Jonathan Chait declares a state of turnout emergency for the Dems:

Young people and liberals get very excited about presidential elections. When the other party holds the White House, they can get fired up about turning them out. When their party wins, they expect all their problems to be solved. When the problems don't disappear immediately, they get disillusioned. To some extent, this dynamic can be found on both sides. But it seems especially sharp on the left. It happened in 1994, and it's likely to happen in 2010. It's a deadly combination for Democrats.

How disillusioned? Over to you, Weigel:

Do you remember how liberals spent roughly 7 years of the Oughts making fun of stupid Republicans, before getting swept up in optimism about Barack Obama? That's over now, so, back to making fun of the stupids.

A-a-and cue the t-shirt:

Richard and I had an entertaining, disembodied video exchange -- hosted at PJTV by the entertaining Glenn Reynolds -- about law school, bar exams, and the "secret of my success" (for those Michael J. Fox/Helen Slater fans out there). Richard looked charming in a headset and mic -- now if I could only get him up to outer space!

But seriously, it might be worth watching for those out there who are interested in whether the ranking of a college or law school matters very much, whether good grades are the secret to success, and what the bar exam is really about. On this one, I think, Richard and I agree on the faults of the grade-less law-less Yale law school curriculum and the importance of learning real law in real classes -- and we speak nostalgically about the good old paper chase days when Professor Kingsfield ruled.

The trick to winning elections is to convince the voters that you're less odd than your opponent. All politicians are, for the most part, sort of nuts -- who would volunteer, after all, for such a job unless it appealed to his or her inner neurotic? -- but some politicians appear less nuts than others, and those are the ones that win.

How did Reagan beat Carter? Or either Bush beat his opponent? They just seemed more normal than the other guy. Why did Clinton manage, ultimately, to best his most effective nemesis, Newt Gingrich? Because when the dust settled after the 1994 Republican revolution, Newt just seemed a little....you know, weird.

The Politico thinks Republicans may be getting weird again:

A former professional wrestling executive, a libertarian ophthalmologist and a man who thinks bicycle use could empower the United Nations filed to run in elections. That’s not the start of a joke: that’s a sampling of the deeply unusual pool of candidates running — and actually being nominated — for high office this year.
A phenomenon that began with physician Rand Paul’s victory in the Kentucky Senate primary has effectively gone national: Primary voters are again and again choosing offbeat candidates shunned by national party strategists and imperiling potential Republican gains this November in the process.

I'm not sure I agree that they're "imperiling" anything, but I do notice a soft trend towards the oddball. This year has a lot of surprises in store -- if you're in the pundit business, this is a great year to make your career by throwing out a truly out-of-left-field prediction, because the landscape has rarely been nuttier.

And neither have the candidates. Which may not be a bad thing.

Ricochet member Cindy writes:

I would love to see a discussion of the 14th amendment on Ricochet. Citizenship, anchor babies, the Constitution. Maybe in response to this morning's WSJ editorial The Case For Birthright Citizenship by Linda Chavez. Also George Will.

It is odd that we are now in a position where people are looking closely at the first sentence of the fourteen amendment. It reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The difficulty comes with the words, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." One account is that it covers only people with diplomatic immunity and the like. The broader view is that it covers people whose loyalties are elsewhere, e.g. citizens of other countries. The evidence is divided naturally, and with a relatively open immigration policy in the late nineteenth century, the issue did not gain salience at the time. Aliens could often vote in local elections, for example. Worldwide we are alone in taking the view that children born of illegal aliens become citizens. Again there is always the position that no one should profit from their own wrong, by conferring benefits on their children. And it is not just illegals to whom this could apply. What about people who give birth while on jobs in the United States?

For the moment, I would not want to weigh in on these legal fine points in the face of a long-established practice. The bigger problem is perhaps attracting immigrants to our shores, which we won't do if regulation makes it hard for us to become again a land of opportunity. Let this one rest.

This item just popped up on my Twitter feed. It's a profoundly shocking allegation. I don't know if it's true.

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Kurdish rebels. German politicians are demanding an investigation.

It would be difficult to exceed the horror shown in the photos, which feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts. The victims are scarcely even recognizable as human beings. Turkish-Kurdish human rights activists believe the people in the photos are eight members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) underground movement, who are thought to have been killed in September 2009.

Kurdish activists apparently gave the photos to "a German human rights delegation comprised of Turkey experts, journalists and politicians from the far-left Left Party."

This rings a few alarms off the bat: Why give this evidence to politicians on the far Left? The European Left has historically been sympathetic to the PKK--a Maoist terrorist group. They are more apt to be gullible about PKK propaganda. It suggests something fishy.

