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• July 31 Word

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Michael Barone has nice news that affects us all. Pickerhead thinks we all need some good news.

… there’s good news here. The number of traffic fatalities is going down—down 2 percent from 2005 to 2006. The relevant figure here is the number of traffic fatalities per 1 million miles driven. In 2006, that number was 1.42, the lowest number in American history, according to NHTSA’s 2006 Traffic Safety Annual Assessment. …

… There were 37,819 traffic fatalities, nearly 90 percent of the 2006 figure, as long ago as 1937, and the rate per million miles of travel was 14.00, nearly 10 times the rate for 2006. The peak years for traffic fatalities were 1969, 1972, and 1973, with 55,043, 55,600, and 55,096. But a lot more people were driving then than in 1937, and the fatalities per million miles driven had fallen to 5.18, 4.41, and 4.20, respectively. Now it’s down to 1.42 per million miles driven—a huge change. …

Thomas Sowell with an interesting take on Bob Novak’s new book.

Many, if not most, college commencement addresses are essentially special interest advertising.

Politicians, political activists, judges and bureaucrats tell the graduating students how it is nobler to go into “public service” — that is, to become a politician, political activist, judge or bureaucrat, instead of going into the private sector and producing goods and services that people want enough to spend their own money for them. …

… Parents who want to counteract politically correct commencement speeches — often after four years of politically correct indoctrination on campus — might include among the things they give their graduate a new book titled “The Prince of Darkness” by columnist Robert Novak.

This book gives Novak’s eyewitness accounts of the numerous Washington politicians and bureaucrats he has dealt with as a journalist for more than half a century.

There is no way you can come away from this book thinking that there is something nobler about “public service,” as it actually exists, rather than the pretty picture painted by those who want to puff themselves up as members of a high-toned profession. …

… While older people with much experience in life may be better able to appreciate this outstanding book, it should be especially valuable to the young in presenting a realistic and three-dimensional picture of the world.

They can get a lot of enlightenment from a prince of darkness.

Robert Samuelson’s Newsweek column highlights an issue our corrupt political class and it’s entourage in DC won’t address.

If you haven’t noticed, the major presidential candidates—Republican and Democratic—are dodging one of the thorniest problems they’d face if elected: the huge budget costs of aging baby boomers. In last week’s CNN/YouTube debate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson cleverly deflected the issue. “The best solution,” he said, “is a bipartisan effort to fix it.” Brilliant. There’s already a bipartisan consensus: do nothing. No one plugs cutting retirement benefits or raising taxes, the obvious choices.

End of story? Not exactly. There’s also a less-noticed cause for the neglect. Washington’s vaunted think tanks—citadels for public intellectuals both liberal and conservative—have tiptoed around the problem. Ideally, think tanks expand the public conversation by saying things too controversial for politicians to say on their own. Here, they’ve abdicated that role.

The aging of America is not just a population change or, as a budget problem, an accounting exercise. It involves a profound transformation of the nature of government: commitments to the older population are slowly overwhelming other public goals; the national government is becoming mainly an income-transfer mechanism from younger workers to older retirees. …

Speaking of corruption, John Fund writes on the good news about Ted Stevens, the man who probably did more to cost the GOP the congress than any other of the creeps we have sent to Washington.

Perhaps the entire Alaskan Congressional delegation should be quarantined before it spends our tax dollars again or has one more questionable relationship with the state’s pork barrel-industrial complex. GOP Senator Ted Stevens, who has spent 39 years in Congress raiding the federal Treasury on behalf of Alaska, has long dismissed complaints about his questionable investments and ties to shady lobbyists as jealousy over his ability to make his state No. 1 in federal pork. (He brought in over $1000 worth for every resident last year.) But yesterday, the raid that was in the news was the one on Senator Stevens’ house near Anchorage by FBI and IRS agents.

The probe of the senator’s ties to the oil-services company Veco is connected to a probe of Alaska Rep. Don Young, the former chairman of the House Transportation Committee. He and Mr. Stevens are being investigated to see if they took bribes, illegal gratuities or unreported gifts. Two former top executives of Veco have pleaded guilty to bribery.

Another political figure under investigation is Ben Stevens, the senator’s son, who retired from the legislature last year just before federal agents raided his office. …

The Captain has a great post on partisanship. It grows out of a WaPo analysis of who votes with their party the most often. Of the top 20 positions in the house and senate, 19 went to one party – the Dems.

Both parties like to blame the other for failing to exercise independence in Congress. Their supporters blame the members of the opposite side for excessive partisanship which keeps Washington DC from accomplishing anything for the people. The Washington Post decided to take a look at the 110th Congress to see which party exercises the most partisanship — and the Democrats win the prize. …

… Democrats — They put the party in partisanship!

Ed Morrissey also posts on the optimistic Times piece from yesterday. We liked that story so much we’ll get the bloggers’ take on it today.

Power Line’s take is here too.

… These are basically the same observations that most visitors to Iraq have made lately. Yet, some think this piece is significant, because of who wrote it–two liberals from Brookings–and the fact that it appeared in the Times. We discussed the column on the radio with Bill Bennett this morning, and he is of that view.

Maybe so. My fear, though, is that the leadership of the Democratic Party sees progress on the ground in Iraq as bad news, not good. I think many Congressional Democrats are committed to defeat, for political and ideological reasons. If so, they won’t be swayed by this kind of report. It could help, of course, if voters perceive progress in Iraq and hold politicians accountable if they fail to sustain it. But not many rank and file voters, either Democrat or Republican, read the op-ed pages of the Times.

As if on cue, The Dem House Majority Whip says a positive report from Petraeus “would be a big problem for us.” Power Line has the details.

… As significant as what Clyburn said is the way he said it. According to Clyburn, a strongly positive report by Petraeus would be “a real big problem for us.” Clyburn’s candor may be commendable, but it’s unfortunate that the Dems regard strongly positive news from Iraq as a problem.

Contentions’ take on Eliot.

… Predictions that the scandal will force Spitzer from office are probably off the mark (unless Spitzer is caught lying about what he knew and when), but there’s no doubt the governor is badly damaged, and that his presidential aspirations are for the moment in tatters. The best thing he can do now for himself, and for the people of New York, is to return to the reform agenda he was elected to implement. More likely, though, we can anticipate another three years of a badly-damaged governor’s limping along, while Albany continues to legislate the Empire State’s decline.

Roger Simon thinks about Edwards.

A post on Politico reminded me of why I find John Edwards one of the most shallow politicians of our era. And not just because of the hair. Or even the 28,000 square foot house when he yammers on about the two Americas.

My problem is that it’s “all about him.” Sure, politicians are narcissistic by nature, but Edwards takes it to a special level. …

Adam Smith reminds us it’s Milton Friedman’s birthday today.

Wall Street Journal celebrates too.

Today, in cities across America, events are being held to celebrate the ideas, vision and influence of the late, great economist and Nobel prize-winner Milton Friedman. This would have been his 95th birthday.

The occasion gives us a chance to look back on many of the questions Friedman contemplated during the course of his productive career. In particular, why do people in some countries prosper, while those in other countries live in poverty? Is it luck? Is it something that their governments do? Or perhaps it’s something that their governments don’t do?

Friedman knew that the answers depended on the extent to which governments supported personal freedom, political freedom and economic freedom. And thanks to his advocacy, many countries around the world have come to see the connection between freedom and prosperity. …

Discover Mag thinks maybe sun is not so bad.

James Lileks with a Bleat post on ocean cruises.

… The sight of the fellow passengers was quite remarkable; if you could sum it up, you’d have to say this is a boat full of small whales looking to catch sight of a larger one. Everyone waddles to and fro, slowly, panting with the effort of transporting the stored energy of previous meals to the location of the next one. …

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• July 30 Word

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NY Times op-ed by two dudes from the liberal think tank Brookings suggests we may overlook a chance for victory in Iraq.

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. …

… for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).

In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.

… In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. …

… How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Hugh Hewitt interviews John Burns who gives us background to use when Petraeus gives his report in September.

