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David Warren writes on who will pay the price for our ethanol foolishness.

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space – facetiously – that an effective response to global warming and/or the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide would be to cut the world’s food consumption by half. This could be achieved if we would all agree to eat only on odd-numbered days.

Among the advantages of having our environmental commissars enforce this scheme, I mentioned the halving of the factory and transport infrastructure that delivers the planet’s food. But beyond this, the food industry’s billion or so poorest customers, who barely get enough to eat now, would be removed from the carbon account entirely. Think of it on the analogy of a corporate buy-out, I suggested:

“At first, there is a net increase in CO2 ‘costs’ as people die and their corpses decay. But later, after they have finished decaying, there are substantial and permanent net savings.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t joke. A scheme to kill off the world’s poor, through starvation, has already been launched on the advice of environmental “experts,” and is showing promising results. The tactics are cleverer than mine, by half.

“Biofuel” is the means. By turning much of the planet’s limited arable land, including especially the lower-cost breadbaskets of the Third World, into grain generators for biofuel, the environmental revolution is creating the conditions for famine on a colossal scale. …

… Biofuel has joined the list of environmental catastrophes caused by environmental scares. That list began with the DDT scare in the early 1960s. Tens of millions have died from malaria and other diseases that could have been eradicated by spraying with this pesticide.

The triumph of “environmentalism” is symptomatic of the madness that has gripped our power elites, under the thrall of “political correctness” – for there is real insanity in creating an actual and predictable disaster, to avert an imaginary one.

Noting food riots already in Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Mexico, and food rationing in Pakistan and China, the Indian development economist Deepak Lal writes: “For the Western ‘good and the great,’ their academic acolytes and the pop stars grandstanding to save Africa and to end poverty, this latest Western assault on the world’s poor by their promotion of biofuels to replace food on the limited land in the world, can only evince contempt.”

The American thinks we should listen to the French – sometimes.

Counterterrorism, like espionage and covert action, isn’t a spectator sport. The more a country practices, the better it gets. France has become the most accomplished counterterrorist practitioner in Europe. Whereas September 11, 2001, was a shock to the American counterterrorist establishment, it wasn’t a révolution des mentalités in Paris. Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelancing but organized Islamic extremists.

In comparison, the security services in Great Britain and Germany were slow to awaken to the threat from homegrown radical Muslims. Britain’s gamble was that its multicultural approach to immigrants was superior to France’s forced-assimilation model. But with the discovery of one terrorist plot after another being planned by British Muslims, as well as the deadly transportation bombings that took place in London on July 7, 2005, the British have begun to question the wisdom of their “Londonistan” approach to Muslim immigration. Similarly, until recently, the belief in Berlin was that Germany was safe from homegrown Muslim terrorism; but two major bomb plots over the past year and a half—one aimed at German trains, the second at American installations and interests in Germany—have raised serious doubts in the minds of many German security officials about that previous assumption.

And French scholars and journalists have been way ahead of their European and American counterparts in dissecting Islamic extremism and in analyzing the phenomenon of European-raised Muslim militants. French officials who work in counterterrorism are well apprised of this intellectual spadework, often maintaining friendly relationships with scholars and journalists working in the field. …

John Fund, who has written often on voter fraud, says it would be a mistake to use postal primaries in FL and MI.

“There’s talk in some Democratic circles of letting the states of Michigan and Florida revote. . . . They’re talking about a revote primary where people would mail in their ballots. That’s a great idea, combine the reliability of the people in Florida who count the ballots with the efficiency of the Post Office. What could go wrong there?”–Jay Leno

It’s unclear if either Florida or Michigan, whose delegations are barred from voting at the Democratic National Convention because they held early primaries in violation of party rules, will figure out a way to hold a revote between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

What is clear is that the Democratic Party in both states is likely to reject using privately funded mail-in elections as the solution. A mail-in vote is less secure than a ballot cast in person, and both Michigan and Florida have long histories of both voter fraud and election official incompetence.

For too long, both parties have encouraged the growth of mail-in ballots (also known as absentee voting), to the point that some 3 out of 10 votes in national elections are now cast before Election Day. Little thought has been given to the security problems attendant to absentee voting.

Carl Hiaasen, who has written often on Florida fraud, writes on another FL primary.

…

8. After what happened here in 2000, why would the Democratic leadership jeopardize its chances to win back the White House by putting Florida in such a pivotal position?

That would be a good question for Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party. Another good question for Dean is: When are you going to stop acting like an addled hamster and do something smart?

9. If another primary were approved, is it true that the Democratic candidates would be allowed to campaign and advertise throughout Florida?

Tragically, yes. After months of peace and quiet, the Sunshine State finally would be invaded full-bore by the Obama and Clinton forces.

Remember back when Rudy Giuliani was the only one hanging around? Heck, we hardly knew he was here.

Those were the days . . .

Jennifer Rubin likes McCain’s earmark record compared to Obama and Clinton.

The Economist tells us how we will soon get real time traffic and road info on our car’s GPS gear.

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We open with a great piece by Abigail Thernstrom. Abby is a friend and one of Pickings most faithful readers. Today’s article celebrates the success of Barack Obama’s appeal across racial lines. Abby shows why this is not typical of African-American politicians in the U. S. today. Yet again, we see the un-intended consequence of well meaning but foolish laws. She is an optimist so ends on that note – probably misplaced.

… Most black politicians do not have the personal history that has allowed Mr. Obama to “find common political ground.” They have also been groomed in majority-black districts where they have seldom needed to appeal across racial lines.

“The Voting Rights Act perplexingly integrates the Congress by separating people into different congressional districts on the basis of race,” political scientist David Lublin has noted. The statute has conferred on minority candidates a unique privilege: protection from white competition. In theory, there are no group rights to representation in America. In fact, the 1965 statute has created a system of reserved seats for blacks and Hispanics.

Almost all members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been elected to fill a reserved seat. They run in what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has called “segregated” districts. These are districts devoid of the normal political pressures that encourage candidates to move to the political center. Candidates win — as Bobby Rush did — by emphasizing their racial bona fides, their commitment to representing black interests, and their far-left convictions — matching those of most black voters. It is not a recipe for winning in statewide and other majority-white settings. …

… Perhaps the candidacy of Barack Obama can convince the black leadership, as well as the Justice Department attorneys and judges who enforce and interpret the Voting Rights Act, that it is time to move on. Barack Obama, in turning his back on the world of segregated politics, has shown the way forward.

Ilya Somin notes one bright spot in the Spitzer mess.

Until his recent downfall, Eliot Spitzer was one of America’s most prominent Jewish politicians. Yet his Jewishness has been almost completely absent from the public debate occasioned by his disgrace and resignation. …

… The lack of focus on Spitzer’s Jewishness is all to the good. It shows that both the political elite and the general public broadly accept the role of Jews in public life and that anti-Semitism has largely been marginalized in mainstream political discourse. …

Abe Greenwald posts for Contentions on the Dem’s Iraq dilemma.

… Enter John McCain. He recognized the failings of the Rumsfeld plan and, determined not to quit, pushed for new ideas. Having backed the Petraeus plan that’s responsible for the shift in Iraq, he doesn’t need to dance around the pro-victory majority—let alone convince them to throw in the towel. Seeing these new figures, the Democrats will at some point try to back off on the defeatist rhetoric, but there’s only so far they can go and not seem preposterous. A 180-degree turn on Iraq would create too much fallout about flip-flopping, experience, and character. It’s not clear how the Democrats are going to wriggle out of this one. But the man who changed when it most mattered can stay in one place for a while.

