Any regular reader of op-ed pages has learned to expect a healthy dose of nonsense from E. J. Dionne, but this morning's Washington Post piece ("Time to Stand Up to the Right Wing") is just, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, pure drivel from the padded cell. The money quote:

The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news....

Where does one begin? "Cowering"??? Would this be the same Obama who spent much of his first year in office indulging in a massively undignified trash-talk campaign against Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Republicans in general? Whose own rush to judgment in the Henry Louis Gates case was every bit as precipitous as anyone's has been with Shirley Sherrod? And would this be the same "mainstream media" whose coverage of the 2008 campaign was mocked even by SNL for its fawning obsequiousness toward Obama? Cowering before the right wing?? What planet has this guy been living on?

The whole article reads as though it were written by someone just a bit unhinged -- like something you'd find at the Daily Kos, not at the Washington Post. I've always liked and respected the Post's opinion page; I've felt that, despite a clear liberal bias, they made a good effort to present a wide variety of opinions, and that, left, right, or center, the columnists they ran were usually among the best at their craft. But if they can't find a better, more thoughtful liberal writer than Dionne as one of their mainstays, then either the Post isn't what it once was or the Left has simply run out of reasonable things to say.

Yes! Someone finally got the message!

An association of Turkish Jews in Israel has launched a campaign to better inform the Turkish public and the Turkish media about events in Israel by addressing them in their own language.

A website from the group, HASTÜRK, at www.hasturktv.com, has been online since July 20 and is attempting to provide news from the Israeli press and official statements made by the Israeli government in the Turkish language.

After arguing against the bar exam -- my response is here -- Liz Wurtzel now poses the challenge of an elaborate bar exam parody of her own creation.

The next time I teach torts I will think of this as a possible fact pattern. Apart from the jokes it is answerable, and the trick for answering it is to take all injuries and see how it relates to each defendant separately. The rules on joint causation are such that virtually everyone who is found liable will not have a remoteness of damage test under directness but a jury question under foreseeability. Once each piece is understood those defendants who get a clean bill of health are out from under the indemnity and contribution issues. Those who are not have to face that barrier. Actually the question is not all that subtle in most cases because in piling on the parties there is less nuance for each of them than might otherwise be the case.

But for these purposes, I do think of the poet Andrew Marvel, and his famous line to his coy mistress that applies to Liz's question: "Had I but world enough and time, . . ." I would work this up. But I have real matters to deal with, many of which are every bit as complex.

Here's a little bit more. I find this footage terribly sad and moving. These are good, decent people. They simply don't understand what happened. The appalling thing, as Okan remarked to me, is that the IHH exploited the Turks' Achilles heel: their generous natures. No one in Turkey would have supported an act of war against Israel. But the Turks love to think of themselves as charitable, as compassionate, as generous--and indeed they are. They genuinely believe that the Palestinians are starving and that the boat was on a humanitarian mission and nothing but a humanitarian mission. They are simply bewildered that anyone would have interfered with such a noble-minded endeavor. This is really what the vast majority of them believe.

Posters have demanded that now that I have revealed myself as anti-Jeffersonian, I have to explain the case for Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton may have been the most important American in our history who never became President. Here are some reasons why I like him:

1. In contrast to Jefferson, he was not born to wealth or land, but was an original Horatio Alger story. He was an illegitimate child born in the Caribbean island of Nevis (for this, John Adams would call him the "bastard son of a Scotch pedlar"). His talents brought him to the attention of local merchants, who essentially gave him a scholarship to study in America.

2. Hamilton was personally brave -- he served for most of the Revolutionary War as Washington's aide-de-camp, but near the war's end he led a frontal assault on a British position outside New York.

3. Hamilton was an outstanding (and fast!) writer. He was one of the co-authors of the Federalist Papers, and contributed some of its most important elements, such as the explanation of the Presidency and judicial review. His anonymous essays defending Washington's proclamation on neutrality led an exasperated Jefferson to write: "Hamilton is really a colossus to the antirepublican party. Without numbers, he is an host within himself."

4. Hamilton remains the leading American thinker on the Presidency. He defended it vigorously during the ratification of the Constitution with such lines as "energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government," and explained putting a single President at the head of the executive branch because "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man." For my extended riff on these themes, check out my book, Crisis and Command, which traces how Hamilton's thinking has provided the foundations for the Presidency ever since.

5. Hamilton was right on judicial review too. He didn't defend it because the judges are somehow smarter than the people, or because they have a right to decide all controversial social questions, but because the judges' constitutional duty is to not participate in any unconstitutional actions of the government. The judiciary, he said, should be "the least dangerous branch" because it had "neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment."

6. Most importantly, Hamilton thought that the government was not sovereign in the United States (unlike Great Britain at the time), but that all power lay in the people. The Tea Partiers would find a lot of support in Hamilton's explanation of government.The Constitution was only the contract by which the principals (us) delegated limited powers to our agents (the government). No act of our agents could violate the original terms of the deal, or, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 78: "the constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents."

7. Hamilton was right about the bank and the national debt. He succeeded in having the new government assume the revolutionary war debts of the states and the Congress, but also remarkably understood that the new U.S. bonds could be used to create a stable financial system centered around a national bank. He was certainly right about this, and Jefferson (whose innate fear of cities included banks and stock markets, I think) wrong.

