The Gulf Oil Spill, according to lots of sources, isn't quite the disaster we were all promised. From the Miami Herald, about Mississippi:

The best-case scenario for Mississippi and the region is that once BP's busted well is plugged, the warm waters and bacteria of the Gulf will dispose of the oil quickly, breaking it into its main components of carbon and water, and normal life and commerce on the Coast can resume.

Gov. Haley Barbour, and the chiefs of the state's two main environmental agencies — the Departments of Marine Resources and Environmental Quality — have proposed that this natural cleanup, along with some relatively minor scouring of tar off the beaches by BP workers, can be handled in a matter of weeks or a few months, not years.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

even for those who use past experience to foresee the Gulf's recovery, it's a cautious optimism.

"There's going to be a big damage-assessment study of this spill over the next 10 years," says LSU's Overton. "But if my assessment is close to right, it means our environment will come back fairly quickly and people's lifestyles will not be wiped out, that they'll be able to make a living off the northern Gulf and enjoy the recreational benefits of this body of water. We'll have to see."

So what's been the biggest damage? Looks like tourism. In a great column by Paul Mulshine from the Newark Star-Ledger:

A simple apology would have been in order.

I’m talking about President Obama’s visit to the Gulf Coast over the weekend. Obama was a co-conspirator in the effort to hype the BP oil disaster out of all proportion. The effects of that spill were supposed to linger for years. But it’s already gone without a trace, or at least a trace visible to me as I visited the coast in two states...

There was not the slightest indication the Gulf has just gone through what the president termed “the greatest environmental disaster in American history.”

Far more economic damage was done by the alarmism than by the oil, several merchants told me. At a surf shop called Blonde John’s, owner John McElroy, who was appropriately blonde, blamed the media for driving the tourists away.

“The media sacrificed us, man,” McElroy said. “Everybody wants to focus on the negative. We only had one bad week of it.”

And then there's this, from Time Magazine. Brace yourself:

The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

Well, Limbaugh has a point.

Limbaugh has a point? For Time Magazine, that's close to an unconditional surrender.

Richard is right on a universe of issues here. It is a target rich environment. Let me add a few points, beyond noting that the problem of collusion between parties in litigation is an equally big problem when it comes to class actions against the government, where plaintiffs sue school districts, claiming insufficient resources, they settle, a court blesses it, all with the aim taking money from the state to fund their institutions without going through the normal budgetary process. Another reason why several states are being run into the fiscal ground.

But I digress. A few additional thoughts.

1. If Judge Walker thinks that the Prop 8 defenders have no standing to appeal, he should not have found that they had a sufficient "interest" to intervene at trial, and certainly not to do anything so important as serve as the main defenders of the law in a federal court. If the pro-Prop 8 parties are the wrong appellants, then they were the wrong defendants. If Walker was wrong on this, he could be reversed and the case sent back to his courtroom, where the state could change its mind -- this would be after the November elections -- and put on a defense. This could be another example where Walker over-extended himself and gives the appeals court the ground to reverse. If Republicans win either the Governor's or Attorney General's elections, and Walker is reversed on this point on appeal, they could then come in and defend.

2. The CA governor's election could interact in significant ways with the Prop 8 case. The reason Walker can make this standing call is because neither Schwarzenegger nor Jerry Brown (as attorney general) will defend the law in court. It is difficult to see how this is consistent with Brown's duty under the California constitution to enforce the law. He could claim, as did San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, that he has a higher duty to the U.S. Constitution. U.S. Solicitors General sometimes face this question when they defend a federal law before the Supreme Court, but they will almost always defend the law even if its constitutionality is doubtful (they usually require the law to be obviously unconstitutional if they won't defend). But there is a provision in the California constitution which requires state officials to defend the law unless an appellate court has held it unconstitutional. It was on this ground that the California Supreme Court reversed Newsom's policy to allow gay marriages. So Whitman could argue, regardless of anyone's position on gay marriage, that Jerry Brown isn't even doing the job he has, not to mention the one that he wants next. At the very least, Brown should explain why he thinks gay marriage is so obviously required by the U.S. Constitution.

3. The whole point of the initiative, thanks to its progressive progenitors, is to enact legislation when the government is captured by special interests that are blocking reform. So it is likely that cases would arise where elected officials would refuse to defend initiatives. Suppose, for example, that an initiative called for caps on government salaries and pensions or term limits -- officials out of their self interest might not want to defend the law. California law, I believe, permits the groups that gathered the signatures and campaigned for an initiative to defend it. They might actually be the groups that are "injured in fact" within conventional standing analysis, rather than the state officials. The main concerns of standing are, as Richard says, to make sure that the parties are actually harmed and have an interest in pursuing the case robustly, to make sure that it is a real controversy and not a hypothetical question, and to make sure that the courts do not become roving inspectors general simply called on to nitpick on every government decision. Here, no one doubts that the plaintiffs have standing, so these concerns are not at issue when it is the defendants who are appealing.

Seven weeks ago, I reported on Heritage Action for America's effort to convince House members to sign onto a discharge petition forcing a floor vote to repeal the entire tottering edifice that is Obamacare.

How are we doing?

96 percent of House Republicans have signed Discharge Petition #11. Yet, not one Democrat has done so, including the 34 Dems who voted against Obamacare's passage. Heritage Action CEO Mike Needham comments in the Daily Caller:

There are two explanations as to why no Democrats have signed the discharge petition. They may have genuinely changed their mind on the merits of Obamacare and now support the law. If this is the case, they owe it to their constituents to say so and explain what new information caused them to change their position.

Alternatively, they have always supported Obamacare, but publicly opposed the measure to avoid political pain. Now, they are afraid of having another health care debate as they are aware the American people overwhelmingly oppose Obamacare. This means that they are implicitly endorsing the government’s takeover of the health care industry – 1/6th of the United States economy – which they claim to oppose. This scenario is why so many Americans are cynical about Washington.

Seems like the "Blue Dog" should be renamed the "Chameleon." It's good to have a bright-line difference between the two parties again.

Wow, it's good to be home.

"In its order for an expedited appeal," Elizabeth Wurtzel notes, "the Ninth Circuit panel has asked the proponents of Proposition 8 to brief them on the issue of standing in their arguments." Earlier in the same article, she suggests that the "appeal of Judge Walker’s decision may be defeated before the issues are even examined—it might be dismissed for lack of standing—and the litigation may simply end in California."

The levels of irony in this standing issue are so numerous that it is difficult to sort them out. The usual view on standing is that with respect to discrete injuries to particular persons, only those persons can sue, not others who wish to vindicate some abstract claim. The textbook case is that if A assaults B, C cannot bring suit for that harm because we know who should have control over the case.

