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• July 5 (word)

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John Stossel starts us off with “Live and let live.” Could be the motto of Pickings.

… there are only two ways to get people to do things: force or persuasion. Government is all about force. Government has nothing it hasn’t first expropriated from some productive person. …

 

… Thomas Jefferson said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Was he ever right! Liberty yields as well-intentioned busybodies try to “fix” the world by stopping you from using gasoline or forcing you to finance antipoverty programs.

No behavior is too small or private to escape the schemers. When a New Zealand couple recently named their child “4real,” the Washington Times said it was “unfortunate” that the government doesn’t forbid that. The “conservative” newspaper named the couple “Knaves of the Week.”

That prompted Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, to write the editor: “I choose you as my ‘Knave of the Week’ for asserting that the decision on naming a child should belong to politicians and bureaucrats rather than exclusively to that child’s parents. True knaves are those who arrogantly impose their tastes and preferences upon others.”

Exactly. “Live and let live” used to be a noble approach to life. Now you’re considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.

I prefer “live and let live.”

Adam Smith with a great idea for rebranding protectionism.

… They pointed to an analysis by the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading US companies, which recommended that economist use the term ‘economic isolationism’ instead of ‘protectionism’ when addressing an audience of non-economists. “While a person may instinctively want to be protected, no one wants to be isolated. To the broad public, the phrase ‘economic isolationism’ conveys the meaning of the term ‘protectionism’ better than does ‘protectionism’ itself.”

Marginal Revolution asks an important question.

The British Parliament was debating how much slave owners should be compensated for their losses, 20 million pounds as it turned out, when a furious John Stuart Mill rose to his feet thundering, “I should have thought it was the slaves who should be compensated.”

I am reminded of this story, which is probably apocryphal, whenever I hear about how we must compensate “the losers” from globalization. Really? Why should they get any compensation at all? …

WSJ editorializes on Congress’s treatment of Peru and Columbia. Brings to mind Bernard Lewis’ description of the U. S. – ”America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”

Claudia Rosett finds a sweet one for July 4th. She calls it the best play in baseball. It was 1976 and Rick Monday of the Chicago Cubs rescues a flag.

Mark Steyn and his fellows at The Corner, one of the National Review Online blogs, have had a field day posting on the news of the England’s current bombers.

Samizdata finishes up after 12 Corner posts.

… Still, it could be argued, that is just as well that they were NHS (Britain’s National Health Service) people. Had they not been their enterprise might have been successful.

Yahoo News found the Islamic “Rage Boy” we had fun with in June 25th Pickings.

Pickerhead takes a holiday tomorrow. Happy Fourth!

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• July 3 (word)

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John Burns, of the NY Times, reports on recent revelations of Iranian efforts in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, — Agents of Iran helped plan a January raid in Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants, an American military spokesman said Monday. The charge was the most specific allegation of Iranian involvement in an attack that killed American troops, at a time of rising tensions with Iran over its role in Iraq and its nuclear program.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, the military spokesman here, said an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a force under the control of Iran’s most powerful religious leaders, had used veterans of the Lebanese Islamic militia group Hezbollah as a “proxy” to train, arm and plan attacks by an array of Shiite militant cells in Iraq.

Joe Lieberman knows what to do.

“The fact is that the Iranian government has by its actions declared war on us,” said Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats. As a result, he continued, “The United States government has a responsibility to use all instruments at its disposal to stop these terrorist attacks against our soldiers and allies in Iraq, including keeping open the possibility of using military force against the terrorist infrastructure inside Iran.”

Max Boot too.

… Ever since 1979, the radical mullahs who control Tehran have been waging covert war on the United States and our allies, and we have scarcely responded. Especially now, when we are mired deep in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans and especially most of our politicians would seemingly prefer not to focus on actions that might embroil us with war on another front.

Yet that kind of ignorance becomes harder to preserve in light of fresh evidence of Iranian aggression. …

WSJ comments on Zimbabwe’s Neocon.

Richard Cohen of WaPo must have a fever. He’s been making a lot of sense lately. He was in Pickings two weeks ago suggesting Libby’s jail sentence be commuted. Now he’s taking the Dems to task for being captured by the teachers unions. Unfortunately he doesn’t find his way to supporting vouchers, but maybe that’s next.

The eight Democratic presidential candidates assembled in Washington last week for another of their debates and talked, among other things, about public education. They all essentially agreed that it was underfunded– one system “for the wealthy, one for everybody else,” as John Edwards put it. Then they all got into cars and drove through a city where teachers are relatively well paid, per pupil spending is through the roof and — pay attention here — the schools are among the very worst in the nation. When it comes to education, Democrats are uneducable.

One candidate after another lambasted George Bush, the Republican Party and, of course, the evil justices of the Supreme Court. But not a one of them even whispered a mild word of outrage about a public school system that spends $13,000 per child — third highest among big-city school systems — and produces pupils who score among the lowest in just about any category you can name. The only area in which the Washington school system is No. 1 is in money spent on administration. Chests should not swell with pride.

The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. …

… In so far as the Democratic presidential candidates talked about public school education and in so far as they mentioned the Supreme Court decision, they largely mouthed Democratic orthodoxy. It must have sounded reassuring to big-city education unions and politicians with a gift for exacerbating racial paranoia. But to the kid in the classroom, to a parent bucking the bureaucracy, the rhetoric must have sounded as unreal as the hot air that comes from Baghdad’s Green Zone — a “surge” of money instead of men or, as we used to say, throwing good money after bad.

Gabriel Schoenfeld on the pardon.

Here is Hillary Clinton commenting on George W. Bush’s modest display of mercy to Scooter Libby, sparing him from prison: “this commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.”

“Cronyism and ideology”? I agree with Hillary that cronyism is a terrible thing, but I think it is a stretch to say that that’s what the Scooter Libby affair was all about. If it was cronyism, Bush has not been very kind to his crony, keeping Libby’s fine, his probation, and his conviction intact.