8. Hamilton was right, and Jefferson wrong, about our foreign policy. Hamilton believed that the U.S. should either be neutral or on the side of Great Britain in the early decades of the Republic, despite the fact that he had personally fought the British on the battlefield. The growth of the special relationship between the U.S. and Great Britain shows that Hamilton's basic insight was correct -- the U.S. had and would have extensive economic relations with Britain, and Britain's navy and peaceful relations on the Canadian border were critical to US security. Jefferson, who admired the French and their Revolution, was almost certainly wrong that siding with France in this period was in our nation's best interests (as the War of 1812 demonstrated).

9. And to continue the threads about Jefferson and slavery, Hamilton was an abolitionist. He was right about that one too.

Why do people still think Jefferson superior to Hamilton?

The Sunday NYT had a front page -- front page, mind you -- story concluding that the Roberts Court is "the most conservative in decades," complete with a creepy pencil drawing of Roberts.

Once you get six paragraphs in, you discover that, in fact, "the recent shift to the right is modest," and that the Roberts court has not struck down laws nor overturned precedent more than earlier courts did. But the author (Adam Liptak) uses "widely accepted political science data" to conclude that the Court has lurched to the right. Briefly stated -- and the article itself is a typical bit of NYT windbaggery -- there are Poli Sci types who "rate" judicial decisions along an ideological spectrum, so that, for instance, decisions favoring criminal defendants are deemed "liberal."

What nonsense! (Professors Yoo and Epstein: help!) Such a ranking only makes sense if you view the world through interest-group politics, so that "conservative" means hostile to the accused and friendly to corporations. In fact, Justices Scalia, Thomas, et al. have often supported the rights of criminal defendants -- not because they happened to wake up on the liberal side of the bed that morning but because in the particular case, that decision was the most faithful to the Constitution (or whatever statute was at issue).

And even if you accept this pseudo science, all you get is that the Roberts Court, in its first five years, issued "conservative" opinions 58% of the time (with an uptick in the last term), whereas the Burger and Rehnquist courts averaged 55%.

And based on that 3% difference, the NYT warns: "If the Roberts court continues on the course suggested by its first five years, . . .abortion rights are likely to be curtailed, as are affirmative action and protections for people accused of crimes."

Don't get me wrong, I'll be delighted if the Court strikes down ObamaCare, and overturns the travesty that is Roe v. Wade. But we're not there yet, and this article strikes me as a particularly egregious example of the NYT trying to shoehorn facts into its pre-determined conclusion.

Here's me in City Journal on Breitbart and Journolist - an article that was sparked by a comment I made here on Ricochet but which puts that comment in context. When these media stories broke, I had just gotten word that my French publisher was canceling publication of my novel Empire of Lies for "political and religious" reasons:

The book’s French cancellation is, I realize, a rather small cultural event. Yet it gives specific color to the recent revelations on the Daily Caller website that left-wing journalists conspired to suppress scandals that might harm Barack Obama and to the brouhaha over Breitbart’s online release of a video that resulted in a government worker’s momentarily losing her job. In both stories, one thing leaps out at me: everywhere, the Left favors fewer voices and less information, and conservatives favor more. Everywhere, the Left seeks to disappear its opposition, whereas the Right is willing to meet them head-on.

Here's the rest.

This week, Los Angeles is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Metro Rail system. The whole thing cost $8 billion. Miles and miles of tunnels were dug. Gleaming new stations were built, complete with correct art -- lots of smiling "indigenous" people, lots of murals, you get the picture -- and the whole system is the kind of big-project, big-money undertaking city governments love: you get some money from the Feds, you get some money from the taxpayers, you build a monument to yourselves.

And nobody, really, is riding the damn thing. From the LA Times:

But although the region now has a gleaming system of subways and light-rail trains, some transportation experts say the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's $8-billion effort — less operating costs — has done little to reduce traffic congestion or increase the use of mass transit much beyond the level in 1985, when planning for the Metro Blue Line began.

Typical, really. Big projects mean lots of money sloshing around, spilling and splashing into places and pockets it's not supposed to go. Buses, which aren't glamorous, would have been a better and more effective way to reduce traffic.

Is there any evidence to suggest that any other city -- or state, for that matter -- could spend $8 billion better? People keep talking about big projects like this -- high-speed rail; major electrical grid upgrades -- but is anyone confident that big government can handle big projects?

Look, I think we need government to undertake some big things. Hoover Dam-type things. Federal highway system-type things. But what happened between then and now to make that seem so fraught with failure, to make us (well, me, anyway) so pessimistic about the combination of your typical state or city government and $8 billion?

I was traveling all day yesterday, so I’m just now catching up with the Sunday news shows--and man, I missed some good stuff.

On Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Wallace covers the Shirley Sherrod story by interviewing Howard Dean and Newt Gingrich. There's an amusing exchange between Dean and Wallace in the clip below. In a nutshell, Dean's blood pressure gets the better of him--again--and Wallace takes him to the woodshed for it. Check it out.

Below is the transcript.

