Senator Clinton Worries Vouchers Could Lead to Jihad Academies

If you were national Democratic politician and a bribed apologist for the teachers’ unions, what would be an easy way to take a cheap shot at school choice in the post 9/11 world?

Well, of course, you’d raise fears that if parents had the right to send their children to the school of their choice, pretty soon people would be spending taxpayers’ money on Jihad Academies.

That’s the argument that Senator Hillary Clinton was making in the Bronx the other day, according to Glenn Thrush, as she spoke to the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp.

"First family that comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher,'" Clinton said. "Next parent that comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist ...' The parent says, 'The way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. ... You gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, under the Constitution, you can't discriminate against me.'"


As an adoring, if somewhat puzzled, audience of Bronx activists looked on, Clinton added, "So what if the next parent comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the School of the Jihad? ... I won't stand for it."

I see. So, on the off chance that some whacko jihadist parent might turn up and create division and discord we have to keep the rest of American kids imprisoned in the schools coincidentally run by the political supporters of Hillary Clinton.

The truth is it is one-size-fits-all government school systems that create division and discord and not the other way around.

The elitist “common school” movement in the 19th century that created our current school system was deliberately trying to purge the schools of their Puritan culture, and pretty soon they were using their power to try to cure the Irish Catholics of their Catholicism. By the end of the 19th century the schools were ramming a bland Christianity down the throats of Eastern European Jews.

It didn’t work. The Catholics got their revenge by creating their own system of schools. The Jews got their revenge by purging the schools of all religion.

Now, of course, you can’t talk about religion at all in the government schools. Except the religion of positive self-esteem. That just happens to be the religion of Hillary Clinton and the teachers union activists.

We school-choice proponents are in this for the long haul, Senator Clinton. We think that ordinary Americans should have the same right that you enjoyed when you sent your daughter to Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC. We believe that all Americans should have the right to educate their children at the school of their choice.

And for politicians like you, who stand in the school house door like the segregationists of 50 years ago, we have nothing but contempt.

Islamists Don't Do Patents

It’s all very well to worry about the Islamists taking over the world, and resetting the culture with sharia law and various 8th century concepts thoughtfully set forth by the Prophet in the Qu’ran through direct divine revelation.

But just think about the Islamic world and intellectual property, you know, inventions and stuff, as Thomas Lifson does.

Actually, the Islamic world hasn’t been doing much of anything in the intellectual property line.

Saudi Arabia, which only established a patent office in 1990, has not granted a patent in six years. Iran in 2001 granted only one patent. Egypt, home to a quarter of the world’s Arabs, is only now getting around to mandating the task of undertaking a substantive investigation of patent claims before granting patents...


The US granted 157,000 patents last year, and has a cumulative total of seven million.

You can set up a scenario in which the Islamist culture takes over the world by getting lucky with its raiding strategy. But you cannot imagine it thriving if it keeps its present culture.

Right now, the Islamists are busily taking over southern Sudan and southern Nigeria. Does anyone think that, after the takeover, these two areas will zoom up to the top in the world league tables of peace and prosperity?

Even if, say, Europe becomes Islamified, the process would look rather like the Mongol invasion of China. Within a generation after the invasion, China’s new Mongol invaders were getting seriously sinicized. And if the eager-beaver Muslim rulers of a future “Eurabia” wanted to enjoy the perquisites of power for any extended period—and by and large politicians and their hangers on definitely do—they would europeanize themselves, and fast.

McCain Flip-flops on Taxes. So Far So Good

Good. John McCain has voted to extend the president’s key investment tax cuts, the 15 percent rate on dividends and long-term capital gains. So he’s started a veer back towards the Republican base, back from the comical position he took in 2000 when he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination by running against the Republican base.

Will it be enough? Has he really converted and seen the light on supply-side economics? Donald Lambro assembles the quotes of Republican activists who aren’t too impressed.

"It's a big flip-flop, but I'm happy he's flopped," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

"It looks like a further morphing of McCain into George W. Bush. He's mailing to his list of campaign contributors, and now he's supporting the tax cuts," said economist Larry Hunter, a longtime Republican tax-cut strategist.

The trouble with Senator John McCain is not just his opposition to rax cuts, or his tone-deaf run for the presidency in 2000. The trouble is everything else as well.

Let us forgive his for his role in the Keating Five scandal. Bill Muller’s report in the Arizona Republic suggests that McCain was pulled into intervening with federal regulators to help S&L crook Charles Keating against his will, and when he had only been a United States Senator for three months.

The problem with McCain seems to be a much bigger question about his judgment. How could a Republican push through the monstrous McCain-Finegold campaign finance bill, an incumbent protection act that clearly narrows the public space afforded by the First Amendment? What kind of a First Amendment is left when you have to check with your lawyer before posting on the Internet?

How could McCain spend most of the Bush administration clearly working to embarrass the president?

And, returning to the 2000 election, how can McCain not understand about the fundamental cleavage in the electorate between the Republicans, the party of religion, marriage, work, and babies, and the Democrats, the party of secularism, sex, creativity, and fetuses?

That is what is worrying about McCain—a vast echoing tone-deafness that calls into question his fundamental judgement.

That is why, for this Republican, Rudy Giuliani, for all his New York social liberalism, rings true while John McCain rings false.

Babies, Houses, and Babies

On Saturday I went to a fringe theater on the last day of the run of DOB, a play by John Kaufmann about birthing. Yes, he went down to California just as his sister was having a baby, and the whole thing turned into a play.

Most of the play takes place in the hospital operating room during his sister’s labor.

The play was a delight, and a real shock.

Here were your young starving actors and your avant-garde types dressed in artistical black and they were putting on a light-hearted, nicely crafted play about having babies. Whatever will they come up with next?

This matter of babies is important, particularly as the voters of the United States are dividing up between the party of babies and the party of, er, fetuses.

In Britain, columnist Minette Marrin is also thinking about babies, or rather the British baby problem.

[T]here is a shortage of babies in respectable, middle-class, middle-income families. The rich and the poor are having plenty of babies. In upper-middle-class circles it is now a status symbol to have four or more children. Among the poor it is perfectly possible to have babies with or without a man or a job; the state will pay. Although it won’t pay much, it will offer as good a life as any other that seems available.


