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• July 17 (word)

• July 17 (pdf)

Andrew Roberts, author of The History of The English Speaking Peoples Since 1900 had an important op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor.

The English-speaking peoples of the world need to unite around their common heritage of values. And they need to sacrifice their naiveté about the true nature of war – and the losses that inevitably go with it. Otherwise, they will lose a titanic struggle with radical, totalitarian Islam.

The reason they are under such vicious attack – my home city of London came within minutes of losing up to 1,000 innocent people in an attempted nightclub bombing two weeks ago – is that they represent all that is most loathsome and terrifying for radical Islam.

Countries in which English is the primary language are culturally, politically, and militarily different from the rest of “the West.” They have never fallen prey to fascism or communism, nor were they (except for the Channel Islands) invaded.

They stand for modernity, religious and sexual toleration, capitalism, diversity, women’s rights, representative institutions – in a word, the future. This world cannot coexist with strict, public implementation of Islamic sharia law, let alone an all-powerful caliphate.

Those who still view this struggle as a mere police action against uncoordinated criminal elements, rather than as an existential war for the survival of their way of life, are blinding themselves to reality. …

William Kristol thinks W’s record is pretty good. Pickerhead agrees.

I suppose I’ll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush‘s presidency will probably be a successful one.

Let’s step back from the unnecessary mistakes and the self-inflicted wounds that have characterized the Bush administration. Let’s look at the broad forest rather than the often unlovely trees. What do we see? First, no second terrorist attack on U.S. soil — not something we could have taken for granted. Second, a strong economy — also something that wasn’t inevitable.

And third, and most important, a war in Iraq that has been very difficult, but where — despite some confusion engendered by an almost meaningless “benchmark” report last week — we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome. …

Tech Central has an item on the recent BBC/Queen flap.

The clattering sound that was heard all round Britain at breakfast time last Wednesday was the sound of British jaws hitting breakfast tables, dressing tables and steering wheels as a commercial for a BBC program urged viewers to watch a program in which “the Queen storms out” of a photo session “in a huff.”

Given that, during the 60 years of her reign as head of state of Britain, Queen Elizabeth has never evinced the slightest sign of irritation – or indeed boredom which must, so many times, have been jaw-cracking as she listened to speeches at state banquets and official luncheons and endured thick-witted dining companions – never mind displeasure, the British simply didn’t believe it. A keen horsewoman and breeder of thoroughbreds, she never even allows herself to look vaguely disappointed in public when one of her horses loses.

Mouths also gaped round the British Commonwealth, for the Queen is also the Queen of Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and around 50 other nations comprising around 2bn people in all. The workload, including traveling, endured by 81-year old Queen Elizabeth, whose devotion to her duty is legendary, would be daunting for someone 40 years younger. …

That will prepare the way for a long article (3,500 words) from the Daily Telegraph written by a former BBC producer. Samizdata tipped us to this.

… for nine years (1955-1964) I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan’s premiership, and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it.

It was (and is) essentially, though not exclusively, a graduate phenomenon. From time to time it finds an issue that strikes a chord with the broad mass of the nation, but in most respects it is wildly unrepresentative of national opinion. When the Queen Mother died the media liberal press dismissed it as an event of no particular importance, and were mortified to see the vast crowds lining the route for her funeral, and the great flood of national emotion that it released. …

 

… So how did it happen that this minority media liberal subculture managed to install itself as the principal interpreter of Britain’s institutions to the British public? And even more interestingly, where do its opinions and attitudes come from?

Some of the ingredients have a proud and ancient lineage: resistance to oppressive political and social authority, championship of the poor, the Factory Acts and the abolition of the slave trade, are golden threads that run though the fabric of British history. But there are four new factors which in my lifetime have brought about the changes which have shaped media liberalism, encouraged its spread, and significantly increased its influence and importance. …

 

… We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world. We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. Some people called us arrogant; looking back, I am afraid I cannot dispute the epithet.

We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say ”Tesco” to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers”. The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers every day does not show up on the media liberal radar. …

 

… For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.

We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism – and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible. …

Corner post tells how the great left-wing conspiracy brought down Don Imus.

Remember the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, that loomed large in Hillary’s mind as a fabricator of obviously untrue rumors about her husband and an intern? As we have long known, Hillary’s most heartfelt complaints about the other side all arise about behavior of which she, personally, is guilty. The politics of destruction (who is more adept than the Clintons at that? Ask the Obama campaign for an update.) The Bush Administration’s ethical breaches? Any such pale in comparison to the Clintons’. The Scooter Libby commutation as a sign of lack of respect for the law? What about Bill’s 140 midnight pardons. And on…

This week, Front page magazine ran a fascinating expose of the connections between Hillary and the lead left wing media monitoring organization—Media Matters. It was Media Matters, you recall, that brought down Don Imus this past April, after a kid who was assigned to monitor his broadcasts heard the unfortunate “nappy headed ho’s” comment at dawn, and thought it might be useful. …

The Captain has some great posts. First on Lady Bird’s success in the broadcast business. Then on Rudy’s campaign. Finally on Thompson’s.

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• July 16 (word)

• July 16 (pdf)

Before we get serious today, the Captain has a great post on a London Times columnist reacting to the BBC Queen snafu and the loony lady who married Bin Laden’s son. If you link to the article in the Times, UK you’ll learn BBC stands for Busy Blurting Confessions.

Power Line posts about a Herbert Meyer essay you won’t want to miss.

During the Reagan administration, Herbert Meyer was Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Steve Hayward notes that in 1983, when the Cold War was still regarded almost unanimously as a fixture in global affairs, Meyer predicted that the Soviet Union was in its final stages. He argued that the U.S. therefore should begin planning for a post-Soviet world.

Earlier this week, Meyer turned his forecasting skills to the present situation. He noted that there are two competing views about the post-9/11 world: (1) that we’re at war with radical Islam and (2) that we’re simply experiencing high levels of violence as a result of our values and policies. Under the first view, we should strive for victory and avoid defeat on battlegrounds such as Iraq. Under the second view, we should merely try to reduce episodes of terrorism while adjusting our values and policies.

