President Bush’s latest veto message contains some fascinating nuggets that appear to be have been completely overlooked by the press.

The message concerns Bush’s pocket veto of a defense budgeting bill.

It appears that some crack, anti-war staffers have buried in provisions that will allow trial lawyers to sue Iraqi property holders in U.S. courts–constricting to the point of suffocation Iraq’s ability to finance its own reconstruction.

Of course, this is a two-fer for the anti-war extremists: sabotaging U.S. efforts in Iraq while enriching the trial lawyers. Some enterprising reporter ought to ask Senators Clinton, Obama and Biden where they stand.

In the wall-to-wall coverage of the murder of Pakistan’s former prime minister, the one question not asked often enough is: Is American foreign policy responsible? What is the role of the State department in the chain of events that led to her death?

Alan Colmes, an underestimated interviewer, recently raised the issue in an exchange with former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

COLMES: Did we make a mistake trying to push democracy too quickly in a region of the world where stability, to use the analogy Rich Lowry used earlier tonight, is more important than democracy? Are they sometimes mutually exclusive?

BOLTON: Well, I think this ought to tell us not to try to micro-manage what goes on in a country like this. What we’ve got now is a prescription for chaos. That country is on the verge. We’ll have to see what happens in the cities tomorrow, whether riots break out. This is exactly what the Islamic fundamentalists wanted, because now Musharraf himself has come under even greater criticism. The country is extremely unstable and control of those nuclear weapons is now up for grabs.

The United States is better off when it backs principles and processes, not people. We should encourage Pakistan to have fair, multi-party elections in time with their own constitution.

We should say that we will work with whomever they elect, not try to impose a leader from abroad who requires that 40 charges of corruption–based on evidence supplied by Swiss banks–be waived before she can lawfully return to the nation she seeks to rule.

And if we do back an exiled leader, we should aim to select one that not only gives lip service to democracy (in my experience, all out of power leaders claim to be democrats), but investigate whether the party she leads freely and fairly elects its own leaders in multi-candidate contests. Bhutto’s party is more dynasty than democracy. After Bhutto’s father was hanged on charges of political murder in 1979, control of the eventually shifted to her mother. And then to Benazir.

Finally, we need to ask: Why did the State department encourage Bhutto to return? What pressure did it apply to Pakistan to assure her re-entry? And are the folks at Foggy Bottom learning the lessons of this tragic episode?

If so, some real benefit can be wrung from Bhutto’s murder. If not, then at least the public knows that the State department treats foreign opposition leaders no better than Bismarck did the deaths of foot soldiers.

In “the lifetime of [his] two cats,” the Baltimore Chronicle’s David Lindorff predicts a cataclysm for red America. Flooding in the Gulf states, drought in the upper Midwest, and scorchingly high energy prices for the Sun Belt will turn millions of Republican voters into refugees seeking succor in blue America–all brought on by global warming.

Ok, you are thinking, this is simply a typical teenage-doom fantasy in which Nature punishes all those who disagree with Mr. Lindorff. And you would be right. That’s what I thought too.

Until I spied this paragraph:

The important thing is that we, on the higher ground both actually and figuratively, need to remember that, when they begin their historic migration from their doomed regions, we not give them the keys to the city. They certainly should be offered assistance in their time of need, but we need to keep a firm grip on our political systems, making sure that these guilty throngs who allowed the world to go to hell are gerrymandered into political impotence in their new homes.

We already have a word for people who move from the Sun Belt to Northern California, or from Texas to New York. We call these people: “American citizens.” The average American family moves every few years; we are a nation of “air-conditioned gypsies.” So denying the rights of citizenship to citizens who move from other states is almost certainly a non-starter. And unconstitutional.

It is the desire to disenfranchise those whom Mr. Lindorff disagrees that is the trouble. We live in a 50-50 nation, as the nearly every presidential election from 1992 onward shows. The presence of third-party candidates disguised this reality in the 1990s, though some noted that Clinton never got more than 49% of the popular vote. Bush famously lost the popular vote in 2000 and crossed the 50% line in 2004 with Herculean voter-turnout efforts. So why does Lindorff want to eliminate the voting rights of the other half of Ameirca, instead of, oh, I don’t know, persuading them to vote for his guy?

Lindorff, sadly, is not alone.

Both the Left and Right is guilty of this impulse and it is quite frankly bad for the country. The desire to eliminate, rather than persuade, is totalitarian. We need a national conversation, not a continental re-education camp.

Still not convinced that Lindorff is shockingly intolerant? Imagine if he was talking about “illegals” instead “Republicans.” Then the MSM might see the outrage… and the larger problem of ideological intolerance that our nation faces.

Have you noticed that the same people who proclaim that they are “rationalists” and would never accept any supernatural beliefs without evidence… read horoscopes in the newspaper, consult psychologists (i.e. faith healers), and play the lottery using their “lucky numbers”?

In fact, these “men of reason” are more superstitious than the rest of us.

