Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 19 (word)

• July 19 (pdf)

George Will with a column that well explains why Pickerhead would vote for Hillary Clinton before he’d vote for John McCain. Students of Ludwig von Mises often repeat his idea that the best form of government is a foreign prince – because you will watch him. Hillary is someone we would never let out of our sight.

… In 2004, Wisconsin Right to Life, a small citizens group that posed no conceivable threat of “corruption” to anyone or anything, wanted to run an ad urging Wisconsin‘s senators, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, not to participate in Senate filibusters against the president’s judicial nominations. But Feingold was running for reelection, and WRTL’s proposed ad was declared an “electioneering communication” (any radio or TV ad that “refers to” a candidate for federal office). And the McCain-Feingold blackout period banned such ads 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election — when ads matter most because people are paying attention to politics.

The WRTL case could have been an occasion for McCain to say: This is not what McCain-Feingold was designed to do — it was intended to stop the (as he sees it) “corruption” of elected officials soliciting large “soft money” contributions (not for particular candidates, but for party-building and other activities). Or he could at least have kept quiet. Instead, he went out of his way to stick his thumb in the eye of critics: With his brief to the Supreme Court, he underscored the fact that suppressing inconvenient (to politicians) speech is exactly what he and his McCain-Feingold allies — Fred Thompson was an important one — had in mind. …

… There is fitting irony in the fact that if McCain’s campaign continues until the delegate selection process begins, he probably will have to accept federal matching funds and the absurd strings attached to them, stipulating the maximum amounts that can be spent in particular states. That would be condign punishment for the man who has dragged politics — the process by which the state is staffed and controlled — deep into the ambit of the regulatory state.

Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg have fun with Dem African proverbs.

Arnold Kling writing for Tech Central has W thoughts.

… Myth 1: Bush lost in 2000

It is a myth that George Bush lost the election in 2000. He lost the popular vote, but that is not how elections are decided. Both George Bush and Al Gore based their electoral strategies on the rules in place at the time, which determines the winner on the basis of electoral votes. Saying after the fact that the Presidency should go to the winner of the popular vote is like saying that the 1964 World Series Championship belongs to the Yankees because they scored more total runs, although the Cardinals took four games out of seven.

It is a myth that George Bush stole the vote in Florida. Every recount has given the victory there to Bush. There is no doubt in my mind that the real villain of 2000 is Al Gore. His challenge of the electoral results was blatantly unfair (recall, he wanted to recount only in certain precincts where he hoped to gain votes) and served only to transform a close election into an illegitimate one. Instead of working to unite the country, Gore set an example of deep partisan bitterness that maximized the long-term damage of the 2000 election for American politics. …

.. The Era of Bitterness

I think that many people are tired of the bitterness and partisanship of the Bush era. My main point, however, is that people over-estimate the extent to which this bitterness and partisanship is due to George Bush himself. My prediction is that we will see further bitterness in the years ahead, as the sore losers of 2000 and 2004 become the sore winners of 2008. In 2012, there will still be Islamic terrorism, millions of Americans will lack health insurance and America’s health care bill will still be unusually high, the rich will still be getting richer (unless the economy tanks), and the trend will be for more people to join the Long Tail that identifies with neither political party. Which is why both parties are becoming more shrill every year. …

WaPo says Jordanian man kills his sister for “honor” and gets sentenced to six months.

AMMAN, Jordan — A Jordanian court sentenced a man to six months in prison Monday for killing his pregnant sister _ an “honor killing” the man said was necessary to uphold his family’s reputation.

The court justified the lenient sentence, saying it was warranted due to the “state of fury” that led to the woman’s slaying.

Politico posts on one of the more egregious earmarks.

John Fund with some shorts.

Jim Taranto with a good post on the “democratic bubble”.

With just 476 days to go until the 2008 election, we have a feeling the Democrats are getting overconfident. True, President Bush is highly unpopular, but he isn’t seeking re-election, and the vice president isn’t running either–the first completely open race since 1952. True, too, the Democrats did very well in 2006, but that isn’t necessarily a portent; and indeed it argues that at least in House races the Dems will be defending more marginal seats.

The Democrats are particularly vulnerable to overconfidence because the “mainstream media” are on their side and tend to be insufficiently critical. (We explained how this hurt John Kerry in an article for The American Spectator two years ago.) Today we noted a couple of examples of credulous media puffery of Democrats. …

NY Times reports on Crocs.

In the summer of 2006, Crocs wearers ranged from children to senior citizens, from the image-indifferent to the celebrity chef Mario Batali. The suggestion of ubiquity was probably magnified by the fact that seeing one pair of the oversize and often brightly colored footwear felt like seeing five. The Washington Post noted the “goofy” shoes were spreading “like vermin,” and Radar Magazine anointed the “hideous” items “summer’s most unfortunate fad.” The good news for critics was that fads fade and that the Croc thing seemed to be at a peak. But a year later Crocs still have traction; in fact, the company’s sales through the first quarter of 2007 are roughly triple what they were for the same period in 2006, and imitations and knockoffs abound. …

Slate too.

… As fans will tell you, Crocs aren’t just footwear; they’re the closest thing to religion that the foot has experienced. The company’s stock has skyrocketed in value over the past year, and Crocs is now poised to launch a new product line this fall. Yet Crocs are heinous in appearance. A Croc is not a shoe; it is a Tinkertoy on steroids. How did this peculiar shoe-manqué achieve ubiquity—and can it possibly stick around?

In the interest of science and as a defender of fashion, I went to Paragon Sports in New York to buy my first pair of Crocs—the shoes were a bright patch in a sea of sportswear. …

… A first-time Crocs wearer will indeed find that the shoes are springy and light, as their fans aver, and cushion the feet with what some have called a “marshmallow fluffiness.” On a muggy New York day, the holes punched in the toe box allow for a soothing breeze to cool the sweating foot. Even so, the ratio of shame to comfort was extreme. When everyone else on the avenue is garbed in proper footwear—even something as unpretentious as flat sandals or ballet flats—an adult, it seemed to me, must blush at the sight of her bulbous feet. But those who wear Crocs all day long swear that the springy material holds up like nothing else; one painter reported that his chronic shin splints disappeared after he began wearing Crocs. Thus was born what one blogger has labeled the “Croc conundrum“: Crocs make you look absurd, but they can change your life. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 18 (word)

• July 18 (pdf)

Manchester Guardian reports on Zimbawe’s latest disasters.