Real Clear Politics brings us that essay.

It’s possible that something horrific will happen in the immediate future to shift public support here in the US, and throughout the West, from the second perception to the first. When asked by a young reporter what he thought would have the greatest impact on his government’s fate, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan responded cheerfully: “Events, dear boy, events.” One more 9-11-type attack – biological, chemical, or nuclear – that takes out Houston, Berlin, Vancouver or Paris, and the leader of that country will be overwhelmed by the furious public’s demands to “turn the creeps who did this, and the countries that helped them, into molten glass and don’t let’s worry about collateral damage.” (This will sound even better in French or German.) Should the next big attack come here in the US, some among us will blame the President but most won’t. The public mood will be not merely ferocious, but ugly; you won’t want to walk down the street wearing an “I gave to the ACLU” pin in your lapel.

Absent such an event in the near future, it’s likely that over the next few years the war will settle into a phase that proponents of Perception Two will approve. Simply put, we will shift from offense to defense. The Department of Homeland Security will become our government’s lead agency, and the Pentagon’s role will be diminished. (Nothing will change at the State Department – but then, nothing ever does.) Most people in the US, and elsewhere in the West, will be relieved that “the war” is finally over.

Victor Davis Hanson in The City Journal answers the NY Times “surrender” editorial.

We promised General Petraeus a hearing in September; it would be the height of folly to preempt that agreement by giving in to our summer of panic and despair. Critics called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a change in command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops. But now that we have a new secretary, a new command in Iraq and at Centcom, new strategies, and more troops, suddenly we have a renewed demand for withdrawal before the agreed-upon September accounting—suggesting that the only constant in such harping was the assumption that Iraq was either hopeless or not worth the effort.

The truth is that Iraq has upped the ante in the war against terrorists. Our enemies’ worst nightmare is a constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate, surrounded by consensual rule in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Turkey; ours is a new terror heaven, but with oil, a strategic location, and the zeal born of a humiliating defeat of the United States on a theater scale. The Islamists believe we can’t win; so does the New York Times. But it falls to the American people to decide the issue.

Debra Saunders reminds us what’s at stake in the emminent domain controversy.

No government should be able to take your land to give it to a corporation. As Susette Kelo noted Thursday, “Our federal tax dollars shouldn’t be used to take away our homes and businesses so that developers can build shopping malls and condominiums.”

Citizens have an interest in a system that allows governments to take property — at a just price — for public projects. But when states and cities, in search of a richer tax base, can take your land and give it to a private developer — they have license to trample on everyone’s rights. And no one, except the very rich, is safe.

ABC News reports Churchill dropped from Brit curriculum.

The Onion says Edwards has pledged to eliminate all bad things by 2011.

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• July 15 (word)

• July 15 (pdf)

Zimbabwe’s problems profiled in the Economist.

ZIMBABWE is an increasingly wretched place and, sadly, will grow more miserable for some time yet. This week an outspoken Roman Catholic Archbishop, Pius Ncube, who has become the strongest voice of opposition in the country, described the economic situation as “life-threatening”. That was an understatement. Years of economic collapse, provoked by dreadful misrule, have already taken a huge toll on Zimbabwean lives: the population has been battered by hunger, poverty and AIDS; some 3m people are estimated to have fled abroad; life expectancy has dropped to medieval levels. …

 

… Choked by hyperinflation and arbitrary restrictions Zimbabweans have had to become increasingly creative to survive. Many of those left behind in the country are staying alive only thanks to remittances from migrants in South Africa, Britain and elsewhere. A local businessman repeats the widely-held prediction that the current system will collapse within six months—and that Zimbabwe, under new management, will become Africa’s fastest growing economy. “Then again”, he smiles, “we have been saying this for years.”

Claudia Rosett keeps us up to date with UN shenanigans.

Another UN moment. There is truly no end to it. Someone ought to set up one of those giant digital counters that tick off things like the growing population of the planet, only in this case, it could have the caption:

“Every 45 seconds, somewhere on earth, a UN official heaps praise on a tyrant.”

Charles Krauthammer features the John Burns article from last Sunday to launch a column.

… It is understandable that Sens. Lugar, Voinovich, Domenici, Snowe and Warner may no longer trust President Bush’s judgment when he tells them to wait until Petraeus reports in September. What is not understandable is the vote of no confidence they are passing on Petraeus. These are the same senators who sent him back to Iraq by an 81 to 0 vote to institute his new counterinsurgency strategy. …

Bill Kristol says the defeatists may have over played their hand.

The Defeatist Democrats have lots of support from the mainstream media, most of whom have simply given up on reporting the war or analyzing arguments about the war. Actually, the newsmen who know something, like John F. Burns and Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times, have produced some terrific reporting. But run-of-the-mill foreign policy and White House reporters have little interest in what is actually happening in Iraq, or in a real consideration of the likely outcomes of different policy options. They’re not even reporting what’s happening in Washington. They’re simply committed to discrediting the war and humiliating the Bush administration.

As for the foreign policy establishment and its fellow travelers in the punditocracy, one might have thought they could be serious about this war–actually analyzing events, engaging in a grown-up debate about the real-world consequences of different courses of action, keeping calm amid the political posturing. Many in the Bush administration who care for their standing in the establishment’s eyes have spent an awful lot of time cultivating these masters of nuance and complexity. All for naught. The establishment, like the media and the Democrats, wants to discredit and humiliate an administration that too often (though not often enough!) dared to think for itself, and to act without their permission. They’re out to destroy Bush, his ideas, and his supporters, no matter the consequences for the country.

Over the last few weeks, all of these estimable entities–the Democratic party in Congress, much of the media, and the foreign policy establishment–have joined together to try to panic the country, and the Bush administration, into giving up. The story of the past week–an important week–is this: They failed. Many around Bush wobbled. But Bush stood firm. Most Republicans on the Hill stood firm. And, so far as one can tell, the country as a whole pulled back a bit from the irresponsibility of cutting and running.

Theodore Dalrymple, a retired psychiatrist, comments on the doctor’s plot for National Review.

