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• June 28 (word)
  

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National Review has an obit for Kurt Waldheim who was perfect for the United Nations.

Kurt Waldheim was one of the most despicable — and most despised — public figures in the West since 1945. His whole career was an exercise in craft and evasion. As secretary general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1982, he helped to put in place the standard approach of that body, which is above all to blame the United States for the world’s ills, and therefore to obstruct its foreign policy. He and the Soviet Union, needless to say, were mutually supportive in that critical stage of the Cold War. Under him too, the U.N. discovered that anti-Israeli agitation served to broaden the attack on the United States. In 1975, he did nothing to oppose the resolution that “Zionism is racism.” The following year, the Israelis rescued passengers on an aircraft hijacked to Entebbe, in Uganda. For Waldheim, this famous blow for freedom was “a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state.” Leaving office, he purloined a large amount of silver that he himself had commissioned for the U.N. Now that he has died at the age of 88, these stolen goods must form part of his estate. The shamelessness is characteristic. …

John Bolton, interviewed by the Jerusalem Post says he is very worried about Israel.

Gabriel Schoenfeld gives us two items. First he posts on bluffing as foolish strategy. Next he draws a line from Tenet’s memoirs to Leahy’s recent subpoena.

Is Tenet simply passing the buck by blaming Congress? I don’t think so, but since he does a lot of other buck-passing in his buck-passing memoir (see my analysis of it here), I can’t be sure. But Tenet has no particular reason to cover his tracks in this instance. For once, he had helped put in place an effective program.

If senior members of Congress of both parties rejected the idea of congressional action to amend FISA, the Judiciary Committee’s grandstanding now on this critical matter of national defense is even more disgraceful than it already appears.

Michael Barone with some quick analysis of the immigration vote today.

One other factor is important. The seats of eight of the 18 switchers are up in 2008: Coleman, Collins, Domenici, Harkin, McConnell, Pryor, Stevens, Warner. That leaves the Senate sharply split between those whose seats are up in 2008 and those whose seats are up in 2010 or 2012. The 2008 senators voted 24 to 9 against cloture, with Johnson not voting. The 2010 and 2012 senators voted 37 to 29 for cloture. That’s a pretty stark difference.

Shorts from National Review.

Paul Jacobs in Townhall picks up the two Americas theme. His is reminiscent of Michael Barone’s Hard and Soft America.

Could Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards actually be right about something? Not where to go to get a haircut, mind you, I mean about there being two Americas.

There is the vibrant America . . . and the stagnant one.

There is the America of ever-increasing wealth, innovation, creativity, of a dynamic economy, new jobs, new products and services. Choices galore. Information overload. The abundant work product of freedom.

And there is the politician’s America: The regulated America, the subsidized America, the earmarked America. The failing America. …

WSJ looks at gov run health care.

… Canadian doctors, once quiet on the issue of private health care, elected Brian Day as president of their national association. Dr. Day is a leading critic of Canadian medicare; he opened a private surgery hospital and then challenged the government to shut it down. “This is a country,” Dr. Day said by way of explanation, “in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.”

Market reforms are catching on in Britain, too. For six decades, its socialist Labour Party scoffed at the very idea of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization.” Today Labour favors privatization, promising to triple the number of private-sector surgical procedures provided within two years. …

Carpe Diem has a health care anecdote from France. It’s only an anecdote, but it is telling.

Hit & Run posts on eagles.

In 1967, there were fewer than 500 breeding pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 states. The national bird was in danger of disappearing from much of the United States.

Though the eagles were never in danger of extinction—the vast majority, over 100,000, were in Alaska and Canada—Americans understandably wanted to protect a national symbol.

Today, the bald eagle is doing well. On June 29 the bald eagle in the lower 48 states will be officially removed, or delisted, from the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Yet delisting the bald eagle from the ESA has been a decade-long process that shows how even the most well-intentioned policy can be overcome by politics and ulterior motives. …

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• June 27 (word)

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John Stossel was so good today, he gets to go first. He takes exception to a David Brooks column. Pickerhead likes internecine warfare on the right.

… In the true Hamiltonian spirit, Brooks also doesn’t trust the market — which means he doesn’t trust free, peaceful individuals and private property. He writes, “We Hamiltonians disagree with the limited government conservatives [I assume Brooks has libertarians like me in mind] because, on its own, the market is failing to supply enough human capital.”

