On August 23, Judge Royce Lamberth of the federal district court in Washington issued a preliminary injunction halting the implementation of new guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, which permitted the use of federal funds to support embryonic-stem-cell (ESC) research that entailed the ongoing destruction of human embryos. This, Judge Lamberth held, violated a restriction on funding embryo-destructive research known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, enacted in each year’s budget since 1996.

#ad#The Obama administration had claimed that the destruction of the embryos and the research using stem cells derived from them could be “separated,” so that the latter was publicly funded but the former (to honor the Dickey-Wicker Amendment) was not. In other words, the administration interpreted the law as saying: “Go ahead and kill the embryos using non-governmental funds; then you can use the stem-cell lines produced by killing the embryos for research using taxpayer money without restriction.” Of course, this interpretation would essentially nullify the amendment, treating its command as if it were a meaningless bookkeeping procedure. Judge Lamberth had no difficulty seeing through this shoddy reasoning: “To conduct ESC research, ESCs must be derived from an embryo. The process of deriving ESCs from an embryo results in the destruction of the embryo. Thus, ESC research necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo.”

The administration ended up in court as a result of Pres. Barack Obama’s decision to reverse the course set by Pres. George W. Bush nine years ago. The Bush policy sought to advance cutting-edge research while maintaining the U.S. government’s longstanding neutrality regarding research that uses and destroys living human embryos. It neither funded nor proscribed such destruction, but did permit federal funds to support research on ESC lines already in existence as of the policy’s promulgation. Thus, it supplied no incentive with U.S. taxpayer dollars for any further destruction of human life for research purposes.

But the Obama administration decided this was not enough. In March 2009, the president issued an executive order reversing the direction taken by the previous administration, and offering the largesse of the federal treasury to scientists engaging in the use and destruction of living human beings. As implemented by the National Institutes of Health four months later -- in guidelines Judge Lamberth has now enjoined while litigation proceeds -- the Obama policy entrenches in federal law a deeply regrettable precedent: the principle that human beings at the earliest developmental stages may be instrumentalized and treated as raw materials to serve the desires of others. Yet at no point has the president or anyone in his administration offered any argument for treating human embryos as less than human beings or for intentionally destroying them for scientific research.

In response to this change in federal policy, leading scholars, ethicists, and scientists met in Princeton, N.J., last September as the Neuhaus Colloquium, named in honor of the late Richard John Neuhaus, a leader in the civil-rights movement who became a leader in the pro-life movement because he understood that the cause of justice is the cause of all human beings regardless of their race, sex, or religion -- or their age, size, or stage of development. In a lengthy statement published in the new issue of First Things, the magazine Neuhaus founded, the members of the Colloquium criticize President Obama for turning his back on the American ideals of equality and human dignity, treating them as disposable or as merely subsumed by the imperative of scientific “freedom.” Coming from a president whose own election was taken by his fellow citizens as the sign of a hard-won victory for the cause of equality in American history -- a history that stretches from Independence Hall to Appomattox to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and beyond -- this disregard for the weakest and most vulnerable human beings is a particularly acute disappointment.

#page#Announcing his policy shift in March 2009, President Obama said: “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources -- it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient -- especially when it’s inconvenient.”

But it is the president who fails to be open to the inconvenient truth about the human embryo, namely, that from the single-cell stage of development onward, the human embryo is a distinct, determinate, self-directing, integrated human organism -- a living member of the human species who, if given a suitable environment, will move along the seamless trajectory of biological development toward maturity. At the so-called “blastocyst stage,” when the embryo might be destroyed to derive embryonic stem cells, he or she is already a living individuated organism. The very same organism -- the very same human being -- who, unless deprived of the conditions of survival, will soon be crawling, then walking, and then a few years later asking mom and dad for the car keys.

#ad#Is our humanity alone enough to merit protection and regard, or are we required to prove we have some other set of qualities or capacities to qualify for respect and protection? Should we be allowed intentionally to destroy living human beings for our speculative benefit because they are going to “die anyway”? Shall we treat human beings in the embryonic stage as less than fully human because the embryonic human would be more useful to us dead than alive?

With our fellow Neuhaus Colloquium signatories, we believe these questions have clear answers. Every human being deserves to be treated with the same basic level of concern and regard that we owe to all members of the human family. If basic human equality means anything at all, it must mean that individuals deserve equal moral regard and legal protection in virtue of who they are, not because of their worth as judged by others according to their own needs and desires.

Abandoning this basic principle of justice, the Obama administration has begun to incentivize -- with funds provided by the American people and in their name -- the exploitation and destruction of human life for scientific research. Judge Lamberth is to be commended for faithfully applying the existing law that expresses the principled conviction that human life is not to be destroyed with taxpayer dollars. President Obama now has a chance to reconsider his misguided policy and replace it with one that advances science while respecting the equal dignity of every human life.

— Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. Yuval Levin is editor of National Affairs. Matthew J. Franck is director of the Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton.

President Obama is the latest in a long line of political personalities to think that establishing a Palestinian state would allow the Middle East to live happily ever after, and he has been pressing for it urgently. Superficially, such a state seems a properly human outcome that would at last allow the Palestinians to take control of their lives, as people ought to. At various points in the past, such a state could very possibly have been negotiated, but each time Israel and the Palestinians had demands that neither was willing to concede to the other.

The proposed state of Palestine consists of two entities, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But the time is long past when president Mahmoud Abbas, who has just resumed direct negotiations with his Israeli counterpart, could speak for both parts. Hamas, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has seen Israel retreat from Gaza and mounted a coup there against Abbas, evolving into a small but fierce force in the global Islamist jihad. Iran, the engine of the jihad, is the unacknowledged presence in the Washington negotiations.

#ad#The most heartening development in this disheartening situation is that conditions on the ground in the West Bank are improving: With financial and technical assistance from the United States, the European Union, and from the hated Israelis themselves, there has been significant work done to build the machinery of governance. Abbas’s security forces -- which operated in Yasser Arafat’s day as independent gangs of hoodlums at war with all and each other -- are being transformed into a legitimate police force, with U.S. training conducted in Jordan. The transformation is incomplete, to be sure, which is why the best outcome of these talks --whether they break down, founder, or continue -- is one that buys Abbas sufficient time to develop more of an infrastructure of governance, thereby heading off a complete Hamas takeover of the Palestinian proto-state.

Abbas is not popular. He stays in office because he has postponed elections on the West Bank. Both he and the Benjamin Netanyahu government fear that another crisis could place both parts of the state of Palestine in the hands of Hamas. This coincidence of interests has strange consequences. Unable to fully to control his territory, Abbas still has to rely for security on Israeli forces, some of them operating under cover and at night. By the same token, Israel has to rely on Abbas to crack down on Hamas and detain those planning jihad. Needless to say, this unspoken deal is shadowy, fraught with betrayals and double crossings.

Abbas holds thousands of Hamas members in prison and has been busily purging schools and mosques. But as the recent murder of Israelis on the West Bank shows, Hamas is still capable of causing murderous havoc outside of its base in Gaza. Its spokesmen like to say that whatever Abbas may agree to in Washington does not obligate anyone.

It is not realistic to expect Israel to maintain the 75-year-old Abbas in power as a mini-dictator indefinitely. Yet in the event that Hamas were to succeed in taking over the West Bank, a bloodbath would follow, with survivors from the Abbas administration, and perhaps Abbas himself, running for their lives into exile. Such a Hamas victory would also enable Iran to open a new front, with Tel Aviv and central Israel within close range of its missiles and air force.

A Hamas takeover is the second-worst possible outcome. The worst outcome is open regional war, with the atomic ayatollahs allied with Hamas. The status quo may be fraught and unnatural, but it is endlessly preferable to those options. The question touching the Palestinian state is not so much “When?” as “What sort?” The foremost priority in these negotiations should be to ensure that it is not one dominated by Hamas or by Iran.

To mark Labor Day 2010, President Obama will join hands with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in Milwaukee, and they will pose as champions of the working class. Bad move. Trumka’s organizing record is a shameful reminder of the union movement’s violent and corrupt foundations.

