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• June 14, 2007 (word)

• June 14, 2007 (pdf)

WSJ editors react to the 4th Circuit decision celebrated by the left this week.

On Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that al Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can’t be detained as an enemy combatant. The press corps is reporting — no, shouting, cheering, doing somersaults — that this is further proof that Bush Administration detainee policies are doomed to legal oblivion.

Well, here’s a wager: This decision is the outlier and will be overturned on appeal, while most of the Administration’s legal antiterror architecture will survive past January 20, 2009. Any takers?

There’s no doubt that the 2-1 Fourth Circuit ruling in Al-Marri v. Wright is remarkable and dangerous in its sweeping judicial claims. Judges Diane Motz and Roger Gregory, both Bill Clinton nominees, ruled that a person like al-Marri does not qualify as an enemy combatant, because the U.S. cannot be “at war” with a private group like al Qaeda. …

One of the above judges, Roger Gregory got a recess appointment from Bill Clinton which expired upon W’s election. As a courtesy, and in an effort to improve the tone in DC, Bush reappointed him. As Clare Booth Luce would say, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Marty Peretz posts on Gaza.

Wednesday 24 people were killed — no, not in Iraq — in the Gaza Strip, including two UN aid workers. And the day is not yet done. …

Ralph Peters says look at Gaza if you want to know what happen in Iraq if we leave too soon.

WONDER what Iraq would look like if we left tomorrow? Take a look at Gaza today. Then imagine a situation a thousand times worse.

We need to stop making politically correct excuses. Arab civilization is in collapse. Extremes dominate, either through dictatorship or anarchy. Thanks to their dysfunctional values and antique social structures, Arab states can’t govern themselves decently.

We gave them a chance in Iraq. Israel “gave back” the Gaza Strip to let the Palestinians build a model state. Arabs seized those opportunities to butcher each other.

The barbarity in Gaza has become so grotesque that not even the media’s apologists for terror can ignore it (especially since Islamist fanatics began to target journalists).

Over the weekend, Hamas gangbangers-for-Allah grabbed a Fatah functionary and dropped him from the roof of a high-rise to check out the law of gravity (the only law that still obtains in Gaza). Tit-for-tat, Fatah gunmen grabbed a Hamas capo and gave him the same treatment. …

Andy Ferguson noticed Al Gore’s Lincoln quote has some problems.

… The quote is a favorite of liberal bloggers, which is probably how Gore came across it. And as a description of how many on the left see the country seven years into their Bush nightmare, it’s pretty much perfect.

Too perfect, in fact. If you’re familiar with Lincoln’s distinctive way of expressing himself, you’ll hear the false notes the passage strikes. …

Don Boudreaux writes on the environmental creed.

Careful observers often and correctly note that, for many of its adherents, environmentalism is a religion.

Too many environmentalists disregard inconvenient truths that would undermine their faith that calamities are percolating just over the horizon. It might well be that humans’ “footprint” on the Earth is larger than ever; it might even be true that this larger footprint creates some health risks for us modern humans that our pre-industrial ancestors never encountered.

But it is undeniably true that we denizens of industrial, market economies live far better and far healthier than did any our pre-industrial ancestors. …

Adam Smith posts on a discovery in a Japanese lab.

In a brilliant breakthrough, Tokyo University researchers have modified a rice strain so that it vaccinates against cholera. It can be orally administered – you just eat the rice. It’s cheap to mass produce, can be stored at room temperature for over a year, and is completely safe. …

And on smoking bans in England.

You know the old saw, “they don’t make’m like they use to.” Pickerhead says it’s true, they make them better. Slate explains.

My wife and I ditched our dull late-model sedans a few years ago. We adopted a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as our only car, driven once or twice a week from our downtown San Francisco home. I blame the Avanti’s seductive powers for our infatuation. It looks futuristic even today—Jude Law drove one in the space-age fantasy film Gattaca—and the car is loaded with luxury options.

When we took our first spin, it was like yachting down the boulevard. Its engine is free of the emissions controls that hamper modern motors, so you feel a direct connection between your foot on the gas and the tires on the pavement. Without today’s federal mandates on its construction, the Avanti sports chrome bumpers fore and aft instead of crumple zones. It serves a spacious, wraparound view to passengers, unobstructed by headrests, airbags, or complicated belts. The car’s body, designed by the legendary Raymond Loewy, flips the bird to modern crash tests, while its interior is designed to resemble an airplane cockpit full of overheard switches—try that nowadays. Every grocery outing became a pleasure cruise. As many a passerby reminded us, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore. But several years with this rolling museum piece has taught me the truth: Even the best old cars sucked. …

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• June 13, 2007 (word)

• June 13, 2007 (pdf)

Yesterday’s David Warren selection started thus;

The Prague Democracy and Security Conference was cleverly scheduled to overlap with the G8 conference in Heiligenndam, this week. Politics is generally a rat’s game, but the Prague meeting was more worth attending. I was delighted that President Bush chose to be there, and be seen, before proceeding to the company of the great posturing buffoons in Germany. I wish Stephen Harper had also been there.

