Hitchens rips Galloway, Saddam's poodle, a new one

This is not going to go down easy with the Hate-Halliburton, BushHitler, Daily Kos Krowd! After a couple of years of apologizing for George Galloway, fifth columnist and shil for Saddam, the left has a lot of explaining to do.

The "anti-war" movement is not blameless in all this. When Galloway came to testify before the Senate and delivered a spittle-fueled harangue instead of answering the direct questions posed to him, he became a populist hero on the Left, was rewarded with a moist profile in the New York Times that praised his general feistiness, and was invited back to the United States to mount a speaking tour in which he repeated his general praise for the heroic "resistance" in Iraq, adding a few well-chosen words in support of the Assad regime in Syria. Praise was showered upon him in the Daily Kos, by columnists in The Nation, and elsewhere. Now we have the sober words of Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary commissioner for standards among elected members, who adds to the existing reports and evidence by saying that however much Galloway may have "prevaricated and fudged," the evidence against him is "now undeniable."

I do not think that an 18-day suspension from the House of Commons is anything like enough punishment for what Galloway has done, first on behalf of a sadistic and genocidal megalomaniac and second to steal food and medicine from the mouths of desperate Iraqis. We ran into each other a few times on his debate-tour, and on the last occasion on which we exchanged views, when he told me that he would never debate with me again (which he has since consistently refused to do), I told him that we were not done with each other. I would, I told him, be waiting to write a review of his prison diaries. The Senate subcommittee referred his "false and misleading" statements under oath (a crime under 18 USC Section 1001) to the Department of Justice in November 2005. Prosecutors in Manhattan (location of the banks through which some of the shady transfers were made) have also been handed the relevant papers. And the evidence adduced by the House of Commons must necessarily be considered by Scotland Yard, because it goes far beyond the damage done to the honor of Parliament. In the meantime, it will be interesting to discover whether Galloway's former wife, or the associates of his campaign who also received "Oil for Food" money, ever declared the income or paid any tax on it. And if I was the editor of the Daily Telegraph in London, whose printed documents about Galloway appear to have been vindicated by the parliamentary inquiry, I would want to revisit the judgment for libel that Galloway astonishingly managed to win, even under a notoriously oppressive law, in an English court. His troubles are only now beginning.

Like Hitchens, I would love to read the Galloway Prison Diaries.

Goldwater: Quote for the day

Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative, "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom."

Goldwater was much reviled in his time but he proved in the long run that ideas matter. He rightly saw the welfare state as a threat to individual freedom.

Cato's David Boaz offers this insight.

Shameless

Yeah if this were a Republican, you'd hear a lot about the abuse of power from the mainstream media. Bob Dole once remarked:"Where's the outrage." Well this time it's on the sidelines particularly when a media-favored Democrat like Charlie Rangel abuses power.

New York's Charlie Rangel provoked smirks this week when news emerged that the Harlem Congressman was humbly seeking a $2 million earmark to create a "Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service" at the City College of New York.

Titters turned to dropped jaws yesterday when a 20-page glossy brochure popped up, describing the yet-to-be-created center. That flyer, which asks for donations, explains that organizers need a mere $4.7 million to restore a "magnificent Harlem limestone townhouse" that will house the center, plus another $2.3 million endowment for its operating costs.

What, overtaxed taxpayers might ask, would all this money buy? One dollop would go to provide "a well-furnished office for Congressman Rangel" and another dollop would fund "the Rangel Library," which will be "designed to hold the product of 50 years of public service by the major African-American statesman of the 20th and early 21st centuries."

According to the brochure, the library not only would tell "the story of one great man.... The Rangel archivist/librarian will organize, index, and preserve for posterity all documents, photographs, and memorabilia relating to Congressman Rangel's career."

...Yesterday, Republican Study Committee Member John Campbell brought an amendment to the House floor that would have stripped Mr. Rangel's homage to himself. He was defeated 316-108. Only one Democrat voted to kill the earmark.

Who's John Campbell? He's the guy standing next to your scrivener last month at a Heritage Foundation event in DC.

Thank God we had Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick put John Rawls in his place. Thank goodness for that; it's too bad he left us way too early. The post-modern liberal socialist philosopher Rawls often had some useful arguments to make but when it came to practical politics he turned out to be a bit of a twit

What Rawls contributed to the political education of American intellectuals was not any sort of rigorous analysis, but an overall spirit or outlook detrimental to freedom. He coined a doctrine of what he called "excusable envy," according to which it is rational to envy people whose superiority in wealth exceeds certain (unspecified) limits, and to act on that passion. He cancelled out his ostensible prioritization of liberty by holding that liberty must first be given its "fair value," meaning that political liberties, including freedom of the press, may need to be restricted so as to ensure that the political process yields legislation that is "fair" to the poor. In his later writings, increasingly deferential to the Marxist critique of liberalism, Rawls wrote that securing people's equal rights and liberties must be preceded by government's first having ensured that their "basic needs" for economic goods were met -- thus sanctioning the alibis offered by assorted despots for violating their subjects' elemental rights to free speech, the freedom from arbitrary arrest, and the security of individual life and property.

John Rawls's intellectual legacy for American politics was an unfortunate one. Then again, he disparaged our political regime as only an "allegedly" democratic one anyway, and grew increasingly bitter in his last years, according to his closest associates, over our failure to institute the policies he happened to favor -- such as severe campaign-finance restrictions and universal health insurance. Whatever one's views on such issues, neither Rawls's principles nor his spirit offer a promising approach for addressing them.

Nozick was a great corrective for the excesses of Rawls's redistributionist anti-libertarianism. For a taste of Nozick's unabashed defense of capitalism, read this.

The Prince of Darkness, an old shoe leather reporter

Good review of Robert Novak's new book. I think I'll put it on my reading list.

Oh no! Tax revolt in Norway, prized welfare state

Tax revolts can grow from the ground up even in Norway, the "model" welfare state. Norway is on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve.

Norwegians are among the most heavily taxed people in the world, and that in turn has made Norway one of the most expensive countries in which to live. Most accept the taxes they're ordered to pay on income and even net worth and property, but growing numbers are publicly complaining about sky-high taxes on everything from cars to fuel to consumer goods.

Norwegians differentiate between skatter (taxes) and avgifter (duties, fees or user taxes) and the latter is the most hated. They're what causes a glass of house wine at an Oslo restaurant to cost the equivalent of nearly USD 16, or a gallon of gas to cost nearly USD 9 at current exchange rates.

"It's clear that taxes are much too high in oil-rich Norway," Oslo resident Gro Pettersen told newspaper Aftenposten. "It's sick!"

The taxes placed on new cars, which can more than double the price of the car itself, are another bone of contention, even though most Norwegians support measures to protect the environment. "The car tax is much too high, but so are most all the other avgifter also," said Ernst Bendiksen of the northern city of Vadsø, where Norwegians are far more dependent on their cars than those living in cities with good public transit systems. "We certainly don't get anything in return for them."

Milhous, always entertaining

The last liberal president, Richard Nixon, is the gift that keeps giving for psycho-historians.

WASHINGTON - President Nixon and his 1972 re-election campaign tried to tie Democrats to the mob, gay liberation and even slavery, according to newly released papers and tapes betraying bare-knuckle tactics from the dawn of the Watergate scandal.

Still, even as Nixon's lieutenants explored every avenue for defeating Democrat George McGovern and nullifying critics of all stripes — "hit them" was a favorite phrase — the president brooded over his reputation as a hard man whose gentle side was not being seen by the public.

Nixon called that side of him "the whole warmth business."

In 1970, he wrote an 11-page, single-spaced memo detailing his acts of kindness to staff and strangers and expressing regret that he was getting no credit for being "nicey-nice."

And in the profanity-laced conversation for which he was known in private, Nixon complained bitterly about Democratic campaign hecklers who shouted down his speeches, in contrast to well-mannered Republicans.

"Our people," he snapped, "are so goddamn polite."

Nixon's crime was that he got caught.