The new Obama/AFL-CIO power alliance -- underwritten with $40 million in hard-earned worker dues -- is a midterm shotgun marriage of Beltway brass knuckles and Big Labor brawn. Trumka warmed up his rhetorical muscles this past week with full-frontal attacks on former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He indignantly accused her of “getting close to calling for violence” and suggested that her criticism of tea-party-bashing labor bosses amounted to “terrorizing” workers.

#ad#Trumka and Obama will cast Big Labor as an unassailable force for good in American history. But when it comes to terrorizing workers, Trumka knows whereof he speaks.

Meet Eddie York. He was a workingman whose story will never scroll across Obama’s teleprompter. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Richard Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to the Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?

A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.–based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.”

In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the s**t out of every last” worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Foundation, the leading anti-forced-unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities#...#organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”

Trumka washed off the figurative bloodstains and moved up the ranks. As AFL-CIO secretary, he notoriously refused to testify in a sordid 1999 embezzlement trial involving his labor-boss brethren at the Teamsters Union. No surprise. Thugs of a feather: Trumka’s violence-promoting record echoes the riotous Teamsters strikes dating back to the 1950s, when the union organized taxicab companies to target workers with gas bombs, bottles, and fists.

And now, Trumka is spearheading a Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign by far-left groups -- publicized in the revolutionary-Marxist People’s World -- to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.”

Take those as literal fighting words. The bloody consequences of compulsory unionism cannot be ignored.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Ron Paul for the mosque I got some nyah-nyah e-mail from readers after Ron Paul came out for the Ground Zero mosque. “How’d you like your hero now?” etc.

For one thing, I don’t really have heroes, not in politics anyway. For another, Ron’s weakness has always been a too-strong adherence to ideological consistency. You can’t get past a certain point in politics without some small quantity of the fudge factor. From that point of view Ron isn’t operating so much in politics as in what Kingsley Amis (who was speaking of Enoch Powell at the time) called “some obscure branch of the truth-at-any-price business.”

For another, in the case of the mosque, Ron seems not to have done his due diligence. He sounds ill-informed, talking about the mosque issue as if it’s entirely a matter of private-property rights. But if the money is being put up by foreign governments, how is the mosque private property? And since we don’t know who is putting up the money, but the funders of mosques and “Islamic cultural centers” have a long and slimy trail of duplicity in these matters, why should we not suppose the worst?

And then Ron says: “The neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia . . . never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for their ill-conceived preventative wars.”

Say what? Well nigh the first thing über-neocon George W. Bush did after 9/11 was show up at a local mosque to make a gassy speech saying the attacks had nothing whatsoever to do with true Islam, which is a religion of peace, doncherknow? The people Ron calls “neo-conservatives” and the people who have been most shamelessly kissing up to the CAIR thugs, the slippery imams, and the shady Saudis this past nine years, look to me like the same people.

And come to think of it, Ron does know how to fudge. When he was campaigning in 2008, he departed considerably from the libertarian True Faith on immigration, even going so far as to give a friendly interview to the immigration-restrictionist site VDARE, if I recall correctly.

Well, perhaps Ron only fudges on the campaign trail. That would make him only nine times more honest than the average politician, versus my previous estimate of ten.

Trendline Test Having been somewhat dismissive of libertarianism there, let me try to make up a bit. There are some follies in libertarianism, but some excellent good sense too.

I’m a math geek, so my favorite chapter in Charles Murray’s book What It Means to Be a Libertarian is the one titled “The Trendline Test.” Murray shows us a marvelous way to illustrate the futility of most government action.

What you do is, draw a graph of some social-progress indicator over time. Murray uses “Deaths Per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled” as an example, but the Trendline Test can be applied to any such indicator: poverty, health, education, and so on.

Now see whether, by examining that graph, you can spot where the government took strong action to affect the indicator. In Murray’s example, the strong action was the imposition of the 55 mph speed limit in 1974. Did the fatalities graph thereupon take a sharp downward turn? Nope.

Murray allows that there have been cases where government action made a positive difference. Mostly, though, as he says: “Among trendlines involving social indicators — crime, the family, community, education, welfare — deterioration has been the rule and improvement is the exception. Among trendlines involving safety and health by far the most common result is . . . nothing. Whatever was happening before the government got involved continued to happen after the government got involved.”

I spotted a very striking illustration of this great truth in the August 21 issue of The Economist, page 31. The graph in this case is titled “China’s fertility rate, live births per woman.”

I rest my case — I mean, Charles Murray’s case.

Eagle Scout A word of congratulation to our friends the Meagher family of Greenlawn, N.Y., whose son Brian made Eagle Scout this month. We attended the presentation ceremony, which was nicely done, and a timely reminder in this, the BSA’s centenary year, of how much good the organization does in that most challenging of all social endeavors, the civilizing of young males.

The event also gives me a chance to expiate my guilt at having nursed uncharitable thoughts about the Boy Scouts in my own adolescence. Youth-training-wise, there were two games in town when I was a teen: the Boy Scouts and the Cadet Force (i.e., boy soldiers). There was a strong expectation that every boy should join one or the other. Boys who’d been in the Cub Scouts naturally gravitated to the Boy Scouts. Never much of a joiner, I’d missed out on Cub Scouts; and anyway the Cadets looked more exciting, with guns and stuff. So I yielded to expectations and became a cadet.

Once committed to the Cadets, we of course got caught up in an ethos of rivalry with the Scouts. We thought they were juvenile, with their shorts and toggles and made-up code words and rituals. They thought we looked ridiculous in our army surplus uniforms (generally a couple of sizes too big), squeaking out orders at parade-ground drill and stamping our boots theatrically as we did about-face.

Looking back, I’m not sure they were wrong. We all had fun in our own way, though, and kept out of trouble for a few years, and learned to take orders and carry out disagreeable tasks without complaining.

(My 2004 review of Robert Baden-Powell’s book Scouting for Boys is here.)

Iran’s new drone Li’l Squinty’s got himself a new toy: an unmanned drone bomber.

My first reaction on seeing that picture was: “It’s a doodlebug!” Yes, I know, it’s a different beast, but it sure looks like a doodlebug.

“Doodlebug” was the name given by the English to the V-1 unmanned flying bomb in World War II. Before my time, but I heard all about it from the older generation, on whom it made a great impression. The doodlebug had a very distinctive sound, so everyone knew when one was coming over. Then (everyone told us), in that heartlessly self-protective way that people get after a few years of war-weariness, you prayed that it would keep going. If the sound stopped, that meant it had run out of fuel and was falling, possibly on you. “Then you got under the table and waited for the crash.”

Nearly ten thousand of the things fell on southern England in the last year of the war, causing around twice that number of casualties. That’s war. Squinty should know all about it — he lived through the war with Iraq in the 1980s, which included heavy shelling and air attacks on Iranian cities. For us in the West, it’s all a remote memory. To remember hearing a doodlebug coming over, you need to be in your seventies at least.

The experience of war doesn’t necessarily seem to make people less warlike; just more determined to get it right next time.

Fat poets The question came up across the dinner table the other day: Can you name a fat poet? After a moment’s reflection I offered G. K. Chesterton. A fellow diner trumped me with Samuel Johnson. We pretty much ran out of names right about there, though. This doesn’t seem right. Surely there have been more fat poets than that?

Get a Government Job, Series #19,846 Stephen Meister in America's Newspaper of Record, August 24: “A shrinking group of private workers — now numbering 107 million — is paying the salaries and benefits of more than 22 million government workers. Thus, every five private-sector workers chip in to cover the costs of one government worker. (Maybe taxpayers should get cards with the name and picture of the government worker they’re sponsoring.)”

That took me back to my days teaching college in China. Reading up on the country before I went, I’d learned that 80 percent of Chinese people were peasants. In other words, it took four peasants to feed one townie.

My college was out at the edge of a provincial town, with villages and fields nearby. Once I’d settled in enough to kid around with my students, I used to point to peasants working in the fields, telling any students nearby: “See those four there? They’re mine! They’re feeding me!” The students would laugh, though probably only out of politeness. (The Chinese, even more than other foreigners, incline to the view that all English people are slightly wrong in the head.)

