Heritage Quote

"I will venture to assert that no combination of designing men under heaven will be capable of making a government unpopular which is in its principles a wise and good one, and vigorous in its operations."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

10,000

Yesterday on May 30, 2006 at 7:52:53 AM, my 10,000th visitor appeared (very, very briefly) from Georgetown University.

That is quite a milestone. Thank you all for reading my stuff.

My goal here has been to balance the mostly left-leaning coverage in the mainstream media with the other side of the stories.

I hope I have been successful in achieving that goal.

Cheers!

Haditha context

Dan Riehl has posted a history of U.S. forces in Haditha in an attempt to show that our history their has not all been butchering civilians, as recent allegations are claiming.

Below the fold are dozens of links to stories and images involving operations of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines in and around Haditha both before and after the incident. None of them are meant to explain away any wrong doing. But there is a Marine history and a legacy in Haditha that's far from negative when viewed in its totality.

I hope and pray that our Marines did not intentionally murder civilians there. But if they did, we need to punish them publicly and with extreme prejudice. Because that is not how America's military does things.

Recommended reading.

Why they fight

Bob McManus has a good article at the New York Post about the Sailors and Marines aboard the U.S.S. Kearsarge and their take on defending America.

"I am part of something larger than myself. I am part of an organization that stands for something."

Indeed it does, and thank God for that.

Thank God for men like Maj. Curtin and the thousands upon thousands of young Americans now under arms - men and women equally dedicated to faithful service to America, never mind the challenge and never mind the danger.

And, of course, for all those who have fallen - and who will fall - to maintain America as an exemplar of peace and freedom in a too-often brutal, benighted world.

The sailors and Marines of Kearsarge get it.

I highly recommend it.

Get over it and move forward

Owen West, a reserve Marine major who served in Iraq and is the founder of Vets for Freedom has a thoughtful op-ed up at the New York Times about how we need to get over past issues concerning Iraq and move on against Islamofascism.

First, in battle you move forward from where you are, not where you want to be. No one was more surprised that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction than the soldiers who rolled into Iraq in full chemical protective gear. But it is time for the rest of the country to do what the military was forced to: get over it.

Go read the rest . . .

[Via Instapundit.]

Heritage Quote

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

-- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

Remember

Jack Dunphy has a good opinion piece up at NRO that talks about a cure for America's attention deficit disorder.

Mrs. Dunphy and I were among the 2,000 or so people who visited the [Los Angeles National] cemetery on Monday to observe Memorial Day, and if I’m any judge of social status I’d guess that only a few of them hailed from any of those elite nearby zip codes. What a shame it is that the people who most enjoy the blessings of American liberty seem to be the least grateful to those who through our history have fought to secure those very blessings.

Go read the whole thing. And think about it. Please.

Amok time for CNN?

It seems as if CNN needs to get a new translator. Mohammed, over at Iraq The Model, an Iraqi, has pointed out that CNN misrepresented a statement made by Iraq's Foreign Minister. He expresses some doubt about CNN's veracity and/or competence:

Does the CNN have problems with translation from Arabic to English or is it a case of deliberate twisting of facts?

Go read the rest.

In Memoriam

Heritage Quote

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

-- John Adams (in Defense of the British Soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre, 4 December 1770)

Honor our noble dead

At 3 PM, your local time, please take one minute to honor the fallen during America's National Moment of Remembrance today.

Because they fell on our behalf.

Honor, not pity

OpinionJournal has some interesting information on the media's predilection for victimizing our troops -- rather than honoring them.

It's true for many of us, though. A good read with some tips on how to honor those among us who are fighting for our freedom.

It's in the extended entry . . .

Victors, Not Victims
Honor soldiers. Don't pity them.

Friday, May 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Here's a Memorial Day quiz:

1. Who is Jessica Lynch?

Correct. She's the Army private captured, and later rescued, in the early days of the war.

2. Who is Leigh Ann Hester?

Come on. The Kentucky National Guard vehicle commander was awarded a Silver Star last year for fighting off an insurgent attack on a convoy in Iraq. The first woman to receive a Silver Star since World War II, and the first woman ever to receive one for close combat.

If you don't recognize Sergeant Hester's name, that's not surprising. While Private Lynch's ordeal appears in some 12,992 newspaper and broadcast reports on the Factiva news service, Sergeant Hester and her decoration for extraordinary valor show up in only 162.

One difference: Sergeant Hester is a victor, while Private Lynch can be seen as a victim. And when it comes to media reports about the military these days, victimology is all the rage. For every story about someone who served out of conviction and resolutely went on with his civilian life, there are many more articles about a soldier's failure or a veteran's floundering.

It's a sign of some progress that the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are not spit upon and shunned as Vietnam vets were. Yet there may be something more pernicious about mouthing "Support Our Troops" while also asserting that many of them are poor, uneducated dupes who were cannon fodder overseas and have come home as basket cases, plagued by a range of mental, emotional and financial problems.

The vast majority of vets don't fit that description. Many, like one returned Army guardsman we talked to, chalk up this portrayal to the media's fascination with bad news in general. As for his combat in Iraq, both "going to war and coming home is very overwhelming," he says. "But you make choices in life . . . and through inner strength and support, I am making a choice that I want to be healthy."

In some cases, the depiction of military personnel as damaged goods serves the antiwar agenda. Yet retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Tom Linn sees more basic impulses at work. "I honestly believe it is guilt" and even resentment, he says. The military type as misfit "is a stereotype that a lot of people from the Vietnam era have held on to." Then, as now, "they saw men and women who did more than they did . . . and they'd compensate by casting those folks in an inferior status."

---

This Memorial Day, most of us will remember the Americans who have served their country since the Revolutionary War not with pity but with admiration. For those who want to show their gratitude, Major John Morris has some recommendations. He's deputy chaplain for Minnesota's Army National Guard and a founder of a state program called Reintegration: Beyond Reunion. Its broad goal, he explains, is to help returning guardsmen and reservists frame their "experience, to draw from it everything that they can to grow into productive citizens."

How can we help? For one thing, he says, don't assume that all struggling vets are sick, since what looks like abnormal behavior may be culture shock. But do give vets and their families the tools to adjust. Major Morris explains: "Schools, look out for these military kids. Neighbors, cut their grass and shovel their snow, baby-sit and do chores around the house. Employers, make sure those jobs are still there." It's the least we can do, he says: "Since there are so few of us fighting the war, it's easy for the rest of us to try."

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Heritage Quote

"Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!"

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 11, 1787)

What she said!

Phoenix is a bit upset about the scofflaws in Washington, D.C..

She makes some good points. Go read her post.

Freedom of religion

In Iraq, no less. Check it out.

Rioting

Gateway Pundit reports on the rioting in Iran.

Defending us

Daniel Heninger, at OpinionJournal, has an interesting piece about Congress, national security, and video games:

For awhile after 9/11 the war on terror was a serious national enterprise. Then it entered a twilight zone between the reality of terrorist killing and the abstractions of our domestic politics. The subject became a kind of political video game in which political partisans--the press, the pols, the bureaucracies--attempt to splatter each other. The best-selling version of the game has been Warrantless Wiretaps, introduced for political playstations by the New York Times.

It's worth reading.

Heritage Quote

"They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men."

-- John Adams (Novanglus No. 7, 6 March 1775)

Imperial Congress

The editors at NRO have a good op-ed up about Congress' latest departure from reality.

By nothing more than dumb luck, the Republican-controlled Congress—lambasted for the junkets, earmarks, and “culture of corruption” that have aligned to produce the lowest approval ratings in memory—was handed a shot at some desperately needed redemption. All its leaders had to do was make the right choice between condemning the rankest corruption and displaying an outsized arrogance. Guess which one they chose?

Stuck on stupid it seems . . .

Recommended reading.

English as the national language

Jeff Jacoby, over at Townhall has an excellent essay on why declaring English our national language is NOT racist. And then he shows how it is a good thing for all of us -- including immigrants.

[This] is a column about the English language, which has always been indispensable to the American identity, and without which no citizen can fully participate in American life. It is a column about the power of English literacy, thanks to which, Douglass wrote in his autobiography, he first "understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." And it is about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of leftist elites like Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who last week denounced as "racist" a bill declaring English the national language of the United States.

My grandfather emigrated here from Greece. His son (my father) could not speak Greek. Because his father adopted his new country's language when he came here.

I recommend you go read it.

Solar warming

Pete du Pont has a good article calling for a more scientific approach to the global warming question. And he's got some good news:

Since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 35 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

I've reprinted it below the fold . . .

Don't Be Very Worried
The truth about "global warming" is much less dire than Al Gore wants you to think.

BY PETE DU PONT
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 35 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

When it comes to visible environmental improvements, America is also making substantial progress:

• The number of days the city of Los Angeles exceeded the one-hour ozone standard has declined from just under 200 a year in the late 1970s to 27 in 2004.

• The Pacific Research Institute's Index of Leading Environmental Indicators shows that "U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 and 2000."

• While wetlands were declining at the rate of 500,000 acres a year at midcentury, they "have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years," according to the institute.

• Also according to the institute, "bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs."

Environmentally speaking, America has had a very good third of a century; the economy has grown and pollutants and their impacts upon society are substantially down.

---

But now comes the carbon dioxide alarm. CO2 is not a pollutant--indeed it is vital for plant growth--but the annual amount released into the atmosphere has increased 40% since 1970. This increase is blamed by global warming alarmists for a great many evil things. The Web site for Al Gore's new film, "An Inconvenient Truth," claims that because of CO2's impact on our atmosphere, sea levels may rise by 20 feet, the Arctic and Antarctic ice will likely melt, heat waves will be "more frequent and more intense," and "deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years--to 300,000 people a year."

If it all sounds familiar, think back to the 1970s. After the first Earth Day the New York Times predicted "intolerable deterioration and possible extinction" for the human race as the result of pollution. Harvard biologist George Wald predicted that unless we took immediate action "civilization will end within 15 to 30 years," and environmental doomsayer Paul Ehrlich predicted that four billion people--including 65 million American--would perish from famine in the 1980s.

So what is the reality about global warming and its impact on the world? A new study released this week by the National Center for Policy Analysis, "Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts" (www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st285) looks at a wide variety of climate matters, from global warming and hurricanes to rain and drought, sea levels, arctic temperatures and solar radiation. It concludes that "the science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21rst century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change."

There are substantial differences in climate models--some 30 of them looked at by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--but the Climate Science study concludes that "computer models consistently project a rise in temperatures over the past century that is more than twice as high as the measured increase." The National Center for Atmospheric Research's prediction of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warming is more accurate. In short, the world is not warming as much as environmentalists think it is.

What warming there is turns out to be caused by solar radiation rather than human pollution. The Climate Change study concluded "half the observed 20th century warming occurred before 1940 and cannot be attributed to human causes," and changes in solar radiation can "account for 71 percent of the variation in global surface air temperature from 1880 to 1993."

As for hurricanes, 2005 saw several severe ones--Katrina and Rita both had winds of 150 knots--hitting New Orleans, the Gulf Coast and Florida. But there is little evidence linking them to global warming. A team of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists concluded that the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995 "is not related to greenhouse warming" but instead to natural tropical climate cycles.

Regarding Arctic temperature changes, the Study found the coastal stations in Greenland had actually experienced a cooling trend: The "average summer air temperatures at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, have decreased at the rate of 4 degrees F per decade since measurements began in 1987." Add in Russian and Alaskan temperature data and "Arctic air temperatures were warmest in the 1930s and near the coolest for the period of recorded observations (since at least 1920) in the late 1980s."

As for sea ice, it is not melting excessively. Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans concluded that "global warming appears to play a minor role in changes to Arctic sea ice." The U.N.'s IPCC Third Assessment Report concluded that the rate of sea level rise has not accelerated during the last century, which is supported by U.S. coastal sea level experience. In California sea levels have risen between zero and seven millimeters a year and between 2.1 and 2.8 millimeters a year in North and South Carolina.

Finally come the polar bears--a species thought by global warming proponents to be seriously at risk from the increasing temperature. According to the World Wildlife Fund, among the distinct polar bear populations, two are growing--and in areas where temperatures have risen; ten are stable; and two are decreasing. But those two are in areas such as Baffin Bay where air temperatures have actually fallen.

---

The Climate Science study concludes that projections of global warming over the next century "have decreased significantly since early modeling efforts," and that global air temperatures should increase by 2.5 degrees and the United States by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the next hundred years. The environmental pessimists tell us, as in Time magazine's recent global warming issue, to "Be Worried. Be Very Worried," but the truth is that our environmental progress has been substantially improving, and we should be very pleased.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Heritage Quote

"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression."