Zimbabweans are shopping like there’s no tomorrow. With police patrolling the aisles of Harare’s electrical shops to enforce massive government-ordered price cuts, the widescreen TVs were the first things to go, for as little as £20. Across the country, shoes, clothes, toiletries and different kinds of food were all swept from the shelves as a nation with the world’s fastest shrinking economy gorged itself on one last spending spree.

Car dealers said officials were trying to force them to sell vehicles at the official exchange rate, effectively meaning that a car costing £15,000 could be had for £30 by changing money on the blackmarket. The owners of several dealerships have been arrested.

President Robert Mugabe’s order that all shop prices be cut by at least half, and sometimes several times more, has forced stores to open to hordes of customers waving thick blocks of near worthless money given new value by the price cuts. The police and groups of ruling party supporters could be seen leading the charge for a bargain. …

John Fund with a great column.

The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law.

In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration’s budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight.

Although Congress has long insisted on copious reporting by corporations, including the burdens of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, lawmakers have been relatively nonchalant about union reporting. Unlike the quarterly filings of corporations, unions must only file once a year with the Labor Department using a free software program. They don’t have to get an independent certified audit, are only rarely audited by the government, and don’t have to follow standard accounting methods. …

David Brooks sits in on an interview W.

I spent the first four days of last week interviewing senators about Iraq. The mood ranged from despondency to despair. Then on Friday I went to the Roosevelt Room in the White House to hear President Bush answer questions on the same subject. It was like entering a different universe.

Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored. While some in his administration may be looking for exit strategies, he is unshakably committed to stabilizing Iraq. If Gen. David Petraeus comes back and says he needs more troops and more time, Bush will scrounge up the troops. If GeneralPetraeus says he can get by with fewer, Bush will support that, too.

Bush said he will get General Petraeus’s views unfiltered by the Pentagon establishment. He feels no need to compromise to head off opposition from Capitol Hill and is confident that he can rebuild popular support. “I have the tools,” he said.

I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency. …

Rich Lowry Corner posts on Brooks’ column.

John Stossel continues reporting his talk with Michael Moore.

Michael Moore loves government.

OK, he doesn’t love a government headed by George W. Bush, but he believes that once the Democrats are in charge, government will do a better job providing health care.

In his new movie, “Sicko,” he praises government-controlled health care systems in Canada and Europe. He suggests that Americans pay more for health care but have a shorter life expectancy than people in other countries because our health care is driven “by profit.”

He is wrong in so many ways.

First, life expectancy is no measure of a country’s medical system. Lifestyle and culture matter more, and Americans are different.

Interviewing Moore for an upcoming health care special on “20/20,” I said, “In America we kill each other more often. We shoot each other. We have more car accidents. Forgive me, more of us look like … you.”

He smiled at that, but still argued that that people live longer in Canada “because they never have to worry about paying to go see the doctor. That means at the first sign of being sick they go right away to the doctor cause they’re not worrying about whether or not they can afford it.”

Please. …

The Captain has the story on how Hillary paid off Vilsack.

Tom Vilsack dropped out of the Democratic presidential race in February, one of the first significant also-rans to acknowledge reality. The former governor of Iowa endorsed Hillary in March, giving her a boost in the key state. However, that seems to have come as part of a quid pro quo, as her backers have piled contributions onto the defunct Vilsack candidacy — and some of the money wound up in Vilsack’s pockets:

The Captain referred to some previous posts which are here also.

Instapundit spotted more Gore hypocrisy.

“ONLY one week after Live Earth, Al Gore’s green credentials slipped while hosting his daughter’s wedding in Beverly Hills.

Gore and his guests at the weekend ceremony dined on Chilean sea bass – arguably one of the world’s most threatened fish species.”

WSJ Editors on Norman Borlaug.

In 1944, when Norman Borlaug arrived in Mexico, the nation was in the grip of crop failure. Cereals like wheat are dietary staples. But in Mexico, an airborne fungus was causing an epidemic of “stem rust,” and acreage once flush with golden wheat and maize yielded little more than sunbaked sallow weeds. Coupled with a population surge, famine seemed in the offing.

Dr. Borlaug left Mexico in 1963 with a harvest six times what it was when he arrived. From acres of arable land sprung a hyperactive strain of wheat engineered by the scientist in his laboratory, fertilized and nurtured according to his methods, and irrigated by systems he helped to design. Mexico’s peasantry was not only fed — it was selling wheat on the international market. …

Mr. Borlaug with an op-ed today.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 17 (word)

• July 17 (pdf)

Andrew Roberts, author of The History of The English Speaking Peoples Since 1900 had an important op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor.

The English-speaking peoples of the world need to unite around their common heritage of values. And they need to sacrifice their naiveté about the true nature of war – and the losses that inevitably go with it. Otherwise, they will lose a titanic struggle with radical, totalitarian Islam.

The reason they are under such vicious attack – my home city of London came within minutes of losing up to 1,000 innocent people in an attempted nightclub bombing two weeks ago – is that they represent all that is most loathsome and terrifying for radical Islam.

Countries in which English is the primary language are culturally, politically, and militarily different from the rest of “the West.” They have never fallen prey to fascism or communism, nor were they (except for the Channel Islands) invaded.

They stand for modernity, religious and sexual toleration, capitalism, diversity, women’s rights, representative institutions – in a word, the future. This world cannot coexist with strict, public implementation of Islamic sharia law, let alone an all-powerful caliphate.

Those who still view this struggle as a mere police action against uncoordinated criminal elements, rather than as an existential war for the survival of their way of life, are blinding themselves to reality. …

William Kristol thinks W’s record is pretty good. Pickerhead agrees.

I suppose I’ll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush‘s presidency will probably be a successful one.

Let’s step back from the unnecessary mistakes and the self-inflicted wounds that have characterized the Bush administration. Let’s look at the broad forest rather than the often unlovely trees. What do we see? First, no second terrorist attack on U.S. soil — not something we could have taken for granted. Second, a strong economy — also something that wasn’t inevitable.

And third, and most important, a war in Iraq that has been very difficult, but where — despite some confusion engendered by an almost meaningless “benchmark” report last week — we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome. …

Tech Central has an item on the recent BBC/Queen flap.

The clattering sound that was heard all round Britain at breakfast time last Wednesday was the sound of British jaws hitting breakfast tables, dressing tables and steering wheels as a commercial for a BBC program urged viewers to watch a program in which “the Queen storms out” of a photo session “in a huff.”

