ED GLAESER: The GOP has a dumb mortgage idea. Yeah, if you’re going to go with a dumb mortgage idea, why not go for broke, with mine?

WASHINGTON’S CULTURE OF IMPUNITY: I’ve got a piece on the various Washington scandals, in today’s Examiner.

UPDATE: Reader Ralph Smith writes: “Glenn, I just want to add my thanks for your continued highlighting the corruption of our ruling classes. As you mention, this is extremely corrosive for society as a whole, and we should all be outraged, regardless of party affiliation. We are nearing pitchfork time, I think. At least I am.”

AN 800 BILLION DOLLAR PLANE RIDE. “We’re going to let this thing go without making them take tough votes because a group of Senators wants to take a ride on the taxpayer overseas. We should call it the $800 billion plane ride.”

Which Senators, I wonder?

UPDATE: Dan Riehl looks into it.

WINDOWS 7 TO COME in six, count ’em, six, varieties.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS goes after Obama’s image.

SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, Mr. Soros. “George Soros explained his own theory of the crisis. While certainly less mythological than most others, it is still theoretically unsound and factually inaccurate in several respects.”

DISTRICT OF CORRUPTION: Norman Ornstein on Washington’s lobbying culture.

ROGER SIMON’S MEMOIR, Blacklisting Myself, is out today. Here’s an excerpt involving a night with Timothy Leary.

AN INSTAPUNDIT EXCLUSIVE: A report from Michael Yon.

It’s Raining

By Michael Yon

05 February 2009

There had been a light, cold drizzle just before the Muslim taxi driver picked me up in Jerusalem. It should be a 90-minute drive to Sderot, in southern Israel. Along the wet highway, I asked the driver to stop at a small town so that I could buy a juice, and inside the Muslim store a television was turned to news in English, showing success of the most recent Iraqi elections.

In the past, candidates often hid their faces, but this time photos were posted all over the walls and buildings. A fundamental change has occurred. A wave of satisfaction filled me, but also sorrow for the many losses we and the Iraqis suffered. Was it all worth it? This cannot be answered with mere logic, but I suspect that it will be worth it, though only if we continue to progress and stay engaged with the Iraqi people, and government.

The Israeli taxi arrived at Sderot just before noon. Thousands of terrorist rockets have rained on Israeli towns within range of Hamas-ruled Gaza, as the world mostly ignored the thunder. Those who knew about the attacks seemed to dismiss the rockets as just a nuisance, like mosquitoes. Yet the rockets have grown more and more powerful, to the point where the largest these days carries about 60 times more explosives than a hand grenade. On February 1, 2009, the day of my visit, The International Herald Tribune reported:

At least two rockets and several mortars were fired into Israel on Sunday, lightly wounding two soldiers and a civilian, and Palestinian militants opened fire on an army patrol along the border, causing no injuries, the military said.

Residents said that one of the rockets landed near a kindergarten in an Israeli village east of Gaza but failed to explode.

The playgrounds in Sderot come equipped with bomb shelters, decorated with kid-friendly art. When the alarms sound, the youngsters have 15 seconds to dash, tumble or waddle into a shelter before impact, or risk being torn asunder.

Earsplitting detonations, spewing searing hot steel, must be terrifying for the kids. It is truly sad to imagine that a ten year-old can have more experience diving for cover than many combat experienced soldiers.

In Sderot, I met up with the American-Israeli writer and Pajamas Media editor Allison Kaplan Sommer, who has lived in Israel for some 15 years, has three children and lives with her husband outside Tel Aviv. Together we went into the police station where the Israeli officers have saved hundreds of the rockets that have been fired from Gaza. Every journalist in Israel should see those rockets. The officer explained that the peak times for launch are when the kids are going or coming from school, and shoppers are in the open, for the greatest odds of casualties.

Looking through the rocket collection revealed more than I had gleaned from the news reports. From the media, one might gather that there is only one sort of “Kassam” rocket. In fact there must be at least dozens of types. Some of the rockets had graffiti scrawled on the casings before they were fired into Sderot.

Mostly the rockets are crude, homemade devices that look like they are put together by a bunch of low-skilled thugs with welding torches, and too much time on their hands. But other rockets are factory made, and the policeman said they come from Iran. The latest models carry a knockout punch. Enough to destroy a home.

