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It is little noticed now, but an Examiner editorial calls attention to an important change in DC. One that will help us get the government under control.

It’s not just another day in the nation’s capital. At 11:30 a.m., Office of Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., will throw the switch on a new landmark of government, USASpending.gov. Mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA), which was co-sponsored by Coburn and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., USASpending.gov is a searchable, Googlelike database that puts most federal spending within a few mouse clicks for every American. (Obama won’t be present at today’s activities because he is on the presidential campaign trail.)

Today is a milestone because, as President Bush noted when he signed FFATA into law Sept. 26: “We spend a lot of time and a lot of effort collecting your money, and we should show the same amount of effort in reporting how we spend it. … Taxpayers have a right to know where that money is going, and you have a right to know whether or not you’re getting value for your money.” Taxpayers can know because USASpending.gov brings federal spending into the Internet age. It’s the place to go, for example, if you’re interested in how much the government spent last year on “consultants” or the number of federal contracts given to the company owned by your congressman’s biggest contributor. …

… it may take a few years before the good effects of USASpending.gov are fully felt, but here’s fair warning to the old-school politicians who thrive on pork-barrel politics: It’s no longer just the dwindling ranks of the mainstream media covering the big spenders. Starting today, legions of citizens and professional watchdogs have access to an unprecedented amount of information and data on where tax dollars are going. And they’re all connected via the Internet. The pig roast with tax dollars as the main course is coming to an end.

Byron York writes about when waterboarding works.

About a year ago, I had dinner with a man who played a key role in the U.S. war on terror. The talk turned to allegations of torture. He said that our policy should be that we do not torture. And we should adhere to that policy. Unless, that is, a truly special situation comes up and we decide that we have to violate that policy in an extremely narrow set of circumstances.

Then, we explain what we did — by that, I think he meant the executive branch would be open with members of Congress — and move on. What he couldn’t understand was the determination, on the part of some lawmakers, to pass a law that would deal with any and all situations in the future. It’s just not possible. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld tours the ideas floated about the CIA.

Boston Phoenix wonders if Huck is the new Jimmy Carter.

For the past 25 years or so, Republicans have made Jimmy Carter and his presidency one of their favorite punching bags — the modern equivalent of what the Democrats did to Herbert Hoover two generations ago. “Look what happens when you nominate someone without much experience, who comes out of nowhere,” they’ve said. Or, “He was just a little too odd or unconventional to be an effective president.”

Now, though, the Republicans may want to keep their opinions of Carter (for whom I worked in the 1976 presidential campaign) to themselves. That’s because if they nominate Mike Huckabee — who this past week was unexpectedly leading the field in at least one national GOP poll and in Iowa — they’re going to be lining up behind someone who looks awfully similar to their bête noir. If nothing else, Carter’s experience as a candidate in 1976 may provide the Republicans a convenient handbook on what’s likely to happen to Huckabee as the campaign progresses. …

Professor Bainbridge lays out the case against Mike. Says if he’s the pick, we’re Hucked.

In my continuing quest to decide which (if any) of the GOP candidates to support in the 2008 Presidential primaries, we come back to the case of Mike Huckabee. I’ve joked in the past about never giving Hope, Arkansas, another chance at the presidency, but more serious and substantial reasons for eliminating Huckabee have now become apparent. Here’s a few in no particular order: …

The Captain posts on the Clinton campaign.

… No one practices the politics of personal destruction like the Clintons. The difference now is that Hillary has proven so ineffectual as a candidate that they have to push harder than normal to get the message out. It also explains the sudden and mystifying meltdown that occurred after the November debate when Hillary got caught switching positions on illegal alien drivers licenses. She proved incapable of containing the damage, and so the campaign panicked and started lashing out in all directions as a distraction, using material they had previously kept for whispering-campaign use. …

… We all watched in amazement as Howard Dean melted down in the snows of January 2004, in Iowa and New Hampshire. Dean, however, was a novice on the national stage. The Clintons are supposed to be grand masters of politics, and their meltdown thus far is far more compelling — and far more revealing of their character.

News.com from Australia says get yourself out in the sunshine.

PEOPLE should sit outside in the middle of the day to help stave off potential deadly medical conditions, an Australian researcher says.

Current recommendations about when people should be exposed to the sun the most were wrong and did not allow people to get enough vitamin D, according to David Turnbull, a research fellow at the University of Southern Queensland’s Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health.

Vitamin D, when absorbed through the skin from UV rays, has been found to help prevent various cancers, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. …

Remember Kelo? That was when New London condemned land for transfer to developers. So how has that worked out? Ilya Somin posts in Volokh.

When the Supreme Court upheld the condemnation of private property for transfer to other private parties in Kelo v. City of New London, it was in large part on the theory that courts should defer to local governments’ judgments about when the use of eminent domain is needed to promote “economic development.” However, two and one half years after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city and some seven years after the condemnation proceedings were first initiated, little or no economic development has occurred on the condemned land. …

… If the Kelo condemnation ultimately ends up creating more economic costs than benefits, that would not be a surprising development. For reasons I have explained in great detail in several articles (e.g. here and here), economic development takings often harm local economies more than they benefit them. …

… What is striking about the Kelo takings is that this pattern held true even in a case where intense nationwide media scrutiny was focused on the local government and its chosen developer. The Day also deserves credit for providing some excellent local coverage of the controversy. In more typical cases, where there is much less media attention, local governments have even less incentive to actually produce the “economic development” that supposedly justified condemnation in the first place.

Daily Mail says the Pope is a globalony skeptic. What will Al say?

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. …

Fox News reports on the holes in the globalony theories.

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate “models” — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions. …

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In a Hill op-ed, Ron Christie says the polls are so yesterday, and lists some of W’s recent wins.

Recent polls placing President Bush’s approval numbers near 30 percent miss an important distinction: The policies and positions the president has advocated since 2001 have led to significant results in recent days. In short, the presidency of George W. Bush is surging, rather than waning, with little more than one year remaining in his term.

On the domestic front, the tax cuts the president pushed through the Congress have led to remarkable economic growth, low unemployment and record-high tax receipts that members of Congress can hardly wait to spend. New data released last week showed that America added 94,000 jobs in November 2007 — capping a remarkable 51 straight months in which jobs have been created in our economy. Despite partisan claims that the economy is soft, more than 8.3 million jobs have been created since August 2003 and unemployment remains low (4.7 percent). America remains open for business. …

Claudia Rosett says the UN is about to do a rerun of the 2001 trash America and Israel conference in Durban.

