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Josh Patashnik wonders what various Dems think about Darfur.

Did Hillary Clinton criticize her husband for not intervening in Rwanda? Mike Crowley blogged about this on The Stump last week. Then George Stephanopoulus asked her about Rwanda on his Sunday morning show, and Crowley went back to the Rwanda issue, again on The Stump, yesterday.

I’m always interested in history, and particularly in the history of mistakes. But, frankly, I’m more interested in saving the living than in figuring out who’s responsible for the dead long ago. You know, that’s why I’m more interested in Israel than in the Holocaust. There are living Jews in Israel who need to be allowed to defend themselves. The Holocaust, that’s about dead Jews. Nothing can be done for them.

So I am interested in what Hillary thinks about intervening in Darfur. Is she for it? And, if she is, just how much is she for it? The sad truth is that she isn’t for it at all. There’s a silent agreement among the Democrats not to talk seriously about Darfur. But, about Africans living and threatened with death, Darfur is–how shall I put it?–more salient than Rwanda. I’d be interested also in what Barack Obama thinks about Darfur. …

Want a clue about Iowa? Read John Fund.

The trouble with the Iowa caucuses isn’t that there’s anything wrong with Iowans. It’s the bizarre rules of the process. Caucuses are touted as authentic neighborhood meetings where voters gather in their precincts and make democracy come alive. In truth, they are anything but.

Caucuses occur only at a fixed time at night, so that many people working odd hours can’t participate. They can easily exceed two hours. There are no absentee ballots, which means the process disfranchises the sick, shut-ins and people who are out of town on the day of the caucus. The Democratic caucuses require participants to stand in a corner with other supporters of their candidate. That eliminates the secret ballot.

There are reasons for all this. The caucuses are run by the state parties, and unlike primary or general elections aren’t regulated by the government. They were designed as an insiders’ game to attract party activists, donors and political junkies and give them a disproportionate influence in the process. In other words, they are designed not to be overly democratic. Primaries aren’t perfect. but at least they make it fairly easy for everyone to vote, since polls are open all day and it takes only a few minutes to cast a ballot.

Little wonder that voter turnout for the Iowa caucuses is extremely low–in recent years about 6% of registered voters. Many potential voters will proclaim their civic virtue to pollsters and others and say they will show up at the caucus–and then find something else to do Thursday night.

All of which means that the endless polls on the Iowa caucuses are highly suspect. …

Want to think Iowa is silly? Read Hitchens.

… So, once you subtract the breathless rhetoric about “surge” and “momentum” and (oh, Lord) “electability,” it’s finally admitted that the rest of the United States is a passive spectator while about half of 45 percent of 85,000 or so Republican caucus voters promote a provincial ignoramus and anti-Darwinian to the coveted status of “front-runner” or at least “contender.”

Now, something as absurd and counterdemocratic as this can be so only if the media say it is so, and every four years for as long as I can remember, the profession has been promising to swear off the bottle and stop treating the Iowa caucuses as if they were a primary, let alone an election. Credit Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post for being the first writer this year to try to hold his fellow journalists to that pledge:

Without that massive media boost, prevailing in Iowa would be seen for what it is: an important first victory that amounts to scoring a run in the top of the first inning.

“It stinks,” says veteran political reporter Jack Germond. “The voters ought to have time to make a considered decision, and the press ought to be a little less poll-driven, and we’re not.” Between the coverage and the hyper-compressed campaign calendar, he says, “the whole system this year is absolutely a disgrace.” …

Jim Taranto was on a roll. He posts on Clinton as his Dem choice and the NY Times pick of Bill Kristol for Op-Ed columnist. And he slaps around the NOW girls.

Remember when Japan was going to have us for lunch? Then it was China. Well,according to a LA Times op-ed, China isn’t the economic dragon we’ve been sold.

The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.

The story’s unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China’s economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.

About 40% smaller.

China, it turns out, isn’t a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

What happened to $4 trillion in Chinese gross domestic product? …

Michael Barone with lessons from the surge.

There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq.

Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done.

We have seen this before in American history. …

Kansas City has cool walls on the library’s parking garage.

John Fund has interesting background on “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

“Charlie Wilson’s War,” the film treatment of how a party-hearty Texas congressman teamed up with other Cold Warriors to humiliate the Soviet Empire and hasten its end, is a box-office success. After the failure of preachy political films, like “Lions for Lambs” and “Rendition,” Hollywood will credit the movie’s appeal, in part, to its witty dialogue and biting humor. Fair enough. But the film offers another lesson, for both Hollywood and Washington: Good things can happen when principle trumps partisanship.

I met Charlie Wilson in his heyday in the 1980s. He was an operator and a carousing libertine. But he was honest about it, promising constituents that, if he were caught in a scandal, “I won’t blame booze and I won’t suddenly find Jesus.” He called himself a Scoop Jackson Democrat, after the hawkish senator from Washington state. Mr. Wilson was fiercely anticommunist.

In 1981, two years after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson visited refugee camps in Pakistan at the prodding of Joanne Herring, a conservative Houston socialite he’d been dating. There he saw starving families and Afghan children whose arms had been blown off by explosives disguised as toys. “I decided to grab the commie sons o’bitches by the throat,” he told me in a recent interview. …

Pickerhead apologizes for missing three days last week. Time was filled with family and celebrating.

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Adam Smith.org provides a chance for some nanny state humbug.

As Santa Claus sets off to drop presents down the chimneys of innumerable households on Monday night, let’s hope that he has got the right paperwork.

Claus, of course, is just an alias. He’s really Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, on the southern cost of Turkey. The EU (foolishly) isn’t admitting Turkey to the Union, so Claus needs a visa and a work permit to run his Christmas delivery service in the UK.

His elves, of course, would be bound by the child labour regulations. Working at midnight on 24 December would be right out. And Claus would have to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau in order to work with young people. …

Time for serious stuff. Some of our favorites have Bhutto thoughts. John Burns of NY Times is first.

Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at age 54 on Thursday in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, spent three decades navigating the turbulent and often violent world of Pakistani politics, becoming in 1988 the first woman to be democratically elected to lead a modern Muslim country.

A deeply polarizing figure, the self-styled “daughter of Pakistan” was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office amid a swirl of corruption charges that ultimately propelled her into self-imposed exile in London, New York and Dubai for much of the past decade. She returned home only two months ago, defying threats to her life as she embarked on a bid for election to a third term in office, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy. …

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today’s events a horrible inevitability. As I always say when I’m asked about her, she was my next-door neighbor for a while – which affects a kind of intimacy, though in fact I knew her only for sidewalk pleasantries. She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be – though in practice, as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world’s most corrupt political classes. …

Christopher Hitchens.

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan’s military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her. …

John Podhoretz in Contentions.

… American politics would dearly love to take a holiday from history, just as it did in the 1990s. But our enemies are not going to allow us to do so. The murder of Bhutto moves foreign policy, the war on terror, and the threat of Islamofascism back into the center of the 2008 campaign. How candidates respond to it, and issues like it that will come up in the next 10 months, will determine whether they are fit for the presidency.

Ralph Peters.

FOR the next several days, you’re going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

Her country’s better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and “hardheaded” journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.

In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency. …

There’s still an election season. Peggy Noonan reviews the candidates.

By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.

But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.

Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They’re the reason we get up in the morning. “What happened?” “Who won?”

This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. …

Corner post on Clinton’s roles in Bill’s administration.

Express, UK calls for school vouchers. Seems the educrats are busy ruining their schools too.

… The state must play an enabling role by giving parents vouchers worth the average educational spending per pupil and the freedom to spend them at any school which will take their youngsters for that price.

Bad schools must be allowed to wither on the vine and good ones to expand. Headteachers must be free to innovate without having to first get the say-so of White­hall bureaucrats. Educ­at­ion ministers must in future do much, much less.

Opponents of enhanced par­ental choice, such as Mr Balls, say what most parents want is for their local school to be a good school. That is the ideal situation but, as Lib Dem education spokesman David Laws has noted, that is an aspiration, not a policy. A policy choice through a voucher Parental requires a mechanism for making it happen. scheme is precisely such a mech­anism.

A continuation of commandments from Mr Balls is not.

Division of Labour posts on global climate change – circa 1907. Seems the ice industry was in trouble because of a cool summer.

… Why no Congressional calls for subsidies for ice farmers? Oh yeah, in 1907 the United States hadn’t yet experimented in a big way with the narcotic effects of government subsidies.

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In honor of Mary, Pickings has another Ladies’ Day. We begin with The Motherland is Calling. This is the iconic image of Russia at war. We also included a picture of the memorial the Soviets placed on a famous hill in Stalingrad (now Volgograd)

Claudia Rosett starts off Ladies Day with a piece on the next UN hate-fest against Israel and the U. S.

At the United Nations, ‘tis the season to bankroll hatred of Israel and America — via pricey preparations for a 2009 gathering dubbed the “Durban Review Conference,” or Durban II. Right now, plans have advanced from general talk of funding this jamboree out of the U.N. regular budget, and have homed in on a figure of $6.8 million which the U.N. budget committee is poised to approve. Unless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes it her business to somehow block the money — and fast — this means that Americans, as top contributors to the U.N. budget, can look forward not only to being vilified at Durban II along with our democratic ally, Israel, but also to picking up the biggest share of the tab for this next landmark U.N. exercise in bigotry.

Durban II is of course being planned as the follow-up to the U.N.’s notorious 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa. Convened under the pretext of fighting racism, that conclave erupted into a frenzy of malice toward America, and even more specifically, Israel. Colin Powell, then secretary of State, had the integrity to withdraw the U.S. delegation, and publicly tell the U.N. organizers: “You do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of ‘Zionism equals racism;’ or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world — Israel — for censure and abuse.” …

Remember how poorly Israel did in the 2006 war with Hizbullah? Caroline Glick discovered why. Olmert put the lawyers in charge.

… The legal establishment’s ardor for the Second Lebanon War was exposed on Tuesday with the publication of the testimonies of Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit before the Winograd Committee which the Olmert government established to research the war’s failures. In their testimonies both men shared their perception of the war as a great victory of lawyers in their campaign to “lawyerize” – or assert their control – over Israeli society.

In his opening statement, Mazuz extolled the war as “the most ‘lawyerly’ in the history of the State of Israel, and perhaps ever.” He explained, “The process didn’t begin in Lebanon 2006. It… is a gradual process of ‘lawyerizing’ life in Israel.”

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.

As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was “the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can’t identify any confrontation… or … demands to ‘Let the IDF win.’” …

… What has changed is the focus of military and political leaders in conducting war. Before the advent of legal dominance, commanders and political leaders devoted themselves to winning wars. Today they concentrate their efforts on avoiding criminal indictments. …

Suzanne Fields says Anne Frank would be 78 now.

Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, and the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy. — Diary of Anne Frank

AMSTERDAM — I climbed the narrow, steep steps to the attic of the Anne Frank House to look out the window at the tree that gave a young girl hope. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez names the real men of the year.

If I were the editor of Time magazine, I’d have three men on the famous year-ending issue. My men of the year would be Gen. David Petraeus, with Sen. John McCain and Joe Lieberman as his Beltway wingmen.

Not to crowd the cover too much, but the mission takes a few good men: I’d make sure that George W. Bush (the commander in chief who put Petraeus where he is) and the American soldier (who does the work every day) got in the picture as well.

When Mitt Romney appeared on “Meet the Press” a week before Christmas, there wasn’t even five minutes of an hour-long program devoted to Iraq. That wouldn’t have happened had Romney been on as recently as last spring and summer. Just ask the Senate candidates who were on the same program in the run-up to the November 2006 elections if they were asked about Iraq, and how often. …

Noemie Emery with good Clinton profile.

What is one to make of Hillary Clinton, now that her front-running campaign seems to be foundering? Pretty much what one made of Al Gore when his campaign faltered.

