For more heartening coverage of the hostage rescue in Colombia, see this story from Saturday's Wall Street Journal and this opinion article, "Vindication for Colombia's Uribe" from Saturday's Washington Post. Schumacher-Matos usefully takes on Human Rights Watch for overstating Colombia's human rights problems; this organization seems interested only in proving that "right-wing" regimes are terrible and seems entirely willing to overlook the depredations of "left-wing" narco-guerrillas. It seems to be a prisoner of the paradigm of Latin American studies departments—that all conflict in Latin America is between the left-leaning "people" and right-wing oppressive regimes. Believers of this paradigm overlook the fact that President Alvaro Uribe and his government have approval ratings from the people of Colombia far higher than those of almost any other leaders or governments in Latin America (or the United States, now and for most of recent history, for that matter). Schumacher-Matos does criticize Uribe for seeking to change the constitution and seek a third consecutive term. "He should build the legitimacy of the presidency by letting it go to someone else," he concludes, without mentioning the shining example of such renunciation, George Washington. As much as I admire Uribe, I am inclined to think this is good advice.

One of the heartening things about the rescue operation is that the Colombian Army's brilliant performance makes the FARC narco-guerrillas look like such idiots. They were completely bamboozled and fooled. Terrorists want us to live in fear of them. Now we are free to laugh at them. The greatest weapon against terrorism is ridicule. Who will want to enlist in the guerrilla army that can't shoot straight? That everyone in the world is laughing at? That was outsmarted and outmaneuvered and humiliated?

Here is my Creators Syndicate column for this week, which readers of this blog will recognize as a variation on the themes in this blog post.

As faithful readers of the blog know, I have long backed the idea of an oil trust for Iraq, along the lines of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which directs a flow of part of the state's oil profits directly to individuals each year. In this post, Glenn Reynolds notes that the Wall Street Journal editorial page Saturday advocated the same idea. Anyway, it's an occasion to note that my position has been advocated, independently, by Nobel Prize-winning economists Milton Friedman and Vernon Smith, retired Newsday reporter Lou Dolinar, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the New America Foundation's Steven Clemons, and Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi. A pretty broad coalition, I think.

A year ago last month, I attended two international conferences, in Istanbul and Oxfordshire, England, that concentrated on the economy. The consensus was that there was a capital surplus around the world, with people looking desperately for places to invest and not demanding much in the way of a risk premium. There was concern about what would happen when a crisis—a financial breakdown of some sort—might occur. No one, as I recall, mentioned American subprime mortgages.

Well, the crisis came two months later with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and much else besides. I don't claim to understand all of this, but it has been a fascinating ride, and it is probably far from over. The proximate cause of the subprime mess has seemed to me something that is eminently fixable. The agencies that rate the creditworthiness of packages of securitized mortgages have been paid by the sellers of the packages. In retrospect, it seems obvious that they should be paid by the buyers. And, perhaps, that the number of ratings firms, now strictly limited by the SEC, should be increased. I gather that this will probably be done, sooner or later (a high Treasury official told me last year we should wait till the crisis simmers down), but intuitively it seems far from sufficient to get financial markets fully functioning again.

Wonderful news: The Colombian military yesterday rescued a group of 15 hostages held for years by the narcoterrorist FARC organization, including the French-Colombian one-time presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, held for six years, and three Americans—Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves—held for three years. This was a brilliant sting operation: The Colombians evidently infiltrated the FARC at several levels, ordered FARC officials in the name of a top commander to gather hostages from three locations and deliver them to a helicopter manned by operatives of a nongovernmental aid organization. Except that the helicopter was actually operated by the Colombian military. Inside the helicopter, they disarmed and tied up the two FARC operatives they had let aboard, as other army personnel arrested the 15 FARC operatives left on the ground. No shots were fired. Betancourt tells what happened next on the helicopter: "The chief of the operation said, 'We're the national army. You're free.' The helicopter almost fell from the sky because we were jumping up and down, yelling, crying, hugging one another. We couldn't believe it."

On one count, Betancourt went a little too far when she said, "Such a perfect operation is unprecedented." Perhaps, but it reminds me of the Israeli rescue of 105 hostages held at the Entebbe airport in Uganda on July 3-4, 1976, a much more complex operation and one that resulted in several deaths, including that of the head of the rescue team, Jonathan Netanyahu. The Israelis relied on main force, the Colombians on stealth, but both performed brilliantly. I trust the Colombian military will not be insulted if one says that its competence and ingenuity are comparable to that of the Israeli Defense Force.

Blogger extraordinaire Mickey Kaus notes the defeat of Republican Rep. Chris Cannon by a 60 percent to 40 percent vote in Utah's Third Congressional District, by many measures the most Republican district in the nation. This was the third time Cannon had faced tough primary fights from opponents who had attacked him for his stands on immigration. Cannon sponsored a bill to provide in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants who graduate from high school and supported comprehensive immigration laws (with guest worker and legalization as well as border and workplace enforcement provisions). Cannon's 2004 and 2006 primary opponents were poorly funded and poorly organized; his opponent this time, Jason Chaffetz, a former aide to Gov. Jon Huntsman, was poorly funded but well organized.

Kaus quotes me as writing, after Cannon survived the 2006 primary, that his type of stand on immigration was "not political death." His defeat this year makes it clear that while such stands are not always political death, they can be sometimes; and I should add that you don't see many 12-year incumbents defeated 60 percent to 40 percent in a primary.

The Supreme Court on June 26 ruled that the Second Amendment to the Constitution confers, as it says, a right to keep and bear arms and that the District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting the possession of handguns by most citizens is unconstitutional. I've written on this issue in a column that appeared shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre, in this blog twice. In the column I noted Judge Laurence Silberman's strong opinion in the D.C. Circuit, which the Supreme Court has just affirmed, and went on:

Limited regulation is allowed, Silberman wrote, but not a total ban. Somewhere on the road between a law banning possession of nuclear weapons and banning all guns, the Second Amendment stands in the way. This is the view as well of the liberal constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe.

And now it is the view of the Supreme Court itself.