OWLBLOGGING: Reader Bruce McCaw emails:

I don’t know if they photoblog owls, but I thought that you would like to see this picture. The owl is a pre flight Great Horned owl. I found it on the ground and placed it on a pine tree limb. It’s parents are feeding it.

Cool. Click on the thumbnail for a bigger picture.

THIS WEEK’S Carnival of the Capitalists is up. Enjoy a bountiful buffet of economics and business blogging from a wide array of bloggers.

THOUGHTS ON EUROPE, from The Belmont Club.

TYLER COWEN has started a blog devoted to avian flu.

THIS IS INTERESTING, even if it’s buried at the end of a story on something else:

The U.S. military reported Saturday that a CBS News stringer detained after a gunbattle between U.S. forces and insurgents this month “tested positive for explosive residue.” “Multinational forces continue to investigate potential collaboration between the stringer and terrorists, and allegations the stringer had knowledge of future terrorist attacks,” said Sgt. John Franzen of Task Force Freedom in Mosul.

It’s going to be bad for journalism, if people get the idea that major-news correspondents may be terrorist moles.

MORE ON THE EVER-POPULAR THEME OF OVERRATED NORDIC AFFLUENCE, this time from Bruce Bawer in the New York Times. And it’s not just Scandinavia:

Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro’s statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg.

Contrasting “the American dream” with “the European daydream,” Mr. Norberg described the difference: “Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 – and the gap is constantly widening.”

The one detail in Timbro’s study that didn’t feel right to me was the placement of Scandinavian countries near the top of the list and Spain near the bottom. My own sense of things is that Spaniards live far better than Scandinavians. . . .

In late March, another study, this one from KPMG, the international accounting and consulting firm, cast light on this paradox. It indicated that when disposable income was adjusted for cost of living, Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third. Spain and Portugal, with two of Europe’s least regulated economies, led the list. . . .

The thrust, however, was to confirm Timbro’s and Mr. Norberg’s picture of American and European wealth. While the private-consumption figure for the United States was $32,900 per person, the countries of Western Europe (again excepting Luxembourg, at $29,450) ranged between $13,850 and $23,500, with Norway at $18,350.

Ouch.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Are we now back at the point where our Progressives are raving about the dark future in which a Popish conspiracy conquers western civilisation and ushers in a thousand years of darkness?”

I disagree with a lot of the Religious Right’s agenda, but the constant wolf-crying about theocracy on the left doesn’t help. Of course, neither does the occasional idiocy on the right. Sigh.

MY EARLIER POST ON HISTORICAL REVISIONISM drew this response from columnist Sylvester Brown of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whom I criticized in the earlier post. Brown, however, tries to play tag by suggesting that maybe I missed Bush’s talk about WMDs.

No — but unlike Brown, I never said that I couldn’t recall Bush ever raising the issue. The difference is that to Bush critics, WMDs were all that mattered, while I favored the idea of turning the Middle East upside down and shaking, hard. Which we’ve done, and which, as even Brown grudgingly admits, seems to have done some good.

He concludes with several tired lefty tropes:

This is a country that 40 years ago restricted the right to vote, use public facilities or eat in restaurants to some of its citizens. It’s a country with a long-standing record of supporting autocratic regimes and dictatorships and overthrowing democratically elected government officials around the world.

When did the United States become the chief exporter of democracy to the Arab world?

Sorry, bloggers. When it comes to regime change and nation-building, I can’t follow the wisdom of Bush and his crew. I lean more toward the words of a real straight shooter, Mohandas Gandhi:

“The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.”

The difference is, the United States didn’t give the Iraqis the spirit of democracy. As they demonstrated on January 30, it was already there. We just cleared the way — something that would never have happened if Brown had gotten his druthers. And it seems to me that the gravamen of Brown’s point is that the United States is so morally deficient that it could hardly be credited with doing good on purpose.

I’m glad he’s wrong about that, too.

UPDATE: Hazen Dempster emails: “It is important to realize that a large part of Gandhi’s success was due to the fact that he was opposing the British, who don’t deal with political opponents by killing them. An Iraqi Gandhi wouldn’t have lasted long under Saddam.” Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Howard Greene adds:

If the Palestinians had followed Gandhi I think they would have had their state in 1970. The Israelis would have had a hard time opposing them while at the same time they would have proved they could live next door in peace. Yet in the context where the Gandhi approach would work, the left “Gandhi Admirers” were sympathetic to the terrorists inclined to lynch a Palestinian Gandhi (and I suspect did lynch or assassinate several).

Meanwhile, reader C.J. Burch emails: “Every time I grow tired of the Republicans a lefty opens his mouth, suddenly I’m not quite as tired.”

Indeed, again. And reader Timothy Morris emails: “Harry Turtledove had an excellent short story, ‘The Last Article,’ about how Gandhi would have fared in a Nazi occupied India. It’s a short story. Both in context and content.”

Yes, I read that. Some of the Nazis feel slightly guilty about killing him and his followers.