2008 has barely begun, but already it seems quite a lot like 2000. There is a sense of deja-vu-all-over-again as Bill Clinton’s over-ambitious First Lady replays his vice president’s fate. The former VP and the former first lady have remarkable similarities. Both Gore and Hillary wanted to be president for a most of their lives, and with an uncommon ferocity. Each one’s rise through the ranks came about via family members — his father; her husband. Both rose to fame on the wings of Bill Clinton, who is proving to be a mixed blessing for both. Each began a campaign in a position of almost impregnable power, which each one subsequently (and quickly) undermined by errors of judgment and character. In short, what we see here are two campaigns that began with a huge amount of familial and institutional support for candidates who rose exclusively through the power of their respective situations, and who, in the end, are inept politicians and thus in over their heads in a high-stakes campaign. …

Maureen Dowd is back on the Clintons.

Once it was about Hillary, but now, of course, it’s about Bill.

Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let’s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we’re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We’ll be heroes.

It worked for Bill and Hillary in ’92 and ’96. It didn’t work in the health care debacle. Will it work in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

“For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,” said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.” …

Kimberley Strassel takes a long look at Huck. She doesn’t like what she sees.

As pigs in pokes go, the Democratic Party bought itself a big one in 1988. Michael Dukakis was relatively unknown, but he was also the last man standing. Only too late did his party, along with the rest of the country, realize Mr. Dukakis was a typecast liberal–a furlougher of felons, and a guy who looked mighty awkward in a tank.

This is what happens when a party takes a flyer, and it could be Republicans’ turn with Mike Huckabee. The former Baptist minister and governor of Arkansas is surging in Iowa, and is tied with Rudy Giuliani in national polls. He’s selling his party on a simple message: He’s not those other guys, with their flip-flops and different faiths, and dicey social positions. As to what Mr. Huckabee is–that’s as unknown to most voters as the Almighty himself.

Mr. Huckabee is starting to get a look-see by the press, though whether the nation will have time to absorb the findings before the primaries is just as unknown. The small amount that has been unearthed so far ought to have primary voters nervous. It isn’t just that Mr. Huckabee is far from a traditional conservative; he’s a potential ethical time bomb. …

Neither did Peggy Noonan.

I didn’t see the famous floating cross. What I saw when I watched Mike Huckabee’s Christmas commercial was a nice man in a sweater sitting next to a brightly lit tree. He had easy warmth and big brown puppy-dog eyes, and he talked about taking a break from politics to remember the peace and joy of the season. Sounds good to me.

Only on second look did I see the white lines of the warmly lit bookcase, which formed a glowing cross. Someone had bothered to remove the books from that bookcase, or bothered not to put them in. Maybe they would have dulled the lines.

Is there a word for “This is nice” and “This is creepy”? For that is what I felt. This is so sweet-appalling.

I love the cross. The sight of it, the fact of it, saves me, literally and figuratively. But there is a kind of democratic politesse in America, and it has served us well, in which we are happy to profess our faith but don’t really hit people over the head with its symbols in an explicitly political setting, such as a campaign commercial, which is what Mr. Huckabee’s ad was. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez rounds out the Huckabee hat-trick suggesting politics makes strange alter-fellows. That in reference to whose church he visited Sunday before Christmas.

… The problem with this particular church is its pastor. It is no secret that evangelicals and Catholics have their theological differences. If we didn’t we’d all be under the same church roof like once upon a time. But Hagee has been particularly outspoken beyond his Cornerstone Church, as a supporter of Israel and a prolific writer. His activism has brought some attention to his views on the Catholic Church.

In Hagee’s “black history” of the Catholic Church, for example, Catholics were far from only guilty of sins of omission when it came to the Nazis, they also gave Hitler his blueprint, according to Hagee. In a speech this year, Hagee pointed to the Catholic Church as having provided the jumping-off point for the Holocaust, claiming: “That was really drawn by the Roman church. [Hitler] did not do anything differently. He only did it more ruthlessly, and on a national scale.” The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has long been concerned about Hagee’s rhetoric, calling him a “veteran bigot,” accusing him of distorting Catholic teachings and misrepresenting Church history. The League has cautioned that, “Tone matters … and Hagee’s tone is nothing but derisive.” …

Sarah Lueck in WSJ reports on the one senator who works for us.

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday afternoon, when most senators were preparing to leave Washington for the holiday recess, Tom Coburn was declaring his intention to stick around.

“The floor’s going to be open,” said the 59-year-old Oklahoma Republican. “I’m going to have to be here…to try to stop stuff.”

Stopping stuff is Sen. Coburn’s specialty. In a Congress that has had trouble passing even the simplest legislation, Sen. Coburn, who proudly wears the nickname “Dr. No,” is a one-man gridlock machine. This year, the senator, who indeed is a medical doctor, single-handedly blocked or slowed more than 90 bills, driving lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to distraction.

He blocked a ban on genetic discrimination by health insurers. He thwarted a bill to set up a program to track patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Also nixed: an effort to promote safe Internet use by children and a resolution to honor the late environmentalist Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth. …

Melanie Phillips with outstanding post on the crumbling of the globalony idea.

And now for some good news. Geophysicist David Denning writes:

‘South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In north-eastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered. …

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The next couple of nights are very full. Just as well, since Pickerhead will be traveling and posting is uncertain for Christmas day and Wednesday. Lots of good stuff both nights.

Jeff Jacoby on the Muslim war against women. We lead with this because tomorrow we honor Mary with Ladies’ Day. A day when all contributors will be female. This will be a perfect example of one of the reasons the Islamic world is so backward, since half the citizens are not allowed to fully participate in their culture. Of course, don’t look for the left-leaning ladies of NOW, or any other part of the West’s “feminist” movement to protest the treatment of Muslim women.

THE “QATIF GIRL” won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier, Sudan’s president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly demanding her execution.

In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in nonmarital sex.)

The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor. But for every “Qatif girl” or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes. …

Mark reviews the candidates’ Christmas ads.

