Liberal Lion J.K. Galbraith Dead at 97

He was a government price controller, a Harvard professor, a public intellectual, a writer of best-sellers, and the face of liberal economics. He was John Kenneth Galbraith and we shall not see his like again.

In the 1950s he taught liberals how to sneer at the American middle class with his best-seller The Affluent Society. In The New Industrial State he taught how General Motors and corporations like it ran the world. In American Capitalism he advanced his ideas of the corporative state as the balance between “contervailing powers” of business, labor, and government.

If you read the appreciative obituary in the London Times you will learn that he was a genius who offered insights into the economy. If you read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph you will learn that

"He is one of those unfortunate people who lived long enough to see his ideas discredited," said Doug McWilliams of the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s he was the voice of enlightened liberalism. He was always ready with an acerbic sound bite to put down the conservative line, and liberals basked in his talent and his brilliance. His best-sellers flowed out, one after the other, confirming for liberals everything they knew, or would have known if they had thought about it.

On occasion Galbraith would debate with William F. Buckley, Jr. as Mr. Liberal against Mr. Conservative. They were well matched, each with an arrogant presence that satisfied their supporters and enraged the opposition.

Democrats sorely miss his presence on the team, as an all-rounder who could think, write, and perform on TV, and pitch their ideas like a pro.

It was doubtless his authority that encouraged Democrats to believe that Reaganomics would never work. But as the old corporative world of big business vs. big labor gave way to the global economy where rent-seeking corporations and labor unions had no place to hide, his ideas began to lose their lustre.

Despite the power of Galbraith’s prose the economy is not a simple narrative of business vs. labor with noble government in between. It is far bigger than that, and far more fascinating.

But it is a world in which liberals are much less important than they would like to be.

Solzhenitzyn Can't Take US Hegemony

Although Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner of the Soviet Union and lived from many years in exile in the United States he has never been a fan of the West. Adrian Blomfield in the Washington Times reports that Solzhenitzyn feels that the US is encircling Russia. WRiting to Moscow News, he wrote

Though it is clear that present-day Russia poses no threat to it whatsoever, NATO is methodically and persistently expanding its military apparatus in the east of Europe and is implementing an encirclement of Russia from the south

The support for revolutions in the Balkans and the Ukraine make it perfectly clear to him.

All this leaves no doubt that they are preparing a complete encirclement of Russia, which will be followed by the deprivation of her sovereignty.

He’s right, of course, but not in the way he thinks. The US is not out to demolish Russia, at least not directly. We just have a civic faith in democratic capitalism. Perfectly harmless, really. We just instinctively work to support democratic capitalism, and try to plant it wherever we find a seedbed that might support it.

But if I were you, Alex old chum, I’d be more concerned about the Chinese. Those chaps are not going to stay south of the border forever, you know.

Music is For Neanderthals

Music has always had a good press. “As Plato said: “Music uses sound to educate the soul in virtue” and most educated persons have since concurred,” according to Terence Kealey.

But scientist beg to differ. Music is the language of pre-speech. It connects with the emotions, not with reason. People who are deficient in reason, like babies, stroke victims, and autistic children are the experts in music.

Leon Miller, of the University of Illinois, described 13 people who were indeed mentally retarded. Typically, their IQs and social skills were so rudimentary that they could not speak or dress themselves. But musically they were gifted, not only playing well but also composing creatively. And, typically, they had perfect pitch.

We use music, or musicality in our voices, to communicate with babies. And they understand us. “'What a good girl!', delivered in French, provokes a happy smile in an English nursery.”

Studies show that 100 percent of mothers sing to their babies.

But here’s the nub. An archeologist, Stephen Mithen, has studied the Neanderthals and decided that they could not speak, but could sing. His book is called The Singing Neanderthals. I know, it sounds like the Trapp Family Singers.

Along came walkin’ talkin’ Homo Sapiens and it was curtains for the Singing Neanderthals.

So when Daniel Barenboim says that “making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy,” he is probably wrong. Unless democracy is considered a primitive, pre-articulate activity.

Saudi Jihadists Take Down Conservative Blogs

This morning at about 10:00am EDT conservaive blogs across the nation suffered a Denial of Service attack originating out of Saudi Arabia.

You can see reports from Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, and Hugh Hewitt. On Hugh Hewitt they are starting out their return to service with a piece on the silliness of Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell. Here at the Road to the Middle Class we have already dealt with her insult to Washington State. Of course. Maybe she’s right, and just reflecting the stump-toothed conspiracy theorists of North Seattle.

Maybe these eager cyber-jihadis haven’t yet read Jonah Goldberg’s piece on “Globalization for Losers.” He suggests that Radical Islam is Globalization for Losers. And of course, running a close second is the Naomi Klein lefty globalization of losers, a globalization run by the UN and progressive activists.

It’s been one rebellion after another over the last 150 years against the glorious rise of the middle class and its commonwealth of law and prosperity.

What is wrong with these people?

Economy: Roaring or Limping? You Make the Call

With the Department of Commerce expected to announce a 5.0 percent annual growth rate for the first quarter the New York Times was worried this morning. Wrote David Leonardt and Vikas Bajaj

Gas prices are rising, as are mortgage rates. House prices in many once-hot markets have started slipping. The American automobile industry shows no sign of recovery. And the paychecks of most workers have not even kept up with inflation over the last four years.

Yet the national economy continues to speed ahead.

What on earth is going on? Well, it turned out that the Commerce Department reported a mere 4.8 percent annual growth in the first quarter of 2006, 0.2 percent less than the forecast. No doubt the shortfall was President Bush’s fault. You can understand the New York Times’ disappointment. Anyway, the rich are doing well.

Spending by upper-income families appears to be driving much of the economy's growth. The average hourly wage for rank-and-file workers — who make up roughly 80 percent of the work force — has fallen by 5 cents in the last four years, to $16.49, after inflation is taken into account. Yet most well-paid workers have continued to receive raises.

You’d expect Larry Kudlow to look on the bright side, and he does.

Today’s economy may be the greatest story never told. It’s an American boom, spurred by lower tax rates, huge profits, big productivity, plentiful jobs, and an ongoing free-market capitalist resiliency. It’s also a global boom, marked by a spread of free-market capitalism like we’ve never seen before.

So let’s pull out all the stops.

Recent data on production, retail sales, and employment are stronger than expected. The latest durable-goods report shows huge gains in orders for big-ticket items like airplanes, transportation, metals, machinery, and computers — even cars and parts. These orders suggest that the economic boom will continue as far as the eye can see... Just what the doctor ordered.

Will angst about gas prices cost Republicans in the Fall? Who knows? But at least the mess over ethanol shortages should force the government to make some sensible decisions about energy. And maybe we could even dip a drilling bit into the sacred groves of ANWR.

“Let free markets work. This is the new worldwide message of freedom, prosperity, and optimism.” That is also the message from Larry Kudlow. New York Times please copy.

Is Bush Exhausted or Just Resting?

Which is it? Is the Bush Administration finished, exhausted? Or is the wily poker player just sitting back faking out the political opposition?

Talking with Hugh Hewitt, the indefatigable Mark Steyn, (perm), asserts that the Bush Administration won’t do anything about Iran.

I think it does seem to me exhausted. And in a strange way, a lot of the things that he's getting into trouble with over the moment, like the $3 a gas pump, is, I think, a reflection of...it doesn't even have the sort of strength of will to drag its own party with him.

But over at The American Thinker Thomas Lifson reminds us not to forget that President Bush had a reputation at Harvard as “a very avid and skillful poker player.” And in case you forgot, Bush is a Harvard MBA.

He is a trained strategist, an MBA graduate of Harvard Business School, where he learned that the point of having a strategy is to win when it counts, not just to feel good about yourself at every moment of the process.

That’s “strategery” to you and I. Lifson likes to call the strategic-poker-player Bush

persona "The Crawford Kid." It is an identity the President probably would never embrace, because keeping it secret keeps his opponents unwary. But they will never learn. Contempt for the President and their own ego-maintenance demands will not let them recognize reality when they are outsmarted.

The thing to remember is that politicians are not like you and I. They enter politics because they like risk and they like to win. A crisis like Iran or like $3.00 gasoline creates a chance for some action. And maybe a chance to win.

"Make Price Gouging Illegal"

Ever since Maria Cantwell was elected to the United States Senate from the Soviet of Washington she has kept a pretty low profile. And a good thing too, since she got elected spending her own money from Real Networks stock options that, after the NASDAQ tanked, she didn’t have. But that’s OK. Hillary Clinton helped her out.