But to speak of General Petraeus in particular, General Petraeus is 54 years old. Let’s look at this just simply as a matter of career, beyond the matter of principle on which I think we could also say we could expect him to make a forthright report. At 54, General Petraeus is a young four star general, who could expect to have as much as ten more years in the military. And he has every reason to give a forthright and frank report on this. And he says, and he says this insistently, that he will give a forthright, straightforward report, and if the people in Washington don’t like it, then they can find somebody else who will give his forthright, straightforward report. He is not without options on a personal basis, General Petraeus, and I think he, from everything I’ve learned from him, sees both a professional, in the first place, and personal imperative to state the truth as he sees it about this war.

The Captain posts on a good David Ignatius column from Sunday and the Clinton/Obama spat.

Debra Saunders writes on John Doe v. The Flying Imams.

Imagine you’re waiting to board a plane, and you see fellow travelers acting strangely and muttering words that you don’t understand. Maybe they’re Muslim, maybe they’re not. You’re afraid that they are up to no good. What do you do?

Nothing. If you report the behavior, you might get sued. Or so Americans had reason to believe after House Democratic leaders omitted from a homeland security bill a measure by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. — that passed by a 304-to-121 vote in a different bill — to grant immunity from civil liability to people who report potential threats to or acts of terrorism against transportation systems or passengers.

Until late last week, that is, when King announced a deal with Democratic leaders to put his amendment into the homeland security bill, which later was approved by both houses. …

Michael Goodwin has more on the Eliot mess.

For someone who fancies himself a student of political history, Eliot Spitzer seems to have missed the most important lessons. Chief among them is that the coverup is usually worse than the crime.

New York’s Democratic governor, who in two past interviews with me said he had learned things from F.D.R., Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, was on top of the world just a week ago. He had squashed dissent in his own party and all that stood between him and one-man rule of the Empire State was the weakened Republican leader of the state Senate.

But as Week 2 of the “Eliot Mess” begins, Spitzer is in a free fall. The definition of “scarce” in Albany is anybody of either party who believes the governor’s claim he had nothing to do with the dirty tricks plot his office concocted against Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. …

… The plot was aligned perfectly with comments he often made about getting rid of Bruno. With Democrats enjoying a huge majority in the Assembly, and with Speaker Shelly Silver mostly abdicating his leadership role to Spitzer, Bruno was the last man willing to say no to the governor. With only a two-seat GOP majority, the feisty Bruno could still block legislation, hold up appointments and deny confirmation to Spitzer judicial picks.

But with Bruno gone, Spitzer would hold vast power over all three branches of government.

Although Spitzer often spoon-fed the media to weaken his targets as attorney general, we don’t know how far he was willing to go in this case. But as the Marist poll makes clear, Spitzer must soon tell the whole truth. Or risk becoming another casualty of a coverup.

Corner posts illustrate how the academy fleeces taxpayers.

What’s the biggest higher education scandal of them all? Ward Churchill? Deconstructionist nonsense? Ideologically biased women’s studies programs? Actually, the biggest higher ed scandal of them all just may be a clever university tactic for tricking the taxpayers into subsidizing all of these abuses. I’m talking about the way colleges and universities collect multi-millions of dollars from the federal government in overhead costs every time they receive money for scientific research. On average, colleges charge the federal government for research overhead at a rate of 52 percent. That means a university can bill the federal government an average of 52 additional cents for every dollar it receives in direct research funding. At private universities, the government is charged an average of 57 percent for overhead.

Now maybe this money really is needed to cover overhead costs. But there are some important signs that the numbers are being inflated, and that university research overhead may in fact amount to a hidden way of getting taxpayers to subsidize ideological women’s studies programs–and every other aspect of university spending–under the guise of supporting valuable scientific research

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• July 29 (word)

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Mark Steyn comments on over zealous prosecutors for the OC Register.

Do you know Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison?

If you do, don’t approach them. Call 911 and order up a SWAT team. They’re believed to be in the vicinity of
McMinnville, Ore., where they’re a clear and present danger to the community. Mashburn and Cornelison were recently charged with five counts of felony sexual abuse, and District Attorney Bradley Berry has pledged to have them registered for life as sex offenders.

Oh, by the way, the defendants are in the seventh grade.

Messrs Mashburn and Cornelison are pupils at

Patton
Middle School. They were arrested in February after being observed in the vestibule, swatting girls on the butt. Butt-swatting had apparently become a form of greeting at the school – like “a handshake we do,” as one female student put it. …

 

… District Attorney
Berry told reporter Susan Goldsmith of the Oregonian that his department “aggressively” pursues sex crimes. “These cases are devastating to children,” he said. “They are life-altering cases.”

No, sir. The only one devastating children’s lives is you. If you “win,” and these “criminals” are convicted, 20, 30 years from now – applying for a job, volunteering for a community program, heading north for a weekend in Vancouver and watching the Customs guard swipe the driver’s license through the computer – there’ll be a blip, something will come up on the screen, and for the umpteenth time two middle-age men will realize they bear a mark that can never be expunged. Because decades ago they patted their pals on the rear in a middle-school corridor.

A world that requires handcuffs and judges and district attorneys for what took place that Friday in February is not just a failed education system but an entire society that’s losing any sense of proportion. Without which, civilized life becomes impossible. So we legalize more and more aspects of life and demand that district attorneys prosecute ever more aggressively what were once routine areas of social interaction.

A society that looses the state to criminalize schoolroom horseplay is guilty not only of punishing children as grown-ups but of the infantilization of the entire citizenry.

Right Coast reviews Steyn’s suggestions for our legal system.

Marty Peretz comments on one prosecutor who got what he deserved – Mike Nifong.

… Chastened by the prospect of going to jail, the already disbarred DA said he was “sorry.” And went on to the usual psycho-babble tropes: “We all need to heal. It is my hope that we start this process today.”

Alas, “healing” is one of the great bullshit phrases of our culture.

Charles Krauthammer says it’s increasingly obvious Obama’s not ready for prime time.

… During our 1990s holiday from history, being a national security amateur was not an issue. Between the 1991 death of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attacks of 2001, foreign policy played almost no part in our presidential campaigns. But post-Sept. 11, as during the Cold War, the country demands a serious commander in chief. It is hard to imagine that with all the electoral tides running in their favor, the Democrats would risk it all by nominating a novice for a wartime presidency.

Do the Democrats want to risk strike three, another national security question blown, but this time perhaps in a final presidential debate before the ’08 election, rather than a midseason intraparty cattle call? The country might decide that it prefers, yes, a Republican — say, Sept. 11 veteran Rudy Giuliani– to a freshman senator who does not instinctively understand why an American president does not share the honor of his office with a malevolent clown like Hugo Chávez.

The Captain reacts to the Krauthammer column.

… Barack Obama doesn’t have the mindset of an executive. Like Tom Hagen in The Godfather, he doesn’t have the cunning instinct necessary for success in understanding the layers of communication and symbolism that goes into becoming a good Commander in Chief. He doesn’t even have enough of those skills to present a credible threat to Hillary Clinton for the nomination.

Initially, though, Hillary’s response wasn’t all that much better. She didn’t really rule out meeting with the same people. She said, “I will use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way. But certainly, we’re not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and
Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.” Only after the debate, while Obama’s people tried to convince people that Obama didn’t say what he said, did Hillary realize the opening she had and drove her rhetorical Mack truck straight through it. …

Another Corner post on the comparison of Giuliani and Nixon. This time from someone who worked in Rudy’s administration.

… From my on-the-ground view as a line manager in NYC government, Rudy governed as a liberating force applying conservative governing principles designed to help individual New Yorkers and private business flourish. …

IBD says, “speaking of Nixon.” They have a nice segue to Spitzer’s troubles with an editorial – Richard Milhous Spitzer.

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the one president ever forced to resign seem to have a lot in common. But at least Nixon waited a little while before using the tools of state against his political enemies. …

Professor Bainbridge weighs in with Eliot Spitzer is a Thug.

Financial Times from
London with a Spitzer report.

… Mr Spitzer seemed to thrive on confrontation with lawmakers, employing tough talk and hardball tactics even against members of his own political party. He allegedly described himself to one lawmaker as a steamroller who would roll over anyone who got in his way.