The women who are not having children are what would have been called in the 19th century the deserving mothers; they are hard working, competent and responsible but have come to recognise that they cannot, as feminism once promised, have it all. They either need to work or want to work, or both, but for those on middling incomes it is not possible to have lots of babies as well. It is too expensive and too risky — expensive in childcare and risky in job prospects.

And what with modern divorce, a woman can’t get too far away from the job market. The problem is that houses are so expensive in Britain that it is hard for a middle-class family to afford both a house and a baby.

In the United States, an interesting trend is developing. Although divorce is dropping a little, it is much lower than normal among college-educated women. Their divorce rate is 25 percent. That makes it much easier to afford children. There’s nothing like divorce to take that last child out of a woman’s life.

Is there something happening here, fellow trend-spotters? Should we be advising up-and-coming young men that babies is the coming thing?

By the way, a word to Minette Marrin. The best thing for you Brits to do about the baby problem is to forget “what everyone knows:” that there is no space left in Britain to build houses. Anyone who has sat in a Boeing 747 early in the morning looking blearily down at England’s green and pleasant land as the airplane circled in a holding pattern waiting to land at Heathrow will know that Britain has plenty of open space for houses.

Those new houses would get the price down, and then those middle-class women could fill the houses with babies. Beautiful bouncing babies.

Supply Side Economics Drives Brazilians into Formal Sector

A big problem in emerging economies is the informal employment sector, the people camping out in the city working as peddlers and running illegal roadside stalls that don’t pay taxes. In Brazil, according to William W. Lewis in The Power of Productivity, the huge informal sector has severely damaged the economy.

To understand how bad things have been in Brazil, get this. Taxes have been so high on the formal sector that large, efficient supermarkets couldn’t compete on price with informal food vendors and corner stores.

In the 1990s formal employment actually declined by almost 15 percent.

But there is good news, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady. In recent years the Brazilian government has

significantly reduced federal payroll taxes and the overall tax burden for small and medium sized companies and simplified the tax system.

The result? Formal employment in Brazil is up 28 percent in the last seven years, and up 13 percent in the last two years alone.

This is supply-side economics at work and it is huge. It is pure economic hygiene, cleaning up the business environment and tax system so that ordinary people can come into the formal system and thrive.

The costs of doing business in the informal sector are pretty significant. You don’t have access to credit, you don’t have the protection of the legal system, and you are probably paying protection money to criminal gangs and bribes to government officials to look the other way.

So you have to screw up pretty bad to get yourself an informal sector like Brazil’s that amounts to about 50 percent of the labor force.

But when the economy is set up so that the costs of doing business in the formal sector are less than the benefits of doing so, then everyone wins.

And that is what is happening in Brazil.

Is This Iraq's Tipping Point?

Let us assume, for a moment, that the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra was the work of terrorist leader Zarqawi. Let us assume that the purpose of the attack was to ignite a general civil/religious war between Sunni and Shiite.

That is the US line, as reported by The Washington Post.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalizad, speaking at a news conference held on the telephone because of the driving ban, said it was "a moment of danger, but it is also a moment of opportunity" in Iraq. "In crises such as the one caused by this attack, there is an opportunity to bring people together and defeat goals of those who want to promote civil war in this country."

We are at a crucial tipping point. For the question is, does the government recently elected have the “soft” power, and do the security forces trained up by the United States have the “hard” power to hold the nascent Iraqi polity, the fragile modern government of laws, together. Or will they fail and surrender Iraq from civilized government (using the word in its strict sense of citified)
to the pre-civilized rule of local warlords and their militias.

You can complain all you like about the mistakes of the Bush administration, but that is the bottom line. The Bush policy has always been to erect in Iraq some sort of political structure based on the rule of law, which we know is the way, the good way, the only way yet known to mankind, that people get to live and prosper in the city.

Naturally, into the power vacuum created by the deposition of Saddam Hussein stepped the forces of pre-civilized culture, the culture we experienced in Europe as feudalism, the bygone era in which the barons of the land were more powerful than the merchant princes of the city.

So our policy was to build up a new political and power structure that would have a chance of introducing civilized governance into Iraq.

As some point the forces of pre-civilized power would make their supreme effort to defeat the forces of civilized power.

We will doubtless find out, in the next few days, whether the new power structure will hold. Let us pray, for the sake of the Iraqi people, that it does.

Happiness is a Serious Business

Conservative columnist George Will recently resported on the latest Pew Research Center study on happiness. But he failed to give us a link to the report Are We Happy Yet? So I just did.

Yes, the main finding of the report is that Republicans are happier than Democrats, and have been every year without exception since 1972 when Pew started the report. You can imagine that on KTTH 770 The Truth here in Seattle, they were chuckling this morning about what misery-guts their liberal friends were.

One listener called in about the neighbor woman who had given him the bird every morning for about two months before the 2004 election as she passed his window. Then the day came when she couldn’t get her car started, and he went out and offered to help. She couldn’t bear to look at him, or even thank him, as he hauled his car alongside hers and gave her a jump start.

The main finding of the Pew report is that wealthy people are more happy, conservatives are more happy, married people are more happy, and people who go to church frequently are more happy.

So it would make sense that Republicans—in the party of conservatism, marriage, and religion—would be happier than Democrats—from the party of liberalism, singlehood, and secularism. The happiest years for Republicans were 1974, 1980, 1990, and 2004. The happiest years for Democrats were 1974, 1977, 1989, and 2004.

Good to know that things weren’t so bad after all for Democrats in 2004.

Dueling Marriage Quizzes

In Sunday’s The New York Times non-traditional relationships advocate Stephanie Coontz ran a pop quiz on relationships that, not surprisingly for the author of The Way We Never Were, repeated the argument of her book that the 50’s ideal of Father Knows Best has never been the norm in human families. And anyway, “Born-again Christians are just as likely to divorce as more secular Americans.”

So National Review Online rolled out conservative marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher with her pop quiz. Not surprisingly for the author of The Case for Marriage, her pop quiz shows that traditional marriage of the kind celebrated in Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver is best.

The statement “Divorce has always been a disaster for women and children” Coontz says is false because while divorce does cause a “sharp drop in
the economic standard of living for women and children” it also reduces women’s suicide rates and only marginally damages children’s emotional wellbeing by 55 percent to 45 percent.