Now the boot’s on the other foot. Some cop, teacher, DMV bureaucrat, or federal GS-15 somewhere is reading this and chuckling: “Yeah right, Derb. You’re one of my five, pal! You’re feeding me!”

In the movies again I spent an interesting morning being filmed by leftist documentary-maker Justin Strawhand for his new project, a movie about nihilism. He asked me to do a spot and I agreed from simple vanity, though I shall probably regret it. Justin told me the film will be shown at London’s Tate Gallery sometime round about a year and a half from now, so there’s something to look forward to.

I’m still not sure what I’m doing in a movie about nihilism. I certainly don’t consider myself a nihilist, unless having zero interest in the supernatural makes you one. I certainly believe in the natural world and all its countless fantastically complicated productions, among which I include myself. That’s not nothing; it’s a great deal. But Justin had read my latest book and spotted some themes he wanted me to talk about.

The encounter turned out to be very convivial. We’d read a lot of the same authors and visited a lot of the same websites. The conviviality was marred only slightly by, on Justin’s part, a Hitler obsession the size of an asteroid and a failure to grasp the elementary principles of scientific inquiry, and, on my part, irritated impatience with all that plus the usual insecurities about my effectiveness at expressing myself in speech. I am much better at writing.

Justin assured me, however, that the couple of hours of me that he’d filmed would be edited down to a few potent minutes, so sometime in early 2012 we’ll see what transpires.

Chick flick Still on movies, but this time big box-office blockbuster ones.

None of the Derbs saw the movie Avatar when it came out last year. Well, this month it came round again, at a local theater with the full IMAX and 3-D deal. We decided to go see it, the whole famn damily. So off we went: Dad, Mom, daughter, and son.

When the movie was over and we came out, Dad and son headed for the men’s room, Mom and daughter for the other place. The following conversation then took place in adjacent stations in the men’s room.

Junior: So, Dad, whaddya think of the movie?

Dad: Tell you the truth, Son, I was rooting for the Colonel.

Junior [laughing]: Me too.

Dad: For goodness’ sake don’t tell Mom I said that, though.

Junior: Course not.

Europe’s gypsy problem Europe’s getting into some nasty problems with gypsies. As movement between EU members has become more and more free, gypsies from Romania and Bulgaria have been showing up in numbers all over Western Europe. Their behavior, wherever they go, has been appalling.

Here’s a news story from the East Midlands of England, where I grew up. A riverside park and wildlife preserve has been taken over by Romanian gypsies (the “Eastern European immigrants” of the story). They are slaughtering the wildlife, camping in the carefully tended picnic areas, poaching the fish stocks, and covering the scenic spots with layers of litter. Local people are now afraid to fish in the river. Earlier this year a man in my home town left his house for less than an hour and found on his return that a Romanian gypsy family had moved in after forcing the locks. (And this was by no means the only such case.)

The British welfare state has been easy game for gypsy criminals, who have milked it for millions, often — as in that case — under cover of “human rights” campaigning. Children are shipped in to be used in these benefit-fraud schemes, and to be raised in Oliver Twist–style pickpocket academies.

Western Europeans are very seriously fed up with the gypsy problem. There is a surprising degree of hostility toward the gypsies. You can be sitting with left-liberal, stuff-white-people-like, PC-as-all-get-out, middle-class Europeans, and mention the gypsies, and their faces go purple and they start foaming at the mouth. In Italy there were anti-gypsy riots, followed by expulsions.

Now France is taking action. On orders from Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy, hundreds of gypsies have been expelled this month, put on planes back to Romania. The EU human-rights busybodies are making a fuss, but the expulsion policy seems broadly popular in France (though it hasn’t done much for Sarko’s poll numbers, which are in the tank on account of economic issues).

This story will run and run. Nobody really knows what to do about the gypsy problem. There is not even general agreement on what kind of problem it is. Human rights? The model here for Americans is always segregation and Jim Crow, where black people were denied bourgeois goods to which they desired access — school and college places, housing and job opportunities — and suffered legal disabilities. None of that is the case with the gypsies in Western Europe. The welfare state is generous to them, and the judicial authorities are scrupulously — over-scrupulously, in the opinion of some of the commenters on those news stories — respectful of their rights in law.

The problem is that the gypsies, or far too many of them, like being gypsies. They don’t want bourgeois goods; they want to continue to live as their ancestors did, by begging and stealing. They don’t want their kids to go to school; they have no desire or aptitude for regular work. They are Europeans, but nomads, with no allegiance to any country, and only scorn for the law, and for non-gypsies.

What’s the answer? I have no clue. I can only assure you that, as I said, you’ll be reading occasional stories out of Europe about this issue for many years to come.

Shared vision Half a dozen people have e-mailed in to ask if this is me writing under a pseudonym.

No, I didn’t write that. I wish I had, though.

Channeling Espy In some private exchanges about the mathematics of voting, the name of the Marquis de Condorcet naturally came up. My correspondent reminded me that Condorcet’s wife, an intellectual lady who ran a famous salon, bore the evocative name Sophie de Grouchy. This inspired me to doggerel in the style of the late great Willard Espy, thus:

Madame Sophie de Grouchy
Was no intellectual slouch. She
Took her knickers off
For a famous philosophe.

So far as I can discover the lady defied her name, being of a sunny and uncomplaining disposition.

When Spain was different I see that Catalonia is to ban bullfighting, beginning in 2012. Most of the commentary on this puts it down to Catalan nationalism — they just want to differentiate themselves from the rest of Spain, with a view to eventual secession and independence.

I can’t say I have any strong feelings about bullfighting, a thing I’ve never seen myself. It does seem a bit cruel to the bull; but then, the matador risks his life too, and not infrequently loses it, so it’s an honorable combat. The real cruelty, as I recall from reading eyewitness accounts, is to the horses of the picadors, when the bull gets his horns under their protective blankets and disembowels them.

It does seem a shame, though, for a nation to lose its distinguishing characteristics and become just another bland modern glorified shopping mall, with airhead politicians babbling about global warming, universities teaching Women’s Studies, the populace gawping at “reality TV,” and a Starbucks every hundred yards. On those vague, general, and reactionary grounds, put me down as pro-bullfighting.

I was only once in Spain, for a summer month in 1963. The place was still frozen in the Francoist time-warp. None of the buildings in Barcelona seemed to be less than 200 years old. In the waiting rooms of country railroad stations peasants drank wine from goatskin bags beneath yellowing Proclamaciónes Reales still pasted to the walls. The police were brutish, arrogant, and corrupt. Outside the towns the grinding poverty described in El Cordobés’s biography was still in plain sight. The whole country slept through the afternoon. It was another world, far and away the most different place I had been to at that point in my young life (I was 18).

Flamenco memories Actually my strongest early impression of Spanish culture, even before I went to Spain, came not from bullfighting but from flamenco dancing.

The English country town I grew up in had a theater. They mostly staged lowbrow comedies and thrillers, with an occasional Sheridan or Shaw for the carriage trade. Once a year, though, they were visited by a flamenco dance act. It was a Spanish couple — I forget their names — presumably man and wife, with a guitarist-singer for accompaniment.

Every year through the early 1960s this trio would show up for a few days and perform to sold-out houses. They were sensational; after 50 years I can still recall their act vividly. Their duets practically threw off sparks, they were so erotic (so perhaps the dancers weren’t married after all . . . ) but they each did solos, too — to give each other a break I suppose. To us hicks, stuffed up to the gills with English restraint, our upper lips frozen stiff, the sheer sweaty exotic stomping vitality of it was incomparably thrilling.

Perhaps if I saw it today, in jaded late middle age, I’d think it corny, I don’t know. I just went browsing on YouTube to see if I could recapture the thrill, but nothing much came up. This clip gives the general idea; but there are no sparks, and where are the castanets? Same remarks for this one. I suspect these people are closer to the real thing, but it’s a terrible recording, mostly dark. Anyone know of a good-quality clip with castanets and sparks?