In any case, in thinking about Hillary’s statement, it is useful to bear in mind some of the pardons granted by her husband Bill. …

David Boaz at Cato has some other commutation prospects.

Mark Steyn’s Song of the Week is American the Beautiful.

…

Oh beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

She put them down on paper that evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel. Today you’d be hard put to find a quatrain known to more Americans. Whether it’s Gary Larson’s Columbus approaching land in a “Far Side” cartoon and saying, “Look! Purple mountains! Spacious skies! …Is someone writing this down?” or Rush Limbaugh at noon welcoming listeners “across the fruited plain” to his daily radio show …

Dinesh D’Souza writes about what’s so good about America.

NY Times book review of The Bottom Billion, Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. The Reviewer is Niall Ferguson. He can make you think.

… Trade, too, is not a sufficient answer. The problem is that Asia has eaten Africa’s lunch when it comes to exploiting low wage costs. Once manufacturing activity started to relocate to Asia, African economies simply got left behind. Now, to stand any chance of survival, African manufacturers need some temporary protection from Asian competition. So long as rich countries retain tariffs to shelter their own manufacturers from cut-price Asian imports, they should exempt products from bottom billion countries.

This, however, is not the most heretical of Collier’s prescriptions. Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What postconflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it.

At a time when the idea of humanitarian intervention is selling at a considerable discount, this is a vital insight. (One recent finding by Collier and his associates, not reproduced here, is that until recently, former French colonies in Africa were less likely than other comparably poor countries to experience civil war. That was because the French effectively gave informal security guarantees to postindependence governments.) Collier concedes that his argument is bound to elicit accusations of neocolonialism from the usual suspects (not least Mugabe). Yet the case he makes for more rather than less intervention in chronically misgoverned poor countries is a powerful one. It is easy to forget, amid the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that effective intervention ended Sierra Leone’s civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to genocide. …

 

Dilbert says planes are living things and you could be airplane poop.

Scrappleface says we are safe even though Scooter Libby is on the loose.

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• July 2 (word)

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Clive Crook gives us another view of events in Europe. Yesterday Lacquer and Dalrymple gave broad brushstrokes. Crook concentrates on the government in Brussels. Although, his jumping off place is a recent court decision here.

… You do have to wonder whether it serves the nation’s interests to have its highest court (not to mention all of the other courts previously involved) listen to the urgent entreaties of, according to The Washington Post, civil libertarians, gay-rights advocates, proponents of medical marijuana, and conservative Christian legal organizations (to name but a few) on the subject of whether the Constitution permits a school principal to discourage idiocy. All of those groups, by the way, argued that “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” was protected free speech. This cannot be what the Founders had in mind.

And yet, I say, count your blessings. If America’s reverence for its ever-constant, ever-changing Constitution should slip, look at Europe. Not too carefully, mind you. A conscientious study of the European Union’s efforts to draft a constitution — they ended last week in failure, but were hailed, as custom dictates, as a success — would drive any sane person mad. Scanned from a safe altitude, however, this sorry tale is good for one’s morale. …

… America’s system of government labors under colossal inefficiencies. It has a limitless capacity to throw up absurdities of one kind or another, among which “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” wins a place of honor. It can struggle endlessly to get simple things done, then lurch abruptly in the wrong direction. But what this system never does, even at its worst, is express naked contempt for the opinions of its citizens. America is a democracy. Europe may have elections, but there is more to democracy than that. Europe mocks the very idea.

As regards attempted bombings in Great Britain, Christopher Hitchens asks, “What did you expect?”

… Liberal reluctance to confront this sheer horror is the result, I think, of a deep reticence about some furtive concept of “race.” It is subconsciously assumed that a critique of political Islam is an attack on people with brown skins. One notes in passing that any such concession implicitly denies or negates Islam’s claim to be a universal religion. Indeed, some of its own exponents certainly do speak as if they think of it as a tribal property. And, at any rate, in practice, so it is. The fascistic subculture that has taken root in Britain and that lives by violence and hatred is composed of two main elements. One is a refugee phenomenon, made up of shady exiles from the Middle East and Asia who are exploiting London’s traditional hospitality, and one is the projection of an immigrant group that has its origins in a particularly backward and reactionary part of Pakistan.

To the shame-faced white-liberal refusal to confront these facts, one might counterpose a few observations. The first is that we were warned for years of the danger, by Britons also of Asian descent such as Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Salman Rushdie. They knew what the village mullahs looked like and sounded like, and they said as much. …

… The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women. In Britain, in the 21st century, there are now honor killings, forced marriages, clerically mandated wife-beatings, incest in all but name, and the adoption of apparel for females that one cannot be sure is chosen by them but which is claimed as an issue of (of all things) free expression. This would be bad enough on its own and if it were confined to the Muslim “community” alone. But, of course, such a toxin cannot be confined, and the votaries of theocracy now claim the God-given right to slaughter females at random for nothing more than their perceived immodesty. The least we can do, confronted by such radical evil, is to look it in the eye (something it strives to avoid) and call it by its right name. For a start, it is the female victims of this tyranny who are “disenfranchised,” while something rather worse than “disenfranchisement” awaits those who dare to disagree.

London Times reports Zimbabwe cleric wishes for invasion and toppling of Mugabe.

ZIMBABWE’S leading cleric has called on Britain to invade the country and topple President Robert Mugabe. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, warned that millions were facing death from famine, unable to survive amid inflation believed to have soared to 15,000%.

Mugabe, 83, had proved intransigent despite the “massive risk to life”, said Ncube, the head of Zimbabwe’s 1m Catholics. “I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe,” he said. “We should do it ourselves but there’s too much fear. I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.” …

Not much chance the new PM Gordon Brown would act considering his foreign policy appointments so far. Mark Steyn has details in a Corner post.

Clarice Feldman links to similar concerns from Melanie Phillips.

The Australian reports our modern day Learned Hand, Richard Posner is out to make his anti-terrorist bones.

A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being “hog-tied” by the US constitution.

Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had “over-invested” in them. …

Sporting News reports on dissing of Chavez by soccer fans in Venezuela.

Sun Times has an op-ed on Gore’s mis-statements.

… Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ”An Inconvenient Truth,” have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported, “Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame.”

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, …

Roger L. Simon posts on Al.

New Editor finds a Gore fan. Of course it’s an academic who could write the following;

I have not yet read “The Assault on Reason.” But I recommend it on the strength of everything else Al Gore has done this past decade.

Carpe Diem posts on employment growth by state.

WaPo has a piece on why cats decided to domesticate themselves.

Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision.

But don’t take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way — about 12,000 years, actually.

Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published Friday in the journal Science.

Scrappleface says Clinton and Obama are distributing campaign cash to their less fortunate rivals.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, not slated to benefit from the redistribution, denounced the move as a “crass political ploy which lacks the weight of traditional Democrat moral leadership, because it was voluntary.”

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• July 1 (word)

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Walter Laqueur 86, historian of Europe and Russia, wrote a new book on Europe’s prospects. We are treated to a review by Theodore Dalrymple. For those not familiar with Dalrymple we have excerpts later from his Wikipedia entry.

It is Europe’s doom that Walter Laqueur explores and explains in this succinct and clearly written book. He does not say anything that others have not said before him, but he says it better and with a greater tolerance of nuance than some other works on this vitally important subject.

There are three threats to Europe’s future. The first comes from demographic decline. Europeans are simply not reproducing, for reasons that are unclear. …

… The second threat comes from the presence of a sizable and growing immigrant population, a large part of which is not necessarily interested in integration. …

… The third threat comes from the existence of the welfare state and the welfare-state mentality. A system of entitlements has been created that, however economically counterproductive, is politically difficult to dismantle: once privileges are granted, they assume the metaphysical status of immemorial and fundamental rights. The right of French train drivers to retire on full pension at the age of 50 is probably more important to them than the right of free speech—especially that of those who think that retirement at such an age is preposterous. While Europe mortgages its future to pay for such extravagances—the French public debt doubled in ten years under the supposedly conservative Chirac—other areas of the world forge an unbeatable combination of high-tech and cheap labor. The European political class, more than ever dissociated from its electorate, has hardly woken up to the challenge.

All this Laqueur lays out with exemplary clarity. He sees Europe, once the home of a dynamic civilization that energized the rest of the world, declining into a kind of genteel theme park—if it’s lucky. The future might be grimmer than this, of course: there might be a real struggle for power once the immigrants and their descendents become numerically strong enough to take on the increasingly geriatric native population. …

 

… Laqueur makes the important point that shortcomings of the host countries notwithstanding, many immigrant groups have thrived without difficulty. He might have added that they have all successfully overcome initial prejudice against them. There is no Sikh or Hindu problem in Britain; the country has recently absorbed half a million Poles without any obvious tension or difficulty. (Tony Blair, with his usual perspicuity, predicted that when Poland joined the European Union, 13,000 Poles would move to Britain.)

This suggests—and Laqueur has no hesitation in so saying—that there is a problem peculiar to the integration of Muslims in Western countries, at any rate, when they are in such large numbers that they are able to make whole areas their own. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld has a nifty piece of work in Contentions about the spinning of news out of London.

Charles Krauthammer on the dishonesty of Congress. Remember Mark Twain, “There is no native American criminal class, except for Congress.”

… The reason Congress loves corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards is precisely that they hide the cost — in the sticker price of a new car. Whatever blame there is for the unfairness of life — that energy efficiency is not free — goes to the auto company rather than the mandating body, namely Congress.

That’s the great attraction of ethanol, too. Another free lunch. The Senate bill mandates a quintupling of ethanol use by 2022. That might be a good idea, but it also has costs. With huge tracts of land now being turned over to grow corn for fuel, the price of corn already is rising, as is the price of other foods whose cropland has been taken over. The beauty of ethanol? It hides the price of purported energy efficiency in the most unlikely of places — your cornflakes. …

… I have no objection to paying more to reduce our dependency on foreign energy. But it is hard to conceive of a more politically dishonest and economically inefficient way to do it than with mandates that make private industry do Congress’s dirty work, hide the true cost of energy efficiency and perpetuate the fantasy of the tax-free lunch.

Immigration bill post-mortems were throughout the web. Here’s the thoughts of some of our favorites.

Debra Saunders is first.

In Washington, it is easier to pass a bad bill than a good bill. That’s practically a law. But as Washington learned last week, there is such a thing as a bill so bad that even Congress can’t pass it. So the Kennedy-Kyl Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill tanked, as it most assuredly deserved to do.

Advice to Washington politicians who want to pass a bill that grants citizenship to some illegal immigrants: Don’t call it “reform.” Reform is supposed to curb abuse, not codify it.

Mark Steyn was in the Orange County Register.

On the eve of Independence Day, the people of this great republic declared their independence from the United States Senate under the stirring battle-cry, “No legislation without explanation!” The geniuses who’d cooked up the “comprehensive” immigration bill’s “grand bargain” behind the scenes in the pork-filled rooms had originally planned to ram it through in 48 hours before Memorial Day. And, right to the end, the bipartisan Emirs-for-life of Incumbistan gave the strong impression they regarded it as an affront to be required by the impertinent whippersnappers of the citizenry to address the actual content of the legislation.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., dismissed critics of the bill as “racist.”

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, complained that the peasants had somehow got hold of his phone number, and he felt “intimidated.”

Sen. Trenthorn Lotthorn, R-Lottissippi, said: Who cares if they call? …

Instapundit with thoughts about the next time.

Byron York in the Hill.

Rich Lowry in Townhall.

Victor Davis Hanson in his blog.

Fred Thompson was linked by Instapundit, so that’s here too.

New Editor posts on NY Times.

Cato posts on our similarities with Zimbabwe. Hint – Congress is involved.