Shocker: Howie is going to rival WTKK-FM Talk

In a stunning blow to the station where has worked for more than 15 years, Howard Lawrence Carr is packing it up for rival talk station WTKK. Moreover, it will be early to rise for Howie who owns Boston radio's afternoon drive time. At WTKK, he'll take over the coveted morning slot once held by Don Imus.

In a bombshell development, WRKO-AM radio host Howie Carr is jumping ship to rival station WTKK-FM, where he’ll take over the prized morning-drive slot.

Tonight, WRKO said not so fast.

The AM station announced they expect to keep Carr in his seat "for many years to come."

Carr, whose contract with WRKO-AM (680) expires in September, is set to host WTKK’s morning drive show solo and replaces shamed syndicated talk jock Don Imus, who lost his national show after the “nappy-headed hos” scandal.

Carr inked a five-year deal with WTKK (96.9), according to his lawyer, Bret Cohen of the law firm Mintz Levin. Carr could not be reached for comment and is vacationing in Florida.

Is this a good move for Howie? He says it's not about the money, Ahem...

And there are more pressing questions:

Will the Howie trademark talk about hacks and pop culture cut it in the morning? Will Max Robins do mornings? How will the Death Pool sound on FM?

Did the constant Red Sox pre-game pre-emptions rub Howie the wrong way?

Did the hiring of the felon as Howie calls him endearingly Tommy "Taxes" Finneran have anything to do with it?

Is this the beginning of the end for WRKO?

And what does this say about the Jason Wolfe-Julie Kahn empire?

What will become of the ever-so-lovely Sandy, Howie's vital foil and a potential on-air talent?

Does Victor Bravo, aka Virgin Boy, return for the afternoon slot freed up by Howie?

Will Howie make frequent appearances on the moderately successful Eagan and Braude mid-day show? Will Jim Braude have seizures? Will Howie get to interview the Governor, Deval Patrick?

This tumultuous event definitely increases the value of John Dennis and Jerry Callahan. It forces Entercom's management to pay a dear financial price to keep their all-star WEEI morning team in place either in their current slot or an afternoon one.

Lots of reports from all over. Brian Maloney at SaveWRKO has more.

BostonRadioWatch.com, one of the best "trade" web sites on Boston radio, thinks the flight of Howie will result in several interesting chess moves.

WTKK's blockbuster move to land Carr will set off some major speculation as to how WRKO's programmers will counter the latest development in the talk radio battle. Will "Dennis and Callahan" move over to WRKO's PM drive to do a non-sports show? Will Don Imus who is rumored to be returning to the airwaves after the summer will somehow fall into the equation? Only time will tell, but for now it's advantage WTKK.

The demise of WRKO began with its deal to be the Red Sox station except when sister WEEI carries the game, a stupid dualism that strains credibility. It made matters worse by brushing asideScotto, a likeable, hip talkmaster in favor of Tommy "Taxes" Finneran. The Wolfe-Kahn tag team of destruction need a miracle and fast.

Cat Stevens Live Earth Headliner: A death-to-Rushdie kind of guy

Yusuf Islam or Cat Stevens as he is known to us in the Western world wanted Salmon Rushdie dead in 1989 upon the publication of The Satanic Verses. He supported a fatwa issued by the ayatollah and has never looked back hoping the modern world would soon forget his disdain for the rights of others. The prize-winning author of Midnight's Children refreshes everyone's fading memory.

However much Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam may wish to rewrite his past, he was neither misunderstood nor misquoted over his views on the Khomeini fatwa against The Satanic Verses (Seven, April 29). In an article in The New York Times on May 22, 1989, Craig R Whitney reported Stevens/Islam saying on a British television programme "that rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, 'I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing'.''

He added that "if Mr Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, 'I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is'.''

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Mr Whitney added, Stevens/Islam, who had seen a preview of the programme, said that he "stood by his comments".

Let's have no more rubbish about how "green" and innocent this man was.

Salman Rushdie, New York

Apparently Al Gore didn't get the memo. After all climate change -- and not terrorism -- is the most pressing issue to the self-indulgent hypocrites worried about global warming. Who knew that Al Gore would be so sentimental about the vindictive heirs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?

They have no shame!

More of the Clinton Show from Dick Morris. Weren't the Clinton years wonder years? Pardons for sale and all those years of peace and prosperity. These people can't help themselves.

The Clinton Show is back

Of course, the Clintons can't restrain themselves in the rush to pile on the Libby fiasco. The woman won't apologize for her vote on the Iraq War but she becomes unleashed when the President wisely commutes Scooter's sentence. The Clinton pardons were far more offensive (including the indulgences to the Clinton library paid by one Denise Rich) but we didn't hear the Democrats or the New York Times complain about justice. How convenient!

More from the Examiner

Republicans who clamored for the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton for lying about his affair in the White House with Monica Lewinsky may justifiably be taken to task now for merely tut-tutting Libby’s crime. Perjury is perjury, regardless of the position of the guilty or the magnitude of the topic misrepresented. Like every other felony, if you commit perjury, be prepared to do some hard time.

But no GOPer is making as much noise as the chorus of the nation’s most prominent Democratic leaders, some of whom should have Googled Clinton’s commutation record before opening fire on Bush and his Libby decision.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, accused Bush of “betraying the American people” and then added that “he has abandoned all sense of fairness when it comes to justice, he has failed to uphold the rule of law.”

Pelosi had a much different understanding of fairness, justice and the importance of upholding the law back in 1999, when Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 imprisoned members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution of disapproval, but Pelosi said she would have voted no had she been present for the tally. Pelosi was thus defending Clinton’s commutations of sentences received for seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to make bombs, bank robbery and illegal possession of stolen firearms, among other things. Between 1974 and 1983, FALN mounted numerous attacks against this nation’s police and military, killing six people and maiming many others.

Then there is Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who saw in Bush’s Libby commutation “a clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.” Clinton touts her years as first lady among her qualifications for being president, but she has never publicly repudiated either her husband’s FALN commutations or his pardons of Susan McDougall, convicted of mail fraud, and Marc Rich, the stock speculator convicted of tax evasion. McDougall was a former Clinton business partner, and Rich was the former husband of Denise Rich, a major Clinton fundraiser, both of whom clearly qualify as Clinton cronies.

An American hero

This is how an American sacrifices for his fellow man.

"Recycling is cheaper, no matter how much it costs!"

Michael Munger, economist from Duke, says: "I'm saving the Earth, one piece of expensive garbage at a time."

Incredible.

Rolling back the rolling back canard

Others bemoan the SCOTUS push back on racialism. Stephen Chapman is more level-headed.

The real educational problems faced by minority kids today are not lack of white students to sit by but inadequate choice, lack of order, a shortage of good teachers and families who don't make a priority of learning. Most parents, given a choice between racially balanced schools and safe, sound schools, would unhesitatingly choose the latter. In the wake of this decision, education officials can now focus more on what's really important.

The chipping away of the New Hampshire Advantage

I have one piece of advice for the "reborn" Blue Granite Stater and the Free State types that enable them; When it comes to the income tax Democrats will put in place, just make it a flat one.

Granite Staters have spent the last half-century reveling in their reputation as the keepers of Yankee libertarianism, the rock-ribbed neighbors to the north who loathe taxes, Democrats, big government, and -- well, anything else that reminds them of Massachusetts.

But now, Democrats are running both houses of the state Legislature, the corner office, and the Executive Council for the first time since the 19th century. This spring, New Hampshire became the fourth state to adopt same-sex civil unions. The House passed legislation, later killed in the Senate, that would have enacted a mandatory seat belt law in the last state to lack one. And, the other day, the Legislature adopted a budget that will increase spending by 17 percent over two years, along with a 28-cent cigarette tax increase to help pay for it.

This is what happens when Republicans stay home.

Proud to be an American, an unhyphenated one

Of course we are a nation of immigrants and we should continue to be so under the right conditions that protect borders, language and culture. My agrarian grandparents came to America and found it wasn't for them. Previous waves of immigrants told their children to become Americans that is to learn the language, succeed in business and promote the culture. That's not the way it is today in part because of the knee-jerk multiculturalism that's taken hold. Peggy Noonan explains why it's important for immigrants to cast away the ways of the Old World. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud.

