Which is worse, do you think, for a politician? Taking too many vacations? Or having too many homes?

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and his family now have 8 homes. According to the Daily Mail, the Blairs "have amassed property worth £15million [more than $23M] since Mr Blair entered Downing Street in 1997."

The latest purchase, by Cherie Blair for the couple's 22-year-old daughter, is a "three-bedroom maisonette in a Georgian townhouse in central London." Sounds lovely.

The purchase was made with cash.

Their three eldest children now each have a £1million home in central London, all bought with substantial help from their parents ... A source close to Mr Blair said: 'It started once they bought a flat for Euan, and after that it was only fair that all the children got a helping hand on to the property ladder.

'Most parents would draw the line at spending so much - it's not far off £3.5million [$5.4M] in total - but the Blairs aren't most parents.'

I know, I know. He's out of office. They can do as they please. They are stimulating the economy. Sigh. As someone who is now looking at being a life-long renter, I guess I'm just ... jealous. Yes, that's it.

I guess I should add here that Blair will donate the profits of his soon-to-be published memoirs to charity. That's pretty good.

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan, August 15, 1986.

There’s a lot that isn’t moving in the United States right now and government money is flowing like water in this Recovery Summer. But who knew that under Barack Obama similar subsidies would be extended to mosque maintenance in foreign lands? Caroline May at the Daily Caller reports:

Just a cursory search of the term “mosque” on the State Department’s list of “projects” reveals 26 examples of federal funds going to fund construction, renovation, and rehabilitation of various mosques abroad. The benefiting countries include Bulgaria, Pakistan, Mali, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Benin, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Egypt, Tunisia, the Maldives, Yemen, Turkmenistan, Tanzania, Uganda, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Serbia and Montenegro.

Money being fungible, wouldn’t it be interesting if some of the Islamist funding provided by the State Department’s U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation freed up other foreign cash later donated to our own Ground Zero Mosque project?

I guess that wall of separation thing so beloved by liberals only applies to churches.

However, American Islamic Forum for Democracy's Dr. Zuhdi Jasser objects:

“We have always felt this type of outreach is completely ineffective and that ultimately we have to approach it like the Cold War where we are fighting an ideology and we have to be poignantly open about what part of political Islam we are trying to change and modify,” Jasser said. “If we are going to have this long war of ideas we cannot fund these religious institutions. We can fund anti-Islamist institutions based in liberty.”

I think Dr. Jasser has it right. If we are going to subsidize Islam abroad, shouldn't we at least direct the funds towards friends of liberty?

It’s a sleepy Friday in late August, the president is on another vacation, Congress is out of town, no one is paying much attention. What better time for the Obama administration to pull the plug, once again, on military commissions? This time, it has halted the case of top al-Qaeda operative Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was to be prosecuted by a military court for the Cole bombing. The Washington Post report is here, and Jen Rubin has thoughts at Contentions.

None of this is terribly surprising. Prosecuting the Cole case by military commission sticks in the Left’s craw because it shows the incoherence of the Obama/Holder position. They want to treat the war like a crime and endow our enemies with all the rights and advantages of civilian courts; yet, they went military in the Cole case, despite the fact that there is a pending Justice Department civilian indictment addressing that attack. There can be only one explanation for that: they are afraid the case against Nashiri is weak and might not hold up under (slightly) more exacting civilian court due process. That is, the Obama/Holder position is not principled — for all their “rule of law” malarkey, they are willing to go where they have the best chance to win. But there were no military commissions when the Cole was bombed, so what is the basis for trying it militarily? Answer: the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war... except the Left doesn’t accept that it’s a war and the administration wants to prosecute the 9/11 plotters in civilian court. None of it makes any sense. -- Andy McCarthy

One of the most difficult tasks for any outsider is to fathom the motivations of government prosecutors in dealing with particular cases. But the McCarthy account does not appear to make any sense to me. If the government thinks that its case could be too weak for civilian court (because of more restrictive rules on hearsay evidence) that is not a reason to stop the proceedings before the military commissions, unless the case is too weak for that forum as well. At that point we are left in the position where there is enough evidence to hold for the duration of the conflict but not enough to convict, especially for death. This does not sound like a decision to prefer civilian courts to satisfy Obama's own left wing. Indeed, on many of the security issues, the Obama policies have strongly resembled the Bush policies with only one exception. Bagram Air Force base is the new preferred destination because it is outside territorial limitations which we are told actually makes a different in dealing with these matters by Supreme Court case law.

In my view this incident is symptomatic of a deeper flaw: a President and Attorney General who cannot execute any game plan. It reminds me of the waffling on the Mosque. What is needed is more coherence and more transparency. And those are not possible without more consistency.