(Halfway through writing that segment I thought it might make up a bit for my earlier negative remarks about gypsies, since I’ve always supposed that flamenco was a product of gypsy culture. Reading up on it, though, the gypsy connection seems doubtful. Flamenco was apparently created by 19th-century entrepreneurs working from traditional Spanish folk dances. Oh well. For gypsy cultural influence, we still have Carmen.)

Marmite meets the love fascists I’m a bit late with this one, but have to post it anyway. It concerns Marmite.

Yes, Marmite, that delicious savory spread so beloved of the English (though not the Australians, who unaccountably spurn it for the loathsome and inedible Vegemite), was in the political news a few months ago, in the run-up to the election campaign for the European Parliament.

In Britain, as here, there is a common political outlook you might call “love fascism.” This is the point of view that regards any opinion to the right of, say, David Brooks as a species of “hate.” People with correct opinions — opinions, that is, to the left of, oh, Frank Rich — are motivated by “love.” People in between are infected to some degree with “hate,” though perhaps not irredeemably so. They need to be re-educated over to the side of “love” — or, failing that, lumped in with the “haters” and excluded from polite society.

Well, the Marmite people ran a TV ad for their product that was entirely premised on the love-fascist approach. This probably wasn’t intentional: love fascism is the default position for the kind of media types who make and approve TV ads. They no more notice it than they notice the air they breathe. The ad compared the Love party, which of course is pro-Marmite, to the Hate party (footage of a skinhead rally), which spreads(!) lies about Marmite.

The British National party, which was running candidates in the election, took umbrage at this, not unreasonably. They’ve been trying for years, with mixed success, to shuck off their old street-fighting, skinhead-attracting image and present themselves as serious players in British politics. They returned fire with an ad on their website prominently displaying a jar of Marmite.

Unilever, the manufacturers of Marmite, threatened a lawsuit, and the BNP backed down.

That is the end of the Marmite news.

Human dominoes. I mentioned dominoes last month. Over in the People’s Republic, someone picked up the theme: “A total of 10,276 people in China’s Inner Mongolia have broken the world record for the biggest human domino chain, state media say. The participants in the city of Ordos sat cross-legged and fell backwards in sequence in a record which took an hour and 20 minutes. The group of mainly high school students spent more than twelve hours over three days to train for the event.”

Well, I’m glad they're keeping themselves busy over there in Inner Mongolia; though what their world-conquering ancestors would have thought, beggars the imagination.

Math Corner I’m sorry: In my July diary I posted a dud link to my June solution — the “Tuesday’s Child” conundrum. If you haven’t already had enough of it, the worked solution, with many notes, is here.

Here’s one for this month.

I have an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards. I shuffle it thoroughly. What is the probability that not one card is in its original position?

Related, but more general:

I have a deck of n cards, numbered from 1 to n. I shuffle the deck thoroughly. Then I turn the cards over one by one. If the k-th card I turn over bears the number k, call that a “match.” What is the probability that after going through the whole deck I shall have tallied m matches, where m is some number in the range from zero to n?

Hamas sent a greeting card to the quintet of leaders meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to initiate negotiations about a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In a well-planned ambush, they killed four Israeli civilians near the city of Hebron, two men and two women (one nine months pregnant), creating seven orphans. The murderers escaped, and may perhaps have videotaped the atrocity. In Gaza that evening, 3,000 celebrants clogged the streets, waving flags, setting bonfires, passing out candy, and carrying their children on their shoulders. If there is videotape, it will presumably permit the revelers to relive the pleasure, even as the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading has circulated on the Internet.

While the Palestinian Authority did condemn the attack, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad did so, he explained, because “the operation went against Palestinian interests.” It would be difficult for a leader of the “moderate” (that word is always attached) PA to condemn such attacks as, say, immoral or despicable, as the Palestinian Authority itself (formerly the PLO or Fatah) was conceived in violence and continues to honor its spirit. In the course of the past few months, the PA has named a square and a children’s summer camp in honor of a terrorist who murdered 37 Israeli civilians on a bus, and provided a hero’s funeral to Amin Al-Hindi, one of the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The official PA newspaper described Al-Hindi as “one of the stars . . . who sparkled at the sports stadium in Munich.” Both Abbas and Fayyad attended the funeral.

#ad#These realities, reflecting as they do the unreadiness of the Palestinian people for peace with Israel, have been and will continue to be ignored by the Obama administration, the so-called international community, and most journalists. Instead, world leaders, very much including President Obama, speak of borders, and confidence-building measures, and opportunities for peace, as if the problem were one of details. This thoroughly misconceives the nature of the dispute. An Israeli saying (now decades old) captured the essence: If the Palestinians were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no conflict. If the Israelis were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no Israel.

With whom would Israel be making binding agreements? Since a bitter civil conflict in 2007, Palestinian society has been divided. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip and the PA controls the West Bank. Just last month, the PA canceled scheduled municipal elections for fear that Hamas might again triumph at the polls as they did in 2006. Hamas and Fatah thugs continue to target and assassinate one another. By standing up the wobbly Abbas and perhaps even signing a treaty with him, the Obama administration may imagine that they can strengthen him. But this is a figure so unsure of his current standing with his people -- and this is before making any unpopular concessions -- that he canceled elections.

Abbas’s weakness in this regard is not so much a personal failing as an inheritance. The entire Arab world (and Iran) has conspired to embitter and enrage the Palestinian people in perpetuity, encouraging maximalist demands and enshrining bloodshed and frenzied hatred. Though Abbas has shaken hands all around in Washington, D.C., the incitement at home continues. A year ago, at Fatah’s general congress in Bethlehem, the delegates reaffirmed their longstanding commitment to “armed struggle” as “a strategy, not a tactic. . . . This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”

Just this week, the PA’s minister for prisoners' affairs presented an award called the Shield of Resoluteness and Giving to Um Yousuf Abu Hamid. Her accomplishment? Four of her sons are serving long sentences in Israeli prisons for committing terrorist attacks. Handing her the plaque, the minister intoned: “The Palestinian mother is a central partner in the struggle, by virtue of what she has given and continues to give. It is she who gave birth to the fighters, and she deserves that we bow to her in salute and in honor.”

A Palestinian children’s-television program instructs its viewers that all Israeli cities -- including Haifa, Lod, Ramle, and Acre -- are “occupied Palestinian” cities. Another show aimed at children, which often dispenses advice like “drink your milk” and “obey your parents,” also advised a young viewer named Saraa that “all Jews must be erased from our land. . . . We want to slaughter them, Saraa, so they will be expelled from our land. . . . We’ll have to [do it] by slaughter.”

This latest iteration of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks midwived by the U.S. is doomed just as all of its predecessors were -- because it is based on a fallacy and a stubborn refusal to face the truth about Palestinian society.

-- Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.

The much-analyzed speeches at the Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial rally weren’t as notable as what the estimated 300,000 attendees did: follow instructions, listen quietly to hours of speeches, and throw out their trash.

Just as stunning as the tableaux of the massive throngs lining the reflecting pool were the images of the spotless grounds afterward. If someone had told attendees they were expected to mow the grass before they left, surely some of them would have hitched flatbed trailers to their vehicles for the trip to Washington and gladly brought mowers along with them.

#ad#This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society. The spark that lit the tea-party movement was the rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who inveighed in early 2009 against an Obama-administration program to subsidize “the losers’ mortgages.” He was speaking for people who hadn’t borrowed beyond their means or tried to get rich quick by flipping houses, for the people who, in their thrift and enterprise, “carry the water instead of drink the water.”

The tea party’s detractors want to paint it as radical, when at bottom it represents the self-reliant, industrious heart of American life. New York Times columnist David Brooks compares the tea partiers to the New Left. But there weren’t any orgiastic displays at the Beck rally, nor any attempts to levitate the Lincoln Memorial -- just speeches on God and country. It was as radical as a Lee Greenwood song.

A New York Times survey earlier this year occasioned shock when it found that “Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class.” We’re so accustomed to the notion of a revolt of the dispossessed that a revolt of the possessed (in the non-demonic sense, of course) strikes us as a strange offense against the nature of things. But it’s threatening to wash away the Democratic congressional majorities in a historic wipeout.