In its abuse of American taxpayer dollars and trust, the United Nations has come up with many creative projects over the years, ranging from terrorist schoolhouses in Gaza, to procurement fraud, to per diems for pedophiliac peacekeepers. Now, the U.N. is on the brink of channeling millions in U.S. funds to pay for an encore of its notorious America-bashing, Israel-trashing conference held six years ago in Durban, South Africa.

That U.N. jamboree, which opened in late August, 2001, was supposed to be all about the worthy cause of ending racism. Instead, it turned into such a frenzy of despotic and Islamofascist hatred, targeting America and Israel, that both countries walked out. A few days later, those events were overshadowed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States — hijackings driven by the same kind of hate stoked at the Durban conference.

Instead of saying “never again,” the U.N. is now preparing a repeat performance, which has acquired the nickname of Durban II. Masquerading as a “review” of Durban I, it is already shaping up as another hate-fest. Among the prime planners of this pow-wow are the despotisms of Libya, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

Stuart Taylor wonders about the efficacy of the Clinton camp’s complaints about Obama’s honesty.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?

The irony of her potshots at Barack Obama’s character has hardly gone unnoticed. Nor has the idiocy of her December 2 press release breathlessly revealing that “in kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President.’ ” This, the Clinton release explained, gives the lie to Obama’s claim that he is “not running to fulfill some long-held plans” to become president. Hillary was not, it appears, joking. …

 

… let’s take a trip down memory lane — from the tawdriness of the 1992 presidential campaign through the mendacity of the ensuing years — to revisit a sampling of why so many of us came to think that Hillary’s first instinct when in an embarrassing spot is to lie. …

Politico has the story in the GOP two wins last night.

Republicans retained two House seats in special elections Tuesday, including a hotly contested Ohio race that the two parties spent nearly $700,000 trying to win.

Republican officials immediately pointed to the issue of immigration, an increasingly pivotal theme in contests across the nation as well as in the presidential primary race, as a key factor in their Ohio victory. …

Shorts from John Fund.

The Captain was on a roll today. He posts on the GOP election success, Clinton, the National Review support of Mitt Romney, Hitch’s call for the end of the CIA, and concealed carry.

1. Had the Republicans lost their two special election contests to replace deceased GOP House members, one would see the papers filled with analyses of the coming debacle for Republican hopes in 2008. Now that they have won both handily, expect most to either ignore the races altogether or chalk up the wins to local Republican strength. However, pundits cannot easily dismiss the lessons from the race in Ohio: …

 

2. Hillary Clinton has begun to shift resources to New Hampshire as part of a firewall strategy after seeing Iowa slip from her grasp. However, it may be too late for the Granite State to contain the collapse of her once-invincible primary campaign. CNN shows a dead heat now in New Hampshire, as Hillary has squandered her lead: …

… A loss here would prove devastating to Hillary. She has had a consistent lead in the state that breathed new life into her husband’s faltering campaign in 1992, and a loss to Obama would have the opposite effect. It would give the one-term Senator national credibility and access to even more fundraising than the prodigious amounts he has already accumulated. It leaves the myth of her inevitability in tatters, and opens the door to the harder Left that supports Obama. …

3. The endorsement season seems in full swing now, and this time Santa’s dropped a big gift to Mitt Romney — the National Review endorsement. When William F. Buckley’s venerable journal speaks on effective conservatism, people listen, and Mitt’s team has reason to cheer: …

4. Christopher Hitchens proposes a radical solution to the problem of spin-cycle NIEs and interagency feuding. Rather than continue with efforts to reform the intelligence community, Hitchens argues for the elimination of the CIA and rebuilding our intel efforts from the ground up. It seems like a radical step during a time of war, but the agency may now have angered enough people on both sides of the aisle to make it possible: …

5. Jeanne Assam carried her pistol with her to church on Sunday. She did so legally, having received a license to carry a concealed weapon. If a weapon in church seems incongruous, it also became providential on this particular Sunday, as Assam stopped an assault that may have killed many more people than it did (via Memeorandum and many CapQ readers): …

IBD editors like concealed carry.

Every time there are multiple shootings, like those that occurred over the weekend at the Youth With A Mission missionary training center in Arvada, Colo., and later at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, we are lectured about the easy access to firearms in the U.S. and the dangers it creates.

But many are thankful today that Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard at New Life, had easy access to a gun when Matthew Murray entered the east entrance of the church and began firing his rifle. Murray was carrying two handguns, an assault rifle and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

If Jeanne Assam had not had a gun at her side, dozens more might have died in Sunday’s shooting at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. …

John Stossel goes mano a mano, libertarian to libertarian with Ron Paul.

Over the last few months, I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from people asking me to interview Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, so I did.

It’s refreshing to interview a politician who doesn’t mince words. It’s even more refreshing to interview one who understands the benefits of limited government. …

Walter Williams thinks the NAACP has been around long enough.

… The major problems confronting a large segment of the black community have little or nothing to do with racism — problems such as unprecedented illegitimacy, family breakdown, fraudulent education, crime and rampant social pathology. If white people became angels tomorrow, it would do nothing to solve problems that can only be solved by blacks.

But I’m somewhat optimistic. More and more blacks are seeing through race hustlers such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Doc Cheatham. An even more optimistic note is the financial decline of the NAACP. Declining black support is good evidence that the civil rights struggle is over and won. That’s not to say there are not major problems but they are not civil rights problems. …

John Tierney on how fishermen and Manhattan drivers can prevent the “tragedy of the commons.”

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Caroline Glick reacts to the NIE on Iran’s bomb.

The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.

The NIE begins with the sensationalist opening line: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Teheran halted its nuclear weapons program.” But the rest of the report contradicts the lead sentence. For instance, the second line says, “We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Teheran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, contrary to that earth-shattering opening, the NIE acknowledges that the Iranians have an active nuclear program and that they are between two and five years away from nuclear capabilities.

The NIE’s final sentence: “We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so,” only emphasizes that US intelligence agencies view Iran’s nuclear program as a continuous and increasing threat rather than a suspended and diminishing one.

But the content of the NIE is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the opening line – as the report’s authors no doubt knew full well when they wrote it. With that opening line, the NIE effectively takes the option of American use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons off the table. …

Bret Stephens says the NIE didn’t forecast the insertion of Soviet ICBM’s in Cuba either.

“The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.”

–Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, Sept. 19, 1962

Twenty-five days after this NIE was published, a U-2 spy plane photographed a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. It’s possible the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program will not prove as misjudged or as damaging as the 1962 estimate. But don’t bet on it.

Free market think tanks in Europe? John Fund has the details.

Mark Steyn gives a link to the Islamocreeps in Canada.

Stanley Kurtz on the complaint against Steyn.