Allison and I set off to find some impacts, and we went to a neighborhood where a number of houses had been walloped with direct hits. Two neighboring homes on one street had been hit. The inhabitant of one home, a friendly older man originally from Morocco, explained that his home had been hit but is now repaired. His neighbor had been an elderly lady in her seventies, who lived alone with a Philippina caregiver. Her home looked as devastated as if a small asteroid had found her roof. When Allison and I walked into the house, glass crunching under foot, I was astonished at the level of destruction caused by these so-called ‘nuisance’ attacks. The destruction to this woman’s home seemed to be about what a Hellfire missile would have delivered. The roof was destroyed and the ceiling caved in. Luckily, she had not been home during the strike or likely she would have been killed. Still, imagine a 70 year-old woman returning to find her home destroyed. Many of her belongings still were in the house. And so now the home of this woman was destroyed, but I was assured that the Israelis had taken her immediately into care at a nursing home in Netanya, deeper into the country, out of range, until her home could be repaired.

Another home, a couple blocks down the road, showed a similar level of destruction, the inhabitants gone, workers inside.

The victims of these attacks gave us free access to their houses and I felt welcome and at home in Sderot. It looks like a very safe place to be – except for the constant rocket strikes.

The economy of Sderot has been badly damaged because of the attacks, adding to the problems that all of Israel is facing due to the global economic crash. To support Sderot not just in word but in reality, people from around the country have been regularly loading up in buses to drive all the way to Sderot, braving attacks themselves, just to do their weekly shopping in the town to boost its economy.

Thousands of blue and white Israeli flags line the roads or hang from windows and wave in the warm breeze. We saw an older man in wheel chair, rolling down a road. He had two large Israeli flags attached to the chair, and they billowed behind him as he rolled ahead. When Allison asked him for a photo he grinned very big. Brave people. Instantly likeable.

As Allison and I drove around, lost at times, we came across Chinese laborers. She said the Palestinians are angry because the Chinese and other foreign laborers imported from abroad have taken the construction jobs that once belonged to the Palestinians. After all of the suicide bombings and other attacks, Gaza has been essentially sealed to stem the violence, a tactic which has been effective except for the rocket strikes.

Yet world sympathy seems to rest with the terrorists, and Israel is condemned for ‘trapping’ the Palestinians inside Gaza and for any retaliation for the missile attacks.

Europe, for instance, was nearly unanimous in its condemnation of Israel after the Israeli Defense Forces finally counter-attacked in Operation Cast Lead.

I considered going to Gaza, to hear the other side of the story, but after having seen so many terrorists attacks up close, there seemed little value in taking such a chance with my life, just to hear ramble from a leadership that condones and executes terrorism and launches thousands of rockets at school kids. Stories like this from April 2007 Times Online make it clear enough:

“The family of a BBC journalist kidnapped in Gaza appealed for his immediate release yesterday, as it emerged that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, had informed the corporation that the journalist was alive and well.

This was the first sign from the Palestinian authorities that they had received any information on the welfare of Alan Johnston, the BBC Gaza correspondent who has now been held longer than any other Western hostage in Gaza.”

The story goes on:

“Mr Johnston, 44, the BBC Gaza correspondent for the past three years, was seized in Gaza City on March 12. About 20 foreign journalists and aid workers have been abducted in Gaza in the past year. However, the kidnappings have typically ended shortly after the capture of the victim.”

It makes no sense to risk life and limb only to allow people who intentionally target children to talk through my pen. Not until they stop the terrorism. Those members of the press who transmute Hamas’s crocodile tears into ink only exacerbate the disease.

Recently, I traveled about a thousand miles around Afghanistan, without military, to learn more about the country. Taking chances for good people is one thing, but taking chances to talk with Hamas terrorist leaders, whom I would not believe anyway, is just not smart. Their propaganda is widely available.

One can roam Israel at will, write as one wishes, without reprisal. The choice is easy: the Israelis won’t kill the messenger, even when journalists mercilessly rip into them.