That said, this needs investigating, urgently. It hardly needs be said that if it's true, Turkey has become a true pariah state. This is what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds.

God, I hope it isn't true. I know a lot of young guys who are soon to be conscripted into the Turkish military here. It kills me to think they could end up involved in something like this.

Meanwhile, an American journalist, Jake Hess, has been arrested in Diyarbakir, the Kurdish southeast, on charges of "assisting the PKK." This too is very disturbing--and certainly hints that they're trying to hide something. This wouldn't be a new policy, to arrest journalists who go down there for a little look-see. One of the ironies of Turkey's criticism of Israel's alleged human rights violations in the territories is that the only reason anyone knows about them is because Israel permits journalists to go there. The Turks aren't that dumb.

The Wall Street Journal kindly ran my piece today on the gay marriage decision in California. It makes some of the same points first floated among the discussion of the case on Ricochet -- that the Constitution allows the people of each state to decide whether to allow gay marriage.

One point became clearer to me. If one were a supporter of gay marriage, as I am as a voter, I would still prefer federalism over judicial imposition. State by state voter choice would lead, I think, to a more durable political consensus. Once a series of state legislatures or state initiatives approve gay marriage, it would be unlikely (I think) that the states would reverse themselves. Gay marriage wouldn't hang on the vote of a single Justice on the Supreme Court, and his or her longevity.

New York Magazine has a hilarious slide show proving that President Obama has alienated yet another constituency:

"Even babies — sweet, lovable, barely sentient babies — have turned on President Obama, the man with whom they once invested so much hope. Though he tries time and again to connect with these impressionable young citizens, it is all in vain, for his overtures are met only with cold shoulders. Tiny, cold shoulders."

No matter what he does, they won't meet his eyes. I'm thinking maybe it's the whole government-funded abortion thing. These kids could be thinking, "Hey, Dude, like, a week ago, that could've been me, nome saying?" Or maybe it's that he's already spent all the money they could possibly make for the rest of their lives.

Or maybe your average baby just has a higher IQ than Frank Rich. Yeah, that's probably it.

Read John Carney's op-ed in the New York Times:

by waiting for a recovery before reforming the government’s mortgage-backing trio, we are getting things backward. Far from being the last bulwark supporting the housing market, the F.H.A., Fannie and Freddie are very likely holding back the private loan industry. And, unfortunately, a little-noticed provision of the Dodd-Frank act threatens to undermine efforts at rebuilding an innovative and healthy private sector for mortgages. [...] lenders will find that it costs far more, and involves more risk, to offer mortgages they back themselves than those covered with a guarantee from the agency.

"Purely private mortgages will quickly be pushed out of the market," Carney writes. "Unbelievably, the two entities whose mortgage market follies led to their collapses may well be given a pass when it comes to managing risk."

Reason's Matt Welch has much more on the nightmare on main street we can't wake up from.

Haifa Wehbe, the Lebanese singer and model—and the Arab world’s most popular sex icon—is also Hezbollah's hottest supporter.

In 2006, she praised Hezbollah and congratulated its leader Hassan Nasrallah for "defending" Lebanon against Israel. In 2008, Wehbe, a Shia, said that she was "under the command" of Nasrallah.

And these days, Wehbe, whose 24-year old brother died in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, is itching to prove just how fervently she supports the "resistance."

In the coming weeks--just two months after the Israelis raided the Gaza-bound flotilla--Hezbollah plans to send another aid flotilla Gaza's way. Leading the fleet's charge is a vessel manned completely by the women of Hezbollah. As David Schenker, of the Washington Institution for Near East Policy writes, "The idea behind this creative and progressive staffing is to raise the negative impact on Israel if it tries to enforce the blockade against a boat full of sympathetic ladies."

Wehbe, the most popular woman in Lebanon, tried to sign up for the trip, but Hezbollah rebuffed her. Hezbollah said her "immodest attire [would] harm the reputation of all the women participating on the trip."

It's pretty amazing that Hezbollah blacklisted Wehbe from the ship. First, Wehbe's presence on the boat would have added some luster, not to mention style, to Hezbollah's ham-handed PR stunt. Second, by enlisting Wehbe--a symbol of Western, commercial ideals and therefore an unlikely supporter of the Islamist Hezbollah--the organization would have displayed some political guile, which it apparently needs according to this piece.

I'm no Objectivist but even my mere libertarianism took a hit when I became a parent. So oh how I loved this McSweeney's post "Our Daughter Isn't a Selfish Brat; Your Son Just Hasn't Read Atlas Shrugged."

It tells the story of a playground scuffle. A sample:

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, "Have a ball, peas [sic]?" And I'm sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, "No! Looter!" right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously.