WALLACE: Let me bring in Governor Dean, because the fact is...

GOV. HOWARD DEAN, FORMER DNC CHAIRMAN: Yeah, Chris, let's just...

WALLACE: Go ahead, sir.

DEAN: Let's just be blunt about this. I don't think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and you're certainly not a racist, but I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist.

They took a -- they had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had -- they had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and Sotomayor and all this other stuff. You -- I think you've got to be very -- I think the -- look the Tea Party called out their racist fringe, and I think the Republican Party's got to stop appealing to its racist fringe. And Fox News is what did that.

You put that on.

WALLACE: Wait, wait, wait, wait --

DEAN: Yes, I think the Obama people...

And here comes the coup de grace:

WALLACE: Governor? Governor? I know facts are inconvenient...

DEAN: Yes. Yep.

WALLACE: I know facts are inconvenient things, but let's try to deal with the facts. The fact is that the Obama administration fired or forced Shirley Sherrod to quit before her name had ever been mentioned on Fox News Channel. Did you know that, sir?

DEAN: I did -- what I do know is that video came out...

WALLACE: Did you -- did you know that, that her name -- did you know that her -- that she was fired before her name was ever mentioned on the Fox News Channel?

DEAN: What about the video? Where did that play? What about the incomplete video from a...

WALLACE: The video had never played...

DEAN: ... from a right-wing...

WALLACE: The video had never played on the Fox News Channel before the White House fired her. It was on Andrew Breitbart, biggovernment.com. We're not responsible for them. I agree with you it was out of context.

I've been traveling a lot so if someone already posted this and I missed it, forgive me. Director Oliver Stone is making a documentary for Showtime called "The Secret History of America," in which he seeks to put Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin "in context." He told the London Times:

“Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support."

Part of the problem, he says, is that the Holocaust is being over-emphasized. Why? Why else?

"The Jewish domination of the media. There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years."

When Mel Gibson got drunk and spouted anti-semitic garbage to a cop, agent Ari Emanuel, brother to Rahm, demanded he be blacklisted. When Mel spouted disgusting garbage at his girlfriend, Ari's agency dropped him.

Stone thinks those sneaky Jews have been taking Hitler out of context and making him look bad. Any reaction, Hollywood? Nah, as long as he's not going around praising Jesus. That would be beyond the pale.

You may recall that Naomi Wolf--of Beauty Myth fame, former masculinity advisor to Al Gore--wrote a book during the Bush years warning that America was on the Fourth Reich expressway.

Whatever the latest outrageous Obama caper, someone on the Right can always be counted on to say--usually correctly--"If Bush had done that, the Left would have gone nuts!"

Well, Naomi's going nuts. You've got to at least give her credit for that.

It gives me no joy to report this, but documents recently released by the Carter Library, as well as from Thatcher's personal files, suggest that compared to Thatcher, Carter was a veritable rock of fortitude and resolution during the 1979 hostage crisis. This doesn't really come as a surprise to me; I'd known this from other sources, but it's interesting to see it spelled out.

In this letter to Carter, dated November 21, 1979--this was when it seemed the hostages would face show trials for espionage--Thatcher admires Carter's "restraint," and "measured response." She then dismisses his request that Britain make even the most minimal show of displeasure:

I have been considering your suggestion that we should make a public gesture of our disapproval of Iranian behaviour by reducing the size of our diplomatic staff in Tehran. We have been keeping the level of our staffing at the Embassy under constant review with the aim of ensuring that it is no more than sufficient for operational needs. There will be some thinning out over the next few weeks. But we have not hitherto believed it wise to make a political point of any reduction, partly because we doubt whether the Iranians would be much impressed and partly because of the risk of retaliatory action against those remaining.

Nor was she willing to go as far as the Carter Administration wanted in freezing Iranian assets in London. In fact, if you take the collection as a whole, you'll see that she was chiefly concerned that Carter not do anything that might "jeopardize British interests" in the region. That was when she was thinking about Iran at all, which she generally was not. Iran was barely a blip on her mental horizon compared, say, to Rhodesia.

I wrote about this in There is No Alternative. I hardly need say how much I admire Thatcher, but there is no doubt in my mind that she failed to grasp the significance of the Iranian Revolution, and she simply did not recognize the threat political Islam could pose to the Western world. (Churchill, by contrast, grasped it quite well.)

Some extracts from my interviews with her intimates:

CB: There’s not a single mention in your book, and not a single mention in any memoir from the time, of anyone being concerned by the growing threat of Islamic extremism—

Bernard Ingham: No.

CB: Were there no indications at the time that this was an issue that would preoccupy Britain so greatly in the next decades?

BI: Well, I suppose our objective was to keep them on our side because of the oil . . . and I suppose that perhaps in trying to keep them on our side because of the oil we did exacerbate the problem. Because we did play up to some pretty reprehensible regimes. . . . Where were the indications coming from, apart from OPEC, which was really a business response, a monopolist response, where were the indications coming from of Islamic extremism at the time?