Because this is what happened. I was supposed to be on at 6:00. At about 5:55 pm, I noticed to my horror that my cell phone was dead. It's a new phone. I didn't know the battery would run down so fast. My friends and I are outside a Japanese restaurant in Tribeca. A cliffhanging scene ensued--could I charge it in the ladies bathroom? No, no plug. (5:56.) Could we swap the SIM card with someone else's phone? We try--"Get me a hairpin! Who has a hairpin!" We swap--it doesn't work. (5:57.) If we smack it hard, might battery revive? Nope, it's dead for sure. (5:58.) Can I call the show and tell them to call me on another number? Nope, don't have their number. (5:59).

There was only one thing left to do: Plug in the phone underneath the reception desk at the restaurant, say "Stand back please, ma'am, this is essential to national security," to the hostess, dive under the reception desk, ball myself into the fetal position, and do the interview from underneath the desk. Oh, I should also mention that I looked like a little rough because the gym I'd gone to with Jonathan Gilbert the night before didn't have a shower, so I had to get back into the only clothes I'd brought with me while I was still pretty sweaty, and while I'd managed to bathe since then, the clothes hadn't.

They called at 6:00 prompt and the rest of the interview went off without a hitch, except there was a lot of background noise, so I couldn't hear their questions. That's okay, I managed to discern the word "burqa," I figured, "Right! I have opinions about that," and pretty much just told my vocal cords to handle the interview while the rest of me scanned the restaurant for the security guards I was pretty sure were en route to deal with this situation.

I wanted to mention "Ricochet" a few times, but since I couldn't hear her questions, I couldn't quite figure out the appropriate angle. I'm sorry about that. On the bright side, when I emerged from under the desk, the receptionist was convinced about the burqa.

"Moderate Muslim" is so last week.

Gaffe-prone NY governor David Paterson has coined a couple of new classifications we might want to ponder: "mainland" Muslims and "almost Westernized" Muslims.

Just got off the phone with the former governor of California (and future Ricochet guest contributor) Pete Wilson. As we discussed the races here in our beloved Golden State, Pete proved in a particularly ebullient mood. I asked why.

"You mean you haven't seen them?" Pete replied.

"Seen what?"

"The numbers. Rasmussen came out with two polls this week. The first showed Carly essentially tied with Boxer. And the second showed Meg ahead of Jerry by eight. Those polls put a spring in my step, I don't mind saying."

If Republicans win here in California, where won't they win?

A spring in your step. What a lovely way to stroll into the weekend.

The August 30 issue of The New Yorker includes a long article on Charles and David Koch entitled “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”

Needless to say, the article proves predictably and risibly tendentious. Since George Soros funds the left, he receives only a polite, passing mention. Since the Koch brothers give money to organizations that promote free markets, advocate low taxes, and question global warming, they’re portrayed as sinister, self-dealing, shadowy, and pernicious; a couple of Mr. Bigs intent on taking over the world—and doing a pretty good job of it. (The reporter, Jane Mayer, seems honestly to believe that the Tea Party has more to do with the organizations the Kochs have founded than with the policies of Barack Obama. “The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections,” she asserts, “represents a political triumph for the Kochs.”)

Still, the piece contains a lot of interesting reporting—and almost every word heightens my admiration for the brothers from Wichita. (I knew they’d helped to found the CATO Institute. I had no idea that they had also helped to establish the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and Americans for Prosperity. Good on ‘em.)

One question—or, rather, bleg:

The article mentions a 1971 memorandum that sounds like an interesting piece of work:

The Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Does anyone know anything about that memorandum? Who at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned it, for example? Or, more to the point, how the Chamber responded? (My guess: that the Chamber acted on hardly any of Powell’s recommendations. Then as now, the basic posture of business in any confrontation with the left was supine. But all the same it’d be interesting to know.)

Peter Wehner at Contentions asks not for whom the bell tolls:

According to Public Policy Polling (PPP), President Obama’s approval ratings in the key states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania are “brutal.”

How brutal?

In Florida, Obama’s approval-disapproval numbers are 39 percent v. 55 percent, with independents registering a 52 disapprove v. 36 percent approve rating.

In Pennsylvania Obama’s approval is 40 percent, while 55 percent of voters disapprove of him. Independents line up against the president by a 63/32 margin.

And in Ohio, Obama’s approval is 42 percent with 54 percent of voters disapproving of him — while the split among independents is 58/33.

