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• October 11 Word

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Christopher DeMuth who ran the American Enterprise Institute for 21 years does his swan song.

… Think tanks are identified in the public mind as agents of a particular political viewpoint. It is sometimes suggested that this compromises the integrity of their work. Yet their real secret is not that they take orders from, or give orders to, the Bush administration or anyone else. Rather, they have discovered new methods for organizing intellectual activity–superior in many respects (by no means all) to those of traditional research universities.

To be sure, think tanks–at least those on the right–do not attempt to disguise their political affinities in the manner of the (invariably left-leaning) universities. We are “schools” in the old sense of the term: groups of scholars who share a set of philosophical premises and take them as far as we can in empirical research, persuasive writing, and arguments among ourselves and with those of other schools.

This has proven highly productive. It is a great advantage, when working on practical problems, not to be constantly doubling back to first principles. We know our foundations and concentrate on the specifics of the problem at hand. We like to work on hard problems, and there are many fertile disagreements in our halls over bioethics, school reform, the rise of China, constitutional interpretation and what to do about Korea and Iran. …

Victor Davis Hanson was in Iraq for a few weeks and gives his prognosis.

Iraq for most Americans is now a toxic subject — best either ignored or largely evoked to blame someone for something in the past.

Any visitor to Iraq can see that the American military cannot be defeated there, but also is puzzled over exactly how we could win — victory being defined as fostering a stable Iraqi constitutional state analogous to, say, Turkey.

But war is never static. Over the last 90 days, there has been newfound optimism, as Iraqis are at last stepping forward to help Americans secure their country.

I spent last week touring outlying areas of Baghdad and American forward operating bases in Anbar and Diyala provinces, talking to Army and Marine combat teams and listening to Iraqi provincial and security officials.

Whether in various suburbs of Baghdad, or in Baqubah, Ramadi or Taji, there is a familiar narrative of vastly reduced violence. Until recently, the Americans could not find enough interpreters, were rarely warned about landmines and had little support from Iraqi security forces.

But now they are being asked by Iraqis in the “Sunni Triangle” to join them to defeat the very terrorists the locals once championed. Anbar, a province that just months ago was deemed lost by a U.S. military intelligence report, is now in open revolt against al-Qaida. …

Mark’s Corner posts. One with perceptive thought.

… If one looks at recent history, the Republican nominee with the fullest, most profound political philosophy, the one who’d thought most seriously about the role of government and its relationship to individual liberty, was Ronald Reagan, who formed his views while doing other stuff. If instead of spending the Fifties doing movies and TV and speechifying for GE (and reading National Review), he’d been a Congressman or Senator, I doubt he’d have developed any kind of coherent worldview.

Thomas Sowell on the Taylor/Johnson Duke book.

… “Until Proven Innocent” also tells us about one of the forgotten victims of the Duke rape case — the African cab driver who cast the first doubt on the indictment, by saying publicly that one of the accused young men was with him in his taxi at the time the rape was supposedly happening.

A flimsy charge against that cab driver from three years earlier was suddenly resurrected, and District Attorney Michael Nifong had him picked up by the police, indicted and put on trial — where he was quickly acquitted by the judge.

Could this country survive as a free nation if every District Attorney used the power of that office to intimidate any witness whose testimony undermined the prosecution’s case?

How long will we in fact survive as a free nation when our leading universities are annually graduating thousands of students each, steeped in the notion that you can decide issues of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, by the “race, class and gender” of those involved?

That is what a large chunk of the Duke University faculty did, while few of the other faculty members dared to say anything against them or against the Duke administration’s surrender to the lynch mob atmosphere whipped up on campus.

In much of the media as well, the students were treated as guilty until proven innocent, and those who said otherwise were often savaged. …

Times, UK reports the British court decision against Gore’s book.

John Fund posts on Gore’s Nobel problems. Drudge is reporting Gore’s canceling appointments for today and flying to Europe. What will Bubba say?

Want to make micro-loans to third world entrepreneurs yourself? AdamSmith tells how. If you follow the link, you’ll find they have enough lenders at this time. Pickings will repeat this in three months to see if things have changed.

… a friend emailed me yesterday about Kiva, a non-profit organization that allows you to lend money to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world. So like Professor Muhammad Yunus – the pioneer of microfinance and recent Nobel Prize winner – you too can become a banker to the poor. All it will cost you is some foregone interest, and apparently Kiva’s entrepreneurs have a less then one percent default rate. …

Good news. WSJ says the bloom is off the rose for ethanol.

… Opposition to the ethanol industry’s goals has grown significantly stiffer. The so-called barnyard lobby — representing the meat, livestock and poultry industries — says high corn prices are hurting its profits. The price of corn-based animal feed has increased about 60% since 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Our single biggest priority is for Congress to reject a new renewable-fuels mandate,” says Jesse Sevcik, vice president of legislative affairs at the American Meat Institute, a meat and poultry trade association.

Other groups that were originally sympathetic to ethanol are drifting away. They fear that the fuel’s advantages are outweighed by the rise in corn prices, which they say increases the cost of foods ranging from steak to cereal. “Many policy makers were seduced by ethanol,” says Cal Dooley, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. He opposes increasing federal support for ethanol.

The Agriculture Department says consumers can expect to pay as much as 4.5% more for groceries and restaurant meals this year over last, up from a 2.4% rise the year before. …

Max Boot with a cautionary tale about abuse of Wikipedia.

Are there people out there who take Wikipedia seriously as a source of objective information? There shouldn’t be, but unfortunately there are. In fact, lots of students use it a source of first resort. It’s so popular, that whenever you type almost any subject into Google, the first hit is usually for a Wikipedia entry.

Yet disinformation abounds, often motivated by animus or prejudice. There is, for instance, the by-now famous story of a former assistant to Robert F. Kennedy who was brazenly—and completely without foundation—accused on Wikipedia of complicity in the assassinations of both JFK and RFK. (For this sorry tale, see his article.)

A friend has now called my attention to another bizarre distortion, this one an attempt not to besmirch the character of one man but of an entire country. If you look up the Philippine War (1899-1902) you get this entry. And in the very first paragraph you get this statement: “The U.S. conquest of the Philippines has been described as a genocide, and resulted in the death of 1.4 million Filipinos (out of a total population of seven million).”

I was pretty startled to read this. I have written a whole chapter on the war in my book, The Savage Wars of Peace, and I have never once heard that the U.S. was guilty of genocide. How could it have entirely escaped my attention? …

John Tierney continues the fracas on fat and food fads with a blog post on cascades.

I suspect a few readers — and diet researchers — will take issue with my Findings column about Gary Taubes’ new book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” and his debunking of the myth that low-fat diets will prolong your life. I’ll be happy in subsequent posts to debate the low-fat diet as well as other issues raised in his book, like the causes of obesity and the case for low-carb diets. But before we start the food fight, I’d like to delve into the question of why scientists and other groups fall prey to the fads called “informational cascades.” …

Dilbert has fun with Tierney’s cascades.