Mr Bruno, in particular, was unimpressed, telling
New York magazine this month that Mr Spitzer “has an attitude about him … like he’s above it all. He thinks I’m a street kid that doesn’t know night from day. I’ve survived 31 years. I don’t pretend to be a genius. I have common sense.”

Mr Spitzer has failed to master the art of politics, relying instead on the tactics that made him successful as a prosecutor, says Fred Siegel, a history professor at the Cooper Union in
New York.

“He was not prepared to govern,” Mr Siegel says. “When he was attorney-general he had extensive subpoena powers that allowed him to embarrass private companies with reputations to protect. That gave him tremendous leverage.” …

The Captain and Power Line post on Chuck Schumer’s promise to reject any Bush nominees to the Supreme Court.

Power Line – It’s hard to say how seriously anyone takes Chuck S., who is more arrogant than the average Democratic Senator, but not any smarter. Should a Supreme Court justice die or retire, and should Senate Democrats reject a series of highly-qualified Bush nominees, the Democrats will no doubt pay a price in 2008. So, as they say: bring it on!

IBD has great piece on socialized medicine by a Canadian doctor.

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• July 26 (word)

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Ralph Peters reports on
Iraq progress.

TO a military professional, the tactical progress made in
Iraq over the last few months is impressive. To a member of Congress, it’s an annoyance.

The herd animals on Capitol Hill – from both parties – just can’t wait to go over the cliff on
Iraq. And even when the media mention one or two of the successes achieved by our troops, the reports are grudging.

Yet what’s happening on the ground, right now, in Baghdad and in
Iraq’s most-troubled provinces, contributes directly to your security. In the words of a senior officer known for his careful assessments, al Qaeda’s terrorists in
Iraq are “on their back foot and we’re trying to knock them to their knees.”

Do our politicians really want to help al Qaeda regain its balance? …

Victor Davis Hanson with important
Middle East history lesson.

… The point of reviewing prior American naiveté and cynicism is not to excuse the real mistakes in stabilizing
Iraq. Instead, these past blunders remind us that we have had few good choices in dealing with the terrorism, theocracy and authoritarian madness of an oil-rich
Middle East. And we have had none after the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11.

After four years of effort in
Iraq, Americans may well tire of that cost and bring Gen. Petraeus and the troops home. We can then go back to the shorter-term remedies of the past. Well and good.

But at least remember what that past policy was: Democratic appeasement of terrorists, interrupted by cynical Republican business with terrorist-sponsoring regimes.

Then came September 11, and we determined to get tougher than the Democrats by taking out the savage Taliban and Saddam Hussein – and more principled than the Republicans by staying on after our victories to foster something better.

The jihadists are now fighting a desperate war against the new stick of American military power and carrot of American-inspired political reform. They want us, in defeat, to go back to turning a blind eye to both terrorism and corrupt dictatorships.

That’s the only way they got power in the first place and now desperately count on keeping it.

Which makes a Corner Post on Cambodia timely as it reminds Pickerhead of a Bernard Lewis quote; ”
America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”

Mark Steyn continues …..

The Corner also posts on the Giuliani-Nixon comparison.

The Captain takes apart a WaPo poll. It’s kind of a little thing, but important to understand how the main stream media keeps fudging their bias.

… In fact, the Post consistently underrepresents Republicans, and has for the past two years. The last time it came close to reality was in November 2006 — when the Post needed to make sure its election predictions came close to the results.

Not surprisingly, that was also the last time the Post’s polling on George Bush’s approval ratings came close to reality, too. His disapproval then was 57%, which the elections seem to have confirmed. At the time, Rasmussen — which has been historically more accurate than the Post — had it at 56%. They now have it at 59%, actually down from a high of 65% in the first part of July during the immigration debate.

Bush is not popular, by any means. However, by seriously underrepresenting Republicans in its polling samples, the Post exaggerates his unpopularity and renders its polling unreliable. …

Steve Chapman with interesting Hillary column.

During the Democratic debate in South Carolina, I heard something I never expected to hear: Hillary Clinton coming out against
U.S. military intervention.

At least I think she was coming out against
U.S. military intervention. Asked if U.S. troops should be sent to Darfur, the
New York senator made a valiant effort to dodge the question by declaiming about sanctions, divestment and UN peacekeepers. But when pressed, “How about American troops on the ground?” she finally said, a bit awkwardly, “American ground troops I don’t think belong in
Darfur at this time.”

But don’t bet that she’ll stick to that position if she’s elected. It goes against type. …

Instapundit carries an interesting thought on Spitzer’s mess.

American.com with a story on Norman Borlaug, the most important man you’ve never heard of. Except you have because you read Pickings. If you want to see when, use the search feature on the Pickerhead website.

Good Walter Williams column on government health care.

Sometimes the advocates of socialized medicine claim that health care is too important to be left to the market. That’s why some politicians are calling for us to adopt health care systems such as those in Canada, the
United Kingdom and other European nations. But the suggestion that we’d be better served with more government control doesn’t even pass a simple smell test.

Do we want the government employees who run the troubled

Walter
Reed
Army
Medical
Center to be in charge of our entire health care system? Or, would you like the people who deliver our mail to also deliver health care services? How would you like the people who run the motor vehicles department, the government education system, foreign intelligence and other government agencies to also run our health care system? After all, they are not motivated by the quest for profits, and that might mean they’re truly wonderful, selfless, caring people.

As for me, I’d choose profit-driven people to provide my health care services, people with motives like those who deliver goods to my supermarket, deliver my overnight mail, produce my computer and software programs, assemble my car and produce a host of other goods and services that I use. …

Rocky Mountain News with good editorial on Ward Churchill.

So what have we learned from the Churchill saga? That it is difficult, but not quite impossible, to fire a tenured professor. That the wheels of due process at a university are ridiculously slow, in this case taking 2 1/2 years. That public pressure on a university is not always a bad thing, since it can produce reform that otherwise would have been spurned. Does anyone suppose that CU would have bothered to revamp the process by which it grants tenure – which it did – without the spur of the Churchill fallout?

Under President Hank Brown’s leadership, the university has put yet another awkward issue behind it. Even if a court reinstates Churchill someday on the improbable, spurious ground that his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired, at least Coloradans will know that the faculty and leadership at their flagship university expelled his poisonous influence from their midst when they had the chance.

WSJ provides a dispassionate look at hurricane forecasting.

Some scientists, journalists and activists see a direct link between the post-1995 upswing in Atlantic hurricanes and global warming brought on by human-induced greenhouse gas increases. This belief, however, is unsupported by long-term
Atlantic and global observations.

Consider, for example, the intensity of
U.S. land-falling hurricanes over time — keeping in mind that the periods must be long enough to reveal long-term trends. During the most recent 50-year period, 1957 to 2006, 83 hurricanes hit the
United States, 34 of them major. In contrast, during the 50-year period from 1900 to 1949, 101 hurricanes (22% more) made
U.S. landfall, including 39 (or 15% more) major hurricanes.

The hypothesis that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the number of hurricanes fails by an even wider margin when we compare two other multi-decade periods: 1925-1965 and 1966-2006. In the 41 years from 1925-1965, there were 39
U.S. land-falling major hurricanes. In the 1966-2006 period there were 22 such storms — only 56% as many. Even though global mean temperatures have risen by an estimated 0.4 Celsius and CO2 by 20%, the number of major hurricanes hitting the
U.S. declined.

Yesterday Tony Blankley was in the humor section commenting on the dem debate. Today it’s Ann Coulter.

… Hillary raised the Bush-stole-the-2000-election fairy tale, saying: “I think it is a problem that Bush was elected in 2000. I actually thought somebody else was elected in that election, but …” (Applause.)

On Nov. 12, 2001, The New York Times ran a front page article that began: “A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.”

Another Times article that day by Richard L. Berke said that the “comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots solidifies George W. Bush’s legal claim on the White House because it concludes that he would have won under the ground rules prescribed by the Democrats.”

On Nov. 18, 2001, notorious pro-abortion zealot Linda Greenhouse wrote in the Times that the media consortium’s count of all the disputed
Florida ballots — in which the Times participated — concluded “that George W. Bush would have won the 2000 presidential election even had the court not cut the final recount short.”

