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• May 9, 2007 (pdf)
• May 9, 2007 (word)

We start off with John Stossel’s weekly column.

Bill Clinton once declared, “The era of big government is over.” Both Republicans and Democrats applauded.
What a joke.
Government grew under Clinton, and grew even faster under his successor. Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.

Michael Barone is having a week. Today he questions our priorities.

Sometimes politicians get things upside down. They ignore problems that are plainly staring them in the face, while they focus on dangers that are at best speculative.Consider two long-range issues that are not pressing matters this year but pose, or are said to pose, threats a generation or two away. One of them you don’t hear much about: Social Security. The other you hear about all the time: global warming. Yet this gets things upside down. We have an unusually precise knowledge of the problems that Social Security will cause in the future. But we don’t know with anything like precision what a continuation of the current mild increase in temperatures will mean.

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mr. Barone about the piece we started with yesterday.

WSJ editorial on the people behind the attacks on Wolfowitz.

George Will pays some attention to the World Bank.

The kerfuffle over whether Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank’s president, behaved badly regarding the contract for his companion to facilitate her departure from the bank involves no large issue. The bank’s existence does. The bank’s rationale, never strong, has evaporated.

The Village Voice thinks NY Times is hypocritical.

May Month selection today is Kolyma: The Land of the White Death.

“As the isolation of the region made it difficult to transport prisoners by rail, the ocean began the preferred route of transport. A fleet of ships based in Vladivostok carried out the operations. In the late fall of 1941, one such slave ship – the Dzhurma – carrying 12,000 Polish prisoners became trapped in the frozen waters near Wrangle Island. The Soviets could not carry out a rescue and refused help from outsiders for fear of exposing their slave apparatus to the world. The entire contingent died due to cold and starvation.”

Instapundit posts on Anne Applebaum’s good bye to Chirac.

Walter Williams writes on the minimum wage.

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• May 8, 2007 (pdf)
• May 8, 2007 (word)

Michael Barone, the master of voting statistics, gives us lost of food for thought with his column in WSJ today.

In 1950, when I was in kindergarten in Detroit, the city had a population of (rounded off) 1,850,000. Today the latest census estimate for Detroit is 886,000, less than half as many. In 1950, the population of the U.S. was 150 million. Today the latest census estimate for the nation is 301 million, more than twice as many. People in America move around. But not just randomly. … … Demography is destiny. When I was in kindergarten in 1950, Detroit was the nation’s fifth largest metro area, with 3,170,000 people. Now it ranks 11th and is soon to be overtaken by Phoenix, which had 331,000 people in 1950. In the close 1960 election, in which electoral votes were based on the 1950 Census, Michigan cast 20 votes for John Kennedy and Arizona cast four votes for Richard Nixon; New York cast 45 votes for Kennedy and Florida cast 10 votes for Nixon. In 2012, Michigan will likely have 16 electoral votes and Arizona 12; New York will have 29 votes and Florida 29. That’s the kind of political change demographics makes over the years.

A series of good blog posts follows.
Power Line post on Edwards’ poverty program and Jim Lileks.

Captain picks up on Lileks and then gives us a good post on the French election.

Ed Morrissey, who is the captain of Captains Quarters, linked to his post on E. J. Dionne at the blog Heading Right.

May Month’s selection highlights the poverty created by the Soviets.

Under communism, in contrast, industrialization accompanied falling agricultural productivity. Almost all Russians were still family farmers in 1928. Stalin seized their land, launching a deadly famine that killed about 7 million. Agricultural collectivization slashed total food production, but the government drastically increased quotas to feed industrial workers and pay for exports. As Robert Conquest explains, collectivizing agriculture was the opposite of progress:
[A]gricultural production had been drastically reduced, and the peasants driven off by the millions to death and exile, with those who stayed reduced, in their own view, to serfs. But the State now controlled grain production, however reduced in quantity. And collective farming had prevailed.
Stalin’s idea of “economic growth,” in other words, was shifting production from agriculture to other sectors – and mangling the former in the process. Genius it was not. If official statistics had properly counted agricultural output, Stalin’s policies would have correctly been seen as a catastrophe.

While on the subject of the Soviet Union, we have a book review from Saturday’s WSJ. The book is by Pickerhead’s favorite author Vasily Grossman.