In extremis, Democrats and liberal commentators have dragged the debate over the tea party into the well-worn rut of elite condescension to the bourgeois, a term coined in its modern sense by Rousseau and not meant as a compliment. For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.

#page#The tea party represents a revolt against his revolution, and thus a restoration. If a tea-party-infused Republican party were to take Congress and manage to cut federal expenditures by a sharp one-fifth, that figure would only be back to its typical level of recent decades of roughly 20 percent of GDP. If the party were to succeed in making the federal government more mindful of its constitutional limits, it would only be a step toward the dispensation that obtained during most of the country’s history.

To be sure, the tea partiers are fiercely anti-establishment, and that produces political candidates who are exotic and unexpected. Then there’s Beck himself. As he’d probably be the first to admit, he’s an unlikely leader for the disaffected bourgeois. He’s emotionally extravagant and conspiracy-minded, an intellectual enthusiast and rollicking showman.

#ad#The last time Republicans benefited from a wave election, they had their own Beckian figure at the top in the person of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They wallowed in their revolution and let Gingrich’s ideological grandeur define them -- to their regret in the end. If the wave comes this time, Republicans should endeavor to be a sober and responsible party for sober and responsible people, resolutely cleaning up after the failed Obama revolution.

They could do much worse than to take their cue from the tea partiers at the Lincoln Memorial, who knew how to make an impression without scaring anyone or trashing the place.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

If the Dems do get shellacked in November, what's the over-under that Hoyer or Rep. X mounts a challenge to Pelosi? I have no inside info or insight on the matter, it just seems like a reasonable question to ask and a fun way to stir the pot.

For all the natalist happytalk, the prospect of an increase in the global population to nine billion or so by the mid-21^st century is more likely a cause for concern than celebration. Nevertheless, this remarkable story from the Economist on Brazil’s agricultural revolution is heartening. Mother Nature can, it seems, still be improved upon:

Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable. Mauro Lopes, who supervised the subsidy regime, says he urged the government to give $20 to Embrapa for every $50 it saved by cutting subsidies. It didn’t, but Embrapa did receive enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution. It does everything from breeding new seeds and cattle, to creating ultra-thin edible wrapping paper for foodstuffs that changes colour when the food goes off, to running a nanotechnology laboratory creating biodegradable ultra-strong fabrics and wound dressings. Its main achievement, however, has been to turn the cerrado green.

When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.

First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. In the late 1990s, 14m-16m tonnes of lime were being spread on Brazilian fields each year, rising to 25m tonnes in 2003 and 2004. This amounts to roughly five tonnes of lime a hectare, sometimes more. At the 20,000-hectare Cremaq farm, 5,000 hulking 30-tonne lorries have disgorged their contents on the fields in the past three years. Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers.

So although it is true Brazil has a lot of spare farmland, it did not just have it hanging around, waiting to be ploughed. Embrapa had to create the land, in a sense, or make it fit for farming. Today the cerrado accounts for 70% of Brazil’s farm output and has become the new Midwest. “We changed the paradigm,” says Silvio Crestana, a former head of Embrapa, proudly.

Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd. Thirty years ago it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time is 18-20 months.

That is not the end of the story...

Indeed it is not. Read the whole thing.

The Hope Rug gets a fact-check:

President Obama's new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it's not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you're fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian's lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he'd ask in a refrain, "How long? Not long." He would finish in a flourish: "Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

A troubling report from Los Angeles via Allysia Finley of the Wall Street Journal:

I asked Mr. Rubin whether some of the school's grandiose features—like florid murals of Robert F. Kennedy—were worth the cost. "Did we have to do that? Hell no. But there's no accounting for taste," he responded.

Talking benches—$54,000—play a three-hour audio of the site's history. Murals and other public art cost $1.3 million. A minipark facing a bustling Wilshire Boulevard? $4.9 million.

The Kennedy complex is Exhibit A in the district's profligate 131-school building binge. Exhibit B is the district's Visual and Performing Arts High School, which was originally budgeted at $70 million but was later upgraded into a sci-fi architectural masterpiece that cost $232 million.

Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.

a good Labor Day weekend. Any plans? Any work? Any good reading?

President Obama handed us another one of those "How stupid do you think we are?" moments yesterday.

Until next time ...

Dear John Boehner, Ted Poe, and Members of the incoming 112th Congress,

If you do only one thing in your time in Washington, and frankly I hope you do only one thing given your propensity to expand government (other than eradicating Obamacare), it is this: SAVE THE LIGHT BULB.

People may not realize it, but one of the first acts of the Democratic Congress in 2007, was to ban the light bulb effective in 2014.

Seriously.

Now, you may say that this is an exaggeration, and it is a bit, but the incandescent light bulb is the light bulb of choice for millions of Americans. It turns on instantly, it can be tossed in the trash without summoning a hazmat team, and is cheap.

The compact fluorescents cannot be treated that way and cost more. Likewise, we are forced to deal with China for every purchase.

If Republicans want to bring change, they need to save the incandescent light bulb. From christmas trees to kitchens, the incandescent light bulb is a staple of the American household and Congress’s ban is offensive.

We should get every Republican out there to pledge their support to saving the incandescent light bulb when they take back Congress.

The “Young Guns” have a book. They also have a promotion tour and a video. Now, the Democrats could engage in a battle of ideas. But that’s not what they do. (are you surprised?)

Instead the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee files a complaint with the Federal Election Commission that promoting the book violates election law. Really. By their interpretation, a book publisher cannot promote a book if it is political.

What is the mechanism? The publisher posts a  video by the authors about their book that contains a link to a website that takes political contributions. It is after all, a political manifesto.

Restating, Democrats use the power of the federal government to attempt to prohibit the political speech and promotion of speech by their political enemies. That’s the kind of thing that lead to the American Revolution. Tea Parties make perfect sense in this context.

Another quick one tonight. I’d feel bad, but the Net Neutrality situation is so important that the current developments by themselves are worth noting. And here’s the key fact right now: It is confirmed that Net Neutrality will not be on the agenda at the FCC’s September meeting. They’ve talked for months, but they’re going to talk some more.

My theory is that Google has pulled out the rug from everyone, the White House is considering going along with the plan as it can be said to meet the President’s campaign promise (transparency online, no discrimination on the public Internet, no two tiers of public Internet traffic, you name it). Another theory is simpler: public and industry support for the Free Press plan is collapsing, so the FCC has to throw out that idea and start over.

Even if Free Press pet Commissioner Michael Copps says the sky is falling. Again.

P.S. Remember when I said that Eric Schmidt sounded like he belonged in politics? he’d better work on his image a bit before he tries. He’s just too much of a target right now after he’s made so many outrageous remarks denying Americans should have privacy.

The Left is still busily trumpeting the fallacy-filled idea of there being a wage gap in favor of men. In fact, the DNC recently sent out an email once again attempting to promulgate this lie, on the 90th Anniversary of Women?s Suffrage, no less. Hey, never waste a Crisis ?, real or imagined, and also never waste a chance to totally use women, right, Lefties? Have to keep those women in line! By in line, I, of course, mean completely shrouded in a veil of nanny state neediness and victim-hood. As I said in my post about the 90th Anniversary of Women?s Suffrage, the woe-is-us ?wage gap? myth has been shattered, despite the Left?s attempt to cover up pesky things like facts and figures and such. Math is hard:

CONSAD found that controlling for career interruption and other factors reduced the pay gap from about 20 percent to about 5 percent. Data limitations prevented it from considering many other factors. For example, the data did not permit an examination of total compensation, which would examine health insurance and other benefits, and instead focused solely on wages paid. The data were also limited with respect to work experience, job tenure, and other factors.

The Labor Department?s conclusion was that the gender pay gap was the result of a multitude of factors and that the ?raw wage gap should not be used as the basis for [legislative] correction. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.?

What? Individual choice? That?s unheard of. Well, unless the choice is killing an unborn child, natch. Time Magazine is now even admitting the gender wage gap against women is unfounded. And, in fact, that women are presently out-earning men. According to Time, we should think this is super awesome. They even titled the article ?At Last, Women On Top?.  (I think that?s supposed to be titillating and edgy):

According to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group?.