In Zimbabwe, the government is ordering businesses to cut prices and threatening to jail executives who don’t comply, in an attempt to deal with inflation that is now variously estimated at somewhere between 4,000 and 20,000 percent a year.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill both houses of Congress have passed legislation establishing stiff penalties for those found guilty of gasoline price gouging. …

Adam Smith notes the start of Great Britain’s smoking ban.

Agoraphilia on the unholy alliance of Baptists and bootleggers.

GayPatriot starts our humor section announcing the recipient of the first annual JEC BOMA (James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award.) The comments were a hoot so they’re included.

Gabriel Schoenfeld posted on Carter’s UFO sighting. Seemed appropriate here.

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• June 28 (word)
  

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National Review has an obit for Kurt Waldheim who was perfect for the United Nations.

Kurt Waldheim was one of the most despicable — and most despised — public figures in the West since 1945. His whole career was an exercise in craft and evasion. As secretary general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1982, he helped to put in place the standard approach of that body, which is above all to blame the United States for the world’s ills, and therefore to obstruct its foreign policy. He and the Soviet Union, needless to say, were mutually supportive in that critical stage of the Cold War. Under him too, the U.N. discovered that anti-Israeli agitation served to broaden the attack on the United States. In 1975, he did nothing to oppose the resolution that “Zionism is racism.” The following year, the Israelis rescued passengers on an aircraft hijacked to Entebbe, in Uganda. For Waldheim, this famous blow for freedom was “a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state.” Leaving office, he purloined a large amount of silver that he himself had commissioned for the U.N. Now that he has died at the age of 88, these stolen goods must form part of his estate. The shamelessness is characteristic. …

John Bolton, interviewed by the Jerusalem Post says he is very worried about Israel.

Gabriel Schoenfeld gives us two items. First he posts on bluffing as foolish strategy. Next he draws a line from Tenet’s memoirs to Leahy’s recent subpoena.

Is Tenet simply passing the buck by blaming Congress? I don’t think so, but since he does a lot of other buck-passing in his buck-passing memoir (see my analysis of it here), I can’t be sure. But Tenet has no particular reason to cover his tracks in this instance. For once, he had helped put in place an effective program.

If senior members of Congress of both parties rejected the idea of congressional action to amend FISA, the Judiciary Committee’s grandstanding now on this critical matter of national defense is even more disgraceful than it already appears.

Michael Barone with some quick analysis of the immigration vote today.

One other factor is important. The seats of eight of the 18 switchers are up in 2008: Coleman, Collins, Domenici, Harkin, McConnell, Pryor, Stevens, Warner. That leaves the Senate sharply split between those whose seats are up in 2008 and those whose seats are up in 2010 or 2012. The 2008 senators voted 24 to 9 against cloture, with Johnson not voting. The 2010 and 2012 senators voted 37 to 29 for cloture. That’s a pretty stark difference.

Shorts from National Review.

Paul Jacobs in Townhall picks up the two Americas theme. His is reminiscent of Michael Barone’s Hard and Soft America.

Could Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards actually be right about something? Not where to go to get a haircut, mind you, I mean about there being two Americas.

There is the vibrant America . . . and the stagnant one.

There is the America of ever-increasing wealth, innovation, creativity, of a dynamic economy, new jobs, new products and services. Choices galore. Information overload. The abundant work product of freedom.

And there is the politician’s America: The regulated America, the subsidized America, the earmarked America. The failing America. …

WSJ looks at gov run health care.

… Canadian doctors, once quiet on the issue of private health care, elected Brian Day as president of their national association. Dr. Day is a leading critic of Canadian medicare; he opened a private surgery hospital and then challenged the government to shut it down. “This is a country,” Dr. Day said by way of explanation, “in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.”

Market reforms are catching on in Britain, too. For six decades, its socialist Labour Party scoffed at the very idea of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization.” Today Labour favors privatization, promising to triple the number of private-sector surgical procedures provided within two years. …

Carpe Diem has a health care anecdote from France. It’s only an anecdote, but it is telling.

Hit & Run posts on eagles.

In 1967, there were fewer than 500 breeding pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 states. The national bird was in danger of disappearing from much of the United States.

Though the eagles were never in danger of extinction—the vast majority, over 100,000, were in Alaska and Canada—Americans understandably wanted to protect a national symbol.

Today, the bald eagle is doing well. On June 29 the bald eagle in the lower 48 states will be officially removed, or delisted, from the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Yet delisting the bald eagle from the ESA has been a decade-long process that shows how even the most well-intentioned policy can be overcome by politics and ulterior motives. …

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• June 27 (word)

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John Stossel was so good today, he gets to go first. He takes exception to a David Brooks column. Pickerhead likes internecine warfare on the right.

… In the true Hamiltonian spirit, Brooks also doesn’t trust the market — which means he doesn’t trust free, peaceful individuals and private property. He writes, “We Hamiltonians disagree with the limited government conservatives [I assume Brooks has libertarians like me in mind] because, on its own, the market is failing to supply enough human capital.”

Now David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way. He continues, “Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.”

Excuse me, but why is that the market’s fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition. …

Amity Shlaes of Bloomberg News, who appears here often, has written a book on the New Deal. The WSJ had an op-ed from her on the subject.

The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a true liberal — a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, “is why we love it so.”

Yet concerning Schlesinger’s own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger’s consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era — or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take a skeptical look at the New Deal as a whole has been considered downright immoral.

The real question about the 1930s is not whether it is wrong to scrutinize the New Deal. Rather, the question is why it has taken us all so long. Roosevelt did famously well by one measure, the political poll. He flunked by two other meters that we today know are critically important: the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of a primary goal: “to put people to work.” Unemployment stood at 20% in 1937, five years into the New Deal. As for the Dow, it did not come back to its 1929 level until the 1950s. …

Greg Mankiw has bits of John Updike’s New Yorker piece slamming Shlaes’ book.

During the day a few Iraq items showed up that give comfort to the brave souls hoping for success there.

IBD editorializes on the body count.

