NYT: Take a Powder, Dems

The nation’s newspaper of record finally said it. Responding to a letter
“from an opponent of the invasion who urged the American left to `get over its anger over
President Bush’s catastrophic blunder’ and start trying to figure out how to win
the conflict that exists,”
The New York Times opined:

No one wants a disaster in Iraq, and Mr. Bush’s critics can put aside, at least temporarily,
their anger at the administration for its hubris, its terrible planning and its inept conduct
of the war in return for a frank discussion of where to go from here.

Oh good. So now after encouraging the crazies for two years the Times has suddenly decided it
is time to get responsible. Maybe that is because Bush has almost won the war (it certainly is telling
that the noted strategic expert Sen. Kennedy (D-MA) has recently called the Iraq War a quagmire).

On the matter of Sen. Kennedy, Tony Blankley thinks that
“Ted Kennedy and the exit strategy crowd” can be explained by modern developmental
psychology. At a certain age, children get to believe that they can manipulate the world through mere wishes.
“Babies cry and mother brings them milk... They cry and mother changes their nappy. Thus the immature mind develops the magical idea that
the physical world can be manipulated by merely wishing for something.” It is telling that Sen. Kennedy would
never think of developing an exit strategy for something he believes in. Like government education.

Liberals have been telling this Vietnam Quagmire story to themselves for a generation.
But there was never a quagmire, and the American people never turned against the war. What happened was
that liberals turned against the war and managed to pitch President Nixon out of office.
Then a Democratic Congress cut the funds to support South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese
invaded the south, and that was the end of the Republic of South Vietnam.
After it was all over liberals needed a narrative that exculpated them from
their responsibility for sending twenty million people into slavery. They decided that their policy
to get out of Vietnam at any cost was a noble attempt to extricate the United States from its Vietnam quagmire.

Free Education for Africa?

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown want the rich countries to donate $7 billion a year for free
education in Africa. But the BBC sent a team to Africa, reports
James Bartholomew,
author of The Welfare State We’re In,
and found that there’s a vibrant private education system in Africa. In Nigeria it outperforms the
free state education sector.

Prof Tooley organised tests of 3,000 children at a random selection of state
and fee-paying schools in Lagos. In every subject, children at the fee-paying schools did
considerably better. In maths, they scored an average of 56 marks whereas children at the
free state schools got 41. In English
they scored 65 marks whereas children at the free schools got only 42.

Bartholomew reports that “many extremely poor parents in the shanty town of Makoko on the Lagos lagoon in Nigeria make great financial sacrifices to send their children to”
the fee-paying schools. Now why does that sound familiar? Because James Mill, father of John
Stuart Mill, made an inspection of fee-paying schools in England in the early nineteenth century.
Mill “wrote of `the rapid progress which the love of education is making among the
lower orders in England.’ He noted that

There is hardly a village that has not something of a school; and not many children
of either sex who are not taught more or less, reading and writing. We have met with
families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet
for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”

This fee-paying system brought England to almost universal literacy in 1870 when the government
started taking over the schooling of children. Today, according to Bartholomew, functional illiteracy
in Britain in about 20 percent of adults.

NY Times Notices Ireland

Did you know that Ireland is the richest country in Europe? You did?
No doubt you read widely, and don’t rely on The New York Times for
your news.

But if you are a Times reader, you are no doubt all
charged up as you learned for the first time from
Thomas Friedman in an opinion piece that

the country that for hundreds of years was best
known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and
leprechauns today has a per capita G.D.P. higher
than that of Germany, France and Britain.

How did Ireland do it? Well, here of course, Friedman tells only part
of the story. This is The New York Times after all. The Irish implemented

a program of fiscal austerity, slashing corporate taxes
to 12.5 percent, far below the rest of Europe, moderating wages and
prices, and aggressively courting foreign
investment. In 1996, Ireland made college education basically free...

But if you want the rest of the story, you’ll need to turn to
Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA)
the evil Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
“Happy Saint Patrick’s Day,” he chortled, as he published the following facts on
the Irish economic miracle:

IRELAND TAX FACTS 1985 2002 % change Top corporate tax rate 50% 12.5% -75% Top marginal income tax rate 60% 42% -30% Top capital gains tax 60% 20% -67%

Marginal tax rates, Tom. Marginal tax rates. It’s the secret
Republican weapon. Just thought you’d like to know.

