I cannot get enough of Dale Peterson.

Predictably, my In Box is full of enraged letters; this happens when one writes about Sarah Palin or the Gaza Flotilla, the former topic inviting responses roughly 30 percent more lunatic than the latter, but only half as offensive. I do read them all to be sure I'm not missing anything important, such as an e-mail from an editor asking, "Where should we send the check?" Tending the hate mail this morning reminded me that nothing I've ever written has caused my In Box to fill up with as much anguished remonstration as one single obscure blog post about the world's greatest martial artist.

Yes, actually, this subject does belong on Ricochet. You'll see.

I'm feeling nostalgic tonight. It's '80s night. Bret Easton Ellis has a new book out -- the sequel (!) to the very grim and very youth-soaked Less Than Zero. (I was youth-soaked...once.) And Jay McInerney has a new video out -- an explanation, at the Wall Street Journal, of why chablis is the perfect pairing for oysters (!!). Once, not too long ago, I blogged from time to time about delicious adult beverages. And as I responsibly sip one now, the urge to do so again is back. So here is a new, but I fancy very '80s, drink that I created. Bartenders in at least two cosmopolitan cities have sipped and loved it. Perhaps you will too.

The Gin Blossom

1 measure Bombay original gin (not Sapphire)

2-3 measures tonic water (splurge here)

1 splash St. Germain (to taste)

Prepare over ice. Stir. Add one drop Peychaud's bitters. Don't stir. Garnish with lime twist. Enjoy.

North Korea did pretty well against top-ranked Brazil in their World Cup matchup on Monday.  It was 2-1 for Brazil, but considering how, um, hard it is to develop great young athletes in a country like North Korea, all in all not a bad showing.  Unfortunately for the team, losing has consequences.

From Abu-Dhabi's English-language paper, The National:

One of the most fabled stories of international sport comes from the 1966 World Cup, when the North Korean side won the hearts of many in a stunning upset of tournament favourite Italy in Middlesbrough, England. The underdogs had shown, as did their 2010 counterparts, that the quality of an athlete does not depend entirely on the nature of his government.

Sadly, sport cannot always transcend politics. The 1966 upset is now part of sporting lore; the story that North Korean refugees tell about the aftermath is less well known. After falling to Portugal in the quarterfinals, the North Korean side reportedly returned home to a peculiar welcome. Some members of the team were imprisoned in the country’s brutal labour camps for their “disappointing” performance.

Yikes.

Reihan points me to Fast Company:

"If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the audience at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference yesterday. And according to Sandberg, only 11% of teens email daily--clearly, a huge generational drop. Instead, they are increasingly turning to SMS (or Twitter) and social networks for communication.

"E-mail--I can't imagine life without it--is probably going away," she said. But this transition will be good for businesses and brand marketers. Why? Because while it's very difficult to gain access to a consumer's email address, connecting with them via social networks is quite simple.

Set aside the question of whether Facebook heralds the death of privacy. Set aside even the question of whether the teens who apparently have determined our future are having second thoughts about letting party pictures get in the way of a good job. I'm not talking about privacy as the way you keep relationships or behavior secret. I'm talking about privacy as a solitary experience -- the experience of being alone. Email enables access to one's social network. But it isn't itself a social network. The death of email would point ultimately toward the death of mail, of communication that goes from box to box.

I love the internet and I love cocktail parties, so you can guess how I feel about talking on the internet in a cocktail-party-like way. But I like mail, too -- snail and e. And I see no reason why either of these should ever die, because they give us a way to access the company of others while we're still alone with ourselves. In quiet moments like that, we think differently. We feel differently. We remember differently. We should want to preserve even a variety of that private experience on the internet. There's nothing stopping us from doing so. Lest we forget, email, too, is free.

Heads up: this week on the podcast, Andrew Klavan sits in the Steyn chair (Mark will be back, we promise) and Tucker Carlson and Jonah Goldberg join us for a wide-ranging and extra-entertaining conversation. It's coming in mere hours to Ricochet.com and your media player of choice.

