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• May 31, 2007 (word)

• May 31, 2007 (pdf)

Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Mark Steyn covers Fred Thompson’s possible bid and the immigration bill.

Professor Bainbridge is happy with Thompson’s run. Here’s Pickerhead favorite bullet point;

Unlike say Hillary or Romney, he hasn’t been planning to run for President ever since s/he got elected President of the 9th Grade class and the senior football players ran his/her underwear up the flagpole, as illustrated by his famous comment that “After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.”

Samizdata’s Quote of the Day features Margaret Thatcher.

More great posts from Contentions.

Daniel Johnson on whether Mosques should be above the law.

Max Boot and the Pew Muslim-American survey.

And Joshua Muravchik on Assad’s dissing of Pelosi.

David Leonhardt of NY Times catches Lou Dobbs with his pants down. Not a pretty sight.

And Reason’s Hit & Run nails both Dobbs and Buchanan.

Walter Laqueur is the finest European historian you’ve never heard of. Gerard Baker reviews his latest for WSJ.

… Is it possible, then, that the writers who have spent the past few years predicting Europe’s collapse could be wrong? The short answer is: no. Even a corpse has been known to twitch once or twice before the rigor mortis sets in. The longer answer is provided by Walter Laqueur in “The Last Days of Europe,” one of the more persuasive in a long line of volumes by authors on both sides of the Atlantic chronicling Europe’s decline and foretelling its collapse.

Unlike the Euro-bashing polemics of a few of those authors, Mr. Laqueur’s short book is measured, even sympathetic. It is mercifully free of references to cheese-eating surrender monkeys and misplaced historical analogies to appeasement. The tone is one of resigned dismay rather than grave-stomping glee. This temperate quality makes the book’s theme–that Europe now faces potentially mortal challenges–all the more compelling. …

Another book you may want to read. Freedomnomics by John Lott. Details by Newmark’s Door.

Spammer gets nailed. I don’t care what Andrew Sullivan says. Let’s dream up torture.

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• May 30, 2007 (word)

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Don Boudreaux, econ prof at George Mason, and blogger at Café Hayek, has a brilliant op-ed in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review with an analogy that nicely illustrates The Lesson of Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson - “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups”

I once knew two World War II veterans. Both were fine men. One, call him Bill, was a navigator on a B-29 bomber based in the Pacific. The other, call him Joe, was an infantryman in Europe. Fortunately, neither was injured during the war. Although alike in many ways, a notable difference between Bill and Joe was that Bill spent lots of time happily recalling his bomber days while Joe steadfastly refused to speak of his wartime experiences.

This difference between Bill and Joe contains a lesson about politics.

I once asked Bill why he retained such fond memories of the war while Joe recoiled from such memories. Bill’s response was revealing: “Joe fought in face-to-face combat. He saw blood and death up close. But for me the war was great. I flew lots of missions over Japan and nearby islands and all I ever saw were little puffs of smoke on the ground where our bombs hit.”

Reflecting on Bill’s response, I realized that politicians and their bureaucratic appointees are much like bomber crews: They wreak much havoc but seldom experience firsthand the destructive consequences of their actions.

Pickerhead likes this metaphor; “The political class carpet-bombing the nation.”

Shorts on immigration.

Mark Steyn on W’s choice of words yesterday.

Post in Reason’s Hit & Run reveals the bureaucrat’s mind.

Instapundit with a great cure for the bureaucrat’s mind.

David Brooks takes one for the team. He read Al Gore’s new book so we won’t have to.

If you’re going to read Al Gore’s book, you’re going to have to steel yourself for a parade of sentences like the following:

“The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.” …

… Some great philosopher should write a book about people — and there are many of them — who flee from discussions of substance and try to turn them into discussions of process. Utterly at a loss when asked to talk about virtue and justice, they try to shift attention to technology and methods of communication. They imagine that by altering machines they can alter the fundamentals of behavior, or at least avoid the dark thickets of human nature.

If a philosopher did write such a book, it would help us understand Al Gore, and it would, as he would say, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Samizdata thinks Obama’s health care ideas are delusional.