No people have been put to the tests of suffering the way Russians have. They have never known anything approaching decent government. Czars or commissars, their leaders have always treated them as if they were a conquered nation. Even now, after the fall of communism, things for them remain impressively dreary. I not long ago asked a formidable expert on Russia whom we were supposed to root for among those contending for power in the country. With only thieves, thugs and former KGB men seeking leadership, he replied, there is no one to root for. Business, in other words, as usual.
Literature has been the only, if of course vastly insufficient, Russian compensation. The barbarity of the nation’s conditions has, somehow, produced a great literature studded with magnificent literary subjects. From Pushkin through Solzhenitsyn — with Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Mandelstam, Babel, Akhmatova, Pasternak and many others in between — great Russian novelists and poets have never been in short supply.
One Russian writer who until only recently slipped through my own net is Vasily Grossman (1904-64), author of a novel called “Life and Fate,” which was written under the direct influence of “War and Peace.” The first I had heard of this book was six or so months ago from my friend Frederic Raphael, the English novelist and screenwriter, a man never given to overstatement. “It’s a masterpiece,” he said, and, upon investigation, this assessment turns out to be precisely correct. …

Thomas Sowell says some scandals are more equal than others.

Mark Steyn reviews a book for WSJ. The book – “Can We Trust the BBC.”

… When a chap writes a book called “Can We Trust the BBC?” I think it’s a safe assumption that the answer is unlikely to be “yes.” So I trust you won’t regard it as a plot spoiler if I reveal that, at the end of his brisk tome, Robin Aitken (a Beeb journalist for 25 years) reveals that, no, you cannot trust the BBC, at least not if you’re of a broadly conservative disposition. On the European Union, on the Iraq war, on Northern Ireland, on Islam, on America, the BBC trends not merely well to the left of the Conservative Party but well to the left of Tony Blair’s New Labour. …

Carpe Diem posts on seasonal gas price increases.

Some environmental folks have gone round the bend. Jim Taranto with details.

Not everyone on the left is nuts. The Nation found a global warming denier, Alexander Cockburn.

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences

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• May 7, 2007 (pdf)
• May 7, 2007 (word)

Gabriel Schoenfeld and Norman Podhoretz wrote excellent posts today in Contentions, Commentary’s blog.
Schoenfeld;

… supporting a war that is going badly, in which American forces are getting continually hammered, is emotionally, morally, and intellectually arduous. To those of us who do not want to see American soldiers die and die needlessly, it may be time, then, to tip our hats to those in public life—soldiers, politicians, and intellectuals—who are not only being steadfast but are finding a way forward.

Podhoretz;

… In spite of what the polls supposedly tell us, I strongly suspect that the Democrats may already have blown the 2008 election. Unlike the late Senator Aiken of Vermont, who proposed that we declare victory and get out of Vietnam, the Democrats want us to declare defeat and get out of Iraq. This, they imagine, is what the American people were demanding in the congressional election of 2006.
But it seems far more likely that the message of that election was not “Get out,” but rather “Win, or get out.” In any case, the position the Democrats are now taking can only have the effect of revivifying and reinforcing the sense of them as weak on national security. And this was the very factor that led to the ignominious defeat of their presidential candidate, George McGovern, in 1972, when they also misread the public temper by paying too much attention to the left wing of their party. …

Lots of reaction to France’s vote.

John Fund’s first.

… It is difficult for Americans to appreciate just how removed from the French people the nation’s bureaucratic elite is. Its arrogance is mind-boggling. One of Mr. Chirac’s ministers privately compared the public’s repudiation of the EU Constitution in 2005 to a temper tantrum. Listen to former president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the prime architect of the now-rejected 448-article European Constitution, when he was asked to respond to complaints that voters would have trouble understanding the dense document: “The text is easily read and quite well phrased, which I can say all the more easily since I wrote it myself.” …… With the victory last year of Angela Merkel, the pro-U.S. leader of Germany, and the impending changeover in power in Britain from pro-American Tony Blair to equally pro-American Labor leader Gordon Brown, there is also at least a chance that Europe will begin to address its problems straight on and avoid needless scapegoating of the U.S. With Mr. Sarkozy’s victory, France’s government looks like it will finally have some energetic adult supervision.

Next Mark Steyn.

