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Pickings has devoted much space to the al-Dura affair which is the modern day version of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion. Those Protocols were created for the Czar’s secret police in 1903 and have become a staple of anti-Semitism since. (Hitler referred to them in Mein Kampf) Later today we devote a lot of space to a Weekly Standard article debunking the al-Dura myth.

Before we get to news items, Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College reminds us of the document and the birthday we celebrate tomorrow.

… We might remember then, this Fourth of July, that our nation may not be perfect, but it can make a claim available to no other: in the name of the rights of all, it was built from the first to belong to its people and not to their rulers. …

A week ago Victor Davis Hanson wrote on our “can’t do” mentality. Daniel Henninger has the theme today with the World Trade Center site as back drop.

James Taranto has interesting background to the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt from FARC rebels in Colombia.

We’ll spend some time today on Wesley Clark. Jennifer Rubin starts us off with three posts from Contentions.

Barack Obama can’t figure out why it should be a top priority to cough up an apology to John McCain for the Wesley Clark slur. Let’s see: 1) it is burying his patriotism defense and making a mockery of Monday’s speech; 2) it is convincing the political establishment that he is tone deaf or arrogant or both; 3) no one will believe his squishy words distancing him from this and future attacks; and 4) New Politics is now fodder for parody. Oh–and he turned a one day story into a week-long blunder. …

… So we have Obama’s entirely self-created blunder where even the MSM is virtually slack-jawed at the sight of the Obama campaign’s determination to inflict more and more damage upon itself. His atrocious judgment in perpetuating a horrible storyline for himself defies the pre-existing media narrative — that Obama is smart, savvy, world-wise, and adept. Not the Obama we have seen lately: he is either paralyzed by indecision or in such a cocoon of liberal elitism that he sees nothing wrong with attacking a war hero’s military service. …

While Rubin concentrated on Obama, Victor Davis Hanson turns towards the perpetrator - Wesley Clark.

… But how can a former four-star general suggest that piloting a jet fighter-bomber under fire  can be reduced to “riding in a fighter plane” (as in a Sunday spin above the base?).  And isn’t the ability to repeatedly pilot a vulnerable aircraft over enemy territory, and then survive years of unimaginable savagery precisely “a qualification to be president” (note the indefinite article “a” that Clark employed, as in one of many that might make a successful President). …

Power Line has spotted the root of the problem - Wesley’s ego.

Wesley Clark has made the rounds of just about every talk show on television over the last 24 hours, repeating his attack on John McCain as lacking the executive experience needed to be President. It’s pretty funny, actually, if you listen to Clark, because whenever he describes the precise military experience needed to equip a candidate for the Presidency, it turns out to be exactly what Clark himself did. Right up until the time he got fired. …

There’s manifest evidence of that ego in Slate’s 2001 review of his book. (2001, mind you. A couple of light years in internet time)

… But at the book’s core is an agenda of score-settling and ass-covering–and there’s plenty of both to do. I don’t really see the difference between “modern war,” as Clark describes it, and a cynical kind of media savvy. (”For large democracies, the home front is the critical theater of war, and words and images are the key weapons.”) Like his fellow airwave-hog Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special negotiator in the run-up to the Kosovo bombing, Clark sought to wage the war by chatting up Tom Brokaw and Christiane Amanpour. He made end-runs around the U.S. Army chain of command and leaked information to other branches of government (State, in particular) and other governments (Britain’s, in particular). This won Clark a reputation for flexibility with Holbrooke and Albright and the esteem of both NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and British Prime Minister Tony Blair–so much esteem, in the latter case, that Clark was recently knighted.

But at the same time, his methods led him into a propagandistic press strategy that was transparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the war. And they hurt him in U.S. military circles, where he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator. Defense Secretary William Cohen told Clark, through Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, “Get your f–king face off the TV.” Shelton didn’t trust him. Nor did Gen. Eric Shinseki, subsequently Army chief. And once the Kosovo operation was finished, Cohen–with no objection from President Clinton–ended Clark’s tour of duty early. In essence, sacked him. …

Back to the real campaign, Karl Rove has a recap of the money war.

On the money front, how do Sens. Obama and McCain stack up? No contest, it seems. Since the campaign began, Mr. Obama has raised a staggering $295-plus million, versus Mr. McCain’s almost $122 million. But that’s misleading.

Mr. Obama spent a lot to win the nomination. So how much cash did he and his rival have when the general election effectively began in June? As of May 31, Mr. Obama had $43.1 million on hand while Mr. McCain had $31.6 million – a significant but not overwhelming advantage.

There is also the cash raised by the Republican and Democratic National Committees. Each candidate depends on the party committees for certain expenditures – registration, voter identification and get-out-the-vote drives, materials distributed by volunteers, even some advertising. Here, the Republicans had $53.5 million in hand on May 31, versus the Democrats’ paltry $4 million. Thus Mr. McCain and the RNC have $38 million more than Mr. Obama and the DNC. …

In 2000 a new blood libel against the Jews was created in the Gaza strip. The Weekly Standard tells us how it was done.

To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can’t own up to a mistake. This is a country where the law of the Circus Maximus still applies: Vae victis, Woe to the vanquished. Slip, and it’s thumbs-down. Not for nothing was Brennus a Gaul. His modern French heirs don’t do apologies well, or at all if they can possibly help it. Why should they? That would be an admission of weakness. Blink, and you become the fall guy.

So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura-a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000-it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel’s regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.

In the ensuing eight years, the small figure of Muhammad al-Dura cowering beside his crouching father became the defining image of the second Intifada. The “child martyr’s” picture cropped up on posters, websites, postage stamps, and street names throughout the Muslim world from Mali to Indonesia, fueling lynchings and suicide bombings. The Israeli authorities at first took the French report more or less at face value and blandly deplored the child’s death in a hasty release (”To the best of our knowledge, the boy was hit by our fire”). Others, however, were not so sure.

They parsed and scoured each of the 59 seconds of the film and every corner of the location for clues, ballistic angles, improbable moves, and hidden motivations. The film showed the two figures first seeking cover from gunfire, then later slumped over, though with no sign of blood or wounds. When increasingly convincing voices came to question, at the very least, the point of origin of the shots-the location of the small Israeli garrison made it pretty much impossible for Muhammad and his father, who was allegedly wounded, to have been hit by Israeli bullets-it took six weeks for the Israeli army spokesman to state in an interview that “both versions of the incident [are] possible,” and two more months for an official investigation to be launched.

Meanwhile, Enderlin and his bosses at the state-run France 2, who had distributed their news item free worldwide, were refusing to answer questions. They flatly declined to provide the complete 27 minutes of footage taken that afternoon by the cameraman, or to concede any possible error, ping-ponging in the classical obfuscating pattern of bureaucracies everywhere. (”It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” hasn’t yet made it to France.) …

The Economist reviews a book on Communist jokes.

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Daily Telegraph blogger says the left is responsible for Mugabe.

A few years ago, when the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this stance, I was assailed by an “Africa expert” who told me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.

White liberals like him are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly unchecked. …

Contemplating Zimbabwe, Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff wonders if the UN is worth anything.

… Following Mugabe’s Stalinesque triumph, the U.N. Security Council expressed “deep regrets” that the election was conducted “in these circumstances.” That language would have been a tad more critical, but South Africa, not wanting to hurt Mugabe’s feelings, objected to describing the elections as “illegitimate.”

On the very day before, hospitals in Harare, the capital, were overflowing, as there weren’t enough doctors. Some hospitals, responding to threats by the military, refused to take any more victims of torture.

Not at all surprisingly, the U.N. Human Rights Council has yet to even put on its agenda Mugabe’s extended version of the Nazis’ “Kristillnacht” that presaged the Holocaust, when the world also declined to intervene. …

Mark’s on hiatus and we need a Steyn fix. Here’s a column from the end of March when Hillary’s demise was becoming clear.

About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can’t blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply.

Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available – his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc. But Hillary liked to live a little more dangerously. The defining fiction arose back in the mid-Nineties when she visited New Zealand and met Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest, and for some reason decided to tell him he was the guy her parents had named her after.

Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and a somewhat unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. If any of the bigshot U.S. newspaper correspondents on the trip noticed this inconsistency, they kept it to themselves. I mentioned it in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph at the time, but like so many other improbabilities in the Clinton record it sailed on indestructibly for years. By 2004 it was preserved for the ages in Bill Clinton’s autobiography, on page (gulp) 870:

“Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea’s mother had been named for.”

Eventually, when it was noticed that Hillary was born six years before the ascent of Everest, Clinton aides tried assuring skeptics that her parents had seen a press interview with Sir Edmund in his beekeeping days, Mr. and Mrs. Rodham apparently being the only Illinois subscribers to The New Zealand Apiarist. Then, in the early days of her presidential campaign, Sen. Clinton quietly withdrew the story, by which time the damage was done. …

Politico’s James Kirchick asks who’s smearing whom?

… the fears of Obama supporters that their candidate lies eternally vulnerable to GOP smears exists only in their fevered imaginations. The evidence of dirty Republican tricks has been utterly absent this campaign season. And if anyone has tried to smear Barack Obama in the way that Thomas, Wolfe and other Democratic partisans allege, it was not the Republican National Committee, but rather Hillary Rodham Clinton and her surrogates. In February, the Drudge Report claimed that the Clinton campaign circulated photos of Obama in a traditional East African turban and robe, with the message that the images showed him “dressed.” Asked if there was any truth to the smear that Obama is a Muslim, she infamously replied, “As far as I know,” it wasn’t the case. After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, she said the results showed that “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”

The belief that “the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968” is a comforting salve for Democrats. After all, it’s much easier for them to demonize conservatives than consider that the reason for their electoral defeats may lie with liberal ideas. Please don’t take that as a “smear.”

Phil Gramm, McCain’s shadow cabinet Treasury secretary, interviewed by WSJ’s Stephen Moore.

John Stossel on the media’s campaign for a recession.

“It’s been described as the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. And it brings with it grave dangers for all American families … ,” said Martin Bashir on “Nightline.” “Recession looms …. “

On the “Today” show June 20, David Faber referred to “the recession … these tough economic times.” Yet that very day first-quarter GDP was revised upward again to 1 percent.

America is not in recession, and who knows — maybe we’ll be less likely to have one if my compatriots would just chill. A recession is defined as two quarters of negative economic growth. We haven’t even had one quarter of negative growth.

Yes, growth has slowed, and many people are suffering because of falling home prices and higher food and energy prices. These are real problems, but watching TV, you’d think we were in a recession so severe it must be compared to the Great Depression. …

Walter Williams says we need more people and less government.

… Contrary to the myths we hear about how overpopulation causes poverty, poor health, unemployment, malnutrition and overcrowding, human beings are the most valuable resource and the more of them the better. There is absolutely no relationship between high populations and economic despair. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, has a meager population density of 22 people per square kilometer while Hong Kong has a massive population density of 6,571 people per square kilometer. Hong Kong is 300 times more crowded than the Congo. If there were any merit to the population control crowd’s hysteria, Hong Kong would be in abject poverty while the Congo flourishes. Yet Hong Kong’s annual per capita income is $28,000 while the Congo’s is $309, making it the world’s poorest country. …

… The greatest threat to mankind’s prosperity is government. A recent example is Zimbabwe’s increasing misery. Like our country, Zimbabwe had a flourishing agriculture sector, so much so it was called the breadbasket of southern Africa. Today, its people are on the brink of starvation as a result of its government. It’s the same story in many countries — government interference with mankind’s natural tendency to engage in wealth-producing activities. Blaming poverty on overpopulation not only lets governments off the hook; it encourages the enactment of harmful policies.

The Economist on the fate of wild mustangs in the not so wild west.

IN 1964 a new car was launched at the New York World’s Fair: the Ford Mustang. Both its name and its galloping horse logo, adapted from Frederic Remington’s portraits of the Old West, epitomised a peculiarly American dream about a land of cowboys and big skies. More than 8m Mustangs have been sold. But on America’s old frontier, the free-roaming wild horses now struggle for survival.

Deanne Stillman, a journalist, began researching this history in 1998 after 34 wild horses were massacred in the Virginia Range of mountains near Reno, Nevada. The horse began evolving on the North American continent 55m years ago, before crossing the Bering land bridge and spreading through Asia and Europe. …

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Onions will help us fight economic nonsense today. Fortune has a short piece on the lack of an onion futures market and the subsequent wild ride for prices.

Before the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission starts scrutinizing the role that speculators may have played in driving up fuel and food prices, investigators may want to take a look at price swings in a commodity not in today’s news: onions.

The bulbous root is the only commodity for which futures trading is banned. Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible for falling onion prices, so they lobbied an up-and-coming Michigan Congressman named Gerald Ford to push through a law banning all futures trading in onions. The law still stands. …

And Robert Samuelson helps out with “Let’s shoot the speculators.”

Tired of high gasoline prices and rising food costs? Well, here’s a solution. Let’s shoot the speculators. A chorus of politicians, including John McCain and Barack Obama, blames these financial slimeballs for piling into commodities markets and pushing prices to artificial and unconscionable levels. Gosh, if only it were that simple. Speculator-bashing is another exercise in scapegoating and grandstanding. Leading politicians either don’t understand what’s happening or don’t want to acknowledge their own complicity.

Granted, raw materials prices have exploded across the board. From 2002 to 2007, oil rose 177 percent, corn 70 percent, copper 360 percent and aluminum 95 percent. But that’s just the point. Did “speculators” really cause all those increases? If so, why did some prices go up more than others? And what about steel? It rose 117 percent — and has increased further in 2008 — even though it isn’t traded on commodities futures markets.

A better explanation is basic supply and demand. Despite the U.S. slowdown, the world economy has boomed. Since 2002, annual growth has averaged 4.6 percent, the highest sustained rate since the 1960s, says economist Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute. By their nature, raw materials (food, energy, minerals) sustain the broader economy. They’re not just frills. When unexpectedly high demand strains existing production, prices rise sharply as buyers scramble for scarce supplies. That’s what happened. …

Martin Peretz wonders what the UN is worth.

Christopher Hitchens on how you can clean your home and help democracy in Iraq. Got some books around you don’t need? The Kurds have a library.

It’s quite common to read, usually from liberal opponents of the engagement in Iraq, that George W. Bush’s administration hasn’t asked the American people to make any sacrifices. I must confess that I never quite understand this criticism. As a society, we collectively contribute a great deal from our common treasury to give Iraq a fighting chance to recover from three decades of war and fascism and to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemies of civilization. And as fellow citizens, we experience the agony of loss when our soldiers, aid workers, civil servants, and others are murdered. (That each of these is a volunteer is a great cause for national pride.)

However, I do believe that many people wish they could do something positive and make a contribution, however small, to the effort to build democracy in Iraq. And I have a suggestion. In the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniya, the American University of Iraq has just opened its doors. And it is appealing for people to donate books. …

Paul Greenberg on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette takes up the problem of Obama’s ignorance of history.

Barack Obama now has cited the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War as a model of the way Osama bin Laden should be tried in the (unlikely) event he’s ever taken alive. He recommends Nuremberg as an example to follow because, he says, those trials embodied universal legal principles.

The Nuremberg trials a model of international law? Those stone-faced judges in Red Army uniforms peering down from the bench at Nuremberg, shoulder boards in place and guilty verdicts at the ready, must have been there as representatives of Comrade Stalin’s well-known devotion to universally accepted legal principles.

This is not to say that the judges at Nuremberg couldn’t demonstrate exquisite tact. For example, not a one noted the Soviets’ responsibility for the Katyn Massacre, a war crime none dared accuse them of at the time.