Here?s the slightly deflating caveat: this reverse gender gap, as it?s known, applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities. The rest of working women ? even those of the same age, but who are married or don?t live in a major metropolitan area ? are still on the less scenic side of the wage divide.

Time, while excited about ?women being on top?, still whines that it?s not every demographic of women across the board. But,  if it was, why would that be a reason to rejoice? Not content with just reporting something factually, Time Magazine had to editorialize and, in true Lefty fashion, showed their absolute idiocy. National Review sums it up:

As this new research shows, it?s women?s (and men?s) attributes and career choices that determine earnings. Yet there?s something troubling about Time?s tone, which suggests that we should all be celebrating the idea of women dominating the workplace. To the extent that this trend is driven by men losing jobs and remaining out of work, and young men failing to attain the skills needed to meaningfully contribute to the economy, this is not good news at all.

Of course, we all want women to have the opportunity to compete and succeed in whatever profession they choose. But we want the same to be true for men. Furthermore, given that some women still wish to stay home or reduce their workload in order to spend time raising children, women?s higher earnings may actually be a symptom of hardship: More women are having to work more since the men in their lives can?t provide for the family alone or because they are providing for themselves.

Why would anyone rejoice at the prospect of a reverse wage gap? Why celebrate the sure to continue trend ? based on education trends and business trends ? of  men earning less? Contrary to the opinion of those who believe that men are the root of all evil and the only thing holding us back from Utopia, it is not a good thing if men are finding it harder to provide for their families. I know. That?s probably my self-loathing and gender traitor-iness talking.

Or maybe it?s reality and common sense talking. No good can come when there are large groups of men who are only under-employable, if employable at all. Nor from mothers who may be forced to work instead of staying home with their children, if they choose to do so.

I?m quite certain that Rosie the Riveter wasn?t meant to permanently replace Roger the Riveter. Well, until the government intervened to ?help,? of course.

??

cross-posted from NewsReal

…but the rate of OSHA recordable incidents in the oil and gas extraction industry is considerably less than most industries, including retailing, libraries and tortilla manufacturing.

[As an aside, yesterday's fire on Mariner's Vermilion Block 380 A Platform sparked renewed calls for the higher levels of government regulation of the rigs (it wasn't a rig), with some calling for an outright end to offshore drilling (it wasn't drilling). It seems that there is a correlation between industry knowledge and holding the industry in a positive light. The industry's biggest detractors mainly traffic in fear, ignorance and misinformation.]

Before you discount it, be aware that the source of the data this analysis is based on is not the API or some other oil industry lobbying group, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Do progressives believe in States’ Rights and the idea of Federalism?  Not Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. 

During a discussion today about the Filibuster sponsored by the American Political Science Association, and shown on C-SPAN, Ezra Klein made a very radical assertion about the issue of States’ Rights and one that should worry conservatives who treasure the idea of federalism. 

Ezra Klein states at about 1:30 into the discussion the following odd statement:

I am a Californian so I have some radical views on how the Senate is constructed and the one think I would note on this is that it is my understanding of the initial compromise is that you have all these little States and you need to bound them into a Republic.  They may not want to do it and they may want to secede and you make a pretty bare knuckled political compromise to give them all this power.  And eventually as we go on through history it begins to recede as you become much more of a nation in order to fight King George… I don’t understand why people think that States are a particularly a particularly useful with which to represent.

Klein expounded on this point in a blog post titled “Repeal the 17th Amendment?” over at the Washington Post where he wrote:

During our discussion of the filibuster today — which you can stream over at C-SPAN’s Web site — Heritage’s Brian Darling talked a bit about the Senate’s important role as a voice for the states. Responding to a questioner, he went so far as to say he’d consider repeal of the 17th amendment, which would mean that senators would again be elected by state legislatures rather than voters.

First of all, the Senate was envisioned by our Founding Fathers as a body to represent the interests of the States.  Solutions for America, a product of The Heritage Foundation, argues for more federalism and explains that progressive governance has lead to an ever expanding federal government intruding into the traditional realm of the States:

In the American plan of constitutional government, the national government was never supposed to have all of the power or make all of the decisions. Indeed, most powers of government were located, and the decisions that affect citizens? day-to-day lives were to be made, at the state level. This relationship was turned on its head over the course of the 20th century. Ever-increasing amounts of regulations and laws emanating from the federal government have centralized and bureaucratized political rule in America, undermining the balance of federalism and threatening self-government.

The Senate is the embodiment of the idea that States, as distinct entities, should have a say in what legislation passes the federal legislature.  The House was to be the House of the people with 2 year terms and the Senate was to be the chamber that represented the interests of the States with members holding 6 year terms.  Our Founders set up a system where State legislatures appointed two Senators from the State to represent the interests of the State in one chamber of Congress.

They wanted the Senate to represent the interests of the States as as part of the Great Compromise of 1787.  James Madison wrote about the reason for the division between the House and Senate when he wrote in Federalist 39:

The House of Representatives will derive its powers from the people of America; and the people will be represented in the same proportion, and on the same principle, as they are in the legislature of a particular State. So far the government is NATIONAL, not FEDERAL. The Senate, on the other hand, will derive its powers from the States, as political and coequal societies; and these will be represented on the principle of equality in the Senate, as they now are in the existing Congress.

The 17th Amendment was approved by Congress on May 17, 1912.  This change in Constitution removed the power of States to appoint Senators and provided for Senators “elected by the people thereof, for six years.”  This change still preserved the idea that States should have distinct representation in our constitutional democratic republic.  Klein seems to find that idea offensive.

Klein does not like the idea that California, with a massive population, has the same representation as North Dakota, a state with a small population.  In short, Klein argues against the idea of Federalism. 

From Klein’s Washington Post blog entry:

I’ve never understood this sort of thing, and said so in the panel. The Founders didn’t wisely orient the Senate around states. They pragmatically oriented the Senate around states. But now that we’ve been the United States of America for a while and none of the states seem likely to secede, the fact that California has 69 times more people than Wyoming but the same representation in the Senate is an offensive anachronism, at least to Californians.  I went on to say that at this point in history, if we wanted the upper body to be based around quotas, then income, age bracket and education made more sense than states. Then I came home and read Kevin Drum’s post echoing Larry Bartels’s research (pdf) showing “that the responsiveness of senators to the views of the poor and working class is….zero. Or maybe even negative. And that’s true for both parties. The middle class does better ? again, with both parties ? and high earners do better still.” Conversely, the body’s responsiveness to the views of North Dakota’s farmers is really incredible.  Back in February, Annie Lowrey* wrote a piece estimating the Senate’s composition if it was organized around income, gender and race, and age.

I disagree with Klein for many reasons.  We live in a federal republic and one that was formed to represent the will of the people and the interests of states.  Federalism is the understanding that the State as a unit is a better means of governance for the traditional police powers of a state than putting all power in a federal government.  Our Founders were wise and they wanted to see a separation of powers between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government.  They also crafted the Great Compromise to make sure that one chamber of the legislature was purely democratic in nature and the other represented the distinct interests of different States. 

Klein also made a statement at the end of his attack on the idea of States Rights that is offensive to those who revere our Founding Fathers.  Klein made an offensive comment that he is wiser than men who spilled their own blood to form our union. 

At about 1:33 into this clip Klein trashes our Founding Fathers.

I think our veneration for the Founders is something that occasionally perplexes me.

This is a truly outrageous statement and is evidence of Progressives distain for our Founding Fathers.  This argument is also evidence of Progressives push to centralize power in one federal government with not regard for States Rights, in the sense of a State having distinct representation in the Senate.  Clearly we had a strong difference of opinion on the Senate filibuster, yet the statement from Klein about the Founders and the Senate should provide a glimpse into the agenda of progressivism.

Jay Leno on Friday ribbed Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the poor state of the economy.

In his opening monologue on the "Tonight Show," the comedian began with a lot of politics first joking about the President's Middle East peace talks, then moving to the war in Afghanistan, and eventually a poke at airline security.

