You are the only thing keeping me sane at this moment in time . . . as I sit at my desk in the Capitol . . . facing a long, long few weeks ahead. I am not alone on the Hill in saying that you all are true heroes. True intellectuals. True conservatives. And most importantly, simply true. Thank you for what you do.
The EU's oligarchs have now chosen the union's new "president" (actually the president of its council, which will likely prove to be an important distinction) and "foreign minister" (or to give the job its full, magnificently pompous, vaguely Ruritanian title, "high representative"). For the former job, they have picked an obscure Belgian prime minister (are there any famous Belgian prime ministers?), a federalist fanatic whose only real achievement has been to keep his miserable wreck of a nation together over the last year or so. As for the high representative, she's an obscure British baroness (and current EU trade commissioner) who never seems to have been elected to anything, but is married to an left-establishment journalist and did suceed in helping force the dishonest, undemocratic and unlovely EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty through the House of Lords, qualifications that have meant something to someone.
Europe's press is underwhelmed by the election of these two dullards, but the choice is good news for two critical constituencies (in fact, the only two critical constituencies — as the national electorates count for nothing). Neither the Belgian nor the baroness will represent too much of a challenge to the egos of the EU states' various prime ministers and nor, more critically, will they have the personalities or ability to challenge the ever-growing power of the unaccountable bureaucrats entrenched in the EU's commission — who have, of course, a leadership, and ever-more ambitious agenda, of their own.
For more detailed background, the best place to turn is, as usual (despite some unecessary remarks about what the baroness looks like), the invaluable EU Referendum.
I'm sacrificing a new amp for this donation, but I figure it's worth it . . . as long as you DON'T send me a copy of that horrible new Star Trek movie. NRO + NR print = bliss.
This coming Tuesday (November 24) would have been Bill Buckley’s 84th birthday. We think a nice way to remember Bill is the way he remembered his own life and doings — through his literary autobiography, Miles Gone By. This beautiful hardcover (a NY Times bestseller when it was first published in 2004) is nearly 600 pages, and includes a CD of WFB reading selections.
Woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than 50 years, Miles Gone By. Is a wonderful account of the larger-than-life man who founded the modern conservative movement. As the brassy member (one of ten children!) of the large and rambunctious Family Buckley, as the enfant terrible who had all academia in an uproar over his first book, God and Manat Yale, from there on to the CIA spy, the National Review founder, the Firing Line inquisitor, father and husband, novelist, sailor, submariner (his account of seeing the Titanic is trés cool), friend (you’ll enjoy Bill’s perspective on his many good friends, from Ronald Reagan and Claire Booth Luce to Roger Moore and David Niven), mayoral candidate, Bach aficionado . . .
How the life of the larger-than-life Bill Buckley can be contained in 600 pages is a mystery, but it is in Miles Gone By. Now, why are we promoting this book? Because we just came across two boxes, hidden for the past five years under other boxes, in the NR storage room. If you would like a copy the cost is only $30, which includes shipping and handling. You may order it safely and securely here, but you had best do it immediately because these will be gone before you know it.
Just a note to Philly NR folks — I will be on the local public radio, WHYY-FM, from 10 to 11 this morning. Opposite me will be a fellow from The Nation. Topics are Palin, Obama in China, health care, terror trials, Afghanistan, and so on. Sounds like the works. See you, Brotherly Lovers (or whatever).
I plan to assemble a list of great conservative novels for NRODT, probably for an issue in early 2010. It will be a good and interesting list because so many readers of The Corner sent in suggestions when I blegged for them in August. I'd like to open the lines once more — except this time, please post your comments at HeyMiller.com, my personal website. The current top item is called "Novels of the Right." That's the place to air your thoughts.
Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.
Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.
I am a family physician, regular Corner reader and NRODT subscriber. Thanks for all of your work for general conservatism, and especially in your efforts to keep me from becoming a G-7 or whatever I'd become under the new American health care.
My all-time favorite response to John McCain’s selection of Palin as his running mate was from Wendy Doniger, a feminist professor of religion at the University of Chicago. Professor Doniger wrote of the exceedingly feminine “hockey mom” with five children: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
The best part about that sentence: Doniger uses the pronoun “her” — twice.