Given that, during the 60 years of her reign as head of state of Britain, Queen Elizabeth has never evinced the slightest sign of irritation – or indeed boredom which must, so many times, have been jaw-cracking as she listened to speeches at state banquets and official luncheons and endured thick-witted dining companions – never mind displeasure, the British simply didn’t believe it. A keen horsewoman and breeder of thoroughbreds, she never even allows herself to look vaguely disappointed in public when one of her horses loses.

Mouths also gaped round the British Commonwealth, for the Queen is also the Queen of Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and around 50 other nations comprising around 2bn people in all. The workload, including traveling, endured by 81-year old Queen Elizabeth, whose devotion to her duty is legendary, would be daunting for someone 40 years younger. …

That will prepare the way for a long article (3,500 words) from the Daily Telegraph written by a former BBC producer. Samizdata tipped us to this.

… for nine years (1955-1964) I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan’s premiership, and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it.

It was (and is) essentially, though not exclusively, a graduate phenomenon. From time to time it finds an issue that strikes a chord with the broad mass of the nation, but in most respects it is wildly unrepresentative of national opinion. When the Queen Mother died the media liberal press dismissed it as an event of no particular importance, and were mortified to see the vast crowds lining the route for her funeral, and the great flood of national emotion that it released. …

 

… So how did it happen that this minority media liberal subculture managed to install itself as the principal interpreter of Britain’s institutions to the British public? And even more interestingly, where do its opinions and attitudes come from?

Some of the ingredients have a proud and ancient lineage: resistance to oppressive political and social authority, championship of the poor, the Factory Acts and the abolition of the slave trade, are golden threads that run though the fabric of British history. But there are four new factors which in my lifetime have brought about the changes which have shaped media liberalism, encouraged its spread, and significantly increased its influence and importance. …

 

… We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world. We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. Some people called us arrogant; looking back, I am afraid I cannot dispute the epithet.

We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say ”Tesco” to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers”. The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers every day does not show up on the media liberal radar. …

 

… For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.

We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism – and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible. …

Corner post tells how the great left-wing conspiracy brought down Don Imus.

Remember the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, that loomed large in Hillary’s mind as a fabricator of obviously untrue rumors about her husband and an intern? As we have long known, Hillary’s most heartfelt complaints about the other side all arise about behavior of which she, personally, is guilty. The politics of destruction (who is more adept than the Clintons at that? Ask the Obama campaign for an update.) The Bush Administration’s ethical breaches? Any such pale in comparison to the Clintons’. The Scooter Libby commutation as a sign of lack of respect for the law? What about Bill’s 140 midnight pardons. And on…

This week, Front page magazine ran a fascinating expose of the connections between Hillary and the lead left wing media monitoring organization—Media Matters. It was Media Matters, you recall, that brought down Don Imus this past April, after a kid who was assigned to monitor his broadcasts heard the unfortunate “nappy headed ho’s” comment at dawn, and thought it might be useful. …

The Captain has some great posts. First on Lady Bird’s success in the broadcast business. Then on Rudy’s campaign. Finally on Thompson’s.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 16 (word)

• July 16 (pdf)

Before we get serious today, the Captain has a great post on a London Times columnist reacting to the BBC Queen snafu and the loony lady who married Bin Laden’s son. If you link to the article in the Times, UK you’ll learn BBC stands for Busy Blurting Confessions.

Power Line posts about a Herbert Meyer essay you won’t want to miss.

During the Reagan administration, Herbert Meyer was Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Steve Hayward notes that in 1983, when the Cold War was still regarded almost unanimously as a fixture in global affairs, Meyer predicted that the Soviet Union was in its final stages. He argued that the U.S. therefore should begin planning for a post-Soviet world.

Earlier this week, Meyer turned his forecasting skills to the present situation. He noted that there are two competing views about the post-9/11 world: (1) that we’re at war with radical Islam and (2) that we’re simply experiencing high levels of violence as a result of our values and policies. Under the first view, we should strive for victory and avoid defeat on battlegrounds such as Iraq. Under the second view, we should merely try to reduce episodes of terrorism while adjusting our values and policies.

Real Clear Politics brings us that essay.

It’s possible that something horrific will happen in the immediate future to shift public support here in the US, and throughout the West, from the second perception to the first. When asked by a young reporter what he thought would have the greatest impact on his government’s fate, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan responded cheerfully: “Events, dear boy, events.” One more 9-11-type attack – biological, chemical, or nuclear – that takes out Houston, Berlin, Vancouver or Paris, and the leader of that country will be overwhelmed by the furious public’s demands to “turn the creeps who did this, and the countries that helped them, into molten glass and don’t let’s worry about collateral damage.” (This will sound even better in French or German.) Should the next big attack come here in the US, some among us will blame the President but most won’t. The public mood will be not merely ferocious, but ugly; you won’t want to walk down the street wearing an “I gave to the ACLU” pin in your lapel.

Absent such an event in the near future, it’s likely that over the next few years the war will settle into a phase that proponents of Perception Two will approve. Simply put, we will shift from offense to defense. The Department of Homeland Security will become our government’s lead agency, and the Pentagon’s role will be diminished. (Nothing will change at the State Department – but then, nothing ever does.) Most people in the US, and elsewhere in the West, will be relieved that “the war” is finally over.

Victor Davis Hanson in The City Journal answers the NY Times “surrender” editorial.

We promised General Petraeus a hearing in September; it would be the height of folly to preempt that agreement by giving in to our summer of panic and despair. Critics called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a change in command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops. But now that we have a new secretary, a new command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops, suddenly we have a renewed demand for withdrawal before the agreed-upon September accounting—suggesting that the only constant in such harping was the assumption that Iraq was either hopeless or not worth the effort.

The truth is that Iraq has upped the ante in the war against terrorists. Our enemies’ worst nightmare is a constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate, surrounded by consensual rule in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Turkey; ours is a new terror heaven, but with oil, a strategic location, and the zeal born of a humiliating defeat of the United States on a theater scale. The Islamists believe we can’t win; so does the New York Times. But it falls to the American people to decide the issue.

Debra Saunders reminds us what’s at stake in the emminent domain controversy.

No government should be able to take your land to give it to a corporation. As Susette Kelo noted Thursday, “Our federal tax dollars shouldn’t be used to take away our homes and businesses so that developers can build shopping malls and condominiums.”

Citizens have an interest in a system that allows governments to take property — at a just price — for public projects. But when states and cities, in search of a richer tax base, can take your land and give it to a private developer — they have license to trample on everyone’s rights. And no one, except the very rich, is safe.