Let's Teach Liberals the Virtue of a Dead Constitution

How do you like your constitution? Living or dead?
Conservative Jonah Goldberg
says he’d rather have it dead.

What, you say?
“Without a ‘living’ constitution, slavery and other such evils would still be constitutional!”

Come now. Tell the truth and shame the devil. Slavery and women’s suffrage were achieved with
the dead letter of the constitutional amendment. When we talk about the “living” constitution
we are talking about judge-made amendments to the meaning of the constitution.

The sad truth is that liberals will only discover the virtues of a dead constitution on the day
that their
ox is gored by the living constitution.
For twenty years, liberals loved the independent counsel law enacted in the aftermath of
Watergate. It was the most tremendous fun to put Republican officials on the rack. But when
Republicans started using the law to investigate President Clinton and his administration, then
liberals suddenly discovered that they didn’t like the idea of an independent counsel at all.

What would be a good issue to start on, to teach liberals about the danger of a living constitution?

“Experience keeps a dear school,” Benjamin Franklin said, “but a fool will learn in no other.”

All Power Corrupts...

Just in time for the contradictory Supreme Court decisions regulating the public display of the Ten Commandments, the
indispensible Lee Harris
explains what is going on.

There is nothing ludicrous or stupid about the Supreme Court issuing murky or contradictory
opinions. When people ask you to make decisions about every little thing for them, you
take advantage of it. Because when people let you decide everything for them, what you
have is power.

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that those with power had an unlimited
right to exercise this power, and observed that they invariably will seek to push this right to
the utmost extreme that they can get away with -- anticipating Lord Acton’s
famous remark about the corrupting effects of absolute power.

Even back in the nineteenth century foreign observers noted the exaggerated respect that
Americans had for the Supreme Court. And in the era of the liberal court since 1954 of course, liberals
have made a national cult out of the Supreme Court because the court was willing to share
power with them.

Fortunately, Spinoza also remarked that there is a way out of this nightmare. Eventually people
get fed up with the abuse of power, and they rise up to “cast out the few who have arrogated
to themselves mastery over the fate of the many.”

The trouble is that people with power seldom go quietly into the night.

Ignore that Laffer Behind the Curtain

Democrats are still holding their hands in front of their eyes refusing to believe in the supply
side revolution, but the rest of us can take a look at the facts from government tax collections
this year.

Supply side economics says that the critical factor in economic performance is the marginal
rate of taxation, i.e., the share of your next dollar of income that the government demands. In the
Bush 2003 tax cuts:

The capital-gains tax (for gains held at least one year)
was cut to 15 percent from 20 percent while the maximum tax rate on corporate dividends
was slashed to 15 percent from 38.6 percent.

This year, according to
Michael T. Darda,
there has been a “45.2 percent fiscal year to date surge
in corporate tax revenues and [a] 35 percent jump in non-withheld (i.e., capital gains) receipts.”
In any estimation, this has to be remarkable.

What’s that? Oh, of course, I agree Democrats. This surge in revenue just couldn’t be due to the supply-side Bush tax rate cuts.
It just couldn’t be. No, there is no chance. Not a chance in hell. No, there must be another reason,
a completely different reason. But whatever the reason is, it couldn’t be the result of a healthy expanding
economy responding to the Bush tax cuts, the Bush tax rate cuts.

Steyn: Burn Baby Burn

What do you think we conservatives are? Wimps? You think we need a
flag-burning amendment to deal with a few lefties burning
our flag? Why, the whole point about Old Glory to
Mark Steyn is that

A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned,
that’s not a sign of its weakness but of its strength. If you can’t stand the heat of
your burning flag, get out of the superpower business. It’s the left that believes the
state can regulate everyone into thought-compliance. The right should understand that the
battle of ideas is won out in the open.

So we don’t need no flag-burning amendment to the constitution.
Go ahead lefties, we say. Be our guest. Be like the sainted Rachel Corrie why don’t you.
Burn baby, burn!