I WROTE A WHILE BACK about Arnold Kling’s new book, Crisis of Abundance, on health care policy. Now the book’s out, and he’s interviewed over at Catallarchy.

A RATHER CRITICAL LOOK at Bush’s energy policy, over at The Truth About Cars.

HEATHERS.

DUTCH (NON)COURAGE: Christopher Hitchens writes on Holland’s shameful treatment of Ayan Hirsi Ali:

After being forced into hiding by fascist killers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali found that the Dutch government and people were slightly embarrassed to have such a prominent “Third World” spokeswoman in their midst. She was first kept as a virtual prisoner, which made it almost impossible for her to do her job as an elected representative. When she complained in the press, she was eventually found an apartment in a protected building. Then the other residents of the block filed suit and complained that her presence exposed them to risk. In spite of testimony from the Dutch police, who assured the court that the building was now one of the safest in all Holland, a court has upheld the demand from her neighbors and fellow citizens that she be evicted from her home. In these circumstances, she is considering resigning from parliament and perhaps leaving her adopted country altogether. This is not the only example that I know of a supposedly liberal society collaborating in its own destruction, but I hope at least that it will shame us all into making The Caged Virgin a best seller.

I just ordered a copy.

UPDATE: Sorry — wrong link before. Fixed now.

OVER AT HOT AIR, Michelle Malkin says that Hookergate is a symptom of much deeper problems with the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. That seems right to me.

UPDATE: This hookergate sounds worse, but it, too, is a sign of deeper institutional problems.

CHINA: A trillion dollars in non-performing loans? Ugh.

BILL HOBBS REMAINS un-silenced.

Also, Michele Catalano is blogging again!

MORE MOLLOHAN SCANDAL DEVELOPMENTS: The Raw Story has it.

TROUBLE NOT THE BLOGGER IN HIS LAIR: My TCSDaily column is up.

DARFUR UPDATE:

Were the 1990s really that long ago? They are remembered now as the halcyon and money-happy interval between the war against Soviet totalitarianism and the war against Islamic totalitarianism, but the truth is that, even in the years immediately following the cold war, history never relented. The ’90s were a decade of genocides–unimpeded (Rwanda) and partially impeded (Bosnia) and impeded (Kosovo). The relative success of those genocides was owed generally to the indifference of that chimera known as “the international community,” but, more specifically, it was owed to the learning curve of an American president about the moral–and therefore the operational–difference between genocide and other foreign policy crises. The difference is simple. In the response to most foreign policy crises, the use of military force is properly viewed as a last resort. In the response to genocide, the use of military force is properly viewed as a first resort.

The notion of force as a first resort defies the foundations of diplomacy and also of common sense: A willingness to use hard power abroad must not become a willingness to use it wildly. But if you are not willing to use force against genocide immediately, then you do not understand what genocide is. . . .

Then there is the other alibi for Western inaction, the distinguished one: the belief that salvation will come from blue helmets. After the slaughters of the ’90s, all of which numbered the fecklessness–and even the cynicism–of the United Nations among their causes, it defies belief that people of goodwill would turn to the United Nations for effective action. The United Nations is not even prepared to call the atrocities in Darfur a genocide. Kofi Annan says all sorts of lofty things, but everybody knows that he is only the humble servant of a notoriously recalcitrant body. Meanwhile the Sudanese regime maneuvers skillfully–what is the Chinese word for oil?–to prevent reprisals of any kind from the Security Council.

Given recent statements about Israel by Iran, and Iranian actions, this suggests that military action against the mullahs is an imperative sooner, rather than later. Right?

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn talks about what needs to be done in Darfur:

I wish the celebs well. Those of us who wanted action on Darfur years ago will hope their advocacy produces more results than ours did. Clooney’s concern for the people of the region appears to be genuine and serious. But unless he’s also serious about backing the only forces in the world with the capability and will to act in Sudan, he’s just another showboating pretty boy of no use to anyone.

Here’s the lesson of the past three years: The UN kills.

In 2003, you’ll recall, the US was reviled as a unilateralist cowboy because it and its coalition of the poodles waged an illegal war unauthorised by the UN against a sovereign state run by a thug regime that was no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders, which it killed in large numbers (Kurds and Shia).

Well, Washington learned its lesson. Faced with another thug regime that’s no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders which it kills in large numbers (African Muslims and southern Christians), the unilateralist cowboy decided to go by the book. No unlawful actions here. Instead, meetings at the UN. Consultations with allies. Possible referral to the Security Council.