This guy Huckabee is some kind of genius. A week ago, you had to be the pope or the queen to do your own big televised Christmas message. But now, since Huck climbed into his red sweater and hired George Lucas to do the notorious “floating cross” effect, every single-digit nickel ‘n’ dime presidential candidate is donning his gay apparel and trolling the ancient Yuletide carol. I haven’t seen so much festive knitwear since “The Andy Williams Christmas Show” 1973.

In seasonal market-share terms, the former Arkansas governor remains the Huckabing Crosby, the pioneer in whose footsteps all others scamper to play Perry Como and Harry Belafonte. Barack Obama’s message is warm and fuzzy and carefully poised, with one of his kids saying “Merry Christmas” and the other “Happy Holidays.” If he had a third, she’d presumably be wishing you a hearty Kwanzaa or or hailing Bob Kerrey with a cheery “Allahu Akbar!”

Ron Paul is the only candidate with the courage to be filmed in front of an artificial tree. Hmm.

In Sen. Clinton’s Christmas message, Hillary is bundling up presents for all of us. They’re beautifully wrapped, but oddly, instead of putting the name of the intended recipient on the gift tag, she’s written out what’s in them: “Universal Health Care,” “Alternative Energy,” “Middle-Class Tax Cuts.” Strange. “Where did I put ‘Universal Pre-K’?” she says. “Ah, there it is.” If you thought Christmas at the mall was too materialistic, this is bonanza time. Message: It Takes A Santa’s Village Staffed By Unionized Government Elves To Raise A Child, and I’m Santa and you’re gonna need a much bigger chimney for all the federal entitlements I’ll be tossing down there. Your stocking’s gonna be packed tighter than Monica in fishnets.

And yet it’s a strangely cheerless message. Less Santa than Frosty the Snowqueen. …

John Podhoretz puts polls in context.

… Turnout in the Iowa caucuses is expected to be somewhere around…this is serious…five percent. That means five percent of the state’s universe of Republicans will attend a Republican caucus meeting, and five percent of the state’s Democrats will attend a Democratic caucus meeting. According to Blumenthal of pollster.com, “The historical high for turnout in the Iowa Caucuses was 5.5% of adults for the Democrats in 2004 and 5.3% of adults for the Republicans in 1988.”

Now here’s what this means. For a poll to achieve a measurable degree of scientific accuracy, a pollster “would need to screen out nineteen out of twenty otherwise willing adults in order to interview a combined population of Democratic and Republican caucusgoers strictly comparable in size to past caucus turnouts.” Because no pollster can afford to do such a thing — to reach thousands of people and then discard the results from 95 percent of the phone calls — each polling firm has to come up with its own theory of how best to locate and identify likely voters in sufficient numbers. That’s why, Blumenthal says, the results of each poll vary so wildly. …

The Captain posts on the chance Bush might kill a lot of the earmarks.

The omnibus spending bill made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue this week, and it could have slid all the way down on the grease it contains from over 9,000 earmarks. In remarks yesterday, George Bush warned that his budget director will look at ways to eliminate wasteful spending, and thanks to Congressional dishonesty, he may have a way to do it:

The White House threatened yesterday to cancel thousands of pet projects that Congress inserted into a massive spending bill before leaving town this week, a move that could provoke a fierce battle with lawmakers in both parties who jealously guard their ability to steer money to favored purposes. …

And he has the goods on the media Iraq bias.

Pew Research Center issued a stinging indictment on Wednesday regarding the press coverage of Iraq this year, one that shows a subtle but clear editorial bias. The news media gave plenty of attention to the war in Iraq when they could show it as a failing enterprise, with half of all their coverage focusing on anecdotal stories of violence. When the success of General David Petraeus made even that coverage difficult, media outlets simply stopped reporting on Iraq (via Wake Up America): …

He also posts on the Bill Clinton column from Gene Robinson.

… reporters who have tallied his words say that he talks more about himself than about his wife — at a ratio of about 9 to 1.

 

And Michael Goodwin says to Bill Clinton, “It’s about Hillary, stupid!”

Something was bugging me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it hit me. While I was reading about the campaign, the realization came like a thunderbolt: I’m tired of Bill Clinton.

Tired of his half-truths and full lies about where he stood on Iraq. Tired of his bull, as when he says he’d campaign for Hillary “if we weren’t married” and calls her a “world-class genius.” Tired of his whining, as when he says the media has been too tough on her and too soft on Barack Obama.

All of this is as real as the lovey-dovey, hug-and-smile photo ops of them in Iowa. It’s theater, staged for maximum political impact. We’re being played again on the two-for-the-price-of-one angle.

But, as always, the game for him is about him. A vote for her is a vote for him. Vanity is a big part of it, with her victory the succession legacy he was denied when Al Gore lost.

All true, but I fear there is more to it now. He wants to be The Man, again. He wants it so much that it’s not clear which President Clinton would be the President. The way he hogs the spotlight, the way he’s trotted out to rescue her when she’s in trouble and the way he sets the talking points mark him as the lead dog in the Clinton pack. Would he also make the decisions in the White House? All of them? Some of them? …

Power Line has another Clinton post.

One of the things that makes the Clintons such tiresome public figures is the low opinion in which they hold the American people. They know they’re incredibly smart and they think we’re incredibly stupid. The credulity of the press has frequently confirmed the Clintons’ perceptions of the American people.

To some extent, however, the spell is wearing off this year, as the Clintons’ calculations have become so transparent. Today’s Los Angeles Times reports, for example, with a mocking headline, “Gee, what a coincidence on the trail with Clinton.” Don Frederick and Andrew Malcolm write: …

Michael Barone has an overview of the GOP field.

… the preference for smaller rather than larger government is not as ample as it used to be. The strongest case against big government has been its failures in the 1970s, typified by gas lines and stagflation. But the median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1964, so he or she never sat in those gas lines or struggled to pay rising bills with a paycheck eroded by inflation. That demographic factor helps explain why Democrats today are promising big-government programs, unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, when the median-age voter remembered the 1970s very well.