Just this week, a liberal blogger at The Atlantic who has dedicated an unhealthy amount of his life to proving a one-man birther conspiracy theory about Palin’s youngest child (it’s both too slanderous and too deranged to detail here) shut down his blog to cope with the epochal, existential crisis that Palin’s book presents to all humankind. The un-self-consciously parodic announcement seemed more appropriate for a BBC warning that the German blitz was about to begin, God Help Us All.
Indeed, some of us will always be sympathetic to Mrs. Palin if for nothing else than her enemies. The bile she extracts from her critics is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.
I'm glad NPR's This American Life is getting some love from NR. I've long thought that it is simply great radio. That it ended up on the right side of a public policy question is nice confirmation of its honesty.
Having converted my decades long subscription to NRODT to the sleek, modern NR Digital, I can now donate the difference to sprucing up my daily online home (NRO). It's like saving the planet for capitalism.
Who's Fact Checking the Fact Checkers at AP? [Andy McCarthy]
In the Washington Times this morning, there is a AP story (it's not really a report, more an ill-informed supposition) positing that a New York jury might very well spare the 9/11 bombers from the death penalty. AP reasons that "New York juries are [so] loath to impose the death penalty, even for terrorists," that, "in fact, a jury spared the lives of two Osama bin Laden followers a month after Sept. 11, while the World Trade Center's ruins were still smoldering."
It's a bogus claim. The story does not mention the two "followers" by name, but it seems clear AP is referring to two of the bombers of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Mohammed Daoud al-`Owhali and Kalfan Khamis Mohamed. The trial jury in Manhattan did deadlock on the death penalty — meaning they got life-imprisonment because a death verdict must be unanimous. But that happened in June and July 2001 (see here and here). We were over two months away from smoldering ruins.
I don't think a civilian trial in New York City is a good idea either, and I think New York juries are a crapshoot. We've had great juries for terrorism cases (mine was), but Manhattan is also the place where Sayyid Nosair got acquitted of murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane — despite shooting him in front of dozens of people and being apprehended after a shoot-out/chase in possession of the gun proved to have killed Kahane. But whatever is to be deduced from all this, fictionalizing the record does not help.
This is a bargain for all the enjoyment I have gotten. Living on the the other side of the world for the past year The Corner keeps me informed on more than just politics. Sorry if that sounds like an ad but it's true. I still plan to watch 24 when I can track it down since I missed it all last year.
One thing you can thank the declining dollar for is that I am currently teaching in Taiwan and paid in New Taiwan Dollars. The drop in the USD gives me the extra money to be able to donate to you.
The idea of having a Thanksgiving Day turns out to be especially inspired when the nation is going through dark times: The attempt to search out things we’re thankful for reminds us of a lot of great stuff we take for granted. Peggy Noonan’s column is an excellent example of this. When most people talk about American culture these days, they’re grousing — liberals about birthers and talk radio, conservatives about sex and anti-Americanism in the entertainment industry. But Peggy makes a point that hadn’t occurred to me, yet one which on reflection appears absolutely right:
I love TV, and the other day it occurred to me again that we are in the middle of a second golden age of television. I feel gratitude to the largely unheralded network executives and producers who gave it to us. The first golden age can be summed up with one name: “Playhouse 90.” It was the 1950s and ’60, when TV was busy being born. The second can be summed up with the words “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “The Wire,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “ER,” “24,” “The West Wing,” “Law and Order,” “30 Rock.” These are classics. Some nonstars at a network made them possible. Good for them.
Some of these shows I’ve never seen. But the ones I have are generally terrific, and do our era great credit. Sopranos: I have close to zero interest in Mafia stories, but I gave this one a try on the advice of the late WFB, and was thrilled by its depiction of the banality – the suburbanity – of evil. West Wing: An addictive political soap opera with, at its heart, a genuinely patriotic love of our country and its institutions. 24: Contrary to an opinion held mostly by people who don’t watch it, it’s not a thuggish celebration of torture and jingoism but a state-of-the-art cliffhanger with a heart. Curb Your Enthusiasm: I have seen a total of about 45 minutes of Seinfeld, and don’t remember laughing once; this show about Seinfeld’s creator has me not just laughing, but enjoying — regularly — “the shock of recognition.”