This year she is running for reelection so she has cudgelled her brain to come up with an issue that will resonate with the voters.

What do you think would go over real good? Price gouging! Yes, that should do it. So Sen. Cantwell is pushing a bill to make price gouging illegal.

Now you’ve worked for a private company, for at least a couple of years, Senator. How would that work?

Never mind. Her price-gouging gimmick is getting her on TV shows like Hardball so that when the the voters complain:

It makes me angry that the prices keep going up for no apparent reason other than the profit of the gas companies.

She can say, with a straight face that, given where the American public is right now

they want something done immediately. And that’s why we need a federal bill to make price gouging illegal.

Well now, Senator. And how would a law against price gouging have any effect immediately? And how exactly would you define price gouging so that it kept honest businessmen, assuming there are any, out of jail?

And what needs to be investigated is whether supply is being artificially manipulated, whether it’s being suppressed or shipped overseas for lower profits, only to have higher profits at home because there’s less supply. And until we have good transparency in these oil markets, we’re not going to be able to give consumers the confidence that prices aren’t being manipulated.

You know, Senator, what with the futures markets and what with spot prices and all, I’d say that the oil business, at least outside of the national oil companies of OPEC, is about as transparent as you can get. But that isn’t really important, does it? Not compared to the importance of getting reelected.

It’s a pity that Senator Cantwell didn’t seem to have time on Hardball to talk about increasing energy supplies. You know, boring things like drilling for oil and building new oil refineries and nuclear plants. Could that be because she has never voted to increase oil supply in her liberal Democratic life? And nuclear: isn’t that like dangerous, and stuff?

Jane Jacobs: Celebrating the City Street

Jane Jacobs was a writer celebrated both by liberals and conservatives. She died April 25 in Toronto, aged 89. In her celebrated Death and Life of Great American Cities she punctured the confident movement of urban renewal that was bulldozing entire urban neighborhoods to cure “urban blight.” Liberals liked her because she bashed the rich. Conservatives liked her because she championed the old and the traditional.

She also belonged to that extraordinary time around 1960 when a clutch of major non-fiction books were published to universal reception: “Death and Life of American Cities,” “Silent Spring,” “The Other America,” “The Feminine Mystique,” “Growing Up Absurd,” “The Affluent Society,” and “Unsafe at Any Speed.”

In the New York Times Douglas Martin speaks of her four recommendations for city environment:

"Death and Life" made four basic recommendations for creating municipal diversity: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition and use. 4. Population must be dense.

In NRO conservative G. Tracy Mehan claims Jacobs for conservatives.

Flourishing city diversity, of the kind that is catalyzed by the combination of mixed primary uses, frequent streets, mixture of building ages and overheads, and dense concentration of users, does not carry with it the disadvantages of diversity conventionally assumed by planning pseudoscience.

Mehan claims Jacobs as a Burkean. But you could also categorize her as a rebellious libertarian.

"City air still makes free the runaways from company towns, from plantations, from factory-farms, from subsistence farms, from migrant picker routes, from mining villages, from one-class suburbs," wrote Jacobs.

We can hardly say that she succeeded in stopping the elite passion for remaking cities in its own highly educated and highly evolved image. “Urban Renewal” was replaced by “New Urbanism” and now “Smart Growth.” The theme is constant—bulldozing people around to suit the aesthetic preferences of the educated elite.

But there is a curious contradiction in Jacobs’ womanly celebration of the vibrant city. The single-purpose suburb, against which she rails, was created by women. They wanted to get away from the danger and the bustle of the city so they could raise their families in peace and quiet.

Blair in a Pickle

You think that President Bush is in a mess. Prime Minister Blair is in meltdown. This week three separate scandals hit the fan. And next week are the British local elections.

The first problem is that the National Health Service is running over budget and so hospitals are laying off doctors and nurses. It’s got so bad that Health Secretary Patricia Hewett was booed by nurses at a convention.

But that was just the light relief. The big deal is that the British prisons have been releasing foreign prison inmates and that over a thousand of these “former inmates were “lost” between an incoherent Prison Service and an inept Immigration and Nationality Directorate,” according to the London Times. Some of them went ahead and committed rapes and murders.

You might wonder how the Brits expect two branches of the Home Office to communicate with each other, and you would be right. It is unconscionable to expect government employees to do much more than just show up. But still. Don’t these bureaucrats have any shame?

Scandal Number Three is really not worth worrying about, except that it is a question of ethics and all that. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has been having an affair with his civil-servant secretary. “[T]his relationship between a prominent politician and a civil servant in his office was unprofessional as well as unethical in other respects,” says the Times. Lucky he isn’t a corporate CEO, but merely a politician. Then he would have had to resign.

The conservative press are, of course, enjoying the meltdown of New Labour immensely. It merely demonstrates the essential unseriousness of the Blair regime: all spin and no substance.

But the British people thought that Blair would be different.

Iran a Threat But Iraq Wasn't

It’s easy to write that now. In the left-wing Guardian Jonathan Freedland writes that:

That the Iraqi peril was a phantom, all but the pro-war diehards now concede. On the current menace posed by Iran, there is no such consensus.

Iran is a country that experts agree could have nuclear weapons in a short while.

But it is surely relevant that Iran is led by a man who cannot let a week go by without issuing an annihilationist threat to one of his regional neighbours.

Well, you expect this sort of thing from left-wing commentators. But looked at from a strategic viewpoint, the attraction of an Iraq invasion was that it was next to Iran. Iran was always the problem, even back in 2000/2001. But when you are doing military operations you have limited options. Iraq was a threat to neighboring states, including of course Israel and it was doable. Hence the decision to invade Iraq.

I suspect that if you could have got into the meetings in the months after 9/11 you would have heard, again and again, that Iraq was only the start. What was needed was to contain Iran.

Of course, when and if we do something about Iran then the lefty media will say that Bush Lied about that too. Iran was never a threat, they’ll say. And Bush knew it.

Raise the Storm Signals

A big worry, if you worry about big things, is this. Does the current explosion in commodity prices mean another economic blowdown like 1979-82, when the world, led by the United States and Europe, experienced “stagflation?” Are we going to see a replay of the Carter years when we had inflation and recession at the same time?

William P. Kucewicz takes a look at the numbers, and asks: is the runup in commodity prices a monetary phenomenon or a response to economic growth?

Don’t worry, he says. The numbers show that it’s an economic response, not a monetary phenomenon.

Well, it’s nice to be so sanguine about it, but I took a look at the graphs in his article and I don’t get it. It looks to me as if the world is heading for a big economic slowdown resulting from the huge increase in commodity prices of the last few years. And just what was the global economic boom driven by other than the huge increase in credit when the Fed started fighting recession in 2001/2002?

Here are the interesting numbers. Economic growth towards the end of 2005, worldwide, has almost stalled out. Global capital spending is still increasing even though global economic growth has been slowing since late 2003.

What the numbers say to me is: Expect a sharp decline in economic growth, a stall in capital spending, and a sharp drop in commodity prices. And then start wondering where the bottom is going to be.

Sounds a bit like 1980 all over again.

Why Are Bush and Cameron Going Green?

President Bush opened the year by confessing that America was “addicted to oil.” It was obviously no throwaway line. He has repeated it, most recently in his speech Monday on renewable fuel sources in which he said that

[T]he prices that people are paying at the gas pumps reflect our addiction to oil.

Meanwhile British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has made a point of moving the Tory Party greenwards, installing a windmill on his London house and buying a Lexus Hybrid. Last week he went to the Arctic to hug a husky. He’s setting up a new

approach to climate change, part of the new green revolution that the Conservative Party is intending to lead.

For starters, he’s going to propose a Carbon Levy on polluters.

If conservative politicians are talking like this then they must be looking at polls and focus group results that tell them to go green or go out of business.

President Bush’s speech “was a sad example of political capitulation by a former Texas oilman who certainly knows better,” writes James K. Glassman He should know that

America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love.


We use oil -- and other unmentioned but implied addictions like coal and natural gas -- to generate energy that powers our cars, heats our homes, lights our cities, runs our factories. By the standard of what they do for us, fossil fuels are pretty cheap. They provide enormous industrial leverage.

And if fossil fuels one day run out, or if global warming really does melt the glaciers and flood the lowlands—a very big if—then humans will adapt.

So what is going on? Why are conservative politicians capitulating to the watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag?

