Inspired by a poem I read at BLACKFIVE the military blog, I wrote a comment that I was going to leave an empty space at our Christmas dinner table as a reminder of the troops. It would be an inspiration for our prayers for their safety and a symbol of pride for their mission. I am going to do it. I wrote to Jim Vicevich at WTIC radio here in CT and asked if he could spread the idea if he thought it was good. Unlike you guys he responds once in a while to my e-mails. In any event, if one of you thinks that the idea has merit perhaps you could put it in your blog. Mine is too new to have an effect. You people are established.

I am not interested in credit for the idea so take it and do what you will. I just think that it is a simple thing that could bring some focus for those kids over there. They are of an age to be my kids, so it is easier for me than for you young people.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it?

"Leveraging his best-selling memoir, Sen.-elect Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is poised to sign a three-book deal landing him a $1.9 million advance."

…finished in Australia, it seems.

“AN evangelical Christian group incited hatred and severe ridicule of Muslims when it called them demons, liars and terrorists, a tribunal ruled yesterday. In the landmark ruling, Catch the Fire Ministries pastors Daniel Nalliah and Daniel Scot were found guilty of religious vilification, making them the first under Victoria's new race and religion hate laws.”

Now what that group had to say sounds pretty crass to me, but the key point about the right of free speech is that - if it is to mean anything - it must extend to those whose views are not in the mainstream. In Australia, it appears, it no longer does.

Multiculturalism or free speech? You choose. You can’t have both.

Here’s a delightful story from the Saudi dictatorship:

“Jeddah (AsiaNews) – A Saudi citizen converted to Christianity has been arrested and jailed. Emad Alaabadi was taken into custody last November 29, at Hofuf, a town in eastern Saudi Arabia, but the news was reported only a few days ago by the International Christian Concern (ICC), a Washington-based human rights group. AsiaNews local sources have confirmed the report, and also say that he “is not the only Saudi Christian in jail at the moment: there are also others”. According to news obtained by ICC, other Christians – at least 3 or 4 – appear to have been arrested along with Emad.”

Now, I understand perfectly well that – for now – the West still has to have dealings with the repulsive regime that runs 'Saudi' Arabia, but I am at a loss to understand how anyone – let alone anyone professing a strong Christian faith – is willing to treat its representatives as honored guests, sponsors or friends.

And if you think I’m referring to the Bush family, you are right.

Via Viking Pundit.

Thanks for all the emails on one side and the other. I just don't have the energy to re-re-re-re-launch that debate right now in the Corner. Maybe I'll write -- sigh -- another drug war column this week. For the record, I do think Andrew makes some fine points, though I think there are some fine responses to them. As for the view advanced by both he and Jon that heroin potency and/or consumption would decrease from legalization I remain unpersuaded in part because I don't buy the direct comparison to alcohol. I do agree that the comparison of booze to pot works better, which is one of the reasons I'm for decriminalizing pot. I simply doubt you'll ever get me to be in favor of decriminaling heroin. My hope remains that technology will solve the problem of heroin, either by nullifying its addictiveness or by simply creating much, much better and safer drugs which make heroin obsolete. But that's all an argument for another day.

From another reader:

Jonah -

Seems to me a lot of your anti-death penalty folks ought to be asked squarely whether they think "killing" and "murder" mean exactly the same thing.

The Commandment, which English translations usually render as "Thou shalt not kill", says plainly in the Hebrew "Don't murder".

The whole point, it seems to me, is that this compels us to think and pray and debate the distinction.

Your guy who thinks the death penalty is state-sanctioned murder - well, does he think that's what all state-sanctioned killing is ? Like killing a Taliban dude who's aiming his AK right atcha ?

