Maggie's Farm

Burma, Gun Control, and David Hume. Samizdata

Dead or alive? Neoconservatism's future by Muravchik in Opinion Journal

Taliban, failing on the battlefield, turns to child suicide bombers

Moral Equivalence Department: Auschwitz=Abu Graib. No Pasaran

Tyler Cowen rips Naomi Klein's Disaster Capitalism, in the NY Sun

Cleaning up: LA catching and deporting hundreds of criminal illegals.

Prominent Canadian pol defends their health service, goes to US for treatment.

You cannot be too paranoid to understand the scheming behind politics. Powerline:

Now we learn from The Politico that in an internal White House staff memo from 1993 Hillary's staff saw federal coverage of children as a “precursor” to universal coverage. In a memo called “Kids First,” Clinton’s staff laid out backup plans in the event the universal coverage idea failed. According to the Politico, one of the key options was creating a state-run health plan for children who didn’t qualify for Medicaid but were uninsured. Under this approach, said the memo, "health care reform is phased in by population, beginning with children.” In this way, “Kids First is really a precursor to the new system. It is intended to be freestanding and administratively simple, with states given broad flexibility in its design so that it can be easily folded into existing/future program structures.”

MSM running from the Rush "phony soldier" story being pushed by Media matters. h/t, Insty. And Riehl on the Dem quagmires MoveOn and Media Matters are creating.

Good comment from a commenter at Gun Shots about the UN's program to disarm people:

Why do we need guns? The UN does a fine job of protecting the citizens of member nations. Rwanda. Bosnia. Darfur. China.

Commenter might have included Burma.

In The Buffalo News: Global warming alarmists must be held to a higher standard. A good short piece asking 4 simple questions.

Stuart Taylor runs through the most egregious recent examples ouf double-standard free speech in higher education. h/t, Volokh

Neuhaus: Christianity "not only disestablished but banished" in Canada.

Bloomberg wants surveillance camers around NYC, calls opponents "ridiculous." Call me ridiculous, Mr. Mayor. Nanny-statists always have a totalitarian side.

After years of a pragmatic, uninspiring and relatively non-ideological Bush, the GOP "brand" has become muddied and tattered. Thus we read depressing pieces like this one in the WSJ.

Although I do not consider myself a Republican, I do consider myself to be a Conservative, with erratically Libertarian aspects. I also believe, perhaps wrongly, that it is in the best interest of the Repubs to continue to stand for conservative ideas. However, I am fully aware that it is the only task of political parties to gain power and easy jobs with great benefits for their members, not to marry any ideology. I also predict that Iraq and terrorism will fade as the major political issue - not disappear, but move to second or third or fourth place. Why? Because Bush will have been successful in defusing some of the most ominous threats (yes, I do know Islam will be a chronic threat for many years).

I would like to see a candidate who is able to refresh the brand in a warm, cheerful, optimistic way. Am I asking for another Reagan?

Editor's note: Great minds think alike. Kudlow today: The GOP has some re-branding to do

The more you tax people, the less money they have to take care of themselves and their families, so the more they are inclined to turn to the government (ie their neighbors' money) for help, so politicians raise taxes to buy their votes, rendering them that much less able to care for themselves and their families.

The News Junkie

All explained by Noel Sheppard at Newbusters. It's the Dem Attack and Smear Machine of hollow organizations, paid for by Soros.

I think it's meant to be the Dem answer to the Repub attack machine during the Clinton administration, but the Soros folks don't seem to give a damn about the truth. Slash and burn while the candidate looks relatively uninvolved.

It's getting rough out there.

The Burmese need guns. Samizdata. Which leads me to another thought: If the Left wants people disarmed, why do they always admire armed rebels and "insurgents"?

UK plans to cut Royal Navy in half. I guess they figure their Uncle Sam wiill protect them.

Russians depart from Iran's nuclear installations. A Debkafiles rumor. Interesting, if true.

Ego tripping. Bloomberg in the UK.

Vienna? An al Qaida bust in Vienna. Atlas

What the sexperts don't understand about sex. Slate

The NYT promises to keep a close watch on Freedom Watch. neoneo. You can bet they will, since they're working for the Dem campaign.

Tom Friedman as an exemplar of the naivete of the Left. Flopping

Why Fred Thompson will win. Am Thinker. Gee, is he still running?

Rick Moran: The Repubs seem determined to alienate almost everybody.

Good point at Coyote, re socialized medicine:

...surely women's groups, who were at the forefront of fighting against government intrusion into our decisions about our bodies, is out there leading the fight against government health care.  WRONG! Their privacy arguments stand out today as sham libertarian arguments that applied only narrowly to abortion.  It's clear that as long as they can get full access to abortion, women's groups are A-OK with government intrusion into people's decisions about their bodies.