It was, however, entirely appropriate for Bush, who has been aptly described by Richard Perle as, “A dissident in his own administration.” At this point, fairly late in his presidency, it would seem that he has failed to mobilize the American electorate behind the “Bush doctrine,” as declared so eloquently in the months after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington; and failed even to mobilize the U.S. bureaucracy, which has consistently resisted direct presidential orders throughout both his terms, and in such cases as the CIA and State Department, often sabotaged them. …

Pickings did a poor job of explaining the Prague Conference, and so today we open up with a couple of items from Contentions by Joshua Muravchik. First he posts on Bush’s speech.

… In rattling off the names of five “dissidents who couldn’t join us because they are being unjustly imprisoned or held,” Bush mentioned figures in Belarus, Burma, Cuba, and Vietnam, all of which are easy to talk about. Then he named a tough one: Ayman Nour, the Egyptian presidential candidate currently languishing in jail. No country has been seen as more of a weather vane of U.S. determination about democracy promotion than Egypt, where Washington has so many other diplomatic interests. During Secretary Rice’s last visit to Egypt, her failure to mention Nour was widely read as a sign of American retreat. But if retreat it is, the Commander in Chief apparently hasn’t gotten the message. …

Then Joe Lieberman’s.

… Another speech worthy of attention was given by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a man who, before our eyes, grows stronger as the going gets tougher. His keynote speech to the opening dinner was an easy occasion for platitudes. He might have heaped praise on Natan Sharansky and Václav Havel, topped it off with some bromides about freedom, and taken his bow to much applause. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld follows up on his post about secrets leaked by the LA Times.

Bret Stephens devoted his weekly in WSJ to Prague.

Couple of items on Dan Rather and Katie Couric from Roger Simon and The Captain.

Michael Barone noticed the polls show the Dems static and the GOP in a lot of flux.

George Will comments on Harry Reid’s tenure as senate majority leader.

We have a lot of Camille Paglia’s latest for Salon. She starts writing about the chances Gore will run.

… Despite numerous polls claiming that registered Democrats like myself are happy with their current field of presidential contenders, the Gore boomlet betrays subterranean tremors of doubt. After two major televised debates by both parties, only a Pollyanna on helium would believe that any of the top-tier Democrats will definitely be able to defeat a leading Republican like Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani.

As the Bush presidency dissolves under the rain of tragic bulletins from the Iraq debacle, too many Democrats seem to believe that their party will simply sail into the White House in 2008. But the conservative grass roots are in open rebellion against the waffling Washington Republican establishment, most recently because of its bungling of the incendiary immigration issue. Campaigning against the rapidly deflating Bush zeppelin is a dead end. …

She has some Hillary thoughts.

… For many Democrats like me, however, Hillary’s history of prevarication, rigidity and quasi-divine sense of election is profoundly unsettling. And who exactly would be running the government — that indefatigable buttinski, Bill Clinton? Spare us! …

And then unloads on Al.

… What exactly were Gore’s achievements in his eight years as vice president? What steps did he take at the time to shape public policy on global warming? What did the Clinton administration do to win U.S. adoption of the Kyoto accords? (Answer: next to nothing.) What political role did Gore play in the world after leaving office? There are some mighty big blanks in Gore’s record.

As a global warming agnostic, I dislike the way that Gore’s preachy, apocalyptic fundamentalism has fomented an atmosphere of hysteria around this issue and potentially compromised the long-term credibility of environmentalism. Democrats who long for his return as the anti-Hillary may not realize how Gore has become a risible cartoon character for much of the country at large. Anyone who listens to talk radio has been repeatedly regaled by clips of Gore bizarrely going off the deep end at one speech or another. And Gore, far worse than Hillary, is the Phantom of a Thousand Accents — telegraphing his supercilious condescension to whatever audience he’s trying to manipulate. …

Which brings us to another Contentions post. This time on global warm………zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

… In this case, the direct evidence doesn’t support the theory of anthropogenic climate change, so proponents have clouded the issue by seizing on unrelated phenomena in a more or less desperate and blatantly opportunistic way. “Global warming” has reflexively been invoked as the explanation for everything from the devastating 2005 hurricane season (but not the barely noticeable 2006 hurricane season) to the recent proliferation of stray cats. For about two years now, it’s been possible to predict that any report of a noticeable change in the environment or in plant or animal behavior will now be chalked up to global warming, with the implication that we must therefore take some sort of radical action to atone for the sin of carbon dioxide emission. …

John Stossel says property owners won one in Illinois.

Walter Williams on school choice.

… The solution to America’s education problems is not more money, despite the claims of the education establishment. Instead, it’s the introduction of competition that could be achieved through school choice. Most people agree there should be public financing of education, but there is absolutely no case to be made for public production of education. We agree there should be public financing of F-22 fighters, but that doesn’t mean a case can be made for setting up a government F-22 factory.

A school choice system, in the form of school vouchers or tuition tax credits, would go a long way toward providing the competition necessary to introduce accountability and quality into American education. What’s wrong with parents having the right, along with the means, to enroll their children in schools of their choice?

