Evil Wal-Mart Overrruns Democratic Bastion

The Wal-Mart PR guys just sent an e-mail to announce the opening of the first Wal-Mart in Chicago, so naturally as a mind-numbed Wal-Mart robot I am blogging about it.

The first reaction was shock. I thought that Chicago didn’t want no stinkin’ Wal-Marts polluting its pristine neighborhoods.

The second reaction was wonder. I wonder how close the new store is to downtown Chicago?

According to Google Maps, it is a mere 7 miles from downtown, so the Democrats entrenched there ought to be able to hear the rumble of the guns out at 4650 W. North Ave. Maybe the staff of City Council should drive out and take a tour of the Western Front.

The new Wal-Mart is only five miles from the faculty lounge at DePaul University. So the social science faculty could start field trips out along W. North to let the students take a look at the enemy.
Students majoring in Labor History could get credit for, let’s see, organizing the workers at Wal-Mart!

After all, something like 80 percent of John Kerry voters have never shopped at Wal-Mart. Yet they all seem to know enough about to be able to tell Wal-Mart management how to run the store.

An article in the Chicago Tribune had some interesting facts about the new store. According Emma Graves Fitzsimmons many of the 490 workers at the new store are making more money than at their old jobs.

Wal-Mart sales associate Tinesha McKay, 26, a mother of three from Austin, said she makes $7.70 an hour, a $1.50 increase from her previous job as a clerk at a blood bank in Glenview. Her commute has been cut from over an hour to 10 minutes, she said.

...

Victor Calderon, 27, a father of three from Humboldt Park, said he had been working at a rubber factory through a temp agency before getting a full-time job at Wal-Mart stocking shopping carts.

He is making “about $2 an hour higher than at his previous job.”

This is pretty shocking, you’ll agree. Everybody knows that Wal-Mart employees are shockingly underpaid. Yet these workers are reporting that they are getting more money at Wal-Mart than at their old jobs. In addition, of course, they are reducing their commutes.

Shopper Therea Flores is not impressed. Interviewed after a two hour shopping marathon filling her shopping cart “with groceries, cleaning supplies and clothing,” she

said the workers deserved higher wages. She said she was disappointed the big-box ordinance [mandating higher wages] did not pass.



"I believe Wal-Mart can afford it," she said. "I wasn't buying the fact that they wouldn't open stores here. There's too much money to be made."

Thank goodness that Theresa Flores can now afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

Born on the Fourth of July

She died on Tuesday, September 26, aged 90. She might have been an ordinary aspirational American, born to immigrants from Japan and graduating from UCLA in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, “hoping to become a physician,” according to Richard Goldstein in The New York Times. But then things went wrong for Iva Toguri.

In the summer of 1941, she visited an ailing aunt in Tokyo at the request of her mother. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was stranded in Tokyo, knowing virtually no Japanese, deprived of a food ration card by the authorities after refusing to become a Japanese citizen and hard-pressed to find work.

She ended up as an announcer and disk jockey for Radio Tokyo’s propaganda broadcasts and became accused of being “Tokyo Rose,” the sexy-voiced announcer who urged American GIs to give up a hopeless cause.

In 1949 she was tried for treason, convicted on a single count, and jailed for ten years with a $10,000 fine. After getting out of jail she moved to Chicago and worked for her father.

She ran an Asian grocery store and gift shop on Chicago’s North Side that family members had opened after their release from a wartime internment camp in Arizona.

But her treason conviction was based on perjury and media hysteria.
According to The Times

In 1976, after a second media campaign led by Bill Kurtis, of CBS, the news anchor Morley Safer produced an item about Iva Toguri on the mass-audience 60 Minutes show. This revealed not only the true nature of Toguri’s enforced wartime occupation, but the extent of the perjury and tabloid feeding frenzy that had led to her arrest and conviction.

In 1977 she received a pardon from President Ford.

Last January, according to Ben Goldberger Toguri received

the World War II Veterans Committee's Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award. As guests sipped champagne around an ice sculpture of a swan, Ms. Toguri pronounced it "the most memorable day of my life."

Because, it turned out, she had used her earnings in Japan to help the GI prisoners of war with whom she worked.

Iva Toguri was born in the United States in 1916 on the Fourth of July.

More Than "School Choice" Needed

How much of a difference do the current initiative on school choice make? Not much, according to Frederick M. Hess.

[C]harter-school enthusiasts, including President Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, have touted the remarkable work of the high-performing KIPP Academies and the new teachers recruited by Teach For America. However, these entrepreneurial ventures are gnats alongside the $550 billion a year behemoth that is K-12 education.

The fact is that most Americans aren’t too riled up about school non-performance. They prefer in-school reform to any radical changes. “School choice” is a nice slogan, but if we are talking about real improvement in education we are talking about entrepreneurial challenge to the status quo.

Ultimately, supply-side dynamism isn’t about “choices;” it’s about Darwinian selection and creative destruction.

...

Vibrant markets in any sector require entrepreneurs, adequate capital, skilled employees, entrance to markets, and so on. Creating good new options requires opportunities for entrepreneurs to enter the field, obtain resources, recruit talent, try new approaches, develop new products, compete fairly, and benefit from their successes. Choice fosters entrepreneurship only to the extent that it promotes these opportunities.

And right now, as told by Judith Kleinfeld, there is the huge problem of the underperformance of boys in school. Here’s one shocker statistic:

White Twelfth-Graders of College Educated Parents Scoring "Below Basic" by Gender and Subject Subject Male Female Reading 23% 7% Writing 25% 6% Mathematics 19% 17%

Can this really be true? One quarter of the white sons of college graduates are reading “below basic” in the twelfth grade? That means that one quarter of the sons of white college graduates are basically illiterate.

It it is true we need more than “in-school reform.” We need an education revolution led by radical entrepreneurs.

Why Did the Brits Invite Clinton and McCain?

Why do the Brits like to have American politicians address them at their political conferences?

This week Bill Clinton, his mind cleared after telling off Chris Wallace on eevil Fox News, gave the Labour Party a pep talk at its annual conference in Manchester. Don’t make the same mistake we did, he told them.

Next week Senator John McCain is going to address the British Conservative Party at its annual conference in Bournemouth. And so the British Spectator’s Matthew d’Ancona is in Washington to interview the man who has his name on a law that diminished Americans’ free speech rights and now has opposed President Bush’s efforts to interview terrorist suspects.

Of course, thousands would argue that Fox News’ tactics in the famous Clinton interview consistuted torture banned by Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention, particularly the prohibition in Section 1(c):

Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.

So maybe John McCain should be working on legislation banning Fox News from asking questions that might hurt the positive self-esteem of Democratic former presidents.

But back to McCain. What would the British Conservative Party want to be doing with John McCain? But it seems like the Brits like him because he appears as a centrist, and that is how David Cameron is “rebanding” the Conservatives.

But it makes you wonder. Is there something about John McCain that we conservatives just cannot see? Some brilliant approach to governing, some stunning record of judgment that is too obvious for us to grasp?

Or are we the guys that understand McCain only too well: too much “honor,” too much senatorial pride, too much desire to be well-thought-of by the media, and a live-long question in the judgment department?

As Hugh Hewitt says: “[John McCain] is a great American, a lousy senator, and a terrible Republican.”

The question still remains: Why do those Limeys like to have US politicians over, over there. Particularly when the Brits really don’t like the US and aren’t afraid to say so.

Harris on Ratzinger at Regensburg

There is perhaps no more exciting thinker living than Lee Harris, a student of philosophy and some time owner of an auto tint shop, whose first book Civilization and Its Enemies, proposed the present unpleasantness as a war between the western team and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

Now he has published a long article entitled “Socrates or Muhammed?”
in theWeekly Standard about—what else—the recent speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg.

But, he confesses, the pope does not speak as the infallible head of the Roman Catholic Church.

He stands before his learned audience not as the
pope, but simply as Joseph Ratzinger, an intelligent and thoughtful man, who makes no claims to any privileged cognitive authority. He has come, like Socrates, not to preach or sermonize, but to challenge with questions.