Karl Rove was in Aspen last week addressing a group of liberal democrats. Clive Crook has details.

Almost everybody who stayed to listen to Rove on the festival’s last day went there mainly in the hope that heavy equipment might fall on him from a great height. This was the same crowd that had gazed wide-eyed and enchanted at their beloved Bill. Why does Rove accept these invitations, one wondered on the way in? Possibly, he does it for fun. He gave every impression of having a good time. And, in fact, he ran rings round an audience that came not to praise him but in the hope that somebody might bury him.

The Captain posts on BBC’s oldest trick – lying. This time to trash the Queen.

Melanie Phillips on the same subject.

If it transposes a picture sequence like this to sex up a story about the Queen by transmitting an outright falsehood, just think what it is doing in the Middle East.

Greg Mankiw takes up the fairness issue for NY Times.

DO the rich pay their fair share in taxes? This is likely to become a defining question during the presidential campaign.

At a recent fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett said that rich guys like him weren’t paying enough. Mr. Buffett asserted that his taxes last year equaled only 17.7 percent of his taxable income, compared with about 30 percent for his receptionist.

Mr. Buffett was echoing a refrain that is popular in some circles. Last year, Robert B. Reich, labor secretary during the Clinton administration, wrote on his blog that “middle-income workers are now paying a larger share of their incomes than people at or near the top.”

“We have turned the principle of a graduated, progressive tax on its head,” Mr. Reich added.

These claims are enough to get populist juices flowing. The problem with them is that they don’t hold up under close examination.

Bret Stephens gets a ride on the USS Harry Truman off the Virginia Capes.

An hour before dusk, the air crew of the USS Truman — several hundred men and women of every rank and job description — gathers at the front end of the deck to walk its 1,100 foot length, looking for tiny pieces of debris. A stray piece of metal sucked into the intake of a fighter jet could cause catastrophic damage to the plane and the pilot and terrible damage to the ship. “We don’t think of this as a dangerous business,” says Rear Adm. Bill Gortney, an F-18 pilot who also commands the Truman’s battle group of cruisers, destroyers and submarines. “It’s just a terribly unforgiving one.” …

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• July 12 (word)

• July 12 (pdf)

Debra Saunders knows we need to be patient in Iraq.

During a teleconference from Iraq with reporters last week, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of coalition forces operating in the region south of Baghdad, explained, “Lynch’s rules of war fighting.” Rule 1 is, “Everything is timing, and the second rule is, everything takes longer than you think it’s going to take.”

I’ve had people ask me what it would take for me to support withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The answer: If military leaders such as Lynch or top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus say this war is not winnable, then it’s time to get out.

But when U.S. senators — be they Republicans Richard Lugar and Pete Domenici, or Democrats Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid — call for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops, that’s not a sign to get out. It’s a sign that D.C. pols want to be on the popular side of an unpopular war. It’s a sign that Washington lacks what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., described as “the courage necessary to put our country’s interests before every personal or political consideration.”

U.S. troops serving in Iraq deserve better. …

David Ignatius too.

… Getting into Iraq was President Bush‘s decision, and history will judge his administration harshly for its mistakes in the postwar occupation. But getting out of Iraq is now partly in the hands of the Democrats who control both houses of Congress. History will be equally unforgiving if their agitation for withdrawal results in a pell-mell retreat that causes lasting damage. …

And the editors of the Washington Post.

IT SEEMS like just weeks ago, because it was, that Congress approved funding for the war in Iraq and instructed Gen. David H. Petraeus to report back on the war’s progress in September. Now, for reasons having more to do with American politics than with Iraqi reality, September isn’t soon enough. …

Don Surber of the Charlestown Daily Mail has more.

I will not mince words. The call to bring our troops home from Iraq is nothing short of a surrender that will move the theater of war from Baghdad to the streets of the United States.

Unlike Vietnam, the enemy will follow our soldiers home.

On Sunday, the New York Times called for a surrender in Iraq. In so doing, the newspaper abandoned any pretense of liberalism, of decency and of compassion for one’s fellow man. …

Jay Nordlinger of National Review Online gives us a delightful change of pace. He has excerpts from speeches given by Abby and Steve Thernstrom when they received Bradley Awards in May. Pickerhead was honored by an invitation and is happy to relive that evening.

Here’s Abby;

… We are true neo-cons. We lingered long on the left until mugged by reality. Even in the ’50s, however, when we met, I was a political disappointment to my parents, who had sent me to Communist schools. Literally. The children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg arrived at my high school after I left.

But my Communist political education failed to take. For reasons I don’t know, I was stubborn, fiercely independent, and willing to pay the price for rebellion. I was the only student in my school, for instance, who refused to wear a black armband when the Rosenbergs were executed in June 1953. It was not a recipe for popularity at that school. . . .

And Steve;

Abby hails from Greenwich Village; I’m from the heartland, specifically two small Midwestern industrial cities, Port Huron and Battle Creek, Michigan. My father, the son of a Swedish immigrant laborer, had to leave school after the 8th grade to earn his keep. My mother’s formal education ended with high school, but she was a devoted life-long reader who encouraged me to read voraciously from an early age. . . .

I met Abby at Harvard in 1958. By then, I had read deeply in Marx, and considered myself a democratic socialist. Over time, though — a long time — I gradually lost my faith that the government could run the economy more fairly than a free market, and began to move back towards Battle Creek, as it were. The year spent in England as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in 1978-79 was particularly eye-opening, as we lived through the final months of the Callaghan Labour government and found ourselves cheering Margaret Thatcher’s election. The tragic degeneration of the civil rights movement, in which I had been active in college and graduate school, also sapped my faith in left liberalism. . . .

John Fund has some Thompson thoughts.

Power Line posts Thompson’s letter to them.

The easiest and most generally used tactic when running against a lawyer is to trade off a general perception that most people dislike lawyers. Goodness knows that a lot of lawyers have earned disfavor but, as it turns out, folks understand our system better than a lot of politicians think they do. In my first run for the Senate, my opponent tried the old demagoguery route – “He has even represented criminals!” – to no avail.

