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• October 17 Word

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Mark Steyn was in The Australian commenting on the ubiquitousness of Gore and his horror flick.

… A school kid in Ontario was complaining the other day that, whatever subject you do, you have to sit through Gore’s movie: It turns up in biology class, in geography, in physics, in history, in English.

Whatever you’re studying, it’s all you need to know. It fulfils the same role in the schoolhouses of the guilt-ridden developed world that the Koran does in Pakistani madrassas. Gore’s rise is as remorseless as those sea levels. I assumed Gore’s clammy embrace would do for the environmental movement what his belated endorsement had done for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential candidacy: kill it stone dead. But governor Dean was constrained by actual humdrum prosaic vote tallies in Iowa and New Hampshire. The ecochondriacs, by contrast, seem happiest when they’re most unmoored from reality.

That’s where Gore comes in. No matter how you raise the stakes (“It might take another 30 Kyotos”, says Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research), Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. “We are,” warns Gore, “altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe”.

Wow. It’s not just the Maldive Islands, but the balance of energy between Earth and the rest of the universe. …

Power Line posts.

Corner post says Belgium might break up.

Thomas Sowell on crime and politics.

Student speaks common sense and the school wants a psychological evaluation. Sounds like the Soviet Union to me.

ST. PAUL, Minn., October 10, 2007—Hamline University has suspended a student after he sent an e-mail suggesting that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been stopped if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus. Student Troy Scheffler is now required to undergo a mandatory “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school. Scheffler, who was suspended without due process just two days after sending the e-mail, has turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

Yahoo News says folks in England have resorted to pulling their own teeth. Does Michael Moore know?

Falling numbers of state dentists in England has led to some people taking extreme measures, including extracting their own teeth, according to a new study released Monday.

Others have used superglue to stick crowns back on, rather than stumping up for private treatment, said the study. One person spoke of carrying out 14 separate extractions on himself with pliers.

More typically, a lack of publicly-funded dentists means that growing numbers go private: 78 percent of private patients said they were there because they could not find a National Health Service (NHS) dentist, and only 15 percent because of better treatment. …

IBD editorial on socialized medicine.

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UVA poly sci prof thinks the Dems have taken over the moniker previously reserved for the GOP: that of the stupid party.

Twice during the past half century, the Democratic party has faced a challenge from its left wing. In the late 1960s, it was the mass movement of the New Left that rose up to defy the party’s liberal-progressive core. Following a contest of ideas and of wills, the liberal center collapsed and briefly yielded control to its radical critics. The struggle today is strikingly different in tone, with the party’s mainstream being bullied by a network of techno-thugs, spearheaded by MoveOn.org. Nothing remotely resembling an idea or a sustained argument has surfaced in this conflict, and there is no danger that one ever will.

 

…

 

Today, the Democratic party mainstream has its values, its instincts, and, as usual, more than its share of 10-point programs. It even has its “isms,” represented by its leading troika: the pragmatism of Hillary Clinton, the idealism of Barack Obama, and the populism of John Edwards. Yet its intellectual reservoir has shown itself to be lacking in depth and confidence. Today’s Democratic mainstream is no more willing or able to stand up to the party’s present leftist insurgency than the older mainstream was to stand up to the New Left. The tenor of the current left is best captured by something Lionel Trilling said in 1949 about conservatives: They do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

 

…

 

What emerges from Bai’s study of the coalition is that the tone of MoveOn’s recent New York Times ad assailing General Petraeus as “General Betray Us,” far from being exceptional, is perfectly typical of the discourse preached and practiced by this so-called progressive coalition. The ad stood out because it exposed to the world at large the ugly style the new radicals have developed for use among themselves–and because it forced the main Democratic presidential candidates, who declined to disavow it, to show publicly their fealty to the movement.

The Democratic party, its prowess renewed by a taste of success in 2006, is riding the crest of a political wave. It is the stupid party triumphant. What serious Democrats must now consider is whether to accept this state of affairs–or begin to think deeply enough to find a principled ground for rejecting a faction in their midst that is not only stupid but dangerous as well.

Thomas Sowell calls a spade a spade.

… Too many Democrats in Congress have gotten into the habit of treating the Iraq war as President Bush’s war — and therefore fair game for political tactics making it harder for him to conduct that war.

In a rare but revealing slip, Democratic Congressman James Clyburn said that an American victory in Iraq “would be a real big problem for us” in the 2008 elections.

Unwilling to take responsibility for ending the war by cutting off the money to fight it, as many of their supporters want them to, Congressional Democrats have instead tried to sabotage the prospects of victory by seeking to micro-manage the deployment of troops, delaying the passing of appropriations — and now this genocide resolution that is the latest, and perhaps lowest, of these tactics.

Jed Babbin with more on the Turk/Armenian maneuvering that perfectly illustrates how many Dems have lost their minds.

… Speaker Pelosi is apparently so intent on forcing an end to American involvement in Iraq that she is willing to interfere in our tenuous friendship with Turkey. When she does, it will be an historic event: the House of Representatives will be responsible for alienating a key ally in time of war and possibly interdicting supplies to US troops.

Richard Cohen, who must be one of the most decent people in DC, gives needed perspective on Turkey.

Jim Taranto with a new look to an old candidate.

The Captain and Real Clear Politics say Harry Reid might get what he deserves.

Mark Steyn thinks we need a coherent ideological framework for our culture to prevail in our war on ……. whatever.

… In Britain in the 1960s, the political class declared that the country “needed” mass immigration. When the less-enlightened lower orders in northern England fretted that they would lose their towns to the “Pakis”, they were dismissed as paranoid racists. The experts were right in a narrow, economic sense: The immigrants became mill workers and bus drivers. But the paranoid racists were right, too: The mills closed anyway, and mosques sprouted in their place; and Oldham and Dewesbury adopted the arranged cousin-marriage traditions of Mirpur in Pakistan; and Yorkshire can now boast among its native sons the July 7th London Tube bombers. The experts thought economics trumped all; the knuckle-dragging masses had a more basic unease, convinced that it’s culture that’s determinative. …

Ben Stein has misc. advice.

