We're still eight weeks out from the midterms, but Democrats are already showing their hand: they've got nothing.

Or so it would seem, when the only thing they have left to stir up the base is Sarah Palin. From the NYT:

Gone are the days when President Obama was the biggest source of motivation for Democrats.

The role now belongs to Sarah Palin.

That, at least, was the argument from David Plouffe, the architect of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, who appeared here on Sunday to deliver a fresh sense of urgency to Democrats in the final 50 days of the midterm election campaign.

“You have a good opportunity to remind your neighbors, your friends and your family members about who the real Republican Party is,” Mr. Plouffe said. “The very best organizer and fund-raiser in the Democratic Party is going to be here in Iowa — Sarah Palin.”

If the best thing the Democrats have going for them is a private citizen that they don't like very much, then they really haven't got much going for them.

Meg Whitman, former head of eBay, is running for governor of California against Jerry Brown. And she's hitting him hard. Here's her latest ad, in which she leaves the negative campaigning to....Bill Clinton:

It's a great spot. Guaranteed to peel off a lot of Brown's Democratic support. It also rattled his cage. A lot. From ABC's The Note:

Jerry Brown lashed out at Bill Clinton Sunday, invoking his affair with Monica Lewinsky and saying, “I mean, Clinton’s a nice guy, but whoever said he always told the truth?”

It may seem like an odd thing for a Democratic candidate for governor in California to do, but Brown was responding to attacks Clinton made on Brown way back in 1992 during the Democratic presidential primary. Those attacks have recently been revived by Brown’s Republican foe Meg Whitman in a devastating ad that replays Clinton’s words in 1992.

In 1992, Clinton accused Brown of raising taxes as governor of California and leaving the state in debt. Today Brown paraphrases Cinton’s most infamous, finger-wagging statement, saying, “I did not have taxes with this state.”

So it's Meg vs. Jerry vs. Bill. Two things strike me about this: 1) What a great campaigner Bill Clinton was; and 2) that the big debate between the two front-runners for a Democratic presidential nomination was....who was a bigger tax raiser. Boy, I miss those days.

Riding from Hanover to New York, I've discovered that the bus is terrible for writing but pretty good for reading. One of the morning's best offerings: Michael Barone, angry.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Barone reports, has written a letter to the chief lobbyist for private insurance plans that bristles with crude threats. Raise premiums? Criticize ObamaCare? Just you try, Sebelius writes. Ordinarily dispassionate, Barone. very justly, erupts:

The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone's business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration's transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government.

More On This Topic:

Freedman > ObamaCare Trumps the First Amendment?

When Maureen Dowd wants to put the knife in, she usually conjures up a member of her family to do the job for her. On Saturday, she deployed her sister Peggy – a Republican who, she says, voted for Barack Obama in November, 2008 -- for this purpose.

Peggy now has regrets, and at the heart of her objections is a single observation about our current President: “He does what he wants but then he tells us to do other things.”

When I read these words – which are, indeed, apt – I could not help but think of the contrast between what Al Gore preaches and the way he lives. I could not help but think of the contrast between what John Kerry preaches and the way he lives.

The hypocrisy identified by the dowdy one’s sister is a species of hypocrisy typical of the most prominent members of a certain political party and of the class most devoted to its dominion. It is helpful to remember that, in Greek, the word hupokrites means actor.

Why have you homophobic, Islamophobic climate change deniers who would send our fighting forces to die to protect oil interests...oppose equal rights for women and people of color...callously ignore the health care needs of our most vulnerable citizens...condemn our children to live on a planet ravaged by the effects of pollution... force young, inner-city women to choose between having more unwanted babies or obtaining life-threatening, back-alley abortions...spread malicious lies about people and policies you oppose...push for huge tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the middle-class...support laws that would punish the children of undocumented workers who have come here to make better lives for their families only to be exploited by big business...oppose any attempts by workers to organize themselves in order to stand up to greedy corporations...continually criticize public-sector workers who selflessly toil on behalf of all Americans...promote gender and racial stereotypes...advocate huge budget expenditures for weapons while ignoring the needs of average citizens...and conspire to steal elections through manipulation and intimidation...become the party of fear and hate?

Newt and Callista Gingrich invited me to the premiere of America at Risk on the evening of September 11. I should explain in the spirit of full disclosure that Newt is a great fan of There's No Alternative, and has gone far out of his way to help me get the word out about the book. It's impossible for me not to be grateful to someone who has taken so much time out of an obviously busy schedule to help me. It's also hard to find fault with the political opinions of someone who so enthusiastically endorses my own. Consider my bias disclosed.

That said, I imagined it would be difficult to make a movie about Islamic extremism that didn't suffer from the usual vices of reporting on this subject--hysteria and an undifferentiated perspective on the Islamic world--and I expected the movie to be, more or less, a campaign commercial for Newt Gingrich. I was also dismayed by Gingrich's suggestion that the Ground Zero Mosque should not be built because Saudi Arabia doesn't permit the building of churches. There are many excellent arguments against that thing, but that's not one of them. So I was prepared to be sympathetic to his aim but dubious about the particulars.

