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Victor Davis Hanson writes on the enemies of George Bush.

George Bush is not a very popular fellow.

Witness the enraged reaction last week from critics to his suggestion that leaving Iraq now could have the same dire consequences as our withdrawal from Vietnam did. “It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,” cried historian Robert Dallek. “Misleading rhetoric,” chimed in Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.

What is it about Bush that evokes such furor?

Let’s start with the hard left, whether in Hollywood or the blogosphere, or among the academic elite. They hate George Bush. To them, his tax cuts, alliance with the religious right, opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq foster the image of an illiberal imperial America. His strut and mangling of words are more salt in their wounds.

The mainstream Democratic Party has been pretty vocal in its dislike, too. Al Gore’s veins bulge when he speaks of George Bush. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s lips curl. …

Adam Smith posts on the large number of hospital infections and steps taken to fight them.

The Bush Administration recently announced that it will not reimburse hospitals for services that left patients with damage caused by poor performance, for instance by falls on hospital wards or nasty hospital acquired infections. Every year 1.7 million people in the US contract infections during their stay in a hospital resulting in as much as $473 million extra costs. …

Ann Coulter has a good idea. Liberals go into overdrive trashing Ashcroft and Gonzales, so Ann reminds us of Janet Reno.

This week, congressional Democrats vowed to investigate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of himself. Gonzales has said he was not involved in the discussions about his firing and that it was “performance-based,” but he couldn’t recall the specifics.

Right-wingers like me never trusted Gonzales. But watching Hillary Rodham Clinton literally applaud the announcement of Gonzales’ resignation on Monday was more than any human being should have to bear. Liberals’ hysteria about Gonzales was surpassed only by their hysteria about his predecessor, John Ashcroft. (Also their hysteria about Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Rice, Barney and so on. They’re very excitable, these Democrats.)

Liberals want to return the office to the glory years of Attorney General Janet Reno! …

… From the phony child abuse cases of the ’80s to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious attacks on Americans’ basic liberties since the Salem witch trials. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing prosecutors, but liberals like Janet Reno.

Reno is the sort of wild-eyed zealot trampling on real civil rights that Hillary views as an ideal attorney general, unlike that brute Alberto Gonzales. At least Reno didn’t fire any U.S. attorneys!

Oh wait –

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Ashcroft: 0

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Gonzales: 8

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Reno: 93

The Captain posts on Japan’s national health care.

The lack of facilities in a national health-care system has resulted in the death of a newborn. Japan, whose system has been cited as a model for the United States to consider, has few medical facilities in their rural areas, and the lack of obstetricians led one couple to be turned away from eight hospitals when the mother-to-be went into labor:

Japan’s health minister has pledged to address the shortage of doctors in the country after a woman in labour was turned away by eight hospitals.

A ninth hospital refused to admit her even after she miscarried in an ambulance and her baby died. …

The Captain also reminds us of the terrible treatment of Richard Jewell mentioned above in Ann Coulter’s piece.

Richard Jewell died yesterday at 44, the victim of diabetes and kidney failure. Richard Jewell’s public reputation died eleven years ago, the victim of a mistake by law enforcement and a media blitz that did its best to paint him as a psychopathic bomber with absolutely no evidence — when all Richard Jewell had done was save lives. …

Neal Boortz on the ag subsidies sent to people in New York.

Judging by the amount of people in Manhattan who receive agricultural subsidies you would think there would be hundreds of acres of farm land on the island. But as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t the case.

But that doesn’t stop your tax dollars from providing these subsidies to Manhattanites who, judging by the fact that they can afford to live in Manhattan, don’t need a government subsidy to begin with. …

The Gainesville Sun (FL) with a good example of how useless statistics can be.

College students driving luxury cars down W. University Avenue may not seem impoverished, but they likely are being counted as part of Gainesville’s poverty rate, which is more than triple the national average, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released Tuesday. …

 

… In 2005, the Alachua County Commission paid the Census Bureau to recalculate the poverty rate by excluding students. The report presented to county commissioners indicated that without students – 26,085 of whom met federal poverty guidelines – the poverty rate dropped from 22.8 percent to 13.9 percent. …

Wired.com with an important article on new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even better, a recent discovery by Chevron has signaled that soon there may be vastly more oil gushing out of the ultradeep seabeds — more than even the optimists were predicting four years ago. In 2004, the company penetrated a 60 million-year-old geological stratum known as the “lower tertiary trend” containing a monster oil patch that holds between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. Dubbed Jack, the field lies beneath waters nearly twice as deep as those covering Tahiti, and many in the industry dismissed the discovery as too remote to exploit. But last September, Chevron used the Cajun Express to probe the Jack field, proving that petroleum could flow from the lower tertiary at hearty commercial rates — fast enough to bring billions of dollars of crude to market. It was hailed as the largest publicly reported discovery in the past decade, opening up a region that is perhaps big enough to boost national oil reserves by 50 percent. A mad rush followed, and oil companies plowed more than $5 billion into this part of the Gulf. …

 

… As consensus grows that the world needs to shift away from fossil fuels, extracting oil from the most extreme and costly locations can seem foolishly myopic. If Chevron is going to throw billions of dollars into something untested and possibly doomed to failure, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in an inexhaustible, greener technology that’s going to have political support a decade from now?

Siegele doesn’t think so. He does know that geological limitations will prevent him from drilling much deeper: It’s a pretty safe bet that below 40,000 feet, the extreme heat has baked off much of the deep-sea troves of crude. And there are financial limits to this frontier, too. Even as Chevron and other oil giants earn record profits, they also face record expenses. For example, the company has commissioned two new deep water rigs that will be able to drill 40,000-foot wells. But at more than $600 million each, they can’t exactly be snapped up on boats.com. “The costs of developing a new oil or gas project are about 65 percent higher today than 30 months ago, and the greatest escalation of costs has been offshore,” says Daniel Yergin, chair of the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates. At today’s oil prices of $70 a barrel, the current exploration makes sense. But if oil drops below $40 a barrel, Yergin says, the cost of exploring this high-risk frontier will become prohibitive.

But Siegele is hardly worried. Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry. “Predicting peak oil,” Siegele tells me as we tour the drilling floor of the Cajun Express, “is almost like predicting peak technology” — an exercise, in other words, that to him seems inherently small-minded. Even absurd.

Siegele takes me to the “crown” of the Cajun Express, a harrowing widow’s walk suspended at the top of the drill’s 200-foot derrick. The rig below looks like the loneliest place on Earth — a tiny, solitary board floating in a boundless blue sea. Then, out in the distance, I spot fleets of trawlers the size of thumbnails setting off seismic guns in search of the next big deep-sea prospect. “A decade ago, I never even dreamed we’d get here,” Siegele marvels. “And a decade from now, this moonscape could be populated with rigs as far as the eye can see.”

Instapundit posts on the oil field.

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WSJ Editorial celebrates Sarkozy’s brand of French foreign policy. Not bad results from the moron in the White House.

Nicolas Sarkozy made headlines this week by telling his diplomatic corps that “an Iran with nuclear weapons is for me unacceptable.” But the French President did more in his speech than name the gravest current threat to global security, itself a feat of clear thinking. He also signaled that France means to be something more on the international scene than an anti-American nuisance player.

That’s worth applauding at a time when the conventional wisdom says the next U.S. President will have to burnish America’s supposedly tarnished reputation by making various policy amends. In Germany, under the conservative leadership of Angela Merkel, foreign policy views have been moving closer to the Bush Administration’s, not further away, while new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made clear he will not depart significantly from the pro-American course set by Tony Blair.

Michael Barone blogs on the unintended consequences of law school affirmative action. Mr. Barone is fair enough to include a ringing defense of the program by Walter Dellinger.

… I’ve long opposed racial preferences not because of the harm they do to those who are discriminated against (a nonblack student who loses a place at Harvard to a lower-scoring black will get admitted to a slightly less selective school and will probably do just fine) but because of the harm they do to the intended beneficiaries (creating a stigma of inferiority, which is just the thing that those of us who have long been against racial discrimination don’t want to see).

But I have to admit that some of these administrators may have worthier motives. I’m prompted to do so by a Slate piece by Walter Dellinger on the Supreme Court’s recent decision barring (or mostly barring) racial discrimination in public school assignment. …

John Stossel writes again about the rankings of the World Health Organization.