On the question “Divorce impoverishes women and children” Gallagher writes:

True. The majority of children raised outside of marriage experience poverty. As many as one-third of divorced women slip below the poverty level after divorce.

Take your pick. And read the whole thing.

Harriet Miers Goes to Sea

Some months ago Peggy Noonan warned that, at this stage of an administration, the White House staff are suffering from extreme exhaustion. That’s why they produce boners like the Harriet Miers nomination and the east coast port deal. So this morning we get the report from the Associated Press that the president didn’t even know about the decision by an administration committee to allow operation of six US east coast ports by Dubai Ports, a state-owned company.

Well, at least the Bush haters are happy about that.

OK. Let’s admit that there could be a security risk if Middle East owned companies own US ports. They might permit someone to smuggle in a nuclear device in a container.

But the port deal merely shows the natural vulnerability of an open society to a sneak attack. A modern democratic capitalist economy runs on trust, a network of trust. That is what makes it different from the tribal, mistrustful world of Islam.

But the world of trust is not as vulnerable as it might seem. It is worth billions, trillions, to be included in the circle of trust. That is why people bring their money to the United States to invest.

Centuries ago, at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Holy League fleet defeated the Ottoman Turks. As the victors looted the galleys of the defeated Turks they were shocked to find fortunes in precious metals and jewels aboard the ships of the Ottoman admirals. These men had to keep their fortunes close by because their monies could be seized at any time by the Sultan. But in the trust economy of the west, rich merchants could already enjoy security of property from expropriation. They could keep their money in a bank.

Things have not really changed that much in the last 400 years. That is why the West is a lot more powerful than we think. And that is why, even though it is sensible to protect the trust relationships in our trading system, the folks from Dubai need us more than we need them.

Harvard Faculty to Larry Summers: You're Outta Here!

So that’s it. Lawrence Summers is to step down at the end of the academic year as president of Harvard University, as reported in Reuters and The Washington Post.

Obviously, the opposition against Larry Summers was not just that he blasphemed the prophet about sacred scripture. No it was not just about innate abilities of men and women to do science (or to want to do science).

Nor was it just that Summers apparently eased out “the arts and sciences dean William Kirby, on January 27,” deepening opposition to him in the faculty.

No it probably goes deeper than that, and no doubt we will find out about the real reason in the next days and months.

No doubt it will come down to out-and-out opposition in the faculty to taking orders from anyone.

It’s not just Harvard. The big gorilla in the room in America is the question of the entire non-profit sector, from government to foundations to universities. Unlike evil corporations, the non-profit sector is run by its employees for their benefit. And there is no effective way to reform it.

Our government is essentially unreformed since the 1930s. Our schools and universities are unreformed since the turn of the twentieth century. Our foundations are unreformed for decades.

That means that when reform comes, as it will, as it must, it is going to be painful. That is what happens when the incumbents have the power to stop change.

And it won’t be painful just for the proud and the powerful who have run the non-profit sector for so long for their own benefit. We’ll all end up paying the price. The proud and the powerful will see to that.

What If..."Catholics Riot over Da Vinci Code"

We all seem to take for granted that millions of Muslims all over the world naturally take to the streets when a couple of obscure Danish cartoonists insult their faith by depicting the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his hair.

But imagine if Catholics were rioting all over the world about Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code the best-selling thriller that depicts Opus Dei as a dangerous and ruthless force, condoned by the pope, bent on supressing the real truth about Jesus.

Imagine no more. David Aaronovitch has done it for you. “In a parallel universe...”

Cardinal Loopi, of the Office of the Defence of the Faith, condemned the book for defaming Catholicism and, in its suggestion that Jesus Christ was married, of heresy. “We demand that the book be destroyed and that the author be punished,” said Loopi, “otherwise we cannot be held responsible for how Catholics throughout the world may react.”

Quite so. Who could blame those Catholics for expressing their “rage,” as the media likes to say? News items like this would be routine:

Bookseller shot dead in Poland, by teenager shouting: “For God, and the Pope!”


Ten killed in Lisbon Dan Brown riots, when police opened fire on mob ransacking the Canadian Embassy. “We thought he was Canadian,” says riot leader.

It would be comical if it weren’t so serious. Read the whole thing.

National Savings Down, But National Wealth Up. Explain

Last year the US savings rate was the lowest since the Great Depression, according to the Associated Press. And that was on top of the huge balance of payments deficit and the Federal government deficit.

How long can this go on? As long as you like, according to supply-side economist Alan Reynolds. That’s because even though people didn’t put more cash in the bank, national wealth went up. Writes Reynolds:

In last year’s third quarter, the Fed’s measure of household net worth amounted to $51.1 trillion -- up more than $5 trillion from a year earlier.

Even though Americans didn’t put anything in the piggy bank, national wealth went up 10 percent. And that’s the point. People save money to add to their wealth. If their wealth is already going up, because of increases in their 401(k) and the real estate market, they can meet their wealth goals without reducing consumption.

Is that a problem? Well, you tell me, senator.

By the way, household net worth “measures assets minus debts,” in case you were worried about the debt explosion.

Here’s something else that Reynolds points out.

To put one year’s $5 trillion wealth gain in perspective, personal income was just $9 trillion after taxes. Even if we had saved half of all personal income, that could not have added as much to household net worth as was, in fact, added.

Let’s put it in personal terms. If you earned $90,000 last year in salary and your home value and your 401(k) went up by $50,000, why would you be worried that you hadn’t put another $10,000 into savings?

People start to save when the economy turns south, as they should. But don’t expect the chaps at Associated Press to understand that.

WSJ Sneers at Newt

First Newt Gingrich was a dangerous “bombthrower.” Then he was the bombastic Speaker of the House of Representatives. Then he was a guy who just talked too much.

Now apparently, the former Speaker is just a figure of fun, as Brian M. Carney sneers at Newt’s office, Newt’s chairs, and Newt’s proposals for this year’s elections.

So what is Newt proposing? He wants the Republicans to cut “down on earmarks and pork-barrel spending” by publishing conference reports on the web so that all the bloggers in the country can find the earmarks. “He’d also `simply ban all fund-raising in Washington. You can do that by straight out rules of the House and Senate.’”

Sounds pretty nifty to me.

Newt has lots of ideas to push Republican reforms and gin up the Republican base, but Carnes can’t get a word in edgeways.