… In my recent book, whose title escapes me, I cite one of those small anecdotes that seems almost too perfect a distillation of Continental politics. It was a news item from 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month.
She was 94 when she croaked, so she’d presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: “Frenchman Lived With Dead Mother To Keep Pension.”
Think of France as that flat in Marseilles, and its economy as the dead mother, and the country’s many state benefits as monsieur’s deceased mom’s benefits. To the outside observer, the French give the impression they can live with the stench of death as long as the government benefits keep coming. If that’s the case, the new president will have the shortest of honeymoons.

Adam Smith.org is pleased.

Jewish World Review reprinted an article from a paper in Belgium. It’s not well written but has interesting background info on Sarkozy

Volokh with insight on Hayek’s spontaneous order.

A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

One of the proprietors of Division of Labour has to listen to a commencement speaker claiming lengthened life spans are a product of the government. Of course he has a comment.

May Month’s selection is on the Soviet state’s murder of the Aral Sea. Ever notice that the worst environmental disasters have been created by government? All of Russia, of course, and here at home look at the sites involved in the production of nuclear weapons.

… The moral of this story is that for lack of property rights & trade, a huge ecosystem (and the health of millions of people) was sacrificed. Let us all keep this in mind when latter day pundits claim that property rights and trade are enemies of the environment.

Carpe Diem mentions a WSJ piece on how governments might ruin our talented and productive drug manufacturers.

Cafe Hayek on job creation.

… William’s example of the ban on self-serve gasoline reminds me of a story. An economist is visiting China and is given a economic tour of the country. At one point, he’s shown a dam under construction and the economist asks why all the workers are using shovels instead of more powerful equipment. It creates jobs, the Chinese guide says proudly. The economist responds: why don’t you have them use spoons? …

Another wind farm is proposed. This time off the Delaware coast.

The Economist writes on gestures, rather than speech, as possible origins of language. We already knew drivers can communicate without speaking!

The proprietor of this site, Ed Roesch, lives in tidewater Virginia where he owns and operates a small business that fabricates precision metal parts for electronic enclosures. Started by Mr. Roesch in 1981, the company has grown from two to almost 100 people. All without memos, meetings, or mission statements. However, like many small business people, Ed understands God put him on the earth to “fund an ever-increasing break-even level.”

He loves freedom and marvels at the accomplishments of people in voluntary cooperation when they are unfettered by government’s dead hand. Pickings started as a clipping service for his six children. Interesting items were copied and mailed in an effort to expose them to ideas about free people and free markets. Although he often said, “If you have an open mind, someone will come along and fill it with garbage,” what he hoped to give them was a chance to fight back.

He also wished they would grow to understand, ‘there ought to be a law’ is perhaps the most dangerous phrase in our language. Mischief and tragedy grow out of those thoughts. The wiser course is to find and repeal the bad laws that created the problem in the first place.

A good example is our third party pays medical system. During WWII employers, seeking to evade wage and price controls, offered medical insurance as a fringe benefit. They went to congress to make sure the expense was deductible but would not be added to their employee’s taxable income. So we have ended in a situation where we all think someone else is paying.

Imagine, if you will, the savings that would accrue from people treating their medical insurer with the same care they give to the company that carries their car insurance. Now new laws are nearly certain to compound the current healthcare morass.

In fact, the phrase is so dangerous, maybe there should be a law prohibiting its use.

Then came the Internet.

Now he had the tools to terrorize his children with greater volume and velocity. The emails were called Pickings from the Webvine and since he was the head picker, Mr. Roesch called himself Pickerhead. Family and friends asked to be added to the distribution list. More family, friends, colleagues, reporters, teachers, pundits, radio hosts, politicos, (liberals and conservatives alike) benefited from Pickerhead’s curious mind and insatiable appetite for surprising and ingenious commentary. The list grew to two hundred and the time came to launch this site.

The goal is to find interesting background to the news that busy people might overlook and the main stream media ignore. Although sources frequently include many right and center-right blogs and publications, the weeks preceding launch in May 2007 saw items from The Nation, Village Voice, and Salon. We try to have fun without being snide, sarcastic or cynical.

Pickings is posted five days a week and the archives go back over one year.