Day after day, Americans are treated to a never-ending, mind-numbing parade of statistics about the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about the terrorists.

One way the media distort Americans’ view of the ongoing war against terrorists is by focusing on just one side in the conflict: ours. Whether it’s the daily body count or alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, the public could be forgiven for thinking the U.S. is not only losing the war, but behaving badly in doing so.

But neither is true. This year, for instance, the U.S. has killed roughly 650 terrorists a month, according to published reports and Defense Department estimates. That compares with about 37 U.S. combat deaths per month, through May. …

VDH points out some of the things going our way in the Middle East.

Rich Lowry has a Corner post on Fred Kagan’s surge testimony today.

… Generals Petraeus and Odierno did not allocate the majority of the new combat power they received to Baghdad. Only 2 of the additional Army brigades went into the city. The other 3 Army brigades and the equivalent of a Marine regiment were deployed into the areas around Baghdad that our generals call the “Baghdad belts,” including Baqubah in Diyala province. The purpose of this deployment was not to clear-and-hold those areas, but to make possible the second phase of the operation that began on June 15. The purpose of this operation—Phantom Thunder—is to disrupt terrorist and militia networks and bases outside of Baghdad that have been feeding the violence within the city. Most of the car bomb and suicide bomb networks that have been supporting the al Qaeda surge since January are based in these belt areas …

Andrew Sullivan posts on Christianity and socialism.

He links to an item at Cato.

USA Today reports on a new study showing that charitable contributions are at an all-time high in America. Most interesting, the report also revealed that Americans are far more generous than supposedly compassionate Europeans. Indeed, no nation gives even half as much (as a share of income) as the United States. The French are among the worst misers, giving less than one-twelfth of what Americans donate, though it is unclear whether this is because they are taxed so much that there is no money left in their wallets or whether they assume that it is now the role of government to solve every social problem: …

Daily Telegraph, UK notes the dem fear of Fred Thompson.

Speaking of Thompson, his ideas of a federalist approach to malpractice reform are refreshing.

NY Times writes on Bernanke. Amazing how well the moron is doing. Roberts, Alito, Hank Paulson, Tony Snow, and now the pick for the Fed is looking inspired.

ALMOST nobody said it publicly, but when Ben S. Bernanke took over as chairman of the Federal Reserve a little more than one year ago, there was an undercurrent of speculation that he might be a little green. …

… financial markets have stopped second-guessing the Fed’s outlook. The federal funds futures market now indicates that investors are not expecting the Fed to cut rates this year. That is consistent with what Fed officials have been implying for quite a long time now.

“The markets have repriced to an economic and monetary policy outlook that is very much aligned with the Fed’s thinking,” said Richard Berner, North American economist at Morgan Stanley.

It is always possible that both the Fed and the markets are wrong; agreement is not the same thing as being right. But if nothing else, it suggests that Mr. Bernanke has attained his Street credibility.

New Editor noticed seven 40-year-old pitchers were scheduled to start today.

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•  June 26 (word)

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Joshua Muravchik who we most often see in Commentary or it’s blog Contentions, was in the WSJ with concerns Iran is making the mistake many authoritarian regimes make when they are toe to toe with the US. They see us as weak and irresolute.

… Democracies, it is now well established, do not go to war with each other. But they often get into wars with non-democracies. Overwhelmingly the non-democracy starts the war; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, it is the democratic side that wins. In other words, dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.

Today, this same dynamic is creating a moment of great danger. The radicals are becoming reckless, asserting themselves for little reason beyond the conviction that they can. They are very likely to overreach. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match–say a terrible terror attack from Gaza–could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, could the U.S. stay out?

With the Bush administration’s policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president’s freedom to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq–all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.

Michael Ledeen’s Corner post – same subject.

Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution has interesting Iran proposals.

First, the Bush administration should cut off Iranian access to gasoline. That may sound strange, but it could be done. Iran is a major producer of oil, but it has limited refinery capacity and imports almost half of the gasoline it needs. These imports arrive by tanker, so a blockade enforced by the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet would have a devastating and immediate effect on Iran’s economy, which is already plagued by high unemployment. It is hard to imagine the hard-line government surviving such an economic catastrophe.

Iran would no doubt see such a blockade as a provocative act. But that is precisely what Iran needs to see from the West in the light of its provocations toward us. Its military options against the U.S. Navy would be limited. And with the economy reeling under the weight of an embargo, Iran would hardly be in a position to engage the United States in a protracted war.

Second, the Bush administration should consider counterfeiting Iranian currency to further undermine the economy. This is not a weapon that should be used lightly, but in this case it is simply a tit-for-tat: Iran and its ally, Hezbollah, have been fingered for counterfeiting $100 bills. Counterfeiting Iranian currency would also provide a stern warning to other countries fond of counterfeiting U.S. currency.

The Bush administration has chosen to take a soft line toward Iran despite its critics calls for military action. This attractive middle course would allow the United States to avoid war but also to bring down one of the most dangerous governments in the world today.

Claudia Rosett was last in Pickings when she suggested the head of the World Bank should be John Bolton or Don Rumsfeld. Now she has a title for Tony Blair’s Mid-East venture – “War Envoy.”

As Tony Blair leaves the post of Prime Minister, the rumor is that he may be appointed “Peace Envoy” to the Middle East.

“Peace” — ? We are talking about the region that has been saturated for years in “peace talks” “land for peace” “seeds of peace” the “roadmap to peace” and especially the mother of all peace labels, the “peace process.” Hamas and Hezbollah snatch Israeli soldiers and attack Israeli civilians, Syria and Iran infiltrate weapons and terrorists into Iraq, the Saudis continue to funnel millions into their global network of kill-the-infidel madrassas. And in the midst of this we are invited to ponder along with the UN’s IAEA whether terrorist-spawning Iran — where terror trainees routinely chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” — simply wants nuclear energy for “peaceful uses.”

Ben Stein sends a mash note to WFB, Jr.