In all seriousness, nothing so much as raising children has made me more aware of the importance of virtue -- not just in my own family but in my community as well. Now excuse me while I figure out what incentives to use for potty training.

Bracing stuff at The New Republic:

There is a school of thought in America which argues that the government must be the main force that provides help to the black community. This shibboleth is predicated upon another one: that such government efforts will make a serious difference in disparities between blacks and whites. Amy Wax not only argues that such efforts have failed, she also suggests that such efforts cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned. [...]

Wax stipulates that the government should do all that it can to ensure equal opportunity, which includes providing decent education and enforcing civil rights laws. I would say that there is somewhat more that the government can do, given the historical circumstances. Programs to ease ex-cons back into society could do infinitely more for black inner-cities than suing car companies over small differences in loan deals. Those who think that Obama has no “black agenda” are unaware of how many black people attend the community colleges to which he has given extra (if insufficient) funding.

Still, at the end of day, as Wax puts it:

The government cannot make people watch less television, talk to their children, or read more books. It cannot ordain domestic order, harmony, tranquility, stability, or other conditions conducive to academic success and the development of sound character. Nor can it determine how families structure their interactions and routines or how family resources—including time and money—are expended. Large-scale programs are especially ineffective in changing attitudes and values toward learning, work, and marriage.

That line about reintegrating convicts into normal human society strikes me as absolutely crucial. And I'll have more to say about education, where the President is doing pretty well, later today. But let me also take the opportunity to emphasize again that, in fact, increasingly prevalent "attitudes and values" running against the kind of learning, work, and marriage reinforced in two-parent households at their best increase the felt need for exactly those kinds of large-scale programs. In the face of cultural decay, activist government becomes self-medicating -- a therapeutic effort on the part of embarrassed and depressed elites to prove to themselves that they're doing something. Will they be able to confront the truth about just how useless at best those efforts really are?

In the words of my photojournalist friend Iason, who was arrested and detained last year in Iran, "At a time when talk of a military strike against Iran looms ever larger, it's often easy to lose sight of the fact that Iran is one of the most visually stunning countries in the world."

His photos really prove this point.

Mollie's post reminded me of a question I've been trying to understand for some time. Why do Americans put up with this ridiculous ritual humiliation at the airports? We all know that it's absurd. You can make a bomb out of solids. You can fashion a weapon just as easily from a broken-off wine bottle (component parts conveniently dispensed on airplanes) as from a pair of tweezers (routinely confiscated). We know perfectly well that the no-fly list is a joke, that the screeners aren't paying attention, that this is all for show, and that the key to stopping terrorists is good intelligence and passengers who are prepared to take them down.

So why do we put up with this? It's a massive economic drain. The number of potentially productive American man-hours wasted daily on this is outrageous. Flying is an ordeal. It's surely costing lives, because people choose instead to drive. Yet I've heard no politician promising, if elected, to do away with this superstitious theater of the absurd. I rarely see op-eds decrying this state of affairs. I see no petitions, no grass-roots campaigns, no protests; the issue seems to be a political non-starter.

Don't Americans pride themselves on being a rational people? The world laughed at Turkey when the news broke that airport officials here had sacrificed a camel on the tarmac to celebrate their achievements in airplane maintenance, but in all honesty I can't see that our approach to aviation safety represents some triumph of sweet Western reason by comparison.

Back in June, David Jones -- here's to you, David -- sent me the wonderful gift of a delicious bottle of Leopold's gin. Yesterday, I finished that bottle with my dear friend the drummer. (No, not in one sitting. He's my drummer, but those days are over. Correction: there never were days when I split a bottle of gin in a single sitting. I haven't lived, I know.)

Much of that Leopold's went into a string of Gin Blossoms, but yesterday it went into something else -- a Ginger Spice. What's that, you ask? Why, it's simple -- and the most refreshing compound pun I've tasted:

Ginger Spice

1 bottle Reed's Extra Ginger Brew Jamaican-Style Ginger Beer

2 shots Leopold's American Small Batch Gin

Dump shots over ice in a large pint glass. Add nice long pour of ginger beer. Swirl. Sip. Enjoy.

Also enjoy Leopold's own favorite recipes. Tell 'em I sent ya. And, of course, submit your own favorite libations. We'll put them into a handsome coffee table book like Andrew's View from Your Window...or something.

What with Steven Slater's dramatic departure from his Jet Blue flight this week, stories about incivility on flights are cropping up. I shared this counter-anecdote for an Associated Press story today:

Mollie Hemingway, a mom of two from Washington, D.C., fondly recalls a flight attendant — traveling as a passenger, no less — who became her guardian angel on what seemed destined to be a flight from, well, a place with no angels.