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• May 6, 2007 (word)
• May 6, 2007 (pdf)

In 1927 the writer Eugene Lyons sailed with his family to Russia, “the land of our dreams.” They returned in 1934 and three years later he published Assignment in Utopia, one of the most courageous, perceptive and honest accounts of the early Soviet Union. And the end of Lyons’ love affair with it. For example;

People under dictatorships, it has been well said, are condemned to a lifetime of enthusiasm. It is wearing sentence. Gladly they would burrow into the heart of their misery and lick their wounds in private. But they dare not; sulking is next-door to treason. Like soldiers weary unto death after a long march, they must line up smartly for parade. …

Our selection today for May Month Grinding People Down With Stupidity uses a passage from Solzhenitsyn to illustrate a lifetime of enthusiasm.

… “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!” …

Power Line and Roger Simon comment on Royal’s late inning tactics in the French elections.

Corner post on Sarkozy’s win.

… Sarkozy just gave his acceptance speech, in which he uttered the somewhat astounding—and from a political point of view, needless—line: “…and let me say to our American friends, they can count on our friendship.” …

Amazing. Germany, and now France. Not bad for having a moron in the White House.

Tenet’s book allows Charles Krauthammer to remind why we went to war.

… Outside of government, the case for war was made not just by the neoconservative Weekly Standard, but — to select almost randomly – the traditionally conservative National Review, the liberal New Republic and the center-right Economist. Of course, most neoconservatives supported the war, the case for which was also being made by journalists and scholars from every point on the political spectrum — from the leftist Christopher Hitchens to the liberal Tom Friedman to the centrist Fareed Zakaria to the center-right Michael Kelly to the Tory Andrew Sullivan. And the most influential tome on behalf of war was written not by any conservative, let alone neoconservative, but by Kenneth Pollack, Clinton’s top Near East official on the National Security Council. The title: “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” …

Judging by re-enlistment rates our soldiers didn’t need to be reminded. Instapundit has the details.

Kathleen Parker comments on the reactions to Broder’s column on Harry Reid.

… Broder’s point, provocative but hardly incendiary, was that American lives are on the line and that Reid’s remark didn’t help matters. Rather than provide encouragement to our enemies, Broder suggested that the Senate leader might do better to heed the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report and seek common ground toward both military and political solutions. …

Strategy Page says Islamists are losing control of women.

…Thus in most Islamic countries, the women are having fewer children, and making more noise about economic and educational opportunities. This resonates with some of the better informed Islamic men. One reason the West, and other parts of the world, have enjoyed much better economic growth than the Moslem countries, is that they have added large number of educated women to their work force.Losing control of the women is something that makes Islamic conservatives very angry. Murderously angry. This is a vicious, lethal battle taking place largely out of the media spotlight. But, long term, it is destroying the source of Islamic terrorism.

G. Schoenfeld posts on Carter’s diplomacy.

James Taranto posts on Pelosi’s diplomacy.

The Captain posts on a typically sneering NY Times reference to W.

The Weekly Standard reviews a book on the wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound.

David McCullough’s face contorted with anger.
That is the first line of Wendy Williams’s and Robert Whitcomb’s account of one man’s possibly misguided attempt to build a wind farm off Cape Cod. My first thought was: Oh, goody. Something snippy about Saint David. I am going to enjoy this.
On page one, McCullough is fulminating about Cape Wind, the 24-square-mile, turbine-powered electrical power project that energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon wants to build in Horseshoe Shoal, not far from McCullough’s Martha’s Vineyard home. McCullough sputters in fine company, with Walter Cronkite, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, and all manner of Kennedys. Because, as everyone knows, it is one thing to speak out in favor of homeless shelters, affordable housing, and “clean” energy projects. It is quite another thing to gaze at them from your front door. …

Toledo Blade with a piece on Pickerhead’s alma mater.

Arnold Kling in Tech Central on how to cure poverty.

… The point of this essay is to simply state the obvious. If you look at poverty from the broad perspective of international and historical comparisons, the solution to poverty is decentralized entrepreneurial activity under capitalism. …

Imus’s suit against CBS will claim the dump button was available to censor his remarks. Slate’s explainer tells us how the “dump-button” works at.

Dilbert’s here.

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• May 3, 2007 (word)
• May 3, 2007 (pdf)

The Captain has an interesting post on developments at the LA Times and CNN. Seems like the media is tearing itself loose from the fools in the Reid Pelosi camp.

Yesterday, CNN reported on the disastrous consequences that a precipitate American withdrawal would create for Iraq. Today, the Los Angeles Times follows suit, describing the delicate process of training a national army from scratch, and the collapse that would ensue if America bugs out …

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Helprin. Mark has long been a critic of the Iraq war. He doesn’t like precipitous withdrawal either.