I was in fact impressed. Although to an extent it was indeed a campaign commercial for Newt Gingrich (and would have been stronger and more credible with skeptical audiences had it not been, but let's live in reality), it was definitely more than that, and deserves to be seen on its own merits. I didn't agree with every assertion made--I particularly don't agree that reducing our dependency on Saudi oil will do a thing to mitigate the problem, oil being a fungible commodity--but thought the movie an excellent starting point for discussion, as the filmmakers intended it to be. I commend them for raising the issue of the pernicious effect of the export of Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia so forthrightly; most politicians won't at all, and that really is the aspect of the problem that most urgently needs to be addressed.

I was also impressed with the line-up of interview subjects, who included, for example, Bernard Lewis and M. Zuhdi Jasser. I'd never seen an interview with Jasser before and thought his contribution compelling. The movie is worth seeing for him alone, particularly for his discussion of a question so often raised here--why is it that genuinely non-radical Moslems such as he are so often unknown to the public and ignored by the media? I was glad too that the movie conveyed a point I far too often see unappreciated: The chief victims of Islamic radicalism are Moslems themselves. America (including its Moslem citizens) lost the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; The Islamic world has lost entire nations and generations to Islamic extremists, and for precisely this reason, many Moslems are our natural allies.

The movie is already and predictably being described as "fear-mongering" by critics. I thought it was dramatically effective, to be sure, but hardly think Gingrich is the one doing the fear-mongering. These things really happened and they are really happening. The charge of fear-mongering is more properly applied to those who smash airplanes into skyscrapers and propose to do it again, or those who threaten a second genocide of the Jews and seek aggressively to acquire nuclear weapons to achieve that end. You'd have to be completely insensate or in abject denial to fail to find that frightening.

Nothing in it came as a surprise to me, but for those who follow these issues less closely, it would be informative. I hope it gets a wide audience, it genuinely deserves one; and I hope critics will try to separate their feelings about Gingrich as a public figure from their assessment of the movie. It deserves that, too.

Another data point for those in the college-degrees-are-worthless camp: In the United States, approximately a third of college graduates between the ages of 25 - 29 work at low skilled jobs.

But hey, at least our "emerging adults" are more successful than Canada's and Spain's!

In my previous post on this subject, I mentioned in passing that Andrew Hacker (whom I knew slightly when I was an undergraduate at Cornell more than forty years ago) and Claudia Dreifus have written a book examining the question. In the interim, The Los Angeles Times has posted a squib from the book. Here is how it begins:

At Pomona College, a top-flight liberal arts school, this year's sticker price for tuition and fees is a hefty $38,394 (not including room and board). Even after adjusting for inflation, that comes to 2.9 times what Pomona was charging a generation ago, in 1980.

This kind of massive tuition increase is the norm. In New England, Williams College charges $41,434, or an inflation-adjusted 3.2 times what it did 30 years ago. USC's current tab of $41,022 is a 3.6 multiple of its 1980 bill.

Tuition at public universities, in a time of ailing state budgets, has risen at an even faster rate. The University of Illinois' current $13,658 is six times its 1980 rate after adjusting for inflation. San Jose State's $6,250 is a whopping 11 times more.

This cannot go on. And when something cannot go on, ordinarily it doesn’t. My bet is that state university charges continue to increase dramatically as the public subsidy is withdrawn and that private education charges level off or even decline.

The piece from which I quote is well worth reading. Hacker and Dreifus document the dramatic increases since 1980 in the money allocated to sports, to administration, and to the salaries of tenured faculty. The book is no doubt worth looking at as well.

The Expectations Game is being played in Washington as we head toward what nearly everyone believes to be a GOP wave in November. Will it be enough to lift the party to majority status is the House? In some quarters, that’s gone from a possibility to a probability to a lock. The Senate seems less likely to change hands, but a growing number of observers rate that chamber as in play, too.

Republicans are doing their best to tamp down expectations, while a growing number of Democrats appear to be fanning the flames of the impending Conservative conflagration. The GOP doesn’t want its supporters to become complacent, while the Dems think it might work to their advantage if the other side’s voters think a blow-out is inevitable. At the same time, they hope to prod their own base to get out and counteract those wacky Tea Party-ers.

The fact is, I don’t think any of these strategies makes a bit of difference in this cycle. The “enthusiasm gap” is real, and voters are chomping at the bit to pull the lever or mark the ballot or punch out the chad. If Republicans (and a great many Independents) could be guaranteed a change in both houses of Congress even if they didn’t vote, they’d still trudge to the polls. They want to be a part of this, and they want the vote totals to be as humiliatingly lopsided as possible. They have a point they want to make, and expectations be damned.

I earnestly hope Turkey's executive branch will be wise in exercising its new power over the judiciary.

I'd sooner compare him to Repo Man, but I'm not swinging for the rhetorical fences like Newt Gingrich -- who has just riffed heavily off of Dinesh D'Souza's recent profile of the President:

“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich tells [National Review].

“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest.”

Gingrich is getting press for declaring that you can only see the real Obama through Kenya-colored glasses, but the truth is, what Obama's achieved only makes sense as an American story:

“[Obama] is in the great tradition of Edison, Ford, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates — he saw his opportunity and he took it,” Gingrich says.

It's true that Americans have never had the corner on seizing the biggest and baddest of opportunities. In America, equality has a pretty distinctive character, but Obama reminds us that Nietzsche was right about democratic life in general when he said, at the close of the 19th century, "Genius is perhaps not so rare after all -- but the five hundred hands it requires to tyrannize the kairos, 'the right time,' seizing chance by its forelock." Still, only his Americanness enabled Obama to seize his very peculiar and fleeting 'right time'. Maybe his supporters were so sick of the Bush years that they'd have welcomed an alien abduction. But not very many people voted for Obama, I'm guessing, because they wanted an alien to abduct them from America. Remember the thrill that ran up your leg when Obama inspired a sea of Democrats to chant "USA! USA!"...?