The difficulties with standing (all of which are a function of unwise constitutional interpretation) have applied that same requirement for discrete injury in cases where there are no discrete injuries, ie taxpayer suits against illegal action, where it leads to the odd result that massive structural harms are not within the power of the court to redress. The usual rationale for this is that no one has sufficient interest to maintain these suits, which therefore will be poorly prosecuted, which seems just absurd in cases like the present where the emotional and symbolic content are both so high.

At this point, the standard application of the rules says that for the purposes of appeal only those who were parties to the original case may sue, and that means that the amicus parties who defended the statute when the state took over cannot sue under these rules.

But this rule presupposes that the actual party in interest is not in league with the party on the opposite side. Clearly someone should be allowed to appeal, and I think that one of two approaches are relevant. First, the state files the appeal and announces that it will allow to be pursued by the same parties who did the trial. If that accommodation worked at one level, it should work at the second. Alternatively, Judge Walker should on a nunc pro tunc (now for then) basis make the defenders of Prop 8 parties to the litigation so that they should be able to bring the appeal. What is unconscionable is to allow collusive action by parties on opposite sides of the litigation to block and appeal when there is no honest settlement of the underlying differences.

Last week I sat down for an Uncommon Knowledge interview with Peter Robinson during which he asked what possessed me to become a Republican in 1968, when the South was still solidly Democratic.

My oldest brother came home from the Army a Goldwater Republican in 1965, and in spring of 1968, he ran for mayor of Yazoo City, Mississippi. He quit his job at the bank, and because the Republicans didn’t even have a line on the ballot, he had to run as an Independent. We had to get a petition going so that he could make it on the ballot. I thoroughly enjoyed that experience, so I dropped out of Ole Miss the fall of my senior year to go work on the Nixon presidential campaign.

To be a Republican in Mississippi in 1968, you really had to take a long view! The first time I ever saw a poll was during the 1968 campaign. That year, six percent of Mississippians identified themselves as Republicans – six percent! Nixon didn’t do well in Mississippi that year because George Wallace, the third party candidate, was hugely popular in the South. But by the 1972 elections, Mississippi represented the state with the highest percentage of its vote going to Nixon. More importantly, the 1972 elections resulted in the election of two young Republican Congressmen: Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who both became giants in the Senate. Today, we not only have a Republican governor, but seven of our eight state elected officials are Republicans, as are both of our United States Senators.

After interviewing Haley Barbour for Uncommon Knowledge last Friday, I joined him for 90 minutes of freewheeling conversation with a few Hoover fellows, including former Secretary of State George Shultz. (Mr. Shultz is also a former Secretary of the Treasury, a former Secretary of Labor, and a former Director of the Office of Management and the Budget. If anyone else has ever occupied four Cabinet positions, I’m unaware of him.) Gov. Barbour laid out his expectations for November—in brief, Republicans will win, big—then allowed that his chief worry now concerns the two-and-three-quarters months between election day this November and the day in January when the new members of Congress will take their oaths of office.

“The Democrats’ll call a special session,” Gov. Barbour said—I’m quoting him from memory. “And they’re going to pass their whole doggoned wish list, including card check, and send the legislation down to the White House. The President’ll be standing by with the cap already off his signature pen.”

For Democrats in Congress, everyone agreed, there would be little to lose. The leadership—Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, to name two—represent safe seats. Their constituents will re-elect them in 2012 no matter how thoroughly they undermine the Republic in the meantime. Others—perhaps, with any luck, Harry Reid—will already have lost their seats. Voting for the rest of the liberal agenda will enable to them to feel righteous and defiant while costing them nothing. But for the President? What sense could it possibly make for Barack Obama to sign a raft of liberal legislation, several of us asked, when he’ll be facing re-election in two years?

“Mr. Obama,” Gov. Barbour replied, “is a true believer.”

Shelby Steele concurred. (Dr. Steele has been engaged in a close study of Barack Obama ever since he began research for his 2008 book about Obama, A Bound Man.) “Barack has said he wants to be transformational. My sense is that he’d rather sign liberal bills into law than serve a second term.”

I spent the weekend having a lot of trouble getting used to that thought. Then today, nosing around on the Internet, I found this. Jeepers. For the last six months, Rob has been trying to tell us that Hillary Clinton will resign as Secretary of State to challenge Obama for the 2012 Democratic nomination, and for the last six months I’ve been telling Rob that he’s crazy. Maybe we’re both wrong. Maybe Obama will give Hillary the nomination.

Barack Obama, a one-term president—by his own choice?

What think?

It can't be said enough: when taxes are cut, money isn't being 'given' to anyone. Money isn't 'going back' to anyone. It's not being returned. It's staying with those whose property it is. In a world where commentators with national platforms continue to write as if all property is the state's, that's a point that fans of liberty ought not be afraid to make again and again.

(via Tim Carney)

When the workers own the means of production, as the saying goes, a magnificent workers' paradise will unfold.

Depending on whom you ask, the United Auto Workers union owns about 39% of General Motors. That, coupled with the Obama administration's stake of about 50%, gives it a major voice in the direction of the company.

A glorious day for the working man, right? Not so fast. From the truly wonderful World Socialist Web Site:

Workers at a General Motors stamping plant in Indianapolis, Indiana chased United Auto Workers executives out of a union meeting Sunday, after the UAW demanded workers accept a contract that would cut their wages in half.As soon as three UAW International representatives took the podium, they were met with boos and shouts of opposition from many of the 631 workers currently employed at the plant. The officials, attempting to speak at the only informational meeting on the proposed contract changes, were forced out within minutes of taking the floor.The incident once again exposes the immense class divide between workers and union officials, who are working actively with the auto companies to drive down wages and eliminate benefits.

On the one hand, it's deliciously fun to watch the UAW fatcats get it from their own rank and file, and have to learn that running a company and creating shareholder value is what it's all about. But on the other hand....

No, wait. There isn't an other hand. It's just fun, and that's that.

Just got back from a family vacation, and that meant taking the interstate. That's what a Dad does: load everyone in the back, pack the trunk, gas up, find the onramp and cruise uninterrupted until kidneys do their work or stomachs growl - then pull off, get gas, slake needs, void bladders, and blam! Back on the road. It gets you there, and sometimes the scenery's nice; half the time you're dealing with a driver who can't judge speed and distance, and doesn't realize you are, in fact, in process of passing someone else, you're just not going to go all Craig Breedlove to do it. You have tailgaters, left-lane prissy-pokers who are doing the speed limit, thank you, and have no interest in letting you driving one MPH faster than you should. It's a great American achievement, the interstate highway system. I avoid it if I can.