My grandfather had his struggles here but never again went home. He'd cast his lot. That's an important point in the immigrant experience, when you cast your lot, when you make your decision. It makes you let go of something. And it makes you hold on to something. The thing you hold on to is the new country. In succeeding generations of your family the holding on becomes a habit and then a patriotism, a love. You realize America is more than the place where the streets were paved with gold. It has history, meaning, tradition. Suddenly that's what you treasure.

A problem with newer immigrants now is that for some it's no longer necessary to make The Decision. They don't always have to cast their lot. There are so many ways not to let go of the old country now, from choosing to believe that America is only about money, to technology that encourages you to stay in constant touch with the land you left, to TV stations that broadcast in the old language. If you're an immigrant now, you don't have to let go. Which means you don't have to fully join, to enmesh. Your psychic investment in America doesn't have to be full. It can be provisional, temporary. Or underdeveloped, or not developed at all.

And this may have implications down the road, and I suspect people whose families have been here a long time are concerned about it. It's one of the reasons so many Americans want a pause, a stopping of the flow, a time for the new ones to settle down and settle in. It's why they oppose the mischief of the Masters of the Universe, as they're being called, in Washington, who make believe they cannot close our borders while they claim they can competently micromanage all other aspects of immigration.

America the beautiful!

People, not government and definitely not socialists, helping people.

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans gave nearly $300 billion to charitable causes last year, setting a record and besting the 2005 total that had been boosted by a surge in aid to victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma and the Asian tsunami.

Donors contributed an estimated $295.02 billion in 2006, a 1% increase when adjusted for inflation, up from $283.05 billion in 2005. Excluding donations for disaster relief, the total rose 3.2%, inflation-adjusted, according to an annual report released Monday by the Giving USA Foundation at Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy.

Giving historically tracks the health of the overall economy, with the rise amounting to about one-third the rise in the stock market, according to Giving USA. Last year was right on target, with a 3.2% rise as stocks rose more than 10% on an inflation-adjusted basis.

"What people find especially interesting about this, and it's true year after year, that such a high percentage comes from individual donors," Giving USA Chairman Richard Jolly said.

Robert Putnam what are you afraid of?

Wouldn't it be ironic if the end game of multiculturalism, properly understood, creates more solipsism? Pushing for a more communitarian ethos actually creates a more atomized, alienated group of people. So says noted scholar Robert Putnam.

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.

Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a big effect on the immigration debate. Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” He said it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that,” a quote that should raise eyebrows. Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.

Political correctness is calling the shots again. Why am I not surprised?

A funny way to make a point about methodolgical individualism

Nicolai Foss over at Organizations and Markets proves that you shouldn't mess with libertarians when they take on socialists at the root and branch.

Sophisticated attacks by methodological holists on methodological individualism often take the form of admitting that while, strictly speaking, only individuals act, individuals are so strongly influenced and constrained by institutions (in a broad sense) that we might as well disregard those individuals and instead reason directly from institutions to social outcomes. Individuals are effectively malleable by social forces. “There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture,” Clifford Geertz famously argued, tying the holist argument to cultural relativism.

Read the whole item for a chuckle.

Meanwhile, read what O&M has to say about one of the most under-rated public intellectuals of our time, Douglass North.

Here's my review of North's Understanding the Process of Economic Change.

Currently listening to...

Ah yes, Tony Levin, one of my favorite bassists mellows out splendidly.

Here are a couple of reviews from Prog Archives.

Thought for the day

"Aristotle said that happiness is found in applying and developing your capabilities, in fulfilling your function. We should strive to create real value by using our capabilities and fulfilling our function," - Charles Koch, industrialist.

Currently reading

Here's a review from the Cato Journal that introduced me to the book.

Atheists on the march

This is worth reading only because it challenges one's faith.

Memorial Day 2007 in my hometown

Memorial Day Ceremony in Wakefield, MA. (May 28, 2007)

Say it ain't so

Fossil fuel extraction and consumption pose a lot of problems as we know. But biofuels aren't a pretty solution.

Indigenous people are being pushed off their lands to make way for an expansion of biofuel crops around the world, threatening to destroy their cultures by forcing them into big cities, the head of a U.N. panel said Monday.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chair of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said some of the native people most at risk live in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together produce 80 percent of the world´s palm oil -- one of the crops used to make biofuels.

She said there are few statistics showing how many people are at risk of losing their lands, but in one Indonesian province -- West Kalimantan -- the U.N. has identified 5 million indigenous people who will likely be displaced because of biofuel crop expansion.

Poem of the day

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
-MEDITATIO, Ezra Pound

Discuss among yourselves, please!

A quote for the day; a verity

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure."
- Colin Powell

Paul Krugman is nuts

Paul Krugman blames Milton Friedman for the outbreak of e coli bacteria on spinach, the result of the New York Times premier economist suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Don Boudreaux will have none of this foolishness.

Question for Krugman, chief mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and self-described "dangerous liberal": How do you account for the number of deaths caused by the F.D.A which refuses to let near terminal patients try drugs that may save their lives? If that's not a case for abolishing the F.D.A then it's certainly a greater concern that a few batches of spinach people fail to wash. For a more reasonable view read this. It's gated, sorry.

A thorough fisking of poor old Business Week

Business Week says predatory banks are waging a war on the poor by enticing them to assume debt they can't pay. Of course, Business Week, reliably liberal and transgressive, doesn't want you to see the unseen: More poor people have goods they wouldn't otherwise have were it not for credit; and some pay the loans back. As one observer noted: "It's either 'Predatory Lending' if you lend to the poor, or its "Redlining" if you don't. Of course Business Week is trying to instigate more government intervention since they know more than the poor.

Russell Roberts over at Cafe Hayek has one of the best "fiskings" or take-downs of the year thus far.

So yes, indebtedness is up in America. Most of that debt is housing. So people have more debt but they also have more assets—median net worth over that time period has gone up for every group except the second lowest quintile. So people are borrowing more but their assets are generally worth more.

Read the whole article.

You don't say

Speaker Pelosi and her crowd taking full advantage of majority status. Yet when they were the minority it was a different story. Power corrupts.

Democrats are wielding a heavy hand on the House Rules Committee, committing many of the procedural sins for which they condemned Republicans during their 12 years in power.

So far this year, Democrats have frequently prevented Republicans from offering amendments, limited debate in the committee and, just last week, maneuvered around chamber rules to protect a $23 million project for Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.).

On Wednesday, Democrats suggested changing the House rules to limit the minority's right to offer motions to recommit bills back to committee -- violating a protection that has been in place since 1822.

Much of this heavy-handedness is standard procedure in the House, where the majority has every right to dominate, but it contradicts the many campaign promises Democratic leaders made last year to run a cleaner, more open Congress.

And Congress as a whole isn't very popular -- right down there in Bush territory.

"There is no God!" Vitamins a waste of $$$

Ditch those high doses of multivitamins.

There's more worrisome news about vitamins: Taking too many may increase men's risk of dying from prostate cancer.

The study, being published Wednesday, doesn't settle the issue. But it is the biggest yet to suggest high-dose multivitamins may harm the prostate, and the latest chapter in the confusing quest to tell whether taking various vitamins really helps a variety of conditions—or is a waste of money, or worse.

And then there's this:

My love affair with vitamins and supplements is over: With a few exceptions -- stay tuned -- I'm tossing them out

What's next the Green Tea?

Only in America

Can home-school immigrants excel? Yes they can because hard work pays off. According to one of the sisters “If everything is too easy, that should be a warning sign,” says Anjela. “It means you’re not on the right plan.”

Two Russian-born sisters are due to become assistant professors of finance in New York state later this year, even though they are only 19 and 21, university officials said Wednesday.

Angela Kniazeva and her younger sister Diana were due to take up their new positions in September at the University of Rochester, where half of their students will likely be older than them.

