Mitt Romney is following textbook politics as he pursues the 2012 Republican nomination. He's raising a ton of money and spreading it around the GOP. He wrote a book outlining the policies he'd follow if he were in charge. His team of consultants is laying the groundwork for the presidential contest while advising candidates like Scott Brown. And for the most part, Romney has flown below the radar as he tries to win what Karl Rove calls the "invisible primaries" of money, establishment support, substance, and reassurance.

For all these reasons, it would be easy to call Romney the frontrunner for the Republican nod. But I'd think twice before doing so. Romney may turn out to be a paper tiger. He has a major likability problem -- according to Gallup, among Republicans, his favorables are the lowest of any of the likely 2012 contestants (with the exception of Bobby Jindal, whom most Republicans never have heard of). Most important, Romney's signature achievement during his one term as Massachusetts governor was his health care plan -- a plan which the Democrats are not wrong to describe as similar to Obamacare, and which Robert Samuelson tears apart in today's Washington Post.

In 2008, Romney had the most success winning caucuses, places where he had personal connections, and states with large Mormon populations. But he had trouble breaking out beyond that. Is there any reason to think he won't have the same problem in 2012 -- or worse?

What can one say? They’ve sunk to a new low? It’s laughable to put “new” and “low” together when talking about Muslim extremists.

According to this account, Sunday’s suicide bombing in Iraq, which killed more than 40 people, was carried out by one or two individuals with Down syndrome. No mainstream news organizations are reporting this angle (yet). And, I must add in fairness that a similar story was reported in February of 2008, but later disproved. (The two women suffered from depression and schizophrenia, apparently, which, if you think about it, is just as abominable.)

True or not, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if this “tactic” has, at the very least, been seriously considered by the scum who plan and perpetrate these kinds of hateful crimes. An individual with Down syndrome would be just trusting and loving enough to do almost anything that was asked of him or her without understanding the consequences.

People with Down syndrome thrive in social environments. They love people, and they love to be loved. They love to be “a part of” something. They are, often, smart enough to know when they are being excluded even when the rejection is subtle. [Here’s a great—and fun—story about a young man with Down syndrome who understands the difference between participating and competing.] So, a “top secret planning session” would have great appeal. There’s nothing my four-year-old loves to do more than to be conspiratorial with her siblings, even if it’s just whispered nonsense.

Many parents of children with Down syndrome will tell you that their child’s EQ (emotional quotient) is right on target – or even advanced. Yet cognitive delays are common. People with Down syndrome are not capable of discerning malice or complex manipulation. To someone who sees the enormous joy in loving, and being loved, the impulse to deliberately hurt someone is alien. There are few grudges in the world of Down syndrome. Life is a great joy. Strange, then, that so many people—both outwardly sane Westerners and outwardly insane extremists—seemingly want Down syndrome erased off the face of the earth. In the West, abortion is the preferred method. In the East, it’s the suicide bomb.

The creeps who plan these suicide missions are, to use a phrase I picked up over the weekend from my fellow Ricochet contributor Bill McGurn, lower than a snake’s belly. Naturally, they’re also cowards. They may believe that their actions put a smile on Allah’s face. I’m pretty sure that they just bought themselves a one-way ticket to hell.

Robert Pear writing in the New York Times this past weekend:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government's "power to lay and collect taxes."

I think it's time George Stephanopoulos recall Obama for a second interview to have the president explain himself.

Once again, our friends at Hong Kong-based Next Media (and I'm not just saying that; they really are friends of Ricochet) have put their animation geniuses to work. This time, to explain the iPhone antenna problem. With a detour through the general history of Apple, its war with Microsoft, and the transformation of Steve Jobs from counter-culture hero to....well, you just have to watch for yourself.

Sometimes, to really know what's going on, you have to see how the Chinese explain it to each other.

This Washington Post series about the rampant growth of the private/public intelligence enterprise since 9/11 drops few investigative bombshells on its first day, but this picture is worth a thousand words:

(Photo: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

I don't have a television handy, but the current CNN home page includes reports on a rise in stingray attacks and the Silly Bandz toy bracelet craze. Are there evildoers that will slip past our defenses if someone misses one minute of hairsprayed bloviation? Is this how "dots" get "connected?" By subjecting users of intelligence to the information equivalent of elevator music as they work?

Blasting our intelligence analysts -- already bombarded with more data and reports than they can effectively process -- with seven simultaneous news feeds seems like a stunning bit of institutionalized stupidity. But maybe I'm wrong. I remain open to the possibility that Bin Laden and Zawahiri are still at large only because counter terrorism officials can't see ten antacid commercials at once.

Yes, Food and Commercial Workers Union, you would be in favor of legalizing marijuana.

Making the Thatcherite rounds today is this item in the Telegraph. It seems an anonymous source claims that Thatcher's family is "appalled" by the screenplay for The Iron Lady:

Although the prospect of Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher may have pleased some admirers of the Conservative former prime minister, her children have been horrified to discover more about the film.

Mandrake hears that the screenplay of The Iron Lady depicts Baroness Thatcher as an elderly dementia-sufferer looking back on her career with sadness. She is shown talking to herself and unaware that her husband, Sir Denis Thatcher, has died.

“Sir Mark and Carol are appalled at what they have learnt about the film,” says a friend of the family. “They think it sounds like some Left-wing fantasy. They feel strongly about it, but will not speak publicly for fear of giving it more publicity."

