Category Archives: Pickings

May 23, 2007

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Turns out Claudia Rosett can be a real bomb thrower. Casting around for ideas for new World Bank prez, she suggests John Bolton or Don Rumsfeld. If only…..

… While it’s doubtful that Paul Wolfowitz enjoyed his recent experience, the Bank’s fury to oust him did have the salutary effect of attracting enough attention to the institution itself so that all sorts of longstanding sleaze within the Bank was at least beginning to be exposed. …

The National Journal gets excited with a cover story about the end of the American era titled, “The Decline Begins.” Mark Steyn brushes it aside with a Corner post.

… This is one of those big think-piece cover stories editors send out in hopes that we’ll all start buzzing about it: …

A lot of ink has been spilled and electrons energized over the Pew Research Center’s survey of American Muslim attitudes. Jim Taranto’s WSJ Best of the Web had a good analysis.

In 2005 our colleagues Bret Stephens and Joseph Rago looked at then-available data on American Muslims and reached this conclusion:

It takes no more than a few men (or women) to carry out a terrorist atrocity, and there can be no guarantee the U.S. is immune from homegrown Islamist terror. But if it can be said that “it takes a village” to make a terrorist, the U.S. enjoys a measure of safety that our European allies do not. It is a blessing we will continue to enjoy as long as we remain an upwardly mobile, assimilating–and watchful–society.

The Pew survey would seem to ratify this view.

The Carter section starts with Amity Shlaes in Bloomberg News.

… Whatever you say of the 43rd president, when it comes to the Middle East, Bush is sticking to his policy. As Monday’s recanting demonstrates, Carter, by contrast, is still prevaricating. Who’s worse?

Marty Peretz too.

So besides his other sins Carter is a liar, a downright liar.

The second of IBD’s ten part Jimmy Carter editorial is here. Even some good stuff about him here.

… Two other moves have garnered Carter praise: setting deregulation in motion and naming Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in 1979. Carter did begin deregulation, for which he deserves credit. And to be sure, Volcker clamped down on the growth in money supply, bringing on a deep recession but also killing the inflationary spiral.Inflation, however, was already easing when Carter entered office. It was only after he named a political supporter, the late G. William Miller, as Fed chairman that prices really took off. Miller, who served only a year, is now viewed as the worst Fed chief ever.

Volcker? He wasn’t Carter’s choice. He was nominated only after a contingent of Wall Street power brokers, alarmed at the economy’s decline, went to the White House and demanded the appointment of the well-respected president of the New York Fed. …

Thomas Sowell with his second column against the “I” bill.

Dick Morris is for the bill.

The Republican Party would be self-destructive (not for the first time, either) if they did not let the immigration compromise negotiated by Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) pass and become law. The hopes of the entire Latino community are pinned to immigration reform and, if the GOP is seen as blocking it, the consequences for the indefinite future will be horrific. The Republican Party will lose Hispanics as surely as they lost blacks when Barry Goldwater ran in 1964 against the civil rights bill (even though a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats backed the bill in each house).

If the Hispanics are not massively turned off by a Republican rejection of immigration reform, they will drift into an increasingly pro-Republican orientation just as Irish and Italian Catholics did before them. Already Protestant evangelicalism has converted a third of the American Latino population, a clear precursor of GOP political support.

Hispanics now account for 13 percent of the U.S. population (blacks are 12 percent) and will constitute 20 percent of our population by 2020 regardless of whether immigration reform passes or not. …

Pickerhead confesses to a fondness for one of the dems. Wouldn’t be the first time. Voted for Gov. Doug Wilder years ago. Bill Richardson is the candidate we can’t beat; Congressman, UN Ambassador, Energy Secretary, two-term tax-cutting governor of a red state. The GOP would nominate him if they could. Jeff Greenfield spent some time with him.

WaPo’s Fred Hiatt writes on the success of vouchers in DC.

You’ll love John Stossel’s many myths of ethanol.

… Surely, ethanol must be good for something. And here we finally have a fact. It is good for something — or at least someone: corn farmers and processors of ethanol, such as Archer Daniels Midland, the big food processor known for its savvy at getting subsidies out of the taxpayers.