The Institute for Justice got honorable mention in John Stossel’s column. WaPo obit says they lost one of their favorite clients.

The Airbus 350 has sold 13 to almost 600 for the Boeing 787.

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• June 12, 2007 (word)

• June 12, 2007 (pdf)

During the week in June 2004 when we celebrated the life of Ronald Reagan, one of the most moving offerings was written by Mark Steyn. He brought it back for a look.

… Yakob Ravin, a Ukrainian émigré who in the summer of 1997 happened to be strolling with his grandson in Armand Hammer Park near Reagan’s California home. They chanced to see the former President, out taking a walk. Mr Ravin went over and asked if he could take a picture of the boy and the President. When they got back home to Ohio, it appeared in the local newspaper, The Toledo Blade.

Ronald Reagan was three years into the decade-long twilight of his illness, and unable to recognize most of his colleagues from the Washington days. But Mr Ravin wanted to express his appreciation. “Mr President,” he said, “thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the Communist empire.”

And somewhere deep within there was a flicker of recognition. “Yes,” said the old man, “that is my job.”
Yes, that was his job.

Power Line with some nifty posts. First on Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. Then on the Dem leadership in congress.

Debra Saunders writes on the 1999 launch of a federal anti-drug program to drive up the street price of cocaine. How’s that working out?

… “Can you tell me any other product that has gone down in price in the last few years?” Curtis asked — and you can’t include technological products that change. Think milk or bread or beef.

Those consumer prices are not falling. It takes a Washington-born government program — designed to drive up the price of cocaine — to drive down the cost of cocaine. The one thing drug warriors never demand of an American anti-drug program is that it actually work.

Speaking of useless government, Instapundit with a PorkBusters update.

David Warren, our favorite Canadian says there’s “no price too high for human liberty.”

IBD’s last in the 10-part Carter series.

… It’s tempting to think of the Carter Administration’s seemingly endless series of catastrophes as an aberration brought on by a yokel peanut farmer. In fact, the former Georgia governor’s thinking as president strongly resembles that of Democrats today: …

Ed Koch, our favorite Dem mayor deconstructs a NY Times editorial page.

… When I read the Times editorial page on June 6th, I was deeply disappointed. Why? Because on one day, in the same issue, three of the four Times editorials struck me as mean-spirited, lacking balance and just plain dumb. …

… The Times is so blinded by its fury on the Iraq war and its hatred of President Bush that its editorial board can’t think straight …

Stuart Taylor in ‘let’s beat up the NY Times day’ writes on another editorial. This is somewhat long, but if you have the time, it is one of a long line of Times items that display the paper’s bias.

Same theme but mercifully short from American Thinker.

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• June 11, 2007 (word)

• June 11, 2007 (pdf)

Gabriel Schoenfeld in Contentions wonders about the cost of a LA Times leak.

Leaks of vital U.S. intelligence secrets can get Americans killed. They can also place Americans in a great deal of danger.

As of yesterday, Iran has seized four Iranian-Americans and charged them with spying. …

… Do these developments have anything to do with a 2002 leak about a highly classified U.S. intelligence program? …

John Fund notes the 20th anniversary of Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech.

Rip Van Winkle has nothing on Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker who just emerged from a coma that began 19 years ago–just prior to the collapse of communism in his country. His take on how the world around him has changed beyond recognition comes at an appropriate time. It was 20 years ago tomorrow that Ronald Reagan electrified millions behind the Iron Curtain by standing in front of the Berlin Wall demanding: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” …

Couple of “I” bill items. First from Mark Steyn who was hiding out at the Orange County Register.

… Back in the real world, far from those senators living in the nonshadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America’s immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room.

Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That’s not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. Under political pressure to “bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,” the immigration bureaucracy will rubber-stamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There’s never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency. …

Then John Podhoretz, who is particularly taken with the way the “I” bill was dispatched.

… The takedown of this bill is a template for future actions against major pieces of legislation. And like so many templates for action these days, it was made possible by the Internet. Here’s how.

This was a “comprehensive” bill, designed to thoroughly “take care” of a thorny problem. It sought to address every important issue relating to immigration – border and employer enforcement, guest workers, legalization and the means by which immigrants can become citizens.

The bill runs more than 400 pages. In its many sections are many innovations and many revisions of existing law. For almost any lay person outside of government, it might as well be written in Urdu – so indecipherable is the drafting language.

That is by design. These bills aren’t written by the senators who negotiate them, but by the staffers who work for the senators. And since the bill seeks to “reform” existing laws, a lot of it simply makes reference to those laws and says Word A should be changed to Word B.

All of this shields the actual meaning of the legislation from the public, which must rely only on the general summaries of the legislation from politicians.

There was almost no way in the pre-Web era to piece together the actual provisions of reform legislation before it became law. …

Instapundit with a Porkbusters update. William Jefferson edition.

Marty Peretz with some interesting posts on grad ceremonies.

John Tierney posts on natural and synthetic pesticides.

