France has its environmentalist non-conformists, as do the Czechs and so many others now. The list is growing. Thank goodness for that. Bloomberg:

The most conspicuous doubter in France is Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, Ma vérité sur la planète (”My Truth About the Planet”), doesn’t mince words.

He calls Gore a “crook” presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore’s French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.

Allegre doesn’t deny that the climate has changed or that extreme weather has become more common. He instead emphasizes the local character of these phenomena. While the icecap of the North Pole is shrinking, the one covering Antarctica — or 92 percent of the Earth’s ice — is not, he says. Nor have Scandinavian glaciers receded, he says. To play down these differences by basing forecasts on a global average makes no sense to Allegre.

He dismisses talk of renewable energies, such as wind or solar power, saying it would take a century for them to become a serious factor in meeting the world’s energy demands. To his relief, France has taken another path: Almost 80 percent of its electricity comes from nuclear reactors. What’s more, France has a talent for eating its cake and having it, too: Although it signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the country is nowhere near meeting the agreed targets.

So others around the world apparently think that Al Gore is some sort of dope or ignoramous or con artist. That’s refreshing. Alas, free thinking in France and the EU has its limits. Bloomberg again:

France bans smoking in cafes, hotels and clubs on Jan. 1, stamping out the habit popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre puffing Gauloises in hazy brasseries. In Germany, 11 of the country’s 16 states plan similar restrictions for 2008. Six of those, including Berlin and Bavaria, start Jan. 1. France banned smoking in offices and public places this year. Germany prohibits puffers at train stations and federal buildings. The limits are part of the European Union’s public health plan initiated in 1985.

You may like or dislike smoking as you wish. We’ve always enjoyed the pungent fumes of Gitanes in the Paris cafe air; and the aroma of pipe tobacco seems positively pleasant to us. Chacun à son goût. What we abhor is the odor of government regulation of such petty freedoms, as it makes the infringement of greater freedoms all the more acceptable.

Evan Thomas (he of the “15 points“) circles around an interesting element in today’s politics, but doesn’t quite capture it, in our view:

There is the America of the rich and the America of the poor, as Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards likes to point out. There is the America of Red States and Blue States, populated, as columnist Dave Barry likes to joke, by “ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks” and “godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.”…

But the real divide, the separation that may matter more to the future of American democracy, is between the political junkies and everyone else. The junkies watch endless cable-TV news shows and listen to angry talk radio and feel passionate about their political views. They number roughly 20 percent of the population, according to Princeton professor Markus Prior, who tracks political preferences and the media.

Then there’s all the rest: the people who prefer ESPN or old movies or videogames or Facebook or almost anything on the air or online to politics…

Today, the evening news shows draw about 10 percent of the viewing audience. For the political junkies, the offerings are much more bounteous than in 1970: not only 24-hour news channels but an infinitely expanding blogosphere…

The presidential candidates by and large at least give lip service to “coming together,” though at the same time their cynical operatives are usually maneuvering to drive voters further apart with “wedge issues” and negative advertising. Americans could, of course, reject this hypocrisy and demand the sort of leadership that reaches across the political aisle to accomplish hard tasks. But first they will have to switch off the Xbox or click away from the Home Shopping Network or “Girls Gone Wild” and go out and vote.

We agree with Thomas that something seems to be dysfunctional in this Long March to November 2008. But surely the problem is not that Americans are disengaged from the political process, as he suggests. The voter turnout was excellent in 2004, for example, for both political parties. And voters were engaged in 2006 as well. We’re not sure that there is a unitary explanation for the strangeness of this political season, but here are some possible causes:

– Part of the fault might lie with McCain Feingold, which stripped the parties of money and power to the advantage of the 527’s and the “20 percent” political junkies that Thomas discusses.
– Part of the reason is undoubtedly the strange way that the nominating process of the parties for presidential candidates has disintegrated since 1968.
– Part of the reason may be that the political reporters themselves are part of the extreme “20 percent”, and now they have their own 24/7 outlets for their endless prognostications.
– It may be that all these factors have come together in a unique and unpleasant way in 2007-2008.

