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Peter Wehner comments on a Thomas Friedman column.
Has anything sillier than this, from the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, been written recently by a serious columnist?
Is the surge in Iraq working? That is the question that General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will answer for us next month. I, alas, am not interested in their opinions. It is not because I don’t hold both men in very high regard. I do. But I’m still not interested in their opinions. I’m only interested in yours. Yes, you—the person reading this column.
This is a case study of a columnist trying to be provocative and merely coming across as pandering and foolish. …
Max Boot thinks the NY Times Book Review might be sillier.
Have you been waiting for an American version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—a searing account of life in the American Gulag? Well, according to the New York Times Book Review, your wait is over. Rush right out and pick your own copy of Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.
To be sure, the Times’s reviewer, Wellesley professor Dan Chiasson, admits that the poems may be somewhat lacking in artistic merit. But, hey, he suggests, you gotta make allowances: …
John Fund follows the controversy surrounding a proposed Romanian mine.
The recent tragedy in Utah has brightened the spotlight on mining, already under assault by environmental and anti-globalization activists world-wide. These activists have produced several documentaries, and the anti-mining campaign has attracted the attention of billionaire George Soros and actress Vanessa Redgrave–and enough charges of greed or hypocrisy to fill a mine shaft.
Tonight, PBS will air “Gold Futures,” a film by Hungary’s Tibor Kocsis. The film focuses on residents in Romania’s Rosia Montana, a rural Transylvanian town, who are divided over the benefits of a proposed gold mine. It also features Gabriel Resources, the Canadian mining company trying to convince them to relocate so it can dig for a huge gold deposit estimated at 14.6 million ounces, worth almost $10 billion. PBS describes the film as a “David-and-Goliath story.” …
… The other side to the controversy is told in a new film that will never be shown on PBS, but is nonetheless rattling the environmental community. “Mine Your Own Business” is a documentary by Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. They conclude that the biggest threat to the people of Rosia Montana “comes from upper-class Western environmentalism that seeks to keep them poor and unable to clean up the horrific pollution caused by Ceausescu’s mining.”
Mr. McAleer, a former Financial Times journalist who has followed the mine battle for seven years, says he “found that everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false.” He produced his film on a shoestring $230,000 budget largely provided by Gabriel Resources, but says he was given complete editorial control.
The Gabriel funding caused environmental groups to label the film “propaganda” and demand the National Geographic Society cancel plans to rent its Washington, D.C., theater to the free-market Moving Picture Institute for a screening. …
Salon.com with a great piece on Alaska and its corrupt GOP legislators.
… The political anomalies of the far Northwest are on view right now in a scandal that looks likely to bring down much of the state’s Republican establishment, threatening the careers of oil executives, lobbyists and all three of Alaska’s representatives in Washington. The alleged improprieties are as crass as they get — lobbyists handing out bribes on the floor of the state Legislature, federal money directed by Alaska’s U.S. senators to those companies, and lobbyists who granted politicians personal favors. The taint has spread so far that it has become a crisis not just for those politicians who have been directly implicated, and not just for the Republican Party, but for the state itself. The Associated Press was recently moved to call the few living statesmen who had signed the state’s first constitution, in 1956, and ask them what had become of their creation. ” Greed is rampant,” one of them, Vic Fischer, told the AP. “I’m very disgusted. It’s not a matter of betrayal. It’s more a matter of sadness and concern. But most of all disgust.”
What’s wrong with Alaska? The state’s politics can seem an accident of its own isolation, and dependence. There are few states that seem as ripe for scandal as this one, with its history of single-party rule and an economy, based on the extraction of wealth from public lands. But there may also be another, deeper truth: Alaska’s strange, enticing political culture may equally be a legacy of the state’s senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens. …
Pejman Yousefzadeh in Tech Central column on Karl Rove.
A day after announcing his resignation as White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove had a conversation with the media during which he revealed one of the reasons why the White House will miss him:
Q Any few accomplishments that you single out as some of the ones you’re most proud of?
MR. ROVE: I’ll think about that in September. This morning, though, at the senior staff meeting, I was very candid with my colleagues. I said that the true story was that I was resigning in protest over our failure to establish equidistance as the principle in the germination of seaward lateral boundaries in the latest version of the act overseeing offshore drilling. I am the leading expert within the administration on this. This actually goes back to Grotios, who was born in 1598, and he wrote this in one of his earliest works. You’re all familiar, of course, with Hugo Grotios?
…
James Taranto has more on Rove.
Rich Lowry on the Edwards’ campaign.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld had a point when he said, in his frequently quoted formulation, that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In the case of John Edwards, however, hypocrisy is simply a way of life.
The infamous $400 haircut — actually, some of his hairstyling sessions ran as much as $1,200 all told — wasn’t a freak embarrassment for a candidate so self-righteously devoted to the poor. It was part of a pattern so pervasive that it has become the defining aspect of Edwards’ candidacy.
Thomas Sowell on why the left loves failure.
It is not just in Iraq that the political left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise. The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest. Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing. One wonders what they would do in heaven. …
Newsweek reports on Chinese laws regulating reincarnation. Seriously!
In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.” …
Dilbert has a reaction. How cool is that?
My favorite story of the week, if not my entire life, involves China passing a law banning Tibetan monks from reincarnating without permission.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/
My first reaction was something along the lines of “Ha ha! You can’t regulate reincarnation!†Then I realized China manufactured every article of clothing I’m wearing, and I didn’t see that coming either. So maybe I should stop underestimating China for once. I’d like to go on record predicting China CAN control reincarnation if they set their minds to it.
Regulating reincarnation is a worthy goal. There are many benefits. For example, reincarnation would give the Chinese government a renewable source of spare parts:
Chinese Bureaucrat: “Hold still.â€
Monk: “Please don’t remove my heart! I’ll die!â€
Chinese Bureaucrat: “No worries. I’ve already signed form R-23 authorizing you to reincarnate.â€
Monk: “As another monk?â€
Chinese Bureaucrat: “As a dung beetle if you don’t stop squirming.†…