These findings should be combined with Jennifer’s posting on the latest analysis by The Cook Report and the story she linked to in Politico, in which a Democratic pollster working on several key races said, “The reality is that [the House majority] is probably gone” and that that his data shows the Democrats’ problems are only getting worse (”It’s spreading,” the pollster said.)

I can't even bear to follow the Knicks or Rangers anymore. I have been fully turned off by what Richard Sandomir describes as the "byzantine, often inexplicable politics that guide Madison Square Garden." The list of ills over the past decade is too long to recount here.

But the return of Ewing's son? I clicked that headline, for sure. Everyone should love that story.

Patrick Ewing, Sr. was equal parts savior and goat throughout his career with the Knicks. The older I get, the more I appreciate what he gave to those teams of the 90s. He was a workhorse, a stoic giant; he didn't project "star power" or charisma. He also never got a ring. Yet those who played with him or coached him insisted there was a super-sized heart buried deep inside that seemingly cavalier exterior. As a reporter, I was always frustrated at Ewing's inability to express passion in any interview about a game and a team that he so obviously seemed willing to die for. Age has softened me, though; he's one of the greats.

Patrick Ewing, Jr., 26, was signed by the Knicks today to a partially guaranteed contract. Basically, it means he will battle for the final roster spot. He did the same thing in 2008, only to be cut two days before the season opener. Here's hoping he makes it. It might be just the thing to revive a dead Garden.

Photo by: Seidenstud

From "Heath Care Reform Update," a letter distributed this week to employees of Stanford University:

Beginning January 1, 2011, Stanford Benefits will start integrating into our health plans changes mandated by the federal Health Care Reform law....The new health care legislation includes numerous regulations, requirements and fees that become effective between 2011 and 2018. In light of these changes, the University will be carefully reviewing the design of its employee and retiree health plans....

You will no longer be able to use your health care spending account to be reimbursed for over-the-counter medication....

The Health Care Reform Bill calls for a special excise tax on certain health benefit plans, beginning in 2018....Even though the effective date for the excise tax is over seven years away, accounting rules require that we reflect the cost of future retiree medical plan obligations in our financial statements. This potential new excise tax represents an additional multi-million dollar liability....Therefore, we are amending the retiree health plan to indicate that, if the excise tax is actually implemented in 2018 and taxes are owed, the cost of the taxes will be paid by the plan participants.

Anybody else receiving notices like this?

Now that Gitmo prisoners have the right to habeas corpus, the New York Times has something to celebrate: the prospect of detainees walking free! The lead editorial of today's Times triumphantly points to a recent report showing that federal judges are "regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners" because they were tortured.

Regularly? Well, so far 52 detainees (out of 176) have brought habeas cases (which require the government to justify continued detention). Of those 52, 15 detainees alleged physical abuse. Of those 15 cases, the government lost 8 and won 7. That's right: 8 district court decisions (all being appealed) -- and the NYT declares that the Bush "torture" regime has been exposed. If the 8 decisions are overturned on appeal, I suspect the NYT will not retract its editorial.

Okay: Professor Yoo, help me out here. The interrogations in question were done before SCOTUS applied habeas corpus to Gitmo, so isn't this just pure hindsight: judging interrogators by civilian standards that they never expected to apply? Or is there evidence that the interrogators went too far, even by war-on-terror standards?

Perhaps it's because of my libertarian political views, but I rarely expect others to agree with me. (At the outset, at least!) And yet I somehow manage to get through life without calling everyone who disagrees with me a bigot. This is a feat way too difficult for most people in the mainstream media and political elite. Charles Krauthammer has a devastating critique of the pervasive charge:

Promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

The end to his column is brutal:

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

I was traveling outside of DC this week and ran into more than a few folks who wanted to talk about this lazy accusation of bigotry. Rather, they didn't want to talk about it. It was just proof to them of how completely useless everyone inside the beltway (literally or figuratively) thinks.

At Midway Airport, a man told me "I can not wait until November." A few other people, not previously part of the conversation, immediately chimed in to excitedly offer the same sentiment. And then they went on with their other business. I'm beginning to wonder just what this November will look like.

For the second year in a row, the domestic birth rate has fallen. It's now the lowest it's been in a century. More from the Associated Press:

Last spring's report, on births in 2008, showed an overall drop but a surprising rise in births to women over 40, who may have felt they were running out of time to have children and didn't want to delay despite the bad economy.

Women postponing having children because of careers also may find they have trouble conceiving, said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based demographic research group.

"For some of those women, they're going to find themselves in their mid-40s where it's going to be hard to have the number of children they want," he said.

Don't blame me -- I had one of my babies in 2009. On the older mom thing, I'm guilty as charged, even if I have several years before I hit 40. Still, compared to the women in my family, I'm an elderly mom. My argument for having children when you're younger is that you simply must have more energy for them then.