… If this complaint carries, public discourse on the war on terror, Muslim immigration, and related topics would be transformed beyond all recognition (in Canada). It is as if, instead of simply rebutting or railing against conservatives and Republicans, liberal Democrats went to the Supreme Court and had the right side of the blogosphere, and nearly all conservative opinion magazines, placed into receivership. It is evident that the complainants are aware of this. They are determined to fundamentally reshape a kind of journalism “that has become increasingly pervasive in Canada in the last few years.” So this is not really a complaint against any particular factual claim or rhetorical move. It is instead a request that vast sections of heretofore legitimate reporting and opinion journalism be altogether banned. …

WaPo op-ed on what it is like to be on a campus and of the GOP persuasion.

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities’ role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote “God and Man at Yale” — in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others — making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views — commonplace in American society and among the political class — are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light. …

Daily Mail, UK wonders if Al Gore is doing good, or just doing well.

Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 a minute to deliver a poorly received speech.

The former American Vice-President was also accused of being “precious” at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming.

Many of the audience at last month’s Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000. …

Dilbert retails the argument for adding a recent president to Mt. Rushmore. And actually, he’s not joking.

News Biscuit says Brit wind farmers are facing competition from cheaper African wind.

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John Fund interviews one of the members of Zimbabwe’s opposition.

Zimbabwe is in the news this weekend as its 83-year-old strongman, Robert Mugabe, arrives in Lisbon to attend his first European Union summit meeting in seven years. His appalling human-rights record has led British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to boycott the meeting.

While the spotlight has not recently been on this deeply troubled land, there are dissidents who do not want the world to forget. Earlier this year I met with one of them, a tall, charismatic 41-year-old who attended the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual chatfest of thinkers and well-heeled idealists sponsored by the Aspen Institute.

But Arthur Mutambara, who leads one of the main opposition groups fighting the Mugabe tyranny, wasn’t in the Colorado Rockies to exchange pleasantries. He startled the crowd with blunt language that isn’t normal parlance for politicians from the developing world.

“We Africans are responsible for our problems, and we must take charge of our lives,” he said in a commanding, deep voice reminiscent of James Earl Jones. “We must move away from aid to genuine investment. We must ensure that after getting rid of a dictator we plant deep roots for the rule of law and actually improve the lot of the people. So when we who believe in democracy triumph, I ask you to judge us harshly if we fail to live up to our promises.” …

Paul Greenberg on Russia’s election.

The latest election results out of Russia are more Russian than ever, more’s the pity.

The latest czar had no problem arranging a victory that would have made old Mayor Daley or Boss Crump look like a piker. The outcome was so forgone a conclusion that the usual European election monitors didn’t even bother to show up. Besides. Vladimir Putin’s regime had delayed granting them visas for so long they were denied a chance to witness all the preparations for the big show. …

Stanley Kurtz posts at The Corner on the attempts by a Canadian Islamic group to censor Mark Steyn.

… This is a big deal. The blogosphere has so far largely missed it, but this attack on Mark Steyn is very much our business. There may be an impulse to dismiss this assault on Steyn, on the assumption that it will fail, that Steyn is a big boy and can take care of himself, and that in any case this is crazy Canada, where political correctness rules, rather than the land of the free. That would be a mistake. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s war on Mark Steyn and Maclean’s is an attack on all of us. I’ll say more in a moment about how a Canadian case can reach into America, but let’s first take a look at the goings on up north. …

One of Steyn’s critics is caught with his pants down. Cool thing is Mark does the honors.

…Hello, Mr Henley? Anybody home in there? Those are quotation marks, because they’re someone else’s words – not the blatant racism of the racist douchebag Steyn but of a prominent Scandinavian imam. It’s tempting to say to Jim Henley, “Douchebag, douche thyself”, and leave it at that. However, in an attempt to divine his thinking on the subject, I’d like to ask him this: …

David Warren comes to Mark’s defense.

… For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant’s right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers — for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

My hope is that this case against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s will be fruitful. It will be, if it inspires enough people — especially journalists, of all political persuasions — to express outrage at what has been done; and inspires Canada’s free citizens into the necessary political action to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves. The worst possible result is if the case fails to produce this response.

Ayann Hirsi Ali notes the times when Muslims are tolerant like when they tolerate the fundamentalist thugs.

… It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? …

Jeff Jacoby is not reassured by the Iran NIE.

… The intelligence agencies’ record for accuracy doesn’t inspire confidence. Not everyone embraced the NIE’s startling judgment. Even the UN’s nuclear inspectors were dubious. “We are more skeptical,” an official close to the inspection agency told The New York Times last week. “We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”

Given the history of US intelligence blunders, such skepticism is well warranted. The intelligence community badly underestimated Saddam’s nuclear progress before the first Gulf War and badly overestimated his stock of WMDs — a “slam-dunk,” George Tenet insisted — on the eve of the 2003 war. It was taken by surprise when Pakistan went nuclear in 1998s, just as it had been stunned when the Soviets went nuclear in 1949. The intelligence agencies didn’t expect Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. They didn’t foresee North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. They were blindsided by Sept. 11.

Now they conclude that the Iranians have shelved their nuclear weapons program. Two years ago they concluded the opposite. “Across the board,” the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission found in 2005, “the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors.” Considering their track record, that sounds about right.

Power Line spots a photo from Iran.

Division of Labour learning to love the big box store.

Coyote Blog provides perspective on wealth.

Hit and Run calls Bill Buckley on his love for smoking nazis.

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IBD editorial tells us how the UN cooked the books on sea level changes at the globalony confab in Bali.

… We have no problem with the IPCC taking control of its meeting destinations. But we do oppose the intellectual dishonesty of seizing control of data and torturing them into the outcome IPCC scientists are looking for.

The possibility of such fraud has been raised by Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden. According to his June interview with the British Telegraph that was revisited on a Telegraph blog last week, the IPCC might have doctored data to show a sea- level rise from 1992 to 2002.

“Suddenly it changed,” Morner said of the IPCC’s 2003 sea-level chart, which is intended to convince the public that warming due to man’s activities is melting ice that will cause the oceans to rise to dangerous levels.

The change “showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 millimeters per year,” which just happens to be the same increase that was measured by one of six Hong Kong tide gauges. Morner said that particular tide gauge is “the only record which you shouldn’t use” because “every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment.”

A simple error by the IPCC? Not in Morner’s mind. “Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that,” he said. “It is a falsification of the data set.”

But what about Vanuatu, that little South Pacific island that’s supposedly drowning because Americans selfishly burn too much fossil fuel to drive their SUVs and heat and cool their McMansions?

“There is absolutely no signal that the sea level” around that island is rising, Morner said. “If anything, you could say that maybe the tide is lowering a little bit, but absolutely no rising.”

