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Did anyone among all those who busied themselves with draft after draft after draft of The Speech That Will Live In Infamy check those Qur’anic quotes? Did they understand that those who knew the text would, as Robert Spencer devastatingly did the other day at this site, recognize the plucking completely out of context of a phrase or two from what turned out to be bloodcurdling passages from the Qur’an? Did they not realize that it did not take Spencer, but that you and I, and practically anyone at this point, could see that the quoting of 5.32 without 5.33 was simply to repeat the hideous misunderstanding of that misunderestimator of Islam, George Bush?

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And I’m sure that will make a difference.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Guess that Obama Apology Tour really worked, didn’t it?

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The UN publicizes such positive rights as “right to water,” “right to housing,” “right to health”, etc. These rights sound wonderful, while not imposing any specific obligation whatsoever on any specific actor to do any specific thing for any specific poor person. It is impossible for the UN or any other body to allocate responsibilities for observing the “right to water,” and also decide who will be first in line among the 884 million people now without clean water. So even if the UN creates international pressure to observe these “rights,” the pressure is diffused across so many potential actors with unclear responsibility that it has no effect, accomplishing nothing for poor people.

So such victims could appeal to the UN Human Rights Council for their rights vis-à-vis the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt – except that the governments of Cameroon, China, and Egypt are MEMBERS of the UN Human Rights Council. The UN is perpetrating a sick joke on such victims, by filling the Human Rights Council with human rights violators. This travesty is already well known, but that doesn’t mean anyone who cares should stop talking about it.

So here’s the scorecard on UN human rights. On something like “the right to water,” where it is impossible to identify who is violating such “rights,” the UN talks big. On human rights violations like killings and torture, where the UN knows precisely who is the violator, the UN sometimes shows up on the violator’s side.

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The Federal Reserve announced a $1.2 trillion plan three months ago designed to push down mortgage rates and breathe life into the housing market.

But this and other big government spending programs are turning out to have the opposite effect.

Gosh, imagine that.

Yields on 10-year Treasury notes, a benchmark for home mortgages and other consumers loans, jumped from 2.5 percent in March around the time of the Fed announcement to as high as 3.7 percent in recent days as signs that efforts to stabilize the financial system and economy were starting to pay off. And 30-year mortgage rates jumped more than a quarter-point this week to 5.29 percent, the highest level since December, Freddie Mac reported.

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Britain’s shire horses could be extinct within a generation following a drastic drop in the number of breeders, experts have warned.

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Arizona’s founders banned gifts to private companies as the result of bitter experience. In the closing decades of the 19th century, local governments borrowed money to force-feed private railroad development. Pima County outside of Tucson, for example, took out $300,000 in bonds in 1882 for a railroad that promised to build some 100 miles of track. The money was spent but the railroad dissolved after a mere 10 miles of track was constructed. The bonds were worthless, but taxpayers were still on the hook for the money.

This time around it’s shopping malls and the like, and the preferred subsidy is tax rebates rather than bonds. But the result is the same. Local governments are foisting the cost of private development onto taxpayers as private companies promise that with just a few tax dollars they will create a wealth of new jobs.

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I would have thought that a ruling prince would have more important things on his mind than Saving the Tuna, but apparently not.

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The national assembly is reading a law that would force the country’s chemical companies to become minority partners in joint ventures with the state.

And the hits just keep on comin’.

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Another good reason to avoid Harvard.

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The education establishment and its political allies employ multiple methods to keep kids trapped in rotten schools. One tactic is to use control of school boards to prevent or limit the creation of charter schools. Another is to smother existing voucher programs with rules and red tape. Real world examples are currently playing out in Milwaukee and New York City.

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We really don’t want to go down that European road.

VATs are associated with both higher overall tax burdens and more government spending. In 1965, before the VAT swept across Europe, the average tax burden for advanced European economies (the EU-15) was 27.7% of economic output, roughly comparable to the U.S., where taxes were 24.7% of GDP, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD). European nations began to impose VATs in the late 1960s, and now the European Union requires all members to have a VAT of at least 15%.

Results? By 2006, the OECD reports that the average tax burden for EU-15 nations had climbed to 39.8% of GDP. The tax burden also has increased in the U.S., but at a much slower rate, rising to 28% for that year.

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I am not making this up.

Russ Smith is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Jerry Pournelle has about the best capsule description of the Ricci case that I’ve seen.

As appears to be becoming traditional, the villain of the piece isn’t the city of New Haven but a stupid law passed by Congress based on bad science. (Gee, where have we heard that before?)

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all of the government we pay for.

Take a look.

And place your bets on how long it will be before black poachers kill them to sell their skins to Arab and Asian collectors.

I give it about a month.

Jerry Pournelle looks at certain controversial issues.