I am very claustrophobic, so the Chilean miners story has been of great interest to me. I am amazed at the resilience of these men, who are having daily meetings, games of dominoes, and singing the Chilean national anthem with gusto.

Judging by my past experiences in claustrophobic situations – as a kid I was once locked in a closet by a mischievous boy from my neighborhood, and as an adult I have spent more than a few long minutes sitting in stalled subway cars deep below New York City – I doubt I would suffer so gracefully being trapped in a 540-foot, 85-degree chamber with 32 of my co-workers.

I’m more of the hysterical, sweaty, panic-attack type.

These miners, who have been trapped for 22 days already, are looking at, possibly, another 90+ days underground. Yet, according to a video released yesterday, they seem to be in fine form with a few exceptions:

"Three or four of the men do have some problems. They're not sleeping at night, they're becoming increasingly anxious and irritable after being cramped in that confined space for so long," said Health Minister Jaime Manalich, according to The London Times. "We are preparing [antidepressant] drugs for them because it would be naive to think that they will be able to maintain this tremendous optimism for the whole period."

I suspect that a strong and deep faith in God would be one of the only natural ways to combat a total breakdown. Probably those drugs won’t hurt either.

What would you do to keep your wits?

Respected Princetonian and adjunct Cato scholar Tim Lee has made a few revealing comments in the wake of liberaltarian duo Brink Lindsey's and Will Wilkinson's departure from Cato. Alas, they're revealing only insofar as they dramatize how deeply confused even extremely smart people have become about conservatism in general and tea party conservatism in particular. Part of this confusion, I freely admit, is a consequence of the bad habits developed by too many Republicans at a time when the GOP was controlled, if only in the popular imagination, by the forces of conservatism. But I'm not sure anything excuses this:

Is the Tea Party “the most dynamic anti-big government political movement in modern American politics?” I think it’s helpful here to unpack the concept of “anti-big government,” because the right uses it in a peculiar and rather perverse fashion.

In the conservative (and fusionist) worldview, government activities are evaluated using a simplistic “size of government” metric that treats every dollar of government spending as equally bad, regardless of how it’s used. This has some unfortunate results. It means that cutting children’s health care spending is just as good as cutting a dollar from subsidies for wealthy corporations. And since wealthy corporations typically have lobbyists and poor children don’t, the way this works out in practice is that conservative politicians staunchly oppose the former while letting the latter slide.

Worse, mainstream conservatives give programs involving the military and law enforcement a free pass. Conservatives vociferously (and correctly) oppose giving the FCC expanded power over the Internet, but they actively supported the NSA’s much more comprehensive and intrusive scheme of domestic surveillance. Conservatives support a massive expansion of government power at our southern border to restrict the freedom of Mexican migrants. They seem unconcerned by the fact that we have more people in government-run prisons than any other nation on Earth.

Any analysis of the tea party that takes "the right" as its monolithic point of departure is foredoomed, and Lee's dizzying remarks show why. To begin with, there is simply nothing in "the conservative worldview" (whatever precisely that may be) that "treats every dollar of government spending as equally bad, regardless of how it's used." You can tell this is true because "mainstream conservatives give programs involving the military and law enforcement a free pass." Only, that's not right either, because mainstream conservatives, unlike the tiny neocon cabal that seized power during the Bush years, are against blank-check nation-building and unsustainable public pensions. Confusing!

Worse (as Lee would put it), mainstream conservatives will laugh in the face of anyone who tells them that they believe a dollar spent on midnight basketball is "equally bad" as a dollar spent on implementing Obamacare. Mindbogglingly, conservatives will even disagree with each other on which federal expenditures (EPA funding! Fannie and Freddie bailouts! Foreign aid for birth control!) are worse than others.

It's true that in the wake of 9/11 conservatives have grown more tolerant of expansive domestic surveillance powers. For the same reason, they're disinclined to champion the 'freedom of movement' of undocumented noncitizens. But which conservatives are they, again, who remain "unconcerned" about the number of noncitizens committing crimes and occupying space in our prisons? What's more, which conservatives blithely or blissfully accept high crime rates (crime, after all, being where prisoners come from)? I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank. Mainstream conservatives are much more inclined to view high incarceration rates as a grim necessity in a degenerate world.