… Dr. Ames was one of the early heroes of environmentalism. He invented the widely used Ames Test, which is a quick way to screen for potential carcinogens by seeing if a chemical causes mutations in bacteria. After he discovered that Tris, a flame-retardant in children’s pajamas, caused mutations in the Ames Test, he helped environmentalists three decades ago in their successful campaign to ban Tris — one of the early victories against synthetic chemicals.

But Dr. Ames began rethinking this war against synthetic chemicals after thousands of chemicals had been subjected to his test. He noticed that plenty of natural chemicals flunked the Ames test. He and Dr. Gold took a systematic look at the chemicals that had been tested on rodents. They found that about half of natural chemicals tested positive for carcinogencity, the same proportion as the synthetic chemicals. Fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices contained their own pesticides that caused cancer in rodents. …

The Captain posts on the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Turns out their membership has fallen to 1,700.

For a group that only has 1,700 members, it has an inordinate amount of political clout. The fact that roughly 25 people paid $3 million and represented the majority of its financing should raise some eyebrows. It comes to an average contribution of $120,000 each for last year alone.

Who are these fundraisers and what do they want? …

According to Hot Air the head of NASA has come out of the global warming closet.

Mike Griffin was a breath of fresh air when he took the reins at NASA in 2005. Coming out of the aerospace industry, Griffin seemed like the perfect choice to head up an agency that was struggling to find its way after the Columbia disaster and the lackluster leadership of administrator Sean O’Keefe.

Earlier this week, Griffin should have earned even more respect from anyone paying attention to NASA. He expressed doubt about the global warming “consensus”. He has since expressed regret, not for saying what he believes, but for wading into a political debate.

Alex Cockburn with more global warming stuff from the conspiratorial left.

… The Achilles’ heel of the computer models, the cornerstone of CO2 fearmongering, is their failure to deal with water. As vapor, it’s a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 by a factor of twenty, yet models have proven incapable of dealing with it. The global water cycle is complicated, with at least as much unknown as is known. Water starts by evaporating from oceans, rivers, lakes and moist ground, enters the atmosphere as water vapor, condenses into clouds and precipitates as rain or snow. Each step is influenced by temperature and each water form has an enormous impact on global heat processes. Clouds have a huge, inaccurately quantified effect on heat received from the sun. Water on the Earth’s surface has different effects on the retention of the sun’s heat, depending on whether it’s liquid, which is quite absorbent; ice, which is reflective; or snow, which is more reflective than ice. Such factors cause huge swings in the Earth’s heat balance and interact in ways that are beyond the ability of computer climate models to predict. …

Carpe Diem likes a recent George Will column.

In the humor section Dilbert posts on the greatest entrepreneur ever.

I was reading a story about Iraqi insurgents, and how they often wear ski masks to avoid identification. This made me wonder, who was the genius entrepreneur who decided to sell ski masks in the desert? Man, talk about your “outside the box” thinking. Be honest, how many of you, at the start of the Iraq war, thought “They’re going to need a lot of ski gear”?

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June 10 (word)

June 10, 2007 (pdf)

Charles Krauthammer entertains us writing about the never-ending presidential campaign.

… As a columnist whose job it is to chart every jot and tittle of these campaigns, every teapot tempest that history will remember for not one second, I curse election years. Now I have to curse the year before as well. But for all its bizarre meanderings, the endless campaign serves critical purposes.

The first two — testing the candidates’ managerial and consensus-building skills — are undeniably useful. But like most Americans, I find it is the third — the gratuitous humiliation of our would-be kings — that makes it all worthwhile.

Gerard Baker tries to explain the campaign to his readers at The London Times. He maintains it’s the Dems to lose and shows how they might.

… So sorry is the Republican condition that there’s little doubt now, even 18 months out, that the 2008 presidential election is for the Democrats to lose. The only reason politics remains interesting is that in the past the Democrats have demonstrated an impressive capacity to stoop to the challenge – and somehow contrive to lose it. Can they possibly do so again?

The political conditions are uniquely favourable to them. In any ordinary circumstances, for a party to win a third straight presidential term in office, as the Republicans would have to do next year, is remarkably difficult.

In the past 50 years only George Bush Sr did it, after eight years of Ronald Reagan in 1988. Change for its own sake is not only the faddish prerogative of voters but democracy’s vital means of renewing itself. You don’t have to subscribe fully to Lord Acton’s dictum to believe that kicking the buggers out every few years is the best way to safeguard the constitution. …

The Corner likes having the French return to sanity.

Clive Crook in the National Journal attempts to make sense of health care proposals.

… A quite different reform strategy — which I think is preferable on the merits, as well as politically more feasible — is to retain the distinctively American aspects of this system, notably its reliance on competing private providers, while in key respects strengthening, not attenuating, the power of market forces. The crux of this idea is to give consumers real choices. That in turn can happen only if employers are largely taken out of the health insurance decision.

Employers do not insure your house or your car; why should they insure your health? No reason, except that a huge tax subsidy encourages them to do so. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld in Contentions on the Sulzberger’s “internal consultants” at NY Times.

