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SHE’s Baaaack!   SHE, as in Camille Paglia, who blasts ObamaCare and it’s presumptions. You’d never know she voted for the amateur.

… By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP’s facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.

This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster — as witness the middle-of-the-night bum’s rush given to “green jobs” czar Van Jones last week — but there’s a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president’s innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to “help” the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows. …

Roger Simon responds to Camille Paglia’s article.

In an otherwise trenchant and amusing column, Camille Paglia evinces surprise that the Democrats, liberals, progressives, call them what you will, have made such a hash of things under Obama and have become, mirabile dictu, an elite.

‘How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “Chimes of Freedom,” made famous by the Byrds? And here’s Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with “Freedom! Freedom!” Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song “A Different Drum,” with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: “All I’m saying is I’m not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me.”’

Well, sure. But where were you, Camille? We’ve been living in a world-upside-down for over a decade now, even before 9-11 (when people like me started to wake up.) I know they would probably boot you out of Salon, even though you are the only thing worth reading over there, if you moved any further to the right, but c’mon, girl. Bob Dylan is less liberal than I am. Reification has set in on the Left. Don’t you be a part of it. Not to put to fine a point on it “Le gauche n’existe pas.” It’s over. It doesn’t exist. There’s no there there. We live in a world where Keith Olbermann is a “gauchiste.” What could be more square than that? Enough. …

Abby Thernstrom has interesting back story to the site of Obama’s student lecture yesterday. She thinks he missed an opportunity. It wasn’t the first he missed. His presidency is one long missed opportunity.

…The racial gap in academic achievement was closing, she said. It wasn’t true then; it isn’t true now. The College Board has just released its report on the 2009 SAT scores of college-bound high school seniors. In the six years since O’Connor’s opinion, the racial gap has widened slightly, and is substantially wider than it was two decades ago. We’re peddling backward on this front.

That gap reflects real deficiencies in skills and knowledge that cripple the life chances of too many black and Hispanic youngsters — deficiencies that were very apparent in the New Haven firefighters promotion test that the Supreme Court upheld 5–4 in this past term — much to the consternation of civil-rights groups. The result: Test designers are reportedly scrambling to come up with assessments that do not measure cognitive skills and thus have no racially disparate impact.

Obama’s innocuous speech was actually a missed opportunity. Instead of platitudes about the importance of working hard, he could have taken on the anti-testing crowd. Standards-based tests, he might have said, are an essential tool in assessing the skills of those applying to law schools — but also in deciding who is qualified to be lieutenant in a fire department. Hostility to such assessments in the K–12 years is not a civil-rights position. It betrays a callousness and indifference to the future of disadvantaged kids. …

Ralph Peters, in the New York Post, comments on the Obama administration’s illogical and irresponsible response to the situation in Honduras.  He gives us a quick recap of the events.

…Our thug-worshipping diplomats figured they’d slip it by us. With the nation focused on barbecues and the beach, they announced that, if Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s client, Manuel Zelaya, isn’t returned to power in Honduras, the United States won’t recognize the results of that country’s upcoming free elections.

Why was former president Zelaya driven from his would-be throne in Tegucigalpa? He tried to subvert Honduras’ Constitution and set himself up as president-for-life.

In June, the elected legislators and the Honduran Supreme Court had enough. As Zelaya aligned with Chavez, the Castro regime, Nicaraguan caudillo Daniel Ortega and other extreme leftists, the Honduran government gave the would-be dictator the boot.

Acting under legal orders, the army peacefully arrested Zelaya and shipped him out of the country. No murders, no Chavez-style imprisonments.

It was not a military coup. An elected congress and interim president, not a general, run the country today.

But the Obama administration has decided that this “violation” is so dreadful that we won’t even recognize future free elections in Honduras. …

…if Obama thinks that handing over a “little” country he couldn’t find on a map is going to win him enduring applause and cooperative friends in Latin America, he’s crazy. What he’s actually doing is frightening our friends. If democratic governments south of the border can’t rely on US support, to whom can they turn? …

Sarah Palin blasted AP for printing photos of a dying marine. David Harsanyi begs to differ.

… When looking at the photo series, “The Death of a Marine,” I felt a heightened respect for the gravity of war. The pictures unquestionably added humanity and context to Bernard’s death.

Now, if I could recall a wanton penchant of the press to run photos of dead Marines, my reaction might have been very different.

It is also conceivable, of course, that I’m a callous journalist, willing to set aside all decency to quench my baser voyeuristic instincts. There is an undeniable emotional component to these pictures that can’t be disregarded. It is unfathomable to imagine the anguish the Bernard family must feel. …

… But on the debate over the substance of these pictures, the press has one overriding question to ask: Do the photos help citizens better understand the story of the war in Afghanistan?

Obviously, they do.

Jennifer Rubin comments on Elliott Abrams reply to Jimmy Carter’s latest “peace” proposal.

The Washington Post’s editors afford Elliott Abrams space to dismantle Jimmy Carter’s vile op-ed (which appeared in the Post over the weekend) accusing Israel of maintaining a “ghetto” for Palestinians and single-handedly preventing an outbreak of peace in the Middle East. Abrams explains that Carter’s anti-Israel rant ignored polling data that showed an uptick in Palestinians’ sense of personal security and also overlooked the 7 percent growth in GDP (”a rate of growth that would be far in excess of ours — or Israel’s”). In painting Israel as somehow holding Gaza hostage, Carter also ignored geography (Gaza is not an “enclave” of Israel) and all the relevant recent history, including the Israelis’ withdrawal from Gaza, which earned them only a shower of missiles and a war.

Abrams concludes:

Most inaccurate of all, and most bizarre, is Carter’s claim that “a total freeze of settlement expansion is the key” to a peace agreement. Not a halt to terrorism, not the building of Palestinian institutions, not the rule of law in the West Bank, not the end of Hamas rule in Gaza — no, the sole “key” is Israeli settlements. Such a conclusion fits with Carter’s general approach, in which there are no real Palestinians, just victims of Israel. . . . Carter fantasizes about a “nonviolent civil rights struggle” that bears no relationship to the terrorist violence that has plagued Palestinian society, and killed Israelis, for decades. Carter’s portrait demonizes Israelis and, not coincidentally, it infantilizes Palestinians, who are accorded no real responsibility for their fate or future. If this is “the Elders’ view of the Middle East,” we and our friends in that region are fortunate that this group of former officials is no longer in power.

So the question remains: can Carter be this ignorant? Well, it would be hard to miss so much recent history and avoid so many facts unless you were trying. …

Jennifer Rubin also gives us the blow-by-blow on Round 2 of Carter v. Abrams.

Unbelievably, Jimmy Carter returns for round two in his debate in the Washington Post with Elliott Abrams. Having already been eviscerated in round one, Carter can’t resist the urge to go back for more. He pleads that Abrams is arguing that Palestinians enjoy “halcyon days.” (He did? No, but Carter isn’t a stickler for facts.) And Carter again argues that those settlements are really Israel’s “worst mistake.” Not much of a retort, is it?

Certainly Carter should have quit while he was behind. Abrams responds that “Jimmy Carter continues his practice of assuming that his travelogues constitute evidence and dismissing data that contradict his claims. This will persuade few people. I did not suggest that life was wonderful in the West Bank, only that it is not getting worse.” Abrams then rather bluntly makes the key argument, one consistently overlooked not only by Carter but also by the J Street crowd, and at least for now by the Obama administration:

What puts Carter’s goal of a two-state solution at risk is not settlements, but terrorism. It is terrorism that prevents Israel from leaving the West Bank entirely in Palestinian hands today, for Israelis learned a lesson after leaving Gaza and South Lebanon. A negotiated settlement is still possible, and it does not require a settlement freeze; instead it requires that Palestinian terrorists stop trying to kill Israelis, or that a Palestinian government be in place that is ready, willing, and able to prevent them from succeeding. …

The Wall Street Journal reports on a surprising addition to the Russian high school curriculum.

MOSCOW — Russia has made a once-banned book recounting the brutality and despair of the Soviet Gulag required reading in the country’s schools, the Education Ministry said in a statement Wednesday.

The ministry said excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 epic “The Gulag Archipelago” have been added to the curriculum for high-school students. The book was banned by Soviet censors, sparking Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s retreat into exile.

The decision announced Wednesday was taken due to “the vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history” contained in Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s work, the ministry said.

The move comes despite Russian moves over the past decade to restore some Soviet symbols and, liberals say, glorify Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. …

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s Take on the consequences we are seeing from Obama’s disastrous foreign policy.

…Well, I think this marks the complete collapse of Obama’s Iran policy. Let’s remember the premise was you be nice to our adversaries, you extend a hand, and you go around the world on an apology tour.

And the administration said behind the scenes, you can’t see the results now, but in time the fruits will be there. Well, let’s look at the harvest.