The question that Ratzinger formulates is the basic question that has dogged us ever since Kant.

The Greeks felt that they could reason about anything and everything--about the immortality of the soul, metempsychosis, the nature of God, the role of reason in the universe, and so on. Modern reason, from the time of Kant, has repudiated this kind of wild speculative reason. For modern reason, there is no point in even asking such questions, because there is no way of answering them scientifically.

But how do we deal with a religion like Islam that asserts that reason has nothing to do with it? What is the position of the atheist who believes in reason when confronted with a culture like Islam for which reason does not enter into it?

Ever since Kant the intellectual and cultural elite have asserted that it is a matter of subjective choice what people believe about God. But Ratzinger challenges this notion.

He has thrown out an immense challenge to modern reason and to the modern world. Is it really a matter of subjective choice whether men follow a religion that respects human reason and that refuses to use violence to convert others? Can even the most committed atheist be completely indifferent to the imaginary gods that the other members of his community continue to worship?

To put it crudely, does it matter to an atheist whether he lives in a society with a dominant religion that respects human reason or a society with a dominant religion that uses violence to convert others?

Lee Harris has a forthcoming book for next year. It is called The Suicide of Reason.

But first, read the Weekly Standard article.

“Read the whole thing.”

Why Are The Rich Getting So Much Richer?

Back at the end of the 19th century the rich were very rich. They were, principally, the people who had brought us the industrial revolution in oil, steel, railroads, and finance.

Then, over the last century, inequality declined. But now it is rising again.
As Robert Samuelson writes,

Productivity gains (improvements in efficiency) are going disproportionately to those at the top. We do not really understand why.

Actually, we do. John D. Rockefeller became fabulously wealthy because he lowered the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents per gallon to about 8 cents a gallon. Nobody really was able to compete with Standard Oil Company until they found oil in Texas.

The classic big corporation of the mid-20th century was not particularly nimble and not particularly entrepreneurial. Plus, of course, the high taxes encouraged corporate executives to limit their taxable income.

But since 1980 there has been a frenzy of change in the business world. Almost all the great companies of 1950 are reduced to shells when compared to their glory years. And a host of new companies have risen to take their place.

Have the CEOs of these companies been too greedy? Who knows? Some of them are crooks, and some of them have gone to jail.

But the bottom line is that American businesses are the most productive in the world (Toyota excepted). So it makes sense that their leaders would be the most highly paid.

And if you want to know why “inequality” is rising, maybe it has something to do with the high rate of immigration. If you increase supply of labor, then the price of labor is going to be lower than it would have been without the extra competition.

There is one fly in the ointment. State and local government employees get paid about 45 percent more than comparable employees in the private sector. It seems we are creating a new oligarchy of government employees in the United States.

Now that sounds like a real problem.

Tony Blair's Last Conference Speech

Whatever his faults, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has understood that the welfare state needed reform. It could not continue in its one-size-fits-all implementation. So in his last speech to the Labour Party conference he spent a lot of time trying to move his party towards a consumer- not a producer-powered society.

In an opportunity society, as opposed to the old welfare state, government does not dictate; it empowers.



It makes the individual - patient, parent, law-abiding citizen, job-seeker - the driver of the system, not the state.

But of course it is exactly that principle that the rank and file of the Labour Party in Britain and the Democratic Party in the US contest. The hate it as “privatization.” So when Blair continues that the opportunity society

sets free the huge talent of our public servants and social entrepreneurs whose ability is often thwarted by outdated rules and government bureaucracy.

We all clear our throats. Because after insisting that consumers—patients, parents—should rule, he then proposes to “set free” the government bureaucrats. Can’t be done, old chap. “Outdated rules” are the things you need to control people when they are spending Other Peoples’ Money.

But Blair sets up the challenge of the next century. In the last century we created the vast producer-powered welfare state in which politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests have amassed enormous power to provide us with social benefits that they control.

How do you get from this producer cartel with its subsidies, its powers, and its queues to a consumer choice system?

Because every step along the way will take power or sinecure away from some politician, some bureaucrat, or some special interest.

At least Tony Blair has made a start.

Media Always Hypes Fears of Climate Change

What are we going to do about global warming? That’s what the media were worried about in the 1930s.

But what about the next ice age? Good point. The media were worried about that back in 1900 and again in the mid 1970s.

In fact, says Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the media are always worrying about climate change.

Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media pedaled a coming ice age.



From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.

Well, of course, hysteria sells. But it would be nice if, say, when James Hansen, noted scientist and global warming enthusiast, appeared on 60 Minutes we would be told of

Hansen’s partisan ties to former Democrat Vice President Al Gore or Hansen’s receiving of a grant of a quarter of a million dollars from the left-wing Heinz Foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Because basic disclosures like that are the mark of professional journalism. Palming off a partisan as an disinterested scientist is fine. But it is straight advocacy.

Breaking the cycles of media hysteria will not be easy since hysteria sells -- it’s very profitable. But I want to challenge the news media to reverse course and report on the objective science of climate change, to stop ignoring legitimate voices this scientific debate and to stop acting as a vehicle for unsubstantiated hype.

You can’t say fairer than that.

Euston Manifesto is Great, But...

Earlier this year a bunch of left wingers and progressives in Britain wrote the Euston Manifesto, in which, according to Martin Walker, they hammered out

a statement of principles in support of democracy, freedom of speech and ideas, and firm opposition to terrorism, all forms of totalitarianism and all soft-headed apologies for it.

Which is nice. Now the manifesto has moved to the United States where

a number of leading academics and intellectuals have signed the Euston Manifesto, and issued their own statement on American liberalism that endorses it.

This is great. I guess.

'Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse-making for suicide terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the 'anti-war' movement with illiberal theocrats) we reject the notion that there are no opponents on the Left,' the manifesto says. 'We reject, similarly, the idea that there can be no opening to ideas and individuals to our right.'

But you know, after 30 years of pushing conservative reform against a hail of reckless rhetoric from the left, I have my doubts.

The problem for the left is that its political power depends on the continuing dependency of the poor and the government workers on continuing government spending.

So it can never really emerge from its love affair with government power and domestic government spending, or slough off its hatred for the market and its freedom from government dependence.

The Euston Manifesto is great. But don’t expect it to change anything.

Real-estate Prices Bobble

So now it’s hit the New York Times. “Home Prices Drop after 11-Year Ascent” is the story reported by Jeremy W. Peters.

The median price of a previously owned home fell for the first time in 11 years last month, and inventories of unsold homes swelled to levels not seen in more than a decade.

But not to worry too much. Says David Lereah, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors:

“We do expect an adjustment in home prices to last several months, as we work through a buildup in the inventory of homes on the market,” he said in a written statement. “This is the price correction we’ve been expecting — with sales stabilizing, we should go back to positive price growth early next year.”

So that’s all right. But the real-estate bears, like Bill Fleckenstein think that we are heading into a bloodbath. Quoting James Campbell of the The Campbell Real Estate Timing Letter:

"The United States has experienced the greatest real estate boom in history, but the boom is now turning into a bust, and the aftermath is not going to be pretty. Present American folklore has it that a real estate decline does not have to affect the economy. That's like saying that it will rain, but you're not going to get wet."

Which will it be? A pause or a debt debacle? We’ll know when it’s over.

School Choice a Winner in Alberta

Here’s an interesting factoid, reported in The Economist. Alberta’s schools come in No. 2 in the international school league tables. That is Alberta the Canadian province we are talking about. It’s the home province of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, leader of the Canadian Conservative Party.

Needless to say, US schools don’t appear in the top ten.

So what is Alberta doing right?

Thank you Senator, I’m glad you asked. The Economist writes that

The curriculum has been revised, stressing core subjects (English, science, mathematics), school facilities and the training of teachers have been improved, clear achievement goals have been set and a rigorous province-wide testing programme... has been established to ensure they are met.

...

[Provincial capital Edmonton] is noted for its innovative system stressing choice, accountability and competition... Each school controls its own budget... Students are free to (and 57% do) attend any school in the city, not just in their own neighbourhood. They can seek out schools specialising in the arts, sports, leadership skills, girls-only education, aboriginal culture, Mandarin, and many other alternative programmes — or simply choose the schools with the best academic results. Students in every grade are tested annually and their scores published.

