Eclipse 500 Gets Preliminary Certification

Even as the Mideast goes up in flames, Eclipse Aviation marked a big milestone as the FAA awarded them a preliminary certification on their Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet in a ceremony at Oshkosh, July 28, according to USAToday. For photos and videos of the Eclipse 500 go to their site. Said CEO Vern Rayburn:

"We have looked forward to this monumental accomplishment since Eclipse was founded nearly eight years ago."

The Eclipse 500 weighs in at 3,536 lbs. empty, and 5,920 lbs. maximum take off weight. Its two Pratt & Whitney Canada PW610F turbofans each deliver 900 lbs of takeoff thrust, and provide power to cruise at 375 knots at 41,000 feet.
Range is 1,125 nautical miles.

CEO Vern Rayburn is an ex-Microsoftie, and maybe it is just as well, since Rayburn needed an infusion of cash from Bill Gates when Eclipse’s initial engine contractor Williams International couldn’t deliver.

But Eclipse Aviation has 2,500 orders booked, and air taxi companies eager to offer the nation’s executives on-demand door-to-door service with fleets of the new VLJs.

Coming soon, of course, a HondaJet.

It could change the face of air transportation.

A Snapshot of Men without Work

For decades we have been taught, nay ordered to believe that the unemployed were helpless victims, denied meaningful work by a cruel and heartless economic system.

Economists disagreed. Ludwig von Mises famously wrote that all unemployment in a free economy is voluntary. When we are out of work we do not take the first job that comes along. We wait, because we expect something better to come up. When we absolutely must get a job, we do.

When Booker T. Washington was traveling across the South after the Civil War on his way to get an education at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute he arrived in Richmond, Virginia late one night hungry and penniless.

[Next morning,] as soon as it was light... I noticed that I was near a large ship, and that this ship seemed to be unloading a cargo of pig iron. I went at once to the vessel and asked the captain to permit me to help unload the vessel in order to get money for food... I worked long enough to earn money for my breakfast, and it seems to me, as I remember it now, to have been about the best breakfast that I have ever eaten.

Unloading pig iron is probably one of the dirtiest, demeaning jobs you can imagine.

Today in America, according to Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, there are about 4 million men in the United States who have withdrawn from the workforce because they don’t want to work at the wages offered by the system—and frankly, they don’t need to.

Many of them are just taking out mortgages on their houses, or living off their wives. Or they are going on disability.

[T]he fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.



No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990.

The rolls of the federal disability program are doubling every decade.

The trouble with the disability program, like all the government programs to assist the unemployed, is that it encourages people to stay out of the workforce. Unfortunately, job skills deteriorate rapidly. The longer you stay out of work, the less employable you are.

According to The New York Times the men that have dropped out of the work force are likely to be:

• Less educated
  
• Living alone
  
• Released from prison
  

The Times invites us to observe the life of the Beggerows. He was laid off from Northwestern Wire and Steel in 2001 and since then has only worked occasionally as a community college instructor. His wife, Cathleen, is getting $12,000 a year from disability after suffering severe injuries in an auto accident. The marriage is the third one for both of them. Beggerow has an adult child from a former marriage; Cathleen has no children. Beggerow has no real plans to look for work.

This is the world that progressives and The New York Times have conjured into being in a century of political thinking and practical politics. And as the workforce participation of men goes down, the participation of women goes up.

Is this really the society that we want, with men dropping out into idleness and dependency? Shouldn’t we do something about it?

Because, as they say, when men go bad, released from work and responsibility, they go bad fast.

Chemerinsky Joins Plame Game

Politics ain’t beanbag, they say. When you go into politics, you had better expect rough treatment.

So when Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times to discredit the Bush Administration over the assertion that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake in Chad, he can hardly have been surprised that the Bush Administration would try to discredit him.

But the media was shocked. The very idea! So we got a special prosecutor to determine whether there had been a violation of law in leaking the name of Joseph Wilson’s wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Years later, the special prosecutor has decided not to prosecute any member of the Bush Administration for leaking Plame’s name.

The result: Valerie Plame is suing Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby in a civil-rights and civil conspiracy complaint.

Well, it’s a free country. And it is perfectly OK to hire the leading left-wing law professor in the land, Erwin Chemerinsky, to be your co-counsel and have him write a scathing article in Slate.

The top government officials who revealed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a secret operative for the Central Intelligence Agency egregiously abused their power and inflicted great harms on Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson.

The Man Bites Dog of this episode is the realization that the CIA, the agency that used to symbolize everything that was evil about the USA, is now, apparently, a part of the great liberal conspiracy.

Years ago, politically connected Democrats like Wilson and Plame would have run a mile to avoid having their names connected with the CIA. But now it appears that well-educated, well-connected folk actually work for, or get contract assignments from the Central Intelligence Agency. And when they want a spot of top-tier legal advice they go to Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky.

It’s good to know that when an elite liberal needs a job she isn’t limited to the academy, local government, public law practice, social service administration, but now can also work for the intelligence community without ruining her bona fides.

The Bolton Kerfuffle Resumes

President Bush has nominated of John Bolton to be reappointed as UN Ambassador, and everyone is rehearsing their arguments of a year ago.

Bolton was appointed to the UN ambassadorship last August in the Congressional recess after Democrats filibustered his nomination. If he is not reappointed his recess appointment will expire at the end of the current session of Congress

Should Bolton be reappointed? As Colum Lynch makes clear, it all depends on what you think John Bolton should be doing at the UN. Democrats argue that Bolton is so combative that he is ineffective.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said, "Mr. Bolton's performance at the U.N. only confirms my conviction that he's the wrong person for this job."

And the UN diplomats agree.

"He sometimes makes it very difficult to build bridges because he is a very honest and blunt person," said South Africa's U.N. ambassador, Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo.

But Republicans like him, and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) has decided to support his nomination this time around.

Republicans feel that since most nations regard the UN as an institution for “constraining U.S. power,” that Bolton’s job is not to make the UN work, but to bring the work of the UN to a halt.

Democrats, who have more faith in the power of diplomacy, want someone to work with the other nations at the UN.

So, do we want to reform an institution that sees its job as constraining US power? Or do we want to keep it discredited and ineffective?

What the US would like out of the UN right now is to enforce Resolution 1559 demanding the disbanding of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Ain’t gonna happen, however nicey nicey the US UN Ambassador is to his fellow diplomats.

The only way that Hezbollah will get disarmed is if it is defeated in battle.

Because international relations are not about diplomacy but about power.

Children are Boring. Discuss

Half a century ago, in her Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir called woman “the victim of the species.” Actually, she included in her chapter on “The Data of Biology” the idea that all female mammals were thus disadvantaged. For instance:

The fish and the bird, which expel the egg from the body before the embryo develops, are less enslaved to their offspring than is the female mammal.

The name of the game, you see, is “autonomy.”

So when journalist Helen Kirwan-Taylor exclaims in print “Sorry, but my children bore me to death!” you can see where the idea came from when
“she argues provocatively that modern women must not be enslaved by their children.”

The thrust of Beauvoir’s life and work is that the data of biology should not get in the way of more important things, like autonomy, creative work, writing painting, sexuality, and all that sort of thing. In fact the central evil of the existentialism that she and J-P Sartre gave the world is “bad faith.”

That doesn’t mean lying, by the way. Writes Austin Cline:

According to Sartre, bad faith occurs when someone tries to rationalize our existence or actions through religion, science, or some other belief system which imposes meaning or coherence on human existence.

Translated, that means that it is wrong to use knowledge to explain the world, because almost all our knowledge of the world comes from other people.

The point of life is to be an autonomous creative, self-inventing individual, not a slavish follower of other peoples’ ideas. “In the absence of any fixed human nature or absolute, external standards, we must all become responsible for whatever choices we make.”

Obvious, the data of biology have a way of severely restricting this kind of freedom. In fact, we could say that the data of biology, which have exploded in the last half-century, tend to raise more and more questions about “the absence of any fixed human nature.” When it comes to nature vs. nurture, nature has been putting points on the board consistently for decades.

You can understand, again, why the feminists had to destroy Harvard President Larry Summers. If women are indeed different from men, and are indeed programmed by a fixed human nature to be child bearers and child nurturers, then the dream of perfect autonomy and equality and an end to underrepresentation in the professions and competitive occupations is a fantasy.

