Meet Julia Langbein, chief mocker of Frank Bruni — the chief restaurant critic of The New York Times.

It's early Wednesday morning and Langbein, 24, is tapping at her laptop in the cramped Brooklyn apartment she shares with three other people. The Times's Dining Out section has hit the Internet and newsstands.

Bruni has passed judgment on his latest dinner. Langbein is passing judgment on Bruni...

"In the past, it was random pop shots," [former Times restaurant critic William]Grimes said. "Now, it seems that you're in grave danger of being stalked on the Internet by a philosophical assassin.

So, let's see: These Congressional giants are demanding that Americans be taxed more to pay subsidies to defray the soaring heating bills caused in part by Congress's refusal to allow more drilling for domestic oil and gas. In another bitter irony, the House has already voted for Alaskan drilling five times since 2001, only to be stymied by the Senate. Now that the Senate has maneuvered to pass ANWR with 51 votes by using the budget process to elude a filibuster, the House 25 are doing Harry Reid's dirty work.

America can survive these policy setbacks; the question is whether the Republican majority will, or even should. If a GOP Congress can't vote to sustain its own wildly successful tax cuts, or to explore for more domestic energy, let's just turn Congress over to Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and at least have truth in liberal advertising.

The beauty of a tax that keeps gasoline at $3 is that it obviates the waste and folly of an army of bureaucrats telling auto companies what cars in which fleets need to meet what arbitrary standards of fuel efficiency. Abolish all the regulations and let the market decide.

I am relieved beyond words to find that Ted Stevens is still in the Senate. Before I left, the senator from Alaska had threatened -- on the floor of the Senate, no less -- to resign his seat if his colleagues passed a measure that would have eliminated some of Alaska's already approved transportation projects, including the now-famous "Bridge to Nowhere," and awarded the money to hard-pressed Louisiana. Stevens may be the first senator to equate pork with honor. A statue should be raised to him.

As the ever-humble Stevens would himself acknowledge, this statue -- appropriately funded with money taken from Louisiana relief -- would be not so much in his honor as the entire Senate's, and -- why stop there? -- all of Washington's. Indeed, the funding of ridiculous and unnecessary projects while the government is deeply in debt (and guided by an economic numskull) has become so much a part of contemporary Washington that -- the scolding John McCain notwithstanding -- it ought to be memorialized. A man feeding pigs is what I have in mind.

A series of gang rapes in these bleak housing estates shocked France a few years ago. In 2002, a 17-year-old girl was set alight by an 18-year-old boy as his friends stood by...the dominance of traditional cultures among families of Arab and black African origin, combined with the growing role of Islam in the suburbs, have contributed to the harsh treatment girls get there.

Pressure is mounting for Muslim women to wear veils. Forced marriages that snatch them from college and career -- where they do much better than their male schoolmates -- are on the rise.

The support group "Ni Putes, Ni Soumises" ("Neither Whores nor Submissives") says the number of forced marriages has risen in recent years, with roughly 70,000 girls pressured into unwanted relationships each year in France.

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the [French] rolling news service TCI, said...his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

"Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television," Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters...

Despite the “sky is falling” rhetoric warning of the dismantling of government, the budget reconciliation savings are exceedingly modest. The House’s $54 billion of reconciliation savings represents just half of 1 percent of the $7.8 trillion entitlement spending planned over the next five years. The challenge is no greater than that facing a family of four making $50,000 a year and suddenly faced with the need to pay off a $250 emergency room bill over a five-year period.

Investor Jim Rogers's...tussle with bedeviled commodity-brokerage Refco Inc. suggests his funds have been flirting with danger lately. The fight boils down to whose fault it is that the Rogers funds had more than $360 million at risk, primarily in an unregulated Refco unit based in Bermuda that engages in privately negotiated trades... Such trades are anathema to the strategy Mr. Rogers has emphasized in public appearances, regulatory filings and a book in which he wrote that the traditional pitfalls of commodity trading can easily be avoided if investors stick with exchange-listed futures contracts and refrain from using too much borrowed money.

...If the brokerage didn't follow instructions from the managers of Mr. Rogers's two funds, Refco may have violated federal commodity-trading rules protecting customers. If, on the other hand, Refco did the managers' bidding, then the funds may not have been adhering to their namesake's much-publicized musings.

You might be aware of attempts by Steven Spruiell of National Review Online to get his readers to bombard newspapers with letters calling for corrections of inaccurate stories about Joseph Wilson. With that in mind, your item about Gail Collins lamenting how few pro-Bush letters are received at the New York Times suggets a way of testing the accuracy of her lament.

How about asking Poor and Stupid readers to cc you whenever they send letters to the editor of the Times? With only a modest amount of space on your web site, you could archive these letters and keep tabs on how many are actually printed. We could then know, for example, whether one's chance of being published shortly after the SOTU address is in fact "really, really, really good", or whether Collins was embroidering the truth a bit. Besides, you already show us the text of your letters that the Times won't publish. Give us more!

By the way, the eloquence of Collins in this quote reminds me of something Homer Simpson said when he met somebody from Reader's Digest. He said, "I love your magazine. My favorite section is 'How to improve your word power'. It's really, really, really...uhhhh...good."

Luskin to Calame
November 2
Still no Krugman correction

It’s been a month. How do you explain this? Archives still uncorrected. Collins win, Calame loses.

Luskin to Calame
November 8
Krugman correction

I see you finally did it. Good.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:37 AM | link  

Monday, November 07, 2005

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:36 PM | link  

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:17 PM | link