John Fund says NY Gov. David Patterson supports vouchers.

… He is passionately in favor of school choice and has even spoken at two conferences held by the Alliance for School Choice. At one, he pulled off the rare feat of quoting both Martin Luther King Jr. and individualistic philosopher Ayn Rand approvingly in the same speech. …

John then flips to Obama’s pastor. Many of our favorites have thoughts on this too and we devote much of today to Rev. Wright. This might be the lever that allows Hillary to push Barack out of the way. A New Yorker profile March 10th had this about Michelle Obama’s address to a South Carolina church during the primary campaign there.

… Earlier on the day that (Michelle) Obama visited the nursery school, she addressed a congregation at the Pee Dee Union Baptist Church, in Cheraw, a hamlet of about six thousand known as “The Prettiest Town in Dixie.” The church’s makeshift gravel parking lot, next to the Pee Dee Ice and Fuel Company and bounded by train tracks, was full. After an invocation by the Reverend Jerry Corbett and an introduction by the mayor of Cheraw, Obama came to the pulpit. “You all got up bright and early just for me?” she asked the mostly elderly, almost all-black crowd. “Yes!” they roared. Obama continued, “On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Wright, I bring greetings.” …

Power Line is first.

… Obama has also said that Wright is “like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” But who takes spiritual guidance from hate-spewing old uncles?

Wright isn’t just someone with whom Obama is friendly. To criticize Obama for having friends with controversial, or even abhorrent, views would constitute guilt by association. But Wright is Obama’s spiritual leader. To be sure, no thinking person always agrees with his minister, priest, or rabbi on political and social issues. But it’s unusual for a thinking person to retain an affiliation with a church whose leader attacks his country unless, at a minimum, that person considers those attacks not “particularly controversial.”

Obama should explain why he retained his apparently close affiliation with Wright and his church in more persuasive terms than he has to date. Otherwise, I think it’s reasonable to draw adverse inferences based on that affiliation, including the inference that Obama doesn’t quite measure up as a “post-racial” figure. …

Victor Davis Hanson with four Corner posts.

… 1) The Obamas were not merely endorsed by, or attended the church of, Rev. Wright, but subsidized his hatred with generous donations, were married by him, and had their children baptized by this venomous preacher; there is nothing quite comparable in the case of Sens. Clinton and McCain.

2) Rev. Wright’s invective is not insensitive or hyperbolic alone, but in the end disgusting. And when listened to rather than read, the level of emotion and fury only compound the racism and hatred, whether in its attack on the Clintons, or profanity-laced slander of the United States and its history, or in gratuitous references to other races. Its reactionary Afrocentrism, conspiracy-theory, and illiberal racial separatism take us back to the 1970s, and compare with the worst of the fossilized Farrakhan—and have no remote parallel in the present campaign.

3) Sen. Obama has proclaimed a new politics of hope and change that were supposedly to transcend such venom and character assassination of the past. Thus besides being politically dense, he suffers—unless he preempts and explains in detail his Byzantine relationship with the Reverend—the additional charge of hypocrisy in courting such a merchant of hate. And then he compounds the disaster by the old-fashion politics of contortion and excuse by suggesting the Rev. Wright is not that controversial, or is analogous to the occasional embarrassing outburst of an uncle—some uncle. …

Ed Morrissey (The Captain)

Before the press began looking into the inflammatory rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, they fawned over his association with Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. In a Chicago Tribune profile that appeared just as Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency in January 2007, the Senator confirmed the close relationship with the firebrand preacher at Trinity United Church. …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions.

… So why doesn’t Obama repudiate Wright? If it’s true, as Obama’s campaign asserts, that Jeremiah Wright is “one of the country’s ten most influential black pastors,” then hate speech like Wright’s isn’t a big deal to a giant swath of American blacks. Moreover, that vote must be courted. Funny, how Democrats have spent decades stoking fears about the dangerous and discriminatory political influence of the religious Right, and now a demonstrably vile Reverend like Jeremiah Wright has the ear of a man who could become the Democratic nominee for president.

Roger Simon.

KJ Lopez.

… Hillary Clinton will be thanking God this Easter for the gift of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

We’ll end this with Mark Steyn.

… I’m not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting this or that candidate dissociate himself from remarks by some fellow he had a 30-second grip’n'greet with a decade ago. But Jeremiah Wright is not exactly peripheral to Barack Obama’s life. He married the Obamas and baptized their children. Those of us who made the mistake of buying the senator’s latest book, “The Audacity Of Hope,” and assumed the title was an ingeniously parodic distillation of the great sonorous banality of an entire genre of blandly uplifting political writing discovered circa page 127 that in fact the phrase comes from one of the Rev. Wright’s sermons. Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama’s pastor for 20 years – in other words, pretty much the senator’s entire adult life. Did Obama consider “God Damn America” as a title for his book but it didn’t focus-group so well? …

 

… What is Barack Obama for? It’s not his “policies,” such as they are. Rather, Sen. Obama embodies an idea: He’s a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don’t boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that’s what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn’t be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for her “insidious racism” indistinguishable from “the vocabulary of David Duke.”

Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert tossers of identity-politics hand grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro’s an “insidious racist”, who isn’t? …

… his whiny wife, Michelle, says that her husband’s election as president would be the first reason to have “pride” in America, and complains that this country is “downright mean” and that she’s having difficulty finding money for their daughters’ piano lessons and summer camp. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Obama earn $480,000 a year (not including book royalties from “The Audacity Of Hype,” but they’re whining about how tough they have it to couples who earn 48 grand – or less. Yes, we can. But not on a lousy half-million bucks a year.

God has blessed America, and blessed the Obamas in America, and even blessed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose bashing of his own country would be far less lucrative anywhere else on the planet. The “racist” here is not Geraldine Ferraro but the Rev. Wright, whose appeals to racial bitterness are supposed to be everything President Obama will transcend. Right now, it sounds more like the same-old same-old. …

Reason says oil prices are in a bubble.

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Pew Research finds the majority of us expect success in Iraq. Ed Morrissey posts on the likely beneficiary.

… The big question will be how this affects the presidential race. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have campaigned on their commitment to withdrawal, especially Obama, who has tried to position himself to Hillary’s left. That made sense in the beginning of the primary campaign, when the surge had yet to begin and the violence appeared to overwhelm the American mission in Iraq. Now, however, it looks more like a senseless surrender with success in reach.

It’s not just Republicans, either. Half of all independents now believe that the US needs to remain in place until the gains in Iraq have been secured. The one presidential candidate arguing that policy also happens to be the Senator who spent the last three years arguing for a better counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. John McCain already had significant appeal for centrists and independents, and this makes his case even stronger.

And then finds a Rasmussen poll as possible illustration

So far, the burden of the early clincher hasn’t done much to damage John McCain. In a sign that the increasingly bitter Democratic primary campaign may provide some assistance to the Republican nominee, Rasmussen shows McCain ahead of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the normally blue state of Michigan. And in worse news, McCain has pulled even in Pennsylvania as well:

John Fund sets the tone for a lot of today’s picks.

As the political career of Eliot Spitzer melts down, many will lament that what the governor on Monday called his “progressive politics” fell victim to his personal foibles. If only he hadn’t made mistakes in his private life, they will moan, New York could have been redeemed from its squalid, special-interest dominated stagnation.

That’s nonsense. More is at issue here than a mere private mistake. The governor’s frequent use of a prostitution ring was of public concern — because, notes Henry Stern, head of the watchdog group New York Civic, “people could easily have blackmailed him, you can’t have that if you’re governor.”