ABOUT a week ago, I was swimming in my pool when I had serious difficulty breathing. “Uh-oh,” I said to myself, “now I am about to die.” My wife was upstairs reading, way out of earshot and, anyway, if I were about to have a lethal heart attack, I wouldn’t be able to scream.

It turned out to be a nasty but short-lived bronchitis, and as I was lying in bed recovering, I thought, “I will die someday, and before I do, I would like to share with you the best possible thoughts I can, in gratitude for the many insightful letters I have received over the years from my readers.” …

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Ralph Peters call the Dems on one of their more disgusting stunts.

… This resolution isn’t about justice for the Armenians. Not this time. It’s a stunningly devious attempt to impede our war effort in Iraq and force premature troop withdrawals.

The Dems calculate that, without those flights and convoys, we won’t be able to keep our troops adequately supplied. Key intelligence and strike missions would disappear.

The Pentagon might be able to improvise other options. But the loss of the base and those routes would definitely hurt our troops. Severely. And we’d be more reliant than ever on a single, vulnerable lifeline running from Kuwait. …

Gary Becker has a go at finding an answer to the never ending question of why intellectuals dislike market solutions.

… In his 1950 book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, discussed exactly this question when asking why intellectuals were so opposed to capitalism during his time? His answer mainly was that businessmen do better under capitalism, whereas intellectuals believe they would have a more influential position under socialism and communism. In essence, Schumpeter’s explanation is based on intellectuals’ feeling envious of the success of others under capitalism combined with their desire to be more important.

I do believe that Schumpeter put his finger on one of the important factors behind the skepticism of intellectuals toward markets, and their continuing support of what governments do. Neither the unsuccessful performance of the US government first in Vietnam and now in Iraq, which they so strongly condemn, nor even the colossal failures of socialism and communism during the past half century, succeeded in weakening the faith of intellectuals in governmental solutions to problems rather than private market solutions. …

The Captain has a post that is apropos to the previous item about anti-capitalistic mentalities.

George Will takes a look at the requirements for today’s students of social work — and discovers a political commissariat worthy of the Soviet Union. Universities have required pledges of loyalty to liberal political thought as a requisite for success in their social-work programs, failing students who object to being told what to think (via CapQ reader Sandeep Dath):

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice “from local to global levels.” A widely used textbook — “Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill” — declares that promoting “social and economic justice” is especially imperative as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Clearly, in the social work profession’s catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism. …

Everyday Economist has a good quote for the day.

Yuval Levin and Peter Wehner with interesting NY Sun OpEd.

Conservatives today are in a funk. The strains of governing, the challenges of war, and the frustration of an unsuccessful mid-term election have contributed to unease and unhappiness. But deeper than these issues is an intellectual fatigue and uncertainty about where the attention of the conservative movement now should be directed.

What domestic issues can unite and motivate conservatives to great political exertions, and can win the allegiance of the public?

In this respect, the right is partially a victim of its own successes. If 25 years ago you had asked an American conservative to name the preeminent domestic policy challenges of the day, you probably would have gotten back, along with a general worry about cultural decline, some combination of welfare, taxes, and crime.

Few conservatives today would name any of these three as the foremost problems, and even on the cultural front they could point to some advances. This is due, in large part, to a series of conservative successes that have transformed American politics and made conservative theories of economics, law enforcement, and welfare the accepted wisdom. Success has not been complete in any of these areas, of course, but the struggle over first principles, over which way to go in general, has been won.

Today the left — which for decades fought vigorously on all three fronts — offers scant opposition on any of them. No leading Democrats are arguing that we undo conservative achievements on welfare and crime. And even on taxes, which liberals want to increase, no Democrats are arguing that we return to the days when the top rate of taxation was 70%.

Bill Kristol with a similar message.

Peter Bronson of Cinn. Enquirer says giving Gore peace prize like literature awards for comics.

Here’s an inconvenient truth: Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize thanks to a movie that needs more warning labels than a carton of unfiltered Camels.

This is puzzling. There are soldiers in Iraq who do more for peace on their day off than Gore does in a year of save-the-planet rock concerts. But I guess they gave him the Peace Prize because they didn’t have one for Politically Correct Mendacity. His Oscar-winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” should be listed as Science Fiction. …

William Gray, a serious meteorologist gives an important speech in NC and we have to read about in an Australian paper.

ONE of the world’s foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize “ridiculous” and the product of “people who don’t understand how the atmosphere works”.

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.” …

Alright. We’ve had a lot of serious stuff, how ’bout Paul Greenberg with Mudfight in the Media. In the tone of – a plague on both your houses, Paul covers Wesley Clark’s smear of Rush.

Some of us can vaguely remember a time when Wesley Clark was going to be the next Eisenhower – a general above the fray, a former supreme commander of NATO who had met the great challenges of his time, someone who would Bring Us Together, lift the tone of national politics, a champion of unity above the usual divisive politics, The Nation’s Hope, and all the rest of the nominating speech.

But that was long ago in another country, and, besides, that Wesley Clark is no more – if he was ever real. His appeal as a presidential candidate peaked the moment he announced back in 2003, if not before, and it steadily deteriorated with every roundhouse swing he took and missed. Sad. …

… Now he’s down there among the Michael Moore/Bill O’Reilly bottom-feeders. …

Rob Bluey with a great piece on the strength of the economy. News the media ignores.

The U.S. budget deficit fell to the lowest level in five years last week, but three of America’s leading newspapers — the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times — couldn’t find the space to mention the dramatic drop.

Journalists who have spent years trashing President Bush’s tax cuts appeared to suddenly lose interest when the budget picture brightened. That’s not surprising, however, considering that mainstream reporters frequently ignore upbeat economic news.

For 49 straight months, dating back to August 2003, the U.S. economy has added jobs. More than 8 million, in fact. Yet the only time economic news seems to hit the front page is when there’s something bad to report. No wonder Bush gets little credit.

