Couldn’t Help But Notice (112507)

Robert Redford ripped into Al Gore (HT Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters) as a cynical opportunist who is taking the easy way out:

Asked why he thinks Gore is not going back into politics, he says: “What’s most important - to be a hero to your country and go save it . . . or do you want to be happy and rich and be a hero and not get into the political scene?”

Here’s Al’s answer to Redford:

Mr. Gore has the chance to achieve enormous wealth after being named last week as a new partner at the famously successful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. No fewer than three of his new colleagues sit on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.

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Catching enviros in fuel-burning hypocrisy is getting too easy:

….. the management of Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport are concerned that the large number of additional private charter flights expected in Bali during the UN Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) December 3-15, 2007, will exceed the carrying capacity of apron areas. To meet the added demand for aircraft storage officials are allocating “parking space” at other airports in Indonesia.

Haven’t they heard of Webex?

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As the DC handgun ban case will now be heard by the Supreme Court, Amy Alkon has some thoughts on its obvious ineffectiveness.
One of her commenters (no direct link; just scroll to about the fifth one) makes an important point about arguing that the various National Guard units represent the Second Amendment writers’ modern version of the “state” militias:

….. in case someone tries to claim the the National Guard satisfies the definition of “militia”, ask them to go read the fence around the National Guard property. It says, “Property of the US Government”. This should be more effective than pointing out that the NG wasn’t established until 1905.

Another thing to consider: If the National Guards were “state” militias, I would think that they would have had a choice as to whether or not to go to Iraq when called, and they did not. If they were truly “state” militias, surely one or more would have refused to go in the four years of the war.

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It is clear that 2007 will be a year of amazingly low murder and other crime statistics in New York City:

New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963.

But within the city’s official crime statistics is a figure that may be even more striking: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of more than 8.2 million.

If that trend holds up, fewer than 100 homicide victims in New York City this year will have been strangers to their assailants. The vast majority died in disputes with friends or acquaintances, with rival drug gang members or — to a far lesser degree — with romantic partners, spouses, parents and others.

….. This year, with 428 killings logged through Sunday — 412 actual killings plus 16 crime victims who have died this year from injuries sustained long ago — the average number of killings is a bit more than one a day.

….. police statistics, which are subject to an internal auditing system in use since the early 1990s, show dips in six of the seven major crime categories, according to the department’s latest reports.

As of Sunday, overall crime was down 6.47 percent, compared to the same period last year. In addition to the homicide rate, the number of rapes, robberies, burglaries, grand larcenies and car thefts are all on the decline.

Points:

• It’s impossible to miss how mightily the New York Times struggled to avoid mentioning Rudy Giuliani’s name, even though the article noted the steep drop in murder and crime that began in the early 1990s.
• The fact that a city that a city that is many times larger than the cities with the worst murder and crime rates can be so orderly ought to be shaming the smaller ones into imitating its policing approaches. But it appears not. Philadelphia had over 400 murders in 2006, and has less than one-fifth the population.
• It’s a good thing the crime stats started dropping decades after Gotham’s strict handgun-control laws went into effect, or we’d be hearing a never-ending stream of claims that those laws caused the decreases.
• I’m actually surprised that gun grabbers don’t try this argument: “New York City’s last 17 years of progress demonstrate what restrictive gun laws and effective policing can accomplish in tandem.” Maybe I should shut up about that.