Working at the New York Times would seem to be one of the most glamorous jobs imaginable, what with consorting with legendary editors, rendezvousing with anonymous sources, occasionally making headlines and history, and bathing 24/7 in a jacuzzi of prestige.

But that is only the appearance. The reality is something else. Because what the public does not know, but Timesmen know all too well, is that if one works at the Times, one has to contend with what are known to all, and dreaded by all, as the Internal Consultants. …

National Review shorts.

WSJ on history of economic time.

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture — but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.

Then — just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations — people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.

Here’s a cautionary tale for flyers. A little over two months ago, travelers returning to Chicago from Jamaica had a two day “flight from hell.” The Chicago Tribune has a lengthy story today. We have part of it, and a link if you wish to read more.

… Jacobs braced for a delay but never imagined that over the next two days he and about 140 passengers would be stranded in a foreign airport as a cascade of mishaps—first a lack of common parts, then no mechanics and finally having to wait for a rescue plane from Chicago—turned Flight 1073 into an “irregular operation,” airline jargon for a flight from hell.

While statistically rare, such miscues are illustrative of how far U.S. airlines have stretched resources—planes, employees and infrastructure—in attempts to regain profitability. “You have no slack in the system,” aviation expert Darryl Jenkins said. “Trying to recover [from disruptions] takes days. It’s the worst it’s ever been.”

Flying has never been so fraught with possible misery. …

Learn why doctors are lining up to move to Texas.

… a report by David Hendricks in the San Antonio Express-News (posted on the newspaper’s website on June 1) should be read by all. It offered hard data on the changes that have occurred in Texas since voters in 2003 gave the thumbs up to a state proposition capping lawsuit awards in medical malpractice cases. …

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• June 7, 2007 (word)

• June 7, 2007 (pdf)

Nat Hentoff makes the case for getting out of the UN.

Mark Steyn was hanging out at the Western Standard where he’s covering another trial. Seems an immigrant to Canada takes offense at swearing allegiance to the crown, and he has some novel legal theories. You get where this is going? You think our legal system can be tedious, get a load of this.

… Mr. Roach is an immigrant to this country, a legal resident but not yet a citizen. And the reason he’s not a citizen is because he’s disinclined to take his oath of allegiance. And the reason he won’t take his oath is because he doesn’t want to swear allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen. And the reason he doesn’t want to swear allegiance to the Queen is because he and his fellow blacks “were colonized as a people by the British throne, and we were enslaved as a people by the British throne and, to me, taking an oath to the monarch of Great Britain, without any disrespect to the Queen herself as a person, is like asking a Holocaust survivor to take an oath to a descendant of Hitler.”

No doubt. But how many Holocaust survivors would voluntarily emigrate to a state ruled by Adolf Hitler Jr.? …

Jeff Jacoby’s been watching the debates. So, we don’t have to. Is This A Great County Or What? He says there are differences between the two major parties.

… On topics large and small — gays in the military, making English the official US language, using nuclear weapons to keep Iran from getting the bomb, even the proper role for former presidents — the differences between the parties came through, stark and unmistakable. If this week’s debates are a preview of coming attractions, the 2008 campaign will be very divisive, and deeply consequential.

Bob Novak says John Edwards is getting unpopular with the dem professionals.

The dynamic performance by John Edwards in last Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate, assailing his competitors for the nomination, got high marks from political reporters, Republican politicians and left-wing activists. But not from the Democratic establishment. Once their great hope for the future, Edwards now is massively unpopular among party regulars who neither like nor trust him.

Number nine in the IBD editorial series on Jimmy Carter.

Of all the errors Jimmy Carter committed, none has earned him more well-justified scorn than his handling of the 1970s energy crisis. True enough, he didn’t cause it. But he did make it much, much worse.

It might come as a surprise, but we agree with those who say it’s unfair to tar former President Carter with having caused the 1970s oil crisis. He didn’t.

Marty Peretz comments on Jimmy’s fund raising at Harvard.

Al Gore’s new faith.

Samizdata with a couple of good posts.

Episode 86 of the Sopranos is Sunday night. David Remnick’s New Yorker piece celebrates the last of the series.

The same snail shells used as jewelry and/or money, have shown up in 70,000 to 80,000 year old sites in South Africa. Morocco, and Israel. The Economist has the story.

… The shells are peculiar because they seem to have been fashioned into beads. They bear traces of red ochre, a pigment. They have been purposefully perforated, presumably to be strung together. And friction marks indicated that they did, indeed, once form part of a necklace or bracelet. …

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• June 6, 2007 (word)

• June 6, 2007 (pdf)

Mark Steyn reports on the Conrad Black trial for the NY Sun. He’s been in the courtroom for three months and Pickerhead has often wondered why. His comments on our legal system might make the effort worthwhile.