And it’s good for vote-hungry presidential hopefuls. Iowa is a key state in the presidential-nomination sweepstakes, and we all know what they grow in Iowa. Sen. Clinton voted against ethanol 17 times until she started running for president. Coincidence?

“It’s no mystery that people who want to be president support the corn ethanol program,” Taylor says. “If you’re not willing to sacrifice children to the corn god, you will not get out of the Iowa primary with more than one percent of the vote, Right now the closest thing we have to a state religion in the United States isn’t Christianity. It’s corn.”

Tech Central with a great post on elimination of ag subsidies in New Zealand.

… A prosperous farm sector without government subsidies? Sounds too good to be true…sounds like a fairy tale. It’s not. In 1985, New Zealand permanently eliminated 30 different agricultural production subsidies and export incentives. Over the past 20 years, as New Zealand’s farms flourished without assistance, the opportunity cost to American consumers and taxpayers of U.S. farm programs has totaled more than $1.7 trillion. With the 2007 Farm Bill, our government has the opportunity to make much needed reforms to farm policy. We could do worse than look to New Zealand’s policy tale for guidance. Like any good fairy tale there is more to take away from their experience than just the story.

Greg Mankiw posts on how to get wealthy.

Are hedge funds worth it? Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

Humor section starts with a John Podhoretz find.

Dilbert tasks the Great Blog Brain.

May 22, 2007

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Bob Kerrey lays out the Dem case for the war in Iraq.

… American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq’s middle class has fled the country in fear.

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. …

Marty Peretz liked Kerrey’s piece.

… Yes, it is clear that the country mostly believes that the war was a mistake or, at least, that is has been directed shabbily. But it is not at all clear that the country wants our military to go into retreat. Actually, the inability of the Democratic leadership to force date-certain terms for leaving the war-zone has saved the Democrats’ collective ass. Karl Rove probably wanted them to win this one. And, as for a Democratic leader who grasps the stakes, there is former Nebraska senator, current president of the New School and amputee Viet Nam war veteran Bob Kerrey who laid out the stakes in this morning’s Wall Street Journal: …

John Hood in a Corner post applauds Bob Kerrey’s op-ed. Then he calls attention to a WSJ reaction to Jimmy.

… As president, Mr. Carter managed to alienate nearly every major country in the world and did so without asserting American power in ways that might justify that alienation. No other president has crammed as many foreign policy debacles into a four-year period. The Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua and the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis are but two examples of many. Near the end of his term, it should be remembered, Mr. Carter’s approval rating fell to 21%, the lowest in the history of polling.

Of course, the reason Mr. Carter, and others, rank President Bush at the bottom is the Iraq war. Mr. Carter himself did not get the country into a war during his presidency, likely because he lacked the fortitude. …

William Murchison in Real Clear Politics has more on Carter.

… It was never the way of James Earl Carter Jr., to keep his moral pronouncements to himself, but this past weekend’s tirade — petty, vain, spiteful — is bad even by Carter’s low standards. In conversing with BBC radio and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, he shows not the least concern for the spectacle of a former U.S. president calumniating one of his successors, together with a loyal American ally. …

IBD has started a 10 part series comparing Bush and Carter. First up; leadership.

… Jimmy Carter, the man who makes Neville Chamberlain look like Dirty Harry …

Jimmy Carter, the gift who keeps on giving. ITAGCOW? Is This A Great Country Or What?

Paul Greenberg tells us what we can learn from France. (Even here we get to trash Jimmy)

The French have been in decline even longer under Jacques Chirac, who by the time he left office had become as irrelevant as Jimmy Carter during the final year of his ever shrinking presidency. The French were ready for a change — just as Americans were in 1980, when Ronald Reagan came along radiating what was then a strange new sensation in American politics: optimism.

George Will thinks the French have a lot of work to do.

During the 25 years that the French left and some right-wing nationalists have spent reviling “cold, heartless impoverishing Anglo-American capitalism,” France’s per capita GDP has slumped from seventh in the world to 17th. Sarkozy’s task is to persuade the French that their government’s solicitousness on behalf of their security and leisure explains the work they must now do to reduce their insecurity.