In 1946, the Soviets were still Our Fighting Russian Allies. And so the mass execution of the Polish army’s officer corps in the Katyn forest was pinned on the Nazis, who were conveniently at hand. What would one more war crime matter in a record already so monstrous? …

Speaking of ignorance, James Kirchick in Contentions writes on Wesley Clark.

One would think that the Democratic Party would have locked Wesley Clark away somewhere after his infamous “New York Money People” remark last year. But he was on the Face the Nation yesterday morning, …

Kirchick referred to Clark’s toe to toe confrontation with Russians at the end of the war in Kosovo. Here’s the story from BBC.

… ‘Third World War’

General Wesley Clark, Nato’s supreme commander, immediately ordered 500 British and French paratroopers to be put on standby to occupy the airport. ”I called the [Nato] Secretary General [Javier Solana] and told him what the circumstances were,” General Clark tells the BBC programme Moral Combat: Nato at War.

”He talked about what the risks were and what might happen if the Russian’s got there first, and he said: ‘Of course you have to get to the airport’. ”I said: ‘Do you consider I have the authority to do so?’ He said: ‘Of course you do, you have transfer of authority’.”

But General Clark’s plan was blocked by General Sir Mike Jackson, K-For’s British commander. “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,” he reportedly told General Clark during one heated exchange. General Jackson tells the BBC: ”We were [looking at] a possibility….of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command.” …

Ed Morrissey wonders just how stupid Wesley Clark is.

David Harsanyi says to Clark and the Obama campaign, “Go ahead, make McCain’s day!”

Ilya Somin posts in Volokh on why campaign finance laws protect incumbents.

Bret Stephens on the religious aspects of globalony.

Reason on how gun control lost.

The Economist says you might be twice as smart.

Forget the stuff that informs, Dilbert went to Branson, Missouri.

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Stuart Taylor has words for those who accuse Bushies of war crimes.

… Among those calling explicitly or implicitly for criminal investigations are 56 House Democrats; retired Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal; liberal groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the ACLU; human-rights lawyers including Scott Horton of New York and Philippe Sands of London; and the New York Times editorial page. Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, has raised the possibility of prosecuting current and former administration lawyers “in a foreign court, or in an international court.”

Is Wilkerson aware that his friend Powell is also among the targets of those hurling accusations of war crimes? So are Vice President Cheney; David Addington, Cheney’s powerful legal counsel; Condoleezza Rice, Powell’s successor; former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; former CIA Director George Tenet; and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. With the approbation of Bush, they all discussed in detail and approved specific interrogation methods, including simulated drowning (”waterboarding”), according to an April 9 ABC News report. …

One of the architects of the Canadian health care system now has serious doubts. Investor’s Business Daily has the story.

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.

But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.

Castonguay’s evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country.

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”  …

Good post in Volokh Conspiracy by Ilya Somin on the drug war’s damage to poor black communities.

Social conservatives have, with some justification, long warned of the dangers of single-parenthood among the poor, which often leads to poor outcomes for children. However, some of those same social conservatives are also staunch supporters of the War on Drugs. Unfortunately, as Kerry Howley points out in a recent LA Times debate with Kay Hymowitz, the War on Drugs is a major contributor to the prevalence of fatherless children in poor black communities: …

Telegraph, UK says the Narcissist is still steamed at Obama.

Mr Obama is expected to speak to Mr Clinton for the first time since he won the nomination in the next few days, but campaign insiders say that the former president’s future campaign role is a “sticking point” in peace talks with Mrs Clinton’s aides.

The Telegraph has learned that the former president’s rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronising attitude to Mr Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence.

A senior Democrat who worked for Mr Clinton has revealed that he recently told friends Mr Obama could “kiss my ass” in return for his support.

A second source said that the former president has kept his distance because he still does not believe Mr Obama can win the election. …

Maureen Dowd reports from Unity, NH.

… The new political allies engaged in what one Obama aide sanguinely described as “comfortable, jovial small talk.” Obama told Hillary about using his Mac to keep in touch with his daughters, and she regaled him with tales of completely unidentifiable dishes you get served on overseas trips. They commiserated about the loss of privacy.

They did not, however, commiserate about Bill Clinton, who is in a self-pitying meltdown about not being Elvis anymore, trying to shake down Obama for more — more apologies for perceived snubs and more help paying off the $22 million Clinton debt.

It’s hard to fathom why Obama should be mau-maued into paying off the debt that Hillary and Bill accrued attacking and undermining him, while mismanaging the campaign and their nearly quarter-billion-dollar war chest so horribly that one Hillaryland insider told The New Republic that it bordered on fraud.

But the former president can’t stand being a loser, so he’s taking it out on the winner. When it comes to Bill, there’s a lot of vanity but very little humility in Unity.

Corner post illustrates the mind-set of those who wish to curtail our freedoms.

A Mexican bank is so successful in microfinance it’s able to raise funds in the market. In the NGO world that makes them suspect. Mary Anastasia O’Grady has the story.

… In a commentary published last June on the Compartamos IPO, Richard Rosenberg, a consultant for the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor – not part of the World Bank but housed on its premises – observes that the demand for shares in the company was driven, in part, by “exceptional growth and profitability.” He then ruminates for some 16 pages on whether Compartamos’s for-profit model is at odds with the goal of lifting the poor. A similar, though far less rigorous, challenge to Compartamos titled “Microloan Sharks” appears in the summer issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In his “reflections” on “microfinance interest rates and profits,” Mr. Rosenberg writes that “overcharg[ing]” clients under a nonprofit model is OK because it is done for the sake of future borrowers. But when profits go to providers of capital through dividends, then there is a “conflict between the welfare of clients and the welfare of investors.” It’s not the commercialization of the lending, we’re told, but the “size” of the profits that must be scrutinized.

What seems to elude Mr. Rosenberg is the fact that there is no way for him to know whether there is “overcharg[ing]” or by how much. That information can be delivered only by the market, when innovative new entrants see they can provide services at a better price. This has been happening since for-profit microfinance began to emerge, and the result has been greater competition. Rates have been coming down even as the demand for and availability of services have gone up.

How much better it would have been, Mr. Rosenberg suggests, if Compartamos had raised capital through “socially motivated investors” like the “international financial institutions” – i.e., the World Bank and the like. How much better indeed, for him and his poverty lobby cohorts, but not, it seems, for Mexico’s entrepreneurial poor.

Ed Morrissey says the “non-recession” continues.

… A 1% annual growth rate won’t excite many people. It follows a quarter with 0.6% growth, making it the weakest two-quarter period in the last four years, as the chart demonstrates. However, this is hardly the worst economy we’ve seen in memory.  The 2000-2001 recession and the damage done to the economy after 9/11 was far worse than what we see now.  In fact, the slight rebound may indicate that the worst of the slowdown is over and that we may start seeing a return to the stronger growth we have experienced since 2003.

Remember this when politicians and the media talk about “the worst economy since the Great Depression”.   When the real numbers come out, no one bothers to report them.  The hyperbole serves them better than the truth.

So how much does it cost to rent a colony of bees? Slate’s Explainer has an answer.

Telegraph, UK with the story about the Bureau of Land Management putting a hold on solar energy projects.

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Gerard Baker of the London Times says, “Cheer up. We’re winning this War on Terror.”

“My centre is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack!”

If only our political leaders and opinion-formers displayed even a hint of the defiant resilience that carried Marshal Foch to victory at the Battle of the Marne. But these days timorous defeatism is on the march. In Britain setbacks in the Afghan war are greeted as harbingers of inevitable defeat. In America, large swaths of the political class continues to insist Iraq is a lost cause. The consensus in much of the West is that the War on Terror is unwinnable.

And yet the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat. The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier’s dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let’s retreat!”

Since it is remarkable how pervasive this pessimism is, it’s worth recapping what has been achieved in the past few years. …

Fouad Ajami on establishing the protocol for a continued American presence in Iraq.