ABC News reports Churchill dropped from Brit curriculum.

The Onion says Edwards has pledged to eliminate all bad things by 2011.

Download Full content – Printable Pickings

• July 15 (word)

• July 15 (pdf)

Zimbabwe’s problems profiled in the Economist.

ZIMBABWE is an increasingly wretched place and, sadly, will grow more miserable for some time yet. This week an outspoken Roman Catholic Archbishop, Pius Ncube, who has become the strongest voice of opposition in the country, described the economic situation as “life-threatening”. That was an understatement. Years of economic collapse, provoked by dreadful misrule, have already taken a huge toll on Zimbabwean lives: the population has been battered by hunger, poverty and AIDS; some 3m people are estimated to have fled abroad; life expectancy has dropped to medieval levels. …

 

… Choked by hyperinflation and arbitrary restrictions Zimbabweans have had to become increasingly creative to survive. Many of those left behind in the country are staying alive only thanks to remittances from migrants in South Africa, Britain and elsewhere. A local businessman repeats the widely-held prediction that the current system will collapse within six months—and that Zimbabwe, under new management, will become Africa’s fastest growing economy. “Then again”, he smiles, “we have been saying this for years.”

Claudia Rosett keeps us up to date with UN shenanigans.

Another UN moment. There is truly no end to it. Someone ought to set up one of those giant digital counters that tick off things like the growing population of the planet, only in this case, it could have the caption:

“Every 45 seconds, somewhere on earth, a UN official heaps praise on a tyrant.”

Charles Krauthammer features the John Burns article from last Sunday to launch a column.

… It is understandable that Sens. Lugar, Voinovich, Domenici, Snowe and Warner may no longer trust President Bush’s judgment when he tells them to wait until Petraeus reports in September. What is not understandable is the vote of no confidence they are passing on Petraeus. These are the same senators who sent him back to Iraq by an 81 to 0 vote to institute his new counterinsurgency strategy. …

Bill Kristol says the defeatists may have over played their hand.

The Defeatist Democrats have lots of support from the mainstream media, most of whom have simply given up on reporting the war or analyzing arguments about the war. Actually, the newsmen who know something, like John F. Burns and Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times, have produced some terrific reporting. But run-of-the-mill foreign policy and White House reporters have little interest in what is actually happening in Iraq, or in a real consideration of the likely outcomes of different policy options. They’re not even reporting what’s happening in Washington. They’re simply committed to discrediting the war and humiliating the Bush administration.

As for the foreign policy establishment and its fellow travelers in the punditocracy, one might have thought they could be serious about this war–actually analyzing events, engaging in a grown-up debate about the real-world consequences of different courses of action, keeping calm amid the political posturing. Many in the Bush administration who care for their standing in the establishment’s eyes have spent an awful lot of time cultivating these masters of nuance and complexity. All for naught. The establishment, like the media and the Democrats, wants to discredit and humiliate an administration that too often (though not often enough!) dared to think for itself, and to act without their permission. They’re out to destroy Bush, his ideas, and his supporters, no matter the consequences for the country.

Over the last few weeks, all of these estimable entities–the Democratic party in Congress, much of the media, and the foreign policy establishment–have joined together to try to panic the country, and the Bush administration, into giving up. The story of the past week–an important week–is this: They failed. Many around Bush wobbled. But Bush stood firm. Most Republicans on the Hill stood firm. And, so far as one can tell, the country as a whole pulled back a bit from the irresponsibility of cutting and running.

Theodore Dalrymple, a retired psychiatrist, comments on the doctor’s plot for National Review.

Karl Rove was in Aspen last week addressing a group of liberal democrats. Clive Crook has details.

Almost everybody who stayed to listen to Rove on the festival’s last day went there mainly in the hope that heavy equipment might fall on him from a great height. This was the same crowd that had gazed wide-eyed and enchanted at their beloved Bill. Why does Rove accept these invitations, one wondered on the way in? Possibly, he does it for fun. He gave every impression of having a good time. And, in fact, he ran rings round an audience that came not to praise him but in the hope that somebody might bury him.

The Captain posts on BBC’s oldest trick – lying. This time to trash the Queen.

Melanie Phillips on the same subject.

If it transposes a picture sequence like this to sex up a story about the Queen by transmitting an outright falsehood, just think what it is doing in the Middle East.

Greg Mankiw takes up the fairness issue for NY Times.

DO the rich pay their fair share in taxes? This is likely to become a defining question during the presidential campaign.

At a recent fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett said that rich guys like him weren’t paying enough. Mr. Buffett asserted that his taxes last year equaled only 17.7 percent of his taxable income, compared with about 30 percent for his receptionist.

Mr. Buffett was echoing a refrain that is popular in some circles. Last year, Robert B. Reich, labor secretary during the Clinton administration, wrote on his blog that “middle-income workers are now paying a larger share of their incomes than people at or near the top.”

“We have turned the principle of a graduated, progressive tax on its head,” Mr. Reich added.

These claims are enough to get populist juices flowing. The problem with them is that they don’t hold up under close examination.

Bret Stephens gets a ride on the USS Harry Truman off the Virginia Capes.

An hour before dusk, the air crew of the USS Truman — several hundred men and women of every rank and job description — gathers at the front end of the deck to walk its 1,100 foot length, looking for tiny pieces of debris. A stray piece of metal sucked into the intake of a fighter jet could cause catastrophic damage to the plane and the pilot and terrible damage to the ship. “We don’t think of this as a dangerous business,” says Rear Adm. Bill Gortney, an F-18 pilot who also commands the Truman’s battle group of cruisers, destroyers and submarines. “It’s just a terribly unforgiving one.” …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 12 (word)

• July 12 (pdf)

Debra Saunders knows we need to be patient in Iraq.

During a teleconference from Iraq with reporters last week, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of coalition forces operating in the region south of Baghdad, explained, “Lynch’s rules of war fighting.” Rule 1 is, “Everything is timing, and the second rule is, everything takes longer than you think it’s going to take.”

I’ve had people ask me what it would take for me to support withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The answer: If military leaders such as Lynch or top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus say this war is not winnable, then it’s time to get out.

But when U.S. senators — be they Republicans Richard Lugar and Pete Domenici, or Democrats Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid — call for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops, that’s not a sign to get out. It’s a sign that D.C. pols want to be on the popular side of an unpopular war. It’s a sign that Washington lacks what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., described as “the courage necessary to put our country’s interests before every personal or political consideration.”