The pair, who already have masters degrees in international policy from Stanford University in California, were picking up their doctorates from New York University's Stern business school on Wednesday after five years of study....

The duo were home-schooled by their parents and earned the equivalent of their US high-school diploma at the ages of 10 and 11 before graduating college in Russia at the ages of 13 and 14....

We need more immigrants like this.

Hat tip to Volokh Conspiracy.

Pure attitude from angry white guy

He's left Massachusetts, bless his soul, and he's still angry.

Uncle raises the topic, Stuff That Sucks.
Shit, where do I start?
How about people who suck?
Wanna know who sucks?
The designers and manufacturers of every car, truck, and SUV I've ever owned, who, for reasons I'll never understand in a million fucking years, couldn't see fit to incorporate into their design a windshield fluid reservoir with a capacity of more than 0.92 gallons. Do you sadistic little fuckers get off knowing there are thousands, if not millions, of garages and driveways in this country with one-gallon bottles of windshield fluid lying around with barely an inch left in the damn things...

Who else?

The R&D people single-cell organisms at Scott Brand Products who came up with their new "Extra Soft" toilet paper. Did any of you asswipes (no pun intended) ever try actually, oh, I dunno, WIPING YOUR ASS with this shit??? Those thousands of cute little quilted fluff-nodules, or whatever the fuck you call them, do but one thing. They serve as one gigantic perforation zone, the sole purpose of which seems to be the introduction of some kind of cost-saving measure, through which men can wipe their ass and give themselves a prostate exam at the same time.

Give me that cheap scratchy shit we had to use in grade school. You know the stuff with the branches and leaves still intact and visible in the fabric of the paper. At least it held together and got the job done.

As only she can mix it up

Camille Paglia is eclectic.

Is there a return to visionary Romanticism these days on classical music stations? In the last few months, I've heard an unusual number of works that heavily influenced me in my youth. Each of them has a passionate, rhythmic force or hypnotic lyricism: Leopold Stokowski's dynamic orchestral transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor" (written for organ); Alexander Borodin's "Polovetzian Dances"; Ernest Chausson's "Poème" for violin and orchestra; and Ralph Vaughan Williams' "English Folk Song Suite."

The Stokowski transcription of Bach had an explosive impact on me when I first heard it on my parents' 45 RPM record before I had even entered kindergarten. This week Philadelphia's WRTI played a spectacular recording of it by the Philadelphia Orchestra (for whom the transcription was originally done), conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. The sonorities of those massed strings could make the earth shake.

The "Toccata and Fugue" is so thunderous, propulsive and over-the-top that it seems to prefigure the Led Zeppelin phase of early heavy metal. It's a clash of the titans: We're overhearing two quarreling aspects of Bach himself. The heroic, questioning, yet tragic individual voice looks forward to Romanticism, while the orderly affirmation of transfiguring collective faith looks back toward medievalism.

The Vaughan Williams "English Folk Song Suite" has special meaning to me because it was a splendid set piece of my concert band in the early 1960s at Nottingham High School in Syracuse, N.Y. The clarinets do a lot of heavy lifting in that piece. Alas, I played clarinet very badly (I was always last seat, third section), partly because I longed to play the drums -- considered unsuitable for a girl in that era.

To my surprise, I recently discovered that the "English Folk Song Suite" was originally written for military band and was not, as I had always thought, transcribed from an orchestral version. The date was 1923 -- a year after the publication of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which registered the devastating disillusion of the generation that had lived through World War I, with its obscene carnage (over 8 million killed to redraw a few borderlines).

Thus Vaughan Williams' juxtaposition of folk song motifs with military riffs was a poetic relinking of British culture to its pre-modern agrarian past. That's exactly what Led Zeppelin did in their signature song, "Stairway to Heaven," which begins with the pipes of the medieval English countryside (whose fragrant herbs appear in "Scarborough Fair"). The savagery of war, with its wanton waste of young lives, would be purged and spiritually transcended through art.

But before purgation and transcendence, the bloodshed must stop. Bring the troops home from Iraq now.

I dissent from the last sentence but the woman is entitled to her opinion. Unlike other war critics, she actually thinks before she speaks.

Taking on libertarian dogma, Arnold Kling soars

A libertarian-leaning economist, Arnold Kling, takes on the libertarian view that only government is coercive.

The difference between government laws and private agreements is not that only the former are ultimately backed by force. The difference is that the cost of finding an alternative government jurisdiction is typically much higher than the cost of finding another private party to a contract

.Read the whole article, look for "The Coercion Herring."

Pandering to the aggreived: Hate crimes laws are unjust

Jacob Sullum fisks the Pelosi Democrats for misguided and unconstitutional "hate crimes" legislations. Of course hate is the eye of the beholder which takes the shape and thrust of creeping federal government.

The bill, which the House passed and President Bush has threatened to veto, expands the federal government's involvement in prosecuting bias-motivated crimes by eliminating the requirement that victims be engaged in a federally protected activity such as voting. It also adds four new bias categories (gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability) to the existing four (race, color, religion, and national origin).

Religious conservatives warn that the bill, combined with existing federal penalties for anyone who "counsels," "commands," or "induces" someone else to commit a crime, could be used against a pastor who condemns homosexuality if one of his congregants later assaults gay people. This seems like a stretch, especially in light of the well-established First Amendment rule that speech can be punished in such a situation only if it is intended to incite "imminent lawless action" and is likely to do so.

But it's not a stretch to say that hate crime laws, by their very nature, punish people for their opinions. A mugger who robs a Jew because he's well-dressed is punished less severely than a mugger who robs a Jew based on the belief that Jews get their money only by cheating Christians. A thug who beats an old lady in a wheelchair just for fun is punished less severely than a thug who does so because he believes disabled people are leeches.

The rationale for such unequal treatment is that crimes motivated by bigotry do more damage than otherwise identical crimes with different motivations because of the fear they foster. Yet random attacks arguably generate more fear, and hate crimes cause anxiety in the targeted group only when they're publicized as such. In any case, judges can take a crime's impact into account at sentencing.

Even if states were justified in punishing bigoted criminals more severely than merely vicious ones (as all but a handful currently do), the case for federal action would be weak. Unlike the situation in the Jim Crow South, there is no evidence that state and local officials are ignoring bias-motivated crimes.

The hate crime bill, which authorizes federal prosecution whenever the Justice Department perceives a bigoted motive and believes the perpetrator has not been punished severely enough, continues the unfortunate tendency to federalize crimes that are properly the business of state and local governments, just so legislators like Nancy Pelosi can show they care. Although the Bush administration claims to be concerned about this trend, the details of its objections to the bill (not to mention its history of supporting unconstitutional expansions of the federal government) suggest otherwise.

Read the whole article.

A project worth checking out: Building a fish weir

I came across my first fish weir last year while walking in the Boston Common. Fishweir.org is dedicated to making the rest of us aware of the artifacts and way of life of the city's Native American population going back 4,700 years. It's a pity that the city has not one landmark commemorating a way of life. As in the past, public school students will help build this year's fishweir on the Common. It will be on dsiplay for most of this month.

Buried under Boylston Street and the Green Line subway, fishweirs are direct evidence of the native communities that once occupied the area where urban Boston has grown.

In a city full of bronze sculptures of historical markers and memorials, there is no public display of information about the ancient fishweirs or the people who lived here 250 generations before the colonists arrived.

By engaging the imagination with the fishweir story, the Ancient Fishweir Project seeks to expand the timeframe of history told in Boston's public places and honor the memory of Boston's early Native inhabitants.

Here's a Globe story on the fishweir project from 2003.

Currently reading...

Having read Fooled by Randomness, I was quick to order Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book. So far, so good.

Today is F.A. Hayek's birthday

Today is Hayek's birthday.

For a primer on this great classical liberal and Nobel prize-winning economist, consult that byproduct of spontaneous order, Wikipedia

By defeating the Germans, did Stalin make the world safe for democracy?

Could Nazi Germany have been defeated without the help of the Soviets? Have American historians overemphasize the U.S. contributions at the expense of Stalin? Interesting debate at Oxblog.

