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Victor Davis Hanson notes three individuals who have changed history; Nicholas Sarkozy, Gen. David Petraeus, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

… What do all these mavericks who have changed the status quo have in common? First, they not only followed their beliefs with action, but also were willing to endure the inevitable criticism to follow. Second, although they have strong beliefs, none are overtly partisan; all instead seek a common good.

The conservative Sarkozy appointed a socialist as his foreign minister. To this day, partisans can’t figure out whether Gen. Petraeus is a Republican or Democrat. Hirsi Ali wants equality for women and greater tolerance of diverse opinion in the Muslim world – and thereby a better understanding between the West and Islam.

Fearless iconoclasts like these three really can make an enormous difference. They remind us that history is not faceless, but can still be changed by just a few brave people after all.

John Fund explains why common sense won’t work in DC.

Should the Salvation Army be able to require its employees to speak English? You wouldn’t think that’s controversial. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding up a $53 billion appropriations bill funding the FBI, NASA and Justice Department solely to block an attached amendment, passed by both the Senate and House, that protects the charity and other employers from federal lawsuits over their English-only policies.

The U.S. used to welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Since 1906, for example, new citizens have had to show “the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English.” A century later, this preference for assimilation is still overwhelmingly popular. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 87% of voters think it “very important” that people speak English in the U.S., with four out of five Hispanics agreeing. And 77% support the right of employers to have English-only policies, while only 14% are opposed.

But hardball politics practiced by ethnic grievance lobbies is driving assimilation into the dustbin of history. The House Hispanic Caucus withheld its votes from a key bill granting relief on the Alternative Minimum Tax until Ms. Pelosi promised to kill the Salvation Army relief amendment. …

Meanwhile, Jeff Jacoby has a history lesson on the “know nothings.”

WHO WOULD HAVE guessed two years ago that as the 2008 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary hove into view, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani would be leading an effort to turn the 21st-century GOP into a party of anti-immigration Know-Nothings? …

Peter Wehner in Contentions will start our look at yesterday’s Bill Clinton lie. How can you tell of Bill’s lying? Watch and see if his lips move.

Slick Willie is at it again. This time it comes in the form of his assertion that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. You can see new contributor Abe Greenwald’s post below for details about Clinton’s claims.

What ought we to make of this?

First, if it’s true that Bill Clinton opposed the war but held his tongue because it would have been “inappropriate at the time for him, a former President, to oppose—in a direct, full-throated manner—the sitting President’s military decision,” one might ask: Why then would it be appropriate to criticize now—in a direct, full-throated manner—the same sitting President’s military decision? In fact, it would have been more responsible to voice his objections before the war, when it was being debated, rather than now, when the decision has been made.

Beyond that, Bill Clinton, unlike George H.W. Bush, has not been shy about criticizing the actions of the President who followed him. Bill Clinton has been a constant critic of President Bush, on a range of issues, including the Kyoto Treaty, the withdrawal of U.S. support for the International Criminal Court and the ABM Treaty, tax cuts, education funding, homeland security, and more. …

Abe Greenwald next.

… So what happened yesterday? At an Iowa campaign stop, Bill Clinton claimed he “opposed Iraq from the beginning. . .”

Never mind that Clinton practically birthed “the beginning” with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. The bald lie is nothing new. But his failure to finesse the gaffe is. …

Then the Captain.

… Those who profess an indefinable discomfort with a Clinton return to power may find more definition for that discomfort after this display. It’s not the equivocation that has people squirming; it’s the ease with which Bill Clinton can issue flat-out lies. In fact, the fact that he issues such researchable and exposable lies and still has the chutzpah to use them on the stump that may worry people most of all. Does he really think that the media will allow those statements to go unchallenged?

The pattern here is really unmistakable. In the early days of the war, Bill had no problem climbing onto the Bush bandwagon, claiming support for the war. Now that it has proven as unpopular as it is, Bill wants to rewrite history and claim that he always opposed it, despite his record of public support. He will say anything to match up with the public sentiment of the moment, showing himself as a man completely without reliable principles.

That’s the problem for Hillary, who almost completely lacks his campaigning skills and needs his assistance in connecting to voters. Her reliance on his campaigning winds up associating herself with his lack of honesty and credibility. When his slickness combines with her high negatives, Democrats should consider the likely result — a general-election disaster. …

Ron Fournier of AP.

As only he can do, Bill Clinton packed campaign venues across eastern Iowa and awed Democratic voters with a compelling case for his wife’s candidacy. He was unscripted, in-depth and generous.

He also was long-winded, misleading and self-absorbed.

“Good Bill” and “Bad Bill” (his nickname among some aides) returned to the public arena Tuesday as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton brandished her double-edged sword of a husband to fend off rivals in the Jan. 3 caucus fight.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Clinton told 400 Iowans at the start of his three-city swing, “I have had a great couple of days out working for Hillary.”

In the next 10 minutes, he used the word “I” a total of 94 times and mentioned “Hillary” just seven times in an address that was as much about his legacy as it was about his wife’s candidacy.

He told the crowd where he bought coffee that morning and where he ate breakfast.

He detailed his Thanksgiving Day guest list, and menu.

He defended his record as president, rewriting history along the way.

And he explained why his endorsement of a certain senator from New York should matter to people.

“I know what it takes to be president,” he said, “and because of the life I’ve led since I’ve left office.”

I, me and my. Oh, my. …

ABC News wants in on the fun.

Peter Wehner ends this section with another post.

City Journal with a look at the oil-boom town – Moscow.

… Oil may prop up the Russian economy, but no market can stay on a rising curve forever, Milov concludes. Sooner or later, prices will begin to fall. As things stand, Russia will not be able to cope.

The sale of oil and gas brings in $150 billion every year; arms sales, a mere $6 billion. Is the oil boom a new Russian curse, or a restoration of national sovereignty? Moscow’s youth lives it up. But some Russians believe that the KGB has never really left the dreaded Lubianka, the city’s dark heart.

In 1991, the people pulled down the statue of Felix Djerzinski, the founder of the KGB. Since then, it has lain on its side in the courtyard of Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art, corroded and covered with weeds. In the same museum, a retrospective is devoted to Oleg Kulik, a video artist who epitomizes new Russian art. Kulik became famous after he walked naked on the streets of Moscow, wearing only a necklace, barking or jumping on passersby to lick or bite them. “Today,” Kulik says, “Russian artists have complete freedom to do what they want—provided that they don’t criticize Putin or the Orthodox Church.”

Thus Moscow 2007: newly prosperous, only partially free—and precarious.

Jim Taranto has some “zero tolerance watch stories that will make you ill. How does our society create these ninnies?

… A 9-year-old boy from a Phoenix elementary school has been suspended after the school determined he engaged in racial harassment by using the term “brown people.” …

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John Stossel starts us off today.

Another global warming skeptic has dared speak up. Meteorologist John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, calls global warming “the greatest scam in history”.

“Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them … create this wild ‘scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. … I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. …There is no runaway climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. … In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious.”

I suspect he’s right.

But what if he’s wrong? …

John Podhoretz has taken over as editor of Commentary. And he has brought new attention to the magazine’s blog Contentions where he and Noah Pollak have an exchange on the Annapolis confab which provides some context and understanding for this most recent Mideast peace effort.