The problem is the “mmmmhh” factor. What’s that? It’s the sound that the fifty-something liberal Seattle women were making all around me on December 6, 2005. They were listening to photographer Subhanker Banerjee tell them about the beauties of the Alaskan North Slope at a Seattle Arts and Lectures special event held at Benaroya Hall. And whenever Banerjee would tell them what a shame it would be to spoil the North Slope by drilling for oil in ANWR, several of them would moan “mmmmhh.”

They weren’t speaking in tongues but they were certainly having a religious experience.

The educated elite in the Anglosphere may not believe in God any more, but they do have a religion, and that religion provides them with the universal human need for meaning, for apocalyptic fear, for sacrifice, and for redemption from sin.

And best of all it is a religion with costs, an essential ingredient in a thriving religion according to sociologist Rodney Stark.

You don’t mess with peoples’ religion. Every politician knows that.

Left Brimming with New Ideas?

If a center-left columnist wrote a column about the new Big Ideas that people on the left were coming up with, what would you think? That’s what E.J. Dionne just did. So what is the basis of his claim?

First of all there’s an article in The American Prospect by Michael Tomasky titled Party in Search of a Notion.

Democrats and their allies must destroy the current political “paradigm” based on “radical individualism” and replace it with a politics of the “common good.” Only a larger argument rooted in a different conception of government and society, Tomasky argues, will allow the party to “do a lot more than squeak by in this fall's (or any) elections based on the usual unsatisfying admixture of compromises.”

OK. That means a lot or a little, depending on what actual policies back it up. And a quick scan of the article indicates that his proposal for Democrats to “argue on behalf of civic reconstruction and genuine public morality” doesn’t yet have any specific ideas attached to it.

What about the Center for American Progress? Dionne says that it is pushing 15 New Ideas on its website. He’s right. Here they are.

Offering Opportunity for All: Build an opportunity nation where every hard-working person — regardless of background — can realize his or her dreams through education, decent work and fair pay.

• Create a Fair and Simple Tax Code
• Extend Learning Time
• Improve Teacher Quality
• Increase College Opportunity and Completion
• Reduce Debt Burdens by Fighting Abusive Lending
• Strengthen Pensions: Universal 401(k)

Promoting a Just and Secure World: Use America’s awesome strength to bring the world together, not pull it apart.

• Use Integrated Power
• Strengthen the All-Volunteer Army
• Grow the World’s Energy Future
• Invest in Global Equity

Building Strong Communities: Reawaken America’s conscience — our sense of shared and personal responsibility &mdash to build healthy, vibrant communities.

• Provide Universal Health Coverage
• Use Health Care to Strengthen the U.S. Auto Industry
• Provide Comprehensive Worker Adjustment Assistance

Creating Open and Fair Government: Reform government so that it is of, by, and for the people: open, effective, and committed to the common good.

• Bring Government Decisionmaking into the Information Age
• Impose New Rules to Curb Abuses of Congressional Power

Most of these ideas are great. They are ideas that Republicans have proposed in Congress and that Democrats have blocked. And there are other ideas, for instance in education, where Republicans have the same goals but different ways of reaching them. There are other areas, like the family, where the 15 New Ideas are silent. And that’s a shame, because the common good begins with the family.

The big problem for Democrats when they start talking about a new devotion to the “common good” is that Democrats, by and large, are the people on the government’s teat sucking greedily from the common good. How many Democrats are going to agree to be plucked off the teat to support civic republicanism and the common good?

That’s why Democrats find themselves opposing all the Republican proposals to enhance the common good. Just about everything you could think of doing for the common good will take money away from Democrats.

And that is going to make it difficult for Democrats to deliver on E.J. Dionne’s hoped-for Big Ideas.

Robert Carleson: Another Conservative That Nobody Knew

Everyone knows that Horace Mann was the father of public education. But nobody knows that Bob Carleson, who died April 21, was the father of welfare reform.

It’s odd, isn’t it? Welfare reform is probably the most successful government reform of the last half century, and yet the man who did the most to bring it about is unknown.

Government education, on the other hand...

It was in 1970 that Governor Ronald Reagan decided that he wanted to do something about soaring welfare caseloads in California. He appointed Robert B. Carleson as director of the welfare department. “After a year of studying the crisis,” according to the Washington Times,

Mr. Carleson handed the governor a plan that would restrict eligibility, clamp down on corruption and increase work incentives.

...

The results were irrefutable. A year after enactment, total welfare spending dropped for the first time, despite an increase in spending on the neediest families. Where once the welfare rolls had been increasing by nearly 40,000 people per month, by the end of the decade there were 300,000 fewer people than in 1971.

It is worth noting that this program was enacted in the early 1970s when program evaluations of the federal War on Poverty were already showing that the huge expansion in material aid to the poor wasn’t winning the war.

It took twenty years to take Carleson’s program national. Now the welfare case load has been cut in half and more, and welfare reform is the most successful social experiment of our lifetimes.

And the most telling anecdote in the years immediately after the 1996 reform was the news that women were deliberately getting back to work before their eligibility was exhausted so that they could “bank” it. What’s this? Weren’t welfare recipients supposed to be helpless victims? Then how could they be planning and thinking about the future, and treating welfare not as a pension but as an insurance against a rainy day?

Nobody remembers Bob Carleson except the few. But he did not live in vain.

US Economy in High Gear, Says Brit

With the GDP number this quarter expected to hit 5 percent the US remains the engine of the world economy. But don’t tell the MSM.

Just think, writes Gerard Baker of the London Times, if you extend that 5 percent for a year, that adds up to $600 billion added to the economy,

roughly the equivalent of adding one whole new Brazil or Australia to global economic activity every year, just from the incremental extra sweat and heave and click of 300 million Americans.

Or, if you like, think of it this way. Right now the US economy is about 30 percent bigger than Europe’s. In 15 years it will be twice as big.

Baker’s only worry is that rising inequality might cause the US to turn away from the global economy. Actually, he is probably wrong about that.

Inequality is probably only a problem when the economy turns south. It is then, as liberals like to say, that the voters turn to a man on a white horse. Sometimes that man is like Ronald Reagan and ushers in a quarter century of prosperity, with SUVs, McMansions, and starter castles. Sometimes that man is a Franklin Delano Roosevelt and bumbles along for ten years getting nowhere but creating lots of New Deal federal agencies and jobs for liberals. And sometimes that man is an Adolf Hitler and leads his people off a cliff.

Celebrating Earth Day

Al Gore celebrated Earth Day, April 22nd, with an fearmongering screed in Vanity Fair. Watch out for the 10,000 ft chunk of ice perched on the top of Greenland, he advised. If it fell off and plunged into the ocean it could raise sea levels by 20 feet!

On the other hand, we could talk, as OpinionJournal.com does, about the amazing improvements in environmental quality since the first Earth Day in 1970.

Since 1970, carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. are down 55%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Particulate emissions are down nearly 80%, and sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by half. Lead emissions have declined more than 98%.

Meanwhile the number of cars of the road has doubled and the number of miles driven has tripled in the United States.

Fifteen years ago at an environmental conference in Davos, Switzerland, a German told me a story about the problem of the improving environment. Every time a chemical plant has a spill in the River Rhine, he observed, there’s a fish kill and the attendant media attention. The dirty little secret is that thirty years earlier there were no fish kills. There were no fish kills because there were no fish living in the rivers. German rivers were too toxic for the fish.

Last year in the British press they wrote about the herons that you could now see along the River Thames. Herons? But that must mean there are fish in the river for herons to eat, and food in the river for the fish to eat.

Still, as Al Gore points out, there is always the chance that Greenland will slide into the sea.

Who is al-Maliki?

Last week the squabbling politicians of Iraq settled upon a prime minister to replace the unsatisfactory al-Jaafari. And hopes are high that he can get a cabinet together in the next couple of weeks. But who is Jawad al-Maliki?

Iranian journalist Amir Taheri gives us a first look. Is he an “apparatchik” of the al-Dawa Party? Or is he a long-time freedom fighter against Saddam Hussein’s regime? More to the point, can he serve as an effective prime minister? On the one hand, writes Taheri,

Where al-Jaafari is a charismatic figure and a powerful orator, al-Maliki is a more cerebral leader - and no crowd-pleaser. In Iraqi politics today, that may be a disadvantage.

On the other hand:

But al-Maliki has several advantages - starting with his discipline and capacity for hard work, something al-Jaafari singularly lacked. Plus, he has developed close ties with secular Shiite leaders and groups, again something that al-Jaafari never achieved. Last but not least: The Kurds and Arab Sunnis, who together account for more than 40 percent of the population, see al-Maliki as someone they can work with - another contrast with al-Jaafari.