Elsewhere in Canada, parents are turning to private schools out of dissatisfaction with the government schools. In Alberta things are different.

“In Edmonton,” says Angus McBeath, the city's recently retired schools chief, “the litmus test is that the rich send their kids to the public schools, not the private schools.”

It really isn’t rocket science. Education is like any other product or service. Provide open entry, choice, accountability and you will get results.

Otherwise, as the teachers union leaders say, “You just don’t care about kids.”

Two Limeys Fight Over Home Schooling

Home schooling. Is it a good idea or a bad idea? In Britain’s Spectator they are duelling it out.

Last week James Bartholomew, author of the welfare state critique The Welfare State We're In, wrote that he had had enough.

For during this term at least, I am going to home-educate her.

Oh please, responds Ron Liddle. Let’s leave education to the professionals.

It is a colossal arrogance — and a self-indulgence — on the part of those 180,000 parents [who home-school in Britain] that a) their knowledge of such diverse disciplines as, say, fine art and pure maths should exceed that possessed by the specialists[.]

He is right, of course, at least in theory. And it sounds like his kids go to a pretty good school.

My kids go to a state school; I am in awe of their teachers’ ability to convey knowledge and get them enthused about such a vast array of subjects.

The thing is this. Modern science tells us that the two biggest influences on our children is 1) their parents’ genes and 2) their peer culture. Parenting doesn’t come close.

So if you want to influence your children what matters is the milieu in which they grow up: the friends in the neigborhood and the culture at school.

In Britain, the culture in school is pretty bad. Read the blog of Frank Chalk author of It's Your Time You're Wasting and a teacher at a “bog-standard” comprehensive school in Britain.

Irrespective of what your kids are actually learning in school, would you want your kid influenced by the culture that obtains in so many government schools?

James Bartholomew says that he is taking his 9-year-old daughter to France and expects that she will learn to speak French, a skill she presently lacks despite years of classes.

Could she be doing anything more important at age 9 than learning a new language? Anything that couldn’t wait a year?

The Swedes are Retiring Early

Back when the apologists of the welfare state wanted more of our money we got to hear a lot about the condition of the working class.

But now that the welfare state has become established and tenured it has become more secretive. We seem to know little about the lives of the poor, and the bureaucrats and the experts like it that way.

Every now and again, someone lifts a flap of the tent and you can look in. That happened this week when the Moderate Party coalition won the elections in Sweden.

When 25-year-old Swede Jessica Pettersson lost her job recently, she found that the welfare state bureaucrats wanted to classify her as mentally disabled. According to Nima Sanadaji,

Pettersson has a high school degree in economics and has worked in a post office and in a grocery store, among other jobs. After being out of work for a while, her supervisor at the unemployment agency told her that she ought to meet with a work-psychologist since "it is so hard to be without a job."

Huh? So she went to a psychologist and pretty soon found that as a result of testing she ought to be “classified as disabled since she wasn't good enough at mathematics.”

No big deal, you understand. It was “simply a matter of changing a code in her status as unemployed.” And she could get more subsidies and benefits.

Today 19.3 percent of those seeking jobs at the unemployment office are being classified as disabled.

What is going on here?

What is going on is that the government wants to hide the true rate of unemployment. In the Economist’s “Pocket World in Figures 2006” the unemployment rate in Sweden is given as 4.9 percent for 2003.

But, writes Johnny Munkhammar, the real rate of unemployment is much higher.

McKinsey estimated the total unemployment rate to be 15 per cent. Sweden has decreased the size of the labour force more than any other European country during the last 15 years, shuffling away hundreds of thousands of people from being called "unemployed" to "early retired".

Early retired? Yes. Get a load of this,

Youth unemployment is 22 per cent, the fifth highest in EU-25, and the number of people under the age of 30 that are "early retired" has increased from 13, 000 to 22,000 during the last six years.

Well, we knew the Swedes were different, but 22,000 early retired under the age of 30? Obviously the new generation of Swedes are not up to the level of the great soprano Birgit Nilsson and her stentorian voice and work ethic. They just can’t take the pace of the modern world.

In Britain, of course, a similar situation exists. The number of people on “incapacity benefit” is three times the number of official unemployed.

But don’t think we are so hot, pal. In the US the number of officially disabled doubles every decade.

Dems Defend Bush Against Chavez

Yesterday Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez called President Bush a devil.
Today two leading Democrats told Chavez he was a thug.

According to Fox News Rep. Charles Rangel (D- NY) told Chavez:

Don't come to the United States and think, because we have problems with our president, that any foreigner can come to our country and not think that Americans do not feel offended when you offend our chief of state... It should be clear to all heads of government that criticism of Bush administration policies, either domestic or foreign, does not entitle them to attack the president personally. George Bush is the president of the United States and represents the entire country. Any demeaning public attack against him is viewed by Republicans and Democrats, and all Americans, as an attack on all of us.

And Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) echoed Rangel’s remarks.

There is only one thing to say to Rangel and Pelosi. Thank you.

But. Here’s a thought for our Democratic friends.

Don’t you think that maybe you are running with the hare and hunting with the hounds here? You’ve had a grand old time, ever since November 2000, trashing the President of the United States, and frankly encouraging foreigners to believe that you don’t think that President Bush is legitimate and worthy of holding the office of president.

Actions have consequences. A foreign thug like Chavez wouldn’t make speeches about devils and sulphur at the United Nations unless they felt that they had encouragement.

That’s why, back in the old days, we used to talk about politics stopping at the water’s edge.

Just something to think about.

"The Great Risk Shift"

According to political science professor Jacob Hacker in his book The Great Risk Shift the United States has seen a big increase in risk for its ordinary citizens in recent decades.
According to Brink Lindsey, Hacker argues that the culprit is

America's sweeping transformation away from an all-in-the-same-boat philosophy of shared risk toward a go-it-alone vision of personal responsibility...


Over the last generation... we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families.

Let’s accept his statement. There has been a reassignment of risk from corporate and government structures to individuals and families. you can tell that for Hacker it goes without saying that this is a loss. But is it?

After all, we now know that the reason that the transfer has taken place is because the promises made by corporations and government were empty, and made reckless assumptions about the future. Once proud corporations with magisterial defined-benefit programs are now broke and cannot perform their promises. The same is true of government. Social Security has a $10 trillion unfunded liability and Medicare has a $60 trillion unfunded liability.

Hacker’s solution is to move to an “‘insurance and opportunity society,’ that would safeguard economic security and expand economic opportunity, ensuring that all Americans have the basic financial security they need to reach for and achieve the American Dream.”

Sorry to butt in, Jacob, old chap, but wasn’t the welfare state supposed to do all that? Isn’t it supposed to be doing that at this very moment? So why do we need to butt in with a whole new program?

Tenured college professors like Hacker often don’t understand how risk operates. For instance, for an individual or a family is it better to trust to a corporate pension plan and a government program for their security, which means in effect giving some of their wage income to a corporation or government in exchange for promises? Or is it better to keep the money and send it off to Vanguard or Fidelity to be invested in stock and bond funds? In which scenario are you “putting all your eggs in one basket?”

Anyway, given that the corporate pension funds are all tapped out and the government’s entitlement programs will need huge tax increases to make good their promises, where is the money going to come from to provide the “insurance” that Hacker is calling for?

Universities Biased Against People Without 'Wives'

Women are underrepresented in the sciences and engineering because of “bias and ‘outmoded institutional structures’ in academia.”

That is what a an Academy of Sciences panel has decided, according to Cornelia Dean.

“Unless a deeper talent pool is tapped, it will be difficult for our country to maintain our competitiveness in science and engineering,” the panel’s chairwoman, Donna E. Shalala, said at a news conference at which the report was made public. The report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” is online at www.nationalacademies.org.

So what are they proposing? Dean writes that

Among other steps, the report recommends altering procedures for hiring and evaluation, changing typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and providing more support for working parents.

