see Fred Claus, which pulled in three times as much money as Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs on both films’ opening weekend. …

Max Boot with a nifty idea for military recruiting.

A Captain post that will make you hate pentagon bureaucrats.

And the Captain also noticed the NY Times has had to climb on board with optimistic Iraq stories.

… The Times waited until the success of Petraeus could no longer be denied to publish the truth. With every other news agency in the world reporting on the drop in violence, the rise in commerce, the flight of the militias even from Baghdad, and the unifying efforts such as the rebuilding of St. John’s Catholic Church in the heart of the capital, the Times has no other choice but to rescue its credibility with an acknowledgment of reality. Even then, they use the hoary device of individual anecdotes to temper the news, as if to assert that even success cannot be enjoyed if even one individual feels fear of entering a specific neighborhood.

One wonders how many Times execs wander freely through the Bronx at night, or even in the daytime.

Now that the Times has finally acknowledged the success of the surge and the reality of Petraeus’ testimony, will they apologize for disparaging the American commander so viciously? Will they retract their political hitpiece of an editorial of September 11th? Don’t bet on it. The Times will undoubtedly take the position that all of this success happened yesterday. After all, if they don’t report it, it doesn’t exist. That’s their willing suspension of disbelief, one that fewer and fewer people choose to adopt.

Here’s the Times story the Captain referenced.

Couple of good Samizdata posts.

Tony Blankley knows how we can judge Hillary’s experience.

If I were advising a candidate who was running against her, I would lay into her loudly and often with a challenge to her claim of experience. If she actually was managing the national economy from 1993-2000 from her perch as wife of the president, let her release White House documents showing her active participation in such management. Whe… n I worked in the Reagan White House, I wrote hundreds of memos on my areas of responsibility. There was a paper trail. If Hillary actually was doing what she implies she was doing, there will be a long paper trail of memos that she either wrote or commented upon.

For example, some of the documents stolen from the National Archives by Sandy Berger, Hillary’s national security advisor (I suppose, following Hillary’s claim, Bill’s appointees also should be considered hers) are believed to be documents written by others with presidential comments in the margin. Let’s have Hillary release all the national economic management documents written by her economic advisors with her comments in the margins. …

… Other than keeping an eye on Bill, let’s find out at what else she actually has experience.

Mark Steyn Corner post.

John Stossel has thanks to give.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. “Isn’t sharing wonderful?” say the teachers.

They miss the point.

Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn’t happen.

The failure of Soviet communism is only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved. …

Greatest Generation? Walter Williams is not so sure.

… When the greatest generation was born, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) was 2.5 percent. As they are now dying off, federal spending is 20 percent of GDP and that doesn’t include government meddling. If the grandparents of the greatest generation were asked to describe their contacts or relationship with the federal government, after a puzzled look, straining their recollection faculties, they might answer, “I used to chat with the mailman once in a while.”

Today, there is little any American can do without some form of federal control, whether it’s how much water we can use to flush a toilet, what kind of car we drive or how we prepare for retirement. Congress manages our lives in ways unimaginable to our ancestors through agencies created by the greatest generation, such as Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Social Security Administration and a host of alphabet agencies such as EPA, DOL, BLM, CDC and DOT. …

Amazing obit from Telegraph, UK. John Noble, 84, an American who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union’s Gulag and lived to tell about it.

John Noble, who died on November 10 aged 84, spent several years in the Soviet gulag system despite being an American citizen, and later wrote about his experiences in two books of memoirs.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

We have a couple of items on the progress in Iraq. Christopher Hitchens, the stalwart, is first.

… As I began by saying, I am not at all certain that any of this apparently good news is really genuine or will be really lasting. However, I am quite sure both that it could be true and that it would be wonderful if it were to be true. What worries me about the reaction of liberals and Democrats is not the skepticism, which is pardonable, but the dank and sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased. The latter mentality isn’t pardonable and ought not to be pardoned, either.

Newsweek is next.

For someone who has returned periodically to Baghdad during these past four and a half years of war, there has been one constant: it only gets worse. The faces change, the units rotate, the victims vary, but it has always gotten worse. Brief successes (elections, a unity government) collapse as still greater problems rear up (death squads, Iranian-made bombs). The country’s sects grow ever more antagonistic; the killings become more depraved; first a million, then 2 million, then 4 million Iraqis flee their homes. Al Qaeda loses its leader when Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is killed. But it steadily replenishes its ranks of suicide bombers, and morphs from a largely foreign force into a far more dangerous indigenous one. And so on.

For the first time, however, returning to Baghdad after an absence of four months, I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable. “It’s hard to believe,” says a friend named Fareed, who has also gone and come back over the years to find the situation always worse, “but this time it’s really not.” Such words are uttered only grudgingly by those such as me, who have been disappointed again and again by Iraq, where a pessimist is merely someone who has had to endure too many optimists. …

… The most important repairs—to Baghdad’s psyche—may be out of anyone’s control. “The greatest obstacle [to reconciliation] is what the social fabric was subjected to,” Tareq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president, said last week. For the first time in years, Baghdad’s citizens now feel reasonably safe in their own neighborhoods. But they remain fearful of moving between them, across the capital’s myriad sectarian borders, some invisible, others marked by high concrete. There continues to be a handful of sectarian killings daily in the city, most attributed to rogue Shiite militias ignoring the ceasefire, but each one leaving a family with a potential vendetta. Patching up Baghdad’s social fabric may prove a lot harder than defeating Al Qaeda. And, yes, it could still get worse again. A pessimist is also an optimist who has too often been proved wrong.

Jack Kelly says Iraq is indeed a quagmire – for al-Qaida.

… Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous “capitals” of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.

Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.

Al-Qaida’s support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group’s lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida’s attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.

“Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization’s reputation as a defender of Islam,” said StrategyPage. …

Norman Podhoretz defends against Andrew Sullivan.