MORE: A couple of readers think that I’m making too much of the democracy thing, since we only went into Iraq as part of the war on terror.

That’s true of course — but it’s precisely the Bush doctrine’s connection of democracy-promotion with anti-terrorism that the left’s tedious obsession with WMDs is intended to deny — because, of course, it’s a connection that the left used to make, until it appeared that doing so might help a Republican.

And, finally, reader Michael Grant sends this quote from Martin Luther King:

If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi. But if you enemy has no conscience, like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.

Grant asks: “Now consider: MLK chose nonviolence to advance his cause. What does that say, then, about his beliefs about his opponent?”

I guess he had a higher opinion of America, and Americans, than does Mr. Brown.

MORE: Still more reasons why Gandhi is a poor role model for Mr. Brown.

PUBLIUS has an Ecuador roundup.

ANOTHER AIR SECURITY SCARE: I don’t think we’re doing nearly enough, or doing it nearly well enough on this score, even though this story has a happy ending.

IS MATT DRUDGE going all fogeyish on us?

UPDATE: Patrick Ruffini says that Drudge is just talking down the competition. “They’re the Firefox to Drudge’s Microsoft.”

Comparing Drudge to Microsoft? Them’s fighting words!

AUTO-PIMPING: With the Bush administration entering the scandal-rich years (years 5-7 of an administration are usually the biggest, for a lot of reasons), I should probably plug The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society, which I coauthored with Peter Morgan back during the Clinton Administration’s scandal-rich period. Administrations may change, but the analysis, I dare to suggest, is evergreen.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: “Although opinions differ, it appears that the Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile has become an innocent bystander wounded in the government’s crackdown on deceptive accounting practices.”

STRATEGYPAGE reports on the new Afghan army — pretty interesting.

I’VE BEEN PRETTY LAME on my East Tennessee photoblogging. But here’s a picture, taken by my sister, of her horse, Smoky, on a gorgeous East Tennessee day yesterday.

CHANGING SENTIMENTS in Denmark.

PUBLIUS HAS THOUGHTS ON CHINA’S FUTURE, which can’t be encouraging to the current crowd of oligarchs:

Perhaps I’m one of the few, but I actually think that China’s democratization is an inevitability coinciding with its economic liberalization. With this kind of collapse around the corner, Taiwan could be a futile last grasp at maintaining authority.

I think that’s right, and I think that it will probably happen — as such things do — rapidly and unexpectedly.

EITHER THIS IS A DREADFUL HIT PIECE, or the Heritage Foundation has some explaining to do. Or perhaps Heritage’s shift in attitude toward Malaysia had something to do with 9/11, which Edsall allows for.

UPDATE: Economist David Levy emails:

The fact that Gerry O’Driscoll witnesses to an attempt to rig the Heritage data on world ranks persuades me that this story is very serious indeed. Gerry is an economist of terrific integrity whose best known paper points out that Ricardo did not believe in the Ricardian equivalence which he proposed!

If the Post had used google on the Mont Pelerin Society it would have discovered something else …

Link

Hmm. Stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Grim, on the other hand, writes:

There may be a connection, but there is a good explanation apart from payoffs. I’ve not been offered a dime from Malaysia (or anyone else), but my own opinion of the place has been on the improve for quite a while.

The context that is missing from the article is this: Mahathir Mohammed, who had been the ruler of the place for more than twenty years, stepped down in 2003. Under his rule, Malaysia had been anti-Western, largely closed and inward looking. Mahathir was strongly anti-US and anti-Israeli, the latter spilling over into genuine antisemitism on occasion. As soon as he appeared to be making moves to retire — and especially since his actual retirement — Malaysia began looking better.

Read the whole thing.

STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE discounts the importance of deferring to the judiciary.

DAVID BERNSTEIN IS CORRECTING Jeffrey Rosen’s constitutional history.

UPDATE: Tom Palmer comments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Ann Althouse and TalkLeft.

MORE: Andrew Sullivan has a complaint that cannot be aimed at Rosen: “Oh, and those photographs! Several friends who know the men personally say they could not recognize them from the images. So Sunstein gets to describe himself as a moderate; while Epstein gets to see himself portrayed as a mob boss in a horror movie. Next time, the NYT magazine should just doodle in a couple of horns, forked tongue and some hooves. We get the idea. Why not be honest about it?”

NEWSPAPERS TURNING TO BLOGGERS FOR HELP? Trey Jackson has video.

TURMOIL in Ecuador.

ANN ALTHOUSE describes her favorite male body part.

WILL FRANKLIN has thoughts on France and the EU referendum.

CHESSBASE REPORTS on a Kasparov attack:

Garry Kasparov was attacked after a meeting with youth activists in Moscow. He was approached by an autograph seeking participant. The young man circled Kasparov and delivered a sharp blow to the head with the chessboard. Russian news agencies place the blame on the pro-Putin organisations Nashi.

Putin and thuggery? Who’d have thought there could be a connection?