OK. What does the report say?

Trustees, university presidents, and provosts should provide clear leadership in changing the culture and structure of their institutions to recruit, retain, and promote more women -- including minority women -- into faculty and leadership positions... show[ing] evidence of having conducted fair, broad, and aggressive talent searches... [holding departments] accountable for the equity of their search processes and outcomes...[setting up] body that would recommend standards.

At least they aren’t proposing beneficial legislation.

The trouble is that many universities have a

work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

That is certainly true. Anyone without a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage in this world.

The whole flap about women in the workforce grows out of the German “creativity” and “genius” cult that grew up in the early nineteenth century. It’s all wrong of course. Before we need a “deeper talent pool” at our universities we need mothers and fathers at home, attending to the real creative project of humanity: children.

Still, you gotta admit that for many women (and men) it’s much more fun to duck out and play at the U with the girls (and boys).

The Three Currents of Islam

According to Bernard Lewis there are three currents in modern Islam, the revival that is trying to deal with the crisis of modernization.

Before modern times the Islamic countries had a fairly pacific government. Rulers had to deal with “established orders—the bazaar merchants, the scribes, the guilds, the country gentry, the military establishment, the religious establishment, and so on.”

But in response to the challenge of the west “A new ruling class emerged, ruling from the center and using the apparatus of the state for its purposes.” Add to that the Nazi influence that seeped into the Middle East through Vichy France and you have a witch’s brew of centralization and brutalization.

Unfortunately the three authentic Islamic responses to the crisis of modernity are Wahhabism, the Iranian Revolution, and Al-Qaeda, all of which are fully jihadist in the Islamic sense that they all subscribe to violent conquest of the rest of the world.

Wahhabism is a problem because it is teaching the children of Islam in the West. The Iranian Revolution is a problem in the same sense that the Soviet Union was a problem. And Al-Qaeda honestly thinks that it knocked out the Soviet Union and is well on its way to knocking out the United States.

The challenge, according to Bernard Lewis, is that it’s a black and white situation.

Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.

But Tony Blankley believes that we have not yet begun to fight.

[Wars] often start with a morally ambiguous view of the enemy, a more limited conception of the war's magnitude and a restrained application of violent tactics.

Eventually, moral clarity is obtained, war objectives expand -- often to grandiosity -- and tactics become ferocious.

He cites the Civil War and WWII as examples.

It is not pleasant to think of the events that will lead to the escalation of Western tactics to the level of ferociousness.

B-XVI Regensburg: Who Has the Problem?

If you didn’t know that we have a cultural war going on you can see it today in the differing takes on the pope’s Regensburg speech of September 12, 2006.

Liberal columnist E.J. Dionne thinks we have a problem. And The Wall Street Journal thinks that Islam has a problem. Says Dionne:

[R]eligious dialogue will not progress very far if it starts off with a slap in the face.

And then he goes on to wax all nostalgic about John Paul II. You know we’ve got a real pope when liberals go all misty-eyed about the notorious conservative Polish pope they loved to hate.

But the Journal is lovin’ it.

This is not an invitation to the usual feel-good interfaith round-tables. It is a request for dialogue with one condition--that everyone at the table reject the irrationality of religiously motivated violence.

Amen to that, brother.

Compassionate Conservatives Win in Sweden

Here in the United States President Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” has disappeared in a hurricane of Bush hatred.

But in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron has given new life to the Tories with an emphasis on green, windmills, and work/life balance.

Now the Moderate Party in Sweden, led by Frederick Reinfeldt, has romped home to an election win in the world capital of the welfare state with a program that promises not to change too much too fast.

Yes, but what will Reinfeldt actually do? CNN has a run down. The main issue was the Swedish welfare system.

While insisting that he has no intention of dismantling the system, which is something of a sacred cow in Sweden, Reinfeldt has argued that, if the country is to compete economically, urgent reforms are needed.

What reforms? Well, a tax cut, for a start, “a reduction in unemployment benefit from 80 percent of previous income to 65 percent,” but above all a determination to “change things through safe steps.”

Lefties like Polly Toynbee in Britain can see the writing on the wall.

What an irony that the victors - 41-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt's New Moderates - modelled themselves on New Labour...


Here's the other great lesson from Sweden. They forgot about women - yes, even in Sweden. New Labour has won the past three elections only on the strength of women's votes - yet Labour too has forgotten the importance of connecting with them...


But in opposition look how Cameron's campaign is devoted to pleasing women, in tone, style, words and demeanour: the polls tell him women are more green, family-minded and worried about work-life balance.

And the thing is, Cameron’s mood music is having an effect. The swing to the Tories is 6 percent among women but only 2 percent among men.

The last, brief rightwing government in Sweden left heavy footprints. It cut the welfare state and damaged education by bringing in private schools[.]

Oh yes, did you know? In Sweden they have school vouchers. You can send your child to the school of your choice. What a radical, woman-friendly concept! But safe, you understand, very safe.

The Devout American Who Wrote "The Path to 9/11"

It’s a free country, like they say. So it is interesting to read what Cyrus Nowrasteh has to say about “The Path to 9/11.”

Remember Cyrus? He was the right-wing nut who wrote the script as a deliberate right-wing plot to discredit the Clintons.

After all the effort we put into the script, he writes, it would have been nice if the critics had done a bit of due diligence. (In your dreams, pal!)

Much was made of his association with Rush Limbaugh (he’s met him twice) while ignoring his association with Olvier Stone. After all, if he wrote a script criticizing the Clintons he must be on the other side, right?

In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, "No." I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings--wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.

There’s a concept for you: a devout American.

And the thing is: What was all the fuss about? Do the Democrats really think they can get us to forget that they were asleep at the switch in the 1990s, along with everyone else?

I guess they really think that they can spin anything. And maybe they are right. We still think, thanks to liberal Whig history, that FDR saved the nation in the Great Depression. Only a few people think that FDR kept the nation mired in misery for ten long years because of stupid economic policy.

But with the end of the liberal media monopoly the job is a lot more difficult than it used to be.

Despite intense political pressure to pull the film right up until airtime, Disney/ABC stood tall and refused to give in. For this--for not buckling to threats from Democratic senators threatening to revoke ABC station licenses--Disney CEO Rober Iger and ABC executives deserve every commendation.

Yeah, let’s hear it for Disney. They took the punches and the political pressure but still put the show on. That takes a lot of courage.

Sticking to the Ground Game

Do you wonder why Republicans keep pulling rabbits out of a hat on election day? Donald Lambro says it’s the “ground game.”

And it was the ground game that helped Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee win his Republican primary against Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey.

[T]he Republican National Committee pumped $400,000 into the race on a voter identification-turnout drive that brought a record number of voters to the polls -- and gave the embattled Mr. Chafee his 54 percent to 46 percent victory

Of course, it’s one thing to spend $400,000 to bring out 62,000 GOP primary voters in one of the smallest states in the Union. The question is: can the GOP coaches make the ground game work nationally in the general election?

Sitting on a cash hoard of about $30 million, the RNC plans to replicate what they did in Rhode Island in about three-dozen House races and six or more Senate contests where Republican candidates are vulnerable.

Still, defense is defense. When do we get to switch to offense?

Jobs and Inequality

We’ve all heard the news that the US median income isn’t going up. Some commentators insist that things have been going downhill ever since 1973.

But David R. Henderson says just a minute. Take a look at the US Census data, particularly Table 3. Distribution of Households by Selected Characteristics within Income Quintiles: 2005.

Throughout the report, U.S. households are categorized by the quintile (fifth) they're in. In 2005, the lowest quintile had incomes of up to $19,178 and the highest quintile had incomes exceeding $91,705. People often picture families at all quintiles looking pretty much alike except for income and ethnicity. But that picture is false.

You see in one quintile, 64.2 percent of householders didn’t work at all during the year. And in another quintile 73.0 percent of householders “worked full-time, year-round.”

Now, which would you think is which?

Exactly. In the lowest quintile nearly two-thirds of householders didn’t work at all. And in the highest quintile they worked like dogs. Actually, in the highest quintile 76.3 percent of households had two or more earners, while in the lowest quintile 58.7 had no earners.