But Helen Kirwan-Taylor has a point. Children are boring, or rather, they are work, and they will suck everything out of you and then ask for more. It is much more fun to work with interesting intelligent adults in fashion journalism as she seems to do. Rich women since the dawn of time have opted to pay other people to look after their children.

It is just the bourgeoisie that has made a cult out of child-raising. The question is: Why? Why has the middle class made such a big thing out of childhood and parenting?

Washington State Supreme Court Upholds DOMA

With the 5-4 decision of the Washington State Supreme Court upholding the state’s Defense of Marriage Act, it looks like the gay marriage issue will move to an accommodation of gay partnerships and not the redefinition of marriage that the high court in Massachusetts mandated back in 2003.

The court’s majority decision (here and here) was split between three justices (Barbara A. Madsen, writing for Chief Justice Gerry L. Alexander and Charles W. Johnson) who said, hey, it is up to the legislature to redefine marriage and two more conservative justices (James M. Johnson and Richard B. Sanders) who argued a more forceful defense of heterosexual marriage, arguing that there is “a compelling governmental interest in preserving the institution of marriage.” On the other hand,

"I would hold that there is no rational basis for denying same-sex couples the right to marry," wrote Justice Mary E. Fairhurst, who was joined by Justices Tom Chambers, Susan Owens and Bobbe J. Bridge [in dissent].

Since six states, Connecticut, Georgia, Nebraska, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee, recently upheld traditional marriage, it appears that a consensus is developing to require gay activists to go through the legislature for relief rather than the courts. That’s probably a good idea because there are, in fact, a host of issues around marriage, including government benefits, safety, fertility, adoption, that really should not be decided under duress after an activist court decision.

Three of the Washington State justices are up for reelection in the fall. They are Justices Alexander (voting in the majority) and Justices Chambers and Owens (dissenting).

Is Religion vs. Science a Red Herring?

While we battle in the public square about whether religious belief can coexist with faith in scientific method, some scientists just go ahead and believe in God anyway.
In The New York Times Cornelia Dean looks at the books of three scientists who came to faith. For instance,

In “The Language of God,” Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government’s effort to decipher the human genome, describes his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he embraced as a young physician.

Of course, Dean also gives us the latest from the religion-and-science-don’t-mix crowd, including Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon).

Of course, just as the professors of faith cannot prove (except to themselves) that God exists, the advocates for atheism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that God does not exist. Instead, Drs. Dawkins and Dennett sound two major themes: a) the theory of evolution is correct, and creationism and its cousin, intelligent design, are wrong; and b) a field of research called evolutionary psychology can explain why religious belief seems to be universal among Homo sapiens.

And, as Dean writes, these authors advance their ideas with something like “religious fervor.”

Of course, ever since Kant, we have been in the position where we can’t prove the existence, or non-existence of God. In fact, we can’t even prove the existence of reality. Anyway, they are two different problems.

The problem of reality is the problem of the “is.” How can we know reality, and how reliable is our knowledge? Since Kant we have gradually come to grasp that all we can have is a view of reality that is good until updated.

The problem of God is the problem of the “ought.” What is our purpose; what should we do; what is the meaning of the universe?

To understand the problem of the “ought” we should go to the man who was both a Catholic priest and a top twentieth century physicist: Georges Lemaître. He was the guy who invented the Big Bang Theory of Creation. It is worth reading what John Farrell writes about him.

Back in the early 1930s, the Nobel Laureate Paul Michael Dirac had a chance to discuss the expanding universe with Lemaître. Dirac was an atheist, and yet later he recalled, "When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion."

Now this is a very disturbing idea, and it cuts across the grain of the usual science vs. religion controversy represented by the books discussed by Cornelia Dean.

What is Lemaître saying? I would argue that he is saying that religion and psychology are both about the human soul, what it means to be a human. Science and creation are really secondary issues. The big issue is: how should I live my life? That applies both at the immanent level of how to treat the other people in your life, and at the transcendent level of what’s it all about?

In other words, forget arguing about the “is.” Evolution vs. Intelligent Design is a blind alley. The big questions are about the “ought.” And whether God exists or not, each one of us acts and lives our life based upon some faith, conscious or unconscious, in the meaning and the purpose of life.

Very often we act against our understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. But that is another story.

Humiliation After Humiliation

Are we in a war with the Islamists? Andrew C. McCarthy is worried that we don’t really take the Islamists seriously. But they are very serious about us. There is no doubt about what Sheikh Nasrullah, leader of Hezbollah, thinks. It’s war, war to the death.

“We consider [the United States] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples. Because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources.... This American administration is our enemy. Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’”

No doubt there are thousands of Levantine antiquities in American museums that ought, in the fullness of time, to be returned to their lands of origin. But plundering oil and resources. Please! When paying $75 per barrel?

The real beef, of course, is the humiliation, the way it all went wrong and Islam became not the glorious expanding fist of God but a collapsed cultural backwater sustained only by the heroin of oil revenues.

The refusal of the United States to take the Islamists seriously, and to brand them as an enemy—the complaint of McCarthy—is not necessarily negligence: it is yet another humiliation for the Arabs of the Middle East.

As the Israelis uncover the surprising extent of the military infrastructure in southern Lebanon we can understand the meaning of all those reports from Iran about workers not getting paid for months at a time. Now we know where the payroll money went. It was sent to Lebanon to build up Hezbollah. And now a lot of it is being blown to blazes. Another humiliation.

If we review all the brave revolutions of the last century that promised death to America and death to capitalism we can observe a common problem. After all the fighting words there came the problem of delivering. And in every case the revolutionaries never had the power to carry out their boasts. The Bolsheviks wasted the fruitful land of Russia. The Nazis didn’t have the economic and military power to conquer Russia. Mao nearly starved China to death trying to become a world power by selling the seed corn of China’s peasants.

You have to wonder. How close is Iran to economic ruin? All these foreign adventures don’t come cheap.

It is relatively easy to find soft spots in the world and entice teenage thugs into the streets. But you have to create a power base if you really want to strut in the world.

The record of the last century is that if you want to lead a powerful nation then you need to create a powerful, capitalist economy, featuring a free people. It is a lesson that the Chinese seem to have learned in the last generation.

It seems to be the one thing that the Islamists cannot bring themselves to do. It is the final humiliation that the Islamists cannot even begin to face.

GDP Up 20 pct. You Gotta Problem With That?

How much economic growth is enough? Writes Pete du Pont,

In the past 33 months the size of America's entire economy has increased by 20%--or, as National Review Online's Larry Kudlow put it, "In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy."

You gotta problem with that? A lot of Americans seem to, since a majority of Americans give President Bush low marks for his stewardship of the economy.

Don’t worry. The federal government has shared in the bounty. Revenues are soaring. In fact the revenue increases are obscene.

Federal tax receipts increased by 15%-- $274 billion--last year and 13%-- $206 billion--in the first nine months of this fiscal year, which, as the Journal points out, means the nine-month increases for the past two years represent the highest growth rates in 25 years. Looking ahead to the end of this fiscal year, total inflation-adjusted government receipts will likely be 23% above 2003 when the Bush tax cuts were signed into law.

You would think that the Democrats would at least be pleased about that.

Yes, those Bush tax cuts are really helping the economy surge ahead, and they are even cutting taxes in the states, although not in the Soviet of Washington, of course.

But there is one group of Americans who have not been converted to the virtues of tax cuts. And we mean, as we always do here at the Road to the Middle Class, tax rate cuts. Who is that mean-spirited, negative, reactionary group? Who else, but Congressional Democrats.

Today the Democratic Party is so vehemently opposed to income tax cuts that when President Bush's reached their final vote in May 2003, only 4% of Democratic legislators (2 of 48 senators and 7 of 205 representatives) voted "yes."

Naturally, the New York Times is not to be outdone by their pals on Capitol Hill when it comes to railing against tax rate cuts.

[V]arious New York Times editorials called them "economically unsound," claimed that "they will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars" and said they were unlikely "to stimulate the wallowing economy."

No doubt the Times editorialist was confusing the national economy with the Old Media economy. As of this writing, there doesn’t seem to be anything that can stimulate that economy.

Let’s finish up with some more numbers. Because the wallowing MSMers certainly won’t talk them up, we will.

Reducing the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 15% increased capital gains tax receipts by 79% from 2000 to 2004. Cutting the dividend tax rate by more than half--from 39.6% to 15%--increased dividend tax receipts by 35% from 2002 to 2004. And corporate tax receipts have nearly tripled since 2003, reaching $250 billion for the past nine months, 26% higher than the same period last year.

