This time each year, I get lots of hits on my 2006 post The real Thanksgiving story, and a smaller bump on my 2007 post This Thanksgiving, celebrate the producers. Please check them out (and please read T.F. Stern's comment and my reply on the latter). This year, courtesy of Doug Fabian, I bring you another thanks to the producers, this one from Jim Woods: 

This Thursday is Thanksgiving, and I suspect that most of you reading this have plans to spend time with friends and family feasting on a sumptuous meal. I know I will be gourmandizing on various gastronomic delights, not the least of which will be of the fine fermented variety.

Now, amidst tomorrow’s day of celebration, I undoubtedly will be bombarded by numerous television news spots aimed at making me feel guilty for my bounty. Although not directed specifically at me, the purpose of these stories will be to remind me that I should feel fortunate to have a roof over my head, warm clothes on my back and a hot meal on my plate. Because, these stories will imply, it could be me -- or any one of us -- who suffers the indignity of poverty, hunger or homelessness.

The plight of those less fortunate, shown to us via remote telecast from the nearest homeless shelter or inner city soup kitchen, is supposed to be a stark reminder that those whose lives aren’t immersed in peril should be thankful for all that we have.

Well, to this I ask, thankful to whom? Who are the people responsible for providing us with the tremendous bounty most Americans enjoy?

This year, I want you to give thanks to those who truly deserve it.

This year, I want you to thank the men (and women) of genius who first discovered how to harness fire and how to forge tools for hunting. I want you to thank the men of genius who discovered how to cultivate crops and how to ferment grapes and create wine.

I want you to thank the men of genius who are responsible for creating the planes, trains and automobiles that delivered the bounty to your table. And I want you to thank the men of genius who, throughout history, plied their various trades -- often in the face of unimaginable opposition -- to help lift us all out of a squalid state of nature and into the magnificence that is 21^st-century America.

And finally, I think we should all give extra thanks to the real unsung heroes, the capitalists, who put their money and their livelihoods at risk to fund the various enterprises throughout the ages that made modern life possible.

To all of the great capitalist heroes, I thank you from the very core of my own productive mind. I can offer you no greater tribute this Thanksgiving than to enjoy, without the slightest hint of guilt, the life-sustaining bounty you all have made possible.

This Thursday, we need to thank the men and women of genius, both past and present, who truly deserve the gratitude, yet who so often get nothing but condemnation in exchange for their tremendous achievements.

I toast you all in the name of the best within us. 

Cheers,

Jim

Cheers to you, Jim, and to Doug for sharing your fine comments with us. And thank you, dear visitor, for dropping by. I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends, and as I said in 2007, remember to thank the producers who made it possible — including yourself!

If you're religious, by all means thank God for giving humans the faculties that make our achievements possible. But don't forget that we have free will. It's the choices we've made — and that countless others alongside us and before us have made — that are responsible for the bounties for which we're thankful today. We have to choose to exercise those faculties productively and to establish and maintain societies in which such exercise is not just possible, but encouraged and rewarded. The incredible riches all around us aren't the result of wishes or prayers, they weren't just handed to us — they exist because of the creativity and hard work that countless people chose to exercise. And they will disappear if people stop making those choices.

So say thanks also to William Bradford and the Pilgrims, and their Massasoit Indian friends. And to the patriots of the American Revolution. And to the Founding Fathers. And to all the scientists and entrepreneurs and capitalists and laborers who've created this incredible modern world in which we live. And to all the people proudly and productively working to create more every day. I bet you're one of them, so in the words of Debi Ghate, "selfishly and proudly say: 'I earned this.'"

On a more somber note, don't forget that today is also the first anniversary of the Jihadist attack on Mumbai. In recent years, our friends in India have joined us in embracing freedom, opportunity, progress, and modernity. For their achievements, they were brutally punished by 7th-century barbarians. There are those who will not rest until they destroy everything we value and the wealth, freedom, and opportunity for which we give thanks. Don't forget that.

The Clarion Fund is making the award-winning full-length feature documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West available online for free through this weekend:

The free stream of Obsession is part of a grassroots initiative to educate the public about the threats that radical Islam pose to national security and the American way of life. Concerned citizens will have the opportunity to watch the film throughout the week, and educate themselves on a growing radical movement targeting western liberties and ideals.

Over 30 million have seen the groundbreaking film, a powerful and controversial educational tool that media pundits have coined a "must-see" Obsession was the winner of the best feature film award at the Liberty Film Festival.