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Christopher Hitchens says we need to help Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

… Suppose the narrow and parochial view prevails in Holland, then I think that we in America should welcome the chance to accept the responsibility ourselves. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a symbol of the resistance, by many women from the Muslim world, to gender apartheid, “honor” killing, genital mutilation, and other horrors of clerical repression. She has been a very clear and courageous voice against the ongoing attack on our civilization mounted by exactly the same forces. Her recent memoir, Infidel (which I recommend highly, and to which, I ought to say, I am contributing a preface in its paperback edition), is an account of an extremely arduous journey from something very like chattel slavery to a full mental and intellectual emancipation from theocracy. It is a road that we must, and for our own sake as well, be willing to help others to travel. …

John Tierney says forget everything you thought you knew about fat. And have some Rocky Road.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

Power Line added dittos to Barone’s piece on “higher education.”

… Elite private colleges are even less constrained. They face little if any competition from colleges that don’t fit the post-modern leftist mold. No one likely to break that mold has much chance of being entrusted to run such an institution, and the demise of Larry Summers at Harvard illustrates the fate that awaits even a mild iconoclast who manages to crash the party. And a hypothetical college that somehow succeeded in breaking the mold would likely be punished, plummeting in college ratings that rely on the views of entrenched academics to assess “academic reputation.”

In theory, alumni should be able to act as a voice of sanity. But colleges have structured themselves (or in Dartmouth’s case, restructured itself) in a way that deprives alumni of any real voice. The only thing they get to say is “yes” or “no” to requests for donations. With only a dim sense of what’s going on, a critical mass continues to say “yes.”

Thus, the rot continues to spread, with no end in sight.

Thomas Sowell adds part 2 to his comments on Clarence Thomas.

… The really fatal fact about Anita Hill’s accusations was that they were first made to the Senate Judiciary Committee in confidence, and she asked that her name not be mentioned when the accusations were presented to Judge Thomas by those trying to pressure him to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Think about it: The accusations referred to things that were supposed to have happened when only two people were present.

If the accusations were true, Clarence Thomas would automatically know who originated them. Anita Hill’s request for anonymity made sense only if the charges were false.

Washington Examiner says there are a lot of meetings on global warming.

John Stossel tells how medical care can work properly.

Health-care costs overall have been rising faster than inflation, but not all medical costs are skyrocketing. In a few pockets of medicine, costs are down while quality is up.

Dr. Brian Bonanni has an unusual medical practice. His office is open Saturdays. He e-mails his patients and gives them his cell-phone number.

“I need to be available 24 hours a day,” he says. “I want to be there when a patient has questions, and I want to be reachable.”

I’ll bet your doctor doesn’t say that. Bonanni knows he has to please his patients, not some insurance company or the government, because he’s paid by his patients. He’s a laser eye surgeon. Insurance rarely covers what he does: reshaping eyes so people can see without glasses.

His patients shop around before coming to him. They ask a question that people relying on insurance don’t ask: “How much will that cost?”

“I can’t get away with not telling the patient how much exactly it’s going to cost,” Bonanni says. “No one would put up with it. And the difference of a hundred dollars sometimes makes their decision for them.”

He has to compete for his patients’ business. One result of that is lower prices. And while the procedure got cheaper, it also got better. Today’s lasers are faster and more precise. …

NY Times takes exception to the bashing of the Dems 12 year-old spokesman. Even thought ther’re carrying Dem water, it’s here for balance.

Mark Steyn answers the Times.

WaPo editors are not happy with Hill’s trade ideas.

… Yet Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) seems to have forgotten her husband’s winning formula. Campaigning for president, she has been busily repudiating his legacy on free trade, voting against the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement in the Senate and backing away from NAFTA. In an interview published yesterday by USA Today, she called for a “timeout” on further trade agreements until their impact can be fully studied. Ms. Clinton even suggested that it might be time for NAFTA to be “adjusted.” Her reasoning was not terribly clear: This is a candidate, after all, who has voted in favor of free-trade deals with Singapore and Chile. She suggested that perhaps something changed between the end of the 20th century, when “trade was a net positive for America and American workers” and now, when we need to have “a serious conversation about that.” …

AdamSmith has ethanol thoughts.

Even the most politically profitable, and therefore highly government-protected, industries are subject to market forces. Ethanol, a bio-fuel grown from corn, is supported by huge US government subsidies (not entirely unrelated to the importance of the Iowa Caucus) and this has led to overproduction on a massive scale. Transportation services cannot keep up to supply the coasts and few gas stations even supply it. …

Slate says the monks are going to beat out Al for the Nobel. Too bad. Pickerhead always thought it would be neat if Gore scored, when all Bill did for has last few years was pursue Monica and the Prize. That’s why he wouldn’t move against Osama, and why he turns up the heat whenever criticisms head his way.

Dilbert dreams up names for bands.

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Melanie Phillips gave us a short yesterday on Ayaan Ali’s new danger. We add two items today. The LA Times has an op-ed co-authored by Salman Rushdie.

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world. The details of her story bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West. …

Anne Applebaum in Slate.

And now we come to what may be a truly fundamental test, maybe even a turning point, for that part of the world generally known as the West. The test is this: Are prominent, articulate critics of radical Islam, critics who happen to be citizens of European countries or the United States, entitled to the same free speech rights enjoyed by other citizens of European countries and the United States?

Legally, of course, they are. In practice, they can say what they want—and then they can be murdered for doing so. That means that Western governments have a special and unusual responsibility to them, as many have long acknowledged. It is no accident that the writer Salman Rushdie, upon whom Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Feb. 14, 1989, is still very much alive. Though details are not publicized, it is assumed that Rushdie remains, one way or another, under the protection of the British police and secret services, both in Britain and abroad. …

John Fund posts on vote harvesting in ethanol rich Iowa and Sandy Berger’s work in Hillary’s campaign.

Pickings has been quick to criticize Pinch Sulzberger’s tenure at the NY Times. Marty Peretz gives another view in this tribute to the reporting of John Burns. Now if the Times would please give back the Pulitzer awarded in the 1930′s for the lies of Walter Duranty – Ukrainian Famine denier.

Gabriel Schoenfeld allows us to post something positive about Jimmy Carter. We did that last year when Panamanians approved proposed improvements to the canal. So once a year we’ll say something nice about Billy Carter’s bro.

Is Jimmy Carter a saint? As James Kirchick has argued, the former President does deserve applause for the courage he displayed last week in the Sudan. He may be our worst ex-President ever, as Joshua Muravchik has irrefutably demonstrated, but it does not follow that every single thing he does today is bad.

The same thing can be said of his presidency. Reviewing Carter’s book, Living Faith, in the Wall Street Journal in 1996, I made the case that he was one of the worst Presidents of the 20th century. Carter read my review and took umbrage. The Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted him saying about me: “The guy, and I don’t know him, was vituperative about everything. He even condemned the poem I wrote about Rosalynn, which is one of the most popular parts of the book.”