Andrew McCarthy’s NRO article was referenced by Pollak above. So it’s here.

The thug Assad regime of Syria will apparently take a couple of days off from murdering Lebanese democrats and enabling the anti-American jihad in Iraq to attend this week’s Annapolis summit … or “conference,” or “meeting.” It’s difficult to say how we should describe Condoleezza Rice’s pie-in-the-sky confab. After all, the main principals — an Israeli prime minister hanging on by a thread and a Palestinian “president” whose only constituency seems to be the U.S. State Department — cannot even agree on what to call it, much less on an agenda.

I’m going with “farce.” …

George Will entertains with speculation on vice-presidential running mates.

A high-priced lawyer, a low-priced lawyer and the tooth fairy are sitting at a table on which rests a $100 bill. The lights go out briefly, and when they come back on the bill is gone. Who took it? Obviously, the high-priced lawyer—the other two are figments of our imaginations.

Here is another such figment: People who vote for a presidential candidate because of that candidate’s running mate. There may be such people, but have you ever met one?

Still, it is neither pointless nor premature to wonder who each of the four most likely nominees—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney—might choose to run with. The question illuminates the different challenges the candidates face in cobbling together 270 electoral votes. …

Mark Steyn comments on Dem candidates as “change agents.”

What do you think is the critical issue in this election season? Personally, I blow hot and cold. I used to think the key issue facing the nation was “hope.” But now I wonder if perhaps it isn’t “change.” It was only last year that I bought The Audacity of Hope by this fellow called Barack Obama. How audacious hope seemed back then! How bold, how courageous! But now, a mere twelve months later, hope seems cheap, glib, easy.

“There has been a lot of talk in this campaign about the politics of hope,” said this guy in Iowa the other day. “But understand this: The politics of hope doesn’t mean hoping that things come easy.” It turned out to be the same Barack Obama who’d been going on about the audacity of hope. But now he’s fine-tuned his campaign, and he’s running on “change.”

No, don’t yawn. Hillary Clinton may be running around New Hampshire on her “Ready for Change” tour, but that kind of facile focus-group change is just the same-old-same-old. “Change can’t just be a slogan,” says Senator Obama, who’s committed to a Democratic party “that doesn’t just offer change as a slogan but real, meaningful change, change that America can believe in. That’s why I’m in this race, that’s why I’m running for the presidency of the United States, to offer change that we can believe in.”

Any cynical hack pol can offer change as a slogan, but Senator Obama’s offering “Change You Can Believe In” as a slogan. …

BBC News reminds us this month is the 75th anniversary of the start of the Soviet’s terror famine in Ukraine.

… The “Holodomor” or “famine plague” as it is known in Ukraine, was part of Joseph Stalin’s programme to crush the resistance of the peasantry to the collectivisation of farming. When in 1932 the grain harvest did not meet the Kremlin’s targets, activists were sent to the villages where they confiscated not just grain and bread, but all the food they could find. The confiscations continued into 1933, and the results were devastating. No-one is sure how many people died, but historians say that in under a year at least three million and possibly up to 10 million starved to death. The horrors Ekaterina saw live with her still.

“We didn’t have any funerals – whole families died,” she tells me. “Of our neighbours I remember all the Solveiki family died, all of the Kapshuks, all the Rahachenkos too – and the Yeremo family – three of them, still alive, were thrown into the mass grave.”

Ekaterina, her mother and brother, survived by eating tree bark, roots and whatever they could find – but she says starvation drove others to terrible deeds. “One day mother said to us, ‘children, you can’t take your usual shortcut through the village anymore because the grandpa in the house nearby killed his grandson and ate him – and now he’s been killed by his son… And don’t go near the priest’s house either – because the neighbours there have killed and eaten their children.’” …

Townhall columnist, Michael McBride, muses on John Kerry’s swift strategy with T. Boone Pickens. Since it’s Kerry, we start the humor section here.

… Most people recognize that the truth lays somewhere between what the Swiftboaters claim and what Kerry claims. What is also clear though is that swinging back four years later, will not clear the decks of this issue entirely. For Kerry to do that he HAS to have DOD release the entirety of his record for full public scrutiny. Only then will we know if his reputation has been diminished by a Swiftboating, or overly enhanced by MSMboating.

Whatever comes of it, we certainly know Kerry is no boxer. If he pursues this, I predict a second round knockout.

Kathleen Parker writes about folks who sterilize themselves to the save the planet.

On a lighter note, we might have avoided all such concerns if only the mothers of (these people) had been as “virtuous” as their progeny.

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David Brooks says we shouldn’t listen to America’s pessimists like Lou Dobbs.

… And if Dobbsianism is winning when times are good, you can imagine how attractive it’s going to seem if we enter the serious recession that Larry Summers convincingly and terrifyingly forecasts in yesterday’s Financial Times. If the economy dips as seriously as that, the political climate could shift in ugly ways.

So it’s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear — the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.

And that’s just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world. …

… Every quarter the U.S. loses somewhere around seven million jobs, and creates a bit more than seven million more. That double-edged process is the essence of a dynamic economy.

I’m writing this column from Beijing. I can look out the window and see the explosive growth. But as the Chinese will be the first to tell you, their dazzling prosperity is built on fragile foundations. In the United States, the situation is the reverse. We have obvious problems. But the foundations of American prosperity are strong. The U.S. still has much more to gain than to lose from openness, trade and globalization.

Mark Steyn notes the “courage” of the Hollywood set and sees it as metaphor for the submission of the West.

Here is part of the opening chapter of Daniel Silva’s new novel The Secret Servant: professor Solomon Rosner, a Dutch Jew and author of a study on “the Islamic conquest of the West,” is making his way down the Staalstraat in Amsterdam, dawdling in the window of his favourite pastry shop, when he feels a tug at his sleeve:

“He saw the gun only in the abstract. In the narrow street the shots reverberated like cannon fire. He collapsed onto the cobblestones and watched helplessly as his killer drew a long knife from the inside of his coveralls. The slaughter was ritual, just as the imams had decreed it should be. No one intervened — hardly surprising, thought Rosner, for intervention would have been intolerant — and no one thought to comfort him as he lay dying. Only the bells spoke to him.”

They ring from the tower of the Zuiderkirk church, long since converted into a government housing office:

“A church without faithful,” they seemed to be saying, “in a city without God.”

Obviously, professor Rosner is an invented character playing his role in an invented plot. But, equally obviously, his death on the streets of a Dutch city echoes the murder in similar circumstances of a real Dutchman for the same provocation as the fictional professor: giving offence to Islam. Theo van Gogh made a movie called Submission, an eye-catching take on Islam’s treatment of women that caught the eye of men whose critiques on motion pictures go rather further than two thumbs up or down. So, in the soi-disant most tolerant country in Europe, a filmmaker was killed for making a film — and at the next Academy Awards, the poseur dissenters of Hollywood were too busy congratulating themselves on their bravery in standing up to the Bushitler even to name-check their poor dead colleague in the weepy Oscar montage of the year’s deceased. …

Speaking of courage, Jack Kelly has Sanchez opinions.

… It does seem odd that Democrats would excoriate Gen. David Petraeus, architect of the strategy that has turned things around in Iraq, and embrace Gen. Sanchez, especially since it was Democrats in Congress who led the criticism of him during the Abu Ghraib affair.