A first cousin of this ploy is to associate the lawyer with the views of his client. Now-United States Chief Justice John Roberts addressed this notion during his confirmation hearings. “… [I]t’s a tradition of the American Bar that goes back before the founding of the country that lawyers are not identified with the positions of their clients. The most famous example probably was John Adams, who represented the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre.”

Samizdata says Tintin books are in trouble in the UK.

Robert Samuelson tries to answer why we don’t get happier.

Corner post on Sicko.

Michael Munger, chair of the PolySci Dept. at Duke, with a great piece on recycling.

Two empty bottles, still cool from their malty contents. I glance at my lovely wife. And as always after a couple of beers, she looks strikingly attractive… as an audience for an economics lecture.

Her reaction, also as always, is to pretend to focus intently on her book, and probably to wonder how we ever managed to have children. …

… “Recycle, regardless of cost!” doesn’t solve a problem; it creates one. Laws requiring recycling harm me, the environment, and everyone else. We have to take prices into account, because prices are telling us that we can’t save resources by wasting resources.

Well, it’s late, and it’s time I head upstairs. I put the glass bottles in the recycle container. They are brown glass, and though their “value” is negative, at least they can be recycled at nominal cost. Besides, it makes me feel good. I’m saving the Earth, one piece of expensive garbage at a time.

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• July 11 (word)

• July 11 (pdf)

John Stossel’s column gets the lead again with “Freedom and Benevolence.”

I interviewed Michael Moore recently for an upcoming “20/20″ special on health care. It’s refreshing to interview a leftist who proudly admits he’s a leftist. He told me that government should provide “food care” as well as health care and that big government would work if only the right people were in charge.

Moore added, “I watch your show and I know where you are coming from. … “

He knows I defend limited government, so he tried to explain why I was wrong. He began in a revealing way:

“I gotta believe that, even though I know you’re very much for the individual determining his own destiny, you also have a heart.”

Notice his smuggled premise in the words “even though.” In Moore’s mind, someone who favors individual freedom doesn’t care about his fellow human beings. If I have a heart, it’s in spite of my belief in freedom and autonomy for everyone.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that someone who wants everyone to be free of tyranny does so partly because he cares about others? …

Tony Blankley looks at the senate in “Chamber of Shame.”

… But if al Qaeda can plausibly claim they drove America out of Iraq (just as they drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan), they will gain literally millions of new adherents in their struggle to destroy America and the West. We will then pay in blood, treasure and future wars vastly more than we are paying today to manage and eventually win our struggle in Iraq.

Our staying power, unflinching persistence in the face of adversity, muscular capacity to impose order on chaos and eventual slaughtering of terrorists who are trying to drive us out will do more to win the “hearts and minds” of potentially radical Islamists around the world than all the little sermons about our belief in Islam as the religion of peace. As bin Laden once famously observed — people follow the strong horse.

We have two choices: Use our vast resources to prove we are the strong horse or get ready to be taken to the glue factory. …

Theodore Dalrymple who was here last week reviewing a book by Walter Laqueur writes on the uncomfortable choices facing Brits.

… A friend who met me at the airport said something that must by now be true of many ordinary British people. Just as we used to wonder, on meeting Germans of a certain age, what they had done during World War II, so she wondered, when she found herself next to a young Muslim on a bus or a train, what he thought of the various bombings perpetrated by his co-religionists and whether he might be a bomber. She found herself looking for the nearest exit, as we are all enjoined to do by flight attendants before the plane takes off, in case of the need for swift exit.

There are reasonable grounds for suspicion, of course. Surveys — for whatever they are worth — show a surprising, and horrifying, degree of sympathy, if not outright support, for the bombers on the part of the young Muslim population of Britain. They show that a large number of Muslims in Britain want the implementation of Sharia law and think that murdering British Jews is justified simply because they are Jews. And when an atrocity is perpetrated by a Muslim, they evince no passion remotely comparable to that aroused by, say, the work of Salman Rushdie. …

Jonah Goldberg has fun with Live Earth.

… if fans had somehow missed the global-warming story entirely, imagine how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn’t hit the mute button when Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she “didn’t feel hate toward nature” because of the tsunami. “I felt nature was screaming for help.”

It’s nice that Nemcova didn’t want to blame the messenger, but it’s hard to feel a similar reluctance about Live Earth’s impresario in chief. Former Vice President Al Gore recently penned a book in which he rails against the current “assault on reason” by the evil forces of Earth-hating right-wingery. He repeatedly invokes science as if it’s his exclusive property. But the soft paganism on display in Nemcova’s faith-based assertion that a suboceanic earthquake was the result of Mother Nature sending us a message is typical of greenhouse gasbaggery. Gore talks about the dysfunction of political discourse today. But when it comes to global warming, he and his acolytes insist that the time for debate is over. In other words, Gore’s ideal discourse would involve only discussion about how best to follow through on his prescriptions. …

Rich Lowry posts on part of McCain’s problem.

One of the problems with senators as presidential candidates is that they usually have never run anything, so they are not well-suited for an executive role. That seems to have been part of the problem with McCain. …

Yesterday Kathleen Parker took on marijuana laws. Today Debra Saunders illuminates sentencing inequities in crack/cocaine laws that weigh heavily on African Americans. She wanders too much, but readers can see some of the problems.

When Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, it wrongly included language that meted out a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for dealing 5 grams of crack cocaine, yet the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence for dealing 100 times that amount, or 500 grams, of powder cocaine. Thus the bill codified a racially unjust divide. The U.S. Sentencing Commission found that in 2000 some 84.7 percent of federal crack offenders were black, while only 5.6 percent were white.

Everyone in Washington knows that the law is unfair — obscenely unfair. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has made four recommendations to curb the sentencing inequity. Alas, for the past two decades, Democrats and Republicans have cravenly set out to out-posture each other in toughness in the war on drugs. So Washington either voted against or ignored the Sentencing Commission’s recommendations. …

American Thinker notes NY Times bonds have rating cut. Yesterday we claimed not to indulge in schadenfreude. We lied. We do enjoy it when the Times gets what it so richly deserves.

Lileks is here.