Which brings us to the tea partiers. It's tea partiers who are more likely than mainstream conservatives to view all government spending as suspect. It's tea partiers who are more likely than mainstream conservatives to oppose Big Brother government. It's tea partiers who are more likely than mainstream conservatives to question the whole logic and effectiveness of our criminal justice system. In part, that's because tea partiers are more open to historically paleoconservative and paleolibertarian ideas than mainstream conservatives. One could argue that this makes them, technically speaking, more conservative than mainstream conservatives, but that's hardly relevant here. What is relevant is that the tea party really is "the most dynamic anti-big government political movement in modern American politics," and that Lee's attempt to "unpack" this fact out of existence at once manages to misrepresent and confound the character of contemporary conservatism while leaving us more convinced than ever that tea partiers are serious about taking on big government.

I'm pleased and proud to have Harry Shearer, my old friend, here on Ricochet for a bit. His new movie, The Big Uneasy, is really exceptional. Don't miss it.

It's got lots in it to infuriate everyone, but if you're a conservative, you'll especially be challenged to re-think the purpose and effectiveness of the Army Corps of Engineers, which despite its gloried history really seems like a Congressional boondoggle -- the private construction company dedicated to getting incumbent members of congress re-elected by building big things in their districts.

Harry's a dangerous lefty, of course. At least that's what I call him whenever I can. I think I've suggested, over dinner and excellent wine, that he be arrested and thrown into federal prison. For his part, I think he's parried that I'm a hypocritical conservative and has mocked the way my voice rises in pitch when I'm especially cornered in a debate. I'm often cornered that way by Harry.

And then we finish our wine and laugh and cackle evilly about the various people in the entertainment industry whom we despise, and we talk about our dogs or whatever else seems to be going on in our lives.

I'm tempted to say that friendships like this don't exist, especially in Hollywood, because it's monolithically left-wing, and partisan, and Harry isn't either one of those things. (He'll reject the label of left-wing, and with justification, although I do enjoy calling him a dangerous anti-American pinko. And he is a dangerous anti-American pinko...) But I can't really blame Hollywood.

I blame a sense of humor deficit. Our side has it, too. The essence of friendship is shared laughter, and it's impossible to laugh with someone if you're screaming at them, or if you're convinced that they're immoral hate-mongers or...well, you know.

It's a friendship killer, I think, this idea that it's all a fight, a war, a twilight struggle for the soul of America -- we get so caught up in it we forget that it's possible to have rich and close friendships with people whose politics are different, without reading them out of polite society. Where I live, this comes more often from the left -- I cannot count the times I've been told, to my face, something like, "You're a conservative? But, I mean, I like you. You don't seem evil" -- but I'm sure it happens to both sides, depending, I guess, on where you live.

Harry and I agree on a lot of things -- we agree, for instance, that his new movie is excellent; we agree that the press is a ludicrous bunch of pompous blowhards -- and we disagree on a lot of things, too. We vote differently. I vote for the Real American; he votes for whoever seems the most like Trotsky. But we're friends first. We laugh at (mostly) the same things. Often, that's each other.

The arrival of the Great Uniter in the White House has left us more divided than at any time in almost 150 years. It’s not just a matter of Red States vs. Blue States or super-heated political rhetoric; rather, there’s such an enormous chasm caused by distrust, and even disdain, that it’s hard to imagine finding a way to bridge the gap. The political well has become so poisoned we all may die of thirst. John Edwards—who seemed to enjoy having two of everything—campaigned on the notion of there being two Americas, and he may have been correct, at least numerically. Each of the two seems to have less and less regard for the other, and the result is the geographical whole is in serious trouble.

In this age of 24-hour political news and Internet echo chambers, it’s hard to imagine any sort of real accommodation between the sides. And, while most of us here at Ricochet share a belief in who’s to blame and which direction we should move, maybe it’s time to throw up our hands and concede that America, as we know it, is simply not working. Maybe it’s time to create—quite literally—two Americas.

The logistics would be incredibly complex, but it’s not that hard to imagine cobbling together two distinct geographical regions, each with political and social philosophies distinct enough from one another so that most citizens would be comfortable living in one or the other. Each would be more likely to live in harmony with the other because, as separate nations, they would become more concerned with things like trade and treaties rather than with each other’s internal workings.

I have a pretty good idea as to which side would thrive and which would eventually have to come, hat in hand, begging for help, but I’m sure we’d be happy to share our bounty with our less-fortunate neighbors in Obamaland.

In a slide show titled, "Earned Housing" the NY Times portrays the experience of Marist College students who are awarded campus housing based on accumulated points for good behavior, community service, and good grades. Those with the most points get the most posh (poshest?) crib.

Depending on your behavior, you might get a large, multi-room apartment with a kitchen, or a small, dank, dark hole (well, I'm exaggerating) in the freshmen dorm. Yuck.