If three prominent articles in the Treason Times isn’t enough to convince Hillary that Bush won the 2000 election, forget the White House: ABC ought to hire her to replace Rosie O’Donnell on “The View.” I know that’s a big seat to fill, but maybe she can finally convince Elizabeth Hasselbeck that 9/11 was an inside job.

Carpe Diem posts on a blues primer.

… Persons with names like Michelle, Amber, Debbie, and Heather can’t sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in
Memphis. …

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• July 25 (word)

• July 25 (pdf)

As advertised yesterday, David Brooks’ column on income inequality is up today.

… the Democratic campaign rhetoric is taking on a life of its own, and drifting further away from reality. Feeding off pessimism about the war and anger at
Washington, candidates now compete to tell dark, angry and conspiratorial stories about the economy.

I doubt there’s much Republicans can do to salvage their fortunes by 2008. But over the long term a G.O.P. rebound can be built by capturing the Bill Clinton/Democratic Leadership Council ground that the Democrats are now abandoning. Whoever gets globalization right will have a bright future, and in the long run, the facts matter.

John Stossel’s weekly column could be a companion piece. Except, you’ll like it better. It’s a review of the book The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture by Brink Lindsey.

In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.

But what’s compassionate about that? Compassionate is “live and let live.” …

… Lindsey, whose book is getting favorable attention in The New York Times, The Economist, Los Angeles Times, Times of London and National Review, is not the first to point this out, but he emphasizes that the “live and let live” ethic arose only when material security could be taken for granted. As people worried less about where their next meal would come from, they had time to contemplate and develop more enlightened attitudes.

“American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change,” he writes. “Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health-care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a ‘creative class’ of ‘knowledge workers’ — all are the progeny of widespread prosperity.”

Great post from West Coast Pajamas Media.

After a six-year stint as an elementary school teacher in the tough LA neighborhood of
Watts, PJM’s Aaron Hanscom would like to know why wealthy Democrats like John Edwards don’t support charter schools or voucher programs. Is choice in education only acceptable to Edwards if parents have his kind of money?

The Captain posts on the non-union labor used for picketing.

Progressives used to argue that the workers had more moral standing than owners and other elites because they actually did the work than enriched the upper classes. The proletarian status of the working class found favor from Karl Marx to George Meaney, and inspired the modern labor movement. Now its heirs have decided on their own division of labor .. by outsourcing picket lines …

Roger Simon thinks Obama’s not ready for prime time.

Fred Dicker, top dog in
Albany for the NY Post, starts off three items on Eliot Spitzer’s trooper-gate problem. Pickerhead wishes Don Imus was around to cover this.

Gov. Spitzer suspended a top aide and reassigned another yesterday after Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released a bombshell report concluding they conspired with the State Police to damage Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno by cooking up a plot claiming he misused state aircraft.

Spitzer, who had recently insisted that neither his staff nor the State Police had acted improperly, said communications director Darren Dopp was suspended without pay for an “indefinite period” of at least 30 days.

William Howard, the governor’s assistant secretary for homeland security, will be reassigned to a position outside of the governor’s staff.

Cuomo’s report also recommended disciplinary action be considered against acting State Police Superintendent Preston Felton, but none was taken.

The scathing, 53-page report detailed a months-long scheme in which Dopp, Howard, and Felton – at times with the partial knowledge of Spitzer chief of staff Richard Baum – used the State Police to gather and create misleading and inaccurate records on Bruno’s use of state aircraft to travel from Albany to Manhattan in hopes of showing he was using the flights strictly for political purposes, a possibly illegal action.

NY Post has an editorial today.

So now comes word that two key aides to Gov. Spitzer refused to be interviewed by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in connection with
Albany’s topsy-turvy Troopergate plot.

Why so reticent?

Could it be that truthful testimony on their role in the scheme to frame state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno – exposed by Post State Editor Fredric U. Dicker this month and confirmed by Cuomo on Monday – would be bad for their principal, Eliot Spitzer?

That candid answers to Cuomo’s question would shed too much light on what Spitzer knew – and when he knew it?

Let’s be frank.

Richard Baum and Darren Dopp – Spitzer’s chief of staff and chief spokesman – didn’t dummy up for no reason at all. …

Michael Goodwin in the Daily News today.

In the fall of 1998, Eliot Spitzer was winning the race for attorney general. I was the Daily News Editorial Page editor, and my colleagues and I had pressed Spitzer about the source of millions of dollars he was spending on the race. He told us, as he told election officials, that he had taken out personal bank loans. Days before the election, Spitzer confessed to another newspaper that his father really was the source of the money.

Soon after I got to my office that day, the phone rang. It was Spitzer, calling to explain. “Eliot,” I said, “you lied to us.”

His response was prompt and certain: “I had to,” he said, adding his father didn’t want his role known.

“I had to” is an excuse I will never forget. As Spitzer collected scalps on Wall Street and built a reputation as a crusading reformer, the memory tempered my applause. “I had to” wouldn’t let go. Even as he swept to a landslide election as governor and said the right things about changing
Albany, Spitzer’s past flashed a yellow caution light about his character.

That light now has turned red, which is why we need to know much more about “Eliot Mess.” This story can’t be a one-day wonder that ends with the mere suspension of one aide and the transfer of another. …

… Two patterns suggest Spitzer was directly involved. First, volcanic anger at targets, followed by leaks to the media, both of which happened here, was standard operating procedure for Spitzer as attorney general. Virtually every Wall Street case he brought was first previewed in newspapers, often with evidence such as key e-mails released by anonymous sources. Notwithstanding that the evidence was often damning, the tactics were more thuggish than professional.

The second argument for Spitzer’s involvement is that he is a micromanager. The notion that his A team – his chief of staff, his communications director, the deputy head of homeland security, the head of the state police – conspired to target the powerful Bruno without Spitzer’s knowledge defies belief. Had the target been a minor critic from Podunk, maybe. But Bruno is Public Enemy No. 1 to Spitzer, and no way would underlings dare go after him without the governor’s knowledge.

But we won’t know the whole truth until a prosecutor summons the spine to find it. If the
Albany district attorney won’t, then a federal prosecutor must. Either way, we have to know what Spitzer knew and did. Only then can
Albany return to its routine scandals.

Robert Samuelson tells us about Prius Politics. Prius hybrids. The ones driven around in a cloud of smug.

… Prius politics promises to conquer global warming without public displeasure. Gains will occur invisibly through business mandates, regulations and subsidies. That’s why higher fuel economy standards are acceptable. They seem painless. It sounds too good to be true — and it is. Costs are disguised. Mandates and subsidies will give rise to protected markets. Companies (utilities, auto companies, investment banks) will manipulate rules for competitive advantage. There will be more opportunity for private profit than public gain.

The government’s support for ethanol is instructive. In 2006, 20 percent of the
U.S. corn crop went for ethanol; the share is rising. Driven by demand for feed and fuel, corn prices have soared. With food costs increasing, inflation has worsened. The program is mostly an income transfer from consumers to producers and ethanol refiners. Americans’ oil use and greenhouse gas output haven’t declined.

Deep reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases might someday occur if both plug-in hybrid vehicles and underground storage of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants become commercially viable. Meanwhile, Prius politics is a delusional exercise in public relations that, while not helping the environment, might hurt the economy.

Don Boudreaux writes on the politics of prohibition.

… if the history of alcohol prohibition is a guide, drug prohibition will not end merely because there are many sound, sensible and humane reasons to end it. Instead, it will end only if and when Congress gets desperate for another revenue source.

That’s the sorry logic of politics and Prohibition.

Tony Blankley today is in the humor section because he wrote about the last debate.

… in Edwards’ only memorable comment of the night, he rather put his foot into it. Each of the candidates was asked to describe something he or she approves of and something he or she disapproves of regarding the candidate to the left. Sen. Hillary Clinton was to Edwards’ left, and he expressed disapproval of her pink (or, perhaps, coral) sweater. The questioner was clearly looking for policy disagreements, so Edward’s reflexive comment on her appearance rather reminded the audience of his reputation for excessive concern with matters of grooming. It also was suggestive of his inner sexism (despite his wife’s claim that her husband is better than Hillary for the fairer sex) as he would hardly have commented on a male candidate’s suit jacket.