Investor’s Business Daily continues the Jimmy Carter editorial series.

… When men of strength are presented with difficult problems, their responses are firm and decisive. Jimmy Carter spent four years as president of the United States responding with weakness.

Carter’s legacy is marked by a series of lame responses to historic challenges. His reputation as a failed president is well-deserved. From January 1977 to January 1981, Carter routinely let America down. …

John Stossel writes on trade and markets.

Some people hate me because I defend free markets. Once someone accosted me on a New York City street and said, “I hope you die soon.”

Why the hostility to commerce? What could be more benign than the freedom to trade with whomever you wish? …

Robert Samuelson, in dog bites man story, finds hypocrisy in DC gas on gas.

… Americans want to stop global warming. They want to cut oil imports. They want cheaper energy. Who will tell them that they can’t have it all? Not our “leaders.”

Thomas Sowell with part II of War of Words.

Nice post on the NY Times agenda from Jim Taranto.

Nice post on the Globe agenda from The New Editor.

Power Line rounds out our MSM hat-trick.

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• May 29, 2007 (word)

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More on the new French foreign minister. This time from Christopher Hitchens.

… I suppose there is some irony to be found in the fact that, while such a person takes command of the foreign policy of France, the only apparent test of liberalism in the United States is the speed with which it proposes to abandon the Arabs and Kurds of Iraq once again.

Volokh posts on attempts by New South Wales Islamic Council to interfere with Hirsi Ali’s visit to Australia.

 

Amnesty International has become an organ for the anti-American left. Joshua Muravchik posts in Contentions.

… Today, it may be that some U.S. actions in the war on terror are questionable or blameworthy. But such derogations are trivial in comparison with what is at issue between us and the terrorists. No one genuinely devoted to human rights can be blind to this. Those who ignore it are using the lingo of human rights to pursue some other agenda.

 

Before we start with today’s immigration debate offerings, the Captain jumps off a Richard Cohen column to a great post; Bush, the Liberal.

Richard Cohen makes the case that Republicans have noted for the last six years — that the Bush administration has not been conservative at all, but rather an exercise in big-government, liberal action. Calling Bush a “neo-liberal”, Cohen hits some convincing points in his argument that Bush resembles a cross between Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson …

 

And he has a gracious send-off for Cindy Sheehan.

 

Mark Steyn on immigration from National Review.

 

The immigration debate is joined by someone who should know a few things. He is Kris W. Kobach, professor of law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. As counsel to the U.S. Attorney General, 2001-03, he was the attorney general’s chief adviser on immigration law. His op-ed piece was in the NY Post.

 

Kris Kobach’s article spawned Corner posts from Krikorian, Steyn, Derbyshire, and Levin.

 

While at the Corner you’ll want to read this moving post by Michael Ledeen.

 

Pickerhead admitted to a weakness for Richardson’s candidacy. John Fund says nothing doing.

 

Thomas Sowell shows how words are important.

… The Constitution says that government can take private property for “public use” if it compensates the owner. The Supreme Court changed that to mean that the government could take private property just to turn over to others, so long as they called it a “public purpose” like “redevelopment.”

 

Politicians are experts at rhetoric, especially if that is all that is needed to justify seizing your home and turning it over to someone else who will build something that pays more taxes. …

 

Carpe Diem posts on the failures of Canadian health care.

 

Andrew Sullivan posts on the unending sickness of Michael Moore.

 

A WSJ review of Michael Barone’s “Our First Revolution.”

… Everything that flowed from the Whig victory of 1688–limited government, the Bank of England, tradable national debt, triennial Parliaments, mercantilism, free enterprise, an aggressively anti-French foreign policy, the union with Scotland, eventually the Hanoverian Succession and the Industrial Revolution–combined to make the English-speaking peoples powerful. Mr. Barone proves beyond doubt how much the Glorious Revolution inspired the Founding Fathers to launch their own, with Virginia gentlemen farmers seeing themselves as the heirs of England’s revolutionary aristocrats. The 1689 Bill of Rights in Britain thus unquestionably paved the way to the American Bill of Rights of 1791.