From the time America struck into Iraq in 2003, Iraqis have exhibited this great, persistent contradiction: the need for the foreign power’s help and protection and an overweening pride that has made them bristle at their dependence. The debate now taking place about a “status of forces” agreement and a security arrangement with the United States puts this Iraqi ambivalence into sharp focus. More than 80 countries have such arrangements with the United States, but Iraq has never been a “normal” country. It has a history of brittle nationalism, and such an accord will have to be reached against the background of the country’s factionalism and of its place in its neighborhood.

As it stands, the American occupation now rests on a United Nations mandate under Chapter 7 of its charter that sanctions Iraq as a threat to peace and abridges its sovereignty. That mandate expires by the end of the year, and the Bush administration is keen to give the American presence the status of a bilateral security arrangement. In the American scheme, this would be done by the end of July, but the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has its own rhythm and challenges.

This is no small development, the extension of the Pax Americana to Baghdad. …

David Warren reports on some possibilities of sanity in the Canadian human rights commissions.

… The people are still sleeping, but some “blowback” has finally begun to occur. Given its very eccentric inquisitorial practices, which have been documented and publicized on the Internet, the CHRC is now under an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation, and there is a Parliamentary investigation pending. (As a public relations exercise, the CHRC has also hand-picked its own “independent” investigator to do what we can only assume will be a defensive whitewash, as usual at taxpayer expense.) It is against this background the CHRC decided that the better part of valour is discretion, and that it truly did not need to be prosecuting such high-profile targets as the bestselling author Mark Steyn and the mainstream newsweekly Maclean’s, at the present time. The CHRC can retrench, and return to its bread-and-butter business of destroying little people who command no publicity — biding their time until circumstances are propitious to “extend their mandate” again.

Vigilance is the price of liberty, and it is crucially important that we not take the heat off Canada’s HRCs when they retreat. Canadians need to know the whole truth about what these vile “human rights” investigators have been doing, and their past victims should be exonerated.

Given what has already occurred, it is not enough simply to fire the people responsible for specific abuses. The Human Rights Code must be rewritten to eliminate future challenges to free speech and press, and the HRCs themselves taken down. The very notion that “your freedom ends when I begin to feel offended” must be shown for what it is: totalitarian flotsam in the fetid swamp of politically correct thought.

The American version of human rights commissions might be called the fairness doctrine. David Harsanyi with details.

Nearly as loathsome as government trying to dictate what we can’t say is government trying to dictate what we have to say.

Some of you, apparently, are too stupid to be free. Worse, your obtuse opinions are reinforced three hours daily by unsanctioned, fanatical talk-radio troglodytes.

This, I’m afraid, is a sin against fairness. Now, if only you had some more information. Because God knows, you’re being deprived of media choices now. So it’s time for re-education, or so sayeth Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. …

… As far as practical politics go, Pelosi may not realize how offensive the Fairness Doctrine is to millions of Americans. Barack Obama has said he would not support it. (Though someone should ask him if he would veto a bill.)

Perhaps Obama understands that government abuse is historically a bipartisan pastime. Setting this precedent now may mean the tables will be turned soon enough.

As for me, I’d rather live in a free country than a fair one. Even if that world includes talk show hosts and an ineffective Madam Speaker with an ugly totalitarian impulse.

John Fund says, “McCain isn’t doomed.”

… Republicans shouldn’t panic, but they should be worried. The McCain campaign reflects the candidate’s impulsive nature and hasn’t articulated a consistent reform agenda. President Bush’s job rating has collapsed. One recent survey found only 53% of Republicans now approve of his performance. Sen. Obama will have so much money to spend he can microtarget millions of his supporters early and deliver absentee ballots – which are prone to abuse – to them.

This election reminds some of the 1980 race, when voters were clearly looking for a reason to vote the incumbent party out of the White House. Even so, Jimmy Carter kept even with Ronald Reagan well into October by painting him as risky and out of the mainstream. Then, in the home stretch, Reagan finally convinced voters he was sensible and trustworthy, and wound up winning by double digits.

Barack Obama is roughly in the same position as Reagan was back then. He is untested in foreign policy. His record in office clearly leans left, with the nonpartisan National Journal rating him the most liberal U.S. senator. When asked this month by ABC News when he had ever broken with liberal orthodoxy and taken risks with his base – as Bill Clinton did on trade, culture and welfare – Mr. Obama had little to say. At a meeting of Obama voters I attended this week, some bemoaned the fact that many of their friends backed him solely because of his cool “name brand” and vague message of change. …

The “ever malleable” Obama by Charles Krauthammer.

… The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. “He does what politicians do,” explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it’s time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia — only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama’s fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he’s finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

Which brought a Peter Wehner Contentions post.

Charles Krauthammer has a typically insightful column today on “the ever-malleable Mr. Obama.” The earth’s landscape is now littered with former Obama commitments, and his embrace of the conservative court’s views on the child rape and second amendment cases this week is head-snapping. Obama sounds like the president of the Federalist Society. …

Howard Kurtz notes both Obama’s flip-flop on gun control and the media’s lack of interest.

… Here’s how the Illinois senator handled the issue with the Chicago Tribune just last November:

“The campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he ‘ . . . believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.’ “

Kind of a flat statement.

And here’s what ABC reported yesterday: ” ‘That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator’s consistent position,’ Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News.”

Inartful indeed.

But even though the earlier Obama quote and the “inartful” comment have been bouncing around the Net for 24 hours, I’m not seeing any reference to them in the morning papers. Most do what the New York Times did: “Mr. Obama, who like Mr. McCain has been on record as supporting the individual-rights view, said the ruling would ‘provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.’ “

Supporting the individual-rights view? Not in November.

Even the Tribune–the very paper that the Obama camp told he supported the gun ban–makes no reference to the November interview. Instead: “Democrat Barack Obama offered a guarded response Thursday to the Supreme Court ruling striking down the District of Columbia’s prohibition on handguns and sidestepped providing a view on the 32-year-old local gun ban. Republican rival John McCain’s campaign accused him of an ‘incredible flip-flop’ on gun control.”

So McCain accuses Obama of a flip-flop, and the Trib can’t check the clips to tell readers whether there’s some basis in fact for the charge? …

Karl Rove on the arrogant candidate.

Many candidates have measured the Oval Office drapes prematurely. But Barack Obama is the first to redesign the presidential seal before the election.

His seal featured an eagle emblazoned with his logo, and included a Latin version of his campaign slogan. This was an attempt by Sen. Obama to make himself appear more presidential. But most people saw in the seal something else – chutzpah – and he’s stopped using it. Such arrogance – even self-centeredness – have featured often in the Obama campaign.

Consider his treatment of Jeremiah Wright. After Rev. Wright repeated his anti-American slurs at the National Press Club, Mr. Obama said their relationship was forever changed – but not because of what he’d said about America. Instead, Mr. Obama complained, “I don’t think he showed much concern for me.”

Translation: Rev. Wright is an impediment to my ambitions. So, as it turns out, are some of Mr. Obama’s previous pledges. ..

Rich Lowry reviews a new book that suggests how the GOP can become a “Grand New Party.”

White working-class voters typically aren’t in vogue, with the political chatter tending to revolve around “soccer moms,” the “youth vote” or other boutique demographic groups of the moment. But the late charge of Hillary Clinton’s doomed presidential campaign made white working-class voters surprisingly fashionable.

They’ll stay that way if the important new book “Grand New Party,” by two young writers for The Atlantic, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, has the impact on the political debate that it should. In an incisive analysis of the past 30 years of our politics, Douthat and Salam puncture self-comforting delusions of both the right and the left, and persuasively advocate a reorientation of the GOP to address working-class concerns.

They define working-class voters — “Sam’s Club” voters, in the phrase they borrow from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — as that half of the electorate that lacks a college education. …

Under the title of “You Can’t Make it Up,” Instapundit reports the federal government is halting solar projects because of environmental fears.

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David Warren offers a prayer for Mugabe’s removal.