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• July 24 (word)

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Thomas Sowell wonders if we are gripped in moral paralysis.

“Moral paralysis” is a term that has been used to describe the inaction of France, England and other European democracies in the 1930s, as they watched Hitler build up the military forces that he later used to attack them.

It is a term that may be painfully relevant to our own times.

Back in the 1930s, the governments of the democratic countries knew what Hitler was doing — and they knew that they had enough military superiority at that point to stop his military buildup in its tracks. But they did nothing to stop him.

Instead, they turned to what is still the magic mantra today — “negotiations.” …

Daniel Johnson in Contentions posts on Gordon Brown’s upcoming visit to the U.S. Prime Minister Brown has some work to do.

… He can expect a polite but cool reception from Bush. The appointment of former United Nations deputy secretary general Mark Malloch Brown as Foreign Office minister for Africa, Asia and the UN has predictably exasperated the Bush administration.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the Sunday Times of London: “If Gordon Brown knew what he was doing when he appointed Mark Malloch Brown, it was a major signal that he wants a different relationship with the United States. If he didn’t know what he was doing, that is not a good sign either.” …

Max Boot, also in Contentions looks at current attitudes towards the war.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll brings moderately positive news about public attitudes toward the war in Iraq. For the raw results, click here. For the Times write-up, click here.

The percentage of the public saying that invading Iraq was the correct decision has risen slightly. Forty-two percent now say it was the right thing to do, while 51 percent say we should have stayed out. That’s a shift from the May poll that had found only 35 percent in support of the invasion and 61 percent claiming it was a mistake.

Christopher Hitchens enjoys the Galloway dénouement.

… Just look at the gang that strove to prevent the United Nations from enforcing its library of resolutions on Saddam Hussein. Where are they now? Gerhard Schroeder, ex-chancellor of Germany, has gone straight to work for a Russian oil-and-gas consortium. Vladimir Putin, master of such consortia and their manipulation, is undisguised in his thirst to re-establish a one-party state. Jacques Chirac, who only avoided prosecution for corruption by getting himself immunized by re-election (and who had Saddam’s sons as his personal guests while in office, and built Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor while knowing what he wanted it for), is now undergoing some unpleasant interviews with the Paris police. So is his cynical understudy Dominique de Villepin, once the glamour-boy of the “European” school of diplomacy without force. What a crew! Galloway is the most sordid of this group because he managed to be a pimp for, as well as a prostitute of, one of the foulest dictatorships of modern times. But the taint of collusion and corruption extends much further than his pathetic figure, and one day, slowly but surely, we shall find out the whole disgusting thing.

Jack Kelly with two stories of main stream media bias.

Jennifer Hunter is married to Chicago Sun-Times publisher John Cruickshank, which explains why Ms. Hunter writes a column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is why she should not.

On July 16, Ms. Hunter wrote a column which began: “After watching the top five Democratic candidates for president speak before a trial lawyers’ group Sunday, attorney Jim Ronca of Philadelphia, a staunch Republican, became certain of one thing: He is not going to vote for a Republican in the 2008 presidential election.”

A suspicious reader checked out Mr. Ronca’s political contributions. Mr. Ronca had made 14 since 1994 — 12 to Democrats. The Democratic candidates received $7,000; the GOP candidates $750.

Mr. Ronca’s contribution record was posted on several Web sites, whose readers flooded Ms. Hunter with demands for a correction.

If Ms. Hunter had fessed up, I wouldn’t be writing about her. But she responded by attacking Web loggers for doing the research she should have done, and blaming her error on her editor. …

Power Line posts on Stephen Hayes’ Cheney bio.

The Captain with a couple of good posts. First on the activities of someone sprung from Gitmo, and then on voter fraud in Milwaukee.

Paul Johnson thinks we should prefer greedy folks to those who are power hungry.

Able, industrious, imaginative and creative people— the top 5% of mankind—divide into two broad categories: those who make money and those who make trouble.

It is striking that the hugely wicked are quite innocent of avarice. Hitler never showed any interest in money. Stalin left his salary envelopes unopened: When Stalin died, the little old desk in his modest office was found stuffed with them. Mao Zedong, over the course of his career, killed 70 million people, but toward the end of his life Mao failed to recognize a current banknote. These three monsters weren’t obsessed with wealth; they were obsessed with power.

Then there are the troublemakers, whose activities take endless forms. …

Carpe Diem posts on a David Brooks piece with the real numbers on income distribution. A column we will have tomorrow.

Myths: The rich are getting richer, especially CEOs, while the average American suffers, the middle class is disappearing, globalization only benefits the top 1% and not the average American, etc. etc.

Realities (from today’s column by David Brooks in the NY Times):

1. Real average wages rose in 2006 at the second fastest rate in 30 years.

2. The poor are getting richer. Between 1991 and 2005, the bottom fifth increased its earnings by 80%, compared with 50% for the highest-income group and around 20% for each of the other three groups.

LA Times has on op-ed on the farm bill.

… On the first point, producers of just five crops — wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice — receive nearly all farm subsidies. In fact, only one-third of the $240 billion in annual farm production is targeted for subsidies. All other farmers — including growers of fruits, vegetables, livestock and poultry — receive nearly nothing.

This raises the question: If farm subsidies are necessary to produce an adequate food supply with stable prices and thriving farmers, why haven’t the growers of nonsubsidized crops experienced these problems?

Walk into any supermarket and you will quickly find yourself surrounded by farm products, from apples to oranges, beef to chicken, that are produced and distributed without farm subsidies. Yet their prices and supplies are relatively stable, and the farmers’ incomes are just as high as those of subsidized farmers. The free market works for all other farm production, and it can surely work for producers of wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice. …

WaPo editorializes on the farm bill.

WSJ story says Germans might be tired of following orders.

A lawyer, three civil servants and a policeman stopped their van to ponder the “No Passing” sign on a narrow residential street.

The sign should be taken down because there’s no room to pass anyway, said the lawyer. It could use a cleaning, said a civil servant. “It’s a nice day,” said the policeman, keeping the peace as he moved the van a few yards down the road to inspect the next sign.

For nearly a decade, Germany’s 15 million-member ADAC automobile association has been curb-crawling the nation’s streets with municipal officials in an effort to persuade them to get rid of as much as half the country’s estimated 20 million traffic signs. Many Germans believe the country’s signage has become so dense that it’s a safety hazard. A recent study concluded that the distracting signs keep drivers from watching the road.

Germans have coined a term for the phenomenon — Schilderwald, or sign forest. But as the van-load of officials touring Troisdorf for surplus signs discovered on a recent morning, parting with them isn’t proving easy.

“Germans like clear rules,” said Joachim Adam, one of the three civil servants in the van.

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• July 23 (word)

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Mark Steyn, after four months at the Conrad Black trial, points out some shortcomings of our legal system.

Here’s just a random half-dozen reforms the US justice system would benefit from:

1) An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. This assures that a convicted man is doubly penalized, first for the crime and second for insisting on his right to trial by jury. The principal casualty of this plea-coppers’ parade is justice itself: for when two men commit the same act but the first is jailed for the rest of his life and dies in prison while the second does six months of golf therapy and community theatre on a British Columbia farm and then resumes his business career, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that such an outcome is unjust. …

John Fund helps us enjoy the prospect of the Sheehan/Pelosi contest.

Gabriel Schoenfeld writes a long one on the CIA for Commentary. One of the most amazing things for Pickerhead to learn over the last decade or so is the amount of bureaucratic rot in the agencies charged with protecting our country. Mr. Schoenfeld takes Tenet’s book and destroys him. We take half of Pickings tonight to see if we can learn how it is that dilettantes and poseurs like Valerie Plame and her husband come to responsible positions in our government.

… For this book’s account of his stormy seven-year term, Tenet has been hammered pitilessly by both Left and Right. In an article in Mother Jones entitled “George Tenet: Loser, Yes. Sycophant, Yes. Fall Guy? Yes,” James Ridgeway thundered that the “slick, self-serving, and stunningly unrepentant Tenet should at best have been fired on September 12, 2001; at worst, he should be in jail. Instead, he has a presidential Medal of Freedom, a best-selling book, and an excuse for everything.” Conservatives and neoconservatives have been no less open-handed with their own denunciations.