In my article “The Case for Bombing Iran” (COMMENTARY, June 2007), in my book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, and in various public appearances, I quoted the Ayatollah Khomeini as having said the following:

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

My source for this statement was Amir Taheri, the prolific Iranian-born journalist now living in London, who has also contributed a number of articles to COMMENTARY. Now, however, the Economist, relying on another Iranian-born writer, Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, has alleged on its blog “Democracy in America” that Khomeini never said any such thing. “Someone,” says Mr. Bakhash, “should inform Mr. Podhoretz he is citing a non-existent statement.”

That “someone” has turned out to be Andrew Sullivan in his widely read blog, “The Daily Dish.” Linking to the Economist post, Sullivan accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for failing to admit that I have made an “error” in relying on a “bogus quotation” to bolster my argument that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would not be deterred from using them by the fear of retaliation.

I do not usually bother responding to Sullivan’s frequent attacks on me, which are fueled by the same shrill hysteria that, as has often been pointed out, deforms most of what he “dishes” out on a daily basis. But in this case I have decided to respond because, by linking to a sober source like the Economist, he may for a change seem credible. …

Thomas Sowell tries to help us make sense of income statistics. Part I was in Jewish World Review, and Part II was found at Townhall. Looks like there will be more, which will be included later.

Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the Census Bureau, which seem to indicate that.

On the other hand, income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service seem to show the exact opposite: People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91 percent by 2005.

The top one percent — “the rich” who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left — saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26 percent.

Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income increased by 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.

How can all this be? How can official statistics from different agencies of the same government — the Census Bureau and the IRS — lead to such radically different conclusions? …

Phil Valentine, a columnist for The Tennessean, has a column on Al Gore; Al Gore is like Jim Jones, and we’re drinking his Kool-Aid. We’re gonna have Mr. Valentine back.

… Al Gore, the Jim Jones of this new religious cult, preaches doom and gloom from his pettifogger pulpit, all the while living the lifestyle of an energy hog. He actually uses twice the amount of electricity in one month at his Nashville home than the average household uses in an entire year. He has two homes in Tennessee, one in Virginia, at least. He flies all over the world on his Magical Hysteria Tour, sucking down resources and belching out tons of carbon, all to tell us we need to conserve. We’re trying to make ends meet just to afford gas in our cars while Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. And no one seems to care.

The Branch Algorians read from the Gospel of Al and never question a word. The movement’s devil is carbon dioxide, an essential component of photosynthesis and the substance we all exhale with every breath. Understand this: CO2 is not a pollutant. However, Gore and the radical environmentalists have been quite successful in convincing people that smog and CO2 are the same. They are not. CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with the smog or haze we see over our cities. There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything to do with any kind of warming. …

Tech Central writes on the findings that a little extra pounds are good for you.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Mark Helprin, always an original thinker, thinks an armed Germany can help preserve peace.

Though no longer the chief delinquent of Europe, and though not much thought is given to its strategic position, Germany is still Europe’s center of gravity, territorially contiguous to more nations than any state other than Russia, with compact interior lines of communication, Western Europe’s largest population, and Europe’s leading economy.

Facts like these assert themselves through every kind of historical fluctuation, even if America now sees Germany, the way stop for airlifters en route to Iraq and Afghanistan, as a kind of giant aircraft carrier with sausages. But Germany is no doubt the subject of far deeper consideration on the one hand by Russia and on the other by Jihadists.

The line from Paris to Moscow, which has been traveled from west to east by the French, east to west by the Russians, and in both directions by the Germans, is a road that invariably attracts continental powers on the brink of military predominance whether in fact or the imagination. …

Power Line notes the end of the last ice age might have started Noah’s travails.

Marty Peretz notes some good news about Jimmy Carter.

David Leonhardt of the NY Times has an nice contrarian view of current economic “problems.”

Until Tuesday’s rally on Wall Street, the news on the business pages has sounded pretty grim lately. Stocks are still down 6 percent from their peak this year, and oil is near a record high. The dollar, incredibly, is worth only 96 Canadian cents. And house prices will be falling for a long time to come.

So in an effort to cheer everyone up before Thanksgiving, this column is going to focus today on some good news. Here it is:

Stocks are still down 6 percent from their peak, and oil is near a record high. The dollar, incredibly, is worth only 96 Canadian cents. And house prices will be falling for a long time to come.

Seriously.

As long as the financial system doesn’t have a major meltdown, none of these developments will turn out to be as bad as you think. Some of them are downright welcome. …

Samizdata caught the Economist with its bias showing.

The editors of The Australian think their left and our Dems should stop ignoring some success in Iraq.

IN April, US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq lost, saying the the extreme violence in the country proved the surge was accomplishing nothing. This week Senator Reid is still engaged in the vain attempt to block funding for the war in the US Senate, refusing to acknowledge the extraordinary success of the surge.

Against all the defeatist expectations of the so-called “anti-war” lobby, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this week reported that terrorist attacks, including car bombings, in Baghdad had dropped by 77 per cent since last year’s peak. The dramatic improvement is directly attributed to the surge of 30,000 US troops, their effective counter-insurgency strategy and to the fact that locals are fed up with al-Qa’ida and other extremists. The good news is not just limited to Baghdad. Anbar, once an al-Qa’ida stronghold, is relatively peaceful thanks to the joint efforts of Sunni sheiks and marines. In the south, those willing Iraq to defeat were gloomily predicting that the withdrawal of British troops from Basra would lead to a brutal domination of the city by Iranian-backed terrorists. That hasn’t happened. …

Michael Barone with a way to grasp the possibility of progress in Iraq. He calls it “macrotime.”

When my father returned from service as an Army doctor in Korea in 1953, he brought back slides of the photos he’d shot, showing a war-torn country of incredible poverty. We would have laughed if you had told us that Americans would one day buy Korean cars. But 50-some years later, South Korea has the 13th-largest economy in the world, and you see Hyundais and Kias everywhere in America. Looking at things in microtime frames is not always a reliable guide to the macrotime-frame future. …

Since this is contrarian day, what with Mark Helprin and David Leonhardt above, how about a libertarian’s negative view of the Iraq war? There are a large number of folks like this who, because of the rabid left, keep their counsel close. Tyler Cowen of George Mason’s econ dept. leads the way.