I have no objection to the point of view in the email. Or I should say, i respect the position of this emailer even if I disagree with it. What I was referring to was the argument made by some, including our own Rod Dreher if I recall, that doubt about the guilt of some somehow mitigates the case for executing those about whom there is no doubt. Anyway:

Dear Sir; I consider myself a Libertarian-Conservative and am also a practicing Catholic. You state, "You must defend the right to life of the people who do horrible things like this. And I suspect that will be very, very hard to do in this case. " I don't think so at all. I oppose the Death Penalty, period. I oppose it for Saddam Hussein, I would have opposed it for Adolf Hitler and I will oppose for these people, too. The Death Penalty is state-sanctioned Murder, just as is Abortion. It is wrong, in the "hard" or "easy" cases. I am not one of those who says that the Death Penalty is "unconstitutional," the Fifth Amendment clearly contemplates the Death Penalty, "no person shall be deprived of LIFE, liberty or property..." Nor do I argue that it is cruel and unusual punishment, the Founders envisioned the Death Penalty and at that time the usual method of execution would have been hanging. If hanging wasn't cruel and unusual, then certainly lethal injection is not either. It is not that we CAN NOT execute, but rather that we OUGHT not execute. When one comes from that perspective, it is easy to say, "No this person or group of persons does not merit death." For NO ONE merits death. So, no I have an easy time of stating these people do not deserve the Death Penalty.

Assuming that there is no doubt about the identity of the murderers involved in the baby-snatching case and the evidence is overwhelming, which it already seems to be, I would very much like the anti-death penalty crowd to take up this case. It's all very easy to talk about the problems with the death penalty in the "hard" cases -- i.e. cases where there's some arguable room for doubt about the guilt of the convicted.

But if you're going to say the death penalty is always and everywhere wrong, you must take the hard cases too. You must defend the right to life of the people who do horrible things like this. And I suspect that will be very, very hard to do in this case.

Your first mistake: reading Tom Shales. The rest is commentary.

Top 10 favorite Christmas Carols in the Corner: 10. I'm Dreaming of a Red State Christmas
9. O Christmas Dead Tree!
8. Silent Moyers
7. Do You Here What I Hear? Asparagus Ice Cream!?
6. What Child (not fetus!!!) Is This?
5. Have a Holly (Non) Jihad Christmas
4. The First NR.
3. Jonah to the World
2. Go Tell It On The Corner
1. K-Lo We Have Heard On High

Andrew Sullivan's "Quote of the Day" is from a blogger named John Coleman :

"There is no theocracy in the United States, and we remain one of the freest and most open countries in the globe; but what happens when the party that once promised to guard this freedom transforms into its detractor? In the late 1990s Bill Clinton shifted domestic politics to the right BECAUSE he was a Democrat (and could). What happens when the party of the right leans away from the defense of liberty and toward the despicable martial art of book burning?"

Please. The "book burning" reference is to some Alabama state legislator who apparently wants to ban some books in Alabama. It is upon this thin gruel Mr. Coleman works himself up into a mighty fine lather about Republicans, the conservative movement and its failure to deal with its drift toward book burning (actually the Alabama guy wants to bury the books). Coleman's essay is in turn a response to Michael Totten's "challenge" to conservatives (other than Sullivan) to complain about Conservative nanny-statism. Coleman & Totten both make it sound like no "prominent conservative" has raised any objections to nanny-statism.

Okay, two points: One do I now get to extrapolate from every nutty idea a leftwing state legislator comes up with a new drift of the entire Democratic Party and liberalism generally? Is Maxine Waters the new weathervane of American liberalism. Give me a break. It doesn't take courage to condemn this sort of thing, it takes awareness of it. And, unless your scouring the Guardian for hit-pieces on the American right, you probably missed this whole story.

Second: It's just a fable that conservatives haven't complained about Bush's nanny-statism and expansion of entitlements. To think otherwise indicates that you've been reading too much of the Guardian and too little of National Review or even the Washington Post.

