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• June 20, 2007 (word)

• June 20, 2007 (pdf)

Mark Steyn was in the Western Standard. He starts out thinking about Vermont – all environment, no people.

In St. Albans, Vermont, just south of the Quebec border, I happened to find myself behind a car bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Bush, geddit? As in George W. of that ilk.

It seemed a curious priority considering that, at that point, on all sides, east, west, north, south, there was nothing to see but trees. Hemlock, birch, maple, you name it, Vermont’s full of it. The state is more forested than it was a century ago, or two centuries ago. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont has problems. It’s a beautiful state to drive through–picture-postcard New England town commons with clapboard churches and grade schools–until you pull over and realize the grade schools are half empty. I used to joke that Vermont was America’s leading Canadian province, but in fact it’s worse than that: demographically speaking, the Green Mountain State qualifies for membership in the European Union. It has the lowest birthrate of any American state. The number of 20 to 34-year-olds in Vermont has fallen by 20 per cent since 1990. Some schools have seen student populations fall by a third since 2000. Vermont’s family tree is all tree and no families.

IBD with another editorial on Jimmy Carter. Maybe someone can get him committed.

Chicago Tribune with a good editorial on earmarks.

Instapundit posts on a new fund-raising gimmick. Now the lobbyists pay to meet staff.

… I’m actually in favor of this. With members of Congress spending most of their time fundraising, most actual lawmaking work has devolved to the staff. So if we can get the staff busy fundraising, too, maybe we’ll just see less legislating overall. Which, based on recent performance, would pretty much have to be an improvement.

Howard Kurtz tours the commentariat checking on how Hillary’s doing.

Hillary Clinton is inevitable.

That, at least, is the consensus view of media wizards, strategists, pollsters and other kibitzers, that HRC is a virtual lock for the nomination. An official with a rival campaign told me that Hillary has an 80 percent chance of being the party’s candidate, and most neutral observers would probably go with a higher number.

So why is there such unease about her within the party? …

Speaking of politicians, Anne Applebaum is tired of the way they talk.

“Eager to preserve the English language against a rising tide of nonsense,” a British newspaper last week asked readers to compose a piece of prose “crammed with as many infuriating phrases as possible.” The results make for entertaining reading.

“I hear what you’re saying but, with all due respect, it’s not exactly rocket science,” begins one excellent example. “The bottom line is you wear your heart on your sleeve and, when all is said and done, this is all part and parcel of the ongoing bigger picture.” Another declared, “[L]et’s face facts here, this could so be my conduit to a whole new ball game. Awesome, or what?” …

WSJ gives a good history lesson comparing the Duke lacrosse players to the Scottsboro Boys.

Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman’s limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored.

The Duke rape case, right? No, the Scottsboro case that began in 1931, in the darkest days of the Jim Crow South. …

Thomas Sowell reminds us there’s unfinished business at Duke.

… there are many other people who disgraced themselves in hyping a lynch mob atmosphere when this case first broke last year.

The New York Times, which splashed these Duke students’ pictures on the front page, along with inflammatory charges against them, and went ballistic on its editorial page, carried the story of Nifong’s disbarment for prosecuting them on page 16.

The 88 Duke University faculty members who took out a hysterical ad, supporting those local loudmouths who were denouncing and threatening the Duke students, have apparently had nothing at all to say now.

Not only did many Duke University professors join the lynch mob atmosphere, so did the Duke University administration, which got rid of the lacrosse coach and cancelled the team’s season, without a speck of evidence that anybody was guilty of anything.

This is one of the few times when Jesse Jackson is speechless, even though he was loudly supporting the bogus “rape” charges last year.

 

John Stossel wishes Bill Gates knew something about economics.

Dropping out of college didn’t stop Bill Gates from making tons of money, but it kept him from classes where he might have learned about the beauty of spontaneous market processes.

Never mind. I forgot that he attended Harvard. He might not have learned about markets after all. …

… He told the grads, “The market did not reward saving the lives of these children [in poor countries], and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.”

What is Gates talking about?

Can he name one poor country that permits the free market to operate? The problem is not that the market doesn’t make it profitable to save lives — it most certainly does. The problem is that Third World countries have overbearing, corrupt governments that are obstacles to private property and freedom. That’s why the children’s parents have no voice or power. …

George Will examines labor’s agenda.

Democracy is rule by persuasion, but the unpersuasive often try to coerce the unpersuaded. Recent days have provided two illustrations of this tendency, both of them pertaining to labor unions, whose decades of declining membership testify to their waning power to persuade workers that unions add more value to workers’ lives than they subtract. …

The New Editor says anti-smoking creeps are costing some jobs in Vegas.

Adam Smith posts on environmentist’s war against the poor.

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• June 19, 2007 (word)

• June 19, 2007 (pdf)

Fred Thompson does a number on Harry Reid.

… The problem is that every one of Reid’s comments I’ve noted here has also been reported gleefully by Al Jazeera and other anti-American media. Whether he means to or not, he’s encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will.

Richard Cohen, liberal at WaPo, is the latest to defend Scooter Libby.

… With the sentencing of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak and wound up prosecuting not the leaker — Richard Armitage of the State Department — but Libby, convicted in the end of lying. This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off. …

Byron York posts at The Corner on Libby’s chances.

Power Line on the Rushdie knighthood.

Michael Barone looks at a divided nation.