But Newt is positive that if Republicans get their act together and put together sensible reform plans that are straightforward and easy for people to understand, they can win in the Fall.

So if you’re asking me, is it possible to be inarticulate, confused and uncertain and win a major policy battle, the answer is no. Do I think the president, the House and the Senate--if they systematically went to the country and laid out a positive plan that would make more sense--could they win? The answer is yes.


Do I think it’s possible to offer a Social Security plan for people under 40 years of age in a positive savings account model that you could pass? Yes. Do I think it’s possible to make it so complicated, so impossible to understand that you can’t build any momentum for it? Yes.

Years ago, someone published a cartoon of a long filing cabinet with each drawer labeled “Newt’s Ideas.” On the end was a single cabinet with drawers labeled “Newt’s Good Ideas.” Very jolly. But many of us grasp that the only way to good ideas is by slogging through drifts of “ideas.” Ideas are easy. Good ideas are hard.

And you can say this for Newt Gingrich. As he slogs away at his pile of ideas, there’s a chance he might come up with one good one. Then you can put him down as a genius.

Islamic World Choosing Segregation from West

When African Americans first started entering selective colleges in significant numbers after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s they found that they were ill-prepared for the challenge of life at the top and they were ashamed. They were ashamed because they were confronted, as Shelby Steele writes in The Content of Our Character, with overcoming in their own lives, right then and there, the centuries-old myth of racial inferiority. Were they good enough, could they make it in competition with the white kids? So they adopted the defensive strategy of keeping themselves apart, of segregating themselves in the cafeteria, of pressuring college administrations for minority dorms, and in general aggressive behavior.

And they held themselves back from full participation in the great American experiment.

Now we are seeing the same behavior in the Islamic Middle East, reported by Daniel Pipes. The cartoon war, he feels is going to hurt, not the west, but the Islamic world.

I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has dreadful implications.

The sectors involved include trade, consumer items, financial investments, aid, and tourism. The problem is that, just like the African Americans held back by centuries of slavery and discrimination, the Islamic world needs not separation but full involvement in—indeed surrender to—the culture of the west with its magic brew of reason, capitalism, and democracy.

Disengagement will only worsen the Muslim predicament. Reduced contact with the world’s most modern, powerful, and advanced countries would likely cause Muslims to do even worse in those indexes and lapse deeper into a condition characterized by self-pity, jealousy, resentment, anger, and aggression.

Compare the Islamic attitude with the Chinese, reported by Michael Novak in his review of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason. For a century or more the Chinese have been cudgeling their brains about the rise of the west. What is it, they have asked themselves? Why has the west overtaken China, the most advanced country in the world, and put China to shame? The answer, they concluded, was Christianity.

At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.

So the Chinese are converting in their tens of millions to Christianity, as told by David Aikman in Jesus in Beijing.

If that is true then the Islamic world is in deeper trouble than we thought. And they have an additional problem. They lack the cultural confidence of the Chinese, the knowledge that China is the first and the best of all civilizations.

After Cheney Tantrum Is MSM Still Relevant?

Will the Bush Administration get away with stiff-arming the Mainstream Media over the Cheney shooting incident?

Obviously, the tactics after the hunting accident, in which Vice President Cheney shot lawyer Harry Whittington Saturday afternoon, were intended to keep the whole thing low key. But the Vice President and the White House miscalculated over one thing. They did not forsee that the MSM White House corps would go ballistic over the insult to their customary right to be the first to report on White House matters.

Or did they? Could they be that smart? Did they figure that the MSM would spend the next week in outrage, proving the adage that hell hath no fury like, let’s say, a prima donna scorned? No, surely not. They called the local Corpus Christi newspaper in order to slide the news of the accident into the public consciousness gently. Next thing they knew, the MSM went ballistic.

But when on Wednesday the vice president gave an exclusive interview to Fox News, the administration insulted the fading CNN, which thought that they should have got in on the action.

And the Democrats are in on the act too. They are outraged too. But then they are outraged about everything.

At least the Washington Post is staying on an even keel and reporting the news pretty straight. After all, the real takeaway is the vice president’s statement:

"Ultimately, I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and fired the round that hit Harry," Cheney said in a hastily arranged White House interview with Fox News Channel anchor Brit Hume. "And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that’s the bottom line. And there’s no -- it was not Harry’s fault. You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I’ll never forget."

It’s something to think about. That the story is about Dick Cheney accidentally shooting his friend, not about the wounded feelings of insulted news media celebrities.

The question is: Can the Bushies get away with this? Can they ignore the wails and the ragings of the MSM?

If they can, it will be another sign that the world is changing, that a new world is aborning.

A Small Step for Dynamic Tax Analysis

President Bush has budgeted “an additional $513,000 for the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis to create a new division of dynamic analysis,” according to Bruce Bartlett. Ho hum.

Actually, this is a big deal. It goes to the heart of the supply-side theory of marginal tax rates that has been the intellectual foundation of the Reagan and the Bush tax cuts. And let us be clear about this.

The reason that the Reagan tax cuts of 1983 and the Bush tax cuts of 2003 have resulted in gangbuster growth is that both were focused upon broad tax rate cuts.

By contrast, Democrats still believe that the way to jumpstart the economy is with “targeted” tax cuts.

The Reagan tax cuts in 1983 lowered the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, and the tax bill of 1986 lowered the top rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. The result? The share of taxes paid by the rich went up.

The Bush tax cuts of 2003 cut the top rate on dividends and capital gains to 15 percent. The result? The economy took off like a rocket.

But guess what? The government’s official estimate of the effects of these tax rate cuts, the so-called “scoring” of tax changes, make no allowance for the idea that people might change their behavior when tax rates are cut.

That’s what the $513,000 is all about. To advance the adoption of “dynamic” economic analysis in forecasting tax revenues.

The first attempt to cut tax rates occurred in 1978 when the Steiger Amendment cut the top capital gains rate to 25 percent.
Writes Bartlett:

After Congress cut the capital-gains tax in 1978, the Treasury Department studied the effect and concluded the tax cut had indeed raised federal revenue. There was also a huge jump in venture capital financing that many economists credit for starting the high-tech revolution of the last 25 years.