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• July 10 (word)

• July 10 (pdf)

Power Line reacts to Dem moves for defeat and the GOP who acquiesce.

Given the demonstrable progress made by General Petraeus and the forces under his command implementing the surge counterinsurgency strategy over the past month, I find the Democratic compulsion to mandate our defeat in Iraq incomprehensible and any Republican assistance lent to the Democrats’ effort contemptible.

The same post quotes Bill Kristol.

… Here’s what I gather is a basic lesson of tactics: When you find yourself in an ambush, attack into the ambush. Don’t twist and turn in the kill zone, looking for a way to retreat. Especially when the ambush is not a powerful one, and the Democrats’ position (to mix military metaphors) is way overextended. The Democrats are hoping the president will break and run. They will not allow him a dignified retreat or welcome him with compromise. They will spring to finish him off completely. It doesn’t matter what the president’s motives are. Some of his advisers are trying to persuade him that he needs to go for a grand bargain now so as to build bipartisan support for his policies when he’s gone. But the only way to do that is to hold firm now–and to counterattack. Those who try to convince him otherwise offer nothing but defeat, for the troops, for the mission, and for the president. …

Later Power Line posts on a Novak column.

Earlier today, Scott wrote that he finds “the Democratic compulsion to mandate our defeat in Iraq incomprehensible and any Republican assistance lent to the Democrats’ effort contemptible.” Just as contemptible, on the evidence of this column by Robert Novak, is the way certain Republican Senators are spinning the matter.

In Novak’s telling, which appears to be an uncritical transmittal of the talking points of the Republicans who intend to bail on President Bush, the president doesn’t understand that support for his position on the Republican side is eroding. Moreover, these Republicans supposedly fear “the president running out the clock until April, when a depleted U.S. military will be blamed for the fiasco.”

This is self-serving rubbish. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and nearly everyone else in a high level position in the administration have been around long enough to understand that some Republican politicians, being politicians, are going to want to jump ship now that the war has become unpopular. It may be in the interest of these politicians to portray Bush as not understanding them. More likely, he understands them perfectly, and simply is unwilling to accede to their defeatist position. …

Power Line then posts on Steve Hayward and his efforts to clearly portray J. Carter and Al Gore.

… Carter has a long habit of engaging in what was once described as “blurt and retreat,” whereby he backs away from egregious statements when called on them. Yet circumstantial evidence suggests that this language was not mere verbal sloppiness, as Carter now wishes us to think. At the end of one of Carter’s freelance Middle East peace conferences a few years ago, he let slip a comment that ranks up there with many racially tinged remarks from his various Georgia political campaigns: “Had I been elected to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It is strange that an experienced politician would use that particular expression. Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, incautiously wrote years after leaving office that Carter’s Middle East plan in a prospective second term was simple: Sell out Israel.

Pickings is proud to have Richard Cohen again with “They Honor Us With Their Hate.” We will forgive him for his slaps at W. The Captain will take that up next. But, you can’t beat his theme that we are honored by the hatred of the anti-Semites in the Muslim world.

… But, in a way, America has little choice about being hated in some parts of the world. The United States is never going to be truly popular as long as it insists on adhering to certain principles. Russia, which is creeping back to totalitarianism, does not have this problem. China, which is already authoritarian and obstructionist on Darfur, does not have this problem. Cuba, which is authoritarian, obstructionist and vile, also does not have this problem. Many Serbs hate America for the NATO bombing of that country, but the bombing stopped the killing in the Balkans. Tell me that was the wrong thing to do.

Alastair Campbell, a one-time spokesman for Tony Blair while he was prime minister, has published a book in Britain titled “The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries.” In it, he recounts Sept. 12, 2001, at 10 Downing Street and the procession of briefers who came to the prime minister that day: “One of the experts . . . a total Arabist, came very close to saying the attack was justified, saying the Americans should look to their own policy on the Middle East to understand why so many people don’t like them.”

It’s always nice to have friends. Sometimes, though, it’s more honorable to have enemies.

The Captain cleans up after Mr. Cohen.

… I agree with Cohen in the first and last paragraphs above, but the middle paragraph is nothing but twaddle. George Bush did not order abuses at Abu Ghraib, and neither did Don Rumsfeld. Abu Ghraib resulted from a lack of discipline one of the units assigned there and a lack of oversight by its officers. Those responsible were court-martialed and sent to prison, and the general commanding that unit got sacked. And while it certainly did give us a black eye in terms of our image, the idea that it somehow outstripped the murders, tortures, and rapes conducted their under previous management is preposterous. …

… We make our share of mistakes, and Abu Ghraib qualifies as a big one. That isn’t what America is or where our values lie. Cohen makes a big mistake in arguing that it does under any presidency, and the swift punishment of those responsible demonstrates the fallacy of that thinking. The response showed that we take our values seriously, even in how we deal with our enemies. I will also note that we have seen how those who hate us and array themselves against us treat Americans they capture, and we can see their values clearly in how they handle themselves.

I’d rather have them as enemies than friends.

Kathleen Parker writes a good column on marijuana laws. Her jumping off point is the recent problems in the Gore family. In the normal course of events Pickings in not interested in schadenfreude. Gore’s ideas are so preposterous we can confine ourselves to the enjoyment of making fun of them. And, the possession of pot should be the least of the problems Gore triple sticks has on his plate.

… Efforts over the past few decades to relax marijuana laws have been moderately successful. Twelve states have decriminalized marijuana, which usually means no prison or criminal record for first-time possession of small amounts for personal consumption. (Those states are: Alabama, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon.)

Yet even now, federal law enforcement agents raid the homes of terminally ill patients who use marijuana for relief from suffering in states where medical marijuana use is permitted. These federal raids have become an issue in the 2008 presidential race as candidates have been asked to take a position. A summary is available on the Marijuana Policy Project Web site (mpp.org).

Beyond the medical issue is the practical question of criminalizing otherwise good citizens for consuming a nontoxic substance — described by the British medical journal Lancet as less harmful to health than alcohol or tobacco — at great economic and social cost. Each year, more than 700,000 people are arrested for marijuana-related offenses at a cost of more than $7 billion, according to the Marijuana Policy Project. …

Arnold Kling writes for Tech Central on the Dem inequality claims.