Here are the numbers, extracted from US Census Bureau Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, 2005. Table 3.

Extract from Table 3. Distribution of Households by Selected Characteristics within Income Quintiles: 2005 Characteristic Lowest Quintile “Poor” Highest Quintile “Rich” Number of Earners No earners 58.7% 2.6% One earner 35.9% 21.1% Two or more earners 5.5% 76.3% Work Experience of Householder Worrked full-time, year-round 14.0% 73.0% Worked part-time or part-year 21.9% 15.7% Did not work 64.2% 11.3%

Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Democrats Do Too Stand for Something

Republicans have been enjoying for some time the idea that Democrats don’t stand for anything. It goes along with the idea that Republicans are thinkers and Democrats are feelers.

Even Peggy Noonan agrees, sort of. She criticizes the Democrats for obsessing about Bush.

[I]f you're going to turn away from [Bush], you'd better be turning toward a plan, and the Democrats don't appear to have one.

Actually, the Democrats do have a plan. It’s just that they can’t talk about it. Rush Limbaugh understands them when he says that Democrats can’t admit who they are, because if they admitted who they are they couldn’t win the support of the American people.

The Democrats’ plan is to defend their turf. The problem is that it is huge. After a century of the welfare state they are strategically extended like the Germany Army in Russia in 1942.

You want to know how huge? Take the government share of GDP today and substract the government share in 1930. Start with all the New Deal legislation, all the Great Society legislation. Then add the huge expansion in education and health care. All this is Democratic dollars and Democratic votes.

If you are a Democrat your job is to defend this. All of it.

That’s why Democrats aren’t much interested in growing the economy. They aren’t much interested in fighting for freedom, justice, and the American Way. They have concerns much closer to home. They must fight to defend the funding for the government programs that keep them in yeasty Victorian houses, Toyota Priuses, and soulful weekend retreats.

Don’t forget that President Bush’s Ownership Society is a strategic project, a Schwerpunkt, aimed at the heart of the Democratic project. If it ever gets seriously off the ground then the American people will start to say: why do I need all these Democrats eating their heads off at my expense? What have they done for me lately?

When we say that the Democrats don’t have a plan, we mean that they don’t exactly know how to counter the encroaching Ownership Society, except to oppose it. All of it.

Google's For-profit Foundation

When Bill Gates set up his charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I was disappointed.

Here was a guy who had revolutionized the world of the computer, but when it came to philanthropy he was just doing routine stuff.

Of course, he had to, because liberals were all over him like a cheap suit asking him why he wasn’t giving it all away yet.

But the Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are different. Their foundation, Google.org, will be a for-profit foundation. What a concept!

Of course, the agenda for their foundation is depressingly blah—tackling “poverty, disease and global warming.” Oh dear. As if everyone and his brother isn’t already spending billions on all this.

Give me a billion or two and I would reinvent education, health care, and the social safety net on the model of the Road to the Middle Class. But hey, that is just my crazy idea.

Guess who is going to be director of Google.org. None other than Dr. Brilliant.

No, seriously! According to Katie Hafner in The New York Times,

Dr. [Larry] Brilliant, a 61-year-old physician and public health expert, has studied under a Hindu guru in a monastery at the foothills of the Himalayas and worked as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Aparently he applied for the job with an email to info@google.com, but they didn’t pay any attention.
Then “Dr. Brilliant was awarded the TED Prize, an award given at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference” and Google invited him to give a talk at the company.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Wal-Mart and the 3.3 Million Job Gap

Even conservative pundit George Will is joining the Up With Wal-Mart campaign with a piece about the Wal-Mart store just outside the city limits of Chicago. He writes about the resentful Wal-Mart shopper who didn’t get a job at the new store because

the person doing the hiring "had an attitude." So why is the woman shopping here anyway? She looks at the questioner as though he is dimwitted and directs his attention to the low prices of the DVDs on the rack next to her.

But the big question is not old economy jobs at Wal-Mart but the on-going mystery about the 3.3 million job gap at the Department of Labor. If you have one of those missing jobs, writes Ashby M. Foote III,
“contact Secretary Elaine Chao at www.dol.gov.”

The 3.3 million job gap is the difference between the job count in the Department of Labor’s Household Survey and its Establishment Survey.

[T]he BLS uses two monthly sample surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. For the top-down view, 160,000 businesses and government agencies are contacted for the Current Employment Statistics (CES), which is referred to as the “payroll” or “establishment” survey. This is the “headline” number, and it is the survey focused on by the press and the financial markets. For the bottom-up perspective, 60,000 households are contacted for the Current Population Survey (CPS), better known as the “household” survey.

Problem is that there is are 3.3 million jobs more in the Household Survey and nobody can figure out why.

Foote suggests that we should look to Chris Anderson and his book The Long Tail. According to Anderson there are three forces that are creating jobs at small “boutique” businesses, the ones that don’t show up on the radar of the Establishment Survey

Force 1: The democratization of the tools of production. (The obvious example is the PC as a tool for publishing and multimedia.)
Force 2: The democratization of the tools of distribution. (For instance, the combination of the PC and the Internet makes everyone a distributor).
Force 3: Connecting supply and demand. (Search filters and feedback loops like those found on Google, iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix help niche content find interested buyers and users.)

Still, you have to respect Wal-Mart and its 1.3 million old-style jobs. Because it is taking people with an attitude and little in the way of job skills and making them into productive members of the twenty-first century society.

Pity it didn’t have a job for the lady in Chicago.

The Transformation of North Korea

You gotta read this stunning analysis of North Korea, “The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism,” by Andrei Lankov.

He writes that the regime of Kim Jong Il is imploding as its Stalinist system has been slowly relaxing by the natural difficulty of keeping extreme political repression going. In the last decade, though, this process has accelerated as a result of economic collapse in 1991-95 and famine in 1996-1999.

The three big factors facilitating this process include:

Information: It used to be that people could only get their hands on radios, and that when doing military service. But now prosperous North Koreans can buy used DVD players and VCRs smuggled in from China. What they like to view are South Korean TV soap operas. These TV programs give the lie to the idea that 7 million South Koreans are unemployed and live in unimaginable poverty. In fact, North Koreans are non-plussed that South Korea is apparently richer than the border area of China—which looks pretty rich to them.

Economic System: When the Stalinist economy broke down the North Korean people had to develop an informal capitalist economy. It had all the bad features of informal economies everywhere including rapacious moneylenders and necessary bribes to officials. But people had to adapt or starve.

Diminishing Political Control: The economic crisis of the 1990s has led to the demoralization of the party cadre. Now they are willing to “turn a blind eye to certain phenomena, especially if monetarily rewarded to do so.” Anyway, since survival is achieved for most North Koreans by small-scale business activity, what’s the point of listening to powerless officials. The social hierarchy has changed too with formerly persecuted Japanese-Koreans and Chinese acquiring wealth and status through their foreign connections and businesses.

It’s an amazing story, and we will read more of it in the coming months and years.

The Divide Between Evangelicals and Libertarians

Ever since the beginning of the modern American conservative movement there has been a tension between traditional conservatives and libertarians. For traditional conservatives the greatest good is virtue. For libertarians the greatest good is liberty.

Now comes Ryan H. Sager, columnist at The New York Post, worrying again about a split between conservatives and libertarians in the Republican Party. He has a book about it: The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.

Ryan’s critique centers around the widely shared idea that the Republican Party abandoned its principles shortly after it gained control of Congress in 1994. Instead of cutting spending it took fright in the budget showdown of 1995 and caved in to the spenders. Now Republicans are in favor of big government as long as conservatives are in charge of it. Except that libertarians aren’t going to take it any more.

It is frustrating. We all know that big government is leading us down a road to national and moral bankruptcy. But try telling that to the beneficiaries of government programs and to the special interests that browse on government spending.

The complainers, I believe, do not give Bush and Rove enough credit. The cornerstone of the Bush/Rove politics is the building of an Ownership Society. They are slowly trying to move the federal government’s posture away from benefit programs and to build societal structures that empower people and expand choice.