It’s easy to get downhearted about our culture, and there’s plenty of garbage out there to get downhearted about. But it was ever thus; and it’s great to be reminded that there’s still a lot of life in our republic of the arts.
Why must Charlie Crist persist in his divisive, increasingly embattled primary campaign against Marco Rubio? Does GOP unity mean nothing to him? When will this ruinous civil war end?
In reply to the post you had on Thompson, Pete Hegseth misses the point entirely, I think. Thompson is not declaring defeat in Afghanistan in Reid-like fashion. Rather, he says in the video, "this didn't/doesn't have to be so." Thompson's implied point, it seems to me, is just this — with Obama at the helm and with his lack of resolve and his fear of making a decision the war is lost. It is judgment agains the administration not the war effort.
Thanks for NRO. I'll be making a contribution later tonight.
Action This Year . . . Or Not [John J. Pitney Jr.]
From Chuck Todd's interview with President Obama, November 18:
TODD: You gonna sign health care before the state of the union? OBAMA: I expect so. TODD: But obviously not the end of the year at this point? OBAMA: You will not hear that from me. TODD: You're not ready to say that? OBAMA: Absolutely not.
Previous comments by the president:
October 5: "And so if you're willing to speak out strongly on behalf of the things you care about and what you see each and every day as you're serving patients all across the country, I'm confident we are going to get health reform passed this year."
September 12: "Nobody should be treated that way in the United States of America, and that's why we're going to bring about change this year."
July 23: "I want the bill to get out of the committees; and then I want that bill to go to the floor; and then I want that bill to be reconciled between the House and the Senate; and then I want to sign a bill. And I want it done by the end of this year. (Applause.) I want it done by the fall. (Applause.)"
July 1: "It's not something that we're going to keep on putting off indefinitely. This is about who we are as a country. And that's why we are going to pass health care reform — not ten years from now, not five years from now; we are going to pass it this year. (Applause.) That is my commitment. We're going to get it done. (Applause.)" June 22: "AARP is committed, as I am, to achieving health care reform by the end of this year."
June 13: "I know some question whether we can afford to act this year. But the unmistakable truth is that it would be irresponsible to not act." May 13: "We've got to get it done this year. We've got to get it done this year — both in the House and in the Senate. And we don't have any excuses; the stars are aligned." May 11: "It's reform that is an imperative for America's economic future, and reform that is a pillar of the new foundation we seek to build for our economy; reform that we can, must, and will achieve by the end of this year."
March 5: "And our goal will be to enact comprehensive health care reform by the end of this year. That is our commitment. That is our goal." February 24: "So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year."
Ithaca College was great and lots of fun (except, perhaps, for the obligatory left-wing townie who provided running commentary throughout the entire Q&A period, although it was more amusing than disruptive). Thanks to everyone who showed up, and my hat's off to the intrepid Ithaca College Republicans who uphold the conservative banner in the most difficult circumstances.
Two points about the strange decision to bring the 9/11 terrorists to New York:
One, Senator Grassley's point about federal attorneys and their past advocacy for detainees is worth listening to. I'll leave it to Andy McCarthy to ascertain the legal ramifications of Grassley's concern that there are lawyers in Eric Holder's Justice Department who (a) may be involved in the decision-making that brings the terrorist combatant KSM and others to civil trials in New York, and (b) not so long ago either were pro bono attorneys working on behalf of the Guantanamo detainees or were employed by firms who provided such subsidized legal work for those at Gitmo.
If any of that were found to be accurate, it would obviously present serious conflict-of-interest problems. But more important than the legal ramifications would be the political consequences.
I don't think the American people would take well to the idea that government prosecutors of the terrorists who had a hand in the murder of 3,000 Americans are, in some way, connected in the past with defense work on behalf of those very terrorists. That would be radioactive in political terms.