Students are given points for high G.P.A.'s, campus involvement and good conduct (like not being written up for under-age drinking) and receive deductions for infractions (like leaving a damaged room). Groups with the highest average scores choose first. At an all-day event in April, students gathered in the gym to learn the housing consequences of their actions and friendships.

Naturally, if you want to boost your score, you invite a goodie-two-shoes to be your roomie. You avoid the baddies like the plague. I wonder if there is an appeal system for unfair treatment? You know, like, "It was his keg, he bought it, and he was drinking it. I was just holding the funnel in his mouth." I suspect that, like communism or The Expendables, this one sounds great in theory, but there are a million ways it can wrong. What do you think?

He is the host of radio's best-titled show, Le Show. He is Spinal Tap's Derek Smalls. He is the voice of Kent Brockman and Mr. Burns, among other Simpsons favorites. He was -- if Wikipedia is to be trusted -- "the precursor to the Eddie Haskell character in the pilot episode for the television series Leave It To Beaver, but his parents decided not to let him continue in the role so that he could have a normal childhood."

And starting today, for a limited time only, he is on Ricochet.

But perhaps most importantly, he is a man on an info-mission -- the man responsible for Kenneth Turan's film pick of the week, an ace muckraking documentary about a certain unnatural disaster that befell New Orleans five years ago. It's called The Big Uneasy. Intrigued? Me too. Put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen, for the one, the only, Harry Shearer.

Do me a favor. Double check my work, if you've got a moment.

Over at the excellent Foreign Policy site, writer Thomas Ricks points to the recently released Pentagon final report on the Fort Hood shootings. Remember those? Insane US Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, steeped in a nasty brew of Islamic radicalism and an acolyte of Yemeni radical Anwar al-Awlaki, goes nuts and kills 13 people.

Of course, officially, no one ever connected those particular dots. Officially, it was a case of a crazy guy going crazy for No Particular Reason and had Nothing to Do With Anything Islamic. You know, that old story.

So, I went and downloaded the PDF with the official report -- now almost ten months after the event -- and did a simple word search.

I looked for "radical," or "Islam," or "Imam," or "Muslim."

Didn't find them. See if you can.

Yahoo! News has a blog called The Upshot. Who knew?

Per The Upshot, an out-of-control haywire drone made a beeline for Washington, DC, violating our restricted airspace. Who knew?

It's unclear how frequently drones fly in U.S. skies. Some local police departments have already begun using them for law enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security began using drones to monitor the border with Mexico in June. Many cities — and drone manufacturers — are pushing the Federal Aviation Administration to update its rules and allow for wider use in the United States.

They might want to figure out how to keep them from going renegade and striking out for the nation's capital first. According to the Los Angeles Times, drones in Iraq and Afghanistan have an uncommonly high failure rate, with at least 79 accidents so far at an average cost of $1 million per incident. If nothing else, the specter of a directionless, bug-ridden drone approaching White House airspace should prompt President Obama to think twice before reprising his controversial White House Correspondents Dinner joke about using Predator drones on the Jonas Brothers if they try to get fresh with first daughters Sasha and Malia.

Anyone looking to prove that we now live in an evil parallel universe could do worse than that last sentence.

Count me among the throngs of loyal Trader Joe’s fans. I love the low prices, the no frills packaging, and the impressive selection of $5 wine. And according to this enlightening Fortune article, I may also be attracted to Trader Joe’s limited selection:

Swapping selection for value turns out not to be much of a tradeoff. Customers may think they want variety, but in reality too many options can lead to shopping paralysis. "People are worried they'll regret the choice they made," says Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore professor and author of The Paradox of Choice. "People don't want to feel they made a mistake." Studies have found that buyers enjoy purchases more if they know the pool of options isn't quite so large. Trader Joe's organic creamy unsalted peanut butter will be more satisfying if there are only nine other peanut butters a shopper might have purchased instead of 39. Having a wide selection may help get customers in the store, but it won't increase the chances they'll buy. (It also explains why so often people are on their cellphones at the supermarket asking their significant other which detergent to get.) "It takes them out of the purchasing process and puts them into a decision-making process," explains Stew Leonard Jr., CEO of grocer Stew Leonard's, which also subscribes to the "less is more" mantra.

Customers accept that Trader Joe's has only two kinds of pudding or one kind of polenta because they trust that those few items will be very good. "If they're going to get behind only one jar of Greek olives, then they're sure as heck going to make sure it's the most fabulous jar of Greek olives they can find for the price," explains one former employee. To ferret out those wow items, Trader Joe's has four top buyers, called product developers, do some serious globetrotting. A former senior executive told me that Trader Joe's biggest R&D expense is travel for those product-finding missions. Trade shows that feature the flavor of the moment "are for rookies," a former buyer said. Trader Joe's doesn't pick up on trends -- it sets them.