 

To comprehend how America’s birth pangs came about–and why its title deeds were drawn up in the way they were–it is therefore crucial to understand the ideals and passions of 1688. The very best introduction is this well-researched, well-written, thought-provoking book.

 

The Spine finds a cartoon.

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• May 28, 2007 (word)

• May 28, 2007 (pdf)

The Corner starts us off with the photo of the day.

A Manchester Guardian columnist helps us understand the surprise of Sarkozy’s choice for foreign minister. Perhaps some of the sleaze and shame of Chirac will be cleansed.

… French intellectuals are trying to recover their poise. I asked Bernard-Henri Levy what he made of his old friend’s transformation from leader of the 1968 generation to statesman. The usually confident philosopher looked uncharacteristically uncertain. He wasn’t sure how much room for manoeuvre the attention-grabbing Sarkozy would grant his old friend. (‘Sarkozy always likes to be at the centre of the photo,’ as Levy nicely put it.) But he was sure that Kouchner would use what time he had to bring aid to the victims of the near-genocide in Darfur, and may succeed.

The same thought is occurring to others watching the diplomatic revolution in Paris. Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, is delighted that Kouchner’s first official act was to say the world has a duty to stop the crimes against humanity in Darfur. So too was Angela Merkel and the Bush administration, which faces public pressure on Darfur far greater than any European government has to cope with. (The Janjaweed’s slaughter of Africans has become the great international cause of the black churches.) …

IBD’s Jimmy Carter series covers his weakness for any dictator of the left.

… In 1982, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, perfectly summed up the Carter administration:

“While Carter was president there occurred a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, southern Africa and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas.”

Had Reagan not beaten Carter in 1980, there’s no telling how far the unraveling of freedom would have gone.

Instead of Reagan going to Berlin to tell Gorbachev to tear down that wall, Carter in his second term might have had to go to Moscow to negotiate our capitulation in the Cold War.

Mark Steyn starts the immigration debate today with his Sun-Times column. He has some amusing items first and then makes us think.

…To embed lawbreaking at the heart of American immigration and to allow it to metastasize through the wider society was perverse and debilitating. Most Americans see this differently from Washington and Wall Street. They’re pro-immigration but they don’t regard it as a mere technicality, a piece of government paper: after all, feeling American is central to their own identity. They rightly revile the cheap contempt the rushed Senate bill demonstrates not just for transparent, honest small-r republican government but for the privilege of being American. Happy Memorial Day.

Michael Barone weighs in too.

… The advocates of this new bill must convince voters that their plan will work better. They have a decent case to make, such as their call for an identification card with biometric information. Technology has made this more feasible than it was 20 years ago, and the phobia against a national identification card has been weaker since 9/11. Advocates must now convince the critics that such a card would make sanctions against employers enforceable. They must also show that border security will improve: that the 700-mile fence mandated by Congress last fall will actually be built; that unmanned aerial vehicles will reduce illegal crossings; that the larger Border Patrol will be effective; and that the apparatus of state will prove strong enough to prevail against market forces.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that voters aren’t dead set against legalizing current illegals. But they must be convinced first that this time, border security is for real.

Power Line has a series of posts on the new Hillary books.

Marty Peretz reacts to NY Times piece on another friend of Bill. Dick Morris wrote about this dude couple of days ago.

George Will notes one of Institute for Justice’s latest clients, a Minneapolis cabbie. You’ll never believe what a group of government’s rent seekers wants here.

… When the incumbent taxi industry inveigled the city government into creating the cartel, this was a textbook example of rent-seeking — getting government to confer advantages on an economic faction in order to disadvantage actual or potential competitors. If the cartel’s argument about a “deregulatory taking” were to prevail, modern government — the regulatory state — would be controlled by a leftward-clicking ratchet: Governments could never deregulate, never undo the damage that they enable rent-seekers to do.