A study by the Business and Media Institute last month revealed the “past four years of media coverage on jobs have been marred by pessimistic predictions, omissions, lack of economic context and focus on job losses instead of gains.” One of the biggest offenders was Katie Couric of the “CBS Evening News,” but she’s hardly alone. …

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Many of our favorites have columns and posts on the peace prize.

Claudia Rosett is brilliant.

So, beyond the Nobel Prize, what is it that Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, the United Nations, Mohamed El Baradei and Al Gore all have in common?

The flip answer is that they have all in their time pushed out enough hot air to melt the polar ice caps on Mars, and if anyone thinks that’s an exaggeration about Mars, check out this 2003 report from NASA. (Yes, it seems that even on a planet where homo sapiens has never exhaled at all, let alone fired up an SUV or hopped a longhaul airline flight, ice caps can suffer a volatile existence).

More seriously, here on planet earth, what those on the list above all have in common is that they have all in pursuit of their own ambitions pushed agendas that corrode the real basis for building a better life for all on this planet — which, in a nutshell, is freedom.

Free societies may produce more CO2 (whatever that actually adds up to — or not — in the context of a world climate that was changing long before we got here, and will go on changing long after we are gone). But that’s because they also produce more, per capita, of just about everything good — including ideas, inventions, contraptions and once-undreamt-of ways not only of sustaining human life, but of making it healthier, longer, easier and better. That happens when individuals have the liberty to make their own choices and tradeoffs.

That is not the world envisioned by the list of Nobel laureates above. …

Bjorn Lomborg

WSJ Editors

Power Line

When did the Nobel Peace Prize go off the tracks? Today’s award to Al Gore and the IPCC “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years …

Jim Taranto comments.

… Gore became only the second former U.S. vice president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The first was Theodore Roosevelt, 101 years ago. (A sitting veep, Charles Dawes, also won in 1926.) A comparison between Roosevelt’s prize and Gore’s shows how far the Nobel Peace Prize has strayed from its original purpose: Roosevelt won the prize for negotiating a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. Gore won it for something that has nothing to do with peace. …

The Captain

… Who else could have won the Nobel prize, if the committee wanted to promote peace and freedom rather than political allies? Well, perhaps they may have considered the hundreds, if not thousands of monks in Burma who just sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of non-violent regime change. One or more of the people involved in the six-nation talks that has avoided war over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programs would have also seemed a more germane choice.

Those choices would have actually focused on real efforts to bring peace and freedom to millions of people. That’s what I thought the Nobel Peace Prize meant to honor. Instead, they chose to honor a hysteric with a polemic on meteorology. And why? Do you suppose the Nobel committee wants Al Gore to try a different job in the near future, and hopes to boost his chances to get it?

Club for Growth with Milton Freidman quote.

Quotes you’ll love in a Michael Ledeen Corner post.

WSJ editors note Ohio teachers’ unions quietly working to kill charter schools.

The concept of charter schools is popular enough that even most liberals won’t attack them openly. Yet the national political assault continues behind-the-scenes, most recently in Ohio, where unions have now been caught giving orders to Attorney General Marc Dann, who has duly saluted.

Last week the Columbus Dispatch published emails showing that Mr. Dann and the Ohio Education Association are in cahoots to close down certain charter schools in the state. Mr. Dann was elected last November in a Democratic sweep that included Governor Ted Strickland and was helped by Big Labor. As a token of his appreciation, Mr. Strickland earlier this year proposed placing a moratorium on new charter schools and restrictions on private-school vouchers, only to be rebuffed by the Legislature. Now it’s Mr. Dann’s turn to send a thank-you. …

Charles Krauthammer thinks of Hillary.

… The Post correctly called Hillary’s retreat from free trade ” opportunism under pressure,” the pressure being the rampant and popular protectionism of her presidential rivals, particularly in protectionist Iowa. But while “opportunism under pressure” suggests ( pace Hemingway) cowardice, the better description of Clintonism is slipperiness. Adaptability. Cynicism, if you like.

Note her clever use of terms. Reassessing NAFTA sounds great to protectionists, but it is perfectly ambiguous. It could mean abolition or radical curtailment. It could also mean establishing a study commission whose recommendations might not reach President Hillary Clinton’s desk until too late in her second term.

The Post editorial noted “a perverse kind of good news” in Hillary’s free-trade revisionism: “There’s little chance that her position reflects any deeply held principle.” And there lies the beauty not just of Clinton on free trade but of the Clinton candidacy itself: She has no principles. Her liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs.

I could never vote for her, but I (and others of my ideological ilk) could live with her — precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband’s — flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated — always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e., self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason. …

Power Line posts on the Dems’ spokesboy.

The infantilization of American politics is nearly complete. Exhibit A is the Democrats’ use of a 12 year-old to give the party’s radio address. Exhibit B is much of what E.J. Dionne writes.

These exhibits come together in Dionne’s latest column. It’s called “Meanies and Hypocrites,” which could be the title of roughly 80 percent of his columns. The meanies and hypocrites are always Republicans and conservatives who disagree with Dionne’s views. Today, they are conservatives bloggers, including the Power Line crew.

We stand accused of “assaulting” the family of the 12 year-old boy the Dems selected to give their radio address. The boy is Graeme Frost, who urged President Bush not to veto the expansion of the SCHIP program, which subsidizes health care to children in low income families. …

Carpe Diem with a post Mikey Moore should note – cancer survival rates tops in US.

National Review editors against ethanol.

It’s a depressing ritual. Every four years, as Iowans prepare to cast the first votes in the presidential-primary season, candidates descend on the corn-covered state and discover the miraculous properties of ethanol. The latest convert is Fred Thompson, who voted against ethanol subsidies when he was a U.S. senator but now says that ethanol is “a matter . . . of national security.” What he means is that he supports increasing federal assistance for ethanol production, on the grounds that this will reduce American dependence on oil from the Middle East. But, like most arguments for ethanol subsidies, this one is spurious. …

VDH Corner post on Carter.

