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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.