I'd rather take the old highways. They don't skirt small towns, they plow right through them. You stop at a light, you see things. You add an hour to your trip, but you learn about where you've been. Taking the interstate is almost like flying. Almost: you could pull off on any exit if you like, slow down, find a town, poke around, look at the old buildings, wonder about the names up on the crumbling brick cornices, imagine the main street on Decoration Day when everyone turned out for the parade. But you don't. Keep going, the Interstate says. It’s about arrival, not travel.

My father has driven enormous trucks for many years - 83, and he can still parallel-park a double tanker, and yes, he has his license - so he doesn't quite get the allure of the back roads. For him the constant thrum of the flat straight road is a Zen joy. Maybe after a few hours he'd turn on Willie's Place channel on the satellite radio. He sees these trips in terms I'm sure Dave Carter knows: the amateur reads the road in intervals of hours, the pro paces himself differently, thinks in terms of states. Eight hours for a civilian is a long, long drive, but I imagine the professional rig-wrangler thinks we'd all be content to spend eight hours sitting at our desk, and where are when when the work day's done? Same damned place.

Maybe it’s because I’m older. Everyone who took a long spontaneous road trip in college knows the gypsy joy you feel when you pull off the road at the end of the day at some all-night joint where the sign buzzes high ahead, the traffic hums in the distance, and you know when you walk inside there will be the smell of french fries and coffee, and there will be guys at the counter with their hands folded as if in prayer, with a cigarette idling between the knuckles.

Or so it was when I did the long drives. As I said, now it's back roads if possible. But on yesterday's interstate jaunt, I noted two things:

1. The number of trucks with patriotic themes - bumperstickers, elaborate paintings of Mt. Rushmore, eagles, flags. LAND THAT WE LOVE said one, splashed on the cab. One reefer had a Bible verse on the back, telling us to do everything we do with love. I hate to presume about the politics of the driver, but I'd guess they're not the sort if favor of cap and trade.

2. Saw a sign that told me a construction project was funded by the Recovery Act. Hey, great. But who funded it before? The Magic Concrete Fairies? Taxpayers, of course. They don't get a sign. But when we need to be reminded that the Special Extra Life-Enhancing All-Solving Stimulus had a hand, well, up go the blaze-orange announcements.

Finally: we made one stop to use restroom, and didn't need any gas or anything else. I bought some peanuts. It's one of those things you learn when your family's in the business. You walk into their store, you use their bathroom, their water, their soap, their towels - then you walk past the inventory, which is usually about $100K worth of stuff they have to carry in case you want Pop Tarts and a comb? Shake loose a buck to say thanks.

One of the left's best tricks, in my opinion - and one the right falls for again and again - is demonizing perfectly reasonable actions and opinions by giving them sinister names. A good example is the feminist complaint that men "objectify women," when they admire their beauty. This didn't catch on over the long term for the same reason coffee health scares never catch on - because no one's going to give it up. A more successful example is "racial profiling." I'm sorry, but if crimes of some kind are primarily being committed by a certain race, the proper name for "racial profiling," is "good police work."

But the most dangerous one on the market right now--being bruited about especially in the Ground Zero Mosque affair--is "Islamophobia." The dictionary defines "phobia" as an irrational fear. There is nothing irrational about being afraid of a religion currently cancerous with violence, bigotry and triumphalism. Instead of trying to defend ourselves against the charge, we ought to challenge the phrase itself wherever it occurs. It's not a condemnation of all Muslims to say that Islam has a major problem adjusting to a world of liberty and multi-culturalism. It's just the simple truth.

Remember back in June, when China revalued its currency? It was hailed as a subtle victory for the Obama administration, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner especially.

Americans have long been obsessed with the dollar-renminbi (RMB) rate of exchange. The strong RMB -- propped up by Chinese government support -- is blamed for our lousy trade deficit with China, a failing American industrial and manufacturing economy, and pretty much every other economic problem we can find.

Not so fast, says Yiannis Mostrous in InvestingDaily:

On the political front the protectionists in the US can declare victory even though they know that, economically, their arguments about the RMB and its impact on the US economy are shaky at best. Recall, for instance, that from 2000 to 2004, when Chinese export prices were falling by around 1 percent a year, inflation in the US for corresponding goods (i.e. apparel, personal care products, sporting goods, toys and audio/video products) was also falling by 1.2 percent. But when Chinese export prices started rising between 2005 and 2008, at a rate of around 3 percent year over year, the corresponding inflation in the US fell around 0.7 percent.

This may sound trivial. But although China exports represent around 60 percent of these goods in the US, the domestic situation in that country doesn’t have any real impact on the US economy--at least not a negative one. The reason, of course, is that more than 70 percent of the final prices US consumers pay for these products is attributable to costs associated with shipping, advertising, rents, profits margins, sale costs and the like. Chinese producers have no material cost contribution to speak of.

It doesn’t matter how much wages will rise in China, or how much stronger the RMB will be in the next five years. The big costs are to be found after the products leave the Chinese factories, and therefore the eventual “haircut” will need to take place in the US in terms of money charged for services once the goods reach the US coasts.

And in any case, it doesn't look like the Chinese were serious about revaluing their currency. The RMB has actually fallen since June. And the timing couldn't be worse.

Writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in The Telegraph:

Tension between the US and China is escalating on several fronts. China has restricted exports of rare earth minerals by more than 70pc in the second half of this year, cutting off the world supply. China produces 97pc of these minerals, used in a wide range of high-tech industries, from hybrid engines to computers, mobile phones, radar, navigation and precision-guided weapons.

The US is to conduct naval manoeuvres with Vietnam in the South China Sea in response to live fire exercises by China, which has stepped up its claims to total sovereignty over a region disputed by a ring of countries. The US is also conducting manoeuvres with South Korea, prompting accusations of "gunboat diplomacy" in the Chinese media.

In a trade and currency and saber-rattling war between the United States and China, who do you think is going to win? Can you say duí bu qï?

It's simple, really, and the writers at Mad Men are by a long shot not the first to put it to words. War can't go on forever, and neither can peace, and the great balancing act is a peace that doesn't soften too much, but has mellowed well enough -- ripened -- so as to be round and full, not bitter and hard. Because this is still a show (at least in part) about men, I can't resist putting the paradox of peace into masculine terms. How does a man fight well? What does it mean to fight well? Not in a battle or even an army, but as a man who must earn a living, a man who is (or was, at least) a head of household? What is the peace dividend? Retirement? That can't be right.