With all that money flooding into the federal coffers I’d say that it is time to repeal the Death Tax.

As composer Giuseppe Verdi said to his librettist, Piave: “Cut, cut, and cut again!”

Can the Left Abandon Appeasement?

Back in 2004 the German writer Henryk Broder wrote to Welt am Sonntag to say that “Europa - dein Familienname ist Appeasement!” Interesting how he used the English word. The German for appeasement, according to Google, is “Beschwichtigung.” Yes. It means what you think it does. “Europe, thy family name is appeasement.”

Subsequently, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, publisher of Die Welt, wrote a stinging amplification: “Europe - Thy Name is Cowardice.”

But let us be charitable to our liberal and lefty friends. Their whole belief system is predicated on the moral necessity of appeasement towards the oppressed and the marginalized, beginning with the working class in 1850. What else would they do?

It was a belief system that worked well for them for over a century. And it also gave them enormous political power.

But the question now before us is: Should we continue the policy of appeasement when it is the Muslim immigrants to Europe and the mad mullahs of Iran that are demanding it?

The saving grace of the old appeasement was that the workers, and after them the blacks, women, and gays, were in the last analysis loyal citizens of their nation states. But the Muslims immigrants may not be. Their first loyalty may be to their faith not to their adopted country.

If that is the case the wages of appeasement is not going to be merely a large public sector and economic stagnation, but something rather bloody.

But can the left change its belief system and its whole way of life in response to the new challenge?

In Israel, according to Dennis Prager, the left that was critical of Israeli policy in the occupied areas of Gaza and the West Bank has all of a sudden changed its tune. Writes Amos Oz, Israeli author and leftist:

"Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. . . . This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages. . . . There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah."

But has the mainstream left in Europe or in the United States reached the tipping point where they can no longer continue down the road of appeasement? Don’t hold your breath.

Is The West Too Soft To Be Ruthless?

Conservatives are taking a look today at the meaning of “proportionality.” Asks John Podhoretz:

What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?

Or you could wonder, with the more pungent Mark Steyn, what to do in your state when

the bumper stickers proclaim confidently, War Is Not the Answer.

It’s true, Steyn writes, war is not the answer. War is the question: “[I]s what you are worth defending?”

“You may not be interested in war,” said Trotsky, “but war is interested in you.”

The logic of appeasement is that it is the logical course of action for a people that does not yet realize how interested war is in them. Only when they catch up with reality do they switch from appeasement to resistance.

Podhoretz asks the question:

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The answer is that in the 1930s they did not have it in them to firebomb innocent civilians. It took the crucible of war and the London Blitz to rile them up enough to find ruthless warriors like “Bomber” Harris and Curtis LeMay that had it in them to carpet bomb German and Japanese cities.

After the war, of course, those with delicate sensibilities could start second guessing, and build distinguished academic careers building the nuanced case that the strategic bombers, the ruthless men of action, were monsters.

The point is that in today’s war we are not “there” yet. We are not to the point where we are willing to go ruthless in the War on Terror.

For the Israelis, of course, that point has already been reached. If they do not take out Hezbollah then they are saying that it is OK to rain missiles on the Israeli heartland. For them the years of proportionate response are over.

Who Can Cross the Partisan Divide?

As Connecticut Democrats get ready to sink their liberal Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, Debra J. Saunders wonders if he isn’t the Democrats’ version of John McCain. In talking to some Democrats she told them:

I appreciate McCain's efforts to curb Washington's runaway spending.. What is more, I think McCain in the White House could go a long way in healing the country's ugly partisan divide.



Then again, I added, Democrats have their own maverick — Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

But is John McCain really the Republicans’ Joe Lieberman? Joe Lieberman is a good loyal Democrat, except that he is not willing to join the fever swamp in abandoning the War on Terror. John McCain ran against the Republican base in 2000, has authored the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold limitation on political activity, and has seemed until recently to be always looking for ways to stick it to President Bush and garner some cheers from the mainstream media.

There is something missing in John McCain. I call it class.

But there is a potential Republican presidential candidate who does have class and who does have a record of healing the partisan divide. That man is Rudi Giuliani, the Republican who was elected twice as mayor of Democratic New York City.

And according to Ryan Sager Rudi, the gay-friendly, pro-choice Republican, does just as well among the conservative Republican base as McCain. Actually, the idea that Giuliani could not win conservative votes has come principally from the mainstream media, who for months have been writing on

a willful adherence to a false storyline that social conservatives could never accept a Giuliani candidacy.

How would they know? I mean, who would be the last group in the country to have a clue about who social conservatives would vote for? Exactly, liberal MSM journalists.

Here’s my prediction. John McCain will burn up like straw. There are too many Republicans that just don’t like him.

John McCain is no Joe Lieberman. John McCain is John McCain. And he just doesn’t have what it takes to be nominated as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party.

Who Stands for the Jews?

Everybody loved the Jews when they were helpless victims slaughtered in the Holocaust. And everyone loved them as plucky underdogs against the Arabs in 1948 and 1956 and 1973. But the left has no room in its heart for people who aren’t progressive or who aren’t victims. And so the left of Europe has slowly moved towards an open support of the Palestinians. They must be right because they are victims.

That’s how you get to demanding “proportionate” response to Hezbollah border attacks and rocket attacks. But as Suzanne Fields points out:

Restraint is what you show in disputes with rational people who are willing to compromise, who will give up something in return for something. But restraint can buy time for your uncompromising enemies to enable them to plot the ambush to kill you later.

Hezbollah and its master in Tehran do not believe in compromise. They believe in the elimination of Israel.

Throughout history, the biggest problem the Jews have had is trying to figure out who their friends were—at least for the moment.

The question in the United States is: how much longer can American Jews afford to vote for a party whose leading presidential candidate once embraced the wife of a terrorist. And how much longer can American Jews keep voting for a party that is about to kick out a Jewish United States Senator because he is insufficiently opposed to the War on Terror.

The clock is ticking and the hour is getting late.

Because the question is: How soon with the left turn from its veiled opposition to Israel to frank and open anti-Semitism?

Public Opinion on Lebanon

After the shock of the new Mideast War we are beginning to see public opinion forming in the pronouncements of the opinion makers. In Europe, of course, the watchword is “disproportionate” as in Israel’s response to border violations and rocket attacks on its citizens.

But in the US there is a different dynamic developing. There is the “arc of Shia radicalism” argument, suggested by Walid Phares, in which the Iranians are building an arc of Shia radicalism from Tehran to Beirut with Hezbollah holding down the right flank.

Then there is Michael Barone observing that the rules have changed in this Mideast War because there is now, after the withdrawal from South Lebanon and Gaza, no excuse for the “land for peace” argument. Israel’s two enemies want to destroy it. Period.

A lot of people are panicking about the strength of Iran and Hezbollah. But Peter Brookes wonders if it is Syria that is panicking. “Syria,” he writes, ”will not be invited to attend this Wednesday's Rome conference on Lebanon.”

Damascus is, in actuality, desperate. It is becomes increasingly marginalized in this Middle East crisis by both the United States and other Arab nations, and may have little to no say in resolving the current Lebanese conflict. This would be a serious blow to Damascus' interests-and more painfully, its ego.

Imagine that. Condi going to the Middle East with cards to play against Syria and Iran.

Suppose that Israel succeeded in defanging Hezbollah, and suppose Syria actually offered substantial concessions to get into the game.

Well, you never know. Justs because CNN and Al-Jazeera are showing mayhem and disaster 24/7 doesn’t mean that, behind the scenes, there really is mayhem and disaster. It just means that they are filling the TV screen with ruined buildings and frightened, wounded children. Because that is what they do.

Anyone for "Mongolian Ping Pong?"

I have seldom been so delighted by a movie as “Mongolian Ping Pong.” It’s a delightful story of a Mongolian boy whose father sends him down from the yurt to dip a bucket of water in the river. And what does he spy in the river, but a round white thing floating along. What is it? Grandma thinks that it is the treasure of the water spirits.

This Mongol seven-year-old, descendant of the Great Khan no doubt, is already a fine horseman, and he and his two friends get into a lot of adventure and trouble with their parents as the movie unfolds—as any decent kids with a spark of spirit should do.