So the answer is: we don’t know. Meanwhile, Taheri writes, the government has two urgent tasks, to push through an emergency economic plan and to negotiate a future relationship with the Coalition occupying forces after the current UN mandate expires in December.

The Russians are Coming -- To Royal Ascot

Many of us, when we take time out from worrying about Iraq, have worried for years about the London social season.

With the British descending into an informal miasma of athletic gear and hoodies, who is going to keep the good old traditions going, like tea at Wimbledon and big hats at Royal Ascot?

Have no fear. The newly rich Russians that have flooded into London in recent years just love dressing up and flaunting their wealth.

And who can blame them? After 80 years of dreadful Stalinism and socialist realism who wouldn’t enjoy dressing up and showing off?
As Christine Toomey explains in the Sunday Times, the Russians like the London season because so many of their “traditions were destroyed in the Russian revolution.” Even the Russians back home are getting into the act, if only vicariously. “Two Russian documentaries were filmed at Royal Ascot last year.”

Can the Russians really be accepted in snooty old London? Elena Ragozhina, editor of a glossy magazine for rich Russians, thinks so. They can get doors to open through their charitable donations.

“Charity is a new concept for many Russians. In Soviet society the state was expected to provide for everybody,” she says. “But before that, there was a noble tradition of charitable giving in Russia, and we are trying to revive that. The generosity of many Russians is greatly appreciated, I think.”

Oh sure. Just listen to this. Some of the old school are not too impressed.

Since the appearance of so many arrivistes, the season is said to have lost its appeal for some of its traditional patrons, says Clive Aslet, a former editor of Country Life. “Most of the real old families rather look down on that world now. They see it as rather pretentious.”

Lowering the tone of the neighborhood, eh?

The Social Security Guarantee

Democrats like to characterize individual Social Security accounts as a “risky scheme.” Social Security, they assert, is guaranteed, while you could lose all your money in an account at Fidelity.

Hold on a minute, writes Jagadeesh Gokhale. What do you mean “guaranteed?”

Life holds no certainties. But to provide a relatively strong benefit "guarantee," Congress would have to pass a law requiring a super majority vote to alter the current benefit formula.

...

In reality, there is no strong Social Security guarantee and future electorates are unlikely to acquiesce to exclusively revenue-side adjustments. Potential future benefit adjustments should not be ignored, but talk of "guaranteed" benefits misleads people into believing their retirements are more secure than is really the case -- a misperception that negatively affects how much they personally save for the future.

The Social Security “guarantee” is really nothing more than the power of Social Security recipients to use the political system to extract resources from other Americans. But in an economic crisis the political system is quite likely to tell the elderly to go fly a kite. It’s happened before.

In fact it is Social Security that is the “risky scheme.” First of all, it discourages savings, which reduces the resources available to pay for pensions. And on a larger scale it also reduces fertility.

[E]conomists and social scientists have begun to suggest that the long-term fertility decline in developed economies may also be the effect of generous pension and health insurance programs. A recent study shows that a significant portion of fertility declines among developed economies during the 20th century can "be explained" by the generosity of retiree pension and health benefits.

The best system is for ordinary people to save for their own retirements and stop working when they can afford it. Once the government steps in and sets an arbitrary level retirement benefits it introduces a systemic risk that endangers everyone’s well-being.

How Hypocritical Can You Get, Liberals?

How low will liberals go? Who knows? Here are the news items on liberal hypocrisy, for just one day.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a high-school student could not wear a T-shirt with anti-gay slogans. But I thought that liberals believed in the First Amendment and the right of dissent.

OK, well maybe innocent high-school students must be protected from the cruel winds of the public square. But the faculty of Ohio State University (Mansfield) voted to allow gay professors to file charges for sexual harrassment against a librarian, Scott Savage, who recommended the following books for a reading list: “'The Marketing of Evil' by David Kupelian, 'The Professors' by David Horowitz, 'Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis' by Bat Ye'or and 'It Takes a Family' by Senator Rick Santorum” because it made them feel unsafe.
But I thought liberals believed in free speech and were absolutely against censorship in any form.

Then we have Howard Dean. He has just called for making border security a top priority. “'The first thing we want is tough border control,' he said.” But don’t Democrats in every big city in the nation order their police officers not to arrest illegal immigrants? And don’t liberals call the border fence “inhuman?”

As gas prices reach $3.00 a gallon the New York Times reports that “Democrats running for Congress are moving quickly to use the most recent surge in oil and gasoline prices to bash Republicans over energy policy.” But haven’t Democrats for years opposed development of new oil resources offshore and in Alaska, and isn’t it Democrats that insist on fancy gasoline formulations that drive up the price and cause local shortages? And don’t Democrats believe that energy prices ought to be high to encourage conservation?

There’s a question that every day gets bigger and bigger. Do Democrats believe in anything?

Two Nations Under 401(k)

Many social changes do not occur in the blaze of national publicity but work their way under the radar, slowly changing society one person at a time. Such a change may be the 401(k) revolution, the rise of defined contribution pensions, or more exactly, the rise of pre-tax individual savings plans. Donald Lambro at the Washington Times celebrates their huge expansion.

The numbers are astounding and explosive: Since 1990, total worker assets in 401(k) plans have grown an average of 13 percent a year, from $385 billion to an estimated $2.1 trillion in 2004... says the Investment Company Institute.

At $2.1 trillion, we are talking about real money. But what political junkies want to know is: Does this change the political balance in the United States towards an ownership society?

"Investors, regardless of income, gender or race, vote more Republican than non-investors," tax cut crusaders Grover Norquist and Cesar Conda wrote in a Wall Street Journal analysis about the effect of President Bush's tax cuts.

But there is another thing to think about. While the ranks of investors grow what about the people left behind? What about the dependent classes, the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party who live by remittances from the government: from government programs, from government jobs, and from government pensions? These people have a completely different outlook on life, and live lives that depend, until their dying day, upon the continuance of that check from the government. For the last half century the Democrats have been happily growing the ranks of the dependent, instinctively understanding that their political support comes from the dependent classes.

When will the clash come between these Two Nations, between the defined contribution nation and the defined benefit nation?

e-Stonian PM Gets Friedman Prize

He’s no relation of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, and he’s certainly not lacking in courage.

He is Mart Laar, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, who set in motion the economic reforms that has doubled the GDP of Estonia in ten years. And now he is the third recipient of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty awarded by the Cato Institute.

Accordint to Marian Tupy

Mart Laar replaced the "dead hand" of the government with Adam Smith's "invisible hand." His government eliminated import tariffs (a decision that was partly reversed by Estonia's membership of the European Union) and established a flat income tax. Corporate taxes on reinvested profits fell to zero and a currency board was established to combat inflation. The government also undertook extensive privatization of state companies.

But here is what Laar himself says about his reforms, as told on the Cato Institute’s website.

"I had read only one book on economics — Milton Friedman's Free to Choose," he said. "I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible."

Oy! It’s lucky that Milton Friedman has solid ideas that actually work. Suppose Laar had read some lefty tome instead! Then e-Stonia would be in a mess, like Old Europe.

And bravo to Mart Laar for turning his nation into a Baltic tiger.

Women Should Be Nice to Men

Author Caitlin Flanagan has written a book for the stay-at-home-mother-with-a-nanny set. It is called To Hell With All That. It’s about time, you might say. After all, we have all been assuming up to now that the nanny set were all out pursuing high-powered careers.

But Flanagan got in trouble with the feminists, so marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher decided to interview her. Flanagan is really a liberal, you see, except that

"I have one conservative standpoint," says Flanagan. "I really have traditional emotions about having a full-time, at-home parent, be it mom or dad. For that, the left has excoriated me, humiliated me, called me names in print - one of which I had to look up."

Welcome to the club, honey. But what has really got her into trouble is promoting the idea that women should be nice to men.

"Try just doing something nice for your husband. Set the table, cook something you know he loves and see what happens."

You see men are not what you think.

"Men really want to help women. Yes, there are bad men in the world. Avoid them. Most of them show their stripes very early."

Actually, men want peace in the house and they are prepared to put up with quite a lot to get it. Men the world over live with the truth that if She is happy, everyone is happy. But if She is not happy then nobody is happy.

Lesson of the Duke Rape Case

In all the flap over the Duke University lacrosse rape case one thing is being forgotten, writes Ann Coulter with her usual verve.