You get Obama saying he wants to meet unconditionally with the Iranians. He holds his tongue when demonstrators are being shot in the street as a way to keep open channels with the regime, even though it sullies America’s reputation of supporting democrats, especially oppressed democrats, around the world. …

…He does all of that, and what is his reward? The president of Iran announces oh, yes, I will speak with Obama, but it has to be in front of the world media, and it will be a debate. And incidentally, the nuclear issue is closed. It is not an issue.

So what does Obama get for that sweet handshake and exchange of books with Chavez at the summit? Chavez arrives in Iran, he makes an alliance, and he promises to supply gasoline. Why is that important? Because the one area where Iran is really weak is in refined petroleum. It has got a lot of crude.

But that’s where we would be applying our sanctions if they don’t stop their nuclear program. So what Chavez is doing is undermining in advance the only remaining economic sanction.

All of this for what the Obama administration calls “smart power.” It’s dumb diplomacy.

Jonah Goldberg posts on the writings of green fascist Thomas Friedman.

Mark beat me to it, but I must put in my two cents. Thomas Friedman writes:

“Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.”

Our one-party democracy is worse….

So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman’s intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are “drawbacks” to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these “drawbacks” pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America. …

Kenneth Anderson, at the Volokh Conspiracy, also comments on the Friedman article.

…There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today … Our one-party democracy is worse.

It is characteristic of Thomas Friedman’s thought to move from particular issues of policy to sweeping conclusions about the Nature of Man and God and the Universe, typically based around some attractively packaged metaphor – flat earth, hot earth, etc. Rarely, however, has he been quite so clear about the directness of the connections he sees between his preferred set of substantive outcomes; his contempt for American democratic processes that have, despite all, managed to hang in there for, I don’t know, a few times the length of time between the Cultural Revolution and today; and his schoolgirl crush on autocratic elites because they are able to impose from above. …

Jack Fowler, National Review publisher, links to a Sarah Palin WSJ Op-Ed blasting ObamaCare.

Here’s Sarah! Pickerhead admits to disappointment when she resigned, but if it means she can engage like this, then maybe it was a good idea.

… President Obama argues in his op-ed that Democrats’ proposals “will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable.” Of course consumer protection sounds like a good idea. And it’s true that insurance companies can be unaccountable and unresponsive institutions—much like the federal government. That similarity makes this shift in focus seem like nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention away from the details of the Democrats’ proposals—proposals that will increase our deficit, decrease our paychecks, and increase the power of unaccountable government technocrats.

Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.

Democrats have never seriously considered such ideas, instead rushing through their own controversial proposals. After all, they don’t need Republicans to sign on: Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency. But if passed, the Democrats’ proposals will significantly alter a large sector of our economy. They will not improve our health care. They will not save us money. And, despite what the president says, they will not “provide more stability and security to every American.”

We often hear such overblown promises from Washington. With first principles in mind and with the facts in hand, tell them that this time we’re not buying it.

Chris Edwards at Cato-at-Liberty.org compares federal government and private sector salaries.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.

The George W. Bush years were very lucrative for federal workers. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66 percent higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector.

…In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197, which compared to an average $49,935 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). The figure shows that the federal pay advantage (the gap between the lines) is steadily increasing.

…the federal advantage is even more pronounced when worker benefits are included. In 2008, federal worker compensation averaged a remarkable $119,982, which was more than double the private sector average of $59,909.

What is going on here? Members of Congress who have large numbers of federal workers in their districts relentlessly push for expanding federal worker compensation. Also, the Bush administration had little interest in fiscal restraint, and it usually got rolled by the federal unions. The result has been an increasingly overpaid elite of government workers, who are insulated from the economic reality of recessions and from the tough competitive climate of the private sector.

It’s time to put a stop to this. Federal wages should be frozen for a period of years, at least until the private-sector economy has recovered and average workers start seeing some wage gains of their own. At the same time, gold-plated federal benefit packages should be scaled back as unaffordable given today’s massive budget deficits. There are many qualitative benefits of government work—such as extremely high job security—so taxpayers should not have to pay for such lavish government pay packages.

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Thomas Sowell reaches a reasonable conclusion to the question of why Obamacare will not be enacted until 2013.

…One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess– for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years– more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?

If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don’t we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to “hurry up and wait” on something that is literally a matter of life and death?

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it. …

Robert Samuelson reports that indications are for a slow recovery from the recession, but there is still much that is uncertain.

…”The 1982 recession was largely caused by the desire to break the back of inflation,” says economist Nigel Gault of IHS. “Once the [Federal Reserve] was comfortable it had broken inflation, it lowered interest rates, and economic growth took off.” Interest-sensitive sectors—autos and housing—propelled recovery. By contrast, today’s slump results from the financial crisis, Gault says. The Fed has already cut interest rates, which will probably go up. As overborrowed households repay debt, their spending will be sluggish. The weak recovery then retards new jobs. …

…Of course, today’s bleak economic forecasts could be wrong—just as upbeat forecasts before the financial crisis were wrong. Some economists are warming to this view. “Global manufacturers cut output too deeply,” says David Hensley of JPMorgan Chase. “People thought we might be headed into another depression.” Here and abroad, he says, companies are reversing previous cutbacks. “Businesses overshot. They’ll snap back [in hiring]; that will fuel consumer spending.” One good omen: in August the number of job openings online rose 5 percent, reports the Conference Board.

Job creation has been a historic strength of the American economy. Its capacity to remain so will increasingly frame the economic debate: between those who want more government and those who want less; between those who fear budget deficits and those who favor more economic “stimulus”; between those who see meager wage gains as impeding recovery and those who see them as encouraging hiring. On Labor Day 2009, future jobs are the gigantic question mark hanging over the American economy.

Victor Davis Hanson comments that the cries of racism by successful people demonstrates that Obama is not the post-racial president that many were expecting.

Van Jones in his final communiqué says, “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” I have not watched the now supposedly infamous Beck exposures, but I am curious what exactly constitutes a “vicious smear campaign.” Did Jones or did not Jones in public and in interviews compare the president of the United States to a crack-cocaine addict, assert that white people are polluting the ghetto, that only white students commit mass murders in the public schools, that Republicans are a**holes, and sign a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration’s purported role in causing 9/11?

The Jones mess brings up a larger issue. Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last ninth months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard-law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming invective episode. Harvard-law educated Michelle Obama explained Justice Sotomayor’s unease at Princeton by comparing her own ordeal there. Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel who had serially dodged his tax obligations claims that white angst explains his IRS problems. New York governor David Paterson blames his sinking polls on white racism, more prominent than ever in the age of Obama. Now Yale law graduate Van Jones claims smears did him in. The list could be easily expanded.

What we are seeing is a very unfortunate turn of events in which racism is now the guaranteed retreat position once many prominent African-American elites find themselves in controversy. The problem is that the rest of the population of all races and classes looks at this privileged cohort and does not really detect bias or ill-treatment in their past or present circumstances, but rather remarkable tolerance and race-blind attitudes, as exemplified by their career successes. …

Stephen Spruiell posts in The Corner that the “green jobs czar” position should go.

To buy into the “green jobs” scam, you must have an unshakeable faith in the ability of the government to create a viable industry from whole cloth, because there is no commercial demand for the services these green-collar workers would provide. We don’t have to guess about the future of green jobs; we can look to the ethanol industry.

In 2005, after decades of subsidization, the government finally mandated the consumption of ethanol. It upped the mandate in 2007. This, plus high gas prices, was the boost the industry was looking for. Ethanol plants started springing up all over the Midwest.

Corn prices went up to meet the government-mandated demand for ethanol. Then oil prices fell, bringing the price of ethanol down with it. The industry’s profit-margins disappeared. VeraSun, one of the largest ethanol makers, is in Chapter 11. Last December, the industry asked Congress for a bailout.

Again, this is an industry whose customers are required by law to buy their product, yet it couldn’t survive in the commercial marketplace. Those green jobs are now disappearing. Before he was hoisted with his own petard, Van Jones was in the business of selling illusions — costly ones, too. It’s good that he’s gone, but it would be better if the position of green jobs czar went with him.

Ed Morrissey posts on the lack of reporting on the Van Jones scandal by the MSM, until the story could not be ignored.

If people relied on the mainstream media, especially print media, to keep up to date on the government, then they must have quite a shock this morning with the resignation of Van Jones.  For instance, the New York Times makes its first mention of the Jones controversy this morning — by reporting his resignation…

…When did the 9/11 Truther connection come to light?  Jim Hoft reported it Thursday, and it flew through the blogosphere.  Even more Truther connections came out the next day.  When did the New York Times — and to be fair, most other newspapers in the country — get around to reporting in print that a paranoid conspiracy theorist had a job as a White House czar?  Today, after he quit.

Byron York gives us the round-up:

Coverage of the Jones controversy was a case study of some of the deep divisions within the media. Fox News’ Glenn Beck devoted program after program to Jones’ past, and a number of conservative blogs were responsible for finding some of Jones’ most inflammatory statements. Yet even as the controversy grew — and even after Jones himself apologized for some of his words — several of the nation’s top media outlets failed to report the story. As late as Friday, as the Jones matter began to boil over, it had not been reported at all in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Although the Post and CBS went on to report the Jones story on Saturday, the Times did not inform its readers about the Jones matter until after Jones resigned.