… if we simply withdraw according to the timetable that they offered, it would be a terrible disaster. And people say that, but they don’t explain why. It would be a disaster because it would energize every enemy of the United States throughout the world, and cause much greater pain and suffering, and danger, than we’ve had up to this point in this war. …

More on salaries at the World Bank.

French presidential debates are real debates. Power Line posts.

John Fund reports on undeclared pres candidates and their strategies.

Longish but well written article from Knoxville on one of those undeclared – Fred Thompson.

It was a scorching summer day in 1993 at the Sevier County fairgrounds. I was standing around with four other political junkies with nothing better to do and we were laughing about Congressman Don Sundquist’s ardent pursuit of the goodwill of Congressman Jimmy Quillen.
Quillen, the boss of the heavily Republican First District, had torpedoed the candidacy of Winfield Dunn, the last serious Republican candidate for governor. Quillen was playing hard-to-get that summer with his back bench colleague, Sundquist, who would be running for governor in 1994.
Quillen and Sundquist were inside a big tent and the crowd was whooping it up, in anticipation of capturing the governor’s office after eight years of Democratic Gov. Ned McWherter.
We looked over the fairgrounds to see a tall fellow we recognized from the movies wandering around like he was lost. He evidently didn’t get the memo about it being a casual event. He had left his suit coat and tie in the car and had rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He wandered up, sweating like a pig. …
… Fred Thompson, on his first campaign appearance in East Tennessee, assumed (not incorrectly) we were a group of local rednecks. We surrounded him like a bear in a ring and started peppering him with questions. …

“Tell us what you really think” Michael Graham has words for Tenet.

If there’s a bigger buffoon or more gutless weasel in the intelligence world than George Tenet, he’s being hidden in a black ops prison on Guantanamo Bay. Tenet, a poster child for “The Power Of Positive Brown-Nosing,” has hit a new low, even for Washington. Having worked his way up the political ladder by leaving no back unslapped, on the way down he’s leaving no back unstabbed.

George Tenet is the Barney Fife of the spy world. Every bad guy got away, and he never took his bullet out of his pocket.

Screwing up the pre-Iraq war intelligence alone makes him a failure. Utterly missing the 9/11 attacks and having not a single CIA asset in the Taliban or al-Qaeda at the time earns him “Worst CIA Chief Ever.” …

The latest problem in Brit health care; they’re short 3,000 midwives.

Great post from Right Coast on how local gov folks apply loving care to military contractors.

New discovery may make less expensive solar panels possible.

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• May 2. 2007 (word)

• May 2, 2007 (pdf)

Following along on the theme we emphasized yesterday, NY Sun editors write on Broder’s column.

Instapundit posts on the Sun editorial.

We get a look at the quinquennial farm bill which proves Bismarck’s dictum; Men should not know how their laws and sausages are made.” This comes to us two different ways; a LA Times editorial on sugar tariffs and an article on the farm bill from NY Times.

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice. …

… The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow. …

Neal Boortz posts on the Bush veto.

Any discussion of the president’s veto of the Democrats surrender bill must begin with the realization of one simple, basic, incontrovertible fact. The Democrat leadership of this country awakes every single day with one desire on their mind: They want a day of bad news from Iraq. Those Democrat leaders who actually pray are praying for our defeat in Iraq. Every bit of bad news from Iraq brings smiles to Democrat faces. Every bit of good news brings sadness.

Tony Blankley writes on Muslim hatred of the West.

Mark Steyn with a Corner post on the same subject.

David Boaz was in Tech Central with our May Month Remembrance of the Victims of Communism. He wants to know where the anti-communist movies are?

The Hurwitz jurors explain their verdict for John Tierney.

John Stossel writes on the school choice wars.

NY City bans aluminum bats. WSJ has an editorial.

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• Pickings :: May 1, 2007 (PDF)

• Pickings :: May 1, 2007 (word)

Once again we see the Dems heading down the primrose path with their friends in the main stream media. The mutual admiration society never alerts Reid, Pelosi, et al to trouble ahead.

The first to break ranks from the MSM was David Broder whose piece was in last Thursday’s Pickings. Now Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic has a piece subtitled; Congressional leaders are illiterate on Iraq.