Now David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way. He continues, “Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.”

Excuse me, but why is that the market’s fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition. …

Amity Shlaes of Bloomberg News, who appears here often, has written a book on the New Deal. The WSJ had an op-ed from her on the subject.

The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a true liberal — a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, “is why we love it so.”

Yet concerning Schlesinger’s own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger’s consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era — or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take a skeptical look at the New Deal as a whole has been considered downright immoral.

The real question about the 1930s is not whether it is wrong to scrutinize the New Deal. Rather, the question is why it has taken us all so long. Roosevelt did famously well by one measure, the political poll. He flunked by two other meters that we today know are critically important: the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of a primary goal: “to put people to work.” Unemployment stood at 20% in 1937, five years into the New Deal. As for the Dow, it did not come back to its 1929 level until the 1950s. …

Greg Mankiw has bits of John Updike’s New Yorker piece slamming Shlaes’ book.

During the day a few Iraq items showed up that give comfort to the brave souls hoping for success there.

IBD editorializes on the body count.

Day after day, Americans are treated to a never-ending, mind-numbing parade of statistics about the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about the terrorists.

One way the media distort Americans’ view of the ongoing war against terrorists is by focusing on just one side in the conflict: ours. Whether it’s the daily body count or alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, the public could be forgiven for thinking the U.S. is not only losing the war, but behaving badly in doing so.

But neither is true. This year, for instance, the U.S. has killed roughly 650 terrorists a month, according to published reports and Defense Department estimates. That compares with about 37 U.S. combat deaths per month, through May. …

VDH points out some of the things going our way in the Middle East.

Rich Lowry has a Corner post on Fred Kagan’s surge testimony today.

… Generals Petraeus and Odierno did not allocate the majority of the new combat power they received to Baghdad. Only 2 of the additional Army brigades went into the city. The other 3 Army brigades and the equivalent of a Marine regiment were deployed into the areas around Baghdad that our generals call the “Baghdad belts,” including Baqubah in Diyala province. The purpose of this deployment was not to clear-and-hold those areas, but to make possible the second phase of the operation that began on June 15. The purpose of this operation—Phantom Thunder—is to disrupt terrorist and militia networks and bases outside of Baghdad that have been feeding the violence within the city. Most of the car bomb and suicide bomb networks that have been supporting the al Qaeda surge since January are based in these belt areas …

Andrew Sullivan posts on Christianity and socialism.

He links to an item at Cato.

USA Today reports on a new study showing that charitable contributions are at an all-time high in America. Most interesting, the report also revealed that Americans are far more generous than supposedly compassionate Europeans. Indeed, no nation gives even half as much (as a share of income) as the United States. The French are among the worst misers, giving less than one-twelfth of what Americans donate, though it is unclear whether this is because they are taxed so much that there is no money left in their wallets or whether they assume that it is now the role of government to solve every social problem: …

Daily Telegraph, UK notes the dem fear of Fred Thompson.

Speaking of Thompson, his ideas of a federalist approach to malpractice reform are refreshing.

NY Times writes on Bernanke. Amazing how well the moron is doing. Roberts, Alito, Hank Paulson, Tony Snow, and now the pick for the Fed is looking inspired.

ALMOST nobody said it publicly, but when Ben S. Bernanke took over as chairman of the Federal Reserve a little more than one year ago, there was an undercurrent of speculation that he might be a little green. …

… financial markets have stopped second-guessing the Fed’s outlook. The federal funds futures market now indicates that investors are not expecting the Fed to cut rates this year. That is consistent with what Fed officials have been implying for quite a long time now.

“The markets have repriced to an economic and monetary policy outlook that is very much aligned with the Fed’s thinking,” said Richard Berner, North American economist at Morgan Stanley.

It is always possible that both the Fed and the markets are wrong; agreement is not the same thing as being right. But if nothing else, it suggests that Mr. Bernanke has attained his Street credibility.

New Editor noticed seven 40-year-old pitchers were scheduled to start today.

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•  June 26 (word)

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Joshua Muravchik who we most often see in Commentary or it’s blog Contentions, was in the WSJ with concerns Iran is making the mistake many authoritarian regimes make when they are toe to toe with the US. They see us as weak and irresolute.

… Democracies, it is now well established, do not go to war with each other. But they often get into wars with non-democracies. Overwhelmingly the non-democracy starts the war; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, it is the democratic side that wins. In other words, dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.