Right after the aphorism above, Nietzsche wrote, "Anyone who does not want to see what is lofty in a man looks that much more keenly for what is low in him and mere foreground -- and thus betrays himself." If you detect a hint of the con in Obama, look not overseas. Look deeper into America -- beginning, perhaps, with America's master of fiction Herman Melville. After all, Melville crowned his career as a writer with a novel concerning a character he called The Confidence-Man...

Is it the odd juxtapositions that dilute the meaning of important events? The solemn observances at Ground Zero yesterday contrast so jarringly with the drunken stupor that Claire Berlinski encountered last night in Georgetown. How to square the excitement of the start of college football with emotions so poignantly expressed by James Lileks yesterday? “I don’t think I’ve ever been more than a second away from the anger I felt on that day,” wrote Lileks. And by God, I’ve been in that same frame of mind since that awful day 9 years ago. 　

And yet September 11^th is a day of celebration for the Carter family. On that day, 25 years ago, my first child was born. I spent yesterday with my son Benjamin, his girlfriend Peggy, and other family and friends. It was a rollicking fun day, beginning with a round of putt-putt played, as we found out, at the same place and on the same course, as the Obama family played just a few weeks ago during their brief stay on Panama City Beach. I asked the attendant, who had been working when the First Family showed up, how the President scored. “They all got the same score,” he answered laughingly. I guess they spread the points around as readily as they spread our property.

From putt-putt to bowling later in the day, to shooting pool, to laughing and celebrating the wonderful ways in which this young man, Benjamin, has enriched all our lives, the day was a wonderful recognition of the very best of American life and yet,….and yet, there it was, unspoken. Perhaps it’s because the juxtaposition of two major events in our personal lives; the birth of a beautiful child and the savage mass murder of our citizens just don’t belong together. Besides, Ben was here first and he certainly wasn’t consulted about the date of the attacks. So we compartmentalize. In the case of our family, it’s necessary. But when a nation compartmentalizes something of this magnitude, is that healthy?

Last night, returning home from the birthday celebration, I sat down with my wife and again watched video footage of the indecent and inhuman assault of 9 years ago. The awful roar of the engines. The sheer speed and savage finality with which the second plane full of innocent people slammed right through a building full of more innocent people shakes us to our souls to this day. Watching the images of people falling, their arms and legs flailing about in those final horrific seconds of life, the anger was just as fresh in my mind as on the day it happened. It was more than anger, that day. For me it was fury.

James writes, “There’s nothing virtuous about anger, and you sound mulish and stubborn if you say you don’t particularly want to heal. I just don’t want to.” While I don’t want to heal either, I’m not sure that I subscribe to James’ statement that there is nothing virtuous about anger. Anger that day, prompted my friend, Bob Lee, to call within minutes of the attacks and volunteer to come out of retirement and go back on active duty to fight the bastards. Anger prompted me, fresh back from a tour in the mid-east, to volunteer for another deployment to help kill as many of them as possible. They didn’t grant Bob’s request, but thankfully they granted mine.

Could it be that the more we lose touch with that anger, the more we compartmentalize? And the more we compartmentalize, the more we lose focus on an enemy that remains at war with us? To James, to Americans, to friends of freedom everywhere, I respectfully suggest that we cling to the anger, and never forget what we felt that day. For to lose those emotions is to risk losing the stomach to engage the fight that is still being waged against us. We lose sight of that salient fact at our peril.

And the whole nation is nervous, my friends say.

The background to the referendum is summarized here. If you want to go into it very deeply, you could try here, though TESEV in my view gets Turkey wrong as often as it gets it right. Here's a compare-and-contrast version of the old and the proposed new constitutions.

Of the proposed 26 amendments, 24 are unexceptional. There are two clauses, however, that are dangerous. They bring the judiciary under the control of the prime minister. Anyone who understands the idea behind "separation of powers" will see immediately how this could be a very bad idea.

Unfortunately, that set does not comprise about 95 percent of the voters in Turkey, who have no idea that this is what they're voting for.

This article by Jihadwatch sums up the secularist case against the referendum. You need not be an arch-secularist to fear the outcome, however; you need only suspect it would be unwise to grant dictatorial powers to the Turkish prime minister, no matter his party or political disposition.

Note the comment underneath that article:

defender | September 11, 2010 12:18 AM | Reply

Today is 9/11.
DO NOT EVER FORGET WHAT PAIN AND DESTRUCTION WAS BROUGHT TO YOU ON THIS DAY 9 YEARS AGO.

I don't think we've forgotten. But I still see little evidence that we're prepared, as a result, to pay the kind of close attention to developments abroad that may further the spread of the ideology that animated the hijackers or may undermine our allies in the struggle against the regimes that sponsor and enable terrorism.

I know that this referendum simply doesn't interest Americans. I know because I've seen no reference to it whatsoever in the news here. I was in the Green Room at Fox in New York on Friday to talk about Obama's economic policy. I tried to persuade the producers to allow me to explain what was at stake in Turkey today, on any news segment. I couldn't persuade them. The breaking news about Angie Eberhardt's views on overly-thin fashion models was apparently more important.