The Left is gearing up for 2008 with major proposals for government intervention to “fix” the distribution of income. For example, the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, recently proposed raising the minimum wage, giving unions more advantages in the workplace, expanding government’s role in child care, and other policies that will be harmful to economic growth, which is the one proven way to raise our standard of living.

In order to build support for this statist agenda, policy wonks and pundits are spreading a set of myths about inequality. We are hearing that incomes are stagnating in middle America, that class mobility is disappearing, and that the political process favors the wealthy. But we should not believe the myths. …

The Australian gives us the skinny on Gore’s movie.

AL Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was launched in May last year. Its message is that global warming is going to roon us all, and the polar bears, too. Initially, the film received eulogistic – and, one might say, generally scientifically ignorant – reviews in substantial newspapers and magazines globally.

As it came to be watched by qualified persons, devastating critiques of the looseness of the film’s science began to appear on the internet. More than 20 basic errors, some of them schoolboy howlers, were identified. …

Perry de Havilland of Samizdata visits the US. to shoot guns and drink Yuengling beer. You’ll love his T shirt. It’s Margaret Thatcher dressed like Che.

A Volokh post on Johnny Carson and Jack Benny.

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• July 9 (word)

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The same day the NY Times called for withdrawal from Iraq, John Burns, the best reporter on the scene, files an optimistic report from Anbar Province.

SUNNI merchants watched warily from behind neat stacks of fruit and vegetables as Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno walked with a platoon of bodyguards through the Qatana bazaar here one recent afternoon. At last, one leathery-faced trader glanced furtively up and down the narrow, refuse-strewn street to check who might be listening, then broke the silence.

“America good! Al Qaeda bad!” he said in halting English, flashing a thumb’s-up in the direction of America’s second-ranking commander in Iraq.

Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by American machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor’s building across the road. Ramadi was Iraq’s most dangerous city, and the area around the building the most deadly place in Ramadi. Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. …

George Will picks up on some of Amity Shlaes new book on the Great Depression.

Some mornings during the autumn of 1933, when the unemployment rate was 22 percent, the president, before getting into his wheelchair, sat in bed, surrounded by economic advisers, setting the price of gold. One morning he said he might raise it 21 cents: “It’s a lucky number because it’s three times seven.” His Treasury secretary wrote that if people knew how gold was priced “they would be frightened.”

The Depression’s persistence, partly a result of such policy flippancy, was frightening. In 1937, during the depression within the Depression, there occurred the steepest drop in industrial production ever recorded. By January 1938 the unemployment rate was back up to 17.4 percent. The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt‘s success was in altering the practice of American politics.

This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive. …

Christopher Hitchens on the doctors plot.

Make any presumption of innocence that you like, and it still looks as if the latest cell of religious would-be murderers in Britain is made up of members of the medical profession. When I was growing up, the expression “Doctors’ Plot” was a chilling one, expressing the paranoia of Stalin about his Jewish physicians and their evil conspiracy; a paranoia that was on the verge of unleashing an official pogrom in Moscow before the old brute succumbed to death by natural causes just in time. Now it seems that there really was a doctors’ plot in London and Glasgow and that its members were so hungry for death that they rushed from one aborted crime scene to another in their eagerness to take the lives of strangers. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld the same.

What is the difference between an Islamic Doctors’ Plot and a Jewish Doctors’ Plot?

It sounds like the opening line of a joke, but it’s not.

So far, in the Islamic Doctors’ Plot now being unraveled by Scotland Yard, eight people have been arrested in connection with two failed car-bombings in London and a third at the Glasgow airport. Seven are doctors, and the eighth is a laboratory technician. They are all suspected of planning or participating in a mass casualty attack, using gas canisters, gasoline, and nails to inflict maximum carnage on innocents civilians, as part of a broader worldwide campaign of terror in the name of Islam. …

… The Jewish Doctors’ Plot is another kettle of fish altogether. On January 13, 1953, the Soviet Communist party newspaper Pravda published an article under the headline “Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of Academic Physicians.” It told of a vast plot by a group of doctors who “deliberately and viciously undermined their patients’ health by making incorrect diagnoses, and then killed them with bad and incorrect treatments.” …

William Easterly, NYU prof, says Africa needs trade, not handouts.

JUST WHEN IT SEEMED that Western images of Africa could not get any weirder, the July 2007 special Africa issue of Vanity Fair was published, complete with a feature article on “Madonna’s Malawi.” At the same time, the memoirs of an African child soldier are on sale at your local Starbucks, and celebrity activist Bob Geldof is touring Africa yet again, followed by TV cameras, to document that “War, Famine, Plague & Death are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and these days they’re riding hard through the back roads of Africa.”

It’s a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that’s being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers. But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help. …

 

… Today, as I sip my Rwandan gourmet coffee and wear my Nigerian shirt here in New York, and as European men eat fresh Ghanaian pineapple for breakfast and bring Kenyan flowers home to their wives, I wonder what it will take for Western consumers to learn even more about the products of self-sufficient, hardworking, dignified Africans. Perhaps they should spend less time consuming Africa disaster stereotypes from television and Vanity Fair.

Kofi Bentil, an African doesn’t like the message in Live Earth. He looks forward to using fossil fuels.

… Even if we accept that global warming may have a significant effect on our climate, limiting the use of fossil fuels in Africa would be counterproductive. Respiratory infections are the leading cause of childhood deaths on my continent, mainly from inhaling the smoke produced by burning wood and dung in our quaint mud huts. …

Adam Smith posts on Zimbabwe.

We often complain about the effect of government interference on our lives, but spare a thought for those less fortunate than ourselves.

The people of Zimbabwe are under the heel of one of the most autocratic and incompetent governments in the world. Top of the list of catastrophic mistakes made by the Mugabe government is its handling of the economy. Price increases ran at an annual rate of 4,500 percent in May of this year and the hyper-inflationary spiral shows no sign of stopping. …

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• July 8 (word)

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Mark Steyn was in the Orange County Register writing about the jobs Brits won’t do.

… Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can’t wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.

Some 40 percent of Britain’s practicing doctors were trained overseas – and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place. According to the BBC, “Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas – the vast majority from non-European countries.” Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain.

Many of these imported medical staff have never practiced in their own countries. As soon as they complete their training, they move to a Western world hungry for doctors to prop up their understaffed health systems: Dr. Abdulla got his medical qualification in Baghdad in 2004 and was practicing in Britain by 2006. His co-plotter, Mohammed Asha, a neurosurgeon, graduated in Jordan in 2004 and came to England the same year. …

… The fact that the National Health Service – the “envy of the world” in every British politician’s absurdly parochial cliché – has to hire Wahhabist doctors with no background checks tells you everything about where the country’s heading.

Natan Sharansky in WaPo with a warning about the results of leaving Iraq too soon.

… Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism. A textbook example came last year from John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq. “Under Saddam,” he said, according to the Associated Press, “if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK.”

The truth is that in totalitarian regimes, there are no human rights. Period. The media do not criticize the government. Parliaments do not check executive power. Courts do not uphold due process. And human rights groups don’t file reports.

For most people, life under totalitarianism is slavery with no possibility of escape. That is why despite the carnage in Iraq, Iraqis are consistently less pessimistic about the present and more optimistic about the future of their country than Americans are. In a face-to-face national poll of 5,019 people conducted this spring by Opinion Research Business, a British market-research firm, only 27 percent of Iraqis said they believed that “that their country is actually in a state of civil war,” and by nearly 2 to 1 (49 percent to 26 percent), the Iraqis surveyed said they preferred life under their new government to life under the old tyranny. That is why, at a time when many Americans are abandoning the vision of a democratic Iraq, most Iraqis still cling to the hope of a better future. …

Joe Lieberman concerned about Iran.

… I hope the new revelations about Iran’s behavior will also temper the enthusiasm of some of those in Congress who are advocating the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Iran’s purpose in sponsoring attacks on American soldiers, after all, is clear: It hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate these states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S.

The threat posed by Iran to our soldiers’ lives, our security as a nation and our allies in the Middle East is a truth that cannot be wished or waved away. It must be confronted head-on. The regime in Iran is betting that our political disunity in Washington will constrain us in responding to its attacks. For the sake of our nation’s security, we must unite and prove them wrong.

Daniel Johnson in Contentions gives some background on the trouble de Villepin and Chirac may have.

Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister, had some unusual visitors this week. Judges and police searched his Parisian apartment as part of their investigation into what is proving to be the biggest of the many political scandals of the Chirac era: the Clearstream affair. …

Claudia Rosett has UN news.

Please try to contain your excitement, but yes, it’s true….

In Geneva today, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presiding, the UN launched yet another “high-level” development thingamabob. This time it’s not a UN Fund, or a Program, or an Initiative, or a Group, or an Alliance, but a “Forum” …

Power Line analyzes LA Times hit piece on Thompson.

Open Market notes National Geographic article on Malaria actually gets it right about Rachel Carson.

Malaria is a confounding disease—often, it seems, contradictory to logic….Rachel Carson, the environmental icon, is a villain; her three-letter devil, DDT, is a savior…In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, documenting this abuse and painting so damning a picture that the chemical was eventually outlawed by most of the world for agricultural use. Exceptions were made for malaria control, but DDT became nearly impossible to procure. ‘The ban on DDT,’ says Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health, ‘may have killed 20 million children.’

Somebody who knows challenges Sicko’s ideas.

In “Sicko,” Michael Moore uses a clip of my appearance earlier this year on “The O’Reilly Factor” to introduce a segment on the glories of Canadian health care.

Moore adores the Canadian system. I do not.

I am a new American, but I grew up and worked for many years in Canada. And I know the health care system of my native country much more intimately than does Moore. There’s a good reason why my former countrymen with the money to do so either use the services of a booming industry of illegal private clinics, or come to America to take advantage of the health care that Moore denounces.

Government-run health care in Canada inevitably resolves into a dehumanizing system of triage, where the weak and the elderly are hastened to their fates by actuarial calculation.

Power Line proves AP is un-American.

Carpe Diem post on the “goldilocks” economy.

Pickerhead is always a sucker for new battery technology. USA TODAY with the story.

Dilbert has kind thoughts for his readers.

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• July 5 (word)

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John Stossel starts us off with “Live and let live.” Could be the motto of Pickings.

… there are only two ways to get people to do things: force or persuasion. Government is all about force. Government has nothing it hasn’t first expropriated from some productive person. …

 

… Thomas Jefferson said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Was he ever right! Liberty yields as well-intentioned busybodies try to “fix” the world by stopping you from using gasoline or forcing you to finance antipoverty programs.

No behavior is too small or private to escape the schemers. When a New Zealand couple recently named their child “4real,” the Washington Times said it was “unfortunate” that the government doesn’t forbid that. The “conservative” newspaper named the couple “Knaves of the Week.”

That prompted Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, to write the editor: “I choose you as my ‘Knave of the Week’ for asserting that the decision on naming a child should belong to politicians and bureaucrats rather than exclusively to that child’s parents. True knaves are those who arrogantly impose their tastes and preferences upon others.”

Exactly. “Live and let live” used to be a noble approach to life. Now you’re considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.

I prefer “live and let live.”

Adam Smith with a great idea for rebranding protectionism.

… They pointed to an analysis by the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading US companies, which recommended that economist use the term ‘economic isolationism’ instead of ‘protectionism’ when addressing an audience of non-economists. “While a person may instinctively want to be protected, no one wants to be isolated. To the broad public, the phrase ‘economic isolationism’ conveys the meaning of the term ‘protectionism’ better than does ‘protectionism’ itself.”

Marginal Revolution asks an important question.

The British Parliament was debating how much slave owners should be compensated for their losses, 20 million pounds as it turned out, when a furious John Stuart Mill rose to his feet thundering, “I should have thought it was the slaves who should be compensated.”