The inconsideration of Jimmy Carter never ceases to amaze. Apparently, he is convinced that his Christian piety provides a pass for an ungenerous disposition, that comes across as self-centered and -absorbed—whether campaigning for a Nobel Prize by publicly attacking his president at a time of war, or smearing democratic Israel, or snide comments about his successors. But that being said, I’m surprised at his latest quip: …

Marty Peretz says, “What another Carter book?”

Clearly Jimmy Carter writes more books than he reads.

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Christopher DeMuth who ran the American Enterprise Institute for 21 years does his swan song.

… Think tanks are identified in the public mind as agents of a particular political viewpoint. It is sometimes suggested that this compromises the integrity of their work. Yet their real secret is not that they take orders from, or give orders to, the Bush administration or anyone else. Rather, they have discovered new methods for organizing intellectual activity–superior in many respects (by no means all) to those of traditional research universities.

To be sure, think tanks–at least those on the right–do not attempt to disguise their political affinities in the manner of the (invariably left-leaning) universities. We are “schools” in the old sense of the term: groups of scholars who share a set of philosophical premises and take them as far as we can in empirical research, persuasive writing, and arguments among ourselves and with those of other schools.

This has proven highly productive. It is a great advantage, when working on practical problems, not to be constantly doubling back to first principles. We know our foundations and concentrate on the specifics of the problem at hand. We like to work on hard problems, and there are many fertile disagreements in our halls over bioethics, school reform, the rise of China, constitutional interpretation and what to do about Korea and Iran. …

Victor Davis Hanson was in Iraq for a few weeks and gives his prognosis.

Iraq for most Americans is now a toxic subject — best either ignored or largely evoked to blame someone for something in the past.

Any visitor to Iraq can see that the American military cannot be defeated there, but also is puzzled over exactly how we could win — victory being defined as fostering a stable Iraqi constitutional state analogous to, say, Turkey.

But war is never static. Over the last 90 days, there has been newfound optimism, as Iraqis are at last stepping forward to help Americans secure their country.

I spent last week touring outlying areas of Baghdad and American forward operating bases in Anbar and Diyala provinces, talking to Army and Marine combat teams and listening to Iraqi provincial and security officials.

Whether in various suburbs of Baghdad, or in Baqubah, Ramadi or Taji, there is a familiar narrative of vastly reduced violence. Until recently, the Americans could not find enough interpreters, were rarely warned about landmines and had little support from Iraqi security forces.

But now they are being asked by Iraqis in the “Sunni Triangle” to join them to defeat the very terrorists the locals once championed. Anbar, a province that just months ago was deemed lost by a U.S. military intelligence report, is now in open revolt against al-Qaida. …

Mark’s Corner posts. One with perceptive thought.

… If one looks at recent history, the Republican nominee with the fullest, most profound political philosophy, the one who’d thought most seriously about the role of government and its relationship to individual liberty, was Ronald Reagan, who formed his views while doing other stuff. If instead of spending the Fifties doing movies and TV and speechifying for GE (and reading National Review), he’d been a Congressman or Senator, I doubt he’d have developed any kind of coherent worldview.

Thomas Sowell on the Taylor/Johnson Duke book.

… “Until Proven Innocent” also tells us about one of the forgotten victims of the Duke rape case — the African cab driver who cast the first doubt on the indictment, by saying publicly that one of the accused young men was with him in his taxi at the time the rape was supposedly happening.

A flimsy charge against that cab driver from three years earlier was suddenly resurrected, and District Attorney Michael Nifong had him picked up by the police, indicted and put on trial — where he was quickly acquitted by the judge.

Could this country survive as a free nation if every District Attorney used the power of that office to intimidate any witness whose testimony undermined the prosecution’s case?

How long will we in fact survive as a free nation when our leading universities are annually graduating thousands of students each, steeped in the notion that you can decide issues of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, by the “race, class and gender” of those involved?

That is what a large chunk of the Duke University faculty did, while few of the other faculty members dared to say anything against them or against the Duke administration’s surrender to the lynch mob atmosphere whipped up on campus.

In much of the media as well, the students were treated as guilty until proven innocent, and those who said otherwise were often savaged. …

Times, UK reports the British court decision against Gore’s book.

John Fund posts on Gore’s Nobel problems. Drudge is reporting Gore’s canceling appointments for today and flying to Europe. What will Bubba say?

Want to make micro-loans to third world entrepreneurs yourself? AdamSmith tells how. If you follow the link, you’ll find they have enough lenders at this time. Pickings will repeat this in three months to see if things have changed.

… a friend emailed me yesterday about Kiva, a non-profit organization that allows you to lend money to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world. So like Professor Muhammad Yunus – the pioneer of microfinance and recent Nobel Prize winner – you too can become a banker to the poor. All it will cost you is some foregone interest, and apparently Kiva’s entrepreneurs have a less then one percent default rate. …

Good news. WSJ says the bloom is off the rose for ethanol.

… Opposition to the ethanol industry’s goals has grown significantly stiffer. The so-called barnyard lobby — representing the meat, livestock and poultry industries — says high corn prices are hurting its profits. The price of corn-based animal feed has increased about 60% since 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Our single biggest priority is for Congress to reject a new renewable-fuels mandate,” says Jesse Sevcik, vice president of legislative affairs at the American Meat Institute, a meat and poultry trade association.

Other groups that were originally sympathetic to ethanol are drifting away. They fear that the fuel’s advantages are outweighed by the rise in corn prices, which they say increases the cost of foods ranging from steak to cereal. “Many policy makers were seduced by ethanol,” says Cal Dooley, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. He opposes increasing federal support for ethanol.

The Agriculture Department says consumers can expect to pay as much as 4.5% more for groceries and restaurant meals this year over last, up from a 2.4% rise the year before. …

Max Boot with a cautionary tale about abuse of Wikipedia.

Are there people out there who take Wikipedia seriously as a source of objective information? There shouldn’t be, but unfortunately there are. In fact, lots of students use it a source of first resort. It’s so popular, that whenever you type almost any subject into Google, the first hit is usually for a Wikipedia entry.