There are spectacular shots of the steppe and its endless grasslands, and they are long shots with people riding into them or walking off as the mood takes them.

The grassy steppe, remember, goes right across Asia from Hungary to the Pacific Ocean. That’s why Genghis Khan and his merry men were able to conquer the whole of Asia. So long as they kept to the steppe their horses had grass to eat, and as long as the horses were fed they could keep invading. That is a big deal for an army because horses eat about ten pounds of grass a day while a soldier needs only one pound of food each day.

But what is most poignant about the movie is that these Mongol kids seem to have the whole steppe to ride around in and get up to mischief. What American kid has such freedom?

Of course, all good things must come to an end. At seven the kid has to go off to boarding school in the city.

Two Views of Hezbollah

Which is it? Is Hezbollah a homegrown political movement that has organized the downtrodden Shia of Lebanon into a political force, as Bronwen Maddox and others propose? Or is it a overweening satrapy of Iran and Syria, a force of disorder in a weak and suffering land of Lebanon, as Fouad Ajami writes?

What is clear is the Hezbollah has had a ton of money from Iran. You don’t build all that military infrastructure on the benevolence of strangers. And now Hezbollah is in a full-out war with Israel.

Write Maddox et al,

Has Sheikh Nasrallah miscalculated? Many assume that in seizing Israeli soldiers he hoped to win the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel, as Hezbollah had done before.

...

But Israel may have also have made a misjudgment. It does not want to withdraw without success, but more fighting will kill more civilians, radicalise more Lebanese and test Israelis’ nerves and the patience of its allies.

In the opinion of Ajami,

A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin.

Right now the Europeans are singing the song of Israeli “disproportion.” After another week President Bush may find it hard to allow Israel to clean up its northern border and give its people the right to live free of rockets from Lebanon courtesy of Sheikh Nasrullah and Hezbollah.

The 100 mpg Car That Isn't

Our liberal media friends are getting all excited about the birth of the 100 miles per gallon car. There are even people driving around with stickers advertising their triple digit gas sippers. Here’s a characteristic gushy article on the topic from MSNBC.

But wait a minute. These gas sipping miracles aren’t really getting 100 mpg. If their owners were corporate advertisers they would be getting sued for false advertising.

This phoney-baloney way to get to 100 mpg relies on buying an expensive conversion kit, including more of those expensive metal-hydride batteries, and plugging your car into the electric outlet. You don’t really get 100 mpg from the total energy input into the car. You get 100 mpg on the gasoline you buy, augmented by “free” power from your home electric outlet. Only you get to see the cost of the free power on your electric bill.

You could say that you are saving because you are charging the car using off-peak power during the night. But if you are a liberal environmentalist you do not believe in market prices, you just look at the difference in overall energy use.

Let us look at that. The key is to think about losses.

If you are charging your hybrid at home then you start with coal. There are losses at the generating plant, say 30 percent. Then there are losses in electrical transmission, say 15 percent. Then there are losses in charging your battery, say 20 percent. Of course, you are saving because you are not paying road fuel taxes.

If you are running a hybrid then you are saving from the smaller gasoline engine (if you have a Prius; Camry and Highlander hybrid owners forget it) and from the energy saved by recapturing energy in regenerative braking, about 50 percent. But you have the energy losses in charging the battery, which are substantial.

And of course if you have converted your hybrid into a plug-in hybrid it has cost you something north of $10,000. Try amortizing that over the life of the car.

OK. Now let us do the math, with our handy-dandy energy price calculator.

(Calculator omitted)

If you put “3.00” into the gasoline price field you will see that it is equivalent in energy to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. How many of you folks out there are paying more than 8 cents per kilowatt hour to your electric utility?

Just checking. Because you see, if the price of gasoline goes back down to, oh, $2.00 per gallon, then the 100 mpg car isn’t going to look too good, is it?

The Black Divide

This week President Bush finally spoke at the NAACP convention and received, according to reports, a polite reception. The delegates especially liked it when he announced his support for extension of the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Did the president go out of politeness or out of political calculation? According to Harry Jackson there is an emerging split in black America, one that puts African Americans in play politically for the first time in forty years.

The split was made public on June 27 before the national media. As a result, writes Jackson, the pastor of New Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Maryland, the occasion

marked a watershed moment for the black religious community in America. The Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Joseph Lowery and about 100 others decided to attack the motives and moral integrity of the nation's most successful black mega-churches.

They made the usual criticism from the left that the mega-churches have abandoned “Jesus' emphasis on social justice to preach a gospel of wealth and self-help.”

No doubt “poverty reduction, education reform, improved health care, judicial fairness and prison after care” are important, Harry Jackson says, but there are plenty of blacks who are also concerned about “black genocide” in abortion and “family disintegration.” And they need a voice for their concerns.

Harry Jackson is concerned about black unity, but he is backing the wrong horse. It is not disastrous but good that blacks are splitting and beginning to emerge from the safety of racial unity.

It’s happened before in America, and it will happen again. When an immigrant group starts to get its feet on the ground it moves away from ethnic solidarity towards the great American way of purpose and self-help. And the great vehicle of this social transformation has been, for two hundred years, the enthusiastic Christian church.

People cannot live on bread alone. As Harry Jackson quoted Senator Barack Obama: People “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.”

Welcome to America.

How About Some Liberal Villains on TV

The Business and Media Institute has done a study on the treatment of businesspeople on TV and they don’t like what they see. In Bad Company they report that if you watch TV shows you would see that:

• TV Is Overwhelmingly Negative toward Business
  
• Businessmen Are Villains, Not Heroes
  
• Businessmen Are a Greater Threat to Society than Terrorists or Gangs
  
• Businessmen Are Almost as Likely to Commit a Serious Felony as Career Criminals
  

and so on. On “Law & Order” 50 percent of the crooks are businessmen. On “Desperate Housewives” the office is represented as little more than a dating service.

Tough, writes columnist Clarence Page.

How many people would have watched "Dallas" if J.R. Ewing were an "average businessman"? A nice, ethical, self-sacrificing father who volunteers in his spare time to work with the Boy Scouts is hardly the stuff of gripping crime dramas.

And anyway there are plenty of bad apples in the business world like “Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff or Jeffrey Skilling.” So get used to it.

Look. If TV wants to do lots of stories about corrupt murdering businessmen it’s OK by me. But the point is that the world is swimming with skunks and scoundrels that never get a mention. How about:

• Liberal professors full of hate and rage towards George W. Bush who fake their resumes and plagiarize other peoples’ scholarly work.
  
• Race baiters who shake down big businesses for cash and contributions
  
• Bus drivers who fail to show up for work and don’t get fired for six months.
  
• Government employees who don’t do any work, run businesses on the side, and get paid 50 percent more than folk doing the same work in the private sector.
  
• Liberal environmental activists who lie about the environment.
  
• Journalists who profess their objectivity while spouting Democratic Party talking points.
  

I don’t know about you, but if TV put out some shows about folks like that, I might even tune in now and again.

It happens that all the candidates for TV villainy above are real. Liberal professors really are full of hate. Government employees really do earn 50 percent more than equivalent workers in the private sector. But what of that? What if they weren’t? If it makes a good story, who cares, as long as the profits roll in?

And, best of all, TV could get out of its rating slump with innovative, edgy story lines.

Why is it that liberals are grossly underrepresented in TV villainy?

No Wal-Mart Law for Maryland

Good news. On July 19, a federal district court judge threw out Maryland’s Wal-Mart health care bill. Reports Jan Haberkorn:

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz ruled that the law violates the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a federal law that sets minimum standards for pensions and health plans.

So that’s all right. Wal-Mart won’t have to pay a tax if its health benefits don’t reach a minimum 8 percent of payroll. You can imagine that Wal-Mart’s PR guys were delighted. “BREAKING NEWS,” they crowed.

But we sober souls need to think long and hard about health insurance and employee benefits and their interaction with government benefits.

The purpose of government benefits is to help people in need. That is a noble idea. The trouble is that when you give people “economic outpatient care” they respond by working less and consuming more.

Over the last century the government has constructed a huge structure of benefits and the result is a lot of people on the lam, doing a minimal amount of work and cunningly using the system to extract the maximum of free services.

It is said that if you finish high school, don’t have child out of wedlock, don’t get divorced then your chance of being poor is pretty small.

But the whole apparatus of government benefits is set to assure that if you do drop out of high school, do have children as a teenager, do get divorced, then things won’t be too hard for you.