Presumably their strategy is guided by a view that conservatives cannot expect to wean people away from government dependence until they have made them independent of government, or at least developed a clear path to independence. In this way the reduction in tax rates and the development of a network of individual choice initiatives like Roth IRAs, Health Savings Accounts, and school vouchers are all works in progress towards the ultimate goal: a society criss-crossed with safety nets built and maintained by the people not by government and
its experts.

Libertarians should take care about pushing their side of the argument too far. If the divide is between evangelicals and libertarians then it may be in fact a divide between women conservatives and men conservatives.

Modern Christian believers are said to be about 70 percent women. This is certainly true in the more enthusiastic sects like the Pentecostals and the Chinese house churches. Libertarianism has always been a rather muscular male thing.

Let us not open a divide in the conservative community between more community-minded women and more agent-minded men. It isn’t worth it.

Teaching Students About Tortured Souls

After a spate of student suicides in the 2003-04 academic year, New York University has come up with a response. It is a musical “The Reality Show: NYU,” and over 5,000 incoming students have seen it already, according to Karen W. Arenson in The New York Times. The production, which

will be shown twice more this month, tells of drugs and date rape, drinking and anorexia, depression and suicide.

Suppose that a spate of suicides had been reported at a Christian college. Might not questions be raised about the dangerous religious culture at the university, and how it was driving students to depression and suicide?

But this is a liberal university, so the college culture does not come into question. Instead we titillate the students with warnings about depression and date rape.

Of course, ever since the invention of the tortured creative soul back in the early days of Romanticism and the suicide of the German poet Hölderlin there has been an assumption that dark thoughts go with a creative commitment, the sensitive artist’s reaction to an uncaring, insensitive world.

Or maybe there is something utterly rancid at the bottom of the creative culture and its ideal of the tortured genius.

Like it or not, that is what we are stuck with until someone comes up with something better.

But can’t colleges come up with a soaring vision with which to inspire its new students? That, after all, is how religions, voluntary associations, and businesses do it. They indoctrinate their members with a sense that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

A General's View of the War on Terror

You’d expect that Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S Central Command, would have guarded opinions to give to talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. But you would expect to be able to glean some unexpected insight into what the US military sees happening in the Middle East.

Here are the take-aways for me.

1. Abizaid does not seem to be raising any red flags over the sectarian violence (or civil war, if you prefer) in Baghdad. “[W]e're confident [we] can, over time, move Baghdad in the right direction.”
   
2. “[W]e've got to keep the flow of natural resources moving through the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the Babel Mandeb, which take an awful lot of air and naval power.” Hmm.
   
3. “I think a nuclear armed Iran in the region is very, very unstabilizing for the region. It would create a regional problem with all of the other major countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It would certainly create a problem for the Turks... And certainly, it creates a problem for Israel.”
   
4. “I also see a growing problem with Iran's internal stability, as people there become less and less satisfied with the quality of life that their government's given them.”
   
5. “And you certainly will see continued instability in places where the extremists continue to operate, such as in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In many ways, the long term health and prosperity of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are bigger strategic problems for us, and we need to do all we can to help the legitimate governments there fight against the extremists the way that they've been doing.”
   

In this view, the two problems are Sunni and Shia extremism, and the significant risks are the extremist threats to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The other big problem is the idea of Iran possessing nuclear weapons.

It’s a different view than the MSM template of Bush Lied and the Mess in Iraq.

Tearing Up The Last Half-Millennium

The events of 9/11, according to Michelle Malkin, awoke her from a slumber.

The mass murder nearly 3,000 innocent people on American soil forced open my eyes to the Islamic holy war against the West, freedom and modernity. The battle has raged not for years or decades, but for centuries -- well before the Crusades.

If you want to know how the holy war works, writes Malkin, just go down the list: Jihad, Infidels, Sharia, Caliphate, Taqiyya (deception), and Dhimmitude (inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam).

The striking thing about the Muslim agenda is how it hasn’t changed over the years. But the striking thing about the West is how much it has changed.

After the religious wars of the seventeenth century, a generation of thinkers tried to think up a society in which these poisonous conflicts over divine truth could be avoided. They came up with the separation of church and state and the idea of tolerance for people you didn’t agree with.

In the first demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences, something extraordinary happened that nobody had thought about. The market economy grew like topsy in the space afforded by the new, if imperfect, tolerance (which was good because it spread prosperity).

But this sudden explosion of markets and trading had a frightening effect. It seemed that it would utterly destroy the old and the familiar, the organic institutions that people had lived under for centuries. What should be done?

“What is to be done” is the watchword of the last two hundred years. Should the market be encouraged? Should it be eliminated? Should we build new institutions to bind people into a sense of belonging? Or should we let everyone just hang out and figure things out for themselves?

But this vast dialogue has not occurred in the Islamic world. There was no reformation, no Enlightenment, no centuries-long dialogue about what we do now. Yet now we see Islamic hot-heads saying that the West has got it all wrong and they are going to clear it all away with jihad, with sharia law, a new caliphate, and dhimmitude.

Sorry fellahs. An agenda like this just doesn’t sound like it will end happily.

It sounds more like a bunch of ignorant teenagers on the lookout for mischief. It sounds like the sort of project that adults put a stop to right now before it gets out of hand and people get hurt.

However flawed and corrupt the West, it must be agreed that real knowledge was gained in the last half-millennium about how to construct a global society.

Tearing it all up isn’t going to solve anything.

But hey, maybe all this mess would never have happened without President Bush and his war on terror.

Oh, I forgot. The war on terror came after 9/11.

Two Kinds of Chess

There are two kinds of chess in the world. There is the western game of chess, in which the pieces move about the board. And there is Chinese chess, in which you put your pieces, or stones, on the board never to move them again.

I say this in connection with the continuing political argument over 9/11 and the war on terror. Democrats are all over the board, yelling at one moment that Bush is to blame, at another that Clinton is not to blame, that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, that the whole thing is “Bush’s War.”

You’ll note that the Republicans have not been rushing around saying this one day and that the other. Instead President Bush is playing it the Chinese way, putting markers on the board and never moving them.

The flap over ABC’s “The Path to 9/11” shows all this with disturbing clarity. The Democrats run a week-long spin extravaganza, with the Clintons soberly asking for the truth, aged historians talking about “disingenuous” disregard for the truth, and Democratic officeholders issuing naked threats about broadcast licenses.

In the end, everyone watched the Sunday Night Football game instead of “The Path to 9/11.”

Media critic L. Brent Bozell III reports on all the Clinton shenanigans. He closes with a quote from a Kosite:

As one blogger at the Daily Kos pleaded about the ABC film: "So who is the greater threat to democracy? Terrorists or media consolidation?" Nothing, but nothing will bring this crowd to reality.

This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Because we have to ask ourselves: Where did this dunderhead learn this crazy conspiracy stuff? And the answer probably is: in college.

Meanwhile President Bush continues fighting “his” war on terror, in behalf of all of us whether we get it or not.

Why the West Won't Win Against Islam

We all know that we will win the war against Islamic fascism. Or will we? Author David Selbourne sets out ten reasons why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated. Selbourne is author of the book The Losing Battle with Islam.

1. Disagreement in the non-Muslim world about what is really going on.
   
2. The nature of Islam is misunderstood. It is not a religion. “It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems.”
   
3. “[T]he low level of Western leadership, in particular in the United States.
   
4. “[T]he egotistical competitiveness... of “experts” and commentators on Islam, from “Islamophobes” to “academic apologists.”
   
5. “[T]he confusion of ‘progressives’ about the Islamic advance,” viewing Muslims through the lens of colonialism and multiculturalism.
   
6. “[T]he vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses.”
   
7. “[T]he moral poverty of the West’s, and especially America’s, own value system.” Obedience to Allah will beat freedom and liberty.
   
8. The skill and effectiveness of Muslim media and propaganda.
   
9. The dependency of the West on the Middle East’s oil resources.
   
10. The notion that “technology-driven modernity and market-driven progress are innately superior to the ideals of ‘backward’ Islam.”
    