Via Dorian Davis [UPDATE: and Elizabeth Scalia!] I cannot believe my eyes:

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

In part? There's something else at work here? The mind throbs in vain to take such totalitarian egalitarianism seriously. But it is oh so serious. How deep must the depths of anxiety be into which our administrative class is regularly plunged. They are getting the bends. They are seeing spots. Potential trouble. Anything that hints of exclusivity. These are operatically pathological attitudes, utterly paranoid and inimical to human liberty in any form. No matter how 'political' this insanity seems, real politics -- practiced by those who are friends, if nothing else -- is impossible in a world where no friend can be closer or better to you or I than any other.

Bill, your question below, about letters of marque and reprisal, set me to thinking. I'm in complete agreement with the impulse behind your question, which I take to be as follows: Since the private sector almost always operates more effectively than the government, the government ought to contract out work whenever it can. What, then, do you make of George W. Bush's decision when, after 9-11, he was faced with the need to increase security at airports around the nation?

The President could have contracted the work out to private security firms, and I thought it a mistake--to be honest, a terrible mistake--that he didn't, instead creating a whopping new bureaucracy, the Transportation Security Administration. When you joined the White House staff a few years later, did you ever hear a convincing rationale for that decision? Did the President and his advisors honestly believe the TSA could do a better job of securing air travel than could private security firms? Or was the creation of the TSA another of those concessions--like a lot of the increase in domestic spending--that the President felt he had to make to Congress to ensure support for the war in Iraq?

While we're at it, what do you make of the present-day politics of the TSA? Americans lose hundreds of thousands of hours a day standing in lines, submitting to frisking, and taking off their shoes, and fishing in their luggage for their laptops, and putting all their gels and deodorants into teensy little bottles. Must we live this way? Manifestly not. Just look at airport security in Israel. Quick, relatively painless, and, the record suggests, successful. So why isn't anybody complaining?

Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty is an interesting guy. Another one of those Republican governors -- Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, and more to come, I suspect -- that seem more than ready for the Oval Office.

On the Daily Show last week, he made a pretty compelling case for rethinking higher education. Why not, he asks, offer some college kids the choice between paying exorbitant tuition (and sleeping through 9AM Econ 101) or paying $199 or so and downloading 'iCollege' to their iPads?

As you might expect, over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, they totally freak out.

If you missed it, go back and read Matt Bai in the NYT:

Voices rose and drowned out other voices as the meeting grew tense. “The fact is,” Pelosi said, addressing herself to Axelrod, “that the longer you say Washington is broken, and you’ve been saying that for 18 months, the more that becomes the story.”

Even when one party controls both branches, it's always hard for the White House to put Congress first. Beneath the I-Miss-Bill nostalgia, the brutal truth still burns: Clinton was horrible for Congressional Dems. Now, with Obama intent on hammering "Washington" and "the system," a whiff of panic is creeping back in. A punishing cycle in '12 will sour Democrats on Obama even more -- something he must well know. But what's the alternative?

Calls Increasing to Punish BP, Halt Drilling

As Spill Expands, So Does Executive Power

Voters in Big States Prefer Skinflint Candidates

Israel Easing Gaza Blockade

Sorry, But You Will Not Retire

Fannie, Freddie To Be Delisted From NY Stock Exchange

Is "Breaking Bad" Better Than "Mad Men"?

Bret Easton Ellis Returns With "Less Than Zero" Sequel

The other day Ursula posted about Gary Brooks Faulkner, the man who was recently found in Pakistan on a private mission -- he says from God -- to hunt down Bin Laden. The stories make clear he is a nutter, and everyone's had quite a few yuks.

But I'd like to ask the Ricochet community a more serious question, about the provision in our own Constitution for letters of marque and reprisal. As I understand it, these were usually navy oriented, mostly used to commission private ships to capture enemy ships. From what I can see, the last time Congress authorized one was back in the 19th century.

Given the complexities of the war on terror, does anyone think it could today it be a useful instrument today instead of a joke?

Stay with me here:

Data Point #1: Barack Obama's free-fall in the polls. Data Point #2: Hillary Clinton's rising popularity.

The next steps:

December, 2010: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton resigns. Says she's "accomplished what she set out to do" and has "restored America's position and standing in the world." Will devote time to writing a "major book about America's challenges, and opportunities, in a complex, multi-polar world."

June 2011 - August 2011: The Clintons, inexplicably and very publicly, summer on Squam Lake, in New Hampshire. Lots of Hillary sightings in and around the area, criss-crossing the state. Bill and Hillary at the farmer's market. At a county fair. You get the idea. 'What's she doing in New Hampshire?' the media wonders.