A major problem in education is that half of the children are below average. As an example, here is a question from a national test for 8th graders. The example is from page 56 in Charles Murray, REAL EDUCATION.

There were 90 employees in a company last year. This year the number of employees increased by 10%. How many employees are in the company this year?

(A) 9    (B) 82   (C) 91   (D) 99    (E) 100

As Charles Murray notes, anyone who reads this web site (or reads to page 56 of his book) would expect “that almost everyone should be able to handle a question like this. Children are taught to divide and calculate percentages in elementary school. Dividing by ten is the easiest form of division… It is a problem based on a simple mathematical concept, using simple arithmetic, requiring a simple logical interpolation to get the right answer. It is an excellent example for starting to think about what below average means in mathematics — because 62% of eight-graders got this item wrong.”

It is unlikely that anyone who cannot correctly answer this question in 8th grade will be able successfully to complete a four year college education. Assume that’s wrong; assume that fully half those who couldn’t answer the question correctly in 8th grade were able to master Algebra in high school. I find that unlikely; but that’s still 30% of  the population who simply cannot complete a college-prep high school curriculum. My guess is that the number who can’t finish (or at least won’t benefit from) a real college-prep education is more like 80%.

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Democrat, of course.

Mr. Carothers is the first alderman to face federal charges since 2007. Twenty-seven city aldermen have been convicted of wrongdoing since 1972.

Mr. Carothers’s father, William Carothers, was also an alderman and was convicted in federal court of attempting to extort a hospital contractor for free remodeling work on his offices in 1981.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Bet they’re glad they stayed….

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Now that’s just wrong.

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It had to happen.

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Condemned out of her own mouth — and Obama along with.

David Friedman finds the key to modern culture.

It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn’t worth looking at, modern music isn’t worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen’s, or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used, and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.

Of course, there might be a reason nobody else has used it.

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Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller’s office concedes is a “substantial decline.” On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year — even at higher rates.

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting view concerning information on social media.

The crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd and to withhold information from that collective knowledge—a link, a restaurant rating, a bit of advice—may be a new definition of antisocial or at least selfish behavior.

This strikes me as statism wearing a Clever Plastic Disguise, the sort of argument one would hear from a communist who had embraced the electronic age. I’m pretty sure Ayn Rand would recoil from it in horror.

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So much for sustainable energy.

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An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

Gee, why is it “unreleased”?

Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo.

And that’s the way it is in the ObamaNation.

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It’s pretty clear that the man-made global warming hypothesis may have more economic influence than any theory in the history of mankind, including Marxism. It provides the justification for enormous government influence in every phase of economic life, and appears to herding the US economy into stalemate with bankruptcy for a great many people, and an over-all lower standard of living for everyone. That’s change you can believe in.

California emphatically rejected tax increases, but so far the message hasn’t sunk in. The purpose of the government of California is to pay enormous retirement benefits to teachers and state workers, then to pay large salaries and benefits to teachers and state employees not yet retired, and then to do everything else like put out fires and enforce laws and provide services. I see no discussion whatever of changing those goals and priorities, and until those priorities are changed, there is no “solution” to the “problem”.

Government tried running factories in the past. The US built steel mills to make armor plate, certain that proper management and engineering would let a government plant produce the stuff for about half what private industry was charging. Of course the result was somewhat different, with the output about twice the open market price, and the plants closed not long after their long delayed opening.  We all know how well the Post Office delivered mail when it had a monopoly. Apparently we have to run those experiments again, since no one studies history.

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Guess they figure that with the Obamassiah in charge they’re going to need a bigger boat.

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Makes you wonder what would have happened if the Germans had come out of the war not having gotten their pants beaten. Would be be looking at a former-Gestapo Chancellor doing a very good imitation of the previous regime? For sure we wouldn’t have had the Nuremberg trials — I don’t know of any of the KGB mass-murderers ever brought to justice.

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Somali pirates might be allowing themselves to be deliberately captured in order to take advantage of European asylum laws, Dutch legal experts have warned.

Which is why they ought to be hanged upon capture, as was done in every century before this one.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Read it.

Internet companies are trying to come up with a solution for one of the classic headaches of parenting: kids begging for money.

On Monday, a service called “Bill My Parents” launched to allow kids to virtually send online purchases to parents for approval and payment — instead of asking mom and dad for their credit cards.

The company makes money by charging a 3% to 5% commission to a merchant for a sale, and also charging parents 50 cents to complete a transaction.

I am not making this up.

Arnold Kling attempts to scare our socks off.

I am not upset with political trends because I want Republicans to win. I am upset because I foresee a one-party state. Even if neither party is particularly libertarian, gridlock and competitive checks and balances are better for libertarians. Moreover, a one-party state is corrupt and backward relative to what we are used to. Again, I just come from reading North, Wallis, and Weingast, and a major characteristic of a “natural” state is that every economic organization must necessarily be a political organization. What we are seeing now, with government threatening private business executives while rewarding lobbyists with “stimulus” (see Russ Roberts, for example), is “natural state” behavior.

