Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 30 Word

• September 30 PDF

Mark Steyn thinks we talk too much.

… So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive. If dissent means refusing to let the Bush administration bully you into wearing a flag lapel pin, why, then Katie Couric (bravely speaking out on this issue just last week) is the new Mandela! If Rumsfeld is a “fascist.” then anyone can fight fascism. It’s no longer about the secret police kicking your door down and clubbing you to a pulp. Well, OK, it is if you’re a Buddhist monk in Burma. But they’re a long way away, and it’s all a bit complicated and foreign, and let’s not “confuse the very dire human rights situation” in Hoogivsastan with an opportunity to celebrate our courage in defending “academic freedom” in America. Ahmadinejad must occasionally have felt he was appearing in a matinee of “A Chance To Hear [Insert Name Of Enemy Head Of State Here].” Could have been Chavez, could have been Mullah Omar, could have been Herr ReichsfuhrerHitler himself, as Columbia’s Dean John Coatsworth proudly boasted on television. …

Claudia Rosett with a couple of posts on the Ahmadeninejad visit.

The most important news this week is breaking not at the UN, but on the streets of Rangoon, where Burmese monks have been braving armed security forces to protest years of brutal, military rule — Richard Fernandez of Pajamas Media has a roundup here.

If the UN were a healthy institution, some of those monks would be speaking to us this week from the General Assembly stage.

Instead, courtesy of his hosts, the UN General Assembly, we have had Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad traipsing around New York, in what has been for the past few days the 24/7 Ahmadinejad Top Hits Propaganda Parade. He has had time to speak at the National Press Club, Columbia University, the UN General Assembly, attend a reception, hold a UN press conference, appear on the Charlie Rose show, and of course taped a curtain-raiser with CBS’s 60 Minutes from Tehran which aired Sunday as he was arriving in New York. …

John Fund comments on the last Dem debate.

The Captain with the lowdown on the O’Reilly smear.

… Just like Bush’s analogy about Nelson Mandela and the Rush Limbaugh controversy, this is another effort to discredit someone by cherry-picking the transcript and stripping something of all context. I don’t even care for O’Reilly’s show. I never watch it unless Michelle Malkin appears on it. I don’t like shoutfests on TV and haven’t gone out of my way to watch them in quite some time. That, however, doesn’t mean that O’Reilly should be pilloried for supposedly saying something almost completely opposite of what he actually said. …

Roger L. Simon posts on some of the Rather detritus.

Mark Steyn Corner posts on Katie Couric.

Power Line posts on the Columbia visit, Duke, and FISA problems.

Tech Central says Gore keeps dodging debates.

As over 150 heads of state and government gather at UN headquarters in New York to discuss climate change, former Vice President Al Gore, the most prominent proponent of the theory of the human-induced, catastrophic global warming, continues to refuse repeated challenges to debate the issue.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who addressed the General Assembly on climate change September 24, is but the latest global warming skeptic to receive the cold shoulder from Gore. In ads appearing in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Times, Klaus has called on Gore to face him in a one-on-one debate on the proposition: “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis.” Earlier in the year, similar challenges to Gore were issued by Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Lord Monckton of Brenchley, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. All calls on the former vice president to face his critics have fallen on deaf ears. …

Contentions post on the Dem debate.

Peter Wehner posts on Chris Matthews.

… Chris Matthews, ever voluble and confused on the facts, is critical of the President for not being sufficiently multilateral and (presumably) not solicitous enough of regimes like Syria and China—yet he appears to be morally indifferent to a great struggle for liberty that is unfolding before our eyes. All of which is a reminder why Chris Matthews is a perfect choice to host a program on MSNBC.

Todd Zywicki in Volokh has a short review of John Lott’s Freedomnomics.

I just finished reading John Lott’s marvelous and entertaining book Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t. It is very well-written and it really reminds you of what an extraordinarily creative and interesting thinker Lott is. Much of the book is a translation of his many papers in different areas into prose and concepts accessible to general readers. …

American Thinker with more ethanol foolishness.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 27 Word

• September 27 PDF

Dilbert gets the lead because he blogged on Bjorn Lomborg’s visit to Bill Maher’s show. You gotta go with two of our favorites together.

… The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems.

The joke about economists is that they are always using the phrase “On the other hand.” Economists are trained to recognize all sides of an argument. That seems like an easy and obvious skill, but in my experience, the general population lacks that skill. Once people take a side, they interpret any argument on the other side as absurd. In other words, they are relatively susceptible to cognitive dissonance.

Recently I saw the best case of cognitive dissonance I have ever seen. It was on Bill Maher’s show, Real Time, which I love. Bill was interviewing Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who has a book about global warming, called “Cool It.” The economist made the following points clearly and succinctly: …

Sam Thernstrom in American.com wonders if Bush can find his way out of the Kyoto konundrum.

Tomorrow morning, President Bush will deliver what may be the most important environmental speech of his administration, as he addresses participants at an international White House summit on global warming. Key developing nations such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and South Korea will be at the table, along with Australia, Russia, and the European Union, ready to hear the president’s ideas about alternatives to the Kyoto Protocol. It remains to be seen, however, whether Bush will propose truly bold policy options that might actually change the way people think about warming—and even if he does, whether anyone is still listening.

Bush has been something of an enigma on climate change for friends and foes alike. More than any other head of state, he understands what’s wrong with the Kyoto-style approach favored by Europeans. Yet Bush has been unwilling to make climate change a personal priority, rarely speaking about it at any length. Indeed, he has mostly let cabinet secretaries and other staffers craft his policy—and explain it publicly. The result has been a series of frustrating and inconsequential half-steps that have failed to reshape the way Americans and foreigners think about the problem. This week’s summit represents Bush’s last chance to display real leadership. …

WSJ editors want to know when Iran will pay a price for killing Americans.

The traveling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad circus made for great political theater this week, but the comedy shouldn’t detract from its brazen underlying message: The Iranian President believes that the world lacks the will to stop Iran from pursuing its nuclear program, and that the U.S. also can’t stop his country from killing GIs in Iraq. The question is what President Bush intends to do about this in his remaining 16 months in office. …

Peter Wehner posts in Contentions on Katie Couric’s thoughts. This is a good example of why Pickerhead has often praised free speech. It makes it easy to spot the idiots.

David Brooks says the netroots make lots of noise but they don’t run the Dem party.

In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C.

At the time, that seemed a sign that the left was gaining the upper hand in its perpetual struggle with the center over the soul of the Democratic Party. But now it’s clear that was only cosmetic.

Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” You can learn most of what you need to know by paying attention to two different groups — high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington. …

Hugh Hewitt post gives a flavor of the debate last night

Power Line has a debate post too.

… Fifth, part of me hopes that Edwards did make headway because he’s too phony for anyone but a committed Democrat not to see through. After the slick talking demagogue said that, as president, he would take away the health care of members of Congress if they don’t pass a bill providing universal coverage, Tim Russert reminded Edwards that in 2004 he said we can’t afford universal coverage. Edwards stammered that things had changed since then. Did he mean that the great Bush economy has made universal coverage affordable, or did he mean he’s running as a leftist in this cycle?

Sixth, the highlight of the evening came when Biden warned that if Hillary is the candidate, a lot of unpleasant “stuff” from the Clinton administration will come back into play. As the camera showed Hillary’s face going glacial, Biden added that he was referring to policy stuff. The glacier did not melt, but after a few moments a painted smile appeared on it.