Listening to the recent debates among the candidates, monitoring their Websites and reading the poll numbers, one gets the impression that the Republican and Democratic primary electorates are living in two different nations — or the same nation that faces two very different threats.

The Republicans want to protect us against Islamist terrorists. The Democrats want to protect us against climate change. Each side believes the other’s fears are largely imaginary. …

… He who defines the issues tends to determine the outcome of the election. When pollster Peter Hart asked a bipartisan focus group which candidate could best protect the nation, several people mentioned Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, one mentioned Barack Obama, and no one mentioned Hillary Clinton. Evidently these people, unlike international elites, see the threat as Islamist terrorism and not climate change.

We know which seems more threatening to Republican and Democratic primary voters. But what about independents, who favored Republicans in 2002 and 2004 and Democrats in 2006? The answer may tell you which side wins in 2008.

The Tennessean thinks hair cuts and houses are a problem for John Edwards.

When it comes to big houses, how big is too big? The answer apparently is 28,000 square feet, which is the size of John Edwards’ North Carolina home.

If Edwards wants to continue being in the top tier of Democratic presidential hopefuls, he may well have to put a “For Sale” sign on his behemoth of a house and move into ordinary rich man’s digs, like, say, a 12,000 square foot mansion.

The house, for the mill worker’s son, has become a millstone around his neck. People are talking about it even more than his $400 haircuts. …

Adam Smith gives us, through the Economist, a short look at The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan.

More on the million dollar pants suit from WSJ.

Power Line posts on the CNN channels that won’t go away.

New Editor finds lots of economic ignorance among activists and, or course, in congress.

Samizdata’s Quote of the Day introduces three items exploring training and education of boys.

Christina Hoff Summers reviewed The Dangerous Book for Boys for the NY Post.

PARENTS and educators are wringing their hands over the poor academic performance of boys. Girls are better readers, earn higher grades and are far more likely to go to college. America does a much better job educating girls than boys. But now, out of nowhere, comes a book that may hold the secret to male learning.

“The Dangerous Book for Boys,” written by two English brothers, Conn and Hal Iggulden, violates all the rules of political correctness – and males between the ages of 8 and 80 are reading it in droves.

Already a major best seller in Great Britain, the book is now topping the lists in America. Its appeal is obvious – it goes directly for the pleasure centers of the male brain.

“The Dangerous Book for Boys” is all about Swiss Army knives, compasses, tying knots and starting fires with a magnifying glass. It includes adventure stories with male heroes, vivid descriptions of battles and a history of artillery. Readers learn how to make their own magnets, periscopes and bows and arrows. It gives rules and tactics for poker and marbles – and secret moves for coin tricks. …

WSJ gets in the act this weekend.

… There’s more than a little irony in the fact that I have three sons. I’m not what you’d call a master of the manly arts. I can’t start a fire without a match, or track a deer, or ride a horse. I don’t know how to fix cars, and my infrequent forays into home repair usually necessitate medical attention. But these are the things little boys want to learn — I remember wanting to learn them myself. Or maybe it’s that boys yearn to do things with fathers, and those things usually involve a little danger. A new wildly popular book of essential boy knowledge recognizes this in its title: “The Dangerous Book for Boys.” My oldest has dog-eared nearly every page. …

Cooking helped our brains grow? That’s what we learn in Technology Review.

… Now Harvard University’s Richard Wrangham has provided some evidence that the very distant ancestors of America’s top chefs indeed may have learned to cook their antelope and rabbit. Cooking makes both plants and meat softer and easier to chew, providing more calories with less effort. What’s more, human teeth got smaller and duller at around this time, which is the opposite of what would have happened if people had had to rip and chew lots of raw meat. …

The federal government collects statistics from 1,221 temperature stations throughout the country. How’s that working, you ask? It’s the government, so you guess. Neal Boortz with the story.

… Believe it or not, Steigerwald and his followers have found temperature measuring stations sitting right next to barrels where trash is burned. Some are sitting directly in front of air conditioning vents. Others are located near the tarmac on parking lots and at airports. Still others are found surrounded by high buildings. Believe it or not, he even found one official temperature measuring station sitting directly behind an airport ramp where it can be routinely subject to jet blast! Just what do you think the locations of these official government temperature measuring stations might mean to all of these temperature measurements that are being used by OwlGore and others to convince us of global warming! …

Dilbert notes sturgeon in northwest Florida are jumping into boats where people are severely injured. He thinks it might be a conspiracy engineered by the sturgeon general.

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• June 18, 2007 (word)

• June 18, 2007 (pdf)

The New Editor posts on the 67th anniversary of Churchill’s “finest hour” speech.

John Fund writes on Harry Reid’s union card-check bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided to hold a vote this Wednesday on perhaps the most unpopular element of the Democratic agenda. The Employee Free Choice Act has already passed the House, but now it faces real hurdles in the Senate because, contrary to the name, it undermines workplace democracy.

Under the so-called card-check bill, a company would no longer have the right to demand a secret-ballot election to certify a union, thus stripping 140 million American workers of the right to decide in private whether to organize. …

Jeff Jacoby says the lawsuit by the jerk judge in DC is no joke.

… The population of lawyers in America has soared in recent decades, and with their increase has come an explosion in the lawyer’s stock in trade: regulation, disputation, and litigation. In 1978, noting that the number of US lawyers had increased to 462,000, Time magazine rued the way laws and lawsuits were taking over American life, making it ever more difficult to rely on custom and common sense in settling differences. It quoted then-Chief Justice Warren Burger: “We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.”