And re SCHIP, Fred Barnes explains why extending a poverty entitlement to the middle class is a bad idea. Weekly Standard. This used to be called "creeping socialism." At the least, it is an effort to transform a charity, stepwise, into a universal entitlement.

Hollywood goes to war. Propa-tainment, by Jules at Pajamas

Opie says Freedom Watch is the anti-MoveOn.org. Here's their NYT advt about Ahmadinejad.

A very bad dude killed in Iraq

Krugman: There was no middle class before FDR.

Who is Joyce Hatto? She's a virtuoso pianist, but you might not have heard of her. Attack Machine has the tale.

America's worst airlines. Gay Patriot. Speaking of air travel, the Carol Ann Gotbaum story. Who knows where that story goes, but it's a damn shame. Those airport guards are quick to use force on the obviously innocent, and everyone knows that.

O mio Fernando from Donizetti's La Favorita. That is a mezzo with serious range.

The Chess University of Dupont Circle

Mahmoud returns home as a hero after his Columbia visit. Gateway

“It’s difficult when you change the school’s culture,” said Columbus Manor Principal Sandy Robertson. Illinois school eliminates Christmas and Halloween to be sensitive to Moslems. Why don't we simply expect Moslems to be sensitive to us?

Re-thinking the Vietnam Era. Stillwell reports on a conference at Hillsdale College. (h/t, neoneo)

Brodhead apologizes. Powerline. Perhaps the board insisted?

More on how Affirmative Action harms minorities. It's not polite to say so, however.

Do not read this link, advises Small Dead Lemmings.

More on how ethanol is driving up the cost of food.

"I really think that if tobacco and coffee were newly discovered and brought back by U.S. troops, they'd be put in Schedule 1 by the geniuses who want to run our lives." Classical Values rants on Khat and drug laws in general.

Another rant: Wizbang on SCHIP:

The expansion of S-CHIP is the ultimate, literal expression of the "nanny state." We don't trust each other (and, by extension and definition, ourselves) to take care of our children, so we want the government (also, by extension and definition) everyone else to do it for us.

Global warming will eat your brain. Jules 

Burkean Reflections takes on Glenn Greenwald in his Blog Watch. I don't read Greenwald because I do not think he is a truth-seeker. A partisan, low-life hack.

Photo: Gwynnie's decoy shack.

This could lead to many Moslem converts in Vancouver

It's good to see that the Brit police are on the job.

The Syria raid: Silence in Syria, Panic in Iran. (h/t, a commenter at Jules)

Social signalling and politics. Assistant Village Idiot. "Social signalling" is a real thing. The NRA sticker on my car is a "social signal."

From Insty:

ENTITLEMENTS FOR THE UNBORN? Greg Mankiw has some questions about Hillary's baby-bond proposal: "How might this be funded? There are only three groups that could be asked to pay for the new entitlement with higher taxes (or lower benefits): the current elderly, those currently of working age, or the same future generations who are getting the new benefit and are slated to pay for existing unfunded entitlements. Which group do you think Senator Clinton has in mind?"

Academic Lunacy. Hansen via Dr. Sanity. It's not insane - it's Gramscian!

Oil reserves increase over time. Cafe Hayek. That seems true, for at least the next couple of hundred years, but I still like nuke power.

Farm S&M Festival at Iowahawk. I can just imagine how many Google "farm p*rn sado-masoch*sm" seaches ended up there.

Poor Juan Williams is getting it from the Left. Althouse. How did the Liberal Williams become what Dems consider to be a house slave? I like Williams, and would love to have a beer with him, but I disagree with him 90% of the time. He is in trouble with the Left because he tries to be calmly rational - and because he is man enough not to be afraid of FOX. Perhaps "calmly rational" is not the political game...

Sexy Katrina produces inadvertent humor in The Nation, re Admadinnajabba. Hatemongers. I always give Katrina a pass though, because she is cute and sexy-looking. Just as she gives Admadinejabba a pass, because he is anti-West.

SCHIP is socialized medicine. Novak at RCP. As we have said here before, when you begin handing out "free" insurance to people making over 80,000/year, you are trying to bring the middle class into the entitlement class. Same as they did with Medicare on the other end of the age range. It's a clever strategery.

The Danbury, CT lawsuit. Is it illegal to arrest illegal immigrants? That would present a Catch 22.

Would there be a beautiful peace in the world if we would only let the peaceful Moslems nuke the Jews?  S,C&A. And, related, why is it so often Moslem doctors who are Jihadists?

Did you read Barrister's post on Gramsci? It's worth a look, if you are weak on your  Gramsci Thought.