Today, this same dynamic is creating a moment of great danger. The radicals are becoming reckless, asserting themselves for little reason beyond the conviction that they can. They are very likely to overreach. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match–say a terrible terror attack from Gaza–could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, could the U.S. stay out?

With the Bush administration’s policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president’s freedom to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq–all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.

Michael Ledeen’s Corner post – same subject.

Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution has interesting Iran proposals.

First, the Bush administration should cut off Iranian access to gasoline. That may sound strange, but it could be done. Iran is a major producer of oil, but it has limited refinery capacity and imports almost half of the gasoline it needs. These imports arrive by tanker, so a blockade enforced by the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet would have a devastating and immediate effect on Iran’s economy, which is already plagued by high unemployment. It is hard to imagine the hard-line government surviving such an economic catastrophe.

Iran would no doubt see such a blockade as a provocative act. But that is precisely what Iran needs to see from the West in the light of its provocations toward us. Its military options against the U.S. Navy would be limited. And with the economy reeling under the weight of an embargo, Iran would hardly be in a position to engage the United States in a protracted war.

Second, the Bush administration should consider counterfeiting Iranian currency to further undermine the economy. This is not a weapon that should be used lightly, but in this case it is simply a tit-for-tat: Iran and its ally, Hezbollah, have been fingered for counterfeiting $100 bills. Counterfeiting Iranian currency would also provide a stern warning to other countries fond of counterfeiting U.S. currency.

The Bush administration has chosen to take a soft line toward Iran despite its critics calls for military action. This attractive middle course would allow the United States to avoid war but also to bring down one of the most dangerous governments in the world today.

Claudia Rosett was last in Pickings when she suggested the head of the World Bank should be John Bolton or Don Rumsfeld. Now she has a title for Tony Blair’s Mid-East venture – “War Envoy.”

As Tony Blair leaves the post of Prime Minister, the rumor is that he may be appointed “Peace Envoy” to the Middle East.

“Peace” — ? We are talking about the region that has been saturated for years in “peace talks” “land for peace” “seeds of peace” the “roadmap to peace” and especially the mother of all peace labels, the “peace process.” Hamas and Hezbollah snatch Israeli soldiers and attack Israeli civilians, Syria and Iran infiltrate weapons and terrorists into Iraq, the Saudis continue to funnel millions into their global network of kill-the-infidel madrassas. And in the midst of this we are invited to ponder along with the UN’s IAEA whether terrorist-spawning Iran — where terror trainees routinely chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” — simply wants nuclear energy for “peaceful uses.”

Ben Stein sends a mash note to WFB, Jr.

What would the world be like if there had been no William F. Buckley?

I can well recall even as a high schooler that Republicans were considered Midwestern stolid reactionaries with no ideas except to oppose generosity and kindness. I can well recall when being a conservative meant being without ideas and simply in opposition to those who had ideas. Or if conservatives had any ideas, they were just that them who had should continue to have and those who had not should rot.

Then came William F. Buckley, seemingly out of the forehead of Zeus.

Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune has criticisms for the anti-trust policies of W’s administration.

Thomas Sowell writes on the mistakes made when children are not taught our common culture.

Among the interesting people encountered by my wife and me, during some recent vacation travel, were a small group of adolescent boys from a Navajo reservation. They were being led on a bicycle tour by a couple of white men, one of whom was apparently their teacher on the reservation.

The Navajo youngsters were bright and cheerful lads, so I was surprised when someone asked them in what state Pittsburgh was located and none of them knew. Then they were offered a clue that it was in the same state as Philadelphia but they didn’t know where Philadelphia was either.

These Navajo boys seemed too bright not to have learned such things if they had been taught the basics. They also seemed too positive to be the kinds of kids who refused to learn.

The most likely explanation was that they were being taught other things, things considered “relevant” to their life and culture on the reservation. …

WSJ editorial notes last Saturday as the second anniversary of the infamous Kelo decision.

Melanie Phillips posts on global warming.

You know how we’re told sixty times per minute that man-made global warming is no longer just a theory but it’s now demonstrable fact, and that anyone who contradicts this is clinically insane because there’s a consensus of all scientists that it’s happening and only about 2.5 scientists on the entire planet disagree and they’re in the pay of Big Oil anyway so we can forget about them; and so the debate is TOTALLY OVER, says the BBC, which has been told that it is authoritatively by Very Important Scientists, so that the ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ BBC says that it no longer needs to give us a balanced argument about climate change because there just isn’t any reputable scientific opposition to the proven facts about seas rising and ice melting and hurricanes happening, all because of the human race and its foul and filthy habits of combustibles, cars and capitalism?