Carter did, and does, have many appalling defects–the least of them his execrable poetry. But let’s give him his due. Even a terrible leader sometimes does some good things. Let me recall a tiny and ancient sliver of the past. …

Mark Steyn was here two days ago with a Corner post on the Dems 12 year-old spokesman. There have been a series of posts since. It gets a little long, but they’re fun.

Over the weekend, I posted a couple of things re Graeme Frost, the Democratic Party’s 12-year old healthcare spokesman. Michelle Malkin reports that the blogospheric lefties are all steamed about the wingnuts’ Swiftboating of sick kids, etc.

Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it’s incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you’re welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.

But one thing is clear by now: Whatever the truth about this boy’s private school, his family home, his father’s commercial property, etc, the Frosts are a very particular situation and do not illustrate any social generality – and certainly not one that makes the case for an expensive expansive all-but universal entitlement.

A more basic point is made very robustly by Kathy Shaidle: Advanced western democracies have delivered the most prosperous societies in human history. There simply are no longer genuinely “poor” people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you’re poor today, it’s almost always for behavioral reasons – behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the “needy” out there that only the government can rescue.

Thomas Sowell writes about Clarence Thomas.

… Clarence Thomas’ own experiences shocked him into a realization that “affirmative action” and other policies being pushed by civil rights organizations and by liberals generally were doing more harm than good, both to blacks and to American society.

In an era when so many people have neither the time nor the patience to examine arguments and evidence, critics have tried to dismiss Clarence Thomas as someone who “sold out” in order to advance himself.

In reality, he was in far worse financial condition than if he had taken the opposite positions on political issues.

As late as the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas’ net worth — everything he had accumulated over a lifetime — was less than various civil rights “leaders” make in one year.

Nobody sells out to the lowest bidder. …

NewsBusters posts parts of Howard Kurtz asking Robin Wright of WaPo and Barbara Starr of CNN why they didn’t report some good Iraq news. Incidentally, this type of interview is why Howard Kurtz’s show Reliable Sources is the pick of Sunday morning. It’s on CNN at 10:00 am Eastern.

… Wow. Numbers shouldn’t be reported because they’re “tricky,” “at the beginning of a trend,” and there’s “enormous dispute over how to count” them?

No such moral conundrum existed last month when media predicted a looming recession after the Labor Department announced a surprising decline in non-farm payrolls that ended up being revised up four weeks later to show an increase.

And, in the middle of a three and a half-year bull run in stocks, such “journalists” have no quandary predicting a bear market every time the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls a few hundred points.

Yet, when good news regarding military casualties comes from the Defense Department, these same people show uncharacteristic restraint in not wanting to report what could end up being an a anomaly.

Isn’t that special? …

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NY Times reports on a French priest who is working in Ukraine locating graves of Jews murdered in the “bullet holocaust” before the Germans developed the gas chambers in mid 1942. There have been other similar efforts. In 1994, Nina Tumarkin, Wellesley history prof, wrote The Living and the Dead; The Rise and Fall of the Cult of WWII in Russia and reported on the movements to give proper burials to the millions who fell in the Great Patriotic War. However, this is the first time the dead from the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary charged with slaughter of “jews, gypsies and commissars” have been carefully researched. It is a very sensitive subject because many locals helped. And the Ukraine is hardly the only placed they operated. Germans were to claim in late 1941 that Lithuania was “judenfrei” after the killing of 400,000 souls there.

His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.

They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.

He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold. …

Max Boot reminds how often our country has used mercenaries. Like Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

Since I have been defending, in recent days, the general idea of using mercenaries—even while calling for greater oversight of what they are actually doing in Iraq—I have often heard from skeptics that it is somehow “un-American” to rely on hired hands to do your fighting. Often cited is the fact that Americans have long hated the Hessians (actually, they came from all over Germany, not just from Hesse-Kassel) hired by the British to fight the American rebellion that began in 1776.

Well, of course, any nation will hate foreign troops who fight particularly hard and even viciously, as the “Hessians” did. But that’s hardly an argument against employing them. Quite the contrary. In fact, the U.S. has a long tradition of celebrated mercenaries. Here is a partial list: …

Melanie Phillips notes problems for Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Jonah Goldberg gives us the skinny on Media Matters, the Soros funded, Hillary inspired group that brought down Don Imus and hopes to do the same to Rush and O’Reilly.

… Nearly every day, I get e-mail spam from this alleged “media watchdog” group. It’s slightly less formal than the usual son of a Nigerian oil minister with erectile dysfunction and a great stock tip giving me a head’s-up about a problem with my eBay account. This spam comes from some earnest p.r. flack letting me know that I might be interested in the latest Very Serious Finding by Media Matters for America. When you actually check out the item, it’s usually very stupid or silly or, sometimes, slanderous.

For example, on Sept. 25, Media Matters sent out a note announcing “Fox News panelist Mort Kondracke recently made several racist comments regarding the Jena 6.

Here are some examples of racism on Fox News.” What were the racist comments? Simply this: Kondracke said in reference to the racial turmoil then brewing in Louisiana, “It looks as though the people of Jena can solve this on their own.” It’s a wonder Kondracke even bothered to take his Klan hood off while on camera.

You don’t hear about most of this stuff because journalists on the receiving end of Media Matter’s junk mail have this rare skill, highly prized in the profession: They can read. And so, most of what Media Matters does is ignored except by the echo chamber of the left-wing blogs and sympathetic pundits. But occasionally, either through luck or distortion, Media Matters hits paydirt. …

Orin Kerr, criminal law prof and Volokh blogger, does a number on the latest smear by Frank Rich.

Frank Rich has a rather nasty essay that purports to catch Justice Thomas misrepresenting his past. The specific example is Justice Thomas’s first job out of law school in the Missouri Attorney General’s Office. As Justice Thomas tells the story, he couldn’t get a job from any law firm despite graduating in the middle of his class from Yale Law School. Law firms assumed he was enrolled in law school only because of affirmative action, so Thomas had to struggle to find a job; he ended up getting only one offer in the Missouri government, thanks to Jack Danforth.

Corner post on the annals of government.

Michael Barone suggests maybe the Ivory Tower is becoming a dangerous parasite.

I am old enough to remember when America’s colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America’s colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society. …

 

… This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals. It explains why Hofstra’s law school invites to speak on legal ethics Lynn Stewart, a lawyer convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist client and sentenced to 28 months in jail.

What it doesn’t explain is why the rest of society is willing to support such institutions by paying huge tuitions, providing tax exemptions and making generous gifts. Suppression of campus speech has been admirably documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The promotion of bogus scholarship and idea-free propagandizing has been admirably documented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It’s too bad the rest of America is not paying more attention.

Bjorn Lomborg with a WaPo op-ed.

All eyes are on Greenland‘s melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.