Seventh, the sound-bite of the evening was probably when Hillary seemed to reject the view of an unnamed guest on Meet The Press who acknowledged that if we captured the number three guy in al Qaeda and that person knew the whereabouts of a bomb that was going to explode in three days, we might need to beat the information out of him. The unnamed guest, of course, turned out to be Bill Clinton. After a brief pause, Hillary said, “well he’s not up here right now.” She then added, with smile (real this time), that she would have to talk to him about the matter. …

Another Power Line post covers the debate by introducing us to the new blog at the Weekly Standard. Are we seeing Karl Rove as blogger?

The Weekly Standard has rolled out its new CampaignStandard blog edited by Matthew Continetti. With Fred Barnes leading off, with Richard Starr coming out from behind his editorial desk to pinch hit, with the pseudonymous “well-known campaign consultant” Richelieu batting third, with Bill Kristol batting cleanup, the lineup looks a little like the punditocratic equivalent of the 1927 Yankees to me. Here’s Bill Kristol summing up last night’s Democratic debate in a midnight post:

Last night, for the first time this election cycle, I watched a Democratic presidential debate. It was appalling. But it was also, in a way, encouraging. Before last night, I thought it was 50-50 that the Republican nominee would win in November 2008.

Now I think it’s 2 to 1. And if the Democrat is anyone but Hillary, it’s 4 to 1.

Susan Estrich does the John Edwards obit.

What do you think of when you hear the name John Edwards?

I was doing a forum with my friend and FOX colleague Rich Lowry last night at the University of Richmond, and the ever-gracious editor of the National Review was his usual gracious self when it came to answering questions about what he saw as the strengths of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But when the topic turned to the former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice presidential nominee, he couldn’t resist. I’m paraphrasing, and he did it funnier, but the point was that the only thing he’d be fearful about if he were to meet Edwards in a dark alley was that Edwards might point a can of hair spray in his eyes.

The audience went nuts. …

Mark Steyn Corner posts on Vancouver allowing Muslims to smoke.

Thomas Lifson posts in American Thinker on the continuing deterioration of NY Times finances under the clown prince Pinch Sulzberger.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 26 Word

• September 26 PDF

George Will nicely explains the many hypocrisies of the Times deal with MoveOn.

… The Times, a media corporation that is a fountain of detailed editorial instructions about how the rest of the world should conduct its business, seems confused about how it conducts its own. The Times now says the appropriate rate for MoveOn.org’s full-page ad should have been $142,000, a far cry from $65,000, which is what the group paid. So the discount of $77,000 constitutes a large soft-money contribution to a federally regulated political committee. The Times’ horror of such contributions was expressed in its enthusiasm for McCain-Feingold.

FEC regulations state: “The provision of any goods or services without charge or at a charge that is less than the usual and normal charge for such goods or services is a contribution.” Individuals are limited to contributing $5,000 in a calendar year; corporations such as the Times are forbidden to make any contributions.

MoveOn.org is going to send the Times a check for $77,000. The Times has apologized, which is sweet, but normally the FEC does not accept apologies in lieu of fines. And often FEC fines are levied after intrusive investigations into motives and intentions. Will there be such an investigation of the Times? The FEC is not lenient when dealing with individuals who, less lawyered-up than the New York Times Co., fall afoul of regulations much more recondite than the bright line the Times ignored. …

Contentions misses Pat Moynihan.

Tony Blankley finds the agreement between the suicide left and Lee Bollinger.

The fact that Congress may pass no law abridging the freedom of speech is a non sequitur to the proposition that a patriotic president of a college ought not offer his campus to the leader of a wartime enemy (and provide him with a chance to propagandize against us. Indeed, the mere presence of such a person in such a location enhances his position and his cause in the eyes of many feebleminded people.)

I do not suggest that President Bollinger is unpatriotic. Rather, I think he suffers from a worse disease than Bush derangement syndrome; he suffers from a loss of the first instinct that nature implanted in every creature: the instinct of self-preservation.

It was said back in the 1970s that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. But if liberals permit America to be mugged by our lethal enemies, they (and we) may not survive to become sadder and wiser conservatives.

Ilya Somin, of the Volokh Conspiracy and George Mason, got one of his posts published in WSJ. It’s a short libertarian answer to the idea of the draft or national service.

One of the most interesting (and in my view sinister) aspects of proposals for mandatory “national service” is that they virtually always target only the young, usually 18- to 21-year-olds. This might be understandable if the proposals were limited to military service. But most current proposals (including those by Rep. Charles Rangel, Sen. John McCain, Bill Buckley, the Democratic Leadership Conference and Rep. Rahm Emanuel), incorporate civilian service as well. When it comes to office work and light menial labor, there are many elderly and middle-aged people who can do the job just as well as 18-21 year olds can, if not better. …

KC Johnson has the first of two Volokh Duke posts. These will be the last of the series by the guest bloggers, Johnson and Taylor.

For those who believed the lacrosse case was over, the past two weeks brought news on two fronts. First, Brendan Sullivan and Barry Scheck, on behalf of the three falsely accused players and their families, presented representatives of the City of Durham with the outlines of a devastating potential lawsuit against the city, former DA Mike Nifong, several police officers, and other individual defendants. The initial demands: $30 million, plus a wide array of procedural reforms, unless the city caves in and settles.

Second, after acting DA Jim Hardin urged a state criminal investigation of Nifong and others, reports surfaced that Justice Department investigators had arrived in the Triangle to look into the case.

Meanwhile, we have learned, Duke, its administrators, and its extremist professors are not out of the legal woods yet either. The University settled months ago with the three falsely accused players. But now a high-powered legal team representing most of the other 44 members of the 2006 lacrosse team is exploring a possible lawsuit. The grounds would include mistreating the entire team, including misleading smears of the players by Duke President Richard Brodhead and dozens of professors.

The first two moves are a reminder that the law enforcement misconduct in the lacrosse case extended well beyond Mike Nifong. Stuart (who co-authored this post) and I thought we would wind up our week of guest-blogging by reviewing the performance of Nifong’s criminal justice enablers. …

Stuart Taylor closes the Volokh Duke posts with A Corrupt Legal Culture.

… The last 18 months, in short, have revealed a deeply flawed legal culture in North Carolina’s fourth largest city. And good reason exists to believe that the lacrosse case only exposed a fraction of Durham’s corruption. To conclude with a vignette: during Nifong’s criminal contempt trial, Durham judge Marcia Morey testified for the ex-DA. Morey offered an unusual argument to minimize Nifong’s repeated lies to the court to conceal his discussions with Dr. Meehan of the undisclosed exculpatory DNA test results.

Prosecutors, Morey asserted, had less of an obligation to be candid before a trial date was set. “I do think it makes a difference,” the judge continued. “Are you are at a trial stage, [or] are you at a pretrial conference?” Her apparent implication: Pretrial, at least, why make a fuss about a little lying between friends — prosecutors and judges — for the sake of helping prosecutors oppress innocent people?

John Stossel turns his attention to health care insurance.

Almost daily, we’re bombarded with apocalyptic warnings about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance. Sen. Hillary Clinton wants to require everyone to have it, big companies to pay for it and government to buy it for the poor.

That is a move in the wrong direction.

America’s health-care problem is not that some people lack insurance — it’s that 250 million Americans do have it.

You have to understand something right from the start. We Americans got hooked on health insurance because the government did the insurance companies a favor during World War II. Wartime wage controls prohibited cash raises, so employers started giving noncash benefits, like health insurance, to attract workers. The tax code helped this along by treating employer-based health insurance more favorably than coverage you buy yourself. And state governments have made things worse by mandating coverage many people would never buy for themselves. …

Walter Williams on global warming hysteria.

… There’s an excellent booklet available from the National Center for Policy Analysis (ncpa.org) titled “A Global Warming Primer.” Some of its highlights are:

“Over long periods of time, there is no close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature.”