Thomas Sowell comments on the “I” bill.

San Francisco Chronicle’s Politics blog discovers John Edwards’ $55,000 fee for poverty lecture at UC Davis.

… The earnings — though made before Edwards was a declared Democratic presidential candidate — could hand ammunition to his competition for the Democratic presidential nomination. The candidate — who was then the head of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina — chose to speak on “Poverty, the great moral issue facing America,” as his $55,000 topic at UC Davis. …

Naturally some of our friends had comments.

John Fund.

Reporters on the campaign trial are now seriously debating a key question: Is presidential candidate John Edwards, who has built his campaign around his appeal to the have-nots of America, a complete and utter phony? …

The Captain.

It turns out that poverty can be a lucrative industry …

Ryan Sager gets picked for this sentence;

You know things have gotten serious in a campaign when the candidates are insulting the sizes of each other’s guns. …

Carpe Diem posts on price controls in Venezuela with a quote from Mary Anastasia O’Grady in WSJ.

… Free prices are to an economy what microchips are to a computer. They carry information. As Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained in his legendary treatise 60 years ago, it is free prices that ensure that supply will meet demand. When Mr. Chávez imposed price controls in Venezuela, he destroyed the price mechanism. …

May 21, 2007

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Some of our favorites comment on the immigration bill. First John Fund.

… There’s an old rule in Washington that in dealing with any tough issue, half the politicians hope that citizens don’t understand it, while the other half fear that people actually do. Here’s hoping that members of Congress and the White House ignore that tendency and come around to the view that in the age of the Internet the people have to be consulted. In retrospect, it’s clear that the 1986 Simpson-Mizzoli reform with its flawed amnesty provisions and lack of a workable guest-worker program would never have passed if the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle had existed then. …

Michael Barone next.

… Changing U.S. public policy is like steering a giant ship — it’s impossible to sharply reverse course, but you can change the direction in a way that will make a significant difference over time. That’s what I think the Bush administration and House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas accomplished in the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, much criticized by many conservatives. They sent the health care ship moving in the direction of market mechanisms and away from government ukase.

The Kennedy-Kyl immigration compromise, now under attack from many conservatives and some liberals, attempts to steer the immigration ship in the direction of regularization, enforcement that actually works and toward skill-based rather than family-based immigration. At least if they get the details right.

Brilliant piece of work by Fred Thompson and his campaign gets him a nice snap on Michael Moore. Stephen Hayes of Weekly Standard has the story. Fun read here.

Pickerhead was just thinking how nice it was that Jimmy Carter had been quiet. But, he’s back! We’ll just have to make the most of it as some of our faves have thoughts.

Marty Peretz.

… But his most haughty pronunciamento was against Tony Blair. I am a fan of Tony Blair. And he is not abominable. It is Jimmy Carter who is abominable…and small-minded, provincial, self-centered, incompetent and also someone who imagines himself a saint. …

Hitch.

… In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president’s dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House “Bible study” sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev’s occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter’s mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld.

Neal Boortz.

The American Spectator.

That’s not all the fun we’re gonna have today. How ’bout John McCain’s F bomb in the senate? Power Line has the details.

… Two weeks ago, Senator McCain defended his reputation as a hothead on Fox News Sunday, saying he loses his temper only when he sees corruption and wasteful spending. This incident involved neither. It was instead a simple policy dispute, where he didn’t want to debate how his legislation would actually work. …

Bob Novak exposes the dem tax increases.

Cafe Hayek’s Don Boudreaux gets a nice letter in USA TODAY.

Christian Science Monitor on the hidden costs of corn-based ethanol.

A new form of, “Let them eat cake!” Marginal Revolution posts on farmer’s accommodation of corn prices.

Division of Labour posts on saving tigers.

Meteorologist from New Zealand with good sense on global warming.

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.

Educators in Canada are teaching their kids to hate the US. National Post with story of kid in Canada who had to watch Gore’s movie 4 times while at school.

John Tierney on energy efficient washing machines.

Regardless, according to Scrappleface Bush says Carter is a great ex-president.

“… I think most Americans will agree with me that he’s a terrific ex-president. Things have never been better since Jimmy Carter left office.”