There may be something else about the screenplay that is offensive to the family, but if so, it's not reported here. If this is all there is to it, I'm puzzled. Baroness Thatcher is suffering from dementia. It's not a secret, nor, surely, should it be a source of shame. It's a terrible disease, not a character flaw. Carol Thatcher herself has written about the agony of explaining to her mother repeatedly that her husband is dead. This is legitimately part of the biography of Margaret Thatcher, not a Left-wing fantasy.

Cameron McCracken, the managing director of the film-maker Pathé, confirms: "It is true that the film is set in the recent past and that Baroness Thatcher does look back on both the triumphs and the lows of her extraordinary career.

"It is a film about power and the price that is paid for power. In that sense, it is the story of every person who has ever had to balance their private life with their public career."

I don't see how a film about Thatcher could fail to treat these themes. Using the vehicle of retrospection is a common artistic device and probably a shrewd one. It is obviously poignant that none of Thatcher's achievements and none of her worldly power could protect her from her fate. Some of the greatest works of literature are meditations on the limits of political power, are they not?

Of course it's still possible that the screenplay is Left-wing garbage. But I certainly wouldn't conclude so from this.

The IDF has declassified the details of the flotilla raid and posted two videos reconstructing the events. They're each about eight minutes long and they're well worth watching. Here they are:

On a personal note, as the mother of three children who will all serve in the army one day, these were extremely difficult videos for me to watch.

Palestinian and Israeli entrepreneurs have just announced a joint venture to build and sell wind turbines in the West Bank and its environs:

A year ago the Brothers Group made e-mail contact (in English, their common language) with Israel Wind Energy, a company that was founded about a year ago, which provides wind turbine solutions and has also developed its own wind turbine. "We got emails from them last year," says Yanir Avital, the Israeli company's founder, standing at Salem's side. "They were interested in our product. We visited their company in Bethlehem and felt they could be a good partner. We could use [Salem's] connections, and with our connections we could help their company go one or two steps ahead."

The two sides intend to first cooperate on the integration of the wind turbines in the PA and later branch out beyond the region. "We'd like to develop and install wind turbines in the territories," says Avital. "In Israel we have very few places that can use this kind of energy."

Okay, perhaps it's a little thing, all things considered. But people need to remember that there are people in this part of the world who are not totally insane.

Here's a poignant image to start your day:

A young Arab couple enjoying an evening together, the husband with his arm slung affectionately around his wife's shoulders, the wife leaning back comfortably against him. She is in a headscarf that fully exposes her face and is looking straight ahead, not down at the ground. They appear to be at a performance of some kind, possibly at a beach cafe. The wife is smoking a nargila, or water pipe.

Haaretz reported today that this past Friday, Hamas decreed that women are no longer permitted to smoke nargilas in Gaza. Hamas men burst into cafes without warning and ordered the proprietors to stop providing women patrons with the pipes. Non-compliance, they were told, will result in heavy fines -- but already, several cafe owners have been arrested on suspicion of not enforcing the order. (Gazan women are already forbidden from riding on motorcycles with their husbands, getting their hair cut in "male" hair salons [and male hairstylists are now forbidden from cutting women's hair], and walking on the beach without a male family member present.)

Lest anyone suspect that the logic behind the nargila ruling has anything to do with concern for women's health, Hamas interior ministry spokesman Ihab Ghussein was quick to clarify the official position: the spectacle of a woman smoking in public "harms the image of our people." Police spokesman Ayman Batneiji added that husbands often divorce wives who allow themselves to be seen smoking, though he didn't have any data handy to support this assertion.

Poor Hamas. The NY Times is publishing long articles documenting the miserable conditions in Gaza that have prevailed, and that are getting worse all the time, under their administration. Even the head of the Gaza office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (U.N.R.W.A.) -- an organization that can usually be counted on to toe the Palestinian party line -- says, “They [Hamas] have no credibility in demanding anything from anybody if they show such disregard for the plight of their own people.” They've been called impure and collaborationist (ouch!) by local Islamists even more Talibanesque than themselves, a problem they've had to put down with the occasional all-night gun battle, complete with a couple of dozen deaths. And every time Hamas gets its inner Taliban on, their political rivals in Ramallah start pointing fingers and accusing them of being incapable of running a civilized government.

It's no picnic, being a democratically elected government. Still -- gotta show the people who's in charge. When in doubt, stick it to the women.

Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published an extremely persuasive piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for an independent inquiry into the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on the state of the Iranian nuclear program.

U.S. intelligence has already had two horrendously costly lapses this decade: the failure to interdict the plot of Sept. 11, 2001, and the erroneous assessment that Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction. Both brought us into wars. A third failure may now be unfolding, with consequences that might dwarf the preceding two. To avoid this, we need an inquest.

The assessment that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD may not have been entirely errorneous; I still think it's an open question. But the first failure is inarguable. I've written a few pieces about what went wrong in our intelligence community prior to September 11, and I have very little confidence that the its culture has changed sufficiently that we need not worry about a repeat.

Schoenfeld notes evidence that "political cookery" tainted the 2007 NIE, and warns:

Since late last year, U.S. intelligence has been preparing a new estimate of Iran's nuclear program. The critical question is whether the forces that led to politicization in 2007 have been eradicated. Will the drafters of the new Iran NIE call the shots as they are, or will they once again use intelligence as a political lever?

Already some hints are emerging. In late June, CIA Director Leon Panetta flatly declared that the Iranians "clearly are developing their nuclear capability." Regarding "weaponization," he stated that "they continue to work on designs in that area." This explicit statement is an unequivocal reversal by our nation's premier spy agency.