John Fund points to another part of the immigration debate that could bite the Dems.

It’s been less than a week since New York’s Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer had to climb down from their support of driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has moved to kill an amendment that would protect employers from federal lawsuits for requiring their workers to speak English. Among the employers targeted by such lawsuits: the Salvation Army.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a moderate Republican from Tennessee, is dumbstruck that legislation he views as simple common sense would be blocked. He noted that the full Senate passed his amendment to shield the Salvation Army by 75-19 last month, and the House followed suit with a 218-186 vote just this month. “I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it’s discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, ‘I want you to be able to speak America’s common language on the job,’ ” he told the Senate last Thursday. …

Karl Rove has started a column for Newsweek. In his first he tells how Clinton can be beaten.

I’ve seen up close the two Clintons America knows. He’s a big smile, hand locked on your arm and lots of charms. “Hey, come down and speak at my library. I’d like to talk some politics with you.”

And her? She tends to be, well, hard and brittle. I inherited her West Wing office. Shortly after the 2001 Inauguration, I made a little talk saying I appreciated having the office because it had the only full-length vanity mirror in the West Wing, which gave me a chance to improve my rumpled appearance. The senator from New York confronted me shortly after and pointedly said she hadn’t put the mirror there. I hadn’t said she did, just that the mirror was there. So a few weeks later, in another talk, I repeated the story about the mirror. And shortly thereafter, the junior senator saw me and, again, without a hint of humor or light in her voice, icily said she’d heard I’d repeated the story of the mirror and she … did … not … put … that mirror in the office.

It is a small but telling story: …

Bill Kristol slams the boomers.

… There really was greatness in the “greatest generation.” It fought and won World War II, then came home to achieve widespread prosperity and overcome segregation while seeing the Cold War through to a successful conclusion. But the greatest generation had one flaw, its greatest flaw, you might say: It begat the baby boomers. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Mark Steyn thinks the world should give thanks for America.

… The New World (The United States) is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union. …

… on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. …

Charles Krauthammer notes the good foreign policy news for the US. Since Bush is supposed to be a moron, how is all this happening?

… France has a new president who is breaking not just with the anti-Americanism of the Chirac era but with 50 years of Fifth Republic orthodoxy that defined French greatness as operating in counterpoise to America. Nicolas Sarkozy’s trip last week to the United States was marked by a highly successful White House visit and a rousing speech to Congress in which he not only called America “the greatest nation in the world” (how many leaders of any country say that about another?) but pledged solidarity with the U.S. on Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. This just a few months after he sent his foreign minister to Iraq to signal an openness to cooperation and an end to Chirac’s reflexive obstructionism.

That’s France. In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder is long gone, voted out of office and into a cozy retirement as Putin’s concubine at Gazprom. His successor is the decidedly pro-American Angela Merkel, who concluded an unusually warm visit with Bush this week.

All this, beyond the ken of Democrats, is duly noted by new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who in an interview with Sky News on Sunday noted “the great change that is taking place,” namely “that France and Germany and the European Union are also moving more closely with America.”

As for our other traditional alliances, relations with Australia are very close, and Canada has shown remarkable steadfastness in taking disproportionate casualties in supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Eastern European nations, traditionally friendly, are taking considerable risks on behalf of their U.S. alliance — for example, cooperating with us on missile defense in the face of enormous Russian pressure. And ties with Japan have never been stronger, with Tokyo increasingly undertaking military and quasi-military obligations that it had forsworn for the last half-century. …

David Broder points out a couple of issues the Dems have to face.

As the Democratic presidential race finally gets down to brass tacks, two issues are becoming paramount. But only one of them is clearly on the table.

That is the issue of illegal immigration. A very smart Democrat, a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me that he expects it to be a key part of any Republican campaign and that he is worried about his party’s ability to respond. …

Dick Morris says, even though CNN gave her a pass, Hillary still has Iowa problems.

Under Wolf Blitzer’s gentle questioning, Hillary was able to avert another debate meltdown in the Nevada Democratic debate held last night, November 15. Asked about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, a compliant, even subservient, Blitzer accepted Hillary’s one word answer, “No,” with no follow up. Had a better journalist been asking the questions — like Tim Russert — he would have followed up the bland negation with probing questions about why she is yet again flip flopping on the issue.

The Drudge Report today highlights that a “senior adviser to the Hillary campaign” said, earlier today, that Blitzer “was outstanding, and did not gang up like Russert did in Philadelphia. He avoided personal attacks, remained professional and ran the best debate so far.” And Blitzer checked his journalistic instincts at the door.

The debate also had a pro-Hillary bias in the amount of time allocated to Bill Richardson — who had the third longest face time in the debate. Since Richardson is auditioning for Vice President on Hillary’s ticket, using his time to plead for unity among Democrats (i.e. don’t bash Hillary), giving him the mike was the same as giving it to Hillary. …

Another grown-up from the National Journal, William Powers, writes on race-gender issues.

Race and gender are journalistic standbys, familiar old hot buttons that reliably lend themselves to news stories, though in today’s world they’re not half as newsy as they once were. To the informed news consumer, these buttons are barely warm. …

 

… The media are always at least a decade behind real life. …

 

…. In February, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that race and gender have lost much of their political relevancy. “According to voters,” the Post reported, “being over the age of 72, a Mormon, twice divorced, or a smoker all are bigger drags on a candidate’s support than is gender or race.” The same poll found that although small percentages of voters would be less likely to support a woman or a black candidate, they are offset by those who are more likely to support such candidates.

If smoking is really a bigger negative with voters than gender or race, shouldn’t Obama’s cigarette habit — which he’s been trying to kick with nicotine gum — be just as controversial, newswise, as his skin color or Clinton’s sex?