I am reminded of this story, which is probably apocryphal, whenever I hear about how we must compensate “the losers” from globalization. Really? Why should they get any compensation at all? …

WSJ editorializes on Congress’s treatment of Peru and Columbia. Brings to mind Bernard Lewis’ description of the U. S. – ”America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”

Claudia Rosett finds a sweet one for July 4th. She calls it the best play in baseball. It was 1976 and Rick Monday of the Chicago Cubs rescues a flag.

Mark Steyn and his fellows at The Corner, one of the National Review Online blogs, have had a field day posting on the news of the England’s current bombers.

Samizdata finishes up after 12 Corner posts.

… Still, it could be argued, that is just as well that they were NHS (Britain’s National Health Service) people. Had they not been their enterprise might have been successful.

Yahoo News found the Islamic “Rage Boy” we had fun with in June 25th Pickings.

Pickerhead takes a holiday tomorrow. Happy Fourth!

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• July 3 (word)

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John Burns, of the NY Times, reports on recent revelations of Iranian efforts in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, — Agents of Iran helped plan a January raid in Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants, an American military spokesman said Monday. The charge was the most specific allegation of Iranian involvement in an attack that killed American troops, at a time of rising tensions with Iran over its role in Iraq and its nuclear program.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, the military spokesman here, said an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a force under the control of Iran’s most powerful religious leaders, had used veterans of the Lebanese Islamic militia group Hezbollah as a “proxy” to train, arm and plan attacks by an array of Shiite militant cells in Iraq.

Joe Lieberman knows what to do.

“The fact is that the Iranian government has by its actions declared war on us,” said Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats. As a result, he continued, “The United States government has a responsibility to use all instruments at its disposal to stop these terrorist attacks against our soldiers and allies in Iraq, including keeping open the possibility of using military force against the terrorist infrastructure inside Iran.”

Max Boot too.

… Ever since 1979, the radical mullahs who control Tehran have been waging covert war on the United States and our allies, and we have scarcely responded. Especially now, when we are mired deep in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans and especially most of our politicians would seemingly prefer not to focus on actions that might embroil us with war on another front.

Yet that kind of ignorance becomes harder to preserve in light of fresh evidence of Iranian aggression. …

WSJ comments on Zimbabwe’s Neocon.

Richard Cohen of WaPo must have a fever. He’s been making a lot of sense lately. He was in Pickings two weeks ago suggesting Libby’s jail sentence be commuted. Now he’s taking the Dems to task for being captured by the teachers unions. Unfortunately he doesn’t find his way to supporting vouchers, but maybe that’s next.

The eight Democratic presidential candidates assembled in Washington last week for another of their debates and talked, among other things, about public education. They all essentially agreed that it was underfunded– one system “for the wealthy, one for everybody else,” as John Edwards put it. Then they all got into cars and drove through a city where teachers are relatively well paid, per pupil spending is through the roof and — pay attention here — the schools are among the very worst in the nation. When it comes to education, Democrats are uneducable.

One candidate after another lambasted George Bush, the Republican Party and, of course, the evil justices of the Supreme Court. But not a one of them even whispered a mild word of outrage about a public school system that spends $13,000 per child — third highest among big-city school systems — and produces pupils who score among the lowest in just about any category you can name. The only area in which the Washington school system is No. 1 is in money spent on administration. Chests should not swell with pride.

The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. …

… In so far as the Democratic presidential candidates talked about public school education and in so far as they mentioned the Supreme Court decision, they largely mouthed Democratic orthodoxy. It must have sounded reassuring to big-city education unions and politicians with a gift for exacerbating racial paranoia. But to the kid in the classroom, to a parent bucking the bureaucracy, the rhetoric must have sounded as unreal as the hot air that comes from Baghdad’s Green Zone — a “surge” of money instead of men or, as we used to say, throwing good money after bad.

Gabriel Schoenfeld on the pardon.

Here is Hillary Clinton commenting on George W. Bush’s modest display of mercy to Scooter Libby, sparing him from prison: “this commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.”

“Cronyism and ideology”? I agree with Hillary that cronyism is a terrible thing, but I think it is a stretch to say that that’s what the Scooter Libby affair was all about. If it was cronyism, Bush has not been very kind to his crony, keeping Libby’s fine, his probation, and his conviction intact.

In any case, in thinking about Hillary’s statement, it is useful to bear in mind some of the pardons granted by her husband Bill. …

David Boaz at Cato has some other commutation prospects.

Mark Steyn’s Song of the Week is American the Beautiful.

…

Oh beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

She put them down on paper that evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel. Today you’d be hard put to find a quatrain known to more Americans. Whether it’s Gary Larson’s Columbus approaching land in a “Far Side” cartoon and saying, “Look! Purple mountains! Spacious skies! …Is someone writing this down?” or Rush Limbaugh at noon welcoming listeners “across the fruited plain” to his daily radio show …

Dinesh D’Souza writes about what’s so good about America.

NY Times book review of The Bottom Billion, Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. The Reviewer is Niall Ferguson. He can make you think.

… Trade, too, is not a sufficient answer. The problem is that Asia has eaten Africa’s lunch when it comes to exploiting low wage costs. Once manufacturing activity started to relocate to Asia, African economies simply got left behind. Now, to stand any chance of survival, African manufacturers need some temporary protection from Asian competition. So long as rich countries retain tariffs to shelter their own manufacturers from cut-price Asian imports, they should exempt products from bottom billion countries.

This, however, is not the most heretical of Collier’s prescriptions. Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What postconflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it.

At a time when the idea of humanitarian intervention is selling at a considerable discount, this is a vital insight. (One recent finding by Collier and his associates, not reproduced here, is that until recently, former French colonies in Africa were less likely than other comparably poor countries to experience civil war. That was because the French effectively gave informal security guarantees to postindependence governments.) Collier concedes that his argument is bound to elicit accusations of neocolonialism from the usual suspects (not least Mugabe). Yet the case he makes for more rather than less intervention in chronically misgoverned poor countries is a powerful one. It is easy to forget, amid the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that effective intervention ended Sierra Leone’s civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to genocide. …

 

Dilbert says planes are living things and you could be airplane poop.

Scrappleface says we are safe even though Scooter Libby is on the loose.