U.S. troops serving in Iraq deserve better. …

David Ignatius too.

… Getting into Iraq was President Bush‘s decision, and history will judge his administration harshly for its mistakes in the postwar occupation. But getting out of Iraq is now partly in the hands of the Democrats who control both houses of Congress. History will be equally unforgiving if their agitation for withdrawal results in a pell-mell retreat that causes lasting damage. …

And the editors of the Washington Post.

IT SEEMS like just weeks ago, because it was, that Congress approved funding for the war in Iraq and instructed Gen. David H. Petraeus to report back on the war’s progress in September. Now, for reasons having more to do with American politics than with Iraqi reality, September isn’t soon enough. …

Don Surber of the Charlestown Daily Mail has more.

I will not mince words. The call to bring our troops home from Iraq is nothing short of a surrender that will move the theater of war from Baghdad to the streets of the United States.

Unlike Vietnam, the enemy will follow our soldiers home.

On Sunday, the New York Times called for a surrender in Iraq. In so doing, the newspaper abandoned any pretense of liberalism, of decency and of compassion for one’s fellow man. …

Jay Nordlinger of National Review Online gives us a delightful change of pace. He has excerpts from speeches given by Abby and Steve Thernstrom when they received Bradley Awards in May. Pickerhead was honored by an invitation and is happy to relive that evening.

Here’s Abby;

… We are true neo-cons. We lingered long on the left until mugged by reality. Even in the ’50s, however, when we met, I was a political disappointment to my parents, who had sent me to Communist schools. Literally. The children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg arrived at my high school after I left.

But my Communist political education failed to take. For reasons I don’t know, I was stubborn, fiercely independent, and willing to pay the price for rebellion. I was the only student in my school, for instance, who refused to wear a black armband when the Rosenbergs were executed in June 1953. It was not a recipe for popularity at that school. . . .

And Steve;

Abby hails from Greenwich Village; I’m from the heartland, specifically two small Midwestern industrial cities, Port Huron and Battle Creek, Michigan. My father, the son of a Swedish immigrant laborer, had to leave school after the 8th grade to earn his keep. My mother’s formal education ended with high school, but she was a devoted life-long reader who encouraged me to read voraciously from an early age. . . .

I met Abby at Harvard in 1958. By then, I had read deeply in Marx, and considered myself a democratic socialist. Over time, though — a long time — I gradually lost my faith that the government could run the economy more fairly than a free market, and began to move back towards Battle Creek, as it were. The year spent in England as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in 1978-79 was particularly eye-opening, as we lived through the final months of the Callaghan Labour government and found ourselves cheering Margaret Thatcher’s election. The tragic degeneration of the civil rights movement, in which I had been active in college and graduate school, also sapped my faith in left liberalism. . . .

John Fund has some Thompson thoughts.

Power Line posts Thompson’s letter to them.

The easiest and most generally used tactic when running against a lawyer is to trade off a general perception that most people dislike lawyers. Goodness knows that a lot of lawyers have earned disfavor but, as it turns out, folks understand our system better than a lot of politicians think they do. In my first run for the Senate, my opponent tried the old demagoguery route – “He has even represented criminals!” – to no avail.

A first cousin of this ploy is to associate the lawyer with the views of his client. Now-United States Chief Justice John Roberts addressed this notion during his confirmation hearings. “… [I]t’s a tradition of the American Bar that goes back before the founding of the country that lawyers are not identified with the positions of their clients. The most famous example probably was John Adams, who represented the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre.”

Samizdata says Tintin books are in trouble in the UK.

Robert Samuelson tries to answer why we don’t get happier.

Corner post on Sicko.

Michael Munger, chair of the PolySci Dept. at Duke, with a great piece on recycling.

Two empty bottles, still cool from their malty contents. I glance at my lovely wife. And as always after a couple of beers, she looks strikingly attractive… as an audience for an economics lecture.

Her reaction, also as always, is to pretend to focus intently on her book, and probably to wonder how we ever managed to have children. …

… “Recycle, regardless of cost!” doesn’t solve a problem; it creates one. Laws requiring recycling harm me, the environment, and everyone else. We have to take prices into account, because prices are telling us that we can’t save resources by wasting resources.

Well, it’s late, and it’s time I head upstairs. I put the glass bottles in the recycle container. They are brown glass, and though their “value” is negative, at least they can be recycled at nominal cost. Besides, it makes me feel good. I’m saving the Earth, one piece of expensive garbage at a time.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 11 (word)

• July 11 (pdf)

John Stossel’s column gets the lead again with “Freedom and Benevolence.”

I interviewed Michael Moore recently for an upcoming “20/20″ special on health care. It’s refreshing to interview a leftist who proudly admits he’s a leftist. He told me that government should provide “food care” as well as health care and that big government would work if only the right people were in charge.

Moore added, “I watch your show and I know where you are coming from. … “

He knows I defend limited government, so he tried to explain why I was wrong. He began in a revealing way:

“I gotta believe that, even though I know you’re very much for the individual determining his own destiny, you also have a heart.”

Notice his smuggled premise in the words “even though.” In Moore’s mind, someone who favors individual freedom doesn’t care about his fellow human beings. If I have a heart, it’s in spite of my belief in freedom and autonomy for everyone.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that someone who wants everyone to be free of tyranny does so partly because he cares about others? …

Tony Blankley looks at the senate in “Chamber of Shame.”

… But if al Qaeda can plausibly claim they drove America out of Iraq (just as they drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan), they will gain literally millions of new adherents in their struggle to destroy America and the West. We will then pay in blood, treasure and future wars vastly more than we are paying today to manage and eventually win our struggle in Iraq.

Our staying power, unflinching persistence in the face of adversity, muscular capacity to impose order on chaos and eventual slaughtering of terrorists who are trying to drive us out will do more to win the “hearts and minds” of potentially radical Islamists around the world than all the little sermons about our belief in Islam as the religion of peace. As bin Laden once famously observed — people follow the strong horse.

We have two choices: Use our vast resources to prove we are the strong horse or get ready to be taken to the glue factory. …

Theodore Dalrymple who was here last week reviewing a book by Walter Laqueur writes on the uncomfortable choices facing Brits.