"Thanksgiving is a time when we pause to consider the values that make America great," stated Raphael Shore, Producer of Obsession and the groundbreaking follow-up documentary The Third Jihad. "This weekend also provides a critical opportunity to recognize the motivations of extremists that actively seek to destroy our freedoms."

"One in six Americans have already seen this important film," added Shore, "but many more Americans need to understand just how deep the dangers run. Today as the number of incidents in the U.S. and across the world increase, it is imperative to educate our family and friends to stand up and mobilize against the threat to our values posed by radical Islam."

If you haven't seen this powerful and important film, I urge you to do so this weekend. Click here or the banner below to watch it for free. And after that, check out The Third Jihad, too. 

It's a tough time in the news business, with lots of layoffs and red ink. So it's especially important for an organization like the Associated Press, which is cutting 10% of its staff, to allocate its limited investigative and reporting resources carefully, based on well-chosen priorities. James Taranto provided an excellent example:

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We'd like to compare this dispatch to the AP's dispatch earlier this week "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
   • ObamaCare bills: 2
   • Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:
   • ObamaCare bills: 4,064
   • Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:
   • ObamaCare bill: 2,032
   • Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.

I suppose that kind of prioritization of journalistic resources is why the evening news, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, etc., haven't dug into the many examples of bogus math and fiscal sleight-of-hand in the ObamaCare bills, like delaying most of the expenditures until 2013 (after the election) so that the CBO's 10-year projection includes only seven years' worth of costs. And they've been too busy with the Palin investigations to notice that both the House and Senate bills contain the regulatory framework that will eventually transform government panels' suggested standards of care, like those much-criticized mammogram and Pap smear recommendations, into the tools for rationing health care. 

I suppose it's also why you'll have a hard time finding any in-depth coverage of the bogus accounting and reporting of the "stimulus" bill's spending and job creation. 

This is nothing new. During the campaign last fall, the big media organizations sent scores of reporters to scour Alaska in search of dirt on Gov. Palin. But hardly anyone had time to investigate Obama's relationships with Tony Rezko, the Daley brothers, ACORN, Rod Blagojevich, Emil Jones, and other elements of the Chicago machine (well, to be fair, I think one reporter each from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times and a couple of semi-pros from Newsmax doggedly dug into these things). 

But some journalists still have the courage to hammer interviewees with challenging, aggressive, well-researched, adversarial questions — at least when the interviewee is a 17-year-old Sarah Palin fan. Speaking Truth to Teenager. (By all means, take Finkelstein's advice and read the blog entry by interviewee Jackie Seals. Fascinating.)

Maybe the courageous Norah O'Donnell's next assignment will be to confront supporters of ObamaCare with tough questions like, "Do you realize that if this passes, you could be sent to jail for not buying an approved health care plan?" And then she'll go to some "Save the Planet" rally and challenge a Gore supporter with, "Are you aware that the Earth's core is 4000°, not a million degrees as Mr. Gore has claimed, and that many of his other claims are equally outlandish and unsubstantiated?"

Somehow, I doubt it. And I'm not holding my breath waiting for 60 Minutes reporters to ambush the perpetrators of the latest climate fraud, either.

As far as dangerously inane commentary on Hasan's Ft. Hood jihad goes, I thought it would be hard to top "pre-traumatic stress disorder" and "it's not illegal to call up al Qaeda, is it?" — but I was wrong.

Naturally, the even more unbelievable expression of naivete, stupidity, willful ignorance, and cowering before the specter of Islamist rage comes from academics — specifically, a pair of criminologists from Northeastern University in Boston, James Alan Fox and Jack Levin, writing in USA Today. They assured us that what Hasan did was just your ordinary workplace murder, not terrorism. And then they warned us that calling it terrorism might cause other Muslims to behave similarly — and it would be our fault. Unbe-frickin-lievable (emphasis added):

Appearances can be perilously deceiving, especially if Americans do not look any further than Nidal Malik Hasan's Palestinian descent, his Muslim affiliation, his Middle Eastern-style clothing, and reports of his having shouted out "Allahu Akbar," an expression of praise to God, before allegedly gunning down dozens of soldiers. Superficially, the Fort Hood rampage looks like terrorism.

Hasan's murder spree appears, however, to be much more about seeking vengeance for personal mistreatment than spreading terror to advance a political agenda. In many respects the Fort Hood massacre stands as a textbook case of workplace murder … and Hasan a disgruntled worker attempting to avenge perceived unfair treatment on the job. His rampage was selective, not indiscriminate. He chose the location — his workplace — and then apparently singled out certain co-workers for death.