Because he’s at odds with the IPCC, Morner would be about as welcome at this year’s meeting as the International Climate Science Coalition has been. That group of international scientists, skeptical of the global warming theory, was told it could not present its information at the conference. …

Power Line posts on the subject and on an Alan Dershowitz appearance at the Hudson Institute.

Charles Krauthammer thinks the Mormon flap has some Huckabee origins.

… Huckabee has exploited Romney’s Mormonism with an egregious subtlety. Huckabee is running a very effective ad in Iowa about religion. “Faith doesn’t just influence me,” he says on camera, “it really defines me.” The ad then hails him as a “Christian leader.” …

 

… Every mention of God in every inaugural address in American history refers to the deity in this kind of all-embracing, universal, nondenominational way. (The one exception: William Henry Harrison. He caught cold delivering that inaugural address. Thirty-one days later, he was dead. Draw your own conclusion.) I suspect that neither Jefferson’s Providence nor Washington’s Great Author nor Lincoln’s Almighty would look kindly on the exploitation of religious differences for political gain. It is un-American. It is unfortunate that Romney has had to justify himself in response.

Mark Steyn was in the OC Register. He suggests we need a free market for housing and religion.

James Taranto has opinions about the worth of the youth vote.

Sorry, but if there’s one subject about which the cynics are always right, it’s the “youth vote.” It is a myth. Young people, by and large, simply do not vote, and there is no reason to think that will ever change. Candidates pursuing the “youth vote” are like Charlie Brown kicking that football–this time, every time, they’re sure it will be different. But it always ends with a WHAM!

The myth of the youth vote is a product of baby-boom liberalism, an extension of the urban legend that the “1960s generation” were a bunch of idealistic activists who vanquished racism and war. The truth is that the civil rights movement had already won by the time the first baby boomer came of age, in 1964; and while there was something of a youth movement against the Vietnam War, it was motivated principally by selfishness–i.e., fear of the draft–not idealism.

The Economist has interesting thoughts about food prices. Their thought is that costlier food provides a chance to get rid of farm subsidies and at the same time right the balance between rural and urban.

… Over the past few years, a sense has grown that the rich are hogging the world’s wealth. In poor countries, widening income inequality takes the form of a gap between city and country: incomes have been rising faster for urban dwellers than for rural ones. If handled properly, dearer food is a once-in-a-generation chance to narrow income disparities and to wean rich farmers from subsidies and help poor ones. The ultimate reward, though, is not merely theirs: it is to make the world richer and fairer.

WSJ contributor wonders if it makes sense to give to Harvard.

Bill Gates has $56 billion to his name. What would you do if he called your home asking you for some money? You’d hang up on the prankster, of course. Now, what would you do if Harvard, with its $35 billion endowment, called begging for cash? My wife and I take out our checkbook. But maybe we should be hitting up Harvard instead. …

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Mark Steyn, in Macleans, makes the point we have laws because we are civilized. Laws didn’t create our civilization.

One of my all-time favourite observations on Canada’s brave new Trudeaupia came from the great George Jonas, apropos the good old days when the Mounties’ livelier lads were illegally burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. With his usual glibness Pierre Trudeau blithely responded that if people were upset by the RCMP’s illegal barn-burning, perhaps he’d make it legal for the RCMP to burn barns. As Jonas observed, M. Trudeau had missed the point: barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong. …

… “A society’s first line of defence is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values,” wrote Walter Williams of George Mason University recently. “They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. Policemen and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct.”

“Restraint” is an unfashionable concept these days. I was lunching with an elderly chap in the early stages of dementia recently. He’s someone who in all the years I’ve known him has never used any vulgar language in public or private, but the waitress’s generous embonpoint caught his eye and he said to me (and half the restaurant) with all the blithe insouciance with which one might remark on the weather or the traffic, “I like big tits, don’t you?” Dementia removes inhibition, and so your private thoughts are now publicly expressed. Society at large has lost its inhibitions: whether that is a symptom of civilizational dementia will be for future generations to judge.

Corner post illustrates the above. It is Steyn again writing about the value of the first amendment which makes it difficult for mischievous laws to be written.

Speaking of laws, Jan Crawford Greenburg posts on Gitmo.

When I was getting ready for a trip to Guantanamo Bay last week, I read an article written last year by a young interpreter (and now lawyer) who was working with some of the attorneys for the detainees. Titled “My Guantanamo Diary,” it was a vivid and urgent piece that painted a grim portrait of a place where evil flourishes amid the scrub of the Cuban coastline.

In the article, the interpreter describes the anguish and helplessness she feels after meeting the detainees, most of whom she believes to be innocent. But initially she was conflicted: She admits to one of the lawyers for the detainees that the guards had seemed so friendly.

“Yeah, they’re nice,” the lawyer, Tom Wilner, a partner in the Washington office of Shearman & Sterling LLP, shoots back. “But this whole place is evil — and the face of evil often appears friendly.”

That perfectly captures Guantanamo: The face of evil often appears friendly.

It’s a sentiment shared by almost everyone you talk to, those on both sides of the debate. Soldiers and lawyers, military officers and human rights activists—everyone sees evil at Guantanamo.

They just believe the evil lies within different people. …

John Bolton writes for WaPo on the NIE.

The Captain compares Bolton’s and Cheney’s NIE thoughts.

… Between the two, I’d trust Cheney on this question. He has seen the data and received the briefing; Bolton is out of the loop now. Cheney has no reason to go easy on the ODNI or CIA, especially since the NIE contradicts what he has stated for the last few years on Iran. Cheney has more motivation to go on the attack than Bolton, and yet he seems content to let the NIE analysis stand. That should speak to its credibility.

Both men, however, make the same point about the limit of the intel that formed the basis of this analysis. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Until Iran fully complies with the IAEA and the UN Security Council, we know that we cannot verify their intentions or actions. We have no firm knowledge that Iran — which lied about this program for years until 2003 — has not moved its efforts elsewhere in the country to continue its weapons program. …

And the Captain posts on the problems of the Clinton campaign.

Once seen as an inevitability, Hillary Clinton may not win the first two contests in the primaries — and that may change the entire Democratic race. Having fallen into no better than a tie with Barack Obama in Iowa, Clinton now has lost significant ground in New Hampshire. She now leads by only six points, and her momentum has completely dissipated: …

Couple of good columns on free trade.

Tony Blankley thinks the country needs to have a good debate about free trade.

Other than the fight against radical Islam, the efficacy of free trade may be the most important issue pending before the American people and our government. Since the end of World War II, the principle of free trade has defined U.S. economic policy — and thus, to a large extent, the world’s economy. Globalization is the product of a long half-century of American free-trade policy.