Flying to Denver with her daughters, ages 1 and 2, Hemingway was stressed to the point of sobbing when her older child soiled her car seat minutes after takeoff, meaning Mom had to balance two kids on her lap.

Changing diapers in the tiny bathroom was a challenge. And the sleep-deprived girls were melting down, "turning into crazed beings that kicked the seats in front of them," Hemingway reports. The flight attendants were nowhere to be seen, until the angel appeared, offering to take the baby.

"I practically threw the baby at her," Hemingway says. "Later she exchanged seats so she could sit next to me and she helped me entertain the girls. I am so thankful for her help."

I'm a strong woman. A veteran traveler. But it's true -- I was crying. Repeatedly. The worst flight I'd had prior to that was the 10-hour Honolulu to Chicago leg I flew with my husband and daughter while pregnant with #2. But this last flight beat even that. And your worst?

We've known for quite some time that Harry Reid has an obsession with race. When the book Game Change was published earlier this year, we learned that:

[Harry Reid's] encouragement of [candidate] Obama was unequivocal. He...believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,"...Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama's race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

It turns out, Harry's obsession with race extends to an obsession with ethnicity, as evidenced by remarks he made yesterday:

Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio responds:

(h/t John McCormack at TWS)

With Peter Robinson hiking in the Sierras (that's not a euphemism, he actually is hiking in the Sierras), Jonah Goldberg sits in and perhaps needless to say, adult supervision is in short supply. Hence, we cover Star Trek (of course), gay bars and the GZM, the use of fake swear words in popular culture (Johnny Dangerously, anyone?), and the time Rob spotted former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in a hot tub. Really. Not to worry though, there's plenty of serious discussion (tenure and taxes, primary election analysis, and of course, conservatives and pop culture) to go around.

Links from this week's show:

• Lileks mixes it up with the Boing Boing cartoonist
• Claire Berlinkski interrogates the GZM Twitter account
• Not fluent in Ferengi? A primer here
• Rob Long on the Gutfeld GZM gay bar story
• Johnny Dangerously on IMDB
• Economist Stephen Moore's bio
• The Shining re-imagined as a romantic comedy

Music from this week's episode:

• Wake Up by Arcade Fire (bonus: live version here)
• Opening Sequence from Star Trek TOS

Direct link to this week's show or better yet, subscribe and have the show delivered automagically each week.

I'd like to thank Rob Long for not stealing my idea - as he'll be the first to tell you, that's a rare thing for a Hollywood guy. He said he’d post this if I didn’t, but apparently not. So:

During today's Ricochet podcast, we were talking taxes and revenue with Jonah Goldberg, and I suggested we adopt the ideas of those who want to tax wealth as well as income. The Moneybags set - you know, the ones whose forebears made a pile in Consolidated Monocle or cornered the sassafras market way back when - have piles of money that just sits there, unmolested, and we need to get at it to fund tomorrow's great ideas. (Or, more likely, fund yesterday's underfunded bad ideas.) That's the argument, anyway. But why stop there?

Why not treat tenure as wealth, and tax it accordingly? Take a college professor. (Please.) Calculate how much they'll make until retirement from their permanent job. Declare it wealth. Hoover up a chunk. Write in a provision that says they'll get 47% of the amount paid (with no interest, over ten years) if they ever quit, with the remainder going to a fund to pay for college tuitions for the poor. Sit back; make popcorn; enjoy the reactions.

Obviously not going to happen, but it brings up an idea: if you wanted to irritate the raise-taxes folks with tax-hiking proposals designed to nettle and sting their tender flanks, what would you do?

>

To hear more from James Lileks, be sure and check out this week's Ricochet Podcast (with Rob Long and Jonah Goldberg).

Like any pundit, my one great love in life is talking with other pundits about punditry. So I really had to reach outside my comfort zone to talk about pundits with Elizabeth Wurtzel. Not only a memoirist and litigatrix, she's a media visionary -- and she's given Ricochet an exclusive inside scoop on the next big national dialog about to sweep America.

Elizabeth Wurtzel writes:

Somebody somewhere could probably get tenure by becoming the leading, or perhaps only, authority on the Third Amendment to the Constitution, which has been sorely neglected. For those who don't remember, this lost clause is a ban on quartering soldiers in private homes during peacetime, and it has not really mattered to much of anybody in a good two centuries or so. It has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court -- but The Onion once ran an article about the National Anti-Quartering Association, which it described as "the nation's leading Third Amendment rights group" -- keeping America safe, year after year, from soldiers demanding room and board.