Curiously, something that’s rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat — perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it’s caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we’re headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it’s all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It’s wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we’re causing it. But that’s not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don’t stack up.

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn’t ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

The Economist surveys the PND industry. That would be portable navigation devices or hand held GPS receivers.

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Stephen Moore with a story we can not hear often enough. It’s about the optimists among us including the late great Julian Simon. Simon famously challenged the population scold Paul Ehrlich to a 10 year wager. Simon claimed the earth’s bounty was becoming more plentiful. John Tierney gave the results in the December 2, 1990 NY Times Sunday Magazine. Since this is a classic, it has been posted to Pickings.

I’m old enough to recall the days in the late 1960s when people wore those trendy buttons that read: “Stop the Planet I Want to Get Off.” And I will never forget that era’s “educational” films of what life would be like in the year 2000. Played on clanky 16-millimeter projectors, they showed images of people walking down the streets of Manhattan with masks on, so they could avoid breathing the poison gases our industrial society was spewing.

The future seemed mighty bleak back then, and you merely had to open the newspapers for the latest story confirming how the human species was speeding down a congested highway to extinction. A group of scientists calling themselves the Club of Rome issued a report called “Limits to Growth.” It explained that lifeboat Earth had become so weighed down with humans that we were running out of food, minerals, forests, water, energy and just about everything else that we need for survival. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book “The Population Bomb” (1968) gave England a 50-50 chance of surviving into the 21st century. In 1980, Jimmy Carter released the “Global 2000 Report,” which declared that life on Earth was getting worse in every measurable way.

So imagine how shocked I was to learn, officially, that we’re not doomed after all. A new United Nations report called “State of the Future” concludes: “People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer.” …

A blogger posts on life in Zimbabwe. Couldn’t think of a better juxtaposition with the above Stephen Moore story about what markets can achieve.

Standing outside over yet another smoky fire late one afternoon this week, a Go-Away bird chastised me from a nearby tree. I’m sure this Grey Lourie is as fed up of me intruding into its territory as I am of being there – trying to get a hot meal for supper. For five of the last six days the electricity has gone off before 5 in the morning and only come back 16 or 17 hours later a little before midnight. “Go Away! Go Away!” the Grey Lourie called out repeatedly as my eyes streamed from the smoke and I stirred my little pot. My hair and clothes stink of smoke, fingers are yellow and sooty but this is what we’ve all been reduced to in Zimbabwe. …

Max Boot on the Times spin of the Iran/Syria axis.

… But of course this being the New York Times, the writer can’t stick to the facts—facts that suggest that some of us have reason to be increasingly alarmed about the Tehran-Damascus Axis. He has to throw in a jab at the Bush administration, too. Naylor claims that Iran and Syria are cementing their ties only because neither one can do business with America, since they’re both under American-led sanctions. He cites anonymous “Western diplomats and analysts,” who say “that Washington has effectively pushed Damascus and Tehran into deepening their alliance of nearly three decades.”

This is pretty much the party line at places like the Times whenever other countries align against the United States: It can’t be because they don’t like us, or because our interests are mutually incompatible. It must be because we spurned their generous and deeply felt offers of friendship. …

The Economist on Putin’s politics.

The Captain posts on Al-Quds Day speeches in Iran and the latest jobs report.

The celebration of Al-Quds Day is a tradition in Iran since the revolution. It rallies people in the cause of Israel’s destruction, in a manner reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s. In fact, both celebrations aimed at destroying the same kind of people. What an odd coincidence, that! Today, as always, Iranian mobs burned Israeli and American flags in an effort to show what a rational and civilized culture does when they have a holiday that wishes for genocide.

 

…

 

Not much has changed in the past year. The economy is still expanding, and employment remains steady at historically excellent levels. Last month’s report was simply wrong, and it serves as a reminder that the BLS often underestimates job gains in the first month of reporting. Analysts should wait to see what adjustment occurs in the following month before basing predictions on the data.

In this case, the BLS estimate was not just significantly off but pointing in the wrong direction. That was enough to out all the Chicken Littles. I wonder how many of them will acknowledge the error today.

Power Line posts on the economy too.

It’s time to start taking seriously the proposition that the American economy under the Bush administration is the best in the nation’s history. This morning the White House expressed entirely appropriate pride in the country’s economic achievements on its watch:

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new jobs figures – 110,000 jobs created in September. September 2007 is the 49th consecutive month of job growth, setting a new record for the longest uninterrupted expansion of the U.S. labor market. Significant upward revisions to employment in July and August mean employment growth has averaged 97,000 per month over the last three months. Since August 2003, our economy has created more than 8.1 million jobs, and the unemployment rate remains low at 4.7 percent.

Real after-tax per capita personal income has increased by over 12.5 percent – an average of over $3,750 per person – since President Bush took office. More than 30 percent of the Nation’s net worth has been added since the President’s 2003 tax cuts. …

Mark Steyn creates another new word – Islamoparanoia. That’s the disease afflicting Dodi Fayed’s father.

National Review’s David Pryce-Jones made the point that, in persisting with his lurid accusations, Mohammed Fayed revealed how little he understands Britain: He’s lived there for years, it’s been good to him, he owns Harrod’s and the Paris Ritz and various other baubles. No big deal. He’s one of many, many beneficiaries of Western openness to “the other.” And yet he’s convinced himself that Buckingham Palace is so consumed by “Islamophobia” that the queen’s husband dialed M, and M called in Moneypenny, and Moneypenny faxed 007, and a week later the princess and her Islamostud are dead.

Reality is more humdrum: In multiculti Britain, everyone was indifferent to Di’s Muslim lover. Could have been a Hindu, could have been a Buddhist. Who cares? But, instead, Fayed has retreated into the paranoia and victim mentality that stunts so much of the Muslim world. A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous Western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family’s assassination of Dodi Fayed. And so, in a London courtroom, a freak one-off celebrity death becomes just another snapshot of the big geopolitical picture.

Mark Steyn Corner posts on the Dems 12 year-old spokesman.

NY Post editorial says it’s time for Chris Matthews to go. If you’re like me and long ago gave up watching Hardball, this will be a surprise.

Bill Kristol says you’ll want to read the Clarence Thomas book.

… Thomas’s memoir raises fundamental questions of love and responsibility, family and character. His book is a brief for the stern and vigorous virtues, but in a context of faith and love. It’s a delightful book–you really can’t put it down–but it’s also a source of moral education for young Americans. It could be almost as important a contribution to his beloved country as Clarence Thomas’s work as a Supreme Court justice. …

Professor Bainbridge has a book to suggest also. Pickerhead likes this sound of this too.

Columnist David Harsanyi offers us Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children: …

Village Voice with the story of yet another innovation killed by government. New York’s City Council is set to pass pedicab regulations that will strangle the service. Sounds like a case for the Institute for Justice. Chip, Kramer, Dana, Neil, Scott, where are you?