So much for speaking truth to power, eh? …

Roger Simon posts that one of the New York Times articles was fixated on Glenn Beck.

…There’s some reference to Beck’s advertising woes (a subject with which the Times should be familiar) due to Beck’s having called Obama a “racist.” But the substance is that Beck got the scoop. His numbers are going up and NYT’s continue to go down as the Newspaper of Record searches for a new economic model.

Part of the reason for this is pretty obvious. People trust Beck and they don’t trust the NYT. Beck may be biased, but he’s honest about it. The NYT persists in the illusion of even-handed reporting, even when, in a case like the Van Jones scandal, they clearly decided not to run the story for political reasons, but don’t have the cojones to admit it. Or is there another reason? We’re waiting.

Victor Davis Hanson makes a good point about America’s left-wing radicals.

As Hugo Chavez continues to shut down the media and silence critics, Oliver Stone—who would never be allowed, if he were a Venezuelan filmmaker, to direct as he does in the states—praises Chavez’s coerced socialism.

Michael Moore, known for hard-nosed distribution and profit-making, announces, again like Stone in conjunction with hyping a profit-making movie, that capitalism (for others) is dead.

Van Jones, solidly middle class and Yale-educated, among other things, pontificated about revolution, an apartheid America, redistributing wealth, a–hole Republicans and George Bush’s involvement in 9/11, in between jetting between conferences, espousing his green jobs promotion that hyped book sales and his own career.

What is strange about all this chic-radicalism is how would-be revolutionaries that wish to dismantle America as we know it and/or emulate failed systems abroad, always do so from comfort, security, affluence, and freedom of choice unique to America and Europe, suggesting that radical politics and those who agitate for them are sort of a fashion statement, aimed to resonate among particular elite leftist audiences and to bring dividends from them, but not to be taken too seriously as guides in their own lives.

Even though it pre-dated the Jones resignation, The American Spectator’s questions about whom in the White House overrode suspected Secret Service objections to Mr. Jones. are still germane.

Here are the questions Glenn Beck and others should be asking, based on my own personal experience:

• Who on the White House staff cleared Van Jones?

• What was that person’s connection to Van Jones or Mr. Jones’s political sponsor?

• Who, exactly, was Mr. Jones’ sponsor for this job? How much money did he/she contribute to the Obama campaign?

• Did the Secret Service notify anyone on the White House staff — or the President or First Lady or Vice President Biden — that Mr. Jones had an arrest record on file with police in two cities?

• Did the Secret Service protest any of this, objecting to Mr. Jones’ clearance?

• If the Secret Service did object, who overruled them? The President? The Chief of Staff? Someone else?

• If the answer to this last question is yes, and the Secret Service was overruled by the President or someone else, why did this happen? …

And we have National Review Shorts. Here are two:

Holder’s Justice Department also quietly killed an ongoing pay-for-play corruption investigation of New Mexico governor Bill Richardson — a key Obama ally whose nomination to be commerce secretary the probe derailed. Though the Richardson investigation was being conducted by the U.S. attorney in New Mexico and a grand jury, the Associated Press reported that top DOJ officials in Washington pulled the plug. That would reverse Justice Department protocols, which call for local control of public-corruption cases in order to avoid the appearance of politicized law enforcement. The dropping of the investigation comes on the heels of Holder’s dismissal of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party (one defendant was an official Democratic-party poll-watcher). During the Bush years, congressional Democrats worked themselves into a frenzy over the mere, never-substantiated possibility that politics would compromise justice. What will they do now that it’s actually happening?

Taro Aso, the outgoing Japanese prime minister, has done something remarkable. In a ceremony marking the end of World War II, he said, “Our country inflicted tremendous damage and suffering on many countries, particularly people in Asia. As a representative of the Japanese people, I humbly express my remorse for the victims, along with deep regret.” And he vowed that Japan would never again behave as it had. There are times for national apologies, and times when such apologies are stupid or cheap, meant only to flatter the apologizers — President Obama’s recent utterances in Europe and elsewhere come to mind. At that World War II ceremony, Aso performed well.

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In the London Times, Sheera Frenkel recounts the story of a homeless Holocaust survivor in Israel. There is government ineptness involved, but the story has a happy ending for Yevgeny Bistrizky.

More than 50,000 Holocaust survivors live below the poverty line in Israel. Mr Bistrizky’s is the only known case of a survivor who became homeless.

The Latet organisation, which provides aid to the needy, discovered him after concerned residents contacted the group. They were astonished to learn that he had been living in the dog park for eight months, cleaning himself with a garden hose inside the rubbish room of a building, and hoping that the faeces-littered park would deter people from trying to attack him in his sleep.

Latet was unable to find him a suitable flat and contacted a newspaper to publish his story. Since then it has received hundreds of calls from people offering food, clothing and rooms in their homes.

One company offered a flat in a building for the elderly. The room is sparse but clean. The only homely touch is two Ukrainian calendars with photographs of kittens above his single bed.

Mr Bistrizky said: “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll wake up and it will all be gone. That I’ll be back on the park bench and this will all be a dream”.

Small but wiry, he moves gingerly around the room. His blue eyes light up as he points out the items people have donated: a microwave, stereo, gas burner and refrigerator.

His hands linger over the objects, stopping at an armchair that he placed by the window. In the afternoon a breeze wafts in: “It’s my favourite thing, my favourite time — this wind,” he says, using the Hebrew word for breeze with a brief, but proud smile. “I am so happy, so thankful to be given all this.”

Michael Potemra, in The Corner, comments on an interesting new book.

When you pick up a book titled The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible Is Scientifically Accurate, you expect a fundamentalist attack on the theory of evolution, or at least a plea for Intelligent Design theory. In fact, the author, Andrew Parker, believes in evolution. A scientist based at Oxford University and the Natural History Museum in London, Parker is not a Bible literalist, and he dismisses Intelligent Design as a “concocted theory” characterized by “flawed logic” and “forced” theorizing. The book describes the remarkable similarity between the order of events described in the first chapter of Genesis and the scientifically known series of macro-evolutionary steps in the history of life on earth. Parker asks how a text written some 2,500 years before the development of modern science could have captured this order of events, and says it was either a lucky guess or a matter of inspiration.

The book is an interesting attempt to make sense of this ancient text: the creation account of Genesis 1 as a combination of divine inspiration with the limited thought- and language-forms of a particular (in this case, scientifically backward) culture. It makes a persuasive case for a deep wisdom behind the words.

David Warren listed some of Obama’s “shadow cabinet” of czars in an article for the Ottawa Citizen that Pickings posted on August 16th. He gave a quick rundown of some of the more colorful characters that are pulling government salaries without clear oversight or accountability.

…Tell you the candid truth, I don’t like “nice” people. Conversely, I have a sneaking regard for real political enemies who are prepared to state candidly what they are about. Which is why I mentioned Obama’s long list of policy czars, above — people like John Holdren (1970s advocate of forced abortions and mass sterilization) the new science czar, Van Jones (declared Communist) the new green jobs czar, Vivek Kundra (convicted shoplifter) the new infotech czar, Adolfo Carrion (pay-for-play scandals) the new urban subsidies czar, Nancy DePerle (lobbyist-to-regulator) the new health czar, Cass Sunstein (behaviourist and animal rights wacko) the new regulatory czar, and so on.

There are dozens of these, altogether. They are Obama’s “shadow cabinet,” with the advantage over his more presentable official cabinet that they can avoid congressional scrutiny in almost everything they do. They didn’t need to face the Senate confirmation revelations that lost Obama so many of his earliest cabinet appointments. A mere Internet search for quotes reveals that many of them are capable of great candour, at least in the radical leftist environments from which most of them came.

The mainstream media focus is nevertheless not on them — rich and easy pickings had they been Republican appointments…

Warren gave us the prologue, and now the first chapter of czar-gate has been written.

Roger Simon wonders if there are constitutional issues that need to be addressed.

…Barack Obama’s Czar System – which has recently come under scrutiny for some repellent, even paranoid, statements by his “Green Czar” Van Jones, a onetime “9-11 truther” who calls Republicans “assholes” on television – is an entirely different matter. This is directly an affair of state and seemingly an end run around the Separation of Powers. According to an article recently published at Examiner.com by Patrick McMahon, there are now thirty-one of these czars, covering areas from terrorism to domestic violence. Congress has not vetted a single one of them, as far as I know. Indeed, with only a couple of exceptions (Dennis Ross, etc.), we know who few of them are. Are others as extreme as Mr. Jones? Who knows? All we know is that they are there and that Obama (or someone) approved them. We don’t know exactly what their authority is and what they are supposed to do ultimately. They are a completely new part of our Executive Branch, invented by the President and/or his advisors. Was this what the Framers intended when they created the three branches of our government with all the checks and balances?