CB: Well, the Iranian revolution, for one thing. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt. The rise of the Taliban, which of course we contributed to—

BI: Yes, but we’d put up—let me plead our history, we’d put up with so many sects in our time! HAH! HAH! I mean, we put up with India! HAH! I mean, what was another sect?! HAH! HAH! . . . But you’re quite right . . . who the hell had ever heard of Islamic extremism in 1979? I didn’t. I’d heard of oil.

"Who the hell had ever heard of Islamic extremism in 1979?"

CB: During the time that you were working with Margaret Thatcher, do you remember anyone asking the question, “Are we nurturing a problem with Islamic fundamentalism, here and abroad?”

John Hoskyns: It wasn’t in the air. It wasn’t in the air at all.

Just not in the air.

CB: When you were working with Mrs. Thatcher, was there any anticipation of the conflict with radical Islam?

Peter Walker: No, not really, no.

CB: It was really not anticipated—

PW: I never heard a murmur.

This was pretty much the universal response I received. Americans old enough to remember that time still remember it vividly--the yellow ribbons, "Day 232, Day 234," the humiliation. The event barely registered in Britain.

When you see this, you do wonder: What are we overlooking now? What events are taking place on page 16 of our papers--and the metaphorical page 16 of our consciousness--that really should be on the front page, bold type, top of the fold?

Last Friday morning we packed the kids into the car and took a ride down to Beersheva, where we spent a very interesting few hours at the Israeli Air Force Museum. I took a zillion photos with the intention of providing Ricochet's gentle readers with a comprehensive illustrated history of the Air Force, but that turned out to be way too big a project for this format. So here are a few highlights.

One of the first things I saw was a little surreal: a haredi (i.e., ultraorthodox) family standing in front of a Kfir C-7 attack fighter. This was a startling image because the haredim do not, for the most part, serve in the armed forces (they’re granted an exemption during their yeshiva studies and almost invariably get a consecutive series of further exemptions until they’re declared permanently off the hook). As you can imagine, this is a touchy business here -- the ultra-religious community is extremely vocal about Israeli policy, yet most of them expect the rest of us to send our kids out to defend the country while their boys stay safe in the yeshiva. It was thus extremely interesting to see a haredi family that had enough interest in the IAF Museum to visit it. When I passed them, I heard that they were speaking Hebrew, not Yiddish, so they weren't off-the-charts ultraorthodox. Here they are:

That pointy thing next to the Kfir is an Arrow anti-ballistic missile, by the way, which was designed to improve upon the Patriot missiles that intercepted Scuds on their way to Israel during the first Gulf War (with limited success).

It can be difficult to cast the mind back to 1948 and imagine the sheer improbability of a bunch of Jewish guys in the middle of the desert -- the Jews, remember, were considered at best a "nation of shopkeepers;" they were not remotely perceived by the world at large as warriors -- having a snowball's chance of taking on the simultaneous invasion of five Arab armies. A big, big part of their ultimate success was their totally unanticipated achievement of aerial superiority. And a big, big part of that achievement hinged on their use of British Spitfires and Avia-199 Messerschmidts. (There’s a certain poetry to their use of the latter, which were made out of reconstituted bits of Luftwaffe aircraft.) The Israelis built two functional Spitfires out of remnants of unflyable planes that the British left behind when they ended the Mandate, combined with parts of a shot-down Egyptian Spitfire. They bought many more from Czechoslovakia (also the source for the Messerschmidts) and from Italy. Here's a Spitfire:

And here's an Avia-199 Messerschmidt:

What you see below are the remains of a Bristol Beaufighter, a British bomber, four of which were smuggled into Israel in 1948 after taking off during a fictitious film shoot. A Beaufighter brought down an Iraqi Fury during the war by diving straight towards the sea and pulling up at the last second, a spectacle that must have looked like a true-life continuation of that imaginary film. This particular plane crashed in combat on October 20, 1948. Its remains were found in a sand dune near Ashdod in 1994; two of its three-man crew are still missing.

This next is an Auster AOP/3-5, otherwise known as a “Primus” – so-called because it made a noise like a Primus stove. The Israelis bought twenty of these British twin-seaters in almost useless condition and reconstructed them in an old wine cellar in Sharona. They used them all over the place during the 1948 War for patrol and reconnaissance purposes.

The next image shows you pretty much all that’s left of the De Havilland Mosquitos, a light, fast bomber made in England. They played an attack/close support role in 1956. The problem with them was that they were made almost entirely of wood, and the desert heat caused the wood to expand. (The Mosquito had a surprising fan, by the way, in Hermann Göring, who wrote in 1943 that the Mosquito made him “turn green and yellow with envy.")

Now we're moving into the modern era. This is a Sikorsky CH-53, the IAF’s main transport helicopter. This American-made helicopter has been used to move more than troops: in 1969, during the War of Attrition, a Sikorsky crossed the Suez and carried back a complete Soviet-manufactured Egyptian radar station. In addition to troop transport, Sikorskys have been essential in search-and-rescue missions.

Next we have an F4-E Phantom, made by McDonnell Douglas. The Phantom was a critical asset in halting the enemy advance during the Yom Kippur War (1973). These were the planes used to buzz the Syrian General Staff HQ in Damascus.