One reason the media lag society is that they rely on precedent. Smokers have been elected president before, but no woman or African-American ever has. The past sets the tune for the present, no matter how much the culture has changed. …

In a Corner post, Mark Steyn has interesting thoughts about the American electorate.

Jonah, I think Americans beat themselves up way too much over “low” voter turnout. For a start, the nature of American democracy is profoundly different: If you live in Hampshire, England, you can vote for just three offices – a local councillor, a Member of Parliament, a Euro-MP – every five years. If you live in New Hampshire, New England, you can vote for hundreds of folks – President, Governor, Senator, Congressman, State Representative all the way up to County Commissioner, Sherriff, Register of Probate, Town Clerk, School District Treasurer, Cemetery Commissioner, Library Trustee, Sexton, etc. If you factor in the multiple officers, America has the highest rate of civic participation in the developed world. …

So how’s Eliot Spitzer doing these days? WSJ Editors have some thoughts.

… The only real difference between Mr. Spitzer now and then is that as Governor he is obliged to govern, as opposed to merely bringing charges amid a PR offensive and then settling before having to prove anything in court. His heavy-handed approach to the drivers license plan shows the limits of such behavior in a job where he actually has to persuade people.

It remains far from clear whether Mr. Spitzer has drawn the right lessons from his recent failures. At Wednesday’s announcement on the licensing plan, he said that leadership was “not solely about doing what one thinks is right,” a curious formulation. There may be more damaging revelations to come out of Troopergate too. But assuming Mr. Spitzer survives that scandal, he could do worse than enroll in anger management class and take a pledge not to try to ruin everyone who disagrees with him.

Ronald Baily of Reason wants you to relax about the coming oil glut.

… Interestingly, despite a four-fold increase in the price of oil, world economic growth has been pretty robust. For example, the U.S. economy grew at 3.9 percent rate last quarter and inflation and unemployment remain low. Why? In September 2007 paper entitled, “Who’s Afraid of a Big Bad Oil Shock,” Yale University economist William Nordhaus speculates that the reaction of consumers and businesses to steep oil price increases is muted because they regard them as temporary. In addition, the cost of energy is less important to the budgets of businesses and consumers.

In 1980, when oil reached $101.70 per barrel in real terms, spending on gasoline was 4.5 percent of GDP, 7.2 percent of consumer expenditures, and 6.2 percent of personal disposable income, according to a March 2005 report by Goldman Sachs. If oil prices reach $105 per barrel, the report noted that gasoline spending would reach 3.6 percent of forecasted GDP, 5.3 percent of consumer expenditures, and 5.0 percent of personal disposable income. Prices would have to rise to $135 per barrel to equal 1970s levels. In addition, it takes only half as much energy to produce a dollar of GDP today than it did in 1980. …

Politico has the story of African Bishops who lobby congress. They don’t understand. For congress, money speaks, not moral suasion.

As domestic agriculture constituencies elbow for big chunks of federal money in the farm bill, three men made the rounds of the Senate offering a different message, from a different continent: Crop subsidies must be curbed because they are hurting African farmers.

“By subsidizing some of the most prosperous U.S. farmers, the farm bill affects the meager livelihoods of 10 million of our fellow Africans,” Bishop Thomas Kabore of Kaya, Burkina Faso, said at a news conference. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Milton Friedman passed away one year ago tomorrow. You will remember why he is missed if you click on his name and hear him answer a question about greed from Phil Donahue.

Victor Davis Hanson notes the lack of news out of Iraq.

There’s an old expression about war: “Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan.” But in the case of Iraq, it seems the other way around. We’ve blamed many for the ordeal of the last four years, but it is the American victory in Anbar province that now seems without parents.

Over the last few months, the U.S. military forced Sunni insurgents in Anbar to quit fighting. This enemy, in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, had been responsible for most American casualties in the war and was the main cause of unrest in Iraq. Even more unexpectedly, some of the defeated tribes then joined in an alliance of convenience with their American victors to chase al-Qaida from Iraq’s major cities.

As President Bush recently told U.S. troops about Anbar province: “It was once written off as lost. It is now one of the safest places in Iraq.”

But that dramatic turnabout in Iraq is rarely reported. We know as much about O.J.’s escapades in Vegas as we do about the Anbar awakening or the flight of al-Qaida from Baghdad. …

Max Boot says send the State Department to war.

THE State Department has announced that it will force 50 foreign service officers to go to Iraq, whether they want to or not. This is the biggest use of “directed assignments” since the Vietnam War, and it represents a long-overdue response to complaints that diplomats aren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient the department and the government as a whole for the global war on Islamic terrorism. Yes, this is a war, but it’s a very different war from conventional conflicts like World War II or the Civil War. It is, in essence, a global counterinsurgency, and few counterinsurgencies have ever been won by force alone. …

It’s Hillary’s bad luck her troubles coincided with Camille Paglia’s monthly Salon.com piece.

… Hillary’s stonewalling evasions and mercurial, soulless self-positionings have been going on since her first run for the U.S. Senate from New York, a state she had never lived in and knew virtually nothing about. The liberal Northeastern media were criminally complicit in enabling her queenlike, content-free “listening tour,” where she took no hard questions and where her staff and security people (including her government-supplied Secret Service detail) staged events stocked with vetted sympathizers, and where they ensured that no protesters would ever come within camera range.

That compulsive micromanagement, ultimately emanating from Hillary herself, has come back to haunt her in her dismaying inability to field complex unscripted questions in a public forum. The presidential sweepstakes are too harsh an arena for tenderfoot novices. Hillary’s much-vaunted “experience” has evidently not extended to the dynamic give-and-take of authentic debate. The mild challenges she has faced would be pitiful indeed by British standards, which favor a caustic style of witty put-downs that draw applause and gales of laughter in the House of Commons. Women had better toughen up if they aspire to be commander in chief. …

Which brings us to two Hillary posts from the Captain.