Two, we are now watching a very Orwellian development, as ACLU lawyers, civil libertarians, and liberal Obama-administration prosecutors all jostle to outbid one another in pretrial chest-pounding — boasting about the overwhelming evidence that will seal the fate of KSM. Our "don't rush to judgment" president has also weighed in and assured the country that the "suspect" will be tried and convicted in federal court, before being executed. (Obama had better be careful: There may one or two ACLU attorneys out there who are not quite on the administration bus and, in customary fashion, may use all that "pretrial" prejudicial publicity as grounds for moving the case to, say, San Francisco, or perhaps as the basis for some sort of pretrial dismissal motion.)
The wonderful contributors to NRO provide my wife and me with a shield against the daily barrage of non sequiturs directed at us from our liberal friends. Thanks, and never give in!
I recently jumped from a lucrative career as a Washington DC corporate firm lawyer to serve the country as an Infantry Officer in the US Army so, alas, I only lament the smallness of the donation I am able to provide. Trust me, NRO is a daily lifeline; I can't contemplate a day without it. Keep up the great work!
AEI President Arthur Brooks announced today that General David H. Petraeus will be presented with the 2010 Irving Kristol Award. General Petraeus, who commands the United States Central Command, will deliver the Kristol lecture on Thursday, May 6, 2010.
The yearly award is presented at the Institute's annual dinner to an individual, selected by the AEI Council of Academic Advisers, who has made exceptional intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.
Fred Thompson’s Harry Reid Impression [Pete Hegseth]
As Kathryn noted, today Sen. Fred Thompson declared, “It really doesn’t matter how President Obama divides the Afghan baby, how he splits the difference between McChrystal and Biden. Because the war has been lost.” That’s right: Senator Thompson has declared America’s defeat in Afghanistan. Read it here.
I have a high regard for Senator Thompson, and greatly appreciated his robust and courageous support for the Iraq surge in 2007. But on this, he is dead — and dangerously — wrong.
Let’s go back to an interview Senator Thompson gave on Hannity and Colmeson May 1, 2007:
HANNITY: The biggest battle we have is this war on terror, this battle in Iraq. We have a really deep divide in the country. Senator Reid the war is lost. We still have to finish the job there. Where do you stand in general on the war on terror and, more specifically, in Iraq, and on the divide surrounding Iraq?
THOMPSON: Well, let's talk about Senator Reid for a moment. Right before I came over here, I was sitting outside, getting a bite to eat, before we did our interview. A young woman [former Army captain] came up and asked if she could sit down and talk to me a minute. . . . I asked her what she thought about this. She said, "How in the world can anyone, any one of our leaders, declare war, declare that the war has been lost when we've got troops in the field? My friends are over there in the field. I know what they think about this."
And, of course, it's just like all other Americans think. The very idea that they would do this and undercut our efforts over there is unprecedented. And it's not only unprecedented; it's awful politics.
We should not be fearful of these people politically. We just need to concentrate on what's right. What is right? We need to take advantage of any opportunity we've got down there. I've got a lot of faith in Petraeus. I knew him when he was at Fort Campbell when I was in the Senate. He tells me we've got a shot? We've got to take that shot.
I’m sure Senator Thompson made many similar comments in 2007, and he was right. Sen. Harry Reid’s statement was unprecedented, and it was awful politics. And if Petraeus says we have a shot, then we’ve got to take that shot.
In light of the above, what is Senator Thompson doing undercutting the mission in Afghanistan? Is the mission less justified? Is it less achievable? Or is McChrystal less capable? No. Senator Thompson’s issue with the Afghanistan mission is President Obama. And while I share many of his frustrations — indecisiveness, lack of will, unwillingness to articulate the need to win — none of them give him, or anyone, grounds to declare the war lost.
It’s awful politics, but no longer unprecedented. Senator Thompson is doing his best Harry Reid impression.
President Obama may not be many people’s preferred commander in chief, but he is our commander in chief. He still may commit sufficient resources to Afghanistan, and it’s almost certain that his generals will support additional troop levels. Our warriors will take the fight to the enemy, and hopefully turn the tide in Afghanistan.
The war is not lost, but it could be lost; especially if our political leaders, and political commentators, start making statements like this. There may be a point at which the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth pursuing, but it’s certainly not before the president announces his decision on troop levels and our top-tier generals are given a chance to execute a counterinsurgency strategy.