… What is going on here? There are two possibilities: First, Reid and Pelosi could be purposefully minimizing the stakes in Iraq. Or, second, they don’t know what they’re talking about. My guess is some combination of the two. Political maneuvering certainly contributes to the everyday pollution of Iraq discourse. But a lot of the pollution derives from legislators being functionally illiterate about the war over which Congress now intends to preside. …

Ed Morrissey, the proprietor of Captain’s Quarters has a number of illustrative posts.

First off, “Good News In Anbar.”

Just as the Democrats have raised the white flag on Iraq, the New York Times reports that the surge strategy has started paying off in Anbar. …

Then a post on Broder.

… David Broder took Democrats to task for allowing an incompetent like Harry Reid to rise to party leadership, pointing out several of the Senator’s foolish foibles as examples. This column sent the netroots into a tizzy, with many of them declaring Broder as irrelevant and past his expiration date. The Senate Democratic caucus even sent him a letter, signed by all 50 members, extolling the virtues of Reid and lauding his “straight talk” — apparently all endorsing the notion that we have lost the war in Iraq. …

Next a post on the possibility Sunni’s have killed the al Qaeda leader in Iraq.

The last is “Dude, Where’s My Bill?” Seems Bush wants to veto the appropriation bill, but he hasn’t got it yet. Why’s that? Because Nancy hasn’t read it. You can’t make it up!

Rich Lowry at NR writes about all this.

WSJ thinks there’s a chance we wouldn’t have beat the Japanese if Murtha had been around.

Mr. Murtha has good intentions, but he’s got it exactly wrong. If U.S. forces lack the equipment or training they need, it’s his job, as the chairman of the one subcommittee specifically responsible for originating defense appropriations, to make sure they get it.

If legislators really don’t believe we should continue in Iraq, they need to come clean, shut down the war–and accept the risks, and take responsibility for the consequences. Otherwise, they need to provide U.S. forces the means to carry out their missions.

Marty Peretz reacts to the NY Times Sunday piece on Anbar province.

… The kissing and dancing of the Democrats when they won their date-certain resolution was simply disgusting. Do they really want to have the terrorists win a free and murderous hand in Iraq?

NY Times with an Op Ed claiming congress should support the surge.

Ilya Somin at Volokh notes we might be ignoring the drug war in order to succeed in an Afghan operation.

He then posts on a May Day that would memorialize the millions of victims of communism.

Two years ago Pickings took the month to honor communism’s victims. We repeat one of our first posts. It is about Walter Duranty, Pulitzer Prize winning liar, who was the NY Times man in Moscow in the 1930′s.

Bret Stephens of WSJ has more on Wolfowitz.

A Corner post on same.

Power Line posts on a NY Sun story of a jobless conservative academic.

Mark Moyar doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.

Yet over five years, this conservative military and diplomatic historian applied for more than 150 tenure-track academic jobs, and most declined him a preliminary interview. During a search at University of Texas at El Paso in 2005, Mr. Moyar did not receive an interview for a job in American diplomatic history, but one scholar who did wrote her dissertation on “The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936.” At Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004, Mr. Moyar lost out to a candidate who had given a presentation on “promiscuous bathing” and “attire, hygiene and discourses of civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations.” …

Another environmental legend bites the dust. No longer is a Galapagos tortoise the last of his species. John Tierney who communed with the beast has the details.

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• April 30, 2007 (word)
• April 30, 2007 (pdf)

John Fund says campaign finance laws inhibit free speech.

Campaign finance laws are increasingly becoming a tool to suppress political speech, and the courts are finally waking up to the danger. …

A Brit pamphleteer says there are now 266 ways a government creep can enter homes in the UK.

In January I reported a bizarre drama that unfolded on a farm in the Forest of Dean, when 22 agents of the state – two state vets, eight trading standards officials and 12 policemen – descended without warning on the owners of a pet Jersey cow, Harriet, to kill her. On that occasion the officials, acting under EU law, were persuaded to back off until the case went to judicial review (and on March 23 Harriet, sadly, had to be put down after developing kidney problems). But the episode helped inspire a pamphlet published today by the Centre for Policy Studies entitled Crossing the Threshold: 266 ways in which the state can enter your home. …

AdamSmith honors tax freedom day, in the U. S., 32 days to go in England.

George Will writes in Newsweek about the dem campaign to bring back the fairness doctrine.