-- James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 17 October 1788)

CIA, DoD split sheets

Strategypage has an interesting article up about how the Department of Defense is no longer dependent upon the CIA for intel.

Without much publicity, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have gotten a divorce. For over half a century, the Department of Defense depended on the CIA for a lot of the intelligence it needed. No more, or at least less-and-less. DoD recently created the post of undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and made it one of the top four positions in the department. DoD is being coy about exactly what the new arrangements are, given the new Director of National Intelligence and plans for "making intelligence more efficient." For DoD, plans aren't enough, as the major issue is that the troops are out there fighting the war on terror, and they need good intel now. So DoD is grabbing as much raw intel (from NRO satellites) as they can, and whatever else the CIA will give up. In the meantime, DoD has its own growing force of agents on the ground, many of them from the Special Forces. This sort of thing isn't new for the Special Forces, they have been going in to foreign regions, dressed as civilians, for decades. Some of this was in cooperation with the CIA, which still hires lots of retired Special Forces troopers, for another career as CIA operatives.

It seems that the CIA lost track of their DoD customer's needs . . . and now they've lost a customer.

Our troops

Peggy Noonan, over at OpinionJournal has a good essay about how American soldiers were regarded by the American populace in times past. She also pays homage to our Soldiers' sacrifices through the years:

The starkest description of the meaning of what the members of the armed services do, and have done, is the simple observation that freedom of speech was not secured for us by editors, readers and writers, but by soldiers who gave their lives to win it and would give their lives to defend it.

I've reprinted it below "the fold" . . .

From 'Eternity' to Here
Americans didn't always appreciate our soldiers the way we do today.

Thursday, May 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

"The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held a fraction of a second longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. . . . This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember?"

For novel readers who care about war and warriors who cared about novels, a great memory is the picture, seen in tens of millions of imaginations, and finally in a film, of Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt playing taps at Schofield Barracks, 25 miles from Honolulu, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, in James Jones's great novel, "From Here to Eternity." It was published 55 years ago and sold three million copies, and it is on my mind today because I'm thinking about the taps we will all hear this Monday, Memorial Day, at ceremonies and in cemeteries throughout the country. When I hear it I'm going to think of what my father always said when he heard taps. "Play it, Prewitt," he'd say. Because that character was like men he'd known in the American army of World War II.

---

It is good that we have this day to remember heroes, to think again of those who over the centuries put themselves in harm's way for our country, for us. It is good that we remember, and take inspiration from, tales of valor, of flags carried uphill, like the one carried by the intrepid young First Lt. Arthur MacArthur, during a Union charge in the Civil War (he would go on to become a lieutenant general and the father of a son named Douglas), and heavily defended positions taken by a lone soldier, like Sgt. Alvin York in World War I. It's good to remember the simple human potential for bravery that lives within all of us, and that in some is fully tapped and met with brilliant, unforgettable actions.

The starkest description of the meaning of what the members of the armed services do, and have done, is the simple observation that freedom of speech was not secured for us by editors, readers and writers, but by soldiers who gave their lives to win it and would give their lives to defend it.

But thinking of "From Here to Eternity" has me thinking of the old American Army of the 20th century, the Depression era, peacetime army that Jones captured as no one else ever had. It was an unspectacular thing, that Army, or seemed so until December 1941. Jones's Pvt. Prewitt was a lost Southern boy who found a home in that Army. He and his friend Angelo Maggio of New York "could live better Inside."

They came from little, had no money, had received indifferent public educations, and the 1930s Army they joined was neither racially integrated, gender-neutral nor adequately funded. The great divide, the caste system, was between officers and enlisted men. The latter were given training and discipline and were left with a passionate and passionately mixed attitude toward the institution that made them part of something as it chipped away at their individuality, that employed them and enslaved them, that made them men and often treated them like children.

When James Jones himself joined the Army, in 1937, a young man whose options seemed limited, he wrote back home, "This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and they feed you like hogs." In the 1953 film of the novel, directed by Fred Zinnemann, the first shot after the credits is of men marching in brisk formation. But all you can see are their boots on a dusty field, perfect but anonymous.

They were not, the men of the peacetime, Depression-era Army, especially respected by the public they served.

---

Our current Army is very different. Our people respect it, and its members are comparatively well-educated, largely middle-class, highly professional, and integrated in race and sex. Chances are good its members will be thanked when they return home from wherever they are--Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, elsewhere. It is a good thing we finally appreciate them, a good thing we, as a society, give them the honor they deserve. There are heroes among them, and their exploits too will be spoken of this Monday, and in Memorial Days of the future.

So here's to them. May they flourish and be safe. Here's to the heroes down the ages who did valorous, death-defying, death-ignoring things. And, this Monday, here's to someone else. Here's to the uncelebrated of the armies of the past, to all the men who went unlauded, who wanted to serve brilliantly, who didn't always quite make it or didn't quite get the call, who were replacement troops never sent to the front, whose service was comparatively undistinguished or unrecognized, but who were there, and did their job, and for us. And that's enough. Here's to them, and to their fictional counterparts Prewitt and Maggio, and all those who once found a home in the army.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Language profile

I was born in Pennsylvania, and raised in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, New Jersey, and Texas. I have lived in Texas now for the last 31 of my almost 49 year life.

And I still can't get a respectable "Dixie" score!

Your Linguistic Profile::

50% General American English

25% Dixie

20% Yankee

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Of course, native Texans (and some adopted ones) would be quick to point out that "Dixie" is not necessarily "Texan", either.

Another thought: I wonder what the remaining 5% of my linguistic basis is . . . ?

Heritage Quote

"Our unalterable resolution would be to be free. They have attempted to subdue us by force, but God be praised! in vain. Their arts may be more dangerous then their arms. Let us then renounce all treaty with them upon any score but that of total separation, and under God trust our cause to our swords."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to James Warren, 16 April 1776)

Is your next vote secure?

My brother, Matt, over at Caffeinated, has a post about an alarming vulnerability in Diebold's voting machines.

Go check it out.

Moral clarity

Mary Katharine Ham, over at Townhall has an excellent essay pointing out this country's need for moral clarity.

I have heard it said that what America needs to win the war on Islamofascism is moral clarity—a strong belief that our ideology and theirs are not comparable; that there is a good and an evil and we are on the good side; that Western civilization, for all its faults, is a damn sight better than that which seeks to destroy it.

Recommended.

Bush the brave

Michael Novak has a good essay, over at NRO about President Bush's bravery in the face of virulent opposition.

What I do want to argue is that, after Washington and Lincoln, Bush is the bravest of our presidents. He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years. He has faced hostility over a longer time, in possibly the most dangerous period of international warfare in our national history. He has remained constant, firm, decided, and generous (to a fault) with his opponents.

It is a good read, and it ends with a statement that I have been thinking for years:

I like this guy. And I admire his guts, and his decency.

Good reading.

We ARE winning

Ralph Peters has a column out about how we really are defeating terrorism and winning the war in Iraq. He's taking no prisoners, though.

With the formation of Iraq's new government, it's a good time to take stock of where we stand in our confrontation with Islamist terror. You wouldn't know it from the outrageously dishonest headlines, but we're winning.

We could do even better, if we put national security above partisan politics.

Go read the rest . . .

Heritage Quote

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank, 15 February 1791)

Katrina revisited

Lou Dolinar has a very interesting article up describing what really happened in New Orleans after Katrina hit. Based upon in-depth research, here's how it starts:

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not the back-pedaling.

Here's another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopters landing at the Superdome as soon as Katrina passed, dropping off tens of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H, carrying the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? About how the operation, which also included the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local first responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best an occasional, parenthetical mention in the national media. The National Guard had its headquarters for Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest places to be in New Orleans, smelly as it was. The situation was always under control, not surprisingly because the people in control were always there.

Read the whole thing. It's a real eye-opener.

Myth-conceptions

Peter Wehner, deputy assistant to President Bush, has an op-ed up at OpinionJournal that debunks some myths about the war in Iraq.

He's trying to set the record straight.

It's in the extended entry . . .

Revisionist History
Antiwar myths about Iraq, debunked.

BY PETER WEHNER
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Iraqis can participate in three historic elections, pass the most liberal constitution in the Arab world, and form a unity government despite terrorist attacks and provocations. Yet for some critics of the president, these are minor matters. Like swallows to Capistrano, they keep returning to the same allegations--the president misled the country in order to justify the Iraq war; his administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments; Saddam Hussein turned out to be no threat since he didn't possess weapons of mass destruction; and helping democracy take root in the Middle East was a postwar rationalization. The problem with these charges is that they are false and can be shown to be so--and yet people continue to believe, and spread, them. Let me examine each in turn:

The president misled Americans to convince them to go to war. "There is no question [the Bush administration] misled the nation and led us into a quagmire in Iraq," according to Ted Kennedy. Jimmy Carter charged that on Iraq, "President Bush has not been honest with the American people." And Al Gore has said that an "abuse of the truth" characterized the administration's "march to war." These charges are themselves misleading, which explains why no independent body has found them credible. Most of the world was operating from essentially the same set of assumptions regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities. Important assumptions turned out wrong; but mistakenly relying on faulty intelligence is a world apart from lying about it.

Let's review what we know. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is the intelligence community's authoritative written judgment on specific national-security issues. The 2002 NIE provided a key judgment: "Iraq has continued its [WMD] programs in defiance of U.N. resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Thanks to the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission, which investigated the causes of intelligence failures in the run-up to the war, we now know that the President's Daily Brief (PDB) and the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief "were, if anything, more alarmist and less nuanced than the NIE" (my emphasis). We also know that the intelligence in the PDB was not "markedly different" from that given to Congress. This helps explains why John Kerry, in voting to give the president the authority to use force, said, "I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." It's why Sen. Kennedy said, "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." And it's why Hillary Clinton said in 2002, "In the four years since the inspectors, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program."

Beyond that, intelligence agencies from around the globe believed Saddam had WMD. Even foreign governments that opposed his removal from power believed Iraq had WMD: Just a few weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom, Wolfgang Ischinger, German ambassador to the U.S., said, "I think all of our governments believe that Iraq has produced weapons of mass destruction and that we have to assume that they continue to have weapons of mass destruction."

In addition, no serious person would justify a war based on information he knows to be false and which would be shown to be false within months after the war concluded. It is not as if the WMD stockpile question was one that wasn't going to be answered for a century to come.

The Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments. Earlier this year, Mr. Gore charged that "CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House . . . found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases." Sen. Kennedy charged that the administration "put pressure on intelligence officers to produce the desired intelligence and analysis."

This myth is shattered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's bipartisan Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Among the findings: "The committee did not find any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so." Silberman-Robb concluded the same, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments." What the report did find is that intelligence assessments on Iraq were "riddled with errors"; "most of the fundamental errors were made and communicated to policy makers well before the now-infamous NIE of October 2002, and were not corrected in the months between the NIE and the start of the war."

Because weapons of mass destruction stockpiles weren't found, Saddam posed no threat. Howard Dean declared Iraq "was not a danger to the United States." John Murtha asserted, "There was no threat to our national security." Max Cleland put it this way: "Iraq was no threat. We now know that. There are no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons programs." Yet while we did not find stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, what we did find was enough to alarm any sober-minded individual.

Upon his return from Iraq, weapons inspector David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told the Senate: "I actually think this may be one of those cases where [Iraq under Saddam Hussein] was even more dangerous than we thought." His statement when issuing the ISG progress report said: "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities" that were part of "deliberate concealment efforts" that should have been declared to the U.N. And, he concluded, "Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

Among the key findings of the September 2004 report by Charles Duelfer, who succeeded Mr. Kay as ISG head, are that Saddam was pursuing an aggressive strategy to subvert the Oil for Food Program and to bring down U.N. sanctions through illicit finance and procurement schemes; and that Saddam intended to resume WMD efforts once U.N. sanctions were eliminated. According to Mr. Duelfer, "the guiding theme for WMD was to sustain the intellectual capacity achieved over so many years at such a great cost and to be in a position to produce again with as short a lead time as possible. . . . Virtually no senior Iraqi believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever. Evidence suggests that, as resources became available and the constraints of sanctions decayed, there was a direct expansion of activity that would have the effect of supporting future WMD reconstitution."