I’m disappointed in Senator Thompson; he knows better. His statements were political, and they do nothing but undermine our troops in the field. We cannot afford to do to President Obama on Afghanistan what the Left did to President Bush on Iraq.
Please accept this contribution for the vital work that you do. I have either subscribed, read, or otherwise followed National Review ever since my graduation from college (1979 — getting old). Carry on.
A federal judge has decided to hold the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers liable for the flooding in New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina. At issue is the Corps' maintenence of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a rarely used shipping channel that hurricane experts warned for years should be shut down. I wrote about the Corps for NRODT shortly after the Katrina disaster. A scientist I talked to explained why MRGO posed a threat:
Dr. Ivor van Heerden of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center explains the geography: “The MRGO and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway [GIWW] join together in an area known as the funnel. You have the Industrial Canal in the middle of New Orleans. Heading off eastward from it is a canal that opens into a big Y — that’s where the GIWW and MRGO merge. That’s one of the very weak points in the system. When you get a surge such as Katrina, the water flowing westward amplifies the surge and leads to levee overtopping in those areas. There was very significant erosion during that levee overtopping during Katrina. It’s the design and location of the levee systems which creates this funnel effect, which caused levee overtopping and erosion and added to the flooding of eastern Orleans and St. Bernard’s parishes.”
So why didn't the Corps close MRGO down? The short answer is that even though traffic was declining and residents of New Orleans hated it, a few influential companies still preferred the channel, and they joined the Port of New Orleans in lobbying to keep it open. The Corps, like most government agencies, hates to give up anything in its portfolio, and the Louisana congressional delegation likes to bring home the bacon, so MRGO stayed open in spite of the risks.
In other words, don't just blame the Corps. Congress has the final say on the Corps' budget, and the Port of New Orleans played a role. The larger issue is that the Corps — again, like most government agencies — is prone to being captured by special-interest groups and used by Congress as a vehicle for pork spending. This might be the only time in history that pork kept an artery unclogged, when it would have been better to plug it up.
Robert P. Casey, the deceased former governor of Pennsylvania, spent his political career defending the principle that every human life is of infinite value. It cost him politically within his own party; but for Casey, politics was a calling to a higher cause — fidelity to the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence. In a 1995 speech at Notre Dame, he said this:
You know, for eight years, I served as governor of Pennsylvania. All the problems that America confronts today, health care, the level of taxation, education, economic growth, crime, welfare, the environment — you name it, a state like Pennsylvania — we see it all. All these things are important, they're very important. They concern the day to day business of government. They were my life for eight years. But, in the end, they are relative problems. And they demand relative solutions. They are about how we shall live as a people in America. Of course the economy is of urgent concern to everyone, and properly so — the issue of how we make our livelihood, how we pay our bills, how we invest for our future. But the need to protect the unborn child is just as urgent as the economic concerns that confront our country.
In the case of the unborn child we're dealing not just with our livelihoods, but with lives . . . not just how comfortably we will live, but how comfortably we will live with our consciences. Think about it, why do all parties to this debate routinely call abortion a "social issue"? Because deep down we know that the fate of one life touches us all. In a way, all the talk about values misses the point. Because we are talking about a thing of infinite value. Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself. The value of everything else is weighed against it. The abortion debate is not about how we shall live, but who shall live. And more than that, it's about who we are.
Now the governor’s son and namesake, the current junior senator from Pennsylvania, will be tested by the standard his father set. If he votes for cloture on the motion to proceed on the health-care bill, he will be making possible the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade, and mandating that all citizens participate through federal funding. Senate majority leader Harry Reid needs all 60 Democratic senators to bring the legislation to the floor and make it the order of business. So Senator Casey has the fate of the bill completely in his power. If he adds his vote, that will mean that any effort to add the pro-life Stupak language from the House bill will require 60 pro-life votes, which, as Senator Casey knows, are not there. Casey’s original vote to proceed will have stacked the deck against defending life.
Everyone will be watching how the senator votes — including, perhaps most poignantly, the man who said of abortion, “it’s about who we are.”
— Frank Cannon is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington consulting firm.
Here's to helping ease the twinge of guilt from getting something this good for free. Without your valuable service many of us would be lost in a liberal morass.