The following is a very special plane. It's a Dassault Mirage, a French-made tactical fighter. This particular Mirage shot down 13 enemy aircraft during its career in the IAF in the late sixties and early seventies (mostly Egyptian MiGs, with some Syrian MiGs as well). When the IAF phased out the Mirage in 1982, the fleet was sold to the Argentine Air Force; hence the Argentine insignia. After this plane was grounded by the Argentines, they sold it back to Israel for the symbolic price of one dollar in recognition of its historical value.

Related to the Mirage is the Dassault Super Mystere B-2, which was the first Israeli plane to break the sound barrier and carry air-to-air missiles. During the Six-Day War, it was used to attack on all fronts:

This next plane, the American-made Dakota DC-3/C-47, had amazing longevity. Dakotas participated in every one of Israel’s wars and many operations between the wars as well. At the beginning of the 1956 War, 16 Dakotas dropped IDF paratroopers over the Mitla Pass, the largest paratroop drop in the history of the IDF. This particular Dakota served with the US Army Air Force in WWII -- and went on to serve in the IAF until 2001.

Next we have a Cobra, a two-bladed, single-engine attack helicopter. It’s remarkably narrow; it's kind of the Modigliani of helicopters. Cobras have seen a great deal of action on the northern front: they were a critical weapon against Syrian armor and fortifications during the 1982 War in Lebanon, and were used extensively against Hezbollah during the 1993 and 1996 operations.

The next two pictures show a Model L Gazelle, a French/British anti-tank combat helicopter. The Syrians used Gazelle Ls against the Israelis in 1982. The IAF shot some down, collected the bits and constructed two flightworthy helicopters out of them. The pair joined the IAF, sporting both Syrian and Israeli insignia. They didn’t last long, though, because there were no spare parts.

Next we have a MiG-23 that was brought to Israel by a defecting Syrian pilot in 1989. It’s the most advanced Soviet fighter the Israelis have ever captured.

And here is its elder brother, a MiG-21 that was brought to Israel in 1966 by a defecting Iraqi pilot. The acquisition of this MiG involved a long and complex operation by the Mossad and IAF intelligence. Simulated dogfights with it proved tremendously useful in exposing its weaknesses; dozens of MiG-21s were subsequently shot down in combat. In homage to the way the plane was brought to Israel, the IAF gave it the number 007.

The following picture shows one of two Mig-17s that arrived here in 1968 when their Syrian pilots accidentally landed at a base in the north of Israel because of a navigation error. (I have no idea why they weren’t shot down.)

This is your correspondent in the cockpit of a Tzukit. The plane is an upgrade of the Fouga Magister, which was the first plane ever constructed by the Israeli Aircraft Industry. The Tzukit came into service in 1983 and is used as a trainer in the IAF flight school.

There was a great deal I didn’t have the space to show you – visuals of both Israeli and enemy ground-to-air missile capability, for example. I’ll leave you with two items that speak for themselves.

The first is a photograph of a book, “Jewish Pilots in the World War,” which was published in Berlin in 1924. It records the history of young Jewish German men who struggled against many obstacles to become fighter pilots in the Imperial German Air Force in World War I. Most who survived their service were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in World War II. It’s remarkable that this book survived the war since the Nazis were careful to destroy most German books on Jewish subjects, particularly anything that cast Jews in a positive light.

The last image is a photograph, taken on September 4, 2003, of three Israeli F-15s flying over Auschwitz. As the jets passed overhead, formation leader Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel read out this statement, which was broadcast on the ground: "We pilots of the Air Force, flying in the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims and shoulder their silent cries, salute their courage and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people and its nation Israel." In the cockpits, the Israeli crews carried the names of all those recorded murdered in Auschwitz on that date exactly 60 years before.

TV's best show is back, tonight, in just over a half an hour. (I write from the West Coast.) Why do we watch, again? And again? A lot of ink has been spilled about Mad Men -- and, yes, as you spill some more below, you should consider this the most exacting test of Ricochet's reputation for grown-up behavior yet: no spoilers. So I'm going to try for a different angle on why we tune in.

We watch because we're mortal and we know it.

Tocqueville once wrote:

The short space of sixty years will never confine the whole imagination of man; the incomplete joys of this world will never suffice for his heart. Alone among all the beings, man shows a natural disgust for existence and an immense desire to exist: he scorns life and fears nothingness. These different instincts constantly drive his soul toward contemplation of another world, and it is religion that guides it there.

It's also art. Mad Men recaptures a world which was also a time -- a time that began to run out, a time that was unsustainable, just as Mad Men's run is unsustainable. It is a show about people on borrowed time that is itself on borrowed time, moreso than the usual television series (or even the unusual series like Deadwood, which died as prematurely as its characters were apt to do).

And during this borrowed time, the men and women of Mad Men know, themselves, that the clock is ticking. Sometimes they labor quickly to destroy themselves. Sometimes they retreat and sit or stand still and catch a glimpse of the vista of that destruction, a scorn for health and safety that titillates us now but only because it still stirs within us.

Mad Men is a show relentlessly, beautifully, brilliantly about time, and like anyone or anything brilliant about time it knows and shows that time is us, our mortality, our once-ness, for once is all we get, and we know it. The interim is ours.