Tax experts eventually determined that there was a reflow effect of about 35 percent. That is, if you reduced a tax rate and crudely assumed that the revenue would be reduced by the same amount, you would be wrong. The loss in revenue would be 35 percent less than you estimated. Equally, if you raised taxes, the increased take would be about 35 percent less than you expected.

The new office of dynamic analysis will be tasked with getting more accurate revenue estimates after tax rate changes. That can’t happen soon enough.

Hugh Hewitt Demolishes Jonathan Chait

On Monday, talk show host Hugh Hewitt (perm) did another of his in-depth interviews of an MSM chappie, this time Jonathan Chait, who had run a piece in the LA Times denying that Hillary Clinton was angry. (He’s probably right. She isn’t angry; she just sounds angry.)

But Hewitt did another forensic interview job, as he did with Joel Stein recently. At the end of the interview, Chait sounded like a insufferably pompous MSM liberal. Which is what he is.

Hugh Hewitt is emerging as one of the best interviewers in the United States. And you can see why. He is a lawyer, and when he interviews he sounds just like a lawyer examining an unfriendly witness. First he sets his witness up, and then he sets about exposing him as uncooperative and evasive. Not the sort of witness that a jury of American voters would want to believe.

Hewitt understands, instinctively, that there are certain things that an MSM liberal doesn’t want to admit. Number One is that the news media puts out a biased news product. Number Two is that Democrats are not noble and lofty, but angry and ruthless.

Think about it. The MSM talks a lot about “objective” news reporters. They have to. Given that the MSM folk are overwhelmingly liberal, they have to insist that they can put all that aside and deliver an unbiased product. If they admitted they had a problem, then they would have to do something about it. They might have to hire conservatives.

The rise of the new media has put them in a box. The new media is frankly partisan. Conservative pundits are frankly conservative, and liberal pundits are frankly liberal. But the news product of the MSM is slowly getting unmasked as partisan, especially as the advance of conservative speech in the media and the difficulties of the Democrats makes the liberal MSMers more and more protective of their liberal friends.

Thus when Jonathan Chait comes on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show he is trapped into defending the indefensible. He has to admit that the MSMers are all liberal, but insists that their news product is moderate. Hillary Clinton is not angry, but Bush Haters like himself are angry, well sort of. They are angry, but in a formal, rational way, because they rationally disapprove of the president’s policies.

MSMers have an image of themselves as being superior, rational, above the lower orders. But actually, of course, they are just as committed as any other participant in the political square.

Hugh Hewitt understands all this, and so, with his lawyerly wiles, knows how to examine his liberal interview subjects and mercilessly discredit them in the eyes of the jury.

What Do Muslims Really Think?

President Bush has implemented a policy of bringing democracy to the Middle East. But, even if his policy succeeds in its immediate aim, what will be the outcome? What will the Muslim peoples choose, and who will they choose to lead them?

Two articles bring an interesting answer to this question. Amir Taheri identifies the Islamists as descended from the Salafi movement, which he describes as a faux-religious movement, Neo-Islam, that is not religious but political and totalitarian. It was all started in the 19th century by

the Persian adventurer Jamaleddin Assadabadi, who disguised himself as an Afghan to hide his Shiite origin and set out to build a career in the mostly Sunni land of Egypt. Although a Freemason, Jamal (who dubbed himself Sayyed Gamal) concluded that the only way to win power among Muslims was by appealing to their religious sentiments. So he transformed himself into an Islamic scholar, grew an impressive beard and donned a huge black turban to underline his claim of being a descendant of the Prophet...

[His partner Mirza Malkam Khan] had a slogan of unrivaled cynicism: "Tell the Muslims something is in the Koran, and they will die for you."

Their direct political descendents are the Muslim Brotherhood, the “semi-literate mullah named Ruhallah Khomeini,” and the Afghan Taliban. To Taheri, this movement is first and foremost political, and uses religious imagery purely as a way to get support and grab power.

Suppose President Bush achieves regime change in Iran. What would the Iranian people do? Jason Lee Steorts conducts an interview with Iranian dissident Amir Abbas Fakhravar, author of the “anti-regime book This Place Is Not a Ditch,” to find out. The key question is whether sanctions or military action would strengthen the Iranian regime. Says Fakhravar:

Please don’t ever say that the people of Iran are going to have resentment or anger in their hearts toward America or Western countries for doing this. [On] Saturday [February 4]... the people here found out that Iran was going before the [U.N.] Security Council, and there was celebration all over Tehran. I heard from my own family, the families of my friends, that it was one of the busiest days of the year for the pastry shops — that people were buying pastries and cookies and candies in the streets of Tehran and going to each other to celebrate.

Well, he’s a dissident. He would say that. What about support from the US government?

I cannot mention who, but I’m definitely communicating with some people in the U.S. government and have established contacts with people in the Bush administration.

So the War on Terror, the war against the Islamists, the contest for the future, continues.

A Moderate Muslim Speaks. And How

Have you been waiting for a moderate Muslim to speak out on the Cartoon Wars? Look no further. She has spoken and she is, appropriately, the daughter of a “martyr.”

Writer Nonie Darwish is daughter of a man who was

sent by Egypt’s President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to head the Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza and the Sinai where he founded the Palestinian Fedayeen, or "armed resistance". They made cross-border attacks into Israel, killing 400 Israelis and wounding more than 900 others.

In the London Daily Telegraph she writes that her father was killed in Fedayeen operations and “was hailed by Nasser as a national hero and was considered a shaheed, or martyr.”

In school in Gaza, I learned hate, vengeance and retaliation. Peace was never an option, as it was considered a sign of defeat and weakness. At school we sang songs with verses calling Jews "dogs" (in Arab culture, dogs are considered unclean)...
Sadly, the way I was raised was not unique. Hundreds of millions of other Muslims also have been raised with the same hatred of the West and Israel as a way to distract from the failings of their leaders. Things have not changed since I was a little girl in the 1950s.

But here is the kicker, the insight that explains the whole Cartoon War kerfuffle.

Indeed, with Denmark set to assume the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, the flames of the cartoon controversy have been fanned by Iran and Syria. This is critical since the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. At the same time, Syria is under scrutiny for its actions in Lebanon. Both Iran and Syria cynically want to embarrass the Danes to achieve their dangerous goals.

No kidding. Thanks, MSM, for the wall-to-wall coverage on this interesting concept.