America has enjoyed low-inflation economic growth for 95 percent of the 2008 median-age voter’s adult life. This is a record unique in history, which neither party is addressing particularly well. Democrats promise tax increases on at least some high earners (by not extending the Bush tax cuts past 2010), though tax increases are not the usual prescription for an economy that may be headed toward recession.

Republicans, facing an electorate half of which doesn’t remember the 1970s and most of which has not appreciated the generally good economy we’ve had since 2001, have yet to muster persuasive arguments for their policies.

WSJ op-ed explains why all the religious stuff is poaching on this week’s celebrations.

Christmas famously “comes but once a year.” In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, “Silent Night” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Jingle Bells” is quite another.

But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused. Religious Christians condemn taking “the Christ out of Christmas,” while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of “A Christmas Carol.”

A little history can clear things up. …

Fluorescent foolishness from feds.

A New Yorker cartoon from several years ago shows a vast, cubicle-filled office, with a manager explaining that the “dim fluorescent lighting is meant to emphasize the general absence of hope.”

Fluorescents aren’t all that bad. In fact, they’ve steadily gained market share in recent years. But from now on their popularity will rest not on consumer preferences, but on the force of law. If there’s anything about fluorescents that involves the general absence of hope, it’s that Congress has been able to mandate them with so little opposition. …

NY Times says somethings are on the job keeping rodents away from delis and bodegas in NY. Or course the government creeps are not happy.

Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.

Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.

When a bodega cat is on the prowl, workers say, rats and mice vanish. …

… But as efficient as the cats may be, their presence in stores can lead to legal trouble. The city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption. Fines range from $300 for a first offense to $2,000 or higher for subsequent offenses. …

Country Store posts on inconvenient incandescent illumination.

The last time the Donks controlled Congress we got the Gore-Toilet, the wimp flusher that saved no water because it required extra flushes and led to toilet smuggling. Well, the Donks are back in control of Congress and guess what? Now it’s Gore-bulbs: …

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Mark Steyn leads us to a Pakistani newspaper for an honest reporting of the latest honor killing in Canada.

Here is that article from Daily Times, Pakistan.

… Here’s a fact: Aqsa has been murdered. For us, denial is not an option. According to the United Nations Population Fund more than 5,000 women worldwide fall victim to honour killing. Denial is not an option.

According to the UN’s Special Rapporteur “honour killings had been reported in Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey and Yemen”. Egypt is 90 percent Muslim, Iran 98 percent, Jordan 92 percent, Lebanon 60 percent, Morocco 99 percent, Pakistan 97 percent, the Syrian Arab Republic 90 percent and Turkey 99 percent. Of the 192 member-states of the United Nations almost all honour killings take place in nine overwhelmingly Muslim countries. Denial is not an option.

More recently, honour killings have taken place in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Intriguingly, all these honour killings have taken place in Muslim communities of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Denial is not an option. …

Just like the rest of us, Karl Rove thinks this campaign is too long. But, he also points out where it is too short.

… despite the seemingly endless campaign, the nomination contest will be settled quicker than ever. In 2000, there were seven contests in five weeks beginning with Iowa. This time there will be contests in 32 states in roughly the same amount of time. …

 

… Cutting the length of the primary season by more than half by jamming the contests together raises the likelihood of a bandwagon developing for the candidate who wins the first few contests. This would allow a candidate to sweep to victory in the subsequent contests that rapidly follow because all that voters will see is his (or her) face on the evening news and in the papers.

Remember: Few Americans have seen these candidates up close, except voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In an abbreviated primary season, the weight these early state voters carry is even more exaggerated. Both parties could end up with a candidate chosen in haste and repented of at great cost.

If primaries and caucuses were spread out with weeks, not days and hours, between them, then voters in more states could learn more about the candidates. Candidates would have more time to come back from an early loss to a contender who was briefly the flavor of the moment in one state. …

The Captain tells you how the latest Clinton slime machine works.

Hillary Clinton just launched her new site The Hillary I Know, designed to humanize her to draw down her high negatives, amid much fanfare. On the same servers, ABC News discovered a few other websites that Hillary plans to launch. She has set up domains for websites designed to attack Barack Obama and to claim that they attacked her first: …

Robert Ardrey, playwright, screenwriter, wise observer and recorder of discoveries in anthropology and the behavioral sciences, is one of Pickerhead’s favorite authors. A central theme of his books, African Genesis, Territorial Imperative, Hunting Hypothesis, etc., is that the human race has descended from effective killing machines; social predators like wolves or African hunting dogs. Here is some of his prose;

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Ardrey thought Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” is foolishness that has caused much pain; most notably from the ideas of Karl Marx. Ardrey died in 1980, his views scorned by many. According to an article in the Economist, some in the natural sciences are coming around.

… Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence. …

Examiner editors on the spending bill.

If character is what we do when we think nobody is looking, then congressional leaders responsible for the 3,500-plus-page Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 have a lot of explaining to do. They should start by telling us why they posted their “omnibus spending bill” on the Internet only hours before voting on it and in a format that made searching the text laborious, at best. …

However, Club for Growth says there might be hope. Don’t get too excited yet.

President Bush said something earlier today that has fiscal conservatives giddy with potential joy. During a press conference, he announced his disappointment with the number of earmarks in the recent Omnibus spending bill. He said:

“I am instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spelling in the omnibus bill.”

This is president-ese for “through an executive order, I might tell the respective agencies to ignore the earmarks and to spend the money on higher priorities.”

This is a HUGE deal. With his signature, Bush could effectively wipe away almost all of this year’s earmarks. It would easily be the biggest achievement on wasteful spending of all time. …

Cafe Hayek tells us what is really crass.

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David Warren, our favorite Canadian, comments on the Great White Fleet and American power.

… Our children today are taught in school, when they are taught any history at all, that Imperialism “was” an unmitigated evil. Alas, this is an unmitigated lie, and it is to European Imperialism that not only we, but formerly subject peoples, owe lives much longer and less painful than those of our ancestors. For in addition to free trade, and the rule of law at sea, the fleets carried with them ideas, and technology — most significantly, certain principles of hygiene which, more even than the discoveries and techniques of modern medicine, contributed everywhere to longevity, prosperity, and health.