… Thanks to the brilliant maneuvers of a City Council that remains beholden to the same permanent government interests that always speak loudest, these so-called electric-assist motors are now illegal on city streets. The politicians did not stop there. The law they passed in response to the lobbyists for the taxi and theater owners also bans pedicabs from using city bike lanes, forcing them into the traffic stream. They cannot go on bridges. They are limited in entering the parks and can be barred entirely from midtown during the Christmas holiday season, or any other two-week period during which officials deem traffic especially heavy.

Stretch limousines, Hummers, vans all come and go freely. Pedicabs risk tickets and confiscation.

There was more yet: The council decided there should be just 325 pedicabs at any one time. There is no exact count of how many are in operation, but 500 is the estimate. Instantly, 175 workers are unemployed. And still more: When city bureaucrats sat down to devise rules for this law, they decided that no one owner could have more than five licensed cabs. This effectively destroys the fleets that have employed hundreds of people, most of them young, who cheerfully haul passengers through the streets, leaving behind nothing more harmful than a small tailwind and the tinkling warnings of a bicycle bell. …

… Pedicabs would not be the first transportation novelty to die of political strangulation in City Hall. In 1870, inventor Alfred Ely Beach sought permits to excavate for something he called a subway. Back then, William “Boss” Tweed controlled all political levers and already had a nice piece of the action going with elevated railways and stagecoach lines. Tweed made sure that Beach’s brilliant plan was snuffed in its cradle. The inventor managed to get a single block-long tunnel built and then hit Tweed’s roadblock. Subways had to wait 30 years to get past it. …

Slate with more on the bustification of ethanol.

For years, economists, environmentalists, and poverty activists have been hating on ethanol. It’s impractical; it boosts food prices and promotes industrial farming. Their scorn didn’t much matter, because there was huge political and social momentum for ethanol production. But now the market is turning on ethanol, too. Ethanol stocks are sinking. Check out this two-year chart of Verasun, Aventine Renewable Energy, and Pacific Ethanol against the S&P 500. All three are down more than 60 percent. Earth Biofuels, which traded at $7 a share in May 2006, now trades for about 5 cents. A gallon of ethanol for November delivery trades at about $1.57 per gallon today, down from about $1.90 in July. As the Wall Street Journal put it (subscription required) earlier this week: “Ethanol Boom is Running out of Gas.” …

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We always knew the NY Times was biased. Now we learn it is corrupt. Gail Heriot at The Right Coast comments on a front page ad for Macy’s masquerading as news.

I find this scary. I know that many conservatives worry about the New York Times’ liberal bias. And they should worry. But geez louise I don’t expect the New York Times to turn over its front page news section to what is most likely its biggest advertiser–and to distort the facts to boot. That’s either craven, rock stupid or both.

Why would the New York Times refer to Terry Lundgren, Macy’s embattled CEO, as “one of the brightest stars in American retailing” in a front page story? This is utter fantasy, and the New York Times presents no evidence of its truth. In the last few months, Macy’s stock has declined 40%. Profits are down a whopping 77%. Sales have slumped. The only important marketing decision that Terry Lundgren has ever made in his life was to gamble on the Macy-fication of American retailing–terminating successful regional department stores across the country and turning their locations into Macy’s. That gamble has turned distinctly sour. Lundgren’s not a bright star; he’s a supernova, and Macy’s seems well on its way to becoming the black hole of American retailing. …

The Captain with a lengthy detailed post on WaPo whitewash of Anita Hill.

… Besides, Marcus leaves out some testimony herself. For instance, J.C. Alvarez flew back to Washington to testify a second time in front of the panel, because she could not believe her eyes and ears when Hill testified. Alvarez, who worked in the same office at the same time, had a few choice words for the panel:

No, Senators, I cannot stand by and watch a group of thugs beat up and rob a man of his money any more than I could have stayed in Chicago and stood by and watched you beat up an innocent man and rob him blind. Not of his money. That would have been too easy. You could pay that back. No, you have robbed a man of his name, his character, and his reputation.

And what is amazing to me is that you didn’t do it in a dark alley and you didn’t do it in the dark of night. You did it in broad daylight, in front of all America, on television, for the whole world
to see. Yes, Senators, I am witnessing a crime in progress and I cannot just look the other way.

Alvarez had more to say about her recollection of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas:

On Friday, she played the role of a meek, innocent, shy Baptist girl from the South who was a victim of this big, bad man.

I don’t know who she was trying to kid. Because the Anita Hill that I knew and worked with was nothing like that. She was a very hard, tough woman. She was opinionated. She was arrogant. She was a relentless debater. And she was the kind of woman who always made you feel like she was not going to be messed with, like she was not going to take anything from anyone. …

And he posts on the phony soldier stuff.

… this is a story. It’s a story of intellectual dishonesty, partisan gunslinging, and distraction tactics designed to protect a major Democratic Party fundraiser. That’s the real story behind this latest absurdity. …

Power Line posts with a great answer to ‘phony soldiers’ with “Phony Democrats.”

Ilya Somin in Volokh illustrates one of the reasons for Russia’s backwardness, the Russian Orthodox Church.

Alexy II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church recently made a speech before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe denouncing homosexuality as “an illness” and a “distortion of the human personality, like kleptomania.” He also claimed that homosexuality is part of “a new generation of rights that contradict morality, and [an example of] how human rights are used to justify immoral behavior.”

Such homophobia is hardly unique to Alexy and his Church. However, they are in a particularly poor position to lecture the Europeans on human rights in light of the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church is hand in glove with Vladimir Putin’s repressive regime, endorsing that government’s authoritarian policies and even using the power of the state to harrass other religious groups and suppress art they disapprove of. …

Charles Krauthammer celebrates the great changes in French foreign policy.

… This French about-face creates a crucial shift in the balance of forces within Europe. The East Europeans are naturally pro-American for reasons of history (fresh memories of America’s role in defeating their Soviet occupiers) and geography (physical proximity to a newly revived and aggressive Russia). Western Europe is intrinsically wary of American power and culturally anti-American by reflex. France’s change from Chirac to Sarkozy, from foreign minister Dominique de Villepin (who actively lobbied Third World countries to oppose America on Iraq) to Kouchner (who supported the U.S. invasion on humanitarian grounds) represents an enormous shift in Old Europe’s relationship to the United States.

Britain is a natural ally. Germany, given its history, is more follower than leader. France can define European policy, and Sarkozy intends to.

The French flip is only one part of the changing landscape that has given new life to Bush’s Iran and Iraq policies in the waning months of his administration. The mood in Congress also has significantly shifted. …

Hugh Hewitt reminds us Hillary is a radical.

Senator Clinton can be pleasant, is certainly intelligent and is absolutely the front-runner for the Democratic nomination and perhaps even the favorite right now to succeed George W. Bush in the Oval Office.

But as the past three weeks have made abundantly clear, Hillary is no “liberal,” or even a “progressive.” She is a radical, and one far outside the mainstream of American politics. In the growing recognition of the true nature of her political ideology is the obvious strategy for whoever the GOP nominee is: Throw the light on what she believes and proposes and keep it there. …

Max Boot posts a couple of times on Blackwater.

