Latin, written off as a dead language by trendy teachers in the 1970s, is staging a quiet comeback, according to the New York Times.

Apparently a new generation is learning what the pre-Boomer set already knew: Latin is a great way to build an English-language vocabulary and to teach grammar. One might know the parts of speech in English intuitively, because one speaks English all of the time, but learn a bit of Latin and you end up knowing a lot more about how English works. That is valuable for any one reads and writes.

Plus, learning about the ancient culture of Rome leads students into an understanding of one of the three main pillars of Western Civilization. (The other two being the cultures of the Jews and the Greeks).

Interestingly, the quiet Latin rennaisance is happening is remote rural areas, up-and-coming suburbs and inner-city charter schools, accoding to the New York Times. It is not happening in Berkeley or Manhattan’s tony Upper West Side. There is a story there too, I’d bet.

Insisting that they have broken with al Qaeda, the Taliban are seeking a separate peace with the elected Afghan government, according to CNN.

The peace discussions, which are still in their early stages despite two years of work, where begun by Saudi Arabia. In the 1990s, Saudi Arabia was one of only three nations on Earth to recognize the Taliban government.

While it is too soon to tell what that means, it suggests two things: The Saudis do not see America’s defeat in Afghanistan as inevitable and want to play a constructive role and, two, Iranian influence in Afghanistan worries the Saudis more than American influence.

It also suggests that the Taliban wonder how much longer their Pakistani and Iranian friends will support them in the field and to ensure that they have a seat when the music stops.

As Americans, we should see this as a hopeful sign. Our forces are making a difference on the ground–compelling our enemies to search out countermoves.

The American Prospect has just published a fascinating piece called “the Coming Conservative Crack Up.”  It is simultaneously un-original and wrong-headed, a bizarre kind of journalistic achievement.

I have been reading articles and books predicting the imminent death of the conservative movement since 1989.Remember when the death of communism was supposed to foreshadow the end of the greatest nemesis as we moved into a “post-ideological world”?

Then came the first two Clinton years and a spate of “conservatism is dead” articles. Remember: Reaganism was dead and Bush killed it?

The Gingrich triumph, seizing Congress for the GOP for the first time in 40 years, put an end to this profitable line of pessismism.

But the conservative-movement-is-dead meme came back like Lazurus. R.Emmett Tyrell published a book called The Conservative Crack-Up in 1997. Death notices for conservatism continued to appear until Bush was narrowly elected in 2000.

As soon as the Iraq war seemed more quagmire than triumph, conservatism-is-dead returned with a vengeance.

Howard Fineman foresaw the end of the conservative movement in Newsweek in 2005: The “movement” – that began 50 years ago with the founding of Bill Buckley’s National Review; that had its coming of age in the Reagan Years; that reached its zenith with Bush’s victory in 2000 — is falling apart at the seams.

So the Prospect gets no credit for oringinality. But what about the thesis? The author confuses the conservative movement with the Republican party. In American history, political parties do die–remember the Whigs–but it happens rarely. Political movements also die (Free Silver, No-Nothingism), but ones that create institutions last for a long, long time. The labor movement created unions and other insitutions. The civil-rights movement created the NAACP and many other institutions. So movements can last for decades after they have accomplished their goals, if they build institutions or take over existing ones. Conservatives have built an impressive array of institutions: think tanks, foundations, magazines, even schools and art centers. No election will take away those things.

Finally, the Prospect author refuses to admit the popular appeal of conservative ideas. More than one-third of the country accepts all of the conservative agenda as its own and a majority have adopted large parts of it (balanced budgets, low taxes, strong foreign policy, tougher policing, welfare reform).

In 2050, we will be reading predictions of Conservatism’s death. And worried conservatives, under the pressure domes on Mars and in the floating sea-cities in the Pacific, will hold conferences and meetings and coffee klatches, wondering what to do.

UPDATE: Tim Noah, over Slate, has posted a piece entitled “GOP,RIP.” It is more of the same. Here’s his conclusion:

This is not, I’ll confess, the first time I’ve believed that the Republican ascendancy has ended. In 1994, I felt sure that the warmed-over Reaganite nostrums of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” spelled defeat in the midterm elections. Instead, the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. I also thought the GOP was cracking up in 2000, when, desperate to find fault with every last aspect of the Clinton administration, it started bad-mouthing prosperity. I got that wrong, too. So maybe the GOP isn’t really dead.