No, he didn't. Every report I've seen said Hasan shot at anyone he could, and his victims were soldiers being processed for deployment overseas, not co-workers who had mistreated him. They just made that last part up.

And how about that explanation of "Allahu Akbar" as an innocuous "expression of praise to God"? Let's flesh that definition out a bit: "An expression of praise to God traditionally shouted by jihadists as they commence slaughtering infidels." There, that's better. 

In today's political climate, it is easy to understand why many observers would uncritically describe Hasan as a terrorist. …

But calling the Fort Hood ambush an act of terrorism would only compound the tragedy by reinforcing the kind of intolerance toward American Muslims that appears to have contributed to Hasan's despair. Unfortunately, according to FBI figures, there has been a precipitous increase in hate crimes against Arab Americans since the 9/11 attacks.

No, there hasn't. They just made that last part up (or compared only the numbers a few months before 9/11 and a few months after). Reports of anti-Muslim hate crimes have declined significantly since 9/11/01. The numbers are comparable to those for anti-Christian hate crimes and only a tenth of anti-Jewish hate crimes (many, if not most, of which are committed by Islamist Muslims). In an Oct. 20 fisking of an Eric Holder speech about hate crimes, Creeping Sharia provided these numbers:

*Source: FBI Uniform Crime Statistics

And on Nov. 4, he added this update (emphasis added):

Related:

http://homelandsecurityus.com/?p=3209

Investigation and research by this author into the documentation that comprises hate crime statistics for 2007 (the figures for 2008 will be available through the FBI on November 23, 2009) found that the parameters used for “hate crimes” against Muslims are exceptionally broad and artificially inflated as a result. These expanded parameters are, in many cases, the direct result of CAIR officials demanding certain dubious questionable events to be included in anti-Muslim hate crime statistics. Examples are plentiful, and include unverified reports of minimal, if not insignificant property damage at mosques and Islamic centers. A trampled flower bed at a mosque, as one example, was listed as an anti-Islamic “hate crime” statistic.

In 2007, crimes classified as having their motivation in anti-Muslim bias amounted to about 9 percent of all hate crimes. By contrast, crimes against Jews, or those having an anti-Semitic motive amounted to nearly 70% during that same period. Despite those figures and the obvious disparity, there has been a continual and vociferous demand for special considerations within law enforcement on behalf of Muslims due to the deceitful embellishment of post-9/11 anti-Islamic bias. Although the statistics for 2008 are not yet published, a review of available reports indicates that the anti-Islamic motivated crimes have dropped significantly. Nonetheless, claims of anti-Islamic bias have risen exponentially during that same period.

Meanwhile, statistics of crimes by Muslims against Muslims, specifically those involving domestic violence, from Sharia sanctioned spousal abuse to “honor killings” are not maintained. The omission of this statistical classification is not due to its rarity, but by deliberate omission. Although the raw statistics exist within the comprehensive CIUS report, they are not properly categorized within the UCR Program’s hate crime data collection. Therefore, they remain a statistic that does not officially exist, except for the victims of such crimes.

Gateway Pundit just yesterday posted even more extensive data refuting the myth that Muslims are especially subject to hate crimes.

Promoting the myth of Muslim victimhood and "despair," along with pressing relentlessly for special accommodations for Muslims and encouraging fear of "Muslim rage" in response to the slightest provocation — these are among the weapons that Islamists use to wage what's been called cultural or political jihad. It's been extremely successful in moving much of Europe toward dhimmitude. And in reaction to that, numerous neo-fascist groups are on the rise across the continent, exploiting the backlash and resentment among non-Muslims. 

Fox and Levin are no doubt too stupid to realize that their vacuous blather benefits two dangerous forces — intransigent Islamists bent on imposing shari'a across the globe and anti-immigrant, anti-Arab neo-fascist nativists. Neither of those groups would treat pompous liberal college professors well, if given the chance. 

To those who have served, and to those who serve today:

Thank you.
 

It is the Soldier, not the minister
Who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer
Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, not the politician
Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag. 

Charles Michael Province, U.S. Army

Copyright Charles M. Province, 1970, 2005

http://www.pattonhq.com/koreamemorial.html

Thanks, Papa, for your many years of service. I love you and miss you.

On this Veterans Day, please make a contribution to an organization (or two or three!) that supports veterans or active-duty military personnel. Such as Project Valour-IT to help severely wounded soldiers. Please click the donation thermometer on the left below the calendar and help me help the Army team in this friendly inter-service rivalry for a good cause.