My suggestion that we have a searching national debate about the Third Amendment -- an "adult conversation," like the one we're supposed to be having right now about raising the retirement age -- is prompted by my viewing of the various 24-hour news channels. I've determined that nothing that's being said by the likes of Keith Olbermann or Glenn Beck -- and their lesser minions -- is really any less ridiculous than discussing quartering soldiers, pro or con. All day long, pundits debate topics that don't really matter, like whether the Fourteenth Amendment will be repealed, which is simply not going to happen -- the Constitution has not been changed in decades, and that provision is pretty much sacrosanct. Or they handicap polls, or they parrot press releases -- and they all say the same things over and over again, which is nothing more than the conventional wisdom either skewed left or flushed right, depending on which side the person is on. The one thing that does not happen on television news is anything that you would call "news" -- I mean, yes, there is "breaking news" whenever something new doesn't happen with the BP oil spill and they have a press conference about it anyway, or something doesn't change with unemployment numbers but the President makes remarks from the Rose Garden just the same. There is just a lot of unenlightened debate about things that don't matter or, quite possibly, don't even exist.

So my suggestion is that we make a cognitive leap and actually discuss an issue that we honestly know doesn't matter: the Third Amendment, and its implications. Let's eliminate the notion that we are having a meaningful conversation and go right for the completely wasteful, irrelevant and unimportant. That's what is happening anyway.

And the added benefit is it might give some poor academic a new idea for a scholarly paper. I see journal articles. I see New York Times bestsellers.

Colorado voters picked their nominees for the upcoming election last night. There were some interesting results. Dan Maes edged out Scott McInnis for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Ken Buck beat Jane Norton for the Republican Senate nomination. And Obama-backed Michael Bennet beat Andrew Romanoff for the Democratic Senate nomination.

After a year of brutal defeats for Obama, his team was understandably pleased by this outcome. They immediately bragged to their press friends and so stories about the vote yesterday told readers that this was all about Obama being awesome again. Or something. John F. Harris' story in Politico was headlined Primary night yields good news for President Obama and Democrats. Sam Youngman's story in The Hill was headlined Axelrod says Colorado results show Obama voters will show up for midterms.

And Marc Ambinder's piece at The Atlantic advanced the story a bit by getting Bennet pushback against Team Obama's braggadocio. That might confuse most readers of Ambinder -- known for his quick capture of White House views. But Bennet's brother James is Ambinder's boss. It was headlined: White House, Bennet Moving in Opposite Directions

Now, I'm a native of Colorado and most of my family lives there and is politically involved. None of these headlines seemed to match with what they were reporting. Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi was also perplexed. He takes apart various claims:

But as of right now, Republican Ken Buck is leading in every poll I’ve seen, and the only “energized” party around here seems to be the party that wants to drive out incumbents.

You wouldn’t know that reading most national coverage. And in just a few posts, Ambinder describes Bennet as a brilliant campaigner (he spent millions more than Andrew Romanoff) as “relatively independent” (he voted down the line for the Obama agenda) an “education innovator” (DPS has, at best, mixed results) and so on. ...

Ambinder claimed that “Democratic turnout was high (though a bit lower than Republican turnout).” In the Colorado Senate race, despite a registration advantage for Dems, 338,537 Democrats voted as opposed to 407,110 Republicans. Is that a “bit,” or is that a lot? Put it this way, more people in Colorado voted for Jane Norton than Michael Bennet on Tuesday.

That last stat makes the Axelrod claim seem pretty silly. All of these stories seem to suffer from too much inside-the-beltway perspective.

Who knows what will happen in November? Colorado campaigns can be infuriating for all involved. But when including White House spin in stories, reporters really should work overtime to avoid contradicting easy-to-find data.

Ross comes close to saying as much, in (1) his recent column on gay marriage and (2) a recent post continuing the conversation:

(1) Nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy obviously natural in the way that most Americans understand the term. If “natural” is defined to mean “congruent with our biological instincts,” it’s arguably one of the more unnatural arrangements imaginable. In crudely Darwinian terms, it cuts against both the male impulse toward promiscuity and the female interest in mating with the highest-status male available. Hence the historic prevalence of polygamy.

(2) the truth in question asks men and women to engage in sacrificial and frankly counter-biological behavior, in pursuit of an ideal that few societies in history have even attempted to achieve. I will return to this point again and again throughout my responses, but let me be clear: The marriage ideal that I’m defending would be in equally serious difficulties in contemporary America if homosexuality did not exist, because what it asks of straight people is in deep tension with what straight people want to do, and with the way that the incentives of modern life often line up.

Hmmm. There's a difference, isn't there, between labeling marriage counter-biological or unnatural and thinking of marriage more as super-natural, or even a specific kind of natural? It's true that lifelong monogamous marriage is consistent with our natural abilities and endowments. Simply because something runs contrary to at least some of our natural appetites doesn't mean it's unnatural. Running is natural, even though we feel exhaustion or laziness. Countervailing extremes are natural.