It isn't the same question as happiness, which is a state of mind. Peace is I suppose something susceptible of being called a state of mind, too, but peace is physical in a way happiness isn't. Peace is not the absence of war, but if the absence of war or violence and turmoil isn't sufficient for peace, it sure seems necessary. One can be happy at war or at peace. One can be bored at war or at peace. The paradox of peace is that you want your peace to outlast you, even though, when it becomes someone else's, it has to stop being yours alone. Historical memory -- the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, 9/11, on and on -- is a great and powerful thing. But the physical facts of peace make the gravity of war unreal. Last year I walked down a hallway by the food court in Georgetown and Undergrad A said to Undergrad B "I don't even know why we celebrate Armistice Day. World War One was like a million years ago." (+1 for knowing what Armistice Day means, -1 for saying 'celebrate'.) It's like macaroni salad: how long can it keep in the sun? How can a catastrophe live on in a culture as a potted plant?

Teaching the facts is important, but teaching the facts won't do. There must be a deep, deep fabric woven from wartime past out and into peacetime, person to person, generation to generation, even when those who knew firsthand and so didn't have to remember feel very much like not sharing. But maybe above all a culture has to reserve in peaceful times a poetic sense of war. Eyes must light up when these things are told, even in spite of the horror. The imagination must be seized. Tonight, as the rival exec spontaneously performed the motorcycle ad he pitched his colleagues, we saw the way advertising had come to seize imaginations: commerce became our muse, and products our window onto poetry. How can a peace be a -- well, manly peace, if war stories fail to catch that same sparkle and gleam?

Yet we don't want to be bloodthirsty, and we're not a nation of aggressors. And man by man we still incline more toward fatherhood as the house of manliness than combative bachelorhood. Which is why fighting for freedom helps, a bit, to unravel the paradox of peace. What keeps the gleam in the American eye is not that we fight but why.

If your state is like mine, local National Educational Association apparatchiks frame every public school discussion in terms of inputs: the amount of tax money being doled out for public school instruction on a per pupil basis. Everyone outside of New York – the funding “winner” at $17,173 per head in 2008 – is lectured endlessly about how underfunded the local schools are relative to, well, New York.

But where does the money actually go?

Tonight, Matt Drudge is highlighting one project soaking up some of the educational loose change rattling around my bankrupt state: Next month’s opening in LA of the nation’s costliest school, a $578 million state-of-the-art structure housing 1,700 K through 12 students.

Let’s analyze the economics using the NEA’s preferred formula. $578 million divided by 1,700 students yields a cool $340,000 per student. Ah, but I’m being unfair since many students will use the facility over time. Fine. Let’s assume that the structure survives twenty years of wear-and-tear without a dime of taxpayer-funded repair or renovation. The adjusted cost per pupil per year drops to a New York-style $17,000. But this “investment” covers only the empty building. Anything educational is extra.

And the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools isn't exactly a one-off for the teacher-firing, class-size-increasing LA Unified School District.

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation's costliest — the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.

The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation's second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.

It is evident that public school outputs in California are poor -- only 63 percent of high school students graduate, despite the gold-plated buildings. Nevertheless, the NEA argues that $9,863 per pupil per year is too little to afford more than a Zimbabwe-level education.

Basic arithmetic points to a serious flaw in the "aren't we stingy" argument. Twenty students carry $197,000 in annual spending into an average California classroom. Since their teacher earned approximately $64,424 in 2007, this leaves only $133,000 for rent, supplies and administrative support. You’ve gotta love a business that can’t get by on a 66 percent overhead rate.

Why can't school officials eschew real estate development, cut overhead, fund academic programs and hire great teachers? Why can't most of the line items in California's monstrous education budget be zeroed out in favor of per pupil block grants to principals and local school boards?

My head hurts.

Yesterday the high school football team held its first scrimmage. I sat in the stands with friends—right next to Pitch and just in front of Ellie, and all three of our boys had been in school together since kindergarten. The sky was cloudless, with that particular look of pale, glowing luminescence specific, in my experience, to California. My son? After a summer during which he had worked out twice a day, dropping ten pounds, taking an eighth of a second off his time in the forty, and adding five inches to his vertical jump, my son was looking pretty good out there. I don’t know why—maybe because I’d overheard someone describe the weather as “paradise”—but for a moment my mind engaged in a brief speculation about heaven. And do you know what I discovered? That I couldn’t imagine—literally, I simply could not imagine—any way in which heaven could improve on that very moment.

The thought has no bearing on politics, history, or culture. I know. But every so often—and particularly on the last real summer weekend (school starts on Tuesday) there’s no harm in pausing to note the sweetness of American life.

A moment ago, come to think of it, Bill McGurn and I exchanged emails. Returning by train to New Jersey after a family vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Bill was in much the same mood I’m in. “Very old-fashioned,” Bill wrote. “Hardly spent any money, save for a game of putt-putt one day and a few ice creams. Just a lot of beach time….I do like going out at the end of the day and enjoying the waning sun.”

If anyone else is in the mood to offer a postcard, so to speak, from the summer of 2010, I'm sure in the mood to read it.

So I’m watching Aftermath: Population Zero on the National Geographic Channel Sunday afternoon (okay, so my life isn’t all that exciting), which asks the question: what would happen if the entire human race simply vanished one day? Well, it turns out things would be pretty rough on domesticated animals and on the ecosystem as a whole, primarily as the result of nuclear plants around the world exploding and releasing radiation without man to, uh, man them.

Happily, though, the earth would heal quickly, plantlife would flourish without the pollution we nasty humans create, and there would be a heaven on earth. So there we have the problem. It’s us. The sooner we leave the better. I commend the good folks at the National Geographic Channel for their willingness to celebrate a world in which their ratings would take a severe hit.

More from Pat Sajak

Today the Presidency - Tomorrow the World!

Ground Zero Posturing

The Bill of Rights, 2010 Style

The taxi's coming to take me to the airport in about three hours. I just woke up with a start, thinking that I'd overslept, and now I'm afraid to go back to sleep for fear that I will. I'm all packed, and it's the middle of the night, so Ricochet buddies, would you please help keep me awake for the next few hours?

I'll give you something to start with. This reminded me of our earlier conversation about the critical things we just don't notice when we're focussing on something else.