Less children equal a cleaner world

The heartless environmentalist mindset has no sense of the future. A world with fewer children will not solve the problems facing the world. More people equals more solutions to the problems.

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

The paper by the Optimum Population Trust will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.

John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.

"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."

What to make of this?

More efficient vehicles are putting a dent in state gas tax revenues. It's always a story when government lose revenue as if it were a tragedy.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters says that the federal highway trust fund will lack sufficient funding from taxes beginning in 2009. She has been pressing states to look for alternatives to gasoline taxes.

"The bottom line is that we are spending more than we take in, and we have nearly run through the balances that had built up in the fund," Ms. Peters told Congress in February. "The highway funding problem is not going to go away, nor can we put it off until the last minute."

The highway-fund shortage could be exacerbated if Congress raises fuel-economy standards to curb pollution and reduce reliance on foreign oil. Cars with higher fuel economy can travel longer without refueling.

Cars already are more fuel-efficient than they used to be. Two decades ago, passenger cars got an average of about 14 miles per gallon, according to the Department of Transportation. Now that number is 17 mpg -- in part because people are trading in older cars for new ones with greater fuel-efficiency. The number would be higher had the fuel economy of vans, pickup trucks and SUVs improved, but it has stayed about the same at just over 16 mpg.

Some states are imposing more tolls on highways to raise money. In 2005, states' income from tolls was $5.9 billion, up from $4.1 billion in 1998. In the past two years, 10 more states have begun the process of putting more tolls on new or existing roads.

Now that's answer more tolls!

Whew the Republic survives the Oxford Union

The proposition debated by the Oxford Union was on its face preposterous, a fit of crude anti-Americanism. But we survived.

I am happy to report to you that the Oxford Union, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed America to continue existing.

After a raucous debate in front of a packed house, the motion - "this House regrets the Founding of America" - was overwhelmingly squashed.

Next time the rabid anti-Americans wallow in their prententious b.s. remind them who saved their ass in World War II. Ingrates I say.

Read this dispatch from the BBC.

Good question: Where are all the anti-communist movies?

Could it be that the Hollywood left is more sympathetic to socialism and opts to ignore the bad characters in its "ideal" system?

Anti-Nazi movies keep coming out, from Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Hitler, Beast of Berlin in 1939 and on through The Great Dictator, The Mortal Storm, The Diary of Anne Frank, Sophie's Choice, Schindler's List, right up to the current Black Book. And many of these have included searing depictions of Nazi brutality, both physical and psychological.

But where are the anti-communist movies? Oh, sure, there have been some, from early Cold War propaganda films to such artistic achievements as The Red Danube, Ninotchka, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Killing Fields, East-West, and Before Night Falls. But considering that National Socialism lasted only 12 years in one country (and those it occupied), and Communism spanned half the globe for 75 years, you'd think there'd be lots more stories to tell about Communist rule.

No atrocities, maybe? Nazis and Brits were vicious, but Communists were just intellectually misguided? Well, that seems implausible. They murdered several times as many people. If screenwriters don't know the stories, they could start with the Black Book of Communism. It could introduce them to such episodes as Stalin's terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Hungarian revolution, Che Guevara's executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam, Pol Pot's mass slaughter—material enough for dozens of movies.

A thorough fisking of Lou Dobbs, protectionist blowhard

For anyone interested in rebutting the claims of protectionist Democrats, please read.

A can of legal worms

Did U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the "swing vote" on the high court, muddle legal affairs when he ruled in favor of a partial birth abortion ban passed by Congress? Charles Fried suspects that Kennedy may be incoherent.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California asked whether I thought a Justice Roberts would vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. I said I thought he would not, at least not in its later, less absolute version embodied in the 1992 Casey decision, which protected against governments imposing an "undue burden" on a woman’s right to choose abortion before the fetus’s viability. I told Senator Feinstein that the formulation, and the principles behind it, had become so deeply rooted - in the law relied on not only in abortion cases but by analogy in matters as widely disparate as the Texas homosexual sodomy case, compelled visiting rights for grandparents and the right to die - that its abandonment would produce the kind of violent unsettling of the law against which respect for precedent is meant to protect.

The next year, when I testified in support of Samuel Alito, Senator Feinstein asked me the same question. I gave the same answer.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision for the court in the abortion case last week does not change my mind, because the procedure that was banned, intact dilation and extraction, is too rarely used and its importance too dubious to make much difference.

Still, this most recent decision is disturbing, because in 2000, in a similar case, the Supreme Court struck down a Kansas partial birth abortion ban. The Kansas law was unacceptably vague, but the principal reason for the court’s earlier decision was that there was responsible medical opinion that sometimes the procedure was less risky for the mother, and therefore in such cases the ban posed an undue burden. The federal ban cured the vagueness, but sought to overcome the medical testimony by a legislative proclamation of a fact that is not a fact: that the procedure was never safer for the mother.

The decision is disturbing because the court has on numerous occasions refused to allow Congress to overturn constitutional law by bogus fact finding, notably in decisions invalidating the Violence Against Women Act (which Justice Kennedy joined) and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which Justice Kennedy wrote).

It’s disturbing because Justice Kennedy fails to come to grips with his own jurisprudence, going so far as to say that because Congress was acting under its power to regulate interstate commerce, it needed only a rational basis to justify its decision. Where a fundamental right is involved, such an explanation is evidently wrong.

It’s also disturbing because Justice Kennedy was not quite willing to embrace his own conclusion. He suggested that perhaps as applied in a particular case in which there was an increased health risk the ban might be unconstitutional after all. What can that mean? The very complaint here was that the ban was unconstitutional because it applies in just such situations. Does the court contemplate a surgeon pausing in the midst of an operation in which he determines the banned procedure might be less risky, and seeking a court order?

Finally, the decision is disturbing for a more far-reaching reason: there are indeed cases where the court in the last few years had become truly incoherent, largely as a result of Justice O’Connor’s pragmatic and underexplained abandonment of positions she had earlier agreed to or even proclaimed on affirmative action and campaign finance. The first issue has been argued and will be decided this term of court; campaign finance is being argued this week.

If the justices eliminate the confusion and restore principle in those areas, the cry will go up that the court is simply reflecting its changed political complexion, not reasoning carefully and promoting stability and clarity in the law. And last week’s decision will lend plausibility to that charge.

Always one step ahead: WalMart

What will the antiWalMart crowd do now?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said on Tuesday that it will contract with local hospitals and other organizations to open as many as 400 in-store health clinics in the next two to three years.

Should current market forces continue, the world's largest retailer said up to 2,000 clinics could be in Wal-Mart stores over the next five to seven years.

Wal-Mart said the effort marks an expansion of a pilot program it started in 2005, when it leased space within its stores to medical clinics. Currently, it said 76 clinics are operating inside Wal-Mart stores in 12 states.

It has said the clinics are expected to boost the health of its shoppers and should also help sales by drawing consumers into its stores.

"We think the clinics will be a great opportunity for our business. But most importantly, they are going to provide something our customers and communities desperately need -- affordable access at the local level to quality health care," said Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer Lee Scott in a statement.

Wal-Mart has endured criticism over the years from labor unions that say it pays inadequate wages and pushes employees onto government aid programs.

The company has tried to counter such attacks, taking steps like selling generic drugs for $4 per prescription, and joining with the 1.8 million-member Service Employees International Union, one of its most vocal labor foes, to call for universal health-care coverage for all Americans by 2012.

The universe is amazing

Fruitful science reveals the wonders of the universe.

Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun's atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say.

These "coronal loops" carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ.

Solar explosions called micro-flares generate sound booms which are then propagated along the coronal loops.

"The effect is much like plucking a guitar string," Professor Robert von Fay-Siebenbuergen told BBC News at the National Astronomy Meeting in Preston.

The corona is an atmosphere of hot, electrically-charged gas - or plasma - that surrounds the Sun. The temperature of the corona should drop the further one moves from the Sun.