True enough, New York’s dysfunctional and secretive state government desperately needs fumigation, with both political parties sharing in the blame. But Mr. Spitzer’s head-butting approach to redemption — involving the arbitrary use of power and bully-boy tactics — was no improvement. As for reform, his first budget grew state spending at three times the rate of inflation, and is a major reason the state now faces a $4.5 billion deficit. When the governor tried to reform the state’s bloated Medicaid program, the health-care workers’ union ran a TV campaign against him, and he quickly caved.

Mr. Spitzer seemed to excel only in the zeal with which he would go after perceived adversaries. …

Fred Dicker owns the Albany beat. Here’s his take.

ALBANY – I saw many signs early on that Eliot Spitzer was to politics what Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry was to religion – a consummate hypocrite – but few, if any, of his governmental colleagues (and even fewer members of the largely fawning press corps) appeared able to see it as well.

To many of them, Spitzer could do no wrong.

They thought he was “right” on the issues that supposedly counted – government involvement in the private economy, hostility to Wall Street, gay marriage, even more campaign-finance restrictions (that favor the wealthy like Spitzer) and tighter gun laws.

So what did it matter if he turned into a boorish Richard Nixon when he unleashed the State Police on his leading Republican nemesis, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, or repeatedly violated his self-proclaimed principles of government openness, public accountability and an end to influence of special interests? …

Charles Gasparino is next.

IN the fall of 2006, with Eliot Spitzer plainly on his way to a landslide win in the governor’s race, I commiserated with one of Attorney General Spitzer’s chief targets, former New York Stock Exchange chief Dick Grasso.

“He’s going to be governor,” Grasso told me, sounding wounded and enraged, “and nothing will stop him.”

Yes, I replied – but he’ll ultimately blow himself up.

I can’t repeat the phrase I actually used in a family newspaper; let’s just say I predicted Spitzer would someday step on a most sensitive part of his own anatomy.

As a reporter covering him – and then becoming the target of one his office’s no-holds-barred intimidation games – I saw Spitzer’s shortcomings first hand: his zealotry, his wild temperament and his penchant for sleazy tactics.

But I never thought I’d be proven right in the most literal sense …

Ever the one to look beyond the fray, Michael Barone notes a troubling aspect of the Spitzer mess.

… When society has effectively legalized something that is still theoretically illegal, there is always the possibility of selective prosecution—targeting individuals who are in disfavor with someone in government. Selective prosecution is tyranny, and the possibility of selective prosecution is a powerful argument for legalization of the behavior that the society has chosen to condone. …

Power Line has the picture.

John Podhoretz has a good take.

John Kass of Chi Trib reacts to wife as stage prop.

Did New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer have to drag his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, up there, in her pearls and powder blue Chanel jacket like some prop to be shamed?

Did he have to parade her before the cameras, so lovely and tired, disgraced and betrayed, for all to see?

No. And he’s a coward for doing so, and for betraying his wife again in public, for compromising all of us who watched the two of them on TV the other day at that terrible news conference.

He was cool, seemingly forceful, making one of those weasel statements that befits lawyers, a vague apology but nothing in his words admitting he broke the law. So he had things together, he was under control, drawing it all out, teasing federal prosecutors into offering him a deal: Spitzer resigns, they don’t press charges on his money transfers to the high priced online whorehouse.

The former prosecutor who attacked, among other things, prostitution rings, has been hoisted on some whore’s petard.

And Silda stood beside him mute, like one of those people who crawl out of burning cars, make it to the side of the road and stare at what brought them there. …

Kimberley Strassel thinks the media have a lot of blame for Spitzer’s tactics.

The fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer holds many lessons, and the press will surely be examining them in coming months. But don’t expect the press corps to delve into the biggest lesson of all — its own role as his enabler.

Journalists have spent the past two days asking how a man of Mr. Spitzer’s stature would allow himself to get involved in a prostitution ring. The answer, in my mind, is clear. The former New York attorney general never believed normal rules applied to him, and his view was validated time and again by an adoring press. “You play hard, you play rough, and hopefully you don’t get caught,” said Mr. Spitzer two years ago. He never did get caught, because most reporters were his accomplices.

Journalism has many functions, but perhaps the most important is keeping tabs on public officials. That duty is even more vital concerning government positions that are subject to few other checks and balances. Chief among those is the prosecutor, who can use his awesome state power to punish, even destroy, private citizens.

Yet from the start, the press corps acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it. Many journalists get into this business because they want to see wrongs righted. Mr. Spitzer portrayed himself as the moral avenger. He was the slayer of the big guy, the fat cat, the Wall Street titan — all allegedly on behalf of the little guy. The press ate it up, and came back for more. …

More on that line from That Gay Conservative.

Vaclav Klaus wrote a piece for the Australian on globalony.

A WEEK ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism. …

 

… The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong. They believe in their own ability to assemble all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility of giving adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions.

We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. We need to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.

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We open with a Power Line post on the recently published A Crime So Monstrous. The author is E. Benjamin Skinner.

Benjamin Skinner is the precocious author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face With Modern-Day Slavery. He spent four years working on the book and investigating the phenomenon of modern slavery up close and personal. Today is the book’s publication date. The author has kindly responded to our invitation to bring the book to the attention of our readers with a message describing what he is up to in it:

There are more slaves in the world today than at any point in human history, and A Crime So Monstrous is their story, in full color. For four years, I traveled in over a dozen countries, talking to slaves, traffickers and liberators, going undercover when necessary in order to infiltrate slave trading networks. …

Perceptive Corner post From VDH.

… McCain may become a proper antidote for all this. Unlike the verbose Michelle Obama, he really has suffered in his life; unlike Barack Obama he really has reached across the aisle and paid a price for it; and unlike Obama’s promises of transparency, he really does talk in specifics and bluntly rather than in mellifluous platitudes. And as for an against-the-odds candidacy, in postmodern America a 71-year-old survivor of communist torture and malignant melanoma seems to match the narrative of a young Ivy-League graduate of mixed ancestry.

Neal Boortz with the truth about polar bears.

So-called “environmentalists” insist on making polar bears the centerpiece for their fight against capitalism. They insist that polar bears are nearing extinction because of man-made global warming. It’s not theory to them .. it’s etched-in-stone fact. Right now the Bush administration is being sued by environmental groups claiming the Fish and Wildlife Service is in breach of its own mandate – its failure to protect the polar bear as an endangered species.

Well, yes … there actually has been a delay to determine whether or not polar bears are actually endangered species. The fact of the matter is that they are not … there are more polar bears today than there were in the 1970s. A lot more. But environmentalists can’t seem to understand that simple concept, or they just don’t want to admit it. They believe that Bush is delaying the decision so his administration can sell oil and gas leases in Alaska, where, by the way, you find most polar bears. …

John Stossel says beware of politicians who will fix all our ills.

Watching presidential candidates promise to “fix” America fills me with dread.

A reason I have this reaction is that I’ve been doing reports for “20/20″ on previous politicians’ campaigns to “fix” child sex abuse.

Sexual abuse was always a problem, but in the early 1990s, something changed. Several pretty white girls were victimized at a time when the 24-hour cable-news cycle was hungry for new drama. Heinous child molestation became the big story. So publicity-seeking politicians clamored for new laws.

One result of their campaign was Megan’s Law, which requires police to notify neighbors when a sex offender lives nearby. States were also ordered to establish registries so that when sex offenders are released from prison or put on probation, everyone can keep track of them.

It does seem important to know when a dangerous person lives nearby, but these laws have freedom-killing effects that go well beyond their proponents’ good intentions.