I disagree. Perhaps you will too.

I was watching Spike Lee's HOB documentary on Post-Katrina New Orleans and was struck by the unintended compare and contrast of Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. Here was Brad Pitt, completely side-stepping government and using private sector investment and private ownership to actually build homes that are reasonably priced, built above flood level, rely on solar generated electricity, and are architecturally significant.

Meanwhile Sean was seen rushing into Nola for a photo op of lifting very big black people out of boats, which he did badly and then yelling for more government intervention...by which he means total government intervention such as in Cuba or Venezuela. (This, in a city where the greatest government intervention caused the catastrophe in the first place...poorly built federal levies ignored by corrupt parish politicians.)

Somehow I don't think Spike intended me to walk away with this impression of these celebs.

I commend to you this Haaretz interview with Mideast analyst David Makovsky, whom I had the privilege of working beside and learning from years ago at the Washington Institute. I recall his being right about everything, and gracious besides.

The prevailing view of the Israeli-Palestinian talks is that they are doomed because the Palestinian side is not unified. I've been arguing for a while that that is exactly the reason why these talks have a chance of success. Hamas, which I think of as the Arafat factor, is outside the process, and that is an essential positive. Makovsky makes the same point:

Some are skeptical that any agreement will be effective with the current rift of the Palestinian leadership.

I tend to believe that Hamas will try to spoil from the inside too, and I’ve discussed this with Palestinian officials in Ramallah who will agree with me, but there is a huge difference between what happened in the 90’s and what is happening today. With Arafat, you felt that he was playing a double game with a green light to terror, and that really destroyed confidence on the Israeli side.

I think now we don’t have any of that ambiguity with Abu Mazen [Abbas] because no one sees him like Arafat. Abbas and Hamas are bitter rivals, nobody believes there’s any green light for terror - quite the opposite - there’s excellent security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Abbas and Fayad are determined to continue it. The amount of violence has sharply dropped.

I think most Israelis are saying that if there’s 100 percent effort against the terrorists, there might not always be 100 percent results, but as long as there’s no double game, we will not allow rejectionists to explode the chance for peace.

I posted recently that Hamas is under a great deal of pressure, despite the financial and military support it receives from Iran. This state of affairs, which stems in part from Abbas's bracingly direct efforts of late to prevent Hamas violence, ratchets up the short-term danger of terrorist attempts but also lays bare the great gulf between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Indeed, Hamas has just directly threatened the PA:

In a harshly worded announcement, the Islamist group declared that "our patience [with the PA] will soon run out" and that they would not remain silent for long, Israel Radio reported.

"You know that the hands that have reached the heart of the occupier can reach you too," Hamas warned, referring to its recent attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, adding that Hamas cannot be stopped, and will strike anywhere, at any time it wishes.

I just went out to get a bite to eat with some friends in Georgetown. I was scandalized by the drunkenness in the streets. Scandalized! I'm not exactly a joyless martinet, or so I like to think, but what on earth is wrong with the youth of our nation's capitol? It's the anniversary of September 11, and they were all out there auditioning for roles in Sodom and Gomorrah: The Musical. They were not just a little bit drunk, they were a lot drunk, so much so that any reasonable person's first thought would be that they were in danger of seriously injuring themselves or getting arrested. The women in particular looked to be on a collision course with a giant breakfast of regret in the morning.

Has anyone else noticed that young people these days seem to have a real problem holding their liquor? Isn't anyone warning these women that it's just not safe to get so drunk that you can barely stand up, especially on the streets of a city with a notoriously high crime rate? Hasn't anyone told them that it's just unattractive, too? And on tonight, of all nights, which one might think an appropriate evening to at least make a pretense of sobriety and dignity?

Young people: You need to get that under control. Respectable people don't do that in public.

Another reason to scold the internet?

Using Facebook is the online equivalent of staring at yourself in the mirror, according to a study. Those who spent more time updating their profile on the social networking site were more likely to be narcissists, said researchers. Facebook provides an ideal setting for narcissists to monitor their appearance and how many ‘friends’ they have, the study said, as it allows them to thrive on ‘shallow’ relationships while avoiding genuine warmth and empathy. They also tend to use the site for promoting themselves to friends or people they would like to meet, the study concluded.

Researcher Soraya Mehdizadeh from York University in Canada asked 100 students, 50 male and 50 female, aged between 18 and 25 about their Facebook habits. They all took psychology tests to measure their levels of narcissism, which the study defined as ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and an exaggerated sense of self-importance’.

One almost forgets that Christopher Lasch was decrying America's descent into narcissism back in 1979, before these narcissistic 18-25-year-olds were a gleam in their narcissistic parents' eyes. And guess what? Lasch landed a lot of blows with his searing critique of everything rotten and corrupt about American culture gone wrong, but his proclamation of "an age of diminishing expectations" -- this is Mr. Malaise we're talking about here -- never fully gibed with the reality of American life, where things were, in different ways, getting better and getting worse at the same time.

Lasch's most potent observation was that Americans were too apt to abdicate all political responsibility for their everyday lives, and I endorse his suggestion that a sound psyche and an unwillingness to outsource all political work to Washington go hand in hand. But I turn skeptical out of reflex whenever someone alleges that the internet is turning us all into self-centered weirdos who make the Me Generation look like paragons of social decency by comparison.