Is the contumely deserved? If, as I have suggested, gathering accurate intelligence is an almost insuperable task, the real question is not whether Tenet was a failure by some utopian standard but whether he was better or worse than the norm—and if worse, why. Answering that question requires a look back at the condition of the agency when Tenet came in, and the steps he took or failed to take to address its problems. Much of the evidence can be found in Tenet’s book itself. …

 

… It was almost by accident, then, that Tenet came to serve at what would turn into one of the most tempestuous moments in American history. The tempests did not blow in all at once. As he recounts in an early chapter, the CIA director was initially absorbed by Clinton’s efforts to negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, a process into which the CIA, in a role new to it, had been injected as a broker between the two sides. After innumerable meetings involving various Arab potentates, and exceptionally frustrating sessions with Yasir Arafat, the effort came to naught.

In 1998, however, the focus abruptly changed with attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the onset of the era of al-Qaeda sponsored terrorism. By the latter part of that year, writes Tenet, “I was aggressively seeking additional resources from our government to fight terrorism.” But his pleas yielded nothing: “For the most part I succeeded in annoying the administration for which I worked but did not loosen any significant purse strings.” …

 

… Insofar as Tenet offers a justification for these admitted failures, it is that the roles in which he served—as head of the intelligence community, director of the CIA, and the president’s principal intelligence adviser—“were too much for any one person.” Clearly there is something to that. Whatever one’s view of the CIA’s shortcomings and setbacks during the Tenet years, one cannot put down his book without a feeling of sympathy for him and for the men and women around him who labored to protect us. They cannot be accused of sitting on the sidelines.

But of course one cannot leave things at that. For there are inescapable problems with Tenet’s account, with Tenet himself, and with the agency that he managed. …

 

… As leader of the CIA, Tenet fought for more resources, more manpower, and better technology. But he never began to address the fundamental problems of the agency either in the age of Clinton or in the age of Bush. Indeed, he was, or became, part of the problem himself. At a juncture of history when the agency’s real, crying need was to penetrate, or at a minimum to study closely the thinking of, adversaries like Iran or North Korea or Iraq—three countries where its coverage and understanding had been chronically inadequate—he now permits himself to boast that he “made it a priority to enhance the agency’s record on diversity” and to have “its workforce reflect a broad cross-section of our population.” In other words, he saw it as the CIA’s most pressing “business need” (his term) to turn its affirmative-action program, at least, into a truly “well-oiled machine”—albeit one running inside a government bureaucracy now indistinguishable from any other. …

 

… In a passage that speaks volumes, Tenet then also concedes that the CIA “had devoted little analytic attention to [this issue] prior to September 11,” and was therefore “not initially prepared for the intense focus that the administration put on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.” Instead, he offers in apparent extenuation, the agency had been “consumed with the very hot war with Sunni extremists all over the world.”

This is confounding. A high proportion of those Sunni extremists were Palestinian suicide bombers whose families Saddam Hussein was rewarding. Abu Nidal himself, notwithstanding the secular ideology he came to embrace, was a Sunni. The individuals who carried out the first World Trade Center bombing, one of whom Saddam was sheltering, had been Sunni extremists. Not only were they Sunnis; they were the germ of the al-Qaeda organization. Yet Tenet, as if these dots could not be readily connected, blithely asserts that the CIA, “consumed” with “a very hot war with Sunni extremists all over the world,” did not find it worthwhile to study the relationship with Iraq. Incoherence seldom gets more incoherent than this. …

 

… In appraising the sorry record of the CIA during George Tenet’s tenure as director it must be recalled that the agency has had its share of previous intelligence failures. The CIA was established in 1947 in large measure to avoid another surprise attack like the one the U.S. had suffered on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. But only three years after its founding, the fledgling agency missed the outbreak of the Korean war. It then failed to understand that the Chinese would come to the aid of the North Koreans if American forces crossed the Yalu river. It missed the outbreak of the Suez war in 1956. In September 1962, the CIA issued an NIE which stated that the “Soviets would not introduce offensive missiles in Cuba”; in short order, the USSR did precisely that. In 1968 it failed to foresee the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. It gave Richard Nixon scant warning of the Egyptian intention to go to war in October 1973. It did not inform Jimmy Carter that the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan in 1979. This is only a partial list.

September 11 and the Iraq-WMD fiasco thus come at the long end of an extensive chain. Still, in the lengthy history of American intelligence failures, they are arguably the most damaging: 9/11 because of its sheer human and material cost; the Iraq-WMD fiasco, not only because it contributed to a calculus for war that might have looked different if the equation did not contain the coefficient of a mushroom cloud, but also because of the stain it has left on American credibility at a moment when the integrity of our word is critically important.

Not to be overlooked is the damage done to the essential mission of intelligence itself. In an age of weapons of mass destruction, of an inchoate global suicide cult composed of Hizballah, Hamas, al Qaeda, and a host of other Islamic groupings, of a fanatical Islamist regime in power in Tehran sitting astride the crossroads of Asia and the Middle East, and manifold other short- and long-term challenges to our security, we are now in a position that even when the CIA gets things right, its findings are likely to be greeted with skepticism if not outright dismissal. As a consequence of its failures to give warning when warning was needed, and of its giving warning when warning was not needed, it has become the intelligence agency that cried wolf and is now treated as such. …

If all that isn’t enough to make you ill, try Bob Novak’s column today. It has to do with earmarks and shame corporations that employ senator’s sons. Remember Mark Twain, “There is no native American criminal class, except for congress.” this is not one of Novak’s best efforts, but the facts speak for themselves.

Dilbert has a lesson in keeping ego out of decisions.

I’ve come to call this ego-driven behavior the “loser decision.” I don’t mean it as an insult. It’s an objective fact that life often presents us with choices where the comfortable decision leads nowhere and one that threatens your ego has all the potential in the world.

You need a healthy ego to endure the abuse that comes with any sort of success. The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.

Has your ego ever driven you off a cliff?

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• July 22 (word)

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Mark Steyn reminds us there is another Iranian hostage crisis.

How do you feel about the American hostages in Iran?

No, not the guys back in the Seventies, the ones being held right now.

What? You haven’t heard about them?

Odd that, isn’t it? But they’re there. For example, for two months now, Haleh Esfandiari has been detained in Evin prison in Tehran. Esfandiari is a U.S. citizen and had traveled to Iran to visit her sick mother. She is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, which is the kind of gig that would impress your fellow guests at a Washington dinner party. Unfortunately, the mullahs say it’s an obvious cover for a Bush spy.

Among the other Zionist-neocon agents currently held in Iranian jails are an American journalist, an American sociologist for a George Soros-funded leftie group, and an American peace activist from Irvine, Ali Shakeri, whose capture became known shortly after the United States and Iran held their first direct talks since the original hostage crisis.

Two months in an Iranian jail is no fun. Four years ago, a Montreal photo-journalist, Zahra Kazemi, was arrested by police in Tehran, taken to Evin prison, and wound up getting questioned to death. Upon her capture, the Canadian government had done as the State Department is apparently doing – kept things discreet, low-key, cards close to the chest, quiet word in the right ears. By the time Zahra Kazemi’s son, frustrated by his government’s ineffable equanimity, got the story out, it was too late for his mother. …

Hugh Hewitt with great post on Senate maneuvers.

A remarkable thing happened in the United States Senate earlier Thursday evening, and it occurred over a rather unremarkable piece of legislation that was being debated. Conservatives, frustrated at the lack of a genuine leader of their party, may have finally found one in Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell.

After Democratic leader Harry Reid’s MoveOn.org all-night session Tuesday night, a move that resulted only in helping unify the weak-kneed Republicans who were peeling away from continued support of the Petraeus surge in Iraq, McConnell, the Republican leader, served notice to anyone watching C-SPAN that he now runs the Senate. …

Andy McCarthy says the Senate has killed the bill that would have protected innocent bystanders when they report suspicious behavior.