For last week’s “20/20″ (http://tinyurl.com/23wywh), I interviewed sex offender Frank Rodriquez. Because he admits he repeatedly had sex with a child, he will forever be listed on the Texas sex-offender registry. His name and picture are posted next to those of murderers of children and a man who molested 200 kids.

But Frank’s “crime” was different. He had sex with his high-school girlfriend. She says it was her idea. …

Thomas Sowell writes on the real costs of crime.

For more than two centuries, the political left has been preoccupied with the fate of criminals, often while ignoring or downplaying the fate of the victims of those criminals.

So it is hardly surprising that a recent New York Times editorial has returned to a familiar theme among those on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, with its lament that “incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen.”

Back in 1997, New York Times writer Fox Butterfield expressed the same lament under the headline, “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling.” Then, as now, liberals seemed to find it puzzling that crime rates go down when more criminals are put behind bars.

Nor is it surprising that the left uses an old and irrelevant comparison — between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars versus the cost of higher education. According to the Times, “Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon devote as much or more to corrections as they do to higher education.”

The relevant comparison would be between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars and the cost of letting him loose in society. But neither the New York Times nor others on the left show any interest in that comparison.

In Britain, the total cost of the prison system per year was found to be £1.9 billion, while the financial cost alone of the crimes committed per year by criminals was estimated at £60 billion.

The big difference between the two kinds of costs is not just in their amounts. The cost of locking up criminals has to be paid out of government budgets that politicians would prefer to spend on giveaway programs that are more likely to get them re-elected. But the far higher costs of letting criminals loose is paid by the general public in both money and in being subjected to violence. …

American.com with a look at Americans and their giving.

Q. How much do Americans give? Is the amount we give going up?
A. In 2006, Americans gave about $295 billion to charity. This was up 4.2 percent over 2005 levels, and charitable giving has generally risen faster than the growth of the American economy for more than half a century. Correcting for inflation and population changes, GDP per person in America has risen over the past 50 years by about 150 percent, while charitable giving per person has risen by about 190 percent. That is, the average American family has gotten much richer in real terms over the past half century, and charitable giving has more than kept pace with this trend. …

Walter Williams on “Big Corn and the Ethanol Hoax.”

… It’s easy to understand how the public, looking for cheaper gasoline, can be taken in by the call for increased ethanol usage. But politicians, corn farmers and ethanol producers know they are running a cruel hoax on the American consumer. They are in it for the money. The top leader in the ethanol hoax is Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the country’s largest producer of ethanol. Ethanol producers and the farm lobby have pressured farm state congressmen into believing that it would be political suicide if they didn’t support subsidized ethanol production. That’s the stick. Campaign contributions play the role of the carrot.

The ethanol hoax is a good example of a problem economists refer to as narrow, well-defined benefits versus widely dispersed costs. It pays the ethanol lobby to organize and collect money to grease the palms of politicians willing to do their bidding because there’s a large benefit for them — higher wages and profits. The millions of gasoline consumers, who fund the benefits through higher fuel and food prices, as well as taxes, are relatively uninformed and have little clout. After all, who do you think a politician will invite into his congressional or White House office to have a heart-to-heart — you or an Archer Daniels Midlands executive?

American Digest says there’s a new way to look at our divided country – Starbucks vs. Wal-Mart.

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Volokh post points out Spitzer irony.

… So Elliot Spitzer, aggressive former white collar crime prosecutor, was brought down because he couldn’t outsmart banks looking for evidence of white collar crimes.

Spitzer posts from a lot of our favorites.

Bad news for the GOP in Illinois. John Fund has the details.

Karen Hanretty, the spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, had a terse response to the startling loss of former Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat in a special election in Illinois on Saturday.

“The one thing 2008 has shown is that one election in one state does not prove a trend,” she noted. Fair enough. Indeed in June, 2006, Republicans retained a California seat in a high-profile special election, but that had no predictive value given that Democrats stomped their way to control of Congress a few months later.

But special elections in highly visible seats do have a psychological effect on parties. Not only can they boost or depress morale, but they can affect how political contributions flow in the months leading up to the general election.

That should worry Republicans because history does show that some special elections have captured a growing mood against the party that controls the White House. …

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Todd Spivak, Houston Press reporter reports his coverage of Obama back in the day. This is long, but will provide a good flavor for Obama and Chicago politics.

It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.

It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.

I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.

This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country’s first black president.

He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois and I work for a string of small, scrappy newspapers there.

The other day, while stuck in traffic on Houston’s Southwest Freeway, I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.

Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There’s no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama’s old state Senate district.

Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years — nearly half Obama’s tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city’s poor, black, crime-­ridden South Side.

It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.

I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at least. I’d ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers. It ran with a headshot that made him look about 14 years old. …

Canada’s National Post has a great op-ed on globalony.

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism — and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy — can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors — the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, — not human sources are behind global warming.

The Washington Post’s first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group’s credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor — the Heartland Institute — received money from oil companies and health care corporations.

That’s standard fare, and partly fair, so that’s not what I am talking about.

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC’s famous report of last year.

After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: “While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.”

First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn’t win the Physics Prize, for instance. …

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Martin Peretz says there is a Mid-East peace process and there is a NY Times. And they’re both foolish.

As Mugabe in Zimbabwe continues his descent, Next door South Africa sees nothing.

Ed Morrissey posts on Zimbabwe too.

Power Line posts on the Times continuing campaign against McCain.

Charles Krauthammer leads us off with one of his better efforts. Now, that is saying something.

… The Obama campaign has sent journalists eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. I am not the only one to note, however, that these are small-bore items of almost no controversy — more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, fighting avian flu and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage.

On the difficult compromises that required the political courage to challenge one’s own political constituency, Obama flinched: the “Gang of 14″ compromise on judicial appointments, the immigration compromise to which Obama tried to append union-backed killer amendments and, just last month, the compromise on warrant eavesdropping that garnered 68 votes in the Senate. But not Obama’s.

Who, in fact, supported all of these bipartisan deals, was a central player in two of them and brokered the even more notorious McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform? John McCain, of course.

Yes, John McCain — intemperate and rough-edged, of sharp elbows and even sharper tongue. Turns out that uniting is not a matter of rhetoric or manner, but of character and courage.

Victor Davis Hanson tells us what Obama has in common with pet rocks.

In fall 1975 I remember sitting in the Stanford student lounge watching two apparently educated and bright students compare their pet rocks, as the craze spread all over Silicon Valley and then went national. By summer few would admit they had purchased one. Never underestimate the ability of mass wired consumer society to go hysterical.

Something like that happened with the Obama campaign in mid-February, as he became the new generation’s pet rock. No one knew what he had done; no one knew what he would do; no one cared whether they knew; all only wanted to be a part of it. It was a sort of self-described “movement” to “change the world,” that offered absolution for all sorts of sins, real and imagined, of commission and omission, an atonement for past and present, here and abroad. …

Been wondering what Andrew Sullivan has been doing? Here’s a Hillary rant.

It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporized metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: inviolable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the You campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway. …

Wish another Hillary? Dick Morris is next.

The real message of Tuesday’s primaries is not that Hillary won. It’s that she didn’t win by enough.

The race is over.

The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the super do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year. …

George McGovern is slapping around the government for excessive regulatory fever. That’s right, George McGovern! Yup, the old Dem candidate.

… With liberalized credit rules, many people with limited income could access a mortgage and choose, for the first time, if they wanted to own a home. And most of those who chose to do so are hanging on to their mortgages. According to the national delinquency survey released yesterday, the vast majority of subprime, adjustable-rate mortgages are in good condition,their holders neither delinquent nor in default.