And I can't help but think that, with studies like this Facebook study, the pop science industry is practically hardwiring that kind of narrative into our collective consciousness. Who has the moxie nowadays to resist the idea that the results of this study provide a powerful guide to What's Wrong With Us? Who are you to deny the cold, hard facts of a clinical trial? Statistics proves that you can pull a hundred people off the street, put them in a petri dish, and pass final judgments on society at large! We are, after all, so similar, so equal, and so interchangeable that what's true about a random sample in a controlled environment is true about us all! I'm a little less worried about how many of us are narcissists today than I am about how consistent our narcissism has become with the proposition that statisticians and clinical trials tell us the truth about who we are.

Every 9/11 in Minneapolis there’s a memorial at the Lake Harriet Bandshell. There have been bandshells standing on the northwest shore since 1888; fire or storms knock them down now and then, but we always rebuild. This was the scene tonight:

Dogs and kids gamboling in the twilight. A volunteer orchestra and choir, men dressed in colonial garb with old flags. Rangy earnest Boy Scouts handing out flags to the veterans who stood when the band played the anthem for their branch of the service. Some Copland, of course. The last movement of Howard Hanson’s marvelous Second Symphony. (The first movement is better, and if you’ve seen the movie “Alien,” you’ve heard the ending. It plays over the credits.) The mayor - a former newspaperman, among other things - made a good speech about hope and America.

When the sun set, we got out our candles, and fire was passed from one citizen to another. Hundreds of flickering lights in the dark. The orchestra played John Williams’ “Hymn for the Fallen,” and two newsreaders from the local TV station read dispatches from the day nine years ago. Banners bearing the names of the dead unfurled on the walls of the bandshell, bathed in blue and red light. My daughter held her candle and whispered that this was a scary story, and I put my arm around her and said she was right. It was.

The program continued with some upbeat patriotic music, and ended with “God Bless America,” sung by everyone at the top of their lungs - then fireworks shot from behind the bandshell and bloomed and boomed and crackled and fizzed overhead. The crowd left happy, and I was humming Irving Berlin all the way back to the car. It was only when I got home that I realized I didn’t want to leave a 9/11 memorial singing. Healing and hope and resolve and all that is well and good, but during the recounting of the events of the day I was angry again. I don’t think I’ve ever been more than a second away from the anger I felt on that day.

There’s nothing virtuous about anger, and you sound mulish and stubborn if you say you don’t particularly want to heal. I just don’t want to. That’s all.

I hear people trying to make something of American soldiers burning some confiscated Bibles in Afghanistan last year since burning things is cool again. Actually the burning of the Bibles makes sense to me. Even a hint of proselytizing in Afghanistan is one of the worst things with which our soldiers could be connected. Burning sacred objects like Bibles when they are not needed is what the Catholic church requires out of respect. The directive is that if it's been blessed, and you have to dispose of it, it must be burned or buried. If it hasn't been blessed, you can just throw it away, it's just a thing.

I don't know what other religions require, but to me this was a sensitive, albeit somewhat creepy, act out of respect for the Muslims of the region. Ground zero Mosque supporters might also want to take note of the sensitivity exercised by the Carmelite Nuns who moved their entire convent further away from Auschwitz when some raised the fear of proselytizing near this "ground zero" for Jews, although many Catholics died at Auschwitz like St. Maximilian Kolbe. But actually I just threw that in so I could post this cool stained glass picture of the Saint.

In 2008, Californians voted on Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act, which proposed that the state severely reduce criminal consequences for nonviolent drug offenses, the court's authority to incarcerate violators of probation or parole be limited, parole for most drug offenses be shortened, and funding for rehabilitation programs be increased. Proponents of the proposition maintained that it would be a cost-cutting measure that would save the state an estimated $2.5 billion dollars and argued that it would free up some much needed space in our overcrowded prisons.

Prop 5 ultimately failed at the polls by an overwhelming margin of nearly 20 percent, with 59.7% of voters rejecting the measure. Nevertheless, the unpopular measure seems to have served as the prototype for the Obama administration's new outlook on crime. Josh Gerstein at Politico reports:

The Obama White House has taken the first steps in decades to move away from a strict lock-‘em-up mentality on crime – easing sentences for crack cocaine possession, launching a top-to-bottom review of sentencing policies and even sounding open to reviewing guidelines that call for lengthy prison terms for people convicted of child pornography offenses.

The moves – still tentative, to be sure — suggest that President Barack Obama’s aides are betting that the issue has lost some of its punch with voters more worried about terrorism and recession. In one measure of the new political climate surrounding the issue, the Obama administration actually felt free to boast that the new crack-sentencing bill would go easier on some drug criminals.

“The Fair Sentencing Act marks the first time in 40 years that Congress has reduced a mandatory minimum sentence,” said White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, who billed the new legislation as “monumental.”

Does anyone else find this move anything short of baffling? With election season now upon us, one would think that the last thing Democrats would want to do is propagate the perception (or reality?) that they're the party that's soft on crime.

People frequently comment to my wife about how lucky she must feel to live with such a funny guy. She says she does, but I can’t help but notice the beginnings of a grimace when she says it. It’s not that I don’t make her laugh, but I suppose, after 20 years, my “humor” can occasionally be a bit tiresome. Recently, however, I got a big laugh out of her when I innocently referred to a pair of my pants as “trousers.” Being much younger than I, it’s apparently a word she hasn’t heard since she used to watch reruns of Father Knows Best as a toddler.