But could this stunning turnabout somehow be every bit as politicized as the 2007 NIE? This troubling possibility cannot be overlooked.

I agree that it can't be overlooked.

If we and the rest of the world are not to be surprised by an Iranian detonation ... We need absolute confidence that the answer, even if indeterminate, is not once again based on cooked intelligence.

That is why a neutral outside panel should be brought in to scrutinize the discredited 2007 NIE and the entire estimating process in this sensitive arena.

Previous intelligence lapses, like those leading up to 9/11 or with Iraq's WMDs, have been thoroughly investigated by independent commissions, unleashing potential for corrective action. Who made mistakes and why? Are those same individuals in the process of introducing errors again? The national intelligence officer who oversaw the writing of the 2007 NIE was Vann Van Diepen. Today he is a senior official at the State Department, where he "spearheads efforts to promote international consensus on WMD proliferation."

I didn't realize this about Vann Van Diepen, and again, I agree that this is a cause for concern. It doesn't necessarily mean he's been discredited, but it definitely suggests that we need to be taking the questions Schoenfeld raises seriously. "An independent inquest might help us avoid what would be the third in an unholy trinity of hugely consequential 21st-century intelligence blunders," Schoenfeld concludes, and I can't see a single reason to think him wrong. Far better the inquest take place before the catastrophe than after.

The intelligence community tends to be less scrutinized than other branches of government, for obvious reasons. We need improved mechanisms for oversight, particularly in this case: A mistake could prove to be the most costly intelligence failure in human history.

Tangentially, a question for Judith: Do you get the sense that something has gone very wrong within the Israeli intelligence community? I'm still flabbergasted by the failure to anticipate violence on the Mavi Marmara, something I could have predicted just from using Google and a bit of common sense, and in fact did predict. Do you think that was a one-off lapse, or part of a pattern? If the latter, what do you think is going on?

The question posed by The New York Times to a wide variety of political observers, 15 in all, was simple, and perhaps a bit plaintive: "How can Obama rebound?"

The answers, in the form of mini-op-eds, mostly fell into two categories: First, liberals who think the President should continue to be liberal, but sell it better; and second, conservatives who think Obama should be, well, more conservative. Speaking for myself, as someone to the right of Obama and who did not vote for him in 2008, I can still concede that the best advice to any politician is to start with who he or she is. And in Obama's case, that means starting on the left and working back over to the middle. Because it's in the middle that national elections are won.

So that's why I thought that two of the op-ed "mcnuggets" offered Obama a genuine ray of hope. That is to say, they offered advice that the 44th President could plausibly follow, advice that would move him to the center in a constructive way, without fracturing his lefty base. Not surprisingly, those two op-eds came from two authors with experience winning red states. The first was a top adviser to Bill "Triangulator" Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign, which the Democrat won in a landslide, making him the first Democrat to win re-election since FDR. And the second was from the wife of a then-populist Democrat who won an upset victory in a Southern state back in 1998. I am speaking, therefore, of Mark Penn and Elizabeth Edwards, who campaigned alongside her husband, John, when he pitched himself as a moderate to defeat a Republican incumbent.

One needn't agree with all that Penn and Edwards have to say, or what they stand for, to nonetheless recognize that they are offering shrewd advice to any candidate--in either party--who wishes to win over the swing voters in the middle.

First, Penn suggested a mix of policies, all aimed, as he put it, "retak[ing] ownership of the center." And that means some spending cuts, but also some spending increases: As the veteran Democratic pollster wrote, if Obama wants to make a comeback, he should start by "making a real down payment on the deficit, revamping the health care act to address the cost issue."

OK, that's budget-cutting and deficit reduction, always sensible in a time of trillion-dollar deficits. But at the same time, we must remember that government overspending was not the proximate cause of the recession--it was the mortgage bubble, along with the even larger financial bubble. Therefore it follows, to any Democrat--and to many independents and even some conservatives--that America needs a plan for moving America back toward physical production, as opposed to real estate speculation and financial "innovation." And we might further observe that simply chopping at healthcare spending is a guaranteed political loser. As we shall see--and as I have been arguing at my blog, Serious Medicine Strategy, the smart approach to health-savings is by helping people to be healthier, and therefore less needful of medical help, as well as more productive in the workforce.

But those ideas were at least alluded to in Penn's prescription. As he wrote, Obama should also dedicate himself to "opening up new markets overseas and creating jobs by promoting innovation through spending on basic research."

And Penn goes further:

Rather than cut the space program, he should double its size. He should make sure that every American with a broadband connection has access to online education. He should offer research grants and tax incentives to promote investment in our coal, natural gas and biofuel resources, as well as wind and solar energy.

Bravo! Yes, it's entirely appropriate to cut spending where necessary. But it's also appropriate to spend where spending is needed--on projects such as energy independence. And yes, the space program should be doubled, just as Penn says, because space exploration provide larger benefits to our economic well-being and national security. (One might add, of course, that to make NASA credible again in the eyes of ordinary Americans, perhaps it needs a new administrator, committed to space and rocketry, as opposed to Muslim outreach and global social work.)

Next up, Elizabeth Edwards, the estranged wife of former Sen. John Edwards. John Edwards, of course, has shamed everyone who ever knew him, while Elizabeth Edwards has created a dignified new life for herself as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center DC think tank. But what she wrote about in her Times piece transcends partisanship and ideology:

Before Ted Kennedy died, he and his fellow senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas proposed a renewed war on cancer. President Obama should take up that proposal.