And the best-educated and highest-earning seem to be the most vulnerable to primitive superstition–probably for the first time in human history, the best and the brightest are the most moronically attracted to magic, the occult, numerology, reincarnation, auras and spirits, and so on. Celestine Prophecy and Nostradamus sit on more book shelves in the Hamptons than, say, a biography of Einstein.

I remember an educated man I met in Aspen a few years ago that he believed that industrialization had angered “gaia,” the goddess of the Earth, and that storms were her revenge. He wasn’t kidding.

Perfectly professional lawyers threated to sue the Pentagon if the military did not admit Wiccans (i.e. witches) into the ranks of uniformed chaplains, back in the Clinton years. Of course, the military immediately complied.

Often superstition involves stones. A women I knew, who had two degrees from University of California at Berkeley, insisted that rolling two pieces of lapus lazuli against her skin would cure back pain. She also had some kind of roller than generated static electricity that supposed to do something to improve your mood. Boy, she needed that. (She was one of those people who fall for the “Head ON… Apply directly to the forehead” ads.)

On airplanes, I have met a number of tattooed women with quartz necklaces. One told me that she wears the “magic stone” to ward off colds. I suggested that covering her midriff and taking Vitamin C might work too.

On a visit to Sedona, Arizona a few years ago, I spoke with a park ranger. He said he spending most of his time persuading people not to move stones into geometric patterns. Why do they do that? “They believe that the spiritual energy is really strong here and they use the stones to concentrate that energy,” he said. Sometimes these stone movers get arrested. They are invariably college-educated people, many of whom have professional jobs.

G.K. Chesterton once observed–and yes, I am quoting from memory–that those who do not believe in God believe in everything else. Why is it that the very people who invoke “science” to silence their critics indulge in so many goofy superstitions?

Christmas is always a confusing time of year for rock stations. Oldies, 80s, metal rockers, you name it, they don’t know what to play this time of year.

Some fall back on Pat Benatar’s “Little Drummer Boy” or that great song from The Waitresses.

But far too many play John Lennon’s “Imagine” over and over again. When you ask them why they would play such an offensive song, they think you are the one on drugs. But it is about peace, man, and isn’t that what Christmas is about?

Actually no. But that is another story.

Let’s stick with Lennon’s Leninist anthem for a moment. First, read the lyrics:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

Okay, no heaven… no religion… Translation: imagine if all you Christians went away, on your way out had to listen to this tripe during one of your highest holidays.

Second, Lennon sees religion as simply “something to kill or die for,” instead of a source of charity, free medical care, homeless shelters, homes for battered women, and so on. The charitable giving of religious people is simply astounding.

As for the hippies, they signed up for welfare and frequented the free clinics–they didn’t found or fund them.

I could go on. And maybe I will. Let me know if you share my disgust with this overplayed hippie hymn.

Sometime after 7PM Eastern tomorrow, I will be on CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” show tomorrow, discussing tainted products from China. You can check out my new study at the Alliance for American Manufacturing website.

Yes, I am just a fiercely free trade as ever. In fact, I believe Bush should announce unilateral free trade with the world. But trade is based on trust and trust is fortified by safety regs that ensure that food is not poison and medicine actually cures. That’s why I wrote this paper; i want to start a national debate that moves beyond the stale free trade-fair trade debate and move to what I call safe trade.

As always, let me know what you think.

“Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.”

Remember that old line? Well, it seems that a good percentage of the green Left wants to enact a punchline.

(And no, the line doesn’t come from Mark Twain, but his friend Charles Dudley Warner, if my memory serves.)

Gore and his acolytes say that man is causing climate change and therefore mankind needs to make massive changes to undo that change. Got that?

If we don’t act, winters will on average be two degrees centigrade warmer in 50 years or so. Summers, one degree hotter. That’s the catastrophe , the horror, they are trying to prevent. Keep that in mind.

Lars Larson, check out his national radio show and web site here, and Keya Dash, my well-dressed, sharply spoken friend and I were sitting around last night… talking about enlarging our carbon footprint.

We began by lighting our cigars. Then we built a blaze in my living room fireplace. (The tree we took down last year has been doing a Sutee’s duty in my living room for months.) Then we fortified the evening with imported spirits, which no doubt burned a few tons of liquified dinosaurs just crossing the Atlantic.

Keya mentioned that us skeptics are now called, by Gore and his crew, “deniers.” It is a rhetorical device designed to connect skeptics who know science with holocaust deniers who know nothing but hate. If there argument is all about science, what’s with the fourth-grade name-calling?

I covered the Nov. 2000 COP-6 Meeting in The Hague for The Wall Street Journal and the thing that most struck me about the meeting was that environmentalists don’t like trees anymore. Really. Plans to sequester carbon by planting acres of young, carbon-hungry trees were considered to be evil schemes to keep electrical plants running and so on. Indeed, the diplomatic part of the meeting turned on the question of whether the U.S. should get full credit for the carbon devoured by its forests or get some less number. If the problem is real, is there any reason to deny full credit? But if it isn’t and the goal is de-industrialization, then full credit for trees just keeps you from nirvana doesn’t it?