If that was true then, how much more so today, when the “hordes of lawyers” (including non practicing ones like me) have swollen to nearly 1 million? A century ago, there was 1 lawyer for every 714 Americans. Today the ratio is 1 to 288. …

Christopher Hitchens goes to bat for Scooter Libby. That case plus the idiot administrative law judge Jeff Jacoby wrote about make it very hard to maintain respect for our country’s legal system.

Michael Barone writes on the primary system.

Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, the leaders in Republican polls during most of the year, have announced they will not compete in the straw poll held in Iowa on August 15. Fred Thompson, who is polling well and expected to enter the race, may also opt out of this early test of strength. Florida has moved its primary to January 29, just one week after New Hampshire and shortly after the actual Iowa caucus, in defiance of Democratic Party rules. (Florida Democrats risk being tossed out of the national convention but say they don’t care.) Michigan Democrats have also said they’ll hold a caucus January 29, or even earlier if New Hampshire acts on its threat to move its primary back.

All these moves are threats to the rule that Iowa and New Hampshire vote first. In fact, the process was begun by the Democratic National Committee, which has authorized a Nevada caucus and a South Carolina primary just after the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. Now others are joining in the attacks.

And a good thing, too, is my gut reaction. I have thumbed through my copy of the Constitution many times to find the part that says Iowa and New Hampshire come first, and I have yet to find it. …

Patrick Ruffini at Hugh Hewitt notes an interesting poll in South Carolina.

Hugh Hewitt posts on the idiot Robin Wright in WaPo.

Two posts from the Captain on the Duke dénouement.

Pickerhead is convinced no good is going to come out of our fascination with ethanol. Volokh has a post along those lines centering on food prices.

The Economist has more on the innovative Japanese process for embedding vaccines in food.

GETTING two for the price of one is always a good bargain. And according to a paper in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that is what Tomonori Nochi of the University of Tokyo and his colleagues have done. Using genetic engineering, they have overcome two of the limitations of vaccines. One is that they are heat-sensitive and thus have to be transported along a “cold chain” of refrigerators to the clinics where they are used. The other is that, although they stimulate immune responses inside the body, they often fail to extend that protection to the outside, where it might prevent bacteria and viruses getting inside in the first place. …

Village Voice writes on health inspectors in NY city. We should be pleased when a left organ sees the foolishness of government functionaries.

…The pizza is baked at 550 degrees, a temperature that kills any bacteria you can test for. Anyway, the inspectors whom the department calls sanitarians don’t really test for bacteria. There can be salmonella jumping on your organic leaf spinach, and they won’t be able to tell. There are no swabs or bacteria cultures or Petri dishes involved. The only scientific apparatus employed is a thermometer, and, as Markt said, “a handheld computer that they use to input their reports. They don’t have a lot of gadgets I’m aware of.” Like ancient oracles, these sanitarians look for signs. As far as we’re concerned, if the milk isn’t refrigerated at the optimal temperature — or in Dom’s case, in a refrigerator fast enough to cool anything a certain number of degrees within a set period of time — it doesn’t matter. If the milk goes sour, you can taste it. And sour milk is not a health problem: It’s called yogurt. …

Dilbert’s best story ever is in the humor section. Go to www.pickerhead.com

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• June 17, 2007 (word)

• June 17, 2007 (pdf)

WaPo has something today that’s really rich. Pickerhead has often asked his liberal friends if they hate W so much because he’s stolen Wilson’s thunder. A former Clinton dude asks WWWWD. What would Woodrow Wilson do?

Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy must be turning in their graves. Using U.S. power to promote freedom and democracy was central to their foreign policies and legacies. Even Jimmy Carter, a far less successful Democratic president, can be proud of making human rights a major U.S. foreign policy objective. And Bill Clinton’s interventions in the Balkans and drive to expand NATO were all about consolidating democracy in Europe‘s eastern half. There was a time, not too long ago, when Democrats were proud of their track record on democracy promotion — and rightly so.

Is the party of Wilson abandoning Wilsonianism? Why have we gone mum on an issue that is so central to our own foreign policy heritage and past triumphs?

Mark’s making fun of the Anglicans today. Then he goes after the nanny state.

The other day, six Anglican archbishops called for the church to bless the unions of same-sex couples. The Anglican Church of Canada is about to have a big vote on the issue, and depending which way they swing it will either deepen the schism within the worldwide Anglican Communion or further isolate the Episcopal Church of the United States.

But never mind all that. What struck me was the rationale the archbishops came up with. This gay thing, they sighed. We’ve been yakking about it for years. Let’s just get on with it, and then we can get back to the important stuff. “We are deeply concerned that ongoing study,” they fretted, “will only continue to draw us away from issues which are gradually destroying God’s creation – child poverty, racism, global warming, economic injustice, concern for our aboriginal brothers and sisters and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.”

That’s it? Anglicans need to fast-track a liturgy for gay couples so they can free up time to deal with the real issues like global warming? …

 

… But in the broader picture it might be truer still to say that the individual, unlike the state, therefore has an interest in stopping and reversing the government annexation of health care – because that argument can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom – and, in the end, you may not get the health care, anyway. Under Britain’s National Health Service, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, says that it’s appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices.” Today, it’s smokers and the obese. But, if a gay guy has condom-less sex with multiple partners, why should his “lifestyle choices” get a pass? Health care costs can be used to justify anything. …

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech republic says the agenda of greens will destroy freedom.