You can severely reduce your chances of having a false accusation of rape leveled against you if you don't hire strange women to come to your house and take their clothes off for money.

She certainly has a point. Not only that.

You can severely reduce your chances of having someone playing the race card on you if you never get into a compromising position of any kind with an African American.

In general, white males seem to have internalized this lesson. That is what the government’s Table 42 in the National Crime Victimization Survey demonstrates year in and year out.

Here are the numbers for Table 42 in 2003 (pdf).

National Crime Victimization Survey 2003 from Table 42. Personal Crimes of Violence Perceived Race of Offender Incidents of Rape/Sexual Assault White Black   White victim 75,866 20,310   Black victim 0 21,105

There you have it. The numbers are pretty telling. Whites are happily raping away on white women. And blacks are happily raping away on black and white women. But whites are not raping black women. In the government’s Table 42 the zero has an asterisk. The sample is too small for a reliable number.

The question is: Why are white rapists so careful about not raping black women? The answer is obvious. Because it is too dangerous.

In this non-judgmental age there are still a few things that people are still really judgmental about. One of them is white-on-black rape.

If you didn’t know that before, you do now. That is what the Duke lacrosse rape case is all about.

Next They Will Lay Off the Journalists

We all know the agony of the layoff. We sympathize, more or less, with the grossly overpaid auto-workers and union pilots as they strike to maintain their rents. And then we are sorry when we read of 10,000 laid off at General Fishslice. But think of the coming layoffs for journalists. You haven’t thought of it? Well, Boris Johnson has. It’s all very well for the well-paid auto workers, but sooner or later they will come for the journalists, and there will

come a time when the forces of international capital will decree that there is no longer any economic justification for this space to be filled by the manual labour of this particular semi-skilled artisan.



The ancient word-plant will be shut. The gerundive turning-sheds will fall silent. The lathes will cease to hone the metaphors, and no sound will be heard in the vast grammatical assembly lines save the drip-drip-drip from the cracked skylight and the scuttling of rats in the stock of unused similes.

Yes, it’s a pretty grim prospect, for every ink-stained wretch knows

that ranged beneath us, smacking their chops, are hordes of brilliant and pustulant young thrusters, only too keen to show what magic they could produce in our places.

In a healthy economy there are lots of jobs being created and lots of jobs being destroyed. For all the lamentations of union leaders, tender-hearted progressives, and sundry other special pleaders,

It's the market and it's the only way.

President Hillary Means Same-old Same-old

After the stellar economic growth of the last 25 years you would think that all serious presidential contenders would be talking expansively about the wonders of low tax rates and the wisdom of the market. But you would be wrong, according to Larry Kudlow. A President Hillary Clinton would take us back to the days to industrial policy and a “national investment authority.” Sounds like Old Europe. Said Hillary in Chicago:

“Tax cuts are not the cure-all for everything that ails the American economy,” and that instead we need the “right tax system [and] the right investment, including infrastructure. . . . decisions and policies that only all of us acting together through our government can make to set the stage for future prosperity.

Of course, this is suitably vague, but it does suggest a lot of top-down political control. And if the infrastructure of the nation needs investment, it is because liberals siphoned the nation’s wealth in the 1960s and 1970s into social programs, and sneered at continuing to build highways until we had paved the nation over.

Of course, no speech from a Democrat would be complete without a bit of class warfare. Said Hillary:

“America did not build the greatest economy in the world because we have rich people.”

That’s true. We built the railroads with the money of rich people in Britain. But it is also true that we have rich people in the United States because we have built the greatest economy in the world.

There is another way to grow the economy and bring prosperity to Americans. Writes Kudlow:

Two weeks ago I was in the Oval Office with President Bush and a handful of financial journalists. The president spoke to us about his growth policies and priorities, such as making tax relief permanent, keeping the tax rate on dividends and capital gains low, maintaining lean budgets, and expanding free trade.



This vision is in deep contrast to the one being set forth by Hillary Clinton. The president places the risk-taker and the entrepreneur at the center of economic growth; the presidential candidate sees government as the driving force of the economy.

Amen, brother.

Gender Gap in High School

Looking back over the last half century, can we say that any liberal enthusiasm has resulted in a good outcome?

For decades liberals have been saying that girls are shortchanged in school. And they have forced us to implement programs of various kinds to discriminate in favor of girls.

But Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters beg to differ. The problem in education is not girl proficiency but sub-par performance from boys. While

72 percent of female students graduate from high school, only 65 percent of male students earned a diploma.

Well, that’s not too bad, you say. But when you unpack the results by race, as all progressives like to do, the results become alarming.

The difference in graduation rates between females and males was about five-percentage points for white students and only 3 percentage points for Asian students. Among Hispanic and black female students the graduation rates are 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively, compared to 49 percent for Hispanic males and 48 percent for black males. Thus, the gender gap is twice as large for minority students as for white students.

So why is this, liberals? Institutional sexism? Institutional racism? How could this be? Schools in minority areas are run by and for liberals. How could there be racism and sexism there?

There is probably something dark and menacing here. But it probably isn’t racism or sexism. Understandably, liberals really don’t want to look at it too closely. It is beginning to look as thought liberals have been wrong about everything, and especially wrong about education.

Sooner or later we are going to have to admit that the progressive enthusiasm for helping the marginalized has had the opposite effect. People must not be coddled and pushed around. They must learn to make it on their own with minimal help from the helping professions and maximum effort of their own.

But that would be an America with a lot less jobs for liberals. And we can’t have that, can we?

Still, liberals can count one success. They set out to favor girls over boys in the education system, and the result is now in. Girls now do much better than boys in school. But isn’t that discriminatory?

Germans Accuse Brit Tabloids of Bum Deal

War has broken out between the German and the British tabloids. And nobody can tell when it will be over.

The British Sun, famous for its Page 3 beauties, published a photo of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bum—that she had incautiously bared while changing into a bathing suit. According to Roger Boyes in the London Times, in the accompanying article

headlined “I’m big in the Bumdestag” and containing eight puns about bottoms, The Sun gave a backhanded compliment to Frau Merkel’s positive effect on the economy and its “much-improved bottom line”.

Well! The Germans were not about to take that sitting down.

“Very bad form,” said Eduard Lintner, of the Christian Democrats. “There should be no place for such pictures.”

The Germans may be the most advanced country in Europe but they certainly aren’t doing much to counter the stereotype that they don’t have a sense of humor.

This may just be the beginning of the conflict. Coming up soon is the soccer European Cup and the prospect of headlines like “‘Achtung! Surrender’ and ‘Blitz the Fritz‘”

Tension in Baghdad

In Iraq blogger Iraq The Model is getting cranky. He wants to see the politicians quit playing games and get a government on the ground. In his latest report Prime Minister Jafari agreed to step down and then decided no to.

The worrying thing is the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. Writes Omar:

The security situation had been steadily deteriorating since after the elections and the Samarra mosque bombing and Baghdad has become more dangerous a place than it used to be.

Makeshift barricades that block entrances and inner streets are now a common sight all over Baghdad.

The delay in forming a government has everyone worried and accusatory.

Baghdad's residents are managing their daily life with great difficulty and each delay in forming the government makes the situation even tenser and people more worried.

Faster please.

The Case for Rumsfeld

No doubt Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has an aggressive manner. No doubt he has made plenty of mistakes. No doubt he has humiliated dozens of generals. But resign?

We can understand why the MSM is parading the opponents of Secretary Rumsfeld through the chat shows. They will do anything to damage the Bush administration. It is not even
conscious; it is instinctive.

We can understand the frustrations of the generals. If only Rumsfeld had followed their advice. A Wall Street Journal editorial appreciates the many grounds that Generals Swannick, Zinni, and Batiste might have for wishing that they had been led by someone else.

But we the American people have different priorities. We want someone to think the deep thoughts about America’s grand strategy. We want someone to keep on the job in Iraq and deal with the larger geo-strategic issues arising out of global Islamism. And we also also want someone to transform the armed forces of the United States to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century.

It’s fine to criticize the president and the secretary of defense. But, as perennial hawk Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. writes:

It bears mentioning that few, if any, of those demanding Mr. Rumsfeld's removal offer an alternative.

In particular, it bears mentioning that nobody has proposed an alternative strategy. Even Candidate John Kerry in 2004 merely proposed to the voters that he would execute the president’s strategy in Iraq better than the president.