Beyond this, Saddam's regime was one of the most sadistic and aggressive in modern history. It started a war against Iran and used mustard gas and nerve gas. A decade later Iraq invaded Kuwait. Iraq was a massively destabilizing force in the Middle East; so long as Saddam was in power, rivers of blood were sure to follow.

Promoting democracy in the Middle East is a postwar rationalization. "The president now says that the war is really about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. This effort at after-the-fact justification was only made necessary because the primary rationale was so sadly lacking in fact," according to Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, President Bush argued for democracy taking root in Iraq before the war began. To take just one example, he said in a speech on Feb. 26, 2003: "A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America's interests in security, and America's belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq. . . . The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. . . . A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region."

The following day the New York Times editorialized: "President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. . . . The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time."

---

These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.

Mr. Wehner is deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Some movement toward immigration reform

It is not moving quickly, nor does it have strict enough security provisions for me, but Congress seems to finally be taking immigration reform seriously. Michael Barone, at U.S. News & World Report, has a post up with some good discussion about the immigration reform bill currently making it's way through both Houses.

Conviction politics. A columnist is tempted to say that the politicians should toss aside political concerns and do what they believe is in the public interest. Easy enough to say. But something just like that may be happening. Politicians act out of some combination of calculation and conviction; the proportions vary. On immigration there are some politicians, of both parties and on both sides, who are visibly acting out of conviction. And not just the noisy immigration restrictionists, like Rep. Tom Tancredo, who wants a border fence. These conviction politicians include Edward Kennedy and John McCain, who favor relatively generous guest-worker and legalization provisions, and Sens. Jon Kyl and John Cornyn, who favor a less generous version. Add to this list George W. Bush, who seems poised to take an unusually active role on the issue.

The route to agreement is to give all of these conviction politicians much of what they want. A fence, high-tech border-security and identification devices, some compromise on guest workers and legalization–all could be part of an omnibus measure. As for the calculation politicians, as they try to assess the political landscape and reconcile the seemingly contradictory findings of various polls, they appear to be coming to the conclusion that inaction–or blocking action now that the issue is so visible–poses a higher political risk than taking action. Voters understandably believe we should have better border security and should do something about the 12 million illegal immigrants in our midst. Neither Congress nor President Bush has acted in five years. Maybe, just maybe, they're on the brink of doing so now.

I recommend it.

Heritage Quote

"All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity."

-- George Washington (letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham, 9 January 1790)

A special thanks to the 3rd ACR

The major of Tal Afar travelled to Fort Carson, Colorado to thank the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment for bringing stability back to his city. A job well done.

Go read the rest, and watch the video, too.

Setting the record straight

Bill Roggio, who is currently preparing to go in country, provides us a picture of Afghanistan that differs from many news reports.

The news reports of a major Taliban offensive in southeastern Afghanistan are inaccurate, as Coalition offensives and Taliban attacks have been lumped together to give the impression of a coordinated Taliban assault in multiple provinces. A reading of the various reports indicates that while the Taliban has launched a major strike on a police station and government center in Helmand province and a small scale attack on a police patrol in Ghazni, as well as two suicide attacks against U.S. contractors in Herat and an Afghan army base in Ghazni, the fighting in Kandahar was initiated by Afghan and Coalition security forces during planned operations. Over 100 have been reported killed during the fighting, with 87 being Taliban. Well over half of those killed were killed during the Coalition offensives in Kandahar.

His reports have been consistently balanced and rational. Recommended reading.

UPDATE (24 May 2006): I mistakenly had Mr. Roggio in Afghanistan, but he is not yet there. He expects to get there sometime late this week.

Over the line

Michael Totten has another good article up at his blog describing conditions and attitudes in the West Bank. For those of you who are looking for a more balanced account of what's going on over there, Michael Totten is your man. He starts this account with:

I rode in an Israeli taxi with Palestinian journalist Sufian Taha from the American Colony Hotel to the Qalandia checkpoint on the road to Ramallah, capital of nascent Palestine, in the hills of the West Bank over Jerusalem. We had to take a taxi, and we had to switch to a Palestinian taxi after we reached the other side. “You do not want to drive in the West Bank with Israeli plates on your car,” he said.

He has plenty of pictures, too. Go read the whole thing.

Heritage Quote

"Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith, 21 February 1825)

U.S. Army recruitment

In the last seven months, the U.S. Army has met or exceeded all of its recruiting goals.

Go read the rest. You'll find items of interest.

Heritage Quote

"The construction applied...to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power...ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers, nor a part to be so taken as to destroy the whole residue of that instrument."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798)

The real Iraq

Amir Taheri, formerly the executive editor of Kayhan, Iran's largest daily newspaper, has a column in Commentary Magazine describing some very real indicators of significant progress in Iraq. He also understands the confusion many Americans have about progress in Iraq:

Spending time in the United States after a tour of Iraq can be a disorienting experience these days. Within hours of arriving here, as I can attest from a recent visit, one is confronted with an image of Iraq that is unrecognizable. It is created in several overlapping ways: through television footage showing the charred remains of vehicles used in suicide attacks, surrounded by wailing women in black and grim-looking men carrying coffins; by armchair strategists and political gurus predicting further doom or pontificating about how the war should have been fought in the first place; by authors of instant-history books making their rounds to dissect the various fundamental mistakes committed by the Bush administration; and by reporters, cocooned in hotels in Baghdad, explaining the carnage and chaos in the streets as signs of the countrys impending or undeclared civil war. Add to all this the days alleged scandal or revelationan outed CIA operative, a reportedly doctored intelligence report, a leaked pessimistic assessmentand it is no wonder the American public registers disillusion with Iraq and everyone who embroiled the U.S. in its troubles.

It would be hard indeed for the average interested citizen to find out on his own just how grossly this image distorts the realities of present-day Iraq . . .

He refutes those who claim Iraq is a failed U.S. endeavor (emphasis added):

But more sober observers should understand the real balance sheet in Iraq. Democracy is succeeding. Moreover, thanks to its success in Iraq, there are stirrings elsewhere in the region. Beyond the much-publicized electoral concessions wrung from authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, there is a new democratic discourse to be heard. Nationalism and pan-Arabism, yesterdays hollow rallying cries, have given way to a big idea of a very different kind. Debate and dissent are in the air where there was none before - a development owing, in significant measure, to the U.S. campaign in Iraq and the brilliant if still checkered Iraqi response.

This is a fascinating article that is written by a man who hails from and understands the region. Highly recommended.

[Hat tip to Instapundit.]

Heritage Quote

"If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security. If standing armies are dangerous to liberty, an efficacious power over the militia in the same body ought, as far as possible, to take away the inducement and the pretext to such unfriendly institutions. If the federal government can command the aid of the militia in those emergencies which call for the military arm in support of the civil magistrate, it can the better dispense with the employment of a different kind of force. If it cannot avail itself of the former, it will be obliged to recur to the latter. To render an army unnecessary will be a more certain method of preventing its existence than a thousand prohibitions upon paper."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 29, 10 January 1788)

Opposite of "in touch"

Peggy Noonan, at OpinionJournal, shows us the common denominator between Bush's immigration speech and the movie 'The DaVinci Code".

She must have enjoyed writing this column.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Out of Touch
What the president's immigration speech and "The DaVinci Code" have in common.

Thursday, May 18, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

What was missing in the president's approach the other night was the expression, or suggestion, of context. The context was a crisis that had gone unanswered as it has built, the perceived detachment of the political elite from people on the ground, and a new distance between the president and his traditional supporters. The president would have done well to signal that he knew he was coming late to the party, as it were; that he'd come to rethink his previous stand, or lack of a stand, and had begun to consider whether there was not some justice in the views, and alarm, of others.

Without an established context the speech seemed free-floating: a statement issued into the ether, unanchored to any particular principle and eager to use, as opposed to appreciate, whatever human sentiment flows around the issue of immigration. It was a speech driven by an air of crisis, but not a public crisis, only a personal and political one.

To acknowledge what he apparently thinks are the biases of the base, he used loaded words like "sneak"--illegal immigrants "sneak across the border"--as if to establish his populist bona fides. This was, not to put too fancy a rhetorical term on it, creepy, and managed to be offensive to everyone.

What was needed was a definitive statement: As of this moment we will control our borders, I'm sending in the men, I'm giving this the attention I've given to the Mideast.

Once that is done, all else follows. "Comprehensive solution" seems like code for "some day we may do something". No one believes in comprehensive solutions. They believe in action they can see. No one believes in the wisdom of government, but they do believe it has a certain brute power.

---

The disinterest in the White House and among congressional Republicans in establishing authority on America's borders is so amazing--the people want it, the age of terror demands it--that great histories will be written about it. Thinking about this has left me contemplating a question that admittedly seems farfetched: Is it possible our flinty president is so committed to protecting the Republican Party from losing, forever, the Hispanic vote, that he's decided to take a blurred and unsatisfying stand on immigration, and sacrifice all personal popularity, in order to keep the party of the future electorally competitive with a growing ethnic group?

This would, I admit, be rather unlike an American political professional. And it speaks of a long-term thinking that has not been the hallmark of this administration. But at least it would render explicable the president's moves.

The other possibility is that the administration's slow and ambivalent action is the result of being lost in some geopolitical-globalist abstract-athon that has left them puffed with the rightness of their superior knowledge, sure in their membership in a higher brotherhood, and looking down on the low concerns of normal Americans living in America.

I continue to believe the administration's problem is not that the base lately doesn't like it, but that the White House has decided it actually doesn't like the base. That's a worse problem. It's hard to fire a base. Hard to get a new one.

---

Speaking of the detachment of the elites, the second big news of the week--in some ways it may be bigger--is the apparent critical failure of "The DaVinci Code." After its first screening in Cannes, critics and observers called it tedious, painfully long, bloated, grim, so-so, a jumble, lifeless and talky.

There is a God. Or, as a sophisticated Christian pointed out yesterday, there is an Evil One, and this may be proof he was an uncredited co-producer. The devil loves the common, the stale. He can't use beauty; it undermines him. "Banality is his calling card."

I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard? They're both already rich and relevant. A desire to seem fresh and in the middle of a big national conversation? But they don't seem young, they seem immature and destructive. And ungracious. They've been given so much by their country and era, such rich rewards and adulation throughout their long careers. This was no way to say thanks.

I don't really understand why we live in an age in which we feel compelled to spoof the beliefs of the followers of the great religions. Why are we doing that? Why does Hollywood consider this progressive as opposed to primitive, like a pre-Columbian tribe attacking the tribe next door for worshiping the wrong spirits?

"The DaVinci Code" could still triumph at the box office, but it has lost its cachet, and the air of expectation that surrounded it. Its creators have not been rewarded but embarrassed. Good. They should be.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

A friend indeed

Australian PM John Howard had some kind things to say about the U.S. of A. in a speech to Canada's parliament:

“Australia, as you know, is an unapologetic friend and ally of the United States,” Mr. Howard told a Commons chamber that's heard all-too-frequent criticism of Washington in recent years.

Fresh from a visit to the White House, Mr. Howard told a chamber packed with Tory MPs, staffers, lobbyists and party functionaries — but noticeably light on Liberal Opposition MPs — that the U.S. “has been a remarkable power for good in the world.

“And the decency and hope that the power and purpose that the United States represent in the world is something we should deeply appreciate,” Mr. Howard said to sustained applause.

He also cautioned those who continually slander America:

“For those around the world who would want to see a reduced American role in the affairs of our globe, I have some quiet advice. That is, be careful of what you wish for. Because a retreating America will leave a more vulnerable world.”

It is encouraging to hear such comments from other heads of state.

Captain Ed has more to say on the subject.

Heritage Quote

"Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country. "

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 25, 21 December 1787)

Petropolitical economics ad nauseam

Jonathan Adler is concerned that Congress does not understand free-market economics.

Criminalizing “price gouging” will do more to encourage gas shortages than control price increases. Whether politicians like to admit it or not, the profit motive plays a key role in calibrating supply and demand. Limit the ability of companies to profit from energy-related investments, and they will make fewer of them. Limiting the potential for profit will limit future supply. Threaten companies with prosecution should they respond to market conditions by raising prices, and shortages are the inevitable result. During the debate, House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Joe Barton said, “Price spikes are a scourge, but dry pumps are a catastrophe.” Barton and his colleagues supported a proposal that will make “dry pumps” more likely nonetheless.

I'm inclined to agree.

And, personally, I'm glad that my family now has a hybrid vehicle -- because things, petrochemically speaking, are going to get worse before they get better. If they get better.