Imperialism is a mixed blessing for both conqueror and conquered, and the whole story is of course complex. It is not an avoidable subject. Notwithstanding the fond dreams of the willfully naive, war will remain a recurring feature of human history. And the power relations upon which war and peace alike are structured have always been with us, and will continue — so long as we are humans formed into large societies. And should we cease to be that, we only return to the conditions of the jungle.

Through the 20th century, the power of America grew and grew. A decade after the Great White Fleet’s circumnavigation, the entry of the U.S. into the First World War confirmed her status as one of the great powers. Her contribution to the Second World War was decisive, over both Atlantic and Pacific. Through the Cold War she provided the shield for the West, and all western allies, against the advance of Soviet Communism. And when that enemy collapsed, from its own internal contradictions, America emerged as the world’s “hyperpower” — a superpower with no plausible rival, whether military, economic, or social. …

Shorts from John Fund.

Howard Kurtz has overview of Clinton coverage.

After weeks of bad news, Hillary Clinton and her strategists hoped that winning the endorsement of Iowa’s largest newspaper last weekend might produce a modest bump in their media coverage.

But on Sunday morning, they awoke to upbeat headlines about their chief Democratic rival: “Obama Showing New Confidence With Iowa Sprint,” said the New York Times. “Obama Is Hitting His Stride in Iowa,” said the Los Angeles Times. And on Monday, Clinton aides were so upset about a contentious “Today” show interview that one complained to the show’s producer.

Clinton’s senior advisers have grown convinced that the media deck is stacked against them, that their candidate is drawing far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama. And at least some journalists agree. …

Jonah Goldberg has his take on the Clinton campaign.

The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill – and his cult of personality – will go down with the ship, too.

Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America “back to the future.”

Last summer, when he first started hawking Hillary like a door-to-door salesman, he told a crowd: “I know some people say, Look at them. They’re old. They’re sort of yesterday’s news.’ …

“Well,” Slick Willie said, grinning, “yesterday’s news was pretty good.”

Indeed, Hillary’s entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly involves designing a failed health-care plan and unsuccessfully hectoring her husband to move to the left. Still, as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen noted in a column last week, it was her decision to make the choice between her and Barack Obama a “referendum on a decade.”

So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination – heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses – I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: “America to Clinton(s): We’re Just Not That Into You.” …

John Stossel with more of his interview with Ron Paul.

Walter Williams explains how our schools have become so bad.

… How do we get out of this mess of abysmal student performance? Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has proposed an $18 billion increase in federal education programs. That’s the typical knee-jerk response — more money. Let’s delve a bit, asking whether higher educational expenditures explain why secondary school students in 32 industrialized countries are better at math and science than ours. In 2004, the U.S. spent about $9,938 per secondary school student. More money might explain why Swiss and Norwegian students do better than ours because they, respectively, spent $12,176 and $11,109 per student. But what about Finland ($7,441) and South Korea ($6,761), which scored first and second in math literacy? What about the Slovak Republic ($2,744) and Hungary ($3,692), as well as other nations whose education expenditures are a fraction of ours and whose students have greater math and science literacy than ours? …

Michael Lewis says it’s time college football players were paid.

… College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

But between buyer and seller sits the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to ensure that the universities it polices keep all the money for themselves — to make sure that the rich white folk do not slip so much as a free chicken sandwich under the table to the poor black kids. The poor black kids put up with it because they find it all but impossible to pursue N.F.L. careers unless they play at least three years in college. Less than one percent actually sign professional football contracts and, of those, an infinitesimal fraction ever make serious money. But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable.

Put that way the arrangement sounds like simple theft; but up close, inside the university, it apparently feels like high principle. …

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London Times says Iraq is the best story of the year.

By any measure, the US-led surge has been little short of a triumph. The number of American military fatalities is reduced sharply, as is the carnage of Iraqi civilians, Baghdad as a city is functioning again, oil output is above where it stood in March 2003 but at a far stronger price per barrel and, the acid test, many of those who fled to Syria and Jordan are today returning home.

The cheering has, of course, to come accompanied by caveats. Security has certainly been improved, but it remains fragile. Basra and the surrounding areas, handed back by Britain yesterday, are not as violent as they were a few months ago but this comparative peace has been bought at a high price in terms of tolerating intolerance (particularly towards women). …

Bret Stephens tells us why we should care about the 1907 sailing of the great white fleet.

On Dec. 16, 1907, the 16 battleships of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet sailed from Hampton Roads, Va., on a 43,000-mile journey around the world. The occasion was immediately understood as Teddy Roosevelt’s way of declaring that the United States, already an economic superpower, was also a military one. Unnoticed by most Americans, this past Sunday marked its centennial.

There is an enduring, bipartisan strain in American politics (think Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich) that wishes to forgo the military role. As wonderfully recounted by Jim Rasenberger in “America 1908,” the voyage of the Great White Fleet, as it was popularly known, was energetically opposed by members of Congress, who sought to cut off its funding when it was halfway around the world. Sound familiar? Mark Twain considered the venture as further evidence that TR was “clearly insane . . . and insanest upon war and its supreme glories.”

In fact, Roosevelt had sound strategic reasons for putting the fleet to sea. …

David Brooks has Clinton/Obama thoughts.

Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.

If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them.

But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness. …

Stanley Kurtz says Mark will lose in Canada.

Melanie Phillips blogs on Steyn’s case.

The lights are going out on liberal society – and it is the most liberal societies with their fingers on the ‘off’ switch. The thesis of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, that Europe was succumbing to an Islamist takeover, has been proved spectacularly correct — in Canada, and with himself as the designated victim. The New York Post reports that both Steyn and Macleans magazine, which reprinted a chapter of his book, are to be hauled before two Canadian judicial panels to answer the charge that they have spread ‘hatred and contempt’ for Muslims. And what was the heinous view Steyn vouchsafed to occasion such a charge?