It sure looks dead, though.

Isn’t this liberal triumphalism starting a little soon? I mean, measuring the White House drapes before the election and all…

With the House of Representatives voting down the bailout package and the Dow plunging some 700 points yesterday, it is time to rethink things. Here are some ideas to add to the next bailout package.

Capital gains. Most people have seen their portfolios decline ten to 15% over the past month, if not by much more. Why not suspend (or eliminate) the capital-gains tax rate, currently at 15%, until the crisis passes? It would inject billions of capital into the markets but would not require the U.S. Treasury to write any checks. It would erase billions in losses, as people recalculate their portfolios based on the tax cut. What about Uncle Sam’s lost revenue? The revenue loss would be minor (capital-gains tax generates little). Besides, if we are debating the most effective means for government to put money into the markets, letting investors keep more of their money rather than giving it to executives at failing banks, is more efficient. Also, the tax cut eliminates the “moral hazard” of bailing out bad behavior.

Ditch “Mark to Market” accounting rules. Artificially reducing the value of bank assets (bundles of securitized mortgages) simply because the market prices of those bundles has fallen doesn’t make sense in the current market environment. Indeed, these rules seem to accelerate and spread panic. Sober officials should remember that the vast majority of mortgages–even subprime ones–are actually performing. People are paying as agreed. And, secondly, marking down mortgages 90%  when the underlying value (the land and the home) have declined in the real-estate market less than 15% makes no sense.

Revoke Sarbanes-Oxley. This showy over-reaction to the Enron mess has saddled public companies in the U.S. market with a welter of unnecessary regulations–and driven a lot of new offerings to London and Hong Kong. The New York Stock Exchange is no longer the world’s leading exchange and is now also one of the least innovative. To bring money back into the U.S. markets, from which it has fled since 2001, we need to return to pre-2001 rules.

You must be as tired of hearing it as I am. Somehow, we are all at fault for Wall Street’s meltdown. We demanded cheap loans for houses we couldn’t afford and voted in corrupt dolts, who took from Fannie Mae and told us what we wanted to hear. Now, we are getting what we deserve.

Take Rod Dreher’s otherwise excellent column in the Dallas Morning News:

After all, these scoundrels did not elect themselves, nor was there an outcry heard in the land against Wall Street rapacity and recklessness when our 401(k)s were rising, and all but the lowliest plebeian was moving into his very own McMansion.

Along those lines, there’s one proverb that we will all become painfully acquainted with in the years to come: You reap what you sow.

There are two essential problems with this analysis: it is factually false and morally unwise.

Rep. Barney Frank was elected by a majority of the people of  his district in Massachusetts. Senator Chris Dodd is brought to us by many but not all of the voters of Connecticut. And so on. Most of us never had the chance to vote for or against these solons. So why should we be blamed?

The regulatory changes that led us to this point were the work of lobbyists, bureaucrats and lawmakers including Dodd and Frank and corrupt executives, like Raines and Johnson. We know or can know their names.

The idea of blaming “all of us” is a way to avoid blaming those who did the deeds and reaped their ill-gotten gains.

What about cheap mortgages? Sure, some of us took them when they were offered. But who offered them and why? Yes, it is the Clinton-era changes to the Community Reinvestment Act that forced banks to lend more for “affordable housing.” Law firms, including ones connected to Obama, sued banks that failed to meet their low-income quotas for mortgages. Bankers were not driven by greed, as everyone says, but by fear. Fear of the baying hounds of regulators and lawyers would call them racist and ruin their careers. But who unleashed the hounds on the bankers?

Particular policies and people made this mess. The public’s only role will be to pay the tab, a cruel addition that will equal more than $2,500 per person. Can’t the talking class at least have the decency to stop blaming the one group generous enough to pay for the party they didn’t attend?

In a shrewd move, Senator McCain has just proposed delaying Friday’s first presidential debate–in order to convene a meeting with Obama, President Bush and other decision-makers from both parties to sort out the financial mess.