“Humans contribute approximately 3.4 percent of annual CO2 levels” compared to 96.6 percent by nature.

“There was an explosion of life forms 550 million years ago (Cambrian Period) when CO2 levels were 18 times higher than today. During the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, CO2 levels were as much as nine times higher than today.”

What about public school teachers frightening little children with tales of cute polar bears dying because of global warming? The primer says, “Polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 in 1950 to as many as 25,000 today, higher than any time in the 20th century.” The primer gives detailed sources for all of its findings, and it supplies us with information we can use to stop politicians and their environmental extremists from doing a rope-a-dope on us.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 25 Word

• September 25 PDF

Some of our favorites express their Ahmadinejad opinions.

The Captain is first.

… No one will learn anything from Ahmadinejad’s visit today that they didn’t know before. He’s an uneducated buffoon who serves as a convenient mouthpiece for the Iranian theocrats who hold the real power in Iran. Unfortunately, Columbia has given the buffoon more prestige for his rambling and disjointed discourse. They have bestowed academic legitimacy to Holocaust denial, as well as to rabid anti-Semitism. Will Bollinger next invite the Imperial Wizard of the KKK to speak as an honored guest at Columbia, and will a rude introduction be seen as enough to justify the appearance? …

John Fund.

… It appears that for too many universities, “intellectual freedom” really represents the freedom to hear ideas the reigning liberals on campus consider acceptable and to flout the sensibilities of ordinary Americans by showing radical-chic tolerance for the likes of Mr. Ahmadinejad. But when it comes to a serious exchange of views with distinguished Americans who happen to differ with them, that’s beyond the pale.

Gabriel Schoenfeld.

… Fortunately, there are other and better solutions being developed than anything in the works at Columbia to deal with Ahmadinejad’s nuclear-weapons program, elements of which are buried deep underground in hardened facilities across Iran.

Defense Daily reports today that Northrop-Grumman is making rapid progress in bringing on board a new weapon. Here is its dispatch based upon an interview with Harry Heimple, a company spokesman:

By next year a 30,000-pound bomb capable of blasting into subterranean tunnels will begin operating in the Air Force’s bomber fleet, according to industry officials. …

Anne Applebaum.

Peter Wehner has more on the MoveOn ad.

Gordon Chang on the obsequious apology by Mattel.

Nicole Gelinas reviews Greenspan’s book for NY Post.

The Economist obits a parrot.

And a better than average humor section.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 24 Word

• September 24 PDF

Robert Tracinski writes for Real Clear Politics on the coming war with Iran.

For more than a year now, I have been arguing that war with Iran is inevitable, that our only choice is how long we wait to fight it, and that the only question is what cost we will suffer for putting off the necessary confrontation with the Islamic Republic.

Now, finally, there is evidence that some of our leaders are beginning to recognize the necessity of this war and are preparing to fight it. And so for past few weeks, as I have been documenting in TIA Daily, the newspapers have been filled with rumors and speculation about an American air war against Iran. …

John Fund says one of the worst of Alaska’s GOP crooks might be at the end of the road.

On Friday Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin ordered the state to prepare a “fiscally responsible” alternative to the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” which made the state a national laughingstock and shone an unwelcome spotlight on the pork-barrel greed of its all-Republican congressional delegation. The $398 million bridge would have connected Ketchikan (population 7,400) to its airport on a nearby island inhabited by 50 people.

The same day, the Associated Press reported that the FBI has recorded two phone calls between Sen. Ted Stevens, who sponsored the bridge, and Bill Allen, a Stevens patron who dominated state politics as the head of the oil-services firm VECO until he pleaded guilty to bribing state legislators this year. Mr. Allen has also testified in open court that he paid some of the bills incurred in the expensive remodeling of Mr. Stevens’s Alaska home. Last month, FBI agents raided the senator’s home to secure evidence about the remodeling work. Few expect Mr. Stevens, who has served since 1968 and rose to become chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, to survive politically. …

Rich Schapiro has the first of three items on NY Times’ giveaway to MoveOn.

… “We made a mistake,” Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for The Times, told the newspaper’s public editor.

Mathis said an advertising representative left the liberal group with the understanding that the ad would run that Monday even though they had been charged the standby rate.

The group should have paid $142,083 to ensure placement that day. …

Roger Simon does NY Times duty for Pajamas Media.

… The question is how systemic is this – how high and deep this bias goes in the paper’s structure?. How long has the Times been showing this kind of favoritism and to whom? More specifically – who knew about the Moveon ad and when did they know it?

Sound familiar? Papers like the Times and the Washington Post make their reputations conducting such investigations. It will be interesting to see if they do one here. We will be waiting. At a moment in history when the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is visiting New York, it is no small matter that the city and the country’s most respected newspaper – or the one that for many years claimed to be – is guilty of unethical behavior that risks jeopardizing our nation’s security.

A few years ago, in a loose-lipped moment that now seems more like projection than anything else, Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, accused blogging of being a “one man circle jerk.” What greater “circle jerk” exists today than the New York Times?

The Captain tells why the NY Times story is important.

Volokh Conspiracy provides four items today on Duke. Why continue with this? The first two posts are Stuart Taylor covering the storm from the media. We just finished discussing the NY Times subsidy of MoveOn,org. How did the Times cover the Duke story? Pickerhead is sooooo glad you asked!

… The first Times reporter to conduct detailed interviewing about the evidence in the rape case was sportswriter Joe Drape, who authored or coauthored articles that appeared on March 29, March 30, and March 31. In each article, he quoted Nifong but also presented a defense viewpoint.

Drape quoted Durham defense lawyer Bill Thomas providing an unanswerable reply to Nifong’s taunts: “Everyone asks why these young men have not come forward. It’s because no one was in the bathroom with the complainant. No one was alone with her. This didn’t happen. They have no information to come forward with.”

The more Drape pushed, the more he came to believe that Mangum was not credible and her rape charge was probably false. Encouraged, Bill Thomas provided all the evidence of innocence then in his possession to the Times reporter, expecting a great article. But in early April Drape called Thomas and said there would be no article because he was “having problems with the editors.”

And soon after Drape privately told people at Duke — and, presumably, at the Times — that this looked like a hoax, his byline disappeared from the Duke lacrosse story. The word among people at Duke and defense supporters, including one who later ran into Drape at a race track, was that the editors wanted a more pro-prosecution line. They also wanted to stress the race-sex-class angle without dwelling on evidence of innocence. They got what they wanted from Drape’s replacement, Duff Wilson, whose reporting would become a journalistic laughingstock by summer, and other reporters including Rick Lyman.

Times editors also got what they wanted from sports columnist Selena Roberts. Her March 31 commentary, “Bonded in Barbarity,” seethed hatred for “a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.” …

KC Johnson covers the Duke administration in two posts on Volokh.

… Brodhead appears to have been cowed by extremists within his faculty. (It’s worth remembering that this case began just over a year after Larry Summers lost a vote of no-confidence in Harvard’s Faculty Council.) A turning point event came in an emergency meeting of the Academic Council on March 30, 2006. The president urged caution and asked faculty to wait for the facts to come in. But the assembled professors, around 10% of the arts and sciences faculty, responded with vitriolic attacks against the team. One speaker claimed that Duke, as an institution, tolerated drinking and rape, and the lacrosse incident reflected a University problem from the top down. Another suggested punishing the team by suspending lacrosse for three years and then making it a club sport. A third asserted that the team embodied the “assertion of class privilege” by all Duke students. A fourth called on the University to do something to help the “victim.”