It is unseemly and ridiculous for adults aged 55 to 70, who presumably are men and women of some substance and accomplishment, to kill themselves for two years or more with 18 hour days of nonsense. It is not a testimony to their character that they do so, though it certainly is ample witness to their ambition. There is nothing to be learned after the first dozen firehouse visits or town meetings or discussions in diners.

We understand that such exertions are part of the political process, but they have gone too far. Maybe when one of the candidates drops dead of a heart attack or collapses from psychological exhaustion, the lesson might sink in. It should not be necessary to be a tri-athlete to be president; indeed, such rigors promise to produce perhaps the worst possible outcomes — the youngest candidates most possessed of ambition and least prepared for actual responsibility.

We’re not sure of what the answers are. Getting rid of McCain-Feingold would be an excellent idea, replacing regulation with disclosure and transparency. Letting the political parties spend what they like in any manner would be helpful, and would diminish the power of the 527’s and the fringes. And it should be clear enough that the ridiculous nominating process — in which, for example, campaigns and their workers set up shop in Iowa two to three years before the caucuses — is in desperate need of reform by the parties. But possibly some aging aspirant is going to have to keel over, or some catastrophic candidate emerge from the process, before power is taken from the microcasters of America’s current political life.

Question: if renowned Democratic Party adviser James Carville understands that every political and demographic group views illegal immigration as a big problem…..

…then why don’t the Republicans?

The United States government, ever unserious, is busy at work in the final hours before Christmas recess — in a reasonably bi-partisan effort, of course. Washington Times:

Congress last night passed a giant new spending bill that undermines current plans for a U.S.-Mexico border fence, allowing the Homeland Security Department to build a single-tier barrier rather than the two-tier version that has worked in California. The spending bill, written by Democrats and passed 253-154 with mostly their votes, surrenders to President Bush’s budget demands…The 2006 Secure Fence Act specifically called for “two layers of reinforced fencing” and listed five specific sections of border where it should be installed. The new spending bill removes the two-tier requirement and the list of locations…

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas Republican who has led the charge to change the 2006 law, said she wants to give Homeland Security more flexibility and wants local officials and landowners to be consulted…Rep. Peter T. King, who sponsored the Secure Fence Act, said if the goal was to give DHS flexibility, the senators have failed. “This is either a blatant oversight or a deliberate attempt to disregard the border security of our country,” the New York Republican said. “As it’s currently written, the omnibus language guts the Secure Fence Act almost entirely. Quite simply, it is unacceptable.”

In some important ways, the controversy last summer about the immigration bill was really about the unwillingness of the political elites to honor the mandate of the majority of citizens (of virtually every party and ethnic background) that the government execute some of its bedrock responsibilities with at least a minimum of competence and respect for the electorate — an electorate whose wishes were routinely mocked, belittled, and then ignored by the grandees. Apparently the people are still held in the same disdain by their betters in Congress.

Last March, when stumping for his comprehensive bill, President Bush said:

A lot of Americans are skeptical about immigration reform primarily because they don’t think the government can fix the problems. And my answer to the skeptics is, give us a chance to fix the problems in a comprehensive way that enforces our border…

“give us a chance to fix the problems.” A chance was given; from the looks of things, the government appears to have failed once more. (Congress did choose to fund attorneys for illegal immigrants, so Congress would appear to be making a definitive statement about its priorities.) Though we understand that this is a tiny provision in a large bill, a veto might be an interesting idea in the interests of the GOP in 2008 — but then again President Bush has never really seemed to be serious about border enforcement.

As we pause briefly between our first performance enhancing drugs this morning — a quart of coffee and a half gallon of Diet Coke — both loaded with a drug considered dangerous by California, we confess we haven’t a clue what all the hubbub regarding steroids is about.

