Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
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.