Unlike Mr. Jones, I am no lawyer, and obviously not a Constitutional one, but it strikes me there is a problem here. And it could be very embarrassing to Mr. Obama. No doubt this is why, as Byron York points out, the mainstream media has been so reluctant to cover this story, only the WaPo and CBS chiming in at this point, although they were late to the party and relatively perfunctory. The former Newspaper of Record has yet to log in. Had Bush appointed thirty-one czars outside the normal Congressional approval system the MSM would have been all over it like the proverbial wet suit, declaring a coup d’etat in the making. But, as of now, the MSM has imposed omerta. It is Labor Day weekend. We shall see what happens next week.

Eugene Volokh ponders the word choice of “czar”.

Others have pointed out that having offices called “czars” is an odd naming choice for a democracy. But czars weren’t just authoritarians. They were ultimately authoritarians who left their country far poorer than their more democratic counterparts, lost a world war, and of course paved the way for an even worse system of government. The label “czar” thus doesn’t historically connect to a model of strongman effectiveness — it connects to a model of strongman failure.

(Of course, I recognize that czars in the federal government don’t have even a fraction of the truly dictatorial power of their namesakes. But the label was used for a reason, presumably to evoke the positive connotation of strong authority that Gets The Job Done. Yet the specific strong authority that the label evokes proved to be unable to get the job done, at least under anything approaching modern conditions — under any sensible definition of “job,” possibly with the significant but narrow exception of the job of defeating Napoleon — and unable in a way that culminated with a disaster of historic proportions.)

Ilya Somin comments on the resignation of Van Jones in Volokh Conspiracy.

The Obama Administration has appointed more czars than Romanov dynasty ever had. Now, however, one of those czars has been forced to resign. “Green jobs” czar Van Jones has resigned as a result of the controversy that arose after the discovery that he signed a 9/11 “Truther” petition back in 2004. Jones’ dubious excuse that he had not read the petition carefully before signing and that it didn’t reflect his real views failed to mollify the critics, especially given other inflammatory statements he has made.

Jones’ ridiculous beliefs probably aren’t typical of those of the administration’s many other czars. However, the fact that a person like him could be appointed to an important czar position does highlight one of the weaknesses of the czar system: by circumventing the normal appointment and confirmation process, it makes it more likely that a poorly qualified person or one with ridiculous policy views will be put in charge of important issues. Unfortunately, not all such dubious czars can be as easily exposed as Jones was. And that is just one of several flaws of the czar system. …

Jennifer Rubin explains that there are several stories here.

Not since Bob Irsay packed up the Baltimore Colts in the dead of night has a high-profile retreat in darkness gotten so much attention. Van Jones was shoved under the Obama bus, as everyone knew would occur, with an announcement coming at midnight. The Wall Street Journal enumerates his baggage, enough to fill a small commuter plane:

Mr. Jones has been in the center of a maelstrom on conservative radio and television talk shows since a video surfaced last week showing him calling Republicans a vulgar epithet. Since then, other controversies have emerged, such as Mr. Jones saying black students would have never committed a massacre such as the one at Colorado’s Columbine High School. His name also appeared on a 2004 petition calling for the government to investigate its own culpability in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. None of those issues happened after Mr. Jones joined the administration.

There are a number of story lines percolating here: the mainstream media’s refusal to report on the incident until he left; the mystery as to how such a figure wound up in the White House; the ham-fisted performance of late by an administration that allowed a story to build and its critics to claim victory; and the substantive issue concerning the proliferation of czars who evade congressional confirmation and oversight – and apparently get a lesser level of vetting. And then there is the familiar White House reaction — no apology, no explanation, and no remorse.

Some of the punditocracy — Juan Williams, for example – are peeved we are spending any time on this. And true enough, if the White House had a near perfect vetting record, or if the president did not have a reputation for hanging out with the likes of Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, whose worldview bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Jones, this might be a nonstory. …

Charles Krauthammer recounts the hole that Obama has dug for himself, and ends with these thoughts.

…After a disastrous summer — mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing — Obama is in trouble.

Let’s be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He’s not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.

But what has occurred — irreversibly — is this: He’s become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He’s regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.

For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform — and his own standing — with yet another prime-time speech.

But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises — mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama’s supreme self-regard may never adapt.

In this article, David Warren writes “nature notes” about trees, environmentalists, natural history, and field guides.

…Trees, as I am just reminded, occupy three entire divisions of the plant kingdom: the Pinophyta (conifers, roughly), the Magnoliophyta (the broadleafs), and the Ginkgophyta.

This last has only one surviving member, the Ginkgo tree, seemingly related more closely to ferns and mosses and algae and cycads than to other trees, especially in their means of reproduction.

According to the fossil record, our Ginkgo went extinct two million years ago. (Ha!) There were other Ginkgo species, farther back in the planet’s history, all long gone. Yet the tree we have is as old as dragonflies and paddlefish: hundreds of millions of years. It was not found wild, but only as a relic of ancient Chinese scholars’ gardens. Where they found it, we don’t know.

The Ginkgo is a tree that positively flourishes in highly polluted, inner urban environments, and seems to benefit from irradiation (four of them famously survived Hiroshima). It stands, as Sibley’s guide somehow does, at the very intersection of the utterly alien, and the utterly familiar. One could almost hug it.

In Slate, Daniel Gross gives us a preview of the coming crisis in commercial real estate investment.

For most of its 34-year life, the Hancock Tower, which looms above its brick neighbors in Boston’s Back Bay, has been the sort of place where money comes to be managed and protected. Its tenants include Ernst & Young and the investment firm Highfields Capital. The I.M. Pei-designed sliver of glass doesn’t seem like a place where several hundred million dollars can vanish in a few months.

But that’s exactly what happened at the 62-story building, now under its fourth owner in six years. In January, an aggressive young wheeler-dealer defaulted on a portion of the building’s $1.3 billion mortgage just 24 months after buying it. In March, two firms that had purchased chunks of the tower’s second mortgage for pennies on the dollar assumed control, essentially rendering up to $400 million of debt worthless. The Hancock’s market value is now about $700 million—half what it appraised for less than two years ago.

Scott Lawlor, the entrepreneur who was forced to concede control of the Hancock Tower, could be called a “poster boy for everything that went wrong,” as one well-placed real estate expert put it. But the trim, straightforward executive is more like a whipping boy. For the tale of the Hancock Tower isn’t a morality play or an example of a bubble-era rise and fall. Rather, it’s an omen. During the credit boom, the same forces that led to $600,000 subprime loans on tract houses in Modesto, Calif., spurred billions of dollars of reckless lending on urban office towers and suburban strip malls. As a result, the nation’s offices, hotels, and malls now carry about $3.5 trillion in debt. Three years after the housing market peaked, falling rents and rising defaults—no surprise given the economy has lost 7 million jobs since December 2007—are posing a new threat to the still-fragile banking system and could inflict billions of dollars in fresh losses. The Hancock Tower was one of the first high-profile deals to go sour—but it won’t be the last. The Blackstone Group, one of the nation’s leading private-equity firms, has written down the value of its mammoth real estate portfolio by an average of 45 percent from the original cost. General Growth Properties, a pioneer of the shopping mall that carried $27 billion in debt, filed for Chapter 11 in April. …

J. Hoberman reviews Mike Judge’s new movie, Extract, for the Village Voice.

Here for Labor Day—a comedy about the hilarity and heartbreak of running a small business. A decade after his succès d’estime Office Space (and a few months following the termination of his long-running animated series King of the Hill), Mike Judge returns with a complementary social satire: Extract.

Where Office Space was a comedy of employee disaffection, Extract looks at the struggle between labor and capital from the other side of the desk. Named for flavorings produced by protagonist Joel Reynold (Jason Bateman) in his small factory, Extract is sweeter than Judge’s scabrous and, in most markets unreleased, Idiocracy. It’s hardly less concerned with putting a frame around stupidity—opening with an apparently ditzy babe (Mila Kunis) fleecing two music-store dudes for a pricey electric guitar—but where Idiocracy held up a grotesque mirror to American mass culture and politics, Extract seems to be designed to give capitalism a human face. …

Dana Stevens reviews the movie for Slate.

The tag line for Extract (Miramax), the fourth feature film from Mike Judge, promises “a comedy with a flavor of its own.” That’s certainly true. Judge cultists will recognize the Beavis and Butt-Head auteur’s signature blend of social satire, broad physical comedy, and lovingly observed middle-American stupidity. But Extract’s particular flavor profile may strike some Judge-heads as overly sweet—it’s the sunniest and least angry of his films—while viewers less disposed to love his work may find it simply bland. Personally, I found Extract to be Judge’s best nonanimated work yet. For all of Office Space‘s comic invention, that movie had a hole at its center: Ron Livingston’s protagonist was an uninteresting guy played by (sorry, Ron) an uninteresting actor. And though Idiocracy was brilliant at extrapolating current trends into a dystopic American future (one day, we will water our crops with sports drinks!), it ultimately fell victim to its own high concept.