And as I wrote on this page in July 2004: “The problem is, by the time you’ve gone through the UN, everyone’s dead.” And as I wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph in September 2004: “The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they’ll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager’s been murdered and his wife gang-raped.”

Several hundred thousand corpses later Clooney is now demanding a “stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur”.

Agreed. So let’s get on to the details. If by “multinational” Clooney means a military intervention authorised by the UN, then he’s a poseur and a fraud, and we should pay him no further heed. . . .

So who, in the end, does “multinational action” boil down to? The same small group of nations responsible for almost any meaningful global action, from Sierra Leone to Iraq to Afghanistan to the tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia and on to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The same core of English-speaking countries, technically multinational but distressingly unicultural and unilingual and indeed, given that most of them share the same head of state, uniregal. The US, Britain, Australia and Canada (back in the game in Afghanistan) certainly attract other partners, from the gallant Poles to the Kingdom of Tonga.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Regarding your posting on Darfur and intervention in genocides, you leave out the genocide of Kurds and Marsh Arabs in Iraq. Considering that more than 300,000 appear to have been slaughtered by Saddam in the 1990s because of who these groups were, and what they represented, it would have presented the very kinds of issues that those on the Left are now trying to suggest in Darfur.

And the ties between Saddam and those who carried out his orders in Iraq are far more direct than the relationship between the Janjaweed and Khartoum.

Good point. Someone should ask Clooney about it.

I’VE GOT MORE ON IMPRISONED EGYPTIAN BLOGGER ALAA over at The Guardian. No real news for InstaPundit readers, but I do try to use all of my outlets when bloggers are in trouble.

A “TAX REVENUE GUSHER” IN 2006: But wouldn’t that mean the economy is doing well? I haven’t heard anything about that on the news. . . .

IN THE MAIL: A new book by Kimberley Strassel, Celeste Colgan, and John Goodman, Leaving Women Behind : Modern Families, Outdated Laws. The book asks “Why haven’t U.S. federal institutions changed to refelct today’s diverse family structure?”

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED, AT SUCH EVIDENCE OF SUPERFICIALITY:

James Felton, a professor of finance and law at Central Michigan University, and a colleague looked at ratings for nearly 7,000 faculty members from 370 institutions in the United States and Canada, and his verdict is: the hotter and easier professors are, the more likely they’ll get rated as a good teacher.

Education, as they say, is the only consumer product where the consumer is out to get as little as possible for the money.

STEPHEN SCHWARTZ: “Shkodra, Albania — Does the mainstream media (MSM) incite the clash of civilizations (COC) between the Judeo-Christian world and Islam? At times, it seems so.”

CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC: No, I’m not talking about Tony Horwitz’s book by that title. But it should be required reading for those who think that any mention of the Confederacy means someone is a closet racist. George Allen’s in trouble for wearing a confederate flag lapel pin. In high school. Now people are sending me copies of this speech by James Webb, Allen’s opponent, praising the bravery of confederate soldiers:

I am here, with you today, to remember. And to honor an army that rose like a sudden wind out of the little towns and scattered farms of a yet unconquered wilderness. That drew 750,000 soldiers from a population base of only five million-less than the current population of Virginia alone. That fought with squirrel rifles and cold steel against a much larger and more modern force. That saw 60 percent of its soldiers become casualties, some 256,000 of them dead. That gave every ounce of courage and loyalty to a leadership it trusted and respected, and then laid down its arms in an instant when that leadership decided that enough was enough. That returned to a devastated land and a military occupation. That endured the bitter humiliation of Reconstruction and an economic alienation from the rest of this nation which continued for fully a century, affecting white and black alike.

I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery.

Well, they were brave, though in a wrong cause. As regular readers know, I’m no fan of neo-confederate sympathizers, but I don’t think that either Allen or Webb qualify, and this back-and-forth strikes me as silly, dirty politics.

As I’ve noted before, the real accomplishment of our civil-war-era ancestors was to bind up the nation in spite of seemingly irreconcilable differences. That’s a lesson our political operators might benefit from today.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel emails:

I live in Fairfax, VA. My first impression of TNR’s George Allen-confederate flag reporting was, “Gee, they’re really not going to help the Dems in Virginia beat him with this stuff!” Now I’m wondering if it was a secret, Rovian plot – by lambasting Allen, they teased these Webb stories out into the headlines. And no one ever lost an election in Virginia for praising the Confederate army too much. Here’s a hint: my townhouse is located just off the Robert E. Lee Highway.