That interim, as Shakespeare knew, is the raw material of drama. It can be the cold pause in which we find the vantage to see our lives as if we had stepped outside them, as Hamlet tried to do.

Or it can be the hot minute described in Julius Caesar:

Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: / The Genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council; and the state of man, / Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection.

Last season was notoriously on the slow side. This season? Hold on to your fedoras.

Pic via Flickr user Fimoculous.

You're probably familiar with the story of Bell, Callifornia. That's the poor Los Angeles County town that was paying some of the highest salaries in the nation, including nearly $800,000 a year for its city manager. This leader of the community recently blew .28 after crashing into a neighbor's mailbox. He's resigned but in just a few years, his pension will grow to some $1,000,000 a year.

Four of the five city council members make $100,000 a year for part-time positions that similar communities compensate with around $400/month. They're being investigated. And the town folk -- one of six who live in poverty -- aren't pleased:

Several hundred angry residents from a modest blue-collar Los Angeles suburb marched Sunday to call for the resignation of the mayor and some City Council members in a protest sparked by the sky-high salaries of three recently departed administrators.

The residents of the city of Bell marched to Oscar's Korner Market and Carniceria, owned by Mayor Oscar Hernandez, then to his home, demanding that he reduce his own six-figure compensation or quit.

They then did the same with some members of the City Council, with many marchers wearing T-shirts that read "My city is more corrupt than your city."

Well, not mine -- I live in D.C.! But seriously, is this a positive sign that people are wising up to outrageous public employee compensation? I hope so.

Netroots Nation, the progressive grassroots organization that Mollie blogged about here, just closed shop on its fifth annual convention, held in Las Vegas.

Just for fun, here's a snapshot of the convention, in quotes:

First up is TV/radio personality Laura Flanders, introducing Michele Bachmann's challenger, Tarryl Clark:

Another little update from the Right Online folks. Michele Bachmann was there last night. Sen. Franken is gonna wrestle with her...We'll make her wear those fishnets that they're wearing serving cocktails outside. That's the kind of Netroots we like.

Second is the delusional Van Jones, speaking about a global warming trip he took to the Arctic with Jimmy Carter, and others:

The other thing that happened was we had this -- well, we had a meeting with them, we had a delegation -- a meeting of -- a delegation of polar bears and, you know, they were very polite, the polar bears. Us, talking to the polar bears....And the only polar bear that spoke up was the black one... Oh, see you didn't know there were black polar bears and I'm telling you, man. Racism every where....But the black polar bear was honest, man....

Alright, someone's been drinking the Kool-Aid. Don't believe me? Keep reading. His "winning" strategy for the midterm elections is to resurrect the ghost of Jimmy Carter (I know, I know: we need to keep in mind that Van Jones is speaking to a lefty audience, but even he admits that Carter is "a punch line" to conservatives and progressives alike).....and yet:

Jimmy Carter...if we had stayed with his program, if we had stayed with his policies, we wouldn't be where we are today. So he deserves the utmost respect from all of us. We need to rehabilitate Jimmy Carter. If -- if conservatives can rehabilitate Ronald Reagan, we can certainly rehabilitate Jimmy Carter.

Then there's the questionable logic of Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida:

We need to have paid vacation...Why? Because we are not slaves...

He goes on:

What we're promising people is a new New Deal.

And finally, President Obama makes his visionary pitch:

Change has not come fast enough for too many Americans, I know that…It hasn't come fast enough for me either. And I know it hasn't come fast enough for many of you who fought so hard during the election. The fact is, it took years to get here. It'll take time to get us out.

Hat-tip to the American Spectator's Philip Klein for most of these quotes.

Manmade global warming, like so many other social and economic issues, has become hopelessly politicized. Each side has dug in its heels and has accused the other of acting irresponsibly and dishonestly. For the believers, the other side has become the equivalent of Holocaust deniers; and for the doubters, the other side has become a cult intent on manipulating mankind to remake the world in some sort of natural Utopian image.

The divide has become so great, it seems virtually impossible to bridge the gap. However, I’m not writing for Ricochet merely to outline problems; I’m here to offer real solutions. And I’m not just blowing carbon dioxide.

Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.

Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.

Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically.

How about it? Why wait for governments to change us? You who have already seen the light have it within your grasp to act in concert with each other and change the world forever. And I hate to be a scold, but you have a special obligation to do it because you believe it so strongly. Then, instead of looking at isolated tree rings and computer models, you’d have real results to point to, and even the skeptics would see the error of their ways and join you.

So start Tweeting each other and get the ball rolling. We’ll anxiously await results. See, I told you I had the solution. My work here is done.

More from Pat Sajak

Drudge-ery
Viva Las Vegas?

Believe the Polls? Even Some Pollsters Don't

The LA Times reports that hispanic families are "fleeing Phoenix out of fear of immigration law." Obviously the reporter had solid facts to back up this serious charge, right? Actually, the entire article is based on interviews with 4 merchants, all of whom work an hispanic neighborhood that is suffering from economic hardship. But wait -- after once we get seven paragraphs into the story, the reporter reveals:

it's hard to determine how much of the neighborhood's woes stem from Arizona's immigration laws and how much from the state's economy, battered by a once red-hot housing marked that cooled.