For a candidate whom everyone expected to march confidently to her party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton has begun stumbling and cannot seem to right herself. First came a disaster of an answer at the last presidential debate, and the breathtaking attack on Tim Russert for having the temerity to question her about an immigration issue in her home state. Next came the revelations of question planting at campaign events. Now Drudge reports that the Clinton campaign warned Wolf Blitzer not to get tough in this week’s debate, or else:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer has been warned not to focus Thursday’s Dem debate on Hillary. ‘This campaign is about issues, not on who we can bring down and destroy,’ top Clinton insider explains. ‘Blitzer should not go down to the levels of character attack and pull ‘a Russert.” Blitzer is set to moderate debate from Vegas, with questions also being posed by Suzanne Malveaux…

The Clinton team has forgotten the First Rule of Holes: stop digging. No one except the most ardent of the netroots bought the explanation that Tim Russert was a right-wing plant at MS-NBC. If the Clintons expect that anyone will believe them when they hang the same jacket on Blitzer, they’re not just mistaken, they’re delusional.

Today, CNN also notes that the explanation given for the Grinnell University incident doesn’t quite wash, either: …

John Podoretz explores the reasons the Clinton folks are unhappy with Tim Russert.

… There is a history here. Tim Russert moderated the only debate in 2000 between Senate candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival, Rick Lazio. While most remember that debate because Lazio crossed the stage to hand a piece of paper to Mrs. Clinton and was upbraided, preposterously but effectively, for somehow “violating her personal space,” Hillary and her people were enraged at Russert for what they took to be an extraordinarily hostile approach to her. …

Neal Boortz has a couple of shots.

Mickey Kaus says John Edwards’ tough talk is a “pathetic bluff.”

But Mark Steyn likes it.

Debra Saunders on how Diane Feinstein is being punished by the netroots for her rare votes supporting Bush nominees.

The new Democratic-led Congress has a 16 percent approval rating — no better than the rating of the Republican-led Congress a year ago — no doubt because voters see members clamoring to score points in the never-ending game of partisan gotcha, instead of working to do what is best for the country. When a politician does try to do what is right, there is too often more downside than upside.

Consider the cheap shots that have come the way of Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Chuck Schumer of New York because they voted to confirm the nomination of now-Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey last week. New York Times columnist Frank Rich compared the Feinstein and Schumer vote to Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf’s arrests of judges, lawyers and human-rights activists. A group of Democrats from the left wing of the party is trying to get the California Democratic Party’s executive board to censure Feinstein for the Mukasey vote, as well as her vote to confirm federal judge Leslie Southwick in October. …

Carpe Diem posts on income inequality and mobility.

… almost everything we hear in the media about increasing income inequality, the disappearing middle class, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and the lack of income mobility is either flawed, deficient, incorrect, incomplete or wrong. …

New York Observer on the return of Imus.

“I think I’ve had some history of defending friends of mine that have been in uncomfortable circumstances,” said James Carville. “I defend the speaker, not the speech. If there’s no redemption, what are we here for?”

Mr. Carville, speaking by phone to The Observer on Monday, was referring to his former boss, President Clinton, but also to another public figure undone by his own indiscipline: Don Imus, the irreverent, sensitive, occasionally boorish, and strangely compelling radio talker who in April was fired from CBS for referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as–remember 2007?–“nappy-headed ho’s.”

Redemption! Since the dark days of April, Mr. Imus, 67–a denizen of Central Park West, and one of the paradigmatic radio heroes of the 90’s–has accomplished the beginnings of a media resurrection. Last month, he signed a 5-year deal with Citadel Broadcasting, through which he’ll return to the radio on December 3rd, as the host of a morning drive time show on the company’s WABC, the top-ranked AM radio station in New York City. The agreement, which will end Mr. Imus’ six-month sabbatical, is reportedly worth between $5 and 8 million annually—a pay-cut from Mr. Imus’ $10 million annual salary at CBS.

Still, his freedom will be curtailed: CBS kept him on only a five-second tape delay, which it rarely used, according to Martin Garbus, Mr. Imus’ lawyer. But a wary WABC told The Observer they’ll have him on a 21-second delay, giving them ample time to bleep out anything…troublesome. It may not be pure democracy, but at least he hasn’t abandoned the wide-open spaces of AM radio for the paywall of XM. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Stuart Taylor lets fly at the left in the Academy.

… the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.

Another hyperbolic, conservative rant about liberals in academia? Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.

They are also ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don’t like; are eager to censor such views; and in many cases are determined to push their own political views on students, who have few reality checks in their course material and are often too innocent of the world to understand when they are being fed fatuous tripe. …

… Academia’s “diversity” obsession is founded on hostility to diversity of opinion. To most academics, “diversity” is a code word for systematic preference of minorities and women over white males in all walks of life. The preferred groups include many faculty members who are manifestly unqualified for their positions and whose websites read like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of wacky professors. …

WaPo op-ed commends the changes in crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and suggests retroactivity.

Today the United States Sentencing Commission holds a hearing on its recent decision to reduce the disparity in federal sentencing guidelines for crack and powder cocaine offenses. As a former federal judge and chairman of the federal judiciary’s Criminal Law Committee, I believe the change in guidelines was long overdue, and, to maximize its impact as an important first step toward restoring the credibility of federal drug sentences, it should be applied retroactively. …

Mark Steyn with a Corner post that stirs up a lot of stuff here at Pickings.

Mark linked to this column by Dennis Prager about the language of the left.

The current issue of Rolling Stone magazine, its special 40th anniversary issue, reveals almost all one needs to know about the current state of the cultural left. The issue features interviews with people Rolling Stone considers to be America’s leading cultural and political figures — such as Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Cornel West, Paul Krugman, Kanye West, Bill Maher and George Clooney, among many others.