I got a similar reaction from my kids a few weeks ago when I slipped up and referred to the computer as the typewriter. They looked at me as if I had suggested we march down the hill to the well to fetch some water for dinner. It appears my vocabulary has become just a bit dated, and my loved ones seem to find this phenomenon amusing.

So I’m trying to take a more modern approach when I speak around the house. In fact, about the only time I can let my guard down while talking is when I’m having conversations with my contemporaries as we sit around on the davenport. Jeepers!

For almost my entire lifetime, the friends of liberty have been in retreat. They have accepted the welfare system, and they have temporized with the administrative state. With regard to domestic affairs, they have been in competition with the progressives – but only in one particular. The battle has been over who can better manage the system. In effect, what we have witnessed is a struggle between two species of progressives – managerial progressives who for the most part come out of the business world and intellectual progressives drawn from the academy. Only rarely in the last century have we had a genuine conservative as President – a man guided by an understanding of what the Founders had in mind when they adopted the Declaration of Independence and framed the Constitution. Only rarely has the Republican Party presented itself as a party of principle. The prospect terrifies many of those who consider themselves conservatives. They cannot imagine our departing from the New Deal order. All that they really want to do is to slow down the liberal juggernaut.

It is not always wrong to temporize. That is precisely what one should do with evils likely to disappear if one leaves them alone. That is what one should do with evils beyond one’s capacity to change.

But occasions do present themselves in which institutions and practices that once seemed entrenched and impregnable can be disposed of, and on such occasions temporizing is disastrous. We spent much of the Cold War attempting to accommodate the Soviet Union – and rightly so. In the beginning, they had the best artillery in the world and a great many divisions; later, they had nuclear weapons.

But a time came when shrewd observers recognized that the revolutionary generation had passed from the stage, that the Soviets had lost their élan, and that their economy was imploding. These men persuaded Ronald Reagan that what had always been deemed impossible was well within our grasp – that it had become possible to roll back communism without a nuclear war. And he, in turn, had the courage and the resolve necessary if an American leader was to seize the occasion and subject the Soviets to pressure that they could not bear. The proponents of Realpolitik recoiled in horror, but Reagan pressed on.

We now live in the worst of times. We are subject to a President and a party intent on fixing elections; on denying to workers faced with unionization the secret ballot; on shutting down conservative talk radio; on marginalizing Fox News; on demonizing Rush Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, and John Boehner; and on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives.” This is the meaning of the massive expansion of federal expenditure and regulation under Obama; it is the likely consequence of Obamacare; and it will come to pass if we do not reverse course, repeal Obamacare, radically cut back federal expenditure, pare regulation, and balance the budget without imposing – except perhaps for a short time – additional taxes.

We also live in the best of times. At no time in the last sixty-four years has American public been as fed up and aroused as they are now. At no time have they been as well-informed. At no time have they been as open to genuine change. The onslaught of Barack Obama is the last gasp of the welfare state. The Social Security Administration is now paying out more than it takes in. Medicare and Medicaid are dependent on general revenues. If we do not cut back, we will have to pony up – and if we choose to pony up, we will soon discover that marginal tax rates affect conduct – that you can raise taxes and collect considerably less, rather than more, in revenues. This is a time for decision, and the American people know the score.

If we could roll back communism, we can roll back the welfare state. We can eliminate the administrative state, restore the separation of powers, re-establish constitutional government, provide for legislative accountability. We can do this, or – out of timidity or a disgraceful taste for running other people’s lives – we can acquiesce. It is not a time for half-measures. Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have unwittingly opened the way for a return to first principles and a political realignment. If we do not seize this occasion now, we may never have another opportunity to change the direction in which this country has been tending for almost a century now.

In the order imagined by Woodrow Wilson and the progressives, set in motion by Wilson’s great admirer Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and extended by Lyndon Baines Johnson, we were destined to drift in the direction of what Alexis de Tocqueville called soft despotism. But Barack Obama has awakened us from our slumber, and we have an opportunity to become again what we once were – free women and men governing ourselves within a republican order characterized by federalism and the separation of powers. At this point, the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself. The only obstacles are the ambition of the would-be managers in our own camp and the timidity of those who mistake temporizing for prudence.

This is just anecdotal, I know, but let the record note that my grandmother has made it to the age of 100--and remains in exceptional health--on a diet of white bread and cake. Seriously. Some Jello, sometimes. I wouldn't have thought a human body could survive a week on what she eats, but apparently hers can and does.

My father and I are both vaguely indignant about this. We both somehow feel it's wrong to eat nothing but white bread and cake, and it would be better for her to eat something fresh every now and again, but we run up against an argument that's impossible to rebut: There she is, alive and well and 100 years old. You're going to improve on that?

She's a living rebuttal to everything we're told about nutrition. If an Omega-3 fatty acid ever crossed her lips, it was probably before the outbreak of the First World War. She never gets any kind of antioxidant. Protein? Forget it. She eats pretty much exactly the diet every kid wants to live on and every mother forbids.

I don't know what to make of it. Obviously she's a statistical outlier, but maybe she's also evidence that we just don't know as much about nutrition as we think.

And for those of you wondering--she's also evidence that a positive attitude is not essential to longevity. Maybe it helps, but you can definitely make it to that age without one, I promise you.