Cancer touches nearly every American family, creating emotional, physical and financial hardship. Each of those families would be cheerleaders in this fight, rooting for earlier detection, improved treatments and — dare we dream — cures. And unlike the debates over health care and financial reform, there are no cheerleaders on the other side, no monied interests hoping to retain the status quo, no lobbying groups working to mute every victory with so many concessions that it seems like a loss.

With a renewed war on cancer, the president could change — there is that word again — the lives of millions of Americans and their families. And a nation would cheer him on again.

We could add that not only would a real war against cancer be popular, but it would also be good economics. An increasingly affluent world is suffering from the same medical maladies as the US and the West--including more cancer. So the country that comes up with the cure will be the medicine chest to the world. And that's a lucrative place to be.

Conservative, libertarians, and tea partiers all have their own ideas on the national agenda. But in the meantime, with Obama in office, and gearing up for a re-election campaign, groups on the right should factor in Obama's plans, not just their own plans. If the President were to listen to Penn and Edwards, and make himself over into a pro-technology, pro-cure centrist, he would be a formidable foe in 2012. If he doesn't do so, if he doesn't move to the center, then he will likely lose.

In which case, the next president will face the challenge of reviving the economy and saving money on healthcare, without hurting old people. And so even then, elements of the Penn/Edwards platform will look mighty attractive.

At the tail end of this conversation, Ricochet Members Scott Reusser and EJHill get into a discussion of recent moves by the Obama administration to get a little leverage -- for national security reasons, says the government; for power politics reasons, says EJHill -- over the internet.

(By the way: I really love the way conversations on here meander away from the original topic and onto a new, interesting, fresh topic. We'll have to work on ways to make it easier to discover and follow the new avenues that open up, but I never want to lose that sense of surprise.)

Okay, back to the point: The Lieberman-Collins-Carper bill, now somewhere in the process of becoming a law, creates an Internet Kill Switch, which, according to Joe Lieberman, would shut down the internet -- all of it -- in order to "preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people."

This all sounds scary to me, EJHill, and Instapundit, who says, simply:

If they shut down the Internet, I’m getting out my gun. And I think everyone should take it as a signal to do the same — because one way or the other, it means the country’s under attack.

Others -- especially over at the Volokh Conspiracy -- aren't so exercised. Writes Stewart Baker:

There’s an Internet kill switch all right, but it ain’t in Washington. It’s in Beijing and Moscow. And soon in Pyongyang.

The Lieberman-Collins-Carper bill, which might take the kill switch away from our foreign adversaries, will soon have bipartisan support in the House. It gives the President basic authority to respond to an attack on our power, phone, and financial systems.

It’s needed, badly, because the President today has less authority over the vulnerable electronic underbelly of our banks and power grid than he has over deepwater oil drilling. Of course the “kill switch” crowd don’t see the need for any such authority. After all, why would we expect private companies ever to screw up in a way that would hurt the rest of us?

Come to think about it, BP could have saved itself $20 billion if it had just persuaded Congress last year that trying to regulate deep sea drilling would create a crazy Big Government “Oil Supply Kill Switch.”

Nobody wants an Oil Supply Kill Switch.

Until, oops, they really, really do.

I can't help but ask: can you imagine the six-act drama that would have ensued if, say, Dick Cheney had asked for this power? And it's odd, isn't it, that since January 20th, 2009 at 12:01PM, suddenly the federal government is our wonderful friend! Fit to switch on and off the internet; fit to conduct domestic spying operations, fit, even, to run the news business.

I'm not -- yet -- as rattled as Instapundit Glen Reynolds, but he's an awfully smart guy. Maybe I should be.

This, from Peter Beinart, doesn't work for me:

The GOP’s basic problem is that many Republicans equate Christianity, or at least Judeo-Christianity, with Americanism. They do not believe it’s possible to truly uphold American ideals unless you identify with the religious traditions that supposedly underlie those ideals. In a country with a growing Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Mormon, and atheist population, that’s a significant source of political bigotry. Is it good that the South Carolina GOP has embraced a South Asian woman? Of course. When that woman can practice whatever religion she wants, without fear that it will wreck her political career, then Republicans will truly deserve to crow.

That's a fraught paragraph (The Jewish and Christian traditions "supposedly" underlie American ideals?), but a fatal closing sentence. The day that Americans merrily elect Satanists, or believers in a genius race of lizards living inside the Earth, or supplicants before a giant Chee-to, will be a dark day indeed in the history of whichever party runs such candidates. Beinart's interest here comes off as pretty cheap: raising the bar on Republicans the minute they start hitting polite culture's diversity benchmarks without resorting to affirmative action.

It's so ungenerous an attack that its culmination in a glib reductio ad absurdum at least offers the consolation of poetic justice. What else could explain the way Beinart's accusation of a Republican "Jesus Litmus Test" collapses into self-parody of itself? For what but a Devil-Worshipping Litmus Test could ever prove that our candidates are impervious to judgments about the compatibility of their faith with the obligations of public office...

Of course, Beinart himself can hardly believe this. He's really just out to claim that Republicans only think good Christians (and maybe Jews) deserve to be elected. But that sounds too much like political bigotry -- which I, of course, stand shoulder to shoulder with Beinart against.

A late reply to Claire's request for nominations for the 25 greatest speeches, but I propose Washington at Newburgh.