What would the world be like if there had been no William F. Buckley?

I can well recall even as a high schooler that Republicans were considered Midwestern stolid reactionaries with no ideas except to oppose generosity and kindness. I can well recall when being a conservative meant being without ideas and simply in opposition to those who had ideas. Or if conservatives had any ideas, they were just that them who had should continue to have and those who had not should rot.

Then came William F. Buckley, seemingly out of the forehead of Zeus.

Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune has criticisms for the anti-trust policies of W’s administration.

Thomas Sowell writes on the mistakes made when children are not taught our common culture.

Among the interesting people encountered by my wife and me, during some recent vacation travel, were a small group of adolescent boys from a Navajo reservation. They were being led on a bicycle tour by a couple of white men, one of whom was apparently their teacher on the reservation.

The Navajo youngsters were bright and cheerful lads, so I was surprised when someone asked them in what state Pittsburgh was located and none of them knew. Then they were offered a clue that it was in the same state as Philadelphia but they didn’t know where Philadelphia was either.

These Navajo boys seemed too bright not to have learned such things if they had been taught the basics. They also seemed too positive to be the kinds of kids who refused to learn.

The most likely explanation was that they were being taught other things, things considered “relevant” to their life and culture on the reservation. …

WSJ editorial notes last Saturday as the second anniversary of the infamous Kelo decision.

Melanie Phillips posts on global warming.

You know how we’re told sixty times per minute that man-made global warming is no longer just a theory but it’s now demonstrable fact, and that anyone who contradicts this is clinically insane because there’s a consensus of all scientists that it’s happening and only about 2.5 scientists on the entire planet disagree and they’re in the pay of Big Oil anyway so we can forget about them; and so the debate is TOTALLY OVER, says the BBC, which has been told that it is authoritatively by Very Important Scientists, so that the ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ BBC says that it no longer needs to give us a balanced argument about climate change because there just isn’t any reputable scientific opposition to the proven facts about seas rising and ice melting and hurricanes happening, all because of the human race and its foul and filthy habits of combustibles, cars and capitalism?

Well, read this remarkable article in Canada’s National Post …

Carpe Diem likes the idea of Hernando de Soto as chief economist at the World Bank.

The New Yorker writes on the new 9/11 monument in NJ.

France gave us the Statue of Liberty. Now Russia has given us “To the Struggle Against World Terrorism,” another XXL, in-a-class-of-its-own monument. If you have not seen it, that may be because you haven’t recently approached New York City by ship. For those coming in from the Atlantic, through the Narrows, the Russian gift now heaves into view well before Lady Liberty. That is intentional, according to Zurab Tsereteli, the Moscow-based sculptor who created the monument. “To the Struggle Against World Terrorism” stands at the end of a long, man-made peninsula in Bayonne, New Jersey, and it looks from a distance like a giant tea biscuit. As you get closer, however, you will begin to make out an immense, stainless-steel teardrop—the Tear of Grief—hanging in a jagged crack that runs down the middle of the main slab. That’s when you’ll know that you’re not looking at some ordinary bronze-sheathed, hundred-and-seventy-five-ton afternoon snack. …

Club for Growth shows up with another cool picture from the shuttle

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• June 25 (word)

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This is a good night. We have Mark Steyn, Gerard Baker, David Warren and Christopher Hitchens. Later, an extraordinary picture of an aurora borealis from the shuttle.

Mark Steyn was in National Review commenting on events in Gaza. He suggests Hamas should not have stolen Arafat’s Nobel Prize since…

…if Hamas had only waited a year or two, the Nobel wallahs would have been happy to give the lads a Peace Prize of their own. Sadly, Israel’s latest designated “partner in peace” was in too much of a hurry for their piece.

Gerard Baker, US Bureau chief for the London Times, visited the old sod. He’s concerned about the growth of government there.

… At root of this nonsense is, of course, the sheer scale of government. The reason you can’t be allowed to eat an egg is that, because of the lack of real choice in healthcare provision, you’re no longer responsible for the financial consequences of your own actions. If you get heart disease from too much cholesterol, the State, collectively known as the NHS, will have to treat you; and that costs the State more and more money so the State will have to stop you from doing it in the first place.

This is the self-perpetuating logic behind the unstoppable momentum of the expanding State. The bigger it grows, the more it intrudes into our lives, and the more it intrudes into our lives, the more dependent we become on it. Education is the same. Our great universities are struggling to compete in a global market because they are hamstrung by the State. They are dependent on central government for their funding; but that funding is insufficient to meet the needs of global competition. But because they need government money for what they do, they cannot break free.

Leviathan is now so large that, outside London, half the population is dependent – either through public sector jobs or benefits – on taxes. …

David Warren, another of our favorites, unfortunately sees Britain as the last bulwark against the EU bureaucracy.

… Democracy is not quite dead in Europe, but getting that way. The cumbersome, incompetent, ridiculously corrupt, incredibly arrogant, and unelected Euro-bureaucracy is already in a position to dictate trans-European policies that by-pass all national legislatures. There is nothing to stop, or even slow, the metastasis of micro-managing regulations that interfere with the daily lives and customs of half-a-billion souls.

While the European Parliament is nominally elected, it exists for show, and is effectively powerless against that bureaucracy, voting on only a tiny proportion of that bureaucracy’s diktats, and having no power whatever to initiate legislation.

An organization that began after the Second World War as a free-trade agreement has morphed into the world’s biggest nanny state. It has tremendous power, and no responsibilities: the prerogative of the harlot on a scale that is impossible for the citizen to imagine. …

Christopher Hitchens writes for Slate on our chances of pacifying “rage boy.”

If you follow the link, you will be treated to some scenes from the strenuous life of a professional Muslim protester in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar. Over the last few years, there have been innumerable opportunities for him to demonstrate his piety and his pissed-offness. And the cameras have been there for him every time. Is it a fatwah? Is it a copy of the Quran allegedly down the gurgler at Guantanamo? Is it some cartoon in Denmark? Time for Rage Boy to step in and for his visage to impress the rest of the world with the depth and strength of Islamist emotion. …

Nose On Your Face has a nifty “rage boy” riff.