… The West, and in particular, former Rhodesia’s departed imperial master, Britain, can take no satisfaction in the turn of events. In the Lancaster House Agreement, of almost thirty years ago, Lord Carrington and the panjandrums of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office delivered the future Zimbabwe into the hands of its most revolutionary faction, in the fairly complete knowledge of what they were doing, in order to wash their hands of the place. They knew then that Mugabe was violent and depraved.

This is a long and cumbersome diplomatic history to which the moral, in retrospect, needs to be affixed. We must eventually abandon the cynical diplomatists’ belief that by cutting the legs out under the most moderate, reasonable, and even popular faction, and delivering a country into the hands of murderous revolutionaries, “progress” will be most efficiently served. In Zimbabwe today, upwards of three million starve, in payment for post-colonial “realpolitik.” …

Times, UK says Mandela has finally spoken out.

Nelson Mandela accused President Mugabe of a “tragic failure of leadership” last night, as southern Africa turned its back on the Zimbabwean leader.

Mr Mandela spoke of his concern and sadness at the chaos engulfing Zimbabwe, amid clear indications that the patience of Mr Mugabe’s remaining allies was at breaking point.

Wielding the moral authority of the world’s best-known statesman, Mr Mandela broke his silence at a fundraising event to mark his 90th birthday celebrations in London.

Hours before he spoke, Zimbabwe’s neighbours presented a united front for the first time and urged Mr Mugabe to call off Friday’s presidential vote. …

But, according to Marty Peretz, Andrew Young still defends Mugabe

So has Israel been practicing an Iranian attack? George Freidman of StratFor says it was a head fake.

… There are also explanations for the extreme publicity surrounding the exercise. The first might be that the Israelis have absolutely no intention of trying to stage long-range attacks but are planning some other type of attack altogether. The possibilities range from commando raids to cruise missiles fired from Israeli submarines in the Arabian Sea — or something else entirely. The Mediterranean exercise might have been designed to divert attention.

Alternatively, the Israelis could be engaged in exhausting Iranian defenders. During the first Gulf War, U.S. aircraft rushed toward the Iraqi border night after night for weeks, pulling away and landing each time. The purpose was to get the Iraqis to see these feints as routine and slow down their reactions when U.S. aircraft finally attacked. The Israelis could be engaged in a version of this, tiring out the Iranians with a series of “emergencies” so they are less responsive in the event of a real strike.

Finally, the Israelis and Americans might not be intending an attack at all. Rather, they are — as the Iranians have said — engaged in psychological warfare for political reasons. The Iranians appear to be split now between those who think that Ahmadinejad has led Iran into an extremely dangerous situation and those who think Ahmadinejad has done a fine job. The prospect of an imminent and massive attack on Iran could give his opponents ammunition against him. This would explain the Iranian government response to the reports of a possible attack — which was that such an attack was just psychological warfare and could not happen. That clearly was directed more for internal consumption than it was for the Israelis or Americans.

We tend toward this latter theory. Frankly, the Bush administration has been talking about an attack on Iran for years. It is hard for us to see that the situation has changed materially over the past months. But if it has, then either Israel or the United States would have attacked — and not with front-page spreads in The New York Times before the attack was launched. In the end, we tend toward the view that this is psychological warfare for the simple reason that you don’t launch a surprise attack of the kind necessary to take out Iran’s nuclear program with a media blitz beforehand. It just doesn’t work that way.

Was Iraq worth the effort. Tony Blankley has an answer.

… Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they’d better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?

The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.

On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush’s political courage — and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women (and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) — America’s willingness and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around the world. This may prove to be the most important global political fact of the first decade of the 21st century — with implications even beyond our struggle with radical Islam. …

Jennifer Rubin and Peter Wehner from Contentions write on Blankley’s piece.

As you note, Jennifer, Thomas Friedman argues in his New York Times column today that Iraqis, in the wake of their liberation of Basra, Amara, and Sadr City from both Mahdi Army militiamen and pro-Iranian death squads, “now have their own narrative of self-liberation.” This, in turn, has created self-confidence and legitimacy for the Maliki government and the Iraqi military. And there is, I think, a lot to Friedman’s analysis–and, it should be pointed out, it is an insight that General Petraeus has long had. It is one of the pillars of his effort to create “sustainable security” for Iraq.

There is, though, a paragraph from Friedman’s column that I wanted to take issue with: …

Karl Rove says they’re both economic illiterates.

Barack Obama and John McCain are busy demonstrating that in close elections during tough economic times, candidates for president can be economically illiterate and irresponsibly populist.

In Raleigh, N.C., last week, Sen. Obama promised, “I’ll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we’ll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills.”

Set aside for a minute that Jimmy Carter passed a “windfall profits tax” to devastating effect, putting American oil companies at a competitive disadvantage to foreign competitors, virtually ending domestic energy exploration, and making the U.S. more dependent on foreign sources of oil and gas.

Instead ask this: Why should we stop with oil companies? They make about 8.3 cents in gross profit per dollar of sales. Why doesn’t Mr. Obama slap a windfall profits tax on sectors of the economy that have fatter margins? Electronics make 14.5 cents per dollar and computer equipment makers take in 13.7 cents per dollar, according to the Census Bureau. Microsoft’s margin is 27.5 cents per dollar of sales. Call out Mr. Obama’s Windfall Profits Police! …

IBD editors on Obama’s ethanol policy.

Barack Obama says he represents change. He also criticizes John McCain for trying to drill our way to energy independence to add to the profits of Big Oil. But it’s Obama who’s playing politics by trying to plant our way to energy independence, buying votes with alternative fuel subsidies that benefit ethanol producers such as Archer Daniels Midland.

ADM is based in Illinois, the second-largest corn-producing state. Not long after arriving in the U.S. Senate, Obama flew twice on corporate jets owned by the nation’s largest ethanol producer. Imagine if McCain flew on the corporate jets of Exxon Mobil.

Corn-based ethanol gets a 51-cents-a-gallon tax subsidy that will cost taxpayers $4.5 billion this year. McCain opposes ethanol subsidies while Obama supports them. McCain opposed them even though Iowa is the first caucus state. Obama, touted by Caroline Kennedy as another JFK, was no profile in courage in Iowa. …

Victor Davis Hanson thinks we have become the “can’t do” society.

… With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is finally waking up to the fact that for decades the United States has not been developing known petroleum reserves in Alaska, in our coastal waters or off the continental shelf. Jittery Hamlets apparently forgot that gas comes from oil — and that before you can fill your tank, you must take risks to fill a tanker.

Building things is a good indication of the relative confidence of a society. But the last American gasoline refinery was built almost three decades ago. As “cowards of our conscious,” we’ve come up with countless mitigating reasons not to build a new one. Our inaction has meant that our nation’s gasoline facilities have grown old, out of date and dangerous.

Maybe Americans can instead substitute plug-in, next-generation electric cars that can be charged at night on the nation’s grid powered by nuclear power plants? Wrong again. We haven’t issued a single new license that actually led to the building of a nuclear power plant in over 30 years. …

Walter Williams points out the problems with centralized control.

… You might argue that saving for retirement is important, but so is saving for a home or your children’s education. Would you want Congress to force us to put money aside for a home or our children’s education?

Oblivious to the huge information problem in the allocation of resources, the people in Washington have confidence that they can run our lives better than we can. Charles Darwin wisely noted over a century and a half ago that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Suggesting that Congress is ignorant of the fact that knowledge is highly dispersed, and decisions made locally produce the best outcomes, might be overly generous. They might know that and just don’t give a hoot because it’s in their political interest to centralize decision-making.

Thomas Jefferson might have had the information problem in mind when he said, “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”

Amazing volcanic eruptions on the floor of the Arctic Ocean.

Brit historian Paul Johnson reviews comparative bio of Churchill and Gandhi.