… So the verdict is in. The vaunted U.S. medical system is one of the worst.

But there’s less to these studies than meets the eye. They measure something other than quality of medical care. So saying that the U.S. finished behind those other countries is misleading.

First let’s acknowledge that the U.S. medical system has serious problems. But the problems stem from departures from free-market principles. The system is riddled with tax manipulation, costly insurance mandates and bureaucratic interference. Most important, six out of seven health-care dollars are spent by third parties, which means that most consumers exercise no cost-consciousness. As Milton Friedman always pointed out, no one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

Even with all that, it strains credulity to hear that the U.S. ranks far from the top. Sick people come to the United States for treatment. When was the last time you heard of someone leaving this country to get medical care? …

The never-ending decline of America is the subject of this tongue-in-cheek article from Real Clear Politics. Never ending to the extent the country has been in decline for more than three hundred years. This is another long item.

… By the mid-eighteenth century, the University of Virginia’s James Ceaser has written, it was widely accepted in Europe that “due chiefly to atmospheric conditions, in particular excessive humidity, all living things in the Americas were not only inferior to those found in Europe but also in a condition of decline.” …

 

… Two generations later, the Civil War would decapitate the national government and deform the nation. As Jay Winik’s April 1865 (HarperCollins, 2001) reminds us, the war not only called into question almost a hundred years of independent self-government, but also embodied decline in its purest sense. Winik recounts savage episodes of murder, mayhem, guerilla warfare, terrorism, vigilantism, and state-sanctioned brutality on a par with anything we condemn today — innocent civilians rounded up and summarily executed; cities burned to the ground; entire counties depopulated; mutilations and beheadings; all manner of torture. After Lincoln’s murder, General Sherman openly feared America’s slipping into anarchy. …

 

… The U.S. failed to respond to the threats posed by the rise of power-projecting dictatorships in Europe and the Pacific — threats punctuated by Japan’s attack on the USS Panay in December 1937 and numerous German attacks in the Atlantic and the Red Sea. As if to underscore American weakness, President Franklin Roosevelt famously sent word to Hitler in 1938 that “the United States has no political involvements in Europe.” The German dictator got the message. Washington’s diplomatic deference and military meekness, says Gerhard Weinberg in A World At Arms (Cambridge, 1994), confirmed Hitler’s “assessment that this was a weak country, incapable, because of its racial mixture and feeble democratic government, of organizing and maintaining strong military forces.” …

 

… U.S. political power and prestige suffered yet another blow when Sputnik rocketed into orbit in 1957 and Moscow took the high ground in the space race. Senator Henry Jackson called it “a national week of shame and danger.” Senator Lyndon Johnson warned that “control of space means control of the world.”

Of course, the U.S. faced terrestrial problems as well. “The Soviet Union increasingly appeared to be a triumphal industrial giant,” Leebaert says. The New York Times, he notes, predicted that Soviet industrial output would exceed America’s by the end of the twentieth century, and the CIA surmised that the Soviet economy would be three times larger than America’s by 2000. “The overwhelming question,” Leebaert writes of the 1950s, “was whether an apparently soft, even hedonistic American consumer society had the stamina for a long, inconclusive contest with communism.” …

 

… To be sure, the U.S. faces challenges, competitors and threats that could erode its global position: China and India are ascending economically; the world abounds with asymmetrical threats that have the capacity to undermine the liberal order that Washington has sought to spread for generations; and Americans find themselves in the midst of yet another “great ideological conflict,” in the words of the president’s most recent security strategy document.

Today as in the past, U.S. primacy is neither inevitable nor a birthright. It is a burden that must be justified and shouldered anew by each generation in its own way. Even so, and notwithstanding Iraq, this is an unusual moment to diagnose the United States as a nation in decline. Just as the past is littered with unfulfilled predictions by the declinists, the present is teeming with evidence of unprecedented U.S. power.

From peace-keeping to war-fighting, deterrence to disaster relief, it is the U.S. military that the world turns to when in need. Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami has noted, “The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip and its hipness.”12 Especially its protection: More than half the globe enjoys overt defense and security treaties with the United States. The U.S. military is the last (and first) line of defense for most of the rest.

Of course, the U.S. military does more than protect and defend: In the span of about 23 months, it overthrew two enemy regimes located on the other side of the planet and replaced them with popularly supported governments. Even as American forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, they kept watch on the Korean peninsula and kept the sea-lanes open for the oil and goods that feed a truly global economy; did the dirty work of counterterrorism from Tora Bora to Timbuktu; and responded to disasters of biblical proportion in places as disparate as Louisiana and Sumatra.

This does not seem to be the handiwork of a faltering empire. Indeed, no other military could attempt such a feat of global multitasking. “The British empire,” writes Niall Ferguson in Colossus (Allen Lane, 2004), “never enjoyed this kind of military lead over the competition . . . [and] never dominated the full spectrum of military capabilities the way the United States does today.” …

Dilbert blogs on the Chinese coal miners who survived underground for six days. If this catches you in the right mood, you will laugh until it hurts.

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Paul Greenberg is glad George Bush is not as smart as the NY Times.

What’s wrong with George W. Bush? Doesn’t he know America has already been defeated in Iraq? Doesn’t he realize that as a lame-duck president he’s just conducting a holding operation? Doesn’t the man keep up with the opinion polls? Hasn’t he noticed the growing tide — the tidal wave, really — of anti-war sentiment? Shouldn’t it have dawned on him even in his snug presidential cocoon that, at this low point in his presidency, there’s no hope he’ll regain the country’s confidence? Doesn’t he read The New York Times? Doesn’t he listen to NPR? …

… Those who believe we can simply pack up and leave Iraq, perhaps declaring peace with honor as Richard Nixon did in Vietnam, may reap much the same result that president did: defeat with dishonor. This president warned that the carnage and suffering that followed America’s defeat in Vietnam might be duplicated on an even larger and more disastrous scale if the United States gave up in Iraq.

Even if this country could withdraw its forces from Iraq at once (a logistical impossibility) the threat from al-Qaida and its various allies would not cease. Indeed, it would be intensified, for Osama bin Laden and far-flung company could again use a failed state as a base of operations, as they once did Afghanistan. The result: Terrorism would be even more of a clear and present danger to our security.

Al-Qaida, and its associates and sympathizers throughout the Islamic world and beyond, understand very well what is at stake in Iraq and Afghanistan — and what a glorious opportunity an American defeat there would give them. Do we?

As the president noted Wednesday in Kansas City, we aren’t engaged today in what one expert called a clash of civilizations; it’s a struggle for civilization.

Evan Thomas in Newsweek with a long (7,000 words) article on the search for bin Laden. It is rare to devote such length (a normal column is 750 words) to one item in Pickings. However, a lot of ordinary people left for work on Sept. 11th and never returned home because of this man. We do this to keep faith with those who rode those buildings and planes to the ground. We look forward to Osama’s dirt nap.

The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden’s redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader’s 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove “the Sheik,” as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. …

 

… And so it has gone for six years. …

 

… In Pakistan, President Musharraf was wary of his American allies in the War on Terror. In 2002, he told a high-ranking British official: “My great concern is that one day the United States is going to desert me. They always desert their friends.” According to this official, who declined to be identified sharing a confidence, Musharraf cited the U.S. pullouts from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s and Somalia in the 1990s. Still, he quickly gave the Americans considerable leeway to operate inside Pakistan. He did not demand prior approval of Predator attacks, and he allowed “hot pursuit” for American forces five kilometers or more inside the border. (With a grim laugh, one U.S. officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK recalled watching on Predator video as insurgents fled across the border and stopped on what they thought was safe terrain—until a U.S. Special Ops helo reared up and blasted them.) Musharraf told the Americans he understood that they would do what they had to do to attack high-value targets, although he indicated the Pakistanis might have to issue pro forma denunciations. His one request, said a U.S. official who dealt directly with the Pakistani leader, was that bin Laden not be captured alive and be brought to trial in Pakistan. …

 

… The American military, understandably, puts a high priority on “force protection,” but as a practical matter that means staying behind armor and barricades. Rice, the A-Team sergeant stuck in his safe house near Kandahar, recalls that his team’s frustration peaked when a memo came down from the brass at Baghram, ordering men not to initiate fire fights and even not to use words like “death” and “destruction” in their CONOPS. Among Rice’s men, it became known as the “limp dick memo.” (The Defense Department declined to comment specifically on Rice’s memories.)