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

… I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”. …

Adam Smith’s quote of the week is from Ronald Reagan.

Jerusalem Post reports a bit of Gaza irony.

Enraged Fatah leaders on Saturday accused Hamas militiamen of looting the home of former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat in Gaza City.

“They stole almost everything inside the house, including Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize medal,”

Corner post on the pilfered prize.

Roger Simon says it’s poetic justice.

Neal Boortz with a Trent Lott post.

… Now we have yet another lesson in how the power of the Imperial Federal Government can be brought to bear against talk radio. Not only are the threats coming from the left, but now also from the right. Talk radio is abuzz today — and I suspect will be for quite a few days — over a comment made by Senator Lott late this week. According to The New York Times Senator Lott had threw a bit of a snit-fit on Thursday over the failure (thus far) of the amnesty bill. He is quoted as saying “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

Now if I were Senator Lott and I wanted to diffuse the uproar over that comment, I would say that what I really meant to say was that we, in the Senate, need to work harder to deal with the problems with the amnesty bill that has talk radio listeners in such an uproar. I would then amuse the press by spinning around on my eyebrows and spitting twenty-dollar gold pieces.

We know what Senator Lott meant. Talk radio is getting in the way of a political goal, and therefore talk radio needs to be dealt with. How? Why with government regulations and restrictions, of course! How else does the government deal with pesky little problems?

Kill the messenger. …

The Captain posts on a Lieberman WSJ op-ed. Then the Nifong disbarment gets a comment.

The Bar had some damning things to say about Nifong before disbarring him. They found that Nifong deliberately acted with malice in order to boost his political career, a conclusion most reached after the results of DNA testing became fully known. They also found that he lied to the court and to Bar investigators.

Speaking of Duke, Power Line wants to know, “what about the (professors in the) gang of 88?”

… It is a remarkable fact of the Duke case that the legal profession has acquitted itself with greater honor than the professoriate.

Helen Thomas reviews the Reagan Diaries and says nice things.

Read the newly published “The Reagan Diaries” if you want a true insight into the mind of the nation’s 40th president.

The diaries — written daily from 1981 until President Reagan left office in 1989 — reveal him to be much more involved in the nitty gritty of national and world affairs than many White House reporters thought. He had often been portrayed as a detached “chairman of the board” kind of president. …

… As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the media could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.

American Thinker on NY Times ad revenue.

Knowledge Problem posts on “creative destruction” as a film shows producing assets leaving Germany for China.

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• June 14, 2007 (word)

• June 14, 2007 (pdf)

WSJ editors react to the 4th Circuit decision celebrated by the left this week.

On Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that al Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can’t be detained as an enemy combatant. The press corps is reporting — no, shouting, cheering, doing somersaults — that this is further proof that Bush Administration detainee policies are doomed to legal oblivion.

Well, here’s a wager: This decision is the outlier and will be overturned on appeal, while most of the Administration’s legal antiterror architecture will survive past January 20, 2009. Any takers?

There’s no doubt that the 2-1 Fourth Circuit ruling in Al-Marri v. Wright is remarkable and dangerous in its sweeping judicial claims. Judges Diane Motz and Roger Gregory, both Bill Clinton nominees, ruled that a person like al-Marri does not qualify as an enemy combatant, because the U.S. cannot be “at war” with a private group like al Qaeda. …

One of the above judges, Roger Gregory got a recess appointment from Bill Clinton which expired upon W’s election. As a courtesy, and in an effort to improve the tone in DC, Bush reappointed him. As Clare Booth Luce would say, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Marty Peretz posts on Gaza.

Wednesday 24 people were killed — no, not in Iraq — in the Gaza Strip, including two UN aid workers. And the day is not yet done. …

Ralph Peters says look at Gaza if you want to know what happen in Iraq if we leave too soon.

WONDER what Iraq would look like if we left tomorrow? Take a look at Gaza today. Then imagine a situation a thousand times worse.

We need to stop making politically correct excuses. Arab civilization is in collapse. Extremes dominate, either through dictatorship or anarchy. Thanks to their dysfunctional values and antique social structures, Arab states can’t govern themselves decently.

We gave them a chance in Iraq. Israel “gave back” the Gaza Strip to let the Palestinians build a model state. Arabs seized those opportunities to butcher each other.

The barbarity in Gaza has become so grotesque that not even the media’s apologists for terror can ignore it (especially since Islamist fanatics began to target journalists).

Over the weekend, Hamas gangbangers-for-Allah grabbed a Fatah functionary and dropped him from the roof of a high-rise to check out the law of gravity (the only law that still obtains in Gaza). Tit-for-tat, Fatah gunmen grabbed a Hamas capo and gave him the same treatment. …

Andy Ferguson noticed Al Gore’s Lincoln quote has some problems.

… The quote is a favorite of liberal bloggers, which is probably how Gore came across it. And as a description of how many on the left see the country seven years into their Bush nightmare, it’s pretty much perfect.

Too perfect, in fact. If you’re familiar with Lincoln’s distinctive way of expressing himself, you’ll hear the false notes the passage strikes. …

Don Boudreaux writes on the environmental creed.

Careful observers often and correctly note that, for many of its adherents, environmentalism is a religion.

Too many environmentalists disregard inconvenient truths that would undermine their faith that calamities are percolating just over the horizon. It might well be that humans’ “footprint” on the Earth is larger than ever; it might even be true that this larger footprint creates some health risks for us modern humans that our pre-industrial ancestors never encountered.