Steve Chapman thinks there’s no debate.

Democrats yearn for the bounteous days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when the economy was flourishing, there were good jobs at good wages, and poverty was on the wane. So it’s a puzzle that on one of his signature achievements — the North American Free Trade Agreement — the party’s presidential candidates are sprinting away from his record as fast as they can. It’s as though Republicans were calling for defense cuts while invoking Ronald Reagan.

Even Hillary Clinton can’t bring herself to defend the deal her husband pushed through. Asked during a recent debate if she thought it was a mistake, she did everything but deny she’d ever met the man.

“All I can remember from that is a bunch of charts,” she chortled, in possibly the least believable statement of the 2008 campaign. “That, sort of, is a vague memory.” In the end, though, Clinton declared that “NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.” …

Allen Barra points out why Heisman candidates rarely succeed in the NFL.

University of Florida sophomore quarterback Tim Tebow is the odds-on favorite to win the 2007 Heisman Trophy this Saturday as the nation’s outstanding college football player. Since the colleges serve as a farm system for the National Football League and Mr. Tebow is the best player in college, he should be a cinch to make it in the pros, right?

Not according to history. In the modern era of the NFL, only a handful of Heisman Trophy winners have enjoyed genuine success in the pro ranks. …

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Power Line posts on Huckabee’s assertion his lack of foreign policy experience is analogous to Ronald Reagan. They think more like Jimmy Carter.

… When it comes to foreign policy, Huckabee more closely resembles another former governor, Jimmy Carter. It was Carter, not Reagan, who viewed foreign policy as an extension of his own character and personal principles. Carter stood for a foreign policy “as decent as the American people.” Reagan stood for defeating our enemies. When Huckabee frets about how Gitmo is making us appear to foreigners, when he asserts that “we broke Iraq,” and when he says he’s qualified to be commander-in-chief because of his character rather than because of his understanding of our enemies, it’s pretty clear that his foreign policy roots extend nowhere near the fertile soil of Reaganism.

The Line also posts on Harry Reid still hoping for defeat in Iraq.

Norman Podhoretz from Contentions starts a long line of posts on the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. Most everybody, except for Mike Huckabee (more on that later) has remarked on this report.

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. …

… I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. …

Max Boot

… So at the end of this NIE you come away knowing not much more than when you started. Basically you are left with the knowledge that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear work that probably won’t result in a bomb in the next couple of years but that could produce a weapon sometime thereafter. And most of those key judgments are delivered with only “moderate confidence.” Given the intelligence community’s consistent track record of being wrong in the past, especially about other nations’ nuclear programs (the CIA has been surprised in the past by, among others, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, India, and Pakistan) that doesn’t inspire much, well, confidence.

Gabriel Schoenfeld

… Without access to the underlying intelligence on which these back-and-forth assertions in this committee-produced document are founded, interpreting them involves groping in the dark. But the peculiar language, and the disclosure of dissenting views expressed by the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council, strongly hint that sharp internal divisions exist about the precise nature of the Iranian halt — if it is a halt at all.

Connecting the Dots, which has been highly critical of leaks of classified information, is left in the uncomfortable position of hoping for a leak of classified information that will resolve all the mysteries surrounding this new assessment of the Iranian nuclear program. Only one thing can be said with “high confidence” about this new NIE: when sharp divisions exist within the U.S. Intelligence Community, leaks are on the way.

Schoenfeld again answering Podhoretz’s suspicions about CIA crossing up Bush.

… There are significant ambiguities in this NIE, and as Max Boot rightly points out, it still leaves ample reason to worry about Iranian nuclear ambitions. But in the current climate of skepticism about the competence of the CIA and other intelligence bodies, the idea that intelligence officials engaged in a coordinated effort to cook the evidence seems impossible to credit. Even if there was a shared desire among all sixteen agencies to do such a thing (which seems implausible on its face) pulling off such a caper would be a hugely difficult task, and almost certainly beyond the capacity even of America’s most ingenious spies — assuming we even have any ingenious spies.

Although I remain as worried as Norman Podhoretz about the dangers posed by an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and though there is ample reason to wonder about the quality of U.S. intelligence, I would still have to put “low confidence” in his dark suspicions.

Third Schoenfeld;

A day has passed since the release of the new intelligence-community estimate of the Iranian program and the smell of rotting fish is growing stronger. Even the editorial page of the New York Times is wondering if the NIE erred on the side of incaution. It reports that an official “close” to the International Atomic Energy Agency “told the Times yesterday that new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.”

Any careful reading of the NIE makes its obvious that this is true. The report’s stark opening declaration – made with “high confidence” – that Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 is blatantly misleading. The only thing that was halted in 2003 was what the intelligence community calls the military side of Iran’s nuclear program. …

… But in dismissing Norman’s dark suspicions, did I treat his claim “a bit too literally,” as Ben Orlanski has written in the comments section in response to my post? Orlanski goes on to explain:

This isn’t a question of cooking the books to produce bogus information to defeat Bush. It is a question of how this was spun. The NIE report chose to lead with the made-for-headline finding about the halt to the program. But this isn’t really the most relevant part of the report, just the part that was pretty clearly intended to grab headlines. Is saying that a conspiracy? I don’t think so. I think the authors wanted to impact the political debate, and did so not by lying or creating bogus conclusions or reasoning, but simply by choosing to emphasize the part of their overall conclusions that played most pointedly into the political environment. [This] suggest[s] certain political canniness [on the part] of our intelligence agencies, and also suggests that they wanted to have an impact on ultimate policy. That is not their role, and there is something disconcerting about their assuming it.

With this I would entirely agree. If that is indeed what happened here, and the evidence that it did so is in front of our eyes, and if it is indeed what Norman was saying, then, like the intelligence-community’s disavowal of its 2005 NIE, I would have to disavow my previous “low confidence” estimate in Norman “dark suspicions” and join him in voicing equally dark suspicions of my own.

Abe Greenwald, also in Contentions, with the Dem reactions.

If Iran did halt its nuclear weaponization program in 2003, then we can thank the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Yet the Democrats consider the NIE an indication of the effectiveness of diplomacy. Here’s a round-up:

The Captain.

Roger Simon.

The Spectator, UK;

… What on earth is wrong with the American intelligence community? Granted that of necessity it can make public only the bare minimum of information, this report provokes a high degree of scepticism. It asserts:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.

But in 2005 this same intelligence community was saying:

“[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable.”

So are we now to assume that in 2005, Iran was ‘determined to develop nuclear weapons’ despite having ‘halted its nuclear weapon programme’ two years earlier? Were the intelligence community simply wrong in 2005? And if they were that incompetent then, why should we believe what they are saying now? …

Byron York has the last post on the NIE. Finally! This goes full circle to Huckabee’s opinion of the new NIE. He hadn’t heard of it. That’s right!