The American military is forever caught in a dilemma. During the early days of the cold war, the old boys who ran the CIA began to reason that when it came to fighting against an underhanded foe in a battle for global survival, the rules of fair play they had learned as schoolboys no longer applied. If the communists fight dirty, we must, too, they rationalized—or freedom would perish. This ends-justifying-the-means rationale led to foolish and ultimately unsuccessful assassination plots and other dirty tricks that disgraced and demoralized the CIA when the agency’s so-called Crown Jewels were revealed during Watergate. After 9/11, Bush administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, vowed to take the gloves off against Al Qaeda. But in the aftermath of allegations of torture in secret prisons, there has been a strong push back, particularly among administration lawyers disturbed by the abuse of constitutional rights. According to knowledgeable sources, Rumsfeld’s deputy for intelligence, Steve Cambone, engaged in an angry debate with the Pentagon’s top lawyer, William Haynes, over the activities of U.S. Special Forces—who in the minds of some government lawyers and lawmakers have been given too much, not too little, license to roam. …

Bret Stephens was in the WSJ with a grown-ups view of climate change.

The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934–and not 1998 or 2006–was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming “denial machine.” I hereby perform mine with a denier’s confession

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre’s discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a “statistically meaningless” rearrangement of data. …

… I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term “denier” so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.

Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn’t deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg’s book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?

Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.

See what 92 years of smoking can do for you.

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David Shribman in the Post-Gazette with a healthy reminder about how much time is still left in the 2008 race.

You can almost hear the Democrats singing: There’s no way even we can lose the 2008 election. There’s upheaval in Iraq, uncertainty in the financial markets, unease in the country. President Bush’s disapproval ratings are at Richard Nixon levels. Many loyal party members think the GOP has veered off course. This is not an easy time to be a Republican.

But here’s a word of caution to the Democrats and a word of perspective for the Republicans: Presidential elections are almost always easier to analyze in retrospect than in advance, and what appears to be clear 14 months before the voters go to the polls can often turn out to be muddied once the voting starts.

Though any sober politician would rather be in the Democrats’ position today than in the Republicans’, a Democratic victory next November is no sure bet, and a new Democratic era, powered by public revulsion of the errors of George W. Bush, is an even less certain development. …

Rob Bluey finds the government program the left hates.

The Office of Labor Management Standards, the federal government’s union watchdog agency, has recouped more than $100 million for American workers since 2001. But the increased oversight on unions hasn’t gone over well with liberals in Congress, who are trying to slash the agency’s budget for next year.

Last month, pro-labor Democrats in the House successfully fought back a Republican-led challenge to restore $2 million to the agency’s budget. The Senate will take up the bill when Congress returns from its August recess.

The liberals’ revolt against the Department of Labor agency comes on the heels of an increased crackdown on union misbehavior and greater scrutiny of union finances. Following the 2000 elections, the Office of Labor Management Standards reversed nearly a decade of lax enforcement under the Clinton Administration. …

David Brooks had book review duty this weekend. He has some fun with a new example of the Dems are thinkers genre.

… The core problem with Westen’s book is that he doesn’t really make use of what we know about emotion. He builds on the work of Antonio Damasio, without applying Damasio’s conception of how emotion emerges from and contributes to reason.

In this more sophisticated view, emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others.

In other words, emotions partner with rationality. It’s not necessary to dumb things down to appeal to emotions. It’s not necessary to understand some secret language that will key certain neuro-emotional firings. The best way to win votes — and this will be a shocker — is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results.

This is how you make voters happy.

Cliff May Corner posts to a good Ralph Peters column.

… Whatever may have been the situation is 2003, today Iraq is the main front in the war against Islamist terror and fanaticism. Our enemies have made it so.

Of the two simultaneous missions under way – maturing a responsible government and advancing our own strategic interests – the latter is far more important. In fact, it’s vital. And on that track, we’re making stunning progress. …

 

… Al Qaeda is on the verge of a humiliating, devastating strategic defeat – rejected by their fellow Sunni Muslims. …

 

… With the sixth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, how dare we throw away so great a potential victory over those who attacked our country?

 

Forget the anti-war nonsense you hear. The truth is that our troops want to continue this struggle. I know. I’m here. And I’m listening to what they have to say. They’re confident as never before that we’re on the right path. …

Mona Charen, also in the Corner, posts for the umpteenth time – we did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD’s.

This morning on C-SPAN 2, I heard a nice young historian spout the conventional wisdom about President Bush and the Iraq War. This particular interpretation is now totally uncontroversial – but it is false.

Elizabeth Borgwardt of Washington University told an audience that George W. Bush had urged the war in Iraq in order to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction and only later used democracy promotion as a post-hoc justification for the conflict. …

The Captain has fun posting on “Winning the Jimmy Carter Sweepstakes.”

The Barack Obama campaign won an endorsement that sounds more like a kiss of death to anyone who survived the Jimmy Carter era. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who oversaw the disastrous foreign policy of the Carter administration, picked Obama to be the next Carter:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most influential foreign-policy experts in the Democratic Party, threw his support behind Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, saying the Illinois senator has a better global grasp than his chief rival, Hillary Clinton. …

… How much did Zbig have to do with our feckless foreign policy regarding the Soviets? He was more of a hawk than Cyrus Vance, but then again, almost everyone was more of a hawk than Vance, except Jimmy Carter. He never bothered to resign in the face of disaster after disaster, and he was the man who created the mujaheddin counterstrategy in Afghanistan, and Zbig drafted Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support them.

Maybe Barack Obama can get Carter’s economic adviser, Charles Schultze, to endorse him as well. That way he can campaign clearly on a return to Carter’s policies.

A more serious note with a post on agreements in Iraq.

It looks like the Iraqi political leadership remained on the job during their August recess. Representatives of all main sects in Iraq announced agreement on the most contentious issues, including a deal to initiate revenue sharing on oil production that concerned the American Congress most (via Power Line): …

Important news like that should be on page one, right?

Let’s say we’re at war, and we’re waiting for some specific action to take place to show us that our efforts are succeeding. Add in that the war itself would be rather controversial and that our political class is split as to whether we will ever see that specific action take place. Imagine that Congress and the White House have scheduled a showdown in the next couple of weeks to determine how much longer we will wait for that development.

Now imagine that the specific action for which we’ve waited actually occurs. Where would you think that story appear in Washington’s biggest newspaper? The front page, one might assume. Would you believe … page 9?

Iraq’s top five political leaders announced an agreement Sunday night to release thousands of prisoners being held without charge and to reform the law that has kept thousands of members of Saddam Hussein’s political party out of government jobs.

The agreement was publicized after several days of meetings between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite; President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni; Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite; and Massoud Barzani, president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region. …

John Fund reports on the increase of government licensing of business. He, and the Institute for Justice claim this is a method to increase cost of entry in many occupations.

Americans pride ourselves on being a country that encourages people to work and stand on their own two feet. But over the past few decades there has been a hidden surge in regulations, licensing and monopolies that discourage people from starting the kinds of small businesses that are often the first step toward self-reliance.

In the 1950s, only about 4.5% of jobs required a license to work. Today, that proportion is more than 20%. Many of the jobs that require a government stamp of approval don’t involve health or safety. Depending on the state, you need a license to be a hair braider, florist, auctioneer, interior designer or even fortune-teller. Many licensing regulations exist only because business interests lobby for them in order to reduce competition. They then often set up oversight boards that protect incumbents in the industry while excluding newcomers.

Reason Foundation analyst Adam Summers has written a new study of occupational licensing (available here) that catalogues some of the absurd requirements to get occupational licenses. Does a hair braider really need hundreds of hours of instruction in all aspects of cosmetology, hardly any of which he will ever use? Is it essential to the well-being of young children that directors of day-care centers possess master’s degrees? What’s the point of refusing to license a car service unless it has at least 10 cars?

Misc. Corner Posts. The second is a two-language pun.

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Mark Steyn continues to mine the Vietnam analogy in “They Wait for us to Run Again.”

George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left’s most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits that we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the president has determined that we might at least learn the real “lessons of Vietnam.”

“Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Aug. 22. “Many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people … . A columnist for the New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: ‘It’s difficult to imagine,’ he said, ‘how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.’ A headline on that story, dateline Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: ‘Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.’ The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”

I don’t know about “the world,” but apparently a big chunk of America still believes in these “misimpressions.” As the New York Times put it, “In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.”

Well, it had a “few negative repercussions” for America’s allies in South Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the North. And it had a “negative repercussion” for former Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak, to whom the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum. “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion,” Matak told him. “I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty … . I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans.” So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other people. If it’s hard for individual names to linger in the New York Times’ “historical memory,” you’d think the general mound of corpses would resonate. …

 

… Depending on which Americans you ask, “Vietnam” can mean entirely different things. To the New York Times and the people it goes to dinner parties with, it had “few negative repercussions.”

And it’s hardly surprising its journalists should think like that when Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger, in a commencement address last year that’s almost a parody of parochial boomer narcissism, was still bragging and preening about his generation’s role in ending the war. Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (which is apparently some sort of elite institution for which people pay big money to receive instruction from authoritative scholars such as professor Nye), told NPR last week: “After we got out of Vietnam, the people who took over were the North Vietnamese. And that was a government which preserved order” – if by “preserved order,” you mean “drove a vast human tide to take to the oceans on small rickety rafts and flee for their lives.”

But, if you’re not a self-absorbed poseur like Sulzberger, “Vietnam” is not a “tragedy” but a betrayal. The final image of the drama – the U.S. helicopters lifting off from the Embassy roof with desperate locals clinging to the undercarriage – is an image not just of defeat but of the shabby sell-outs necessary to accomplish it.

At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim they had no idea of what would follow.

To do it all over again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be America’s allies in the years ahead?

Professor Bernard Lewis’ dictum would be self-evident: “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”

Max Boot follows along.

Ever since the mid-1970s, critics of American military involvement have warned that any decision to deploy armed forces abroad–in Lebanon and El Salvador in the 1980s, in Kuwait, Somalia, and Kosovo in the 1990s, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan–would result in “another Vietnam.” Conversely, supporters of those interventions have adamantly resisted any Vietnam comparisons.

President George W. Bush boldly abandoned that template with his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday. In a skillful bit of political jujitsu, he cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic–just as they were in Southeast Asia.

This has met with predictable and angry denunciations from antiwar advocates who argue that the consequences of defeat in Vietnam weren’t so grave. After all, isn’t Vietnam today an emerging economic power that is cultivating friendly ties with the U.S.?

True, but that’s 30 years after the fact. In the short-term, the costs of defeat were indeed heavy. More than a million people perished in the killing fields of Cambodia, while in Vietnam, those who worked with American forces were consigned, as Mr. Bush noted, to prison camps “where tens of thousands perished.” Many more fled as “boat people,” he continued, “many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.”

That assessment actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. In the late 1970s, America’s enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan. It is impossible to prove the connection with the Vietnam War, but there is little doubt that the enfeeblement of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from. Indeed, as Mr. Bush noted, jihadists still gain hope from what Ayman al Zawahiri accurately describes as “the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.” …

Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt’s site posts on his Vietnam analogies.

How dare he! In his speech to the VFW the other day, George W. Bush had the audacity to compare the current struggle to the Vietnam War. What was he thinking? Doesn’t he know that the left has the exclusive franchise on Vietnam analogies? The President may well be hearing from the Democratic Party’s attorneys in the coming days.

Of course, there’s a serious side to this issue. For decades now, the American left has desperately attempted to scrub the history books of its deplorable conduct during the Vietnam era. One leftist professor even went so far as to publish a book that purported to prove that war protestors never spat on American soldiers. Unfortunately for the professor, countless American soldiers can testify to the contrary.

No one on the American left bothered to mouth empty platitudes like “We support the troops” during the Vietnam War. They “supported” the troops by calling them baby killers. This behavior would have been odious in any era, but it was particularly vile in relation to the Vietnam War where many of the soldiers served because the Army had drafted them. …

And Byron York in the Corner finds some interesting James Webb quotes from a 2000 op-ed in WSJ.

… this Congress was elected in November 1974, only months after Nixon’s resignation, and it was dominated by a fresh group of antiwar Democrats. One of the first actions of the new Congress was to vote down a supplemental appropriation for the beleaguered South Vietnamese that would have provided $800 million in military aid, including much-needed ammunition, spare parts and medical supplies.

This vote was a horrendous blow, in both emotional and practical terms, to the country that had trusted American judgment for more than a decade of intense conflict. …

Marty Peretz suggests Britain has some responsibility for Zimbabwe.

… The Brits bear responsibility. Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia, a crown colony, and it still a member if the Commonwealth. At the first elections after independence, London tilted towards Robert Mugabe against Bishop Muzorewa, tilted heavily. And it is the British-backed winner who is the genocidalist. …

Peretz also pins the donkey’s tail on the Narcissist – Bill Clinton.

… Clinton, as everyone knows, had this fixation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his ambitions for a Nobel Prize by solving it. Already in 1998, he put Tenet in charge of this very charged matter. It took time, energy, brain power (or such as he had), imagination…and, of course, he failed. …

IBD Editorial seconds Peretz.

A highly critical CIA report details the spy agency’s failings during the 1990s in preventing the 9/11 attacks. But as the report makes clear, the Clinton administration also deserves a big piece of the blame. …

… True, former Director of Intelligence George Tenet dropped the ball, but President Clinton, in office for eight years before 9/11, did next to nothing. This has now been confirmed by both the CIA report and the 9/11 Commission report, released in 2004.

As for claims later made by both President Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, that a comprehensive plan for dealing with al-Qaida was given to President Bush, that now appears to be an outright lie.

As the CIA report concluded, “before 9/11, neither the U.S. Government nor the IC (Intelligence Community) had a comprehensive strategy for combating al-Qaida.”

The media and the Democrats used the 9/11 Commission report, released three years ago, to relentlessly bash President Bush for his “failures” in stopping the 9/11 attacks, even though he had been in office for just eight months when they occurred. …

The New Editor spots the real problem in a story on the Las Vegas schools.

Reason’s Hit and Run posts on gun control in Britain. How do you think that’s working?

Following the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, in which seventeen people were killed by a man armed with two 9mm pistols, Britain passed a law outlawing the ownership of most handguns, despite researchers finding “no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession.” It’s a law so severe that the Britain’s Olympic shooting team is forced to train abroad, lest one of its members try to shoot up a grammar school. So how effective has the law been? A doubling in gun-related crimes since the ban, naturally. …

Reason also posts on the success of NJ’s $2.57 cents a pack cigarette tax.

… the latest increase in the tax was followed by a reduction in revenue, from $787 million in fiscal year 2006 to $764 million in fiscal year 2007. …

Jonah Goldberg, noted dog lover, writes his Michael Vick column.

Readers keep asking me what I think about Michael Vick, the disgraced Atlanta Falcons quarterback who this week agreed to plead guilty to a number of charges relating to his aspiration to be the Don King of dogfighting. They ask not because I’m a renowned sports lover, but because I’m such a dog lover.

And I do love dogs. They are, evolutionarily and otherwise, man’s partners, our wingmen — winghounds if you prefer. Dogs are the only animal to choose to be our friends and comrades in the great struggle of muddling through our turn on this mortal coil. (Cats, I’m sorry to say, hold one paw in each camp so as to forever keep their options open, and all other domesticated animals had to be forced into the arrangement.) …

Betsy Hart has a look at “organic” myths.

Occasionally, I will buy “organic” fruits and vegetables or other food, supposedly meaning food grown without pesticides or fertilizers or other chemicals.

But when I buy the stuff, it’s always by accident.

(Ditto for “fat-free” foods, like ice cream or half-and-half or cookies. Once in a while I’ll buy the “fat-free” varieties without realizing what I’ve done, only to gag when I put it in my mouth. I mean, if I want to eat a goodie, I want the satisfaction of the real thing.)

Other people feel virtuous when they buy expensive organics. I feel I’ve been had.

A recent piece in Time magazine backs me up. In “Rethinking Organics” by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the doctor writes that while few things make people feel more “virtuous” than eating organic food, there’s little evidence that they are either more nutritious or any safer for our bodies than traditionally grown produce with their fertilizers and pesticides.

Gee, you mean “organics” won’t save the world after all? …

Dilbert was outstanding.

A reader sent this story about his workplace.