I posted a link to our conversation about whether Islam itself is the enemy to my Facebook page. Some of my friends here in Istanbul (who are Moslems, and, as the word "friend" suggests, not my enemy) weighed in with responses that I think confirm my assertion that the Islamic world is not monolithic. In particular, my friend Babür left a long, thoughtful response, which I'll reproduce in full. (I've told my Facebook friends that anything they say on my page is on-the-record, and I've told Babür this in particular, so I'm sure he won't mind):

As a practicing muslim, and as somebody who's undertaken some Islamic studies, I might have a say for the closing remarks of this article:

-To decide whether Islam INSTITUTIONALLY embraces terrorism or not, the exact description and scope of “GENUINE” Islamic beliefs should be concretized first of all,

-I agree with the fact that, implementations of Islam are, unfortunately, as many as the number of muslims,

-Such differentiation upon "personal perceptions" is the misfortune of any mainstream & globalised religion,

-However, this differentiation occurs only in the practical level: the limits of Islamic beliefs - the theory, is all well defined,

-There is only one genuine, unique and clear-cut definition of Islamic beliefs, which is established back in 632 A.D., preserved with a sound application of METHODOLOGY (centuries before the European version of methodology was developed), and has survived so far,

-This set of beliefs is called "Sunnah", and its followers "Sunnis",

-In terms of daily religious activities, the Sunnah have several sub-categories, the practical sects / "MEZHEB"s; which provide Sunnis with a somehow wide range of options to choose from,

-The practical mezhebs are not at conflict with one another at all; one can pray according to "hanafi" mezheb, fast according to "shafi" mezheb, and yet, make his/her donations according to "maliki" mezheb, etc.: the Prophet (sav) has fulfilled his daily actions compatibly with all mezhebs,

-BUT THEN.. where do we locate the "Shia" concept?

-Clearly speaking, the modern Islamic world is divided into some 75 THEORETICAL mezhebs, most of which fall under the "Shia" category,

-The word "Shia" has its roots in the expression "Gulat-i Shia li Ali b. Ebi Talib", meaning "helpers of Ali b. Ebi Talib",

-Ali, the beloved cousin of Prophet and one of the capital masters of muslims - either Shia or Sunnis, has experienced a major political chaos near the end of his life, and naturally, a circle of helpers / political suppliers formed around him,

-The historical development, and thus, main BELIEF categories of these helpers, the Shia, has 4 main phases:

(1) those who favor Ali over Osman as a caliph (ONLY a political distinction),

(2) those who favor Ali over Abu Bakr and Omar as well (a FAR-FETCHED, but still political distinction),

(3) those who favor Ali over Prophet (sav) (the beginning point of BLASPHEMY),

(4) those who favor Ali over God (an EXTREME point of blasphemy).

-The last two phases emerged nearly a century after the death of the Prophet (sav); SO, DURING THE FIRST CENTURY OF ISLAM, THERE WAS NO DISTINCTION OF BELIEFS, BUT ONLY POLITICAL VIEWS,

-Apart from the Shia, some extremist sects also arose throughout the history, like Batinis, Ismailis, Durzis, etc., who are definitely non-muslims,

-So, in terms of beliefs, the modern Islamic world can be divided into three parts: (1) Sunnis, the unique believers, (2) non-Sunnis, but believers, (3) non-Sunnis and non-believers,

-Haven said all this..

How does genuine Islam, the Sunnah, approach terrorism?

Islam ABSOLUTELY forbids even the slightest offense against individuals (either women or men, the young or the old, etc.) who has not attacked Islam and/or muslims in a military fashion; even, military personnel figthing against Islam and/or muslims who ask for mercy during a full scale battle, should not be touched.

-This rule is very, very clear:

The first two warfare of Islamic history, The Battle of Badr and The Battle of Uhud, were of vital importance for the survival of the early Islamic society and thus, the entire religion.

EVEN DURING THOSE WARFARE, the Prophet (sav) applied the above principle with utmost certainty..

-A similar example is The Conquer of Mecca, where, the Prophet (sav) showed TOTAL mercy (involving the entire enemy army), after being oppressed, humiliated, and even subject to genocide for two decades..

-This is the REAL Islamic approach. Any sincere muslim IS OBLIGED TO oppose terrorism, suicide bombing, 9/11 attacks, El Qaeda, etc.

-The knowledge requirement standards enough to make a decree, or “ICTIHAD” were stated by the Prophet (sav) himself. Those fulfilling the standards, the “MUCTEHID”s can alone authorize the Islamic approach to any situation.

-Real muslims do not care about Imam Whatsoever, etc. has said, unless those so-called, often self-declared Imams measure up to be a muctehid..

I later left this comment:

I've just walked down a street filled literally with thousands of Moslems of exactly the kind many people are seriously arguing do not exist. I saw them with my own eyes, as I have every day for the past five years. With so many other questions in the world, why waste time debating this? Book a ticket to Istanbul, spend an afternoon here, have a lovely time, drink some tea, meet friendly, tolerant, warm, welcoming Moslems (mostly), and see for yourself. They exist! They're my neighbors and my friends! Babür, is there anyone at our gym, for example, who would not describe himself as a Moslem? Would any member of our gym endorse terrorism, honor killing, forcing me to wear the hijab, or subjecting me to a dhimmi tax? The idea is so absurd it's beyond discussion -- and yet we're discussing it.

Theo Spark found the conversation sufficiently interesting to link to it in his blog. He described the discussion as a "raging debate." I notice that his post has been picked up at Right Wing News. So now this chat among my friends is a raging and somewhat public debate, I guess.

The odd thing is that the "raging debate" is about whether moderate Moslems exist. That they do is a proposition so easily verifiable that I don't even have to leave my apartment to do it. I can just look out the window.

But no one even noticed the snake pit of controversy embedded in Babür's claim that Shi'a Islam is a heresy.

Now, as people who know the Islamic world well will tell you, that is--what is it Andrew Sullivan calls it?--the money quote. You just watch and see how much more blood is yet to be spilled over that claim.

And no one even noticed it--their attention was elsewhere.

More from Claire Berlinski

Don't Be Depressed By the GZM Debate

Moderate Islam: A Definition

Arguments Good and Bad: the GZM, Zoning Law, and the Bush Doctrine

Let's Not Convince the World's Muslims We're Out to Destroy Islam

In reading this account, I do not have the benefit of the full decisions, but I did go back to read the provisions of the Criminal Code that should be relevant to the matter of the charged Somali pirates. I set them out below. The materials quoted make reference to section § 1651 which tracks the constitutional authorization given to Congress, which under Article I has the power “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations.” Reading that section, however does not seem to exhaust the scope of criminality for which punishment could be authorized. It would be odd in the extreme if the Constitutional provision were read in such a fashion to make it impossible to declare attempted piracy a crime, when attempted murder surely is a crime. And so too with making criminal aiding and abetting, or conspiracy to commit piracy and the like. Indeed, a further look at the code contains section 1653, which makes “cruising against the vessels and property” of the United States a crime, and if so, it is odd, to say the least that criminal charges were not put forward on those grounds in this case, or if put forward did not prevail. “Cruising around” seems to describe the behavior of these pirates to a tee.