It brings me no pleasure to say that, with few exceptions, the interviews reveal a superficiality and contempt for cultural norms (as evidenced by the ubiquity of curse words) that should scare anyone who believes that these people have influence on American life.

First, the constant use of expletives. …

Which led to another Steyn Corner post, and then a post from Gateway Pundit which reported on a blog that actually surveyed the profanity of left and right blogs. Using as a standard of measure, George Carlin’s “seven words.” “They must be reeeeallllly baaaaad!!!!!!!”

This is what happened when the students at News Buckit compared nutroots profanity with profanity on the right:

And this is what I found, using what I deemed — through a mix of TTLB and 2006′s Weblog Award lists — to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. (Not counting this one. :)) I couldn’t account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn’t make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin’s “seven words” versus the Right?

According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Here are the data tables. …

We get all done with that, and WSJ has a Peter Berkowitz column on Bush hatred.

Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. The people, or various factions among them, have indulged in Clinton hatred, Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred, FDR hatred, Lincoln hatred, and John Adams hatred, to mention only the more extravagant hatreds that we Americans have conceived for our presidents.

But Bush hatred is different. It’s not that this time members of the intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition. Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene. …

… Many [Bush haters] seem not to have considered that in 2000 it was Al Gore who shifted the election controversy to the courts by filing a lawsuit challenging decisions made by local Florida county election supervisors. Nor [have many of them taken] into account that between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, 10 of 16 higher court judges–five of whom were Democratic appointees–found equal protection flaws with the recount scheme ordered by the intermediate Florida court. And they did not appear to have pondered Judge Richard Posner’s sensible observation, much less themselves sensibly observe, that while indeed it was strange to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide a presidential election, it would have been even stranger for the election to have been decided by the Florida Supreme Court.

Walter Williams writes about the tax burden and turns up scary numbers.

… What about any argument suggesting that the burden of taxes have been shifted to the poor? The bottom 50 percent, earning $30,000 or less, paid 3 percent of total federal income taxes. In 1999, they paid 4 percent. Congressmen know all of this, but they attempt to hoodwink the average American who doesn’t.

The fact that there are so many American earners who have little or no financial stake in our country poses a serious political problem. The Tax Foundation estimates that 41 percent of whites, 56 percent of blacks, 59 percent of American Indian and Aleut Eskimo and 40 percent Asian and Pacific Islanders had no 2004 federal income tax liability. The study concluded, “When all of the dependents of these income-producing households are counted, there are roughly 122 million Americans — 44 percent of the U.S. population — who are outside of the federal income tax system.” These people represent a natural constituency for big-spending politicians. In other words, if you have little or no financial stake in America, what do you care about the cost of massive federal spending programs? …

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, was the subject of a profile in last Sunday’s business section of Times, YUK.

THIS is yet another story about a clueless but obtrusive boss — the kind of meddlesome manager you might laugh at in the panels of “Dilbert,” the daily comic strip. …

… “THE most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.” …

… “THE purpose of a plan is to disguise the fact that you have no idea what you should be doing.” …

… He adds that running a restaurant complements his life nicely. “It’s a source of stress, but it adds such richness and happiness to my life,” he says. “The problem with being a cartoonist is that if you don’t have someplace else to go, your life just gets so small.”

At the very least, Scott Adams is getting fresh insight into Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Pete Du Pont writes on the Utah school voucher loss.

… Utah citizens voted down the voucher plan by 62% to 38%. That is too bad–educational choices by parents for their children is an important concept–but not surprising. While there are successful school choice programs operating in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, 10 state referenda on various voucher proposals have been defeated since 1972, including two defeats each in California, Michigan and Colorado.

One reason for these defeats has been the work of the teachers unions, which oppose school choice of any kind because it limits their power. Passage of the Utah school choice statute earlier this year prompted a union call to arms. The national teachers unions went to war in Utah and won.

When the choice bill was passed by the Utah Legislature last winter, Nancy Pomeroy of Parents Choice in Education enthusiastically recited the score: “Parents and Children 1. Unions and Educrats 0.” Unfortunately the score flipped on Tuesday. …

Michael Barone too.

Education is not ordinarily thought to be in the purview of a Federal Reserve chairman. So it’s striking when Alan Greenspan in his memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” raises the subject.

“Our primary and secondary education system,” he writes, “is deeply deficient in providing homegrown talent to operate our increasingly complex infrastructure.” The result: “Too many of our students languish at too low a level of skill upon graduation, adding to the supply of lesser-skilled labor in the face of an apparently declining demand.”

So if you’re concerned about widening disparities in income, Greenspan tells readers attracted to his book by its publicists’ promise of criticism of George W. Bush, then what you need to do is to “harness better the forces of competition” in educating kids. …

Good Power Line post on what’s in a name.

One might have thought that after the Democrats’ electoral victory last November, the ideology that dare not speak its name might come out of the closet. But no: Politico points out that the Democrats still won’t let on that they are liberals:

These are heady days for Democrats. The party is favored by almost all measures in the coming presidential contest.

But while Democrats are emboldened, they remain wary of the term “liberal.” …

James Taranto covers David Brooks column on the tiresome folks that also write at the Times,YUCK. Remember the London Times is Times, UK. We needed a designation for the paper of Walter Duranty and defeat.

What’s black and white and red all over? A New York Times blood feud! On Friday David Brooks of the Times devoted his column to debunking a “distortion” that “has spread like a weed over the past few months”:

An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia [Miss.] to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side.

“The truth,” Brooks notes, is more complicated. Reagan had planned to spend the week after the 1980 GOP convention courting black voters: …

Taranto also spots gay-baiting Dems including, would you believe, Andrew Sullivan.

And Jim reports on Hillary’s thin skin according to The New Republic.

George Will talks some economic sense.

… Presidential elections are always epidemics of economic illiteracy and hysteria, for two reasons: The party not holding the White House has an incentive to talk gloomy nonsense, and the media, for whom the phrase “good news” is an oxymoron (“We don’t report the planes that land safely”), love crises. In 2004, Democrats spoke of “the worst economy since Hoover” and “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” Republicans will, in time, have their wilderness season for spouting nonsensical pessimism.