Eurabia is real. Fjordman at Brussels Journal. It begins:

Does anyone still think it is a conspiracy theory to say that there is a coordinated campaign going in Europe to destroy the established nation states and surrender our countries to Muslims?

I would put it "to the Muslim hordes." Why don't they just fix their own places instead of bringing their alien culture to us, where it doesn't fit in? Read the whole thing. Immigrants always want to come to the prosperous, civilized, industrialized Western nations - and then they want to change them. Stupid, and cruel and insensitive to their overly-generous hosts. My message to all immigrants in the world: Man-up, Stay Home and Fix It. We did that job already, and you can do it too. Difficult? Of course, but that is what the world really needs for harmony and prosperity.

Photo: Lunchtime during the construction of the Empire State Building, 1930, from Dr X, who always has cool old photos.

Super Tuscans. The new wines of Tuscany. The American. Photo is an Antinori vineyard in the Chianti region.

Be careful when using your Chase Card.

Economic disaster is good for you. Dust My Broom

"Everyone in this room would agree..." Katie Couric on Iraq:

“Everyone in this room would agree that people in this country were misled in terms of  the rationale of this war,” said Couric, adding  that it is “pretty much accepted” that the war in Iraq was a mistake."

It is? Only time will tell. Also:

The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable.

Yes, I guess saying "we" is rather intense. That lady does not get out of Manhattan enough. I must admit I have never seen her, but she sounds like a caricature of the typical smug NYC left-chic chardonnay-sipping multi-millionaire who lives in a bubble.

Since it's Beat Up on Columbia Week, a quote from a piece in FIRE:

...keep in mind that FIRE’s core objections to “social justice requirements” have been broadcast loud and clear. For ready example, we’ve told Columbia University’s Teachers College time and again that their use of “social justice” dispositions in student evaluations is morally repugnant. Despite sending more than a few letters to Teachers College, they still seem not to understand. (To be fair, their last letter insisted that they were looking into the problem—but that was May, and we’ve heard nothing since.) Unfortunately, Teachers College is far from the only school with a penchant for dictating acceptable ideologies to its students. As we wrote in the New York Post in June, Washington State University, Le Moyne College, Brooklyn College, and Rhode Island College have all imposed their own political or moral conclusions upon their students in the past several years.

Smart Christian links thus to the "New Humanism" Conference at Harvard:

Here is an article on the “New Humanism” conference at Harvard.  Harvard’s humanist chaplain was there, how nice.  It seems like the same old thing to me.  I take Harvard’s activities rather personal, as my many great grandfather, Thomas Dudley, signed its original charter.  He is turning over in his grave.

If you read his link, it just sounds like a 19th Century anti-religion meeting. One would think that real "humanists" would have more respect for the very human search for the divine.

The wave of pessimism has passed. Dunn in American Thinker. A quote:

One of the benefits of Petreaus-Crocker hearings is the way they've cleared up the miasma of defeatism and futility that settled over the topic of Iraq since the beginning of this year. Much of this was produced by MoveOn, the media, and advantage-hunting Democratic pols, but it was also implicit in a lot of commentary from the war's supporters as well. (e.g., the habit of ending each announcement of good news with some line such as, "of course, there's a long way to go" or "we've still got a hard road ahead". This solecism is common among everyone from W on down, and amounts to jabbing a nail in your own tire.)

WalMart beats socialized medicine. No Pasaran. Hmmm, maybe free markets work better than government.

Who writes history? Driscoll. And who invented the myth of the 50s? I think the myth was based on TV, not real life. It seems to me that the 50s were generally sane, stable, and prosperous. The war was over, the culture wars had not begun, and the grown-ups were in charge.

Gay-point averages rank colleges. h/t, reader. If you "happen to be" straight, would you be uncomfortable in the most highly-ranked gay-friendly schools?

Fishing: A new college sport. How do you win?

Italy's sex slave trade. BBC

Canadians upset about Mexican immigration (from the US). Darn those racist Canadians.

Ideological perfection. Kim. Seeking it in a candidate is a fool's errand.

The SCHIP story. Powerline. It's important, but a bit below the MSM radar. I do think it's a Trojan horse, designed to make the middle class accustomed to government health care. It's "for the children," isn't it?

Back Pain: Acupuncture works by placebo effect. Duh. But it works better than conventional treatments for back pain. So how come the placebo effect is weaker with conventional treatments?