By the winter of 1783, hostilities between the British and Americans had ended, but no terms had yet been worked out. The British continued to occupy New York. Most of the Continental Army was encamped some 60 miles away, in Newburgh, New York. Forced to serve without pay for months, American soldiers and officers alike had grown restive, and certain officers had conspired with members of Congress who wanted to strengthen the new central government, agreeing to force Congress to impose a new tariff or impost. The plan -- known now as "the Newburgh Conspiracy" -- would have solved the problem of back pay -- the proceeds from the new tariff would have been devoted to the army -- but overturned, at the very moment the new nation was coming into being, the principle of civilian control of the military.

George Washington called a meeting of his officers to discuss the matter, arranging beforehand for Gen. Horatio Gates to preside. The meeting took place on March 15, 1783 in a small wooden building at the army encampment. After the meeting had begun, Washington himself entered, completely unexpected. Gen. Gates gave Washington the floor. Washington then delivered a carefully written address, expressing sympathy for his officers' demands but rejecting the plan to use the army to threaten Congress. At the end of his balanced, dispassionate remarks, the officers appeared unmoved. Washington removed from his pocket a letter from a member of Congress explaining the difficulties Congress faced in raising funds. For a moment, Washington fumbled with the document. He reached into his pocket again, this time removing reading glasses, which few had ever seen him wear. "Gentlemen," Washington said, "you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country."

With that remark, witnesses reported, Washington brought tears to eyes of officers--by now hardened veterans--throughout the room. The conspiracy collapsed.

Trent Lott is concerned. The former Republican senator worries about the Tea Party candidates, especially if they win.

All of these bumptious new politicians making noise. All of that fractious stubborness. How on earth are these people going to be able to craft a compromise on the Comprehensive Federal Jobs and Employment Act of 2011 or the National Playground Equipment Standards Resource Center Act of 2012 if they're all so...so...Tea Party-ish?

As he puts it in yesterday's Washington Post:

Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. "We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples," Lott said in an interview. "As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them."
But Lott said he's not expecting a tea-party sweep. "I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people," he said.

"We need to co-opt them," said a Washington lobbyist. That quotation, copied el-cheapo style onto a postcard and dropped in the mail to "independents, undecided" would be the best, most efficient direct mail piece the Tea Party could ever imagine.

Few people know there exists a band called Vampire Weekend. Fewer are fans. And an even tinier number of humans are aware that there is a Polaroid-looking photograph of an all-American girl on the cover of the latest Vampire Weekend album, and that this girl, Kirsten Kennis, has decided that when life gives you fame but not a lawsuit, you should take the fame and bring the lawsuit.

What seems to be a pointless tiff in the irrelevant world of world-beat-lovin', deck-shoe wearin' indie pop opens up on a Real World Issue. (Or perhaps the reverse -- a Real World Issue has managed to penetrate the groovy carapace of the blue state Afro-Prep scene...?) Supposedly, a creative, social-network-loving youth culture is swelling up to blow away the litigious, grasping, griping boomer culture still clinging to the rafters above it. Supposedly our swelling, youth-fueled love of fame is pushing out our lingering love of money, and the heaps of it that lawsuits provide. Supposedly free fame is the new free love; mere exposure sets you on the high road to El Dorado.

But these are straitened times. Rights too tacky to assert when we're high on the hog come back into vogue when the future's at stake. Either that, or you can throw opportunism out with a pitchfork, but opportunism comes back and back. We're still a society of fame and lawsuits. All the youth and hipness and open-source sociableness and all the feeling in the world of entitlement to anything plausibly labeled information won't change that. Fame and lawsuits are our get rich quick schemes. And our love for get rich quick schemes is as all-American as we can get.

One of the most dispiriting things I can hear from anyone for whom I have respect or affection is the comment or tone that reflects contempt for the laborers who work with their hands for a living. While I applaud parents, for example, who encourage their children to excel in school in the hope that they will go on to college and a financially secure future, I cringe when they point at the construction worker or the waitress, the farmer or convenience store clerk and refer to them as "losers." It's an ugly attitude, and it may be getting worse.

Over at NRO, the always thoughtful John Derbyshire spotlights an unfortunate trend. The Obama administration has undertaken initiatives that will have the effect of reducing the number of unpaid internship programs available to young people. Meanwhile, the Center for Immigration has released a study which includes the finding that:

In 1994, nearly two-thirds of US-born teenagers were in the summer labor force; by 2007 it was less than half.

As the opportunities to go out and do the work that strengthens their bodies and their character start to dwindle, the elites in what Derbyshire appropriately calls the "overclass," preach the theme typified by the Superintendent of public schools in Prince Georges County, MD, to wit: "We believe that every kid can learn at a high level, and that college is for every child." In the real world, however, Mr. Derbyshire accurately labels this as, "...the romantic piffle of fools living in money-padded cocoons."

The result of this kind of utopian vision is a society increasingly disposed to sit there like Charlie Gibson with his little glasses on, looking down his nose at those lessor beings who work with their hands to literally build the society he simultaneously takes for granted and diminishes. It's not unlike the iconic banners in the old Soviet Union that celebrated the working man even as the ruling elites treated him as little more than a dumb beast of burden; a pawn in their grand theories.

Having dined with generals and eaten MRE's in fox holes, authored scholarly volumes of official military history and enthusiastically signed on to drive an 18 wheeler across the country, I've seen both sides of this equation and have come away with a greater appreciation for what my parents and grandparents knew instinctively; that there are few things in life as invigorating as old fashioned hard work; that a good day of honest labor truly does cleanse the soul. These are among the lessons that the human experience has taught us, lessons that conservatives should naturally embrace. Those who reject this in favor of a haughty condescension toward the good people who use their hands and their minds to make our lives a little easier, know as little about the human spirit as they do about the American character and yes, American exceptionalism.