Yet disinformation abounds, often motivated by animus or prejudice. There is, for instance, the by-now famous story of a former assistant to Robert F. Kennedy who was brazenly—and completely without foundation—accused on Wikipedia of complicity in the assassinations of both JFK and RFK. (For this sorry tale, see his article.)

A friend has now called my attention to another bizarre distortion, this one an attempt not to besmirch the character of one man but of an entire country. If you look up the Philippine War (1899-1902) you get this entry. And in the very first paragraph you get this statement: “The U.S. conquest of the Philippines has been described as a genocide, and resulted in the death of 1.4 million Filipinos (out of a total population of seven million).”

I was pretty startled to read this. I have written a whole chapter on the war in my book, The Savage Wars of Peace, and I have never once heard that the U.S. was guilty of genocide. How could it have entirely escaped my attention? …

John Tierney continues the fracas on fat and food fads with a blog post on cascades.

I suspect a few readers — and diet researchers — will take issue with my Findings column about Gary Taubes’ new book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” and his debunking of the myth that low-fat diets will prolong your life. I’ll be happy in subsequent posts to debate the low-fat diet as well as other issues raised in his book, like the causes of obesity and the case for low-carb diets. But before we start the food fight, I’d like to delve into the question of why scientists and other groups fall prey to the fads called “informational cascades.” …

Dilbert has fun with Tierney’s cascades.

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Christopher Hitchens says we need to help Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

… Suppose the narrow and parochial view prevails in Holland, then I think that we in America should welcome the chance to accept the responsibility ourselves. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a symbol of the resistance, by many women from the Muslim world, to gender apartheid, “honor” killing, genital mutilation, and other horrors of clerical repression. She has been a very clear and courageous voice against the ongoing attack on our civilization mounted by exactly the same forces. Her recent memoir, Infidel (which I recommend highly, and to which, I ought to say, I am contributing a preface in its paperback edition), is an account of an extremely arduous journey from something very like chattel slavery to a full mental and intellectual emancipation from theocracy. It is a road that we must, and for our own sake as well, be willing to help others to travel. …

John Tierney says forget everything you thought you knew about fat. And have some Rocky Road.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

Power Line added dittos to Barone’s piece on “higher education.”

… Elite private colleges are even less constrained. They face little if any competition from colleges that don’t fit the post-modern leftist mold. No one likely to break that mold has much chance of being entrusted to run such an institution, and the demise of Larry Summers at Harvard illustrates the fate that awaits even a mild iconoclast who manages to crash the party. And a hypothetical college that somehow succeeded in breaking the mold would likely be punished, plummeting in college ratings that rely on the views of entrenched academics to assess “academic reputation.”

In theory, alumni should be able to act as a voice of sanity. But colleges have structured themselves (or in Dartmouth’s case, restructured itself) in a way that deprives alumni of any real voice. The only thing they get to say is “yes” or “no” to requests for donations. With only a dim sense of what’s going on, a critical mass continues to say “yes.”

Thus, the rot continues to spread, with no end in sight.

Thomas Sowell adds part 2 to his comments on Clarence Thomas.

… The really fatal fact about Anita Hill’s accusations was that they were first made to the Senate Judiciary Committee in confidence, and she asked that her name not be mentioned when the accusations were presented to Judge Thomas by those trying to pressure him to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Think about it: The accusations referred to things that were supposed to have happened when only two people were present.

If the accusations were true, Clarence Thomas would automatically know who originated them. Anita Hill’s request for anonymity made sense only if the charges were false.

Washington Examiner says there are a lot of meetings on global warming.

John Stossel tells how medical care can work properly.

Health-care costs overall have been rising faster than inflation, but not all medical costs are skyrocketing. In a few pockets of medicine, costs are down while quality is up.

Dr. Brian Bonanni has an unusual medical practice. His office is open Saturdays. He e-mails his patients and gives them his cell-phone number.

“I need to be available 24 hours a day,” he says. “I want to be there when a patient has questions, and I want to be reachable.”

I’ll bet your doctor doesn’t say that. Bonanni knows he has to please his patients, not some insurance company or the government, because he’s paid by his patients. He’s a laser eye surgeon. Insurance rarely covers what he does: reshaping eyes so people can see without glasses.

His patients shop around before coming to him. They ask a question that people relying on insurance don’t ask: “How much will that cost?”

“I can’t get away with not telling the patient how much exactly it’s going to cost,” Bonanni says. “No one would put up with it. And the difference of a hundred dollars sometimes makes their decision for them.”

He has to compete for his patients’ business. One result of that is lower prices. And while the procedure got cheaper, it also got better. Today’s lasers are faster and more precise. …

NY Times takes exception to the bashing of the Dems 12 year-old spokesman. Even thought ther’re carrying Dem water, it’s here for balance.

Mark Steyn answers the Times.

WaPo editors are not happy with Hill’s trade ideas.

… Yet Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) seems to have forgotten her husband’s winning formula. Campaigning for president, she has been busily repudiating his legacy on free trade, voting against the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement in the Senate and backing away from NAFTA. In an interview published yesterday by USA Today, she called for a “timeout” on further trade agreements until their impact can be fully studied. Ms. Clinton even suggested that it might be time for NAFTA to be “adjusted.” Her reasoning was not terribly clear: This is a candidate, after all, who has voted in favor of free-trade deals with Singapore and Chile. She suggested that perhaps something changed between the end of the 20th century, when “trade was a net positive for America and American workers” and now, when we need to have “a serious conversation about that.” …

AdamSmith has ethanol thoughts.

Even the most politically profitable, and therefore highly government-protected, industries are subject to market forces. Ethanol, a bio-fuel grown from corn, is supported by huge US government subsidies (not entirely unrelated to the importance of the Iowa Caucus) and this has led to overproduction on a massive scale. Transportation services cannot keep up to supply the coasts and few gas stations even supply it. …

Slate says the monks are going to beat out Al for the Nobel. Too bad. Pickerhead always thought it would be neat if Gore scored, when all Bill did for has last few years was pursue Monica and the Prize. That’s why he wouldn’t move against Osama, and why he turns up the heat whenever criticisms head his way.

Dilbert dreams up names for bands.