… It is often said that Churchill’s knowledge of India was shallow and out of date. But he was proved right in his prediction that independence would mean the end of unity. Gandhi had argued that the Hindu–Muslim divide was superficial and could be bridged by patience and statesmanship. He was proved totally wrong on this fundamental point. Not only was Pakistan created, despite all his efforts, but it in turn split into two, when the eastern section, now Bangladesh, refused to accept government by the western section. The key problem of Kashmir — the most beautiful part of the subcontinent, where the elite was Hindu and the majority population Muslim — was left unsolved by partition, and smolders away. It has already caused two wars between India and Pakistan; if the Muslim extremists take over Pakistan, a nuclear exchange may well occur, justifying Churchill’s worst fears.

In the meantime, India has taken the route of high technology and advanced capitalism, and is racing along it. For the first time scores of millions of Indians are tasting affluence. By mid-century India will have over a billion inhabitants and, quite possibly, the world’s largest economy after the United States. This prospect would have delighted Churchill, who always believed that the Raj had set India’s feet firmly on the road to long-term prosperity. It would have horrified Gandhi, who deplored Western living standards and wanted Indians to lead simple, pure, and prayerful lives close to the subsistence level. His chief reason for espousing independence was that India would thereby escape the corruption of the West. So who was right about India? The answer is that both Churchill and Gandhi were right — and both were wrong. But this juxtaposition of these two extraordinary men makes for a fascinating story.

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Daily Telegraph editors say there is finally some movement against Mugabe in Africa, and that it’s time for Nelson Mandela to do the same.

John Stossel wonders if McCain understands how markets work.

… This is not the first time McCain has displayed what I would call an anti-capitalist mentality. In an early presidential debate he countered former businessman Mitt Romney’s claim to superior executive experience by saying, “I led the largest squadron in the U.S. Navy, not for profit but for patriotism”.

Why the put down of profit?

It’s clear McCain does not understand how markets work or why they are good. He certainly doesn’t understand the role of speculators and other middlemen. He’s not alone. Speculators are among the most reviled people in history. When they were members of ethnic minorities, they have been easy targets for economically illiterate people who were jealous of their success.

McCain wonders “whether speculation has been going on.” He needn’t wonder. Speculation always goes on. Speculation means to take a risk on what the future holds in hopes of making a profit. The world’s stock and commodities markets are based on this principle. Sen. McCain must have meant it when he said, “I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues”. …

Denver Post’s David Harsanyi takes a dim view of McCain’s battery prize.

… But this is about politics, of course, so it can’t make much sense. And McCain’s theatrical prize money offer grabbed headlines for a day.

Job done.

But when McCain peddles prize money, he also feeds the perception that industry and scientists aren’t already working diligently on energy breakthroughs — with batteries and areas unknown — or that the market doesn’t incentivize them to do so.

Worse, McCain makes it seem that a cure for oil is just beyond our grasp. Around $300 million away.

In this arms race of goofy ideas between the candidates — windfall taxes and gas-tax holidays, to name two — we’re sure to see more poorly thought-out plans in the near future.

Let’s hope they are just empty promises.

Jennifer Rubin thinks Obama is losing his Teflon sheen.

Barack Obama is endangering his status as the media darling of the 2008 presidential campaign. In fact, he has been the villain in the campaign story over the last few days. Two decisions — one small and one large — showed the dangers he faces. And a third showed that the post-racial candidate is no longer in evidence. It is no secret that the media has been openly rooting for Obama for months. His gaffes would have felled other candidates, his relationship with hate-mongering preachers would have disqualified mere mortal candidates and, of course, his lack of any national record of accomplishment might have prevented all but the most ego-inflated from even mounting a White House run. But it was hanging together fairly well until last week.

The trigger for the downward slide was his decision to abandon public financing. The decision made cold political sense given his likely enormous advantage over the McCain camp but there were two complicating factors: he had shaped his career as a “reformer” and he specifically promised that he would take public financing and the rules that go along with it.

To make matters worse he concocted a false and misleading, indeed an  operatic” explanation that those mean Republicans forced him to take private money. …

And Bill Kristol slams MoveOn.org’s latest ad.

… Here’s what the mother of an actual soldier has to say about the remarks of the mother of the prospective non-soldier in the ad:

“Does that mean that she wants other people’s sons to keep the wolves at bay so that her son can live a life of complete narcissism? What is it she thinks happens in the world? … Someone has to stand between our society and danger. If not my son, then who? If not little Alex then someone else will have to stand and deliver. Someone’s son, somewhere.”

This is the sober truth. Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.

We do, however, live in a free country with a volunteer army. In the United States, individuals can choose to serve in the military or not. The choice not to serve should carry no taint, nor should it be viewed with the least prejudice. If Alex chooses to pursue other opportunities, he won’t be criticized by John McCain or anyone else.

But that’s not at all the message of the MoveOn ad.

The MoveOn ad is unapologetic in its selfishness, and barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve — and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving. The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

And the sole responsibility of others.

The Economist reports on the growing use of windpower.

ON A ridge near Toledo in Castile-La Mancha stands a row of white windmills. Literary buffs, even if they have never been to Spain, will recognise them as the ferocious giants attacked by Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s fictional 17th-century hero. These days, however, they are dwarfed by legions of modern wind turbines that grind out not flour but power, helping to make Spain one of the leading producers of wind-based electricity in Europe.

Does this amount to tilting at windmills? There is no doubt that Spain’s wind turbines would not have been built without assistance from the highly visible hand of a government that wanted to prove its green credentials. But wind power is no illusion. World capacity is growing at 30% a year and will exceed 100 gigawatts this year. Victor Abate, General Electric’s vice-president of renewables, is so convinced that by 2012 half of the new generating capacity built in America will be wind-powered that he is basing his business plan on that assumption.

Wind currently provides only about 1% of America’s electricity, but by 2020 that figure may have risen to 15%. The one part of the United States that has something approximating a proper free market in electricity, Texas, is also keener than any other state on deploying the turbines. In May, T. Boone Pickens, one of the state’s most famous oil tycoons, announced a deal with GE to build a one-gigawatt wind farm—the world’s largest—at a cost of $2 billion. …

When the Russert wakes went over the top, you knew Hitchens was itching.

… But it was precisely around the time of these various wakes and memorials that the thing began to get seriously out of hand. One started to hear whispers about something more than the merely ordinary, as if a numinous and mysterious element had crept into the everyday obsequies. I quote from an e-mail entitled “The Russert Miracles,” which came to me from someone quite well-known in the world of Washington TV and media:

The first “Russert miracle,” as attendees called it, happened at the private funeral service held at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown; the family had requested that Senators Obama and McCain sit together. … CNN Washington Bureau Chief David Bohrman describes the scene to Newsweek: “They sat side by side and spoke for twenty minutes. The body language was total friendship. … I kept thinking here we are at the funeral of the son of a sanitation worker, and the presidential candidates are having their first one-on-one conversation here.”

So at this point we are supposed to celebrate the holy miracle of “bipartisanship,” an everyday occurrence in the Senate of which both men are members. …

Thomas Malthus was the first and Jeff Jacoby says he’s not the last. Malthus claimed in 1798 the world would be overcome with population growth. The problem is exactly the opposite. Jeff has two columns on the subject.

… Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.

The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones - some of them in bestsellers like “The Population Bomb,” which predicted that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” - have never come to pass. That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset - the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love. …

From the second column.

In 1965, the population of Italy was 52 million, of which 4.6 million, or just under 9 percent, were children younger than 5. A decade later, that age group had shrunk to 4.3 million — about 7.8 percent of Italians. By 1985, it was down to 3 million and 5.3 percent. Today, the figures are 2.5 million and 4.2 percent.

Young children are disappearing from Italian society, and the end isn’t in sight. According to one estimate by the UN’s Population Division, their numbers will drop to fewer than 1.6 million in 2020, and to 1.3 million by 2050. At that point, they will account for a mere 2.8 percent of the Italian nation.

