Pickerhead apologizes for missing three days last week. Time was filled with family and celebrating.
Adam Smith.org provides a chance for some nanny state humbug.
As Santa Claus sets off to drop presents down the chimneys of innumerable households on Monday night, let’s hope that he has got the right paperwork.
Claus, of course, is just an alias. He’s really Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, on the southern cost of Turkey. The EU (foolishly) isn’t admitting Turkey to the Union, so Claus needs a visa and a work permit to run his Christmas delivery service in the UK.
His elves, of course, would be bound by the child labour regulations. Working at midnight on 24 December would be right out. And Claus would have to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau in order to work with young people. …
Time for serious stuff. Some of our favorites have Bhutto thoughts. John Burns of NY Times is first.
Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at age 54 on Thursday in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, spent three decades navigating the turbulent and often violent world of Pakistani politics, becoming in 1988 the first woman to be democratically elected to lead a modern Muslim country.
A deeply polarizing figure, the self-styled “daughter of Pakistan†was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office amid a swirl of corruption charges that ultimately propelled her into self-imposed exile in London, New York and Dubai for much of the past decade. She returned home only two months ago, defying threats to her life as she embarked on a bid for election to a third term in office, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy. …
Mark Steyn Corner post.
Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today’s events a horrible inevitability. As I always say when I’m asked about her, she was my next-door neighbor for a while – which affects a kind of intimacy, though in fact I knew her only for sidewalk pleasantries. She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be – though in practice, as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world’s most corrupt political classes. …
The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan’s military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her. …
John Podhoretz in Contentions.
… American politics would dearly love to take a holiday from history, just as it did in the 1990s. But our enemies are not going to allow us to do so. The murder of Bhutto moves foreign policy, the war on terror, and the threat of Islamofascism back into the center of the 2008 campaign. How candidates respond to it, and issues like it that will come up in the next 10 months, will determine whether they are fit for the presidency.
FOR the next several days, you’re going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.
Her country’s better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.
We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.
She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and “hardheaded” journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.
In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency. …
There’s still an election season. Peggy Noonan reviews the candidates.
By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.
But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.
Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They’re the reason we get up in the morning. “What happened?” “Who won?”
This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. …
Corner post on Clinton’s roles in Bill’s administration.
Express, UK calls for school vouchers. Seems the educrats are busy ruining their schools too.
… The state must play an enabling role by giving parents vouchers worth the average educational spending per pupil and the freedom to spend them at any school which will take their youngsters for that price.
Bad schools must be allowed to wither on the vine and good ones to expand. Headteachers must be free to innovate without having to first get the say-so of WhiteÂhall bureaucrats. EducÂatÂion ministers must in future do much, much less.
Opponents of enhanced parÂental choice, such as Mr Balls, say what most parents want is for their local school to be a good school. That is the ideal situation but, as Lib Dem education spokesman David Laws has noted, that is an aspiration, not a policy. A policy choice through a voucher Parental requires a mechanism for making it happen. scheme is precisely such a mechÂanism.
A continuation of commandments from Mr Balls is not.
Division of Labour posts on global climate change – circa 1907. Seems the ice industry was in trouble because of a cool summer.
… Why no Congressional calls for subsidies for ice farmers? Oh yeah, in 1907 the United States hadn’t yet experimented in a big way with the narcotic effects of government subsidies.