Lars pointed out that cold is more deadly than heat. Pushing the average winter temperature up might save more lives than the increased heat levels might take. I think it interesting how the Gore-ites rarely mention human effects, unless they mean the islanders on Tuvalu. What about the old lady in Detroit? (Here’s a hint: one votes in U.S. elections.)

The most likely culprit for the warming is a combination of the urban heat island effect (concrete jungles are hotter than real ones), better measurement and cyclical changes in the sun’s heat. The sun has been getting hotter in the past decade.

Don’t forget, Mars is getting hotter too. And they don’t have SUVs there.

Oh well, at least Gore didn’t get one of those Nobel prizes handed out the Swedes for science. He got the Norwegian one, handed out for “peace.” Previous winners include Yasser Arafat, the terrorist. So Gore fooled the rubes in Oslo. It has happened before.

I just finished watching “The Lost City,” a 2005 film directed by its main star, Andy Garcia. It is a little gem. Rent it or buy it if you can.

It is a closely observed story of a Cuban family splintered by the communist takeover–and it doesn’t have a rosy-eyed view of the reds, either. But it is not didactic. It really a poem of love for place and time destroyed by the busy monsters, the fidelistas.

Check out my story on the main page of Pajamas Media. I take what we used to call in college debate a “cross bench approach” or a pox on both houses. Let me know what you think!

New Republic editor’s Frank Foer’s 14-page online apologia has been maligned and misunderstood.

The bloggers’ criticisms are, mostly, either toothless or beside the point. Meanwhile, a close reading–or “Fisking”–of Foer’s missive reveals that the bloggers would have cornered their prey if they barked up the right tree.

Most of the comments on TNR’s post and the blog coverage that I have seen makes much of the fact that Foer wrote 14 pages and we waited until page 14 before he admitted the magazine had been snookered. Both of these complaints are worthless.

In those 14 pages, Foer presents a clear time line that answers many lingering questions. Early on, he admits that Beauchamp’s wife was indeed his fact-checker on his third and most controversial piece. He admits, as I speculated at PajamasMedia, that Beauchamp married her after securing his first piece in the magazine. (Beauchamp’s potential psychological issues just offstage, he ignores and probably rightly so.) Foer only briefly touches on the obvious problem of having a wife fact-check a husband. His explanation is a bit lame–Beauchamp is hard to get a hold of and she was talking to him anyway–but in a cozy office, one can see how it could happen. In other words, it rings true to me. Not right, but true. And so on.

The length is a plus. It fills it many blanks. Indeed, it seems like bad faith for bloggers to demand a full accounting and then complain about its length, when they get it.

As for putting the admission at the end, that too seems like a strange complaint. So Foer saved the best for last? He clearly wanted his readers to understand what happened and why, before fessing up. So? If he confessed up front, who would read the chronology? Foer’s sequence actually promotes better understanding, at least among the patient.

Now let’s look at the hidden surprises: Foer twice mentions trying to contact Beauchamp through his lawyer. Who is this lawyer? When was he retained by Beauchamp? Why? Didn’t that make Foer suspicious?

While Bob Owens over at Confederate Yankee rightly points out that Foer elides past his conversations with the maker of Bradley Fighting Vehicle. (Beauchamp alleged that a Bradley driver swerved right to take out Iraqi street dogs. The hood hump on the Bradley makes it impossible to see the forward right-side tire. So the driver couldn’t see the dogs to kill them.) If Foer is going to confess or explain, why not do so here?

Finally, Foer admits that he treated bloggers differently from dead-tree journalists. He decided not to return calls from bloggers. Big mistake. Any blogger who took the trouble to call was signaling that he was not just a opinion-monger, but a reporter. And it is always better to talk to reporters than to stonewall.

As for Foer’s dark implications about the military public-affairs system, he is either naive or paranoid. The military is simply not out to get the magazine. It is not a political entity, like a presidential campaign. It is a bureaucracy that has no incentive to move quickly. And what you get out of it depends largely on the luck of the draw. If you get a helpful person, golden doors can open and you can get a scoop. Most of the time, reporters get delays followed by apologies. Yes, it sucks. But it is not a conspiracy, anymore that DMV is a conspiracy against people who want to renew their licenses.

As for his veiled attack on Col. Steve Boylan, all I can say is: “Frank, you’re an idiot.” I had dinner with Boylan in Baghdad and I have always found him to be a straight shooter. So have virtually all of the reporters who have worked with him. Frankly, the last thing Boylan would want is to be dragged into the mess that Beauchamp created. If he did anything that seemed to favor or harm the New Republic, Boylan, and perhaps his boss, Gen. Petraeus, would be tagged as “political.” That is not what either one of these serving military officers would want in the run-up to Petraeus’ historic testimony on Capitol Hill. They had bigger fish to fry.

Perhaps Foer should extend his apology.