I'm going to reply in a new thread (Ed.: the earlier thread is here) because I need more than 200 words to make this point. Judith wrote:

Actually, you can make a serious and persuasive case that the Koran does not even insist upon women covering their heads; and there's no support whatsoever in the Koran for covering the face.

The key passages are these:

24-30 Say to the believers that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts; that is purer for them; verily, God is well aware of what they do.

24-31 And say to the believing women that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts, and display not their ornaments, except those which are outside; and let them pull their kerchiefs over their bosoms and not display their ornaments save to their husbands and fathers, or the fathers of their husbands, or their sons, or the sons of their husbands, or their brothers, or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women, or what their right hands possess, or their male attendants who are incapable, or to children who do not note women’s nakedness; and that they beat not with their feet that their hidden ornaments may be known.

and

"O Prophet, tell your wives and daughters and the believing women to draw their outer garments around them (when they go out or are among men). That is better in order that they may be known (to be Muslims) and not annoyed..." (Qur'an 33:59)

Noteworthy is the emphasis on male modesty, mentioned even before female modesty. Keeping in mind, of course, that the Koran is supposed to be untranslatable, there is much debate among Islamic scholars about the meaning of the word "zīna," which is translated here as "ornaments," but can also mean "jewels" or even "clothes." Some argue the proper interpretation is in fact "jewels." The Koran, in this interpretation, would be demanding that women be modest about their wealth--a completely plausible interpretation in view of similar demands in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Then there is this passage:

"Ayesha (R) reported that Asmaa the daughter of Abu Bakr (R) came to the Messenger of Allah (S) while wearing thin clothing. He approached her and said: 'O Asmaa! When a girl reaches the menstrual age, it is not proper that anything should remain exposed except this and this. He pointed to the face and hands." (Abu Dawood)

But this is hadith, not Koran, and this distinction is critical: The Koran is generally held to be infallible, but the hadiths, or commentary, not so much. The diyanet--Turkey's official religious affairs directorate--has made impressive reforms to the hadiths on the grounds that they promote unpleasantness toward women and therefore must be mistaken. (How does a secular country have an official religious affairs directorate? Excellent question! I told you the Turkish Constitution doesn't make much sense.)

All of this said, it's irrelevant. Millions of Moslems interpret these passages to mean that God wants women to cover their heads, at the very least. Some interpret them as meaning, cover everything. Do we really want the state to be in the business of Koranic exegesis? The last thing I want is a government that believes itself qualified to decide what God really has in mind and legislate accordingly. The idea is ridiculous.

It doesn't make sense to ban the burqa on the grounds that the Koran doesn't demand it. Even if it does, so what. The grounds for banning it must be secular.

Judith! You're here! I'm so excited! Now things are really going to get interesting. Judith is one of my oldest and dearest friends. I'm so pleased that Ricochet has persuaded her to join us.

Here's an article I wrote a while ago about our friendship, Judith's talent, Israel, babies and bombers:

I MET JUDITH WRUBEL in 1991 at Oxford University, where we were both graduate students in international relations. We became friends walking back to Balliol College each week, along the leafy Banbury Road, from a seminar at St. Antony’s College on the international relations of the Middle East. Both secular American Jews — the only ones in the class — we found in one another a measure of intellectual and ethnic solidarity against our classmates, who tended to view the region through the prism fashionable in academia: The violence and misery of the Middle East devolve from Israeli territorial expansionism and its abuse of the Palestinians. Once when a suicide bombing in Israel claimed the lives of a number of children under the age of 10 — it is often forgotten how common an occurrence these were even during the Rabin years — a fellow student, upon hearing the news, proclaimed with satisfaction, "Good. They deserve it."

After graduating, I moved to Thailand to take a job as a journalist. Judith returned to New York to work for an investment bank. We lost touch. Years later, she found my name on the Internet and wrote to me. I was delighted to hear from her, and we soon established a prolific correspondence. I had returned to the United States and was living in Washington, D.C.; she had married an Israeli mathematician and moved with him to Rehovot, an Israeli city well within the Green Line. She was now Judith Levy. She was expecting her first child, a boy. But her romantic and maternal fulfillment came at a cost: She now reckoned each day, as she wrote to me, with the possibility of her own murder.

I see in our local press (I live in Israel) that the Egyptians are running an unconfirmed story that Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are headed to Gaza to try to free Gilad Shalit and to weigh in on the Israeli blockade.

Setting aside the appropriateness of handing Hamas the p.r. coup of two former U.S. presidents coming to them to negotiate (which, among other things, would further legitimize the war crime of Shalit’s kidnapping and now four-year solitary confinement), I have to take issue with at least 50% of the talent roped into this alleged mission: namely, Carter.

Few things cause this otherwise mild-mannered suburban mother of three to become quite as incandescent as being lectured on the Israeli-Palestinian problem by Jimmy Carter. One of the signal events to which the emboldenment of fundamentalist Islam can be traced was Carter’s supine response to the mass hostage-taking at the American Embassy in Iran in 1979. Couple that up with his brightly forthright bias against Israel, and you have a person I would argue is uniquely ill-equipped to come wading into our local quagmire and offering helpful suggestions. It’s breathtaking that he of all people purports to have any business advising anyone, let alone us, about a hostage crisis, but they apparently breed some serious chutzpah in Plains, Georgia.

