“The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.” Written by Alex Tabarrok on Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco. The whole commentary is worth a read.

*Title meme stolen from Alex’s co-blogger Tyler Cowen.

I don’t have time to properly do this. I’d like to give supporting quotes from major players, but I just have to say what seems not to be said very much: Israel has a stupid strategy, and they need to just stop it.

Israel’s avowed strategy is to make the government of Lebanon as a whole disarm the Hezbollah who attacked and kidnapped a single soldier. Never mind that this government only came to power when the pro-Syrian government was embarrassed out of office. Never mind that the peace process had been unable to disarm Hezbollah, never mind that the government itself is outgunned by Hezbollah. Rather than attack Hezbollah in a full force, Israel would rather play dueling barrages and then bomb unrelated parts of Lebanon in an attempt to “pressure” the rest of Lebanon to do something about Hezbollah.

Sure, at the same time they bleat about Syria and Iran ending their support, but they aren’t bombing Syria or Iran. They’re bombing Lebanon, and not just Hezbollah possessions. They’re basically undoing the good that has been done since Lebanon finally achieved real independence following the assasination of Rafik Hariri.

Yes, Israel, you’ll be a lot more secure if you make Lebanon more like it was in 1986 than it was in 2006. Brilliant. You’re actually managing to make Bush look smart by comparison.

Ginger has a good piece on just how silly introducing a flag burning amendment is in general, and doing so now in particular.

Supporters say it should be banned because it is disrespectful to those who died for our country to burn the flag they were serving to protect. My brother died in service to this country. He had an American flag draped over his casket. I don’t feel that it dishonors him in the least to continue to allow this kind of freedom of expression – because that’s what it is.

I’ll just reiterate the threat I made last year. Remember, Republicans, only you can prevent me burning a couple of flags.

Fafblog is back, and rightly denounces those who would insult America by accurately describing its behavior. Choice bits:

Oh sure, the “Blame Atrocities First” crowd will tell you these prisoners were “driven to despair,” that they “had no rights,” that they were “held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice.” But what they won’t tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide!

Well if these Guantanamo prisoners are so innocent then what are they doing in Guantanamo? Sneaking into our secret military prisons as part of an elaborate plot to make it look like we’re holding them in our secret military prisons, that’s what!

You read whole thing now!

So, despite the guy arrested coming from Canada for the Millenium Bomb Plot and this weekend’s arrest of terror plotters in Canada, none of the usual suspects are calling for a wall across our northern border with Canada. You see, the illegal immigration thing is secondary for them, they say, but they’re just so concerned about terrorists coming in from Mexico.

But there don’t seem to be any terrorists in Mexico. We have proof there have been several in Canada, and one tried to enter via that route.

So if they are only concerned about border security when it involves Mexicans, that means that these people are just worried that we won’t be the Fourth Aryan Reich if too many brown people show up.

There. I said it. Every last one of you who hasn’t called for a similar wall on the Canadian border is a racist. Just have the balls to admit it to yourself and say in public what you believe in private: you want America for whites only.

You disgust me.

CNN has a very interesting Reuters story demonstrating how poorly-targeted aid can hurt some while helping others.

A year and a half ago, terrorists took a school in Beslan, Russia, and and killed many of the students and teachers. More were killed in the crossfire when troops went in to rescue the hostages. Little Sveta Dzieva heard the gunshots and ran, saving her own life. But the shock — 186 of her classmates were killed — struck her mute for a month. Going to Moscow for treatment cost her mother, Albina, her job and their apartment. Ironically, a lot of aid from Russia and elsewhere poured into Beslan and made it harder on the Dzievas. Why? Because Sveta wasn’t killed or physically injured.

Sveta, her mother, and her brothers now live in a shack in a neighboring village. Why can’t they go back to Beslan?

Officials say the money — 1.45 billion rubles in the first year after the attack — has split many families in the poor North Ossetia region as they argue over how to share it. Albina said it had split the community as well. Those who received compensation had driven prices up, pushing those without compensation even further into poverty in a region where many already struggle to make ends meet.

“You can’t even rent an apartment any more. The owners now ask for a year in advance, and the prices have gone up so I can’t pay anyway,” said Albina.

Money isn’t wealth: just pouring money into the hands of victims means the prices for scarce supplies will increase. It’s worse in this case because the money is a one-time deal. Aid will slow and stop as memory of the tragedy fades. So no one will risk new construction to house those forced out by inflation. Unless some other source of wealth comes into town, my guess is prices will eventually fall, but not before a lot of harm is done to people like Sveta and her family.

So people are all upset at these illegal immigrants coming in, and they think the dirty, smelly, uneducated (*cough*brown*cough*) ones are the problem, even if economists disagree that they’re a problem. But while the polite Canadian or German immigrant may be a more grokkable neighbor to you…do you really want high-skilled legal or illegal immigrants?

Mexican day-laborers are not going to be competing for your white-collar job, but those highly-educated ones will. Remember a while back when we were all freaking out about H1-B visas and Indian programmers coming in to “take ahr jarbs”? An increase in the supply of any product drives the price of that product down, whether the supply has brown or white skin. So just because Germans aren’t used to living in third world conditions for the privilege of programming doesn’t mean they won’t drive down the average salary of a programmer.

So before you say you’re “pro-immigration, but we can’t we get those highly-skilled valuable immigrants instead of more dishwashers,” you might want to think about the consequences of that statement.

For extra credit, figure out why both arguments are full of crap, even though the income effect might be measurable and real, and why I don’t support more restrictions on high- or low-skilled laborers.

Neo-nazi posing as a “Christian Libertarian“:

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work.”

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Hmm…though mere deportation seems like a partial solution. What’s your Final Solution, there, assmunch?

Here’s a hint for those confused by this whole “libertarian” thing: if your favorite policy solution is reinforced by how well it worked in the Holocaust, you’re not a libertarian.

So we all know tonight’s performance was a crock of shit from just about every side, right? There is no immigration “crisis”, nor are the National Guard going to do a damned thing, nor does this have anything to do with national security. This has everything to do with hating people darker than oneself and using that for electoral advantage, since nobody new has caught teh Gay since Queer Eye for the Straight Guy stopped airing new episodes.

So we are going to prosecute the hardest-working part of our population to satisfy a bunch of drunk old social-security-collecting welfare queens and their ex-wives. Because illegals are a drain on our taxes. Or possibly Manuel has been talking about unionizing again.

And Democrats take the heroic stand that they’ll…marginally…change…something…but otherwise, they’re pretty much on board. I guess since Nannygate they’ve been jealous that Republicans have been getting the cheap domestic help.

Sure, I’m sarcastic. But even I have trouble achieving the Snark Per Paragraph ratio of the Sploid post entitled “Clinton Bows to Father Bush“:

The Bush-Clinton dynasty laughed in the face of “Democrats” and “Republicans” again this weekend when ex-president Bill Clinton bowed before ex-president George H.W. Bush at a ceremony in New Orleans — where so many died because of Washington’s criminal “ineptitude.”

“Life’s like that,” Clinton told the graduates at Tulane University.

Later, a television lesbian invited the students to laugh at their problems.