At least for now, the Democrats have killed Rep. Pete King’s amendment which would have provided protection from being sued for people who report suspicious behavior — like the Flying Imams’ simulated hijacking — in national security cases. Michelle Malkin has the details.

Maybe it’s me, but I just find this stunning. Asking whether, in this era (or, frankly, any era), you should be able to tell the police you saw something troubling without having to worry about it is like asking whether you should be able to breathe. It is common sense — if such a thing exists anymore in Reid/Pelosi America. …

… All Republicans in the Senate except Brownback voted for the measure. Hillary Clinton, who is running for president and obviously is not suicidal, broke with her party and voted with the Republicans. So did Senators Bayh, Conrad, Dorgan, Landrieu, Lieberman, Nelson (of Nebraska), and Schumer. The remaining 39 Democrats were all nays. Call them the “Death Wish Caucus,” doing the bidding of CAIR, which is backing the Flying Imams and their alleged right to sue Americans for reporting potential terrorist activity. …

Debra Burlingame, sister of one of the 9/11 pilots, reacts to the Senate move.

… Yesterday, members of Congress met in conference to finalize provisions of the 9/11 security bill, which implements the final recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. But as of press time, the Democratic majority was using a technicality to block the so-called John Doe amendment from being included in the bill.

The amendment, which protects citizen whistleblowers who report suspicious activity from being sued, was sponsored by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) after six imams who were removed from a U.S. Airways flight in November filed a lawsuit against the passengers who reported their behavior to flight crews. …

 

Marty Peretz touts a WSJ column by Michael Oren

Here’s the piece by Oren.

JERUSALEM–Newspapers in Israel Tuesday were full of stories about President Bush’s call on Monday for the creation of a Palestinian state and an international peace conference. While Israeli officials were quoted expressing satisfaction with the fact that “there were no changes in Bush’s policies,” commentators questioned whether the Saudis would participate in such a gathering and whether Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with his single-digit approval ratings, could uproot Israeli settlers from the West Bank.

But all the focus on the conference misses the point. Mr. Bush has not backtracked an inch from his revolutionary Middle East policy. Never before has any American president placed the onus of demonstrating a commitment to peace so emphatically on Palestinian shoulders. Though Mr. Bush insisted that Israel refrain from further settlement expansion and remove unauthorized outposts, the bulk of his demands were directed at the Palestinians. …

The Australian has a great item on what it’s like to go against the global warming crowd.

WHEN I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head.

So I wasn’t shocked that the film was attacked on the same night it was broadcast on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) television last week, although I was impressed at the vehemence of the attack. I was more surprised, and delighted, by the response of the Australian public.

The ABC studio assault, led by Tony Jones, was so vitriolic it appears to have backfired. We have been inundated with messages of support, and the ABC, I am told, has been flooded with complaints. I have been trying to understand why.

First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are told the global warming theory is robust. They say you’d have to be off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it’s definitely true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish documentary-maker – who clearly must be as mad as a snake – who steps out of line?

I think viewers may also have wondered (reasonably) why the theory of global warming has not been subjected to this barrage of critical scrutiny by the media. After all, it’s the theory of global warming, not my foolish little film, that is turning public and corporate policy on its head.

The apparent unwillingness of Jones and others at the ABC to give airtime to a counterargument, the tactics used to minimise the ostensible damage done by the film, the evident animosity towards those who questioned global warming: all of this served to give viewers a glimpse of what it was like for scientists who dared to disagree with the hallowed doctrine.

Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with people about this, I am convinced that it’s because global warming is first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the oft-repeated phrase “we consume too much”. I have also come to the conclusion that this is code for “they consume too much”. People who believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen, and so on. …

Speaking of global warming foolishness, WaPo says all the corn planting has the potential to harm the Chesapeake Bay. Knowledge Problem gives us a link.

Allen Barra in the Village Voice doesn’t like the rehabilitation of Barry Bonds.

It’s a sad situation when the tabloids are on higher moral ground than the mainstream press, but that’s what Barry Bonds has driven us to. Watching Fox’s coverage of the All-Star game in San Francisco with a smiling Bonds escorting his godfather, Willie Mays, around AT&T Park, and listening to Joe Buck chide Hank Aaron for not being in attendance while Tim McCarver hedged on the issue of Bonds and steroids . . . Well, one yearned for the overwrought but refreshingly uncompromised headlines in the New York Post last year, when Bonds tied Babe Ruth for second place on the all-time list at 714. The Post’s Sunday cover featured a series of needles arranged to form the number 714 under a headline that read “Hey, Babe: Move Over for the ‘Shambino.’” The inside was just as good, with stories headlined “Say it taint so!” and “Sultan of Syringe.” …

 

… Let’s also dispense with the idea that whatever Bonds used didn’t enhance his performance. In 1999, a 34-year-old Bonds, weighing around 200 pounds, hit .262 with 34 home runs. Then, in defiance of all known natural law, he put on about 25 pounds of rock-hard muscle and proceeded to become, over the next five years, arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history. No such late-career surge has ever been seen in baseball, or anywhere else in professional sports. …

 

… Barry Bonds, on the other hand, was a pampered middle-class brat who grew up in a world of privilege and was merely jealous of the attention accorded other home-run hitters. He has polluted the historical record for all time.

Planet Ark says Spanish scientist has solved the case of the missing bees.

The culprit is a microscopic parasite called nosema ceranae said Mariano Higes, who leads a team of researchers at a government-funded apiculture centre in Guadalajara, the province east of Madrid that is the heartland of Spain’s honey industry.

He and his colleagues have analysed thousands of samples from stricken hives in many countries. …

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• July 19 (word)

• July 19 (pdf)

George Will with a column that well explains why Pickerhead would vote for Hillary Clinton before he’d vote for John McCain. Students of Ludwig von Mises often repeat his idea that the best form of government is a foreign prince – because you will watch him. Hillary is someone we would never let out of our sight.

… In 2004, Wisconsin Right to Life, a small citizens group that posed no conceivable threat of “corruption” to anyone or anything, wanted to run an ad urging Wisconsin‘s senators, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, not to participate in Senate filibusters against the president’s judicial nominations. But Feingold was running for reelection, and WRTL’s proposed ad was declared an “electioneering communication” (any radio or TV ad that “refers to” a candidate for federal office). And the McCain-Feingold blackout period banned such ads 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election — when ads matter most because people are paying attention to politics.

The WRTL case could have been an occasion for McCain to say: This is not what McCain-Feingold was designed to do — it was intended to stop the (as he sees it) “corruption” of elected officials soliciting large “soft money” contributions (not for particular candidates, but for party-building and other activities). Or he could at least have kept quiet. Instead, he went out of his way to stick his thumb in the eye of critics: With his brief to the Supreme Court, he underscored the fact that suppressing inconvenient (to politicians) speech is exactly what he and his McCain-Feingold allies — Fred Thompson was an important one — had in mind. …

… There is fitting irony in the fact that if McCain’s campaign continues until the delegate selection process begins, he probably will have to accept federal matching funds and the absurd strings attached to them, stipulating the maximum amounts that can be spent in particular states. That would be condign punishment for the man who has dragged politics — the process by which the state is staffed and controlled — deep into the ambit of the regulatory state.

Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg have fun with Dem African proverbs.

Arnold Kling writing for Tech Central has W thoughts.

… Myth 1: Bush lost in 2000

It is a myth that George Bush lost the election in 2000. He lost the popular vote, but that is not how elections are decided. Both George Bush and Al Gore based their electoral strategies on the rules in place at the time, which determines the winner on the basis of electoral votes. Saying after the fact that the Presidency should go to the winner of the popular vote is like saying that the 1964 World Series Championship belongs to the Yankees because they scored more total runs, although the Cardinals took four games out of seven.