Using actual stimulus spending data from Recovery.gov, my colleague Jerry Brito and Eileen Norcross of the Mercatus Center have launched the new version of Stimulus Watch.
The website, unlike the administration’s one, allows you to search for contracts and grant awards by state and city, by awarding agency, or by recipient. And they will even have a keyword search soon. The really cool aspect of the site is that once you find an award that interests you, you can vote on whether you are satisfied with it or not, add to the wiki description of the project, and join in the conversation about the award in the comments section.
With this website, it will become obvious which contracts are bogus, which ones are wasteful, or which ones simply don't exist!
Back in February, Brito and Norcross made the list of "shovel-ready projects" available in the same way and it proved to be a very valuable tool in exposing the ridicule of these projects (see this for instance). This version promises to do even more.
Check it out and be ready to laugh and cry at the same time when see that your tax dollars are used to pay for picnic tables or replace the motor on a boat.
I'm a Canadian who thinks that one of the most important things for the world is that the US remain prosperous, free, and engaged in spreading freedom. NRO is an important voice in support of those goals. Good luck!
You are getting the donation that I otherwise would have made to the Republican National Committee this year. NRO is definitely making more headway in the fight for conservative values! Keep up the great work.
Two boys in parochial school, wife totals her car two weeks ago, uncovered medical expenses, really cannot afford this, but you guys are my sanity in times of collective national irrationality. I will skip lunch for a month or two . . .
Final thought, slip some prozac in Derb's tea, he needs to cheer up, we are not totally doomed, it just feels that way as BHO reminds the current generation why great societies are based on capitalism, not collectivism.
At 25, I'm a third generation National Review subscriber. My grandfather and my father have both subscribed to NR for years and I began reading it occasionally in high school and college. I only became a devotee after I graduated from college and started working full time. Then I fully realized the importance of a commentary magazine w/ a convservative point of view. My wife sometimes laughs at me for sitting down and reading my new NR cover to cover when it comes in the mail, but as any NR subscriber knows, once you start reading it's pretty hard to put down.
Thank you for all you do and PLEASE keep up the great work. We need conservative views and arguments more than ever and I don't know of a better place to find and hear those arguments than National Review.
In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa's much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists' posters. Like other so-called "hockey stick" temperature graphs, it's an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We're burning ourselves up!
"It was the belle of the ball," Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. "Its dance card was full."
At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia's Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears...
Prior to the Briffa graph revelation, he had also caught a statistical error that undercut another exalted "hockey stick" graph prominently featured by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, this one by Michael Mann, head of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center... In 2007, Mr. McIntyre found a technical gaffe that forced NASA to correct itself and admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the continental U.S.
"The science is settled" means: The politics is settled. So the science has to follow.
Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has decided not to run for governor of New York next year after months of mulling a candidacy, according to people who have been told of the decision.
His decision is a blow to many Republican leaders, who had viewed Mr. Giuliani as the strongest potential candidate in a year in which voter anger and anti-Albany sentiment appear to be swelling.
P.S. I think Matt Yglesias is right to doubt that the unemployment rate will have as much effect on the midterm elections as Douthat thinks it will. As bad as the high-unemployment 1982 elections were for Republicans, for example, we shouldn't forget that it was the first election under the district lines of the 1980s, which were generally more favorable to congressional Democrats than those of the 1970s. (Republicans did fine in the Senate elections that year.)
She's Sending, but He Ain't Receivin' [Mark Steyn]
Did David Frum really say this about Sarah Palin? Apparently so, and on PBS:
This is a woman who has got into a position of leadership by sending very powerful sexual signals. And we see that in the way that men like her much more than women do.
With this line of attack, David seems to be channeling his inner Andrew Sullivan.
(By the way, when I saw her campaign in N.H., I was surrounded by moms with strollers.)
In purporting to refute Sen. Lindsey Graham's contention that the Obama administration has turned the war into a legal issue, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy proved Graham's point. The Hill reports:
"The red herring that my friend [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] was covering is not realistic," Leahy said during an appearance on "Washington Journal" on C-SPAN. "For one thing, capturing Osama bin Laden — we've had enough on him, we don't need to interrogate him," Leahy added.