As for various commenters who assure me that there is some natural tendency for a second party to be competitive, allow me introduce to you to Montgomery County, Maryland, as well as to many large American cities. In fact, it is quite easy for a one-party government to emerge when there are ethnic blocs and a large public sector relative to the private sector.

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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

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Here’s the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies — old and new — have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

New York and California are nice places to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Charles Stross, British science fiction writer (and one of my Recommended Writers; see right), finds out that travel in the U.S. is about as much fun as you would expect a government-controlled activity to be.

I caught an Amtrak train — the #513 from Seattle to Portland, business class. It was that, or fly (I don’t drive in the US), and I’m fed up with security theatre.

“Security theatre”, of course, being Bruce Schneier’s term for what goes on at airports — making it look like we have security without actually doing much.

I was gobsmacked by how slow and inefficient the process of catching the train in America feels, compared to even the ghastly suboptimization of Virgin or National Express in the UK, never mind Japan Rail. First you book the ticket and a seat. You have to present photo ID to claim a boarding card —like airline travel in the 1950s — an intrusive and annoying but not actually effective security measure. Then you check your bags — all but the two carry-ons you’re allowed— not less than an hour before departure. For boarding, there’s a long queue while all those folks who didn’t think to book a seat present their tickets at the gate and are issued with seat allocations. Only then do folks get to go on board the train — which makes boarding it a half-hour torment rather than a rapid, relatively painless rush.

Our tax dollars at work.

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That’s a rather expansive definition of “we”, of course.

Joel Kotkin limns how the interests of the current ruling class are not identical with the interests of the common weal.

A yuppie stimulus differs from the more traditional approach, which aims to get the front-line, blue-collar types back to work. Instead, it would channel public funds away from those grouchy construction workers – some 30% of whom may soon be out of work – to better heeled, and, in their minds, more deserving “creative” professionals. After all, what stake do the netroots have in making things better for Joe the Plumber?

In contrast, the yuppie bailout focuses on a sure-fire Democratic constituency, the well-educated urban professional. One advocate of such an approach, pundit Richard Florida, has urged President-elect Barack Obama to eschew crude investments in traditional production and a renewed housing market in favor of goodies directed to what he calls “the creative industry.”

Florida sees any focus on restoring manufacturing and housing as a misguided rescue of the “old industrial economy,” in which Americans actually made things and other Americans consumed them. Instead, he suggests, “the first step must be to reduce demand for the core products and lifestyle of the old order.”

So let’s stop worrying about what happens to Detroit, or the crisis in the housing market. In Florida’s view, cars, of course, are demonized as woefully bad for environmental reasons and not particularly friendly to the preferred dense urbanity so attractive to advocates of “hip cool” cities.

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And, consequently, they are raising a generation of victims.

Which is okay — when the bad times come again, as they always do, it’s the children of the rednecks who will survive, and the children of the ruling class that will fertilize their soil.

Steve Sailer discusses how regressives are going back to the 19th century.

What’s particularly striking is that this legal privilege is more or less hereditary, being passed down to the child from grandparents who currently live in Beverly Hills and from parents who used to live there.

It is, of course, all about money.

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought.

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Pretty soon they’ll all be going to school in pajamas.

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Sounds like the 1930s all over again. And this time they won’t have a King to pull the plug when it all goes south.

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The driver lost the money to the wind when an envelope he had stuck in the passenger seat pocket of his vehicle came loose during a test drive.

The cash – in 500, 200, and 100 euro notes – fluttered across the motorway in the midst of speeding traffic near the city of Hanover.

Here’s your sign….

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This is not your father’s trade war, a tit-for-tat over champagne or cheese. With countries worldwide desperately trying to keep and create jobs in the midst of a global recession, the spat between the United States and its normally friendly northern neighbor underscores what is emerging as the biggest threat to open commerce during the economic crisis.

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You mean the global warming alarmist are lying to us? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Peggy Noonan:

The indecipherable language of government has actually become dangerous to the well-being of the nation. As the federal government claims ever greater powers, its language has become vague to the point of meaningless and meaningless to the point of menacing.

Ever notice how policemen and lawyers can’t say “car” or “truck”?

I think I heard “accessing affordable quality health care,” “single payer plan vis-à-vis private multiparty insurers” and “key component of quality improvement.” In any case, she didn’t answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore.

A New York Times profile recently had her recalling with self-deprecating charm the time her child ran a high fever and she caused a bit of confusion by forgetting to say, “We have to go to the hospital!” and announcing instead, “This unsustainable increase in body temperature requires immediate access to a local quality health-care facility!” I made that up, but it was believable, wasn’t it?