Labor Day 2011: Delivering the Goods: What I Learned at the State Department, What I Learned from Main Street hits the bookstores. It's a big bestseller. And very critical of the Obama administration.

September 2011: Terry McCauliffe block-books a couple of floors in the Hampton Suites in Iowa City, IA, and the Manchester Marriott in Manchester, NH.

October 1st, 2011: It's on. Official. Announcement on Jay Leno during her book tour.

January 16th, 2012: Iowa Caucuses. She wins?

January 24th, 2012: New Hampshire primary. She wins?

You didn't think she was really going to give up, did you?

James Madison famously observed that if we were all angels, we wouldn't need a government, adding that, "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." So, in the absence of angels, who are we left with? A community organizer whose unique perspective enabled him to remark that:

"Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying 'do something,' are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much."

Well, that little exercise in reductionism is catchy so long as one doesn't bother to look behind the rhetorical curtain. Fortunately for us, W. R. Wansley, at the American Thinker, has pulled the curtain back and exposed federal incompetence on a scale that would make Cecil B. DeMille blush.

What people, from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, to local county and city councils in the Florida panhandle, to fishermen and ordinary citizens have asked of the federal government is simple. Get your enormous bureaucratic, lethargic, agencies to free up the resources our people need to deal with this mess, or at a minimum, please get out of the way.

In his article, Wansley gives examples like the company that produces fiber mats to absorb oil, or another that has a machine that will separate oil from water. He writes,

"One man has tons of material that is extremely lipohilic (oil loving) which traps, holds, and sinks the oil to be destroyed by oil eating bacteria."

Has the gentleman advised the EPA of this material? Yes. And the EPA responded that it is against regulations to intentionally sink oil. Evidently, EPA regulations do permit the destruction of the gulf coast by oil, so we can rest easy. Our bureaucrats are hard at work. Meanwhile, Governor Jindal and at least one Florida local government has decided to move forward with construction of barriers to protect their coasts with or without federal approval.

Proving yet again the inherent inefficiency of a massive and massively uncontrollable federal government, Obama had the gall to lampoon the people who want the government to stay within its Constitutional limits, essentially calling them hypocritical. Evidently, expecting competence in response to an event that took place in federal waters is expecting too much. They will be so much more adept at managing your health care, right?

Arguably the best line in the article is this:

"If he is looking for someone's 'buttocks' to boot, maybe he should look at the one whose rear end is up in the air in a notorious picture bowing to the Saudi King."

President Obama became animated last night in speaking about the moral imperative of pursuing alternative energy, freeing us from reliance on fossil fuels.  Why then has he not already expanded the availability of carbon dioxide-free energy? The roughly $1 trillion spent so far by Obama on stimulus efforts would fully fund at least 100 dual-reactor nuclear power plants, doubling domestic nuclear capacity to 40 percent of total generation.

As reported by the Huffington Post, Sarah Palin was on the O'Reilly Factor last night talking about the oil spill.  Sarah's takeaway:

[Obama's] top priority is cap-and-tax.  It is using this crisis, not letting it go to waste, but [using] this crisis to increase the cost of energy. And that is going to stall any kind of economic recovery that we have.

Some might call this borderline conspiracy theory, but it strikes me as a rather sensible conclusion.

Over at The New Ledger, Ben Domenech has an interesting take on Obama's speech last night. Ben always has something interesting to say. He's on my regular click-list.
Ben says, in a nutshell: senators make lousy presidents.
In my piece this week in the Dead Tree edition of National Review, I put it this way:

Here’s the part of Obama's interview with Matt Lauer I find the most interesting: “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar,” said the former college professor, who ran a health care reform summit meeting like the cranky chairman of a faculty committee of a third-rate college. Who finds it impossible to describe something as simple and clear as Islamic fundamentalism without weasel-wording equivocations. Who, in other words, thinks this is a college seminar.

So we've got a Senator-in-Chief, and a Professor-in-Chief. It would be nice to have a Commander-in-Chief, too.

The President has accused BP of "recklessness," used all the threats of coercion and retribution implied in the powers of his office to cow BP into devoting billions--billions--of its shareholders dollars to paying the costs the President wants it to pay, and has done all this, manifestly, before he, BP, or anyone else knows quite what happened on the Deepwater Horizon. (As the President himself put it last night, he is establishing a national commission "to understand the causes of this disaster.")