That can, however, be self-fulfilling: Worried people curtail consumption, wary businesses defer investments. Everyone should remember the witticism that the stock market has predicted nine of the last three recessions.

Terry Teachout, writing in The National Review, gives us a 50 year look at Atlas Shrugged.

As I write these words, the 146th best-selling book on Amazon.com is the trade-paperback edition of a 1,200-page-long, 50-year-old mystery novel about a physicist, two industrialists, and a South American playboy with four (count ’em, four) middle names. Though the novel in question contains a fair amount of sex, its centerpiece is a 56-page monologue about the modern-day implications of Aristotelian philosophy. The author, a squat, vain Russian émigré, was so sure she’d penned a masterpiece that she refused to let anyone change a line of it, and so stubborn that she managed to impose her will on her publisher, who readily admitted to finding her philosophy “absolutely horrifying.” Be that as it may, Random House’s Bennett Cerf had been in the book-selling game long enough to know a cash cow when he saw one, so he ordered up a first printing of 100,000 copies — and sold them all.

Cerf recalled his friendly but uneasy professional relationship with Ayn Rand in At Random, his genial autobiography:

I remember when Atlas Shrugged was being edited by Hiram Haydn. The hero, John Galt, makes a speech that lasts about thirty-eight pages [sic!]. All that he says in it has been said over and over already in the book, but Hiram couldn’t get her to cut a word. . . . I said, “Ayn, nobody’s going to read that. You’ve said it all three or four times before, and it’s thirty-odd pages long. You’ve got to cut it.” She looked at me calmly and said, “Would you cut the Bible?” So I gave up.

Cerf dictated that anecdote to an oral historian in 1968. …

Long Range Weather gives us a graph of 4,500 years of global temps. Shows Al Gore is full of it. But you knew that.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Maimon Schwarzschild posts in Right Coast on Armistice Day.

It was 89 years Sunday since the Armistice that ended the First World War in 1918 – the day the guns finally fell silent on the Western Front (and on all fronts) at precisely 11-11-11: 11.00 am, November 11.

In Britain and Commonwealth countries every year, there are remembrance ceremonies on the Sunday that falls nearest November 11 – Remembrance Sunday – but this year November 11 itself is Sunday, which will make these remembrance events somehow especially poignant.

Even now, 89 years later, there is a lot more emotion about all this in Europe and in the countries that were British dominions than in the US. …

Suzanne Fields on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Nearly 20 years ago, the Berlin Wall finally came tumbling down. If Humpty Dumpty had been foolish enough to sit on it, that’s where he would have had his fatal fall. Not all the East German guards nor all the Stasi operatives who spied on everyone could have put poor Humpty together again.

It was a defining moment for mankind, exposing the ultimate failure of the brutal and goofy Marxist economic system. As John F. Kennedy noted on his visit to the Wall in 1963: “There are some who say communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.” …

Three folks, Peggy Noonan, Dick Morris, and Michael Goodwin comment on Hillary’s problems.

Noonan;

The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they’d like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, “I will have beef.”

Yes, said the waiter. “And the vegetables?”

“They will have beef too.”

Too good to check, as they say. It is certainly apocryphal, but I don’t want it to be. It captured her singular leadership style, which might be characterized as “unafraid.”

She was a leader.

Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender. …

Morris;

During the Bill Clinton presidency, it became obvious that the president and the first lady were locked in a zero sum game of perception. The stronger people perceived her, the weaker they felt he was. Early in his tenure, news stories were rife about Hillary’s extraordinary influence on appointments, policy and political strategy. Each of these leaks sapped confidence in Bill Clinton’s strength and led to a drop in his ratings.

The solution was to exile Hillary from the White House. She stopped attending strategy meetings, no longer had a direct or public role in policy formulation and redoubled her schedule of foreign travel and writing.

Now, as Hillary runs for president and Bill speaks out on her behalf, the Clintons’ zero sum conundrum has returned. His stout defense of his wife saps her credibility and raises doubts about her potential strength as a president. With his every speech and utterance, the question grows: Can she stand up for herself or does she need to hide behind her husband? …

Goodwin;

Hillary Clinton has a man problem. No, no, not that kind of man problem. And not the man problem she had in mind when she accused her rivals of “piling on” at the debate debacle. Her man problem comes from her friends.

Friends like Gov. Spitzer, who has thrown her the hottest political potato of the year with his plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Friends like booster Charlie Rangel, the Harlem congressman whose massive tax-hike proposal is fast becoming a millstone around her political neck.

And the biggest man problem of all is Hubba Bubba, who is developing a habit of saying stupid things. A bimbo eruption would almost be comic relief compared with his nonsense of saying that critics who blast wifey’s habit of ducking tough issues are practically “Swift-boating” her. He followed that turkey with a free-association ramble to an Iowa audience that seemed to suggest the rough and tumble of the immigration debate resembled Al Qaeda tactics.

Tech Central Station has a side of Mexican immigration you might not have considered.

I wish my American friends who fret about Mexican immigrants could be here with me. Listening to Emiliano Zapata, a laborer who happens to be the grandson and namesake of the legendary Mexican revolutionary, they perhaps would get a clearer sense of how the migration of Mexicans originated a few decades ago and why it continues today. …

American Thinker likes the Hugo Chavez put-down.

Power Line has Chavez thoughts too.

Contentions posts on the U of Deleware PC programs.

Bjorn Lomborg was in the Sunday Telegraph.

This week, the United Nations’ climate scientists will release a major report synthesising the world’s best global warming research. It will be the first time we’ve heard from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore.

The IPCC’s Assessment Report will tell policy-makers what to expect from man-made climate change. It is the result of rigorous and painstaking labour: more than can be said for the other Nobel Prize winner. The difference between Gore’s claims and IPCC research is instructive.