May 20, 2007

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Because the world would prefer not to be reminded, Charles Krauthammer is here to remember June 1967: a time when Israel had no friends.

The world will soon be awash with 40th-anniversary retrospectives of the war — and exegeses on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only to return to lines of June 4, 1967. But Israelis are cautious. They remember the terror of that June 4 and of that unbearable May when, with Israel in possession of no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel’s imminent extinction. And the world did nothing.

That was the UN 40 years ago. Here it is today.

World Bank without Wolfowitz nicely summed up by Power Line.

Mark’s Corner post on the Flight 93 memorial.

Last time out Nat Hentoff told of efforts to boycott China because of its refusal to help bring Sudan to heel in Darfur.

Bloomberg News tells us Fidelity Funds has responded.

May Month item is on China’s cultural revolution.

If you’re like Pickerhead, you don’t quite know what to make of the immigration bill. When we see Dems and the GOP all smiles, it’s safe to assume the country is getting hosed. However, we know something needs to be done. Steve Malanga of City Journal has tepid support for the bill.

Because emotions are running so high on both sides of the political aisle over immigration legislation, there’s likely to be lots of heated debate and perhaps more compromise. But although both liberals and conservatives are going to focus on the hot-button issue of amnesty, the real linchpin of the legislation is a shift to a skills-based immigration system. If we do that sensibly and thoroughly and don’t allow amendments to undermine or weaken it, we may finally have a chance to create an immigration policy that works.

More lukewarm support comes from Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Fred Barnes is a little happier with the effort.

Mark Steyn is decidedly against. He makes a good point here about the people who will be administering the process.

As for the notion that dumping a population the size of four mid-size European Union nations into the lap of America’s arthritic “legal immigration” (please, no tittering; apparently, there is still such a thing) bureaucracy will lead to tougher enforcement and rigorous scrutiny and lots of other butch-sounding stuff, well, if that were the case, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. You can declare that “illegal” now mean “legal” very easily; to mandate that “incompetent” now means “competent” is a tougher proposition.

Pity John Edwards as he tries to differentiate himself from the rest of the field. And yet now he has done something that makes it hard to contain contempt. Thankfully, a grownup from the left delivers a spanking. Here’s Joe Conason from Salon.

While one can oppose the war and still support the troops, the presidential candidate’s call for antiwar protests on Memorial Day is a bad idea.

The Captain posts on a Fred Thompson ‘Fairness Doctrine’ piece.

New Editor on George Will column. And a link to a PBS interview with Andrew Young who called the charges against Wolfowitz, “bureaucratic crap.”

The humor section is graced with Paul Greenberg’s letter to folks who can’t take a joke.

Oh, yes, the letter in question (“Daylight Exacerbates Warming,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 16, 2007) drew attention from Juneau to Timbuktu. It was the work of the Sage of Hot Springs, Ark., Connie Meskimen-a lawyer there who keeps his powder dry and tongue firmly planted in cheek.

There’s no need to go into the scientific details, but the burden of his missive was that by, moving Daylight Savings Time up a month this year, thus providing an extra hour of sunlight in March, Congress had thoughtlessly brought summer on in spring.

One of WaPo’s bloggers has some thoughts about Montgomery County, MD.

May 17, 2007

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We’re a little long today. Thankfully it is the end of the week.

Whole bunch of global warming stuff.

The first warming piece is from The Nation. This is a first for Pickings. It’s a typical item from the conspiratorial genre of the left and is a perfect illustration of yesterday’s discourse on those angry folks. The theme, by Alex Cockburn, is the global warming debate was cooked up by the nuclear power industry. I’m not kidding. Here’s the pull quote;

The world’s best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-’90s he’d positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around “the challenge of climate change,” which stepped forward to take Communism’s place in the threatosphere essential to political life.

Pickerhead’s always been willing to credit Al Gore with sincere motives in this debate. But for the crazy left, if you disagree with them, they will find evil.

From a blog from the U. S. Senate, of all places, we learn of many scientists who have become global warming skeptics. Thirteen of them from 9 countries have vignettes in this post. Here’s a sample;

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears “poppycock.” According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.” “The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported Bellamy “won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.”

Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, calls for rational rather than hysteric approachs to global warming inquiry in his new book.

Samizdata with good quote.

May Month post is on cannibalistic communists.

Another organ of the left, the Village Voice, on groups organizing to pressure China over Darfur.

Power Line with some background on testimony of Deputy Attorney General Comey. Washington is truly a cesspool.

Speaking of Washington and cesspools, the Captain has Berger news.

New Editor with a short from a Weekly Standard piece on the 2006 vote.

Don Boudreaux’s bi-monthly Tribune-Review column starts with something that is hard to believe.

The economist Paul Romer notes the astonishing fact that if you thoroughly shuffle a deck of 52 cards, chances are practically 100 percent that the resulting arrangement of cards has never before existed.

Never.

Michael Gerson, formerly a Bush speechwriter, is now writing a column for WaPo. He starts out with the bizarre circumstance of missionaries from Africa working the northern Virginia suburbs for converts.

An epoch-dividing event recently took place in the religion that brought us B.C. and A.D. Too bad hardly anyone noticed.

For years, a dispute has boiled between the American Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion it belongs to, with many in the global south convinced that Episcopalians are following their liberalism into heresy. This month, Archbishop Peter Akinola, shepherd of 18 million fervent Nigerian Anglicans, reached the end of his patience and installed a missionary bishop to America. The installation ceremony included boisterous hymns and Africans dressed in bright robes dancing before the altar — an Anglican worship style more common in Kampala, Uganda, than in Woodbridge.

The American presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, condemned this poaching of souls on her turf as a violation of the “ancient customs of the church.” To which the archbishop replied, in essence: Since when have you American liberals given a fig about the ancient customs of the church?

May 16, 2007

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Bernard Lewis gives another Middle East history lesson.

Jonathan Gurwitz lists the lessons of Fort Dix.

In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens writes on changes to his neighborhood in London.

It’s impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie’s death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph above), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god.

Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as “magnificent” and proclaimed that “Britain belongs to Allah.” When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari’a, he replied: “Who says you own Britain anyway?” A question that will have to be answered one way or another.

Great Posts from Power Line;
John posts on senate defeat of Iraq funds cut-off and on the standoff in the house. Then he posts on the debate which will serve as our segue to the Captain and his debate thoughts.

Good debate take from the Captain.

While London’s changing for the worse the left in the US is going “round the bend.” First example is from Jonah Goldberg.

And Thomas Sowell writes on their anger.

That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

The source of the anger of liberals, “progressives” or radicals is by no means readily apparent. The targets of their anger have included people who are non-confrontational or even genial, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Sowell then follows with a column trying to understand why the left’s so sure it’s right.

… Elites are all too prone to over-estimate the importance of the fact that they average more knowledge per person than the rest of the population — and under-estimate the fact that their total knowledge is so much less than that of the rest of the population.

They overestimate what can be known in advance in elite circles and under-estimate what is discovered in the process of mutual accommodations among millions of ordinary people.

Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.

The ignorance of people with Ph.D.s is still ignorance, the prejudices of educated elites are still prejudices, and for those with one percent of a society’s knowledge to be dictating to those with the other 99 percent is still an absurdity.

You know the old saw that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality? Plain Dealer has a story.

John Stossel on the tax-cut myth.

According to Cafe Hayek, the village idiots in Montgomery County MD are on the loose again.

May 15, 2007

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In Contentions, Gabriel Schoenfeld, examining the past, peers into the future.

In 1981, Israel hit Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak. Eight F-16 fighter-bombers and eight F-15 fighters swooped in to carry out a precision strike that set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions by more than a decade.As the whole world knows, Israel now faces a similar challenge from Iran, which has an ambitious nuclear program of its own, and whose president has threatened to wipe Israel from the map. …

… Thus, one does not have to be a Vanity Fair writer, or to love the Islamic bomb, to see that Israel’s decision, whatever it is, will be one of the biggest rolls of the dice in the sixty-year history of the Jewish state.