Apparently you can’t play baseball on steroids anymore, though surely you can be a lineman in the NFL. So what exactly and is not forbidden? For example, can you be fired as governor if you’ve used performance enhancing drugs? Are the baseball players who have used steroids now forbidden to run for political office?

The WSJ rehashes an old argument of our times:

The dispute arises from the first four words of the Second Amendment, the full text of which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” If the first two clauses were omitted, there would be no room for ambiguity. But part of the legal controversy has centered around what a “well regulated militia” means.

Judge Silberman’s opinion argued, with convincing historical evidence, that the “militia” the Framers had in mind was not the National Guard of the present, but referred to all able-bodied male citizens who might be called upon to defend their country. The notion that the average American urbanite might today go to his gun locker, grab his rifle and sidearm and rush, Minuteman-like, to his nation’s defense might seem quaint. But at stake is whether the “militia” of the Second Amendment is some small, discreet group of people acting under government control, or all of us.

The phrase “the right of the people” or some variation of it appears repeatedly in the Bill of Rights, and nowhere does it actually mean “the right of the government.” When the Bill of Rights was written and adopted, the rights that mattered politically were of one sort–an individual’s, or a minority’s, right to be free from interference from the state. Today, rights are most often thought of as an entitlement to receive something from the state, as opposed to a freedom from interference by the state. The Second Amendment is, in our view, clearly a right of the latter sort…

It would seriously harm the Court’s credibility if Justice Kennedy and the Court’s liberal wing now turned around and declared the right “to keep and bear arms” a dead letter because it didn’t comport with their current policy views on gun control. This potential contradiction may explain why no less a liberal legal theorist than Harvard’s Laurence Tribe has come around to an “individual rights” understanding of the Second Amendment.

There are still a few Americans living today who can remember when a great many people were armed. It’s not so difficult to imagine a future in which that might also be true.

Former New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan looks like he is both an incompetent and a crook, according to this WSJ piece by Douglas McCollam:

the disarray in the DA’s office can be traced to a decision Mr. Jordan made shortly after being elected to a six-year term in 2002. During the campaign, Mr. Jordan pledged to make the DA’s office look “more like New Orleans,” code words, many assumed, for hiring more black staffers and attorneys. Using a “cultural-diversity report” compiled by his transition team, Mr. Jordan proceeded to systematically fire veteran white staffers and replace them with African Americans with little or no experience.

A later analysis showed that, after about two months in office, Mr. Jordan altered the racial composition of the staff, going to 27 whites and 130 blacks from 77 whites and 56 blacks. Among the 56 staffers who were fired, 53 were white, two were black, and one was Hispanic. Among the 20 case investigators fired (many retired police detectives), all were white.

The committee making firing recommendations for Mr. Jordan was run by Stephanie Butler, an aide to Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson. This is the congressman who drew national attention when federal agents found $90,000 in his freezer, which led to his indictment this year on bribery and obstruction of justice charges. Mr. Jefferson has pleaded not guilty.

When challenged in court, Mr. Jordan claimed the firings were “random,” with no intentional racial component. They were, he said, part of the standard turnover officials are entitled to make under the patronage system.

But in 2005, a federal jury disagreed, finding that 35 of the fired workers had been let go solely because of their race, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The jury awarded them close to $2 million, which ballooned with interest and attorneys’ fees to about $3.5 million–more than the DA’s annual budget.

Following Mr. Jordan’s resignation, attorneys for the plaintiffs seized the DA office’s bank accounts and threatened to foreclose on all its property to satisfy the judgment. That threat prompted city and state leaders, who for months had refused to negotiate, to pony up $2.9 million last week to settle the case. The majority of the payment requires the approval of some key state legislators, who are usually hostile to anything that involves spending money to bail New Orleans out of a jam.

This DA Jordan even makes the former governor and the mayor look good by comparison. Now that’s really saying something.