But then, Democrats have a history of preferring losers to winners. In 1864, they were sharply critical of Generals Grant and Sherman, who were leading the Union to victory, and nominated as their presidential candidate Gen. George B. McClellan, who Robert E. Lee had beaten like a drum on numerous occasions.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson likens Gen. Sanchez to other “whistleblowers” such as former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke who were failures at their jobs.

“In all these cases there is a dismal pattern: a mediocre functionary keeps quiet about the mess around him, muddles through, senses that things aren’t going right, finds himself on the losing end of political infighting, is forced out or quits, seethes that his genius wasn’t recognized, takes no responsibility for his own failures, worries that he might be scape-goated, and at last senses that either a New York publisher or the anti-war Left, or both, will be willing to offer him cash or notoriety — but only if he serves their needs by trashing his former colleagues in a manner he never would while on the job,” Mr. Hanson said.

Amir Taheri works to give a balanced appraisal of Iraq news.

‘A TORRENT of good news”: So The New York Times described the reports of a significant fall in violence in Iraq. But reducing all Iraqi news to measures of violence can hamper understanding of a complex situation.

Those who opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 prefer to focus on violence, for it has seemed to confirm their claim that the war was wrong. They’ve downplayed all good news from post-Saddam Iraq – the end of an evil regime that had oppressed the Iraqi people for 35 years; the return home of a million-plus Iraqi refugees in the first year after liberation; the fact that the Iraqis got together to write a new constitution and hold referendums and free elections – for the first time in their history – and moved to form coalition governments answerable to the parliament.

The drop in violence is certainly a good thing. But other Iraq news, both good and bad, needs to be taken into account. …

Thomas Sowell with more on his series on income distribution. This time focusing on the “top one percent.”

… Who are those top one percent? For those who would like to join them, the question is: How can you do that?

The second question is easy to answer. Virtually anyone who owns a home in San Francisco, no matter how modest that person’s income may be, can join the top one percent instantly just by selling their house.

But that’s only good for one year, you may say. What if they don’t have another house to sell next year?

Well, they won’t be in the top one percent again next year, will they? But that’s not unusual.

Americans in the top one percent, like Americans in most income brackets, are not there permanently, despite being talked about and written about as if they are an enduring “class” — especially by those who have overdosed on the magic formula of “race, class and gender,” which has replaced thought in many intellectual circles. …

Ever wondered how all the stupid structures get built? WSJ book review has some answers.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has just filed suit against the architect Frank Gehry, whose wavy, odd-angled metallic forms infiltrate the skylines of many American cities and not a few abroad (like Bilbao, Spain). The suit seeks unspecified damages for “design and construction failures” at the Stata Center, a two-towered structure that opened three years ago, housing computer-science labs on MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus. Mr. Gehry’s response? “M.I.T. is after our insurance.”

John Silber’s “Architecture of the Absurd” might serve as an amicus brief for MIT. It is a thoughtful argument against the excesses of “designer” architects and urban-planning utopians. Mr. Silber, the former president of Boston University, may seem, as he notes, “an unlikely person to write a book on architecture.” But he is an architect’s son and a professional philosopher who, as the president of a major university for 25 years, directed the construction of buildings totaling 13 million square feet of floor area — more than most clients, to say the least. His critique of today’s architectural culture has a hard-nosed clarity that is seldom found in today’s writing about architecture. …

… The great enablers of Genius architects have been nonprofit corporations, especially museums and universities, where “decisions are made by persons who are not spending their own money, who take no personal financial risk, and who often lack the knowledge and experience in building necessary to ensure that the needs of the institution are met.” Such clients become the gullible victims of jargon-spouting architects and their critical sycophants.

Mr. Silber comes down especially hard on Daniel Libeskind, the architect who won the competition for the replacement tower at the World Trade Center site. Mr. Libeskind had claimed that the angled incisions, or cuts, on the surfaces of his Jewish Museum in Berlin referred to locations where Jews flourished in pre-Nazi times. Yet later, when he designed the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, he used similar patterns of surface cuts, only this time they served to make, in the architect’s words, a “crystal, a structure of organically interlocking parts prismatic forms” that “asserts the primacy of participatory space and public choreography.” Of course, no one quite knows what he means. Mr. Silber writes: “How many times, one wonders, will Libeskind be able to impress clients and critics with his metaphysical spin-doctoring of senseless contrivances?” …

… Mr. Silber eloquently describes the absurdities of buildings such as Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitories at MIT, a profoundly ungainly structure that the architect himself said was meant to resemble a sea sponge. It’s an example of what nonprofit institutions allow themselves to be talked into by architects whose “Theoryspeak” proves irresistible to boards of culturally insecure trustees. …

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Ever since the 1940′s, the Arab world has made sure its refugees have remained a festering sore in the Middle East. Bernard Lewis has the history lesson.

… During the fighting in 1947-1948, about three-fourths of a million Arabs fled or were driven (both are true in different places) from Israel and found refuge in the neighboring Arab countries. In the same period and after, a slightly greater number of Jews fled or were driven from Arab countries, first from the Arab-controlled part of mandatory Palestine (where not a single Jew was permitted to remain), then from the Arab countries where they and their ancestors had lived for centuries, or in some places for millennia. Most Jewish refugees found their way to Israel.

What happened was thus, in effect, an exchange of populations not unlike that which took place in the Indian subcontinent in the previous year, when British India was split into India and Pakistan. Millions of refugees fled or were driven both ways — Hindus and others from Pakistan to India, Muslims from India to Pakistan. Another example was Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when the Soviets annexed a large piece of eastern Poland and compensated the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. This too led to a massive refugee movement — Poles fled or were driven from the Soviet Union into Poland, Germans fled or were driven from Poland into Germany.

The Poles and the Germans, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.

The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation. …

Claudia Rosett says there is an inconvenient truth for the UN. Their latest globalony scare shows up just as they need to climb down from their overblown AIDS rhetoric.

Just as Ban Ki-moon is warming up to climate change as “the defining challenge of our age,” with the UN describing as absolute and unequivocal the “dire report” of the UN’s IPCC (picked for the Nobel prize courtesy of the Norwegian parliament, whose wisdom, we must infer, is similarly absolute), along comes the news that — whoops! — the UN in its earlier apocalyptic warnings about another issue has, in the words of the Washington Post, “long over-estimated both the size and course” — in that case of the AIDS epidemic. …

The Captain noticed Richard Holbrooke auditioning for State by retailing some Balkan nonsense.

… Where to start with this litany of foolishness? First, Holbrooke leaves out a few little details about why the Bush administration didn’t make Kosovo its highest priority. In September 2001, we had this little incident with terrorists and a few airplanes that focused our attention elsewhere. We also had a military commitment that long preceded the Balkans that the UN couldn’t handle for twelve years, one that involved a lot more hot-war actions than the Balkans. The notion that Kosovo should have been a high priority between 2001-2006 is patently absurd, and Holbrooke shows intellectual dishonesty for not pointing out the valid reasons this got back-burnered. …

Adam Smith knew 250 years ago what modern science is just discovering about empathy.

Michael Barone says the 2008 race has a wide range of possibilities.