Norman Podhoretz will be making the case for the U.S. to step up to the plate and deal boldly with Iran’s nuclear program in the June issue of COMMENTARY; an advance posting will be available next week at www.commentarymagazine.com.

Here’s a link for the Podhoretz article. It is 5000 words so it’s doubtful it will be in Pickings.

Ed Koch says the dems own defeat in Iraq.

During the Cold War the pols in Washington were mostly united in support of this goal. But now the Democrats are not. There is no safety for the weak and foolish. When you seek to end a war without substantially achieving your essential goals by simply ceasing to fight, it is often a form of surrender. And that’s the way the Democrat-imposed outcome in Iraq will be understood around the world, especially by our enemies.

David Brooks (Subscription Reg.) sees off Tony Blair.

… In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat. He argued forcefully for putting ground troops in Kosovo and highlighted the menace posed by Saddam Hussein.He saw the terrorists of Sept. 11 as extremists who sought to divide humanity between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb — the House of Islam and the House of War. “This is not a clash between civilizations,” he said last year in the greatest speech of his premiership. “It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence.” He concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community, even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished. …

For two months, Mark Steyn has been in Chicago following the Conrad Black trial. It has been ignored here. Today in National Review, Mark tells us why we should be interested.

Jamestown just celebrated 400 years. David Boaz says private property saved the colony.

May Month honors today go to a post in Volokh by Ilya Somin on the current memorial controversy in Estonia.

Prof. Somin links to a Reason article by Cathy Young. She closes with:

… The best summary of the crisis comes from Elena Bonner, the widow of the great Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov and a noted human rights activist in her own right as well as a World War II veteran. On May 9, the day Russia commemorates its victory over Germany—an occasion that Putin used to take a public swipe at those who “desecrate monuments to war heroes”—Bonner issued a holiday greeting that dealt largely with the drama over the Bronze Soldier.

“I am not insulted by the relocation of the remains and the monument,” Bonner wrote. “It is far more honorable to have one’s final resting place on a cemetery than at a bustling, noisy bus stop. What did and still does insult me is the inscription on the monument. What it should say, in Estonia or in any other country, is not ‘To the soldier-liberator,’ but ‘To the fallen soldiers.’

Soviet soldiers, Bonner writes, liberated no one—not even themselves, though many hoped that after the war things would be different. That hope, she concludes, didn’t come true in 1945—or, for Russians, in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Power Line posts on the ludicrous Chuck Hagel.

The Captain too.

The New Editor exposes most recent hatchet job by MSM

The latest from the “I’m From the Government, and I’m Stupid Sweepstakes.” Of course it would turn out the coerced switch to biofuels has some huge downsides. Ones that may make us worse off than before. Instapundit with the details.

Instapundit linked to a post from Nature.com. That is here too.

Hit & Run post on another dumb law.

When to take social security: 62, 66, or 70? NY Times profiles an econ prof who says wait as long as you possibly can.

… Indeed, requesting your Social Security benefits might seem like the first order of business as soon as the going-away party is over. But you might be a lot better off waiting a bit longer, until age 66 or even 70 before tapping into the government retirement fund. Relying at first on other savings like individual retirement accounts or the 401(k) from work could raise your living standard in retirement as much as 10 percent, according to calculations made by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University. …

While campaigning on the Iberian Peninsula, the Duke of Wellington, annoyed, writes to the bureaucrats in the foreign office

… to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance,

2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

Your most obedient servant

Wellington

May 14, 2007

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Theodore Dalrymple, who has a second home in France, writes on Sarkozy and what his election might mean.

The French Revolution having taken place only two centuries previously, Chou En-lai famously remarked that it was too early to tell what its effects might be. A fortiori, it is too early only a few days after Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory in the French election to say what that victory means. One thing is certain: It means something.

The rioters in the Place de la Bastille agreed. What they feared was that Sarko, as he is known to both his friends and his enemies, is in reality what he has all along presented himself as being, a man determined to change France. One of the ironies of the election was that the conservatives wanted change, while the liberals wanted everything to remain the same. And there is nothing like the prospect of change in France to spark a riot.