May I just ask where all this fits into the Constitution of the United States?

The San Francisco Examiner provides one possible explanation for President Obama's eagerness to "persuade" BP to transfer $20 billion to his control ahead of any independent assignment of clean-up cost responsibility.

The Dutch offered to fly their skimmer arm systems to the Gulf 3 days after the oil spill started. The offer was apparently turned down because EPA regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.

As of June 8th, BP reported that they have collected 64,650 barrels of oil in the Gulf. That is only a fraction of the amount of oil spilled from the well. That is less than one day’s rated capacity of the Dutch oil skimmers.

Got that?  The enviro-statists at Obama's EPA cited regulations prohibiting the discharge of oily water at sea in refusing aid from the Netherlands, a country that knows a thing or two about managing water, thereby prohibiting recovery of massive amounts of oil near the source from the outset of the spill.   Since perfection was not on offer -- extremely oily water would be pumped aboard and slightly contaminated effluent returned to the sea -- the bureaucrats nixed the idea.  But don't worry, Obama's boot is firmly on the neck of BP and it will pay every penny, regardless of actual culpability.

My mom limited television when I was a child -- 30 minutes a day, and she chose the show. As a result, I might be the only person this side of 40 who can recite scenes from I Love Lucy.

Needless to say, my brothers and I were a little different than the other kids in our neighborhood. We sat on the front steps on perfect summer evenings while everyone else ran home to watch the latest episode of Love Boat.

God bless her, but my mother’s plan to keep me from becoming a slave to the “idiot box” failed. No one loves stupid television more than I do. I wasted about three full days in 2004 watching a non-stop marathon of The Osbournes. If I wasn’t so exhausted at night, you can bet I’d be following every dopey storyline of The Bachelorette. (Go ahead, lose all respect for me if you haven’t already.) It seems that despite the restricted viewing habits of my youth – or perhaps because of it – I’m more fascinated than I should be by the television screen … and every mindless thing that runs across it.

I’m a mom now, too. When housework and kid chaos get in each other’s way, I don’t blink. The TV goes on. How am I going to get the lunch dishes washed in time for dinner while simultaneously refereeing a toddler fistfight? Yo Gabba Gabba, that’s how. If keeping the TV off came with a guarantee that my kids would be well-adjusted great readers with healthy relationships and low blood pressure, then I would maybe think twice. But, in our house, my kids are more likely to be healthy because I was actually able to put food on the table, and did it without a frazzled, screaming meltdown.

Bringing democracy to Afghanistan is a good thing to do. (It had better be. It's cost us a lot of scratch.) But shouldn't it be a good thing to do for Afghanistan?

So why are the Chinese getting rich?

I hate to be crass (actually, I don't really hate to be crass), but where's our slice?

Catastrophe in the Gulf, financial cataclysm in Europe, incompetent ideologues running Washington:  Sometimes you need to shift your gaze and savor one of the blessings of our innovative, caring society.  Watch as 8-month-old Jonathan's new cochlear implant is activated and he hears his mother's voice for the very first time.

From the Washington Post:

The Oscar winner has been granted life membership in the prestigious think tank [the Council of Foreign Relations].

What are Clooney's qualifications for such a position, you ask?  Allow me to remind you that he played a really, really smart CIA operative in the movie Syriana.

Not sure if people saw Peter's excellent lead op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on Reagan and immigration. Knowing the Gipper's views on both immigration and law, Peter asked where Reagan would stand today. And he believes that Reagan would still be for a welcoming policy toward would-be Americans while also coming down on enforcing the laws.

Now the possibilities for an immigration debate are endless. But I'd like to ask Peter to follow up on two points for the Ricochet audience. First, isn't it possible to in fact have the policy he believes Reagan would be for, by enforcing our borders and providing legal avenues for people to come? It's not clear the American people really oppose a pro-immigration policy, but it does seem clear that they are not open to *any* policy until the federal government regains control of our borders.