Go ahead. Read the whole thing.

Can Compassionate Conservatism Win in Britain?

George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative.” Annoying to conservatives, his campaign was an attempt to tackle the reality that most people do not think of the welfare state as a bureaucratic government monopoly but as society’s compassionate attempt to help the less fortunate.

Now David Cameron, new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, is trying the same approach. He is dealing with the reality that, however clumsy and bureaucratic and monopolistic Britain’s government health service and government schools may be, people still think of them as “their” schools and “their” National Health Service.

In a speech to the British think tank Demos Cameron has laid out his strategy in broad terms. He calls for the revival of “civil society” between the two extremes of government and the individual. And so he and his colleagues are working out policy

to establish clear borders of responsibility, by working out what is best done by the state, what is best done by civil society and what is best done by the individual.
But, in seeking that balance, we start with an instinctive desire to put more trust in civil society and in the individual, rather than in the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.

So he is clearly attempting to define the Labour Party as the party of clunking and insensitive bureaucratic apparatus.

In the London Spectator Matthew Parris is trying to think forward from Cameron’s speech to the actual battle for the hearts and minds of the British people. What will happen when the Labour Party starts to talk about “Tory cuts” in welfare state provision? Civil society is all very well when there is no alternative. In Ethiopia there is no welfare state. That means that civil society in the form of

family and village are all a needy Ethiopian has to turn to, and family and village know it.

That is why Brownites [supporters of Labour leader Gordon Brown] suspect that a Tory party which argues for a bigger role for civil society may secretly contemplate cutting state welfare. This is what Labour will argue. The Conservatives need an answer.

The answer probably is that conservatives need to make a new argument, an argument they have up to now been afraid to make, that state welfare is not compassionate and kind, but cruel and oppressive. We need to argue, and convince the voters throughout the Anglosphere, that the government welfare state is not a nice cuddly thing, but the proximate cause of all the wrongs of society, from angry young gangbangers to healthy middle-aged people drawing government disability benefits and to senior citizens cruelly dependent upon the state for their welfare in their old age.

Until we can make that argument, and persuade the political center of our argument (and let us be frank here, “political center” means non-political middle-class mothers), then the “cuts” argument will continue to work for the parties of the left.

Maybe David Cameron is the conservative who will figure out how to cut this Gordian Knot.

Low Fat is Out -- Government Study

In the largest study ever conducted into the efficacy of low-fat
dieting the result is finally out. No difference. As Gina Kolata writes in The New York Times:

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.

The Washington Post agrees.

Low-fat diets do not protect women against heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer or colon cancer, a major study has found, contradicting what had once been promoted as one of the cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle.

OK. So now what? Do we shut down the whole government enterprise that advises us about our eating? Do we stop the legal assault on fast food?
The biggest question of all is, do women now obsess about something else? For over a generation we have encouraged women to think that they can control their weight (i.e., attractiveness) by fiddling with the foods that they eat. Now we learn that the big deal, the low-fat diet, does not have any effect on health. Not really. Not so it would make a significant difference to a woman’s life.

In fact, the likelihood is that low-fat dieting actually has a negative effect on a woman’s life and her family’s life.

Women obsess about health issues for a very good reason. Health is related to survival and women are interested in anything that improves survival for their loved ones. That is why, if you listen to the conversation of two women friends out for a walk, the chances are that they are talking about health issues.

But if women have been putting energy into low-fat dieting and low-fat dieting has no effect on health then they have been wasting their energy. They have been doing the familial equivalent of leaf raking.

The New York Times is not yet ready to throw in the towel on dieting.

The results, the study investigators agreed, do not justify recommending low-fat diets to the public to reduce their heart disease and cancer risk. Given the lack of benefit found in the study, many medical researchers said that the best dietary advice, for now, was to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating, with less saturated and trans fats, more grains, and more fruits and vegetables.

And the editorialists at the Times agree:

Meanwhile, experts in nutrition and chronic diseases have moved on to a new consensus: it is not the total fat but the kind of fat you eat that is important. Many groups recommend that people cut their intake of "bad" fats, like saturated fats and trans fats, and increase their intake of "good" fats, like those found in vegetable and fish oils.

But before we give such unsubstantiated advice, and encourage women to put enormous energy into feeding their families “less saturated and trans fats, more grains, and more fruits and vegetables,” shouldn’t we do a study?

Could it be that food is food and that, if we just relax and enjoy it, we’ll live just as long as the obsessive dieter next door? As the Times says, by the time any long-term study on “good” and “bad” fats gets done, the “nutrition experts might have moved on to yet another approach.”

Go Ahead Democrats. Insult the President Why Don't You

Here’s how the Washington Post covered the insults to President Bush at the Coretta Scott King funeral.

At one point, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the group Martin Luther King Jr. helped found, made a reference to not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The well-heeled, mostly black crowd erupted in a standing ovation.

But at the conservative Washington Times things looked a little different. Of President Carter, not mentioned in the Washington Post article, reporter Joseph Curl wrote:

Halfway through the service, former President Jimmy Carter scolded Mr. Bush for his terror-surveillance program... Mr. Carter later said Hurricane Katrina was a clear sign that racism is still alive in America. Several black leaders have blamed the president for what they consider an insufficient federal response.

And about Joseph Lowery, he wrote:

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and an outspoken civil rights leader, during his speech about Mrs. King ripped into Mr. Bush... “We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there... [T]here are weapons of misdirection right down here.”

Real nice, isn’t it, to insult the President of the United States right to his face.

And you wonder: Did the Washington Post’s light touch on the insults issue from embarrassment over the graceless behavior of Democratic speakers, or did they not even notice the outrage?

This sort of behavior puts the lie to the gospel of political correctness, the doctrine that we should not use speech that hurts, that we should be sanctioned for using “hate speech.”

If we didn’t already know, we ought to know by now. It’s all a political ploy, a trick to deny conservatives their constitutional right to speech. It is all about licensing left-wing speech, however racist, however sexist, however it plays the class warfare card.

What Democrats don’t seem to understand, living as they do in their liberal bubble, is just how clear a message this sort of thing sends to people who aren’t fully committed liberal blue-state Democrats.

The first rule of politics is: Don’t make unnecessary enemies. Especially don’t make enemies of decent middle-class Americans.