Those Rovian agents are everywhere.

ANOTHER UPDATE: On reflection, though, the real news in Dave’s email is that he can afford a townhouse in Northern Virginia on what those cheapskates at Reason pay.

MORE: Reader Randolph Resor emails:

I’ve admired James Webb every since I read Fields of Fire a couple of decades ago. I’m glad to see he has kind words for the Confederates. My mother’s side of the family is from Georgia, and she still has her great-grandfather’s diary. He was with Toomb’s brigade at the Burnside Bridge at Antietam, among other places.

Southerners do have long memories. One of the reasons for this is an economic statistic: the South didn’t return to its 1860 level of gross domestic product until after 1920. That war cost a lot — in lives and in forgone economic growth.

Yes, which is why I think that romanticizing it is a bit foolish.

MORE STILL: Eric Muller corrects Webb’s history. Meanwhile Ryan Lizza emails:

Glenn, I noticed you wrote, “George Allen’s in trouble for wearing a confederate flag lapel pin. In high school.” To the extent that he is in trouble it’s not because of the high school photo. It’s because the high school photo is the beginning of a decades-long embrace of the Confederate flag by Allen, who is from southern California.

Here’s what TNR reported:

Allen:
-wore a Confederate flag pin in his high school yearbook photo
-had a Confederate flag on his car in high school
-had a Confederate flag on his truck in college
-had a Confederate flag on his truck in law school
-displayed the Confederate flag in his room in college
-displayed the Confederate flag in his living room until 1992
-included a folded Confederate flag in a shot of him in his office in his first campaign commercial for governor in 1993
-in 2000, when a voter called out to him, “Long live the Confederate flag!” Allen responded, “You got it!”

Lizza’s piece is behind the subscriber firewall, but Lizza writes: “None of this means Allen is a racist, of course.”

So what does it mean, exactly?

Jon Henke, meanwhile, notes Allen’s association with another racist symbol that Lizza has overlooked.

PHOTOBLOGGING A SANDSTORM at Camp Taji, Iraq.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: A new editorial in the Washington Examiner:

If Bush is truly serious about protecting the powers and prerogatives of his office, he will set aside his veto reservations and slam-dunk the emergency funding bill if it comes to his desk in anything remotely resembling the form in which the Senate passed it last week. Bush originally asked for $92 billion to support U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and to assist with hurricane recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast. The House approved the bill substantially as Bush requested.

Things were completely different in the Senate, where the Old Bulls had a field day larding the measure up with nearly $20 billion worth of special-interest earmarks like $700 million for the “Railroad to Nowhere” in Mississippi. A valiant effort by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to remove a dozen of the worst earmarks failed and the thoroughly stuffed final measure was approved by a wide margin. Passage came within days of release of a highly credible survey that said stopping such spending sprees was the public’s top priority.

That is why the conditions could not now be more perfect for a presidential veto. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and 34 other senators vowed to vote to sustain a presidential veto if needed and House Speaker Dennis Hastert declared the $109 billion earmark-stuffed monstrosity “dead on arrival” in the lower chamber. . . .

If Bush fails to deliver his first veto now, it won’t much matter for the rest of his term what he thinks about executive branch powers, because the Old Bulls in Congress will have all the privileges that count.

Read the whole thing — er, especially if you’re President Bush.

MICHAEL BARONE ON IMMIGRATION POLITICS: “A columnist is tempted to say that the politicians should toss aside political concerns and do what they believe is in the public interest. Easy enough to say. But something just like that may be happening.”

ALAA UPDATE: I’ve got more on the case of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Alaa over at GlennReynolds.com, and Sandmonkey has posted an update:

Alaa and those arrested with him are now arrested for 15 days “pending investigation”, which could be renewed indefinitely if the state so wishes. Him and the men were sent to the infamous Torah Prison and the girls to the Qanatir prison for the duration. This makes them hardly safe, because stuff that goes on in egyptian prisons on the hands of the jailors: beatings, sexual assaults, torture of all kinds. This is why we aim to get them out of there as soon as possible, so that even if they do end up serving the entire 15 days- which they won’t have to if the government gets pressured- they don’t end up serving an extra day after that. No one deserves this happening to them, especially for exercising their right to free speech.

Read the whole thing, as they’re urging people to contact the State Department, too.

MICKEY KAUS has more on third-party prospects.

OVER AT REALCLEARPOLITICS, John McIntyre looks at how 2006’s elections will affect 2008.