… What about the general election? Consider two poll results: When the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked voters which party they preferred to win the race for president, Democrats led 49 percent to 36 percent. When the FOX News poll asked which of two specific candidates would do the better job of protecting the country, Rudy Giuliani came out ahead of Hillary Clinton by 50 percent to 36 percent. Those numbers suggest to me that the range of possible outcomes in November 2008 is much wider than it was in November 2004.

What we have not seen yet is a debate between the two parties on ideas. The Democratic candidates have been busy pounding George W. Bush, who will not be on the ballot. The Republican candidates have been busy pounding Hillary Clinton, who may or may not be on the ballot. And candidates in each of the parties have gotten started pounding each other. These arguments are mostly about the past. We haven’t heard much yet about the future.

Ted Olson is the WSJ Weekend Interview. By James Taranto.

Rudy Giuliani doesn’t always follow Ted Olson’s advice. “I remember conversations with Rudy before he became mayor when he was thinking about running,” Mr. Olson says. “I was asking him, ‘Why in the world would you want to do this? A, you can’t get elected. You’re a Republican; it’s New York City. And B, there’s nothing that can be done about New York City. It’s too big; the problems are too deeply engrafted onto the city; the city’s in the grip of labor unions, crime, high taxes, heavy burdens. The city’s a terrible place, and it’s too big to govern.’ “

Just as Mr. Olson was sure Mr. Giuliani couldn’t get elected in New York because of his party, it has been a common assumption that the former mayor cannot win the Republican presidential nomination because of his liberal positions on social issues, particularly abortion and guns. Mr. Olson is one of the nation’s top conservative lawyers, having represented President-elect Bush in Bush v. Gore and served as Mr. Bush’s solicitor general. As chairman of Mr. Giuliani’s Justice Advisory Committee, he intends to help the candidate defy conventional wisdom again. …

Cafe Hayek starts an interesting thread on the globalization v. localization debate.

… Ironic, isn’t it, that “Progressives” advocate a return to the economic arrangements of the dark- and middle-ages?

Which led to a post by Coyote Blog.

… By the way, one reason this food-mile thing is not going away, no matter how stupid it is, has to do with the history of the global warming movement. Remember all those anti-globalization folks who rampaged in Seattle? Where did they all go? Well, they did not get sensible all of a sudden. They joined the environmental movement. One reason a core group of folks in the catastrophic man-made global warming camp react so poorly to any criticism of the science is that they need and want it to be true that man is causing catastrophic warming — anti-corporate and anti-globalization activists jumped into the global warming environmental movement, seeing in it a vehicle to achieve their aims of rolling back economic growth, global trade, and capitalism in general. Food miles appeals to their disdain for world trade, and global warming and carbon footprints are just a convenient excuse for trying to sell the concept to other people. …

And then to a post at American Thinker.

… Along those same lines comes this release out of Bali that the airport there is expecting so many private jets for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference that local officials will be making most attendees ferry their planes to four other airports in the region for parking as the local airport can only accommodate 15 planes. The closest airport to provide parking space for such jets is about 60 miles away, the furthest about 600. …

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Mark Steyn looks over the candidates.

… Let me ask a question of my Democrat friends: What does John Edwards really believe on Iraq? I mean, really? To pose the question is to answer it: There’s no there there. In the Dem debates, the only fellow who knows what he believes and says it out loud is Dennis Kucinich. Otherwise, all is pandering and calculation. The Democratic Party could use some seriously fresh thinking on any number of issues – abortion, entitlements, racial preferences – but the base doesn’t want to hear, and no viable candidate is man enough (even Hillary) to stick it to ‘em. I disagree profoundly with McCain and Giuliani, but there’s something admirable about watching them run in explicit opposition to significant chunks of their base and standing their ground. Their message is: This is who I am. Take it or leave it.

That’s the significance of Clinton’s dithering on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. There was a media kerfuffle the other day because at some GOP event an audience member referred to Sen. Clinton as a “bitch,” and John McCain was deemed not to have distanced himself sufficiently from it. Totally phony controversy: In private, Hillary’s crowd liked the way it plays into her image as a tough stand-up broad. And, yes, she is tough. A while back, Elizabeth Edwards had the temerity to venture that she thought her life was happier than Hillary’s. And within days the Clinton gang had jumped her in a dark alley, taken the tire iron to her kneecaps, and forced her into a glassy-eyed public recantation of her lese-majeste. If you’re looking for someone to get tough with Elizabeth Edwards or RINO senators or White House travel-office flunkies, Hillary’s your gal.

But tough on America’s enemies? Thatcher-tough? Not a chance.

Charles Krauthammer on progress in Iraq and the Dem denial. The Democrats confuse process with results which has become a metaphor for government thought and action at all levels; local, state, and federal.

It does not have the drama of the Inchon landing or the sweep of the Union comeback in the summer of 1864. But the turnabout of American fortunes in Iraq over the past several months is of equal moment — a war seemingly lost, now winnable. The violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. Political allegiances have been radically reversed. The revival of ordinary life in many cities is palpable. Something important is happening.

And what is the reaction of the war critics? Nancy Pelosi stoutly maintains her state of denial, saying this about the war just two weeks ago: “This is not working. . . . We must reverse it.” A euphemism for “abandon the field,” which is what every Democratic presidential candidate is promising, with variations only in how precipitous to make the retreat.

How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks — mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government — that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation. …

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Gerard Baker on the strength of the U. S. economy.

The Captain with a series of posts on the candidacy of HRC.

1. And here I thought that the dumbest statements of this extended political season would come in the quiz shows presidential debates. The latest kerfuffle in the Democratic primary centers on whether living abroad as a child carries more weight on foreign policy than being First Lady. It’s akin to watching two guys in a bar debate whether playing Pop Warner football gives more credibility than playing Madden 2007 when criticizing NFL head coaches: …

 

 

2. InfoUSA now faces an SEC probe, one that could indirectly, at least, involve Bill and Hillary Clinton in the middle of an election campaign. The data processing company spent millions on Bill Clinton as a consultant and has flown Hillary around on its corporate jets. Now the SEC wants a look at the company’s books, spurred on by stockholders who sense something amiss in the benefits showered on the former First Couple: …

 

 

3. This story challenges the boundaries of satire. Hillary Clinton captured the vital corrupt-foreign-leader constituency with Bernadette Chirac’s endorsement yesterday. The wife of the French ex-president said that she thought Hillary had the makings of a president, although her personal experience at that may not play too well on the campaign trail (via Memeorandum): …

Kimberley Strassel gives her perception of Clinton’s weakness.

You might not think one lousy debate performance, or one silly planted question, would jolt a storming campaign. Then again, you might not be Hillary Clinton. If the last few weeks have shown anything, it’s that Mrs. Clinton has some weak spots. What isn’t yet clear is whether her Democratic opponents have the time, or the will, to exploit them.

Until recently, the biggest thing going for Hillary is that she has appeared “inevitable.” This is no accident. Mrs. Clinton may not be as naturally gifted as her husband, but she does have access to his playbook. One of Bill’s more brilliant strategies when he ran in 1992 was to campaign as if he were already the nominee. It gave an otherwise little-known governor the legitimacy to sideline his opponents.