It is instructive to compare Sarko’s dignified and decent statement after his election — that it was important for everyone to respect Ségolène Royal because millions of French people had voted for her — with the rioters’ contorted faces of hatred. Like Mrs. Thatcher (and George Bush), Sarko evokes hatred completely disproportionate to anything he has done or might conceivably do. It is his ideas that are hated and feared more than the man himself. …

… Sarko has been called American in his attitudes, but has taken it as a compliment rather than as a criticism. His problem is that, without reform, France is headed for very serious violence, amounting almost to civil war; with reform, it is headed for serious, though temporary, conflict. But the reward of reform is that France would soon be one of the very richest countries in the world, as well as what it is now, the country with the highest per capita consumption of tranquillizers.

John Fund has ideas for the World Bank.

Modern Malthusians see nothing but trouble ahead. Jeff Jacoby sees good news.

… take infant mortality. Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than one in five. “In the United States as late as 1900,” Goklany writes, “infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6.” In developing countries, the fall in mortality rates began later, but is occurring more quickly. In China, infant mortality has plunged from 195 to 30 in the past 50 years.

Life expectancy? From 31 years in 1900, it was up to 66.8 worldwide in 2003. …

Great Corner post from Victor Davis Hanson.

Good news worldwide on school vouchers from The Economist.

… Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule—the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).

More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.

Claudia Rosett thinks Zimbabwe as head of CDC is perfect. Instead of calling it the Commission on Sustainable Development, she says how ’bout, “U.N. Commission on Sustainable Dictatorships.”

Couple of Wolfowitz items. Chris Hitchens and WSJ.

Carpe Diem posts on Wal-Mart health clinics.

Our May Month article describes prison camps in NoKo.

The most salient feature of day-to-day prison-labor camp life is the combination of below-subsistence food rations and extremely hard labor. Prisoners are provided only enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. And prisoners are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes — anything remotely edible. It should be noted that below-subsistence-level food rations preceded, by decades, the severe nationwide food shortages experienced by North Korea in the 1990s.

Great Cafe Hayek post on unintended consequences.

Reason’s Hit & Run posts on the foolishness of Lou Dobbs.

Jim Taranto writes on what can happen to a college student who suggests carrying weapons.

May 13, 2007

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Mark’s Sun-Times column comments on the backgrounds of the Fort Dix Six.

…what then radicalized so many Western Muslims? Answer: in many cases, the Balkans. When Yugoslavia collapsed 15 years ago, Jacques Poos told the Americans to butt out: “The hour of Europe has come!” he declared confidently. Poos was the foreign minister of Luxembourg, a country as big as your hot tub, but he chanced to be holding the European Union’s rotating “presidency” at the time and, as it happened, the Americans were very happy to butt out. “We don’t have a dog in this fight,” said then-secretary of state, James Baker.

Well, the hour of Europe came and went, and a couple of hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too happy for Americans to butt back in again. So NATO bombed Christian Serbs in defense of Albanian Muslims, and a fat lot of good it did if the Duka brothers are any indication. …

… Tough, you say. So what? Washington still has no dog in these fights. It’s time to hunker down in Fortress America. Which brings me to the fourth lesson: What fortress? The three Duka brothers were (if you’ll forgive the expression) illegal immigrants. They’re not meant to be here. Yet they graduated from a New Jersey high school and they operated two roofing companies and a pizzeria. Think of how often you have to produce your driver’s license or Social Security number. But, five years after 9/11, this is still one of the easiest countries in the world in which to establish a functioning but fraudulent identity. …

Richard Perle is in WaPo with reaction to Tenet’s book.

The Captain links to a Swedish study that says our health care system outperforms in providing new treatments.

Because he is a gentleman, Larry Arnn, Hillsdale College president, waited a long time before losing patience with the Bush administration’s Education Department.

…Today we watch with trepidation an attempt to establish federal control over all colleges and universities, including our campus. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings wants to extend the testing and standards requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act to colleges. The specific details of what these testing and standards would entail are unclear, but are likely to be determined by education department regulators over the next several months.

President Bush and Ms. Spellings have brought a new approach to education reform at the federal level. They have good motives and a fair appraisal of the situation, at least in K-12 education. But national standards and testing in higher education will only strengthen a bureaucracy that already plagues an otherwise highly competitive system.