The Signaleer has a nice history of Remembrance Day, which begat Armistice Day, which begat Veterans Day, and he includes the classic World War I poem, In Flanders Fields. Worth a visit.

It's been fascinating (and disturbing) to watch the evolving story of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan in the media since the massacre at Ft. Hood last week. It began with the FBI, barely an hour after the shootings and with no evidence or investigation, declaring that this wasn't a terrorist act.

The mainstream media and leftist propagandists (but I repeat myself) quickly picked up that meme. Newsweek, in a contemptible piece, declared that Hasan's act was a symptom of "a Military on the Brink." The Huffington Post on Friday was awash with similarly vile posts about how the war, the "sick" military, American foreign policy, our cowboy insistence on defeating our enemies, and/or lack of sufficient mental health care funding were to blame for Hasan "snapping" (see here, here, and here for examples).

Then there was the ABC News story, picked up by many others, parroting the family's explanation that Hasan snapped because he was "constantly harassed," called a "camel jockey," and subjected to "bullying" for being a Muslim.

And there were countless suggestions that Hasan, who counseled post-traumatic stress disorder patients, had succumbed to PTSD himself.

Filling in for Rush on Friday, Mark Steyn joked that, since Hasan has never been deployed to a war zone (or even overseas), he must have suffered from "pre-post-traumatic stress disorder" — something akin to feeling pain in your leg because you're going to break it next week. But these days, it's not easy to parody the left. A while later, Steyn was informed that a commentator on NPR had in fact suggested Hasan was suffering from "pre-traumatic stress disorder" due to his pending deployment. It was Tom Gjelten on NPR's Morning Edition (emphasis added):

GJELTEN: That's right, Steve. You know, you referred to the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There's - almost seems to be a phenomenon that you could maybe call a pre-traumatic stress disorder. There have been a lot suicides in the Army, many more as a result of these wars than in previous years. Interestingly enough, as many soldiers have killed themselves before they were due to be deployed as after. Thirty-five percent of the suicides are pre-deployment, 35 percent are post-deployment. So there seems to be an issue here of expectation of what you are getting into. And the fact that Major Hasan would've known better than others, even, about how traumatic combat experience would be, you know, raises the question of, you know, was he an example of these soldiers who are literally freaked out by what they are likely to face when they are deployed?

Freaked out — as if the psychiatrist Major would be going into battle with a rifle instead of sitting in an office holding counseling sessions. 

Even as such nonsense was being offered, a mountain of evidence was accumulating that Hasan was a radical Islamist and had been for years. He proselytized his co-workers and his patients (a gross violation of professional ethics), warning them of the deadly consequences of remaining infidels. He praised suicide bombers for killing the soldiers who waged war on Islam. He worshipped at the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, VA, maybe the most radical Wahabbi mosque in America, alongside two of the 9/11 hijackers. He remained in touch (into this year) with its former imam (now living in Yemen), Anwar al-Awlaki, who praised Hasan as a hero who did the right thing. He contacted or attempted to contact al Qaeda leaders.

This evidence was only spottily reported in the U.S. mainstream media (for thorough coverage, check the British press, especially the Telegraph). And then, usually accompanied by demurring that we don't know what motivated him or why he "snapped." The President cautioned us not to "jump to conclusions," and that blathering idiot, Chris Matthews wondered aloud on national TV, "it's not illegal to call up al Qaeda, is it?"

Dorothy Rabinowitz outlined a lot of this insane, delusional denial in an excellent Wall Street Journal column this morning. And growing numbers of people — even some in the media — are now questioning why the FBI, CIA, Justice Dept., and Army all failed to "connect the dots" regarding Hasan.

They failed because even now, eight years after 9/11, our government institutions and their media lapdogs refuse as a matter of policy to acknowledge the dangers of radical Islam and its many adherents. They practice as a matter of policy a suicidal political correctness that makes a question like "it's not illegal to call up al Qaeda, is it?" something other than absurd. For fear of offending the easily offended and violent, they embrace dhimmitude, and they're going to get a lot more of us killed. 

Maj. Hasan isn't an isolated phenomenon. He's one of many examples in the U.S. (and many, many more in other countries) of what Rusty Shackleford called "individual jihad" and Daniel Pipes dubbed "sudden jihad syndrome." Three years ago, an Islamist website even published a "Guide for Individual Jihad."

Pipes argued that this phenomenon means that all Muslims must be considered potentially dangerous. I disagree. People like Dr. Zudhi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, are decidedly not potentially dangerous. In fact, they're critically important — and immensely brave — warriors in the fight against radical Islamism.