It is a myth that George Bush stole the vote in Florida. Every recount has given the victory there to Bush. There is no doubt in my mind that the real villain of 2000 is Al Gore. His challenge of the electoral results was blatantly unfair (recall, he wanted to recount only in certain precincts where he hoped to gain votes) and served only to transform a close election into an illegitimate one. Instead of working to unite the country, Gore set an example of deep partisan bitterness that maximized the long-term damage of the 2000 election for American politics. …

.. The Era of Bitterness

I think that many people are tired of the bitterness and partisanship of the Bush era. My main point, however, is that people over-estimate the extent to which this bitterness and partisanship is due to George Bush himself. My prediction is that we will see further bitterness in the years ahead, as the sore losers of 2000 and 2004 become the sore winners of 2008. In 2012, there will still be Islamic terrorism, millions of Americans will lack health insurance and America’s health care bill will still be unusually high, the rich will still be getting richer (unless the economy tanks), and the trend will be for more people to join the Long Tail that identifies with neither political party. Which is why both parties are becoming more shrill every year. …

WaPo says Jordanian man kills his sister for “honor” and gets sentenced to six months.

AMMAN, Jordan — A Jordanian court sentenced a man to six months in prison Monday for killing his pregnant sister _ an “honor killing” the man said was necessary to uphold his family’s reputation.

The court justified the lenient sentence, saying it was warranted due to the “state of fury” that led to the woman’s slaying.

Politico posts on one of the more egregious earmarks.

John Fund with some shorts.

Jim Taranto with a good post on the “democratic bubble”.

With just 476 days to go until the 2008 election, we have a feeling the Democrats are getting overconfident. True, President Bush is highly unpopular, but he isn’t seeking re-election, and the vice president isn’t running either–the first completely open race since 1952. True, too, the Democrats did very well in 2006, but that isn’t necessarily a portent; and indeed it argues that at least in House races the Dems will be defending more marginal seats.

The Democrats are particularly vulnerable to overconfidence because the “mainstream media” are on their side and tend to be insufficiently critical. (We explained how this hurt John Kerry in an article for The American Spectator two years ago.) Today we noted a couple of examples of credulous media puffery of Democrats. …

NY Times reports on Crocs.

In the summer of 2006, Crocs wearers ranged from children to senior citizens, from the image-indifferent to the celebrity chef Mario Batali. The suggestion of ubiquity was probably magnified by the fact that seeing one pair of the oversize and often brightly colored footwear felt like seeing five. The Washington Post noted the “goofy” shoes were spreading “like vermin,” and Radar Magazine anointed the “hideous” items “summer’s most unfortunate fad.” The good news for critics was that fads fade and that the Croc thing seemed to be at a peak. But a year later Crocs still have traction; in fact, the company’s sales through the first quarter of 2007 are roughly triple what they were for the same period in 2006, and imitations and knockoffs abound. …

Slate too.

… As fans will tell you, Crocs aren’t just footwear; they’re the closest thing to religion that the foot has experienced. The company’s stock has skyrocketed in value over the past year, and Crocs is now poised to launch a new product line this fall. Yet Crocs are heinous in appearance. A Croc is not a shoe; it is a Tinkertoy on steroids. How did this peculiar shoe-manqué achieve ubiquity—and can it possibly stick around?

In the interest of science and as a defender of fashion, I went to Paragon Sports in New York to buy my first pair of Crocs—the shoes were a bright patch in a sea of sportswear. …

… A first-time Crocs wearer will indeed find that the shoes are springy and light, as their fans aver, and cushion the feet with what some have called a “marshmallow fluffiness.” On a muggy New York day, the holes punched in the toe box allow for a soothing breeze to cool the sweating foot. Even so, the ratio of shame to comfort was extreme. When everyone else on the avenue is garbed in proper footwear—even something as unpretentious as flat sandals or ballet flats—an adult, it seemed to me, must blush at the sight of her bulbous feet. But those who wear Crocs all day long swear that the springy material holds up like nothing else; one painter reported that his chronic shin splints disappeared after he began wearing Crocs. Thus was born what one blogger has labeled the “Croc conundrum“: Crocs make you look absurd, but they can change your life. …

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• July 18 (word)

• July 18 (pdf)

Manchester Guardian reports on Zimbawe’s latest disasters.

Zimbabweans are shopping like there’s no tomorrow. With police patrolling the aisles of Harare’s electrical shops to enforce massive government-ordered price cuts, the widescreen TVs were the first things to go, for as little as £20. Across the country, shoes, clothes, toiletries and different kinds of food were all swept from the shelves as a nation with the world’s fastest shrinking economy gorged itself on one last spending spree.

Car dealers said officials were trying to force them to sell vehicles at the official exchange rate, effectively meaning that a car costing £15,000 could be had for £30 by changing money on the blackmarket. The owners of several dealerships have been arrested.

President Robert Mugabe’s order that all shop prices be cut by at least half, and sometimes several times more, has forced stores to open to hordes of customers waving thick blocks of near worthless money given new value by the price cuts. The police and groups of ruling party supporters could be seen leading the charge for a bargain. …

John Fund with a great column.

The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law.

In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration’s budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight.

Although Congress has long insisted on copious reporting by corporations, including the burdens of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, lawmakers have been relatively nonchalant about union reporting. Unlike the quarterly filings of corporations, unions must only file once a year with the Labor Department using a free software program. They don’t have to get an independent certified audit, are only rarely audited by the government, and don’t have to follow standard accounting methods. …

David Brooks sits in on an interview W.

I spent the first four days of last week interviewing senators about Iraq. The mood ranged from despondency to despair. Then on Friday I went to the Roosevelt Room in the White House to hear President Bush answer questions on the same subject. It was like entering a different universe.

Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored. While some in his administration may be looking for exit strategies, he is unshakably committed to stabilizing Iraq. If Gen. David Petraeus comes back and says he needs more troops and more time, Bush will scrounge up the troops. If GeneralPetraeus says he can get by with fewer, Bush will support that, too.

Bush said he will get General Petraeus’s views unfiltered by the Pentagon establishment. He feels no need to compromise to head off opposition from Capitol Hill and is confident that he can rebuild popular support. “I have the tools,” he said.

I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency. …

Rich Lowry Corner posts on Brooks’ column.

John Stossel continues reporting his talk with Michael Moore.

Michael Moore loves government.

OK, he doesn’t love a government headed by George W. Bush, but he believes that once the Democrats are in charge, government will do a better job providing health care.

In his new movie, “Sicko,” he praises government-controlled health care systems in Canada and Europe. He suggests that Americans pay more for health care but have a shorter life expectancy than people in other countries because our health care is driven “by profit.”

He is wrong in so many ways.

First, life expectancy is no measure of a country’s medical system. Lifestyle and culture matter more, and Americans are different.

Interviewing Moore for an upcoming health care special on “20/20,” I said, “In America we kill each other more often. We shoot each other. We have more car accidents. Forgive me, more of us look like … you.”

He smiled at that, but still argued that that people live longer in Canada “because they never have to worry about paying to go see the doctor. That means at the first sign of being sick they go right away to the doctor cause they’re not worrying about whether or not they can afford it.”

Please. …

The Captain has the story on how Hillary paid off Vilsack.

Tom Vilsack dropped out of the Democratic presidential race in February, one of the first significant also-rans to acknowledge reality. The former governor of Iowa endorsed Hillary in March, giving her a boost in the key state. However, that seems to have come as part of a quid pro quo, as her backers have piled contributions onto the defunct Vilsack candidacy — and some of the money wound up in Vilsack’s pockets:

The Captain referred to some previous posts which are here also.

Instapundit spotted more Gore hypocrisy.

“ONLY one week after Live Earth, Al Gore’s green credentials slipped while hosting his daughter’s wedding in Beverly Hills.

Gore and his guests at the weekend ceremony dined on Chilean sea bass – arguably one of the world’s most threatened fish species.”

WSJ Editors on Norman Borlaug.

In 1944, when Norman Borlaug arrived in Mexico, the nation was in the grip of crop failure. Cereals like wheat are dietary staples. But in Mexico, an airborne fungus was causing an epidemic of “stem rust,” and acreage once flush with golden wheat and maize yielded little more than sunbaked sallow weeds. Coupled with a population surge, famine seemed in the offing.

Dr. Borlaug left Mexico in 1963 with a harvest six times what it was when he arrived. From acres of arable land sprung a hyperactive strain of wheat engineered by the scientist in his laboratory, fertilized and nurtured according to his methods, and irrigated by systems he helped to design. Mexico’s peasantry was not only fed — it was selling wheat on the international market. …

Mr. Borlaug with an op-ed today.