To quote Max Bialystock to Leo Bloom, “Don’t help.”

I love the Economist, which only gives you the sense of knowing what’s up in East Timor but has enormous special sections like “Tin: a 14-page series.” (It’s in demand, which is putting stresses on the environment, and there are new players in Asia poised to capitalize on it, but the future is still a question.) This week there was a tiny article on Canadian health care, and this passage made my eyes go Marty Feldman:

“Health spending, which is administered by the provinces, has increased from nearly 35% to 46% today. In Ontario, the most populous province, it is set to reach 80% by 2030, leaving pennies for everything else the government does, not counting tax increases or new federal transfers.”

Meaning, there will be tax increases and new federal transfers. Eighty percent! The article goes on to note how drug costs are going up - there’s a stunner - and the government came up with some jiggery-pokery to increase the amount of generics sold vs. branded drugs. (Generics are more expensive in Canada, according to the article. Also, Spock has a beard.) This was very unpopular with pharmacists: “The official leading the reform, who had received death threats in a previous round of cutting, now has police protection.”

Health care will just get more expensive, and there will be less of it. But as long as everyone has the same amount of more expensive, less-available care, that will be fine. Give “Logan’s Run” some credit for its pure egalitarian vision: everyone died at 30, and you can’t get anymore equal than that.

(PS: Bonus Ricochet points for anyone who can explain the title of the post.)

The Vatican just released a revision to a previous apostolic letter that was basically some Vatican housekeeping making it easier to give bigger punishments to clergy who break the rules, but especially the rules against abusing minors. But here's how the N.Y. Times opens their story on it:

The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

I like that they open their stories with a lie. It saves me time. I've never read this scandal-sheet before but James told me I should take a look at this article because he knows how to fire me up. I know Rob has read this paper before. He told me it was suspicious. There are more actual facts in an average story published by the Onion.

What the Times is reporting in their opening paragraph is just not true, but it is incendiary and designed to make the reader spit on the ground immediately and curse a particular religion. The Vatican did not equate pedophilia with the ordaining of women. Author Laurie Goodstein reports from Rome but has no idea how to read a Roman document. What is she doing there?

Perhaps the Vatican could avoid incurring the wrath of Laurie Goodstein by issuing two documents so that the mention of the act of committing heresy against the holy sacraments isn't in the same document that does things like double the statute of limitations for punishing abusive priests, but why should they?

They will never please a reporter like this. Glancing at her previous work, I think she should change her title to N.Y. Times bureau chief in charge of marginalizing Catholicism. Her favorite technique is quoting N.Y. Times polls that show things like "most Catholics want women ordained" or "most Catholics don't like this Pope much." The trouble is that they use a sample of all Catholics instead of Catholics that go to church every Sunday.

Among the Catholics that I hang out with, and they're a rowdy bunch, we don't care what Catholics that don't go to mass each Sunday say or think. They are living in a state of mortal sin, and instead of attempting to get out of it, they often try to move the Church closer to where their comfy cafeteria style self-appointed doctrine puts them.

The only problem with the Catholic Church, many of them say, is that there are too many Catholics, and the tepid ones are more harmful to the Church than non-Catholics because of the way they are used by people like the obviously anti-Catholic Laurie Goodstein. There; I'm fired up!

Ricochet member Scott Reusser, commenting on my post about this November and the Battle of Saratoga:

It'll take more than big gains in Nov. to dispel that George Will conundrum [namely, that voters tend to oppose federal spending...except when it benefits them]. It will take those newly minted lawmakers' actively dismantling your program and my program while at the same time retainingour support.

One candidate who might just meet Scott's standard: Chris Gibson.

After an Army career that included three tours in Iraq, Chris retired to run for Congress in New York's 20th congressional district. Chris believes we're all going to have to get used to receiving less from the government, and he has decided to lead by example. If elected to Congress, he has promised, he'll forgo his Army pension, sacrificing many tens of thousands of dollars a year. (Chris and his wife still have three children to get through college. It really will be a sacrifice.)

Pleased, Scott?

Scroll down, and you'll find the conversation of the day -- chewing over the difficult problem of whether the burqa should be banned. There, Richard Epstein raises a question that might well touch off a conversation of its own: is it possible that the burqa question all comes down to where it's being worn? "A market in Jerusalem is perhaps one thing," he writes, "but one in Detroit is perhaps another." Could one just as readily say "Europe is one thing, but America is another?" Practical circumstances matter, after all. His conclusion so far:

the question boils down to tough assessments of competing risks of over and underenforcement of anti violence norms. No wonder the question is hard.

A colleague from the Reagan speechwriting shop, Clark Judge is one of my oldest friends--and one of the most perceptive observers of American politics I've encountered. In an email this morning, Clark suggests that the election this November might prove even more significant than the most optimistic among us now supposes.

It is not just that political alignments and governing assumptions in place for decades are coming undone. An entirely new demand is rising in the electorate. Even now it is only murkily visible and faintly audible to today’s elites. And yet it hoists its flags and musters its masses and sounds its cries on the field of every poll and Tea Party rally...around the nation. If it has staying power, the unfinished portion of the transformation you and I participated in all those years ago will advance to fruition within the decade....The old George Will conundrum of a people opposed to all programs but their own is breaking down. Obama didn’t create this new constituency. But it has built in reaction to him and his frightening overreach.