There’s no question, however, that delinquency and default rates are far too high. But some of this is due to bad investment decisions by real-estate speculators. These losses are not unlike the risks taken every day in the stock market.

The real question for policy makers is how to protect those worthy borrowers who are struggling, without throwing out a system that works fine for the majority of its users (all of whom have freely chosen to use it). If the tub is more baby than bathwater, we should think twice about dumping everything out.

Health-care paternalism creates another problem that’s rarely mentioned: Many people can’t afford the gold-plated health plans that are the only options available in their states.

Buying health insurance on the Internet and across state lines, where less expensive plans may be available, is prohibited by many state insurance commissions. Despite being able to buy car or home insurance with a mouse click, some state governments require their approved plans for purchase or none at all. It’s as if states dictated that you had to buy a Mercedes or no car at all. …

Speaking of government, Jeff Jacoby explains why it always makes things worse.

… The subprime mortgage collapse is another tale of unintended consequences.

The crisis has its roots in the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, a Carter-era law that purported to prevent “redlining” – denying mortgages to black borrowers – by pressuring banks to make home loans in “low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.” Under the act, banks were to be graded on their attentiveness to the “credit needs” of “predominantly minority neighborhoods.” The higher a bank’s rating, the more likely that regulators would say yes when the bank sought to open a new branch or undertake a merger or acquisition.

But to earn high ratings, banks were forced to make increasingly risky loans to borrowers who wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage under normal standards of creditworthiness. The Community Reinvestment Act, made even more stringent during the Clinton administration, trapped lenders in a Catch-22.

“If they comply,” wrote Loyola College economist Thomas DiLorenzo, “they know they will have to suffer from more loan defaults. If they don’t comply, they face financial penalties . . . which can cost a large corporation like Bank of America billions of dollars.”

Banks nationwide thus ended up making more and more subprime loans and agreeing to dangerously lax underwriting standards – no down payment, no verification of income, interest-only payment plans, weak credit history. If they tried to compensate for the higher risks they were taking by charging higher interest rates, they were accused of unfairly steering borrowers into “predatory” loans they couldn’t afford.

Trapped in a no-win situation entirely of the government’s making, lenders could only hope that home prices would continue to rise, staving off the inevitable collapse. But once the housing bubble burst, there was no escape. …

Daily Telegraph, UK on continued climate skepticism.

Last week, virtually unreported in Britain, the extraordinary winter weather of 2008 elsewhere in the world continued. In the USA, there were blizzards as far south as Texas and Arkansas, while in northern states and Canada what they are calling “the winter from hell” has continued to break records going back in some cases to 1873. Meanwhile in Asia more details emerged of the catastrophe caused by the northern hemisphere’s greatest snow cover since 1966.

 

In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call “the Winter Snow Disaster” has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming. …

Want to be healthy? Get out in the sun. Shows what the experts knew. Toronto Globe and Mail bemoans Canada’s location.

In the summer of 1974, brothers Frank and Cedric Garland had a heretical brainwave.

The young epidemiologists were watching a presentation on death rates from cancer county by county across the United States. As they sat in a lecture hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore looking at the color-coded cancer maps, they noticed a striking pattern, with the map for colon cancer the most pronounced.

Counties with high death rates were red; those with low rates were blue. Oddly, the nation was almost neatly divided in half, red in the north and blue in the south. Why, they wondered, was the risk of dying from cancer greater in bucolic Maine than in highly polluted Southern California?

The two had arrived at Johns Hopkins a few days earlier, having driven their Mustang from their hometown of San Diego. Frank was about to begin graduate studies and Cedric his first job as a professor. It was July, and the trip through the sunny South gave them an idea as they studied the cancer maps: Exposure to sunshine varies dramatically depending on the latitude. What if that’s what was behind the varying cancer rates?

Their hypothesis, painstakingly developed and published six years later in the International Journal of Epidemiology, was that sunlight has a powerful anti-cancer effect through its role in producing vitamin D in bare skin. Those living at northern latitudes, they theorized, receive less sunlight and make less of the vitamin, which in turn increases their risk of dying from cancer.

Today, with vitamin D so much in the news, it’s hard to believe that it took decades for the Garlands’ hypothesis to gain traction in the mainstream medical community. …

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Rich Lowry writes on the Columbia, Venezuela, and Ecuador excitement.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reached for what he considered the ultimate insult when he called Colombia “the new Israel.” If by that he means a country better governed than its immediate neighbors, that dares to protect itself against terrorists across its border despite getting bludgeoned for it by the international left — he had a point. …

The Economist has a good analysis of the battle for the Dem nomination.

JOHN EDWARDS has been saying since 2004 that there are two Americas—the America of the rich and privileged and the America of the poor and put-upon. The results of March 4th proved that there are also two Democratic Parties.

A famous political distinction exists between “wine-track” and “beer-track” Democrats. Wine-track Democrats have traditionally supported reform-minded liberals such as Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas. Beer-track Democrats have preferred more practical-minded pols. Walter Mondale famously hammered the nail into Gary Hart’s coffin when he stole a line from a hamburger advertisement and asked “Where’s the beef?”

Part of Bill Clinton’s genius was to bring the wine-drinkers and beer-drinkers together. This was, after all, a man who went to Yale and Oxford but who grew up the child of a widow in the backwoods of Arkansas. Yet this year’s Democratic primaries have burst the party asunder once again.

Obamaworld is a universe of liberal professionals and young people—plus blacks from all economic segments. Hillaryland, by contrast, is a place of working-class voters, particularly working-class women, and the old. These are people who occupy not just different economies but also different cultures. How many white Obama voters eat in Cracker Barrel or Bob Evans? And how many Clinton voters have a taste for sushi? …

… The great challenge for the Democratic Party in November will be to put this coalition back together. But the bitter fight in the months to come will widen the already gaping divide. John McCain could not be better positioned to pick up the pieces.

Then Peggy Noonan. Who is awesome.

From the first voting in Iowa on Jan. 3 she had to prove that Clintons Are Magic. She wound up losing 11 in a row. Meaning Clintons aren’t magic. He had to take her out in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday or Junior Tuesday. He didn’t. Meaning Obama isn’t magic.

Two nonmagical beings are left.

What the Democrats lost this week was the chance to paint the ’08 campaign as a brilliant Napoleonic twinning of strategy and tactics that left history awed. What they have instead is a ticket to Verdun. Trench warfare, and the daily, wearying life of the soldier under siege. The mud, the cold, the dank water rotting the boots, all of it punctuated by mad cries of “Over the top,” bayonets fixed.

Do I understate? Not according to the bitter officers debating doomed strategy back in HQ. More on that in a minute.

This is slightly good for John McCain. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hemorrhage money, exhaust themselves, bloody each other. He holds barbecues for the press and gets rid of a White House appearance in which the incumbent offers his dread embrace. …

… I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio’s Hugh Hewitt, because, “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power . . . people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”

It was like Claude Rains summing up the meaning of everything in the film “Lawrence of Arabia”: “One of them’s mad and the other is wholly unscrupulous.” It’s the moment when you realize you just heard the truth, the meaning underlying all the drama. “They win in the end.” Gave me a shudder.

Good VDH Corner post on the same subject.

And then, Mark Steyn.

Well, we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more, at least for another few weeks. The Mummy (as my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls her) kicked open the sarcophagus door and, despite the rotting bandages dating back to Iowa, began staggering around, terrorizing folks all over again.

“She is a monster,” Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power told a reporter from The Scotsman – and not a monster in a cute Loch Ness blurry, long-distance kind of way. “You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh,’” continued Ms. Power, who subsequently resigned from the campaign.

