January 12, 2010

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Michael Barone looks at the polls in Massachusetts.

John Fund posts on that race.

Corner post too.

What a day for Scott Brown, the Massachusetts Republican vying for Teddy Kennedy’s former U.S. Senate seat. In recent days, polls have shown Brown steadily closing the gap in what’s become a surprisingly close race against Democrat Martha Coakley. To build on his momentum, Brown went to the web today to raise more cash for his surging campaign. Brown hoped to raise half-a-million dollars in a day, and boy, did his supporters come out in droves. As of 11:40 p.m., Brown has raised over $1,117,000 dollars via his “Red Invades Blue” campaign. Many Republicans have pitched in: To help Brown out, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty both sent out fundraising appeals on his behalf. …

After that we open with more commentary from Mark Steyn on the fallout from the pantybomber.

…According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world’s superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can’t blame the world’s mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion.

…What did the Pantybomber have a membership card in? Well, he was president of the Islamic Society of University College, London. Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a burning jeep into the concourse of Glasgow Airport, had been president of the Islamic Society of Queen’s University, Belfast. Yassin Nassari, serving three years in jail for terrorism, was president of the Islamic Society of the University of Westminster. Waheed Arafat Khan, arrested in the 2006 Heathrow terror plots that led to Americans having to put their liquids and gels in those little plastic bags, was president of the Islamic Society of London Metropolitan University.

Doesn’t this sound like a bigger problem than “al-Qaida,” whatever that is? The president has now put citizens of Nigeria on the secondary-screening list. Which is tough on Nigerian Christians, who have no desire to blow up your flight to Detroit. Aside from the highly localized Tamil terrorism of India and Sri Lanka, suicide bombing is a phenomenon entirely of Islam. The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonist’s home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is, likewise, a phenomenon of Islam. This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious – that this “war” is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London. …

In the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes says that the Obami need to get smart about counterterrorism.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was created in 2004 for the purpose of coordinating intelligence among the many agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The NCTC essentially exists to make sure the strands of intelligence like those the U.S. government had on Abdulmutallab are brought together to prevent an attack.

Michael Leiter, the head of the NCTC, spent Christmas Day on the job. He left the day after, having gotten permission of the White House and the director of national intelligence. …

…Under any circumstances, Leiter should have remained at the NCTC to help determine how such an intelligence failure could have happened. But there was a truly pressing reason for him to stick around and do his job. Abdulmutallab had told interrogators that there were others to follow. The concerns were serious enough that Obama surged the number of federal air marshals on airplanes. …

…So at precisely the same time the staff of the NCTC was working furiously to piece together bits of intelligence to prevent another attack, the director was on a White House-approved vacation? …

Claudia Rosett criticizes Obama’s lack of understanding of the important issues, by way of discussing his December schedule, and then reviews the serious foreign situations that the Obami need to be paying attention to. Here are a few:

Iran: Last week the Tehran regime missed another U.N.-drafted deadline for halting its uranium enrichment, aka its nuclear bomb program. Instead, in its umpteenth round of nose-thumbing at the multilateral monitoring and dialogue on which Obama has placed his bets, the Iranian regime set its own Jan. 31 deadline for the West to accept Tehran’s terms for its bomb-fuel projects. Meanwhile, Manhattan’s longtime, legendary district attorney (a Democrat), Robert Morgenthau, just before going into retirement, told The Wall Street Journal, that “the president is smoking pot or something if he thinks that being nice to these guys is going to get him anywhere.” …

North Korea: As detailed in the Washington Post, a report surfaced from Pakistan’s nuclear mass-marketing wizard, A.Q. Khan, that, based on his multiple past close encounters with North Korea, Kim Jong Il’s regime may have a more advanced uranium enrichment program and missile-ready nuclear arsenal than suspected. Meanwhile, North Korea keeps dispatching munitions to Iran, by ship and by plane.

Russia: Obama’s “reset” and reneging on missile defense for Eastern Europe has now translated into Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s threat that Russia, to balance any American missile defense, will develop new “offensive” weapons. …

…America’s foes have their differences. But they all have this in common: They see America as an antagonist, not because they are appalled by Guantanamo Bay, as Obama keeps arguing (every patch of turf listed above features far worse treatment of “detainees”), but for the opposite reason–that America has stood for generations as the leader of the free world, what Ronald Reagan called “the shining city on a hill.” That’s what this war is about, and that’s the crisis that needs the full attention and a genuinely viable strategy right now from America’s commander-in-chief. When does President Obama look at this scene and finally connect the dots?

Mark Steyn blogs about the security breach at Newark Airport and the Keystone Cop performance of the TSA.

After six days, the authorities have finally caught the man who strolled through into the “secure” area at Newark Airport. …

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg expressed anger that he could only face a fine.

“It wasn’t some prank that didn’t do any harm – it did a lot of harm because it sent out an alert that people can get away with something like this,” he said.