… A friend who met me at the airport said something that must by now be true of many ordinary British people. Just as we used to wonder, on meeting Germans of a certain age, what they had done during World War II, so she wondered, when she found herself next to a young Muslim on a bus or a train, what he thought of the various bombings perpetrated by his co-religionists and whether he might be a bomber. She found herself looking for the nearest exit, as we are all enjoined to do by flight attendants before the plane takes off, in case of the need for swift exit.

There are reasonable grounds for suspicion, of course. Surveys — for whatever they are worth — show a surprising, and horrifying, degree of sympathy, if not outright support, for the bombers on the part of the young Muslim population of Britain. They show that a large number of Muslims in Britain want the implementation of Sharia law and think that murdering British Jews is justified simply because they are Jews. And when an atrocity is perpetrated by a Muslim, they evince no passion remotely comparable to that aroused by, say, the work of Salman Rushdie. …

Jonah Goldberg has fun with Live Earth.

… if fans had somehow missed the global-warming story entirely, imagine how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn’t hit the mute button when Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she “didn’t feel hate toward nature” because of the tsunami. “I felt nature was screaming for help.”

It’s nice that Nemcova didn’t want to blame the messenger, but it’s hard to feel a similar reluctance about Live Earth’s impresario in chief. Former Vice President Al Gore recently penned a book in which he rails against the current “assault on reason” by the evil forces of Earth-hating right-wingery. He repeatedly invokes science as if it’s his exclusive property. But the soft paganism on display in Nemcova’s faith-based assertion that a suboceanic earthquake was the result of Mother Nature sending us a message is typical of greenhouse gasbaggery. Gore talks about the dysfunction of political discourse today. But when it comes to global warming, he and his acolytes insist that the time for debate is over. In other words, Gore’s ideal discourse would involve only discussion about how best to follow through on his prescriptions. …

Rich Lowry posts on part of McCain’s problem.

One of the problems with senators as presidential candidates is that they usually have never run anything, so they are not well-suited for an executive role. That seems to have been part of the problem with McCain. …

Yesterday Kathleen Parker took on marijuana laws. Today Debra Saunders illuminates sentencing inequities in crack/cocaine laws that weigh heavily on African Americans. She wanders too much, but readers can see some of the problems.

When Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, it wrongly included language that meted out a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for dealing 5 grams of crack cocaine, yet the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence for dealing 100 times that amount, or 500 grams, of powder cocaine. Thus the bill codified a racially unjust divide. The U.S. Sentencing Commission found that in 2000 some 84.7 percent of federal crack offenders were black, while only 5.6 percent were white.

Everyone in Washington knows that the law is unfair — obscenely unfair. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has made four recommendations to curb the sentencing inequity. Alas, for the past two decades, Democrats and Republicans have cravenly set out to out-posture each other in toughness in the war on drugs. So Washington either voted against or ignored the Sentencing Commission’s recommendations. …

American Thinker notes NY Times bonds have rating cut. Yesterday we claimed not to indulge in schadenfreude. We lied. We do enjoy it when the Times gets what it so richly deserves.

Lileks is here.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 10 (word)

• July 10 (pdf)

Power Line reacts to Dem moves for defeat and the GOP who acquiesce.

Given the demonstrable progress made by General Petraeus and the forces under his command implementing the surge counterinsurgency strategy over the past month, I find the Democratic compulsion to mandate our defeat in Iraq incomprehensible and any Republican assistance lent to the Democrats’ effort contemptible.

The same post quotes Bill Kristol.

… Here’s what I gather is a basic lesson of tactics: When you find yourself in an ambush, attack into the ambush. Don’t twist and turn in the kill zone, looking for a way to retreat. Especially when the ambush is not a powerful one, and the Democrats’ position (to mix military metaphors) is way overextended. The Democrats are hoping the president will break and run. They will not allow him a dignified retreat or welcome him with compromise. They will spring to finish him off completely. It doesn’t matter what the president’s motives are. Some of his advisers are trying to persuade him that he needs to go for a grand bargain now so as to build bipartisan support for his policies when he’s gone. But the only way to do that is to hold firm now–and to counterattack. Those who try to convince him otherwise offer nothing but defeat, for the troops, for the mission, and for the president. …

Later Power Line posts on a Novak column.

Earlier today, Scott wrote that he finds “the Democratic compulsion to mandate our defeat in Iraq incomprehensible and any Republican assistance lent to the Democrats’ effort contemptible.” Just as contemptible, on the evidence of this column by Robert Novak, is the way certain Republican Senators are spinning the matter.

In Novak’s telling, which appears to be an uncritical transmittal of the talking points of the Republicans who intend to bail on President Bush, the president doesn’t understand that support for his position on the Republican side is eroding. Moreover, these Republicans supposedly fear “the president running out the clock until April, when a depleted U.S. military will be blamed for the fiasco.”

This is self-serving rubbish. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and nearly everyone else in a high level position in the administration have been around long enough to understand that some Republican politicians, being politicians, are going to want to jump ship now that the war has become unpopular. It may be in the interest of these politicians to portray Bush as not understanding them. More likely, he understands them perfectly, and simply is unwilling to accede to their defeatist position. …

Power Line then posts on Steve Hayward and his efforts to clearly portray J. Carter and Al Gore.

… Carter has a long habit of engaging in what was once described as “blurt and retreat,” whereby he backs away from egregious statements when called on them. Yet circumstantial evidence suggests that this language was not mere verbal sloppiness, as Carter now wishes us to think. At the end of one of Carter’s freelance Middle East peace conferences a few years ago, he let slip a comment that ranks up there with many racially tinged remarks from his various Georgia political campaigns: “Had I been elected to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It is strange that an experienced politician would use that particular expression. Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, incautiously wrote years after leaving office that Carter’s Middle East plan in a prospective second term was simple: Sell out Israel.

Pickings is proud to have Richard Cohen again with “They Honor Us With Their Hate.” We will forgive him for his slaps at W. The Captain will take that up next. But, you can’t beat his theme that we are honored by the hatred of the anti-Semites in the Muslim world.

… But, in a way, America has little choice about being hated in some parts of the world. The United States is never going to be truly popular as long as it insists on adhering to certain principles. Russia, which is creeping back to totalitarianism, does not have this problem. China, which is already authoritarian and obstructionist on Darfur, does not have this problem. Cuba, which is authoritarian, obstructionist and vile, also does not have this problem. Many Serbs hate America for the NATO bombing of that country, but the bombing stopped the killing in the Balkans. Tell me that was the wrong thing to do.