Rob Long told me a while back that one of the toughest things in Hollywood these days is picking the right villain. In a global market for American movies you don’t want to unnecessarily tick off any potential customers (hold the snarky comments: we all know that conservatives aren’t “potential customers” in the movie biz). One thing everyone seems to agree on is that multinational corporations – heck, even interstellar corporations – are the safe movie villains of the modern age. It is de rigueur to depict corporate-types sneering at vital safety regulations and destroying otter and seal pup habitat for the fun of it, usually while on break from orchestrating a global takeover in the furtherance of moneymaking.

But what about a reality where the villain isn’t flesh-and-blood but the dead hand of bureaucratic processes? A reality where disaster is due in part to employees of a multinational corporation diligently following those earnest, otter-saving rules routinely ignored by their celluloid counterparts?

This may be the case in the Gulf Oil Spill disaster. The Wall Street Journal reports today that in the minutes before the explosion BP engineers successfully used the blowout preventer to regain control of the runaway oil well. However, gas was already rushing towards the surface. Rather than diverting the deadly mixture safely overboard, the crew allowed the jet of combustible gas to come aboard the rig, engulfing the drilling platform, causing the explosion and the spill.

Why wouldn’t the rig operators routinely err on the side of caution and divert potentially deadly flows from an unbalanced well over the side?

Workers had made another fateful decision in the first moments of the blowout: They had directed the gas and drilling fluid coming out of the well through a system on board the rig rather than straight overboard. Normally, that would have been the right decision. Dumping oil-based fluid overboard is a violation of federal law and could have drawn a substantial fine. The system on the rig was designed to capture the fluid and get rid of the gas.

Government regulation isn’t cost-free. Sometimes the unintended consequences contribute to a Great Recession – as with Fannie and Freddie mandating the extension of mortgages to un-creditworthy borrowers – and sometimes a gigantic oil spill.

I can’t wait for the Obamacare and Dodd-Frank financial regulations to really kick in.

(You can download the entire BP accident report here.)

Nine years, two wars, and one administration later, what is there left to say about 9/11? What should our response be? And is it possible to move forward without growing complacent, without forgetting that we're never free from the threat of terrorism? Here's Ed Morrissey on those questions:

So what do we do now? What do the next nine years look like from this vantage point? Terrorism has ceased being the top priority of Americans, who are more worried now about the economy and jobs — as it should be. We should go about our business, but with the clarity that while we don’t want to arrange our public lives around terrorism forever, we need to keep the danger in mind as we conduct that business. Recent attack attempts remind us of the potential cost of complacency, but we no longer have the luxury of indulging in sheer ignorance as we did through September 10th, 2001.

We may never “stamp it out,” because this kind of lunacy doesn’t take too many people to become a danger to the US and the rest of the free world. We can stamp out the terrorists where we find them, and we can cut off their funding and resources. That will be the new normal, and it will last a long time, and we finally appear to have realized it.

Some of you may know that I'm the daughter of David Berlinski, known, among other things, as the author of The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. (He's best known to me, of course, as my affectionate and devoted father, but you would be more likely to know him for that book, or one of his many other wonderful books about mathematics and science.)

My father was in Birmingham, Alabama last week to debate Christopher Hitchens on the topic, "Does Atheism Poison everything?" It was a long-scheduled event. As I'm sure you all know, Hitchens was recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and the prognosis is very grave.

My father is here in Washington D.C. with me right now--sitting across from me, in fact. He was profoundly impressed, he said, by Hitchens' dignity and courage even in attempting to make the trip down to Birmingham. Although ostensibly devoted to the topic that atheism poisons everything, the evening, he reports, was largely "a well-merited celebration of Hitchens' appearance."

I asked him, of course, how the debate itself went. "I should note," he says, "that Hitchens' presentation was lucid and fully conveyed by his inimitable bass baritone, which did not flag during the entire evening. I suspect that deep down, we discovered we held a surprising number of beliefs in common. Hitchens was asked what he thought the weaknesses of Pascal's Wager might be, and he allowed himself to expatiate on them. I was asked for its strengths, and since this was a discussion about atheism, I acknowledged that it really had none. The wager of course plays a certain role in the history of philosophy and theology, but the role that it plays in history has very little to do with the claims that it makes on belief; and the claims that it makes on belief have very little to do with the role that it plays in history.

"There does come a point, of course, when in his desire to witness the second coming of H.L. Mencken, Hitchens embraces a position that I could not possibly accept. But I suspect there's very little help to be gained from argument on this point. An immense amount depends on temperament and a determination not to worry over-much about being sophisticated. In any event, I was glad to see him in Birmingham, toddling off to the bar, smoking like a chimney, eating with gusto, and quoting English poetry sonorously. Alllow me to repeat what I said to him at the debate: 'Hey Christopher: L'Chaim.'"

I second the sentiment, as I'm sure we all do.

Health Care Czarina Kathleen Sebelius has announced a "zero tolerance" policy against health insurers who make the outlandish claim that Obamacare is causing them to raise their premiums.

“Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections,” Sebelius said. She warned that bad actors may be excluded from new health insurance markets that will open in 2014 under the law.

That's it -- criticize the law and you're out of business. Anyone see a problem?

Just under nine years ago, on 16 September, 2001, Richard H. Brodhead, then Dean of Yale College, convened a panel of Yale faculty members to speak on the significance of what had happened five days before. Not one of those on the panel took this as an occasion for denouncing those responsible for the massacres in New York and Washington. No one discussed the religious motivations of the perpetrators. No one laid stress on the need for retaliation. Some intimated that the United States was at fault. All urged those in attendance to consider the perspective of those who responded to 9/11 by dancing in the streets.