Extract is more modest in its ambitions, a 98-minute goof with little more on its mind than cracking us up. After the past few years of comedies in the Apatow mold, it’s refreshing to find a movie that doesn’t combine that simple goal with a secondary agenda to gross us out (babies crowning! naked fat guys with flaccid penises!), or to make us cry, or to teach us life lessons. For all of Judge’s comic absurdity, his universe is as familiar as an Arby’s drive-through—I grew up in the suburb of a Southern city much like the unnamed town where Extract is set. The hotel-chain sports bars and pretentiously named subdivisions where the action unfolds are both cartoonish versions of American alienation and sociologically precise portraits of places we’ve all been. …

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In the Wall Street Journal, Dan Senor and Peter Wehner urge Republicans to back Obama on Afghanistan.

…The president deserves credit for his commitment earlier this year to order an additional 17,000 troops for Afghanistan, as well as his decision to act on the recommendation of Gen. David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to replace the U.S. commander in Afghanistan with Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

These were tough and courageous decisions. The president’s actions have clearly unsettled some members of his own party, who hoped he would begin to unwind America’s commitment in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama not only ignored their counsel; he doubled down his commitment. There should therefore be no stronger advocates for Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy than the GOP.

The war in Afghanistan is a crucial part of America’s broader struggle against militant Islam. If we were to fail in Afghanistan, it would have calamitous consequences for both Pakistan and American credibility. It would consign the people of Afghanistan to misery and hopelessness. And Afghanistan would once again become home to a lethal mix of terrorists and insurgents and a launching point for attacks against Western and U.S. interests. Neighboring governments—especially Pakistan’s with its nuclear weapons—could quickly be destabilized and collapse.

Progress and eventual success in Afghanistan—which is difficult but doable—would, when combined with a similar outcome in Iraq, constitute a devastating blow against jihadists and help stabilize a vital and volatile region.

…In addition, indifference or outright opposition to the war would smack of hypocrisy, given the Republican Party’s strong (and we believe admirable) support for President Bush’s post-9/11 policies, its robust support for America’s democratic allies, and its opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests. Republicans should stand for engagement with, rather than isolation from, the world. Strongly supporting the president on Afghanistan would also be a sign of grace on the part of Republicans. We know all too well how damaging it was to American foreign policy to face an opposition that was driven by partisan fury against our commander in chief. Republicans should never do to President Obama what many Democrats did to President Bush. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Fred Kagan’s article in the Wall Street Journal about the importance of the war in Afghanistan.

Fred Kagan sets out the strategic case for the war in Afghanistan in a must-read piece in the Wall Street Journal. He makes clear that the task at hand ”will be difficult” but is “no fool’s errand.” He does not shy away from examining the errors of the past, but his focus is on why we must persist in waging an increasingly unpopular war.

He explains:

Critics of the war have suggested we should draw down our troops and force Pakistan to play a larger role in eliminating radical extremists. American concerns about al Qaeda and Taliban operating from Pakistani bases have led to the conventional wisdom that Pakistan matters to the U.S. because of what it could do to help—or hurt—in Afghanistan. The conventional wisdom is wrong as usual.

Pakistan is important because it is a country of 180 million Muslims with nuclear weapons and multiple terrorist groups engaged in a mini-arms race and periodic military encounters with India—the world’s most populous state and one of America’s most important economic and strategic partners. Pakistan has made remarkable progress over the last year in its efforts against Islamist insurgent groups that threatened to destroy it. But the fight against those groups takes place on both sides of the border. The debate over whether to commit the resources necessary to succeed in Afghanistan must recognize the extreme danger that a withdrawal or failure in Afghanistan would pose to the stability of Pakistan. …

Jennifer Rubin also comments on the Carter trip to the Middle East.

Jimmy Carter brings us his report, fresh from his Middle East visit with his fellow ”Elders,” including the Medal of Freedom prize-winning duo of Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. Carter and crew go to the Middle East and see “despair.”

Not the despair of Jews in Israel who would like to live in peace with their neighbors and have tried repeatedly to give the Palestinians their own state. Not the despair of victims of Hamas violence or of honor killings. Not the despair of the Palestinian people who would like a government free from corruption. Not the despair of Jews who find it incomprehensible that teaching the Holocaust is considered to be a human-rights violation by Hamas. Not the despair of Israel and its neighbors who are contemplating a nuclear-armed Iran and a timid U.S. response. And certainly not the despair that Israelis must feel as a U.S. administration renounces past obligations and delights in picking a fight with its ally.

No, all Carter sees and all he writes about (I know, you’ll be shocked) is the “despair that settlement expansion is continuing apace.” And he divines that Israel is bent on a one-state solution, aiming to “colonize” East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Using unmistakable Holocaust terminology, he terms Gaza a “ghetto.” How perfectly Carter-esque. And Robinson-esque. (Anyone in the White House still think that Medal of Freedom thing was a grand idea?) …

Also in Contentions, Rick Richman fills us in on another mind-blowing foreign policy decision, this time concerning Honduras.

…The State Department announced today it has formally determined that what happened on June 28 in Honduras was a “coup d’etat” requiring the termination under U.S. law of a broad range of assistance to the poverty-stricken country. The announcement cites “the continued resistance to the adoption of the San Jose Accord by the de facto regime and continuing failure to restore democratic, constitutional rule to Honduras.”

The San Jose Accord would require Honduras to ignore multiple rulings by its Supreme Court that the removal of former President Zelaya was constitutional (and done pursuant to its order, not by military action taken without prior legal authorization). It would require Honduras to act contrary to the consensus of all organs of the Honduran government, including its Congress and representatives of the church and civil society—a consensus communicated to the foreign ministers of the Organization of American States when they visited Honduras on August 24-25 and heard from them all.

It is a strange definition of coup d’etat that includes action authorized by the Honduran Supreme Court, ratified by its Congress, and supported by a consensus of its political parties and civil society. As for the “continuing failure to restore democratic, constitutional rule,” there is an election scheduled for November. A vote of the people is not generally considered characteristic of a coup d’etat, and returning Zelaya to serve a few more months (since even he now concedes he cannot hold a “referendum” to allow him to serve longer) would not seem necessary to “restore democratic, constitutional rule.” …

Abe Greenwald has choice words for the State Department’s inappropriate response to Honduras.

Hillary Clinton has given a lovely gift to Honduran strongman Manuel Zelaya: “the State Department has announced it will cut aid to Honduras, contingent upon the return to office of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, with whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Thursday.”

So we’ll cut off aid to a democratic country in order to punish it for defending its democracy. How many ways, big and small, does this shame the United States?

It vitiates what little enthusiasm President Obama has shown for the promotion of democracy around the globe. Who cares if he said in Ghana that “governments that respect the will of their own people are more prosperous, more stable, and more successful than governments that do not.” He respects the will of the ruler who creates his own self-sustaining rules. …

…We’re no longer merely apologizing to the bad guys; we’re encouraging them.

In the Wall Street Journal, John Fund interviews David Walker, the GAO head under Clinton and Bush. Mr. Walker says the deficits are coming.

…Mr. Walker’s own speeches are vivid and clear. “We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a savings deficit, a value-of-the-dollar deficit and a leadership deficit,” he tells one group. “We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease.”

Mr. Walker identifies the disease as having a basic cause: “Washington is totally out of touch and out of control,” he sighs. “There is political courage there, but there is far more political careerism and people dodging real solutions.” He identifies entrenched incumbency as a real obstacle to change. “Members of Congress ensure they have gerrymandered seats where they pick the voters rather than the voters picking them and then they pass out money to special interests who then make sure they have so much money that no one can easily challenge them,” he laments. He believes gerrymandering should be curbed and term limits imposed if for no other reason than to inject some new blood into the system. On campaign finance, he supports a narrow constitutional amendment that would bar congressional candidates from accepting contributions from people who can’t vote for them: “If people can’t vote in a district not their own, should we allow them to spend unlimited money on behalf of someone across the country?” …

…He suggests giving presidents the power to make line-item cuts in budgets that would then require a majority vote in Congress to override. He would also want private-sector accounting standards extended to pensions, health programs and environmental costs. “Social Security reform is a layup, much easier than Medicare,” he told me. He believes gradual increases in the retirement age, a modest change in cost-of-living payments and raising the cap on income subject to payroll taxes would solve its long-term problems. …

Stuart Taylor, in the National Journal, thinks that the Justice Department’s review of terrorist interrogations will not lead to prosecutions.

…The bottom line is that it would be exceedingly difficult for Holder and Obama to justify going after low-level CIA officials for abusing detainees in ways no more brutal than the methods approved by the high-level officials who will apparently be given a pass as long as they heeded Justice’s legal guidance.

And it would be impossible for Holder and Obama to go after the Bush team — an unprecedented criminalization by one administration of its predecessor’s national security policies — without antagonizing most of the 75 percent of voters who call themselves conservative or moderate.

Such a move would tear the country apart, doom Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda, and possibly make him a one-term president. All for the sake of bringing prosecutions with virtually no chance of convictions.

Surely Holder and Obama understand this. And neither seems inclined to commit political suicide.