Recommended.

Looking back from the future

Hans Moleman, on National Review Online, puts polls in perspective with an historical example.

The sight is a pathetic one. An embattled president moves into a second term that quickly turns into an uninterrupted downhill slide: poll approval sinking to the low 30s; his own party members distancing themselves at every opportunity; his political capital now consumed by a once-popular war that became a hopeless quagmire with no end in sight; a war in which he persists, determined to stay the course despite the political cost, refusing to abandon the valiant allies who took his commitment seriously.

George W. Bush? Oh yeah, him too. But we were discussing Harry Truman, weren’t we?

It's a good read . . .

Hamas and the killing of innocents

Edward Bernard Glick, over at the American Thinker, gives us his take on Hamas, innocents, and the Israeli Defense Force. He starts with:

Why should Hamas care if its irredentist terrorism kills or causes Israel to kill innocent civilians?

Unfortunately, it makes a lot of sense. Read the whole thing.

Heritage Quote

"Have you something to do to-morrow; do it to-day."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1742)

Supply-side state economics

Lawrence J McQuillan and Hovannes Abramyan, over at the Pacific Research Institute, have an interesting article that suggests supply-side economics is at work in states just like it is working nationally.

No surprise, there. I've reprinted the whole thing in the extended entry.

OPINIONJOURNAL FEDERATION

'Live Free or Move'
Jobs are flocking to low-tax states for a reason.

BY LAWRENCE J. MCQUILLAN AND HOVANNES ABRAMYAN
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Voters will elect governors in 36 states this year. And as they decide who to send to the governor's mansion, they will also be shaping the economic future of their state. On taxes, the gubernatorial candidates fall into one of two camps. Either they believe that the best way to close a budget gap is to raise taxes. Or, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have done from the Oval Office, they believe in raising revenue by growing the state's economy with tax cuts.

Now new data is out and it shows that the states that embraced supply-side tax cuts are not only financially more sound and enjoy stronger economies, but they are draining residents away from the states that opted for high taxes. The Pacific Research Institute has crunched the tax numbers in all 50 states and published the "U.S. Economic Freedom Index" ranking all states according to how friendly or unfriendly their policies were toward free enterprise and consumer choice in 2004--the most recent year that comparative data is available for each state. It's clear that the economic policies of 2004 determined where each state fell in the rankings, and shaped 2005 economic performance.

---

It isn't just fun to pinpoint which states are getting it wrong. Where a state falls on the U.S. Economic Freedom Index also indicates how likely it is to experience real economic growth over the long term. Individuals looking to open a new business, expand operations or market new products weigh the comparative costs and benefits of different locations. They evaluate local universities, transportation networks, labor skills, market size and even the weather. They also assess the policy climate. Economic freedom--a favorable state tax, regulatory, and legal climate--attracts entrepreneurs and capital, thereby increasing jobs and wages.

In 2005, per capita personal income grew 31% faster in the 15 most economically free states than it did in the 15 states at the bottom of the list. And employment growth was a staggering 216% higher in the most free states. It hasn't been a "jobless recovery" in states that have adopted pro-growth tax and regulatory policies.

Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. has a uniformly pro-growth economic climate. But policies vary dramatically from state to state and the biggest single policy states have to get right to out-compete the other states for jobs and high-skilled workers is taxes. Taxpayers paid 14% less in "effective tax rates" in 2005 in the most economically free states than did the taxpayers in the least free states. Effective tax rates are based on what people actually pay after deductions, exemptions and credits. This helps explain why entrepreneurs are attracted to more free states and why personal income and jobs are growing so much faster there.

Though typically tax cuts are opposed with the argument that slashing rates will force state revenue to fall, new data from the Nelson Rockefeller Institute shatters the myth that budget deficits are caused by supply-side policies. In 2005, the 15 states with the most economic freedom saw their general fund tax revenues grow at a rate more than 6% higher than the 15 least free states, despite their lower effective tax rate. Instead of blowing a hole in state budgets, lower tax rates rewarded productivity and risk-taking and allowed the economy to grow. As the economy expanded it also generated more revenue for the state Treasury as capital and people flowed in. Census data shows an astounding 245% difference in net state-to-state migration rates in 2005 between the freest states (net inflow) and least-free states (net outflow). "Live Free or Move" is fast becoming the national motto.

California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all elect governors this year. And all languish near the bottom in terms of economic freedom. They have all also struggled with significant budget deficits. Candidates from California and Ohio highlight the stark differences on taxation.

California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides vows, if elected, to raise the upper tax rate on individuals to 12% from 10.3%, in part to close California's $7 billion deficit. But this high rate, the nation's highest, has not prevented California from suffering a multi-billion-dollar budget gap. What the 2005 fiscal facts show is that raising it even higher will likely make the problem worse in the long term. When Gov. Pete Wilson raised taxes in the early 1990s, hoping to close a budget gap, revenues actually fell and deficits lingered. The 2005 numbers foretell the same outcome with Angelides's tax-hike scheme.

---

On the other hand, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell vows, if elected, to cut taxes and to support a tax-and-expenditure limit to curb the growth of state spending. The 2005 numbers clearly support his approach to economic prosperity. Low taxes expand economic opportunities and lift a state's personal income, employment, and tax revenues. It's a lot easier to close a budget gap when the economy is growing and more money is flowing into the state's coffers (assuming the legislature doesn't spend the new revenue faster than it comes in).

Voters might want to keep some of these facts in mind and reject the flawed tax-hike approach when they head to the polls for the primaries in the coming months and the general election in November. Supporting candidates and policies that promote economic opportunity through cutting taxes is the best way to fiscal health for both taxpayers and states. Lower taxes, less burdensome regulations and a reasonable civil-justice system rejuvenate economies, lift incomes and even fatten state revenues.

Mr. McQuillan is director of business and economic studies and Mr. Abramyan is a public policy fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.

Something our state legislators should keep in mind . . .

President Bush on immigration

President Bush's speech Monday night on immigration reform was encouraging to a certain degree.

At the same time, we're launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history. We will construct high-tech fences in urban corridors, and build new patrol roads and barriers in rural areas. We'll employ motion sensors, infrared cameras, and unmanned aerial vehicles to prevent illegal crossings. America has the best technology in the world, and we will ensure that the Border Patrol has the technology they need to do their job and secure our border.

But I'm wondering if a rational, methodical approach to this massive problem will ever be arrived at before it gets much, much worse.

Go read the whole speech . . .

Heritage Quote

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on Virginia, Query 19, 1781)

Interview with a Danish Muslim democrat

Andrew Stuttaford at National Review has published an article about a member of the Danish Parliament who is also a Muslim. Here's how it starts:

The restaurant, unpretentious and vaguely chic, and the weather, cold and rainy, were as they should have been in northerly, elegant Copenhagen. The watchful plainclothes policemen were not. These are strange, unsettling times in Denmark: quiet, orderly, peaceful, nothing-happens-here Denmark; hated, reviled, infidel, embassies-in-flames Denmark. I was having lunch with Naser Khader, a Syria-born member of the Danish parliament for the Social Liberals (the party of Denmark’s metropolitan elite), a brave, engaging man who has discovered that, in today’s Denmark, for a Muslim to speak his mind about Islamic extremism means immense popularity — he’s probably the country’s most acclaimed politician — and a life under police protection.

I recommend you read the rest.

Without firing a shot

How do we deal with Iran effectively, yet avoid a war? Bret Stephens has some ideas on how to go about taking Iran down -- peacefully (at least outside of Iran).

I've reprinted it all in the extended entry.

How to Stop Iran (Without Firing a Shot)
Current diplomacy isn't working. Here's Plan B.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

What can the Bush administration do to persuade Iran's leaders that their bid to develop nuclear weapons will exact an unacceptable price on their regime? What can it do, that is, short of launching air strikes?

Begin by shelving the current approach. For three years, the administration has deferred to European and U.N. diplomacy while seeking to build consensus around the idea that a nuclear-armed Iran poses unacceptable risks to global security. The result: Seven leading Muslim states, including Pakistan and Indonesia, have joined hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to affirm his right to develop "peaceful" nuclear technology. China and Russia have again rejected calls for U.N. sanctions. The Europeans are again seeking to sweeten the package of technical, commercial and security incentives the mullahs rejected last year. And that's just last week's news.

Today, the international community is less intent on stopping Tehran from getting the bomb than it is on stopping Washington from stopping Tehran. That's something the administration may not be able to change. But there are steps it can take independently to alter Iran's calculations. Here are four.

• Take the diplomatic offensive. "Western countries must push the internal conflicts inside the Iranian government," says Mehdi Khalaji, an Iranian journalist and visiting scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Mr. Khalaji proposes that President Bush write an open letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, specifying the conditions under which the U.S. would be prepared to negotiate. By addressing Mr. Khamenei this way, Mr. Bush would bypass and humiliate Mr. Ahmadinejad, aggravate the regime's internal frictions and explain to the Iranian people why theirs is a pariah state.

---

"The administration could say, 'If you halt enrichment, we can negotiate. If you stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, we can negotiate. If you release the following political prisoners, we can negotiate. If you stop meddling in Iraq, we can negotiate.' This would provoke a controversy inside the government. Some would say, 'OK, we can give up on these prisoners. We can back away from our relationship with Hamas. And so on.'"

Mr. Khalaji also urges the U.S. government to recast the content of its Farsi-language radio station, known as Radio Farda. The station's programmers, he says, "misunderstand the young generation of Iran, which is very political. The quality is not appropriate for a serious audience. The news isn't professional the way the BBC is." Offering a serious journalistic alternative to the Beeb ought to be an administration priority.

• Target the regime's financial interests. "In many ways, the Islamic Republic of Iran has become the Islamic Republic of Iran, Inc.," says Afshin Molavi, the Iranian-American author of "Persian Pilgrimages." Between 30% and 50% of Iran's economy is controlled by the bunyad, so-called "Revolutionary Foundations" run by key regime figures answerable only to Mr. Khamenei. Hard-line Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, considered to be Mr. Ahmadinejad's spiritual mentor, controls the sugar monopoly, while former President Ali Rafsanjani is said to be the richest man in the country.

Since Mr. Ahmadinejad came to power, these ayatollah-oligarchs have been running for financial cover: Capital outflows from Iran surpassed the $200 billion mark in the past year alone. Much of that money has made its way to banks in the United Arab Emirates, many of which have correspondent banks in the U.S. "We are preventing financial transactions going to the Palestinian Authority because banks are scared they'll be hit by U.S. terrorism-financing laws," says a source who closely tracks the Iranian economy. "Why can't we do the same thing with Iran?"

• Support an independent labor movement. On May Day, 10,000 workers took to Tehran's streets to demand the resignation of Iran's labor minister. And despite last year's $60 billion oil-revenue bonanza, the Iranian government routinely fails to pay its civil servants, leading to chronic, spontaneous work stoppages.

Workers' rights got a boost in January when Tehran's bus drivers went on strike to demand the release of their imprisoned and tortured leader Mansour Ossanloo. In a state that bans independent labor unions, the strike was an unprecedented event, calling to mind the 1980 Gdansk dock strike that became Poland's Solidarity movement. That movement succeeded largely thanks to the support of Lane Kirkland's AFL-CIO, which in turn received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. The same model needs to be energetically applied to Iran today.

"The neat thing about the labor movement is that wherever it goes, it's welcomed," says a source familiar with Iranian workers' groups. "It actually makes America look good."

• Threaten Iran's gasoline supply. Iran is often said to have an oil weapon pointed at George Bush's head. Rob Andrews, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, notes the reverse is closer to the truth: Because Iran lacks refining capacity, it must import 40% of its gasoline. Of that amount, fully 60% is handled by a single company, Rotterdam-based Vitol, which has strategic storage and blending facilities in the UAE. The regime also spends $3 billion a year to subsidize below-market gas prices.

---

With Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, Mr. Andrews has introduced legislation calling for the quarantine of gasoline imports should Iran continue to flout Security Council resolutions. "If gas prices were to soar in Iran," he says, "the regime would be destabilized, the possibility of internal change would increase and the regime would find a way to back away from the precipice."

One objection: A gas quarantine may require the naval blockade of Iranian ports, which is legally tantamount to an act of war. Not a problem, says Mr. Andrews: "I think the development of a nuclear weapon in violation of an international treaty is an act of war, too."