… Point one: I’m amazed at how few trials there are. The federal courthouse isn’t one of these 19th century deals with pillars, it’s a Mies van der Rohe office block built in the Sixties and I’m in a courtroom on the 12th floor. There are two other courtrooms on the same corridor and gazillions more on the floors above and no trials are going on in any of them but ours. If you want to get away from the media hubbub of the Black trial and find a quiet corner to snore the afternoon away, the best place to go is one of the other courtrooms. You could hunt buffalo on the vast empty plains of these courts. There are no trials taking place. Trial by jury, which is one of the most fundamental rights extending back through the U.S. Constitution to English Common Law and the Roman Empire and the Athenian Republic, is in terminal decline in this country. …

While Mark’s been in Chicago, demographic concerns show up in Contentions as Gordon Chang worries about the effects of China’s policies.

… This massive experiment in social engineering has caused a rapidly aging China—it is often said that the country will grow old before it becomes rich—and has skewed demographics: there are now about 118 boys for every 100 girls, and in a decade there will be about 30 million excess males. Many have speculated about the social consequences of such a demographic imbalance. Some believe that the overabundance of young men—“bare branches,” in popular terminology—will lead the country to war, while others merely see increased prostitution, trafficking in females, and assorted other criminal activity. Whatever happens, it’s clear that none of the policy’s byproducts is socially desirable.

If demography is destiny, then China is in for a disturbing future. And it is clear that the one-child policy is destabilizing the present. Population control through repression, as the Rongxian and Bobai disturbances suggest, is completely unsustainable.

It’s timely to repeat a Victor Davis Hanson column from last August.

… For about the last half-century, globalization has passed most of the recalcitrant Middle East by — economically, socially and politically. The result is that there are now few inventions and little science emanating from the Islamic world — but a great deal of poverty, tyranny and violence. And rather than make the necessary structural changes that might end cultural impediments to progress and modernity — such as tribalism, patriarchy, gender apartheid, polygamy, autocracy, statism and fundamentalism — too many Middle Easterners have preferred to embrace the reactionary past and the cult of victimization.

At one time or another, they have welcomed all the bankrupt ideologies that traditionally blame others for prior self-induced failure: fascism, communism, Baathism, Pan-Arabism and, most recently, Islamic fundamentalism. …

That makes a good set-up for a post from the Captain.

Megan Stack writes a fascinating account of her experiences as a woman in Saudi Arabia, stationed there for the last four years by the Los Angeles Times. If anyone wonders what being a woman in Saudi Arabia means, Stack gives a firsthand account of the demeaning and oppressive existence that all women — Western or otherwise — endure in the Kingdom. …

 

Roger Simon posts on the same LA Times article.

IBD with the latest Carter editorial.

Great column on Rachel Carson by John Tierney.

For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it.

If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin.

He didn’t have Ms. Carson’s literary flair, but his science has held up much better. He didn’t make Ms. Carson’s fundamental mistake, which is evident in the opening sentence of her book: …

Michael Barone with interesting GOP numbers.

John Stossel’s weekly wonders why profit is a dirty word.

Quote of the day is from Mencken. Spotted by Samizdata.

Good Walter Williams column.

… Liberals love to talk about this or that human right, such as a right to health care, food or housing. That’s a perverse usage of the term “right.” A right, such as a right to free speech, imposes no obligation on another, except that of non-interference. The so-called right to health care, food or housing, whether a person can afford it or not, is something entirely different; it does impose an obligation on another. If one person has a right to something he didn’t produce, simultaneously and of necessity it means that some other person does not have right to something he did produce. That’s because, since there’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy, in order for government to give one American a dollar, it must, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. I’d like to hear the moral argument for taking what belongs to one person to give to another person. …

You’ll love how Teddy’s friends in congress are going to help his fight against the wind-farm. From Classical Values.

There is a move afoot in Congress to require new wind turbine project developers to do environmental impact statements on potential bird kills by turbines and to monitor wind sites for bird deaths. …

Remember our favorite from Mark Twain is, “There is no native American criminal class, except for congress.” That would explain Nancy Pelosi’s son’s new job. Country Store with details.

Dilbert, Scrappleface, and Borowitz are here. www.pickerhead.com

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• June 5, 2007 (word)

• June 5, 2007 (pdf)

On the 40th anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War, we have a couple of items.

Bret Stephens in WSJ wants to upset conventional wisdom.

Richard Chesnoff in NY Daily News.

Forty years ago tomorrow, Israel wielded its terrible swift sword against the attack-poised armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan – and saved the Jewish state from destruction.

It was the Six-Day War, and the fledgling state’s stunning victory over enemies determined to annihilate it galvanized the world and changed the Mideast map – perhaps forever.

I was one of the handful of foreign correspondents who reached the front during that monumentally brief battle. I was in Sinai on the first day, then returned north and managed to enter Gaza just as that benighted city was falling to Israel’s largely civilian tank corps. Then it was on to Jerusalem.

Like anyone who believes in the justice of Israel’s existence, I was deeply relieved by its victory on June 10. I had heard the bloodthirsty Arab threats of a new Holocaust. I had seen the “Kill the Jews” posters in Gaza schools. I had seen the bunkers and mass graves that Israel had been forced to dig in expectation of invasion, if not defeat. …

Daniel Johnson in Contentions has something to add to yesterday’s items on Israel.