In Contentions, Peter Wehner comments on the Obamacare re-launch.

…the president will give a speech to a joint session of Congress next Wednesday, in an effort to “re-launch” ObamaCare. His words will soothe our fears and heal the wounds caused by what Politico rightly calls a “brutal August recess.” So the idea, it appears, is to have Obama continue to say what he’s been saying—but to say it more often and more “prescriptively.” The underlying assumption is the public just hasn’t heard enough from Barack Obama on health care.

If Obama really believes this is the reason his health-care effort is in critical condition, then he has lost touch with reality. Obama’s health-care ambitions are being shattered because what he wants to do would make things worse rather than better, and costlier rather than cheaper. President Obama is attempting to sell a product that is fundamentally defective and increasingly radioactive. Even if Team Obama were doing everything right—and it is not—it would find itself in a precarious position. It is reality, including numerous CBO analyses, that is doing the damage. Public relations has very little to do with it. …

John Carney in the blog Business Insider says the prez made the typical leftist mistake of economic determinism when he expected the GOP to line up behind big pharma and the insurance industry as they sold out.

… The Obama administration “expended great effort to line up the support of health-care insurers, pharmaceutical makers and care providers, believing that by keeping them around the table, they could win over Republicans and stop the kind of industry-led attacks that helped sink the Clinton plan,” writes the Journal team.

It was supposed to be a simple formula. Win over the health care industry shepherd, and the Republican will follow like sheep. But it didn’t work.

What seems to have gone wrong can be described as a failure of the imagination: Obama’s administration just never believed Republicans would stand up for their limited government principles if that meant opposing business interests. They were apparently assuming that Republicans and conservatives could be won over by winning over “business interests,” as if free market and anti-government positions were just rhetorical cover for policy making at the behest of business. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews a couple of things we might want to watch on TV.

The first soundheralding the arrival of the brand new “Melrose Place” (Tuesday, 9-10 p.m. EDT, on the CW)—the noise of an incessantly ringing cellphone— brings us up to date nicely. So does the frantic text-messaging of the premiere episode’s opening moments— dispatches sent by the diabolical Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton), well known to followers of the old “Melrose Place” as the landlady intimately ensnarled in the lives of the 20-something tenants there. In the old series, which ran from 1992 to 1999, land-line phones were still essential. Life and all vital connections managed to proceed, furthermore, without text-messaging. Nothing, though, can bring home the difference between that ’90s culture and today’s more starkly than those original episodes, where characters utter lines like “he wrote me a letter every single week.” Wrote a letter? In the “Melrose Place” of today, such a reference would have the quaintness of something from the Civil War era, whenever that was. …

David Harsanyi has fun with the upcoming Presidential address to schoolchildren.

…Moreover, if your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, they will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Who do you think they will be dealing with when they need that hip replacement in 60 years?) …

…Why should we deny that he can elevate our schoolchildren from the abyss so they can finally, after decades of neglect, learn again? And who better to dictate the lesson plan than the president’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, a man who left a Chicago school district with a meager 40 percent dropout rate?

Honestly, if I’m going to be badgered and browbeat by the president every day, kids should suffer a bit as well. The president has been treating the American people like schoolchildren for more than seven months — with another “major address” on health care coming right after he talks to the kids.

When my own brood comes home next week, I’ll explain that in this remarkable nation, anyone can become president — though, hopefully, they’ll choose something more constructive…

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Thomas Sowell comments on the Justice Department investigating the CIA. No hope here. Just audacity.

…Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about “upholding the law” but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.

There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot — and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

So many “rights” have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don’t meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn’t protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

Jennifer Rubin reaches a compelling conclusion about Obama’s spineless responses to outrageous actions.

…The Obama administration’s blasé attitude has raised speculation that we were in on the “deal” or that we share suspicions long held by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and others that maybe the wrong terrorist was convicted. But I think the explanation is simpler. Obama never gets very outraged about outrageous things, because that would require he do something.  And, yes, there is a double standard about who gets the tongue-lashings. (Peretz again: “It is not as if Obama is usually shy with emotional oratory, although he is rather shy in admonishing Muslims, a difficulty he seems not to have with the Israelis.”)

If we were full-throated in our condemnation of Iranian show trials, or the continued Syrian facilitation of terrorists who kill our troops in Iraq, or human rights in China (or anywhere), Obama might be expected to address the source of the outrage and confront the miscreants. This he does not do. So he looks down, shuffles his feet, offers only the most tepid words, and moves on. But others, primarily our adversaries, are watching. They see an irresolute and unconcerned American president. And they will act accordingly.

Since the new administration tries to blame everything on W, Karl Rove has fun pointing out the real cause of their troubles.

… The administration’s problems have been compounded by tactical mistakes. Allowing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to push for a Democrat-only bill shatters any claim Mr. Obama can make to bipartisanship, a core theme of his candidacy. Leaving the legislation’s drafting to Congress has tied the president’s fortunes to Mrs. Pelosi, who has a 25% approval rating nationwide, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose approval rating is 37% in Nevada.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) was inartful but basically correct when he said if Mr. Obama loses on health care, “it will be his Waterloo.” It would destroy confidence in the ability of Democrats to govern. Mr. Obama knows this, which is why he will stop at nothing to get a bill, any bill, on which the label “health-care reform” can be stuck.

Given the Democratic congressional margins, Mr. Obama has the votes to do it, but at huge costs to him and his party. Legislation that looks anything like the bill moving through the House will contain deeply unpopular provisions—including massive deficit spending, tax hikes and Medicare cuts—and create enormous ill will on Capitol Hill. This will be especially true if Democrats rely on parliamentary tricks to pass a bill in the Senate with 51 votes. The public’s reaction in August showed that the president is creating the conditions for a revolt against his party in the 2010 elections.

On the other hand, if Mr. Obama jettisons the public option, he may spark a revolt within his party. The Democratic base is already grumbling and could block a bill if it doesn’t include a public option.

Presidents always encounter rough patches. What is unusual is how soon Mr. Obama has hit his. He has used up almost all his goodwill in less than nine months, with the hardest work still ahead. At the year’s start, Democrats were cocky. At summer’s end, concern is giving way to despair. A perfect political storm is amassing, and heading straight for Democrats.

Ed Morrissey posts on Jake Tapper’s reporting of Obama’s “precipitous slide.”

How bad has Barack Obama’s slide in the polls become? So bad, Jake Tapper reports for ABC News, that the White House has abandoned the talk of mandates and now cast Obama as a courageous statesman willing to do the unpopular. Why, the world would look much different if Obama was concerned about mandates: …

Howard Kurtz recounts how a lot of the left-media are falling out of ObamaLove.

It is as inevitable in Washington as sweltering summers and steamy sex scandals.

A president is going to be smacked around from the moment he takes office and the uplifting rhetoric of campaign rallies meets the gritty reality of governing.

But the criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheerleading role during the campaign, some are bluntly questioning whether he’s up to the job.

If Obama is losing Paul Krugman, can the rest of the left be far behind?

“I’m concerned as to whether, in trying to reach out to the middle, he is selling out his base,” says Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. “I find myself saying, ‘Where’s that well-oiled Obama machine we saw last year?’ . . . Maybe he’s being a little too cool at this point.”  …

From abroad, Roger Simon looks at the current political landscape here and has some sage advice for the GOP.

… If I were the Republicans, I’d be worrying about peaking too early.

In Slate, Anne Applebaum explains some of the reasons for the continuing World War II commemorations.

…The answer cannot lie in the personal experiences of any of the statesmen involved, since none was alive at the time. It lies, rather, in the way that memories of the war have come to be central to the national memory, and therefore to the contemporary politics, of so many of the countries that fought in it.

Everything about modern Germany, for instance, is the way it is because of the war, from its pacifism and its devotion to the European Union to the architecture of its capital city. War guilt is built into the political system and becomes controversial only when it seems some Germans want to abandon it: The new wave of interest in the fate of Germans who fled or were expelled from Central Europe after the war, or the popularity of books about Allied bombings of German cities, worries many in the region. Hence Angela Merkel’s presence at Westerplatte. (She was the first to confirm she would attend.) No German chancellor wants any of Germany’s neighbors to doubt that Germany is still very sorry about 1939 (even if some are rather indifferent). And none wants Germany’s neighbors to fear German aggression today.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will attend for slightly different reasons, or so it would seem. Last weekend, Russian state television ran a long documentary essentially arguing that Stalin was justified in ordering the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Baltic states—and in doing a secret deal with Hitler—on the grounds that Poland itself was in a secret alliance with the Nazis. Putin himself probably will not defend this startling and ahistorical thesis, although—judging from an article he has written for the Polish media—he may well try to “contextualize” the Hitler-Stalin pact by comparing it with other diplomatic decisions. Lately, other Russians have lately expressed similarly positive views of 1939 in a well-coordinated attempt to justify the Hitler-Stalin pact. (If they have any views: The majority of Russians, a recent poll shows, do not know that the USSR invaded Poland in 1939.)