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Heritage Quote

"Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1749)

Truman understood it

[soapbox]

Betsy Newmark pointed to a speech by President Truman in 1947 that just brought home to me that we Americans have been in a worldwide struggle for freedom for a long time.

One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.

To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations, The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.

Though he was talking about Greece and Turkey, Truman hit upon some salient points that apply to all countries on this Earth.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

The world is not static, and the status quo is not sacred. But we cannot allow changes in the status quo in violation of the Charter of the United Nations by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration. In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

What was true after WWII is still true today. Whether we like it or not, the United States of America has a moral obligation to advocate for freedom on Earth -- up to and including going to war with tyrannies, if necessary.

It is what this country is all about -- how it was founded, and how its foreign policy has been conducted ever since.

We've got to do what we've got to do. Because it is our national purpose.

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.

The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world -- and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.

Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.

I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely.

Lately, I have been less confident in the Congress ability to "face its responsibilities squarely", but I still have hope that we -- as a free nation -- will do the right thing and fulfill our national purpose by spreading freedom throughout the world.

It will take decades to do, but we should never falter in our efforts toward that goal.

And if believing this makes me an idealist, then so be it.

[/soapbox]

Good news from Iraq

Bill Crawford published his weekly report on Iraq yesterday. He starts with:

I had hoped this Iraq-progress round-up would include news about the formation of a new government today, but infighting has stalled the process. Still there is lots of other good news to report from Iraq, and even signs that some in the media are taking notice: The article linked to says “Statistics cited come from a report in National Review.”

Recommended reading.

Most Americans get it

Why doesn't the ACLU?

Arab Israelis

Related to a blogversation I had last week with my brother, I stumbled across this article by freelance journalist Michael Totten wherein he was reporting about a recent trip to Israel and the racism he observed there.

I wish I could tell you that Israeli Jews and Arabs have created a groovy urban Middle East melting pot culture like the Lebanese have. But I’d be fantasizing or lying. It’s not that they hate each other. But they do seem to fear each other. The sense I got from talking to various people is that many Jews are afraid the Arabs might hurt them, and most Arabs do their best to keep their heads down and steer as wide of politics and the conflict as possible.

Go read the whole thing.

Heritage Quote

"War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perserverance, by time, and by practice."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 25, 21 December 1787)

Still more good news from Iraq

The Brookings Institute has released its latest index report on Iraq, and the numbers show real progress.

All Things Conservative provides a good summary of the data, and The Futurist goes into a deeper analysis.

What do these countries have in common?

China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia.

One thing they have in common is their long records of human rights abuses.

The other thing is they are all now members of the newly established UN Human Rights Council.

What are those people in Turtle Bay thinking?

Why does the U.S. continue to heavily subsidize an organization, the U.N., that continuously ignores genocide?

Border control

Thomas Sowell makes a good case for separating border control from immigration.

There is no reason other than politics why amnesty and border control have to be in the same bill. It will take time to see how various new border control methods work out in practice and there is no reason to rush ahead to deal with the people already illegally in this country before the facts are in on how well the borders have been secured.

He makes several good points. I recommend you read it all.

Irony

Greyhawk illustrates widely differing attitudes about Iraq by posting a news story out of Jordan and one out of America.

I am ashamed of our negativity.

Heritage Quote

"Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1738)

Read this

The Hatemonger's Quarterly has an interesting essay about the dichotomy apparent in those opposed to war in Iraq who favor war in Sudan.

And yet we cannot help but be irked by the clarion call for action on the part of sundry anti-war liberals. They seem not to realize the obvious: Their constant denouncing of the Iraq War has aided and abetted isolationist fervor in this country. If Americans are wary of committing US troops to Darfur, these liberals have themselves partly to blame.

Recommended.

[Hat tip to Phoenix.]

This may be painful

Related to yesterday's post on this: It seems that there may be an intelligence scandal brewing on the border.

Michelle Malkin, who has been a stalwart on immigration, reports that the United States government has been providing Mexico with intelligence about the lawful activities of American citizens, specifically, the locations and tactics of Minuteman patrols.

I hope that this is not what it sounds like. If it is, though, mid-management heads better start rolling in the Dept. of Homeland Security!

Advice to the President

Johm Hinderaker has some excellent advice for President Bush.

You know how the Democrats are always after you to admit that you made a mistake? You've wisely ignored them; they don't have your interests at heart, and the policies they're talking about weren't mistakes. The time has come, though, to go on national television and say you were wrong, and you've changed your mind. About immigration.

I just hope President Bush reads the whole thing while he prepares for his speech tomorrow.

Heritage Quote

"The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. . . . How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers?"

-- John Adams (Diary, 2 June 1778)

Turn around?

Tony Snow is sending out email corrections to misleading news articles.

White House sources said Snow, who started on the job Monday and has yet to give his first public press briefing, is determined to aggressively counter what the administration considers unfair assertions in both news and editorials about Bush. At the same time, he is eager to make the notoriously secretive administration more accessible to the press.

He is now engaged in something that I have been trying to influence through this blog -- a more balanced approach to the news. In my blogging efforts, over the last 18 months, I have found myself having to lean much further to the right than I would normally do in order to make up for the extreme left leanings of much of the mainstream news. That seemed to be the only way to find balance.

I realize now that balancing with extremes (both left and right) is too polemic an approach. I am not comfortable with either extreme, and it disturbs me that there are so many folks out there with vein-popping tirades espousing the views of one or the other.

Let's hope Tony Snow can cool the fires of debate enough so that this nation can actually have rational debate once more. We certainly need it.

An American hero

As part of the OpinionJournal Federation, Ralph Kinney Bennett writes about a naturalized American who earned the Silver Star in Afghanistan.

It's a good story.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

OPINIONJOURNAL FEDERATION

Sgt. Sar's Silver Star
One man's journey from Cambodia to America to Afghanistan--where he became a hero.

BY RALPH KINNEY BENNETT
Wednesday, May 10, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

The sound of the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters echoed off the rugged, snowy ridges, almost 9,000 feet up in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. In the dim first light of dawn, the men of U.S. Army Special Forces detachment Alpha 732 were scanning the fog-bound boulders and trees, searching for Taliban fighters.

They spotted a tiny village of earth and stone huts strung out along the top of a ridge. Something didn't look right about the peaceful scene that early morning, March 2, 2005. The Blackhawks touched down, one on either side of the ridge, less than 100 yards below the huts. Six men jumped out of the chopper on the north side of the ridge, and as it flew away they came under intense automatic weapons fire from the village. Returning fire, they sought cover amid rocks and trees in the knee-deep snow.

As the other copter had touched down on the south side of the ridge, Master Sgt. Sarun Sar heard the heavy fire and spotted Taliban fighters around the huts above him. The sudden arrival of the 12-man Alpha 732 team by air had surprised the enemy. But the advantage of surprise was evaporating fast in a hail of fire.

In seconds, Sgt. Sar, a veteran of many combat operations over the past 15 years, grasped that if that fire from the high ground was not quickly suppressed, the Blackhawks could be damaged or destroyed if they tried to land again and his small detachment could be pinned down in this remote area.

---

Sgt. Sar, Cambodian-born, with a ready smile and a gentle demeanor that belies his toughness, reacted immediately. He charged toward the huts and the scattered muzzle flashes of the Taliban weapons, lifting his knees high to negotiate the deep snow as he ran uphill. He could hear bullets whizzing past him.

Sgt. Sar had his M-4 carbine set on semiautomatic, choosing his single shots carefully. He knew the area from many patrols. He didn't want to hit any of the civilians whose confidence he and his men had worked so long and so hard to win.

The 15 to 20 Taliban fighters, who had pinned down the Americans on the north side of the ridge, seemed stunned by the swift, furious charge of the short, wiry, helmeted figure rushing up the ridge from the south. Taliban began to fall, hit by Sgt. Sar's well-aimed shots.

Now he was almost to the huts. Those Taliban who had not been killed broke and ran for the nearby woods. One turned to fire at the onrushing sergeant but was killed. Another, carrying an AK-47 assault rifle, disappeared into one of the huts.

Only then did Sgt. Sar realize that he was alone. His men, who had exited the Blackhawk after him, had been temporarily pinned down. They were far behind him, still working their way up the snowy hill. Keeping his eye on the doorway of the occupied hut, he called on his radio for help. Within minutes the team's medic was beside him.

The door to the windowless hut was partly open. Sgt. Sar could see only darkness inside. He had a flashlight mounted on the barrel of his M-4. Deciding to "keep the momentum," he barreled through the small, low opening, gun to the front. But the heavy load of patrol gear he was carrying caught on the sides of the small doorway.

It was a moment that will ever be frozen in his memory. Sgt. Sar was halfway into the darkened hut, the flashlight on his M-4 illuminating the face of a Taliban fighter, and the muzzle of his AK-47 pointed directly at Sgt. Sar's head. The Taliban fired a short burst, three shots. Sgt. Sar felt the muzzle blast as it lit up the darkness.

Miraculously, two of the bullets missed him. But one struck the lower edge of his Kevlar helmet right at his forehead. It felt like a hammer blow on his skull. "I'm hit, I'm hit," he screamed, falling back out of the doorway. He quickly recovered, realizing the bullet had only grazed him. Sgt. Sar and the medic pressed the attack, tossing a grenade into the hut before he re-entered it and killed the man who had almost killed him.

Within minutes, thanks to Sgt. Sar's fearless initiative, the Taliban ambush that placed the men of Alpha 732 in mortal danger had been smashed. The Americans cleared all the huts in the village, treated two civilians who had been slightly wounded, and rounded up a huge cache of enemy weaponry--rocket-propelled grenades and grenade launchers, a radio, a mortar and shells, bomb-making materials and explosives, and a slew of AK-47 assault rifles. The wounded villagers were flown to a military hospital.

Ten months later, home from Afghanistan at Hawaii's Camp H.M. Smith, Sgt. Sar stood at attention as he received the Silver Star, the nation's fourth-highest award for valor in combat. He was a reluctant recipient. He felt that what he had done that day in Afghanistan was "just my duty as a soldier, protecting my guys like they protect me."

As to his many missions in harm's way--in the Gulf War, in Bosnia and Kosovo, and through two combat tours in Afghanistan--he says quietly that "it's a small price to pay for this country that I love more than my birthplace, this country that has given me so much."

---

Indeed, few at the awards ceremony could have known what a journey Sarun Sar had made to pay that "small price." Born in Cambodia in 1966, he had led an idyllic boyhood even as the clouds of war gathered over Southeast Asia. His father was a schoolteacher, and his mother looked after their home on a large rice farm with his brothers and sisters.

Then war blew his boyhood apart. The communist Khmer Rouge insurgency of the ruthless Pol Pot overthrew the Cambodian government and began the period of the "killing fields," an orgy of executions and enforced starvation that took the lives of more than a million Cambodians who refused to be "re-educated."

Sarun Sar's father was arrested and sent to a prison camp. He eventually died of ailments resulting from his imprisonment. One of Sarun's brothers was executed. His mother and two younger brothers, dispossessed of their farm and hiding in fear of the communists, eventually died a cruel death by starvation.

Sarun and his older sister ended up in a refugee camp along the Thailand-Cambodia border. Under the sponsorship of a church in Montgomery County, Md., Sarun and his sister received visas and came to the U.S. in 1981. His older sister eventually moved to California. Sarun lived with an American family in Maryland until he could finish high school (where he joined the wrestling and track teams).

He felt strongly that he should serve his adopted country. He joined the Army in 1985, one year after graduating from high school. The next year he proudly became an American citizen. While stationed as an infantryman at Fort Benning, Ga., he says, "I was mentored by a sergeant who urged me to consider joining Special Forces."

He did. He also qualified as an Army Ranger, winning honors in his class. Then, between deployments all over the world, he earned a bachelor's degree in American history at Campbell University, in North Carolina. While stationed in Germany, he met and eventually married a Polish girl, Dobromila. Now living in Hawaii, they are currently enjoying the fact that he is "home" from the latest of his many foreign assignments.

---

With his boyish face and quiet voice, Sgt. Sar hardly seems the combat veteran who has earned the respect of the "toughest of the tough," his Special Forces peers. He prefers not to dwell on the many days and nights of patrols and firefights in Afghanistan. He tries to steer "war stories" toward the countless acts of humanitarian work he and his team did in Afghanistan to gain the trust of the people in the countryside. "When I went there, we were engaged in as many as six or seven attacks each day. By the time we left, they were about one a month."