————-
“A theme from many of your previous comics came true to life for us today. Quality in the workplace.

Yesterday, a pointy-haired boss decided our meeting room needed nice motivational pictures on the wall. Twelve by eight inch, wooden frame, 1940s-style motivational tools (think ‘Rosie the Riveter’ in artwork, color and font). So an assistant was ordered to procure such things. …

… This story made me think about one of the great wonders of capitalism: It is driven by morons who are circling the drain, and yet. . . it works!

Think about all the people working and earning paychecks from companies that will ultimately fail. It’s a lot of people. But until those companies fail, the employees are getting paid, buying goods, and contributing to the economy. After the failure, those employees hop over to another sinking ship, and so on.

Within successful companies, a huge portion of resources are dedicated to projects and products that will ultimately fail. But in the meantime, everyone is getting paid and propping up the economy. …

… In the rest of the animal kingdom, being a moron is nothing but bad. A moron lion, for example, who can’t catch anything to eat, is adding nothing to the lion economy. But a moron human who starts a business selling garlic flavored mittens is stimulating the economy right up until the point of going out of business.

My point is that I hope the monkeys that already know how to use sticks for tools don’t start using leaves for money. If that happens, we’re screwed.

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Mark Steyn uses yesterday’s Bush speech to pull up his Sun-Times column from 2003′s 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. This is particularly timely since many Dems wish to change the government in Iraq. Mr. Steyn is wise enough to remind us how that worked once before in a place called Viet Nam.

On Saturday, America remembered the day it’s never forgotten: Nov. 22, 1963. Everyone, as they say, can recall where they were when they heard the news that Kennedy was shot. Even if you weren’t born, you can recall it: the motorcade, Walter Cronkite removing his spectacles, LBJ taking the oath of office, all the scenes replayed a million times in untold documentaries and feature films.

History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November 1963:

8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men. They’re tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for inspection by the army’s commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and chief adviser.

Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned. When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had gone wrong. I use “gone wrong” in the debased sense in which a drug deal that turns into a double murder is said to have “gone wrong.”

Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about his part in the murder of an ally, he didn’t feel bad for long: Within three weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events leading to the slaying of another head of state. The noble ideals of Camelot did not extend to the State Department or the CIA. …

The Captain posts on the Dems who thought they were in the cat bird seat just a few months ago.

Democrats figured that the August recess would give them plenty of opportunity to raise the heat on Republicans to force a withdrawal date from Iraq. They could return to their home districts, stoke some demonstrations, and return with new momentum after Labor Day to push for retreat. Unfortunately, events have intervened, and now Democrats have to regroup to avoid looking like defeatists while the military effort has started producing successes: …

Wall Street Journal editorial illuminates the environmentalist’s war against energy independence.

Just about everyone claims the U.S. must urgently become “energy independent,” yet at the same time just about every policy that may actually serve that goal is met with environmentalist opposition. That contradiction has impeded the Bush Administration’s attempts to increase domestic energy production. And even the modest progress so far may be blocked because litigation is driving the conflict out of politics and into the courts.

To see this trend at work, look north to Alaska, where lawsuits are blocking an offshore drilling program. …

… The public interest in this case is domestic energy. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that chooses to lock up its natural resources. Since 2003, the Administration and Congress have lifted the federal moratoria on a few select areas of the Outer Continental Shelf. The Beaufort basin, which is estimated to hold 27.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 8.2 billion barrels of recoverable oil, was one of those. A successful exploratory program could open a new frontier of energy.

That public purpose is what drives the greens bonkers, so they’re trying to create a legal backstop to prevent any Administration from doing what President Bush has done. The Shell case shows that even a long and expensive effort to address every conceivable concern can still be undone by lawsuits. If anyone wants to know why we’re still “dependent on foreign oil,” this is it.

New Editor posts on Hillsdale College prof who speculates why the academy is anti-American.

… Celebrating foreign cultures and rejecting America are two sides of the same multicultural coin; it is the way American multiculturalists demonstrate their own multicultural sophistication to each other. From their perspective, the most anti-American Americans are the most educated Americans. …

John Fund tells us about a new special interest group.

Which special interest has suddenly become a major new player in presidential politics, giving more than $4.1 million in the first half of this year? You’d probably be surprised to learn it was academics. Professors and others in the education-industrial complex gave more money to federal candidates than people working in the oil, pharmaceutical or computer industries. Naturally, over 75% of their money has gone to Democrats. …

Claudia Rosett blogs on the prospects for a UN whistle blower.

UN “Ethics” – Round three. In which UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (your tax dollars pay for at least 22% of everything he does) fails the Ethics test, and the UN outdoes even itself for new highwater marks of hypocrisy. Now the case of the fired whistleblower from the UN Development Program is being handed over, in effect, to some of the very folks on whom he blew the whistle. At the UN, this is called an “independent” review. …

Peter Wehner in Contentions shows the opportunity the GOP has if they can climb down from the earmark express.

… The 2006 mid-term election was viewed by many commentators as an enormous set-back for the GOP. While the results were about typical for a second mid-term election for the presidential party in power, they did not usher in days of wine and roses for Republicans, who trail Democrats on the generic ballot and in fund-raising. But Republicans have an opportunity. The anger that was directed toward the GOP is now being re-directed toward Democrats, who are finding that governing is more difficult than merely opposing. This may allow President Bush and Republicans to define themselves against the failures of the 110th Congress, just as Bill Clinton was able to define himself against the mistakes of Newt Gingrich (recall the government shut-down).

The congressional GOP is in desperate need of re-branding after years in power, when the fires of reform dimmed and died. The party now has an opening, one growing larger by the month. Once-cocky Democrats must wonder how things have come undone quite so fast.

Contention’s Michael Totten also provides important background to the brutal al Qaeda attack last week against the Iraqi Yezidis.

Hundreds of Iraqi Yezidis, members of an ancient religious sect heavily influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism, were murdered last week in the most deadly terrorist attack in the world since September 11, 2001. Fuel tankers packed with explosives were ignited in a refugee camp near the town of Kahtaniya, just outside the Kurdish autonomous region. Officials say the death toll has surpassed 500. The American military says this is the handiwork of al Qaeda. They’re probably right: this has their fingerprints all over it.

John Tierney asks if there’s anything good about men.

What percentage of your ancestors were men?

No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly. But first let me credit the source, Roy F. Baumeister, who answered that question – and a lot of other ones – in an address on Friday at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. I recommend reading the whole speech: “Is There Anything Good About Men?”

As you might expect, he did find something good to say about men, but the speech wasn’t an apologia for the gender, or a whine about the abuse heaped on men. Rather, it was a shrewd and provocative look at the motivational differences between men and women – and at some of the topics (like the gender imbalance on science faculties) that got Larry Summers in so much trouble at Harvard. Dr. Baumeister, a prominent social psychologist who teaches at Florida State University, began by asking gender warriors to go home. …

The Captain with another post. This on the nanny state’s regs about trees. They are modern day Druids.

Bette Midler has long championed environmentalist causes, but apparently that didn’t stop her from cutting down 230 trees on her Hawaiian property. The state will fine The Compost Queen $6500 for removing the trees and grading a road without the proper permits: …

Mark weighs in at the Corner.

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John Stossel starts us off today reacting to the World Health Organization’s ranking of the U.S. as 37th in quality of health care.

The New York Times recently declared “the disturbing truth … that … the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care.”

As usual, the Times editors get it wrong.

They find evidence in a 2000 World Health Organization (WHO) rating of 191 nations and a Commonwealth Fund study of wealthy nations published last May.

In the WHO rankings, the United States finished 37th, behind nations like Morocco, Cyprus and Costa Rica. …

… So the verdict is in. The vaunted U.S. medical system is one of the worst.

But there’s less to these studies than meets the eye. They measure something other than quality of medical care. So saying that the U.S. finished behind those other countries is misleading. …

American Spectator thinks NY Times might be channeling Hayek.

Readers of the New York Times got a front-page example recently of what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit” — the idea that some great mind or committee can do a better job than the private market in organizing and directing an economy.

Hayek argued that the market automatically coordinates the millions of individual activities in an economy by way of “natural, spontaneous and self-ordering processes of adaptation to a greater number of particular facts than any one mind can perceive or even conceive.”

The record of the past century shows that the system that delivers the goods, reduces scarcity and improves living standards is the “spontaneous human order created by a competitive market,” said Hayek, not the “deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based on the collective command over available resources.”