Even good laws have bad consequences. Bad laws with bad logic do even worse. It is obvious that the legislative class would use the BCRA to protect themselves from challengers, both the washed and unwashed. A particularly egregious example is the Millionaires’ Amendment. George Will:

legislators added to McCain-Feingold the Millionaires’ Amendment to punish wealthy, self-financing opponents. The amendment revealed the cynicism behind campaign regulation’s faux idealism about combating corruption. The amendment says: When a self-financing House candidate exceeds the personal spending threshold of $350,000, his opponent gets three benefits.

– First, the opponent can receive contributions triple the per election limit of $2,300 from each donor.
– Second, the donors’ now-tripled contributions are not counted against those donors’ aggregate contribution limits for the two-year election cycle.
– Third, the opponent is permitted to coordinate with his political party committee unlimited party expenditures that otherwise would be limited by statute.

Senate campaigns are subject to similar provisions, which are even more generous to candidates opposed by wealthy, self-financing individuals…incumbents can benefit from the Millionaires’ Amendment even when they have amassed, as most can, substantial war chests. McCain-Feingold’s authors wrote this provision while pretending to reduce the influence of donors, but while actually engaged in incumbent protection.

In a way McCain-Feingold is a microcosm of the shrinking world of personal freedoms that are supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights. Over and over we have seen this trend, with few examples of expanding freedoms, except in the one area where such license is arguably the most destructive to society.

In 1976 the courts ruled that in political speech and contests the participants most needed “the unfettered opportunity to make their views known.” Time and again the politicians backing the BCRA have cynically used the legislation to do precisely the opposite, just to protect their own precious backsides.

A Palestinian who ran for the presidency of the PA from Alexandria, Virginia, where he was under house arrest, is now going to prison — in the United States. Ole Miss alumnus Abdelhaleem Ashqar was just sentenced in Chicago to 11 years for contempt of court:

A former professor accused of providing money to Hamas terrorists was sentenced Wednesday to more than 11 years in prison and fined $5,000 for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury. Abdelhaleem Ashqar…was convicted earlier this year of criminal contempt and obstruction of justice for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the Palestinian militant movement Hamas on June 25, 2003….

Before being sentenced, Ashqar delivered a nearly two-hour passionate statement describing the suffering of Palestinian people under the Israeli occupation and saying he would rather go to prison than divulge the secrets of Palestinian militants. “The only option was to become a traitor or collaborator and that is something that I can’t do and will never do as long as I live,” he told the court.

This distinguished gentleman has been up to such antics and worse in New York, Oxford, Chicago, Alexandria, Washington and elsewhere for more than a decade. Question: why has the US judicial system been occupied with this fellow for all this time instead of deporting him many years ago? HT: LGF

Telegraph:

Train passengers face routine airline-style bag checks and body searches as part of a new counter-terror crackdown announced by Gordon Brown. He conjured up visions of ”Fortress Britain” as he unveiled a succession of security measures at airports, railway stations, sports venues and other public places. There is also to be a huge “hearts and minds” drive aimed at diverting young Muslims away from the influence of fanatics.

The Prime Minister said a review of vulnerable buildings and crowded spaces like shopping centres had led to a rethink of the way they are protected. More than 250 busy railway stations, airports and seaports as well as 100 “sensitive” installations like power stations and electricity substations will be given extra security. This could include screening luggage at major stations like London King’s Cross or Manchester Piccadilly using mobile checking devices that can be moved around the country. More buildings will be defended by barriers to stop car bomb attacks, extra blast-proofing, vehicle exclusion zones and metal detectors.

Daily Mail:

the Government unveiled plans to take up to 53 pieces of information from anyone entering or leaving Britain. For every journey, security officials will want credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights. The information, taken when a ticket is bought, will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place…

The scheme will apply to every way of leaving the country, whether by ferry, plane, or small aircraft. It would apply to a family having a day out in France by Eurotunnel, and even to a yachtsman leaving British waters during the day and returning to shore.