Alastair Campbell, a one-time spokesman for Tony Blair while he was prime minister, has published a book in Britain titled “The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries.” In it, he recounts Sept. 12, 2001, at 10 Downing Street and the procession of briefers who came to the prime minister that day: “One of the experts . . . a total Arabist, came very close to saying the attack was justified, saying the Americans should look to their own policy on the Middle East to understand why so many people don’t like them.”

It’s always nice to have friends. Sometimes, though, it’s more honorable to have enemies.

The Captain cleans up after Mr. Cohen.

… I agree with Cohen in the first and last paragraphs above, but the middle paragraph is nothing but twaddle. George Bush did not order abuses at Abu Ghraib, and neither did Don Rumsfeld. Abu Ghraib resulted from a lack of discipline one of the units assigned there and a lack of oversight by its officers. Those responsible were court-martialed and sent to prison, and the general commanding that unit got sacked. And while it certainly did give us a black eye in terms of our image, the idea that it somehow outstripped the murders, tortures, and rapes conducted their under previous management is preposterous. …

… We make our share of mistakes, and Abu Ghraib qualifies as a big one. That isn’t what America is or where our values lie. Cohen makes a big mistake in arguing that it does under any presidency, and the swift punishment of those responsible demonstrates the fallacy of that thinking. The response showed that we take our values seriously, even in how we deal with our enemies. I will also note that we have seen how those who hate us and array themselves against us treat Americans they capture, and we can see their values clearly in how they handle themselves.

I’d rather have them as enemies than friends.

Kathleen Parker writes a good column on marijuana laws. Her jumping off point is the recent problems in the Gore family. In the normal course of events Pickings in not interested in schadenfreude. Gore’s ideas are so preposterous we can confine ourselves to the enjoyment of making fun of them. And, the possession of pot should be the least of the problems Gore triple sticks has on his plate.

… Efforts over the past few decades to relax marijuana laws have been moderately successful. Twelve states have decriminalized marijuana, which usually means no prison or criminal record for first-time possession of small amounts for personal consumption. (Those states are: Alabama, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon.)

Yet even now, federal law enforcement agents raid the homes of terminally ill patients who use marijuana for relief from suffering in states where medical marijuana use is permitted. These federal raids have become an issue in the 2008 presidential race as candidates have been asked to take a position. A summary is available on the Marijuana Policy Project Web site (mpp.org).

Beyond the medical issue is the practical question of criminalizing otherwise good citizens for consuming a nontoxic substance — described by the British medical journal Lancet as less harmful to health than alcohol or tobacco — at great economic and social cost. Each year, more than 700,000 people are arrested for marijuana-related offenses at a cost of more than $7 billion, according to the Marijuana Policy Project. …

Arnold Kling writes for Tech Central on the Dem inequality claims.

The Left is gearing up for 2008 with major proposals for government intervention to “fix” the distribution of income. For example, the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, recently proposed raising the minimum wage, giving unions more advantages in the workplace, expanding government’s role in child care, and other policies that will be harmful to economic growth, which is the one proven way to raise our standard of living.

In order to build support for this statist agenda, policy wonks and pundits are spreading a set of myths about inequality. We are hearing that incomes are stagnating in middle America, that class mobility is disappearing, and that the political process favors the wealthy. But we should not believe the myths. …

The Australian gives us the skinny on Gore’s movie.

AL Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was launched in May last year. Its message is that global warming is going to roon us all, and the polar bears, too. Initially, the film received eulogistic – and, one might say, generally scientifically ignorant – reviews in substantial newspapers and magazines globally.

As it came to be watched by qualified persons, devastating critiques of the looseness of the film’s science began to appear on the internet. More than 20 basic errors, some of them schoolboy howlers, were identified. …

Perry de Havilland of Samizdata visits the US. to shoot guns and drink Yuengling beer. You’ll love his T shirt. It’s Margaret Thatcher dressed like Che.

A Volokh post on Johnny Carson and Jack Benny.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 9 (word)

• July 9 (pdf)

The same day the NY Times called for withdrawal from Iraq, John Burns, the best reporter on the scene, files an optimistic report from Anbar Province.

SUNNI merchants watched warily from behind neat stacks of fruit and vegetables as Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno walked with a platoon of bodyguards through the Qatana bazaar here one recent afternoon. At last, one leathery-faced trader glanced furtively up and down the narrow, refuse-strewn street to check who might be listening, then broke the silence.

“America good! Al Qaeda bad!” he said in halting English, flashing a thumb’s-up in the direction of America’s second-ranking commander in Iraq.

Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by American machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor’s building across the road. Ramadi was Iraq’s most dangerous city, and the area around the building the most deadly place in Ramadi. Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. …

George Will picks up on some of Amity Shlaes new book on the Great Depression.

Some mornings during the autumn of 1933, when the unemployment rate was 22 percent, the president, before getting into his wheelchair, sat in bed, surrounded by economic advisers, setting the price of gold. One morning he said he might raise it 21 cents: “It’s a lucky number because it’s three times seven.” His Treasury secretary wrote that if people knew how gold was priced “they would be frightened.”

The Depression’s persistence, partly a result of such policy flippancy, was frightening. In 1937, during the depression within the Depression, there occurred the steepest drop in industrial production ever recorded. By January 1938 the unemployment rate was back up to 17.4 percent. The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt‘s success was in altering the practice of American politics.

This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive. …

Christopher Hitchens on the doctors plot.

Make any presumption of innocence that you like, and it still looks as if the latest cell of religious would-be murderers in Britain is made up of members of the medical profession. When I was growing up, the expression “Doctors’ Plot” was a chilling one, expressing the paranoia of Stalin about his Jewish physicians and their evil conspiracy; a paranoia that was on the verge of unleashing an official pogrom in Moscow before the old brute succumbed to death by natural causes just in time. Now it seems that there really was a doctors’ plot in London and Glasgow and that its members were so hungry for death that they rushed from one aborted crime scene to another in their eagerness to take the lives of strangers. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld the same.

What is the difference between an Islamic Doctors’ Plot and a Jewish Doctors’ Plot?

It sounds like the opening line of a joke, but it’s not.

So far, in the Islamic Doctors’ Plot now being unraveled by Scotland Yard, eight people have been arrested in connection with two failed car-bombings in London and a third at the Glasgow airport. Seven are doctors, and the eighth is a laboratory technician. They are all suspected of planning or participating in a mass casualty attack, using gas canisters, gasoline, and nails to inflict maximum carnage on innocents civilians, as part of a broader worldwide campaign of terror in the name of Islam. …

… The Jewish Doctors’ Plot is another kettle of fish altogether. On January 13, 1953, the Soviet Communist party newspaper Pravda published an article under the headline “Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of Academic Physicians.” It told of a vast plot by a group of doctors who “deliberately and viciously undermined their patients’ health by making incorrect diagnoses, and then killed them with bad and incorrect treatments.” …

William Easterly, NYU prof, says Africa needs trade, not handouts.