The larger question in one sense, however, is whether the only sanctions that can be brought against pirates are those of the criminal law. I am no expert on the subject, but my understanding is similar to John’s, which is that pirates can be rooted out at any time and any place that they can be caught. They are regarded as universal outlaws who enjoy the protection of no sovereign. The United States is not bound to so treat them, but may. The question is whether that course of conduct is wise, which it may well be given the havoc that these pirates wreak in the shipping lanes.

That I have little confidence in my own judgment about what should have been done is neither here nor there. That I have little confidence in the judgment of President Obama is much more of a concern. The problem is simple. He cannot be the reflective philosopher sitting on top of some distant tree and the President of the United States at the same time. He has to think of American interests first, and not act as an advocate of the enemies of this nation. All this is not to say that he, or any other president should ignore arguments that others could make against the United States. It is that in making his calculations, he cannot think of himself as a detached and disinterested observer. That is a job for professors like myself. As against enemies of the United States, and indeed all civilized peoples, he should use all his lawful powers to the maximum and not make excuses for those who do not deserve benefit of the doubt.

§ 1651. Piracy under law of nations

Whoever, on the high seas, commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations, and is afterwards brought into or found in the United States, shall be imprisoned for life.

§ 1653. Aliens as pirates

Whoever, being a citizen or subject of any foreign state, is found and taken on the sea making war upon the United States, or cruising against the vessels and property thereof, or of the citizens of the same, contrary to the provisions of any treaty existing between the United States and the state of which the offender is a citizen or subject, when by such treaty such acts are declared to be piracy, is a pirate, and shall be imprisoned for life.

Presidential administrations aren't brought low by the actions of their enemies. Usually, it's the people inside.

They leak and spin and talk out of school. They try to get their story out first. They'll call a friendly media toady and speak on deep background: "No, no. I told the president...." and the piece will read something like, "Sources close to the president say that it was Chief of Staff About To Be Fired who made the call...." Or: "Close presidential associates say that the White House knows it has a big problem...."

We've all read these pieces. Every administration experiences it, eventually.

Here's the first one I've spotted for the Obama crowd. It's about -- what else? -- the political stupidity of wading into the Ground Zero Mosque business. From Politico:

The president’s decision — made with the support of senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, his two closest friends in the West Wing — reflected Obama’s forcefulness on issues closest to his heart, a willingness to jettison calculation when core beliefs are in play.

Right, okay. You can skip over the sloppy French kiss the reporter gives to his beloved president. He's too good for us. Got it. Moving on.
The point is, it's Axelrod and Jarrett who are fingered for this blunder. And whoever "helped" the reporter with his piece knew it was a blunder, delivering this nugget of office gossip:

For several days leading up to the Ramadan speech, Obama and his inner circle had been discussing how or whether to publicly address the issue, which seemed to be dying down in the New York tabloids.

Someone was arguing that the story had run its course. Someone was arguing that injecting Presidential prestige into the discussion was a loser idea. Who was that someone? Well, who do you think?

Prior to the decision, Emanuel and Obama’s communications staff vividly — and presciently — predicted that Obama would be handing Republicans a weapon to batter Democrats as weak-kneed on terrorism three months before the midterms, according to several people familiar with the situation.

More to come. This is going to be fun.

Federal judge Raymond A. Jackson has dismissed piracy charges against six Somali men who are alleged to have fired on U.S. naval warships on the Indian Ocean. Why? Because the attacks failed to ravage our vessels — indeed, the Somalis were captured and brought to Judge Jackson’s civilian court in Virginia. According to Judge Jackson (appointed to the bench by President Clinton in 1993), to be prosecuted for piracy (under Section 1651 of the federal penal code), pirates have to succeed in carrying out a robbery on the high seas. If they try but we capture them, they can’t be charged. -- Andy McCarthy

The rejection of the piracy charges shows yet again how the Obama administration confuses the nature of war with crime. Compare President Obama with President Teddy Roosevelt.

In 1904, New Jersey native Ion Perdicaris was taken hostage by Moroccan bandits. They were led by Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, who was known as the "Last of the Barbary Pirates." President Roosevelt's response to the news: "This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!"

The president ordered seven battleships and a contingent of Marines to Morocco. That is how American presidents used to respond to pirates.

Likewise with Jefferson. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson ended the payment of tribute to the Barbary pirates, who preyed on American shipping in the Mediterranean and enslaved U.S. sailors. He sent a naval squadron against the pirates with orders to "chastise their insolence" by "sinking, burning, or destroying their ships & vessels wherever you shall find them." That August, the USS Enterprise fought a three-hour duel with a pirate corsair, killing half its crew, cutting down its masts, throwing its guns overboard, and setting it adrift.

The Obama administration's legal and policy confusion over terrorism and piracy has contributed to the very problem at hand. Under the Left's theory of the war against al-Qaeda, terrorism is really a crime, not an act of war. Terrorists are not illegal combatants (a category recognized by the Supreme Court in past wars and by other nations since Roman times to distinguish between proper soldiers of an enemy state and those who fight outside the laws of war), but just garden-variety criminals.

The Obama administration seems to think of pirates as criminals, who are to be arrested and hauled back to the United States for trial. When Somali pirates took Captain James Phillips of the Maersk Alabama hostage in spring of last year, President Obama sent the FBI to conduct hostage negotiations, and only authorized the use of force -- in this case, allowing Navy snipers to shoot at the pirates -- if Captain Phillips' life was in imminent danger.

We should treat the pirates as they have consistently been since Roman times, as hostis humani generis, the enemy of all mankind. SEAL sharpshooters should be able to fire whenever they have a clear shot at them, regardless of whether a hostage is threatened with imminent harm or death. The same goes for pirate vessels. Rather than let pirates approach peaceful commercial shipping and only then seek to make arrests, our powerful Navy could simply hunt and destroy pirate ships and their land-based support networks "wherever" a commander "shall find them," in Jefferson's words.

But this would require the Obama administration to follow the Bush counterterrorism example by applying the rules of warfare to piracy. This does not mean that the United States cannot resort to its criminal laws, only that conflict with pirates can rise to the level of war and justify the use of military measures, too.