Mrs. Clinton has made this tactic a cornerstone of her campaign, and it had been working. During debates she frequently speaks on “behalf of everyone” on the stage. She chooses moments wisely to make statements no Democrat disagrees with (“George Bush is ruining this country”), leaving the competition nodding in miserable agreement. Her insistence that she and her Democratic colleagues should keep this race focused on their arch-enemy was equally savvy. With everyone piling on Dubya, nobody was piling on her.

Add to this Mrs. Clinton’s stash of money, the vaunted infrastructure, the endorsements and her superstar status. The Clinton campaign has flogged all of these to leave the impression she’s the only player in the game.

The trick is that there’s little room for error. The media hates a winner as much as it hates a preordained election, and so it has seized on her missteps to blitz the papers with stories suggesting she’s not Teflon. For a campaign betting so much on perception, this new doubt is not good. ..

Ann Coulter wants all Dems reading the NY Times.

Here’s a story that may not have been deemed “Fit to Print”: In the six months that ended Sept. 25, The New York Times’ daily circulation was down another 4.51 percent to about a million readers a day. The paper’s Sunday circulation was down 7.59 percent to about 1.5 million readers. In short, the Times is dropping faster than Hillary in New Hampshire. (Meanwhile, the Drudge Report has more than 16 million readers every day.)

One can only hope that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are among the disaffected hordes lining up to cancel their Times subscriptions.

The Times is so accustomed to lying about the news to prove that “most Americans” agree with the Times, that it seems poised to lead the Democrats — and any Republicans stupid enough to believe the Times — down a primrose path to their own destruction.

So if you know a Democratic presidential candidate who doesn’t currently read the Times, by all means order him a subscription. …

Denver Post with a story that’ll make you sign on to every lawyer joke you’ve heard.

The New Editor has a govemnment waste story that’ll amaze you.

Here’s a story that seems to illustrate in spades the ridiculous inefficiency of government: (via Don Boudreaux)

After Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Audubon Aquarium needed to restock its collection in order to replace losses resulting from the storm, and did so at a cost of about $100,000. However, when aquarium officials sought disaster-relief compensation for the loss from FEMA, they were turned down because the agency said they should have spent more than $600,000 in order to replace the fish. …

Samizdata on one of the ways socialism kills.

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Slim Pickings today.

Three items on Hugo Chavez. First is from WaPo on the remark of King Juan Carlos.

King Juan Carlos of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to zip his lip on Saturday and the Spanish-speaking world went nuts.

Overnight, the king’s “Por que no te callas?” — Why don’t you shut up? — became a YouTube sensation and a downloadable ring tone. One industrious composer turned the king’s choice words into new lyrics, giving the old warhorse “Que viva Espana” new, and somewhat amusing, life. …

Real Clear Politics gives another review.

A few days ago, Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero of Spain hosted a conference of leaders of Spanish-speaking countries in Chile. Among those attending was that democratically-elected gangster Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela (but soon to be dictator). Mr. Chavez loves to make long anti-American leftist harangues, and
when his turn came to speak, he decided to go after former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a long-time ally of the U.S. who, when in office, supported President Bush in Iraq. Mr. Zapatero, a socialist, defeated Mr. Aznar (and the two remain bitter opponents), but he found himself defending his rival to Mr. Chavez as “a man who was elected by the Spanish people.” Mr. Chavez does not care about this principle (he said he will sidestep the Venezuelan constitution to stay in office beyond the alloted two terms), and kept interrupting Mr. Zapatero
(a fellow socialist) in a most boorish fashion.

Finally, a man seated next to Mr. Zapatero, leaned over and in a loud vice said to Mr. Chavez, as if they were two men in a working class tapas bar in the Madrid rastro (flea market), “Why don’t you shut up?” (“Por que no te callas?”)

The man, of course, was the Spanish head of state, King Juan Carlos, and not one known for crude talk. Nevertheless, his riposte has now become a cheer throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and in not a few other places as well. ..

WSJ reports on the milking of the Citgo cash cow by Chavez.

In 1997, one of every 10 gallons of gasoline U.S. drivers bought came from a Venezuelan-owned refiner, Citgo Petroleum Corp. That year, a student at Oxford University wrote a thesis saying Citgo was cheating Venezuela’s people by investing too much in the U.S., and should send more cash home.

The student, Juan Carlos Boué, drew scant attention until four years ago, when Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chávez, took control of the state oil apparatus. Today, Mr. Boué is an influential member of Citgo’s board. And Citgo, which Venezuela bought two decades ago to market its hard-to-refine heavy oil, now has a different focus: feeding cash to Mr. Chávez’s program to build socialism in Venezuela.

In recent years, while other U.S. refiners have invested heavily to take advantage of historically wide profit margins in the business, Citgo has been slimming down. It has slashed its investment and sold off U.S. assets, most recently by agreeing last week to shed a unit that turns crude oil into asphalt. In keeping with Mr. Boué’s nostrums, Citgo has sent the extra money to its sole shareholder, the Venezuelan government. Citgo has raised its annual dividend to more than $2 billion, from $225 million in 2000.

The changes at Citgo are altering the U.S. fuel landscape. Citgo owns 5% of U.S. refining capacity, a significant chunk at a time when U.S. demand for fuel is growing faster than domestic production, and no new refinery has been built in three decades. Citgo’s production will stagnate, adding to pressure on pump prices and fuel imports. …

The Captain wonders why there is not more outcry.

Jackson Diehl takes note of the undiplomatic smackdown delivered by King Juan Carlos of Spain to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez last week, but turns the question around. Rather than just applaud the king’s public chastisement in asking Chavez, “Why don’t you just shut up?”, Diehl wants to know why more of the world’s leaders haven’t spoken up against Chavez’ scheme to transform Venezuela into a Cuba with oil. Chavez will accomplish that in less than a fortnight:

Crude and clownish, si, but also disturbingly effective. Borrowing the tried-and-true tactics of his mentor Fidel Castro, Chávez has found another way to energize his political base: by portraying himself as at war with foreign colonialists and imperialists. Even better, he has distracted the attention of the international press — or at least the fraction of it that bothers to cover Venezuela — from the real story in his country at a critical moment. …

Maureen Dowd with a good column on Obama/Clinton flap.

Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he’s boxing in the wrong weight class. But Monday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut.

At a news conference, the Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton’s attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator had touted her own know-how, saying that “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — that’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed that she was referring to Obama.

Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”

Everybody laughed, including Obama.

It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point. …

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Mark Steyn comments on Hollywood’s Bush derangement syndrome. They hate Bush so much, they’ve come to hate the country.