When we try to enlist nature as a guide to what we want, it contradicts itself. In fact, I'm tempted to say that, in the case of we humans, biology itself isn't of much use in determining what exactly is natural. (Nietzsche, who insisted that the most fit specimens are often the ones killed off by the weaker many, mocked Darwinism for thinking itself a science and not a belief system.) On its own, nature leaves us with no clear picture of what it means to be human. It's not that marriage runs contrary to nature. It's that our nature is compatible with a wide variety of relationships -- lifelong monogamy and nightly orgies alike.

The question is what we are going to do with our nature -- toward what end we are going to, shall we say, educate it. Marriage, which as I understand it goes way beyond 'lifelong monogamy', is a particularly ambitious way of educating our human nature so as to reach beyond some of its more animalistic and banal characteristics. If the conflicting features of our human nature abound, the meaning and purpose of heterosexual marriage superabounds. In its superabundance, it's supernatural -- not in a way that overthrows the laws of the flesh, we might say, but in a way that fulfills one of its particularly impressive kinds of promise.

Half of all new businesses fail in five years.

Unless they're Amish.  Amish businesses have a 95% success rate.  The Amish economic engine -- in places like Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, where the recession has hit especially hard -- is roaring.

Jason Zasky, in FailureBlog, asks Erik Wesner, author of Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Survive why this is so.

He offers a brace of interesting answers.  One, they don't sue:

In the business realm, it can be a bit of an Achilles heel...I ran into a number of Amish businesses that  had not been paid by dealers, resulting in thousands of dollars in losses. They typically have limited  means to recoup money. An Amish person may hire a lawyer to draft a letter, but that is usually where  legal involvement ends. So unscrupulous outsiders may take advantage of Amish this way, and some have.

Amish, on the other hand, tend to get the word out to others in the community quickly if there is an  individual passing bad checks, for instance. Word gets around and if you treat people well, others will  learn about it quickly in Amish communities. The opposite is true as well.

Another reason -- they keep costs down:

Amish tend to run lower-overhead businesses. One reason is that there is less of a cultural expectation  to deck a business out in frills such as air conditioning and plush offices. Amish businesses are typically operated at home, often in a shed or old building converted for the purpose. Amish tend to be  efficient in how they use resources. An aversion to waste is built-in to the Amish mentality.

Also, they try to build lasting businesses:

The idea of humble leadership is another good example. Amish frequently express the idea that “I’d  never ask an employee to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to do.”  Amish bosses are often  involved in the work in a hands-on way, rather than simply delivering orders from a remote office. This orientation has something to do with the productivity and longevity Amish bosses get out of their employees.

A third idea would be the approach to growth. Viewing employees as family, rather than a disposable input, tends to make you approach decisions more cautiously. A side benefit has been a very low rate of failure among Amish businesses. In light of the numerous high-profile business failures, not to  mention recent “bubbles” driven by greed, a measured approach to growth may be wise.

There's a lot going on, apparently, besides barn raisings and pie baking.

The other day, I posted a blog largely in praise of the television show Mad Men. Then last night, I had an opportunity to watch the second episode of the current season. It contained what John Nolte of Big Hollywood calls a "sucker punch," which is where the lefty screenwriter simply can't help but unleash an unnecessary, self-righteous and out-of-context insult against conservative viewers. In this case, some of the old 1960's ad men on the show are sitting around griping. One says that Medicare is the beginning of socialism, and the other--get this--says, yeah, and civil rights, that's really bad! Translation: These old poops are just like the racists who oppose Obamacare today.

As this had nothing whatsoever to do with the story--and as Medicare is a socialist mess about five years away from insolvency--and as civil rights legislation was supported by a greater percentage of Republicans then Democrats--I would like to take this opportunity to send a response to the creators of Mad Men. But I can't, because only one message is appropriate and this is a family-friendly site.

Eugene Volokh flags a "fascinating new article" by Prof. Rick Sander and Prof. Jane Yakowitz. They introduce their findings as follows:

One of the most enduring shibboleths in the legal world is that would-be lawyers should go to the most elite law school they can get into. That’s why LSAT prep courses and US News rankings generate so much [...] interest, and it’s why so many applicants apply to more than ten schools and move thousands of miles to matriculate at the “best” school that will have them.

There have long been grounds for skepticism about this view. In the work one of us did on law school affirmative action, lots of data suggested that black law school applicants were being harmed, not helped, by being enticed to attend more elite schools where their credentials were below those of their classmates. Grades mattered a lot in determining who passed the bar, and being “mismatched” in law school had devastating effects on grades. [...]