Last week’s vote by the British Universities and Colleges Union admonishing its members to “consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions” marks a new stage in the concerted campaign to put Israel into a kind of cultural quarantine. This boycott and others like it are not merely aimed at forcing a change of that country’s policy towards the Palestinians—they are explicitly intended to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state. By branding Israel an apartheid state, these academics are denying its right to exist in anything like its present form. …

… It is Britain, not Israel, that is most harmed by this vandalism. These academics are cutting themselves off from the mainstream of Jewish intellectual life—from one of the sources of their own civilization. When Alan Bloom conjured the image of the closing of the American mind, he meant just such self-inflicted amnesia. Only this time, it is the British mind that is closing.

Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters notes a new Brit health regulation.

Many people who want to “fix” the American health-care system want a single-payor model in which the government controls the distribution of benefits, as opposed to private-sector health insurers and providers. They claim that only government control will result in equitable distribution. However, given the intimate nature of health care, such control opens the door to intrusions on personal choice unseen in American history.

Don’t believe me? Ask British smokers, who have been threatened with losing ground in seeking care: …

Along the same vein, Cafe Hayek posts on trans-fat regs in Montgomery County, MD.

And Carpe Diem posts near the subject.

IBD with the seventh Carter editorial. This time on his “human rights” record.

… In the Soviet Union, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko laughed at Carter’s human rights record behind his back, but knew how to manipulate Carter in public. Gromyko browbeat Carter, telling him the USSR’s health care and housing trumped America’s. “I couldn’t argue,” Carter winced in his book, “Living Faith.” “We each had a definition of human rights, and differences like this must be recognized and understood.”

Carter’s inability to distinguish intentions from results through his “human rights” policy has led to more human rights violations around the world than any dictator could have done on his own.

But he didn’t just undermine human rights; he undermined the U.S. and its legitimate security interests. His legacy is the spread of tyranny, making him the U.S.’ worst president for human rights.

With Al Gore and the Fairness Doctrine, Neal Boortz starts off today’s huge Gore section. Neal segues into a post on global warming on Neptune. No SUVs there!

Ann Althouse says Gore’s too good for us.

Thomas Mitchell, editor of Las Vegas reviews Gore’s new book.

You have to give Al Gore credit for one thing: Truth in labeling.

His new book, “The Assault on Reason,” is precisely that — a relentless assault on reason, as well as science, history, Republicans, news media, the president, corporations, the wealthy and any ignoramuses who do not fall in line with his soft-core socialist friends.

It is a 320-page daisy-chain of platitudes, sophomoric clichés punctuated by vaguely relevant quotations ripped straight from the pages of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” and smatterings of pseudoscientific citations to prop up lame contentions.

The New Editor takes a turn.

Time for the Gore/Unabomber quiz. Twelve quotes. You have to guess if the quote is by Al Gore or the Unabomber.

The Captain links to a Guardian, UK piece on the corruption in the carbon offset biz.

Do you like your irony so thick that it drips? The Guardian has a nice, juicy slice of it for you today. The main organization used by Europe to trade carbon credits has mismanaged the process so badly that they have created an increase in greenhouse-gas emissions as a result: …

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• June 4, 2007 (word)

• June 4, 2007 (pdf)

Israel’s treatment by the left commentariat in the West, is the subject of our first offerings

Eugene Volokh notes university lecturers in UK calling for a boycott.

Also from Volokh, David Bernstein comments on the South Africa analogy.

Advocates of boycotts of Israel and Israelis, such as the British boycott Eugene blogs below, often draw an analogy between Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and South African apartheid. And just as South Africa was boycotted, they argue, so should Israel be boycotted.

For reasons that should be obvious to any objective observer, I find the South Africa analogy to be both absurd and obscene. However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Israel’s occupation of the lands it captured in 1967 is indeed morally analogous to South African apartheid.

The relevant analogy would then have to be as follows. …

Speaking of double standards, Samizdata wonders how the world would have reacted if Israel was abducting BBC reporters.

Power Line posts on the latest from Ahmadinejad and segues to a David Horovitz essay in the Jerusalem Post.

That essay is here.

A two-hour drive, at most, from here, in a lawless land, extortionists are holding a British journalist captive to try and delegitimize my country.

The kidnapping of the BBC’s Alan Johnston in Gaza, and now the broadcast of his taped denunciation of the fact of Israel’s existence, are only one small part of a wider campaign. And it is working.

The international community is being drip-fed the toxic assertion that, were it not for Israel, ours would be a peaceful world, a harmonious community of nations, living in tranquility alongside each other, respecting differences and working out disagreements in a spirit of compromise. If it were not for Israel, the Original Sin, the bone in the Islamic throat.

In Alan Johnston’s Britain, the campaign is proving particularly effective. So much so that the union that represents his own profession, the National Union of Journalists, along with many academics, members of the clergy and numerous other opinion-shapers, now subscribe to this notion of Israel as prime irritant, prompter of terrorism. …

It’s spreading to this country too. Marty Peretz spots a lying obit in NY Times.