…the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada’s liberalized, Western civilization.

Well excuse me, but some of us were under the impression that a global war was currently being waged by a section of the Islamic world in order to write the truth of that assertion in blood.

The irony, of course, is that by this action Canada is thus demonstrating that if any culture is incompatible with liberalised western civilisation, it is clearly Canada’s. The idea that certain arguments must not be made, and that to do so is to find oneself arraigned before a judicial tribunal, is the very antithesis of a liberal society. …

Ed Koch doesn’t think Al Gore should be trashing his country.

I may be old fashioned, but I think it’s wrong to publicly attack and criticize your own country overseas. It is doubly wrong to do so in the presence of those who hate the United States.

Al Gore, a former Senator from Tennessee, a former Vice President of the United States and the 2000 Democratic candidate for president, apparently believes that since, as he said, he is “not an official of the United States,” he is free to attack his native country anywhere.

This month in Bali, Indonesia, the United Nations held a conference on global warming for the purpose of extending the Kyoto Protocols, which will formally end in 2012. The United States — concerned about Kyoto’s effect on economic growth — has refused to ratify the Protocols. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate rejected then Vice President Gore’s advice and voted 95-0 to reject the Kyoto Protocols

Last week Al Gore appeared at the Bali conference and said, “I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that.” …

Cafe Hayek on how good weather forecasts help stores keep prices low.

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Mark Steyn says since so many of Hollywood’s anti-war flicks are box office bombs, maybe Mel Brooks is involved.

We’re all familiar with the famous plot of Mel Brooks’ The Producers: A wily impresario figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop musical, Springtime for Hitler. To date, Brooks has got a film and a show and a film-of-the-show out of this inspired idea. But, if he’s minded to go to the well a fourth time, he might like to modify the plot and make it the tale of a wily filmmaker who figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop anti–Iraq War movie.

Mark Cuban and Brian De Palma’s Redacted is not exactly Springtime for Saddam, but its flopperooniness is something to marvel at. In its first three weeks, the movie earned $60,456 at the box office. Which would be a disappointing take for your cousin’s summer-stock production of Brigadoon in a leaky barn theater in Maine, but is apparently a respectable haul for an award-winning motion picture ballyhooed for weeks on end in the national press. “The film traffics in, and clearly means to provoke, strong, unbalanced emotions,” declares A. O. Scott in his review for the New York Times. The strongest unbalanced emotion it provokes is a powerful visceral urge to say, “Well, I was thinking of going to the movies this weekend, but I figured I’d stay home and wash my hair.” …

David Warren has more Steyn defense.

… These days in Canada, if you’re feeling down and blue, and you think somebody hates you, you bring your case to a human rights tribunal. And the people you think hate you get that knock on the door, celebrated in the literature of the Soviet Gulag, and wherever else ideology triumphed over humanity in the 20th century’s painful course. Your daddy, your mommy, your brubber, or more likely some newspaper pundit gets dragged before a committee of smug, left-wing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators. After long delays that are costly only to the defendant and the taxpayer (justice delayed is justice denied), you will have the satisfaction of making your enemy squirm, in a kangaroo court where he is stripped of the right to due process, in which there are no fixed rules of evidence, in which the “judges” make up the law as they go along, and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations. …

 

… But to paraphrase the late Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the redneck trolls, and I did not speak out because I was not a redneck troll. Then they came for the male chauvinist pigs, and I did not speak out because I was not a male chauvinist pig. Then they came for Mark Steyn, and I did not speak out because I was not Mark Steyn. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.” …

Some shorts from John Fund.

Don Boudreaux thinks “sweet land of liberty” means petty local tyrants don’t get to run our lives.

… I’ve always understood the boast that America is a “sweet land of liberty” to mean that we Americans — each of us, individually — value our personal space and will tolerate no interference with our individual choices by anyone. As long as I accord others the same rights, I am free to do as I please. That, at least, is the ideal to which Americans traditionally aspire.

According the same rights to others means, of course, that I’m not free to punch my neighbor in the nose (unless he punches me first), take my neighbor’s car without his permission or rape his wife and daughters. I refrain from inflicting material harm on him and he reciprocates. It’s a wonderful arrangement.

Within the boundaries of this arrangement, neither my neighbor nor I am free to dictate the ingredients of each other’s diet or, more generally, each other’s lifestyle choices. I might be convinced — and correctly so — that my neighbor’s habit of smoking, eating lots of salt-encrusted trans fat-laden foods and sitting for hour upon endless hour watching television will likely shorten his life.

I can try to persuade him to make more healthful choices. But that’s it. In a free society, if my neighbor chooses to trade off longer life expectancy for greater gustatory or decadent pleasures, so be it. He is a free man. …

Ilya Somin with yet another example of the war on drugs interfering with the war against fundamental Islamofascists.

National Review shorts.

December 16, 2007

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Mark Steyn has more comments on the folks who think we should have no children.

This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” – or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.”

Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time, and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare that it’s surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it. …

… Last year I wrote a book on demographic decline and became a big demography bore, and it’s tempting just to do an annual December audit on the demographic weakness of what we used to call Christendom. Today, in the corporate headquarters of the Christian faith, Pope Benedict looks out of his window at a city where children’s voices are rarer and rarer. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe. Go to a big rural family wedding: lots of aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas but ever fewer bambinos. The International Herald Tribune last week carried the latest update on the remorseless geriatrification: On the Miss Italia beauty pageant, the median age of the co-hosts was 70; the country is second only to Sweden in the proportion of its population over 85, and has the fewest citizens under 15. Etc.

So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world’s oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade. That’s worth bearing in mind if you’re an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it’ll be his mom and dad’s place. …

Bill Kristol says the Iowa dems might be giving us all a present soon.

…First there was Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife in Iowa, claiming falsely–manifestly and provably–that he had “opposed Iraq from the beginning.” Can’t we move on from rewriting history for the self-aggrandizement of the perennially needy former president?