Second, Peter mentioned Reagan's awareness of the politics, that the GOP will have no future unless it can broaden its appeal to Latinos. That seems like a mathematical truth. But the question is, Shouldn't we have the right immigration policy, and, like all policies, use our talents to persuade Americans -- Latinos included -- of this? More to the point, if the general failure of the GOP to make serious inroads into the African-American community is any clue, isn't the real answer on the political side to find good Republican Latino candidates that people respond to? A black colleague of mine once said the Republicans are not, for example, going to get black votes by being for vouchers (though this friend is a strong advocate of vouchers). Ultimately it would take some good black Republican candidates.

The shamelessly intelligent Jonah Goldberg has a shamelessly intelligent column up at NRO pointing out that oil is the greenest energy there is:

If you remove the argument over climate change from the equation (as even European governments are starting to do), one thing becomes incandescently clear: Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil.

Hit the link and read the whole thing, but for me the overall point is that a media more dedicated to narrative virtue than truth, and an opposition (that's us, folks) too fearful of offending the elite intellectual power base, allow a poisonous atmosphere of falsehood to envelop this and other issues. Not just on the environment, but on spending too and religion and Israel, the battle we're waging is a battle between we who believe the truth is what sets you free and those who believe the truth is whatever story wins.

The facts about capital punishment that I alluded to in yesterday's post are made explicit today in Slate:

Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School who has studied execution methods for nearly two decades, said she'd pick the firing squad if offered Gardner's choice between the two methods. "To me, it seems like the more humane choice," she said.

All of which raises the question: Why did the states drop firing squads in the first place? Death penalty scholars say that legislators tend to like lethal injection because it appears dignified and medical. It also seems to create less media frenzy. When Utah officials were planning the state's most recent firing squad execution, they were met with interest from the international press, repeated comparisons to Old West justice, and a flurry of volunteers offering their services as executioners. Maybe firing squads get people going not just because they're unusual, but because they cater to a certain bloodthirstiness and obsession with guns. And because they seem like a more heroic way to die. In 1996, just before that previous execution, state Rep. Sheryl L. Allen sponsored legislation to phase out the firing squad, saying that it gave the state an image of "brutality."

Appears dignified and medical. (Dignified because medical? There's a dangerous idea.) An image of brutality. Once again, some suddenly regnant impression about what it takes precedence over what really is. It's a terrible way to make policy -- for criminal justice or anything else.

President Obama has accused BP of "recklessness"--the word he used in his Oval Office address last night--insisting that the company pay the costs of the six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf that he has declared. There are really only two possibilities here:

Possibility one: We know that BP was indeed reckless. But if that's the case--if we know for certain that the oil leak was caused by BP's recklessness--then why impose a moratorium on drilling by everyone else? Does the highway patrol shut down an entire interstate for six months when a reckless driver causes a crash?

Possibility two: We don't know that BP was reckless for the very good reason that we still don't know what happened when the Deepwater Horizon exploded and oil began to gush from the bottom of the Gulf. As the President himself said last night, "I have established a National Commission to understand the causes of this disaster...." But if this is the case, then by what conceivable right does the President accuse BP of "recklessness?" And insist that BP bear all the costs of a the moratorium, paying the wages of idled workers, when, for all he or anybody else knows, the accident might just as well have happened on another rig operated by another corporation?

Faced with a massive economic and environmental catastrophe, the President has chosen to adopt a position that is simply incoherent.

Tim Carney reports:

Government is constantly lobbied, but it is often a lobbyist, too. Governments and government agencies have spent just over $100 million lobbying Washington since the beginning of 2009. That doesn’t include the tab for cities, towns and counties lobbying their state governments. [...]

Local government officials are using your money to hire former government officials to ask current federal officials to give local governments more federal money — and future taxpayers will foot the bill for this whole racket.

Economists can argue about the economic virtues of such a “stimulus,” but on the question of battling the special interests, it’s another failure for the Obama administration.

In the wake of the Spill Speech, Michael Dougherty tweets: "I''m sorry. But you can't do corporate welfare one day, then, when it's unpopular, throw out the rule of law to punish your partner." N.B.: Buying Tim's book Obamanomics is stimulus I can believe in.

Obama Vows Fix for Oil Spill in Tuesday Night Speech

France Calls Russia Strategic Partner

Zynga Spells Mindless Online Consumption

George Clooney Joins Council on Foreign Relations

Organic Food Out, Authentic Food In?

When The Land Marks Man, Not the Other Way Around

Karate Kid Remake Gets a Sequel

Fewer Humans in Today's Monster Market