Well, read this remarkable article in Canada’s National Post …

Carpe Diem likes the idea of Hernando de Soto as chief economist at the World Bank.

The New Yorker writes on the new 9/11 monument in NJ.

France gave us the Statue of Liberty. Now Russia has given us “To the Struggle Against World Terrorism,” another XXL, in-a-class-of-its-own monument. If you have not seen it, that may be because you haven’t recently approached New York City by ship. For those coming in from the Atlantic, through the Narrows, the Russian gift now heaves into view well before Lady Liberty. That is intentional, according to Zurab Tsereteli, the Moscow-based sculptor who created the monument. “To the Struggle Against World Terrorism” stands at the end of a long, man-made peninsula in Bayonne, New Jersey, and it looks from a distance like a giant tea biscuit. As you get closer, however, you will begin to make out an immense, stainless-steel teardrop—the Tear of Grief—hanging in a jagged crack that runs down the middle of the main slab. That’s when you’ll know that you’re not looking at some ordinary bronze-sheathed, hundred-and-seventy-five-ton afternoon snack. …

Club for Growth shows up with another cool picture from the shuttle

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• June 25 (word)

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This is a good night. We have Mark Steyn, Gerard Baker, David Warren and Christopher Hitchens. Later, an extraordinary picture of an aurora borealis from the shuttle.

Mark Steyn was in National Review commenting on events in Gaza. He suggests Hamas should not have stolen Arafat’s Nobel Prize since…

…if Hamas had only waited a year or two, the Nobel wallahs would have been happy to give the lads a Peace Prize of their own. Sadly, Israel’s latest designated “partner in peace” was in too much of a hurry for their piece.

Gerard Baker, US Bureau chief for the London Times, visited the old sod. He’s concerned about the growth of government there.

… At root of this nonsense is, of course, the sheer scale of government. The reason you can’t be allowed to eat an egg is that, because of the lack of real choice in healthcare provision, you’re no longer responsible for the financial consequences of your own actions. If you get heart disease from too much cholesterol, the State, collectively known as the NHS, will have to treat you; and that costs the State more and more money so the State will have to stop you from doing it in the first place.

This is the self-perpetuating logic behind the unstoppable momentum of the expanding State. The bigger it grows, the more it intrudes into our lives, and the more it intrudes into our lives, the more dependent we become on it. Education is the same. Our great universities are struggling to compete in a global market because they are hamstrung by the State. They are dependent on central government for their funding; but that funding is insufficient to meet the needs of global competition. But because they need government money for what they do, they cannot break free.

Leviathan is now so large that, outside London, half the population is dependent – either through public sector jobs or benefits – on taxes. …

David Warren, another of our favorites, unfortunately sees Britain as the last bulwark against the EU bureaucracy.

… Democracy is not quite dead in Europe, but getting that way. The cumbersome, incompetent, ridiculously corrupt, incredibly arrogant, and unelected Euro-bureaucracy is already in a position to dictate trans-European policies that by-pass all national legislatures. There is nothing to stop, or even slow, the metastasis of micro-managing regulations that interfere with the daily lives and customs of half-a-billion souls.

While the European Parliament is nominally elected, it exists for show, and is effectively powerless against that bureaucracy, voting on only a tiny proportion of that bureaucracy’s diktats, and having no power whatever to initiate legislation.

An organization that began after the Second World War as a free-trade agreement has morphed into the world’s biggest nanny state. It has tremendous power, and no responsibilities: the prerogative of the harlot on a scale that is impossible for the citizen to imagine. …

Christopher Hitchens writes for Slate on our chances of pacifying “rage boy.”

If you follow the link, you will be treated to some scenes from the strenuous life of a professional Muslim protester in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar. Over the last few years, there have been innumerable opportunities for him to demonstrate his piety and his pissed-offness. And the cameras have been there for him every time. Is it a fatwah? Is it a copy of the Quran allegedly down the gurgler at Guantanamo? Is it some cartoon in Denmark? Time for Rage Boy to step in and for his visage to impress the rest of the world with the depth and strength of Islamist emotion. …

Nose On Your Face has a nifty “rage boy” riff.