The measure applies equally to UK residents going abroad and foreigners travelling here. The information will be stored for as long as the authorities believe it is useful, allowing them to build a complete picture of where a person has been over their lifetime, how they paid and the contact numbers of who they stayed with.

Suppose none of this works. What’s the next step?

A presidential candidate lumbers away from a mess of her own making. AP:

“I support Governor Spitzer’s decision today to withdraw his proposal,” Clinton said in a statement. “As president, I will not support driver’s licenses for undocumented people and will press for comprehensive immigration reform that deals with all of the issues around illegal immigration including border security and fixing our broken system.“

Best line to capitalize on Clinton’s mess, via WaPo:

“When it takes two weeks and six different positions to answer one question on immigration, it’s easier to understand why the Clinton campaign would rather plant their questions than answer them,” said Barack Obama spokesman Bill Burton...

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, if he continues to rely on proxies to deliver lines like these, it is unlikely he is going to prevail versus his opponents. On the other hand, he may well be really running for VP anyway. Additional point: Was Mrs. Clinton withdrawing her support for Spitzer’s first scheme or his second scheme? On further reflection, who cares?

A landslide of 70% of Californians approved of Jessica’s Law, but there is apparently a lot of misplaced sympathy for these low criminals among the community of those who “care” more than the rest of us, and apparently do so for a living. AP:

Jessica’s Law, approved by 70 percent of California voters a year ago, bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children gather. That leaves few places where offenders can live legally. Some who have had trouble finding a place to live are avoiding re-arrest by reporting — falsely, in some cases — that they are homeless.

Experts say it is hard to monitor sex offenders when they lie about their address or are living day-to-day in cheap hotels, homeless shelters or on the street. It also means they may not be getting the treatment they need. “We could potentially be making the world more dangerous rather than less dangerous,” said therapist Gerry Blasingame, past chairman of the California Coalition on Sexual Offending. Similar laws in Iowa and Florida have driven offenders underground or onto the streets. “They drop off the registry because they don’t want to admit living in a prohibited zone”…

We are apparently missing the point, but there’s so much foolishness abroad in the land that it is hard to keep up. This new scofflaw behavior seems like a good development. These often incorrigible offenders are placing themselves in a situation where, once they’re nabbed for this or that, they are obviously to be seen as parole violators. Seems like a good way to help keep them incarcerated for much of their lives, which is what should happen to many of these fine specimens of humanity.

AP:

Spain’s prime minister said the verdict still upheld justice. But victims of the attack, which killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800 when bombs exploded on four trains on March 11, 2004, expressed shock and sadness over the court’s decision…

Three lead suspects — Jamal Zougam and Othman Gnaoui of Morocco and Emilio Suarez Trashorras of Spain — were convicted of murder and attempted murder and received prison sentences ranging from 34,000 to 43,000 years. Under Spanish law, the most they will spend in jail is 40 years. Spain has no death penalty or life imprisonment.

191 dead, 1800 wounded. “Spain has no death penalty or life imprisonment.” That’s nice.

Newsday reports that New York is about to adopt a three-tier driver’s license scheme, the lowest tier of which virtually identifies the holder as being in the United States illegally:

The Bush administration and New York cut a deal Saturday to create a new generation of super-secure driver’s licenses for U.S. citizens, but also allow illegal immigrants to get a version…The deal comes about one month after New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced a plan whereby illegal immigrants with a valid foreign passport could obtain a license. Saturday’s agreement with the Homeland Security Department will create a three-tier license system in New York…

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he was not happy that New York intended to issue IDs to illegal immigrants. But he said there was nothing he could do to stop it. “I don’t endorse giving licenses to people who are not here legally, but federal law does allow states to make that choice,” Chertoff said. “It’s going to be a big deal up in Buffalo, it’s going to be a big deal on the Canadian side of the border,” Chertoff said. The governor made clear he is going forward with his plan allowing licenses for illegal immigrants…