But Pipes is partly correct. The mosques funded by the Saudis, distributing radical Islamist literature, and preaching Wahabbi doctrine, the mosques controlled by Hezbollah, and all the men who worship at these mosques and have been or are being radicalized by them are potentially dangerous. No, we don't lock people up or strip them of their rights for having a dangerous potential. But we shouldn't turn a blind eye, either.

When such a person is in the military, and provides plenty of warning signs of extreme radicalization, we sure as hell shouldn't ignore those signs and promote him! When we're that willfully ignorant, people die.

Twenty years ago today, residents of the slave state known as the Democratic Republic of Germany danced atop the Berlin Wall with their West German brethren and rushed through the suddenly open gates to freedom -- a freedom that thousands had been killed for attempting to reach. It was the beginning of the end for the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Empire, and the subjugation of hundreds of millions under brutal collectivist regimes. It was arguably the most momentous event since the end of World War II.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who herself walked from East Germany to freedom that day, is leading the appropriately massive celebrations taking place all day today in Berlin. Joining her are Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, and the leaders of all 27 European Union countries.

Absent is the leader of the country most responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall, the country that made possible the survival of West Berlin to see that glorious day. President Obama declined Chancellor Merkel's invitation to attend, saying he was too busy. So let's see what his schedule for today looks like: 

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_______________________________________________________________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 8, 2009

DAILY GUIDANCE AND PRESS SCHEDULE FOR
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009

In the morning, the President will receive the Presidential Daily Briefing, the Economic Daily Briefing, and meet with senior advisors in the Oval Office. These meetings are closed press.

In the evening, the President will sign an Executive Order on the employment of veterans in the federal government in the Oval Office. Through this Executive Order, the President will make the Federal Government the model employer of Veterans. The Executive Order establishes a Council on Veterans Employment and a Veterans Employment Program office within most Federal agencies. The signing is closed press.

The President will then meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel in the Oval Office. This meeting is closed press.


In-Town Travel Pool
Wires: AP, Reuters, Bloomberg
Wire Photos: AP, Reuters, AFP
TV Corr & Crew: CNN
Print: CQ
Radio: VOA
Travel Photo: TIME


EST

9:00AM Pool Call Time

10:00AM THE PRESIDENT receives the Presidential Daily Briefing
Oval Office
Closed Press

10:30AM THE PRESIDENT receives the Economic Daily Briefing
Oval Office
Closed Press

11:00AM THE PRESIDENT meets with senior advisors
Oval Office
Closed Press

6:45PM THE PRESIDENT signs the Veterans Employment Initiative Executive Order
Oval Office
Closed Press

7:00PM THE PRESIDENT meets with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel
Oval Office
Closed Press


Briefing Schedule

12:30PM Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs


##

The Office of the Press Secretary doesn't disclose with whom the President is playing golf in the afternoon. 

When I learned that Mikhail Gorbachev was attending the ceremonies today in Berlin, I felt a bit of a lump in my throat. The man who should really be there, but who's no longer with us — the man who, more than any other, brought about that day of liberation in 1989 — is the man who issued this challenge to Gorbachev in 1987: 

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

To watch, listen to, or read President Reagan's address at the Brandenburg Gate, go here.  

I've been meaning to sign up for this year's Project Valour-IT fundraiser all week, but haven't gotten around to it. Today, in the wake of the murderous attack at Ft. Hood, I've made time.

Project Valour-IT (Voice Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops) is a project of the wonderful Soldiers' Angels Foundation. The money raised provides voice-controlled/adaptive laptop computers and other technology for Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines with severe injuries — typically hand and arm injuries or amputations.

The annual fundraising event is a friendly competition among teams of bloggers representing the service branches to see who can raise the most money for this wonderful cause. I join the Army team each year, in honor of my late father, Col. Samuel R. Combs, United States Army Signal Corps, who passed away August 16, 2006, at the age of 89, and who the Rocky Mountain News described as epitomizing the Greatest Generation. ("He answered his country's call even before the phone rang" is a phrase I shall always treasure. Thank you again, Bob Denerstein.)

But this year, I'm also doing it for the killed and wounded at Ft. Hood and their families. Some of the survivors may need those laptops and other devices that Project Valour-IT provides. 

Donations of any size are tax deductible and greatly appreciated. Please do me the honor of donating through my humble blog by clicking the button below (or in the left sidebar). I've kicked in a C-note, as usual. Give what you can — it's dead simple, whether you use a credit card, PayPal, or electronic check — and even five or ten or twenty bucks helps a lot. Thanks for your support!