Power Line with a change of subject. Their view of the detainees at Gitmo is opposite Stuart Taylor’s.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear argument in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, in which foreign detainees challenge the legality and constitutionality of their detention as enemy combatants pursuant to the Military Commissions Act of 2006. To understand the issues in this case, I can’t think of a better source than this on-line debate presented by the Federalist Society. …

The Captain thinks the NY Times is “bailing on Hillary.”

The New York Times offers an unusually pessimistic appraisal of Hillary Clinton’s effect on the 2008 down-ticket races. Carl Hulse reports that Congressional incumbents and candidates have begun to fear that her nomination will energize a dispirited opposition and could cost the Democrats the seats they gained in 2006. It’s not exactly a new thought, but usually it gets expressed as Republican optimism (via Memeorandum): …

John Stossel has more on the tragedy of the commons.

My Thanksgiving column about how the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming but thrived once they switched to private cultivation made some people angry. One commented, “Sharing of the fruits of our labor is a bad thing?”

I never said that.

I practice charity regularly. I believe in sharing. But when government takes our money by force and gives it to others, that’s not sharing.

And sharing can’t be a basis for production — you can’t share what hasn’t been produced. My point is that production and prosperity require property rights. Property rights associate effort with benefits. Where benefits are unrelated to effort, people do the least amount necessary to get by while taking the most they can get. Economists have a pithy way of summing up this truth: No one washes a rental car.

It’s called the “tragedy of the commons.” …

Walter Williams has more on income mobility.

Listening to people like Lou Dobbs, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee lamenting the plight of America’s middle class and poor, you’d have to conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket. According to them, there’s wage stagnation, while the rich are getting richer and the poor becoming poorer. There are a couple of updates that tell quite a different story.

The Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal editorial “Movin’ On Up” reports on a recent U.S. Treasury study of income tax returns from 1996 and 2005. The study tracks what happened to tax filers 25 years of age and up during this 10-year period. Controlling for inflation, nearly 58 percent of the poorest income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005. Twenty-six percent of them achieved middle or upper-middle class income, and over 5 percent made it into the highest income group.

Over the decade, the inflation-adjusted median income of all tax filers rose by 24 percent. As such, it refutes Dobbs-Edwards-Huckabee claims about stagnant incomes. In fact, only one income group experienced a decline in real income. That was the richest one percent, who saw an income drop of nearly 26 percent over the 10-year period. …

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Mark Steyn tells us why we should miss Australia’s John Howard.

… What mattered to the world was the strategic clarity Howard’s ministry demonstrated on the critical issues facing (if you’ll forgive the expression) Western civilisation.

First, the prime minister grasped the particular challenge posed by Islam. “I’ve heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child,” said the Democrats’ Lyn Allison. “If it wasn’t the Greeks, it was the Italians … or it was the Vietnamese.” But those are races and nationalities. Islam is a religion, and a political project, and a globalised ideology. Unlike the birthplace of your grandfather, it’s not something you leave behind in the old country.

Indeed, the pan-Islamic identity embraced by many second and third-generation Muslims in the West has very little to do with where their mums and dads happen to hail from. “You can’t find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad,” said Howard, stating the obvious in a way most of his fellow Western leaders could never quite bring themselves to do.

“Raving on about jihad” is a splendid line which meets what English law used to regard as the reasonable-man test. If you’re a reasonable bloke slumped in front of the telly watching jihadists threatening to behead the Pope or Muslim members of Britain’s National Health Service ploughing a blazing automobile through the check-in desk at Glasgow airport, “raving on about jihad” fits in a way that President George W. Bush’s religion-of-peace pabulum doesn’t. Bush and Tony Blair can be accused of the very opposite of the traditional politician’s failing: they walked the walk but they didn’t talk the talk. That’s to say neither leader found a rhetoric for the present struggle that resonated. Howard did. …

Claudia Rosett keeps us up to date on the UN climate conference in Bali.

… Life’s much too short to read all the documents assembled already (especially when you could be making much better use of your time watching a superb film that did NOT get a Nobel Prize: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”). But just to provide a sample, here’s one of my favorites, found while browsing through so far. It’s an agenda item discussing the ways to ensure UN-style “Privileges and Immunities for individuals serving on constituted bodies under the Kyoto Protocol… .” Translation: They’re looking for a way to ensure that no matter what they do to the rest of us, we can’t do anything about it.

Lotsa election stuff today. George Will is first. He’s spotted a few candidates he doesn’t like at all in “None of the Below.”

… Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism: He wants Washington to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public, show more solicitude for Americans of modest means and impose more protectionism, thereby raising the cost of living for Americans of modest means.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And — 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note — America must have a Christian president.

Another pious populist who was annoyed by Darwin — William Jennings Bryan — argued that William Howard Taft, his opponent in the 1908 presidential election, was unfit to be president because he was a Unitarian, a persuasion sometimes defined as the belief that there is at most one God. The electorate chose to run the risk of entrusting the presidency to someone skeptical about the doctrine of the Trinity.

If Huckabee succeeds in derailing Romney’s campaign by raising a religious test for presidential eligibility, that will be clarifying: In one particular, America was more enlightened a century ago.

Lee Harris in Tech Central thinks Rudy was too rough and should listen to the boos.

… We don’t want our President to lose his head while all about are losing theirs, to paraphrase Kipling.

We don’t want them acting mean either. That is why I suggest that Mayor Giuliani, who has so much to commend him, should pay attention to the boos he received in the last debate. They may have been the best advice that he could have possibly receive at this point in his campaign: stay tough, but don’t play too rough. Many of us like the guy, and we don’t want him to give us reason not to.

Michael Barone with an Iowa overview.

Every so often, I page through my copy of the Constitution, searching for the section that says Iowa and New Hampshire vote first. I’ve yet to find it. But Iowa and New Hampshire are set to lead off the presidential voting on January 3 and 8. Right now, Iowa, where about 200,000 people–around 10 percent of registered voters–are expected to attend the party caucuses, is producing great ruction in both parties’ races. …

Now, as to the tactics Clinton learned in kindergarten. “I know you are, but what am I?”

James Taranto.

As Democratic primary voters experience pre-emptive buyer’s remorse–that is, second thoughts about Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability”–a desperate Mrs. Clinton stands on the brink of losing all dignity. This is from a press release she put out last night: …

Captain comments.