But it is undeniably true that we denizens of industrial, market economies live far better and far healthier than did any our pre-industrial ancestors. …

Adam Smith posts on a discovery in a Japanese lab.

In a brilliant breakthrough, Tokyo University researchers have modified a rice strain so that it vaccinates against cholera. It can be orally administered – you just eat the rice. It’s cheap to mass produce, can be stored at room temperature for over a year, and is completely safe. …

And on smoking bans in England.

You know the old saw, “they don’t make’m like they use to.” Pickerhead says it’s true, they make them better. Slate explains.

My wife and I ditched our dull late-model sedans a few years ago. We adopted a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as our only car, driven once or twice a week from our downtown San Francisco home. I blame the Avanti’s seductive powers for our infatuation. It looks futuristic even today—Jude Law drove one in the space-age fantasy film Gattaca—and the car is loaded with luxury options.

When we took our first spin, it was like yachting down the boulevard. Its engine is free of the emissions controls that hamper modern motors, so you feel a direct connection between your foot on the gas and the tires on the pavement. Without today’s federal mandates on its construction, the Avanti sports chrome bumpers fore and aft instead of crumple zones. It serves a spacious, wraparound view to passengers, unobstructed by headrests, airbags, or complicated belts. The car’s body, designed by the legendary Raymond Loewy, flips the bird to modern crash tests, while its interior is designed to resemble an airplane cockpit full of overheard switches—try that nowadays. Every grocery outing became a pleasure cruise. As many a passerby reminded us, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore. But several years with this rolling museum piece has taught me the truth: Even the best old cars sucked. …

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• June 13, 2007 (word)

• June 13, 2007 (pdf)

Yesterday’s David Warren selection started thus;

The Prague Democracy and Security Conference was cleverly scheduled to overlap with the G8 conference in Heiligenndam, this week. Politics is generally a rat’s game, but the Prague meeting was more worth attending. I was delighted that President Bush chose to be there, and be seen, before proceeding to the company of the great posturing buffoons in Germany. I wish Stephen Harper had also been there.

It was, however, entirely appropriate for Bush, who has been aptly described by Richard Perle as, “A dissident in his own administration.” At this point, fairly late in his presidency, it would seem that he has failed to mobilize the American electorate behind the “Bush doctrine,” as declared so eloquently in the months after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington; and failed even to mobilize the U.S. bureaucracy, which has consistently resisted direct presidential orders throughout both his terms, and in such cases as the CIA and State Department, often sabotaged them. …

Pickings did a poor job of explaining the Prague Conference, and so today we open up with a couple of items from Contentions by Joshua Muravchik. First he posts on Bush’s speech.

… In rattling off the names of five “dissidents who couldn’t join us because they are being unjustly imprisoned or held,” Bush mentioned figures in Belarus, Burma, Cuba, and Vietnam, all of which are easy to talk about. Then he named a tough one: Ayman Nour, the Egyptian presidential candidate currently languishing in jail. No country has been seen as more of a weather vane of U.S. determination about democracy promotion than Egypt, where Washington has so many other diplomatic interests. During Secretary Rice’s last visit to Egypt, her failure to mention Nour was widely read as a sign of American retreat. But if retreat it is, the Commander in Chief apparently hasn’t gotten the message. …

Then Joe Lieberman’s.

… Another speech worthy of attention was given by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a man who, before our eyes, grows stronger as the going gets tougher. His keynote speech to the opening dinner was an easy occasion for platitudes. He might have heaped praise on Natan Sharansky and Václav Havel, topped it off with some bromides about freedom, and taken his bow to much applause. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld follows up on his post about secrets leaked by the LA Times.

Bret Stephens devoted his weekly in WSJ to Prague.

Couple of items on Dan Rather and Katie Couric from Roger Simon and The Captain.

Michael Barone noticed the polls show the Dems static and the GOP in a lot of flux.

George Will comments on Harry Reid’s tenure as senate majority leader.

We have a lot of Camille Paglia’s latest for Salon. She starts writing about the chances Gore will run.

… Despite numerous polls claiming that registered Democrats like myself are happy with their current field of presidential contenders, the Gore boomlet betrays subterranean tremors of doubt. After two major televised debates by both parties, only a Pollyanna on helium would believe that any of the top-tier Democrats will definitely be able to defeat a leading Republican like Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani.

As the Bush presidency dissolves under the rain of tragic bulletins from the Iraq debacle, too many Democrats seem to believe that their party will simply sail into the White House in 2008. But the conservative grass roots are in open rebellion against the waffling Washington Republican establishment, most recently because of its bungling of the incendiary immigration issue. Campaigning against the rapidly deflating Bush zeppelin is a dead end. …

She has some Hillary thoughts.

… For many Democrats like me, however, Hillary’s history of prevarication, rigidity and quasi-divine sense of election is profoundly unsettling. And who exactly would be running the government — that indefatigable buttinski, Bill Clinton? Spare us! …

And then unloads on Al.

… What exactly were Gore’s achievements in his eight years as vice president? What steps did he take at the time to shape public policy on global warming? What did the Clinton administration do to win U.S. adoption of the Kyoto accords? (Answer: next to nothing.) What political role did Gore play in the world after leaving office? There are some mighty big blanks in Gore’s record.