While Gore was creating alarm with his belief that a 20-foot-high wall of water would inundate low-lying cities, the IPCC showed us we should realistically prepare for a rise of one foot or so by the end of the century. Beyond the dramatic difference, it is also worth putting that one foot in perspective. Over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot – yet, did we notice?

Most tellingly, while Gore was raising fears about the Gulf Stream halting and a new Ice Age starting, the scientists discounted the prospect entirely. …

Speaking of green, Jonah Goldberg comments on NBC’s new program.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• Word

• PDF

Mark Steyn has Pakistan thoughts.

… Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: Gen. Musharraf should do this; he shouldn’t have done that; the State Department should lean on him to do the other.

“It is time for him to go,” pronounced Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach. Every foreign policy genius has his Hollywood pitch ready: “If we’re not careful, we’re going to see the same thing happen that happened in Iran,” warned Dan Burton, R-Ind. Pakistan 2007 is a remake of Persia 1979 with the general as the shah, etc.

Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad.

Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that’s because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives. In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush told the world that you’re either with us or against us. Musharraf said he was with us, which was jolly decent of him considering that 99.9999 percent of his people are against us. In the teeth of that glum reality, he’s rode a difficult tightrope with some skill. …

Bill Kristol makes sure we don’t overlook Lieberman’s recent speech, or Lieberman himself. Here’s the Senator;

. . . [T]here is something profoundly wrong–something that should trouble all of us–when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base–even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.

For me, this episode reinforces how far the Democratic Party of 2007 has strayed. . . . That is why I call myself an Independent Democrat today. It is because my foreign policy convictions are the convictions that have traditionally animated the Democratic Party–but they exist in me today independent of the current Democratic Party, which has largely repudiated them. …

Samizdata quote reminds us idiots reside in business too.

Karl Rove had an op-ed about the Dem congressional leadership in WSJ.

This week is the one-year anniversary of Democrats winning Congress. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid probably aren’t in a celebrating mood. The goodwill they enjoyed after their victory is gone. Their bright campaign promises are unfulfilled. Democratic leadership is in disarray. And Congress’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest point in history.

The problems the Democrats are now experiencing begin with the federal budget. Or rather, the lack of one. In 2006, Democrats criticized Congress for dragging its feet on the budget and pledged that they would do better. Instead, they did worse. The new fiscal year started Oct. 1 — five weeks ago — but Democrats have yet to send the president a single annual appropriations bill. It’s been at least 20 years since Congress has gone this late in passing any appropriation bills, an indication of the mess the Pelosi-Reid Congress is now in. …

Peter Wehner in Contentions comments on Pelosi’s latest “end the war” stunt.

… In Iraq we’re also seeing some encouraging news on the economic front and very encouraging, even dramatic, progress on the local political front; “bottom-up” reconciliation is continuing apace. The main problem in Iraq lies with the central government and its unwillingness, still, to share power. Nevertheless, almost every important trend line in Iraq is positive. And yet to the likes of Speaker Pelosi, it matters not at all. She and her colleagues are ideologues in the truest sense—zealous and doctrinaire people committed to a path regardless of the evidence. And the fact that good news in Iraq seems to agitate her and other leading Democrats is astonishing, as well as unsettling.

Nancy Pelosi’s effort to subvert a manifestly successful (if belatedly implemented) strategy in Iraq is reckless and foolish—and it may succeed in driving down Congressional approval ratings, already at record lows, to single digits. Which is about where they belong.

Joshua Muravchik, also in Contentions, examines awards by something in DC called the Churchill Centre.

… If you find the Baker-Hamilton legacy incongruent with that of Churchill, the Churchill Centre is out to reshape your memory of him, much as various academics lately have redefined Ronald Reagan as a liberal or moderate in noble contrast to the odious conservative, George W. Bush. The Centre explains: “The political precept that won Churchill respect from all sides was his belief that in difficult times the best results follow when people of differing beliefs and backgrounds come together, the greatest example of which was the ‘Grand Alliance’ of World War II.” In other words, Churchill’s great feat was not his resistance to Hitler but his embrace of Stalin.

Next, perhaps, the Centre will create a Churchill Award for Appeasement.

Speaking of Churchill, a Power Line post on new books centering on his relationship to Jews.

Cafe Hayek says Bill’s taking the fall for Hill.

Speaking of those two, Marty Peretz wonders if Bill wants her to fail. And Peretz is not reassured by her Mid-east thoughts.

American Thinker has a peek inside the academy’s fundraising.

Higher education, one of the biggest industries in America, has gotten wealthy beyond the dreams of previous generations of academics. Tuition increases at more than double the rate of inflation for a decade, taxpayer funding of research, tuition loans and scholarship, and tax exempt donations by the wealthy have all added enormous sums.

Wrapped in mantle of virtue and knowledge, the actual business of extracting the annual hundreds of billions of dollars it devours remains in the shadows. But a recent event has made public a perfectly normal, yet mildly disturbing practice related to fundraising.

To paraphrase a campaign slogan of yore, it’s not what’s illegal that’s the problem; it is what is normal. …

The Angry Economist posts on the drug war.

One of the funniest things ever in the New Yorker. Showed up four and a half years ago. Time for a redo.

People are surprised when I tell them that I, by temperament and by avocation, am a naturalist. I don’t look like a naturalist. No pair of field glasses dangles from my sunburned neck (which isn’t sunburned), and I don’t wear hiking boots or an old bandanna, and my arms are not laden with specimen bags and notebooks and tweezers—the tools of the naturalist’s trade, you are thinking, but not of mine. I don’t live in a tent, not even for part of the year. I don’t own a canoe or a kayak or any kind of net. The shelves in my study? I can tell you truthfully that they are not lined with large jars containing the well-preserved bodies of dead squirrels and such, or with old birds’ nests, or with a dozen or so different types of ferns that are indistinguishable to you but not to me. No. …

Paul Greenberg provides more entertainment.