The New York Times took a different line. The monster is you – yes, you, the American people. Surveying the Hillary-Barack death match, Maureen Dowd wrote: “People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?”

Do even Democrats really talk like this? Apparently so. As Ali Gallagher, a white female (sorry, this identity-politics labeling is contagious) from Texas, told the Washington Post: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’”

When everybody’s a victim, nobody’s a victim. …

David Brooks thinks Obama has taken a wrong turn with his campaign.

… Clinton can’t compete on personality, but a knife fight is her only real hope of victory. She has nothing to lose because she never promised to purify America. Her campaign doesn’t depend on the enthusiasm of upper-middle-class goo-goos. On Thursday, a Clinton aide likened Obama to Ken Starr just to badger them on.

As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself. And even if he goes on to win the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president.

In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.

Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.

If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.

After a March weekend when it snowed for 24 hours straight in Mississippi, it is fitting we have an WSJ Interview with Vaclav Klaus one of the world’s prominent global warming skeptics.

… Mr. Klaus has become a globally prominent voice of skepticism about what he calls global-warming “alarmism.” This week, while in New York to address a gathering of fellow “non-alarmists” at a conference in Times Square, he took some time to sit down with members of the Journal’s editorial board to offer his dissenting views on Russia, Kosovo, America and of course, climate change.

“I am not a climatologist,” Mr. Klaus cheerfully admits. “I am not disputing the measurement of the temperature.” Even so, Mr. Klaus believes that his many years of experience in the fields of economics and econometrics give him some insight into the nature of the problems faced by climatologists and policy makers. In climatology as in economics, he says, “there are no controlled experiments. . . . You can’t repeat the time series.” So, just as you can’t run a controlled experiment to determine the effect of, say, deficits on interest rates, we can’t directly determine the effect of CO2 on climate. All we have are observations and inferences.

Mr. Klaus is also interested in the politics of global warming. He has written a book, tentatively titled “Blue, Not Green Planet,” published in Czech last year and due out in English translation in the U.S. this May. The main question of the book is in its subtitle: “What is in danger: climate or freedom?”

He likens global-warming alarmism to communism, which he experienced first-hand in Cold War Czechoslovakia, then a Soviet satellite. While the communists argued that we must all sacrifice some freedom in pursuit of “equality,” the “warmists,” as Mr. Klaus calls them, want us to sacrifice liberty — especially economic liberty — to prevent a change in climate. In both cases, in Mr. Klaus’s view, the costs of achieving the goal, and the impossibility of truly doing so, argue strongly against paying a price of freedom. …

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Mark Steyn’s Buckley send-off.

If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you’d come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist who lived part time in Switzerland and was partial to words like “eremitical” and “periphrastic.” “It’s the epigoni, stupid” is not a useful campaign slogan – although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni (“a second-rate imitator”).

But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original, who founded the modern conservative movement half a century ago and saw it through to victory in the 1980 presidential election and then to vindication in the collapse of communism a decade later. He would demur when credited with “creating” the entire show but he was certainly its impresario, and at a time when there wasn’t exactly a lot of talent stampeding to audition.

The 1950s are assumed, at least by children of the Sixties, to be a “conservative” era. But at home New Deal liberalism controlled all the levers of society, and abroad the communists had gobbled up half of Europe, neutered most of the rest, swiped China, were eyeing up other valuable real estate across the planet, and Washington’s foreign policy establishment was inclined to accept this as a permanent feature of life to be “managed” rather than defeated.

The Republican minority in Congress were isolationists or country-club liberals, and their presidential nominees were “moderates” like Dewey or nonpartisans like Ike. There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism. The notion that in the early 21st century more Americans would identify themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals” would have struck the elites of 50 years ago as preposterous: a scenario unimaginable outside the more-fanciful dystopian science fiction. …

Thomas Sowell too.

Writing in 1954, Lionel Trilling said that most conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

One of the perks of being a liberal is disdaining people who are not liberals. However, as of 1954, Trilling’s dismissive attitude toward conservatives’ intellectual landscape was painfully close to the truth.

Trilling wrote ten years after Friedrich Hayek’s landmark counterattack against the left in his book “The Road to Serfdom.” But that was a book with great impact on a relatively small number of people at the time, though its influence spread around the world over the years.

Trilling also wrote eight years before Milton Friedman’s first book aimed at a popular audience — “Capitalism and Freedom” — and a quarter of a century before Rush Limbaugh pioneered conservative talk radio.

They say it is always darkest before the dawn. One year after Lionel Trilling’s dismissal of conservative intellectual thought, William F. Buckley founded National Review, the first in a series of conservative journals of opinion that would build on its success.

In short, Bill Buckley revitalized conservatism, with his wit, his intellect, and his inimitable mannerisms that made him a TV icon as a guest on many programs, even before he created his own long-running program, “Firing Line.” …

Peter Wehner points out there is more working well in the Middle East besides the military surge.

… In November 2007 Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (“Dr Fadl”) published his book, Rationalizations on Jihad in Egypt and the World, in serialised form. Mr Sharif, who is Egyptian, argues that the use of violence to overthrow Islamic governments is religiously unlawful and practically harmful. He also recommends the formation of a special Islamic court to try Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two and its ideological leader, and calls the attacks on September 11 2001 a “catastrophe for all Muslims”.

Mr Sharif’s words are significant because he was once a mentor to Mr Zawahiri. Mr Sharif, who wrote the book in a Cairo prison, is “a living legend within the global jihadist movement”, according to Jarret Brachman, a terrorism expert.

Another important event occurred in October 2007, when Sheikh Abd Al-‘Aziz bin Abdallah Aal Al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from engaging in jihad abroad. It states: “I urge my brothers the ulama [the top class of Muslim clergy] to clarify the truth to the public . . . to warn [youth] of the consequences of being drawn to arbitrary opinions and [religious] zeal that is not based on religious knowledge.” The target of the fatwa is obvious: Mr bin Laden.

A month earlier Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, an influential Saudi cleric whom Mr bin Laden once lionised, wrote an “open letter” condemning Mr bin Laden. “Brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocents among children, elderly, the weak, and women have been killed and made homeless in the name of al-Qaeda?” …

Karl Rove reviews the campaign.

Tuesday’s exciting presidential primaries were about momentum, delegates and second looks.

In the Republican contest, these factors gave victory to the Lazarus candidate. John McCain’s campaign nearly collapsed eight months ago in a mass of debt and missteps. Tuesday, Mr. McCain became the GOP’s standard-bearer by passing the 1,191-delegate threshold needed for nomination. It was a remarkable comeback and personal triumph of character, grit and persistence.

The Democrats saw Hillary Clinton come back from the abyss for the third time this year. What is it about the Clintons living life on the political edge? Mrs. Clinton was on the edge after Iowa but recovered in New Hampshire. She was falling after losing South Carolina but recovered on Super Tuesday. She then endured 11 straight defeats that threatened to end her candidacy but won three of Tuesday’s four contests. However, as of Wednesday night, her victories only closed Mr. Obama’s delegate lead by nine, from 110 to 101.

As exciting as Tuesday night was, the Democratic contest has not shifted to advantage Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama still has a healthy advantage. There are 611 delegates to be elected in 12 future contests, 349 superdelegates have yet to commit, and 12 delegate spots from Tuesday’s primaries are still not allocated. To win, Mrs. Clinton must take 58% of these outstanding delegates. That’s a tall order.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it doesn’t necessarily all depend on Pennsylvania and its 158 delegates. …

Roger Simon posts on the Dem dust-up.