On this day in 1605, Guy Fawkes attempted (and failed) to blow up the British Houses of Parliament. He's been toasted ever since (in some circles, at least) as "The last man to enter Parliament with honourable intentions." 

Courtesy of the Moving Picture Institute, here's a short clip from V for Vendetta honoring the day. 

[YouTube link]

Does the current debate about health care reform have you confused? Do the many arguments, counter-arguments, and conflicting claims leave you not knowing what to believe? If you're like most Americans, that may be because you know woefully little about the basic principles of economics and how to apply them to a given problem. It's not your fault; your education taught you almost nothing about economics, and some of what it did teach is probably wrong.

Investor's Business Daily is providing a resource that will correct that — specifically about health care, but in a broader sense as well. They're publishing an entire chapter of Dr. Thomas Sowell's highly-acclaimed Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One, entitled "The Economics of Medical Care." The nine-part series is available here (at this time, the first five parts have been posted). (Link omitted. Fixed now. Thanks, David!)

If you suspect that your understanding of economics is lacking — and even if you don't — I strongly encourage you to read this series. Sowell is arguably America's greatest living economist (I've been a huge admirer since reading Knowledge and Decisions, one of the most important works in economics of the past half-century, almost 30 years ago). And yet, his writings for the lay audience are remarkably readable and clear. 

Be aware, however, that in the process of getting the text on line, IBD unfortunately lost some of the formatting. I noticed that block quotes are no longer distinguished by indenting or any font change — it's annoying, but you can probably figure out where those quotes begin and end. It's only a minor distraction in an immensely valuable resource. Thank you, Investor's Business Daily!

Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate in the NY-23 special Congressional election, has suspended her campaign and freed those who endorsed and supported her "to transfer their support as they see fit to do so." This is tremendous news. It clears the way for Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate and a free-market conservative supported by the Club for Growth, to potentially hand the statists of both major parties a stunning defeat. Hoffman has led in most recent polls, and is neck and neck with Democrat Bill Owens (and "surging") in the latest Daily Kos poll.

Scozzafava, who's been in third place for a while now, is so liberal the liberal Owens has attacked her for her tax hiking record. There was no primary for this vacancy election, and Scozzafava (great name, BTW; even fun to type) was selected by three local Republican leaders, reportedly at the behest of the RNCC and its beltway-mentality party hacks. My guess is they saw "NY" and assumed the GOP needed a liberal candidate to be "in tune" with the electorate (wrong; the district is upstate and moderately conservative).

If Hoffman pulls off a win, this will be a tremendous boost for the grass-roots pro-freedom tea party movement, which has been instrumental in the Hoffman campaign. And it's a wake-up call to people like Newt Gingrich (who should know better) and the GOP's unprincipled, visionless, corrupted-with-power Washington elite who think the "little people" in the party should just shut up and do what their leaders tell them.

UPDATE (11/2/09): Surprise, surprise, surprise! The liberal pseudo-Republican Scozzafava has endorsed the liberal Democrat Owens. Speaking of wake-up calls for the party's inept leadership. Investor's Business Daily :

… Republican success has always had to do with ideas and principles, not "pragmatism."

That's why the Gerald Fords and the Bob Doles were losers, while the Ronald Reagans and the George W. Bushes were winners. It's why backslapping old Bob Michel was a permanent House Minority Leader who could never become speaker of the House, while firebrand Newt Gingrich was propelled to third in line to the presidency by nationalizing the 1994 congressional elections.

Unfortunately, one of the people forgetting that lesson is Gingrich himself. First, the former speaker endorsed Scozzafava. When she withdrew late last week, Gingrich endorsed Hoffman but in a back-handed sort of way, warning that local party hacks should be allowed to nominate liberal Democratic clones.

But the reason Hoffman was able to end Scozzafava's candidacy is that the people in NY-23 preferred a Reaganite citizen politician to a party machinist doing an impersonation of liberal Sen. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican.

Now that Scozzafava has, in an act of incalculable pettiness, endorsed the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens, Gingrich looks like a professor at the Mister Magoo school of political science.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Hoffman, because if he wins, it may mark the beginning of something important. Maybe this time, we don't need a Gingrich to lead the way. Maybe this time, change will come from the bottom up instead of the top down. And thus be more lasting.