LA Times Op-Ed says Ahmadinejad walked away with a win thanks to the folks at Columbia who have yet to meet a fascist they don’t like.

One of the world’s truly dangerous men, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left New York a clear winner this week, and he can thank the arrogance of the American academy and most of the U.S. news media’s studied indifference for his victory.

If the blood-drenched history of the century just past had taught American academics one thing, it should have been that the totalitarian impulse knows no accommodation with reason. You cannot change the totalitarian mind through dialogue or conversation, because totalitarianism — however ingenious the superstructure of faux ideas with which it surrounds itself — is a creature of the will and not the mind. That’s a large lesson, but what should have made Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia University this week a wholly avoidable debacle was the school’s knowledge of its own, very specific history.

In the 1930s, Columbia was run by Nicholas Murray Butler, to whose name a special sort of infamy attaches. Butler was an outspoken admirer of Italian fascism and of its leader, Benito Mussolini. The Columbia president, who also was in the forefront of Ivy League efforts to restrict Jewish enrollment, worked tirelessly to build ties between his school and Italian universities, as well as with the powerful fascist student organizations. At one point, a visiting delegation of 350 ardent young Black Shirts serenaded Butler with the fascist anthem. …

 

Jonathan Turley, card carrying liberal, thinks maybe the NRA gets something right about the second amendment.

… Considering the Framers and their own traditions of hunting and self-defense, it is clear that they would have viewed such ownership as an individual right — consistent with the plain meaning of the amendment.

None of this is easy for someone raised to believe that the Second Amendment was the dividing line between the enlightenment and the dark ages of American culture. Yet, it is time to honestly reconsider this amendment and admit that … here’s the really hard part … the NRA may have been right. This does not mean that Charlton Heston is the new Rosa Parks or that no restrictions can be placed on gun ownership. But it does appear that gun ownership was made a protected right by the Framers and, while we might not celebrate it, it is time that we recognize it.

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Clarence Thomas give a dinner Monday night attended by some of our favorite writers. There have been many reactions and we will have a few tonight. The first blog post from The Right Coast has a link (via Instapundit) to the 60 minutes interview from Sunday night, so we’ll start with that.

The Captain was there too.

Monday evening, I attended a two-hour dinner event at the Heritage Foundation with Justice Clarence Thomas, his wife Virginia, and a small number of other bloggers and New Media members. It confirmed for me that the media has never gotten a grasp of the man under the robes, possibly because they have not spent even the small amount of time with him that we did tonight and that Steve Kroft did with his 60 Minutes interview — and they have missed a real story from that failure. And while the nominal reason for the evening was his book launch — and we each received autographed copies — it turned into a wide-ranging conversation that had little to do with the book.

The evening started with Justice Thomas greeting us, taking pictures and chatting us up a bit. He asked me what I wrote about at Captain’s Quarters, and I replied, “Just about anything — politics, culture, foreign policy, and Notre Dame football,” at which he let loose his unique gust of laughter. “Notre Dame football?” he asked incredulously. “You’d better stick with foreign policy this year!” …

Kate O’Bierne with a Corner post.

I had the pleasure of joining about 20 members of the new media for a dinner with Amazon’s #1 author for dinner this evening. Justice Thomas was wise, candid, and upbeat. The “controversial” justice stresses that he hasn’t had a negative incident in his 16 years on the Court. He explains it is humbling that he is treated so well by audiences he addresses and others he meets. He cheerfully notes that when he has encountered some opposition on university campuses, “it is always the faculty, never the students.” He laughingly allowed that he would have to be “a Middle East dictator with nuclear weapons to be invited to Columbia,” adding that it wasn’t an invitation he was interested in. …

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line.

This evening, in honor of the publication of My Grandfather’s Son, the Heritage Foundation hosted a dinner for Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, along with a group of conservative journalists and “new media” types. I have been at social gatherings where Justice Thomas was present but had never actually met him before. Those who know him have told me how warm and gracious he is, and these qualities certainly were evident tonight.

Justice Thomas began his after-dinner remarks by saying he wishes the new media had been around at the time of his confirmation hearings because it “gets beyond the monopoly” held by the liberal media. In this connection, he noted that the old media is misrepresenting the tone and the point of his book by focusing on “anger.” The real tone and point of the book, he said, is quite different. Thomas believes his life story will offer insight and hope, especially to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, he seeks to counter the message, all too prevalent in the black community, that studying hard is a tantamount to being white ,and to call attention to an older tradition in the black community that focused on scholastic achievement. That, of course, is the tradition his grandfather represents. …

Jim Taranto was at the dinner too. He has a couple of posts centered on the lovely Anita Hill.

John Fund with a short on the phony soldiers flap.

Anne Applebaum writes more on what she calls the “Nonstop Thrill Ride of Russian Politics.”

LA Times op-ed says Mugabe has always been a thug.

… The characterization of Mugabe as a good man gone wrong extends to popular culture as well. In the 2005 political thriller “The Interpreter,” Nicole Kidman played a dashing, multilingual exile from the fictional African country of Matobo, whose ruler was once a soft-spoken, cerebral schoolteacher who liberated his country from a white minority regime but became a despot. Mugabe certainly understood the likeness; he accused Kidman and her costar, Sean Penn, of being part of a CIA plot to oust him.

But this popular conception of Mugabe — propagated by the liberals who championed him in the 1970s and 1980s — is absolutely wrong. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state. Characteristic of this historical revisionism is former Newsweek southern Africa correspondent Joshua Hammer, writing recently in the liberal Washington Monthly that “more than a quarter-century after leading his guerrilla army to victory over the racist regime of Ian Smith in white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, President Robert Mugabe has morphed into a caricature of the African Big Man.” …

Cafe Hayek picks a movie – “Lives of Others.”

Mark Steyn was in Macleans reacting to American World War ethnocentrism.

… The other day, Senator Thompson was on the campaign trail and told his audience: “This country has shed more blood for the liberty of other countries than all other countries put together.”

More than “all other countries put together”? As I told our friends to the south, I’m the most pro-American non-American on the planet, but, if that’s the new default braggadocio, include me out. The Washington Post’s attempt to refute Thompson by championing the Soviets was as predictable as it was absurd — the Reds certainly shed a lot of blood but not obviously in the cause of liberty. Yet slightly more startling was the number of pro-Fred American conservatives who sent me scornful emails belittling the efforts of the Commonwealth.

As old-timers will tell you at Royal Canadian Legion halls, the Dominion “shed more blood” proportionately than the United States in the Second World War. Newfoundland — not yet part of Canada — had a higher per capita casualty rate than America. No surprise about that: Newfs and Canucks sailed off to battle two years ahead of the Yanks. And, if we’re talking hard numbers, almost as many Britons died in the war as Americans, despite the latter having thrice the population. …

John Stossel continues his series on health care insurance.