Then there was the Hillary campaign press release attacking Obama for saying he hadn’t spent his whole life planning to run for president (unlike some other candidates). No! Das Hillary Apparat unearthed one Iis Darmawan, 63, “Senator Obama’s kindergarten teacher [in Indonesia].” She recalled that little Barack had written an essay in kindergarten, “I Want to Become President.” Gotcha!

This is not a joke. The Clinton campaign put out a press release on December 2 trumpeting this discovery. One notes, with open-mouthed wonder, the brazenness of Hillary Clinton’s criticizing someone else for ambition. One marvels at the mind-boggling triviality of this particular nugget mined by the legendary Clinton research operation. One also, incidentally, asks: Do kids actually write “essays” in kindergarten? About becoming president of the United States? In Jakarta? Can’t we move on from ridiculous Clintonian attacks?…

… It will be good for the country to be able to move on, sooner rather than later, from the Clintons and their brand of politics. If the Democratic primary electorate brings this about, THE WEEKLY STANDARD will be first to say something we are not accustomed to saying to the Democratic party–thank you.

Peggy Noonan with a good column on Iowa events.

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge.

The Republican race looks–at the moment–to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress. …

… I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I’m just not sure he’d be pure enough to make it in this party. I’m not sure he’d be considered good enough. …

… A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It’s all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he’s there, and he’s a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife’s fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the ’90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they’ll love seeing him back in the White House. So they’ll vote for Hillary. Because she’ll bring him. “Two for the price of one.”

It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don’t miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don’t actually want Bill back in the White House?

Maybe. But maybe it’s this. Maybe they’d love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don’t want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo’s Nest and they’d love having Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don’t miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come? …

Abe Greenwald thinks Slick Willie has lost his touch.

… Last night, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton grew red-faced and tense as he grasped to defend his wife. He complained that Senator Barack Obama has garnered media support, as if to suggest good press is the Clinton clan’s exclusive entitlement.

Clinton tried to be elusive about trashing Obama for his lack of experience, but the bitterness was front and center. …

George Will thinks it would be a good idea to paralyze the Federal Election Commission.

… The six-person FEC — three members from each party — enforces the rules it writes about how Americans are permitted to participate in politics. You thought the First Amendment said enough about that participation? Silly you.

The FEC’s policing powers may soon be splendidly paralyzed. Three current FEC members, two Democrats and one Republican, are recess appointees whose terms will end in a few days when this session of Congress ends — unless they are confirmed to full six-year terms.

Four Senate Democrats decided to block the Republican, Hans von Spakovsky. Republicans have responded: “All three or none.” If this standoff persists until Congress adjourns, the three recess appointments will expire and the FEC will have just two members — a Republican vacancy has existed since April. If so, the commission will be prohibited from official actions, including the disbursement of funds for presidential candidates seeking taxpayer financing.

Democrats oppose von Spakovsky partly because when he served in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department he overruled staffers in the voting section who wanted to block a Georgia law requiring voters to present a government-issued ID before voting, as Americans do before boarding airplanes, entering many buildings, renting movies, etc. Von Spakovsky’s critics say the law is a way of suppressing voting by poor, mostly minority, citizens. Eighty percent of Americans — racists all? — favor such laws. The Supreme Court probably will settle the issue in a case concerning Indiana‘s voter ID law. …

Michael Barone with a short on the GOP wins last week.

… The minority party often does well in special elections; a voter knows that his vote will not determine which party controls the House. The fact that Democrat Nikki Tsongas won by only 51 to 45 percent in the very seriously contested race in October in Massachusetts 5 (a 57-to-41 John Kerry district in 2004) was bad news for Democrats. This week’s results were not bad news for Republicans. Yes, Latta ran 4 points behind Bush’s 2004 percentage, but that’s not as much as the 6 points Tsongas ran behind Kerry’s 2004 percentage. To me this suggests that the low job approval rating for Congress poses more problems for Democrats than for Republicans in 2008.

Howard Fineman’s views on the campaign so far.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is teetering on the brink, no matter what the meaningless national horserace numbers say. The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is a fantasy, and she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina – probably to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now, in momentum terms, the Democratic frontrunner.

On the Republican side, meanwhile, the race is shaping up in an even more unexpected way: a contest between two former Northern moderates (Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney) for the right to take on a Southern Baptist preacher, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture but not in Darwinian evolution. …

The Captain notices more fabrication from Clinton. He also posts on USAspending.gov and defends the CIA against some of its critics.

… I have had a lot of criticism for the intel community, but in this case they have a real grievance. For three years after the 9/11 attacks, they got overwhelming criticism for their inability to “connect the dots” and stop the terrorist attack before it started. Some of that criticism was justified, but a lot of it related more to bureaucratic hurdles in allowing communication between law enforcement and intelligence agents, as well as interagency barriers that had long stood in the way of cooperative intelligence. Instead of addressing these issues, the 9/11 Commission surfed that wave of recrimination to establishing even more bureaucratic obstacles rather than streamlining intelligence.

The failure to connect the dots came from bureaucratic interference. Failure to collect dots came from a lack of resources and poor prioritization. In the case of the former, America demanded a much more robust effort to collect intel that could prevent another 9/11. The administration and its agencies responded with aggressive tactics that have prevented dozens of attacks and identified hundreds of terrorists abroad. For six years, despite the bloodthirsty appetites of our enemies, we have not suffered another attack on our soil, and not even one against our diplomatic or military assets around the world, save in Iraq.

What have we done to celebrate that success? We have newspapers like the New York Times exposing the programs that have kept us safe and that have identified and caught major terrorists before they could strike. We have people in Congress like Nancy Pelosi screaming for prosecutions against the agents and the administration for efforts she personally witnessed and to which she never objected until years later. …

NY Post editors defend Steyn.

… Of course, a ban on opinions – even disagreeable ones – is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the “crime” of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about. …

Division of Labour points to evidence polar bears will be able to take care of themselves.

Borowitz and Scrappleface are here too. Andy says Clinton revealed Obama was a bed wetter at 3 years old.