The clarity and the forcefulness of these ideas are helpful in thinking about what the West must do to counter the Muslim threat.

But the biggest thing to think about is the lesson of the Enlightenment.

The great Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century were trying to find a path out of the brutal religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their solution was to back off from the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful. They proposed instead a society in which these absolutes were removed from the public square into the private realm. In politics we would be content with the fairly good, the true enough, and the merely pretty.

The result, of course, was the staggering prosperity revolution of global capitalism. It was when the West abandoned the Islamic notion of a “transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems” that it began its breathtaking climb to world domination.

The Blank Page of History

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the new Hitler? And Osama bin Laden the new Lenin? Is Iraq the new Vietnam?

The problem with our national analysis of the war on terror is that most of us don’t know much history, according to Jonah Goldberg. So we go cherry-picking where we already know there are cherries.

One of the main reasons we leap to analogies about World War II and the Cold War is that it’s the only history most of us know.

...

If Iraq is Vietnam, we allegedly have no choice but to accept the futility of our presence there and depart. If the war on terror is like the Nazi menace, it’s time to wax Churchillian.

It’s true that the analogy of Ahmadinejad to Hitler is pretty strained.

Iran is an economic and military weakling... [whereas] Der Fuehrer [had] a strong economy and an enormous military to accomplish his objectives.

The difference, of course, is nuclear weapons. A military weakling like Iran looks a lot different with the destructive power of nuclear weapons.

Or does it? It is, after all, telling that the US and the Soviet Union never used nuclear weapons during the cold war. How seriously should the world take Iran and North Korea—with or without nuclear weapons?

The problem is: We don’t know. “[H]istory may be offering us a blank page.” And that is why everyone disagrees about what kind of a war we are in. If we are in a war.

If Democrats Win in November

What if Democrats win in November? What will they do? Richard E. Cohen runs down their agenda.

[Democratic House Leader Nancy] Pelosi has also promised that within 100 hours after taking control of the House on January 3, Democrats will pass legislation to increase the minimum wage, mandate the negotiation of Medicare prescription drug prices, fully implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, and repeal tax benefits for big oil companies.

OK. Those are all policy initiatives that will help Democratic voters in the short term. What else?

Barbara Boxer wants to legislate reductions in greenhouse gases; Ted Kennedy wants to reduce student loan interest rates. Charles Rangel “wants a more bipartisan policy on international trade, including better protections for U.S. workers.”

Then there is this:

For many key Democrats, the emerging strategy -- should they win some congressional control this November -- appears to be to try to score legislative victories where possible, thwart GOP initiatives, and wage an aggressive oversight campaign to expose what they see as Bush administration shortcomings and neglected national problems.

Er, isn’t that what they have been doing for the last six years? Democrats have always been good at oversight, that is when it involves public hearings with eevil corporate executives brought to the bar of browbeating. You can bet that Rep. Henry Waxman will be a “barracuda”
in this department, according to Republican Rep. Tom Davis.

It is interesting, though, that there is nary a word in Cohen’s article about Iraq and the war on terror.

I wonder why?

The Path to Censorship

Imagine the following news item in your friendly local newspaper.

A furious former President Bush is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to Kuwait" grossly misrepresents his actions in the first Iraq war - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

Imagine the screams. Imagine the outrage. Censorship! Abuse of power!

Actually it would never have happpened. Republicans know better than to even whisper a suggestion that a broadcast TV network should edit, or, God forbid, withdraw a drama on network TV.

But when ABC puts up a mini-series “The Path to 9/11” that dramatizes the ineffective policies and actions of the Clinton administration in the happy-go-lucky Nineties, the old Clinton War Room swings into action. As reported in The New York Post:

A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to 9/11" grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

But wait. I thought the Democrats believed that the war on terror was a Bush Lie, a put-up job to scare the American people. I thought that President Clinton believes that Global Warming is the number one problem in the world.

Why should the Clintonoids and the former president care about 9/11? It’s just a law-enforcement problem, isn’t it? Really not that important when compared to global warming, institutional racism, gay marriage, and embryonic stem cell research.

So maybe the Democrats are misleading us on the war on terror as well. They know it is important, and they know that the American people think it is important.

The problem is that they can’t appear to take the war too seriously. Their base won’t let them.

The Election Campaign Begins

With Labor Day behind us we can expect to see, in the next couple of weeks, how the Bush administration intends to fight the mid-term elections.

Many people have noted how the Bushies seem to manage to pull themselves out of the ditch every election cycle—just after “everyone” has consigned them to electoral disaster.

The reason for this is not remarkable. In normal times the informal alliance of Democrats and liberal media means that the liberal world view occupies most of the public square. Only in the conservative subculture does an alternative view exist.

Come the campaign season the Bushies can engage the American people and advance their ideas and policies against the Democrats using the president’s bully pulpit and the paid media of campaign commercials.

With two speeches under his belt it is clear that President Bush and his staff have prepared a full-scale campaign to win the hearts and minds of the American people. They intend to confound those who have already conceded the election to the Democrats.

In his speech Tuesday, the president called for Congress to pass new legislation to clarify uncertainties in the legal status of unlawful combatants. Specifically, he declared:

I'm sending Congress legislation to specifically authorize the creation of military commissions to try terrorists for war crimes.

In addition, and perhaps for patriotic Americans this is the most important, the president said:

I'm asking Congress to pass legislation that will clarify the rules for our personnel fighting the war on terror. First, I'm asking Congress to list the specific, recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act -- so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies. Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. Third, I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts -- in U.S. courts. The men and women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs.

These are important issues that have needed attention for some time. Some have complained that the Bush administration has not addressed them earlier. Obviously it is best to send them up to Congress in the weeks before an election. It helps concentrate the mind—of Congress and the American people. That is what the Bush administration is doing.

You can complain about the timing as a naked attempt to politicize the war on terror. But timing is everything. The president has a responsibility to advance his agenda at the best moment. Otherwise, why bother?

The Democrats have had a fine old time for the last year traducing the president and our war on terror, specifically against the Islamist movement that would like to overturn the Pax Americana. It has been very difficult to counter their careless and vindictive talk.

The time to engage with them in a battle is at election time, and that is what the president is doing.

The Two Nations in Education

How come if the US education system is so poor, asks Robert Samuelson, that the economy is so good? How do you answer the following riddle:

Why do Americans do so badly on international educational comparisons and yet support an advanced economy?

I know. The answer to the riddle is simple: Democrats and Republicans. Democrats are the cause of the lousy school system, and Republicans are the cause of the advanced economy. But let us allow Samuelson to suggest a more nuanced explanation.

The short answer is that the US has two systems for the education of the American people.

In trying to explain the riddle, let me offer a distinction between the U.S. school system and the American learning system.

The school system is the formal system of schools and colleges. What some of us call the “education blob.”

The American learning system is more complex. It's mostly post-high school and, aside from traditional colleges and universities, includes the following: community colleges; for-profit institutes and colleges; adult extension courses; online and computer-based courses; formal and informal job training; self-help books.

Exhibit A in the learning system is the for-profit University of Phoenix founded in 1976.

Now it has about 300,000 students (half taking online courses and half attending classes in 163 U.S. locations). The average starting age: 34.

Samuelson reckons that “the American learning system” is effective for two main reasons. As he puts it:

• First, it provides second chances.
  
• Second, it's job-oriented.
  

What we Americans need to think about is how to transfer the successful features of the American leaning system over to the US school system. Problem is that the US school system costs a ton of money and it doesn’t deliver too much to the bottom line.

(No I don’t mean eevil capitalist profits. I mean outcomes, as in educated, productive people.)

My own view is, first, that there is a lot of value in getting basic literacy and numeracy, but that parents understand that so deeply that we don’t need the government enforcing it.

Second, I think that most teenagers should be out in the job market. And it wouldn’t hurt if they were experiencing some mild-to-moderate exploitation. Because that is what will get them off their duffs and into some job-oriented learning.