Since nobody is proposing a radical change in US strategy, what’s the point of changing horses? Rumsfeld will be gone in a couple of years anyway. And then the new president and the new secretary of defense can change anything they want.

Brit Working Class Warms to BNP Fascists

In Britain this week everyone is writing about the horrifying move of working-class Brits to the racist British National Party, or BNP. And there is a fear among the chattering classes that the BNP will make substantial gains in the local elections coming up in May. But they really cannot believe it. Writes Rachel Sylvester in the Daily Telegraph,

I find it hard to believe that a sixth of people in this tolerant, decent and middle-of-the-road country really will... put an X in the far-Right box when they fill in their ballot papers in two weeks' time.

Oh please. It is the middle class that believes in tolerance, decency, and middle-of-the-road. The working class belonged to the Labour Party because it was a fighting party that at least talked about a class war against the Tory toffs.

The problem is that the traditional working class, the non-working class that lives in “social housing” and “on the sick,” i.e., on disability rather than work, has rather gone off Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

Actually, it is probably closer to the truth to say that the Labour Party has gone off them.

It used to be that the Labour Party lived and breathed the working class, but now it is more interested in canvassing support from social workers, teachers, and immigrant Muslims and doing the multicultural thing. Understandably the working class feels betrayed.

On top of that the welfare state has destroyed the authentic culture of the working class. It used to be that working-class men had jobs, got married, and supported their children. They liked a smoke, and they liked a drink. In the welfare state, they don’t need working-class men. Sorry fellahs.

In Germany when the ordinary people got reamed by the lefty politicians in the 1920s they regressed, in their demoralization, to the tribal politics offered to them by Adolf Hitler.

Today in France and in Britain the elite has tired of telling the working class that it is the salt of the earth. They have gone on to other enthusiasms. Whereas they used to demonstrate their progressive faith by throwing other peoples’ money at the working class now they show how advanced they are by encouraging unlimited immigration and making Britain into a tolerant multicultural society.

And they are surprised that their former proteges are upset?

What is happening is that the working class, the folk that the Fabian socialists had organized into the tribal politics of class, is now shifting towards another form of tribalism, the tribalism of being native French and native British and hating the new pampered favorites of the political class. Abandoned by their lefty tribal chieftains they are seeking new clan leadership.

Women and Forgiveness

Since it is Easter, columnist Minette Marrin is thinking about forgiveness. And, she admits, she doesn’t get the point. After reviewing the news of the past week, including the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, she writes:

I could not understand the meaning of human forgiveness, at least not in extreme cases. Forgiveness may be divine but I don’t think it is human. To me it seems either pointless or meaningless.

There is, indeed, a good reason to wonder about the point of forgiveness in the larger social and political context. Evil is evil and must be fought to the death. But I think that the point of forgiveness manifests itself in the small world of the family, in particular in the face-to-face world of the woman and her personal relationships.

Let us try to imagine why forgiveness might be, not divine, but merely practical, and especially practical in a woman’s life and in her family relationships.

In the first place we have the evidence of Marvin Olasky and his 1990 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. He rehearses the system of rehabilitation used by 19th century charity workers in getting people out of the gutter and on to their feet. The first item in the A-B-C-D-E-F-G system as A for Affiliation. Upon meeting a needy person the charity worker would first try to find out about family members or friends upon whom their victim had a claim of support or affection. In other words, the workers were trying to bring together a family that had broken apart. It is likely that success would require forgiveness between the estranged family members.

Secondly, there is the evidence of the Asia Times columnist Spengler. Only half in jest, he laughs at the idea of women priests. “A priest's most important function is to forgive sins. Women never forgive anything,” or indeed forget anything. While it is true that: “Flesh-and-blood women cannot forgive men because they cannot be sure of them,” the same does not apply to relations between women. Can women really afford not to forgive other women? Forgive helps women repair a damaged network of care.

The other reason is surfaced by James M. Ault, Jr. in his sociological study of a fundamentalist church in Worcester, Massachusetts, Spirit and Flesh. Everyone knows that fundamentalist churches are hopelessly patriarchal. Women are second-class citizens. Well, not quite.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

How might this destructive power have been mitigated? By forgiveness.

I propose that while the destructive conflict of the men’s feud is mitigated by law, women’s conflict is mitigated by forgiveness.

Is it perhaps significant that the major force in the early Christian church was well-to-do Roman women? It might explain why, in Marrin’s words: “Forgiveness is central to Christianity.”

Seniors Like Medicare Drugs

For months we have been hearing horror stories about the complexities of the new Medicare Part D drug program. Seniors were totally angry and confused and would likely take their revenge in November.

But now that the deadline for signup is approaching, it turns out that seniors are fairly content, writes Donald Lambro in the Washington Times.

[T]he latest Washington Post/ABC News poll found 74 percent of all seniors said they had "an easy time" signing up, compared to only 24 percent who said it was too confusing.



As for all those reports suggesting the discount savings were small to nonexistent, this poll found just the opposite. A sizable 63 percent said they were saving "a lot" or "some," compared to 26 percent who said their drugs were just as expensive.

Of course, for us taxpayers, maybe that isn’t such good news. If all those seniors are so happy, maybe it’s because we are getting shafted.

Even the AARP is happy. Its “poll, released last week, reported 78 percent of seniors who have signed up for the benefits were happy with its results.”

The fact is, of course, that the plan is complicated. When you get ready to sign up you find that there are literally dozens of different programs out there.

Still, it’s good to find out that the gloom and doom merchants were wrong. Again.

Conservative Cool

What young person would be a conservative in Britain? That is the question that Nigel Farndale asks in the Daily Telegraph.
The answer, unfortunately, is nobody. The problem is the David Starkey test.

Dr Starkey once said that, as a young man, he felt more embarrassed about coming out as a Conservative than he did about coming out as a homosexual.

Hmm. And that is just the half of it. Your average impressionable Brit is deeply affected by his favorite rock stars and comedians. One leading comedian asserts on his website that he is “committed to non-violence and is an active campaigner for CND and the Campaign Against Arms Trade.” Thank goodness.

But here in the United States things are a little different. There is a feeling—tell me if you have felt it too—that there is something risky, something edgy, something transgressive about being a conservative. It must help that we have a genuine conservative movement with campus chapters and all. And then there are the conservative rites of passage, being hauled before the diversity Star Chamber for conducting a diversity bake sale, and having the conservative speakers you bring to campus heckled by the Angry Left.

If you are a conformist, a girl for instance, you listen with rapt attention to your professors railing away against the evil Bush and the awful Halliburton. If you are a guy, you just cannot be a man and just let yourself be covered in ordure by some pimply lefty.

But how can we help our Brit fellow travelers get some backbone?

Irish to Observe Easter Rising: Brits Keep Stiff Upper Lip

For the first time since 1969 the Irish are going to observe the Easter Rising of 1916 with a military parad. They will celebrate the Easter Sunday when Irish patriots (or terrorists) rose in rebellion against the Brits and seized the General Post Office. The result was the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and independence from Britain for the Irish after centuries of oppression.

In the Daily Telegraph Tom Peterkin reports that

Bertie Ahern, the prime minister, has said that the parade is an opportunity to build on the Easter Rising's legacy and pay tribute to those who built the republic.

and also identify his Fianna Fail party with Irish nationalism, as opposed to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, which has reached 10 percent popularity in Ireland.

But some say that it “will romanticise the violent rebellion used by the Provisional IRA.”

Back in Britland a Telegraph editorial about the event keeps a stiff upper lip and commends the Irish.

We hope the weather holds, and the participants enjoy themselves. As we often observe in the context of Orange marches, the ideal ought to be of a society where such parades can happen uncontroversially.

Then comes the little dig.

We hope that Unionist politicians will attend the ceremony in future years; and, by the same token, that Northern Ireland's republicans will turn out to applaud their Orange neighbours' parades.

The parade will feature a march past by the Irish Defence Forces so presumably there won’t be a flap over whether the Irish gays and lesbians get to demonstrate their Irish pride.

Pope Walks Way of the Cross

Back in 2003 the Slovakian government signed an agreement with the Catholic Church “to let doctors and health-care workers in Catholic hospitals decline to participate in abortions as a matter of conscience.” Let no good deed remain unpunished. This year “the EU's Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights... ruled Slovakia in violation of its EU 'obligations,'” according to Daniel Henninger. Tolerant, those Euro-secularists, aren’t they?