On the day the Labor Department announced an uptick in the unemployment rate, Leno had a number of jokes about how bad the economy is.

Finally, the monologue concluded with a nice tribute to a United States Marine Corps unit in the audience (video follows with commentary):

It sure is nice to see the late night comedians feeling that this White House is no longer off limits. 

Laura Ingraham and Greg Gutfeld had some fun Thursday evening bashing NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel for absurd comments he made on the "Today" show this week.

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, Engel that morning told NBC's Ann Curry:

If there had been no invasion Saddam would still be in power. He was probably getting more moderate. He was being welcomed into the, into, by, by a lot of European countries, he was being welcomed in Eastern Europe in particular. He was heading in a, in a direction of accommodation.

LAURA INGRAHAM: In the "Back of the Book" segment tonight, "The Dumbest Things of the Week." Is NBC News making excuses for Saddam Hussein? Regardless of your thoughts on Iraq, one thing most people agree on is that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing. But some are wondering if NBC's chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engle, doesn't miss the good old days when Saddam was still around.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD ENGLE, NBC CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: If there had been no invasion, Saddam would still be in power. He was probably getting more moderate. He was being welcomed into the -- into -- by a lot of European countries. He was being welcomed in Eastern Europe, in particular.

He was heading in a direction of accommodation. The sanctions regime that was holding him in place was starting to fail. So, I think it would be somewhat of a basket case, but it would be -- Iran would be a lot more contained.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Joining us now from New York is Greg Gutfeld, host of "Red Eye" and the author of "The Bible of Unspeakable Truths."

So Greg, as far as I can tell, Saddam was on the verge of having his own reality show.

GREG GUTFELD, HOST, "RED EYE": I mean, you have to figure out he said he would be more moderate. You have to ask him, what does he mean by moderate? Was he talking about alcohol intake? Was he going to cut back on his booze? Or was he going to only gas half as many Kurds or tell his sons they could only rape women every other weekend?

Pr maybe he was becoming more environmentally friendly and was going to use renewable car batteries when he electrocuted his citizens. So we need -- we need to give specifics on what he meant by moderation.

INGRAHAM: I think he was clearly going green, Greg. He was making inroads with Eastern Europe. I don't know what countries in Eastern Europe? Poland? Old Czechoslovakia? What countries was he getting close to? I just don't recall that.

GUTFELD: He does have a point, though. He said that, if we didn't have the war, Saddam would be more accommodating, which is true because you are more accommodating when you are not dead. It's really hard to buy somebody dinner when you're dead. So, in effect, he's actually correct by accident.

INGRAHAM: Well, Iran -- Iran might not have been the problem it is today, but the idea that he -- it was going to be Saddam the milquetoast if we didn't invade. I just -- I was desperately looking to follow that logic. But you know, when NBC is involved, Greg, all bets are off. All bets are off.

GUTFELD: Yes. Can't stomach victory. You've got a war that you've won. Enjoy it.

INGRAHAM: Winning is not fun. We're supposed to be America on our knees, begging for mercy all the time. You don't understand that. We need to apologize, Greg. Get used to it.

GUTFELD: I am. Believe me. I'm married.

To give readers an idea just how absurd Engel's comments were, even the liberal Mediaite found this segment to its liking.

Now that's saying something.

Liberal "comedian" Kathy Griffin thinks there is no line of rudeness she can't cross, including calling the daughters of Sen. Scott Brown "prostitutes." On Monday's Joy Behar Show on CNN Headline News, Griffin proclaimed "But yes, whenever a statement is issued against me, I`m in heaven. I feel my next special is half written for me. And then I get to read statements allowed in my live shows which you can go to KathyGriffin.net and see the many, many cities I`ve picked up for my current tour."

Not even Rep. Barney Frank could make her feel bad about it:

BEHAR: So you're really feeling bad about it all? Okay, I mean, when Barney Frank turns on you, one of your gays, you have to start to wonder.

GRIFFIN: Hey, the gays, look, there is -- that's -- there is a reason that that flag has colors. There's many levels and colors. There's not just -- I mean, I make the joke about the gays, but there's many, many kinds of gay people like there are many, many kinds of straight people. And you know, he's one of my gays. He just doesn't know it because he doesn`t know, you know, who I am, as usual.

Behar had the same conversation with liberal "comedian" Margaret Cho on August 25, but Cho had no idea who Scott Brown was. So Behar told her (incorrectly) that Scott Brown posed for Playgirl magazine -- when it was really Cosmopolitan. 

BEHAR: And he also introduced his daughters in one speech that he gave saying they're available and he posed for them in bikinis. They were in bikinis. People felt that they were easy targets and available. But she got into trouble because he didn't like that she called them prostitutes.

CHO: Yes, well, I don't know. I think she can say whatever she wants. And part of her appeal and her glory is that she does. She doesn`t really care.

BEHAR: She doesn't care, the more you criticize, the more she loves it.

This logic of Griffin's doesn't always work -- CNN did bump her off their New Year's Eve program as she incessantly tried to embarrass Anderson Cooper. 

Rap star Kanye West bashed former President George W. Bush on Saturday while apologizing to country singer Taylor Swift for his appalling behavior at last year's MTV Video Awards.

Our story begins with West making a fool of himself - again! - when he interrupted Swift last September during her acceptance speech for best female music video of 2009 (right).

With the 2010 Awards quickly approaching, West must have felt it necessary to make amends.

As People.com reported moments ago, West took to Twitter early Saturday morning issuing a bizarre stream of consciousness apology:

"I wrote a song for Taylor Swift that's so beautiful and I want her to have it," he said on his Twitter Saturday morning. "If she won't take it then I'll perform it for her."

West's actual Twitter account doesn't show any of these tweets. However, the People links do indicate the activity being reported suggesting West has since taken them down:

Nearly a year since he first apologized to Swift, the hip-hop artist is still offering up I'm sorries, calling her "justa lil girl with dreams like the rest of us" on his Twitter.

"She deserves the apology more than anyone," he Tweeted, before thanking the creators of Twitter for making a public platform for expression.

"We're both artist[s] and the media and managers are trying to get between us. Everyone wants to capitalize off this [in] some way." 

Maybe even more delicious, MTV.com reported some other tweets People missed:

Expounding on the backlash he received, he wrote, "If you Google a--hole my face may very well pop up 2 pages into the search. ... There are people who don't dislike me ... they absolutely hate me. People tweeted that they wish I was dead ... No listen. They wanted me to die, people. I carry that."

I was indeed hoping his face would appear in such a Google search. Unfortunately, no. But I digress:

Kanye went on to say that the media vilified him. He alluded to his claim during a 2005 NBC telethon for Hurricane Katrina that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," as a point for which the media was looking to pay him back. He noted that in the VMA aftermath, the media played the race card and turned it into an angry black man versus innocent white girl issue.

"Even though the NBC telethon was widely praised y'all didn't think they was just gone let me get away with that did y'all???!!!" he questioned, rhetorically. "The media has successfully diminished the 'receptive' audience of... KANYE WEST. ...taking a 15 second blip the media have successfully painted the image of the 'ANGRY BLACK MAN.' The King Kong theory. With the help of strong will, a lack of empathy, a lil alcohol and extremely distasteful & bad timing ... I became George Bush over night."

I was wondering when he'd take to bashing Bush. For those that have forgotten, this was West during the aforementioned Hurricane Katrina telethon in September 2005:

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food. And you know that it's been five days because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV, because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before I've even given a donation. So now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help with the set up the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they have given them permission to go down and shoot us...George Bush doesn't care about black people.

Makes one wonder how much alcohol and "extremely distasteful & bad timing" it took for West to again make an "a--hole" of himself.

Actually, it should now be apparent that this isn't that difficult for him. 

The following headline appeared at Time.com shortly after the release of Friday's jobs report:

What's Good About Rising Unemployment

What should jump out at the eagle-eyed reader is that headline didn't end with a question mark.

Time senior writer Stephen Gandel was actually making the case that the rising unemployment rate was good news.