Candidates for president have plans to get more people health insurance. Some would compel us to buy it; others would use the tax code to encourage that. Regardless, insurance is the magic that will solve our health-care problems.

But contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s not those without health insurance who are the problem, but rather those with it. They make medical care more expensive for everyone.

We’d each be better off if we paid all but the biggest medical bills out of pocket and saved insurance for catastrophic events. Truly needy people would rely on charity, not government, because once government gets involved, unintended bad consequences abound. …

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Stuart Taylor with a scathing denunciation of campus left wing radicals.

In the matter of the Holocaust-denying, terrorism-sponsoring, nuke-seeking, wipe-Israel-off-the-map-threatening, we-got-no-gays-in-Iran-spouting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his September 24 showcase speech at Columbia University: It would be easier to stomach the free-speech grandstanding of Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president and Ahmadinejad’s histrionically hostile host, and others of Bollinger’s ilk if they were a bit less selective in their devotion to the First Amendment. When a student group recently canceled an event featuring an anti-illegal-immigration speaker for fear of a hecklers’ veto by leftist students, for example, Bollinger had nothing to say.

Looking to the other coast, it would be easier to admire the indignation of certain academics and journalists at the temporarily shabby treatment of crusading liberal constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky by the University of California (Irvine) if those same people had also spoken out against the far more widespread campus censorship of less liberal figures. …

…

Bollinger has never made a serious effort to use such episodes to reverse the censorial drift of Columbia’s campus politics. Other examples range from the suspension last fall (later revoked) of the men’s hockey club for posting recruiting flyers that said “Stop being a pussy” — a less-than-tasteful play on Columbia’s athletic “Lions” — to the ideological litmus tests used by Columbia’s Teachers College to evaluate student performance. Among these tests: “respect for diversity and commitment to social justice.” That terminology is a standing invitation for professors to penalize any student who criticizes racial preferences, openly votes Republican, or defends Larry Summers.

This is also the same Bollinger who joined a vote of the university’s Senate in 2005 to continue a 36-year ban of ROTC programs from Columbia because of the military’s discrimination (which I, too, deplore) against service members who admit to being gay. Did anyone tell him that Ahmadinejad’s government executes people who admit to being gay?

It took a unanimous Supreme Court to teach Bollinger — a prominent First Amendment scholar — that his argument (in an amicus brief [PDF] that he joined) in a major 2006 case was so far-fetched as to be an embarrassment. The argument, also endorsed by hundreds of other legal academics, was that universities might well have a First Amendment right to keep collecting millions of federal tax dollars despite a law cutting off those that do not give military recruiters the same access to students as they give other potential employers. …

Yale thinks money is more important than their principles. James Taranto with details.

James Kirchick in Contentions says Gordon Brown is in hard line opposition to Mugabe.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has set African leaders astir with his ultimatum concerning an upcoming European Union/African Union conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Brown has laid down a simple condition for his attendance at the December conference: that Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe not attend. “We should not sit down at the same table as President Mugabe,” Brown told the Labour Party conference last week. …

The Captain has more good news from a friend.

The government of Nicolas Sarkozy intends to keep pressure on Iran to abandon their nuclear program, and wants to see the rest of the world follow suit. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told a European broadcaster that Western credibility required the pursuit of tougher sanctions, as the UN continued to dither:

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Tuesday the West must continue to work on sanctions if it is to be taken seriously by Iran, even as talks continue to resolve a stand-off over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. …

And the Captain also posts on a memo from Hillary’s first attempt at socialized medicine.

Defenders of the S-CHIP expansion refute the accusations of its critics that it amounts to a Trojan horse for nationalized health care. However, The Politico notes that a 1993 memo from Hillary Clinton’s health-care task force proposed using children as a mechanism in order to take control of health-care delivery for all Americans. The revelation gives the White House new momentum for its expected veto:

Back in 1993, according to an internal White House staff memo, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s staff saw federal coverage of children as a “precursor” to universal coverage.

In a section of the memo titled “Kids First,” Clinton’s staff laid out backup plans in the event the universal coverage idea failed.

And one of the key options was creating a state-run health plan for children who didn’t qualify for Medicaid but were uninsured. …

Dick Morris says the Bill and Hill we see on FOX are the real thing.

Chris Wallace brings out the real Bill and Hillary each time he interviews one of them.

For those who have ever visited Clintonland, it’s sometimes hard to recognize the slickly-scripted, post-White House media personalities of the Clintons: the affable, smiling Hillary seen on the campaign trial or the laid back, take-it-as-it-comes Bill who periodically surfaces for softball interviews.

But every once in a while, there’s a rare moment of clarity. That happened last year when Wallace interviewed the former president. At the end of the interview, Bill lost it. Suddenly the veneer was off, exposing the enraged, snarling, lunging Bill accusing Wallace of “do[ing] his nice little right wing hit job” when he forced Clinton to address his inability to capture or kill bin Laden.

Not a pretty sight. …

Thomas Sowell on Columbia, Duke, and the media.

Michael Barone notes the differences between the GM strike in 1970 and last week’s strike.

… Reuther hoped that UAW contracts (in 1970) would set a pattern for the economy and lead America toward a social democratic state. The 1970 contract seemed to be doing that: The number of workers covered by cost of living adjustments increased from 30 million to 57 million by the end of 1971. But that only fueled inflation, which led to massive job losses in the auto industry in the recessions of 1979-83. In the 1980s, foreign companies began building auto plants in the United States, almost none of them organized by the UAW. As the Wall Street Journal concluded, “Toyota, not GM or the UAW, now sets the pattern for auto industry labor costs in the U.S. economy.”

It turns out that market competition punishes those firms whose costs are out of line with others. It also produces better value for consumers, as today’s cars are far superior in quality to the clunkers of 1970. And it can make things better for workers, as well. The reason the UAW demanded 30-and-out in 1970 was that workers hated their assembly-line jobs. Newer manufacturing techniques, pioneered by Japanese firms, give workers more autonomy and responsibility — and more job satisfaction. The business model of 1970 is history. But most of us are better off today.

Jeff Jacoby on art scams.

Behold two public displays: One is an immature stunt, the other a work of art. Can you tell which is which?

Display No. 1: In an empty room in Boston’s South End, track lights go on and off at five-second intervals. The lights illuminate nothing except the bare walls and floor. This is “Work 227: The Lights Going On and Off,” the brainstorm of a Scotsman named Martin Creed, who has explained it in these words: “It’s like, if I can’t decide whether to have the lights on or off then I have them both on and off and I feel better about it.”

Display No. 2: An MIT student walks into Logan International Airport wearing a sweatshirt adorned with a plastic circuit board, on which a handful of glowing green lights arranged in a star are harmlessly wired to a 9-volt battery. On the back of the sweatshirt is scrawled “Socket To Me” and “COURSE VI.” The student is electrical engineering major Star Anna Simpson, and the outfit, she explains, is an art project meant to attract attention at an MIT career fair.