The Obama overreach reminds Clark of Gen. Burgoyne, one of the British commanders during the American Revolution. Burgoyne attempted to march down the Hudson River Valley to isolate New England from the rest of the colonies. Burgoyne's campaign began well enough. But he soon encountered stiff American resistance. Although Burgoyne defeated the Americans at the Battle of Freeman's Farm on Sept. 19, 1777, he suffered heavy losses.

When Burgoyne continued his advance, launching a second attack on the Americans in the Oct. 7 Battle of Bemis Heights, the Americans proved determined and adventurous, withstanding a bayonet charge, then counterattacking so effectively that the British lines broke. The British retreated in disorder to entrenchments in their rear. Gen. Benedict Arnold (before he turned traitor, of course) then led determined attacks on both wings of the British defenses, capturing the second.

Having lost 1,000 men, Burgoyne now found himself outnumbered by three to one. He withdrew to the fortifications at Saratoga from which he had begun his advance. The Americans quickly surrounded him. On Oct. 17, 1777, Burgoyne surrendered.

Why did American resistance prove so much more determined than Burgoyne seems to have expected?

[T]he British overreached. They encouraged the Indian tribes to join them....[H]orrified, upstate New York’s undecided farmers and merchants rallied round the new flag, believing (rightly) the old one had turned against them.

So it is today. The last year and a half has prompted revulsion in large numbers who were previously undecided. They are not convinced that all in the GOP march with them, hence successful challenges to [GOP] incumbents and annointeds in state after state. But they know in the end which side they are on. The fight will be fearsome, but the outcome, I feel, is assured. And no part of the political world....will remain [untouched].

To which, there really is only one possible response, isn't there?

Huzzah!

The orangeness of that photo was driving me batty.

Have your wife -- who's also your manager -- get it for you. The whole mystery and irony of the relations between and within the sexes, tucked inside a single bit of pop trivia. Beautiful.

I agree with Brother Rob to a point: The last thing I need is another gadget to haul around. After a while your stuff starts to own you. I get that. So I wanted to avoid the iPad; needed to hate it, in fact. All the hype about transforming publishing, transcending laptops: just another Reality Distortion Field.

Time out for full disclosure: I earn my living developing high-technology medical gizmos, so it’s hardly surprising that I’m what marketers call an “early adopter” – essentially an easy mark for overpriced, half-finished products. I already own a bevy of mobile phones, computers of every size running a rainbow coalition of operating systems; there’s the inevitable Kindle, of course; and don’t get me started on my assortment of ham radios and digital cameras. Could I possibly need an iPad?

Unfortunately, yes.

Much as it pains me to say – I’m fighting a strong urge to strangle a stuffed animal right now -- iPad lives up to the hype. It is a truly disruptive product.

It all started a few weeks back when I had a flash of insight: One day soon your physician, electronic chart in hand, will review your web-based physiologic data in the hallway just before knocking on the exam-room door. (You will be found perched atop the white-paper-lined table, bumping your head against the ancient wall-mounted otoscope while arranging your gauzy open-backed gown for maximum coverage – sorry, I'm a technologist, not a fashionista.) When the doc finally comes in and asks how you’ve been doing, he already knows, thanks to the new wireless monitor you’re wearing. And in my mind’s eye the doctor’s electronic chart is an iPad.

iPad offers the best UX – tech-speak for “user experience” – of any high-tech consumer product: technology so advanced it simply goes away. Apple's latest computer requires no booting-up, shutting-down, applying patches, configuring drivers, attaching accessories, or backing up drives. Nothing. You press the single button and the iPad is on. You touch the screen, move your fingers and start navigating -- herky-jerky at first, then with increasing confidence, until in minutes you stop thinking about the interface at all. The remaining technical worries are so minor -- battery drain is imperceptibly slow -- that even obsessive-compulsives like me forget to fret. You read, organize, surf – whatever – without really thinking about the machine at all. And while my fellow nerds and I derive perverse satisfaction from worrying about our machines, most people don’t, and now they won’t have to.

And if you’d rather be bored, well, okay: send me your iPad; I bet I can put it to good use.

I can't say I agree with Bob Herbert, of the New York Times op-ed page, on too many issues. But the title of his NYT op-ed today caught my eye, and made me smile: "Tweet Less, Kiss More." The column itself wasn't too shabby either. Herbert writes about our frenetic obsession with checking e-mail, texting, tweeting, bbm-ing, etc--being totally plugged into our technological gadgets and plugged out of the world around us.

He writes:

Beyond the obvious safety issues, why does anyone want, or need, to be talking constantly on the phone or watching movies (or texting) while driving? I hate to sound so 20th century, but what’s wrong with just listening to the radio? The blessed wonders of technology are overwhelming us. We don’t control them; they control us.

We’ve got cellphones and BlackBerrys and Kindles and iPads, and we’re e-mailing and text-messaging and chatting and tweeting — I used to call it Twittering until I was corrected by high school kids who patiently explained to me, as if I were the village idiot, that the correct term is tweeting. Twittering, tweeting — whatever it is, it sounds like a nervous disorder...

A friend of mine told me about an engagement party that she had attended. She said it was lovely: a delicious lunch and plenty of Champagne toasts. But all the guests had their cellphones on the luncheon tables and had text-messaged their way through the entire event.

One affect of twitterization of our lives, as we all discussed and debated here, may be the death of creativity. Another affect, as Herbert notes, is the death of thoughtfulness and even intimacy.

We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in awhile. Try kissing more and tweeting less.