Watch just how far a liberal media member is willing to go today to make economic data look favorable for the Party currently in power, and imagine the unlikelihood of such a thing happening if a Republican was in the White House (h/t Rusty Weiss):

The unemployment rate, probably the most famous of economic gauges, may actually be a very bad indicator of how healthy the economy is. [...]

The unemployment rate peaked in late 2009 at just above 10% and has been mostly falling ever since. But the hiring numbers, or less firing numbers, have only been improving recently. So what was going on? The unemployment rate tracks not just how many people have jobs, but how many people are looking for jobs. And, up until August, the number of people looking for jobs was dropping rapidly.

Really? And just how did Gandel reach that conclusion?

Here is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' table of folks 16 and over currently out of the labor force but wanting a job now:

As is plainly visible, the number of folks out of the labor force but wanting work has been fluctuating between 5.61 million and 6.31 million since last August. It did experience a large drop in May, but has pretty much been rising since and is now basically where it was in April and January.

As such, claiming that "up until August, the number of people looking for jobs was dropping rapidly" is utter nonsense not supported by the data. In fact, this number is basically right back to where it was last September.

With that in mind, let's continue:

When people give up looking for work, essentially giving up on the economy, that indicates a really bad drop in confidence, something a recovery feeds on. So the reason the unemployment rate was rising has less to do with more people getting jobs, and more to do with fewer people looking.

Is this really a senior writer? 

Let's walk through that last sentence again: "So the reason the unemployment rate was rising has less to do with more people getting jobs..."

Huh? The unemployment rate is a simple arithmetic equation whereby the number of people unemployed is divided by the number of people considered part of the labor force. 

Using data just released Friday, there are currently 14.86 million people considered unemployed. The labor force is 154.11 million. This produces an unemployment rate of 9.64 percent.

Now, when people get jobs, the number considered unemployed declines reducing the numerator and therefore decreasing the unemployment rate.

As such, to claim rising unemployment has less to do with more people getting jobs makes absolutely no sense.

On the other hand, the final part of that sentence "and more to do with fewer people looking" needs to be addressed.

"Discouraged workers" - those out of the labor force but wanting a job - can have a huge impact on the unemployment rate.

The way these numbers are calculated, you are only considered unemployed and part of the labor force if you're actively looking for work. As such, when folks give up their search, it reduces the number of unemployed and the labor force by an equal amount.

Once again going back to simple arithmetic, a decrease in the numerator and denominator by an equal amount results in a lower ratio.

2 divided by 3 equals .67; 1 divided by 2 equals .5.

With this in mind, the unemployment rate can decline simply by discouraged job seekers ending their search. This has happened a number of times in the past few years.

Conversely, discouraged workers re-entering the labor force can cause the unemployment rate to rise. An increase in the numerator and denominator by equal amounts produces a higher result.

Gandel claimed this is what happened last month:

According to today's report, 550,000 people entered the workforce in August. That's a huge jump of new people looking for work, either because they haven't worked before or because they decided that this was the month to get back off the couch and start looking. With that many people entering the workforce, the fact that the unemployment number only rose 0.1% is quite a good thing. In fact, more than half of those people who began looking for work in August, or 290,000, landed a job in August. 

I agree that this this could be good news, but not necessarily for the same reason.

To make the case that the big jump in the labor force in August was even partially due to discouraged workers starting to look for work again goes against the data as the number of people out of the labor force and wanting work now increased by 86,000.

It goes without saying that if this huge increase in the labor force was caused by discouraged workers re-entering it, the number of discouraged workers wanting work should have declined.

But that's not what happened.

Instead, it appears the August data might have been confounded by seasonalities and the associated adjustments.

As employment watchers are painfully aware, there are seasonal changes in the jobs market that make for wild shifts in the numbers depending on the month.

The summer is a particularly volatile period with teachers out of work, students taking part-time jobs, and graduates getting full-time positions.

To smooth out the data, the Labor Department makes adjustments to the raw figures each month; the headline numbers are always "seasonally adjusted."

However, these manipulations at times present a peculiar picture of the labor market. As Gandel correctly pointed out:

It is possible that coming at the end of the summer an uptick in people looking for work is not as positive as it appears. This is the time of year, after two hot months, when recent graduates start to actually think about their future and send out resumes. And you can image many other out of work people deciding to take off looking for a job in the summer. In August, with the summer ending, some of those people started looking again in earnest.

Exactly. As such, the uptick in the labor force might have had little to do with discouraged workers beginning a new search as he suggested earlier. 

In fact, the unadjusted data actually showed a 600,000 decline in the labor force as well as an almost 400,000 decrease in the number of people unemployed.

This means the August data could easily be confounded by seasonalities and their related adjustments thereby offering a fuzzy picture about what any of this means going forward.

This is not to say Friday's report wasn't better than expected.

Over the past couple of weeks, signs had been pointing to a much worse economic conditions leading analysts to ratchet down their estimates for these numbers. As a result, what the BLS released Friday was certainly better than the gloomiest predictions out there.

But, calling this clearly mixed bag "good news" should be left to the administration and the Party currently controlling Congress and not so depicted by a so-called journalist.  

This seems especially true given that these exact same numbers would certainly not have been reported with such optimism when George W. Bush was in the White House.

Or have you forgotten the media's favorite economic term during his presidency "jobless recovery?"

For almost two years, Sarah Palin has been complaining about media members making things up about her.

On Friday, one finally admitted it.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, Vanity Fair's October issue has a hit piece on its cover about the former Alaska governor that Palin-hating press members have been predictably fawning and gushing over.

Now, the Associated Press is reporting that the author, Michael Joseph Gross, has admitted making a mistake in his piece:

Reporter Michael Joseph Gross describes Palin's youngest son, Trig, being pushed in a stroller by his older sister, Piper, before a rally in May in the Kansas City suburb of Independence.

"When the girl, Piper Palin, turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008," according to the article. "Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage."

Later in his piece, Gross described Piper joining Sarah on stage to "allow Palin to make a public display of maternal affection." 

Unfortunately, as Politico's Ben Smith reported Thursday, that was a different Down syndrome baby:

Trig wasn't at the event, according to its organizer, Karladine Graves, a 61-year-old Kansas City physician, who, in 2009, founded one of the wave of new local conservative groups, this one called Preserving American Liberty. The "woman, perhaps a nanny," was the boy's mother, St. Louis talk radio host Gina Loudon, according to Graves.

But it gets worse according to the AP:

The mother of that child, conservative activist Gina Loudon, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she told Gross during the rally that the child in the stroller was her son, not Palin's. She said she tried to make it clear because the two children look a lot alike.

"I told him that. And he ignored it," Loudon said. "It's not even like he didn't fact check - he just ignored facts."

Now, Gross has admitted it:

Gross said in a written statement sent to The Associated Press that he was mistaken.

"Trig was with his mother the next day in Wichita (Kan.), but the child in Independence was someone else, and I regret the error," he said.

He regrets the error?

No he doesn't. He regrets getting caught, for as Smith wrote Thursday, this has been a modus operandi for dishonest media members like Gross for two years:

[T]he Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin is so emblematic of much that's wrong about the way she's covered that it's worth returning to, and I've learned that the its long wind-up is based on fundamental confusion about which of Palin's children was at an event in Kansas City.

Palin almost never talks to neutral media outlets, leaving her - as critics accurately note - subject to none of the questions, challenges  and reality checks that the political press puts regularly to almost every other national political figure. She takes a lot of heat for this, deservedly.

But with the hunger for information about her, and the traffic she drives, the press sometimes compensates by printing such thinly sourced, badly reported nonsense about her that it's hard to imagine it making it into a serious magazine like Vanity Fair if it concerned any other figure. Of course, this might not happen if she spoke to reporters, but that's no excuse.

Yeah it is, Ben, for what's the point of talking to the press if they're going to just make stuff up?

Of course, this is the kind of yellow journalism by "impotent, limp, gutless reporters" Palin ridiculed while chatting with Sean Hannity Wednesday, and is why it's difficult to believe any of the nonsense about her in the media.

Vanity Fair should be so proud of itself.