When you have a vast apparatus of means-tested government services supplemented by a raft of employer-paid first-dollar employee benefits then you have destroyed the market in basic human needs. You no longer know how much health care people would buy if they had to pay for it, and how they would balance their consumption of health care against other human needs.

For instance, Americans are buying gigantic houses and SUVs these days. Would they be buying smaller houses if they paid a bigger share of their health care costs out-of-pocket?

We know that whenever the government meddles with a market in products or services that sooner or later the supply of products and services gets out of whack.

Wal-Mart is a company that knows that it must mark itself to market every day. It must mark itself to market when it buys products for its customers, and it must mark itself to market when it hires new employees.

Most of all, Wal-Mart has been very careful not to make rash promises to its employees. It has held off giving them first-dollar health insurance or defined benefit pension programs. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. Make an open ended promise like that and you will likely end up destroying the company and the jobs it provides.

Does Wal-Mart take advantage of its employees? I hope so. That’s the idea of the market economy. You buy low and sell high. Still, when Wal-Mart opens a store it generally gets thousands of people applying for the hundreds of jobs. That has to mean something. It has to mean that some people really value a Wal-Mart job.

But the message hasn’t got to the politicians yet.

Making War Against a Tribal Culture

In the season of Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn we appreciate that primitive man was not a noble savage but a savage killer. Now the excellent Mark Steyn has read Wade and written

that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people."

That sort of information is useful when you are thinking about the tribal mores of the Islamist terrorists. Robert D. Kaplan has read Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias by Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew and the Islamist way of war seems very like the way described by Wade.

While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on sophisticated defense systems, the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war.

And that gets back to Lee Harris and his western team vs. the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

The symmetry of “asymmetric war” is that the ruthlessness of the terrorists fits the reluctance of the west to target civilians. And so the terrorists hide behind civilians and assassinate civilians and terrorize civilians.

Eventually, of course, the west will tire of its forebearance. It is the nature of war that what seems unthinkable at the beginning is committed without a qualm by the end. The British were outraged by German bombing in 1940 but leveled Hamburg with firebombing in 1944.

No doubt that is how the War on Terror will end up. The terrorists use terror because it is their only weapon. But it is terrible only so long as it is discrete enough to make the cable TV news. In a general war, terror loses its power to terrorize.

SecEd Launches Vouchers, Bureaucrats Run Interference

What a coicidence! Just before Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announces a new federal pilot school voucher program the folks deep in the bureaucracy at the Institute of Education Sciences release a study that shows that “public school students did as well as or better than those in private school” in many areas.

That meant that the New York Times report by Diana Jean Schemo on Spellings’ announcement of a $100 million school voucher program could feature this paragraph:

The new legislation was introduced after an Education Department report released Friday, which showed that students attending public schools generally did as well as or better than comparable students in private schools.

And of course the reporter made sure to get an inflammatory quote from liberal activist Ralph Neas:

“The goal of this movement isn’t to help students. It’s to achieve vouchers at any cost.”

Still, the Times did have the decency to insert this quote from Secretary Spellings into their report:

Whatever the report’s findings, Ms. Spellings said, parents with children in public schools that repeatedly fail deserve more options.

Actually, you could put it stronger than that, to balance the flamethrower rhetoric of Ralph Neas.

It is wrong and unjust to condemn little children to lousy inner-city schools and stand in the schoolhouse door protecting the monopoly privileges of the system while generation after generation of children go to rot. And when activists like Ralph Neas trample on the right of parents to get their kids a decent education they ought to be ashamed.

How is that for a start?

Government Fails to Educate NJ Kids

Widower Van-Ness Crawford and a number of other parents have sued the State of New Jersey to demand the right to take their children out of failing schools and send them to the school of their choice.

Filed as Crawford v. Davy the suit aims to be a landmark case that establishes the right of parents to educate their children.

Obviously widower Crawford and his triplet 16-year-old sons that attend the failing Malcolm X. Shabazz High School in Newark have been selected by school choice activists as poster boys for school choice. But the point remains: why can New Jersey schools not educate children when they are spending $10,000 to $20,000 per year per student? What gives them the right to spend the money on Crawford’s sons rather than Crawford? If they are going to piss the money away on his kids why not give the money to him and let him piss the money away?

According to Kristen A. Graham, the activist groups backing the suit are “Alliance for School Choice, a Phoenix-based group; the Black Minister's Council of New Jersey; the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey; and Excellent Education for Everyone, a New Jersey group that supports school choice and vouchers.” The co-plaintiffs joining Crawford have been selected from around the state, as you might expect.

Leaving aside the church vs. state aspect of education, there is the basic nature of government. Government responds to problems and throws money at them. But government has no interest in solving problems. If ever a problem would be solved then the funding would go away. What would be the point of that?

Thus when school fail our kids the school lobby demands more money. Why don’t we say that if you fail to educate our kids then we are going to take the money away and give it to someone else?

"We Don't Want to Fight"

It’s not just me. It’s all the conservatives who are deploring the “cycle of violence” brigade. Here is Thomas Sowell writing that “Those who keep calling for an end to the "cycle of violence" are what make such violence more likely.”

Then there is Charles Krauthammer.

Amid the general wringing of hands over the seemingly endless and escalating Israel-Hezbollah fighting, everyone asks: Where will it end?

Or take Robert Tracinski. “What Part of War Don’t We Understand?” Because we are good guys we have to prove our goodness. “a Los Angeles Times op-ed demanded that Israel "has to be the most responsible party" by declaring an immediate ceasefire.”

Like I wrote earlier this week in It’s a War, Stupid. Syria and Iran base their foreign policy on the sponsorship of terrorism. Indeed without terrorism they would be nothing.

It’s time we disabused them of the idea that terrorism is a good idea for them.

NYT Clearing Throat Over Mideast "Conflict" And More

You know that when the cat gets its voice back at the New York Times that President Bush is going to be reprimanded for his intemperance in calling for the United Nations to get its, er, stuff together to stop Hamas and Hizbollah.

As all thoughtful people know, the crisis in the Middle East is much more nuanced than that. Until the Times can finish clearing its throat, at least they have Paul Krugman growling about “the same cast of characters” behind the Times Select wall.

But at OpinionJournal.com James Taranto had some interesting tidbits about the Mideast War. Key Arab governments (well Sunni ones) are blaming Hizbollah for the war, and worrying that it will put the whole region back by years.

But whatever they are saying at the Arab League summit or not saying at the New York Times, the words of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demand respect:

"Citizens of Israel, there are moments in the life of a nation, when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality and say: no more," he said.


"And I say to everyone: no more. Israel will not be held hostage - not by terror gangs or by a terrorist authority or by any sovereign state,"

You can’t say fairer than that.

Two Different Worlds

If you watch CNN you are no doubt worried about the “escalation of violence” in the Middle East, and the divided American families who are waiting for the US to evacuate their loved ones from Lebanon.

If you are reading the conservative online media you are experiencing something quite different.

In Frontpagemag.com David Horowitz tells of Hizbollah missiles that clearly come from China via Iran and need sophisticated trained crews to operate. From Strategic Forecasting he quotes:

We are now in the period preceding major conventional operations. Israel is
in the process of sealing the Lebanese coast. They have disrupted Lebanese
telecommunications, although they have not completely collapsed the
structure. Israeli aircraft are attacking Hezbollah's infrastructure and
road system. In the meantime, Hezbollah, aware it is going to be hit hard,
is in a use-it or-lose-it scenario, firing what projectiles it can into
Israel.

CNN reports the G-8 summit as a confused waffle. But in the New York Sun Eli Lake reports a diplomatic success for President Bush at the G-8 summit.

The final G-8 summit resolution marks a diplomatic victory for the president... [T]he resolution that emerged yesterday confirmed the president's view of the conflict, that Israel was fully justified in protecting itself against terrorist actions by Hezbollah and that instead of condemning Prime Minister Olmert, the root causes of the violence should be addressed, namely the continuing terrorist actions of Hezbollah.

In the Jerusalem Post Edward N. Luttwak represents the Hizbollah/Hamas attacks on Israel as an attempt by Iran to unify the Arabs against a common foe and reject the western attempts to get it to stop its nuclearization. But Iran’s strategy has forced Hizbollah away from integration into Lebanese politics.

Hizbullah has thrown away its political position in Lebanon because it is obvious to all that it is bringing destruction upon the country.