By challenging his adopted country to honor its principles of economic liberty and limited government, Paucar, assisted by the local chapter of the libertarian Institute for Justice, is giving a timely demonstration of this fact: Some immigrants, with their acute understanding of why America beckons, refresh our national vigor. It would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar comes to America, a native-born American rent-seeker who has been corrupted by today’s entitlement mentality would leave.

Post from Samizdata illuminates the criminal behavior behind protectionism.

WSJ editorial on the latest gas price foolishness from congress.

… No one seriously believes this law will lower prices for consumers, but you can bet that brigades of lawyers will earn fat fees sorting out what exactly is meant by “unreasonably,” “gross disparity” and “excessive.” …

Quote of the Week from AdamSmith. The Smithies also post on road pricing in England. Coming to a New York City near you.

The NY Times has an intelligent article on gas prices and the complaints against oil companies.

… But is that price gouging?

Because the demand for gasoline is what economists call inelastic, which means that people cannot quickly reduce their consumption when prices rise sharply, abrupt supply shortages lead to steep price increases without any immediate decline in sales.

The most common reason for such increases in gasoline prices is a steep increase in the price of crude oil. But crude oil prices are set in global markets, and even the biggest American or European oil companies are modest players compared with state-controlled oil companies in the Persian Gulf, Russia and Latin America.

Even the mighty Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which defines itself as a competition-limiting cartel, has only a limited grip on world oil prices. OPEC countries watched helplessly as oil prices plunged in the early 1980s and remained mired below $20 a barrel for most years (excluding the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991) through the mid-1990s.

It seems hard to believe today, but world oil prices briefly drifted below $11 a barrel in 1998. Not surprisingly, few lawmakers in Congress took that opportunity to denounce “unconscionably excessive” price declines. ..

Jim Taranto had a wonderful take on the MIT administrator who lost her job because of résumé fraud.

… Ostensibly Ms. Jones was forced out because she committed fraud, but one can make a strong case that MIT had to get rid of her to avoid acknowledging that there is something fraudulent at the heart of American higher education. “If she had done a miserable job as dean, MIT might have been more forgiving,” the leftist author Barbara Ehrenreich writes in an essay for the Nation, “but her very success has to be threatening to an institution of higher learning: What good are educational credentials anyway?”

Ms. Ehrenreich argues that “there are ways in which the higher education industry is becoming a racket: Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000. . . . In the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A résumé without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen applications.” …

Joke of the Day from AdamSmith.

Dean Barnett at Hugh’s site has a gracious offer to the creator of the best photo-shop of the month. Don’t miss this.

Nose on Your Face with related photo-shop.

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• Pickings :: May 27, 2007 (word)

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Joseph Skelly, history prof and army reserve officer, writes about Memorial Day in National Review.

… let us honor those who have defended our right to self-government with their last breaths. We can do so on Memorial Day by attending to their families. We have a moral obligation to comfort those who bear the brunt of the suffering, pain, and grief of our age. Let us reach out to them, with humility.

One day, history will judge our decisions to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has already judged the democratic fallen — as champions not just of our time, but of all time. The same holds true for their families. Perhaps this Memorial Day, as our nation honors the sacrifices of their sons and daughters, they can find consolation in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, who so poignantly said in his Second Inaugural, as our bitter Civil War consumed all in its path, “the Almighty has his own purposes.”

Mark Steyn, an immigrant to our country, tells the story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

… Henry Steele Commager called it “the one great song to come out of the Civil War, the one great song ever written in America.”

Whether or not that’s true, most of us understand it has a depth and a power beyond most formal national songs. When John F Kennedy was assassinated, Judy Garland insisted on singing it on her TV show – the producers weren’t happy about it, and one sneered that nobody would give a damn about Kennedy in a month’s time. But it’s an extraordinary performance. Little more than a year later, it was played at the state funeral of Winston Churchill at St Paul’s Cathedral. Among those singing it was the Queen. She sang it again in public, again at St Paul’s, for the second time in her life at the service of remembrance in London three days after September 11th 2001. That day, she also broke with precedent and for the first time sang another country’s national anthem – “The Star-Spangled Banner”. But it was Julia Ward Howe’s words that echoed most powerfully that morning as they have done since she wrote them in her bedroom in Washington 140 years earlier:

As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.