JUST WHEN IT SEEMED that Western images of Africa could not get any weirder, the July 2007 special Africa issue of Vanity Fair was published, complete with a feature article on “Madonna’s Malawi.” At the same time, the memoirs of an African child soldier are on sale at your local Starbucks, and celebrity activist Bob Geldof is touring Africa yet again, followed by TV cameras, to document that “War, Famine, Plague & Death are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and these days they’re riding hard through the back roads of Africa.”

It’s a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that’s being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers. But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help. …

 

… Today, as I sip my Rwandan gourmet coffee and wear my Nigerian shirt here in New York, and as European men eat fresh Ghanaian pineapple for breakfast and bring Kenyan flowers home to their wives, I wonder what it will take for Western consumers to learn even more about the products of self-sufficient, hardworking, dignified Africans. Perhaps they should spend less time consuming Africa disaster stereotypes from television and Vanity Fair.

Kofi Bentil, an African doesn’t like the message in Live Earth. He looks forward to using fossil fuels.

… Even if we accept that global warming may have a significant effect on our climate, limiting the use of fossil fuels in Africa would be counterproductive. Respiratory infections are the leading cause of childhood deaths on my continent, mainly from inhaling the smoke produced by burning wood and dung in our quaint mud huts. …

Adam Smith posts on Zimbabwe.

We often complain about the effect of government interference on our lives, but spare a thought for those less fortunate than ourselves.

The people of Zimbabwe are under the heel of one of the most autocratic and incompetent governments in the world. Top of the list of catastrophic mistakes made by the Mugabe government is its handling of the economy. Price increases ran at an annual rate of 4,500 percent in May of this year and the hyper-inflationary spiral shows no sign of stopping. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• July 8 (word)

• July 8 (pdf)

Mark Steyn was in the Orange County Register writing about the jobs Brits won’t do.

… Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can’t wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.

Some 40 percent of Britain’s practicing doctors were trained overseas – and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place. According to the BBC, “Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas – the vast majority from non-European countries.” Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain.

Many of these imported medical staff have never practiced in their own countries. As soon as they complete their training, they move to a Western world hungry for doctors to prop up their understaffed health systems: Dr. Abdulla got his medical qualification in Baghdad in 2004 and was practicing in Britain by 2006. His co-plotter, Mohammed Asha, a neurosurgeon, graduated in Jordan in 2004 and came to England the same year. …

… The fact that the National Health Service – the “envy of the world” in every British politician’s absurdly parochial cliché – has to hire Wahhabist doctors with no background checks tells you everything about where the country’s heading.

Natan Sharansky in WaPo with a warning about the results of leaving Iraq too soon.

… Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism. A textbook example came last year from John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq. “Under Saddam,” he said, according to the Associated Press, “if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK.”

The truth is that in totalitarian regimes, there are no human rights. Period. The media do not criticize the government. Parliaments do not check executive power. Courts do not uphold due process. And human rights groups don’t file reports.

For most people, life under totalitarianism is slavery with no possibility of escape. That is why despite the carnage in Iraq, Iraqis are consistently less pessimistic about the present and more optimistic about the future of their country than Americans are. In a face-to-face national poll of 5,019 people conducted this spring by Opinion Research Business, a British market-research firm, only 27 percent of Iraqis said they believed that “that their country is actually in a state of civil war,” and by nearly 2 to 1 (49 percent to 26 percent), the Iraqis surveyed said they preferred life under their new government to life under the old tyranny. That is why, at a time when many Americans are abandoning the vision of a democratic Iraq, most Iraqis still cling to the hope of a better future. …

Joe Lieberman concerned about Iran.

… I hope the new revelations about Iran’s behavior will also temper the enthusiasm of some of those in Congress who are advocating the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Iran’s purpose in sponsoring attacks on American soldiers, after all, is clear: It hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate these states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S.

The threat posed by Iran to our soldiers’ lives, our security as a nation and our allies in the Middle East is a truth that cannot be wished or waved away. It must be confronted head-on. The regime in Iran is betting that our political disunity in Washington will constrain us in responding to its attacks. For the sake of our nation’s security, we must unite and prove them wrong.

Daniel Johnson in Contentions gives some background on the trouble de Villepin and Chirac may have.

Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister, had some unusual visitors this week. Judges and police searched his Parisian apartment as part of their investigation into what is proving to be the biggest of the many political scandals of the Chirac era: the Clearstream affair. …

Claudia Rosett has UN news.

Please try to contain your excitement, but yes, it’s true….

In Geneva today, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presiding, the UN launched yet another “high-level” development thingamabob. This time it’s not a UN Fund, or a Program, or an Initiative, or a Group, or an Alliance, but a “Forum” …

Power Line analyzes LA Times hit piece on Thompson.

Open Market notes National Geographic article on Malaria actually gets it right about Rachel Carson.

Malaria is a confounding disease—often, it seems, contradictory to logic….Rachel Carson, the environmental icon, is a villain; her three-letter devil, DDT, is a savior…In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, documenting this abuse and painting so damning a picture that the chemical was eventually outlawed by most of the world for agricultural use. Exceptions were made for malaria control, but DDT became nearly impossible to procure. ‘The ban on DDT,’ says Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health, ‘may have killed 20 million children.’

Somebody who knows challenges Sicko’s ideas.

In “Sicko,” Michael Moore uses a clip of my appearance earlier this year on “The O’Reilly Factor” to introduce a segment on the glories of Canadian health care.

Moore adores the Canadian system. I do not.

I am a new American, but I grew up and worked for many years in Canada. And I know the health care system of my native country much more intimately than does Moore. There’s a good reason why my former countrymen with the money to do so either use the services of a booming industry of illegal private clinics, or come to America to take advantage of the health care that Moore denounces.

Government-run health care in Canada inevitably resolves into a dehumanizing system of triage, where the weak and the elderly are hastened to their fates by actuarial calculation.

Power Line proves AP is un-American.

Carpe Diem post on the “goldilocks” economy.

Pickerhead is always a sucker for new battery technology. USA TODAY with the story.

Dilbert has kind thoughts for his readers.