In this view the question is how much damage Israel gets to create before Hizbollah and Hamas have to cry uncle.

In war it is very difficult for ordinary people watching the media to understand what is going on.

One thing it is not is a mindless “cycle of violence,” or “Crisis in the Middle East.” It is a war, stupid. It is a war to preserve the state of Israel.

The Flaws of the Famous, Then As Now

Hum. We think we are so modern and special, uniquely privileged and uniquely corrupt.

But back in the nineteenth century, preacher Henry Ward Beecher was both uniquely privileged as a great preacher and uniquely corrupted as a great adulterer. He was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and he is the subject of Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America.

Beecher’s fame could be put to good use. When the feminist Victoria Woodhull was criticized for her ideas,

Woodhull, a radical feminist and an advocate of free love, answered critics by proclaiming that her ideas on sexual freedom simply mirrored the advanced practices of Henry Ward Beecher, who, she said, preached every Sunday morning to a dozen of his mistresses.

Beecher was in at the creation of the Republican Party and a strong anti-slavery advocate. His father was Rev. Lyman Beecher, a leading light in the Second Great Awakening in the early years of the nineteenth century.

But what sort of a man was Beecher? That, according to George Marsden, we really do not get to find out in Applegate’s biography.

We do not get any sense of his interior life, his spirituality or his religious anxieties. What we have instead--as Ms. Applegate's title implies--is the engaging story of a celebrity.

It seems that Beecher’s humanity got submerged in his fame, much like another flawed moral leader, Martin Luther King, in the twentieth century.

How Important is a College Education?

Everybody knows that to compete in the job market these days you need a college education. Better still, get a master’s degree.

Then how come, asks Australian Mercurius Goldstein, that the most successful people in Australia come up short in the academic credentials department?

[T]hese Australians are "one in the eye" for the great middle-class myth that a university education is an essential ingredient for a fulfilling life.



Such people are living reminders that success often depends far more on hard work, inspired intuition, social skills and not a small measure of rat cunning. Whereas many anxious middle-class parents prefer to believe, and to inculcate in their children, the corrosive belief that once you have a degree, you've "got it made". Of course, none of this helps when all their middle-class mates grow up to possess identical qualifications. The reality is that when everybody has a degree, nobody has a degree; and any competitive advantage in the job market is lost.

So why do parents fork out so much money for college?

It is a bid by parents for more power, money or prestige.. It is to protect privilege and ensure that young Cassandra and Joel both get a bigger slice of the pie than their parents did.

The question is: Does it really help? The message of
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko is that parents have to be really careful doling out “economic outpatient care” to their children. They should only spend money on things that make their children more independent and motivated. Giving them cash just makes them used to supplementing their life styles with remittances.

But Stanley and Danko also suggest that it is a lot easier to live a comfortable life in a professional career than as an entrepreneur and risk taker.

Of course, maybe boys have already figured all this out. Maybe it’s why more girls go to college than boys. The boys do the math, and figure: what’s the point?

So that’s why the feminists want girls to excel and math and science.

Experts Rank Global Warming as Minor Problem

Everyone is concerned about global warming, even Republicans, writes Ryan Sager. But when it comes to prioritizing it as a major problem, “ Republicans ranked global warming 19th out of the 19 issues; Democrats ranked it 13th out of 19.”

In this, you might be surprised, the American people agree with the experts. Danish economist Bjorn Lomberg got 50 politicians to review monographs prepared by economists on major world problems. Then he asked them to rate the problems in order of importance. Wait a minute, they said. These are all No.1!

That’s the point, Lomberg told them. This exercise is intended to force you to choose. The result? Global warming rated way down the list.

Lomberg’s initiative is called the Copenhagen Consensus. The prioritized list is here.

Here are the highlights of the prioritized list of global initiatives rated in order of importance by the participants in the Copenhagen Consensus:

Challenge Opportunity 1 Communicable Diseases Scaled-up basic health services 2 Sanitation and Water Community-managed water supply and sanitation 3 Education Physical Expansion   ... ... 27 Climate Change Kyoto Protocol

What about global warming? You can see for yourself: Climate change: Kyoto, down at 27 out of 40.

So it seems that the experts and the people agree about global warming. Where does that leave Al Gore and his “Inconvenient Truth?”

When the Missiles Start to THAAD

The short road from the current border clashes between Israel and its Hamas and Hizbollah enemies leads to Damascus, according to Yossi Klein Halevi. The long road leads to Iran, the Iran that is working to get nuclear weapons and the missiles to project them.

That is why it is important that today down at the White Sands Missile Range they conducted a successful test of the THAAD missile, as reported by Jason Gibbs.

THAAD is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile. It’s the missile you would want if you were living in Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem and the Iranians had operational nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

Actually, the military folks weren’t just pleased with the successful test. They seemed euphoric.

"This was phenomenal," said U.S. Army Col. Charles Driessnack, the project manager for the Missile Defense Agency's THAAD program. "It performed as expected."

They have spent about $4 billion on THAAD thus far, and are $48 million over budget. They could get the missile ready for “emergency deployment” about a year from now.

It sounds like the eevil Republicans, despite twenty years of non-stop opposition from you-know-who, are finally getting missile defense deployed and, all things considered, not a moment too soon.

Feminists Against Choice

In Michigan the state legislature recently passed a bill to permit single-sex programs in the public schools. “No child would be required to attend a single-sex classroom,” writes Carrie Lukas, but parents would be allowed to choose. Those parents who believe that children learn better without the distraction of the other sex in the classroom could have their way. And those parents who believe that co-education “breeds healthy social interaction” could have their way too.

It is a radical concept, of course. The very idea that parents ought to direct their children’s education!

But the feminists object. Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women:

We strongly oppose these bills because the separation of boys and girls, and the underlying (and false) assumption that girls and boys are so different that they shouldn't even be educated together, introduces harmful gender stereotypes into public education. This could lead to, among other possible outcomes, emphasizing math and science for boys, and for girls, less rigorous course work.

Ah yes. The King Charles’s head for feminists. Off in a secret male-only classroom, there is a danger that boys will be gaining an unfair advantage over girls in math and science. We must stamp that out!

I recently spoke with a young women who delightedly told me that she was working as a genetics counselor. She had a degree in microbiology and had worked for a few years in a lab. But then she quit and went to Japan to teach English for a couple of years. Now she’s back and she much prefers her job as a counselor, helping people with genetic screening and associated life decisions, to working in a lab.

You can math-and-science girls all you like, but in the end most women will choose to do people work rather than numbers-and-things work. And why not?

But that is all by the way, and a distraction. Let us get this straight.

It is wrong and it is a gross injustice to maintain a public school system at taxpayers’ expense that impose a one-size-fits-all policy on the education of children.

It is wrong to submit the education of children to the centralizing power of political pressure groups.

It is the right of every parent to direct the education of their children.

And it is wrong for political activists to interfere with that right.

A Republican Brawl in 2008?

After President Bush is goes “a Republican Party known for ideological solidarity is on the cusp of a far more searching philosophical battle than are the Democrats, historically accustomed to bruising fights over the finer points of political theory.”

That is what liberal columnist E.J. Dionne thinks is coming up. “A Republican brawl.”

Why do I as a thoroughly Republican voter think that this is a load of hot air?

Correct that. I expect that John McCain will be as intemperate and out of touch with the Republican base as he was in 2000. Call that a brawl if you want.

Call it a brawl when the bloggers in pajamas take McCain apart. Oops, they are doing it already.

But as for the other candidates, men like Rudi Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich, I expect a spirited contest with a lot of ideas spilling around. Call that a brawl if you want.

The fact is that the MSM just doesn’t have a clue about the Republican Party, and doesn’t have a clue about Republicans. It doesn’t know how Republicans think, or how they feel.

And anyway, when was the last time that Democrats has a fight “over the finer points of political theory?”

For one thing, parties don’t have fights over fine points. They argue about big ideas and little gaffes.

It is quite likely that the Republicans will be doing some serious thinking about where they go after Bush. But a brawl? In your dreams, E.J.

Religious Left At Prayer

You wonder about our liberal friends when they agitate for more social programs with fine moral fervor. What about all the money we are already spending? Doesn’t that count?

The religious left had a convocation recently, organized by Jim Wallis and reported by Mark Tooley. The idea was to reignite the Social Gospel movement of 1900.