Italy isn’t alone. There are 1.7 million fewer young children in Poland today than there were in 1960, a 50 percent drop. In Spain 30 years ago, there were nearly 3.3 million young children; there are just 2.2 million today. Across Europe, there were more than 57 million children under 5 in 1960; today, that age group has plummeted to 35 million, a decline of 38 percent. …

List Verse with the top 30 failed technology predictions.

Throughout history man has been making predictions of the future. With the advent of technology, the predictions moved away from religious topics to scientific and technological. Unfortunately for the speakers, many of these failed predictions have been recorded for all future generations to laugh at. Here is a selection of the 30 best.

1. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

2. “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.” — Bill Gates

3. “Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public … has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company …” — a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.

4. “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” — T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961 (the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965). …

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David Brooks says finally Bush got something right in Iraq.

Let’s go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-2007. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.

Expert and elite opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.

Democratic leaders like Senator Harry Reid considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007, while Senator Reid offered legislation calling for a complete U.S. pullback by March 2008.

The arguments floating around the op-ed pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge — a mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminishing it. The more the U.S. did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in the middle of a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.

When President Bush consulted his own generals, the story was much the same. Almost every top general, including Abizaid, Schoomaker and Casey, were against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.

In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call. …

Bret Stephens says the cure for Zimbabwe is for the Brits to apply the Bush Doctrine.

Here’s a prediction: Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

He would be its worthiest recipient since the prize went to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the prize’s few worthy recipients, period) in 1991. He deserves it for standing up – politically as well as physically – to Robert Mugabe’s goon-squad dictatorship for over a decade; for organizing a democratic opposition and winning an election hugely stacked against him; and for refusing to put his own ambition ahead of his people’s well-being when the run-off poll became, as he put it last weekend, a “violent, illegitimate sham.”

Here’s another prediction: Mr. Tsvangirai’s Nobel will have about as much effect on the bloody course of Zimbabwe’s politics as Aung San Suu Kyi’s has had on Burma’s. Effectively, zero. …

John Tierney looks at cartels in diamonds and in oil, and asks if they will go on forever.

As Lab readers were debating Malthusianism and oil reserves, I noticed a couple of interesting items about diamonds, one of the most expensive and restricted resources on Earth.

The diamond cartel has survived more than a century, making it what Edward Jay Epstein calls “the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce.” The DeBeers cartel has kept prices of diamonds artificially high by limiting supply (and by creating demand through marketing like its 1947 slogan, “A diamond is forever.”)

Lately, though, the cartel has been under strain. “Cartel-free” diamonds are being mined and sold in Canada, where huge reserves have been discovered. (For an engrossing account of the epic quest to find diamonds near the Arctic Circle, see Kevin Krajick’s “Barren Lands.”) And now, as Ulrich Boser explains in Smithsonian, there’s a whole new threat: “virtual diamond mines” that are creating diamonds in laboratories that even the expert eye of a jeweler can’t distinguish from one found in the ground. …

Speaking of the oil Cartel, Barron’s cover story this week wonders if oil has peaked.

Oil’s sharp move up — prices have doubled in the past year — caught the world by surprise, including almost everyone involved in the petroleum market, from major exporting nations to big energy companies to the global analyst community. The rally has emboldened oil bulls, who argue the world is bumping up against oil-supply constraints, and that demand will rise inexorably, despite sharply higher prices, as the four billion to five billion people in emerging economies like China and India get a taste of the energy-intensive good life, replete with the cars, air conditioners, refrigerators and computers that Americans and Western Europeans have long enjoyed. Statistics support their view that demand growth is in its infancy in the developing world: U.S. per-capita oil consumption is 25 barrels annually, while Japan uses 14 barrels per person. China’s 1.3 billion people consume just two barrels each per year, however, and India’s 1.1 billion use less than a barrel a year.

In the next decade, oil indeed may hit $200 a barrel. But prices could fall to $100 a barrel by the end of this year if Saudi Arabia makes good on its pledge to increase production; global demand eases; the Federal Reserve begins lifting short-term interest rates; the dollar rallies, and investors stop pouring money into the oil market. China raised prices on retail gasoline and diesel fuel by 18% Thursday, in a move that is expected to curb demand.

It’s tough to know how much of the surge in crude-oil prices — up 40% just this year — reflects fundamental supply and demand, and how much is due to other factors, including the dollar, commodity speculation and interest from institutional investors. Like some others, we suspect the run-up was fueled by more than economics. …

Pickerhead was thoroughly annoyed with William Manchester when, in 1992, instead of the next volume of his Churchill biography, we got instead A World Lit Only By Fire. Then Manchester was forgiven when the book was read. Cafe Hayek has an excerpt that is good for getting our lives in perspective.

The late William Manchester’s 1992 book A World Lit Only By Fire provides a well-paced and vivid look at life in late-medieval and renaissance Europe.  For example, consider his description of the homes and some common experiences of peasants (pp. 52-54):

Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without it, would have been the front yard.  The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling.  Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family’s apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot.  According to Erasmus, who examined such huts, “almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer…remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable.  Hence, with the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome.”

The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin.  Everyone slept there, regardless of age or gender — grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and hens and pigs — and if a couple chose to enjoy intimacy, the others were aware of every movement.  In summer they could even watch…..

If this familial situation seems primitive, it should be borne in mind that these were prosperous peasants. …

Volokh Conspiracy tells a disturbing story from the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago has decided to establish an economics research institute named after the late Milton Friedman. Normally, a university’s decision to name an institute after it’s most famous and successful professor would be a completely uncontroversial nonstory. However, over 100 University of Chicago professors have signed a letter protesting the decision. Essentially, they object to naming a research institute after Friedman because he was a libertarian rather than a liberal or leftist - even though Friedman’s academic distinction is such that he clearly deserves the honor. It is inconceivable that you could find 100 academics at Chicago or any other major university who would sign a letter opposing the creation of an institute named after a liberal academic whose intellectual achievement’s were as great as Friedman’s. …

Thomas Sowell wonders why we should imitate Europeans.

… Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.

If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies’ patents and profits, then we should do the same.

Some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.

Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the United States has been doing better than Europe for a very long time. …

Samizdata says there might be a tax revolt in Massachusetts.

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Today is Kelo Day. We have contemporaneous columns from three of our favorites    Mark Steyn takes us back with his July 3rd, 2005 column for the Chicago Sun-Times.

… A couple of days beforehand, the majesty of the law turned its attention to “eminent domain” — the fancy term for what happens when the government seizes the property of the private citizen. It pays you, of course, but that’s not much comfort if you’ve built your dream home on your favorite spot of land. Most laymen understand the “public interest” dimension as, oh, they’re putting in the new Interstate and they don’t want to make a huge detour because one cranky old coot refuses to sell his ramshackle dairy farm. But the Supreme Court’s decision took a far more expansive view: that local governments could compel you to sell your property if a developer had a proposal that would generate greater tax revenue. In other words, the “public interest” boils down to whether or not the government gets more money to spend.

I can’t say that’s my definition. Indeed, the constitutional conflation of “public interest” with increased tax monies is deeply distressing to those of us who happen to think that letting governments access too much dough too easily leads them to create even more useless government programs that enfeeble the citizenry in deeply destructive ways. …

Next for Kelo Day, John Tierney’s NY Times column for July 5, 2005 on eminent domain abuse in Pittsburgh.

… Pittsburgh has been the great pioneer in eminent domain ever since its leaders razed 80 buildings in the 1950’s near the riverfront park downtown. They replaced a bustling business district with Gateway Center, an array of bland corporate towers surrounded by the sort of empty plazas that are now considered hopelessly retrograde by urban planners trying to create street life.

At the time, though, the towers and plazas seemed wonderfully modern. Viewed from across the river, the new skyline was a panoramic advertisement for the Pittsburgh Renaissance, which became a national model and inspired Pittsburgh’s leaders to go on finding better uses for private land, especially land occupied by blacks.