John Lott writes for Tech Central about gas price legislation.

With gas prices around $3 a gallon, the Senate last week passed new energy legislation. It will ultimately go to conference with the House to work out differences between the Senate and House bills. But any bill that gets agreed upon seems certain to increase the swings in gas prices and leave the average American worse off. …

The New Editor says the jerk judge lost his case.

American Thinker with more NY Times news.

I have been covering the failure of Pinch Sulzberger’s business strategy, as documented in its latest earnings report, showing what the PR release called a “9.1% decline” in advertising revenue at the Times Media Group. But it now appears that this number might disguise as much as it shows, hiding a much more serious decline in print advertising revenue.

They also take off after the latest outrage from the Smithsonian.

There’s a cool picture going around the web of the aurora borealis seen from the shuttle.

Dilbert’s here with a post about his route to success.

And so it went, in ant-sized steps forward. Every pat on the back came with a kick in the nuts. I worked for ten years without a day off. During one particularly busy year, I held a full-time job at the phone company, wrote and drew Dilbert, and wrote a book called “The Dilbert Principle.” I didn’t sleep much that year. It was my first hard cover book. Yay!

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• June 24, 2007 (word)

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WSJ’s weekend interview is with Mario Vargas Llosa Peruvian novelist and part-time politician. He touches a subject that is often a Pickings theme.

… There is another disturbing current in Mr. Vargas Llosa’s work that is less often discussed–mistreatment of women, ranging from disrespect to outright violence. The abuses are particularly horrifying in “The Feast of the Goat,” a novel based on the life of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who terrorized the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Mr. Vargas Llosa describes traveling to the Dominican Republic and being stunned to hear stories of peasants offering their own daughters as “gifts” to the lustful tyrant. Trujillo and his sons, he tells me, could abuse any woman of any social class with absolute impunity. The situation in the Dominican Republic, which he refers to as a “laboratory of horrors,” may have tended toward the extreme, but it underscores a larger trend: “The woman is almost always the first victim of a dictatorship.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa discovered that this phenomenon was hardly limited to Latin America. “I went to Iraq after the invasion,” he tells me. “When I heard stories about the sons of Saddam Hussein, it seemed like I was in the Dominican Republic, hearing stories about the sons of Trujillo! That women would be taken from the street, put in automobiles and simply presented like objects. . . . The phenomenon was very similar, even with such different cultures and religions.” He concludes: “Brutality takes the same form in dictatorial regimes.”

Did this mean that Mr. Vargas Llosa supported the invasion of Iraq? “I was against it at the beginning,” he says. But then he went to Iraq and heard accounts of life under Saddam Hussein. “Because there has been so much opposition to the war, already one forgets that this was one of the most monstrous dictatorships that humanity has ever seen, comparable to that of Hitler, or Stalin.” He changed his mind about the invasion: “Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.” …

Instapundit posts about refugees from Zimbabwe fleeing to South Africa.

… the Mbeki government deserves these problems for its shameful complicity in Mugabe’s disastrous dictatorship. South Africa could have done good here, but chose a see-no-evil approach. Now the problems are crossing its border.

Mark was in the Orange County Register with comments on various reactions to the Rushdie knighthood.

… What easier way for the toothless old British lion, after the humiliations inflicted upon the Royal Navy sailors by their Iranian kidnappers, to show you’re still a player than by knighting Salman Rushdie for his “services to literature”? Given that his principal service to literature has been to introduce the word “fatwa” to the English language, one assumed that some characteristically cynical British civil servant had waved the knighthood through as a relatively cheap way of flipping the finger to the mullahs.

But no. It seems Her Majesty’s Government was taken entirely by surprise by the scenes of burning Union Jacks on the evening news.

Can that really be true? In a typically incompetent response, Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, issued one of those “obviously we’re sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding” statements in which she managed to imply that Rushdie had been honored as a representative of the Muslim community. He’s not. He’s an ex-Muslim. He’s a representative of the Muslim community’s willingness to kill you for trying to leave the Muslim community. But, locked into obsolescent multicultural identity-groupthink, Mrs. Beckett instinctively saw Rushdie as a member of a quaintly exotic minority rather than as a free-born individual.

This is where we came in two decades ago. We should have learned something by now. …

The Corner was busy this weekend. Michael Leeden and Andy McCarthy post on Iran. And Andy makes sport of Abbas’ refusal to negotiate with Hamas. Byron York on some of Edwards’ bad luck. Mark Steyn notes some hypocrisy in the anti-gun crowd. John Miller and Michael Rubin post on Virginia’s latest insult to her citizens.

John Fund with some shorts on whether Fred Thompson will get the girls, and how we might soon be able to get rid of one of the GOP’s most corrupt.

Michael Barone posts his guess about which party will be most damaged by a Bloomberg 3rd party run.

How serious is a Bloomberg candidacy? And who does he take votes away from? Speculation about these questions is interesting, but I think the answers depend on who the Republican and Democratic parties nominate.

Carpe Diem posts on corn and ethanol.

Reason Magazine on the competition between food and fuel. Who will be hurt?

“Rapid development of the corn-based ethanol industry is already having adverse impacts on food supplies and prices.” That’s the claim in a letter from leading food companies to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Headlines earlier this year blamed a tortilla shortage in Mexico on high U.S. corn prices and margarita drinkers must now worry about a future tequila shortfall because Mexican farmers are ripping up their agave fields to plant corn.

The ethanol rush is definitely on. There are now 110 ethanol plants operating in the United States and 74 more are on the way. The competition between food producers and fuel refiners has doubled corn prices in the past year from $2 to over $4 per bushel. At the same time, the price of groceries has gone up 3.9 percent in the last year, faster than the general inflation rate of 2.6 percent. Coincidence? …

Debra Saunders looks at the different ways global warming skeptics are smeared.