Three professors overpowered the meeting: Houston Baker stated as a fact that African-American women had been “harmed” by the lacrosse players and claimed that students in his mostly white, female class were terrified of the lack of an administration response. Wahneema Lubiano alleged favoritism by Duke toward the team and demanded a counter-statement from Duke denouncing the players. And Peter Wood asserted that two years previously, the team was out of control, and demanded a hard line against the athletic director, coach, and team. These remarks, according to several people who attended the meeting, received robust applause.

One week later, when Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse season, he appointed a “Campus Culture Initiative” to explore issues raised by the case. Wood chaired one of the CCI’s four subcommittees. Two other subcommittees (race and gender) were chaired by Group of 88 members Karla Holloway and Anne Allison. And one of the four student members was Chauncey Nartey, an African-American student who had sent an e-mail to the Presslers that the former coach’s wife considered a threat against their daughter. The Presslers filed a police report and told the administration what Nartey had done; the appointment went ahead anyway. …

A Volokh post asks whether the blog should be covering the Jena 6. Pickerhead has no idea what’s going on there, but thinks the Wikipedia entry is pretty thorough.

The Captain has a Rather post.

… He can’t stand not having the spotlight. He also can’t admit his own fault in his downfall, and so the only explanation that he can accept is that Les Moonves, Sumner Redstone, Josh Howard, and Don Hewitt of all people are actors in a vast, Bush-based conspiracy to discredit him.

Unfortunately, Dan does that well enough on his own, and even his colleagues have to admit it.

Charles Lane in WaPo has some Rather thoughts.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 23 Word

• September 23 PDF

Mark Steyn covers her new health plan with, “Bend Over for Nurse Hillary.”

… Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one’s instant and painless – just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.
Hooray!

And, if you don’t, it will be illegal for you to hold a job.

Er, hang on, where’s that in the Constitution? It’s perfectly fine to employ legions of the undocumented from Mexico, but if you employ a fit 26-year-old American with no health insurance either you or he or both of you will be breaking the law? …

 

… Do you remember the so-called “government surplus” of a few years ago? Bill Clinton gave a speech in which he said, yes, sure, he could return the money to taxpayers but that we “might not spend it the right way.” The American political class has decided that they know better than you the “right way” to make health care decisions. Oh, don’t worry, you’re still fully competent to make decisions on what car you drive and what movie you want to rent at Blockbuster.

For the moment.

But when it comes to the grownup stuff, best to leave that to Nurse Hillary.

Charles Krauthammer on the Israeli raid in Syria.

… This is an extremely high-stakes game. The time window is narrow. In probably less than two years, Ahmadinejad will have the bomb.

The world is not quite ready to acquiesce. The new president of France has declared a nuclear Iran ” unacceptable.” The French foreign minister warned that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst” — and “the worst, it’s war, sir.”

Which makes it all the more urgent that powerful sanctions be slapped on the Iranian regime. Sanctions will not stop Ahmadinejad. But there are others in the Iranian elite who might stop him and the nuclear program before the volcano explodes. These rival elites may be radical, but they are not suicidal. And they believe, with reason, that whatever damage Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic folly may inflict upon the region and the world, on Crusader and Jew, on infidel and believer, the one certain result of such an eruption is Iran’s Islamic republic buried under the ash.

John Fund thinks Ted Stevens might be gone soon.

Bill Kristol finds hypocrites at Columbia.

… Actually, this is a liberal university president at his stupidest. As Powerline‘s Scott Johnson put it, “Columbia’s prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.” …

VDH Corner post on the same subject.

… Still, if one examines the recent shameful treatment of Chermerinsky at Irvine, Summers at Davis, and the idea of inviting a terrorist to Columbia, the lowest common denominator is not even politics, but stupidity on the part of university administrators, who blunder into decisions, then give sanctimonious lectures about free speech, a topic they have rarely have studied and know nothing about, and then usually cave when reminded of how embarrassing they’ve become.

All this is just another reminder how divorced from our common culture and workplace academics have become, and how little respect the public accords them. Proof?

The replacement for the gender-insensitive Summers apparently will be Gov. Schwarzenegger-who fought serial accusations of groping in his first gubernatorial campaign and was once sued for sexual harassment.

 

James Taranto gets in his Columbia licks.

… If the U.S. military executed homosexuals instead of merely discharging them, perhaps Bollinger would welcome ROTC back to Columbia.

Jeff Jacoby says Dems are afraid of MoveOn.

… The only Democratic presidential candidate unafraid to tell off MoveOn was Senator Joseph Biden. Queried on “Meet the Press,” he replied forthrightly: “I don’t buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth.”

So this is what the Democrats’ leading lights have been reduced to — wobbling and weaving for fear of offending the hyperventilators in far left field. Do Clinton, Edwards, and Obama really have no idea of the esteem in which most Americans hold military officers like Petraeus? (From Gallup: “The military remains the top-rated institution of Americans, with 73% saying they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. . . . HMOs, big business, and Congress earn the least amount of confidence.”) Did they learn nothing from the “botched joke” that ended John F. Kerry’s presidential hopes once and for all? Is retaining MoveOn’s good will so important to them that they will look the other way even when the integrity of a distinguished American general is recklessly trashed?

“If you are not tough enough to repudiate a scurrilous, outrageous ad such as that, then I don’t know how you are tough enough to be president of the United States.” So said an indignant Senator John McCain the other day. You don’t have to be a Republican to feel the same way.

Ken Burns has a new series starting tonight. We have two reviews from the WSJ.

Brendan Miniter was published first.

… The film makes clear that World War II was a “necessary war” in which the U.S. was unquestionably on the right side, but one that nonetheless came at a steep price. And that price, as in every bloody military conflict, was paid in two ways. Families at home suffered from the loss of their loved ones. And those on the front lines witnessed–even meted out–brutality they never would have imagined before the war. For example, one U.S. Marine–to the horror of his comrades–robbed a wounded Japanese soldier, using a knife to pry loose his gold teeth.

Asked about a line in the film that revealed this theme early on, Mr. Burns recited it from memory before it could be completely read to him: “The Second World War brought out the best and the worst in a generation–and blurred the two so that they became at times almost indistinguishable.” “The War” isn’t aimed as a commentary on the global war on terror or the war in Iraq–production on it began before 9/11–but Mr. Burns told me that he thinks the timing is good. “It agitates the questions about war” that should arise from viewing the reality that is armed human conflict.

Dorothy Rabinowitz showed up this weekend.

… As history, the series is inarguably valuable not only for its treatment of battles nowadays comparatively unknown, like Salerno and Anzio, but also as potential instruction for the fearfully large population of television-watching 20-somethings — or older — not quite sure whether it was the Chinese or the Italians who bombed Pearl Harbor. The astounding narrative of the Bataan Death March, told by a long-embittered survivor, Glenn Frazier, isn’t exactly boring history, of which there is, in fact, none in these 15 hours — hours which include, in extensive treatment, the internment of Japanese-Americans, segregation of the military, and the crimes of Nazism.

Mr. Burns has made it clear in various interviews that one of his prime intentions in this series, was to undo the notion of World War II as “the good war.” Or, as he told a Newsweek reporter this week, with some abandon, it was time to “just unwrap the bloodless, gallant myth of the Second World War. . . .” Here Mr. Burns has shown himself prone to some mythmaking of his own — specifically the myth that there prevails, in our times, some notion that World War II was bloodless. Americans knew it was not in 1945, and they know plenty more about the war now, as they know, too, that it was not all gallantry and victories. It requires a certain willed distance from reality to believe — despite all the documentaries on the war’s bloody toll, its needless battles and misbegotten strategies, which air regularly on television — that a benighted America is in need today of a rescuer to save it from its illusions about the war.