But from the point of view of the Russian ruling elite, such interpretations make sense: By praising Stalin’s aggression toward the USSR’s neighbors 70 years ago, the current leaders help justify Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors today, at least in the eyes of the Russian public. …

David Harsanyi, one of our favorites, agrees with George Will.

… Judging from their harsh reaction to Will, it’s not clear when, if ever, some conservatives believe the U.S. should withdraw from Afghanistan. Even less clear is how the victory narrative is supposed to play out. Does this triumphant day arrive when every Islamic radical in the region has met his virgins? If so, after eight years of American lives lost, the goal seems further away than ever.

Or is victory achieved when we finally usher this primitive tribal culture, with its violent warlords and religious extremism, through the 8th century all the way to modernity? If so, we’re on course for a centuries-long enterprise of nation-building and babysitting, not a war. The war was won in 2002.

If the goal is to establish a stable government to fill the vacuum created by our ousting of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, we’ve done quite a job. Most Americans can accept a Marine risking life and limb to safeguard our freedoms. But when that Marine is protector of a corrupt and depraved foreign parliament — one that recently legalized marital rape and demands women ask permission from male relatives to leave their home — it is not a victory worth celebrating. …

Scott Johnson of Powerline recounts a shocking story from Peter Robinson.

…Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalls that Senator Kennedy was something more than a useful idiot. In the heyday of the Soviet Union’s peace offensive, Senator Kennedy appears to have offered his collaboration with Soviet leadership in opposing Reagan’s efforts. Robinson writes:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

See Robinson’s column for the rest of the story. I add only that the soul of liberalism appears to be immortal. At any rate, it survives Senator Kennedy’s death.

The IBD Editorial board also comments on Kennedy’s KGB overtures and the egregious lack of coverage by the MSM.

…When we first heard of this, we thought it must be a mistake. Or a hoax. But it appears to be neither. Indeed, to our knowledge, the memo written by then-KGB chief Victor Chebrikov to Andropov has never been challenged as a fake….

…As we said, we’re not the first to report this. First came the London Times’ Sebastian, way back in 1992. And just three years ago, historian Paul Kengor repeated the story in his book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.” …

…The whole shameful episode reflects poorly on the honesty and integrity of America’s major news outlets. It seems Kennedy read the media right — he was quite confident the Fourth Estate’s reflexive defenders of Camelot could be counted on to help. …

…Again, in the end, there’s no evidence Kennedy or Tunney ever actually helped the KGB. Just that they offered to. Yet this raises many troubling questions that, sadly, may never be answered.

Did Kennedy not understand that the Soviet Union was, indeed, a murderous evil empire? Did he really think that, between Reagan and Andropov, the Russian was the lesser of two evils?

Still more troubling, perhaps, is the question asked recently by James Kirchick at Commentary Magazine: Did a sitting senator violate the Logan Act, the 1799 law that prohibits “any citizen” of the U.S. from meddling in American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign power?

The mainstream media could have at least asked these questions. That they didn’t only adds to a long, shameful history of partisanship that has skewed the news for more than a generation — and left the nation worse off for it.

David Warren has been reluctant to write about Kennedy.

…Those who could not guess what I thought of Ted Kennedy, could not have been reading my columns. But to review, quickly, I classed him among the horrible freaks of electoral politics, an embodiment of almost everything I detest in public life, from open advocacy of “the culture of death,” and socialist tyranny, to great personal hypocrisy; sometimes nearly a traitor to his country; and certainly a traitor to his religion. …

…”But what do you really think?” I can hear my reader asking. That is what I really think, but it is not incompatible with something else I really think: that Kennedy was a great and interesting man, and not without some noble qualities; moreover, a man in some (small) degree excused by the overweening ambitions of the Kennedy family, inculcated by a rather monstrous father. His brother Robert would, had he survived, have set Ted a better example, for Robert retained a fairly stalwart Christian moral sense, and was thus less easily corrupted.

Ambition on behalf of the good should be encouraged; ambition as an end in itself should never be. But the worst kind of ambition was the sort Ted Kennedy had, in which self and cause become inextricably confused. …

John Stossel looks at the unintended, and negative, economic consequences of Cash for Clunkers.

…Let’s start at the beginning. The government paid car owners to trade in their old cars, which will be destroyed. But the government is running a deficit. So it doesn’t have $3 billion to hand out. It must borrow the money, which reduces the amount of money for other investments. Moreover, the government must raise taxes in the future to pay back the principal and interest — or the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt through inflation. Either way, we pay.

That isn’t all. Those car buyers were either going to trade in their used cars soon or they weren’t. If they were, Cash for Clunkers simply moved up the schedule. The stimulation of the auto industry occurred earlier. Big deal. But if buyers planned to keep their cars longer, the program imposed costs that are less visible. Without the government incentive to buy cars, consumers would have bought other things — computers, washing machines, televisions. The manufacturers and sellers of those products didn’t get to make those sales. Why should the auto industry get privileges at the expense of others?

Then there are the mechanics who would have serviced those used cars. They’ve lost business. Some will be laid off. Nor should we forget low-income people who depend on the used-car market for their transportation. The cheap cars they would have bought were destroyed. …

…Finally, there is something revolting about the government subsidizing the destruction of useful things. It reminds me of the New Deal policy of killing piglets and pouring milk down sewers to keep food prices from falling. …

Given the complaints of some of the left Luddites about bio-engineered crops, the fact there is plenty of diversity in available seeds is counter-intuitive. Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy has the story.

It is generally assumed that crop diversity declined dramatically during the 20th century. This trend is blamed upon market pressures and the rise of corporate agriculture, among other things. But is the underlying assumption accurate? Paul Heald and Susannah Chapman of the University of Georgia (law and anthropology, respectively) suggest we may need to rethink what we think we know about vegetable crop diversity. In a new paper, “Crop Diversity Report Card for the Twentieth Century: Diversity Bust or Diversity Boom?”, they present evidence that crop diversity has not declined meaningfully at all. …

The Wall Street Journal editorial board reports on the government-created drought in California.

…The state’s water emergency is unfolding thanks to the latest mishandling of the Endangered Species Act. Last December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what is known as a “biological opinion” imposing water reductions on the San Joaquin Valley and environs to safeguard the federally protected hypomesus transpacificus, a.k.a., the delta smelt. As a result, tens of billions of gallons of water from mountains east and north of Sacramento have been channelled away from farmers and into the ocean, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land fallow or scorched. …

…The result has already been devastating for the state’s farm economy. In the inland areas affected by the court-ordered water restrictions, the jobless rate has hit 14.3%, with some farming towns like Mendota seeing unemployment numbers near 40%. Statewide, the rate reached 11.6% in July, higher than it has been in 30 years. In August, 50 mayors from the San Joaquin Valley signed a letter asking President Obama to observe the impact of the draconian water rules firsthand. …

…The issue now turns to the Obama Administration and the courts, though the farmers have so far found scant hope for relief from the White House. In June, the Administration denied the governor’s request to designate California a federal disaster area as a result of the drought conditions, which U.S. Drought Monitor currently lists as a “severe drought” in 43% of the state. Doing so would force the Administration to acknowledge awkward questions about the role its own environmental policies have played in scorching the Earth. …

…The Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three farmers in the valley, calling the federal regulations “immoral and unconstitutional.” Because the delta smelt is only found in California, the Foundation says, it does not fall under the regulatory powers provided by the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. On a statutory basis, the Fish and Wildlife Service also neglected to appropriately consider the economic devastation the pumping restrictions would bring. …

We close with a look at a time when we had a government that got a few things right. John Fund reviews Hayward’s The Age of Reagan.

You call this a crisis? Think back nearly 30 years ago. When Ronald Reagan took office the ­country’s economy was in a shambles—inflation was running into the double digits, growth had ­stagnated and the top marginal tax rate was 70%. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, bristling with imperial designs and ­nuclear weapons, had recently invaded ­Afghanistan, installing a puppet regime, and Iran had ousted a pro-Western leader in favor of a ­fervently ­anti-American cleric. The White House tenure of Jimmy Carter, known for hand-wringing over ­”malaise” and a botched hostage-rescue mission, had led scholars to conclude that the American presidency, as an institution, was too weak to govern in the ­modern world.

And then came Reagan. He faced down the Soviets, cut taxes and revived the economy. Not least, he ­restored confidence in the presidency itself, providing a model for his successors. One of his legacies, visible in the outlook of every successful presidential candidate since, is an ­optimism about the ­nation, echoing his statement that “people who talk about an age of limits are ­really talking about their own limitations, not America’s.”

In “The Age of ­Reagan,” Steven F. ­Hayward offers a splendid narrative history of ­Reagan’s two terms in the White House—a period (1981-89) that amounted to what he calls a “counterrevolution,” reversing so much of what had spiraled downward in the late 1970s. Along the way, he supplies a keen analysis of just how much Reagan succeeded in changing America’s self-image, often by reasserting core principles. …

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In the New Statesman, George Friedman of Stratfor, uses a geopolitical paradigm for a fascinating review of the history of global powers and a look at the potential rise of new powers.