Counterintuitive at first, the concept rings true. My favorite fast food? In ‘N Out. They haven’t got any breakfast burritos, or chicken sandwiches, or apple walnut salads. It’s just burgers, fries, and shakes. Simple. Delicious.

But if this limited-selection model is indeed at least partially responsible for the success of these two ventures, why haven’t more retailers and restaurants followed suit?

Top-down government spending can goose an industry. Nobody's questioning that. But where will electric cars -- for example -- really come from?

The coolest thing about this electric car isn’t the Lola racing car chassis, or the clear plastic bodywork or even the fact it gets the equivalent of 300 mpg. The coolest thing about this car is the kids who built it.

The car was a class project at the Automotive Design Studio at the DeLaSalle Education Center, an alternative high school in Kansas City, Missouri. The school serves those kids who fall through the cracks, and most of them live below the poverty line. A lot of them have seen some violence in their lives, others have kids, others have drug and alcohol problems and many of them struggle with basic educational skills. It’s an amazing opportunity for them to follow up two years of work in a class called Creative Studio and Entrepreneurial Studies by designing and building a record-breaking electric car.

DeLaSalle draws its funding from government and private sources, but it provides the kind of education that public schools in general are failing to provide. Entrepreneurial Studies! How weaker would the temptation be to dump federal dollars on favored industries in a world where most kids got a sound education in Entrepreneurial Studies? That would be a world where the future would arrive from the ground up.

(via Ricochet member PEG)

Murphy’s Law of Mechanics: Interchangeable parts won’t.

Dave’s Law of Applied Mechanics: If at first you don’t succeed, try demolition.

The above represents the sum total of my mechanical experience and expertise. Who hasn’t felt themselves growing old trying to fit Tab “A” into Slot “B” only to find that it simply isn’t working? Have you taken a little gadget apart in an attempt to repair it, and after an eternity spent reassembling the stupid thing, it still doesn’t work? Do you despair? Do you repeat the process again and again, torturing yourself on the project until your fingers bleed, your tools break, and your spirit withers? Not me. I destroy the little menace, getting my money’s worth of enjoyment by taking a much larger and heavier object and applying it with great force, producing a satisfying explosion of little airborne parts soaring every which way across the room.

Across the ocean, the Mail Online discusses a study which finds that people who are similarly inept are in good, albeit younger, company. The study found that over half of young people are unable to maintain their homes. A full 50 percent do not know how to rewire an electrical plug, while over half will not attempt to put up wallpaper, never mind try something like “bleeding a radiator” (didn’t they use to do that to people?). And when they do attempt repairs, it gets worse:

The study also found that when the under-35s do attempt to do a job themselves and it goes wrong, it costs nearly three times as much to fix as problems caused by other age groups. The average cost of putting right a botched DIY job carried out by someone under 35 is £2,498, compared with around £838 for those aged over 45.

So domestic and mechanical ineptitude is partly an age issue, but there must be more to it than that, yes? My brother in law literally built my Mother’s house after a drunk driver plowed into the living room of the previous house, and he did an unbelievable job. It would have been just a big smoking crater if I had tried that.

I’m not completely useless, however. Thanks to the military, I’ll do just fine in the field thank you very much. Survival and combat skills in the desert or jungle? No problem. I can field strip an M-60 like nobody’s business and deal with just about any situation that arises on the road in or around the 18 wheeler. But ask me to wire something in the house, install flooring, or do anything with plumbing and I’ll be as out of place as Tim Geithner at a tax audit or Bill Clinton under oath. Maybe it’s because I don’t wear my pants low enough.

Or maybe it stems in part from an acute lack of curiosity about these things during my formative years, and a distinct lack of patience with all things mechanical that persists to this day. On the negative side, this admittedly puts people like me at the mercy of experts and professionals when something goes wrong. On the other hand, I never fail to get my money’s worth of satisfaction out of any object I purchase.

Does this seemingly creeping ineptitude on the part of young people signal a bigger problem, or is it an assist to the professional fix-it people? Is there a need for more formal courses in this kind of thing, or should we just hide the large hammers?

In what can only be the least amusing practical joke of the year, Hezbollah's PR shop apparently seized control of Fareed Zakaria's teleprompter:

And now for the "Last Look." With all the talk about places of worship and where they do and don't belong, I wanted you to see this. This is the Magen Abraham synagogue. It's not in Miami. It's not in Tel Aviv. It's in Beirut. That's right, Beirut, Lebanon.