Yes, and, if you thought before opening your ridiculous Senatorial mouth, you’d realize that that’s what you should be mad about – that at your airport anybody “can get away with something like this”, not that Mr Jiang exposed that fact. He didn’t have to try anything clever. He just waited until crack TSA national security operative Ruben Hernandez turned his back…

…A bystander waiting for an arriving passenger noticed the breach and told the guard. TSA officials then discovered that surveillance cameras at the security checkpoint had not recorded the breach. …

…That’s right – they weren’t even recording, sources said, and needed a reboot, which the agency apparently didn’t ask for. …

…With the cameras inoperable, the TSA tried to get a second set of surveillance video from Continental Airlines. But the TSA apparently didn’t know the correct telephone number and the specific procedures to get the footage.

Shutting down the airport, wasting thousands of people’s time by pointlessly rescreening them, treating them as animals in pens without food or drink or bathroom breaks for hours on end, causing them to miss their flights and screwing up their lives… none of that is Mr Jiang’s fault but that of the money-no-object TSA that imposes stupid petty rules on everybody else but doesn’t even follow its own. …

Melanie Phillips on the self-destructive culture of guilt and appeasement in Britain.

…The left are consumed by hatred of America and the west in general. The paleo-cons believe that ‘abroad’ – about which they know no more than the BBC tells them, God help us – is a dangerous and frightening place full of lunatics who will leave us alone as long as we don’t do anything unpleasant to them; and the fact that they want in fact to kill us must therefore mean that we have indeed done something unpleasant to them. So they end up agreeing with the Islamic world that the west is actually the cause of the war being waged against it. …

…There is no question in my mind but that this mass public derangement is the single most important weapon in the Islamists’ arsenal. The unremitting barrage of these ignorant, bigoted and unfounded claims week in, week out provides a lethal echo chamber for the already epidemic conspiracy theories, victim complex and inversion of cause and effect that are coursing through the Islamic world, thus helping to incite untold numbers of British Muslims to an ever greater pitch of hysteria.

It also demoralises (in every sense), demotivates and discombobulates non-Muslim Brits so that they are quite unable to grasp that they are under attack from religious fanaticism; instead they turn on their own side (America, Israel) and create a climate of anti-war defeatism and appeasement. This undermines British troops abroad and ensures that no politician will commit properly to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq (not to mention Iran) thus ensuring that the west will lose the fight to defend the free world. …

What happens when the government provides low-interest loans to law students? More law schools open and charge higher tuition, and more students get degrees and large student debt, but can’t get jobs. Government incentives distort the market, and calls for regulation begin. Mark Greenbaum in the LATimes does just that, but he also gives us a picture of the untenable market situation. His solution though just packs more bad laws on top of other bad laws. We’d have been better off if market distorting policies didn’t get launched in the first place.

…From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016. Taking into account retirements, deaths and that the bureau’s data is pre-recession, the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.

This jobs gap is even more problematic given the rising cost of tuition. In 2008, the median tuition at state schools for nonresidents was $26,000 a year, and $34,000 for private schools — and much higher in some states, such as California. Students racked up an average loan debt in 2007-08 of $59,000 for students from public law schools and $92,000 for those from private schools, according to the ABA, and a recent Law School Survey of Student Engagement found that nearly one-third of respondents said they would owe about $120,000.

Such debt would be manageable if a world of lucrative jobs awaited the newly minted attorneys, but this is not the case. A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt. This problem is exacerbated by the existing law school system. …

In WSJ, Eric Felten discusses his discomfort with charitable solicitations at store checkouts.

…If you shopped at any number of stores participating in the hospital’s campaign—including Williams-Sonoma, Kmart, CVS drug stores, and others—you also were asked to contribute. Chances are, like me, you dutifully added to the kitty. But I wonder how many, like me, came away with a bad taste from the experience, an unpleasant sense of having been imposed upon.

I asked Leslie Lenkowsky, who is director of graduate programs at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy. He acknowledges that the practice involves some arm-twisting—”You get to feel badly if you refuse to donate”—but he thinks that the register pitch is not only effective but morally superior to indirect methods (such as when a store contributes on customers’ behalf a small percentage of its revenues). “From the charity’s point of view, this will be viewed as more ethical,” he says, “since the donor has to make an affirmative decision to give.” And if you are a customer/donor, he adds, “you get the product and the warm fuzzy glow.”

Well, I’m not glowing. It’s more like a slow burn. If I answer yes to the pitch, I don’t feel the least bit generous; I’m left with the nagging sensation of having been made to cry “uncle.” I never feel as though the offhand donation amounts to much—what, only a $5 donation when spending $100 on yourself?!—which leaves me feeling rather like a skinflint. And yet, if I don’t pony up at all, there’s the reflexive twinge of shame. Are these the emotions businesses want to produce in their customers? …

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