Back to the “I” bill. Yuval Levin has a thoughtful post in Contentions.

… In the current issue of COMMENTARY, I discuss why reforms to the legal immigration system (together with improvements in our approach to the assimilation of immigrants) matter more than what we do about the status of illegal immigrants, and I try to show how such reforms can help us remain a society that welcomes and appreciates immigrants. But these reforms are clearly secondary in the bill.

Washington has to take this issue up in the way the American public understands the problem—as a problem of respect for the law and of our future as a nation that can successfully integrate newcomers. Instead, the President and Congress have presented it in the most divisive way possible—treating the lawbreaker, not the law, as in need of protection.

A bill that included only the border-protection and legal-immigration reforms of the new proposal could be a unifying measure. But by assigning top priority to normalization, the new bill will only exacerbate concerns about immigration—and about the ability of our leaders to understand the public’s concerns. It has done serious damage to the prospects for meaningful change.

Instapundit says one of the big troubles with the I bill is the shabby way that people who want to come here legally are treated. He brings back one of his posts from January 2006 to explain. It is always worth remembering the bureaucrats who will be tasked with enforcing this new legislation. Since they are not equal to the job of preventing illegals, they justify their existence by making life miserable for people who try to follow the law.

Thomas Sowell writes his third piece on the bill.

… One of the remarkable aspects of the proposed immigration “reform” is its provisions for cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Employers are to be punished for not detecting and excluding illegal immigrants, when the government itself is derelict in doing so.

Employers not only lack expertise in law enforcement, they can be sued for “discrimination” by any of the armies of lawyers who make such lawsuits their lucrative specialty.

But no penalties are likely to be enforced against state and local politicians who openly declare “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants. Officials sworn to uphold the law instead forbid the police to report the illegal status of immigrants to federal officials when these illegals are arrested for other crimes.

This is perfectly consistent for a bill that seeks above all to solve politicians’ problems, not the country’s.

Michael Gerson, former W speech writer uses his bi-weekly WaPo column to talk it up.

Power Line doesn’t like Gerson’s attitude.

John Fund gives us a peak at two new Hillary books.

Jeff Jacoby starts off the Carter section.

… It took Americans only four years to realize what a disaster Carter had been; they booted him out in 1980 by a 44-state landslide. …

IBD’s fourth Carter editorial.

… the former peanut farmer, who, on taking office, declared that advancing “human rights” was among his highest priorities. The shah was one of his first targets. As he’s done with our terror-war detainees in Guantanamo, Carter accused the Shah of torturing some 3,000 “political” prisoners. He chastised the shah for his human rights record and engineered the withdrawal of American support.

The irony here is that when Khomeini, a former Muslim exile in Paris, overthrew the shah in February 1979, many of the 3,000 were executed by the ayatollah’s firing squads along with 20,000 pro-Western Iranians.

According to “The Real Jimmy Carter,” a book by Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute: “Kho-meini’s regime executed more people in its first year in power than the Shah’s Savak had allegedly killed in the previous 25 years.” …

Power Line and Roger Simon with some campaign shorts.

Three good posts from Jim Taranto.

Something new on London’s skyline. WSJ with details.

Three great posts from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem.

NewsBiscuit says not only can’t Prince Harry serve in Iraq, he can’t serve in the royal family either.

Prince Harry will not be allowed to take up his position in the Royal Family, it was finally announced today. A spokesman for Buckingham Palace told a press conference that Harry’s inclusion would represent a ‘significantly increased risk’ to the future and respectability of the monarchy. …

Scrappleface explains Barack’s and Hillary’s votes against funds for the war.

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• Pickings :: May 24, 2007 (word)

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In the personal blogs of writers, we get to watch the development of their ideas. Victor Davis Hanson’s recent post on the growing European sympathy for American ideas is a good example.