And then, about ten paragraphs later, we discover that "No one has measured the effect of SB 1070 on businesses, or the number of immigrants it has prompted to leave Arizona."

I suppose the reporter is to credited with having enough honesty to include these factoids, but this is a story that a responsible editor should have killed. The piece is simply devoid of any facts that support its conclusion: that there is an exodus of Latinos out of Arizona *because of* the immigration bill.

"Dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms." Things sound pretty grim to me at the NHS, our new role model for enlightened medical care.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:

* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.

* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.

* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.

* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.

My own experience of the NHS--I lived in Britain for about seven years--was that it was pretty good for things like routine sniffles. I was always seen promptly, and I reckon the standard of care was perfectly adequate.

Then my brother came to visit me after spending three months backpacking in India, and on his first night at my place had a massive epileptic seizure on my floor. He'd never had one before, and of course I freaked out completely. We rushed him to the hospital, where they did a basic checkup and told us cheerfully, "Well, it's probably nothing, but of course it could be meningitis, since he's been in India, and it could always be a brain tumor." And how would we rule that out, we asked? You'd start with a CT scan, said the doctor. But alas, he couldn't authorize that. You needed to have three seizures before the NHS would pay for it.

Fortunately, my brother had health insurance. We went to a private hospital, where we were relieved of the agony of wondering whether he had a brain tumor within a few hours.

Now, before you jump to ideological conclusions, there's a twist to this story: My brother can't afford private insurance in the US anymore, because while he didn't have a brain tumor, he does have epilepsy.

That's definitely a big flaw in the system, too.

Elizabeth Wurtzel just emailed me a list of some prominent bar exam failers -- which got me thinking, probably tangentially to her point, that there really are a lot of people who pass through law school. WikiAnswers indicates that the US has the largest number of lawyers by far:

Country Lawyers Population People/Lawyer

US: Lawyers: 1,143,358 Pop: 303MM P/L:265

And that's excluding people who fail the bar exam. But in a legalistic society like ours, a law school education and a legal degree are a fine (if often expensive) way of getting ahead in the world. They provide a certain credential, a certain way of seeing the world. They put you in a certain circulation: not necessarily in 'the elite', but in a certain professional class -- one that, indeed, is growing way too large really to count, I think, as elite. Our legalistic way of viewing the world isn't confined to our lawyers. I wish I could say this is a great thing, but I'm not at all sure. Liberal bias in law school is an issue that might be so important because of the way its prejudices are compounded and directed by 'legalistic' -- as opposed to lawyerly, in the judicious sense -- thinking.

There's been some support voiced around here, by contributors and members alike, for Paul Ryan's Roadmap. Via Stacy McCain, here's Ryan on the Roadmap, gloves off:

Co-blogger Smitty's take:

Ryan puts words in the mouth of unnamed Dems: “If it wasn’t so political–I love your idea–I’d go for this.” Ryan points out the stark challenge facing a GOP trying to play bass and drums at the same time. There really is no half measure between the minimal, essentially libertarian Constitution as written, and the nanny state. He remains unconvinced, perhaps rightfully so, that the American people are serious about the elimination of Federal entitlements.

In response to Angelo Codevilla's must-reader at AmSpec, Ross sounds a cautionary note:

One can deny that Barack Obama’s inner circle is wise, but it’s foolish to pretend that they aren’t remarkably intelligent. This pretense, like the notion that two-thirds of Americans are ripe for a revolution against the administrative state, has the unfortunate consequence of making things seem too easy for conservatives.

If that were true, says Ross, "conservatives would be poised for victory after victory, at the ballot box and in the halls of Congress alike. But matters are more complicated than that, and the conservative challenge much more difficult." For Ross, the "two great vices of the Obama-era right" are "premature triumphalism" and "a blithe conviction that 'true conservative' good intentions trump policy substance and deep expertise." Tough stuff, but why would it be true?

Conservative triumphalism might be premature because the liberal state, like its Obama-era advancements, is simply too difficult to undo short of a systemic breakdown of government. And conservative 'blitheness' might be misguided because real experts really do need to craft policies designed to grapple with intense, complex realities.

Granted. But here's what concerns me. Rather than being organized around the challenge of dealing with the external crises manufactured by the real world, much of the expertise concentrated in the liberal state is assembled to study and manage the crises internal to the administrative regime, crises manufactured by the regime itself. The bigger the state, the higher the risk that any internal crisis will become a catastrophic systemic crisis -- that is, a crisis that will badly harm not just the liberal state but the real world that it supposedly supervises. For that reason, I want to argue, policy experts in the liberal state cannot help but confuse their administrative regime with the real world. And, at the same time, ordinary citizens who tolerate, accept, or celebrate the liberal state partake of the same conflation from the opposite, bottom-up direction -- not because they're delusional or long for servitude (necessarily), but because the logic of the liberal state really does cause the reality of the world and the artifice of government to run together. (Nowhere is this more apparent than with taxes.)