Sgt. Sar feels the American public has heard only about the fighting in the war against terrorism and not enough about the work to achieve peace. "They should be proud of what their soldiers have done to overcome fear and win the hearts of these people." He chuckles when he recalls that when he first arrived in Afghanistan "the people didn't talk to me. Towards the end they wanted me to marry one of their daughters so I could stay a little longer."

Mr. Bennett writes the "American Heroes" series for the American Security Council Foundation.

Harry Potter and the War on Terror

Crypto-conservative Bookworm, at American Thinker has published a composite books/movies/society review. She points out some compelling characteristics of several different books and movies that have come out over the last ten years, or so. Many of them are ones that I have greatly enjoyed, and encouraged my children to read and watch.

Recommended.

How can we secure our borders this way?

Providing operational intelligence (about U.S. citizens lawfully exercising their rights in their own country) to a foreign country is definitely a losing proposition -- especially when those citizens are assisting the U.S. Border Patrol in securing our borders.

According to three documents on the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Web site, the U.S. Border Patrol is to notify the Mexican government as to the location of Minutemen and other civilian border patrol groups when they participate in apprehending illegal immigrants -- and if and when violence is used against border crossers.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman confirmed the notification process, describing it as a standard procedure meant to reassure the Mexican government that migrants' rights are being observed.

"It's not a secret where the Minuteman volunteers are going to be," Mario Martinez said Monday.

(Are you listening, Washington?)

Sheesh . . .

Heritage Quote

"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Monsieur A. Coray, 31 October 1823)

Coffee addiction

My brother, who is 11 years younger and quite a bit brighter than I, has started his own blog!

He has commented on this blog occasionally -- adding insight and, generally, a dissenting opinion, to a few of my more politically-oriented posts.

I thought he had stopped reading my blog because, until this week, he hasn't commented here in a very long time. Truth be told, I have missed his presence here -- he helps keep me from becoming too cynical about things in the news. And he also is ready to point out any faulty arguments that I pose.

We live a thousand miles apart and have very different and busy lives -- both professional and personal -- so we don't get in touch nearly enough. But that does not detract from the genuine love and respect I have for him.

As a footnote, I have always considered myself an independent politically. Though the last decade, or so, I have been voting Republican (at least in national elections), I have voted for Democrats and independents, as well. In fact, in the very first election I was eligible to vote in, I voted for Jimmy Carter. (Please forgive me.) The point I'm trying to make is, thanks to my brother, I now know how to describe myself:

My brother is an avid, well-informed blogger, with, what I would call a rightward slant and shades of libertarianism.

I may take exception to the "well-informed" part (I do appreciate the kind description, though!), but upon reflection, I think he has done a good job of characterizing my political inclinations.

And finally, to change the subject somewhat, I really think his blog would be an ideal candidate for the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, don't you?

Welcome to the blogosphere, Matt!

101st Fighting Keyboardists

The "Fighting KeeBees are looking for a few good bloggers!

For those who wish to join, please either drop a comment on this post or send me an e-mail. The Fighting Keebees, as one of our members called it, is strictly a volunteer organization. We just ask that you support the troops and support civilian control over foreign policy and the military, and have a really good sense of humor. It's all in fun and meant to irritate all the right people.

I've signed up . . . why don't you?

Too much environmentalism?

Robert Farago has some choice things to say about President Bush's "Declaration of Less Dependence" on foreign oil. Here is his conclusion:

In fact, the nuclear power plant debate-- or lack thereof-- encapsulates all that’s wrong with America’s energy policy: we don’t have one. As long as environmentalists set the political agenda, as long as our oil companies go along to get along, America’s push for energy independence is doomed. President Bush’s finale about leaving our children a “cleaner, a healthier and a more secure America” reveals the extent to which our future has been hijacked by environmental politicial correctness. The truth is, unless we detach ourselves from imported oil first and fast, all those clean, healthy Americans and their life-sustaining economy will continue to be at the mercy of foreign despots.

I recommend you go an read the build up to it.

Ecologics

Kenneth Green, over at NRO, takes a more level-headed approach to global warming.

These cracks in the climate coalition are excellent signs that rationality might win out in the debate over climate change and climate policy. The world needs more brave scientists to step up to the plate, disavow the hunt for ever-scarier scenarios, and join a meaningful discussion of what we might do to protect future generations from climate variability.

I recommend it.

Decentralizing Iraq

John R. Thomson & Hussain Hindawi, over at NRO have an editorial up with some good ideas on how to make a decentralized democracy in Iraq work to the betterment of its people.

Simply stated, Shia and Kurd leaders overwhelmingly favor a decentralized government, with the Sunnis nominally opposed, fearing they will be dealt out of Iraq’s oil wealth.

What is required is equitable distribution of oil ownership and its attendant financial benefits, a challenge that provides an outstanding free market opportunity which we summarize below. Following is what we have been recommending for the past two years, with respect to both governance and petroleum.

An interesting concept.

And one that just might work. . .

An open market for education

Michael Strong makes a strong case for opening up education to market forces.

It is possible to create safer, better, happier, healthier, schools, and many parents would send their children to such schools if they had the option. An open education market would create an innovation dynamic that would allow for steady improvements in the school communities in which young people spent most of their waking hours. [6] Had we followed Milton Friedman's advice in 1955, millions of young people would not have died, and millions more would be healthier and better off today. Parents, choosing among educational entrepreneurs, could solve the problem of adolescent health far more quickly and more effectively than can academics trying to guide public policy.

He has some interesting points. Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking up Arms, 6 July 1775)

AQ-Baghdad SITREP

It looks like the bad guys in Iraq are singing the blues. At least it seems that way:

CENTCOM announced today that they had captured al-Qaeda correspondence in Iraq that discusses the state of the insurgency, especially around Baghdad but also around the entire country. Far from optimistic, the documents captured in an April 16th raid reveal frustration and desperation, as the terrorists acknowledge the superior position of American and free Iraqi forces and their ability to quickly adapt to new tactics.

Go read the rest at Captain Ed's place.

Economic boom

The editors at NRO make no bones about the fact that Bush's tax cuts have contributed to the current economic boom, and they want to extend them.

For a boom is what it is. The economy is growing, jobs are increasing, wages are up, and the stock market is rising. The tax cuts are not responsible for all of this good news, but both common sense and the timing of the recovery suggest that they have played an important role.

An interesting read.

The once and future Holocaust

Charles Krauthammer has a compelling editorial up at the Washington Post about the very real potential for genocide being visited upon Israel. While the world stands by and watches. Again.

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen -- after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear -- that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration -- putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.

Go read the whole article.

More good news from Iraq

Bill Crawford provides us with his weekly column covering good news from Iraq. Here's how he starts:

Though the evening news and above-the-fold coverage here in the U.S. about Iraq may not reflect it, we have come far. For starters this week, here are two stories that give an indication of just how much. The first story shows the progress we have made in reconstruction, and the second story highlights the progress made in training Iraqis to secure their own country.

Go read the rest.

Heritage Quote

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."

-- James Madison (speech at the Constitutional Convention, 7/11/1787)

Illegals?

John Leo does a good job of describing several largely unpublicized aspects of the illegal immigration crisis we find ourselves in. Here's an excerpt (emphasis mine):

Editorialists seem to discuss the illegals mostly in terms of compassion and the impossibility of deporting the 11 million already here. But the core of the problem is that illegal entry is a never-ending process. An amnesty-light compromise in Washington is unlikely to do much more about this than the allegedly tough amnesty-light program of 1986. In a poll last August, about 40 percent of adults surveyed in Mexico said they would like to move to the United States. If so, there would be another 28 million people. Mexico has a high birthrate, a broken political culture and a government determined to dump its poor on the United States. It even publishes a comic book showing illegals how to avoid the U.S. border patrol.

And there's more. Highly recommended.

Dementia illustrated

Past president Jimmy Carter has once again embarrassed himself in public:

Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.

Those 'innocent people' elected a government of terrorists. And regardless of why they did that, no free nation on this planet should be expected to subsidize terrorism.

Perhaps Mr. Carter should just go back to his peanut farm, and leave foreign policy to those who are more in tune with reality.

More petronomics

Economist and business owner, Noel Sheppard, has provided more evidence that there is no price-gouging by 'Big Oil'. And, despite some snarkiness (not un-deserved, by the way) towards so-called journalists reporting about 'Big Oil' profits, he points out some additional details about the economics of our high energy prices.

. . . using Horsley’s numbers, $2.79 out of the $2.90 that folks are currently paying for a gallon of gasoline are oil companies’ costs.

Very interesting reading.

Happy birthday, Dad!

Another peanut butter cup day in your honor.

I still miss your steadying presence.

Don't get me wrong -- we're all doing well without you. But, if given the choice, we'd rather be doing well with you.

Heritage Quote

"[T]here is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it."

-- George Washington (letter to Robert Morris, 12 April 1786)

Economic cover-up

The news media -- particularly the broadcast media, in this case -- has done a pathetic job in reporting on the economy lately.

During the Clinton years, network journalists argued (correctly) that strong economic growth, a rising stock market, low unemployment and low inflation were the benchmark indicators of a good economy. Today, economic growth is a phenomenal 4.8 percent, the stock market has been climbing for three straight years, and inflation and unemployment are both low.

But instead of trumpeting the amazing “Bush economy,” TV news has downplayed this recent good news while hyping the bad news of rising fuel costs.

So begins this article recently published by the Media Reasearch Center.

I recommend you read the rest.

Arranged marriage

Bret Stephens describes an eye-opening tradition amongst Turkish immigrants in Germany. Importation of child brides.

I've reprinted the whole thing in the extended entry.

The Foreign Brides
Germany tries to protect Turkish girls from arranged marriages.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Sunday, May 7, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

They are called Die Fremden Bräute--the foreign brides. This year, thousands of teenage girls, very few past the age of consent, will arrive in Germany from Turkey for arranged marriages and lives of domestic servitude enforced by tradition, isolation and fear. It's a thriving one-way trade that has been going on for more than three decades, and it sits at the core of Europe's greatest predicament today: the widening gulf between an increasingly postmodern society and its often premodern immigrants.

The subject of foreign brides broke wide in the German media last year, when a 28-year-old Turkish man took his 11-year-old wife to a registry office in Düsseldorf to get her an ID card. On that occasion, the girl was detained by the authorities and deported to Turkey. But according to the Turkish-born German sociologist Necla Kelek, that is more often the exception than the rule. Ms. Kelek, 48, is one to know: In two bestselling books, "The Foreign Bride" and "The Lost Sons," she has exposed Germans to the lives of their 2.6 million-strong Turkish community in a way few of her German-born peers would have dared.

This week, the German parliament is set to debate legislation, conceived by Ms. Kelek and supported by Chancellor Angela Merkel, that would require foreign brides (from outside the European Union) to learn German before their arrival and bar entry to those under 21. "The goal," says Ms. Kelek, "is to ensure that those who come are willing to integrate."

This isn't just an academic or political issue for Ms. Kelek. It's a telling fact that the most prominent Muslim critics of contemporary Muslim societies--Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Holland, Irshad Manji in Canada, Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli in Germany--are women. "It's the women who have felt the relapse into Shariah the most," explains Ms. Kelek. "The boys might be slaves to their families, but on the streets they are free, and besides they can always look forward to a wife they can suppress. It's the women who explode."

---

Ms. Kelek herself came to Germany as a child in the late 1960s, along with a family that, initially at least, sought to integrate into German society. She learned German, made German friends, respected what later would be called, controversially, the German Leitkultur, the "lead culture."

But things changed in the 1970s. Previous Turkish immigrants had generally come from cities and were relatively secular, but later arrivals were overwhelmingly from the countryside and traditional in their outlook. The rise of fundamentalist Islam also had an effect. Religion became the primary marker of individual identity. Codes of family honor and standards of female purity, to which Ms. Kelek's family had once been relatively indifferent, became important.

When Ms. Kelek was 17, she locked herself in her room in a fit of adolescent rebellion. Her father knocked the door down with an ax. Instead of beating or killing her, he abandoned the family for good. It was, she says, one of the happiest days of her life: "We turned on all the lights and played music. We were free."

A similar scenario between a rebellious daughter and her Turkish father might work out differently these days. There have been 55 honor killings in Germany in the past six years. Most of the victims were "fallen" girls who had broken from their families and were living "like a German." Usually the perpetrator is a brother, acting at his father's behest. The Turkish community tends to treat these young killers as heroes.