Global Cooling on the Way

Russian scientist Khabibullo Abdusamatov says forget about global warming. He predicts global cooling by the middle of the 21st century.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory said temperatures would begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reached its peak, and that the coldest period would occur 15-20 years after a major solar output decline in 2035-2045.

Yes, I know. You young pups who have been raised on global warming scares feel like you just took a blow to the solar plexus.

But before the global warming fad it was generally accepted that the “Little Ice Age” at the middle of the last millennium may have had something to do with very low sunspot activity.

Abdusamatov said dramatic changes in the earth’s surface temperatures were an ordinary phenomenon, not an anomaly, and resulted from variations in the Sun’s energy output and ultraviolet radiation.


The Northern Hemisphere’s most recent cool-down period of 1645-1705, known as the Little Ice Age, left canals in Holland frozen solid and forced people in Greenland to abandon their houses to glaciers, the scientist said.

The mid-millennium decline in sunspot activity was called the Maunder Minimum. Of course, up until recently we had no way of reliably measuring fluctuations in “insolation,” the solar energy reaching the earth. But now we do, and scientists generally accept that the sun emits more radiation when it has a lot of sunspots and emits less radiation when it has few sunspots.

But what about the “hockey stick,” the graph in the UN’s report on global warming that shows surface temperatures pretty well flat during the last millennium up until the sudden increase in temperatures starting in 1850?

I’m glad you asked that. The hockey stick assumption seems odd, considering that in Britain, for instance, it was warm enough in the year 1000 to grow grapes, yet by the seventeenth century the River Thames regularly froze over in winter. How could global temperatures have been flat when reports so clearly indicate significant fluctuation? For a discussion of problems with the hockey stick graph, disussed here.

Maybe there is nothing to it. Maybe there won’t be any global cooling, and we can keep religiously worrying about global warming and spending big research bucks to study it. After all, the Russians would naturally prefer continued global warming to reduce the chill of those notorious Siberian winters. Maybe their forecast of global cooling is just wishful thinking.

Ask a Tough Question of a Senator...

As we all know, it is the objective news journalists who ask the tough questions. We know that because the journalists keep telling us that the whole point of the First Amendment and the special position given to the press is to allow them to ask the tough questions that others may not have the courage to put to powerful politicians and officeholders.

So when blogger Paul Mirengoff asked Senator Dick Durbin a searching question about the constitutionality of the president’s electronics surveillance operations the Senator responded with... a question about who Mirengoff represented. Oh really. Now that tells us a lot about the media business. Ask a politician a tough question and he asks: Who is your boss?

But here is the “dog that didn’t bark” moment, from Mark Tapscott, quoting an unnamed “veteran Senate GOP staffer:”

"The mainstream news media that covers Congress is tightly controlled by the House and Senate press galleries and they would never be so aggressive in pressing a Member of Congress. So this was big, it was unprecedented to have a blogger asking such questions. We need more bloggers up here asking questions because they aren’t controlled by the galleries."

Oh really. Do you mean to say, as veteran CBS 60 Minutes talent Mike Wallace used to say, that our tough questioning MSM reporters really aren’t? Never have been? Never will be?

So what’s the point? What’s the point of the First Amendment? What’s the point of these sacred “shield” laws to protect journalists from retribution?

We always wondered why the MSM is so gentle with the Democrats. Apparently it is not just that they are all liberals together. There is an unseen doggie leash restraining the reporters, the doggie leash held by their own colleagues in the press gallery, the ones that control the press credentials, the essential access to Congress.

If you want corroboration about the power of the press gallery and its credentialing of reporters to the US Congress, you could start with Joseph Farah’s fight to get WorldNetDaily.com accredited to report on our public servants on Capitol Hill.

Don't Be Victims, Muslims!

It is dispiriting to see how weak-kneed the liberals are about the Muslim rioting. Let a Christian conservative complain about the anti-Christian work of a gay artist and the 16-inch editorial guns of the MSM thunder with booming retorts. But apparently it is different when Muslims riot in the streets about blasphemy againt the prophet.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has a telling post from a Muslim emailer:

Coming from an all Muslim family, I’m forced to listen to the sense of perceived injustice of Muslims concerning the depiction of their revered prophet. It’s quite sickening.


I tell my family that that’s just how things work in a free society: while I don’t agree that the newspaper should have done something so culturally insensitive, they do have the right to do that, and attempting to make Danish society pay as a whole for it is utterly ridiculous.


It doesn’t matter, I’m told. It literally means nothing to them, because in their world, everything should revolve around them and their culture, and God made the world for Muslim Arabs to control.

Muslims need to understand that liberal “multiculturalism” in the west was designed by the left as a weapon with which to beat the bourgeoisie. But it has done nothing for its liberal clients, the “traditionally oppressed and marginalized,” except confirm them in a self-destructive culture of victimhood. You can see them everywhere in the cities of the welfare state, the impulsive, self-destructive underclass.

To make it in the global economy and global culture you need to offer yourself and your culture to the world in a spirit of humility and sacrifice. Demonstrating and posturing in rage and impotence will get you nowhere. That is what every group and every individual has to learn as they come to the city.

In the old tribal world, the people in the next village are your enemy. In the new global world everyone is your partner, perhaps your customer or your supplier.

That’s a very hard lesson to learn. And it looks like many Muslims are finding it impossible to get started.

Why The Economy is Doing Better Than You Think

Wonder why the US dollar manages to defy gravity with the twin deficits, the federal budget deficit and the merchandises trade deficit?

Maybe it’s because we aren’t counting our gross domestic product properly, according to staid Business Week.

Everyone knows the U.S. is well down the road to becoming a knowledge economy, one driven by ideas and innovation. What you may not realize is that the government’s decades-old system of number collection and crunching captures investments in equipment, buildings, and software, but for the most part misses the growing portion of GDP that is generating the cool, game-changing ideas. "As we’ve become a more knowledge-based economy," says University of Maryland economist Charles R. Hulten, "our statistics have not shifted to capture the effects."

The numbers used to generate GDP statistics were developed in the 1930s, and don’t really count many of today’s wealth building activities. For instance, your iPod reads “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China.” So how do we count the value of the iPod?

Or look at Intel as it cranks up a fabrication plant in Israel. Intel doesn’t just build a new plant and hire a bunch of people.