In Foreign Policy, in a revised version of his remarks, Strobe Talbott, who had been second in command in Bill Clinton’s State Department, urged that we take care to distinguish between “the assassins and those who mastermind and abet their operations” and “their constituencies – those millions who feel so victimized by the modern world that they want to be victims, too; those who see Osama bin Laden as a combination avenging angel and Robin Hood.” The “raw materials of what we are up against,” he contended, “are “disease, overcrowding, undernourishment, political repression, and alienation,” which “breed despair, anger, and hatred.” “Reactive, defensive warfare” he pooh-poohed. Instead he called for an international “war on poverty” – which he termed “a proactive prolonged offensive against the ugly, intractable realities that terrorists exploit and from which they derive popular support, foot soldiers, and political cover.”

What struck me when I first read about the Yale teach-in and, again later, when I perused Talbott’s remarks was the resolute refusal to take religion seriously. The same thought came to mind in 2008 when I read about the patronizing remarks that Barack Obama had delivered in a closed-door meeting with donors in San Francisco. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania,” he observed, “and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Both Talbott and Obama took it for granted that religious faith is epiphenomenal and that man lives by bread alone. To this day, neither understands that serious political disputes always turn on moral and religious principles. Leave aside the fact that LBJ’s war on poverty was an egregious failure and that an international war on poverty would be a fool’s errand. Those who flew jetliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon knew nothing of disease, overcrowding, and undernourishment, and, in justifying themselves, they said not a word about any of these. They were middle-class; many were well-to-do. They had been educated in the West, and we owe them this much respect – to take seriously their claim that their motives were religious.

These men sacrificed their lives for a cause they believed in. If we are to give them their due, we must ask whether they were right about the dictates of Islam. This is a question we should consider, and it is a question that all Muslims sooner or later will have to confront.

I lived in Istanbul for two years, and, for seven years, I was married to a Turk; I puzzled for many years over the uneasy cohabitation of Islam and a secular state in Turkey, and I still wonder whether that cohabitation can survive. But I do not pretend to know the answer to the question I have posed here. I do, however, know this. Islam is and has always been a religion of Holy Law. It has never embraced the separation of church and state and full religious freedom; it has never been willing to tolerate apostasy – though it has been tolerant of those born Christians and Jews. To make itself compatible with liberal democracy, it would have to be willing to treat religious obligations as a private matter and give up the quest to legislate for the whole political community.

This is a tall order, and we may wonder whether genuinely devout Sunni and Shiite Muslims can ever be fully comfortable within a secular state. It is, however, good to remember that there was a time, not so long ago, when it was unclear whether Roman Catholics, not to mention Anglicans and Presbyterians, could make their peace with a thoroughgoing separation of church and state. No one – apart from the adherents of Islam – can decisively answer the question I have posed. What, in the end their answer will be . . . this is a matter of profound significance for them, and it is hardly less important for us. I can only say that – if one is inclined to interpret the religious commitments of others as a pathological response to job loss, disease, overcrowding, and undernourishment – one cannot begin to comprehend the world into which we were so violently thrust nine years ago today.

As I get older, I become more and more fond of my hometown. Isn't that how it is for everyone? When you're 21, you're dying to escape. When you're 40, you long for the simplicity of childhood. You miss the people you knew who, as time passes, seem more and more like family.

The Curatolos are a typical Staten Island family: Italian Dad, Irish mom, eight kids. Mr. Curatolo coached the basketball team at my all girls' Catholic high school and took us to the state championships a handful of times. I was the team manager and book keeper. He was the best boss I ever had. His youngest son, Robert, was a year older than me. Before he became a firefighter, he worked in the mail room of the Staten Island Advance, where I started my journalism career. I worked "in front" and he worked "in back." We laughed about that when I passed him in the halls. I will always remember him wearing a smile, an inky apron, and ear plugs to block out the deafening sounds of the printing presses.

Rob became a firefighter shortly after I left my hometown newspaper to work at the New York Post. He also married one of my best high school friends, a player on one of his father's best basketball teams. They were married on August 16, 2001. He was dead on September 11. From his obit:

After his shift ended, the 31-year-old from Ladder 16 in Manhattan arrived at the wreckage of the World Trade Center to continue doing what he was trained to do — save lives. But sometime after the second tower collapsed, the firefighter lost his own.

His body was found yesterday under a rig between the two towers in an area near where his brothers, Billy and John, both firefighters, and Anthony, a police officer, had been searching since Tuesday.

"They were trying to figure out where he was and they were determined not to come home until they knew something," said Kathy Curatolo, who said the family is having a difficult time dealing with the numbing loss of their baby brother, the youngest of eight children.

I think about Rob, his widow, and his family hundreds of times a year, not just today.

I've been a Lileks fan for nine years -- almost exactly, because I found him, as a lot of us did, in the wake of 9/11, when I'd sit at my computer and click and click and click late into the night, trying to read something that made sense to me, that made me feel better -- or at least made me feel worse in a more meaningful way, if that makes any sense.

His blog was like a lighthouse. He wrote about his family, his day, what he loved about America, what he didn't love so much about America. And then I found The Diner, and his books, and I was hooked. Having him co-host the podcast is a giant thrill for me.

Treat yourself: start listening to The Diner.