Certainly our advice is not to go to the worst school one gets into [...]. We hope the group most influenced by our findings, however, are legal educators, who to date have tended to underestimate and trivialize the learning that occurs in law school and its significance for later career success. We hope that academics will stop repeating the mantra of “eliteness = success” and start studying real learning outcomes [or maybe “real advances to human capital” or something like that?].

I must confess that I am not surprised by the findings of Sander and Yakowitz. The explanation is this: being an excellent lawyer depends on a lot more than knowing the law. It also depends on a sense of self-confidence that can win the trust of clients and the respect of business partners (for transactional lawyers) and opponents (for litigation). That self-confidence, and all the other skills that come with it—presence, responsiveness, alertness to social cues—depend on success early in life. The student who swims well with the tide and develops these skills at lesser law schools have built an asset that some students with the same raw intellectual ability cannot acquire at the top schools because they are always under suspicion and hence ill-at-ease. To be sure, there are some positions that are dependent on doing well at major law schools, and these include prestigious clerkships, teaching positions, jobs in the media, where the connections run only to a half dozen skills. Yet even at all elite places most law students will practice some sort of law, so that for them hitting the comfort zone in law school really matters.

There is also another statistical anomaly that is worth mentioning. Take a great student and put that person in a lesser school, and usually the achievement level will be pretty close to the same. The point here is that the person is what matters critically. So if someone in the top 1 percent nationwide comes to Chicago or Boalt Hall (to pick two places not quite at random), they fight against a strong pack and may finish in the middle. Let them go to a second tier school, and they finish at the very top, which compensates for the placement.

So the moral is: always go where you feel comfortable because that it where you are most likely to realize your full potential.

There’s been a lot of great talk on Ricochet about the Ground Zero Mosque—so I would like to add another voice to that conversation, that of Asra Nomani, a Muslim by birth, and a moderate one too, if we follow the definition Claire gives.

In a column today, Nomani, pictured above, does not denounce the Ground Zero Mosque out of hand, but she questions it, noting that "We’re not being honest in our Muslim community about the violent ideology inside of our Muslim world that needs to be defeated....we have a serious problem inside our Muslim communities."

I think many at Ricochet would agree with Nomani when she writes, "We need an expression of institutional Islam that is moderate, progressive and liberal. We don’t have it yet."

Will we find it at the Ground Zero Mosque? She admits that she is as concerned about the mosque as conservatives are. She has seen firsthand the Wahhabist direction that many mosques in the US are moving in, like her own in Morgantown W. Va, and so she acknowledges that at Ground Zero, there is "potential for a 'good mosque' and a 'bad mosque.'"

Nomani, Indian by birth, is a moderate Muslim woman in the way we at Ricochet have come to define the term here and in other conversations. She is a modern American woman who is also a Muslim. She attends mosque regularly, but she doesn't wear the veil, and she is the single mother of a young boy.

What's more: she has seen the evil of radical Islam face to face. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, her good friend was Daniel Pearl--the American journalist who was brutally murdered in 2002 by terrorists in Pakistan.

Nomani herself has received death threats from radical Muslims for her bold and brave efforts--in writing and in deed--to move Islam in a more progressive direction (for instance, she's involved in a movement to end the gender segregation which occurs in a majority of American mosques).

I think we need more voices like Nomani's out there. If a major mosque is going to go up at Ground Zero, or anywhere else in this country, I hope that their leaders internalize the thoughts of people like Nomani as those mosques form their religious and intellectual identities.

I'm only halfway through, but this is obviously the article everyone is going to be talking about. Judith, you may want to skip it; it's not calculated to reassure, and what can any of us really do?

Reuel Marc Gerecht, as usual uncommonly intelligent, asks whether Imam Rauf is a "moderate Moslem" today in the New Republic. I agree entirely with his assessment:

If Mr. Rauf has collected monies from individuals or Muslim organizations overseas that preach contempt for infidels, have financially supported religiously militant organizations, or, worse, provided aide to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, then his project, which has been approved by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, ought to be cancelled. Any American non-profit organization can tell you exactly whence its money comes. By contrast, it appears that the Cordoba Initiative’s funding has not been cross-checked with financial counterterrorist information within the Treasury Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency. (If it had been, we probably would have heard about it.)

And I note, again, that Imam Rauf's association with the Perdana Peace Initiative makes it hard to believe that this isn't the case. Gerecht continues to ask, "What might be an American definition of a “moderate Muslim?” and offers the following as a rough answer:

(i) a believer who unqualifiedly rejects terrorism against anyone. This is America’s Eleventh Commandment. If a Muslim cannot renounce terrorism against Israelis, that person should not be allowed to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero. Testing for unacceptable deviancy isn’t hard. Just borrow from the former al-Qa’ida philosopher, Abd al-Qadir bin Abd al-Aziz, aka “Dr. Fadl,” who sees Palestinian suicide bombers as destined for hell. Thus: “Do you, Feisal Abd ar-Rauf, believe that Allah damns eternally Palestinian suicide bombers?” “Do you believe that rockets launched at Israeli towns by Hamas and Hizbollah are acts of terrorism, which will bring down upon the perpetrators Allah’s wrath?” Mr. Rauf’s answers ought to be short.