Under the compromise, New York will produce an “enhanced driver’s license” that will be as secure as a passport. It is intended for people who soon will need to meet such ID requirements, even for a short drive to Canada. A second version of the license will meet new federal standards of the Real ID Act. That law is designed to make it much harder for illegal immigrants or would-be terrorists to obtain licenses. A third type of license will be available to undocumented immigrants. Spitzer has said this ID will make the state more secure by bringing those people “out of the shadows” and into American society, and will lower auto insurance rates.

Those licenses will be clearly marked to show they are not valid federal ID. Officials, however, would not say whether that meant local law enforcement could use such a license as probable cause to detain someone they suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

Perhaps we’re missing something, but this sounds even zanier than Spitzer’s first harebrained scheme to “allow illegal immigrants to obtain the same kind of driver’s licenses as other New Yorkers.” The new third-tier driver’s license would appear to specifically identify the holder as a person in the United States illegally.

Therefore, the likely outcomes are that (a) illegal aliens will not apply for the license; and (b) advocacy groups will file suit and take other measures to ensure that a card that screams that the holder is a lawbreaker must be ignored by authorities. Is that an intended or unintended consequence of this nutty scheme?

UPDATE

Here is a discussion of the New York proposal by a leading presidential candidate that is every bit as coherent as the Spitzer plan:

Good luck understanding this mess.

UPDATE II

That was fast. Now everything is clear, less than a day later, or is it? NYT:

Mrs. Clinton’s statement affirming her support of Mr. Spitzer in his office came less than a day after she offered a muddled and hesitant position on the bill, prompting a round of denunciations by her opponents. It signaled the extent to which her advisers viewed that moment as the biggest misstep she made in the debate, and one with long-term potential to undermine her candidacy.

“Senator Clinton supports governors like Governor Spitzer who believe they need such a measure to deal with the crisis caused by this administration’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform,’” her campaign said…

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said that she had not studied either plan, and was not specifically endorsing either of them.

Addendum: Polipundit asks a question.

Character is destiny, or at least close enough so for government work. Things that happen once almost always happen twice in peoples’ lives, the charitable, the criminal, the venal, and just about everything else where character, judgment and the passions are in play. Today we are treated to a story of questionable campaign giving in the LA Times, the paper that followed up most aggressively on the Wall Street Journal’s recounting of the adventures of the mysterious Mr. Hsu in August.

Indeed, the story opens up pretty much the same way as that story of two months ago, with poor, apolitical Chinese people suddenly having the urge to give massive amounts ($380,000 versus $24,000 in 2004) to a certain political campaign whose predecessors were previously well known for precisely these shenanigans. This whole thing is like a an old time radio serial or a movie and its sequels.

In the episode of ten years ago, our little play unfolded at a small Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas; six weeks ago, we visited a modest bungalow at 41 Shelbourne Ave in Daly City, California; and today’s episode begins at 44 Henry St, a grimy restaurant in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown:

Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door. And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.

All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown…

Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province. The organizations, at least one of which is a descendant of Chinatown criminal enterprises that engaged in gambling and human trafficking, exert enormous influence over immigrants. The associations help them with everything from protection against crime to obtaining green cards. Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give…

The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records. And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs — including dishwasher, server or chef — that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election…

The tenement at 44 Henry St. was listed in Clinton’s campaign reports as the home of Shu Fang Li, who reportedly gave $1,000. In a recent visit, a man, apparently drunk, was asleep near the entrance to the neighboring beauty parlor, the Nice Hair Salon. A tenant living in the apartment listed as Li’s address said through a translator that she had not heard of him, although she had lived there for the last 10 years.

All the eccentricities and exuberances of the nineties can be expected to reappear in some form over the next period, wizened no doubt but also more focused and extreme, conscious that time is shorter now. It’s like the movies: will the sequel be more interesting than the original? For example, did you prefer The Godfather or Godfather II, Vito Corleone or Michael Corleone?