What works, in short, is freedom and capitalism, not statism and socialism. …

… The Times article that supports Hayek’s line of reasoning — “Caps on Prices Only Deepen Zimbabweans’ Misery,” by Michael Wines — provides a perfect illustration of how the “fatal conceit” of government can turn a difficulty into a catastrophe.

“Robert G. Mugabe has ruled over this battered nation, his every wish endorsed by Parliament and enforced by the police and soldiers, for more than 27 years,” explained Wines. “It appears, however, that not even an unchallenged autocrat can repeal the laws of supply and demand.” …

American Thinker says Hugo Chavez is the next ignorant thug to wave a magic wand.

Hugo Chavez is moving the clock in Venezuela forward by 30 minutes, in the name of reshaping Venezuelans’ metabolism. The New York Times reports:

Moved by claims that it will help the metabolism and productivity of his fellow citizens, President Hugo Chávez said clocks would be moved forward by half an hour at the start of 2008. He announced the change on his Sunday television program.

The mini-version of Daylight Savings Time apparently will be year-round. Evidently el presidente is persuaded that this will have Venezuelans getting up earlier on the solar clock, which he believes will affect their metabolisms. …

Ilya Somin in Volokh posts again on how the drug war harms our efforts fighting fundamentalist Islamist fascists.

Time and again, on this blog, I have warned that the War on Drugs is undermining the War on Terror in Afghanistan (see here, here, here, and here). As I explained in earlier posts, it does so in three separate ways: By diverting valuable resources away from military missions to poppy eradication; by creating a black market that provides the Taliban with the lion’s share of its income; and by antagonizing rural Afghans who then start to support the Taliban or at least become less likely to provide valuable assistance and information to NATO and Afghan government forces. …

Walter Williams shows how liberal opinions create black victims.

… Blacks are not only the major victims of homicide; blacks suffer high rates of all categories of serious violent crime, and another black is most often the perpetrator.

Liberals and their political allies say the problem is the easy accessibility of guns and greater gun control is the solution. That has to be nonsense. Guns do not commit crimes; people do.

Up through 1979, the FBI reported homicide arrests sorted by racial breakdowns that included Japanese. Between 1976 and 1978, 21 of 48,695 arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter were Japanese-Americans. That translates to an annual murder rate of 1 per 100,000 of the Japanese-American population. Would anyone advance the argument that the reason why homicide is virtually nonexistent among Japanese-Americans is because they can’t find guns?

The high victimization rate experienced by the overwhelmingly law-abiding black community is mostly the result of predators not having to pay a heavy enough price for their behavior. They benefit from all kinds of asinine excuses, such as poverty, racial discrimination and few employment opportunities. …

Don Boudreaux’s fortnightly column wonders if government intervention in the credit markets is a good idea.

… The most famous such intervention is Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Still commonly regarded as saving America from the Great Depression, this spasm of interventionist government did no such thing.

On the eve of entering World War II in 1941, America’s economy was still quite depressed — as it had been for more than a decade. And as economic historian Robert Higgs shows in his 2006 book, “Depression, War, and Cold War,” New Deal policies and the prevailing climate of ideas from which they sprang suppressed investment.

The New Deal and the genuine risk of outright socialization of industry in the 1930s kept the American economy in deep doldrums for a much longer time than would have been the case if Uncle Sam just said “laissez faire” and had conspicuously ignored all the Very Smart People who clamored for socialism. …

Sense4Fun with interesting post.

Next time you’re washing your hands and the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children — last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” …

Der Spiegel writes on gas emissions from Norway’s moose population.

The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of methane a year — equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey. …

Division of Labour has more on the nanny state.

If you’re a hurricane watcher, Pickerhead has some sites you can visit. The National Data Buoy Center has a map where you can link to buoys placed throughout the world’s seas. An example is provided tonight in Pickings, of a 12 meter discus buoy moored in 4,400 meters of water in the Yucatan Basin between Cancun and the Caymans. We have a picture of the buoy and some information that shows wave heights reached 36 feet as Dean passed yesterday at 0250 hours Greenwich Mean Time while east winds gusted to 50 knots (58 mph).

A comprehensive website is Tropical Weather Information which provides more maps than you can imagine. An example is here tonight showing the systems getting ready to roll off the African coast.

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Peter Wehner comments on a Thomas Friedman column.

Has anything sillier than this, from the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, been written recently by a serious columnist?

Is the surge in Iraq working? That is the question that General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will answer for us next month. I, alas, am not interested in their opinions. It is not because I don’t hold both men in very high regard. I do. But I’m still not interested in their opinions. I’m only interested in yours. Yes, you—the person reading this column.

This is a case study of a columnist trying to be provocative and merely coming across as pandering and foolish. …

Max Boot thinks the NY Times Book Review might be sillier.

Have you been waiting for an American version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—a searing account of life in the American Gulag? Well, according to the New York Times Book Review, your wait is over. Rush right out and pick your own copy of Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.

To be sure, the Times’s reviewer, Wellesley professor Dan Chiasson, admits that the poems may be somewhat lacking in artistic merit. But, hey, he suggests, you gotta make allowances: …

John Fund follows the controversy surrounding a proposed Romanian mine.

The recent tragedy in Utah has brightened the spotlight on mining, already under assault by environmental and anti-globalization activists world-wide. These activists have produced several documentaries, and the anti-mining campaign has attracted the attention of billionaire George Soros and actress Vanessa Redgrave–and enough charges of greed or hypocrisy to fill a mine shaft.

Tonight, PBS will air “Gold Futures,” a film by Hungary’s Tibor Kocsis. The film focuses on residents in Romania’s Rosia Montana, a rural Transylvanian town, who are divided over the benefits of a proposed gold mine. It also features Gabriel Resources, the Canadian mining company trying to convince them to relocate so it can dig for a huge gold deposit estimated at 14.6 million ounces, worth almost $10 billion. PBS describes the film as a “David-and-Goliath story.” …

… The other side to the controversy is told in a new film that will never be shown on PBS, but is nonetheless rattling the environmental community. “Mine Your Own Business” is a documentary by Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. They conclude that the biggest threat to the people of Rosia Montana “comes from upper-class Western environmentalism that seeks to keep them poor and unable to clean up the horrific pollution caused by Ceausescu’s mining.”

Mr. McAleer, a former Financial Times journalist who has followed the mine battle for seven years, says he “found that everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false.” He produced his film on a shoestring $230,000 budget largely provided by Gabriel Resources, but says he was given complete editorial control.

The Gabriel funding caused environmental groups to label the film “propaganda” and demand the National Geographic Society cancel plans to rent its Washington, D.C., theater to the free-market Moving Picture Institute for a screening. …

Salon.com with a great piece on Alaska and its corrupt GOP legislators.

… The political anomalies of the far Northwest are on view right now in a scandal that looks likely to bring down much of the state’s Republican establishment, threatening the careers of oil executives, lobbyists and all three of Alaska’s representatives in Washington. The alleged improprieties are as crass as they get — lobbyists handing out bribes on the floor of the state Legislature, federal money directed by Alaska’s U.S. senators to those companies, and lobbyists who granted politicians personal favors. The taint has spread so far that it has become a crisis not just for those politicians who have been directly implicated, and not just for the Republican Party, but for the state itself. The Associated Press was recently moved to call the few living statesmen who had signed the state’s first constitution, in 1956, and ask them what had become of their creation. ” Greed is rampant,” one of them, Vic Fischer, told the AP. “I’m very disgusted. It’s not a matter of betrayal. It’s more a matter of sadness and concern. But most of all disgust.”

What’s wrong with Alaska? The state’s politics can seem an accident of its own isolation, and dependence. There are few states that seem as ripe for scandal as this one, with its history of single-party rule and an economy, based on the extraction of wealth from public lands. But there may also be another, deeper truth: Alaska’s strange, enticing political culture may equally be a legacy of the state’s senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens. …

Pejman Yousefzadeh in Tech Central column on Karl Rove.

A day after announcing his resignation as White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove had a conversation with the media during which he revealed one of the reasons why the White House will miss him:

Q Any few accomplishments that you single out as some of the ones you’re most proud of?