But, in fact, the coronal temperature is up to 300 times hotter than the Sun's visible surface, or photosphere. And no one can explain why.

That's pretty cosmic don't you think?

What was the Pentagon thinking?

Months ago I heard former Pentagon flak Dorie Clark explain how the Jessica Lynch story got out hand as the press got carried away with several aspects of the story. I don't fault the Pentagon on what spiraled out of control with the Lynch story. However, there
is no excuse for the Pentagon's "cover-up" of the circumstances surrounding Pat Tillman's death. It looks bad for everyone including the President.

Don Surber says heads should roll. Given government inertia, I don't think they will.

Oh it's only mercury

Mercury catches up with feel-good environmentalism. The Gaia crowd just doesn't understand the law of unintended consequences.

With all of the alarms raised about mercury, why are the moonbats advocating massive change to fluorescent lighting. The State of Vermont went through great lengths to rid the state of mercury thermometers and mercury batteries. Now the global warming loons want to swap all incandescent bulbs for mercury-based fluorescents.

The new way to save the planet is by poisoning it, yourself and Junior’s hamster. How you ask? Here’s how!

Fluorescent lamps work by exciting atoms of liquid mercury in an inert gas and having them excite a phosphor coating to produce visible light.

Thanks to Vermont Woodchuck for this one.

Update: Glenn Reynolds points to an article that says there isn't that much mercury in enviro-friendly lightbulbs. Still mercury isn't nice to have around if you keep listening to those public service ads warning about its disposal.

They keep thinking: Who needs men?

KAY HYMOWITZ gets one thinking about fatherhood. In the age of the sperm bank, a man can be the worst he can be and have it affirmed by women who should know better. I'm not sure what to make about this -- whether individual choice triumphs over nature and tradition. But Hymowitz's piece is thought-provoking.

There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men reinforces the worst that women fear in men. Think of all the complaints you hear: Men can’t commit, they’re irresponsible, they don’t take care of the kids. By going to a sperm bank, women are unwittingly paying men to be exactly what they object to. But why expect anything different? The very premise of AI is that, apart from their liquid DNA, we can will men out of children’s lives.

It’s not a good idea for society to erect a wall between children and their biological fathers — nor to encourage men to disown their kids. In several nations, including Britain and Sweden, sperm donors must agree to be identified if the child wishes, typically as of age 18. It would be a good idea for America to follow suit.

But let’s not kid ourselves that such a rule would also put an end to fatherlessness — which is nourished by our cultural predilection for individual choice unconstrained by tradition, the needs of children, or nature itself.

Does a child conceived with the "help" of a sperm bank have a right to know her biological father?

Wish I could be there, today at Sanders Theatre: Barro on Friedman

Robert Barro lectures at Sanders Theatre on Milton Friedman. I hope someone records this.

Mankiw updates with a post to Barro's paper on MF.

Christians under attack in Turkey

Sad story. Why can't we just get along?

While I was away

Spring break brought us to Ogunquit, Maine only to be holed up in a resort because of the nasty weather. We made the best of it and took in a lot of television as the Virginia Tech massacre unfolded.

As the motto for Maine proclaims the state is "worth a visit, worth a lifetime." Nice place. If you are up in Ogunquit you have to get a burger from Wild Willie's.

Nikki is one tough woman

If Nikki Giovanni, the great American poet, had a problem with the nutcake Cho then you knew this madman was a real problem.

The mood in the basketball arena was defeated, funereal. Nikki Giovanni seemed an unlikely source of strength for a Virginia Tech campus reeling from the depravity of one of its own.

Tiny, almost elfin, her delivery blunted by the loss of a lung, Giovanni brought the crowd at the memorial service to its feet and whipped mourners into an almost evangelical fervor with her words: "We are the Hokies. We will prevail, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech."

Nearly two years earlier, Giovanni had stood up to Cho Seung-Hui before he drenched the campus in blood. Her comments Tuesday showed that the man who had killed 32 students and teachers had not killed the school's spirit.

"We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid," the 63-year-old poet with the close-cropped, platinum hair told the grieving crowd. "We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness."

In September 2005, Cho was enrolled in Giovanni's introduction to creative writing class. From the beginning, he began building a wall between himself and the rest of the class.

He wore sunglasses to class and pulled his maroon knit cap down low over his forehead. When she tried to get him to participate in class discussion, his answer was silence.

"Sometimes, students try to intimidate you," Giovanni told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. "And I just assumed that he was trying to assert himself."

But then female students began complaining about Cho.

About five weeks into the semester, students told Giovanni that Cho was taking photographs of their legs and knees under the desks with his cell phone. She told him to stop, but the damage was already done.

Female students refused to come to class, submitting their work by computer instead. As for Cho, he was not adding anything to the classroom atmosphere, only detracting.

Police asked Giovanni not to disclose the exact content or nature of Cho's poetry. But she said it was not violent like other writings that have been circulating.

It was more invasive.

"Violent is like, `I'm going to do this,'" said Giovanni, a three-time NAACP Image Award winner who is sometimes called "the princess of black poetry." This was more like a personal violation, as if Cho were objectifying his subjects, "doing thing to your body parts."

"It's not like, `I'll rip your heart out,'" she recalled. "It's that, `Your bra is torn,and I'm looking at your flesh.'"

His work had no meter or structure or rhyme scheme. To Giovanni, it was simply "a tirade."

Tax history as natural history

The morally discredited U.S. tax system has evolved taking with it a bit of the American character to question authority. Bit by bit, the tax system has made us a bit fatalistic, as the power of central government grows. Neo-socialists take note of Kevin Hassett's offering:

Today taxes eat up about 30 percent of income, a much heavier burden. And like our ancestors, we don't believe that our money is particularly well spent. A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken last April found that Americans believe that 51 cents of every tax dollar is wasted. But where's the outrage? Most of us don't even own muskets, and the few of us who have revolted against the IRS are settled safely behind bars, to popular acclaim.

Which makes the U.S. tax system, ugly as it is, something of a marvel. It raises revenue without raising a ruckus. A simpler and more efficient system would undeniably serve everyone better, but the current hodgepodge is so entrenched as to have become a political third rail, and attempts to reform it almost always fail or are gradually reversed. Witness Ronald Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986.

Like a finch in the Galapagos Islands, the tax code has gradually evolved in a manner that maximizes its chances for survival. So a natural history of our tax system provides an interesting mirror on ourselves and reveals some surprising facts.

Drew Bledsoe, Class Act, retires

Drew Bledsoe was a great quarterback and helped resurrect the Pats from the team's doormat status in the early 1990s. He set records, earned four Pro Bowl visits and won a superbowl in a supporting role. Not bad for the 14 year veteran. He wasn't always treated well in New England after Tom Brady took over but he never seemed to complain extensively.

Like most football stars Bledsoe credited his father for his upbrining. The Drew Bledsoe Foundation is a proud sponsor of Parenting with Dignity run by Mac Bledsoe. More on the program here.

Thank you Drew for allowing us to know you. Hold your head up high. You are a great role model. All the best.

Who is an American and who would want to be?

Must read: John McWhorter

I will never forget a conversation I had with two twentysomething Muslims not long after 9/11. One had been born and raised in the United States, the other had come here at a young age. It was clear from our conversation, though they gingerly avoided putting it explicitly, that neither of them entirely disapproved of what Osama bin Laden had done. There were, of course, multiple recitations of "I think what he did was terrible" - but delivered with a certain lack of emotional commitment. What came through was a sentiment that, in the end, something terrible had been necessary for bin Laden to get across a valuable message. . .

The killer quote however is this:

The urgency of defending the life we know, American life, against murderous barbarians would instantly wake us up to the value of what America, its flaws acknowledged, is, and what it has achieved.

To all the beautiful, one-worlders and postmodernists I have this to say:

I'm proud to be an American.

Got it?

The charlatans in full regalia: "White people suck"

Get a load of this! Racist Collectivists attack individuality and thus freedom. That's right individualism is a problem on the road to racially harmonic nirvana.