OK, so perhaps you already know that Creed’s flashing lights won the $30,000 Turner Prize, …

The Economist agrees ethanol’s a scam.

Carpe Diem says African countries lead the world in red tape.

Rich Lowry sees common sense developing in the climate debate.

… If the United States had participated in Kyoto and it had been fully implemented, according to economist Bjorn Lomborg in his new book, “Cool It,” it would have cost the developed world about $9 trillion to lower the global temperature by about .3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. That would have put off predicted warming by the end of the century by about five years. …

Damn Interesting has the story of oil drillers who drilled a hole in a lake in Louisiana and watched the water drain out.

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The end of the baseball season is a reminder we haven’t had a Ladies Day for awhile.

So today’s Pickings all come from some of our favorite distaff scribes; Debra Saunders, Anne Applebaum, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Ann Coulter, etc. and includes Pickerhead’s sixth child who is a freshman at VA Tech and a staff writer for The Collegiate Times. In the About section you can find a picture of her from our ’97 Alaska cruise. She’s the one that was still a yard ape.

Kathleen Parker takes us into the world of slavery – present day!

… In “Sold,” a documentary by former ABC producer Jody Hassett Sanchez, we meet Pakistani boys as young as 3 sold into service as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates. We also meet little girls as young as 5 who had been sold as sex slaves.

One of the challenges of modern-day slavery is that good people are often unknowingly complicit. Many of the children featured in the documentary are sold by their impoverished parents, who were promised that their children would have better lives. The reality is something different. Little girls end up as abused prostitutes, while little boys sold as jockeys spend 12 or more hours a day strapped onto the backs of camels, are shocked with metal prods and fed saltwater to prevent their gaining weight.

At a screening here Wednesday, Sanchez told an audience that included U.S. Reps. Mary Bono, R-Calif., and Connie Mack, R-Fla., that she wanted to focus on people who were working to end slavery. She followed three faith-driven people — a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian from India, Pakistan and Togo, respectively — who have suffered threats and beatings to save women and children. …

 

Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports that our sole socialist senator, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is in Costa Rica fighting a free trade pact and carrying water for Hugo Chavez. Thanks Vermont!

Ann Coulter has some opinions. How’s that for a news flash? Today her righteous wrath is pointed at academia.

… Contrary to all the blather about “free speech” surrounding Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia, universities in America do not invite speakers who do not perfectly mirror the political views of their America-hating faculties. Rather, they aggressively censor differing viewpoints and permit only a narrow category of speech on their campuses. Ask Larry Summers.

If a university invites someone to speak, you know the faculty agrees with the speaker. Maybe not the entire faculty. Some Columbia professors probably consider Ahmadinejad too moderate on Israel.

Columbia president Lee Bollinger claimed the Ahmadinejad invitation is in keeping with “Columbia’s long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate.”

Except Columbia doesn’t have that tradition. This is worse than saying “the dog ate my homework.” It’s like saying “the dog ate my homework” when you’re Michael Vick and everyone knows you’ve killed your dog.

Columbia’s “tradition” is to shut down any speakers who fall outside the teeny, tiny seditious perspective of its professors.

When Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and his black colleague Marvin Stewart were invited by the College Republicans to speak at Columbia last year, the tolerant, free-speech-loving Columbia students violently attacked them, shutting down the speech. …

Anne Applebaum reports on the effects of Putin on the still born Russian middle class.

… The mere fact of living in a post-Communist country doesn’t explain their tribulations, however. I reckon my friends in Warsaw must be the rough socioeconomic equivalents of my friends in Moscow, but my Warsaw friends are flourishing despite the chaotic coalition government that currently runs their country, and despite the corruption that sometimes prevails in their city government. They might not be zillionaires, but their children study abroad, their apartments have new Ikea bookshelves, and they don’t regularly tell horror stories about their daily lives. They aren’t a would-be middle-class, they’re a real middle class, and eventually they’ll vote like one, too. …

Suzanne Fields writes on college students’ ignorance of history.

… In a shocking study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), “civic literacy” is found to be declining at some of our finest (and most expensive) colleges and universities. Many graduates leave college with less knowledge of American history, government, foreign affairs and economics than when they entered as freshmen. Knowledge apparently just evaporates. If the survey questions administered by a team of professors to 14,000 college students at 50 colleges had been a test in a college classroom, the average score would be 53.2 percent — or simply an “F” for failure. …

Debra Saunders does her Edwards obit.

… Elizabeth Edwards disingenuously told the Progressive that when her husband voted for the war resolution, “Mostly the anti-war cry was from people who weren’t hearing what he was hearing. And the resolution wasn’t really to go to war. The resolution, if you recall, was forcing (President) Bush to go to the U.N. first.”

That’s simply not true. The resolution title was clear: “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.” There was no language requiring Bush to win U.N. approval.

How does Edwards deal with a vote he now calls a mistake? At a February Democratic forum, John Edwards crowed, “I think I was the first, at least close to being the first, to say very publicly that I was wrong.”

Elizabeth Edwards is trashing the front-running Democrats because her husband is trailing in the presidential polls – and rather than take each of them on directly, he is hiding behind his wife’s skirts.

Melanie Phillips records the descent of Britain from a results oriented society, to one controlled by process.

Did you happen to assume, by any strange chance, that the purpose of the emergency services was to rescue people in an emergency from the prospect of death or injury? Indeed. So did we all.

Well, more fool us! It turns out that their purpose is to avoid anything that puts themselves at risk – and they’ve got a health and safety rule book that says so.

The more we learn about how ten-year-old Jordon Lyon drowned in a pool in Wigan while two police support officers at the scene did nothing to save him, the more surreal and preposterous life in Britain appears to have become.

In any normal society, these officers would have been disciplined for failing to carry out what one might have presumed to be the essential duty of a police support officer, namely to protect people from harm – not to mention the basic instinct of any decent human being to try to prevent a tragic accident.

But no – their employers, the top brass of the Greater Manchester Police, say they behaved perfectly correctly. This is because both the police and fire service have instructions not to save people who are drowning.

The reasons pile absurdity upon absurdity. Police and fire officers, we are told with the straightest of faces, are not taught to swim or trained to save people from drowning. This apparently means that even if they can swim, they still have to fold their arms and stay put. …

Liza Roesch’s latest assignment for the VA Tech Collegiate Times was to report on a Seung-Hui Cho professor who refused to be interviewed.

… While in Hicok’s English class in spring 2006, Cho wrote a play about a student who plots a school shooting. Hicok voiced his concerns about Cho to Lucinda Roy, English department head. Roy declined comment on this incident.

Much of the poem, called “So I know,” includes thoughts about Cho, notably a line in which the speaker expresses his wishes that he would’ve taken Cho’s life and then his own to prevent the deaths of many more.

“Maybe I should’ve shot the kid and then myself given the math. 2<33,” the poem reads. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez makes a pitch for National Review Online.