For five years we have been lectured that George Bush ruined the trans-Atlantic relationship. But now we see pro-American governments in both France and Germany, and a radical change in attitudes from Denmark to Holland to Italy. …

Perfect illustration of same comes from the Jerusalem Post.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy called Wednesday for sanctions on Iran to be tightened if the country does not adhere to the West’s demands to cease its nuclear agenda, Israel Radio reported. …

Immigration bill time. David Brooks is first. He likes it.

… The United States is the Harvard of the world. Millions long to get in. Yet has this country set up an admissions system that encourages hard work, responsibility and competition? No. Under our current immigration system, most people get into the U.S. through criminality, nepotism or luck. The current system does almost nothing to encourage good behavior or maximize the nation’s supply of human capital.

Which is why the immigration deal reached in the Senate last week is, on balance, a good thing. …

George Will is next. He doesn’t.

… In 1986, when there probably were 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants, Americans accepted an amnesty because they were promised that border control would promptly follow. Today the 12 million illegal immigrants, 60 percent of whom have been here five or more years, are as numerous as Pennsylvanians; 44 states have populations smaller than 12 million. Deporting the 12 million would require police resources and methods from which the nation would rightly flinch. So, why not leave bad enough alone? …

WSJ likes it.

IBD has the third Jimmy Carter editorial.

John Fund writes on Thompson’s use of the internet.

… Former Senator Fred Thompson, who is still mulling over whether to join the GOP race and to date hasn’t raised a penny in campaign funds, is the latest to pioneer a novel technique for harnessing the new medium. He inspired hundreds of comments on blogs this week by posting a short, 39-second video response to a debate challenge from lefty filmmaker Michael Moore over the propriety of Mr. Moore’s recent trip to Cuba. …

Instapundit excerpts good Examiner editorial.

Joshua Muravchik posts on Hillary’s many positions.

Much has already been said about Hillary Clinton’s shifting positions on Iraq. Having once criticized President Bush for not sending enough troops, she now has announced her intent to vote to block war funding. But Hillary’s zigzagging is nothing new. It has been the stamp of her last fifteen years. …

New Republic reviews Bob Shrum’s new book. The 0 for 8 dem campaign consultant has a knife out for Edwards.

Political junkies have been awaiting the new memoir by Bob Shrum, the famed consultant to a string of Democratic presidential candidates, including Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. After compiling an 0-8 record in presidential campaigns, Shrum has taken something of a beating from the political and media establishment of late, and he has been conspicuously absent from the 2008 campaign thus far. But it seems he’s determined to play a role after all, as is clear from his forthcoming book, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner.

One nice thing you can say about Jimmy Carter. He doesn’t hang around with the type of people Bill Clinton enjoys. Dick Morris has the details.

Looks like they’ve found Chirac’s cash stash.

LONG-STANDING rumours that the former French president Jacques Chirac holds a secret multi-million-euro bank account in Japan appear to have been confirmed by files seized from the home of a senior spy. Papers seized by two investigating magistrates from General Philippe Rondot, a former head of the DGSE, France’s intelligence service, show Mr Chirac opened an account in the mid-1990s at Tokyo Sowa Bank, credited with the equivalent of £30 million. It is not known where the money came from, nor whether it is connected to various kick-back scandals to which Mr Chirac’s name has been linked over the past decade.

Last year, Mr Chirac “categorically denied” having a bank account in Japan. …

Cafe Hayek posts on price-gouging legislation.

Carpe Diem says gas prices are not even close to an all-time high.

Last night Dilbert tasked the Great Blog Brain for ideas to improve his restaurants. He posts on some of the answers.

NewsBiscuit announces the launch of Google Gossip.

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• Pickings :: May 23, 2007 (word)
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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.

Download Pickings

• Pickings :: May 22, 2007 (word)

• Pickings :: May 22, 2007 (pdf)

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. …

Download Pickings:

• Pickings :: May 21, 2007 (word)
• Pickings :: May 21, 2007 (pdf)

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.”

Download Pickings:

• Pickings :: May 20, 2007 (word)

• Pickings :: May 20, 2007 (pdf)

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.