White people, you're privileged, and guilty, guilty, guilty of oppressing disadvantaged minorities. Denial only makes things worse.

This is the message currently emanating from the Seattle School District. Never mind that this dubious construct undercuts needed emphasis on minority student achievement.

District officials this month are sending students from four high schools to an annual "White Privilege Conference" in Colorado. The conference is billed as an "opportunity to examine and explore difficult issues related to white privilege, white supremacy and oppression" — "a challenging, empowering and educational experience."

The conference has little to do with mastering reading, writing, math and science; or with graduating from high school and keeping one's head above water in college. Those are the lessons high-school students should be learning, not that they will be given social promotions in the name of equity and inclusion.

The focus of Seattle Public Schools bureaucracy is clearly political indoctrination, not academics. The district is even planning an "equity summit" in the spring, which White Privilege Conference attendees are to help lead.

What's the thinking behind this theory of white privilege? For the 2006 conference, a paper by Tobin Miller Shearer (who is white) argued that white people could not enter the kingdom of God unless they confronted the way racism and white privilege shaped their lives and spirituality. He maintained that white people tend to be far too individualistic and need to acknowledge their membership in a group that is unavoidably racist.

Robert Jensen, a journalism professor writing in the Kansas City Business Journal, echoed those sentiments. Breaking free of white privilege means "challenging the pathological individualism of this culture so we can see how our successes and our failures are always partly social, not strictly individual," Jensen asserted.

So, there you have it. Somehow, in 2007 in the United States, "society," racial bias and stereotyping are still controlling forces, oppressing minorities.

I have a different view. What we have here is an institutional evasion of personal responsibility. Why is it such a great bugaboo to think that actions have consequences?

The emphasis in Seattle Public Schools on "institutional racism" and "white privilege" flows from unpleasant outcomes that must be spun politically to explain such things as the district's most recent state achievement test scores.

In core academic subjects, whites and Asians still exceed blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. The disparity is not simply a matter of color: School District data indicate income, English-language proficiency and home stability are also important correlates to achievement.

Racial politics and white guilt at its worst. I trust that likes of Shearer and Jenson have never experienced working class life in an Italian or ethnic "ghetto". They are collectivist idiots who should never be placed near the levers of power never mind a classroom. I would never send my kid to this "seminar." After all what would it do to his or her "self-esteem?"

Dispatch from the Banana Republic addicted to oil

One good reason to pray for the emergence of alternative energy or a radical drop in oil prices. In Venezuela they never seem to learn and Little Castro is proof of that.

Dependence on one export has strapped the country’s financial fortunes to a roller coaster. When oil prices are high, many Venezuelans enjoy an enviable quality of life, particularly for a developing nation. The state doles out subsidies to domestic businesses, adds thousands of state jobs, and keeps the domestic currency artificially strong, which makes imports cheap. This state-dispensed bounty has helped create a carefree, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may mentality in Venezuelans and fostered a concomitant sense of entitlement. After all, with money seeping out of the ground, what incentive is there to work? Of course, government can only apportion handouts when the cash box is full. When oil prices fall, government revenue plummets, and the state is forced to curtail the spoils.

The prudent approach would be to leverage the country’s petroleum wealth to fortify other sectors of the economy. But Venezuelans gravitate to leaders who swear oil reserves can keep the party going indefinitely. Chávez is the latest in a long line of irresponsible, populist presidents, and if he has his way, his successor won’t emerge for many years. Chávez is demanding—and is expected to receive— authority to run for unlimited reelection. Still, even as he concentrates power, broader trends could determine how long his unlimited term in office lasts. Chávez’s standing—like so many things in this country—may depend more on the price of oil than he would like to believe.

Should latte liberals in NYC switch to Dunkin Donuts?

Oh the pity of it all and in New York City no less! It's bad enough Starbucks serves inferior coffee (burnt to taste)But to suffer the indignity of not being liberal enough in America's premier union town after all that "fair trade" blather. What is a liberal to do?

Judging by the lines at Starbucks stores in Manhattan, one of the most progressive and union-friendly towns in the country, the accusations of union-busting and poor pay may not matter a lot. New Yorkers will probably continue to queue up in the thousands for the privilege of shelling out $4 or so for a caffeine injection. (There are more than 200 Starbucks outlets in the five boroughs.)

Activists are asking consumers to sign petitions and send e-mail messages protesting Starbucks’ practices. But they may have a hard time matching the success of the campaign against Wal-Mart.

One could chalk it up to the nature of the product Starbucks peddles. Many customers feel they simply can’t get their day started without a caffeine-laden beverage. But some powerful, far-reaching trends — like consumers’ viewing their spending choices as political expression — may also help explain why a company can maintain its assiduously polished progressive reputation while also bitterly fighting unions.

A dream course for Classical Liberals

I'd love to dig into the reading list for this course.

Mario J. Rizzo Fall, 2007
New York University
Department of Economics

Description: Classical liberalism is the political philosophy that holds that society, within a legal framework of private property and liberty of contract, largely runs itself. This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the fundamental principles of liberalism and its application to issues of broad relevance to the law. These principles are developed through classical and contemporary sources from Marcus Tullius Cicero to Richard Epstein and Randy Barnett. The applications include eminent domain, religious toleration, the legal status of homosexuality, the war on terror, the market for parental rights, and the moral and economic status of profiting from the ignorance of others.

Farm subsidies are immoral

Let's get normative in our analysis. U.S. farm subsidies are hurting African farmers. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem poised to do much about it. This is immoral.

The cotton market, which provides nearly 70 per cent of impoverished Burkina Faso’s cash exports and income for more than a quarter of its 13 million people, has been brought to breaking point by factors known locally as “the monster with three heads”: a weak dollar, low world prices and US cotton subsidies.

This year will be crucial for the futures of 10 million West African farmers as the US rene-gotiates its Farm Bill, which has attracted international condemnation.

America’s 25,000 cotton farmers receive subsidies totalling some $4bn, allowing them to undercut their developing competitors. The subsidies were ruled illegal by the World Trade Organisation three years ago, yet only 10 per cent have been dropped so far, and Washington still pays many times more in subsidies to these farmers than it gives in aid to Africa each year. As a result, world cotton prices are now at the lowest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The answer isn't "fair trade," nor more foreign aid. The solution is more open, free trade.

Just finished: Cicero's De Senectute (On Old Age)

Montaigne was most correct when he said that Cicero gives "one an appetite for growing old."

"For what advantage is there in life? Or rather, are not its troubles infinite? No there are advantages too: yet all the same there comes a time when one has had enough. That does not mean that I am joining the large and learned body of life's critics! I am not sorry to have lived, since the course of my life has taken has encouraged me to believe that I have lived to some purpose. But what nature gives us is a place to dwell in temporarily, not one to make our own. When I leave life, therefore, I shall feel as I am leaving a hostel rather than a home."

They don't make Stoics like Cicero the staple of sound learning anymore. What a shame!

Einstein the deist

Walter Isaacson on Einstein, brilliant! Do you believe in God? Einstein was asked. He replied:

"I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

Tyler's take on the ever improving economy

Conservatives: The economy is doing well; look at the unemployment rate.
Liberals: No it's not; look at real wages, they've been stagnant for years.

Tyler Cowan provides a great starting point for the Great Debate over the state of the current U.S. economy. He's worth reading.

I believe that the much-heralded "real wage stagnation" consists of three major factors: a) potential real wage increases being absorbed by rising health care premiums in the broader employment package, b) unmeasured improvements in the quality of economic life, the internet being one example, and c) an unusually long lag between rising productivity and real wage gains. I am increasingly of the belief that the third factor no longer operates.

Are atheists the new fundamentalists?

Is the ever-clever Richard Dawkins a simpleton shilling for the authoritarism of science? Are believers evil?

A high debate takes place in Britain around the proposition: "Are we better off without religion?" As is custom for the debating society, Intelligence Sqaured, a vote is held before and after the arguments. Apparently the atheists won the "popular" vote and were able to draw even more undecided observers into their column by the end of the night.

But Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph, who voted against the proposition, observes the continuing trend: Atheists who aren't careful for what they wish. Their rhetorical and argumentive skills are turning them into the what they dislike about organized religion: dogmatism, arrogance and self-centeredness.

I feel that atheism may be acquiring precisely those characteristics that atheists so dislike about religion - intolerance, dogmatism, righteousness, moral contempt for one's opponents.

When you hear or read people like Richard Dawkins, you have to admit the force of many of their arguments. Religious people do often say extraordinarily indefensible things about their faith, and can be astonishingly evasive or confused. Very few of us (certainly not I) can competently maintain the standard arguments for the existence of God against a determined onslaught.

And yet the Dawkinses and Graylings, the Hitchenses and the Parrises, seem somehow to be missing the point. What they say is dry and unnourishing. I think one reason for this lies in their underlying conception of what it is to be human - they think that the highest quality is to be clever.

More from the Associated Press, via the Christian Post.

A more civil debate between Rev. Purpose (Rick Warren) and the St. John of Secular Humanism Sam Harris here.

Carla Howell's annual rite to sing her song

It's tax time which means it's time for libertarian activist Carla Howell's little ditty on the joys of filing taxes. I'm not sure Carla's into paying taxes on principle but the song reminds us all of the need to simplify the tax system either with a national sales tax or a flat rate income tax.

Today, Americans spend more than 6 billion hours at a cost of $265 billion preparing their taxes in what amounts to tortuous deadweight loss to the economy.

Soccer: The world sport of peace

The Brits may have cowered to Little Hitler in Iran, but they're still tough when it comes to soccer, apparently.

Tottenham fans fought with Spanish police in riot gear Thursday night during the English team's UEFA Cup quarterfinal at Sevilla. Seven fans of the London club were reportedly hospitalized — mostly with cuts to their heads. A policeman also was reported to have been injured in the disturbances.

The violence appeared to begin at about the 30th minute of Sevilla's come-from-behind 2-1 win, after the home team tied the game on a disputed penalty kick by former Tottenham player Frederic Kanoute. Tottenham goalkeeper Paul Robinson was called for a foul in the 18th for taking down Adriano Correia. Television replays showed Robinson got a hand to the ball before making contact with Adriano.

Fans ripped up plastic seats at the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan stadium and hurled them at police, who then hit spectators with night sticks. Before the match, about 50 Tottenham fans reportedly clashed with police outside the stadium.

More Pelosi

One has to admit that George Bush is blessed by his political enemies and opponents.

Where was Speaker Pelosi, the guardian of all that is true, liberal and San Franciscan speaking out against Arab oppression?

No it's a lot easier to bash Bush on both sides of the Atlantic and engage in futile diplomacy on an unmitigated pretentious level.

Pelosi’s visit took place at a time when several Syrian political and human rights activists are facing trial for exercising their right to freedom of expression. Former prisoner of conscience Kamal al-Labwani is due back in court on April 10. He was arrested in November 2005, on his return to Syria after several months in Europe and the United States, where he met with officials to call for peaceful democratic reform inside Syria. He is charged with “encouraging foreign aggression against Syria.” Prominent writer Michel Kilo and human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni have been detained since May 2006, following their signature of the Beirut-Damascus Declaration, which called for improved relations between Syria and Lebanon.

Hat tip: Austin Bay.

Quote for the day

By way of the dedication page of Manfred Fuhrmann's Cicero and the Roman Republic

I have resolved to take
wisdom for my playmate;
for I know she will be a good
counsellor and a comforter to me
in trouble and in sorrow
The Wisdom of Solomon 8, 9

Now playing...Marin Marais

Delightful after dinner music.

Marin Marias, French composer and viol player, had time for more than music. According to Wikipedia, Marin Marais married Catherine d'Amicourt in 1676 and had 19 children together. Wow!

My longtime favorite after hearing it for the first time on WCRB-FM years ago is the title ttrack from Sonnerie de Sainte Genevieve du Mont.

Government-run health care will be a disaster

Government health care will have the efficiency of the post office in the age of e-mail.

As H. L. Mencken said: "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong." Universal healthcare is a textbook case.

A socialist kill-joy in Venezuela

Hugo, the protofascist sure knows what's "good" for his people.

Venezuela's government left bar-owners reeling by imposing an alcohol ban over Holy Week and Easter weekend, forcing drinkers in the whisky-mad Catholic country to use covert methods in search of a fix.

The ban outlaws drinking alcohol from 5:00 pm to 10:00 am each night from March 31, and all day from the following Thursday to Easter Sunday. It aims to lower the toll of traffic accidents due to drunk-driving over the period.

But it has led the South American country's top beer brewer, Cerverceria Polar, to cancel a series of festive events it had planned for the week on the tourist island of Margarita and other resorts.

In a shop in the neighborhood of La Carlota, near the president's residence in Caracas, drinkers have taken to ordering "a kilo of beans" from their grocer -- code words for a pack of beer.

Traders in the seaside resorts have complained they will lose up to 70 percent of their business during the ban. Other celebrations -- salsa, reggae and rock concerts -- have also been called off at beaches on Venezuela's Caribbean coast.

Hardened bar and restaurant-owners in the coastal capital Caracas were not cowed, however, saying that in parts of the city the police will be unable to enforce the dry-out.

"In the working class areas there is no alcohol ban," said one bar owner in the central district of Chacao. "The police won't go in there because the delinquents are better armed than they are."

Pedro Carreno, the interior and justice minister in the government of firebrand socialist President Hugo Chavez, has championed the ban, insisting: "You don't have to have alcohol to have a good time."

The finance ministry meanwhile has announced new taxes to curb the country's taste for mature Scottish imports. Venezuela is the world's biggest consumer of 18-year-old whisky.

Can we question his patriotism now?

Arson. Clear and Simple. I hope the prosecutor presses serious charges.

Three Yale University students were arrested early Tuesday morning for burning an American flag on a pole attached to a house in New Haven, the Yale Daily News reported today.

The three men, all of foreign origin, were charged with offenses ranging from reckless endangerment to arson and were held in jail Tuesday night after a judge refused to release them without bail.

According to the newspaper, the New Haven police said the men — two freshmen and a senior — first attracted police attention at about 3 a.m. Tuesday when they asked two offcers for directions back to their residence. They were identified as Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, also 19.

The two officers returned to the neighborhood shortly afterward and found the flag burning in front of a house. One officer pulled down the flag to keep the fire from spreading and the other tracked down the three men. The police said the men admitted to starting the blaze, the newspaper reported.

Mr. Anklesaria was identified as a British subject and Mr. Angelopoulos as a citizen of Greece. Mr. Akbar was born in Pakistan and is a naturalized American citizen, the newspaper said.

Mr. Akbar is the author of a published memoir, “Come Back to Afghanistan,” describing his experiences over three summers spent observing reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and acting as an informal translator for American forces there.

Can we now question Said Hyder Akbar's patriotism? Or his stupidity?

Over and out at the Philly Inquirer

One of my favorite economics writers is calling it quits. Andrew Cassel has written his last column for the Inquirer. And he goes out on a tall note calling for better economic education for students.

A smart financial-education program would give kids the tools to understand that, and also help them avoid investment fads and emotion-laden financial sales pitches down the road.

But economics learning doesn't - or shouldn't - end with investing and personal finance.

At its core, economics isn't about managing money at all; it's about making choices, balancing risks and rewards, and creating wealth in the broadest sense.

The primary focus, in fact, should be on developing what economists call "human capital" - a fancy term for whatever each of us has to offer the rest.

In my own idealized economics-education program, kids would learn mainly about investing in themselves, and only secondarily about investing in stocks and bonds.

They also would learn that markets and commerce - which for many still carry a bad odor of greed and exploitation - are neither immoral nor amoral, but simply a way for human beings to cooperate with one another as strangers.

If we want to get along with people we'll never meet, competition and trade are the keys. The former spurs us to do our best, and the latter lets the whole world share in the fruits of our effort.

Hear! Hear!

An archive of his columns can be found here.