OpinionJournal - Extra - 'It Didn't Happen'

Democrats go soft on crimes against humanity. Two top Democrats are unbelievably complacent about the risk of Iraq descending into chaos: "Mr. Obama's blase cynicism about the possibility of genocide in Iraq is of a piece with Mr. Kerry's denial of the humanitarian catastrophe that followed America's departure from Vietnam."

The Left consistently claims that Bush "ignored the experts" but those same experts warn today that a sudden American withdrawal from Iraq would be bad for both Iraq and America. It would harm America's long term interests. Why does the Left want to harm America's long term interests?

OpinionJournal Federation - Emptying the Humidor

Congressmen push a cigar tax, proving they've learned nothing from history. Democrats in Congress love to do several things at once - pretend to solve problems, hike taxes, and make other problems worse: "A Joint Economic Committee study later found that 330 jobs in the jewelry industry and 7,600 jobs in the yacht industry were lost thanks to the luxury tax. Perhaps the greatest irony was that in 1991 the federal government paid out over $7 million more in unemployment benefits to those workers than it collected in luxury tax revenues."

The dirty secret is that for Democrats, slowing the economy and increasing unemployment is good, because it makes people more dependent on the government, increases the need for social services (and thus government employment), and thus bumps up the numbers of people voting Democrat.

OpinionJournal - The Spitzer Method

His nasty tactics get exposed in Albany: One of the reasons why I think there's an intellectual monoculture among most MSM reporters. This was a big story waiting to be broken, but most papers wouldn't touch it and most reporters wouldn't look into it.

Reporters have an obligation not to be used this way:

"The media are doing their best Claude Rains act over the revelation that the office of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer orchestrated a smear campaign against State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. But far from being a unique, out of character event, the episode is a classic example of the Spitzer political method: nasty and exaggerated accusations fed by selective, politically motivated news leaks. The difference is that this time his targets could fight back.

On Monday, the office of Democratic Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released a 54-page report on Mr. Bruno's use of state helicopters, allegedly for personal political purposes. The investigation had been prompted by the Governor's office after Mr. Spitzer's communications aide and hatchet man, Darren Dopp, saw to it that allegations of impropriety against Mr. Bruno had found their way into the hands of gullible, pliant reporters.

Only now it is Mr. Dopp who is in hot water, having been suspended without pay for his role in ginning up a non-scandal about the Republican Majority Leader. The AG cleared Mr. Bruno of any wrongdoing, but in the process uncovered Mr. Dopp's unseemly little scheme to plant the story and then use that as a pretext to call for the investigation."

Of course all the red flags were there for years, for anyone who wanted to see them.

Delusions of Honesty - Tony Blair's domestic legacy: corruption and the erosion of liberty

OpinionJournal - Federation provides the text of a City Journal article.

Key quote:

At the outset of his tenure, Mr. Blair said that his government would be tough on crime and on the causes of crime. He wanted to appeal--and succeeded in appealing--to two constituencies at once: those who wanted criminals locked up, and those who saw crime as the natural consequence of social injustice, a kind of inchoate protest against the conditions in which they lived.

Mr. Blair's resultant task was to obfuscate, so that the electorate and even experts could not find out, without great difficulty, what was going on. For example, Mr. Blair's government, aware of public unrest about the number of criminals leaving prison only to commit further serious crimes, introduced indeterminate sentencing--open-ended imprisonment--apparently a tough response to repeat offenders. But the reality was different: the sentencing judges still had the discretion to determine such criminals' parole dates, which, in England, are de facto release dates. The sentences that criminals would serve, in other words, would be no longer than before the new law.

Another way to confuse the public was to corrupt official statistics. Last year, to take one example, the government dropped three simple but key measures from the compendious statistics that it gathers about people serving community sentences--that is, various kinds of service and supervision outside prison: their criminal histories prior to sentencing, their reconviction rates, and the number given prison sentences while serving their community sentences. Instead, it introduced an utterly meaningless measure, at least from a public-safety perspective: the proportion of people with community sentences who abide by such conditions as weekly attendance for an hour at a probation office.

The police also received encouragement to keep crime numbers down by not recording crimes. The crime rate has fallen in part because shoplifting has ceased to be a crime, for instance. Police now deal with it the way they do with parking violations: shoplifters get on-the-spot fines worth half, on average, of the value of the goods that they have stolen.

Reminds me of the classic book "How to Lie with Statistics" - apparently required reading in Blair's government.

Oregon Progress Board and OPPMA

Oregon Progress Board Key Performance Measures: State Agencies - jumps you to the OPPMA entry.

Oregon Public Performance Measurement Association (OPPMA)

The mission of OPPMA is to provide performance measurement and management support to practitioners working in the public sector.

Purposes:
a. Facilitate a common understanding of performance measurement best practices
b. Improve performance management skills
c. Foster open discussion of credible performance information with interested citizens
d. Provide collaborative venues for performance management practitioners

I'm proud to have been part of the Steering Commmittee and now on the Executive Committee.

A Gate-Crasher's Change of Heart - washingtonpost.com

A Gate-Crasher's Change of Heart - washingtonpost.com relates the very odd story of a "robbery gone right".

Short version: robber with gun walks in on dinner party, demands money. Diners invite him to join them; he agrees, has a bit of cheese with his wine, then asks for a hug. Yes, a hug. Then a group hug. Then he walks away without any money, having hurt nobody.

Several interpretations come to mind. The first is that Gavin De Becker is right - intuition is very powerful and can be your friend in a time of crisis. I'm betting that there was something in the robber's demeanor that the first diner picked up on, that the words "join us" would be a strategy that would work with this particular armed man at this particular time.

Having read De Becker's "The Gift of Fear" I've become persuaded that any sort of hard-and-fast rules about dealing with dangerous situations - to always do this, to never do that - are probably bad.

I doubt anybody's list of "what to do when confronted by an armed robber" would include "invite him to join you for a glass of wine".

Having said that, I'm sure there's a starry-eyed pacifist out there somewhere who will seize upon this incident as "proof" that all conflict can be resolved peacefully.

Other interpretations - the robber may well have been bipolar or suffering from some other mental disorder, as the shift from robbery to hugging seems abrupt and unnatural to me. At the very least he doesn't seem like a hardened career criminal, who (I imagine) would be more task-centered. Dangerous, yes, but not acting like someone pursuing a goal - he was too easily distracted for that interpretation to seem valid to me.

Also, it reminds me that I need to carry my own gun even in my back yard, and to remember to lock the gate.

Hat tip to National Review.

Iraqi Neighborhood Watch

On the page Reason Magazine - Hit & Run we find this video:



It's unsurprising to me that local people would band together for self protection, so I find this video to be plausible, and in a way uplifting - all the MSM reporting out of Iraq seems both negative and focused on the moves of the people at the top, not on what normal people are doing to make their own corner of the world better.

We're Number One, Alas - WSJ.com

We're Number One, Alas - WSJ.com - an overview of corporate tax rates across Europe and around the world. It points out that the US has one of the highest corporate tax rates, yet gets less revenue than other countries with lower rates. Good explanation of the Laffer Curve.

The Fight for Urban Accountability

The Fight for Urban Accountability - Stephen Goldsmith relates the story of San Diego and it's financial implosion, followed by significant reforms.

What Transformational Leaders Do

What Transformational Leaders Do - a column by Babak Armajani - offers good advice for the aspiring leader, echoing much of what Peter Drucker, Larry Dennis and others have said. Well written.