As a global warming agnostic, I dislike the way that Gore’s preachy, apocalyptic fundamentalism has fomented an atmosphere of hysteria around this issue and potentially compromised the long-term credibility of environmentalism. Democrats who long for his return as the anti-Hillary may not realize how Gore has become a risible cartoon character for much of the country at large. Anyone who listens to talk radio has been repeatedly regaled by clips of Gore bizarrely going off the deep end at one speech or another. And Gore, far worse than Hillary, is the Phantom of a Thousand Accents — telegraphing his supercilious condescension to whatever audience he’s trying to manipulate. …

Which brings us to another Contentions post. This time on global warm………zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

… In this case, the direct evidence doesn’t support the theory of anthropogenic climate change, so proponents have clouded the issue by seizing on unrelated phenomena in a more or less desperate and blatantly opportunistic way. “Global warming” has reflexively been invoked as the explanation for everything from the devastating 2005 hurricane season (but not the barely noticeable 2006 hurricane season) to the recent proliferation of stray cats. For about two years now, it’s been possible to predict that any report of a noticeable change in the environment or in plant or animal behavior will now be chalked up to global warming, with the implication that we must therefore take some sort of radical action to atone for the sin of carbon dioxide emission. …

John Stossel says property owners won one in Illinois.

Walter Williams on school choice.

… The solution to America’s education problems is not more money, despite the claims of the education establishment. Instead, it’s the introduction of competition that could be achieved through school choice. Most people agree there should be public financing of education, but there is absolutely no case to be made for public production of education. We agree there should be public financing of F-22 fighters, but that doesn’t mean a case can be made for setting up a government F-22 factory.

A school choice system, in the form of school vouchers or tuition tax credits, would go a long way toward providing the competition necessary to introduce accountability and quality into American education. What’s wrong with parents having the right, along with the means, to enroll their children in schools of their choice?

The Institute for Justice got honorable mention in John Stossel’s column. WaPo obit says they lost one of their favorite clients.

The Airbus 350 has sold 13 to almost 600 for the Boeing 787.

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• June 12, 2007 (word)

• June 12, 2007 (pdf)

During the week in June 2004 when we celebrated the life of Ronald Reagan, one of the most moving offerings was written by Mark Steyn. He brought it back for a look.

… Yakob Ravin, a Ukrainian émigré who in the summer of 1997 happened to be strolling with his grandson in Armand Hammer Park near Reagan’s California home. They chanced to see the former President, out taking a walk. Mr Ravin went over and asked if he could take a picture of the boy and the President. When they got back home to Ohio, it appeared in the local newspaper, The Toledo Blade.

Ronald Reagan was three years into the decade-long twilight of his illness, and unable to recognize most of his colleagues from the Washington days. But Mr Ravin wanted to express his appreciation. “Mr President,” he said, “thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the Communist empire.”

And somewhere deep within there was a flicker of recognition. “Yes,” said the old man, “that is my job.”
Yes, that was his job.

Power Line with some nifty posts. First on Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. Then on the Dem leadership in congress.

Debra Saunders writes on the 1999 launch of a federal anti-drug program to drive up the street price of cocaine. How’s that working out?

… “Can you tell me any other product that has gone down in price in the last few years?” Curtis asked — and you can’t include technological products that change. Think milk or bread or beef.

Those consumer prices are not falling. It takes a Washington-born government program — designed to drive up the price of cocaine — to drive down the cost of cocaine. The one thing drug warriors never demand of an American anti-drug program is that it actually work.

Speaking of useless government, Instapundit with a PorkBusters update.

David Warren, our favorite Canadian says there’s “no price too high for human liberty.”

IBD’s last in the 10-part Carter series.

… It’s tempting to think of the Carter Administration’s seemingly endless series of catastrophes as an aberration brought on by a yokel peanut farmer. In fact, the former Georgia governor’s thinking as president strongly resembles that of Democrats today: …

Ed Koch, our favorite Dem mayor deconstructs a NY Times editorial page.

… When I read the Times editorial page on June 6th, I was deeply disappointed. Why? Because on one day, in the same issue, three of the four Times editorials struck me as mean-spirited, lacking balance and just plain dumb. …

… The Times is so blinded by its fury on the Iraq war and its hatred of President Bush that its editorial board can’t think straight …

Stuart Taylor in ‘let’s beat up the NY Times day’ writes on another editorial. This is somewhat long, but if you have the time, it is one of a long line of Times items that display the paper’s bias.

Same theme but mercifully short from American Thinker.

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• June 11, 2007 (word)

• June 11, 2007 (pdf)

Gabriel Schoenfeld in Contentions wonders about the cost of a LA Times leak.

Leaks of vital U.S. intelligence secrets can get Americans killed. They can also place Americans in a great deal of danger.

As of yesterday, Iran has seized four Iranian-Americans and charged them with spying. …

… Do these developments have anything to do with a 2002 leak about a highly classified U.S. intelligence program? …

John Fund notes the 20th anniversary of Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech.

Rip Van Winkle has nothing on Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker who just emerged from a coma that began 19 years ago–just prior to the collapse of communism in his country. His take on how the world around him has changed beyond recognition comes at an appropriate time. It was 20 years ago tomorrow that Ronald Reagan electrified millions behind the Iron Curtain by standing in front of the Berlin Wall demanding: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” …

Couple of “I” bill items. First from Mark Steyn who was hiding out at the Orange County Register.

… Back in the real world, far from those senators living in the nonshadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America’s immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room.

Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That’s not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. Under political pressure to “bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,” the immigration bureaucracy will rubber-stamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There’s never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency. …

Then John Podhoretz, who is particularly taken with the way the “I” bill was dispatched.

… The takedown of this bill is a template for future actions against major pieces of legislation. And like so many templates for action these days, it was made possible by the Internet. Here’s how.

This was a “comprehensive” bill, designed to thoroughly “take care” of a thorny problem. It sought to address every important issue relating to immigration – border and employer enforcement, guest workers, legalization and the means by which immigrants can become citizens.

The bill runs more than 400 pages. In its many sections are many innovations and many revisions of existing law. For almost any lay person outside of government, it might as well be written in Urdu – so indecipherable is the drafting language.

That is by design. These bills aren’t written by the senators who negotiate them, but by the staffers who work for the senators. And since the bill seeks to “reform” existing laws, a lot of it simply makes reference to those laws and says Word A should be changed to Word B.

All of this shields the actual meaning of the legislation from the public, which must rely only on the general summaries of the legislation from politicians.

There was almost no way in the pre-Web era to piece together the actual provisions of reform legislation before it became law. …

Instapundit with a Porkbusters update. William Jefferson edition.

Marty Peretz with some interesting posts on grad ceremonies.

John Tierney posts on natural and synthetic pesticides.

… Dr. Ames was one of the early heroes of environmentalism. He invented the widely used Ames Test, which is a quick way to screen for potential carcinogens by seeing if a chemical causes mutations in bacteria. After he discovered that Tris, a flame-retardant in children’s pajamas, caused mutations in the Ames Test, he helped environmentalists three decades ago in their successful campaign to ban Tris — one of the early victories against synthetic chemicals.

But Dr. Ames began rethinking this war against synthetic chemicals after thousands of chemicals had been subjected to his test. He noticed that plenty of natural chemicals flunked the Ames test. He and Dr. Gold took a systematic look at the chemicals that had been tested on rodents. They found that about half of natural chemicals tested positive for carcinogencity, the same proportion as the synthetic chemicals. Fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices contained their own pesticides that caused cancer in rodents. …

The Captain posts on the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Turns out their membership has fallen to 1,700.

For a group that only has 1,700 members, it has an inordinate amount of political clout. The fact that roughly 25 people paid $3 million and represented the majority of its financing should raise some eyebrows. It comes to an average contribution of $120,000 each for last year alone.

Who are these fundraisers and what do they want? …

According to Hot Air the head of NASA has come out of the global warming closet.

Mike Griffin was a breath of fresh air when he took the reins at NASA in 2005. Coming out of the aerospace industry, Griffin seemed like the perfect choice to head up an agency that was struggling to find its way after the Columbia disaster and the lackluster leadership of administrator Sean O’Keefe.

Earlier this week, Griffin should have earned even more respect from anyone paying attention to NASA. He expressed doubt about the global warming “consensus”. He has since expressed regret, not for saying what he believes, but for wading into a political debate.

Alex Cockburn with more global warming stuff from the conspiratorial left.

… The Achilles’ heel of the computer models, the cornerstone of CO2 fearmongering, is their failure to deal with water. As vapor, it’s a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 by a factor of twenty, yet models have proven incapable of dealing with it. The global water cycle is complicated, with at least as much unknown as is known. Water starts by evaporating from oceans, rivers, lakes and moist ground, enters the atmosphere as water vapor, condenses into clouds and precipitates as rain or snow. Each step is influenced by temperature and each water form has an enormous impact on global heat processes. Clouds have a huge, inaccurately quantified effect on heat received from the sun. Water on the Earth’s surface has different effects on the retention of the sun’s heat, depending on whether it’s liquid, which is quite absorbent; ice, which is reflective; or snow, which is more reflective than ice. Such factors cause huge swings in the Earth’s heat balance and interact in ways that are beyond the ability of computer climate models to predict. …

Carpe Diem likes a recent George Will column.

In the humor section Dilbert posts on the greatest entrepreneur ever.

I was reading a story about Iraqi insurgents, and how they often wear ski masks to avoid identification. This made me wonder, who was the genius entrepreneur who decided to sell ski masks in the desert? Man, talk about your “outside the box” thinking. Be honest, how many of you, at the start of the Iraq war, thought “They’re going to need a lot of ski gear”?

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June 10 (word)

June 10, 2007 (pdf)

Charles Krauthammer entertains us writing about the never-ending presidential campaign.

… As a columnist whose job it is to chart every jot and tittle of these campaigns, every teapot tempest that history will remember for not one second, I curse election years. Now I have to curse the year before as well. But for all its bizarre meanderings, the endless campaign serves critical purposes.

The first two — testing the candidates’ managerial and consensus-building skills — are undeniably useful. But like most Americans, I find it is the third — the gratuitous humiliation of our would-be kings — that makes it all worthwhile.

Gerard Baker tries to explain the campaign to his readers at The London Times. He maintains it’s the Dems to lose and shows how they might.

… So sorry is the Republican condition that there’s little doubt now, even 18 months out, that the 2008 presidential election is for the Democrats to lose. The only reason politics remains interesting is that in the past the Democrats have demonstrated an impressive capacity to stoop to the challenge – and somehow contrive to lose it. Can they possibly do so again?

The political conditions are uniquely favourable to them. In any ordinary circumstances, for a party to win a third straight presidential term in office, as the Republicans would have to do next year, is remarkably difficult.