So whenever a conservative or a libertarian proposes that we dismember the liberal state, the attack is inevitably, and not ridiculously, interpreted by liberals and progressives as an attempt to pull everyday life limb from limb. Ross is absolutely right that Republicans have relied on just such an interpretation when expedient to do so -- attacking Obama, in the latest instance, for trying to Take Away Your Medicare. Faced with this awkwardness, some paleo or traditional conservatives are tempted to fantasize about the collapse of the whole awful beast, government and reality alike -- peak oil, hyperinflation, and all the rest. But, for most of us, the watchword is Don't Go There. Which is why Ross is also right that the "conservative challenge" is difficult indeed.

Nevertheless...doesn't right now seem like as auspicious a time as there has been since the New Deal for a political transformation? less 'conservative' in any specific sense than anti-statist in the broad sense? One has to start somewhere, and the reason to start has perhaps never been so well dramatized.

Republicans have a habit -- stretching back over 40 years -- of nominating the "next guy in line" for president. Sometimes that works out pretty well -- the Reagan who ran in 1980 had been honed by his brief 1976 attempt to win the nomination from Ford. Sometimes, not so much, cf. McCain, 2008. There are always dark horses and out-of-left-field names in the mix, but in the end, the Tired Old Party usually picks the Next In Line.

Right now, though, there are two Next In Lines, according to Republican tradition. There's the guy who ran for the nomination last time and lost -- that's the Reagan 1980 model -- and is called the "front runner." That's Mitt.

And there's another Next In Line. That's the guy who ran on the losing ticket last time. That's Sarah Palin.

Frankly, neither one of them has what 2012 is going to be asking for.

So, Conor Friedersdorf has a good idea:

Let's think this through together. What are the most useful things an Islamic mosque and community center could do to discourage radical Islam?

The Tel Aviv Tourist Association, warmly backed by Mayor Ron Huldai, has launched a six-month outreach program to encourage gay and lesbian travelers from around the world to visit the city. The program will offer discounted flight and hotel packages, free city tours and discounts. It's currently oriented towards the communities in Germany and France, but the intention is to expand the program to other international markets after the six-month launch period is up.

I can't vouch for the club scene but I'm a serious foodie, and you can believe me when I tell you that Tel Aviv offers some world-class dining. And the beach is beautiful. The city's a little grubby, but it's got a great, friendly, good-humored charm. We're subscribers to a couple of theaters in Tel Aviv and it's always a pleasure going into town. I heartily back this initiative. Welcome, one and all!

Commenting on John Yoo's recent attack on Thomas Jefferson--yes, John attacked Jefferson--Ricochet member Zoon Politikon:

Until I got to know you all I'd heard about was what a monster you were. The first time I looked you up i fully expected to see a monster's picture instead of a human being's. Then I started reading what you had to write and watching some interviews and said to myself, "self, that John Yoo ain't so bad after all."

Declaring yourself a Hamiltonian puts us back at square one, Mr. Yoo.

If you had told me on 9/11 that almost a decade later there would still be a pit at Ground Zero, I would have laughed...then cried...then hurled. But here we are. Forget about whatever's going up at that sorrowful spot, or when. What I want to know is what we should have put there already.

My atavistic suggestion, aired in the Ground Zero Strip Club conversation below:

a huge golden obelisk [...] topped with a Screaming Eagle or a Gleaming Eye[.]

Bonus points, possibly in the form of pelted rotten vegetables, if you convincingly argue for exactly what it is we're doing now.

Over in the comments section, Ricochet member Jim Chase writes this:

The current political class notwithstanding, we are a nation founded on the rule of law. If the Cordoba bunch has legally acquired property/zoning permissions, and if there is no direct tie (financial) to groups formally designated as terrorist by the State Dept., then they have the right to build wherever they want. Our laws protect such activity, be it religious, economic and/or assembly.

I don't like it. I can protest against it. I can ignore their propaganda. As citizens, we can keep an eye on them to a point. But I cannot take away their right, nor would I advocate such.

I myself haven't yet thought this all the way through--there is, after all, a well-established principle that, in the old phrase, the Constitution isn't a suicide pact--but Jim's statement here strikes me as a wonderful expression of decency, patriotism, and common sense. Worse affronts than the construction of "Cordoba House" will no doubt come. But at least for now, I'm standing with Jim.

if you're going to fight Chicago style, you need to be really, really right. Otherwise, you fall not just into an ends-justifies-the-means situation but into an even more perverse means-justify-the-ends situation. In other words, saying we need to fight like Alinskyites out of some principle almost certainly guarantees that we will lose sight of what we're supposed to be fighting for. -- Jonah Goldberg

I don't get Rush's point at all. I think Breitbart made a mistake, reacted badly to its exposure, and ought to apologize. Maybe that set of views is wrong, but how is it cowardly? -- Ramesh Ponnuru

I am the only one who finds this whole Shirley Sherrod imbroglio too surreal to process? Is there any reason at all why we all shouldn't just affirm what Goldberg and Ponnuru say here and get on with our lives?

If you wanted to argue that Newt Gingrich is often given to the unduly sweeping statement, or that from time to time he seems to confuse pop culture with historical analysis--remember how much he used to make of Alvin Toffler's Third Wave?-- I'd make no effort to gainsay you. On the other hand, just get a load of this:

The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over....America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.

Newt is right--he's right. And who but he would have the particular fearlessness required to make such a statement?