Rod Blagojevich was the headline act today on Fox News Sunday, and he filled that role gloriously.

Comparing himself at various moments to Batman, Robin and Winston Churchill, Blago dissembled, dodged, and ignored Chris Wallace’s questions with aplomb, even in the face of infamous “[expletive] golden” phone conversation clips.

Blago made big news, however (and Wallace did his best to press him) when he suggested that his legal team might call Washington stalwarts like Rahm Emanuel, Sen. Harry Reid, and Sen. Robert Menendez for defense testimony in a second trial, and insisted that he was guilty of nothing more than standard political horse-trading. Wallace asked Blago if he thought he was no more guilty than Harry Reid, Rahm Emanuel, or Bob Menendez, and Blago said: “That is exactly right…they are not guilty either…we are going to try to call them up…and President Obama too.”

He also said that he's not ruling out a return to politics. Remarking on Blago's self-comparison to Winston Churchill and his vow to break back into the arena, Wallace said, “You can’t be serious.”

Blago’s last words? “No, I’m not serious—I don’t smoke cigars [like Churchill], I don’t drink as much scotch …and I run faster than him…and no I’m not ruling myself out for coming back politically.”

----

The Ground Zero Mosque was another hot story on FNS, This Week, and Meet the Press.

On FNS, by way of introduction, the panel discussed Obama's religious beliefs. A White House spokesman, responding to the belief among some Americans that Obama is a Muslim, noted that Obama is a Christian and prays daily. In part because of Obama’s support for the Ground Zero Mosque, 18% of Americans believe he’s Muslim (while 12% did last November, at election time). To Juan Williams, there have been concerted maligning efforts among conservatives to bring into question Obama’s religious beliefs. Williams noted that it doesn’t help that Rush Limbaugh calls the president “Imam Obama.”

I was surprised to see that the panel did not discuss at all the source of funding of the mosque itself, since there was an article in The Daily Beast just this weekend that questions the claims that the mosque is receiving funding from countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or radical Muslim groups.

In recent days, critics of the proposal to build a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero have linked the plan to everyone from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Islamist organizations Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But the plan's real fundraising effort, thus far, is much more innocuous: a PayPal account with less than $9,000 in it, mostly from New Yorkers, raised by a group of Muslim moms in Manhattan whose original aim was to host a peace march.

Daisy Khan, the wife of Feisal Abdul Rauf, appeared on This Week today with Christiane Amanpour and one topic of discussion was funding. Khan said that the funding plans are a long time off (as The Daily Beast article attests--they've only raised $9,000 dollars). First, the organization needs to establish a board, and then that board needs to establish a financial arm. Once it does, Khan said that in their fundraising, the center would adhere to the strictest dictates of the Treasury Department.

I think it's becoming clearer and clearer at the GZM will not be the bastion of radicalism that some people have claimed it would be. Add the seemingly harmless sources of the mosque's funding to Imam Rauf's moving speech at a service for Daniel Pearl where he said "I am a Jew, I have always been one," to the fact that Rauf is a Sufi, and I think that Americans will find an ally, not an adversary, in this center and its leader.

For instance, the idea that the center would have Saudi funding, or funding from other Wahhabist or jihadist groups, is misguided. In Saudi Arabia, Sufism can be a capital offense. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have a history of attacking Sufis and Sufi shrines. Rauf's center near Ground Zero is not so much an affront to Americans as it is to the jihadists that we all abhor.

For those who may not know, Sufism is a mystical arm of Islam--the flower-children of Islam, diametrically opposed to the radicalism of the jihadists. I grew up in a Sufi meeting house in Montreal. Twice a week, a mix of Western and Middle Eastern Sufis met, meditated, drank black tea, and smoked cigarettes. They spoke with love about the ecstatic poetry of Rumi. Many of them being Iranian expats, they despised the theocratic regime in Iran. They, in short, are the type of Muslims that Americans would want as partners in their efforts of combat radical Islam.

Regardless, on Meet the Press today, Rick Lazio said, "There are millions of peace-loving Muslims in America…this Imam, Abdul Rauf, is not one of them." Lazio is running for governor of New York.

One point that Daisy Khan made on This Week, which struck me, was that the opposition to the "mosque"--which isn't really a mosque, but a community and athletic center that will also have a prayer room--is shocking to her. It is like "metastasized anti-semitism. It's not even Islamophobia, it's a hate of Muslims. We are deeply concerned." Is that a fair characterization?

---

Christiane Ammanpour had President Hamid Karzai on this morning's This Week, and she tossed him a few softball questions before getting into some meatier ones, first about Karzai's recent order requiring the disbandment of private security contracts within Afghanistan within the year.

A little bit of news was made when Ammanpour asked about the recent arrest of a close Karzai associate, Mohammad Zia Salehi, who is charged with taking bribes and providing luxury cars to presidential allies. Immediately after his arrest, Salehi was released, prompting serious concerns among American officials about the seriousness of Karzai's commitment to anti-corruption initiatives.

Earlier this week, Karzai's people denied that Karzai had any role in securing Salehi's release. But on questioning from Ammanpour today, Karzai proudly announced that he had secured Salehi's release, likening the nature of the arrest to Soviet-style political persecution. Karzai did himself no favors with his American audience, looking by turns weak, vacillating, and aloof.

Diane's sad post, earlier today, prompted a surprising number of comments about childhood memories of similar, hugely traumatic events. It made me wonder: If this group of people were speaking in person, would such a conversation be at all likely?

This has long interested me, the curious relationships people develop on the Internet. They're often at once much more intimate and vastly less intimate than ones that take place face-to-face. I wrote Lion Eyes in part just to explore this strange phenomenon. It's not just true of romance on the Internet, it's true of many relationships.

This old article about the psychology of cyberspace (remember that term?) offers some useful thoughts about why this is so.

I'll be meeting at least a few of you in person in the coming weeks; it will be interesting to see how similar or different you are from the way I imagine you.

I'm delighted to welcome this week's Guest Contributor: veteran journalist and intrepid blogger Robert Stacy McCain. A frequent contributor to The American Spectator and the co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons (2006), McCain spent 11 years writing and editing at The Washington Times before hanging up his bloggy shingle at The Other McCain.

A native of Atlanta and graduate of Jacksonville (Ala.) State University, McCain was awarded the George Washington Medal by the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge in 1996 for his series of columns in the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune about the National Standards for U.S. History. He lives in western Maryland with his wife and six children.

The consummate insider's consummate outsider, McCain is equally at home in the deserts of the Sudan and the wilds of the Georgetown cocktail circuit. I'm sure he'll fit right in. Help him feel at home anyway, won't you?

