As you probably realize, I read The Wall Street Journal regularly. In fact, my day is incomplete without it. I got hooked when The State was paying for my home subscription. I had a tough couple of months after that ran out, as I waited for the Journal‘s circulation department to cave in and offer me the $99 deal I had heard about from my friends. For weeks, I suffered withdrawal each day as they kept sending me offers at well over $400 a year, but eventually I got the good deal.

So, having waited for it so long, I appreciate it all the more, and spend a good bit of time with it each morning. More time than with The State, in fact, but that’s just because there’s more to spend time with. (The Journal has cut back, too, but it started with more.) And every day, I get a bunch of ideas about things to blog about, but by the time I finish breakfast and get to the office and get settled in and open my laptop and check my e-mail… the ideas are gone. Or I’ve just moved on.

So I thought I would try to reproduce the thoughts that hit me this morning while reading just the opinion pages of the Journal. Or three of them, anyway:

1. Just in case you thought Rush Limbaugh lives only on the radio, check out the column “To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid,” by Bret Stephens. That aside, I read this one with a willingness to be persuaded, if only because I have an affinity for counterintuitive arguments (see what I have to say on item 3), and because I’m well aware that many efforts to Do Good in poor countries are doomed to end up merely enriching or empowering those who already have power, at the expense of the needy. To me, that’s no reason to quit trying, but I’m open to an argument presenting alternatives. Unfortunately, Mr. Stephens goes out of his way to turn me off to his argument by first excoriating the people who devote their lives to trying to help others. Mr. Stephens is apparently the kind of “conservative” who believes that anyone who spends his life doing anything other than making money for himself is wasting his life. He dismisses NGOs and their workers with the same snotty tone we hear used so often to put down people who devote their lives to public service in this country: “All this works to salve the consciences of people whose dimly benign intention is to ‘do something.’ It’s a potential bonanza for the misery professionals of aid agencies and NGOs, never mind that their livelihoods depend on the very poverty whose end they claim to seek.” There is so much malice in his tone that I have little trust that the evidence he presents for his argument against continuing aid (he grants that it’s fine to help in this crisis; he just despises people who would stay and keep helping when the TV cameras have gone away) as being representative or fully relevant. It would be nice to see a good examination of the limitations in the efficacy of conventional aid — together with ideas for alternatives that have a little more credibility and specificity than vague wishes for “investment” — by someone who actually believes in helping. That might prove enlightening. But this was not.
2. An op-ed piece headlined “The Body Scanner Scam” had a real grabber lede: “All males have a body cavity. Females have two body cavities….” But that’s not why I kept reading. What interested me was that, after presenting some fairly (but not entirely) persuasive arguments as to why physical checks are doomed to fail because of the inadequacy of the equipment or lack of time or terrorist countermeasures, the author went on to present an argument based in the idea of what you might call “positive profiling.” In other words, rather than pick on a given group for special attention, make the system more efficient by positively identifying categories of people who can be waved through safely, making time to devote to scrutinizing everyone else more closely — and to do that with questions, not probes or scans or pat-downs. A neat idea, and a creative way of getting around libertarian and identity-politics arguments against profiling. But face it: If you wave through everybody who isn’t a young man with an Arabic name, sweaty palms and lumpy underwear, you’re sort of singling out the aforesaid young men. And once everyone knows that groups of old people on tours together get waved through, al Qaeda is going to be recruiting granny and getting her a group rate (not easy, but an organization that can persuade young fools to blow themselves up isn’t going to stop trying because of a little recruitment challenge). Personally, I think we should act like we have good sense and scrutinize the aforesaid young shifty-eyed men, and put up with the fact that the shifty-eyed young men lobby will raise Cain about it. But that’s me. Anyway, a thought-provoking piece.
3. Finally, let’s look at the editorial, “Predators and the Constitution.” Normally, I don’t read the editorials in the Journal, because, like the editorials in The New York Times, they are just so predictable and SO party-line. I’m like, “I know what Democrats think about this,” and “I KNOW the Republican talking points,” and so I find their editorials, while well-written, tiresome. (Oh, and if you wonder why I read the Journal and not the Times, the answer is simple: The NYT guy refuses to deliver on my side of the river. Really.) But I read this one, and after going through some gyrations, I agree with it. Basically, it bemoans the idea of the Supreme Court supporting a federal law that keeps sexual predators in the justice system after their sentences end. Now on one level, this is typical Journal editorial board anti-gummint (especially anti-federal), states’-rights, pro-civil liberties, anti-courts stuff, but in this case they’re right. As much as I believe that such predators should stay in the system (because everything we know indicates they will NEVER cease being a menace to society, so if we’re ever going to let them out of prisons or mental hospitals, we should at least keep tabs on them), this IS properly a matter for the states and not the feds (another case of members of Congress wanting to be seen as doing something about an emotional issue, even when it isn’t their business), and such things should be decided by the political branches and not the courts. As the editors note, 20 states have thus far passed laws keeping predators in the system (as they should), and this trend should be allowed to play out without the feds trying to impose it. So, good one this time, editors. (I can already see bud, who cares more for results than proper processes, disagreeing with me on this. Hey, that’s why he’s a Democrat and I’m an UnPartisan.)

And that’s just a taste. So much to think about, so little time for thinking…