It is evident that Pope Benedict XVI understands the stakes. According to George Weigel, biographer of Pope John-Paul II,

"Ratzinger has been thinking about Europe for 25 years," Mr. Weigel told me. "He needs to address the problem of a Europe in which consciences are being coerced by transnational institutions. This is the cash-out of what he means by the dictatorship of relativism. It's a real issue with real world consequences."

Can the Church hope to make headway against the fierce secularism of Europe? Henninger thinks he may. In 2004 as Cardinal Ratzinger he had a debate with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the pope, if you like, of Euro-secularism, and Habermas emerged from the dialog to create

a mini-sensation by suggesting that religious communities deserve respect for having "preserved intact something which has elsewhere been lost."

In Italy there has been a renewal of interest in the monastic life among educated young women.

Today Benedict XVI lead the Way of the Cross procession in Rome. Opening with a prayer, Benedict said Jesus' suffering "is the whole of human history, a history where the good are humiliated, the meek assaulted, the honest crushed, and the pure of heart roundly mocked."

On Sunday he will celebrate Christ’s resurrection for the first time as pope.

Meaning of the Passion

What is the meaning of Christ’s Passion? What does it mean when God sacrifices his Son to show that He loves the world? And what are we trying to say when we observe the curious events that took place on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago?

In the London Times Gerard Baker reminds us of the human at the center of the Passion: St. Peter.

It is Peter who most truly compels our attention as the flawed human in the narrative: not the good or evil figure sleepwalking his way towards fate, but the man with choices who can’t get them right; who oscillates between the inner angel and the demands of the flesh.

First he tells Jesus that he’s going to be right there with Him, rashly attacking one of the soldiers sent to arrest Him. Then a day later, he is busily denying all knowledge of Him. It is right after Peter’s denial in Bach’s Matthew Passion that the alto sings the haunting (Win) (Real), Erbarme dich, Mein Gott: Have mercy, O God.

Yet it is the flawed St. Peter who becomes the official founder of the Church, the guy who talks the talk but can’t quite walk the walk the walk.

Is the Squeeze on for al Sadr?

What is really going on in Iraq these days? Are things really in an impasse as the Iraqis fail to come up with a new government? Or is something going on under the blanket?

Austin Bay thinks that they may be putting the squeeze on Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi militia. And Shia Ayatollah Sistani may be at the center of it.

Wishful thinking? Who knows? But let us give the Iraqis credit for being more than just American stooges. After all, the translation of “national rescue coalition” is “everyone gets a share of the loot.”

Back in August 2004 Sadr thought he was going to put the interim government out of business by taking over the mosque in Najaf. Instead the US forces mauled his fighters, the inhabitants of Najaf welcomes the US as liberators, and Sistani negotiated a face-saving withdrawal for Sadr and his fighters.

in the January elections Sadr supporters won three dozen seats in the Iraqi parliament, and he obviously felt he was going to be a king-maker in the new government.

But that status appears to be short-lived. One indicator is the March 26 attack by Iraqi commandos on a Mahdi militia facility in Baghdad. The predictable media outrage lasted less than a week -- and Iraq's Interior Ministry pointed out it had acted to stop sectarian vigilantes. Sadr lost "street face" to the Interior Ministry -- and it appears Sadr's political position has subsequently deteriorated.

And yes, are our MSM dumb or something? Couldn’t they see what was going down when the Iraqi special forces took out Sadr’s pals and afterwards when he squawked like a banshee and staged his fake demonstrations?

Or as Mike Wallace might have said in his heyday: You mean to say that the Iraqi army is now “stood up” enough so it could be used to teach Sadr and his militia a lesson?

The truth is, of course, that we ordinary mortals don’t have a clue what is going on in Iraq behind the curtains.

Fighting Against Economic Reality

At bankrupt Delta Air Lines union pilots who earn an average of about $150,000 a year are resisting 18 percent wage cuts to keep the airline flying. In France students riot in the street to protest the idea of postponing for two years the French guarantee of lifetime employment. In Italy Prime Minister Berlesconi is voted out of office (just) after failing to pass legislation in his five year period in office that would make Italy’s labor market for flexible and Italy more competitive. And, let us not forget the German electorate that nearly died of fright last fall when an advisor to candidate Angela Merkel proposed tax rate cuts.

Now George Will writes about the agonies of General Motors, a corporation that pays $100,000 to $130,000 a year to keep 14,700 laid-off workers in a “Job Bank.” And the United Auto Workers union is threatening a crippling strike if bankrupt Delphi gets the bankruptcy court to cut wages of its members.

What goes up comes back down, especially in the marketplace. But the welfare state is founded on the notion that a government can legislate economic relations and that people should never have to suffer unemployment or reduction in wages.

The beauty of the market system is that is spreads risk around. The danger of the political system is that it concentrates risk, and it encourages people to resort to political power to avoid losses and setbacks.

The history of the industrial era teaches us that it is essential for the market to adjust to new conditions every day. If you try to resist economic change you just put it off, so that the eventual change becomes wrenching, or even catastrophic.

But some people never learn.

Enough of the Self-Servers on Iraq

Should we have sent more troops to Iraq? Did Defense Secretary Rumsfeld criminally omit to plan for the Iraq occupation? Right now, observes Victor Davis Hanson there is a plague of retired senior officers plugging books on TV. And they

offer sharp interviews about our supposed strategic and operational blunders in Iraq — imperial hubris, too few troops, wrong war, wrong place, and other assorted lapses.

Imagine if we had talking heads second-guessing every action in World War II!

Then there is Iran, for which there are three “bad” options, and

on which talking heads can blather about the dangers of "preemption," but without either responsibility for, or maturity in, advocating a viable alternative.

In Iraq we might have sent more troops. But more troops doesn’t necessarily mean a better outcome. “More troops may have facilitated Iraqization — or, in the style of Vietnam, created perpetual dependency.” Who knows?

What we need, then, are not more self-appointed ethicists, but far more humility and recognition that in this war nothing is easy. Choices have been made, and remain to be made, between the not very good and the very, very bad. Most importantly, so far, none of our mistakes has been unprecedented, fatal to our cause, or impossible to correct.

And in any endeavor, let us never forget, there are always going to be mistakes. It comes with the territory, as Dan Rather used to say.

It’s easy to play the game of outrage politics, and dish out blame on national TV. But in the real world people have to make decisions based on the information they have at the time. After they have made the decision the facts on the ground change, and it turns out that many of the decisions were wrong.

It may be, for instance, that the whole Islamo-fascist eruption is an ephemeral flash in the pan that will soon fade away. Or it may turn out to be a titanic clash of civilizations.

If you were the leader of the United States, the nation preeminent in the world for the idea and the vision of a global commonwealth of democratic capitalism, what should you do? Take Islamism seriously as a force to be stopped, or just ignore it?

New Hope for Malaria Sufferers

I know. It’s rather bad form to equate the tragedy of malaria with the tragedy of psoriasis. But there really is good news on the malaria front. Only there’s a minor problem.

First the good news. Scientists have found a way to synthethize artemisinic acid, a precursor to artemisinin, “the most effective therapy for the world’s second-most deadly infectious disease.” The problem is that the process uses genetically modified yeast or bacteria. And we all know how dangerous that can be.

It’s estimated that the new method will reduce the cost of a dose of the malaria drug by 90 percent from about $2 to about 25 cents.

The report in the London Times on this breakthrough by Mark Henderson indicates that the new method should be ready in about ten years. It was funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

We could also help in the meantime and save lives by allowing the use of DDT.

Employers Hiring Older Workers in Britain

In Britain, older workers are rushing into the work force. According to Allister Heath in the London Spectator, “pensioners accounted for 85 per cent of the employment growth in Britain during” the last six months. A full 60,000 of them went back to work.

Why are they going back to work? Who knows? For some it is a choice, and for others it is probably from necessity. Real-estate taxes have been going up pretty sharply in Britain due to escalating home prices.

But maybe the rise in older worker employment is not just the desire of older workers for jobs but a conscious strategy of employers to seek out “seasoned citizens” as employees.

One third of companies are giving school-leavers basic training in literacy and numeracy and nobody is fooled by the government’s propaganda about increasing standards any more.

In fact, employers are finding that older workers with just a basic high-school education—“O-levels” in Britspeak—are more literate and numerate than college graduates. One employer said that

Pensioners tend also to be more articulate, better presented, and have a better attitude to work than many of today’s school-leavers or university graduates; if he could, he would recruit only Polish immigrants or British pensioners.

At the home improvement store B&Q they opened a store in the town of Macclesfield staffed exclusively with people over 50. There were no problems with getting the oldsters to use computers.