John Lott writes for Tech Central about gas price legislation.

With gas prices around $3 a gallon, the Senate last week passed new energy legislation. It will ultimately go to conference with the House to work out differences between the Senate and House bills. But any bill that gets agreed upon seems certain to increase the swings in gas prices and leave the average American worse off. …

The New Editor says the jerk judge lost his case.

American Thinker with more NY Times news.

I have been covering the failure of Pinch Sulzberger’s business strategy, as documented in its latest earnings report, showing what the PR release called a “9.1% decline” in advertising revenue at the Times Media Group. But it now appears that this number might disguise as much as it shows, hiding a much more serious decline in print advertising revenue.

They also take off after the latest outrage from the Smithsonian.

There’s a cool picture going around the web of the aurora borealis seen from the shuttle.

Dilbert’s here with a post about his route to success.

And so it went, in ant-sized steps forward. Every pat on the back came with a kick in the nuts. I worked for ten years without a day off. During one particularly busy year, I held a full-time job at the phone company, wrote and drew Dilbert, and wrote a book called “The Dilbert Principle.” I didn’t sleep much that year. It was my first hard cover book. Yay!

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• June 24, 2007 (word)

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WSJ’s weekend interview is with Mario Vargas Llosa Peruvian novelist and part-time politician. He touches a subject that is often a Pickings theme.

… There is another disturbing current in Mr. Vargas Llosa’s work that is less often discussed–mistreatment of women, ranging from disrespect to outright violence. The abuses are particularly horrifying in “The Feast of the Goat,” a novel based on the life of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who terrorized the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Mr. Vargas Llosa describes traveling to the Dominican Republic and being stunned to hear stories of peasants offering their own daughters as “gifts” to the lustful tyrant. Trujillo and his sons, he tells me, could abuse any woman of any social class with absolute impunity. The situation in the Dominican Republic, which he refers to as a “laboratory of horrors,” may have tended toward the extreme, but it underscores a larger trend: “The woman is almost always the first victim of a dictatorship.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa discovered that this phenomenon was hardly limited to Latin America. “I went to Iraq after the invasion,” he tells me. “When I heard stories about the sons of Saddam Hussein, it seemed like I was in the Dominican Republic, hearing stories about the sons of Trujillo! That women would be taken from the street, put in automobiles and simply presented like objects. . . . The phenomenon was very similar, even with such different cultures and religions.” He concludes: “Brutality takes the same form in dictatorial regimes.”

Did this mean that Mr. Vargas Llosa supported the invasion of Iraq? “I was against it at the beginning,” he says. But then he went to Iraq and heard accounts of life under Saddam Hussein. “Because there has been so much opposition to the war, already one forgets that this was one of the most monstrous dictatorships that humanity has ever seen, comparable to that of Hitler, or Stalin.” He changed his mind about the invasion: “Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.” …

Instapundit posts about refugees from Zimbabwe fleeing to South Africa.

… the Mbeki government deserves these problems for its shameful complicity in Mugabe’s disastrous dictatorship. South Africa could have done good here, but chose a see-no-evil approach. Now the problems are crossing its border.

Mark was in the Orange County Register with comments on various reactions to the Rushdie knighthood.

… What easier way for the toothless old British lion, after the humiliations inflicted upon the Royal Navy sailors by their Iranian kidnappers, to show you’re still a player than by knighting Salman Rushdie for his “services to literature”? Given that his principal service to literature has been to introduce the word “fatwa” to the English language, one assumed that some characteristically cynical British civil servant had waved the knighthood through as a relatively cheap way of flipping the finger to the mullahs.

But no. It seems Her Majesty’s Government was taken entirely by surprise by the scenes of burning Union Jacks on the evening news.

Can that really be true? In a typically incompetent response, Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, issued one of those “obviously we’re sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding” statements in which she managed to imply that Rushdie had been honored as a representative of the Muslim community. He’s not. He’s an ex-Muslim. He’s a representative of the Muslim community’s willingness to kill you for trying to leave the Muslim community. But, locked into obsolescent multicultural identity-groupthink, Mrs. Beckett instinctively saw Rushdie as a member of a quaintly exotic minority rather than as a free-born individual.