Mr. Burns’s zealous effort to eradicate any hint of a “good war” aura has come at a cost to his series. Thanks to its scope and ambition, and above all to Americans introduced here — those who went to war and survived to speak for themselves and the others whose lives spoke for them — it is nonetheless a profound and moving work.

The Economist reports on the high tech search for Steve Fosset.

Jonah Goldberg starts the humor section with a Dan Rather piece.

In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why … why … why?

“There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.”

Well, God has not forsaken us. Dan Rather seems divinely inspired to crash more times than a Kennedy driving home from an office party. The multimillionaire semi-retired newsman is suing for $70 million, $1 million for every year he’s been alive since he was 5 years old. Which is fitting, because that’s what he sounds like. The gist of his lawsuit is that CBS used him as a “scapegoat” in the Memogate story to “pacify the White House.” The swelled-headed former anchor, who used to brag incessantly about his toughness and independence, also whines in his suit that the network forced him to apologize under duress when “no apology from him was warranted,” and that the former managing editor of CBS News “was not responsible for any such errors.” …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 20 Word

• September 20 PDF

Power Line posts on “Columbia’s Disgrace.” That would be their invitation to Ahmadinejad.

Mark Steyn Corner posts on the DC dry cleaners who gave up.

John Tierney with a great post on Economists vs. Ecologists.

… The classic example is the “population crisis” of the 1960s and 1970s, when biologists like Paul Ehrlich were convinced humanity was about to suffer massive famines and devastating shortages of energy and other resources because the growing population would exceed the planet’s “carrying capacity.” This concept seemed obvious to biologists who study ecosystems, but economists realized there’s a big difference between animals and humans: Humans are remarkably adaptable and creative. When confronted with shortages and environmental problems, they have a long history of coming up with solutions — new methods of farming, new and cheaper sources of energy, cleaner technologies — that leave them better off in an environment that’s less polluted. .

When the economist Julian Simon pointed this out and predicted that humanity wouldn’t run out of food or energy or other resources in an article in the journal Science, the journal was widely criticized by ecologists and other scientists for publishing the work of an ignorant outsider. Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, said that economists like Dr. Simon were members of a “space-age cargo cult.” Trying to explain to these economists that commodities must inevitably become more scarce and expensive, the Ehrlichs wrote, “would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.”

So Dr. Simon challenged the supposed experts to pick any resource that was going to become scarce, and offered to bet them it would instead be cheaper in the future. Dr. Ehrlich and two specialists in energy and natural-resource issues, John Harte and John Holdren, picked five metals and bet $1,000 in 1980. Ten years the supposed experts in natural resources had to pay up, because all five metals were cheaper, just as Dr. Simon had predicted. (You can read more about this in my New York Times Magazine article on the bet.) …

Don Surber with more proof Twain was right when he said, “There is no native American criminal class, except for congress.”

You bought Google at $100 and 3 years later is nearing $600 a share? Big deal. Microsoft has gone up 28-fold over the last 20 years? Yawn. You want to make the big bucks? Rent a congressman. Your return on your investment can be as high as $75 for every dollar invested.

Just ask the good folks at PMA Group, a lobbying firm. They sank $1,333,074 into the campaigns last year of 3 Democratic members of the House defense appropriations subcommittee and walked away with $100.5 million in defense earmarks for PMA clients, Roll Call reported.

That means for every buck they spent, their clients got back $75.39. In less than 1 year.

The 3 Democratic rent-to-own congressmen are John Murtha, Jim Moran and Peter Visclosky. These antiwar Democrats see nothing wrong with steering military money to PMA clients. …

John Fund with a short reminder just what a creep Jim Moran is.

IBD Editorial on Canadian Health Care.

Those who hold up Canada’s nationalized system as a model for the U.S. have another piece of evidence that maybe it’s not: Those who are sick and have a choice go to the U.S. for their care.

The most recent example of this trend is Belinda Stronach, a Liberal Party member of Canada’s Parliament and daughter of Canadian billionaire industrialist Frank Stronach. …

Stuart Taylor posts at Volokh on Mike Nifong’s tactics.

… Nifong’s unethical media campaign, his willful blindness to the facts, his rigged photo lineup, his lies to the public and the court, and his concealment of proof of innocence are a rare study in how to frame innocent defendants by using procedural violations to construct a phony case out of whole cloth.

The DA also had accomplices who joined or assisted in his crimes, including some police officers and others, plus enablers who helped him get away with his flagrant misconduct for so long. Subsequent posts will examine some of the enablers. As for Nifong, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper called him a “rogue prosecutor” in April, while declaring the three wrongly indicted defendants “innocent.” The DA lost his law license in a bar disciplinary hearing in June. He was convicted of criminal contempt and jailed for a day this month. And he still faces possible investigation for crimes that could bring serious prison time, including obstruction of justice and violating the lacrosse players’ civil rights.

KC Johnson posts on the fine folks on Duke’s faculty.

Professors like to think of themselves as aggressive defenders of due process. In theory, the academy exists for the pursuit of truth. And faculty members are, in an ideal world, more inclined to embrace the dispassionate evaluation of evidence than the passions of the mob.

The behavior of activist members of the Duke arts and sciences faculty during the lacrosse case contradicted all of these myths about the academy. And most other professors at Duke elected to remain silent as their extremist colleagues rushed to judgment and refused to reconsider their actions.

In March 2006, less than a week after Crystal Mangum’s rape allegation became public, Houston Baker, a professor of English and African-American Studies, penned an open letter demanding the immediate expulsion from Duke of all 46 white players on the lacrosse team. (Several lacrosse players, in fact, hadn’t even attended the party.) Baker mocked the “tepid and pious legalism” that resulted in “male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.”

Two days after Baker’s missive, the former dean of faculty, History professor William Chafe, published an op-ed in the campus newspaper, the Chronicle. Entitled “Sex and Race,” Chafe’s op-ed suggested that the whites who kidnapped, beat, and murdered Emmett Till provided the appropriate historical context through which to interpret the behavior of the lacrosse players. In an unintentional commentary on the article’s intellectual seriousness, Chafe (a historian of civil rights) misidentified the year for Till’s murder, one of the crucial events in the development of the civil rights movement. …

Mr. Johnson with the today’s last Duke post. This continues on the fine faculty of Duke.

While the Group of 88 led a faculty rush to judgment against the lacrosse team, the most striking aspect of the Duke faculty’s reaction to the lacrosse case came in the professors’ utter closed-mindedness as Mike Nifong’s case collapsed in late 2006. For instance:

–History professor Peter Wood claimed, in an interview with the New Yorker, that a lacrosse player advocated genocide against Native Americans. His evidence: an anonymous student evaluation in a class of 65.

–Literature professor Grant Farred published an October 2006 op-ed accusing Duke students of “secret racism” for seeking to vote Nifong out of office; in April 2007, he publicly deemed unnamed lacrosse players guilty of “perjury.”

–Houston Baker, by this point having been hired away by Vanderbilt, suggested that the lacrosse players might have been guilty of other rapes (he supplied no evidence) and e-mailed one player’s mother that her son and his teammates were “farm animals.” …

… Even now, with Nifong’s case having been exposed as a fraud, only one member of the Group of 88 has publicly apologized. Another privately admitted that she was sorry for signing the statement, but wrote that if she apologized publicly, “my voice won’t count for much in my world.” The Economist recently concluded: “The only people who, it seems, have learned nothing from all this are Mr. Nifong’s enablers in the Duke faculty. Even after it was clear that the athletes were innocent, 87 faculty members published a letter categorically rejecting calls to recant their condemnation. And one professor, proving that some academics are as far beyond parody as they are beneath contempt, offered a course called ‘Hooking up at Duke’ that purported to illustrate what the lacrosse scandals tell us about ‘power, difference and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US.’”