(ii) a believer who embraces the doctrine of “neo-ijtihad,” which holds that Muslims today are not chained to the Qur’anic interpretations and legal decisions accepted centuries ago as canonical. Specifically, a “moderate Muslim American” is someone who unqualifiedly renounces the applicability of the Sharia, the Holy Law, in American society. The “Americanization of Islam” here means that the traditional Muslim understanding of orthodoxy as orthopraxy (it’s not what you believe in your heart—that is between you and God—but how you act, i.e., apply the Sharia, in the public square that matters) is null and void. Thus, women may veil or not veil as they please; a woman’s testimony is equal to a man’s; polygyny is verboten; marriage to a menstruating child is an abomination; accepted corporal punishments—amputations and stonings—are immoral; apostasy reflects bad judgment but isn’t criminal; and Jews and Christians should spiritually no longer be viewed as dhimmis, a properly subordinate species who really don’t deserve the same social status and legal rights as Muslims. Jewish and Christian power in America and Europe isn’t an offense against the divinely-sanctioned natural order; it’s just the product of a long, difficult, and tortuous evolution. The Sharia is a lengthy and complicated corpus that developed over centuries and often constrained the worst instincts of despots. A “moderate Muslim American” would see it in much the same way that a faithful “moderate Jewish American” views the Old Testament and the Talmud: documents of a certain time that contain considerable “divine” wisdom (as well as much looniness) and many imperatives for a good, healthy life.

I agree. An excellent definition. Gerecht concludes:

If Mr. Rauf can so define “moderate Islam,” he may not be as American as apple pie, but he would certainly be as American as much of New York City. Any mosque built by such a believer would honor us all.

I agree with that as well. I would add one more point, namely that Moslems who embrace Gerecht's definition surely do exist. They are not mythological. Assertions to the contrary are ridiculous and undermine the credibility of anyone who makes them. The distinction between radical and moderate Islam is well worth drawing and must be drawn if we are to avoid radicalizing moderates by confirming the propaganda of the Narrative.

Park 51 is now on Twitter:

If you're a journalist interested in the Park51 community center project, please contact us here or at park51nyc@gmail.com 2:00 AM Jul 16th via web

.@sarahpalinusa if you'd like to discuss our community center and prayer space project, please feel free to contact us.#transparencyiskey4:41 PM Jul 19th via web

RT @joegomezruiz: I see nothing wrong with building a mosque near ground zero (9/11). Have we forgotten freedom of religion in this country?10:40 PM Jul 19th via TweetDeck

.@elidesuperbiam @greggutfeld If there are no place to learn about Muslims and build engagement, we all loseabout 8 hours ago via web

.@greggutfeld Greg, we're looking to open Interfaith dialog and build moderate Muslim communities. Hate speech doesn't helpabout 8 hours ago via web

From me:

@Park51 Imam Rauf key figure in Perdana Peace Org, prime sponsor of Gaza Flotilla, perhaps IHH. What is the link to Park 51?about 8 hours ago via web

@Park51 We agree that #transparencyiskey. Let me help you get the facts out. This needs investigating; it looks like tie to terror group.about 8 hours ago via web

From Park 51:

Park51 @ClaireBerlinski I'm sorry what are you referring to? Links please?about 8 hours ago via web in reply to ClaireBerlinski

From me:

@Park51 http://www.perdana4peace.org/agenda.aspx?x=3,about 8 hours ago via web in reply to Park51

@Park51, http://www.perdana4peace.org/Default.aspxabout 8 hours ago via web

@Park51, Perdana is the single biggest donor ($366,000) so far to the Free Gaza Movement.about 8 hours ago via web

@Park51, Has money from this gone to IHH? It's a quasi-terrorist entity. http://bit.ly/dc0z6P Its German wing has been banned.about 8 hours ago via web

Did you receive links, @park51? I sent them.about 7 hours ago via web

@Park51 Imam Rauf key figure in Perdana Peace Org, prime sponsor of Gaza Flotilla, perhaps IHH. Are there links between PPO and Park 51?8 minutes ago via web

@Park51, this is quite an important question. I support goal of engaging moderates. But is PPO/IHH Imam Rauf's idea of moderate?5 minutes ago via web

I'll let you know if they reply.