It makes McCain look engaged in solving the number one issue on the minds of Americans, right now. It gives him a bigger bully pulpit to fight the Christmas tree of legislation that is winding its way through Congress now (even student and car loans have been added to the bailout).

It minimizes the power of Rep. Barney Frank, who has rolled his Senate counterpart, Chris Dodd, and is leading the congressional effort. Rep. Frank is a key Obama ally.

It also presents a strategic problem for Obama. Until now, the Illinois freshman has been able to coast, saying he supports what Rep. Frank and other Democrats are doing. If Obama and McCain attend a White House summit, each will have to lay out detailed proposals for reform. Obama would have to lock himself in–and take criticism for his ties to Fannie and Freddie.

And if Obama refuses to attend the summit, he effectively announces that he is unready to lead in a crisis.

While this may be a shrewd move for the McCain campaign, it is not an example of “country first,” his campaign theme. The Dow may tumble on the news that all of the discussions of the past two weeks will be thrown up in the air, pending a White House summit with two presidential candidates who are 40 days away from an election. The street doesn’t like wild cards.

And the summit means more cooks in the kitchen. It will no longer just be Treasury Secretary Paulson, Rep. Frank and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke.  Having two presidential campaigns in the room sounds like a recipe for Yalta.

The best outcome for the country is to settle the financial crisis as soon as possible, for as little as possible.

But if Obama chooses “country first,” he may lose the election. Either one of Obama’s choices will be revealing–as is McCain’s move.

UPDATE: Obama is insisting the debate is still on. That position may change, as preliminary polls seem to see McCain’s bet as statesmanlike.

Senator John McCain’s unprecedented war against the New York Times continues to amaze.

There are really two separate stories here: one, the ties of Rick Davis’ former firm to Fannie and Freddie Mac and a second one about the New York Times’ ideological war against all enemies of Obama.

Part I

Politico gets it exactly right with the headline: “McCain camp attacks Times, doesn’t deny report.” The McCain statement hotly denies Davis’ involvement (which no one has alleged) and does not address whether his former outfit was doing business with the Fannie and Freddie as recently as last month.

Of course, the New York Times is trying to have it both ways. While their story might be technically correct (no one has addressed the direct allegations), it is essentially a non-story meant to create a moral equivalency. Let me explain both parts.

Non-story: Who cares what a former employer does? The minute you leave, your responsibility ends–whether is by resignation or leave of absence. And Davis never even worked on the account when he did work there. At best, this is guilt by association–what the Left hates Sen. McCarthy for.  There is no news story here. So why write the “story”?

“Moral equivalency.” Obama is tied to Fannie and Freddie seven ways to Sunday: He took more campaign contributions from them than any other senator, save one. He hired Fannie’s former chief executive to run his vice-presidential search team. And, despite the denials, appears to have hired a second former Fannie chief executive to advise him on “housing policy.” Meanwhile, McCain loudly demanded reform for years while the fashionable friends of Fannie (and Obama) looked on, unmoved.  These facts, presented in tv spots, would tar Obama with the greatest economic disaster of the past decade. So the search was on. Somehow tie someone connected to McCain to Fannie and, then say, “well both parties did it…”

If one continues to insist that McCain was long the lonely voice for reform and Obama is up to his eyeballs with Fannie’s corruption, you will get written off as a partisan hack.

So far the strategy seems to be working.

McCain would be better off saying “So what? When my former employer, the U.S. Navy, makes a mistake, everyone knows it would be unfair to blame me. Why do you hold my campaign manager to a different standard?”

Part II

The other half of McCain counter-blast is  so simultaneously snarky and high-minded that it could be a New York Times editorial. From campaign deputy spokesman Michael Goldfarb:

We all understand that partisan attacks are part of the political process in this country. The debate that stems from these grand and sometimes unruly conversations is what makes this country so exceptional. Indeed, our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications. We celebrate their contribution to the political fabric of America. But while the Huffington Post is utterly transparent, the New York Times obscures its true intentions — to undermine the candidacy of John McCain and boost the candidacy of Barack Obama — under the cloak of objective journalism.

The New York Times is trying to fill an ideological niche. It is a business decision, and one made under economic duress, as the New York Times is a failing business. But the paper’s reporting on Senator McCain, his campaign, and his staff should be clearly understood by the American people for what it is: a partisan assault aimed at promoting that paper’s preferred candidate, Barack Obama.