… I can see where Hillary might be offended by someone with overactive ambition. Imagine what it would be like to have someone stick with a philandering husband/politician, accuse political opponents of vast partisan conspiracies, carpetbag into another state to win a walkover Senate election, all just to maintain one’s political viability for a Presidential run! My goodness, we wouldn’t want that kind of overwhelming, avaricious desire for power succeeding in grabbing the White House, would we? …

Couple of Corner posts.

Extraordinary. She’s lost some altitude nationally, and a little ground in Iowa where it’s always been a pretty close race, so nothing seems to suggest a need to break the glass—as in “break the glass in case of emergency.” But there’s broken glass scattered over the place and she’s taking the fire ax to Obama’s campaign. What does the Clinton campaign know about this race that we don’t? …

Writing in The Freeman, Walter Williams reminds us of the morality of free markets.

All too often defenders of free-market capitalism base their defense on the demonstration that free markets allocate resources more efficiently and hence lead to greater wealth than socialism and other forms of statism. While that is true, as Professor Milton Friedman frequently pointed out, economic efficiency and greater wealth should be seen and praised as simply a side benefit of free markets. The intellectual defense should focus on its moral superiority. Even if free markets were not more efficient and not engines for growth, they are morally superior to other forms of human organization because they are rooted in voluntary peaceable relationships rather than force and coercion. They respect the sanctity of the individual. …

It’s Getting Better All the Time says humpback whales are making a comeback.

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Nat Hentoff says when it come to Sudan, the UN and Africa have disgraced themselves.

The American draft of the resolution before the U.N. General Assembly could not have been any clearer or more vital, especially since an increasing number of governments and their murderous militias are using rape as a political weapon. As reported in The New York Times (Nov. 17), America intended to condemn “rape used by governments and armed groups to achieve political and military ends.”

But, as often happens at the spineless, rampantly disingenuous United Nations, the final resolution — after itself being savaged by many self-protecting revisions — stated that, in general, rape is not acceptable, but stripped out rape as an “instrument to achieve political objectives.” There was no mention left of government “soldiers and militia members.”

Instead, the United Nations weakly says that rape should not be used “in conflict and related situations.”

Who crippled the original American draft language? Not surprisingly, it was the 43-nation African Group Coalition. Said South African ambassador Dumisnai Kumalo, America had created two categories of rape and the African delegates wanted “to balance the text by making certain that there was no politicization of rape.”

Huh? …

Stuart Taylor is regarded highly here at Pickings. He has harshly criticized Bush’s policy regarding detainees. Seems like it ought to be here.

Lakhdar Boumediene was abducted almost six years ago from his home in Bosnia and flown to Guantanamo. He may be a bad guy. Or he may not be. We have no idea. The reason is President Bush’s continuing war on due process, which has blighted the lives of some unknown number of innocent men while doing vast damage to America’s standing in the world.

Boumediene’s petition for release, and those of 62 other Guantanamo detainees, will come before the Supreme Court on December 5. Based on the Court’s previous war-on-terrorism decisions and its unusual alacrity in agreeing on June 29 to hear these detainees’ appeals, Bush seems likely to get his fourth drubbing from the justices since 2004.

Bush deserves to lose. But even the wisest Court decision could barely begin to fix the mess that Bush has made of detention policy. And a judicial over-reaction — along the lines urged by left-leaning human-rights groups — could tie the hands of Bush’s successors. No would-be successor has suggested a sensible alternative policy. And most in Congress punt to the courts (or to Bush) the little-discussed, quintessentially legislative question of what our policy on detaining suspected foreign combatants should be.

So here’s my hope for a three-step quick fix: …

David Warren cruises the world looking for bullies like mobs in Sudan and diplomats from Saudi Arabia.

… My third example of bullying is a more subtle one. It is from the conference at Annapolis this week, and could be seen on television, by any perceptive person. Naturally, it was widely noticed in Israel, but not elsewhere. The royal Saudi delegates not only did not politely applaud, as is the genteel custom, after the Israeli delegate spoke. They had declined to put in their earphones, to hear the translation while that delegate spoke. From a party to actual peace negotiations, comes this rude gesture to announce that nothing a representative of Israel could say would be worth hearing.

After the conference, the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, whose national affiliation is compounded by the fact she is a woman, made an unprecedented public complaint. She said that none of the Arab foreign ministers would shake her hand; that she was treated as a pariah. Or as Frans Timmermans put it — a Dutch government minister who was in attendance — they “shun her like she is Count Dracula’s younger sister.”

The questions should ask themselves: Why do we treat Arab foreign ministers diplomatically, who are themselves incapable of diplomacy? Why do we confer dignities upon Saudi royalty who will confer no dignity upon our friends? …

NY Times editors agree about the Saudis. That’s right, a Times editorial here.

Pickings has recently praised Dianne Feinstein. Barbara Boxer, however, is a creep. John Fund has the story.

How much more partisan and petty can Washington get? California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer is refusing even to allow a hearing for a judicial nominee who has the backing of prominent Democrats, in part because she harbors a decade-old grudge about the Clinton impeachment. …

 

… Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to President Clinton, is disappointed in the Boxer rebellion against Mr. Rogan. “This is a man who would make a great judge,” he told the Washington Post, adding that if Ms. Boxer “got to know Jim Rogan since the impeachment days as I have, [she] would reconsider her opposition.”

Many California legal figures are shocked at Ms. Boxer’s sudden animus. In 2001, the Bush administration struck an agreement with Sen. Boxer and her California colleague, Dianne Feinstein, to create a panel to fill federal district court vacancies in the Golden State. Known as the Parsky Commission after Bush adviser Gerald Parsky, it is composed of members appointed separately by President Bush and both senators. Since 2001, its members have unanimously approved 27 candidates for judicial vacancies, all of whom have been later approved by Sens. Boxer and Feinstein. Indeed, Ms. Boxer recently praised the committee’s picks as “the best of the best.” At least one Democrat who has served on the committee told me of their profound disappointment that Ms. Boxer has now decided to second-guess its work: “This sends a bad message to good people who should be on the bench, since it shows the rug can be pulled out from under them at a very late stage.” …

The Captain says Clinton is going after Obama’s character. Say what?

Paul Greenberg writes for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Before that he was with the Pine Bluff Commercial. He has long experience with the Narcissist and thus is uniquely qualified to write about slick Willie.

… Bill Clinton tends to bet for and against any political proposition that involves taking a risk, then recall only the position that proved popular. That way, he can’t lose. Principle has nothing to do with it; he’s just betting across the board.

An escape hatch is almost standard equipment on any Clinton assertion. By now there’s even a term for it – the Clinton clause. It’s a kind of art form, really, and connoisseurs of the Clintonesque will be able to remember the exact moment they caught on to it. …

Tim Rutten, media critic of the LA Times has the harshest criticism of CNN’s debate performance.

… Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday’s debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN’s performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent. …

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Mark Steyn thinks the best defense is being offensive.

The holiday season is here, and that means it’s time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition. Australia is a gazillion time zones ahead of the United States – it may even be Boxing Day there already – so they got in first this year with a truly fantastic headline:

“Santas Warned ‘Ho Ho Ho’ Offensive To Women.”

Really. As the story continued: “Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say ‘ha ha ha’ instead, the Daily Telegraph reported. One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use ‘ho ho ho’ because it could frighten children and was too close to ‘ho’, a U.S. slang term for prostitute.”

If I were a female resident of Sydney, I think I’d be more offended by the assumption that Australian women and U.S. prostitutes are that easily confused. As the old gangsta-rap vaudeville routine used to go: “Who was that ho I saw you with last night?” “That was no ho, that was my bitch.”

But the point is that the right not to be offended is now the most sacred right in the world. The right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, all are as nothing compared with the universal right to freedom from offense. …

Gerard Baker of the London Times looks at the celebrity Clinton dragged out to counter Obama’s Oprah.

… Streisand long ago crossed the blurry boundary between celebrity and politics. She is yesterday’s news, proudly waving the banner of liberal preposterousness since 1965. Her only memorable recent cinematic performance, for all the wrong reasons, was as the oversexed sexuagenarian alongside Dustin Hoffman in the utterly tasteless Meet The Fockers sequel.

Her intervention this week is fitting, though, precisely because it captures what looms as the largest impediment to the increasingly troubled ambitions of Mrs Clinton, that what the former First Lady is offering is a better yesterday. Mrs Clinton’s campaign might in fact be summed up in the lyrics of Streisand’s most famous locution, back when she was still a bona fide celebrity:

Memories, like the corners of my mind,

Misty, water-coloured memories

Of the way we were.

Despite her efforts to portray herself as something new, voters know well enough that Mrs Clinton represents a restoration rather than a revolution. …

The Captain posts on the Iraqi cleric Ali Sistani.

Earlier this week, the leading Shi’ite cleric in Iraq issued a fatwa that has largely gone unnoticed by the world media, but could have an impact on reconciliation and the political gridlock in Baghdad. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani forbade the killings of Sunnis by Shi’ites on Tuesday while meeting with Sunni clerics in an ecumenical council, and called for a renewed sense of Iraqi nationalism to replace sectarian divides in the country (via SCSU Scholars): …

And he posts on the dénouement for the latest New Republic fabulist.

John Fund reports Tom Lantos has fun with Dutch Euro-weenies.

And Mr. Fund will kick off the coverage of the debacle created by CNN at the YouTube debate.

… The debates so far have largely been political theater. Polls show that voters are most concerned about Iraq, the economy and Washington corruption. But most of the debates featuring GOP candidates have been loaded up with questions on God, guns, gays and abortion that, while important, do not make the list of pressing issues news outlets such as CNN routinely compile. In the wake of the Kerr fiasco, a full autopsy of just how these debates are put together is called for. I would never have thought I would be pining for the days when PBS sponsored GOP debates, but that’s where we are now.

Hugh Hewitt has a phrase; “premeditated mediocrity.”

… this [is] premeditated mediocrity. The network had months to prepare and consider and execute. But even with all that time, it lacked the minimal talent necessary to produce a serious debate about important issues using new technology. All it could deliver was a carnival of bad taste, trick questions, and full frontal left wing bias.

Hugh’s interview with Mark Steyn touched on the debate.

MS: Yes, and I think in fact, CNN behaved disgracefully. I don’t know, I mean, you’ve been on CNN before. I find CNN a very tiresome network in part because when you, when they try to book you on something, they want to have these pre-interviews, which are big time wasters, and I never agree to do them, where they want to discuss your views for an hour beforehand, before you do your two minute on-air bit with whoever the host is. So it seems to me incredible on its face that for example, this gay general who’s supporting Hillary, that they couldn’t have done the minimal amount of work necessary to find out that this guy is not Mr. Undecided Voter, but he is in fact on the Hillary campaign, that the woman who asked the abortion question is not, you know, Little Miss Undecided Feminist Voter, but in fact an explicit John Edwards supporter. I simply don’t buy the fact that even the overmanned, deadbeat production staff at CNN simply were incapable of finding out the truth of this thing.

Howard Kurtz with CNN comments.

The Captain weighs in.

… Memo to CNN: quit trying to excuse this away. No one tried “extremely hard” to vet these questions. Obviously, no one tried vetting them at all. The continuation of the pretense only damages your credibility even further than the debate did.

What a shame, too, because the questions themselves weren’t so bad. The plants revealed their own prejudices against the GOP, and the candidates did a good job of swatting them aside. The worst inclusions didn’t come from the plants, but from CNN’s decision to include insulting questions about Confederate flags and the Bible, which revealed CNN’s prejudices about Republicans. Mitt Romney gave the best response to this when he asked contemptuously why the flag question even got selected for a presidential debate. Otherwise, with just over 30 questions in the debate, most of them focused on policy in substantive ways and provoked perhaps the best intramural exchanges in the debates this year.

CNN blew it, and blew it big — and they didn’t try extremely hard to avoid it. They got extremely sloppy and careless, and they got caught. …

The New Editor.

Stephen Green from Pajamas Media.

… What didn’t happen was a real debate, although what we saw was certainly, if only occasionally, entertaining. What we saw tonight was the usual for a presidential “debate.” In other words, it was a joint press conference, the only real difference being that, this time, it was punctuated by cute videos made by “real Americans” “just like you.” That’s the hype, anyway.

What we really saw was CNN playing out its own agenda in front of a couple million viewers and seven or eight candidates, without anyone calling them on it. …

Phil Valentine from the Tennessean is back with more on the marxists in the globalony movement.

Apparently, I hit a nerve with a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago on global warming. Many of you took umbrage with my daring to connect the global warming movement to Marxism. Don’t get me wrong. I do not believe everyone involved in the global warming movement subscribes to Karl Marx’s philosophy. However, make no mistake about it. Those at the epicenter of this movement have ulterior motives, many of them socialist or even Marxist. What I wrote that caused such a fuss was that global warming is being used as a template to rob from the rich nations and give to the poor ones. …

American Thinker posts on a Brit who’s compiled a list of all the calamities caused by global warming, according to the media.

… The site’s stated mission is to expose all the “scares, scams, junk, panics and flummery cooked up by the media, politicians, bureaucrats and so-called scientists and others that try to confuse the public with wrong numbers” Professor Brignell’s motto is “Working to Combat Math Hysteria.” …

James Taranto finds another calamity.