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Melanie Phillips gave us a short yesterday on Ayaan Ali’s new danger. We add two items today. The LA Times has an op-ed co-authored by Salman Rushdie.

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world. The details of her story bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West. …

Anne Applebaum in Slate.

And now we come to what may be a truly fundamental test, maybe even a turning point, for that part of the world generally known as the West. The test is this: Are prominent, articulate critics of radical Islam, critics who happen to be citizens of European countries or the United States, entitled to the same free speech rights enjoyed by other citizens of European countries and the United States?

Legally, of course, they are. In practice, they can say what they want—and then they can be murdered for doing so. That means that Western governments have a special and unusual responsibility to them, as many have long acknowledged. It is no accident that the writer Salman Rushdie, upon whom Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Feb. 14, 1989, is still very much alive. Though details are not publicized, it is assumed that Rushdie remains, one way or another, under the protection of the British police and secret services, both in Britain and abroad. …

John Fund posts on vote harvesting in ethanol rich Iowa and Sandy Berger’s work in Hillary’s campaign.

Pickings has been quick to criticize Pinch Sulzberger’s tenure at the NY Times. Marty Peretz gives another view in this tribute to the reporting of John Burns. Now if the Times would please give back the Pulitzer awarded in the 1930′s for the lies of Walter Duranty – Ukrainian Famine denier.

Gabriel Schoenfeld allows us to post something positive about Jimmy Carter. We did that last year when Panamanians approved proposed improvements to the canal. So once a year we’ll say something nice about Billy Carter’s bro.

Is Jimmy Carter a saint? As James Kirchick has argued, the former President does deserve applause for the courage he displayed last week in the Sudan. He may be our worst ex-President ever, as Joshua Muravchik has irrefutably demonstrated, but it does not follow that every single thing he does today is bad.

The same thing can be said of his presidency. Reviewing Carter’s book, Living Faith, in the Wall Street Journal in 1996, I made the case that he was one of the worst Presidents of the 20th century. Carter read my review and took umbrage. The Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted him saying about me: “The guy, and I don’t know him, was vituperative about everything. He even condemned the poem I wrote about Rosalynn, which is one of the most popular parts of the book.”

Carter did, and does, have many appalling defects–the least of them his execrable poetry. But let’s give him his due. Even a terrible leader sometimes does some good things. Let me recall a tiny and ancient sliver of the past. …

Mark Steyn was here two days ago with a Corner post on the Dems 12 year-old spokesman. There have been a series of posts since. It gets a little long, but they’re fun.

Over the weekend, I posted a couple of things re Graeme Frost, the Democratic Party’s 12-year old healthcare spokesman. Michelle Malkin reports that the blogospheric lefties are all steamed about the wingnuts’ Swiftboating of sick kids, etc.

Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it’s incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you’re welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.

But one thing is clear by now: Whatever the truth about this boy’s private school, his family home, his father’s commercial property, etc, the Frosts are a very particular situation and do not illustrate any social generality – and certainly not one that makes the case for an expensive expansive all-but universal entitlement.

A more basic point is made very robustly by Kathy Shaidle: Advanced western democracies have delivered the most prosperous societies in human history. There simply are no longer genuinely “poor” people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you’re poor today, it’s almost always for behavioral reasons – behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the “needy” out there that only the government can rescue.

Thomas Sowell writes about Clarence Thomas.

… Clarence Thomas’ own experiences shocked him into a realization that “affirmative action” and other policies being pushed by civil rights organizations and by liberals generally were doing more harm than good, both to blacks and to American society.

In an era when so many people have neither the time nor the patience to examine arguments and evidence, critics have tried to dismiss Clarence Thomas as someone who “sold out” in order to advance himself.

In reality, he was in far worse financial condition than if he had taken the opposite positions on political issues.

As late as the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas’ net worth — everything he had accumulated over a lifetime — was less than various civil rights “leaders” make in one year.

Nobody sells out to the lowest bidder. …

NewsBusters posts parts of Howard Kurtz asking Robin Wright of WaPo and Barbara Starr of CNN why they didn’t report some good Iraq news. Incidentally, this type of interview is why Howard Kurtz’s show Reliable Sources is the pick of Sunday morning. It’s on CNN at 10:00 am Eastern.

… Wow. Numbers shouldn’t be reported because they’re “tricky,” “at the beginning of a trend,” and there’s “enormous dispute over how to count” them?

No such moral conundrum existed last month when media predicted a looming recession after the Labor Department announced a surprising decline in non-farm payrolls that ended up being revised up four weeks later to show an increase.

And, in the middle of a three and a half-year bull run in stocks, such “journalists” have no quandary predicting a bear market every time the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls a few hundred points.

Yet, when good news regarding military casualties comes from the Defense Department, these same people show uncharacteristic restraint in not wanting to report what could end up being an a anomaly.

Isn’t that special? …

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NY Times reports on a French priest who is working in Ukraine locating graves of Jews murdered in the “bullet holocaust” before the Germans developed the gas chambers in mid 1942. There have been other similar efforts. In 1994, Nina Tumarkin, Wellesley history prof, wrote The Living and the Dead; The Rise and Fall of the Cult of WWII in Russia and reported on the movements to give proper burials to the millions who fell in the Great Patriotic War. However, this is the first time the dead from the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary charged with slaughter of “jews, gypsies and commissars” have been carefully researched. It is a very sensitive subject because many locals helped. And the Ukraine is hardly the only placed they operated. Germans were to claim in late 1941 that Lithuania was “judenfrei” after the killing of 400,000 souls there.

His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.

They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.

He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold. …

Max Boot reminds how often our country has used mercenaries. Like Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

Since I have been defending, in recent days, the general idea of using mercenaries—even while calling for greater oversight of what they are actually doing in Iraq—I have often heard from skeptics that it is somehow “un-American” to rely on hired hands to do your fighting. Often cited is the fact that Americans have long hated the Hessians (actually, they came from all over Germany, not just from Hesse-Kassel) hired by the British to fight the American rebellion that began in 1776.