Goldfarb is right.

John Steele Gordon, over at Commentary, puts it in historical perspective:

This is something very new. Politicians have been complaining about specific news stories since modern media first developed in the 1830’s and 40’s. And they have complained about individual organizations that made no secret of their biases, such as the Chicago Tribune under Robert R. McCormick in the 1930’s and 40’s and its campaign against FDR and the New Deal.

But I can think of no instance when a campaign has taken on a news organization as nationwide and as powerful as the New York Times, and publicly accused it, in effect, of journalistic prostitution

That the McCain campaign has decided that is a net plus for them to do so is, perhaps, a sign of just how much less powerful the mainstream media have become in the last decade as the Internet has broken their monopoly as gatekeepers of information. And it is certainly a sign of the decline of the New York Times from its once unquestioned position as the world’s most powerful newspaper to its present sad state.

I imagine the Gray Lady is not happy being called merely a dishonest version of Arianna Huffington.

Yes, the New York Times has hurt itself in all this. Every questionable story shrinks its reputation; every drop of river water erodes rock, reducing the once mighty to pebbles. It takes a long while. But the New York Times has been at this dangerous game for at least a generation. Results are visible. Its market capitalization is now roughly equal to the daily variation in Google’s capitalization. Soon, it may be no more powerful than Ozymandias.

Watch a YouTube clip of The View yesterday and ask yourself: Does this sound like a man working night and day to get Obama elected?

President Clinton sounds oddly detached, making analysis more powerful. (Indeed, he sounds less partisan than many pundits on talk tv.) He makes a good point that receives thunderous applause. After a long aside about how voters make up their minds, he says he have to stop looking for reasons to tear someone just because we are going to vote for the other guy. He’s right. The kind of rabid partisan that has spread from the web to tv is ultimately bad for the country.

Let’s think about this a little, though. Why are GOP negative television and radio advertisements often effective? They cut through the clutter and either raise new issues or old ones in a fresh way.  If the press were more even-handed is examining issues as they come up, there would no shock value (and therefore benefit) from this ads. Instead, the press buries anything that might hurt Democrats. Compare the coverage of Palin versus Biden or Rep. Charlie Rangel. So the first most voters here of it is on the web, talk radio or a 30-second tv spot. That gives little time for a Democratic candidate to respond to issue in context–their responses are necessarily sound-bites and spots. In short, I suspect that this hyper-partisan atmosphere is driven by the press’ failure to weigh the merits and not pardon the offenses of politicians. Like welfare, media bias hurts those it is trying to help.

Next, in the Clinton appearance we hear a fair amount of praise for McCain. This is fair minded and clearly not an endorsement of the Republican nominee. Still, the heartburn in the Obama campaign must be off the Alka-Seltzer charts…

Finally, is the bombshell the press missed. Clinton says that Hillary didn’t really want to be vice president but would have accepted it as “her duty” if need be. Okay, some of this is sour grapes. On the other hand, if she thinks Obama is a loser, she may not want to be tainted by his loss. Kerry’s defeat didn’t position Edwards very well for the 2008 race. The Clinton calculatrix is always calculating.

Over at Wizbang, a fascinating look inside the raw numbers of the lastest Gallup Organization’s polls.

Skip the opening paragraphs about “trolls,” and dive into the numbers he dissects. If you look at the raw numbers, McCain is significantly ahead of Obama and his support is steady or growing in all categories. Meanwhile, Obama is steady or falling in all categories.

But Gallup reports Obama up over McCain by two points. Why? The weighting of voters–basically a guestimate about voter turnout–has changed over at Gallup, favoring Republicans during their convention but now favoring the Democrats. All polling organization weight the numbers. The question is how.

Now, here is where it gets fascinating. Wizbang re-weights the numbers to match ratios established by exit polls (polls of voters exiting the voting booth) in the past few presidential contests. Result: Obama 39%, McCain 45%.

Could Wizbang be right? If voter turnout doesn’t change substantially, yes, he could be right. Read his post and decide for yourself.

One hypothesis I would add: Republican and Republican-leaning independents are now favoring McCain because they took his pick of Palin as a signal that he will govern as a conservative, not a RINO.