1. Um, this is a bit of a straw man. As you indeed recognize, I'm not claiming that it is "sufficient" to argue that the war on terror is by itself reason to scrap the war on drugs, and I don't think there many on the legalization side who would. There are countless reasons to scrap the war on drugs. Its immensely unhelpful contribution to the war on Islamic extremism is yet another.

2. Actually, opiate producers are legitimate businesses already. That's where prescription opiates come from. My point (and I'd guess Christopher Hitchens' ) is that prohibition has generated something else altogether - a blackmarket trade in opiates. The extraordinary profits that this generates encourages dealers to push their products wherever, whenever and however they can. Legalization which is (conservatives should note) merely a reversion, roughly speaking, to the legal situation that prevailed in the early 20th Century, would stamp out the black market. With that market gone, its perverse incentives would die. As a result, I suspect that consumption would fall, and what consumption there was would be in safer form. Most people simply are not that self-destructive. They weren't a century ago. They aren't now. Sadly, there'd still be some junkies. There will always be junkies, but with a small fraction of the billions in law enforcement dollars saved by the abolition of drug prohibition, there will be plenty of cash to help them. There isn't now.

3. You're right, of course, that Afghanistan would lose its competitive advantage if the trade in opiates was freed up, but let's be honest, that change is not likely to happen any time soon. We're talking about the real world now, a real world in which prohibitionists have to explain how destroying the Afghans' only source of income is going to win them over to the West.

4. Hitchens is right. Tough talk about crushing the mafia may be fine, and crushing them may be even better (as you say, they are bad guys) but it does nothing to address the effects of the impoverishment that will result from the destruction of a poor country's only cash crop.

We could argue this forever, but I do think that the war on Islamic terror has added a new dimension - and a new urgency - to the debate over drugs. With the exception of a few pieces of crass - and spectacularly dishonest - propaganda, I see no sign at all that this has occurred to the Bush administration. And that failure is, quite simply, unforgiveable.

Woman Slain, Fetus Stolen

Woman arrested, baby returned in bizarre murders

Infant in good health

That's a blessing. Now they need to find the guy who killed her mother and do very bad things to him.

Andrew, I don't want to get into a whole drug war thing late on a Friday (in part because pro-legalization emailers can be dismayingly obnoxious), but a few random quick points:

1. I'm just not persuaded by your mantra: "War on terror or war on drugs? Choose one. You can't fight both." As a general proposition I don't see how it's any different than the countless declarations from liberals along the lines of "War on terror or tax cuts, you can't have both." In other words, I don't think it's sufficient to take a policy you'd want to get rid of anyway and then say the war on terror justifies getting rid of it. I am perfectly willing to concede that the war on terror makes the war on drugs more difficult, and vice versa, but the war on terror makes pretty much all public policies more difficult. That doesn't automatically mean it's not a worthwhile project. Ditto the war on drugs.

2. Now today you do offer something more than the mantra, but even here I'm not sure I see how it makes legalization obviously correct. So, according to you and Hitch, we should legalize heroin because if we did so it would make heroin producers into legitimate business men? Encouraging -- or at the very least not discouraging -- millions of Americans to become dope fiends and smack addicts in order to put warlords out of one lucrative business seems like a pretty odd national security argument to me. If we legalize heroin, should we offer the Afghans preferential treatment in the heroin trade, even if it harms our more deserving American poppy growers? I'm patriotic enough to believe that if you're going to buy H you might as well buy it from the US of A.

3. More seriously, who says Afghanistan wouldn't be hurt by legalization? Surely other nations -- not to mention the biotech and agribusiness industries -- which are now out of the heroin business would jump in once America lifted its trade and legal barriers against the product. Once that happened, presumably the price would drop, even as demand (and potency) increased. This might be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but it wouldn't be a great boon to the average poppy grower in Afghanistan. I don't know a lot about the agricultural issues here, but it seems to me that once poppies become just another crop in the global marketplace, Afghanistan's competitive advantages disappear.