New Editor says tobacco is making a comeback with American farmers.

Thomas Sowell continues his book review with part III of “Mugged by Reality.”

… It would be wonderful to have free and democratic nations throughout the world, and that would very likely reduce military conflicts, as Sharansky and others say. But we do not ensure freedom by holding elections. According to John Agresto, in Iraq “the ‘democratic’ government now entrenched is as sectarian and incompetent as we ever could have feared.” He is unwilling to say that the invasion of Iraq “as originally conceived” was a mistake but he fears that it has become “a tragedy.” This is not a plea for withdrawal. Whatever the situation when we went in, international terrorists have chosen to make this the place for a showdown battle. We can win or lose that battle but we cannot unilaterally end the war.

It is the terrorists’ war, regardless of where it is fought.

Paul Greenberg with good miscellany.

David Bernstein, who blogs at Volokh, with a LA Times Op-Ed on Larry Summers’ dinner date at UC.

The saga of controversial liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky’s on-again, off-again deanship at the new UC Irvine law school was highly unusual in two ways. First, the pressure to enforce political orthodoxy at Chemerinsky’s expense came from the right, not the left, and second, academic freedom and 1st Amendment values won a resounding victory when Chemerinsky was ultimately rehired. A more typical example of how academic freedom remains in jeopardy across the country is the UC Board of Regents’ treatment of Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University.

The regents had invited Summers to be the keynote speaker at a dinner tonight in Sacramento. They then uninvited him last week after some UC faculty protested that “inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California.” …

The Captain posts on the Rather/CBS fun.

… That’s not the only concession Rather makes about his integrity. Not only did he purportedly allow CBS to use his outsize reputation on a badly-sourced hit piece, but Rather also argues that he didn’t want to apologize for the Guard story after it collapsed. Rather specifically and personally apologized in a written statement released on 9/20/04, and later emphasized his personal regrets on that night’s broadcast. If he didn’t mean it, why did he say it? Has he always been in the habit of reading text on air in which he doesn’t believe, and then emphasizing his personal endorsement of it?

Now, just as the statute of limitations is running out for a lawsuit, Rather now argues that CBS damaged his reputation. He wants $20 million in real damages and $50 million in punitive damages. In reading Rather’s submission to the court, his own admissions paint him as a hack of the first order who had little reputation left to damage. …

Beldar Blog on Rather/CBS.

… it would be fun to watch CBS be forced to justify its putting of Rather out to pasture in a not-quite-firing by showing all of the grounds it had. Usually in a good juicy family court spat, you find yourself in sympathy with at least one litigant. But here’s a case in which I can just cut loose and enjoy the misery and embarrassment of all concerned! …

Mark Steyn with a Corner post that has fun with Dan Rather’s lawsuit.

Dan Rather was awarded Gay Patriot’s JECBOMA (James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award). Notice was made in July 1st Pickings. We repeat that today.

After much deliberation, we at GayPatriot are pleased to announce that Dan Rather has been selected to be the first recipient of the prestigious James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award (JEC BOMA). Named in honor of the nation’s thirty-ninth president, the JEC BOMA honors those men over 70 who, in their dotage, by the very bitterness of their manner, follow in the footsteps of the nation’s worst president. …

Dilbert read about firemen using a lift truck to get a 900 pound man out of his house.

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 19 Word

• September 19 PDF

Michael Goodwin says it’s time for Spitzer to try the truth.

He tried bravado, he tried apologies and he tried silence. Sooner or later, Eliot Spitzer is going to have to try the truth.

That’s the loud-and-clear message from the latest voter survey on what New Yorkers think about the dirty tricks plot cooked up in Gov. Spitzer’s office. His Plans A, B and C about how to fudge and duck the Eliot Mess didn’t work. Big doubts about Spitzer’s honesty are sticking in voters’ throats, and they won’t go away until he raises his right hand and swears to tell the whole truth.

A whopping 70% of those responding to a new Siena College poll not only want the rookie Democrat to testify – they want him to do it publicly. A mere one in four believes he has been honest so far. That’s a resounding “NO SALE” response to the governor’s efforts to make the issue go away without first coming clean. …

Peter Wehner connects some dots.

… Let’s now connect these dots and draw some conclusions from them, shall we?

MoveOn.org—an angry, far-left, antiwar group—views the modern Democratic Party and its leadership as its cat’s-paw, and there’s little reason to dispute this judgment. The problem for many Democrats is that a Great Unmasking is taking place. For one thing, it’s difficult to say they oppose the war but support the troops when they train their fire on the commanding general of the troops, whose main transgression appears to be that he’s helping America succeed in an epic struggle against radical Islam.

Beyond that, the Democratic Party’s aversion to any (authentic) good news from Iraq, when combined with their effort to accelerate a premature withdrawal from that traumatized country, would lead to an American defeat and a victory for jihadism. This would be reckless—and it would reinforce the view among many Americans that the Democratic Party cannot be trusted on national security matters.

When MoveOn.org says jump, the Democratic Party asks, “How high?” There should be, and eventually there will be, a political price to pay for this ugly alliance.

Robert Samuelson adds a note of caution to the market’s euphoria.

… Unfortunately, disinflation’s benefits — the huge drop in interest rates, the big increases in stock and home values — can be enjoyed only once. This favorable cycle has ended. Indeed, it has left a hangover, as higher stock prices and home values both inspired damaging speculative “bubbles.” Good times often foster their own undoing. People become overly optimistic, giddy, careless, complacent. Businesses become sloppy and sometimes criminal in pursing growth and profits. Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, has inherited the hangover.

As for Greenspan, his outlook is decidedly somber. Oil prices have already soared, reversing globalization’s impact on inflation. He sees little relief. He thinks productivity growth will slow at best to 2 percent annually, down from about 3 percent from 1995-2005. He fears that inflation will gradually move to 4 percent to 5 percent and, in the process, raise interest rates and hurt stock prices. He worries that the nation hasn’t faced the costs of an aging baby boom. If he is right, the age of tranquility may slowly become his age of turbulence.

Law prof gives Yale Law the contempt it deserves.

Thomas Sowell has a part II to the column on “Mugged by Reality.”

Anne Applebaum comments on Putin’s moves.

… The identity of the next president of Russia doesn’t actually matter. Though a lot of analytical effort has already been wasted on careful pre-electoral scrutiny of the potential candidates, their opinions, views, alleged pragmatism, or alleged chauvinism are much less important than the nature of the coming presidential selection process itself.

If Zubkov (or someone else) becomes president following an orchestrated media campaign, falsified elections, and with Putin hovering constantly in the background, we’ll know he really is a place-holder. If Zubkov (or someone else) manages to garner some genuine support, both among voters and within the Kremlin, we’ll know to take his views seriously. If Putin remains president—well, we’ll know what that means too. Already, the fact that no one outside the Kremlin’s inner sanctum has any idea what the succession will look like is a bad sign. It’s hard to talk about “rule of law” in a country where power changes hands in such a thoroughly arbitrary manner. …

John Stossel continues his series on health care describing the problems with socialized care.

Last week I pointed out that Michael Moore, maker of the documentary “Sicko,” portrayed the Cuban health-care system as though it were utopia — until I hit him with some inconvenient facts. So he backed off and said, “Let’s stick to Canada and Britain because I think these are legitimate arguments that are made against the film and against the so-called idea of socialized medicine. And I think you should challenge me on these things.”

OK, here we go.

One basic problem with nationalized health care is that it makes medical services seem free. That pushes demand beyond supply. Governments deal with that by limiting what’s available.

That’s why the British National Health Service recently made the pathetic promise to reduce wait times for hospital care to four months.