Ricochet member Tom Lindholtz was kind enough to suggest a topic a few weeks ago when our James Poulos solicited them with his Assignment Desk post. Tom wrote, in part:

I would like to see some thoughtful discussion on the nexus between religion/morality/ethics and politics/jurisprudence/economics/policy. Is it possible to be great -- which I take for granted we all want America to be -- without being good? Is there a fundamental, unwritten (?) assumption on the part of the Founders that demands freedom of religion for religions that are antithetical to religious freedom?Commentators? Anyone, but especially Dave and Victor and Mark (if he's ever around anymore.)

My apologies to Tom. I haven‘t forgotten his request, but it was a pretty tall order. Then again, no one else has taken a stab at it, so I might as well put some thoughts on the table for discussion, or dispute, or slaughter, as the case may be.

Is it possible for America to be great without being good? I don’t think so. I think it is possible for individuals to be great without being good, depending of course on your definitions of goodness and greatness. It is generally believed, outside of the White House these days, that Winston Churchill was a great leader. He was also an insatiable boozer. There was a story that a group of ladies met with the Prime Minister to voice their concerns over his alcohol consumption during WWII. If all the liquor he had consumed during the war to that point were poured into the room, they told him, the level would go up to his waist. Churchill reportedly looked at the ground, then at his waist, and then up to the ceiling before replying, “So much already done. So much left to do.” Some would argue that this made Churchill less than a good man. I disagree, but the case can be made. His greatness as a leader, however, is beyond reasonable dispute.

In the case of America, I think that we invite trouble precisely to the extent that we cease to be a good country. Our Constitution is based on “self evident” truths championed in the Declaration of Independence, and those truths are tethered to the Judeo-Christian experience. When we cease to think of our rights as having been authored by the Creator, we leave them vulnerable to the avaricious designs of dangerous men. That is when our right to property, self defense, free speech, the fruits of our labor, etc., cease to be self evident or divine in nature, becoming instead the playthings of utopians. In fact, a convincing case can be made that our current maladies are exactly the result of severing the ties between “religion/morality/ethics” on one hand, and “politics/jurisprudence/economics/policy” on the other.

As to the question about a, “...fundamental, unwritten (?) assumption on the part of the Founders that demands freedom of religion for religions that are antithetical to religious freedom,” I think Claire Berlinski has made a compelling argument in this regard. As regards Islam and its practice in the West (if I goof this up, Claire, please correct me), we already have laws on the books that if properly enforced, would deal effectively with any religious (or non-religious) practice that infringed on the rights of other people. This would necessarily foreclose the practice of sharia in America, as that savage code embodies the unconstitutional denial of human rights, but would permit Muslims, Buddhists, and even Alabama football fans, to believe as they wish and practice their faith so long as it doesn’t infringe on our rights and laws.

President Obama’s singular lack of courage led him to announce the obvious, namely that Islamic leaders in the US have a right to build a mosque in lower Manhattan at Ground Zero (assuming the funding and logistical mechanisms are legal). What he didn’t have the fortitude, or leadership, or understanding to say was that the American people have a corresponding right to make their voices heard on the subject, and that there is a critical difference between permitting an action and granting our approval of that action (especially when it is of such a provocative nature).

Thomas Jefferson’s willingness to tolerate even the voices of those who advocated the repeal of our system of government was, essentially, a testament to the good judgment of the American people to discern between sound and unsound ideas and boldly identify them as one or the other. While people in the US enjoy the right to believe and speak as they wish (within the law), Americans do not have a commensurate obligation to quietly and sublimely endure intolerant hostility to our Constitution, our rights, or our traditions whether in the name of religion or political correctness.

On Thursday evening I attended the Swell Season concert at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga with my boyfriend. The venue is stunningly beautiful: the band plays in front of a large, church-like stone building atop a mountain peak that offers breathtaking views of the Bay Area.

As the end of the concert approached, I saw a man jump onto the rear corner of the roof, then sprint toward the tip of the gable and dive off the roof. He fell about 30 feet onto the stage, just feet away from lead singer Glen Hansard and died in a pool of blood before the eyes of 1,900 concert attendees. It was one of the most shocking and traumatic events I have ever witnessed, and the incident has played and replayed in my mind constantly over the past two days.

There are always big questions revolving around suicide. It’s never easy to process how a fellow human being could be so determined to end his own life. But the questions I’m struggling with as I process my own trauma aren’t about suicide, but rather about the nature of facts. I struggle to understand why I’m so angry at misinformation in news reports about the incident. I’m angry when I read eyewitness accounts recounting the man falling from the lighting fixture when I clearly saw him fall from the roof. I’m angry when I read someone write that he performed flips as he fell, when I saw him fall like a bag of cement.

Yet as I read reports that differ from what I myself saw, I start to doubt if the way I remember things happening is the way they really happened. I feel tempted to conform my memory to the details I read. And I can’t stop myself from coloring in the missing details -- the expression on the lead singer’s face or the pool of blood surrounding the dead man. These are things I rationalize that I really must not have seen because of my distance from the stage, but the memory of these details seems flush with the rest of the memory. I am frustrated that I find myself unable to differentiate what I saw from what I imagine I saw.

Ultimately, the minutiae of the incident that I’m struggling with don’t matter. But I’m suffering from a severe crisis of faith in eyewitness accounts, including my own.

This past week at Ricochet, Ed Driscoll did the collapse with the once-hot left, shed a tear for Europe, disapprovingly quoted Harry Reid, blamed bad acting and bad writing for the letdown of CGI, watched progressives turn back the clocks, approvingly quoted Chuck Todd (on Obama!), and asked us all what we're likely to remember this November. Join us all in a tip of the hat as Mr. Driscoll rides on back to his Pajamas Media homestead. Happy Trails, Ed!

Clayton Christensen, the brilliant author of The Innovator's Dilemma -- for my money one of the most revolutionary and electric books about business and entrepreneurship every written -- coined the term "disruptive technology" to describe an innovation that takes the market by surprise, by either creating a new and unexpected market, or by delivering something at a radically lower cost.

He's also, it turns out, an eloquent thinker about life in general.

In his recent article, How Will You Measure Your Life?, in the Harvard Business Review, he applies his business ideas to life, and describes a class lecture he delivers at Harvard Business School:

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

And he gets deep:

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford t o take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day.

Why are you on the planet? What's your purpose? Those are great questions -- and a little irritating, too, I know. But worth thinking about. And worth asking, I think, not just of ourselves but of the people we're about to elect, or toss out, or re-elect, into office.