This is where we came in two decades ago. We should have learned something by now. …

The Corner was busy this weekend. Michael Leeden and Andy McCarthy post on Iran. And Andy makes sport of Abbas’ refusal to negotiate with Hamas. Byron York on some of Edwards’ bad luck. Mark Steyn notes some hypocrisy in the anti-gun crowd. John Miller and Michael Rubin post on Virginia’s latest insult to her citizens.

John Fund with some shorts on whether Fred Thompson will get the girls, and how we might soon be able to get rid of one of the GOP’s most corrupt.

Michael Barone posts his guess about which party will be most damaged by a Bloomberg 3rd party run.

How serious is a Bloomberg candidacy? And who does he take votes away from? Speculation about these questions is interesting, but I think the answers depend on who the Republican and Democratic parties nominate.

Carpe Diem posts on corn and ethanol.

Reason Magazine on the competition between food and fuel. Who will be hurt?

“Rapid development of the corn-based ethanol industry is already having adverse impacts on food supplies and prices.” That’s the claim in a letter from leading food companies to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Headlines earlier this year blamed a tortilla shortage in Mexico on high U.S. corn prices and margarita drinkers must now worry about a future tequila shortfall because Mexican farmers are ripping up their agave fields to plant corn.

The ethanol rush is definitely on. There are now 110 ethanol plants operating in the United States and 74 more are on the way. The competition between food producers and fuel refiners has doubled corn prices in the past year from $2 to over $4 per bushel. At the same time, the price of groceries has gone up 3.9 percent in the last year, faster than the general inflation rate of 2.6 percent. Coincidence? …

Debra Saunders looks at the different ways global warming skeptics are smeared.

If you want to convince the world that an overwhelming majority of scientists believes in global warming, then start by ignoring scientists who are not true believers. First, establish lists of scientists with your approved position, then smear dissidents. Soon, up-and-coming scientists will be afraid to cross the rigid green line.

So, the Society of Environmental Journalists put together a guide on climate change that lists a number of publications on global warming, scientists and seven environmental groups, each with positive descriptions. Under the “Deniers, Dissenters and ‘Skeptics’” category are four listings — all negative. They suggest that these folk are venal, partisan and bad scientists, or all of the above. …

So how do they know what the average temperature is? If the numbers come from the government, would it surprise you to learn it’s poorly done? A new blog for us, Watts Up With That posts on one sensor.

… OK this picture comes in today from from surfacestations.org volunteer Steve Tiemeier, who visited the climate station of record located at the Urbana, Ohio Waste Water Treatment Plant …

American Thinker posts on the incredible shrinking NY Times.

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• June 21, 2007 (word)

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The father of the Iranian Revolution is – Jimmy Carter. Jerusalem Post has the details.

We just don’t get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called “dim-witted cowboy,” has created the entire mess.

The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.

Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter’s ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.” Carter’s Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, “Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure.” Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.” …

David Warren, in the Ottawa Citizen, has more to add about Carter’s fecklessness

…. There is an interesting piece in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, by the Turkish writer, Ahmet Altan, on the important and still under-appreciated role Turkey may play in the coming disorder. He says his country has reached a demographic tipping point. Turkish society is divided between two electorates, culturally distinct — rather as, I would observe, Western societies have increasingly divided between traditional, conservative people with religious beliefs; and urban, liberal, “secular,” essentially rootless people. Two electorates that are mysteries to each other. …

… if any American president could legitimately claim to have “lost” the Middle East, it was Jimmy Carter, who put the skids under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, enabling the Islamist revolution in Iran, nearly three decades ago. Beneath that, we might look back to the success of the OPEC cartel, in creating the oil crisis of 1973, which the West accepted numbly, while the U.S. was navel-gazing through Watergate, and cutting and running from Vietnam. …

That was the Middle East. How was Jimmy in the Far East? Contentions Gabriel Schoenfeld has part of an answer.

… Then there is our friend Taiwan, a threat to no one, a stable and law-abiding country, threatened by its giant Communist neighbor, which has been engaged in an intense military build-up across the Taiwan straits. In the 1970’s, feeling increasingly isolated and vulnerable in light of Richard Nixon’s opening to Communist China followed by Jimmy Carter’s abrupt severing of diplomatic relations, the Taiwanese government launched a covert nuclear-weapons development program.

Fascinating newly declassified documents, some of them top-secret and just put on-line by the National Security Archive, a private research group, show that the U.S., particularly under Carter, came down hard, leading Taiwan’s premier to complain that Washington was treating Taiwan “in a fashion which few other countries would tolerate.”