Such violence is integral to what Ms. Kelek calls the Turkish community's "organized self-marginalization." The tender age of the foreign brides, for instance: That isn't just a matter of depraved sexual tastes. "They want a girl with 'closed eyes,'" Ms. Kelek explains. The younger the bride, the more likely she is to be submissive to her husband, dependent on his family, ignorant and terrified of the world outside.

Today, every second Turkish woman who has a child in a German school is herself a foreign bride. Two-thirds of these children arrive in school not speaking a word of German. The German educational system bends over backward for them, providing religious instruction in Turkish or Arabic and excluding girls from physical education, sex ed and other subjects where Islamic mores might be offended. The results have been dismal: 60% of Turkish children leave school without any kind of certificate. "The distance between Turkish youngsters and German ones increases every year," Ms. Kelek says.

The Turkish community is not the only party at fault, however. Until last year, few Turks, including those whose families had lived in Germany for generations, could obtain German citizenship. Successive German governments compensated for their refusal to facilitate citizenship procedures by allowing the Turkish community to do more or less as it pleased. Thus the 11-year-old bride: With a parent's consent, Turkish law will allow even a 9-year-old girl to marry. Had German law applied, the age threshold would have been 16.

---

There's a deeper problem here, though, which goes to the heart of modern Germany's problematic notion of goodness. Germans, Ms. Kelek says, "want to do everything right that they previously did wrong. This is especially the case with the Muslim community because it's such a different culture, such a different religion. Germans are trying to prove to themselves just how tolerant they are."

No surprise, then, that Ms. Kelek's legislation is being hotly opposed by the Social Democrats and the Green Party. For too many self-described progressives, limitless tolerance of "the other" has replaced the defense of individual liberty as proof of virtue.

Ms. Kelek sees it differently. Europe, she says, "has to fight for its values," not least by putting some hard questions to its increasingly alien and belligerent Muslim communities: "'Why aren't your women free? Why aren't your children free?' If we don't ask those questions, this will only continue."

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Moussaoui trial -- a good thing?

J. R. Dunn, over at The American Thinker has a different take on Moussaoui's trial and sentencing than most of the rest of us. But he makes some good points:

So, in the end, despite everything, Moussaoui has been valuable. He has accomplished the last thing he would have chosen to do; he has given us something no one else could provide. Subjected to the endless minutia of the legal process, he at last cracked open and showed us what he really was. And for that we can be grateful. Because if Zacarias Moussaoui is any example of what we’re up against, there is no way, whatever the inattention, folly, or negligence, that we will not see this thing through.

Recommended reading.

Heritage Quote

"[T]he foundation of a great Empire is laid, and I please myself with a persuasion, that Providence will not leave its work imperfect."

-- George Washington (letter to Chevalier de LaLuzerne, 1 August 1786)

The Bush presidency

Jack Kelly has a good summation of many folk's frustration with President Bush. Mine included.

Heritage Quote

The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity. -- George Washington (letter to Gouverneur Morris, 22 December 1795)

Quotable Quotes

James Taranto has pulled together some inspiring quotations by Democrat leaders in America.

Great Orators of the Democratic Party

• "One man with courage makes a majority."--Andrew Jackson
  
  
• "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin D. Roosevelt
  
  
• "The buck stops here."--Harry S. Truman
  
  
• "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."--John F. Kennedy
  
  
• "I was recently asked about the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. When it comes right down to it, the essential difference is that the Democrats fundamentally believe it is important to make sure that American Jews feel comfortable being American Jews."--Howard Dean

Heritage Quote

"Human Felicity is produced not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography, 1771)

The wrong verdict

Peggy Noonan makes a strong case that we should have sentenced Moussaoui to death.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.

[. . .]

He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

Because we did not sentence Zacarias Moussaoui to death, our society and our judicial system has diminished.

I've reprinted the whole thing in the extended entry.

They Should Have Killed Him
The death penalty has a meaning, and it isn't vengeance.

Thursday, May 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)--Moussaoui said as he was led from the courtroom: "America, you lost." He clapped his hands.

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve.

From the moment the decision was announced yesterday, everyone, all the parties involved--the cable jockeys, the legal analysts, the politicians, the victim representatives--showed an elaborate and jarring politesse. "We thank the jury." "I accept the verdict of course." "We can't question their hard work." "I know they did their best." "We thank the media for their hard work in covering this trial." "I don't want to second-guess the jury."

How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him." This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened. But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.

This is what Moussaoui did: He was in jail on a visa violation in August 2001. He knew of the upcoming attacks. In fact, he had taken flight lessons to take part in them. He told no one what was coming. He lied to the FBI so the attacks could go forward. He pled guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda; at his trial he bragged to the court that he had intended to be on the fifth aircraft, which was supposed to destroy the White House.

He knew the trigger was about to be pulled. He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.

He could have stopped it. He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died.

---

This is what the jury announced yesterday. They did not doubt Moussaoui was guilty of conspiracy. They did not doubt his own testimony as to his guilt. They did not think he was incapable of telling right from wrong. They did not find him insane. They did believe, however, that he had had an unstable childhood, that his father was abusive and then abandoning, and that as a child, in his native France, he'd suffered the trauma of being exposed to racial slurs.

As I listened to the court officer read the jury's conclusions yesterday I thought: This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur.

Of course he had a bad childhood; of course he was abused. You don't become a killer because you started out with love and sweetness. Of course he came from unhappiness. So, chances are, did the nice man sitting on the train the other day who rose to give you his seat. Life is hard and sometimes terrible, and that is a tragedy. It explains much, but it is not a free pass.

I have the sense that many good people in our country, normal modest folk who used to be forced to endure being patronized and instructed by the elites of all spheres--the academy and law and the media--have sort of given up and cut to the chase. They don't wait to be instructed in the higher virtues by the professional class now. They immediately incorporate and reflect the correct wisdom before they're lectured.

I'm not sure this is progress. It feels not like the higher compassion but the lower evasion. It feels dainty in a way that speaks not of gentleness but fear.

---

I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.

It is not a matter of vengeance. Murder can never be avenged, it can only be answered.

If Moussaoui didn't deserve the death penalty, who does? Who ever did?

And if he didn't receive it, do we still have it?

I don't want to end with an air of hopelessness, so here's some hope, offered to the bureau of prisons. I hope he doesn't get cable TV in his cell. I hope he doesn't get to use his hour a day in general population getting buff and converting prisoners to jihad. I hope he isn't allowed visitors with whom he can do impolite things like plot against our country. I hope he isn't allowed anniversary interviews. I hope his jolly colleagues don't take captives whom they threaten to kill unless Moussaoui is released.

I hope he doesn't do any more damage. I hope this is the last we hear of him. But I'm not hopeful about my hopes.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Get a grip

On spending, that is. OpinionJournal reports on some potentially good news -- about the emergency spending bill that has recently passed the Senate.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Veto Hallelujah
The Senate is challenging George Bush's presidential manhood.

Friday, May 5, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

All bad things must come to an end, and it may just be that President Bush's record for not casting vetoes will soon be history. So much the better that he is promising to break his dubious record by nixing the astonishing supplemental spending bill passed by the Senate yesterday.

If ever a bill deserved a veto, this is it. The ball of blubber rolled out of the world's greatest spending body at $108.9 billion, a mere $14.4 billion more than Mr. Bush requested. The original request was for Iraq, Afghanistan and hurricane relief, but these "emergency" spending bills have become regular bacchanalia because they fall outside the limits set by the annual budget spending "caps."

And speaking of toga parties, West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd took to the Senate floor to deplore Mr. Bush's veto threat as an outrage that would deny money for all sorts of domestic disasters, including farm losses and coal-mine accidents. "If the President wants to veto a bill that funds the troops, if he wants to veto a bill that funds victims of Hurricane Katrina . . . have at it," he taunted.

As Mr. Byrd knows from his years in the Roman Senate, this is a time-honored legislative tactic: Load up a vehicle that the President wants with junk that you want, and dare him to veto. We trust Mr. Bush knows his Presidential manhood is being challenged here. The Senate's misbehavior only grew worse in the wake of his veto threat, as if the Members don't believe he can finally be serious. They loaded up with earmarks, such as the $700 million Mississippi railroad to nowhere, and some $4 billion in farm aid at a time when farm income is high thanks to soaring commodity prices.

The bill passed 78-20, which means this Senate bender is bipartisan. But 35 GOP Senators have also sent Mr. Bush a letter pledging to support his demand to reduce the bill's total cost; that's one more vote than needed to block a veto override. Meanwhile, over in the House, GOP leaders are finally behaving like, well, Republicans. Speaker Denny Hastert declared the Senate bill "dead on arrival" in a House-Senate conference. "The House has no intention of joining in a spending spree at the expense of American taxpayers," he added. Hallelujah.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Hallelujah, indeed.

Heritage Quote

"It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religion profession of sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship...."

Massachusetts Bill of Rights, Part the First, 1780

Axis of obstruction

Gary Andres has an editorial up at The Washington Times describing the history of liberal environmental politics -- leading to today's expensive fill-ups. (I am not saying that environmentalism is inherently liberal, but rather that liberal environmentalism is generally too radical to be practical. Case in point: fuel prices today.)

For years Democrats conspired with environmental special-interest groups in Washington to block a host of even modest proposals, ranging from expanded domestic drilling, to increased use of nuclear power, to common-sense rules allowing more adequate refining capacity — all factors that would increase supply and reduce prices. Now Democrats have the audacity to stand in front of gas stations and say prices are too high.

We need to stop blaming "Big Oil" and set our sights on our esteemed national leaders. Perhaps then we can start dealing with this problem rationally and responsibly.

Recommended.

Penn State censorship

A rundown on censorship at Penn State University. This is my mom and dad's alma mater, and I almost went there myself.

I'm sorry to see Penn State having to go through this.

Well said

Captain Ed has some well-chosen things to say about Stephan Colbert's rude and tasteless remarks about President Bush . And about Colbert's apologists.

Standing in front of a tank in Tianenman Square is speaking truth to power. Lech Walesa forming a workers party in Communist Poland to demonstrate the plight of the oppressed is speaking truth to power. The bravery of West Berliners in the opening days of the Cold War is speaking truth to power. Humiliating Joe McCarthy on national TV by scolding him for his indeceny is speaking truth to power. Equating these actions to Colbert's performance should embarrass those who make the argument.

Go read the whole thing. The Captain has, once more, hit the nail squarely on its head.

Heritage Quote

"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."

-- Patrick Henry (speech in the Virginia Convention, 23 March 1775)

Rebuttal

Executive editor Bill Keller, of the New York Times, wrote a letter in rebuttal of the OpinionJournal editorial entitled 'Our Rotten IntelligenCIA". I posted about that article here.

I can understand Mr. Keller's indignation, but I don't think that he made a very good case to refute the OpinionJournal piece. For one thing, he must have an incomplete understanding of security classification standards if he thinks that the President of the United States cannot decide to de-classify any U.S.-classifed data that he wants to. The President is the ultimate authority in national security in this country. Secondly, if a contractor or government/military employee had released the information that Mr. Keller's paper published, he would lose his job and go to jail. Third, the publishing of that data is tantamount to giving it to our enemies. And in war, that is spelled T-R-E-A-S-O-N.

As I said before, I am very disappointed in the poor performance of many news organizations over the last few years -- the New York Times included.

I've reprinted the whole letter in the extended entry.

Striking a Balance
The New York Times executive editor on leaks and partisanship.

BY BILL KELLER
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Most American newspapers, including yours and mine, try hard to separate the curiosity-driven world of reporters and editors from the ideology-driven world of editorial writers and columnists. The news and opinion departments operate under separate management, and they play by different rules. When editors like me disagree with our counterparts in opinion-land, we tend to keep it to ourselves.

Still, I imagine a lot of people on the news side of this divide were appalled by your editorial attack April 26 on the patriotism and professional integrity of journalists and government officials who talk to them ("Our Rotten IntelligenCIA," Review & Outlook). Since my paper was one of your particular targets, I hope you'll allow me to respond.

Your editorial posits a conspiracy between journalists and "a cabal of partisan bureaucrats" to undermine President Bush by sabotaging the war on terror. Among the suspects swept up and summarily convicted in your argument are: a) government officials who have disclosed secret doings of the government (with the exception of President Bush, whose leak-authorizing somehow escapes your notice); b) reporters and editors at the New York Times and Washington Post for reporting on these secret doings--notably the detention of terror suspects in CIA facilities in Europe and eavesdropping on Americans without warrants; and c) the Pulitzer Board, which honored both of those journalistic exploits last week.