Much of today’s Pickings is devoted to a Reason Magazine interview with one of Pickerhead’s good friends, Chip Mellor, President and co-founder of the libertarian public interest law firm The Institute for Justice. IJ has figured in these pages many times. This particular interview provides readers with an in-depth introduction to the thoughts one of the most consequential lawyers in the country.

Chip and Bob Levy (also with the Institute) have written The Dirty Dozen; How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. This 300 page book will be published in May. The Foreword, by Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago, is itself worth the price of admission. When out to dinner a few weeks ago, Chip and Bob gave me one of the proofs. Here, from the introduction, is the purpose of the book.

Whether it is political speech, economic liberties,property rights, welfare, racial preferences, gun owners’ rights, or imprisonment without charge, the U. S. Supreme Court has behaved in a manner that would have stunned, mystified, and outraged our founding fathers.

Here’s Chip describing IJ’s first case.

…

reason:

What was the first case that IJ took on?

Mellor: The first case was in 1991 and involved a wonderful entrepreneur here in Washington, D.C., named Taalib-Din Uqdah and his wife, Pamela Farrell. They were entrepreneurs seeking to braid hair but had the misfortune of doing so without a license to practice cosmetology.

Hair braiding is a means of both artistic and cultural expression as well as personal preference for the way that hair is styled, particularly in African-American and Caribbean communities. It is widely practiced and very popular. It’s often practiced in the home and passed on from mother to daughter in sort of an informal apprenticeship, because it is a very elaborate means of styling hair. But Taalib-Din had opened a salon. It was in a home, but one where they’d converted the first floor to a salon. He employed about a dozen people.

He actually received a knock on the door from the D.C. cosmetology police informing him that he was practicing cosmetology without a license, and he had to cease and desist immediately or face a fine—I believe it was $1,000 a day—and possibly even imprisonment for the crime of braiding hair and employing people. And when he went down to get a license, of course, he found that it was much harder than one would expect because it required that you actually attend cosmetology school for a couple of years, that you have thousands of hours of training learning skills that have nothing to do with African hair braiding. Adding insult to injury, it required you to demonstrate your proficiency by showing that you could, on a practical exam, style women’s hair in finger waves and pin curls, which were the hair styles popular with white women in 1938, when the law was passed.

reason: What happened in the case?

Mellor: We lost at the U.S. District Court and were moving it up through the appeal process when we were successful through both media and other efforts in getting it deregulated in the D.C. City Council.

reason: How did the media respond?

Mellor: All of our cases are deliberately designed as platforms to educate the general public about the importance of what may seem to be unique or even arcane issues and why those issues affect many, many people beyond the particular case, both in terms of the situation and also in terms of the constitutional principle involved. Here we had a wonderful media response from everybody. They picked up on several things: 1) the inherent injustice involved; 2) the compelling story that the clients had to tell; and 3) the way in which the law was really rigged against what could otherwise be a totally legitimate and productive activity.

The principle of law there is applicable whether it’s hair braiding or cab driving or casket retailing or flower selling or any number of entry-level occupations that are subject to arbitrary regulations. …

The Economist spent a lot of the last issue on potatoes. Even though we are already full, three articles were noteworthy and are included. It’s the weekend, so we can be a little longer. There’s actually a book you can read. The review is here too.

IT IS the world’s fourth-most-important food crop, after maize, wheat and rice. It provides more calories, more quickly, using less land and in a wider range of climates than any other plant. It is, of course, the potato.

The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato. It hopes that greater awareness of the merits of potatoes will contribute to the achievement of its Millennium Development Goals, by helping to alleviate poverty, improve food security and promote economic development. It is always the international year of this or month of that. But the potato’s unusual history means it is well worth celebrating by readers of The Economist—because the potato is intertwined with economic development, trade liberalisation and globalisation. …

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Bureaucrats at the Dept. of State continue to try to frustrate the Bush aims in Iraq. NY Post OpEd shows how they do this stiffing Iraqi’s who have helped our forces.

AS a Marine, I was taught never to leave a comrade-in-arms behind on the battlefield. But that’s exactly what the State Department is doing to men and women who’ve sacrificed everything to help our troops – our Iraqi interpreters.

When I last left Iraq 12 months ago, I promised to save two “terps” marked for assassination. Last month, I received a desperate e-mail from one of them: “Sir my situatione is so bad naw please save my life. Please help me sir.”

A year after making my promise, I’m deeply ashamed that I haven’t completed the mission. And I’m not alone: To help “their” terps, Marines and soldiers across the country are battling a bureaucracy that is at times more maddening than the Iraqi insurgency.

Shunning those who risk death to help us deliver freedom is un-American. …

Jeff Greenfield says the Dem race is easy to understand. Bugs Bunny always wins.

How did we reach the point at which Sen. Clinton, the clear Democratic front-runner six months ago, needs clear wins in Texas and Ohio to mute the calls for her to end her campaign?

There’s no unified field theory that answers this question: You can give more or less weight to Obama’s political magnetism, the tactical and strategic miscalculations of the Clinton campaign, the delegate-allocation rules that weakened the punch of Clinton’s big-state wins, the crucial difficulty of a former first lady who embodies Restoration competing in an election in which change is the watchword. And here’s another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. …

Byron York reviews Obama’s NAFTAGate problems.

For the last several months, the tone of the Democratic presidential debate on the issue of trade has worried government officials in Canada and Mexico. Would a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton actually pull the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement? It’s a nightmare scenario in Ottawa and Mexico City — not to mention Washington — and Canadian and Mexican officials have tried as best they can to gauge just how sincere the criticisms of NAFTA coming from Obama and Clinton really are.

Those criticisms have been particularly intense in the run-up to today’s primary in economically struggling Ohio. At last week’s debate in Cleveland, Obama and Clinton dueled to see who could be more anti-NAFTA; Obama won, at least rhetorically, by promising to “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to renegotiate NAFTA on his own terms.

Did he mean it? Or was he just telling steelworkers in Ohio what they wanted to hear? That is the question behind the first real scandal of the Obama campaign. And while the campaign has made several statements on the issue, there are growing indications that officials there are not telling the whole story. …

Dana Milbank nicely captures the mood just before Tuesday’s voting.

It took many months and the mockery of “Saturday Night Live” to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.

The day before primaries in Ohio and Texas that could effectively seal the Democratic presidential nomination for him, a smiling Obama strode out to a news conference at a veterans facility here. But the grin was quickly replaced by the surprised look of a man bitten by his own dog.

Reporters from the Associated Press and Reuters went after him for his false denial that a campaign aide had held a secret meeting with Canadian officials over Obama’s trade policy. A trio of Chicago reporters pummeled him with questions about the corruption trial this week of a friend and supporter. The New York Post piled on with a question about him losing the Jewish vote.

Obama responded with the classic phrases of a politician in trouble. “That was the information that I had at the time. . . . Those charges are completely unrelated to me. . . . I have said that that was a mistake. . . . The fact pattern remains unchanged.”

When those failed, Obama tried another approach. “We’re running late,” the candidate said, and then he disappeared behind a curtain. …

More of the mood of the day, with Corner posts from some of our favorites. Jonah Goldberg felt the need to explain his description of Mark Steyn as a “weird cat.”

… As for me calling Steyn a “weird cat” I hope Mark understands I meant it in the best possible way. But a guy with an accent that is part James Bond villain, part Thurston Howell III and Part William F. Buckley, who dresses like Beau Brummel except when he’s in his New Hampshire lair — where he dresses like one of the Darryls from the Newhart show — who seems like an immortal from the Highlander series in that he’s been everywhere and met everyone over the last three centuries and yet always looks like he’s 34, and who seems to know everything about everything when he’s writing for every English language publication in Christendom is, in my book, something of a weird cat. Would that I could be remotely as weird as he.