A few months back, Peter Berg attended a test screening of his new film in California — not Malibu or Beverly Hills, but out in farm country. The Kingdom is about FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, etc.) investigating a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia, and finally, about two hours in, the star talent gets to kill a bunch of jihadists. As Entertainment Weekly described it, “the packed house went completely bonkers, erupting in cheers” — and poor old Berg was distraught. “I was nervous it would be perceived as a jingoistic piece of propaganda, which I certainly didn’t intend,” the director agonized. “I thought, ‘Am I experiencing American bloodlust?’ “

You really want an answer to that? Okay, here goes: No. It’s not American bloodlust. As they say on Broadway, the audience doesn’t lie, and, when they’re trying to tell you something, it helps not to cover your ears. For all Mr. Berg’s pains, The Kingdom was dismissed by the New York Times as “Syriana for dummies.” That’s to say, instead of explicitly fingering sinister Americans as the bad guys, it merely posited a kind of dull pro forma equivalence between the Yanks and the terrorists. It came out, oh, a week and a half ago and it’s already forgotten in the avalanche of anti-war movies released since. There’s Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah and Redacted — no, wait, Rendition. No, my mistake. There’s a Redacted and a Rendition — one’s about American soldiers being rapists, one’s about American intelligence officials being torturers. Every Friday night at the multiplex, Mr. and Mrs. America are saying, “Hmm, shall we see the movie where our boys are the torturers? Or the one where our boys are the rapists? How about the film where the heroic soldier refuses to fight? Or the one where he does fight and the army covers up the truth about his death?” And then they go see Fred Claus, which pulled in three times as much money as Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs on both films’ opening weekend. …

Max Boot with a nifty idea for military recruiting.

A Captain post that will make you hate pentagon bureaucrats.

And the Captain also noticed the NY Times has had to climb on board with optimistic Iraq stories.

… The Times waited until the success of Petraeus could no longer be denied to publish the truth. With every other news agency in the world reporting on the drop in violence, the rise in commerce, the flight of the militias even from Baghdad, and the unifying efforts such as the rebuilding of St. John’s Catholic Church in the heart of the capital, the Times has no other choice but to rescue its credibility with an acknowledgment of reality. Even then, they use the hoary device of individual anecdotes to temper the news, as if to assert that even success cannot be enjoyed if even one individual feels fear of entering a specific neighborhood.

One wonders how many Times execs wander freely through the Bronx at night, or even in the daytime.

Now that the Times has finally acknowledged the success of the surge and the reality of Petraeus’ testimony, will they apologize for disparaging the American commander so viciously? Will they retract their political hitpiece of an editorial of September 11th? Don’t bet on it. The Times will undoubtedly take the position that all of this success happened yesterday. After all, if they don’t report it, it doesn’t exist. That’s their willing suspension of disbelief, one that fewer and fewer people choose to adopt.

Here’s the Times story the Captain referenced.

Couple of good Samizdata posts.

Tony Blankley knows how we can judge Hillary’s experience.

If I were advising a candidate who was running against her, I would lay into her loudly and often with a challenge to her claim of experience. If she actually was managing the national economy from 1993-2000 from her perch as wife of the president, let her release White House documents showing her active participation in such management. Whe… n I worked in the Reagan White House, I wrote hundreds of memos on my areas of responsibility. There was a paper trail. If Hillary actually was doing what she implies she was doing, there will be a long paper trail of memos that she either wrote or commented upon.

For example, some of the documents stolen from the National Archives by Sandy Berger, Hillary’s national security advisor (I suppose, following Hillary’s claim, Bill’s appointees also should be considered hers) are believed to be documents written by others with presidential comments in the margin. Let’s have Hillary release all the national economic management documents written by her economic advisors with her comments in the margins. …

… Other than keeping an eye on Bill, let’s find out at what else she actually has experience.

Mark Steyn Corner post.

John Stossel has thanks to give.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. “Isn’t sharing wonderful?” say the teachers.

They miss the point.

Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn’t happen.

The failure of Soviet communism is only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved. …

Greatest Generation? Walter Williams is not so sure.

… When the greatest generation was born, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) was 2.5 percent. As they are now dying off, federal spending is 20 percent of GDP and that doesn’t include government meddling. If the grandparents of the greatest generation were asked to describe their contacts or relationship with the federal government, after a puzzled look, straining their recollection faculties, they might answer, “I used to chat with the mailman once in a while.”

Today, there is little any American can do without some form of federal control, whether it’s how much water we can use to flush a toilet, what kind of car we drive or how we prepare for retirement. Congress manages our lives in ways unimaginable to our ancestors through agencies created by the greatest generation, such as Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Social Security Administration and a host of alphabet agencies such as EPA, DOL, BLM, CDC and DOT. …

Amazing obit from Telegraph, UK. John Noble, 84, an American who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union’s Gulag and lived to tell about it.

John Noble, who died on November 10 aged 84, spent several years in the Soviet gulag system despite being an American citizen, and later wrote about his experiences in two books of memoirs.

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We have a couple of items on the progress in Iraq. Christopher Hitchens, the stalwart, is first.

… As I began by saying, I am not at all certain that any of this apparently good news is really genuine or will be really lasting. However, I am quite sure both that it could be true and that it would be wonderful if it were to be true. What worries me about the reaction of liberals and Democrats is not the skepticism, which is pardonable, but the dank and sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased. The latter mentality isn’t pardonable and ought not to be pardoned, either.

Newsweek is next.

For someone who has returned periodically to Baghdad during these past four and a half years of war, there has been one constant: it only gets worse. The faces change, the units rotate, the victims vary, but it has always gotten worse. Brief successes (elections, a unity government) collapse as still greater problems rear up (death squads, Iranian-made bombs). The country’s sects grow ever more antagonistic; the killings become more depraved; first a million, then 2 million, then 4 million Iraqis flee their homes. Al Qaeda loses its leader when Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is killed. But it steadily replenishes its ranks of suicide bombers, and morphs from a largely foreign force into a far more dangerous indigenous one. And so on.

For the first time, however, returning to Baghdad after an absence of four months, I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable. “It’s hard to believe,” says a friend named Fareed, who has also gone and come back over the years to find the situation always worse, “but this time it’s really not.” Such words are uttered only grudgingly by those such as me, who have been disappointed again and again by Iraq, where a pessimist is merely someone who has had to endure too many optimists. …

… The most important repairs—to Baghdad’s psyche—may be out of anyone’s control. “The greatest obstacle [to reconciliation] is what the social fabric was subjected to,” Tareq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president, said last week. For the first time in years, Baghdad’s citizens now feel reasonably safe in their own neighborhoods. But they remain fearful of moving between them, across the capital’s myriad sectarian borders, some invisible, others marked by high concrete. There continues to be a handful of sectarian killings daily in the city, most attributed to rogue Shiite militias ignoring the ceasefire, but each one leaving a family with a potential vendetta. Patching up Baghdad’s social fabric may prove a lot harder than defeating Al Qaeda. And, yes, it could still get worse again. A pessimist is also an optimist who has too often been proved wrong.

Jack Kelly says Iraq is indeed a quagmire – for al-Qaida.

… Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous “capitals” of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.

Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.

Al-Qaida’s support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group’s lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida’s attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.

“Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization’s reputation as a defender of Islam,” said StrategyPage. …

Norman Podhoretz defends against Andrew Sullivan.

In my article “The Case for Bombing Iran” (COMMENTARY, June 2007), in my book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, and in various public appearances, I quoted the Ayatollah Khomeini as having said the following:

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

My source for this statement was Amir Taheri, the prolific Iranian-born journalist now living in London, who has also contributed a number of articles to COMMENTARY. Now, however, the Economist, relying on another Iranian-born writer, Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, has alleged on its blog “Democracy in America” that Khomeini never said any such thing. “Someone,” says Mr. Bakhash, “should inform Mr. Podhoretz he is citing a non-existent statement.”