MR. ROVE: I’ll think about that in September. This morning, though, at the senior staff meeting, I was very candid with my colleagues. I said that the true story was that I was resigning in protest over our failure to establish equidistance as the principle in the germination of seaward lateral boundaries in the latest version of the act overseeing offshore drilling. I am the leading expert within the administration on this. This actually goes back to Grotios, who was born in 1598, and he wrote this in one of his earliest works. You’re all familiar, of course, with Hugo Grotios?

…

James Taranto has more on Rove.

Rich Lowry on the Edwards’ campaign.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld had a point when he said, in his frequently quoted formulation, that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In the case of John Edwards, however, hypocrisy is simply a way of life.

The infamous $400 haircut — actually, some of his hairstyling sessions ran as much as $1,200 all told — wasn’t a freak embarrassment for a candidate so self-righteously devoted to the poor. It was part of a pattern so pervasive that it has become the defining aspect of Edwards’ candidacy.

Thomas Sowell on why the left loves failure.

It is not just in Iraq that the political left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise. The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest. Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing. One wonders what they would do in heaven. …

Newsweek reports on Chinese laws regulating reincarnation. Seriously!

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.” …

Dilbert has a reaction. How cool is that?

My favorite story of the week, if not my entire life, involves China passing a law banning Tibetan monks from reincarnating without permission.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

My first reaction was something along the lines of “Ha ha! You can’t regulate reincarnation!” Then I realized China manufactured every article of clothing I’m wearing, and I didn’t see that coming either. So maybe I should stop underestimating China for once. I’d like to go on record predicting China CAN control reincarnation if they set their minds to it.

Regulating reincarnation is a worthy goal. There are many benefits. For example, reincarnation would give the Chinese government a renewable source of spare parts:

Chinese Bureaucrat: “Hold still.”

Monk: “Please don’t remove my heart! I’ll die!”

Chinese Bureaucrat: “No worries. I’ve already signed form R-23 authorizing you to reincarnate.”

Monk: “As another monk?”

Chinese Bureaucrat: “As a dung beetle if you don’t stop squirming.” …

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John Fund gives his send off to Michael Deaver.

Mike Deaver was always on the lookout for ways to present Ronald Reagan in the best possible light, and I saw that firsthand as a Sacramento high school student during Reagan’s last year as California governor.

Reagan, who had come to office in 1967 promising to crack down on campus unrest, frequently clashed with student protesters and hippies. Once Reagan told a crowd that “the last bunch of people here were carrying signs that said ‘make love, not war,’ but they didn’t look capable of doing either.”

Yet Reagan was determined to connect with young people. Deaver and his deputy, the late Joe Holmes, came up with the idea that the governor should hold a weekly “news conference” with high school students and answer their questions about state government and national issues. “The theory was that high school students still lived at home with their parents, hadn’t been radicalized by liberal professors yet, and still showed some respect to adults,” Deaver once told me.

The 30-minute show, “The Governor and the Students,” was taped on a weekday after school, then sent to TV stations all over the state for them to air as they wished at no cost. During the program’s last year, my civics teacher recommended me as a “panelist” on the show. After the first taping, Deaver pulled me over and asked if I would like to do it again. Flustered, I stuttered “Sure.” I wound up appearing on a few more shows asking the governor questions. …

The Captain posts again on Edwards.

John Edwards had a tough week. Not only has he descended into an immature name-calling obsession over Ann Coulter, not only did the Wall Street Journal expose him as a towering hypocrite on predatory lending, but on Friday Edwards demonstrated that he has no real knowledge of foreign affairs or of movies — even the films he recommends. When pressed in Iowa as to whether the US should adopt the Cuban model for healthcare, his answer exposed his lightweight status (h/t CQ reader Rush L):

When an Iowa resident asked former senator John Edwards Thursday whether the United States should follow the Cuban healthcare model, the 2004 vice presidential contender deflected the question by saying he didn’t know enough to answer the question.

“I’m going to be honest with you — I don’t know a lot about Cuba’s healthcare system,” Edwards, D-N.C., said at an event in Oskaloosa, Iowa. “Is it a government-run system?” …

And Zimbabwe.

Yesterday, the Telegraph reported that Western officials expect a complete collapse of Zimbabwe’s economic and political systems, by Christmas or even sooner. Today, the Los Angeles Times picks up where the Telegraph left off, explaining in detail the disintegration of Africa’s one-time breadbasket. The farms that once sustained the entire region have returned to pre-agricultural times, and manufacturing and retail will soon join them: …

Michael Ledeen reminds us of the fruitlessness of talks with Iran.

For some time now, the chattering classes have debated whether the United States should negotiate with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both sides have endowed the very act of negotiating with near-mythic power.

The advocates suggest that “good relations” may emerge, while opponents warn it is somehow playing into the mullahs’ hands. Both seem to believe that the three recent talks in Baghdad are historically significant, since they are said to be a departure from past practice.

That claim is false. Every administration since Ayatollah Khomeini’s seizure of power in 1979 has negotiated with the Iranians. Nothing positive has ever come of it, but most every president has come to believe that a “grand bargain” with Tehran can somehow be reached, if only we negotiate well enough.

Washington diplomats have steadfastly refused to see the Iranian regime for what it is: a relentless enemy that seeks to dominate or destroy us. …

Michael Barone with his early Rove verdict.

The resignation of Karl Rove ends the tenure of a man who has occupied a unique place in American history. No other presidential appointee has ever had such a strong influence on politics and policy, and none is likely to do so again anytime soon. Only Robert Kennedy exerted similar influence, and he had little to do with electoral politics during his brother’s presidency.

Rove brought to his work a wide and deep knowledge of U.S. history, political statistics, demography, and public policy. He worked hard and, for most of three years, under an unjustified threat of indictment. He does not seem to have weighed in much on foreign or military policy, and there is no reason to believe that George W. Bush sought his advice on whether to take military action in Iraq. …

Sydney Morning Herald with good overview of global warming’s bad month.

Imagine if the American government agency responsible for temperature records had announced a fortnight ago that it had overestimated annual temperatures since the year 2000. Imagine if, at the time of correcting this error, the hottest year on record was mysteriously altered from 1998 to 1934. Imagine further that if you considered the 10 hottest years on record after these corrections, the hottest decade changed from the 1990s to the 1930s.

Would that change your views on global warming? It should, because climate change theory says increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere raises the temperature. Yet the hot 1930s was hardly a decade of carbon-spewing industrial growth.

Well, all these things have happened. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculates the average US temperature figures. It does this by processing data from land measurement sites. Earlier this year a Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre approached the institute and pointed out an error in its more recent calculations. Figures since 2000 had been inflated by about 0.15 of a degree Celsius.

The institute thanked him and on August 7 quietly changed these figures, and some of the rankings on its list of the hottest years on record, which extends back to 1880. It did this without any public acknowledgment of the changes.

The Goddard Institute is a major supporter of the climate change orthodoxy, and the discovery that it got one of the central data sets of global warming science and debate wrong is embarrassing and disturbing. …

American Thinker posts on another global warming scold who can’t tolerate disagreement.

Ward Churchill could tell NASA’s James Hansen what it is like when your work goes under a microscope. Churchill ended up losing his job over the academic misconduct that was uncovered. The intemperate response Hansen has displayed toward his critics begs for an explanation.. Will the global warming game be over if the scrutiny goes too deep?

Last week, Hansen, NASA’s lead scientist on global warming, penned a rather strange ad hominem attack against critics that questioned the validity of his work in the wake of corrections prompted by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit http://www.climateaudit.org/

Under most circumstances, it is inappropriate for a Federal Agency Administrator to pen such a highly political polemic, although Hansen has a long history of doing just that. Rather than respond with a proper full acknowledgement of his error and a promise to uncover other potential flaws which may be lurking in his data and analysis, his technical explanation is interspersed with swipes at his critics, whom he sees involved in a sinister conspiracy to discredit the impeccable science he claims to represent. …

The New Scientist gives us more reason to doubt the efficacy of governments ethanol regs.

It sounds counterintuitive, but burning oil and planting forests to compensate is more environmentally friendly than burning biofuel. So say scientists who have calculated the difference in net emissions between using land to produce biofuel and the alternative: fuelling cars with gasoline and replanting forests on the land instead.

They recommend governments steer away from biofuel and focus on reforestation and maximising the efficiency of fossil fuels instead.