The wait to see dentists is so long that some Brits pull their own teeth. Dental tools: pliers and vodka.

One hospital tried to save money by not changing bed sheets every day. British papers report that instead of washing them, nurses were encouraged to just turn them over. …

Division of Labour provides the example of member of Canadian parliament who went to LA for treatment.

Hugh Hewitt posts on the end of TimesSelect.

NY Times editors have figured out ethanol is a loser.

Slate writer tries golf.

… During my brief immersion in the world of golf, I determined that gloom is an essential golf component, as befitting a game that started on the moody moors of Scotland. When tennis players get thoroughly beaten, they come off the court sweaty and smiling. Their endorphins have shot up, and they look cute in their outfits. Even skiers being carried off the slope on a stretcher seem bizarrely thrilled about the elemental encounter between body and mountain. But golf induces despair. Take the observations in the book The Bluffer’s Guide to Golf, by Peter Gammond, “The golfer [is] a miserable wretch at the best of times.” “A golf match is designed to make as many people as possible unhappy.” There are very few golf jokes, he writes, that do not mention “death and destruction.” …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 18 Word

• September 18 PDF

Jim Taranto makes the point that Frank Rich cannot be expected to know any better if his only source for news is the NY Times.

… Frank Rich is an opinion columnist, and as such he is entitled to express the tendentious view that this out-of-context quote “was all you needed to take away from last week’s festivities in Washington.” But it’s embarrassing to the Times that its news judgment is in line with the politics of one of its shrillest columnists.

John Fund on Barry Manilow and health care coercion.

What is it about liberals that makes them want to avoid debates about their views? Take Oscar-winner Al Gore, who refused to allow Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg to appear with him on the Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss global warming. Earlier, Mr. Gore backed out of a previously agreed joint discussion with Mr. Lomborg hosted by Denmark’s leading newspaper. Nor would Mr. Gore even allow Mr. Lomborg to appear on the same panel when both were called to testify before Congress this year.

Now Barry Manilow, a major Democratic fundraiser who is currently God’s gift to the Las Vegas lounge act, has cancelled a scheduled appearance to promote his new album on “The View,” the daytime chat show hosted by Barbara Walters. It appears that Mr. Manilow views conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a fervent supporter of the Iraq War, as “dangerous” and “offensive.” …

Richard Cohen takes Hillary to task for not repudiating the BetrayUs ad.

If there is a phrase more closely associated with both Hillary and Bill Clinton than “the politics of personal destruction,” it does not come to mind. All the others — “It’s the economy, stupid,” for instance — belong to one or the other, but “the politics of personal destruction” is a phrase both Clintons have used repeatedly — so much so, it seems, that for Hillary it has lost all meaning. When, for instance, Gen. David Petraeus was slimed as “General Betray Us,” Hillary Clinton looked the other way. This was the politics of personal expediency.

The swipe at Petraeus was contained in a full-page ad the anti-war group MoveOn.org recently placed in The New York Times. It charged that Petraeus was “cooking the books” about conditions in Iraq and cited statements of his that have turned out to be either (1) not true, (2) no longer true, (3) possibly not true, or (4) like everything else in Iraq, impossible to tell. Whatever the case, using “betray” — a word associated with treason — recalls the ugly McCarthy era when, for too many Republicans, dissent corresponded with disloyalty. MoveOn.org and the late senator from Wisconsin share a certain fondness for the low blow.

Almost instantly, though, it got pretty hard to find a Democratic presidential candidate willing to dispute MoveOn.org. To his credit, Joe Biden did. “I don’t buy into that,” he said. “This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth.” But lonesome Joe, whose virtues have yet to come to the attention of the vast and apathetic electorate, was seconded only by Joe Lieberman, not a presidential candidate, and John Kerry, a man whose tomorrow is yesterday. When Clinton was asked about the ad, she avoided answering. …

Jonah Goldberg reacts to Cohen.

Mark Steyn, in the Western Standard, on cultures that refuse to protect themselves.

… I wonder how long these pieties can endure. A recent study of terrorist suspects arrested in Britain between 2001 and 2005 revealed that one in four of them was admitted to the country as an asylum seeker. They included, for example, Muktar Said Ibrahim, one of the four men who attempted unsuccessfully to self-detonate on the London Tube two weeks after the July 7th slaughter. In other words, young men taken in and given sanctuary by Britain thank their hosts by trying to kill them. Will any changes be made to immigration procedures? Or will the British simply accept that a one-in-four terrorist/refugee ratio is simply part of the privilege of being a progressive social-democratic society? Just as we accept that allowing parts of Toronto to, in effect, assimilate with Kingston, Jamaica is the price we pay for being able to congratulate ourselves on our boundless, boundless tolerance.

Thomas Sowell touts a book on Iraq.

In a world where the tragedy that is Iraq is usually discussed only in media sound bites and political slogans, it is especially gratifying to see an adult, intelligent, and insightful account of life inside Iraq by someone who lived there for nine months in the early days of the occupation in 2003 and 2004, and who saw the fundamental mistakes that would later plague the attempt to create a viable Iraqi government.

John Agresto, a career American academic and former college president who volunteered to go help create a better higher education system in Iraq, learned a lot about Iraqi society in general and about American attempts to create a better society there.

His recently published book is titled “Mugged by Reality” and is subtitled: “The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions.”

What is refreshingly different about this book is that it does not take the Bush administration line, the Congressional Democrats’ line or anybody else’s line. …

Theodore Dalrymple says the marxism of our time is Islam.

… All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. Had Fritz G. and Daniel S. grown up a generation earlier, they would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists. The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths’ personal angst.

This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us.

Speaking of marxism, LA Times Op-Ed explains why Pete Seeger’s obedience to Moscow’s line is still important.

… Eventually everyone — the remnants of the communist left included — took to ritualistically denouncing Soviet communism before joining whatever argument was going on later. But at the same time, those victimized by McCarthyism — in particular the Hollywood Ten and the rest of the show-business blacklistees — were elevated to heroic status. In the years that followed the 1947 HUAC hearings that led to their dismissal from the movie industry (for a 1st Amendment absolutist like me, a very bad idea), they have been celebrated in an endless series of books and tributes. As if by magic, the unapologetic defenders of a deadly doctrine have been transformed into martyrs to liberal belief — which none of them embraced in their day.

This is a massive, apparently unresolvable disconnect — and communism’s one lasting American triumph. Frankly, it makes the anti-communist left crazy. Mountains of new documents — notably the Venona transcripts, records of the cable traffic between Soviet spies and Moscow — prove beyond doubt the conspiratorial nature of American communism. But still its apologists stand beaming on the heroic heights, untouched by inconvenient scholarship, mere “dissidents” who paid an awful and unfair price for expressing their opinions.

One of these expressions of opinion was an obituary tribute to Stalin when he died in 1953, signed by 300 American communist intellectuals. It said, in part: “Glory to Stalin. Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands.” I don’t really want to defend to the death anyone’s right to that kind of insanity. Maybe we can afford to leave poor old Pete Seeger in peace — but not, I think, his co-religionists.

Karl Rove does a health care op-ed for WSJ.

… In short, the best health reform proposals will be those that recognize and build on the virtues of our market-based medical system. Sick people around the world come here because they can’t get quality care in their home countries. Many health-care professionals come here to practice, leaving behind well-meaning health-care systems where government is in charge, bureaucrats make the decisions, and where the patient doesn’t have the choice he or she does in the U.S.

Mrs. Clinton may think Americans want to trade freedom and innovation for the illusory security of government regulation and surrender control of their health decisions to government bureaucrats. My bet is 2008 will teach us something different if Republicans make health care a centerpiece issue.

