EMBEDDED BLOGGER BILL ARDOLINO POSTS more reporting from Iraq. He has this on the surge: “The Marines I spoke to think it’s a good thing, but from what I understand it’s only 4,000 in Anbar. More significant would be a change in strategy, letting the Marines do what Marines do.”

Plus, more on what’s going on in Somalia.

SOME SUGGESTED QUESTIONS FOR TIM RUSSERT: “These are obvious and pressing questions. They will not be asked.”

Some useful background reading here, too.

IN THE MAIL: Col. Robert Black’s new book, The Battalion: The Dramatic Story of the 2nd Ranger Battalion in World War II. Looks pretty interesting, and offers some useful historical perspective.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! Mickey Kaus comments on the Democrats’ plan to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax for people in the $100-500K income range:

Washington Monthly’s Charles Peters mocks the “new proletariat” of Americans in the “$100,000-$500,000 income range,” especially their agitation against the Alternative Minimum Tax. … My impression is the main complaint against the AMT is not the extra tax it extracts but the extra paperwork hassle it imposes on those who essentially have to calculate their tax two times, using different sets of rules (or, almost as annoying, pay an accountant to do it for them) … I would think the anti-bureaucratic Wash. Monthly would join in the fraternal struggle against unnecessary government-imposed complications–realizing that Washington could probably collect a lot more tax money, indeed more money from the complaining top 20%, and if only it did so with less hassle.

The hassle is an issue. So is the money. And the Dems have a lot of key constituents in those brackets. Kaus has some interesting observations on Chuck Hagel’s positioning, too.

A NIFONG ROUNDUP from Tom Maguire.

HUGE ANTI-TERRORIST PROTESTS IN SPAIN, inspired by the ETA’s latest attacks. Publius is reporting, and so is Barcepundit.

MORE ON HEALTH CARE:

TALKING to Europeans (particularly non-Brits) about things like health care and welfare programmes is a treat. Most of the Europeans I meet seem to believe that huge numbers of Americans get no health care at all, while the rich few wallow in luxury. In fact, the biggest problems uninsured Americans face are not doctors refusing to treat them, but the fact that they use the incredibly inconvenient emergency room for most of their care, and that a really bad illness could force them into bankruptcy. (Some also believe that it reduces quality of care for chronic illnesses like diabetes, but this is much less clear). Not admirable, by any means, but a far cry from the tortured visions of poor Americans dying at the hospital’s door, their pleas for care unheeded.

Americans on the other hand, the overwhelming majority of whom are insured, seem to believe that millions of Europeans die each year from lack of treatment. The reality is much less grim; a fair number of Europeans go without hip replacements and other quality of life treatments, and some do die on waiting lists, but many of those people would have died anyway, because they have nasty diseases with life expectancies measured in months. America caters, expensively, to their desire to live a few extra weeks or months; Europe does not.

Because I’m unhappy with our current state of medical progress, the most important single issue to me is which system encourages research and development. The answer, of course, is that neither does it nearly as well as I’d like, though the U.S. system is pretty clearly better than the European. I want an Andy Kessler world, and I want it soon!

COMPANIES ARE STARTING TO AVOID LOCATING IN CHINA, according to a report in The Economist:

Although all three companies had different reasons for their decisions, the outcome was the same: they chose to avoid China’s thundering economy in order to put their factories elsewhere in Asia. These companies are not alone. In the calculus of costs, risks, customers and logistics that goes into building global operations, an increasing number of firms are coming to the conclusion that China is not necessarily the best place to make things. . . .

Scott Brixen, an analyst at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, a Hong Kong-based investment bank, gives two big reasons why China has not found itself at the top of the list for some new factories: “Rising costs and a natural desire by companies for diversification.”

Both of these make sense to me, and in particular the latter. China’s political stability is not to be taken for granted, and it’s a mistake to put too many eggs in that one basket. (Via Gerald Hibbs). On the price front, I think that China is facing the need to shift from being a low-cost supplier to being more competitive in higher-end areas, a transition that some countries have found difficult, though I think that China is well-situated to negotiate that change.

Of course, some things are booming nonetheless. One billion intimacy kits, stat!

TRUTH IS HARDER THAN FICTION: Amateur detective work lands John Grisham in trouble.

A LOOK AT HARVARD AND GUN CONTROL. I’m pretty sure that these guys would call anyone who accepted grants from the NRA bought-and-paid-for. But the Joyce Foundation is every bit as biased as the NRA, and has a history of paying for scholarship that would be treated as a scandal if it were engaged in by pro-gun folks.

I find much of the public health literature on guns to be highly biased and deeply untrustworthy. It starts with an agenda, rather obviously, and then constructs “research” to confirm it. In this it resembles far too much of the politicized social science we see today, which explains in part why people are far less persuaded by social science claims than they used to be.