That “someone” has turned out to be Andrew Sullivan in his widely read blog, “The Daily Dish.” Linking to the Economist post, Sullivan accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for failing to admit that I have made an “error” in relying on a “bogus quotation” to bolster my argument that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would not be deterred from using them by the fear of retaliation.

I do not usually bother responding to Sullivan’s frequent attacks on me, which are fueled by the same shrill hysteria that, as has often been pointed out, deforms most of what he “dishes” out on a daily basis. But in this case I have decided to respond because, by linking to a sober source like the Economist, he may for a change seem credible. …

Thomas Sowell tries to help us make sense of income statistics. Part I was in Jewish World Review, and Part II was found at Townhall. Looks like there will be more, which will be included later.

Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the Census Bureau, which seem to indicate that.

On the other hand, income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service seem to show the exact opposite: People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91 percent by 2005.

The top one percent — “the rich” who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left — saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26 percent.

Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income increased by 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.

How can all this be? How can official statistics from different agencies of the same government — the Census Bureau and the IRS — lead to such radically different conclusions? …

Phil Valentine, a columnist for The Tennessean, has a column on Al Gore; Al Gore is like Jim Jones, and we’re drinking his Kool-Aid. We’re gonna have Mr. Valentine back.

… Al Gore, the Jim Jones of this new religious cult, preaches doom and gloom from his pettifogger pulpit, all the while living the lifestyle of an energy hog. He actually uses twice the amount of electricity in one month at his Nashville home than the average household uses in an entire year. He has two homes in Tennessee, one in Virginia, at least. He flies all over the world on his Magical Hysteria Tour, sucking down resources and belching out tons of carbon, all to tell us we need to conserve. We’re trying to make ends meet just to afford gas in our cars while Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. And no one seems to care.

The Branch Algorians read from the Gospel of Al and never question a word. The movement’s devil is carbon dioxide, an essential component of photosynthesis and the substance we all exhale with every breath. Understand this: CO2 is not a pollutant. However, Gore and the radical environmentalists have been quite successful in convincing people that smog and CO2 are the same. They are not. CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with the smog or haze we see over our cities. There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything to do with any kind of warming. …

Tech Central writes on the findings that a little extra pounds are good for you.

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Mark Helprin, always an original thinker, thinks an armed Germany can help preserve peace.

Though no longer the chief delinquent of Europe, and though not much thought is given to its strategic position, Germany is still Europe’s center of gravity, territorially contiguous to more nations than any state other than Russia, with compact interior lines of communication, Western Europe’s largest population, and Europe’s leading economy.

Facts like these assert themselves through every kind of historical fluctuation, even if America now sees Germany, the way stop for airlifters en route to Iraq and Afghanistan, as a kind of giant aircraft carrier with sausages. But Germany is no doubt the subject of far deeper consideration on the one hand by Russia and on the other by Jihadists.

The line from Paris to Moscow, which has been traveled from west to east by the French, east to west by the Russians, and in both directions by the Germans, is a road that invariably attracts continental powers on the brink of military predominance whether in fact or the imagination. …

Power Line notes the end of the last ice age might have started Noah’s travails.

Marty Peretz notes some good news about Jimmy Carter.

David Leonhardt of the NY Times has an nice contrarian view of current economic “problems.”

Until Tuesday’s rally on Wall Street, the news on the business pages has sounded pretty grim lately. Stocks are still down 6 percent from their peak this year, and oil is near a record high. The dollar, incredibly, is worth only 96 Canadian cents. And house prices will be falling for a long time to come.

So in an effort to cheer everyone up before Thanksgiving, this column is going to focus today on some good news. Here it is:

Stocks are still down 6 percent from their peak, and oil is near a record high. The dollar, incredibly, is worth only 96 Canadian cents. And house prices will be falling for a long time to come.

Seriously.

As long as the financial system doesn’t have a major meltdown, none of these developments will turn out to be as bad as you think. Some of them are downright welcome. …

Samizdata caught the Economist with its bias showing.

The editors of The Australian think their left and our Dems should stop ignoring some success in Iraq.

IN April, US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq lost, saying the the extreme violence in the country proved the surge was accomplishing nothing. This week Senator Reid is still engaged in the vain attempt to block funding for the war in the US Senate, refusing to acknowledge the extraordinary success of the surge.

Against all the defeatist expectations of the so-called “anti-war” lobby, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this week reported that terrorist attacks, including car bombings, in Baghdad had dropped by 77 per cent since last year’s peak. The dramatic improvement is directly attributed to the surge of 30,000 US troops, their effective counter-insurgency strategy and to the fact that locals are fed up with al-Qa’ida and other extremists. The good news is not just limited to Baghdad. Anbar, once an al-Qa’ida stronghold, is relatively peaceful thanks to the joint efforts of Sunni sheiks and marines. In the south, those willing Iraq to defeat were gloomily predicting that the withdrawal of British troops from Basra would lead to a brutal domination of the city by Iranian-backed terrorists. That hasn’t happened. …

Michael Barone with a way to grasp the possibility of progress in Iraq. He calls it “macrotime.”

When my father returned from service as an Army doctor in Korea in 1953, he brought back slides of the photos he’d shot, showing a war-torn country of incredible poverty. We would have laughed if you had told us that Americans would one day buy Korean cars. But 50-some years later, South Korea has the 13th-largest economy in the world, and you see Hyundais and Kias everywhere in America. Looking at things in microtime frames is not always a reliable guide to the macrotime-frame future. …

Since this is contrarian day, what with Mark Helprin and David Leonhardt above, how about a libertarian’s negative view of the Iraq war? There are a large number of folks like this who, because of the rabid left, keep their counsel close. Tyler Cowen of George Mason’s econ dept. leads the way.

John Fund points to another part of the immigration debate that could bite the Dems.

It’s been less than a week since New York’s Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer had to climb down from their support of driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has moved to kill an amendment that would protect employers from federal lawsuits for requiring their workers to speak English. Among the employers targeted by such lawsuits: the Salvation Army.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a moderate Republican from Tennessee, is dumbstruck that legislation he views as simple common sense would be blocked. He noted that the full Senate passed his amendment to shield the Salvation Army by 75-19 last month, and the House followed suit with a 218-186 vote just this month. “I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it’s discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, ‘I want you to be able to speak America’s common language on the job,’ ” he told the Senate last Thursday. …

Karl Rove has started a column for Newsweek. In his first he tells how Clinton can be beaten.

I’ve seen up close the two Clintons America knows. He’s a big smile, hand locked on your arm and lots of charms. “Hey, come down and speak at my library. I’d like to talk some politics with you.”

And her? She tends to be, well, hard and brittle. I inherited her West Wing office. Shortly after the 2001 Inauguration, I made a little talk saying I appreciated having the office because it had the only full-length vanity mirror in the West Wing, which gave me a chance to improve my rumpled appearance. The senator from New York confronted me shortly after and pointedly said she hadn’t put the mirror there. I hadn’t said she did, just that the mirror was there. So a few weeks later, in another talk, I repeated the story about the mirror. And shortly thereafter, the junior senator saw me and, again, without a hint of humor or light in her voice, icily said she’d heard I’d repeated the story of the mirror and she … did … not … put … that mirror in the office.

It is a small but telling story: …

Bill Kristol slams the boomers.