I leave to others, including the court of public opinion, whether the government officials who spoke to reporters about secrets that troubled them were partisan evildoers, as the Journal contends, or conscientious public servants, or something more complicated. Since most of them, including the nearly a dozen who were cited in the first warrantless eavesdropping story, have not been publicly identified, it's hard to know how the Journal is so certain of their motives.

---

As regards the journalists, the editorial is animated by a couple of assumptions. One is that when journalists write things politicians don't like, the motivation is sure to be political. The other is that when presidents declare that secrecy is in the national interest, reporters should take that at face value. I don't believe either of those things is true, and I find it hard to believe that you do, either.

To believe that aggressive journalism is driven by liberal partisanship requires an awfully selective memory. (Ask Bill Clinton. Ask Congressman Mollohan.) The role of journalism on our side of the news/opinion divide, at least as we aspire to perform it, is not to be advocates for or against any president or any party or any cause. It is not to tell our readers what we think or what they should think, but to provide information and analysis that enables them to make up their own minds. We are sometimes too credulous, sometimes too cynical--in other words, we are human--but I think we get the balance right most of the time, and when we don't we feel an obligation to correct it.

In addition to fair treatment in the news pages, presidents are entitled to a respectful and attentive hearing, particularly when they make claims based on the safety of the country. In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: "We've been clear all along that we don't like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job." That's nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It's just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

Mr. Keller is executive editor of the New York Times.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

The late al-Qaeda?

Harold C. Hutchinson has an interesting op-ed up at StrategyPage explaining why al-Qaeda has been losing so badly:

Despite the many brickbats of the media, al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq, and is now retreating to lick its wounds where it can. If it can. Just over four and a half years, al Qaeda has gone from being the dominant terrorist group in the world to a defeated shell of its former self. In trying to defeat the United States, al Qaeda made three big mistakes: They fought the last information war, they underestimated the American leadership, and they also managed to anger the Iraqi people.

Go read the rest.

Dissent

Mark Steyn points out a fallacious quotation that has become accepted by many national leaders as true.

Dissent for its own sake is like the Democrats' energy policy: We're opposed to any kind of energy; we prefer to be mired in enervated passivity. If the right is full of armchair generals, the left is full of armchair generalities: Nothing can be done, any course is futile, everything's a quagmire. All we can say for certain is that saying so for certain is the highest form of patriotism.

It's truer to say that these days patriotism is the highest form of dissent -- against a culture where the media award each other Pulitzers for damaging national security, and the only way a soldier's mom can become a household name is if she's a Bush-is-the-real-terrorist kook like Cindy Sheehan, and our grade schools' claims to teach our children about America, "warts and all," has dwindled down into teaching them all the warts and nothing else. Or as the Capital Times of Madison, Wis., concluded its ringing editorial on the subject:

"Thomas Jefferson got it right: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' And teaching children how to be thoughtful and effective dissenters is the highest form of education."

Teaching them authentic Jefferson quotes would be a better approach.

Go read the whole thing.

Petronomics update

Brendan Miniter gives us some insight into why our energy policy has contributed to higher fuel prices.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Running on Empty
On the highway, fuel is in short supply. In Washington, ideas are.

BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

ALONG INTERSTATE 95, Md.--Driving to New York from Washington recently I came across something worse than $3-a-gallon gasoline, price gouging or oil-company windfall profits. At a rest stop outside Baltimore a makeshift sign had a stark message for motorists: "No gas." The Exxon station serving northbound traffic had run dry. I eventually found enough regular unleaded to keep going north, but only after watching two other drivers argue over a working pump at another station that was running out of gas.

This is not a replay of the 1970s with widespread shortages, long gas lines and rationing. But with gas prices off the charts, crude above $70 a barrel, and now "spot shortages" at service stations in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere, it's not hard to see why lawmakers in Washington feel compelled to do something. And what we're getting is the kind of policy ideas we can expect in a panic.

Congress is now considering revoking $2 billion in tax credits for oil companies that it stuffed into an energy bill just last year. The House Energy Committee plans hearings. And there's already plenty of grandstanding about lavish executive pay and record profits. (Adding more fuel to the fire, Exxon Mobil reported last week that it took in $8.4 billion in profits over the past three months, up 7% from a year earlier.) Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican and sometime sane voice, captured the mood when he told a reporter that "Nobody has any sympathy for oil companies on Capitol Hill right now."

On the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Bush is also revving his engine with nowhere to go. He too wants to suspend oil-exploration tax credits that he signed into law a mere eight months ago, though he doesn't say how this will increase crude oil production and therefore bring down prices at the pump. He wants to investigate allegations of price gouging and to raise fuel-economy standards for cars. And he will stop steering oil into the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, making a few additional million barrels available on the market. The man who complained about America's addiction to oil now says "every little bit helps."

Actually looking to the reserve is not such a bad idea. Steering oil away from or even tapping into the reserve won't cut the price of gasoline by much. President Clinton proved that in the 1990s by releasing oil from the reserve and watching as just a few pennies were shaved off prices at the pump. But if law makers insists on doing something, tinkering with the reserve is one of the less destructive things they can do.

---

One reason for all the creative thinking on energy policy in Washington these days is that Congress has embraced little more than bad policy for years. Last year's energy bill actually contributed to this year's price spikes and shortages with new mandates that in effect strip out one antipollution gasoline additive (MTBE) and add in another (ethanol). Energy experts don't describe it that way. Instead they tell us that the MTBE requirement is disappearing as of May 5. But with the additive now said to pollute groundwater, any oil executive worth his salary knows that leaving it in one day longer than federal law requires it to be there is an open invitation to be sued.

Congress could have given oil companies a little flexibility by including liability protection in the energy bill. It chose not to. And it's true that oil companies can decide where to sell ethanol-blended gasoline. But the new rules require four billion gallons of it be sold somewhere in the U.S. this year and even more next year. That's great for corn growers, but not so good for consumers as oil companies figure out where to sell the new fuel.

With MTBE on its way out, something has to take its place. Substituting ethanol is even a good idea, except that it's only gotten more expensive since Congress mandated its use. And it's a lot easier to add a subsidy for the corn-based fuel to a piece of legislation than it is to add the fuel itself to a gallon of gas. Ethanol can't be mixed at refineries. Instead it has to be shipped separately to terminals closer to local gas stations and blended there. That requires new equipment and new supply chains. Ethanol also doesn't mix well with the old MTBE gas, so service stations have to empty and scrub their tanks before taking delivery of the new fuel. That's creating hiccups in the system we see as spot shortages. Congress could make the changeover a lot easier if it would repeal the ethanol mandate. But that's a non-starter on the Hill.

With the president's approval rating at 36% and Congress's at 22%, no one is willing to step on the breaks before Washington pushes through more bad policies. The president is right about one thing. It's going to be a tough summer for drivers.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Heritage Quote

"There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come."

-- Peter Muhlenberg (from a Lutheran sermon read at Woodstock, Virginia, January 1776)

In Iraq

Joseph E. Robert Jr., a businessman who has recently had occasion to go to Iraq, has a column up at washingtonpost.com suggesting that we dare not leave Iraq before the Iraqis are ready.

My flight out of Baghdad was a somber one. Our C-130 cargo plane bore the flag-draped coffin of an American soldier killed helping the Iraqi people defend themselves against a vicious insurgency. Back home, as the election-year debate over Iraq rages on, I think about that soldier's sacrifice and recall a final impassioned plea from an Iraqi general named Aziz: "Iraqi troops will finish this job; we will kill this insurgency. But please tell the American people and President Bush that America cannot withdraw before the Iraqi troops are ready. We can't stand alone yet. We need more time."

Let's give them more time, and give liberty a chance.

Good reason to close our southern border

Check out this post.

It's worth thinking about.

Personal reflections and "United 93"

Gerard Van der Leun has posted an introspective piece on 9/11 and "United 93". He was living in New York City on that stunningly infamous day.

The best among us all had our rituals for getting through those days and, to tell the truth, for a long time in New York, the best of us were the most of us. In time, as you can see today, that faded out of a lot of New Yorkers' souls, and left them even emptier and more cynical than before as they turned back to petty politics and bad art. A lot of the output of these damaged souls can be seen in the media products that the city produces to fainter and fainter acclaim. But we were, for a bit, somewhat united by the evil that had been visited on us. That and the need to bear witness to our dead.

You should go read the whole thing.

Spying for prizes

Ralph Peters has a good column up about how some self-serving journalism has resulted in harm to this country's security, and the need to keep classified information a secret.

WE face savage enemies who obey no laws, honor no international conventions, treaties or compacts, and who believe they do the will of a vengeful god. Under the circumstances, we need to be able to keep an occasional secret.

Recommended reading.

Heritage Quote

"There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; for the true idea of a republic is "an empire of laws, and not of men." That,as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Good news from Iraq

Bill Crawford has his Monday column up with more good news from Iraq. One notable item is this quote on the "Iraqi civil war":

And on Thursday, the military said that Iraq was moving away from the threat of a civil war: "We are not seeing widespread militia operations across Iraq. We are not seeing widespread movement of displaced personnel," he said. "So we do not see us moving toward a civil war in Iraq. In fact we see us moving away from it."

Recommended.

Remember, we are liberators

Larry Elder reports on how we were greeted when we toppled Saddam in 2003.

It's worth reading.

Flight 93 and the war on terror

Callimachus, at Done With Mirrors has posted an excellent and balanced summation of America's psychological struggle with the war on Islamofascism.

We all do see the enemy for who he is and we read his own words and take them at their face value. Some of us recognize this as a Long War for Civilization, and think the obvious disparity in firepower and national economies masks a vulnerability in the West. The people we are fighting say certain things very clearly: we are infidels who have offended their religion, they are at war with us, and they want us to die. They may not have an air force, but they have other weapons, more intangible, perhaps more powerful. And we have weak spots. We could be brought down hard by a combination of lack of will and a few hard, well-timed terrorist strikes with the right volume.

Go read the whole thing.

Middle East policy looking up

Victor Davis Hansen has a column up about positive indications from the Middle East.

But if we look beneath all these self-serving contradictions, real progress amid the carnage since September 11 is undeniable. It is not just that the United States has not been attacked again. Al Qaeda's leadership has been insidiously dismantled. Even bin Laden's communiqués are increasingly pathetic, whining about lost truce opportunities for the Crusaders while warning of more welcomed genocide in Darfur. We can be sure of his war-induced attenuated stature when some on the Left are already suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were mostly the operations of just a few criminals rather than precursors to international jihad.

Go read the whole thing -- particularly the footnote where he describes a recent life and death experience he had in Libya.

Heritage Quote

"The American war is over; but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection."

-- Benjamin Rush (letter to Price, 25 May 1786)

Petro-economics redux

Charles Krauthammer gets it. Supply and demand. Now, if only those meatheads in Washington would regard the problem as such, our government would be in a lot better position to solve the problem for the long-term.

George Shultz once said, "Nothing ever gets settled in this town." But even Shultz, who has seen everything, must marvel at the perfect regularity, the utter predictability, of the bottomless cynicism of Washington in the grip of gasoline fever.

Recommended reading.

An analysis of conditions in Iraq (wrapped within a book review)

Phillip Carter, currently deployed in Iraq, has an interesting post about a book -- and his take on Iraq.

My copy of The Assassin's Gate by George Packer arrived shortly after I deployed to Iraq. One of my journalist colleagues said in an e-mail that this book could be "the one" — the single, authoritative narrative of how America marched to war in Iraq. I found that statement to be a bit odd. We are certainly at war in Iraq, but we have not finished it yet. I couldn't imagine a definitive narrative of Iraq that could be written with the war still in progress, and the outcome still very much in doubt.

This is good stuff -- go read the whole thing.

Energy outlook

Larry Kudlow tells us the greatest story never told.

The big point here is that free markets work. Rising prices from the global boom will lead to more conservation, less consumption, and more production, but only so long as government stays out of the way. Instead of blaming ExxonMobil for high gas prices, irate motorists and voters should blame Congress for mandating, regulating, and taxing against energy.

It's good news about the economy . . .

Recommended.

Avoid Massachusetts!

Jeffy Jacoby points out the trash they are teaching in Massachusetts public schools. And the public educators are adamant about it, too.

"We couldn't run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed," Lexington’s superintendent of schools, Paul Ash, told the Globe. "Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal."

Some places seem like they're going to Hell faster than others.