Power Line posts on yesterday’s vote.

The Captain, now at Hot Air posts on the results.

… Her triumph last night had little to do with numbers and everything to do with appearances, however. Obama has begun looking invincible, but Hillary managed to stop him, even after she slid out of the lead in Texas. Thanks to the twin gifts of the Rezko trial and the NAFTA dance, Obama not only started facing a few tough questions from the media, he blew up when they asked them of him. Hillary went negative to keep the pressure on him, and Obama displayed a glass jaw.

That will have the superdelegates — the party establishment — wondering whether Obama is ready for prime time. And now that question will occur not in the context of an overwhelming, unstoppable movement, but in the context of Hillary victories that indicate the party wants this race to continue. Hillary’s team will sell this as a vote of non-confidence; Texas and Ohio had the opportunity to climb on the Obama bandwagon and rejected it. …

John Stossel says of course we have influence peddling.

… “Good government” types rightly abhor this influence-peddling, but they propose pointless reforms like bans on lobbyist-sponsored gifts, junkets and rides on corporate jets. They also back a vicious assault on free speech: campaign-finance restrictions designed to reduce the influence of lobbyists in political campaigns. Despite all these “reforms,” influence-peddling goes on.

For good reason. None of the reforms gets near root of the problem.

The root is government power. When government is free to meddle in every corner of our lives and regulate the economy through taxes, regulation and subsidies, then “special interests” have every incentive to work on the politicians to preserve their turf or gain an advantage.

A tax, regulation or subsidy can make the difference between an industry’s success and failure. If the government were not giving preferential tax treatment to ethanol, the corn farmers and ethanol processors would have to find something else to do because their product can’t compete against regular gasoline on a level playing field.

In a real free market, a company succeeds only by making things consumers want to buy and keeping costs low enough that the market price yields a profit. Sadly, in our mixed economy, success can be achieved another way: by lobbying the government for advantages over one’s competitors. The prospect of favorable government intervention creates incentives for producers and their lobbyists to strive to satisfy legislators and bureaucrats instead of consumers. The resulting competition for privileges sets the stage for the improper relationships that reformers fret about. …

NY Sun editors note more Pinch Sulzberger hypocrisy

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Abby and Stephen Thernstrom, authors of America in Black and White, point out one of the blessings of this campaign. They claim Obama’s success shows we have made great strides in our country. Their book is filled with illustrative stories like a rural Georgia county, which at the advent of the automobile, discussed the desirability of having two, separate (but presumably equal) road systems.

One of the most notable — yet unremarked-on — lessons of this year’s Democratic presidential nominating contest is the demolition of the long-held belief that whites simply won’t vote for black candidates for higher office. Before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, who could have predicted the remarkable outpouring of white support for Sen. Barack Obama?

As recently as 2006, when Congress held hearings on the renewal of the expiring parts of the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates delivered a united message, echoed by the House Judiciary Committee. “It is rare that white voters will cross over to elect minority preferred candidates,” the committee’s report concluded — a statement from which there was no congressional dissent.

The 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, it seemed, were living proof of this. Overwhelmingly, they had been elected in “majority-minority” districts drawn specifically for African American candidates; only a handful had been elected in districts in which most voters were not black or some combination of black and Latino.

So it’s not surprising that, as the 2008 prePDFsidential race got underway, many observers — white and African American alike — thought Obama’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination were very poor. …

… After nearly two dozen primaries, we now know beyond dispute that the pessimists were wrong. Obama won the majority of white votes in Virginia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, and he received extremely high vote totals among whites in the other states he’s run in as well. …

Alan Dershowitz points out our problems confronting enemies who wish to die.

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women’s magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya — the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 — Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: “if you’re not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don’t want you.”

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. …

John Fund says some of the vanity prez candidates are facing tough primaries.

Congressmen Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich had a great time running for president over the past year, allowing both men to showcase their non-mainstream views in a slew of nationally-televised debates. But now both are haunted by the political ghost of former GOP Congressman Bob Dornan, who similarly enjoyed his 1996 run for president, then found he had alienated the folks back home by neglecting his day job. He failed to be reelected to Congress.

Both Messrs. Paul and Kucinich face serious primary opponents tomorrow. Mr. Paul appears to have the easier time. …

Thomas Sowell on how the “rust-belt” drove away jobs.

It is fascinating watching politicians say how they are going to rescue the “rust belt” regions where jobs are disappearing and companies are either shutting down or moving elsewhere. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being blamed for the jobs going elsewhere. Barack Obama blames the Clinton administration for NAFTA, and that includes Hillary Clinton. Senator Obama says that he is for free trade, provided it is “fair trade.” That is election year rhetoric at its cleverest.

Since “fair” is one of those words that can mean virtually anything to anybody, what this amounts to is that politicians can pile on whatever restrictions they want, in the name of fairness, and still claim to be for “free trade.” Clever. We will all have to pay a cost for political restrictions and political cleverness, since there is no free lunch. In fact, free lunches are a big part of the reason for once-prosperous regions declining into rust belts. …

Charles Krauthammer defends lobbyists.

… To hear the candidates in this presidential campaign, you’d think lobbying is just one notch below waterboarding, a black art practiced by the great malefactors of wealth to keep the middle class in a vise and loose upon the nation every manner of scourge: oil dependency, greenhouse gases, unpayable mortgages and those tiny entrees you get at French restaurants.

Lobbying is constitutionally protected, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it all. Let’s agree to frown upon bad lobbying, such as getting a tax break for a particular industry. Let’s agree to welcome good lobbying — the actual redress of a legitimate grievance — such as protecting your home from being turned to dust to make way for some urban development project.

There is a defense of even bad lobbying. It goes like this: You wouldn’t need to be seeking advantage if the federal government had not appropriated for itself in the 20th century all kinds of powers, regulations, intrusions and manipulations (often through the tax code) that had never been presumed in the 19th century and certainly were never imagined by the Founders. What appears to be rent-seeking is thus redress of a larger grievance — insufferable government meddling in what had traditionally been considered an area of free enterprise. …

Regular Pickings readers know Pickerhead is a sucker for studies of animals that are social predators like humans. NY Times reports on folks studying hyenas.

… Brain imaging studies have revealed that when people think about other people, parts of the frontal cortex become active. Advocates of the social brain hypothesis say the frontal cortex expanded in our ancestors because natural selection favored social intelligence.

Most of the research on the social brain hypothesis has focused on primates. One reason for that bias, Dr. Holekamp said, is many scientists thought that no other animals were worth studying. “Primatologists have argued for years,” she said, “that primates are unique in terms of the complexity of their social lives.”

From her experience with hyenas, Dr. Holekamp had her doubts. So she began to run experiments on spotted hyenas similar to the ones run on primates. She would play recordings of hyenas, for example, to see if other hyenas recognized them individually. They did. She soon came to see the primates-only view of the social brain as deeply flawed.

“I would argue that’s not true at all: spotted hyenas live in a society just as large and just as complex as a baboon,” Dr. Holekamp said, noting that spotted hyenas live in the largest social groups of any carnivore. “We’re talking about 60 to 80 individuals who all know each other individually.” …

Burlington, VT TV station says winter carnival activities cancelled because there’s too much snow. Where’s Owl Gore? Did anybody tell him?

OK, what is the protocol for waking the prez at 3 am? Slate has the answers.