In Sderot, Allison and I had the pleasure of having lunch with Noam Bedein, the Director of the Sderot Information Center, a privately funded organization. According to the “Kassam counter” on http://www.sderotmedia.com/, as of February 1, 10,046 Kassam rockets have hit Sderot and the Western Negev since 2001. During a single two-week period, 293 rockets rained in on Sderot. According to a pamphlet from the Sderot Information Center, a kindergarten teacher asked her pupils, “Why does the snail have a shell?” The Children answered in chorus, “So it can be protected from the Kassam rockets.”

Yet the Kassams and other attacks cause even worse harm to Palestinian children. The Israelis and Egyptians have isolated Gaza. Hamas and those who support them, thanks to their own terrorist ways, are consigning themselves to lives of squalor and war.

Allison believes that Gaza could be as prosperous as Singapore if their leaders would stop fighting, move forward, and focus on developing their economy.

The idea of a two-state solution, once popular with many Israelis, is evaporating. More and more Israelis are coming to believe that any appeasement with the Palestinians is merely a reward for terrorism. And so it is. The Palestinians have become prisoners by their own hand. The hand that builds the bombs, wields the guns, and welds the rockets, has caused a fence to be built around them.

They are isolated and imprisoned. But it’s not only Israel who’s done this. The Gaza Strip borders Egypt, and Egypt has done the same. The terrorists are tunneling like rats and the Egyptians and Israelis are trying to locate and destroy the tunnels under their respective fence lines. Who wants the Palestinians? If the Palestinians truly were a peaceful lot, victims only of Israel, one might think that they would have free entry into Egypt. But they do not.

Meanwhile Operation Cast Lead is threatening to unravel international relations.

The previously cozy relations between Turkey and Israel has gone frigid. A British official told me that the British are investigating war crimes charges against Israel, while Israelis tell me that if the British charge Israelis with war crimes, they will charge British officers with war crimes for their actions in Basra, Iraq. A Spanish judge is also talking war crimes. The situation only gets worse from there. Just as we have seen U.S. relations crash after our responses to the 9/11 attacks, important relations between responsible nations are fraying due to responses to terrorist attacks.

Many of us remember those long security lines in the airports, and the billions we must invest in security that could go elsewhere, and all because of a relatively tiny number of people. Many of us remember the people raining from the buildings, choosing the falling death to the burning death, and reports of certain Palestinians celebrating those deaths. How much veracity and weight to assign reports of Palestinians celebrating is unknown to me, but there seems to have been at least some basis in truth.

And today, where is the equity? Why haven’t Hamas leadership been charged with war crimes for indiscriminate attacks on Sderot and other towns? They, along with other terrorist organizations, launched about 7,000 missiles since 2005, and about 10,000 since 2001. It would be impossible to know exactly how much explosives were contained in those rockets because the Kassams include a great mix of types and sizes. Yet to make a ballpark guess, there might be an average of 20lbs of explosives per rocket since 2005. Since 2005, that would be about 140,000lbs of explosives, not to mention the metal mass of the powerful rocket tubes. Imagine about 140,000lbs of explosives raining down at random times, but particularly when the kids are going to school.

There are many types of fragmentation hand grenades that are designed to kill people. One of the most widely used, the deadly American M67, contains a little more than 1/3lb of explosives per grenade. (The entire M67 grenade including fuse and casing weighs 1lb.) This means that 140,000lbs of explosives would be roughly equal the “net explosives weight” of about 350,000 grenades launched randomly against civilians. So far, Kassams have killed few people, but it seems just a matter of time before a school gets wiped out, not to mention the general psychological trauma inflicted.

It simply does not make sense for us to support a Palestinian state, when at every turn they demonstrate that they will simply become more powerful, richer terrorists, with longer range rockets.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Burch comments:

As a non-Jewish Knoxvillain who recently moved away from Ashkelon, Israel (in order to no longer be in range of the Kassams and the heavier-duty Grad rockets which afflict our former city) I agree with Michael Yon’s assessment. I like his descriptions of the lethality of the rockets, but that is really beside the point. Who cares if the lethal radius of shrapnel is 5, 10, or 25 meters? Thank God that, of all the rockets that hit our town, I never encountered a strike up close. But just hearing the ongoing explosions on a regular basis of projectiles that have the hope and intention of shredding anyone and everyone possible is simply maddening and makes daily life impossible.