That's September 10th counterterrorism for you. Who cares what intelligence the head of al-Qaeda might be able to give us about ongoing mass-murder plots? Who cares that by interrogating bin Laden at great length we might be able to save lots of lives? The only thing that matters is whether we have sufficient evidence to convict him at a trial beyond a reasonable doubt. Since, by Leahy and Holder's lights, we already have an overwhelming legal case against him, so we don't need to worry about the fact that Miranda means we can't interview him. The litigation will be successful, so therefore it's somehow a national security success, too.
This is exactly the problem Graham homed in on when he told the attorney general:
The big problem I have is that you're criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we'd have mixed theories and we couldn't turn him over — to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence — for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we're saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you're confusing the people fighting this war.
By the way, the situation is actually even worse than Sen. Graham suggested. It's not just that bin Laden, if captured, would be entitled to Miranda warnings because he'd then be in custody (Miranda is required for all custodial interrogation in the U.S.). As Attorney General Holder noted, bin Laden has already been indicted (in 1998). Under American law, that means he is already an "accused" — the formal legal case against him has begun. If we are going to treat him like a civilian defendant with Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, he has a right to counsel now — before we ever capture him.
Of course, KSM was also under indictment (since around 1996) when we captured him. But the Bush administration regarded that as irrelevant because KSM was an enemy combatant in wartime.
If, as Holder and Obama insist, we must adhere to the "rule of law" (a phrase they construe as "the rules and procedures of the civilian justice system"), we have to adhere to all of the "rule of law." If they are going to pick and choose which rules they're going to follow, how are they different from what they have spent years condemning?
On passage of a health-care bill in light of the differences between the House and Senate versions:
Well, it will depend on whether these numbers are anywhere near real. We just heard Harry Reid throw out a number, and I don't know where it came from, three-quarters of a trillion dollars he said are going to be saved as a result of this [Senate health-care bill]. I don't know where that came out of. If that holds up, I will eat my hat.
There are already loopholes that Mort talked about, the doctor fix, and there is something else. In the House bill, and I'm sure in the bill that we will hear about tomorrow in the Senate, it's ten years of people paying in, and six or seven years of health care [paying out] because [the benefits] kick in later.
So that is how you make the numbers look good. But annually it runs at a huge deficit.
On President Obama’s interview with Fox News’ Major Garrett:
Let me say how good it was to see the president sit down with Major. It constitutes the most important truce … since the Korean armistice in 1953, and I would say that we are South Korea …
[Present Obama] said "people" are warning us about a loss of confidence. He means the Chinese and the others whom he has been speaking with. Meaning that: He is a little bit wary about attacking the jobs issue with another huge stimulus because the people who buy our bonds, who he has been speaking with in Asia, are extremely nervous about that and are discouraging any attempt to blow up our debt on the jobs issue, also on health care and other [parts] of Obama's ambitious domestic agenda.
So it looks as if he wants to scale back. And in fact, the example he used, he mentioned earlier in the [Fox] interview, which we said: One thing we could do is to increase our exports to Asia by one percent, that would create a lot of jobs and it wouldn't be a drain on the treasury.
And that is so. But if he wants any progress on that, he's got to get [the] Chinese to … readjust their currency.
And on that he just got stiffed. … On Sunday, at the APEC summit, the Asian summit, the clause in the communique that called for a market-oriented currency exchange, which is code for raising the Chinese currency, was stopped and didn't enter the communique at all.
On Obama’s remarks to Garrett on Israeli settlement construction:
Well, he returned to his hard line again, in which he says that Israeli settlements are making it hard for a re-launch of the peace negotiations.
Apart from what anybody thinks about the virtue of settlement, the ideological import of it, look at the historical fact. For 16 years, in the absence of a freeze of settlements, there were negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, a year ago Abbas, the leader of the Palestinians, was deep in negotiations with the Israeli prime minister at a time when there was an increase in settlements.
So it was Obama who comes in. He calls for a settlement freeze. The Palestinians, of course, endorse it, and then say that unless Israel imposes a freeze, that there won't be any negotiations.
This was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the administration, completely unnecessary, and that's what has stopped the negotiations.