3. Hitchens calls the demand for a ruthless crackdown on the Afghan mafia a "non-sequitur." Maybe this is a wrong proposal, but it's not an illogical one. The warlords and mafia are bad people, regardless of what you think of the drug trade. They murder people. Crushing them would be a good thing.

...picture something that you do not have to imagine--a determined effort by the liberators of Afghanistan to force the country back into warlordism and anarchy. Every day, soldiers acting in our name are burning or spraying Afghanistan's only viable crop.Like many stories in the mainstream media, this dramatic piece of news can appear on the front page only if it is printed upside down. Thus we learned from the New York Times of Dec. 11, in a front-page article bylined by Eric Schmitt, that a secret "assessment" by Lt. Gen. David Barno, the senior American officer in the country, has concluded that poppy cultivation is the main threat to the creation of a decent society, and the main avenue by which former Taliban and al-Qaida forces can hope to return from their crushing defeat. Any attentive reading of the report, however, shows that it is the campaign against poppy cultivation that constitutes the threat. This point was underlined, perhaps coincidentally, by an op-ed essay in the same edition of the Times, written by Afghanistan's tireless and talented finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. "Today," he wrote, "many Afghans believe that it is not drugs, but an ill-conceived war on drugs that threatens their economy and nascent democracy" [my italics]. Ghani went on to point out that a third of Afghanistan's GDP depends on the crop and that "destroying that trade without offering our farmers a genuine alternative livelihood has the potential to undo the embryonic economic gains of the past three years." As he further emphasized, these highly undesirable consequences arise from the control of the trade by a "mafia" with links to Islamic nihilism. Ghani's meticulous analysis promptly broke down with a non-sequitur: a call for more money and force to be spent in combating a "mafia" that, as he has already admitted, commands a decisive part of the rural economy. Nowhere is it even asked what would happen if the trade was legalized and taxed: a measure that would immediately remove it from mafia control and immediately enrich a vast number of Afghan cultivators who currently exist on the margin of survival...

From an economist:

Dear Jonah,

The problem with "is WWII responsible for ending The Great Depression?"
is the question is posed wrong. The question implies there that is SOMETHING responsible and we need to figure out whether it was WWII or something else. But one does not need to find a cause of recessions or depressions ending. They almost always do that themselves and usually quite quickly. The puzzle is not why the depression ended but why it didn't end sooner. Thus the correct question is "what is responsible for the depression not ending in 1933?" The best answer is The New Deal, especially the cartelization of industry it encouraged. The best paper is by Hal Cole and Lee Ohanian “New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis", which is forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy. It can be downloaded at http://www.econ.ucla.edu/hlcole/HLCresearch.htm.

By the way, I'm actually more interested in this topic than most because of that other thing I'm working on. So if there academics out there who want to join this fray -- for a little while -- I look forward to hearing from ya. From a reader:

Jonah --

You're quite right that the consensus among economists is that the New Deal probably prolonged the Great Depression, through it's ham-handed price controls and attempts at micromanaging the economy. But you're incorrect to state that there's no dispute among economists that WWII is what fixed the Great Depression. Actually, there's a lot of doubt as to whether WWII played an important role in fixing the Depression.

By most accounts the Great Depression is over by about 1934, and the
U.S. economy starts recovering. Then the Federal Reserve, which was
still figuring out how to conduct monetary policy, decided that inflation was a major threat in 1937 and clamped down on the money supply, bringing the very deep recession of 1937-38. After that, the economy started recovering again. Then comes World War II. But if you looks at the trendlines from the recovery in the late 1930s through both the wartime boom and the post-war slump and on inton the late 1940s, it's not at all clear that WWII causes a change in trend.

In addition, the mechanism through which WWII is supposed to have saved
the U.S. economy is not at all clear. Yes, WWII involved massive deficit spending and borrowing, which in a Keynesian model should stimulate an economy. But the late 1940s involves massive reductions in deficit spending, which in a Keynesian model should have collapsed the economy -- and that didn't happen. The ability of the U.S. economy to move from a wartime footing in the early 1940s to booming peacetime economy in the late 1940s with a relatively short post-war recession in between was quite remarkable.