The Macclesfield store did better than other B&Q stores in almost every way. Profits were higher by a fifth; staff turnover was six times lower; there was more than a third less short-term absenteeism; and, most remarkably of all, theft collapsed by more than half.

It all gives you a new perspective on an old excuse: “I’m living on a fixed income.”

Dem Vote 43.9% in CA 50 Special Election

How much trouble are Republicans in for this Fall? Maybe not as bad as some have feared. In the special election to fill disgraced Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham’s seat the Democrat came in with only 8 percent more votes than in the general election in 2004. That means that the election will go to a runoff in June. Writes political scientist Jay Cost:

The Democrats had everything going for them in this election. They had a corrupt felon-incumbent, they had low turnout, they had a well-financed challenger, and they had a divided Republican field. They had a district that has, in the last 10 years, skewed Republican less and less. And they only managed to get about 8% more of the vote when they needed 14% more. In 2004, Busby pulled in 36%. This time around she won 43.9%.

Cost gets specific:

There is no other way to understand this but as a loss for the Democrats.

That is because CA 50, as Cost has written before, is the “type of seat the Democrats need to capture to take the House” in November. It is Republican but has been trending slowly Democrat over the last few years. Therefore Cost predicts:

no win in CA 50, no Democratic takeover. I still hold that position.

Meanwhile Tom DeLay has decided not to run in Texas and Bush’s numbers appear to have hit the floor.

The question is: how will the immigration issue play in November?

The Iran Cloud Gets Bigger

A somber Mark Steyn writes about the Iran business, and wonders about what lies ahead as Iran acquires nuclear weapons and the west does nothing. In an article in City Journal he thinks about Facing Down Iran.

For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?


For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?

The problem really is, as it was in the 1930s, that the center ground of public opinion doesn’t want to do anything about the gathering storm. Back then people had had enough of war and they believed that we ought to live in a world without war. Today we have major sectors of educated public opinion in the west that believe that nobody wants war, nobody wants conflict, and if they do it is because they are oppressed victims of the west.

Given the reality of western public opinion and its aversion to conflict we shall not rise to oppose Iran until the mullahs have used nuclear weapons and there is no choice left but to go to war, just as Britain and France went to war against Hitler, finally, when the writing on the wall became the real, live invasion of Poland.

Again and again humans have confidently rung down the curtain on conflict and war. But conflict and killing have always been at the center of life. Living things live by eating other living things. In the west we have pushed the killing out of sight, and there are plenty of people who insist that we eat without killing, or at least without killing animals. (But isn’t killing a plant ultimately the same thing?)

The enthusiasts of Islamism insist that killing is OK if it is in the service of Islam. As Steyn writes, killing is OK even if it means the use of nuclear weapons:

Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

Let us take the Iranians at their word, that they intend to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. That means that the “unthinkable” is going to become reality.

Probably before the United States uses nuclear weapons we will see nuclear weapons used on a non-Iranian city. And then, unfortunately, nuclear warfare will not be unthinkable any more.

Romney's Health Care Solution

First Governor Romney put up his education proposals in the Wall Street Journal. Now he has done the same for health care.

Actually he has written an article describing the universal health care program recently enacted in Massachusetts.

It all started when Romney talked to Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, who told him to figure out how to do health insurance. When Mitt objected, Tom said: “You can find a way.”

So Mitt set to work, and found out why the uninsured were uninsured. First of all, he found that

Some 20% of the state's uninsured population qualified for Medicaid but had never signed up.

That was easy. He set up web pages so that people could sign up for Medicaid when they turned up at the ER.

Another 40% of the uninsured were earning enough to buy insurance but had chosen not to do so. Why? Because it is expensive, and because they know that if they become seriously ill, they will get free or subsidized treatment at the hospital. By law, emergency care cannot be withheld. Why pay for something you can get free?

So Mitt set out to change the law to allow high deductible insurance without all the mandatory benefits so insurers could lower their premiums.

Another group of uninsured citizens in Massachusetts consisted of working people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford health-care insurance.

For them Romney proposed a subsidy, to be paid out of the state’s $1 billion uninsured-care fund. But would $1 billion be enough?

Jonathan Gruber of MIT built an econometric model of the population, and with input from insurers, my in-house team crunched the numbers. Again, the result surprised us: We needed far less than the $1 billion for the subsidies.

Of course, no policy reform would be complete without valuable assistance from the conservative Heritage Foundation. The Heritage guys came up with “a 'connector,' allowing citizens to purchase health insurance with pretax dollars, even if their employer makes no contribution.”

Can Mitt Romney keep this up? First he puts out a six point program on education that we reviewed yesterday, then he explains his uninsured health care solution. What could be next? The White House?

How Will Immigration Issue Break?

On Monday April 10th, the streets of America were again filled with demonstrators demanding U.S. citizenship for illegal immigrants. The battle of immigration continues.

There are two questions here. How will the demonstrations affect the fate of immigration bills now in Congress, and what will be the political effect down the road?

Democrats are encouraged by the demonstrations. Writes Charles Hurt in the Washington Times,

Democrats on Capitol Hill favoring citizenship for illegal aliens say they have been buoyed by the massive rallies across the country... Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat and a leading backer of such legalization bills, invoked civil rights icon Martin Luther King when he spoke at yesterday's rally on the Mall.

But then Democrats love huge political demonstrations. It reminds them of their finest hour in the 1960s civil rights revolution. Indeed, a show of force in the streets always sways the political class. It instinctively yields to the most passionate political actors. We can expect a comprehensive immigration reform of some kind this year, one that addresses border security and also addresses legalization of residency status.

The other question is the overall political effect on the 50-50 nation. In the New York Post John Podhoretz takes the organizers of the demonstrations to task. If the Democrats think it will help them at the polls they are wrong. “They are riling up the GOP base, which has been pretty disheartened lately and needed a bit of riling.” But when it comes to the long term political impact Podhoretz reserves judgment.

The direction all this will take in years to come is unknowable. It may align Hispanics with the Democrats in the long term. On the other hand, it may drive more Democratic voters of modest means into the Republican camp, offsetting the Democratic gain.

Exit poll data show that Hispanics vote more Republican the more they prosper. Only blacks remain Democrat whatever their economic status. So what would happen if blacks decided that a pro-immigrant Democratic Party was an anti-African American party?

The truth is, we don’t know. The outcome of every battle is unknowable until it is over.

Romney's Six Point Education Plan

They say that Bill Clinton’s great success in the presidency was that he acted like a governor. After the failure of tax increases and Hillarycare in his first two years he focused on close-to-home issues like midnight basketball and 100,000 cops that are the sort of issue that you expect city mayors and state governors to deal in. Still, it probably helped him win the soccer-mom vote.

George W. Bush did the same thing, campaigning for No Child Left Behind, and passing a pale shadow of his plan once elected.

Now comes presidential hopeful Governor Mitt Romney with more governor stuff, a carefully placed article about education in the Washington Times.

If you are a Democrat, then education is simple. More funding for education—and your number one special interest, teachers.

But a Republican like Mitt Romney has to be more careful. He can’t say that teachers are rent-seeking scoundrels comparable in greed to the worst robber barons of the 19th century. He can’t say that partly because it’s not nice and partly because there are hundreds of thousands of nice teachers who believe what their union has told them, and really believe that they are underpaid and overworked. So a Republican has to weave and dodge. He will want to curb the rent-seeking; he will want to recommend school choice, but he will want to be nice about it. So here’s what Romney comes up with.

1) Make teaching a true profession.

Translation: break the union.

2) Let the leaders lead.

Translation: break the union.

3) Measure up.

Translation: unless we can test we don’t have a clue what they are doing with our money.

4) Let freedom ring.

Translation: Break the union.

5) Pull in the parents... For our lowest-performing schools, I've proposed mandatory parental preparation courses. Over two days, parents learn about America's education culture, homework, school discipline, available after-school programs, what TV is harmful or helpful and so on.

6) Raise the bar. Our kids need to be pushed harder. Less about self-esteem; more about learning.

Good luck with the union, Mitt old chum.

Mitt Romney is coming up with some unexceptional ideas here. But at least they take one small step along a long road back from the dreadful mess we have got ourselves into. It is the mess that Horace Mann got us into 160 years ago with the idea that government-driven education would be better than parent-driven education. What a grand idea it seemed back then. What a dreadful waste of $500 billion a year it has turned out to be.

And what an injustice it is to impose the system upon our nation’s children.