The reason is that producing biofuel is not a “green process”. It requires tractors and fertilisers and land, all of which means burning fossil fuels to make “green” fuel. In the case of bioethanol produced from corn – an alternative to oil – “it’s essentially a zero-sums game,” says Ghislaine Kieffer, programme manager for Latin America at the International Energy Agency in Paris, France …

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Mark Steyn wonders when the American public might get sanctuary.

At the funeral of Iofemi Hightower, her classmate Mecca Ali wore a T-shirt with the slogan: “Tell Me Why They Had To Die.”

“They” are Miss Hightower, Dashon Harvey and Terrance Aeriel, three young citizens of Newark, New Jersey, lined up against a schoolyard wall, forced to kneel and then shot in the head.

Miss Ali poses an interesting question. No one can say why they “had” to die, but it ought to be possible to advance theories as to what factors make violent death in Newark a more-likely proposition than it should be. That’s usually what happens when lurid cases make national headlines: When Matthew Shepard was beaten and hung on a fence in Wyoming, Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times that it was merely the latest stage in a “war” against homosexuals loosed by the forces of intolerance. Mr. Shepard’s murder was dramatized in plays and movies and innumerable songs by Melissa Etheridge, Elton John, Peter, Paul and Mary, etc. The fact that this vile crucifixion was a grisly one-off and that American gays have never been less at risk from getting bashed did not deter pundits and politicians and lobby groups galore from arguing that this freak case demonstrated the need for special legislation.

By contrast, there’s been a succession of prominent stories with one common feature that the very same pundits, politicians and lobby groups have a curious reluctance to go anywhere near. In a New York Times report headlined “Sorrow And Anger As Newark Buries Slain Youth,” the limpidly tasteful Times prose prioritized “sorrow” over “anger,” and offered only the following reference to the perpetrators: “The authorities have said robbery appeared to be the motive. Three suspects – two 15-year-olds and a 28-year-old construction worker from Peru – have been arrested.”

So, this Peruvian guy was here on a green card? Or did he apply for a temporary construction-work visa from the U.S. Embassy in Lima?

Not exactly. Jose Carranza is an “undocumented” immigrant. His criminal career did not begin with the triple murder he’s alleged to have committed, nor with the barroom assault from earlier this year, nor with the 31 counts of aggravated sexual assault relating to the rape of a 5-year-old child, for which Mr. Carranza had been released on bail. (His $50,000 bail on the assault charge and $150,000 bail on the child-rape charges have now been revoked.) No, Mr. Carranza’s criminal career in the United States began when he decided to live in this country unlawfully. …

Diana West with an important column on ROE – Rules of Engagement.

Now that Marcus Luttrell’s book “Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10″ is a national bestseller, maybe Americans are ready to start discussing the core issue his story brings to light: the inverted morality, even insanity, of the American military’s rules of engagement (ROE).

On a stark mountaintop in Afghanistan in 2005, Leading Petty Officer Luttrell and three Navy SEAL teammates found themselves having just such a discussion. Dropped behind enemy lines to kill or capture a Taliban kingpin who commanded between 150-200 fighters, the SEAL team was unexpectedly discovered in the early stages of a mission whose success, of course, depended on secrecy. Three unarmed Afghan goatherds, one a teenager, had stumbled across the Americans’ position.

This presented the soldiers with an urgent dilemma: What should they do? If they let the Afghans go, they would probably alert the Taliban to the their whereabouts. This would mean a battle in which the Americans were outnumbered by at least 35 to 1. “Little Big Horn in turbans,” as Marcus Luttrell would describe it. If the Americans didn’t let the goatherds go — if they killed them, there being no way to hold them — the Americans would avoid detection and, most likely, leave the area safely. On a treeless mountainscape far from home, four of our bravest patriots came to the ghastly conclusion that the only way to save themselves was forbidden by the rules of engagement. Such an action would set off a media firestorm, and lead to murder charges for all. …

Max Boot posts on the Air Force fighter jocks who need to be pushed to develop a new bomber.

The National Journal has an interesting article in the current issue on “The Air Force’s Next Bomber,” by Sydney Freedberg. But the gist is that the Air Force, after years of pressure from Congress and political appointees in the Department of Defense, reluctantly has agreed to begin developing a new bomber by 2018. Yet many analysts doubt whether the Air Force is serious. …

Samizdata’s quote of the day is from Barry Goldwater.

The Captain was on a roll this weekend. Seven items from Captain’s Quarters.

     First; John Edwards, Exploiter of the Poor.

     Then; Edwards, Jumps the Shark.

In 1992, one could tell the precise moment when George H. W. Bush lost his grip and the election. In a late campaign speech, he referred to Bill Clinton and Al Gore with sarcastic name-calling. I can’t find the exact quote (see update below), but as I recall, he called Gore “Eco Boy” and Clinton something equally silly. It made Bush look immature and desperate; he managed to make Clinton look more presidential than the sitting President.

At least George Bush shot off his mouth at his actual political opponent. John Edwards has apparently decided he’s competing with Ann Coulter to see which can prove themselves the most immature:

Former Sen. John Edwards on Friday fired the latest round in his ongoing verbal feud with Ann Coulter, calling her a “she-devil” at a public event before quickly adding that he shouldn’t engage in name-calling. …

     The Captain noticed Patty Murray imitates Carol Mosley Braun.

     Some on the left are figuring out Hugo Chavez.

Jeb Koogler, a staunch liberal at The Moderate Voice, has defended Hugo Chavez for a long time. He thought that Chavez intended to help the poor and downtrodden and made excuses for his tough tactics as a necessary interlude towards a better society. He disregarded Chavez’ authoritarian impulses as unimportant in the long run. Now Koogler says he can remain silent no more — and wonders why his colleagues on the Left haven’t made the same decision …

      The Captain posts on a Dem who supports the war.

Another Congressional Democrat has shifted his views on Iraq to support from opposition — and this change has significance. Rep. Brian Baird, one of the Democrats who voted against the authorization to use military force in 2002, has now returned from Iraq convinced that we need to give General David Petraeus more time …

     And Rudy’s pop in the polls.

Rudy Giuliani got good news earlier this week from a CBS poll that most people have learned to mistrust — for good reason — but Rasmussen may provide some corroboration today. According to the normally reliable pollster, Rudy has his first significant lead in head-to-head polling against Hillary Clinton, and the crosstabs show some surprising depth (via Instapundit):

     A Zimbabwe post closes out Captain’s Quarters.

Zimbabwe has just about reached the end of its tether, according to Western officials contacted by The Telegraph, and in four months will be reduced to anarchy. Britain has plans to evacuate its 20,000 citizens on an emergency basis as the former agricultural power will send its starving people into the street in a paroxysm of anger, tribal conflicts, and utter collapse …

Jeff Jacoby led off the last Pickings with global warming, part one. Here’s part two.

IF THERE’S anything climate-change crusaders are adamant about, it is that the science of the matter is settled. That greenhouse gases emitted through human activity are causing the planet to warm dangerously, they say, is an established fact; only a charlatan would claim otherwise. In the worlds of Al Gore, America’s leading global warming apostle: “There’s no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. . . . There is no more scientific debate among serious people who’ve looked at the evidence.”

But as with other claims Gore has made over the years (“I took the initiative in creating the Internet”), this one doesn’t mesh with reality.

Scientists and other “serious people” who question the global warming disaster narrative are not hard to find. Last year 60 of them sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, urging him to undertake “a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science” and disputing the contention that “a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause.” The letter cautioned that “observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models” and warned that since the study of climate change is relatively new, “it may be many years yet before we properly understand the earth’s climate system.” …

Power Line post.

World literature is replete with “artists” who bamboozle would-be sophisticates into doing foolish things, usually to the benefit, financial or otherwise, of the “artist.” A master practitioner of this age-old craft is Spencer Tunick, an American photographer who travels around the globe, directing thousands of people to take off their clothes so he can photograph them. Really. …

Corner Posts

Betsy’s Page has more on Edwards’ collapse.

Scotland’s Daily Record reports on Scotland’s cancer treatment wait. But Michael Moore said all was well in socialized medicine paradise.

CANCER patients are still waiting up to seven months for treatment. Patients are supposed to be treated within 62 days of urgent referral. But figures out yesterday showed only three areas in Scotland were meeting those targets every time. In the worst cases, sufferers were kept hanging on for 220 days. …