Like most religious left outfits, Mr. Wallis's groups want to disengage churchgoers from concerns about abortion and homosexuality and refocus them on poverty and the environment... [H]e still looks to the federal welfare and regulatory state as the source of secular salvation.

Doesn’t the religious left worry a bit about concentrating all that secular power in the government? No, because “poverty is not a family value.”

It was at that meeting, you’ll remember that DNC chairman Howard Dean talked about the nation as back in the 1950 with McCarthyism and no civil rights, and all.

Mr. Dean shared hope for America as a "moral nation," with national health care, an increased minimum wage, and a protected estate tax. "The folks in this church are ones who live their faith through works--that is the mark of a real Christian," he assured his audience.

Something there just slipped past me. What exactly does morality have to do with increased government spending and higher taxes?

The truth is that it is politics not the love of God that stirs in the breasts of the religious left. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that many of us just don’t want to be forced to pay for the liberal moral vision.

Doing good works with other people’s money just doesn’t sound like the moral life to me.

But really, I’m just tired of all the phoney-baloney liberal rhetoric about the poor and doing it for the children. As Robert William Fogel wrote in The Fourth Great Awakening, the spiritual condition of the poor is worse than it used to be.

Such problems [in cities] as drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago.

You could look it up.

In Britain, for instance, over the last century, violent crime has increased by over 2000 percent, even as social spending rocketed into the stratosphere. Or was it because social spending rocketed into the stratosphere?

A Word About Our Fighting Marines

We conservatives honor our troops. “Thank you for your service,” is the constant refrain of the talk-show host. But what do we actually do for them? Do we walk the walk or just talk the talk?

In the American Thinker they ran a speech delivered by Marine Maj. Gen. Mike Lehnert, commander of Marine Corps Bases (West) to a San Diego community group.

Lehnert began with his son’s graduation at Stanford, at which Tom Brokaw told the graduates that

that they could likely expect rapid advancement in almost any endeavor they choose and that they were destined to lead the most powerful country in the world. The class was beaming.



And then Brokaw reminded them that the liberties and freedoms they enjoyed were being defended by young people their age that did not have their advantages.

Lehnert was the only parent of the graduating class serving in the military. But the Marines he led

tend to come from working class families. For the most part, they came from homes where high school graduation was important but college was out of their reach.

So when he approached three Marines sitting in the sun at a Marine golf tournament to raise money for wounded Marines and asked them why they weren’t playing,

they said that they’d never learned. No one in their families ever played golf and that this was the first time they’d ever been on a golf course. I asked them how many times they’d deployed. One of the young men had just returned from his third deployment and had been wounded every time...



I asked these Marines if I could buy them a beer. They looked at me and smiled. One of them said, “We can’t ask you to break the rules sir. None of us are 21 yet.”

Yeah. It does kinda give you a catch in the throat. But here’s the kicker.

Later this morning I’ll be meeting with educators across the California University system. We are trying to make California more veteran friendly. California hosts 40% of the combat power of the Marine Corps and 40% of the Marine veterans who leave the Corps do so out of Southern California bases. 96% have participated in the Montgomery GI Bill and are eligible for benefits but only a small number enter the California University system. That’s because California, unlike other states did not provide any veterans preference or even reach out to veterans. These combat veterans score in the top 50% of their age group, are drug free and morally straight but are lost to California and return to other states that aggressively work to attract them.

Governor Schwarzenegger is working to change that. We should all be working for change.

How American Racism Works

Conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager was watching videos of “people reacting to radio talk shows.” No doubt it’s a part of his job, to understand his audience.

But he was surprised to notice that there were no black people on the panels. Why not?

Oh, they used to include blacks, responded the firm that had organized the panels. But they had to give it up. White people on the panels would not publically disagree with the blacks.

Therefore, once a black listener spoke, whites stopped saying what they really thought, if what they thought differed from what a black had said.

To find out what whites thought, they could not be on a panel with blacks.

Makes you think, doesnt it? White racism, do you think?

Years ago I served on a six person jury. We were judging the guilt or innocence of a black man accused of assaulting a police officer. I found that I wasn’t sure which way I was going to vote until I had heard from the middle-aged black woman on the panel. Finding that she was ready to convict, we five white sheep were ready to go along and vote guilty too.

What do you think? Were we all white racists? Or were we just adopting the precautionary principle, staying out of trouble, making sure that nobody could call us racists?

It reminds me of the old song.

Who’s the racist of us three?

Is it me? Is it thee?

Or the liberal behind the tree?

It is all such a shame.

MSM Doesn't Get Freedom of the Press

It is interesting to follow Hugh Hewitt’s interview (perm) of Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board member Elizabeth Sullivan. Sullivan had published an article supporting the New York Times’s outing of the Bush Administration’s program to track down terrorist financing. So Hewitt got to do another of his forensic interviews, the kind in which he manages to show that the MSM journalist in question doesn’t have much “there” there.

HH: [The New York Times] named three specific, they named three specific cases where SWIFT had led to the arrest of terrorists. Those three, then, can be reversed engineered by the associates of those individuals. That's...those are three specific cases. But more broadly, what this FBI, Lormel man is saying is that when you tell and broadcast, you alert the less smart, the less sophisticated...



ES: The...it is, I think, not persuasive in this case. Not persuasive to me that that's the case.

Elizabeth Sullivan basically argues that the media should be the judge of whether to publicize a classified program, and that they should not be accountable for making a mistake.

I just don’t think that the American people are going to like that. The whole point of freedom is that it is not a license to do anything you want without accountability, but that it gives you freedom from prior restraint. But if you make a mistake, if you harm someone, then you should pay the piper.

The reason that we have a legal system is precisely to judge contested actions. Did the government judge correctly that the use of SWIFT for tracking down terrorists was appropriately secret? Is the New York Times correct in saying that its revelation of the classified program does not materially harm the nation’s ability to track down terrorists? Let’s try the facts and the law and find out.

And the MSM is arguing that because they are special, because they are important, they should not be accountable for their actions.

They just don’t get it.

The Future of Marriage Seen from 1926

Eighty years ago advanced people were beginning to understand “that the emancipation of women was changing the nature of marriage.” What would that mean to marriage a hundred years from 1926? The London Times asked some “luminaries from the arts world” for their predictions about marriage. You can see their prophesies (here). Interestingly, the most sensible thinking came from Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and President of the Eugenics Education Society(!). Wrote Darwin:

My anticipations are somewhat different from my hopes. For some time to come the marriage tie will, I believe, become more lax and children brought up without the care of both parents more numerous. Childless intercourse before marriage will increase in frequency, such temporary unions being often followed by childless marriages with the same or some other partner.



The harm done by the abandonment of family life will however become more and more generally apparent and then will begin a slow swing back to more old- fashioned views as to the sanctity of the marriage contract, together with a greater readiness to submit to sacrifices and to impose hardships in order to keep family circles united.

Hilaire Belloc, the comic poet of Cautionary Verses, wrote this:

It would seem probable that the process of regarding marriage as a terminable contract will advance with still greater speed... There is no reason in the new scheme why a man should be compelled to support his wife any more than the wife her husband...



But what I do think probable is conflict between that sort of society and the traditional world which will exist either as a separate area or as a distinct and contrasting social group. I am pretty sure that one will try to kill the other.

The question remains: which group will kill the other first?

Iraq Getting On Its Feet

What is happening in Iraq? With Sunnis appearing to be ready to cry Uncle and end their insurgency, the Shias are beginning to reel in their death squads, the chaps who have been retaliating against Sunni outrages by killing Sunnis.
StrategyPage reports that

the Shia are ready to fight their own, and in the last week, Shia and Kurdish police and soldiers fought Shia radicals, led by men like Abu Deraa.

I’ve been reading about Germany after its defeat in 1918. It’s an amazing story of the stolid Majority Socialists trying to hold the country together while the Independent Socialists and Spartacus whack-jobs were trying to replicate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

There was no army for several months after the Armistice in November 1918, yet the revolutionary left failed to get the German people to make revolution. And the government, such as it was, moved rapidly to set up a democratic election to create a constitutional assembly two months after the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime.

Imagine that. Friedrich Ebert, head of the government by virtue of the previous Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, saying “you’re it,” without an army, with the German Army melted away, organizes Germany’s first democratic election and Constitutional Assembly. All in two months while the lefty whack-jobs like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are trying to work the German workers up into bloody revolution.