Lightning always strikes twice — or more. A clever reporter might want to scan the major themes of certain human behavior in the 1993-2001 time frame and use these to shape some possible story lines for the next year; but then again, he might not.

There are allegations that the Chinese government has hijacked the major US search engines and redirected their Chinese search traffic to Baidu. AFP:

US Internet search engines in China were being hijacked and directed to Chinese-owned Baidu, analysts said Wednesday, speculating that this may be retaliation for the White House award to exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama. Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on Internet search, said Chinese users trying to search on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being directed to the Chinese search engine.

“It seems like China is fed up with the US, so as a way to fight back, they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine,” the analysts wrote.

The authors said it was not clear exactly how or why the searches were being redirected, but China is known for tightly controlling the Internet and using a variety of filters to screen out search results for issues relating to dissidents or the Tibetan spiritual leader. On Wednesday, US President George W. Bush called for an end to “religious repression” in China as he defiantly became the first US leader to appear in public with the Dalai Lama.

As has been noted, Baidu, a Chinese company, is listed on NASDAQ. Search engines get much of their revenue from their traffic, because internet advertising revenues are related to page views, click-throughs, or other such metrics. Question: if China has been redirecting traffic from these other US public companies to the US public company Baidu for the economic benefit to China or otherwise, is it guilty of stock manipulation? Should the SEC be investigating China?

China’s exports are up another 27% so far this year, to $878 billion for the year to date, and an annualized total of $1.171 trillion for all of 2007. IHT:

China said that it had exported $878 billion worth of goods through the first nine months of this year, up 27 percent from its record shipments a year ago. Analysts say global worries about contaminated pet food, tainted seafood and toxic toys and toothpaste are hardly enough to slow down the powerful Chinese export engine, which has quickly come to dominate everything from electronics to textiles. “You know, 40 million toys may be bad for dozens of toy makers in Dongguan,” said Dong Tao, an economist at Credit Suisse, referring to a city in southern China. “But that’s small potatoes for China’s over $1 trillion a year of exports.” The Chinese trade surplus with the rest of the world ballooned to $187 billion through September of this year, up from $177.5 billion for all of 2006…

In 1969 the US government filed suit against IBM for monopolizing the computer industry. It was thought that the marketing practices of IBM with its powerful System/360 would permit the company to put all its competitors out of business while growing to vast, unimaginable proportions. IBM’s revenues were $7 billion at the time. The fear of the awesome power of Big Blue is hard to believe, but it’s true. For 13 years, the antitrust case was big business news, and occupied half the staff of a major New York law firm. Now almost no one remembers it. The point is: there are limits to this kind of growth, and some extrapolations are foolish.

If China’s exports continued to expand at the same rate for a decade, they would nearly equal the size of the entire US economy, around $13 trillion. Such a growth rate is impossible, and indeed we think we are far nearer to the end of this dramatic run than to the beginning. Political pressure, the need to get the current account deficit under control, problems of the exporters themselves, and other factors are quite likely to usher in a new environment within a few years, not only for US-China policy, but that of the EU as well.

It would be nice if the changes on the horizon could be implemented in a sober and serious fashion, but as IBM antitrust lawsuit demonstrates, governments have a knack for folly and grandiosity. We’ll expect more of the same, and be pleasantly surprised if the future turns out better.

Judith Miller in City Journal describes some positive developments in the law for a change:

Over the last few years, Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars, and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits’ outcomes—poorly covered by the media—represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees.

The latest victory came in August, when an Islamic charity, KinderUSA, and its board chairman, Laila Al-Marayati, dropped the libel suit they had filed in April in California state court against former Treasury Department official Matthew Levitt, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which now employs him), and Yale University Press. In 2006, Yale published Levitt’s book on Hamas, which Washington says supports terrorism. Levitt never mentioned Al-Marayati in his book, but he did assert that KinderUSA, founded to raise money for Palestinian children, had ties to terrorist groups.