Whether the U.S. pushed too hard can be debated, but the pressure did achieve the desired result. Taiwan today does not have nuclear weapons.

Should we applaud? If so, only with one hand. Most of the criminals in this particular neighborhood now have the guns while one of its upstanding citizens was successfully disarmed.

The Australian has an op-ed by a Muslim woman who is offended by people always taking offense.

… I’m offended that every year, there are more women killed in Pakistan for allegedly violating their family’s honour than there are detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Muslims have rightly denounced the mistreatment of Gitmo prisoners. But where’s our outrage over the murder of many more Muslims at the hands of our own?

I’m offended that in April, mullahs at an extreme mosque in Pakistan issued a fatwa against hugging.

The country’s female tourism minister had embraced – or, depending on the account you follow, accepted a congratulatory pat from – her skydiving instructor after she successfully jumped in a French fundraiser for the victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. Clerics announced her act of touching another man to be “a great sin” and demanded she be fired.

I’m offended by their fatwa proclaiming that women should stay at home and remain covered at all times.

I’m offended that …

WSJ on how the internet helped end human trafficking in a Chinese province.

Instapundit posts on Congress at 14% approval. Perhaps finally the country has signed on to the wisdom of Mark Twain. “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Roger Simon on same poll.

Power Line too.

Power Line also posts on the failure of mainline protestant churches to condemn Hamas thuggery.

Jeff Jacoby celebrates the fights on the right.

… On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman .

In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity. …

… From school vouchers to stem cell research to racial preferences to torture, the American right bubbles with debate and disagreement, while the left, for all its talk about “diversity,” rarely seems to show any. As National Review’s Jonah Goldberg points out, that may be because “liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.”

Good arguments are no bad thing. They energize political parties and put convictions to the test. They illuminate the issues. They make people think. The debates on the right enliven the marketplace of ideas and enrich the democratic process. Some debates on the left would, too.

Maureen Dowd does Hillary.

Couple of posts from Carpe Diem show how ethanol foolishness has become embedded in our economy.

Power Line posts on the next climate problem – cooling.

WSJ does a story on Bill James, the statistician who helped bring a World Series win to Boston. Refreshingly modest, he brings interesting insight to baseball.

… “People think they understand how to win in baseball much more than they really do,” Mr. James says. This is true of the statisticians as much as it is of traditional scouts. While “Moneyball” treats scouts and analysts as at odds, Mr. James says he learns from the scouts all the time. “The scouts see a lot of things that I can’t see. And some of the things they see I have learned to see. But some of the things they see I can’t see at all. And I’m not suggesting it’s not real, it’s just that I can’t see it,” he says. “There is no reason for there to be a conflict. The conflict exists only when people think they know more than they do.”

After a lifetime of studying the game, Mr. James reckons he still has plenty to learn. The internationalization of the game is one source of new wisdom, he says. “One of the great things about the Cubans and the Japanese is that they develop their own traditions and a lot of the things we think they know they don’t necessarily buy into. Incorporating those other traditions is a source of wealth for baseball, and if we’re smart, we’ll do more of it.” …

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• June 20, 2007 (word)

• June 20, 2007 (pdf)

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

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

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

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

Chicago Tribune with a good editorial on earmarks.

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

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

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

Hillary Clinton is inevitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

John Stossel wishes Bill Gates knew something about economics.

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

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

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

What is Gates talking about?

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

George Will examines labor’s agenda.

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

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

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

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• June 19, 2007 (word)

• June 19, 2007 (pdf)

Fred Thompson does a number on Harry Reid.

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

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

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

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

Power Line on the Rushdie knighthood.

Michael Barone looks at a divided nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the million dollar pants suit from WSJ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WSJ gets in the act this weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• June 18, 2007 (word)

• June 18, 2007 (pdf)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Barone writes on the primary system.

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

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

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

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

Hugh Hewitt posts on the idiot Robin Wright in WaPo.

Two posts from the Captain on the Duke dénouement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• June 17, 2007 (word)

• June 17, 2007 (pdf)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerusalem Post reports a bit of Gaza irony.

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

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

Corner post on the pilfered prize.

Roger Simon says it’s poetic justice.

Neal Boortz with a Trent Lott post.

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

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

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

Kill the messenger. …

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

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

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

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

Helen Thomas reviews the Reagan Diaries and says nice things.

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

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

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

American Thinker on NY Times ad revenue.

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