The Iraqis aren’t the Germans. But considering that the Iraqis have elected a constitutional assembly, have elected a legislature, now have an elected government in place, and have an army that is rapidly gaining effectiveness, a student of history would have to say that is growing rapidly more and more difficult to imagine the insurgency destroying the power of the current government.

If, as StrategyPage says, the Shias are starting to move against their own radicals, it is beginning to look as if Bush’s policy is working.

New York Times Says Boys Underperforming in College!

Now even the folks at The New York Times admit it. Boys aren’t doing too well in college. Writes Tamar Lewin,

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment.

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Of course, this isn’t new. The schoolboy “creeping like a snail/ Unwillingly to school” was already a stereotype when Jaques mourned about life in the Forest of Arden.

But hidden in the article is this little nugget. It turns out that not all boys do worse than girls in college.

The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education.

Oh really. So “the rich” are doing just fine. It is the middle and lower class boys who aren’t doing too well. The upper-class feminists are taking care of their own even as they visit a murrain upon the sons of the lower classes.

What is to be done, as Lenin once said? Shall we start affirmative action programs for boys? Consciousness raising? New programs to target at-risk male youth?

Let us not be tempted by the the liberal recipe. It is that sort of thinking that got us here, the programmatic, government-funded liberal mindset that turns everything into a government program and turns an independent people into servants cowed by the lash of compulsion.

Let us ask instead big questions, such as:

• What exactly is education for, beyond basic skills such as literacy and numeracy?
• What level of political direction is beneficial, or even prudent, when it comes to education?
• What are we achieving with compulsory education?
• Is it really such a good idea to separate work and learning the way we do?
• What is the point of undergraduate education today?

My own view is that I don’t know what girls want or need in an education. But I do believe that boys need an Education for Adventure, a program that develops in them them a capacity for physical and social risk, so that they can take their adult places in the world with these qualities: “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.” Those are the words of General von Seeckt writing about the kind of soldier he wanted in the German army.

Obviously the current education system is designed for some other purpose.

A Nation of Shoplifters

They used to sneer at the Brits as a Nation of Shopkeepers. That’s what the Germans thought when they marched to war in 1914.

But now Mary Wakefield worries that they have become a nation of shoplifters. And she is not talking about boys with pants down around their ankles.

Rob is a kind man, who listens carefully to his conscience and usually follows its advice. He's well off, no family to support, well respected in his field and well balanced - so there's no real explanation, as far as I can see, for the fact that he shoplifts.

Wakefield took a look at all the Evian bottles in his apartment. Expensive habit, she thought. “Not if you steal them from Sainbury’s,” Rob replied.

Didn’t he feel bad?

"Nope," he said, with a defiant smile. "And anyway, your other friends shoplift too."

And it turned out that they did. There are even internet chatrooms where you can discuss how to do it.

"Look, nice-tasting water should be free," said Rob, as I stared at him, still disapproving, over tea. "If I paid for it, I would resent it, and in fact I resent having to go to the horrible supermarket at all."

In Britain, the educated classes rather frown on supermarkets. They have a cult of local and fresh. So that makes it easier to steal from them.

Fortunately the educated classes in the US don’t just frown on Wal-Mart. They wouldn’t be seen dead shopping there. And, of course, they wouldn’t dream of shoplifting in an independent bookstore.

But who knows what they get up to in Barnes & Noble.

But I have a soft spot for the supermarkets. Their workers work hard, and they bring an unimaginable bounty to us every day. On top of that, US retail and food processing are the most productive in the world. It was hard work and attention to detail that got them there.

So I believe they deserve every penny that I spend with them.

Ken Lay: RIP But Still a Crook

Did you know that in Enron’s home town of Houston they regard the Enron collapse as a tragedy rather than an example of capitalist rascals at work?

A Democratic friend seemed surprised that this was so. After all, if you read the New York Times every day you likely think that the Enron fraud was hatched in the offices of Halliburton and signed off by then-Governor Bush in Austin.

Of course, Democrats don’t realize that Republicans feel just as angry as they do about Enron. And Republicans don’t just feel outraged by Enron’s frauds. We also feel betrayed, because we know that there are many Democrats just waiting to blame Republicans and the whole capitalist system when a corporation like Enron collapses. And also hurts because we know that Democrats will be trying to stampede some new regulatory burden on business.

No doubt Democrats have been wondering all along when the fix would be in on Enron. When were Enron’s corrupt Republican friends going to bail them out? Well, it looks like the Republicans’ God stepped in and did the dirty deed.

Columnist Peggy Noonan reminds us that there is another aspect to all this.

Ken Lay, Enron CEO and convicted felon died this week of a massive heart attack. But he also died of a broken heart.

His life was broken and would never be healed. Or if it was to be healed it would happen while he was imprisoned, for the rest of his life, with four walls to look at. All was wreckage around him.

Deserved as his conviction for fraud might be, he was also a human. And Noonan recalls a friend who remarked how hard we humans are on each other. How we are all little pirates, and how we are more breakable than we know.

Jennifer Roback Morse writes in Love and Economics how

[she] once had a priest tell [her] to kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament... so that [she] could feel the love of God pour over her.

If you wonder what all the sin and redemption stuff is all about in Christianity think of it this way. It is a way for humans to save themselves when the little pirate in them is broken. When they are in danger of dying from a broken heart.

But Ken Lay is still a crook.

Job Growth Moderating; Or Is It?

Today’s announcement by the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the increase in payroll employment at 121,000 last month. It’s the “nonfarm employment” number from the Bureau’s Establishment Survey, and indicates that payroll growth is moderating from the faster pace of last year.

On the other hand, if you look at the increase in employment from the Bureau’s Household Survey, employment increased by 387,000. Here employment growth is, if anything, accelerating. What is going on? The government is measuring triple the employment growth in the household survey than in the establishment survey.

If you step back and look at graphs of the numbers, the difference in the two surveys is quite stark. Here’s a graph of the household survey and here is a graph of the establishment survey.

The household survey shows strong employment growth consistently for the last two years. Going back to the last recession, it shows negative job growth only for twelve months, and shows employment increase comparable to the glory years of the late 1990s.

The establishment survey shows employment growth moderating since the first of the year. Going back to the last recession, it shows a sharp drop in employment for a year, from January 2001 to January 2002, followed by two years of no job growth. Starting in mid 2003, employment growth has been solid and consistent—five million new jobs—but the job growth has never come close to the job growth in the 1990s.

What is going on?

Brits Rail at US While Teen Thugs Run Riot

The Brits have a rather poor opinion of the United States, according to Ben Fenton. Only 12 percent of them think that the United States can be trusted to act responsibly on the world stage.

Britons, writes Anthony King, feel that

America appears to be a class-divided and racially divided society and one that fails to offer its citizens equality of opportunity. Nearly three quarters of Britons, 72 per cent, believe American society is essentially "unequal".

It is understandable that they would take a dim view of the US. It helps them to avoid examining the mess in their own country, where teenaged gangs seem to roam around without limit, according to Theodore Dalrymple. It seems to be considered rare sport for young thugs to loiter around and beat up on adults, sending them to hospital with serious brain injuries. And why not? The criminal justice system just gives them a slap on the wrist.

Peter Wareing, a 42-year-old barrister, was attacked in the street by a gang of youths, and suffered permanent brain injury. The two youthful thugs that beat him were sentenced to 18 months in jail and will likely get out in 9 months.

Wareing was no privileged insider, pampered by a privileged upbringing.

He was evidently a man of some spirit: having been a salesman, he decided to study for the law, supported himself at law school by a variety of manual jobs, and qualified at the bar at the age of 40. The extent of his recovery astounded his neurosurgeon, who attributed it to Wareing’s determination and “bloody-mindedness.”

Here’s another story. “An engineer — Philip Carroll, the father of four — was tinkering with his car outside his home. Four drunken youths sat on a wall on his property, and he asked them to leave.” They beat him and caused brain injury. Carroll may never work again. The culprit, Michael Kuba-Kuba, a talented athlete whose parents owned an African foods grocery store, got 12 months in jail. He said he acted in self-defense.

It’s just as well that the Brits are disgusted with the United States, its racism, its inequality, and its imperial ambitions in the world. They wouldn’t want to look at the unequal fight being waged on their own streets between peaceable householders and drunken teen thugs. That might be too unpleasant.