How the heavy-handed Clintons control the press. via Drudge

The Seven Perennial Sins, a book at LaShawn

When NJ and KY tried Hillarycare. Betsy

Bollinger scrambles to save face - and to save donations. NY Sun

A new classic on the subject of blogs and the media by Driscoll at The Atlas Society: Atlas Mugged: How a gang of scrappy individual bloggers broke the stranglehold of the Mainstream Media. Read the whole thing because it gives a good summary of the history of "self-publishing." A quote:

Big Media isn’t going away. They still generate enormous sums of advertising revenue, despite a declining—and rapidly aging—audience. But fortunately, information alternatives are becoming increasingly available. The forms of blogging will become increasingly diversified, too, to the point where the words “blogs” and “blogging” soon may become passé.

But whatever its future form, the idea and ideal of individual self-publishing—something that our pamphleteer-era Founding Fathers would instantly understand and enthusiastically applaud—is safely here to stay.

Photo above: That is not dog vomit - that is delicious Chipped Beef on toast. As our mornings get cooler, it seems like time to begin to think about hot, heart-warming and artery-clogging All-White Breakfasts (food white in color - nothing racial). And speaking of comfort food, SISU makes a "perfect apple pie," with lard, of course. In Yankeeland, Apple Pie is traditionally for breakfast, not dessert.

X Games injuries. Idiots.

Steyn: Bend over for Nurse Hillary.

Annie Oakley's guns at auction.

The Pope gets tough on Moslem extremism

Bip died. Jules. It surprised me that he was still living.

I'm beginning to enjoy XXl Century Socialism. Devil's Excrement

Jena: Searching for facts

I was wrong about the NYT: Roger Simon

It's not about Free Speech. SDA. Bollinger has it all bolluxed up, and I'd guess he thinks his critics are neanderthal proles. It's about who you deem worthy of your invitation and your audience. What somebody deems worthy says plenty about them, their judgement, and their values. I have free speech too, but Bollinger hasn't invited me yet.

Sgt. Eddie Jeffers, US Army, milblogger, and the best America can produce, was killed in Iraq on Sept. 19.

Read about this young man at Flopping.

God bless such men, who face the dangers while we safely, comfortably, and complainingly do whatever it is we must do or chose to do. 

Photo from Assymetric Military.

I would not invite Yasser Arafat to anything, anywhere, anytime, anyplace.

Rudy Giuliani in 1995, when he kicked Arafat out of a Lincoln Center concert for the UN's 50th Anniversary.

I am trying to decide what term to use for the aggressive suppression of ideas and speech in Leftist academia. When will the book burning begin?

Now I see Stanford is fighting Don Rumsfeld's visiting professorship. As Protein says:

Alas, we’ve surrendered liberalism for the kind of creeping totalitarianism whose resemblance to liberalism is limited to a familiar smile and wink.

"Behead those who insult the Party Line." Maybe Stanford is jealous that Columbia got Ahmadinejad and not them. Academia is beginning to look like this.

It's sick out there, and getting sicker.

Hey, where are all the hurricanes? I am eagerly awaiting to hear that global warming reduces hurricanes. Or maybe makes hurricanes difficult to predict?

Speaking of hurricanes, New Orleans, the Crime Murder Capitol of the USA, literally held up America - and got away with it. Below is Kudlow, as quoted in Moral Issues and Economic Solutions at Classical Values:

The grand total is $127 billion (including tax relief).

That's right: a monstrous $127 billion. Of course, not a single media story has highlighted this gargantuan government-spending figure. But that number came straight from the White House in a fact sheet subtitled, "The Federal Government Is Fulfilling Its Commitment to Help the People of the Gulf Coast Rebuild." Huh?

Perhaps all this money should've been directly deposited in the bank accounts of the 300,000 people living in New Orleans. All divvied up, that $127 billion would come to $425,000 per person! After thanking Uncle Sam for their sudden windfall, residents could head to Southern California and buy homes that are now on sale thanks to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and bid up the sagging house prices in the state.

George Soros: The Man, the Mind, and the Money Behind MoveOn, at IBD (h/t, Buddy). The article asks "Who is this man and what is he up to?"

Read it, because the guy owns the Democrat Party.

Captain Ed:

It’s a particularly sad commentary on the Democratic Party that they cannot bring themselves to support the very commander they sent to lead American troops in battle by a unanimous vote. It’s not a case of a few fringe politicians like Bernie Sanders or Barbara Boxer, either. The Majority Leader, Harry Reid, and his chief deputy, Dick Durbin, refused to condemn the smear on Petraeus’ honor. Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd, both of whom want to become Commander in Chief over the military, chose to endorse MoveOn’s smear campaign against a man who has dedicated his life to defending this nation and serving presidents in a nonpartisan manner.

A Commander in Chief cannot dishonor the military: they are the only thing between us and the barbarians. What more can be said? As Bob Grant often says on the radio, "It's sick out there, and getting sicker."