When you don’t know history, or forget it, you confabulate the past. Sometimes in grand dimensions. And sometimes in smaller ones. But even small distortions tell big lies. And that’s what, I regret to say, is what The New York Times has done… again. …

John Fund reports from the Richmond Fred Thompson appearance.

The Corner and Hugh Hewitt post on the dem debate.

… The weirdest moment: A five minute discussion of stopping the genocide in Darfur by boycotting the Beijing Olympics? Huh? And Chris Dodd called that going “too far.” This is not exactly a strong and decisive bunch.

Ben Stein – gas-price gouging laws.

… It sounds good, but in fact it simply destroys the free market. It takes away the genius of the free market, which is its ability to respond to shortages or surpluses through the price system. It punishes one specific class of people in the economy, people in the energy business, while anyone else — plumbers, electricians, lawyers, doctors — can raise prices any time he wishes. This is an outrageous attack on the mechanism that has served America brilliantly. The price system. It also is an attack on the liberties of citizens. What if drivers want to pay more for gasoline rather than wait in line or face shortages? …

Samizdata posts on what totalitarianism will look like in UK and us too.

… We are headed for a different kind of totalitarianism than that of Stalin or Hitler or Mao, but a total state really is what a great many people have in mind for us all. They seek a sort of ‘smiley face fascism’ in which all interactions are regulated in the name of preventing sexism, promoting health, and defending the environment. The excuses will not invoke the Glory of the Nation or the Proletariat or the Volk or the King or the Flag or any of those old fashioned tools for tyrants, but rather it will be “for our own good”, “for the Planet”, “for the whales”, “for the children”, “for the disabled” or “for equality”.

But if they get their way it will be quite, quite totalitarian.

Adam Smith.org goes through one day’s paper for examples.

Jimmy Carter and Chavez by IBD editors.

Someone with relatives in Cuba gives the lie to Michael Moore.

Scrappleface and Dilbert are in the humor section.

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• June 3, 2007 (word)

• June 3, 2007 (pdf)

Ralph Peters has little good to say about any side in the Iraq debate. Says we have been out-thought by the Islamists. Perhaps, but what other strategy did they have except the one they adopted?

… Since Saddam’s statue fell, we’ve tried one grunt-level technique after another, hoping tactics would produce a strategy. That’s backward. First, you establish your strategy. Then you select the tactics that can achieve it.

Oh, we had nebulous goals regarding democracy and peace in the Middle East. But goals aren’t a strategy. And neither the Bush administration nor the Pentagon ever laid down a coherent and comprehensive strategic plan to get us from A through B to C. Even if the current troop surge works, it gets us only to B – with C still undefined after more than four years.

The terrorists have done a better job. We sent them reeling in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq stunned them, but when we reached Baghdad we turned out to be the dog that caught the fire truck. …

Andy McCarthy on the significance of the JFK plot.

War is about breaking the enemy’s will. Having laid bare the sorry state of our brains and our guts, jihadists are now zeroing in on the will’s final piece: our hearts.

That is the central lesson to be gleaned from Saturday’s news that four Muslim men have been charged with plotting to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, and with it much of Queens. …

Charles Krauthammer gets to lead the immigration debate today with Get in Line Einstein.

Corner posts carry on the debate. Mark Steyn entertains first. Rick Brookhiser asks a good question and Iain Murray answers.

Laura Ingraham had a good debate with Linda Chavez. A post here provides a link. Laura criticizes Linda’s column claiming many of the “I” bill opponents had racist motives.

Roger Simon posts on a Fareed Zakaria column with claims similar to Linda Chavez’s.

Jim Miller in Tech Central gives the “free market case against the bill.”

Dean Barnett posts on his vindication.

Cato tells us what the Spelling Bee tells us about home-schoolers.

A home-schooler, 13-year-old Evan O’Dorney, is once again the winner of the Scripps National [sic] Spelling Bee. In fact, home schoolers took fully one third of the top 15 spots in the Bee, utterly out of proportion with their share (about 1/40th) of the U.S. student population. Another two spots were taken by private school students, and three were taken by Canadian public school students (hence the “sic,” above — we’ve yet to anschluss the Canucks so far as I can recall).

That left five spots for U.S. public school students — the same number taken by home schoolers whom they outnumber by 50 million or so kids. And it isn’t as though the home-schoolers are fabulously wealthy and able to hire special tutors. The winner’s father is a subway train operator and his mother oversees his education. …

We haven’t heard from Linda Seebach for awhile. She reviews a documentary on the lefties controlling lots of campuses.

Adam Smith’s birthday.

Carpe Diem posts on Exxon’s taxes.

Cafe Hayek says prices are important signals.

Club for Growth with interesting post on Chinese opinions of our TV.

Division of Labour says ethanol is raising the price of beer.

Adam Smith says it’s tax-freedom day in UK. And posts on an important new book.

Ross Clark is at his usual best in How to Label a Goat, which as the subtitle says, documents The Silly Rules and Regulations that are Strangling Britain. …

Dilbert’s here with some wisdom. He doesn’t make perfect the enemy of the good.

NewsBiscuit story about a football (soccer) ref who’s hated by his family too.