The local and national media are full of stories about the massive H1N1 vaccine shortage and canceled vaccination clinics. But I haven't seen any finger-pointing or even serious inquiries into why this has been such a cluster-f**k. Well, Be John Galt gathered a sampling of exactly such stories, pointing the finger at the President, and even one about a congressional investigation, led by Rep. Henry Waxman, which determined that the administration should have prevented the vaccine crisis.

Oh, wait — they're not about this year's 100-million-dose shortage of H1N1 vaccine. They're about the far more modest — and far less serious — shortage of regular flu vaccine in 2004. They're about blaming Bush! 

Almost nobody is interested in doing that sort of pointed inquiry and allocation of blame this year. Even though this time (unlike in 2004 and other years) it's a 100% federal government operation. Every single dose of H1N1 vaccine produced is turned over to and distributed by the federal government. The Obama administration insisted on that. Can't leave such things to the market, can we? It might not restrict the vaccine to "high-priority people with no medical coverage," i.e., the down-trodden and disadvantaged.

And almost nobody in the media is interested in asking why there are so few vaccine producers (only about half a dozen, as I recall, mostly foreign). That might bring up the fact that scores of pharmaceutical manufacturers have stopped all vaccine production in the last few years due to the tremendous liability risks. And that might lead to questions about why tort reform is completely off the table in the Democrat's various plans for "reforming" health care.

The Institute for Justice is one of my favorite non-profits. This "merry band of libertarian litigators" just keeps finding wonderful ways of using the courts and the court of public opinion to fight for individual liberty, especially economic liberty. And they keep winning. IJ has been the leader in the fight against eminent domain abuse and for school choice, and it's helped countless minority entrepreneurs overcome arbitrary and discriminatory licensing laws, regulations, and other barriers to entry erected by governments.

On Wednesday, IJ and a diverse group of plaintiffs took on another stupid and unconstitutional law against capitalist acts between consenting adults — and this time there are many lives at stake. Flynn v. Holder seeks to overturn the ban on compensating marrow cell donors:

Every year, 1,000 Americans die because they cannot find a matching bone marrow donor.  Minorities are hit especially hard.  Common sense suggests that offering modest incentives to attract more bone marrow donors would be worth pursuing, but federal law makes that a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

That is why on October 28, 2009, adults with deadly blood diseases, the parents of sick children, a California nonprofit and a world-renowned medical doctor who specializes in bone marrow research joined with the Institute for Justice to sue the U.S. Attorney General to put an end to a ban on offering compensation to bone marrow donors.

The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984 treats compensating marrow donors as though it were black-market organ sales.  Under NOTA, giving a college student a scholarship or a new homeowner a mortgage payment for donating marrow could land everyone—doctors, nurses, donors and patients—in federal prison for up to five years.

NOTA’s criminal ban violates equal protection because it arbitrarily treats renewable bone marrow like nonrenewable solid organs instead of like other renewable or inexhaustible cells—such as blood—for which compensated donation is legal.  That makes no sense because bone marrow, unlike organs such as kidneys, replenishes itself in just a few weeks after it is donated, leaving the donor whole once again.  The ban also violates substantive due process because it irrationally interferes with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment.

Jeff Rowes, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, said, “The only thing the bone marrow provision of the National Organ Transplant Act appears to accomplish is unnecessary deaths.  A victory in this case will not only give hope to thousands facing deadly diseases, but also reaffirm bedrock principles about constitutional protection for individual liberty.”

Read the rest to learn about the people involved and their compelling stories.

It's the time of year when I make the bulk of my charitable contributions, and IJ is always near the top of my list. This suit strikes me as a terrific cause, so I'm going to donate online right now. Won't you help, too?

HT: Megan McArdle, whose column about this in the Atlantic I strongly recommend.

The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful opinion piece by Daniel Henninger that I think really explains why the polling numbers have gone so south on all the variations of ObamaCare (and on Obama and Congress, too):

In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939.

…

Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark—all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington's Forever Land. But it's more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive—all the things people hate nowadays.

…

The larger point here isn't necessarily partisan. It's a description of the way people live their lives in a 21st century world, and how disconnected politics has become from that world.

If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care—a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge.

No chance of that. Our outdated political software can't recognize trial and error. What ObamaCare is doing with health care—the "public option"—may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it's starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go. Wait until EPA's ghost busters start enforcing cap-and-trade.

I think he's spot-on, but the House Democrats certainly don't get it. They're doubling down — almost literally. After declaring the other day that they want a do-over (I think they called it a "reset"), they've now revealed that they have a new, improved health care bill. The old one was 1012 pages. The new one is just shy of 2000. 