Well, of course, any nation will hate foreign troops who fight particularly hard and even viciously, as the “Hessians” did. But that’s hardly an argument against employing them. Quite the contrary. In fact, the U.S. has a long tradition of celebrated mercenaries. Here is a partial list: …

Melanie Phillips notes problems for Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Jonah Goldberg gives us the skinny on Media Matters, the Soros funded, Hillary inspired group that brought down Don Imus and hopes to do the same to Rush and O’Reilly.

… Nearly every day, I get e-mail spam from this alleged “media watchdog” group. It’s slightly less formal than the usual son of a Nigerian oil minister with erectile dysfunction and a great stock tip giving me a head’s-up about a problem with my eBay account. This spam comes from some earnest p.r. flack letting me know that I might be interested in the latest Very Serious Finding by Media Matters for America. When you actually check out the item, it’s usually very stupid or silly or, sometimes, slanderous.

For example, on Sept. 25, Media Matters sent out a note announcing “Fox News panelist Mort Kondracke recently made several racist comments regarding the Jena 6.

Here are some examples of racism on Fox News.” What were the racist comments? Simply this: Kondracke said in reference to the racial turmoil then brewing in Louisiana, “It looks as though the people of Jena can solve this on their own.” It’s a wonder Kondracke even bothered to take his Klan hood off while on camera.

You don’t hear about most of this stuff because journalists on the receiving end of Media Matter’s junk mail have this rare skill, highly prized in the profession: They can read. And so, most of what Media Matters does is ignored except by the echo chamber of the left-wing blogs and sympathetic pundits. But occasionally, either through luck or distortion, Media Matters hits paydirt. …

Orin Kerr, criminal law prof and Volokh blogger, does a number on the latest smear by Frank Rich.

Frank Rich has a rather nasty essay that purports to catch Justice Thomas misrepresenting his past. The specific example is Justice Thomas’s first job out of law school in the Missouri Attorney General’s Office. As Justice Thomas tells the story, he couldn’t get a job from any law firm despite graduating in the middle of his class from Yale Law School. Law firms assumed he was enrolled in law school only because of affirmative action, so Thomas had to struggle to find a job; he ended up getting only one offer in the Missouri government, thanks to Jack Danforth.

Corner post on the annals of government.

Michael Barone suggests maybe the Ivory Tower is becoming a dangerous parasite.

I am old enough to remember when America’s colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America’s colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society. …

 

… This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals. It explains why Hofstra’s law school invites to speak on legal ethics Lynn Stewart, a lawyer convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist client and sentenced to 28 months in jail.

What it doesn’t explain is why the rest of society is willing to support such institutions by paying huge tuitions, providing tax exemptions and making generous gifts. Suppression of campus speech has been admirably documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The promotion of bogus scholarship and idea-free propagandizing has been admirably documented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It’s too bad the rest of America is not paying more attention.

Bjorn Lomborg with a WaPo op-ed.

All eyes are on Greenland‘s melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.

Curiously, something that’s rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat — perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it’s caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we’re headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it’s all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It’s wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we’re causing it. But that’s not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don’t stack up.

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn’t ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

The Economist surveys the PND industry. That would be portable navigation devices or hand held GPS receivers.

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Stephen Moore with a story we can not hear often enough. It’s about the optimists among us including the late great Julian Simon. Simon famously challenged the population scold Paul Ehrlich to a 10 year wager. Simon claimed the earth’s bounty was becoming more plentiful. John Tierney gave the results in the December 2, 1990 NY Times Sunday Magazine. Since this is a classic, it has been posted to Pickings.

I’m old enough to recall the days in the late 1960s when people wore those trendy buttons that read: “Stop the Planet I Want to Get Off.” And I will never forget that era’s “educational” films of what life would be like in the year 2000. Played on clanky 16-millimeter projectors, they showed images of people walking down the streets of Manhattan with masks on, so they could avoid breathing the poison gases our industrial society was spewing.

The future seemed mighty bleak back then, and you merely had to open the newspapers for the latest story confirming how the human species was speeding down a congested highway to extinction. A group of scientists calling themselves the Club of Rome issued a report called “Limits to Growth.” It explained that lifeboat Earth had become so weighed down with humans that we were running out of food, minerals, forests, water, energy and just about everything else that we need for survival. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book “The Population Bomb” (1968) gave England a 50-50 chance of surviving into the 21st century. In 1980, Jimmy Carter released the “Global 2000 Report,” which declared that life on Earth was getting worse in every measurable way.

So imagine how shocked I was to learn, officially, that we’re not doomed after all. A new United Nations report called “State of the Future” concludes: “People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer.” …

A blogger posts on life in Zimbabwe. Couldn’t think of a better juxtaposition with the above Stephen Moore story about what markets can achieve.

Standing outside over yet another smoky fire late one afternoon this week, a Go-Away bird chastised me from a nearby tree. I’m sure this Grey Lourie is as fed up of me intruding into its territory as I am of being there – trying to get a hot meal for supper. For five of the last six days the electricity has gone off before 5 in the morning and only come back 16 or 17 hours later a little before midnight. “Go Away! Go Away!” the Grey Lourie called out repeatedly as my eyes streamed from the smoke and I stirred my little pot. My hair and clothes stink of smoke, fingers are yellow and sooty but this is what we’ve all been reduced to in Zimbabwe. …

Max Boot on the Times spin of the Iran/Syria axis.

… But of course this being the New York Times, the writer can’t stick to the facts—facts that suggest that some of us have reason to be increasingly alarmed about the Tehran-Damascus Axis. He has to throw in a jab at the Bush administration, too. Naylor claims that Iran and Syria are cementing their ties only because neither one can do business with America, since they’re both under American-led sanctions. He cites anonymous “Western diplomats and analysts,” who say “that Washington has effectively pushed Damascus and Tehran into deepening their alliance of nearly three decades.”

This is pretty much the party line at places like the Times whenever other countries align against the United States: It can’t be because they don’t like us, or because our interests are mutually incompatible. It must be because we spurned their generous and deeply felt offers of friendship. …

The Economist on Putin’s politics.