For some academic evidence on the complexities, see the work of Robert Higgs. A nice accessible piece from a few years ago is at . Or for the hard-core, check his article in the March 1992 Journal of Economic History: "Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s." As Higgs asks at one point, when you think about it a little, is it really plausible that one of the most costly and destructive wars of all time was actually highly beneficial for the U.S. economy?

Getting a lot of email like this:

You missed the biggest argument: it's the world's biggest Ponzi scheme. If a private citizen tried to start something exactly like it, they'd be thrown in jail, and rightly so. It was always called "Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance." It isn't insurance in any way, shape or form. There aren't any reserves for claims…

I'm a Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter; I oughta know.

And...

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

What I cannot understand is that no one is applying the historic legal standard for the proper stewardship of money.

Legally, a fiduciary HAS TO INVEST in a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds as well as other reasonable assets.

He HAS TO DIVERSIFY or he breaks fiduciary law.

This has been conventional wisdom as well as LAW for ages. Exactly why doesn’t anyone ask the Krugman’s of the world why the LEGAL standard for rationally investing money for pension funds, trusts and other types of custodial accounts doesn’t have any bearing on the largest “pension plan” ever?

Is Krugman’s private assets all in treasury bills? Does he think this is prudent? Then why in the world would anyone advocate against doing what a “wise” fiduciary is legally bound to do?

Why doesn’t anyone argue that Social Security is the only “pension fund” or “trust fund” that is run absolutely contrary to legal doctrine?

I've lost the Columbia College libertarians!

Now here's a serious email:

When you get over attacking liberals maybe you can get around to disccusing some of the details of reforming Social Security. Such as transition costs of 2 trillion, when we have huge deficits. Or how can you trust the Bush administration to administer the reform when they have made a mess of everything they've done, especially in Iraq. And why would any adult listen to your propaganda when you and your ilk were so criminally wrong about WMD.

From a reader:

Jonah,

FDR is dead, but Hoover isn't.
the Dems can't let FDR rest in peace, because they won't let Hoover die. My 83 year old mother-in-law is convinced that she must continue to vote Democratic, or "Hoover times" will return, with GOP zombies rising from the grave to snatch the Social Security check from her hand.

Krugman says that one of the two biggest problems with social security privtatization is that it leaves retirees in poverty. The other problem is that firms will take handling fees for private accounts. Since that is chiefly an efficiency argument rather than a moral one (unless the former Enron advisor thinks it's immoral for firms to charge for services) I am assuming he thinks the tendency of privatized systems to "leave many retirees in poverty" is his chief moral complaint. Fair enough. It's a good complaint.

But here's what I'm missing. The current Social Security system leaves retirees in poverty too. Doesn't it? This is not my field of expertise, but I quickly looked up the stats for poverty among the elderly. It's 14% according to no doubt
Krugman-approved sources . Though the Census Bureau says it's closer to 10% (and twice that for blacks). What the Census bureau also says is that poverty among the elderly has been higher than 10% since they started collecting data. It's gone down steadily since 1959 (where the table I found began) but I doubt Krugman would attribute that trend to Social Security so much as to rising prosperity generally.

Anyway, the point is that if Krugman's big objection to the new system is that it leaves retirees in poverty, why isn't he troubled by the fact that the current system does too? Why doesn't he even mention it? Or, again, am I missing something?

FDR is dead.

From a piece in USA Today about young Democrats asserting themselves in the party:

"This generation is looking for ways to participate because we're tired of losing," says Jamal Simmons, 33, a consultant who has worked for presidential hopeful Wesley Clark and several other Southern candidates.

Isn't this the first vanity of all vanities when it comes to politics: "If I'm more involved, we'll be more likely to win."

