Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
David Brooks thinks the 2008 election will be decided by the happiness gap.
Some elections are defined by the gap between the rich and the poor. Others are defined by the gap between the left and the right. But this election will be shaped by the gap within individual voters themselves — the gap between their private optimism and their public gloom.
American voters are generally happy with their own lives. Eighty-six percent of Americans say they are content with their jobs, according to the General Social Survey. Seventy-six percent of Americans say they are satisfied with their family income, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Sixty-two percent of Americans expect their personal situation to get better over the next five years, according to a Harris Poll, compared with only 7 percent who expect it to get worse.
Researchers from Pew found that 65 percent of Americans are satisfied over all with their own lives — one of the highest rates of personal satisfaction in the world today. …
… In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt could launch the New Deal because voters wanted to change the country and their own lives. But today, people want the government to change so their own lives can stay the same. Voters don’t want to be transformed; they want to be defended.
Roger Simon reports the Dems are being sued by Ralph Nader.
What happens to old pols when time has passed them by? They sue each other:
Consumer advocate and 2004 independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader sued the Democratic Party on Tuesday, contending officials conspired to keep him from taking votes away from nominee John Kerry.
John Stossel says Utah has historic vote soon on school choice.
Next Tuesday, Utah voters go to the polls to decide if their state will become the first in the nation to offer school vouchers statewide. Referendum 1 would make all public-school kids eligible for vouchers worth from $500 to $3,000 a year, depending on family income. Parents could then use the vouchers to send their children to private schools.
What a great idea. Finally, parents will have choices that wealthy parents have always had. The resulting competition would create better private schools and even improve the government schools.
But wait. Arrayed against the vouchers are the usual opponents. They call themselves Utahns for Public Schools [http://tinyurl.com/25sbtu]. They include, predictably, the Utah Education Association (the teachers union), Utah School Boards Association, Utah School Employees Union, Utah School Superintendents Association, the elementary and secondary school principals associations, and the PTA. No to vouchers! they protest. Trust us. We know what’s best for your kids. …
… For over a century, American children have been in the hands of education bureaucrats. For over 40 years, the government’s system has been dominated by a protectionist teachers’ union that puts itself ahead of the children entrusted to its members. The results are what we should expect from a monopoly financed with money extracted from taxpayers: poor quality, lack of innovation and bored children.
The parents of Utah should be the envy of the rest of the country because on Tuesday, they have a chance to take back control of their children’s education.
Amir Taheri sticks up for the Saudi royals.
The decision by Vince Cable, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, to boycott the state visit of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz al Saud may win plaudits from the supporters of gesture politics. But gesture politics will not alter the fact that Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and the single biggest customer of its arms.
Nor would it change the strategic reality that the kingdom sits atop a quarter of the world’s oil reserves or that the West needs Saudi co-operation to uproot the Islamist terror, a monster they both created before becoming its joint victims. The truth is that we need to maintain close ties with the country while encouraging its still tentative, fragile attempts to reform itself. …
The Captain with some great posts. John Murtha, the GOP version of a Murtha pig -Ted Stevens, speaking of slimes, what we might learn from John Edwards, and Hillary’s problems in last night’s debate.
Rich Lowry dances on Obama.
When it comes to self-reflection, Barack Obama is an overachiever. At age 46, he has already written two memoirs when most people in public life — sometime at the end of their career — will be lucky to write one.
So far, what Obama seems set to get out of his presidential campaign is yet another memoir — this one an agonized, deeply personal account of how his campaign went nowhere despite all the media hoopla, crowds, and fundraising. It turns out that voters aren’t as interested in Barack Obama as Barack Obama is.
Like Jacob grappling with the angel, Obama, Obama has been wrestling with his own conscience the entire campaign and has come up lame. He has engaged in a running commentary on whether the tactics of his own campaign — down to specific press releases — live up to his standard of audacious hopefulness. Left unclear is why anyone else besides Barack Obama should care.
The insular, self-obsessed campaign of her chief rival is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton has had as good a 90-day run as anyone in presidential politics in recent memory. …
Orin Kerr of Volokh wants to know why a supreme court justice is lobbying congress.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently gave an address on the role of dissenting opinions that included a remarkable explanation for her dissent last term in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber. That case involved a statute regulating when discrimination claims must be filed; the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the lawsuit in that case was filed too late. Justice Ginsburg dissented, and she took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench.
In her address, Justice Ginsburg explains that the purpose of her dissent was “to attract immediate public attention and to propel legislative change.” …
James Taranto with a nice example of media bias when reporting the war.
One of the ways in which the media bolster their anti-Iraq narrative is by maximizing the number of U.S. casualties. The figures you hear for the number of deaths–currently approaching 4,000–almost always include noncombat deaths. Roughly 20% of “Iraq war” deaths are from illness, accident, suicide or other “nonhostile” causes.
By this standard, of course, every serviceman in Iraq is doomed, and so are the rest of us. Even for those who perish in combat, war is only the proximate cause of death.
A striking example of “Iraq war” deaths that weren’t appeared last week in the New York Times: …
Thomas Sowell writes on driving while black.