Mr. Bush and Ms. Spellings will be not be around long enough to write the rules of this new program. They will leave behind them a much larger department, now armed with the tools to influence education to a much greater extent. Ms. Spellings often uses the language of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in her speeches. …

WaPo has a profile on Shaha Riza. She would be the woman portrayed by some of Wolfowitz’s enemies as a bimbo.

She is the invisible woman at the center of the storm swirling around embattled World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz. Serious, discreet and strong-willed, Shaha Ali Riza has been variously described as Wolfowitz’s “girlfriend,” his “female companion” and, according to Salon.com, his “neoconcubine.”

But little beyond labels is publicly known about the 52-year-old British citizen who has been dating Wolfowitz, one of Washington’s most high-profile and powerful men, for the past seven years. People close to Riza have encouraged her to go public and tell her side of the story, but she remains silent.

When a friend is asked how Riza is feeling at the moment, the friend, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation, says, “What would you expect? How would you like to be portrayed as somebody’s bimbo when you’re a highly educated person who has actually worked hard to make life better for women and civil society in the Middle East and has actually achieved a lot.” …

Bunch of good posts from Power Line and New Editor. The segue between is when they both post on what should be in the humor section; Zimbabwe selected by the UN to head the U.N. body charged with promoting economic progress and environmental protection.

WSJ reacts to Obama’s Detroit speech.

Shorts from National Review.

NR Online on AARP.

IBD with some good news on trade and congress.

After two years of gloom, Congress has seized the lead on free trade. Its green light for Peru and Panama pacts strengthens our allies and breaks a trail for bipartisanship. This is real progress.

The accord Congress reached Thursday with the Bush administration marks the first true act of bipartisanship since the Democrats won Congress in 2006. The bickering’s gone, and this time the vote was more than “symbolic.”

Members like Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., showed leadership in bringing back free trade from its moribund state. His office tells us he was tired of Congress’ do-nothingism and wanted to work.

Nice post from Division of Labour on Milton Freidman.

Tech Central on the doomsayers.

Paul Krugman who told us that we’d ‘all better start brushing up on our depression economics,” and astonishingly, two months ago, was talking about a short-term drop in the Dow as a sign of “economic collapse.”

May 10, 2007

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Today turns out to be Institute for Justice Day.

IJ has been mentioned from time to time in Pickings. We have just learned a charity rating service continues to give IJ its highest award.

Next is an example of the types of clients assisted by the Institute.

DANNY GLOVER’S recent difficulty hailing a cab in New York City highlighted one transportation problem faced by minorities. But there is another problem that is perpetuated by the government of the city of New York — lack of alternatives to the public transportation system.Like other cities, New York throws barriers in the path of entrepreneurs who attempt to launch van or jitney services. When Hector Ricketts, a Jamaican immigrant and father of three children, lost his job at a hospital, he decided to start a van service. He had seen the difficulties his fellow Queens residents had in obtaining cheap, convenient transportation. People were often faced with a walk to the bus plus a transfer to the subway to get to work. Those who live in high-crime neighborhoods and must return home after dark are frightened of even a two or three block walk — particularly women. Vans pick people up at the subway station and take them directly to their doors. And they do it for $1.00, considerably less than the public system charges.

One would suppose that in this era of welfare reform, obstacles to obtaining jobs would be cast aside with brisk efficiency. Not so. …

One of the Institute’s main efforts is litigation against abuse of eminent domain. There has been a recent victory in Riviera Beach, FL.

If you’re interested, check out their web site. www.ij.org They are lucky folks; they get to spend their days suing governments.

David Brooks – Anglophile.

Der Spiegel has a long look at the IPCC, the UN climate panel. This looks to be a reasonably balanced portrayal of the debate.

Yesterday marked the end of WWII in Europe. Historian Richard Overy writes on the war.

May Month has a posting on Eric Hoffer, the philosopher longshoreman from California.

… The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliché that money is the root of evil! The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind. …

There’s still a war. Max Boot has a good post in Contentions.

Tony Blankley thinks September May Be the Cruelest Month.

Claudia Rosett comments on World Bank.