Third, I’m inclined to support some sort of government-backed second-chance operation. As bureaucratic and unionized as community colleges have become, they do perform an important function. Probably it’s a function that would be better performed by a private-sector, government-subsidized operation.

As for the current US schools sector. You tell me: What’s the point?

The Real Plame Story

For perennial hawk Frank J. Gaffney Jr. the astonishing thing about the Plame game was the identification of leaker Richard Armitage as “no partisan gunslinger.” What do you mean, he writes.

Rich Armitage in truth is the consummate partisan gunslinger. It's just that his partisanship is... the other sense of a partisan: one who wages war from behind enemy lines.

But that is not what astonishes me. What astonishes me is that the unmasking of Armitage as the leaker who put the name of Valerie Plame, CIA wife of former Ambassador Wilson into the public square unmasks something much bigger. “A conspiracy so vast...” as the saying went in another time when the loyalty of the State Department was in question.

It shows that the State Department has been blocking and hindering the Bush Administration’s foreign policy ever since 9/11, and that nobody has paid the price for this disloyalty.

Indeed, it is the Bushies who have paid the price with three years of investigations and humiliations—while everyone else looked on and sniggeringly knew what had really happened all the time.

I would say that many senior revolving-door Republicans, the kind who occupy presidential sub-cabinet appointments in a Republican adminsitration, are going to be taking a long, slow look at the State Department and CIA operations of the past few years. The next Republican president will have a State Department task group whose job it will be to make sure, at any cost, that enough of the president’s men get jobs at State to keep it on-side, or at least prevent it from actively working to sabotage the president’s foreign policy.

Don't Look For Education Reform From Within

When you have been president of Harvard, as Derek Bok has been, or dean of Harvard College, as Harry Lewis has been, you ought to have some ideas about how to fix higher education.

But according to Robert Kagan himself a former president of Yale, neither Derek Bok in Our Underachieving Colleges nor Harry R. Lewis in Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education has a clue what to do about the “imperial faculty.”

They wield their statistics and show how much trouble colleges are in. And they understand it is a problem of leadership.

Both Harry Lewis and Derek Bok have entered a devastating judgment on contemporary university leadership — more devastating, and more self-incriminating, than they appear to know.

But neither of them are really willing to tackle the real problem, an education system taken over by its producers.

As things stand now, no president appears capable of taming the imperial faculty; almost none is willing to try; and no one else from inside the world of the universities or infected by its self-serving culture is likely to stand up and say “enough,” or to be followed by anyone if he does. Salvation, if it is to come at all, will have to come from without.

But this is hardly surprising. When people have the power to control their terms of employment they abuse that power damnably. The only thing that gets the powerful to reform is the threat of disaster, the moment when Attila the Hun gallops over the horizon.

That moment seems as yet a long way off.

Mortgage Moms Feel the Heat

Back in the Nineties it was the Soccer Moms who voted for Bill Clinton. Then after 9/11 it was the Security Moms who voted for President Bush.

Now, according to Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post, it’s the Mortgage Moms, people who are up their eyeballs in debt.

Flat wages and rising debt nationally have converged to leave millions of middle-class households feeling acutely vulnerable to bumps in their financial planning.

Debt. The numbers are huge.

The amount of mortgage debt alone has more than doubled since 2000, to nearly $9 trillion.
...
Among the most exposed are those who bought into one of the great fads in mortgage lending in recent years -- adjustable rates. Next year, $1 trillion worth of adjustable-rate mortgages -- about 11 percent of all outstanding mortgage debt -- is scheduled to readjust to a higher interest rate for the first time, according to LoanPerformance, a research company.

Right now we are at the stage in the business cycle where people are still talking about a “soft landing.” Humans are, by their nature, hopeful.

But that puff of smoke you see when an airplane lands at your local international airport is a reminder that on any landing, soft or hard, someone gets burned.

And the Mortage Moms, who are getting burned by the ratcheting adjustable mortgage rates, are not likely to be voting for the party in power this fall.

French Ex-pats in London

The French were already having a rough summer, with presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy advising them to get a clue in his new book Témoignage (Testimony).

But now comes Marc Levy with his bestselling novel

Mes Amis Mes Amours, the story of two divorced Parisian men who move to the UK to raise their children. The plot was really just a framing device for Levy’s real purpose: a love letter to his adopted home of London.

What? A Frenchman in love with Britland? Certainly. As Levy tells Giles Hattersley, “England is so marvellous!”

The French are not amused. In a recent debate on French radio

It might be acceptable, they conceded, to live in London for some high-paying job, but the idea of crossing the Channel to improve on l’art de vivre was anathema.

So sit down in London at a café

on Bute Street, known affectionately among London’s large French population as Frog Alley. This evening, in the shadow of the Lycée Français, the bookshops and boulangeries are full of yummy mamans buying their children ice-creams and talking French.

Frog Alley? You mean the French ex-pats in Britland have a sense of humor? This is something I have to see.

Want more? Here is Levy again.

Paris is like a dead city with no progress while everything here [in London] has the buzz.

Or this, on French women. Too many of them adopt

the “Ce n’est pas possible” attitude as a life philosophy... that power can only come with saying ‘non’. They say it without thinking, all the time, every day, to everyone they meet. It’s like they think, “Lets start with ‘non’, have a think, then if we change our minds we can say ‘non’ to ‘non’.

Whereas British women, by all accounts...

Dependency Ratio Hits WSJ

Earlier this week I criticized an article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. In the article Gladwell criticized the notion of a company defined-benefit pension plan. It could never work because of the natural changes in the “dependency ratio” between workers and non-workers.

But I critiqued the notion that the dependency ratio is out of our control. The dependency ratio is only fixed because we chose to fix it, politically. When it comes to the crunch, children could work and so could older people (Disclosure: I’m 60).

Not, you understand, that I’d like to be working at 70. I’d hate it.

Today Ron Gettelfinger, president of the United Auto Workers, gets his say in the Wall Street Journal. Right on Malcolm, he writes.

[I]t makes no sense to transfer these obligations [of pensions and health insurance] to individual households. We need to... protect and develop well-funded public programs which cover every man, woman, and child in America.

Well, you can see where Ron is going. More taxes and more political control in America. But it doesn’t change the basic problem. Whatever benefits are promised or are paid, they have to come out of the present economy. And the more you “fix” things with public programs and the like, the more of a crash you’ll get when extravagant promises can’t be paid.

That is why it is a good idea to get people to declare, by their spending and savings patterns, just how much a retirement pension and health care means to them.

Everyone is in favor of a pension or health care that costs them nothing. The question is, how much are people prepared to sacrifice for future income and health care?

President Bush Makes His Case

Yesterday at the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City President Bush began a series of speeches to bolster support for the war on terror.

Earlier in the week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created controversy by delivering a “bad cop” speech accusing the president’s critics of “moral confusion.” But a day later Mr. Bush got to make “good cop” in which he laid out his case in positive terms without descending to blaming his critics.

In The New York Times Anne E. Kornblut and Sheryl Gay Stolberg made it clear that Bush’s attempt to link all fronts in the war on terror together was wrong.

In making the case that the war in Iraq is “the central front in our fight against terrorism,” the president linked Iraq, the summer battles between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the growing nuclear threat in Iran under the general rubric of his freedom agenda.



At the same time, he placed various factions of terrorists — Sunnis who swear allegiance to Al Qaeda, Shiite radicals who join groups like Hezbollah and so-called homegrown terrorists — under one umbrella.



Experts said that might be overstating the facts.



“‘Network of radicals’ suggests they are actually connected in some practical fashion, and that’s obviously not the case,” said Steven Simon, a State Department official in the administrations of President Bill Clinton and Mr. Bush’s father.

Well, maybe. But there is no doubt that we are engaged in a war against all of these forces, all of whom regard the United States as the Great Satan and all of whom are actively using military force against the United States.

And that is a truth that hardly needs overstating.

It is true that President Bush is trying to gin up support for his policies right before an election. But since the ongoing war requires the continuing support of the American people, he is bound to work to secure our approval at election time. It is by elections, after all, that we the people set the broad outlines of the policy of the government of the United States.