Meanwhile, note this piece by Jacob Sullum on gun control’s shaky empirical foundation. Excerpt:

The panelists considered 51 published studies examining seven different kinds of laws, including bans on specific firearms, restrictions on who may own a firearm, and waiting periods for gun purchases. They “found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws.”

In other words, after more than half a century of local, state, and federal gun control legislation, we still don’t know whether these laws do what they’re supposed to do. The report’s most consistent finding was inconsistent findings: Sometimes gun control is associated with reduced violence, and sometimes it’s associated with increased violence.

The world is messy, and it can be difficult to control for all the relevant variables when you’re trying to determine the impact of a particular law. Not surprisingly, the CDC panel calls for more and better research, and it cautions that “insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness should not be interpreted as evidence of ineffectiveness.”

But it’s scandalous that politicians have been legislating in the dark all these years, promising that the gun control solution du jour would save lives when there was no evidence to back up such claims. If gun control laws have any positive effect at all, it must be pretty modest to have escaped documentation so far.

If a drug company were as cavalier about science as these people are, its executives would all be in jail.

COMMENTS ON IRAQ from a British soldier.

THOUGHTS ON YOUTUBE AND POLITICS, from John McCain’s internet guy, Patrick Hynes.

THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS is angry.

THE STAMP OF SHAME.

DEMOGRAPHICS AND TERRORISM:

Heinsohn demonstrated that when 30 percent or more of a population is aged 15-29, you have too many young men with bad attitudes, and the result is a jump in crime, terrorism and civil unrest. Heinsohn showed that in 90 percent of the 67 of the countries that have the 30 percent “Youth Bulge” (as demographers put it) you have massive unrest. Moreover, 13 of the 27 nations with the largest Youth Bulge are Moslem. In fact, most of the Youth Bulge is found in Africa and in Moslem nations.

Heinsohn also points that many historical upheavals were attributable, at least in part, to the Youth Bulge. These would include the American and French Revolutions and many other uprisings in places like Ireland and Latin America. The current growth of Youth Bulge can largely be blamed on Western efforts to improve the lives and health of people in the developing world. No good deed goes unpunished.

This “youthquake” problem is taken for granted by many experienced terrorism and criminology experts. But the pattern is not generally recognized as the main cause of unrest. However, historically it appears to be the case. In pre-industrial societies, 5-10 years of favorable weather would create an abundance of food, and a population explosion. There would follow a period of civil unrest and wars as these kids came of age. Zoologists note the same pattern in animal populations. Humans are more complex beasts, but just as the American crime rates began to plunge in the 1990s, as the Youth Bulge disappeared, so will the civil disorders and terrorism now causing so much misery.

I guess that’s good news, in a way, though it’s certainly ominous with regard to countries that are stable now but that face an excess of young males, like China and India.

TIGERHAWK HAS questions on the surge.

CONGRESSMAN JAMIL HUSSEIN? Er, or something.

ANDREW CUOMO has Spitzer-like ambitions.

In an Internet age, there’s no reason for Wall Street firms to stay on Wall Street, really. That’s something that New York State officials might keep in mind.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis chooses to read this as an endorsement of corporate crime. It is, rather, a repudiation of politically-motivated prosecutions, a topic explored here. His first commenter corrects him; it’s a pretty silly error, even for Oliver.

DEMINT THANKS DEMOCRATS FOR AGREEING TO PELOSI PLAN: No, really, that’s the news.

ANOTHER RECORD HIGH FOR THE DOW: I’m quite surprised to see the stock market continue to do so well.

UPDATE: Maybe this has something to do with it: Deficit Falls to Lowest Level in 4 Years.

MEGAN MCARDLE:

I don’t get Mark Kleiman. As I understand it, minorities are typically overrepresented in many branches of government employment, relative to their percentage of the relevant workforce; many have described government jobs as the foundation of the black middle class. Yet all the government agencies I am familiar with have special outreach programmes for minorities as workers and suppliers. Does Mr Kleiman want this to stop?

Yes and no.

GLOOMY THOUGHTS ON AMERICAN POLITICS, from Donald Sensing.

A LOOK AT James Webb, Condi Rice, and the limits of presidential power.

LOTT VS. LEVITT: In my opinion, a lawsuit that shouldn’t have been brought, over a chain of events that shouldn’t have happened, and involving accusations that shouldn’t have been made.

RON ROSENBAUM: “If Iraq is to be compared to Vietnam, how relevant is Cambodia? Ever since the news of the genocidal scale of mass murder in Cambodia reached the West, I’ve been trying to figure out how to relate it to my previous opposition to the Vietnam War.”

That’s more than most people did.