… There really was greatness in the “greatest generation.” It fought and won World War II, then came home to achieve widespread prosperity and overcome segregation while seeing the Cold War through to a successful conclusion. But the greatest generation had one flaw, its greatest flaw, you might say: It begat the baby boomers. …

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Mark Steyn thinks the world should give thanks for America.

… The New World (The United States) is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union. …

… on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. …

Charles Krauthammer notes the good foreign policy news for the US. Since Bush is supposed to be a moron, how is all this happening?

… France has a new president who is breaking not just with the anti-Americanism of the Chirac era but with 50 years of Fifth Republic orthodoxy that defined French greatness as operating in counterpoise to America. Nicolas Sarkozy’s trip last week to the United States was marked by a highly successful White House visit and a rousing speech to Congress in which he not only called America “the greatest nation in the world” (how many leaders of any country say that about another?) but pledged solidarity with the U.S. on Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. This just a few months after he sent his foreign minister to Iraq to signal an openness to cooperation and an end to Chirac’s reflexive obstructionism.

That’s France. In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder is long gone, voted out of office and into a cozy retirement as Putin’s concubine at Gazprom. His successor is the decidedly pro-American Angela Merkel, who concluded an unusually warm visit with Bush this week.

All this, beyond the ken of Democrats, is duly noted by new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who in an interview with Sky News on Sunday noted “the great change that is taking place,” namely “that France and Germany and the European Union are also moving more closely with America.”

As for our other traditional alliances, relations with Australia are very close, and Canada has shown remarkable steadfastness in taking disproportionate casualties in supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Eastern European nations, traditionally friendly, are taking considerable risks on behalf of their U.S. alliance — for example, cooperating with us on missile defense in the face of enormous Russian pressure. And ties with Japan have never been stronger, with Tokyo increasingly undertaking military and quasi-military obligations that it had forsworn for the last half-century. …

David Broder points out a couple of issues the Dems have to face.

As the Democratic presidential race finally gets down to brass tacks, two issues are becoming paramount. But only one of them is clearly on the table.

That is the issue of illegal immigration. A very smart Democrat, a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me that he expects it to be a key part of any Republican campaign and that he is worried about his party’s ability to respond. …

Dick Morris says, even though CNN gave her a pass, Hillary still has Iowa problems.

Under Wolf Blitzer’s gentle questioning, Hillary was able to avert another debate meltdown in the Nevada Democratic debate held last night, November 15. Asked about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, a compliant, even subservient, Blitzer accepted Hillary’s one word answer, “No,” with no follow up. Had a better journalist been asking the questions — like Tim Russert — he would have followed up the bland negation with probing questions about why she is yet again flip flopping on the issue.

The Drudge Report today highlights that a “senior adviser to the Hillary campaign” said, earlier today, that Blitzer “was outstanding, and did not gang up like Russert did in Philadelphia. He avoided personal attacks, remained professional and ran the best debate so far.” And Blitzer checked his journalistic instincts at the door.

The debate also had a pro-Hillary bias in the amount of time allocated to Bill Richardson — who had the third longest face time in the debate. Since Richardson is auditioning for Vice President on Hillary’s ticket, using his time to plead for unity among Democrats (i.e. don’t bash Hillary), giving him the mike was the same as giving it to Hillary. …

Another grown-up from the National Journal, William Powers, writes on race-gender issues.

Race and gender are journalistic standbys, familiar old hot buttons that reliably lend themselves to news stories, though in today’s world they’re not half as newsy as they once were. To the informed news consumer, these buttons are barely warm. …

 

… The media are always at least a decade behind real life. …

 

…. In February, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that race and gender have lost much of their political relevancy. “According to voters,” the Post reported, “being over the age of 72, a Mormon, twice divorced, or a smoker all are bigger drags on a candidate’s support than is gender or race.” The same poll found that although small percentages of voters would be less likely to support a woman or a black candidate, they are offset by those who are more likely to support such candidates.

If smoking is really a bigger negative with voters than gender or race, shouldn’t Obama’s cigarette habit — which he’s been trying to kick with nicotine gum — be just as controversial, newswise, as his skin color or Clinton’s sex?

One reason the media lag society is that they rely on precedent. Smokers have been elected president before, but no woman or African-American ever has. The past sets the tune for the present, no matter how much the culture has changed. …

In a Corner post, Mark Steyn has interesting thoughts about the American electorate.

Jonah, I think Americans beat themselves up way too much over “low” voter turnout. For a start, the nature of American democracy is profoundly different: If you live in Hampshire, England, you can vote for just three offices – a local councillor, a Member of Parliament, a Euro-MP – every five years. If you live in New Hampshire, New England, you can vote for hundreds of folks – President, Governor, Senator, Congressman, State Representative all the way up to County Commissioner, Sherriff, Register of Probate, Town Clerk, School District Treasurer, Cemetery Commissioner, Library Trustee, Sexton, etc. If you factor in the multiple officers, America has the highest rate of civic participation in the developed world. …

So how’s Eliot Spitzer doing these days? WSJ Editors have some thoughts.

… The only real difference between Mr. Spitzer now and then is that as Governor he is obliged to govern, as opposed to merely bringing charges amid a PR offensive and then settling before having to prove anything in court. His heavy-handed approach to the drivers license plan shows the limits of such behavior in a job where he actually has to persuade people.

It remains far from clear whether Mr. Spitzer has drawn the right lessons from his recent failures. At Wednesday’s announcement on the licensing plan, he said that leadership was “not solely about doing what one thinks is right,” a curious formulation. There may be more damaging revelations to come out of Troopergate too. But assuming Mr. Spitzer survives that scandal, he could do worse than enroll in anger management class and take a pledge not to try to ruin everyone who disagrees with him.

Ronald Baily of Reason wants you to relax about the coming oil glut.

… Interestingly, despite a four-fold increase in the price of oil, world economic growth has been pretty robust. For example, the U.S. economy grew at 3.9 percent rate last quarter and inflation and unemployment remain low. Why? In September 2007 paper entitled, “Who’s Afraid of a Big Bad Oil Shock,” Yale University economist William Nordhaus speculates that the reaction of consumers and businesses to steep oil price increases is muted because they regard them as temporary. In addition, the cost of energy is less important to the budgets of businesses and consumers.

In 1980, when oil reached $101.70 per barrel in real terms, spending on gasoline was 4.5 percent of GDP, 7.2 percent of consumer expenditures, and 6.2 percent of personal disposable income, according to a March 2005 report by Goldman Sachs. If oil prices reach $105 per barrel, the report noted that gasoline spending would reach 3.6 percent of forecasted GDP, 5.3 percent of consumer expenditures, and 5.0 percent of personal disposable income. Prices would have to rise to $135 per barrel to equal 1970s levels. In addition, it takes only half as much energy to produce a dollar of GDP today than it did in 1980. …

Politico has the story of African Bishops who lobby congress. They don’t understand. For congress, money speaks, not moral suasion.

As domestic agriculture constituencies elbow for big chunks of federal money in the farm bill, three men made the rounds of the Senate offering a different message, from a different continent: Crop subsidies must be curbed because they are hurting African farmers.

“By subsidizing some of the most prosperous U.S. farmers, the farm bill affects the meager livelihoods of 10 million of our fellow Africans,” Bishop Thomas Kabore of Kaya, Burkina Faso, said at a news conference. …