Power Line suggests we perform due diligence when we hear quotes from long ago speeches.

… So, I urge you to be careful. When someone quotes a president, go back and read the whole speech. You may find that the president’s words have been hijacked, and attached to thoughts the great man never intended.

Presidential speeches are on the internet. It’s not too much of a chore, and you’ll maintain your political purity.

Paul Greenberg on politicians and the economy.

… But it’s not a waste of ambitious politicians’ efforts. They get to posture before the cameras and demand ACTION! — even if it’s precisely the wrong kind.

The pols may be wrong again and again, year after year, but think of the advantages. They’re able to strike while public anger is at its zenith, appease their louder and less thoughtful constituents, and they never have to say they’re sorry by the time gas prices fall and the public’s interest in the subject has waned. (Somehow they never get around to demanding a probe when gas prices go down.)

That’s the way it is with wild accusations; the facts may never catch up. Or if they do, the story is relegated to the business section. Ho hum.

The price of gasoline may rise and fall and rise again, like that of any other commodity, but the market for demagoguery remains remarkably stable.

Dilbert comments on the guy suing God.

… I sure hope it goes to trial. Imagine how interesting that would be. First, how do you select a jury of God’s peers? Compared to the Almighty, even Buddha is just a guy who should use the stairs more often. …

Download Full Content – Printable Pickings

• September 17 Word

• September 17 PDF

Mark Steyn comments on Pete Seeger’s mea culpa.

… James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, once offered this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger: “‘If I Had A Hammer’? Well, what’s stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they’re about a buck-ninety, tops.”

Very true. For the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul, and Mary revival, you could buy half a dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself. Yet in a sense Lileks is missing the point: Yes, they’re dopey nursery-school jingles, but that’s why they’re so insidious. The numbing simplicity allows them to be passed off as uncontentious unexceptionable all-purpose anthems of goodwill. Which is why you hear “This Land Is Your Land” in American grade schools, but not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The invention of the faux-childlike faux–folk song was one of the greatest forces in the infantilization of American culture. Seeger’s hymn to the “senselessness” of all war, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” combined passivity with condescension — “When will they ever learn?” — and established the default mode of contemporary artistic “dissent.” Mr. Seeger’s ongoing veneration is indestructible. But at least we now know the answer to the question “When will he ever learn?” At least half a century too late.

Ed Morrissey in Heading Right clarifies one of the mis-reported Greenspan remarks.

George Shultz deals with the “Israel lobby” canard.

… those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support are wrong. They are wrong because, to begin with, support for Israel is in our best interests. They are also wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they are wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts, not any other state or any of the myriad lobbies and groups that battle daily—sometimes with lies—to win America’s support.

Contentions’ Noah Pollack on Brzezinski’s bs.

… The true lesson of the Egypt-Israel rapprochement is actually the opposite of what people like Brzezinski would like it to be: It is a lesson in the sometimes irrelevance of American diplomacy in forging peace between nations, and more importantly it is an example of the reality that peace between implacable foes is usually only possible when one has so thoroughly beaten the other on the battlefield that the defeated party is left with only one option, to sue for peace. People like Brzezinski would like us to believe that heroic diplomacy in 1978 midwifed a peace treaty. Candidate Obama will be ill-served listening to this nonsense.

Pajamas Media speculates on what Israel was doing visiting Syria.

It is clearly difficult to be an Israeli journalist with good military sources this week. You can palpably feel the frustration on the page as you read news articles and sense that the writers know so much more than they are telling.

Whether or not reporters know the precise details of what happened in Syria on September 7, when Israeli planes attacked a mysterious target near the Syrian-Turkish border – the extremely tight censorship rules forbid them to report any of it – and Israeli officials are publicly, and uncharacteristically – silent.

So the Israeli press clenches their teeth and carefully does what they are permitted to do – repeat the reports that are emerging from overseas media and add their commentary as best they can. Meanwhile the public has had no way of knowing for certain whether the raid was “merely” an attempt to stem the flow of weapons from Syria to Hezbollah – or something of historic significance, a meaningful blow against an Axis of Evil. …

A London Times story was referred to above. Here it is.

Michael Barone says Iraq is the over-lawyered war.

… In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress passed laws that criminalized military and civilian officers who broke the rules on electronic surveillance and detainee treatment: “the criminalization of warfare.” Its ban on political assassination deterred the Clinton administration from gunning down Osama bin Laden. The CIA has become so wary of possible criminal charges that it urges agents to buy insurance. Developments in international law, especially the doctrine of universal decision, also threaten U.S. government officials with possible prosecution abroad. All of this creates a risk-averseness that leaves us more vulnerable to terrorists.

The CIA today employs more than 100 lawyers, the Pentagon 10,000. “Every weapon used by the U.S. military, and most of the targets they are used against, are vetted and cleared by lawyers in advance,” Goldsmith notes. In this respect, the national security community resembles the larger society. As Philip Howard of Common Good points out, we are stripping jungle gyms from playgrounds and paying for unneeded medical tests for fear of lawsuits. …

KC Johnson posts in Volokh on Nifong before the lacrosse team showed up. Johnson who is Stuart Taylor’s co-author will be guest posting for the week. This is his first.

… What kind of man would try to send three innocent young men to prison for 30 years to win an election? How could a career prosecutor not previously known as a nut or a rogue go so bad, so fast? How could he have thought he would get away with it?

Stuart Taylor and I (who jointly wrote this post, and one later today) have found widespread curiosity about these questions, especially among lawyers, while working on our new book, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. So this first post in a week of guest-blogging focuses on Nifong’s background, character, and the months of escalating misconduct that have brought him down. Subsequent posts will examine the misconduct (as we see it) of dozens of Duke professors, many journalists, the Duke administration, and the Durham law enforcement establishment. …

Bill Kristol has interesting commentary on the presidential campaign.

What a way to begin the fall! Perennial college-football power University of Michigan was ranked No. 5 in the preseason polls. It paid little Appalachian State University of Boone, N.C., about $400,000 to have its football team visit Ann Arbor to serve as a season-opening tune-up for the Wolverines. In a stunning upset, Appalachian State won 34-32– kicking a field goal with 26 sec. left, then blocking a Michigan field-goal attempt on the game’s last play.

Lesson: the improbable sometimes happens. And what’s true in sports is true in politics. There hasn’t been a major upset in a presidential-nomination race since Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976. We’re due. And the 2008 presidential campaign is an especially good candidate to provide a surprise. …

John Fund recaps the problems in the FAA. Says it should be privatized.

If you think there are more airport delays and cancellations than ever, you’re right. The percentage of late flights has doubled since 2002. And as bad as things are now, they’re about to get worse. The Federal Aviation Administration predicts there will be 36% more people flying by 2015. If the U.S. doesn’t dramatically expand the capacity of its overburdened air traffic control system, the airlines won’t be able to keep up with demand and ticket prices will skyrocket.

It ought to be an issue in the presidential campaign that the FAA isn’t equipped to clean up this mess. “The FAA as currently structured is impossible to run efficiently,” says Langhorne Bond, who ran the agency from 1977 to 1981. BusinessWeek reports the air traffic control network runs on software that is so outdated that there are only six programmers left in the U.S. who are able to update the code. The FAA’s efforts to move to a satellite-based system have been plagued by cost overruns and performance shortfalls. …

Power Line notices good environmental news.

Dilbert has OJ remarks.

… Unfortunately for O.J., his old attorney Johnny Cochrane has passed away. He’s the one who coined the phrase “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” In my opinion, that rhyme freed O.J. I recall reading a study that says people perceive things that rhyme to be more persuasive than things that don’t. Who will create the new rhyme that sets O.J. free? I have a few suggestions. …