The synagogue is just now emerging from a painstaking restoration project. When the repairs began over a year ago, the temple was literally a shell of its former self. So why did this nation, often teetering on the brink of religious hostilities and hostilities with Israel, restore a Jewish house of worship? To show that Lebanon is an open and tolerant country.

And indeed, the project is said to have found support in many parts of the community, not just from the few remaining Jews there, but also Christians and Muslims and Hezbollah. Yes, Hezbollah -- the one that the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Hezbollah's view on the renovation goes like this. "We respect divine religions, including the Jewish religion. The problem is with Israel's occupation of Arab lands ... not with the Jews." Food for thought. Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week. Stay tuned for "Reliable Sources."

"Arab lands," if Hassan Nasrallah is reliable enough a source for you, include all of Israel. Food for thought.

(via Noah Pollak)

In order to get rich, you have to know how to "sell high." But you also have to do another thing first, and that's "buy low." People often forget that part, and end up buying high and hoping to sell higher.

Buying low is a bullish thing to do. But it's also a risky thing to do, too. And with a country and an economy in a justifiably sour mood, people aren't taking the risks they used to.

So what's the case for optimism? Over at a fine economics blog, Calafia Beach Pundit (hat tip: Mark Perry) has put together an immensely cheering collection of 20 bullish charts. Here's his take:

Pessimism is rampant, and most of the articles and commentaries I see have some doom-and-gloom flavor to them; indeed, many pundits are already claiming to see a double-dip recession either in progress or as imminent. I think the "conservative" bull case—that the economy is growing at a sub-par trend rate of 3-4%, which will leave the unemployment rate uncomfortably high for some time to come—is not getting its fair share of the news.

And here are two of my favorite charts from his excellent post -- though I really suggest you click over there and see them all.Here's one for US Industrial Production from 1997:

And here's another one, the HARPEX Shipping Index, which I love because I'm a container ship groupie:

Pessimism is easy. Optimism requires maintenance. And being bullish means putting down some money. How bullish are you?

The British Parliament does it, why can't we? Rob and Peter (Lileks is at the Minnesota State Fair this week) answer your questions -- when Peter is not answering his wife's phone -- and later, talk to author, columnist, and all around smart guy Shelby Steele. He's got some fascinating insights about Obama and what the future may hold for him, and us.

And now, let's hit the links:

• The Krugman in Wonderland blog is here.
• Lileks' coverage of the Minnesota State Fair. His own blog is a must read.
• Peter's wife is an Animist?
• While you were watching Jersey Shore, Peter was reading Dostoevsky's Devils.
• Shelby Steele's A Bound Man.
• George H.W. Bush checks the time during a debate.
• The transcript of Barak Obama's immigration speech.
• Rob's post on the Democratic Party's Power Point presentation.
• Fox News pundit Juan Williams gets emotional on election night 2008.
• The Ricochet debate on net neutrality is here.
• Harry Shearer on IMDB.
• The floorwalker from The Jack Benny Show.

Music from this week's episode:

• Wake Up by Arcade Fire
• Don't Ask Me Questions by Graham Parker & The Rumour

Play this week's episode. Subscribe here. Direct link to the audio file.

Of all the things that the media does that make me laugh, the faux "fact check" is my favorite. I actually laughed out loud when I read the Associated Press' fact check on the Park 51 mosque. It began:

A New York imam and his proposed mosque near ground zero are being demonized by political candidates — mostly Republicans — despite the fact that Islam is already very much a part of the World Trade Center neighborhood. And that Muslims pray inside the Pentagon, too, less than 80 feet from where terrorists attacked.

As I wrote elsewhere . . . when composing something that you’re trying to pass off as an independent judgment of “facts,” lay off the non sequitirs, politicking, loaded phrases, red herrings and unsubstantiated statements.

The St. Petersburg Times PolitiFact had another howler this week. Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner, where my husband works, had written:

"Obama’s stimulus, passed in his first month in office, will cost more than the entire Iraq War -- more than $100 billion more."

Is this not true? Well, the PolitiFact machine cycles out paragraph after paragraph after paragraph explaining that there is a lot to consider here. They concede that the "facts" and "data" support Tapscott but they quote other people saying that maybe the numbers offered by official government sources don't tell the whole story. Now, they don't wonder whether the stimulus numbers are correct -- those apparently come from the hand of God. But the other numbers could, conceivably, undercount the full cost.

The final verdict? "Barely true."

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Barely true. That's awesome. So it is true . . . but only barely. That was a close one.

I wonder if the fact checker judged his wife only "barely pregnant" when she provided him with proof.