Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
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.