My family is half-Arab, but as far as we’re concerned Israel has done too little much too late, and after this operation in Gaza I feel doubly convinced that my decision to leave the vicinity was the right one. Don’t get me wrong, I love Arabs so much I married one. Israel, however, has the righteous responsibility and duty (for the sake of all things decent) to eliminate this threat of unrepentant terror without mercy, not just for the good of Israel, but also for the good of Palestinian Arabs.

It’s not as if Hamas has the best interests of the Arabs at heart. That’s been made abundantly clear. (Bumped).

TOM MAGUIRE looks at Leon Panetta’s finances and finds no conflict: “That’s encouraging – almost no one with a direct connection to national defense was interested in paying to hear Panetta’s thoughts on national security or intelligence so he should be good to go for the CIA job.”

MOE LANE SAYS I’M TOO GENTLEMANLY: No, really, Glenn: Dumber than soap. Well, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to be the sharpest knife in the Congressional drawer — which is not exactly full of top shelf cutlery to begin with.

SO WHAT’S THE STORY WITH GENERAL ZINNI? “A former senior official familiar with the case said the matter appears to have been handled disastrously.”

Plus, “Obama Not In Charge?”

POLITICO: OBAMA LOSING THE STIMULUS MESSAGE WAR. It’s not the messenger. It’s the message that stinks. And, as a wise man once said, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis: “We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future.” We could start by not saddling the future with trillions more in debt for bailing out the past . . .

HILDA SOLIS QUESTIONS: The Nominee Who Lobbied Herself.

TAXPROF: Is Kwame Kilpatrick’s Lawyer Angling for a Cabinet Appointment? “The Detroit News reports that Willie Gary, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s new lawyer, was the subject of $3.8 million in IRS tax liens for the 1998-2000 tax years.”

UH OH: Obama’s Salary Cap Could Seriously Hurt New York.

Plus, “First, they came for the executives . . . .”

HOPE AND CHANGE! Newsweek changes its tune on waste, fraud and abuse. “So we need strict oversight and a plodding pace in a war zone where people are dying every hour, but we need to throw accountability and thoughtfulness overboard when dealing with a program that represents just an acceleration of run-of-the-mill government spending?”

Not every war. Just Bush’s wars.

THIS SEEMS KIND OF SHADY: New Rochelle Public Schools Assign Seven Year Olds to Obama Campaign.

PHIL BREDESEN: A finalist for HHS Secretary? Seems doubtful to me, and I actually think we need him in Tennessee, where we’ve got our own budget issues. . . .

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Dodd’s New Dodge.

Dodd, the chairman of the Banking Committee, announced this week that he’ll have the mortgages refinanced and managed by a third party to protect against allegations of influence peddling.

Problem is, this doesn’t negate any prior influence peddling. It’s akin to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, torn down the fences and set the farm on fire.

The influence-peddling took place when Dodd got the special deal from Countrywide – and the shenanigans that Dodd & Co. allowed Countrywide and other irresponsible subprime lenders to engage in have already burned down the US economy.

Dodd promised last summer that he’d release all of his mortgage documentation to the public. He’s now in his seventh month of failing to deliver. This week, Dodd released some of the papers – but only to a select group of reporters, who weren’t allowed to make copies.

The long wait suggests that Dodd has something to hide. The incomplete “disclosure” and the refinancing, meanwhile, look more like an attempt to bury evidence than a sudden commitment to clean government.

Gee, do you think?

JUST WORDS: From “I won” to “I screwed up” in 11 days.

DIGITAL TV TRANSITION postponed until June.

UPDATE: No, I don’t know if there’s a Salemme connection.

NOTHING GIVES YOU THAT “MORNING FRESH FEELING” like bacon-flavored dental floss!

OH, GOODY: Treasury in plans for record debt sale. “The US Treasury on Wednesday opened the floodgates of government bond issuance, revealing plans for a record debt sale in February and more frequent auctions in the months to come. The announcement came amid growing fears about US government deficits and sent the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rising to 2.95 per cent, up from just over 2 per cent at the end of December. The rise in Treasury yields has been pushing mortgage rates higher, complicating efforts to revive the economy.” So the “stimulus” is now a drag on the housing market. . . .

HEARTS AND MINDS in Afghanistan. “It’s a press offensive by someone.”