… Supreme Court justice and liberal icon William Douglas said: “The Fairness Doctrine has no place in our First Amendment regime. It puts the head of the camel inside the tent and enables administration after administration to toy with TV and radio.” The Reagan administration scrapped the doctrine because of its chilling effect on controversial speech, and because the scarcity rationale was becoming absurd. …

OK! It’s George Tenet’s turn. First Chris Hitchens.

… Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted. …

Roger Simon.

… This is the former DCI we’re talking about here. Is he a moron or a liar or both? …

The Captain; Ed Morrissey.

… Tenet has yet to see his book hit the stores, and it already has serious credibility issues. He misidentifies a Defense Department analyst as a “naval reservist” in an attempt to belittle her credentials. Tenet can’t seem to understand that Iran-Contra involved arming the mullahs, not the dissidents. It’s a great display of why the CIA seems to have been rather incompetent during the years of his leadership. If the boss can’t get his facts straight, how can he have advised two presidents with any degree of competence at all? …

The Captain finishes with a post on Carl Bernstein’s new Hillary book and leads us to his post on the subject in the HeadingRight blog.

WSJ editorial with more on Wolfowitz.

… Ms. Riza will also get her first hearing today in this kangaroo court, and she ought to blast them for the way the bank has violated its own rules in leaking details of her salary and damaged her career — all in the name of preventing a “conflict” that was no fault of her own. The real disgrace here isn’t Mr. Wolfowitz or Ms. Riza but the bank itself and its self-protecting staff and European directors. Their only “ethic” is to oust an American reformer so they can get back to running the foreign aid status quo.

Shorts from John Fund.

Michael Barone with a good gun-law summary.

If you have, or know, a child applying to college this year, this piece in the NY Times by a Harvard grad is for you.

Hugh Hewitt comments on declining newspaper readership.

Humor section starts with a Chi Trib column on the accents of Hillary and other pols.

… America might finally be ready for a white Yale Law School graduate from Park Ridge who is fluent in Southern Woman and various dialects, including Granny Clampett and Black Female Preacher. She commands many different voices — and uses them without blushing — as you may see for yourself on YouTube. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• April 29, 2007 (pdf)
• April 29, 2007 (word)

Mark Steyn’s Sun-Times column juxtaposes changing light bulbs and voting for defeat in Iraq.

… In Khartoum, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere, the world’s mischief-makers have reached their own conclusions about how much serious “work” America is prepared to do.

Charles Krauthammer gives his Yeltsin send-off.

… Yeltsin is not the first great revolutionary to have failed at building something new. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering what he did achieve. He brought down not just a party, a regime, and an empire, but an idea. Communism today survives only in the lunatic kingdom of North Korea, in Fidel Castro’s personal satrapy and in the minds of such political imbeciles as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who can sustain his socialist airs only as long as he sits on $65 oil.
Outside of college English departments, no sane person takes Marxism seriously. Certainly not Putin and his KGB cronies. In the end, Yeltsin succeeded only in midwifing Russia’s transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism with the briefest of stops for democracy—a far more modest advance than he (and we) had hoped, but still significant. And for which the Russian people—and the rest of the world spared the depredations of a malevolent empire—should forever be grateful.

Couple of good posts from Power Line.

WSJ and then Amity Shlaes at Bloomberg News with more on Wolfowitz. You will not believe the World Bank Ms. Shlaes shows us.

The Captain gets us up to date on some of Jimmy Carter’s benefactors. The Captain quotes Alan Dershowitz.

… Recent disclosures of Carter’s extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially, I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School, Rachael Lea Fish showed me the facts. …

And if you’re wondering what to think about Tenet’s book, the Captain posts on one of Tenet’s critics, Michael Scheuer.

… Scheuer offers this contemptuous evaluation of Tenet as CIA chief:
‘Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush — denigrating good intelligence to sate the former’s cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter’s Wilsonian militarism.’
And now Tenet can sell the American public what it wants to hear.

Shorts from National Review.

John Tierney gives us the verdict for Dr. Hurwitz.

Want to clean up the environment? You must industrialize.

While the modern environmental movement often portrays capitalist industrial societies as the world’s biggest pollution problem, Forbes notes something interesting about the top-25 cleanest cities in the world: Most of them are in wealthy industrialized democracies. Turns out, all that industrialization created wealth which, in turn, buys the things (mass transit, especially) and pays for the policies that create a cleaner environment. …

Taxes around the world from Greg Mankiw.