In the past 50 years only George Bush Sr did it, after eight years of Ronald Reagan in 1988. Change for its own sake is not only the faddish prerogative of voters but democracy’s vital means of renewing itself. You don’t have to subscribe fully to Lord Acton’s dictum to believe that kicking the buggers out every few years is the best way to safeguard the constitution. …

The Corner likes having the French return to sanity.

Clive Crook in the National Journal attempts to make sense of health care proposals.

… A quite different reform strategy — which I think is preferable on the merits, as well as politically more feasible — is to retain the distinctively American aspects of this system, notably its reliance on competing private providers, while in key respects strengthening, not attenuating, the power of market forces. The crux of this idea is to give consumers real choices. That in turn can happen only if employers are largely taken out of the health insurance decision.

Employers do not insure your house or your car; why should they insure your health? No reason, except that a huge tax subsidy encourages them to do so. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld in Contentions on the Sulzberger’s “internal consultants” at NY Times.

Working at the New York Times would seem to be one of the most glamorous jobs imaginable, what with consorting with legendary editors, rendezvousing with anonymous sources, occasionally making headlines and history, and bathing 24/7 in a jacuzzi of prestige.

But that is only the appearance. The reality is something else. Because what the public does not know, but Timesmen know all too well, is that if one works at the Times, one has to contend with what are known to all, and dreaded by all, as the Internal Consultants. …

National Review shorts.

WSJ on history of economic time.

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture — but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.

Then — just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations — people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.

Here’s a cautionary tale for flyers. A little over two months ago, travelers returning to Chicago from Jamaica had a two day “flight from hell.” The Chicago Tribune has a lengthy story today. We have part of it, and a link if you wish to read more.

… Jacobs braced for a delay but never imagined that over the next two days he and about 140 passengers would be stranded in a foreign airport as a cascade of mishaps—first a lack of common parts, then no mechanics and finally having to wait for a rescue plane from Chicago—turned Flight 1073 into an “irregular operation,” airline jargon for a flight from hell.

While statistically rare, such miscues are illustrative of how far U.S. airlines have stretched resources—planes, employees and infrastructure—in attempts to regain profitability. “You have no slack in the system,” aviation expert Darryl Jenkins said. “Trying to recover [from disruptions] takes days. It’s the worst it’s ever been.”

Flying has never been so fraught with possible misery. …

Learn why doctors are lining up to move to Texas.

… a report by David Hendricks in the San Antonio Express-News (posted on the newspaper’s website on June 1) should be read by all. It offered hard data on the changes that have occurred in Texas since voters in 2003 gave the thumbs up to a state proposition capping lawsuit awards in medical malpractice cases. …

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• June 7, 2007 (word)

• June 7, 2007 (pdf)

Nat Hentoff makes the case for getting out of the UN.

Mark Steyn was hanging out at the Western Standard where he’s covering another trial. Seems an immigrant to Canada takes offense at swearing allegiance to the crown, and he has some novel legal theories. You get where this is going? You think our legal system can be tedious, get a load of this.

… Mr. Roach is an immigrant to this country, a legal resident but not yet a citizen. And the reason he’s not a citizen is because he’s disinclined to take his oath of allegiance. And the reason he won’t take his oath is because he doesn’t want to swear allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen. And the reason he doesn’t want to swear allegiance to the Queen is because he and his fellow blacks “were colonized as a people by the British throne, and we were enslaved as a people by the British throne and, to me, taking an oath to the monarch of Great Britain, without any disrespect to the Queen herself as a person, is like asking a Holocaust survivor to take an oath to a descendant of Hitler.”

No doubt. But how many Holocaust survivors would voluntarily emigrate to a state ruled by Adolf Hitler Jr.? …

Jeff Jacoby’s been watching the debates. So, we don’t have to. Is This A Great County Or What? He says there are differences between the two major parties.

… On topics large and small — gays in the military, making English the official US language, using nuclear weapons to keep Iran from getting the bomb, even the proper role for former presidents — the differences between the parties came through, stark and unmistakable. If this week’s debates are a preview of coming attractions, the 2008 campaign will be very divisive, and deeply consequential.

Bob Novak says John Edwards is getting unpopular with the dem professionals.

The dynamic performance by John Edwards in last Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate, assailing his competitors for the nomination, got high marks from political reporters, Republican politicians and left-wing activists. But not from the Democratic establishment. Once their great hope for the future, Edwards now is massively unpopular among party regulars who neither like nor trust him.

Number nine in the IBD editorial series on Jimmy Carter.

Of all the errors Jimmy Carter committed, none has earned him more well-justified scorn than his handling of the 1970s energy crisis. True enough, he didn’t cause it. But he did make it much, much worse.

It might come as a surprise, but we agree with those who say it’s unfair to tar former President Carter with having caused the 1970s oil crisis. He didn’t.

Marty Peretz comments on Jimmy’s fund raising at Harvard.

Al Gore’s new faith.

Samizdata with a couple of good posts.

Episode 86 of the Sopranos is Sunday night. David Remnick’s New Yorker piece celebrates the last of the series.

The same snail shells used as jewelry and/or money, have shown up in 70,000 to 80,000 year old sites in South Africa. Morocco, and Israel. The Economist has the story.

… The shells are peculiar because they seem to have been fashioned into beads. They bear traces of red ochre, a pigment. They have been purposefully perforated, presumably to be strung together. And friction marks indicated that they did, indeed, once form part of a necklace or bracelet. …