If you want to convince the world that an overwhelming majority of scientists believes in global warming, then start by ignoring scientists who are not true believers. First, establish lists of scientists with your approved position, then smear dissidents. Soon, up-and-coming scientists will be afraid to cross the rigid green line.

So, the Society of Environmental Journalists put together a guide on climate change that lists a number of publications on global warming, scientists and seven environmental groups, each with positive descriptions. Under the “Deniers, Dissenters and ‘Skeptics’” category are four listings — all negative. They suggest that these folk are venal, partisan and bad scientists, or all of the above. …

So how do they know what the average temperature is? If the numbers come from the government, would it surprise you to learn it’s poorly done? A new blog for us, Watts Up With That posts on one sensor.

… OK this picture comes in today from from surfacestations.org volunteer Steve Tiemeier, who visited the climate station of record located at the Urbana, Ohio Waste Water Treatment Plant …

American Thinker posts on the incredible shrinking NY Times.

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• June 21, 2007 (word)

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The father of the Iranian Revolution is – Jimmy Carter. Jerusalem Post has the details.

We just don’t get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called “dim-witted cowboy,” has created the entire mess.

The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.

Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter’s ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.” Carter’s Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, “Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure.” Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.” …

David Warren, in the Ottawa Citizen, has more to add about Carter’s fecklessness

…. There is an interesting piece in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, by the Turkish writer, Ahmet Altan, on the important and still under-appreciated role Turkey may play in the coming disorder. He says his country has reached a demographic tipping point. Turkish society is divided between two electorates, culturally distinct — rather as, I would observe, Western societies have increasingly divided between traditional, conservative people with religious beliefs; and urban, liberal, “secular,” essentially rootless people. Two electorates that are mysteries to each other. …

… if any American president could legitimately claim to have “lost” the Middle East, it was Jimmy Carter, who put the skids under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, enabling the Islamist revolution in Iran, nearly three decades ago. Beneath that, we might look back to the success of the OPEC cartel, in creating the oil crisis of 1973, which the West accepted numbly, while the U.S. was navel-gazing through Watergate, and cutting and running from Vietnam. …

That was the Middle East. How was Jimmy in the Far East? Contentions Gabriel Schoenfeld has part of an answer.

… Then there is our friend Taiwan, a threat to no one, a stable and law-abiding country, threatened by its giant Communist neighbor, which has been engaged in an intense military build-up across the Taiwan straits. In the 1970’s, feeling increasingly isolated and vulnerable in light of Richard Nixon’s opening to Communist China followed by Jimmy Carter’s abrupt severing of diplomatic relations, the Taiwanese government launched a covert nuclear-weapons development program.

Fascinating newly declassified documents, some of them top-secret and just put on-line by the National Security Archive, a private research group, show that the U.S., particularly under Carter, came down hard, leading Taiwan’s premier to complain that Washington was treating Taiwan “in a fashion which few other countries would tolerate.”

Whether the U.S. pushed too hard can be debated, but the pressure did achieve the desired result. Taiwan today does not have nuclear weapons.

Should we applaud? If so, only with one hand. Most of the criminals in this particular neighborhood now have the guns while one of its upstanding citizens was successfully disarmed.

The Australian has an op-ed by a Muslim woman who is offended by people always taking offense.

… I’m offended that every year, there are more women killed in Pakistan for allegedly violating their family’s honour than there are detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Muslims have rightly denounced the mistreatment of Gitmo prisoners. But where’s our outrage over the murder of many more Muslims at the hands of our own?

I’m offended that in April, mullahs at an extreme mosque in Pakistan issued a fatwa against hugging.

The country’s female tourism minister had embraced – or, depending on the account you follow, accepted a congratulatory pat from – her skydiving instructor after she successfully jumped in a French fundraiser for the victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. Clerics announced her act of touching another man to be “a great sin” and demanded she be fired.

I’m offended by their fatwa proclaiming that women should stay at home and remain covered at all times.

I’m offended that …

WSJ on how the internet helped end human trafficking in a Chinese province.

Instapundit posts on Congress at 14% approval. Perhaps finally the country has signed on to the wisdom of Mark Twain. “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Roger Simon on same poll.

Power Line too.

Power Line also posts on the failure of mainline protestant churches to condemn Hamas thuggery.

Jeff Jacoby celebrates the fights on the right.

… On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman .

In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity. …

… From school vouchers to stem cell research to racial preferences to torture, the American right bubbles with debate and disagreement, while the left, for all its talk about “diversity,” rarely seems to show any. As National Review’s Jonah Goldberg points out, that may be because “liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.”

Good arguments are no bad thing. They energize political parties and put convictions to the test. They illuminate the issues. They make people think. The debates on the right enliven the marketplace of ideas and enrich the democratic process. Some debates on the left would, too.

Maureen Dowd does Hillary.

Couple of posts from Carpe Diem show how ethanol foolishness has become embedded in our economy.

Power Line posts on the next climate problem – cooling.

WSJ does a story on Bill James, the statistician who helped bring a World Series win to Boston. Refreshingly modest, he brings interesting insight to baseball.

… “People think they understand how to win in baseball much more than they really do,” Mr. James says. This is true of the statisticians as much as it is of traditional scouts. While “Moneyball” treats scouts and analysts as at odds, Mr. James says he learns from the scouts all the time. “The scouts see a lot of things that I can’t see. And some of the things they see I have learned to see. But some of the things they see I can’t see at all. And I’m not suggesting it’s not real, it’s just that I can’t see it,” he says. “There is no reason for there to be a conflict. The conflict exists only when people think they know more than they do.”

After a lifetime of studying the game, Mr. James reckons he still has plenty to learn. The internationalization of the game is one source of new wisdom, he says. “One of the great things about the Cubans and the Japanese is that they develop their own traditions and a lot of the things we think they know they don’t necessarily buy into. Incorporating those other traditions is a source of wealth for baseball, and if we’re smart, we’ll do more of it.” …