And that, of course, is why liberals hate Palin. They wanted an election between two liberals, a hard and soft option.  And now they are disappointed. So they want to punish McCain through Palin.

Conservatives are biologically different from the rest of us; they are fearful creatures who sweat when shown gruesome images. This is the finding published in Science, once America’s premier peer-reviewed scientific journals.

This article in London’s Daily Telegraph sums up the results.

The study is the work of gaggle of scientists from across the country: professors Douglas Oxley, Kevin Smith and John Hibbing and others at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, alongside  professor John Alford at Rice University, Matthew Hibbing at the University of Illinois, and Peter Hatemi at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics.

But don’t be fooled. This is, at best, pseudo-science. While bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse seem to be giving the study some smidgen of credence, here is why you should not:

Sample Size. There were only 46 people tested. Hardly enough for a statistically valid sample. Assuming half of the sample was made up by the non-conservative control group, that suggests only 23 “conservatives” were tested.

Selection bias. Next, the subjects were not randomly selected; they were volunteers. This is elementary selection bias.

Definition of Conservative. Researchers labeled as “conservative” any one who believed this set of things, according to the Telegraph: “support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Creationist views, and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.”

This a stereotype cross-dressing as an objective definition. I know of many conservatives who oppose all of the things that this gaggle of scientists thinks would define them as conservatives. How can obedience be a key conservative trait, when most conservatives favor deregulation, a smaller state and fewer govenrment orders in their lives? Some elements of the definition are tendentious: no one favors warrantless searches, what many favor is warrantless surveillance of non-citizens often who are outside the United States. (Since the call is connected through network inside the U.S., lawyers have argued that FISA warrants are necessary. Whatever the legal merits of that view, listening in on enemy communciation is a well-established practice in war time–even if some civilian chatter is intercepted as well.)

The other half of definition is equally silly. In practice most conservatives oppose premarital sex and pornography only for their daughters, not themselves. And they can be right both times.

And what about the many conservatives who are immigrants? Or the children of immigrants? Are they supposed to be opposed to immigration to join the Conservative Club?

We could pick on both sides of this definition all day long, but would just be shooting fish in a barrel. The point is established: researchers defined a conservative as a Moral Majority yokel from 1979, someone who even at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution made up a part of a broad and variegated movement.

And mistaking a part for a whole is a key blunder that contaminates the study.

Imagine if one defined as a liberal someone who favored communal farms over cities, wanted to see the abolition of cars and other private transportation, wanted free love and legal marijuana, wanted to abolish the department of defense and replace it with a department of peace, believed that police and poverty cause crime,  that religion is a cunning trick practiced by televangelists and so on. Many conservatives would chuckle at this definition and insist that there is some truth to it. But any sophisticated observer would note two things: most liberals do not hold these views and this collection of views sounds like a 1971 hippie, not a contemporary adult.

The study contains an obvious problem. What about liberals who become conservatives or vice versa?  Do their impulses change? If so, by how much? Why wasn’t this studied?

Finally, the whole study is naive. The main author, Hibbing, believes that the study can eliminate political conflict. Again, from the Telegraph: “If political beliefs do run as deep as we suggest, it becomes easier to understand why political conflict is so persistent. It’s not that those who disagree with us politically are being intentionally stubborn but rather that the world seems very different to them. Perhaps recognition of the deep physical nature of these differences will increase political tolerance and understanding…”

Translation: it is not that conservatives are unwilling to see the light, they may be biologically incapable of seeing the light.

Smug, isn’t it?

A less naive approach would say something like this: people differ politically because they do not value all goods equally and rank goods differently than others do. Some value liberty more than order; others value self-development over hierarchy. The list of political goods to rank is long and the order of them varies as much as people do, though people seem to cluster around election day.

Political disposition does not seem to emerge from biology (any more than a preference for scotch over bourbon does), but it does appear to be mildly heritable. No one is destined to be a Republican or a Whig or a Democrat or a Monarchist, but parents are part of cornucopia of causes that influence one’s politics.

How did this study come about? Eliminating the numerous unnamed graduate students and other drones employed, the study suggests a ratio of 7.6 subjects per scientist.  While this ratio alone tells us nothing of scientific value, it reminds us of an old rule: large idiocies require committees.