Al-Marayati and KinderUSA charged that Levitt had made “false and damaging” charges that caused “irreparable harm to its reputation,” and they sought at least $500,000 in damages, a public retraction, and a halt to the book’s distribution. But Levitt and his codefendants stood by his claims. In June, they filed a motion against the charity and its chairman, seeking to quash the libel suit and demanding that the plaintiffs pay all legal fees. They cited a California law that bans “SLAPP”—or “strategic litigation against public participation”—suits, which aim not at winning in court, but at intimidating into silence a group or a publication raising issues of public concern. “California enacted anti-SLAPP legislation to get rid of inappropriate lawsuits like this one,” they wrote in a 15-page brief. Less than six weeks later, Al-Marayati and KinderUSA dropped the suit.

If these developments could spread to England, justice and knowledge would benefit greatly.

Government employees and elected officials at work, via LA Times:

Following San Francisco’s lead, Los Angeles County and city officials are urging people, businesses and government to switch off nonessential lights for one hour next month to save energy. Led by Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke and City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, the proposed effort asks Angelenos to simultaneously go dark between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20, as San Franciscans do the same. Local officials are expected to vote on the plan next week…

“It’s a great opportunity to conserve,” Burke said, “a great [symbol] of people coming together.”…Although officials still are finalizing which public buildings will join in the voluntary blackout, possible candidates include City Hall, the county Hall of Administration, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, DWP headquarters, the Port of Los Angeles and the multicolored pylons at Los Angeles International Airport.

We’re not fans of the trial lawyers, but we hope that if someone gets hurt in a traffic accident or otherwise as a result of this foolishness, that they sue the city for a billion dollars and win.

Gorge Will discusses the events at the NYT that we touched on the other day:

In June, the Times was in high dudgeon…about the Supreme Court’s refusal to affirm a far-reaching government power to suppress political speech. The court ruled that a small group of Wisconsin residents had been improperly refused the right to run an issue advocacy ad urging the state’s two senators not to filibuster the president’s judicial nominees…Justice Antonin Scalia noted that although McCain-Feingold was written to prevent “corrosive and distorting effects” by entities with “immense aggregations of wealth,” it actually muzzled — with the Times’ strenuous approval — a small group of Wisconsin residents.

Less than three months after the Times excoriated the court for weakening restrictions on issue ads, the paper made a huge and patently illegal contribution to MoveOn.org’s issue advocacy…The Times, a media corporation that is a fountain of detailed editorial instructions about how the rest of the world should conduct its business, seems confused about how it conducts its own. The Times now says the appropriate rate for MoveOn.org’s full-page ad should have been $142,000, a far cry from $65,000, which is what the group paid. So the discount of $77,000 constitutes a large soft-money contribution to a federally regulated political committee. The Times’ horror of such contributions was expressed in its enthusiasm for McCain-Feingold.

FEC regulations state: “The provision of any goods or services without charge or at a charge that is less than the usual and normal charge for such goods or services is a contribution.” Individuals are limited to contributing $5,000 in a calendar year; corporations such as the Times are forbidden to make any contributions…

Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., defending the decision to run the ad, said: “If we’re going to err, it’s better to err on the side of more political dialogue…Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people.” Bauer notes that Sulzberger might have used words from a Supreme Court decision: “In a debatable case, the tie is resolved in favor of protecting speech.” And: “Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor.” So spoke Chief Justice John Roberts in the Wisconsin decision that Sulzberger’s paper denounced because it would magnify the voices of, among other things, “wealthy corporations.” The Times Co.’s 2006 revenue was $3.3 billion.

“it’s better to err on the side of more political dialogue.” We couldn’t agree more. Perhaps that convenient sentiment from the Times’ Publisher will filter down to the editorial board of the newspaper.