No, I don't plan to read it.

Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the TV broadcast "Rendezvous with Destiny," a 30-minute campaign commercial for Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, delivered by Ronald Reagan. It was a variation of a speech called "A Time for Choosing," padded with some "vote for Goldwater because…" stuff.

Reagan delivered this speech many times in 1964, including when he nominated Sen. Goldwater at the Republican National Convention. Reagan fans of a sufficient age have always just called it "The Speech." It is as meaningful today as it was in 1964. These excerpts are (despite what the intro at this site says) from his nominating speech at the convention:

It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."

This idea -- that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power -- is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream--the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.

Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.

…

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. …

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

Hat tip to Rush Limbaugh for reminding me (albeit a day late) and for these quotes: 

Dr. Thomas Sowell:

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? …

Read. The. Whole. Thing.

It's definitely a "man bites dog" event when a CBS-affiliated local TV news department headlines a story "Global Cooling Causes Fish Kill In Cherry Creek": 

DENVER (CBS4) - A major fish kill was reported Tuesday afternoon in Cherry Creek in downtown Denver.

Dead fish were spotted from Confluence Park upstream to Speer Boulevard.
The fish were small, between two to four inches long. They were floating in the swift current and sloughing off on the banks of the creek.

...

The Division Of Wildlife said the kill came as a result of global cooling.

I'm sure the DOW really said something about "recent cooling" or the like, referring to the weather, not climate. And I'm certain that legions of climate change watchdogs are contacting CBS4Denver at this moment, and the offending phrase will soon be scrubbed from the story. But it gave me a laugh. Here's the original preserved for posterity: 

With apologies to Martin Niemöller:

First they went after executives at bailed-out companies, and I did not speak out because I was not an executive at one of those companies. 

President Barack Obama has welcomed plans to force some companies which accepted government aid during the financial crisis to cut executive pay.

Firms paying bosses vast bonuses while getting state assistance offended peoples' values, the president said.

Under Treasury plans, seven companies must slash the basic salaries of their 25 best-paid employees by up to 90%. 

…

As well as its top-earners facing a 90% pay cut, the total paid to each firm's 125 top earners would be halved under the proposals.

Then they went after bankers in general, and I did not speak out because I was not a banker. 

The Federal Reserve’s new push to regulate pay levels of bankers probably won’t include a review of your friendly neighborhood branch manager’s salary.

But the Fed made clear Thursday that it will be looking at compensation arrangements beyond the executive suites of the 6,000-some banks it regulates.

…

Bottom line: The obsession with financial companies' pay levels, far from reaching a peak, is just ramping up.

Then they hinted at going after all private sector employees, and I did not speak out because I was too stunned.

Discussing Obama administration efforts to limit executive pay in companies that took TARP funds, on Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith asked Congressional Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren: “Chuck Schumer, some others, have said...why wouldn’t we...make this law across the board and put a governor on compensation for everybody in private enterprise?’”

Warren seemed very open to the idea: “Well you know, it reminds us that there is a compensation problem in American industry....executive compensation right now is – has got the wrong set of incentives in it....what we really need to do are change the basic laws to align the incentives of the executives with the long-term health of the company and ultimately the long-term health of the economy.”

And then … ?

Tonight's Rockies-Phillies playoff game has been postponed because of weather:

Game Three of the 2009 National League Division Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field in Colorado has been postponed due to inclement weather, and has been rescheduled for Sunday at 8:07 p.m. mountain time.

Game Four has been moved to Monday. Those fans with tickets for Game Three will now be able to use them only for Sunday's game at 8:07 p.m. mountain time.

Those fans with tickets for Game Four will be able to use them for Monday's game.

The problem isn't precip — we have light snow falling right now, but it should end by early afternoon. The problem is the cold. The low this morning was 17° F., shattering the old record low of 25° set in 1905. At 10 AM, it's all the way up to 19°, and windy enough to make it feel considerably colder.

I doubt we'll even come close to the record low high for the date of 34°, and we'll have record cold again tonight. When the gloves feel like cinder blocks, it's not exactly baseball weather.

Global warming is like the police — it's never around when you really need it.

Having served ten eleven days in office when nominations closed, President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I think he was nominated by Joe Biden. For being so clean and articulate.

The Nobel committee lost all credibility when they awarded the Peace Prize to the murdering terrorist Arafat. But that was disgusting. This is just so utterly absurd that you have to laugh.

UPDATE: I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when Bill Clinton got the news.