The Captain posts on Al-Quds Day speeches in Iran and the latest jobs report.

The celebration of Al-Quds Day is a tradition in Iran since the revolution. It rallies people in the cause of Israel’s destruction, in a manner reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s. In fact, both celebrations aimed at destroying the same kind of people. What an odd coincidence, that! Today, as always, Iranian mobs burned Israeli and American flags in an effort to show what a rational and civilized culture does when they have a holiday that wishes for genocide.

 

…

 

Not much has changed in the past year. The economy is still expanding, and employment remains steady at historically excellent levels. Last month’s report was simply wrong, and it serves as a reminder that the BLS often underestimates job gains in the first month of reporting. Analysts should wait to see what adjustment occurs in the following month before basing predictions on the data.

In this case, the BLS estimate was not just significantly off but pointing in the wrong direction. That was enough to out all the Chicken Littles. I wonder how many of them will acknowledge the error today.

Power Line posts on the economy too.

It’s time to start taking seriously the proposition that the American economy under the Bush administration is the best in the nation’s history. This morning the White House expressed entirely appropriate pride in the country’s economic achievements on its watch:

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new jobs figures – 110,000 jobs created in September. September 2007 is the 49th consecutive month of job growth, setting a new record for the longest uninterrupted expansion of the U.S. labor market. Significant upward revisions to employment in July and August mean employment growth has averaged 97,000 per month over the last three months. Since August 2003, our economy has created more than 8.1 million jobs, and the unemployment rate remains low at 4.7 percent.

Real after-tax per capita personal income has increased by over 12.5 percent – an average of over $3,750 per person – since President Bush took office. More than 30 percent of the Nation’s net worth has been added since the President’s 2003 tax cuts. …

Mark Steyn creates another new word – Islamoparanoia. That’s the disease afflicting Dodi Fayed’s father.

National Review’s David Pryce-Jones made the point that, in persisting with his lurid accusations, Mohammed Fayed revealed how little he understands Britain: He’s lived there for years, it’s been good to him, he owns Harrod’s and the Paris Ritz and various other baubles. No big deal. He’s one of many, many beneficiaries of Western openness to “the other.” And yet he’s convinced himself that Buckingham Palace is so consumed by “Islamophobia” that the queen’s husband dialed M, and M called in Moneypenny, and Moneypenny faxed 007, and a week later the princess and her Islamostud are dead.

Reality is more humdrum: In multiculti Britain, everyone was indifferent to Di’s Muslim lover. Could have been a Hindu, could have been a Buddhist. Who cares? But, instead, Fayed has retreated into the paranoia and victim mentality that stunts so much of the Muslim world. A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous Western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family’s assassination of Dodi Fayed. And so, in a London courtroom, a freak one-off celebrity death becomes just another snapshot of the big geopolitical picture.

Mark Steyn Corner posts on the Dems 12 year-old spokesman.

NY Post editorial says it’s time for Chris Matthews to go. If you’re like me and long ago gave up watching Hardball, this will be a surprise.

Bill Kristol says you’ll want to read the Clarence Thomas book.

… Thomas’s memoir raises fundamental questions of love and responsibility, family and character. His book is a brief for the stern and vigorous virtues, but in a context of faith and love. It’s a delightful book–you really can’t put it down–but it’s also a source of moral education for young Americans. It could be almost as important a contribution to his beloved country as Clarence Thomas’s work as a Supreme Court justice. …

Professor Bainbridge has a book to suggest also. Pickerhead likes this sound of this too.

Columnist David Harsanyi offers us Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children: …

Village Voice with the story of yet another innovation killed by government. New York’s City Council is set to pass pedicab regulations that will strangle the service. Sounds like a case for the Institute for Justice. Chip, Kramer, Dana, Neil, Scott, where are you?

… Thanks to the brilliant maneuvers of a City Council that remains beholden to the same permanent government interests that always speak loudest, these so-called electric-assist motors are now illegal on city streets. The politicians did not stop there. The law they passed in response to the lobbyists for the taxi and theater owners also bans pedicabs from using city bike lanes, forcing them into the traffic stream. They cannot go on bridges. They are limited in entering the parks and can be barred entirely from midtown during the Christmas holiday season, or any other two-week period during which officials deem traffic especially heavy.

Stretch limousines, Hummers, vans all come and go freely. Pedicabs risk tickets and confiscation.

There was more yet: The council decided there should be just 325 pedicabs at any one time. There is no exact count of how many are in operation, but 500 is the estimate. Instantly, 175 workers are unemployed. And still more: When city bureaucrats sat down to devise rules for this law, they decided that no one owner could have more than five licensed cabs. This effectively destroys the fleets that have employed hundreds of people, most of them young, who cheerfully haul passengers through the streets, leaving behind nothing more harmful than a small tailwind and the tinkling warnings of a bicycle bell. …

… Pedicabs would not be the first transportation novelty to die of political strangulation in City Hall. In 1870, inventor Alfred Ely Beach sought permits to excavate for something he called a subway. Back then, William “Boss” Tweed controlled all political levers and already had a nice piece of the action going with elevated railways and stagecoach lines. Tweed made sure that Beach’s brilliant plan was snuffed in its cradle. The inventor managed to get a single block-long tunnel built and then hit Tweed’s roadblock. Subways had to wait 30 years to get past it. …

Slate with more on the bustification of ethanol.

For years, economists, environmentalists, and poverty activists have been hating on ethanol. It’s impractical; it boosts food prices and promotes industrial farming. Their scorn didn’t much matter, because there was huge political and social momentum for ethanol production. But now the market is turning on ethanol, too. Ethanol stocks are sinking. Check out this two-year chart of Verasun, Aventine Renewable Energy, and Pacific Ethanol against the S&P 500. All three are down more than 60 percent. Earth Biofuels, which traded at $7 a share in May 2006, now trades for about 5 cents. A gallon of ethanol for November delivery trades at about $1.57 per gallon today, down from about $1.90 in July. As the Wall Street Journal put it (subscription required) earlier this week: “Ethanol Boom is Running out of Gas.” …

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