Anyway, the real news here is that even 40-somethings in the Democratic Party have to play the "youth" card to make their case. It might be partly true sociologically, but I think it's kind of sad that grown men and women need to play this game in order to be heard. Then again, since the party is run by 1960s types it might work.

FYI - Sam and Harry's is at the nexus of two parallel universes and you and Jonah were not together last night. Your images were an astro-physical projection resulting from an anti-matter convolution on the rim of wormhole (NRO-68432, more commonly know as Buckley's Warp). All this is much too complicated for mere mortals to understand so its best not to get into it, as the vocabulary to describe such an event has not yet been invented. By my calculations you and Jonah were at least six parsecs apart both physically and mentally. Ms. Lopez, you would know all this if you allowed more Star Trek chatter at the corner. On the bright side, if you did understand the foregoing we would have to kill you to keep is a secret, so its best not to delve into matters of the space time continuum to deeply.

Perhaps if David Brock tied himself to a tree again he could bear-bait O'Reilly out into the open.

It's become abundantly clear to me that some folks have taken far too seriously my earlier post of that email from a reader who's subscribing to NR and dropping the Standard over Bill Kristol's column on Rumsfeld. I just thought it was funny. Just to be clear, I think conservatives should read both magazines (but if forced to choose between the two, I think my advice would be obvious. Pay for NR and read the Standard at the local bookstore).

As for the merits of the issue, I think Rumsfeld deserves his share of criticism, as does the whole administration. The administration has already, I think, received well in excess of their share. But hey, they're big boys and big girls. As for Rummy's share, I tend to find today's editorial on NRO very persuasive.

Merry Christmas to you and me, KLO.
I just gave myself NR Digital.
Fa, La, La, La, La....
Hi, Jonah.

I think this is the State of the Union the Democrats actually heard! It certainly would explain a lot.

Note to the Washington Post: This is a parody.

I can't make this work except to have the cats go straight up in the air. But Cosmo likes it anyway.

Update: I figured it out (actually a reader explained it to me). You hit the right-left arrows alternately as you run toward the cat-toss line. My personal best 178. But PLEASE do NOT send me your scores. I still have hundreds of emails somewhere on my computer with readers penguin toss scores.

Okay Megatron has nothing to do with it. But my computer hates Windows Media Player. If yours doesn't and you're nostalgic for 1980s TV Commercials, well then your day is toast.

From a reader:

Dear Mr. Goldberg, I just wanted to let you know that Mr. Kristol's recent (illogical) criticism of Secretary Rumsfeld means that I will not be renewing my Weekly Standard subscription next year and thus I'll soon be changing to National Review instead. This day has been long in coming, especially in so far as I enjoy your writers more than theirs anyway. Just wanted to let you know. Keep up the great work! Best wishes, [name withheld],

“Treasure” is the right word to use for these three collections of children’s literature. Indeed, reading through the National Review treasuries is a happy reminder of the time when children were respected as creatures capable of both real thoughts and real imaginings rather than, as they so much are today, no more than a cohort of small and conventionally attitudinizing adults. Indeed, with the Treasuries in tow, parents and children are both apt to begin anticipating bedtime as a whole new adventure.

Ronald Brownstein in the LA Times writes:

"The generation-long political retreat of Democrats across the South is disintegrating into a rout." Across the thirteen states of the South, Bush carried nearly 85% of all the counties; Bush won 1,124 counties, to Kerry’s 216 (Clinton won more than 650 counties in each of his presidential victories). Bush has become the first candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944 to carry more than 1,000 Southern counties twice. "Kerry won fewer Southern counties than any Democratic nominee since the Depression except Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and George S. McGovern in 1972."

Nod to Peter Schramm.

"So this whole Homeland Defense nomination snafu is being spun as a problem within the Bush administration vetting process, isn't it more an indictment of the NY Times, NY Post and NY Daily News? Where the hell were they when this guy was playing all his ethically-challenged games on their turf?"