Bulldozers razed the Lower Hill District, the black neighborhood next to downtown that was famous for its jazz scene (and now famous mostly as a memory in August Wilson’s plays). The city built a domed arena that was supposed to be part of a cultural “acropolis,” but the rest of the project died. Today, having belatedly realized that downtown would benefit from people living nearby, the city is trying to entice them back to the Hill by building homes there.

In the 1960’s, the bulldozers moved into East Liberty, until then the busiest shopping district outside downtown. Some of the leading businessmen there wanted to upgrade the neighborhood, so hundreds of small businesses and thousands of people were moved to make room for upscale apartment buildings, parking lots, housing projects, roads and a pedestrian mall.

I was working there in a drugstore whose owners cursed the project, and at first I thought they were just behind the times. But their worst fears were confirmed. The shopping district was destroyed. The drugstore closed, along with the department stores, movie theaters, office buildings and most other businesses.

You’d think a fiasco like that would have humbled Pittsburgh’s planners, but they just went on. …

Debra Saunders had a good Kelo column too.

AMERICANS who want to keep government out of the bedroom, beware. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that makes it too easy for the government to seize your bedroom — and kitchen, parlor and dining room — then hand your precious home over to a corporation.

The Fifth Amendment stipulates, “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Lawyers call it the Takings Clause.

In its decision, the Supreme Court expanded the concept of “public use” to apply it, not to a highway or school or railroad, but to economic development sanctioned by a government entity.

The city of New London, Conn., found itself in economic doldrums. Redevelopment was supposed to be the bromide. State and local officials created the New London Development Corporation. That unelected entity decided to increase tax revenues by pushing middle-class families out of their waterfront homes and using eminent domain — the other E.D. — to make way for a revitalization project, anchored around a Pfizer Inc. research facility.

Some families in the redevelopment area agreed to be bought out. Susette Kelo and Wilhelmina Dery, who was born in her home in 1918, were among those New Londoners who balked. The city didn’t contend there was any blight in the neighborhood to warrant government action. Why should they move out because Pfizer wanted in?

In a 5-4 ruling on Kelo written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Big Bench answered the why question: Because the government says so. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld writes on the ways to defeat Iranian tunneling.

Israel has just carried out a major aerial exercise, putting a hundred or so F-15s and F-16s into the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, evidently a rehearsal for a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The move follows the statement earlier this month by Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s deputy prime minister, that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program is “unavoidable.” Israel almost certainly knows the location of some of the critical nodes in the Iranian program that it must hit if it is to set the Iranian effort back by several years. It also possesses the technology to assure that its bombs will fall close to or on their targets. But would such a strike succeed?

We cannot know the answer, and neither can the Israelis. The question calls attention to what might be called the ongoing Counterrevolution in Military Affairs.

The Revolution in Military Affairs was based upon silicon, in particular the computer chips that make for precision-guided weapons. In the 1980s, the United States developed the technology to drop munitions near enough to their targets to ensure a high chance of destruction. In World War II, the circular error probable–the radius of a circle into which a projectile will land at least 50 percent of the time–was more than half a mile. Today, thanks to GPS systems and laser- and infrared-guiding devices, the radius is less than two dozen feet. Almost any given target can be knocked out by the use of just one or two conventional bombs.

In the face of the threat of such efficient destruction, Iran has not stood still. …

Pickerhead got to vent last week on the GITMO decision with Ann Coulter. Now we have a couple of serious people. Richard Epstein, Chicago law prof who has graced these pages before, is first. He likes the decision.

LAST week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush settled a key constitutional issue: all prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay are constitutionally entitled to bring habeas corpus in federal court to challenge the legality of their detention.

This 5-4 decision was correct. The conservative justices in the minority were wrong to suggest that the decision constitutes reckless judicial intervention in military matters that the Constitution reserves exclusively for Congress and the president. (Disclosure: I joined in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on the plaintiff’s behalf.)

Yet Boumediene is rich in constitutional ironies. In addressing whether non-Americans detained outside the United States are entitled to habeas corpus, the court passed up an opportunity to clarify the law, and instead based its reasoning, flimsily, on a habeas corpus case that was decided just after World War II. This is too bad, because issues as important as habeas corpus should turn not on fancy intellectual footwork but on a candid appraisal of the relevant facts and legal principles. …

Stuart Taylor is next.

Our Constitution works best when its custodians–the president, Congress, and the judiciary–behave well. In the matter of suspected “enemy combatants,” all three have behaved badly. That’s why the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been such a running sore. Even if Guantanamo ends up being closed, the human-rights and public-relations debacles that it symbolizes will continue until a new president and Congress take a grown-up approach to some extremely thorny problems.

Problems such as: What should we do with a Guantanamo detainee who, the best available evidence suggests, is probably a jihadist bent on mass murder but who cannot be convicted of any crime?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a clear answer from the Supreme Court, which has asserted its supremacy in such matters–while raising more questions than it has resolved–in three cases, culminating in its big 5-4 ruling on June 12 that Guantanamo detainees have a right to broad federal judicial review of their petitions for release.

The Bush administration has perpetuated a global scandal since 2002 by stubbornly refusing to provide these detainees–who could be locked up for life–with a fair opportunity to prove that they are innocents seized and held by mistake. Bush and a few of his top political appointees imposed these policies over objections from many of the military lawyers and other professionals whose expertise ordinarily helps shape presidential decisions and helps entitle them to judicial deference. …

Ilya Somin in Volokh, posts a comparison of soccer to normal US team sports.

The conjunction of the Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals and the European Soccer Championship led me to reflect on two important advantages of US pro sports over international soccer: soccer often promotes nationalist and ethnic violence and provides propaganda fodder for repressive or corrupt governments, while US pro sports (with extremely rare exceptions) do not.

European and Latin American soccer rivalries are commonly linked to nationalistic and ethnic antagonisms (e.g. - England vs. Germany, England vs. Ireland, Germany vs. Poland, etc.). Even the fan bases of teams in internal national soccer leagues often break down along ethnic lines. This conjunction of sports rivalries and nationalistic/ethnic rivalries often leads to violence. The most notorious example is the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras - a conflict which might have been funny except for the fact that 2000 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. And there are many lesser cases of riots and other violence resulting from soccer games.

Many European and especially Latin American soccer teams are also closely associated with governments. This often allows repressive and corrupt regimes to obtain propaganda benefits from the teams’ victories. …

John Podhoretz posts on a publisher who’s had enough of the NY Times Book Review.

The many-hatted Roger Kimball, who runs Encounter Books when he’s not running the New Criterion and writing art criticism and trying to keep the universities honest and sailing boats and God knows what else, has made an extraordinary decision: Encounter Books will no longer send review copies of its work to the New York Times Book Review. He writes:

In the last month, Encounter has had two titles on the extended New York Times best-seller list: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor by Roy Spencer, and Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, by Andrew C. McCarthy. But that list is the only place you will find these books mentioned in the pages of The New York Times….

Once upon a time, and not that long ago, it meant something if your book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. A Times review imparted a vital existential certification as well as a commercial boost. Is that still the case? Less and less, I believe. The Times in general has lost influence as the paper has receded into parochial, left-liberal boosterism and politically correct reportage. And where its news and comment have become increasingly politicized, its cultural coverage has become increasingly superficial and increasingly captive of establishment, i.e., left-liberal, pieties and “lifestyle” radicalism.

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Don’t forget, Monday is Kelo Day at the Institute for Justice.

David Warren reduces Israel’s current problem to one simple right, that of self-defense.

It will be recalled, by readers who follow world news, that the President of Iran has on many occasions unambiguously declared both the desire to annihilate Israel, and the expectation that Israel will soon be annihilated. It will also be recalled, that on the balance of evidence, the Iranian state has been working assiduously to acquiring the means for this act of genocide. Iran is in direct defiance of UN resolutions to stop enriching uranium, and playing Saddam-like games with UN inspectors.

If a man were threatening to kill you, and declaring that you will s