To get its new plants running quickly, the chipmaker brings 800 or 900 employees from the new fab to spend a minimum of six months in Hillsboro, Ore., where Intel develops new production processes. By the time they return home, these people will have picked up not just the details of the process but also tribal knowledge -- the unwritten lore of how Intel works. With that info in their heads, they’re equipped to get the new factory up and running at high volume within a quarter, rather than taking a year or more. In economics speak, this is a classic transfer of human capital. So why isn’t it called an export?

Imagine this sort of thing happening all over the economy. Now you begin to understand why people are flocking to the United States from all over the world, why house prices are out of sight, and why investment money is pouring into US securities markets.

And don’t forget lowly Wal-Mart. It’s workers are the most productive retail workers in the world.

Go on, read the whole thing.

Ready for Polyamory Yet?

Same sex marriage, polygamy, polyamory. What are the liberals up to? For some time Stanley Kurtz has been following the movement to break up the traditional heterosexual monogamous marriage. In his latest article he focuses on a feminist activist law professor in Canada who is leading the fight to abolish marriage and replace it with

a modern, secular, “non-patriarchal” relationship system that would allow for marriage-like unions in any combination of number or gender.

The way that activists like Martha Bailey, Queens University law professor, propose to get to their non-patriarchal unions is by dismantling the exclusivity and privileged position of heterosexual monogamous marriage by advocating same-sex marriage and polyamorous relationships.

Well, you can read all about it in Kurtz’s article, but let us think about what these activists are missing.

Suppose they are wrong in supposing that monogamous marriage is “patriarchal,” that is, oppressive to women. The argument of conservative writers on marriage like George Gilder in his Men and Marriage is that the opposite is true. Far from oppressing women, monogamous marriage is a profoundly democratic institution that binds men to the mothers of their children and civilizes them out of the gang and into productive work. It is, of course, women that civilize these men, and the work of civilization is a hard and “oppressive” job. But without monogamous marriage, Gilder argues, boys mature into aggressive predators that do little work and prey on the flocks of single women that are created by the collapse of marriage.

The advocates of non-heterosexual marriage are high-status women who see a vision of a more relaxed, more creative world where people are free to pursue their personal vision of sexual relationship and experience. But suppose that the relaxed, creative world is instead a hell on earth? It is not as if we don’t have clear indications that it will, with the growth of violent underclasses throughout the western world where traditional marriage has broken down under the warped financial incentives of the welfare state.

And then there are the children. Children seem to want a mother and a father—their mother and their father—and they get pretty angry when they don’t get them.

And when women have less sexual security they have less children. We are finding out in the aftermath of the sexual revolution that the twenty years of female fecundity is not all that long. When a woman takes a couple of detours through graduate school or a live-in relationship or a failed marriage she ends up having less children than she might have instinctively preferred. When she gets to the other side of 50 she regrets that she didn’t have those children. But then it is too late.

It is easy to get angry with the same-sex marriage movement, their mendacity and the blindness of their cloying elitism. But things are really more serious than that. As we will shortly find out.

What About The Democrats?

Everyone is counting out the Democrats this week after their defeat in the Battle of the Court. Talk show hosts are delightedly signing up for their funeral.

For Tony Blankley the liberal party has become the nihilist party. For him the defining moment of that transformation was the Democrats cheering that nothing had been done to fix Social Security.

Their collective decision to cheer the failure of the body politic to provide for sufficient revenues to pay the benefits was an act of historic shame for the Democratic Party.

Considering that Democrats have run on protecting Social Security from evil Republicans for over half a century, it is a curious thing to cheer at leaving Social Security out in the street. But hatred is what defines today’s Democratic Party.

Until George Bush became president the Democrats, for better and for worse, were a liberal party. Deformed by hatred of the current president, the Democrats have become a nihilist party.

Even the kindly Peggy Noonan is disturbed.

Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The Democratic Party has changed into a party of anger and venom.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

Where did this venom and anger come from? It was created by the Democratic Party leadership itself, in the Clinton impeachment when the Clintons decided to fight and sent out their attack dogs to rile up the base, and it was reinforced after the 2000 election when, after the Supreme Court spoke, the Democrats decided not to accept the result with a good grace but keep their base riled up for what they expected would be smashing victories in 2002 and 2004.

Now the leadership are reaping the whirlwind, for the Angry Left that they created for tactical reasons to defend President Clinton and to help boost turnout has become a political force in its own right. It is no longer a tool of the party leaders but is an authentic political movement that is demanding a seat at the table.

Let us not count the Democrats out. That would be a fatal error. But they really have a problem with their crazies. As Noonan says:

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

It is, of course, the great achievement of William F. Buckley that he had the courage and the wisdom to read right-wing crazies like the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement. Who will step up and read the left-wing crazies out of the Democratic Party?

Twas a Famous Victory

Republicans enjoyed a well-earned victory lap last night, giving President Bush a manly cheer as he addressed the Congress and the nation. “It was a grand night for celebrating,” wrote Stephanie Mansfield.

For all the quagmire talk coming out of the MSM the President has had an astonishing year, winning at the important things while stumbling on the unimportant things.

He achieved three elections in Iraq (think of that!), continued robust economic growth founded upon the taxs rate cuts of 2003, and he ended the Bork era by nominating two conservatives to the Supreme Court and obtaining the advice and consent of the Senate to do so.

The Democrats decided to give battle on the Supreme Court nominations and they were soundly beaten. In retrospect, it is easy to see that everything turned out in the president’s favor. First he nominated John Roberts, a man that the Democrats could never get a grip on. Then he nominated Harriet Miers who turned out to be a curious diversion, reminding Republicans just what the long march through the judicial institutions of the last twenty years was all about. Then he nominated Italian-American Samuel Alito (it translates from the Italian as “Breath” according to Google), and the Democrats attacked. They sent in the Old Guard, just as Napoleon did at Waterloo, with drums rolling. But even the Old Guard of Senators Kennedy, Kerry, and Schumer could not break the Republican square. La garde recule! came the cry, and the Kossites broke up in rage and confusion. It was a famous victory.

After the battle, what then? What do we do next to continue the long march to transform this great nation from Entitlement America to Ownership America, from rights-obsessed adolescence to mature self-government?

Take a look in the mirror. The next step is up to you and me.