Japan and Turkey form an alliance to attack the US. Poland becomes America’s closest ally. Mexico makes a bid for global supremacy, and a third world war takes place in space. Sounds strange? It could all happen.

In 1492, Columbus sailed west. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. These two events bracketed the European age. Once, Mayans lived unaware that there were Mongols, who were unaware there were Zulus. From the 15th century onwards, European powers collectively overwhelmed the world, creating the first truly global geopolitical system in human history, to the point where the fate of Australian Aborigines was determined by British policy in Ireland and the price of bread in France turned on the weather in Minnesota.

Europe simultaneously waged a 500-year-long civil war of increasing savagery, until the continent tore itself apart in the 20th century and lost its hold on the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a single European nation that could be considered a global power of the first rank.

Another unprecedented event took place a decade or so earlier. For 500 years, whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled Europe’s access to the world and, with it, global trade. By 1980, the geography of trade had shifted, so that the Atlantic and Pacific were equally important, and any power that had direct access to both oceans had profound advantages. North America became the pivot of the global system, and whatever power dominated North America became its centre of gravity. That power is, of course, the United States.

It is geography combined with the ability to exploit it that matters. …

…Geopolitics assumes two things: first, that human beings organise themselves into units larger than families and that they have a natural loyalty to the things they were born into, the people and the places; second, that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship between nations. We use the term “geography” broadly. It includes the physical characteristics of a location, but it goes beyond that to look at the effects of a place on individuals and communities. These are the foundation of geopolitical forecasting. …

…The world is Americentric. The US marshals the economic resources of North America, controls the world’s oceans and space, projects force where it wishes – wisely or not. The US is to the world what Britain once was to Europe. Both nations depended on control of the sea to secure their interests. Both nations understood that the best way to retain control of the sea was to prevent other nations from building navies. Both understood that the best way to do that was to maintain a balance of power in which potential challengers spent their resources fighting each other on land, rather than building fleets that could challenge their control of the sea. …

Before we get to the main event today, which is George Will’s Afghan bug-out column, we have some business with another of our apostates. So now David Brooks is falling deeply out of ObamaLove. Jonah Goldberg has the story in The Corner.

… According to Brooks, the reason why Obama is falling apart is that he’s married himself to the very liberal Democratic leadership. Brooks thinks this was a horrible tactical and strategic mistake and, he’s right! But why did he make it? Brooks ends his column with this partial explanation: “Events have pushed Barack Obama off to the left. Time to rebalance.”

Oh those horrible events! They make criminals rob liquor stores.  John Edwards cheated on his cancer-stricken wife even as he was using her as a campaign issue because of “events.” Larry Craig was driven to that bathroom stall by “events.” I am overserved at open bars because those pernicious events won’t leave me alone.

Maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama wasn’t driven to the left by events but, rather, he was driving them thataway?

Brooks, it seems to me, is still holding out hope for the possibility that if we “let Obama be Obama” he’ll tack to the center because he really is that bipartisan, moderate, Niebuhr-grocking 21st century man that caused so many otherwise sensible conservatives to go off their feed.

That seems highly implausible to me. Obama has been Obama, and that’s why he’s in the predicament he’s in. He is the author of these events, not a victim of them. …

George Will thinks that it’s time to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

…The U.S. strategy is “clear, hold and build.” Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country — “control” is an elastic concept — and ” ‘our’ Afghans may prove no more viable than were ‘our’ Vietnamese, the Saigon regime.” Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only “police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for ‘vacation.’ ” Afghanistan’s $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise’s. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan’s poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?

Even though violence exploded across Iraq after, and partly because of, three elections, Afghanistan’s recent elections were called “crucial.” To what? They came, they went, they altered no fundamentals, all of which militate against American “success,” whatever that might mean. Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry hopes for a “renewal of trust” of the Afghan people in the government, but the Economist describes President Hamid Karzai’s government — his vice presidential running mate is a drug trafficker — as so “inept, corrupt and predatory” that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, “who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai’s lot.”  …

…U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable. …

Peter Wehner responds to George Will in Contentions.

…It appears to be Will’s principle that when he signs up and speaks out, when he marshals his eloquent and influential words on behalf of war, he will strongly support that war, but only for a season; only so long as it goes quickly, smoothly, and without complications. If, however, the conflict gets hard — if progress is slow and setbacks are incurred, if lives are lost and the war doesn’t end on his time line — Will is ready to declare, as he does in his column today, that “Genius . . . sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.” Translation: he’s ready to up and quit.

Here is a disturbing fact to ponder: If George Will were commander in chief, we would, under his leadership, have begun and lost two wars of enormous consequence. The damage to America — militarily, geopolitically, and morally — would be staggering. The boon to militant Islam — militarily, geopolitically, and in terms of morale — would be incalculable. Yet nowhere in his most recent column does Will even begin to grapple with what surrender in Afghanistan would mean — to that country, to Pakistan, to jihadists around the world, to confidence in America’s word and will, and to our national-security interests. And while Afghanistan, like Iraq, is a very difficult undertaking, declaring defeat at this stage is unwarranted and terribly unwise. If General David Petraeus thinks the task is hopeless, then I will take a hard second look at the war. But if George Will declares it hopeless, I will simply take a hard second look at his record.

Mr. Will has earned the reputation as one of the finest columnists alive, and one of the better ones our country has ever produced. I have admired him in the past, and I learn from him still. But on Iraq and Afghanistan, he has been wrong, unreliable, and unsteady.

In 1983 the French journalist and intellectual Jean-Francois Revel wrote How Democracies Perish. It was a withering critique of the West’s loss of nerve and will in the face of the totalitarian threat it faced. In his book, Revel wrote, “Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them.” In a column praising Revel’s book, George Will wrote, “Defense of democracy depends on pessimists who are not defeatists. It depends on spirited realists such as Jean-Francois Revel.”

Now, like then, America needs spirited realists, not defeatists. We need individuals who believe a nation must be willing to fight for what is right even when it is hard. We need people who are going to resist the temptation to eagerly support war at the outset and then prematurely give up on it. …

Frederick W. Kagan has a sharply worded reply to some inaccuracies and characterizations in Will’s column.

In response to George Will’s column, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?,” it is worth noting some factual inaccuracies. There are considerably more than 4,000 counterinsurgents in Helmand Province. Will may find the British contribution “risible” — a rather offensive statement considering the number of soldiers Britain has lost in Afghanistan and the size of its military contributions to both Iraq and Afghanistan; others might make various more specific criticisms of the British performance from a technical perspective; but there are still 9,000 British military personnel in Afghanistan — most of them in Helmand, and most of them fighting hard. This misstatement is part of a larger problem summed up in the following two sentences:

Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

If we are quoting counterinsurgency theory, then we might do well to be specific about it. COIN theory calls for one counterinsurgent for every 50 people in a conflict area (although this is hardly a hard-and-fast law, it turns out to be a reasonably good rule of thumb). There are perhaps 16 million people in the Pashtun belt — the area in which almost all insurgent activity occurs in Afghanistan. The one-to-50 ratio would call for about 320,000 counterinsurgents in that area. But that group would include indigenous forces. Granting Will’s anecdotal observations that the Afghan police are at best ineffective (which is far too sweeping a statement), the Afghan National Army is at least as good as many of the organizations that have functioned as counterinsurgents in Iraq. The ANA numbers about 90,000 right now, and it can be expanded to 134,000 next year, and perhaps 240,000 within a couple of years after that. There are around 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan now. So: How inconceivable is it? And for how long?

The surge of forces that some (including me) are proposing is intended to bridge the gap between current Afghan capacity and their future capacity, while simultaneously reducing the insurgency’s capabilities. Whatever may happen in Afghanistan, counterinsurgency theory does not call for the deployment of hundreds of thousands of coalition forces for decades. Lastly, neither waving the bloody shirt nor rudely disparaging the efforts of allies who have shed their own blood alongside our troops is appropriate to this discussion. But doing both in the same column is simply reprehensible.

Also in The Corner, Rich Lowry states that a troop withdrawal will negatively impact Pakistan’s counter-insurgency efforts.

…Will says “Pakistan actually matters.” That’s a very important reason to care about Afghanistan too. For the first time, Pakistan has been undertaking serious counter-insurgency operations in the border areas. And we have been supporting them with counter-insurgency operations in adjacent areas in Afghanistan. Just as Pakistan begins to get serious are we going to pull the rug out from under them? The Durand Line obviously works both ways. Just as Pakistani under-performance over the years has created a haven for fighters to infiltrate into Afghanistan, our under-performance would create a haven in Afghanistan for fighters to infiltrate Pakistan. And there’s no such thing as simply guarding the border since there’s no border to speak of. If you want to control the border you have to control the population near it, which means you can’t just rely on special operations forces and have to undertake counter-insurgency operations that require boots on the ground and, ultimately, a functioning indigenous army and government.

In other words, if you think Afghanistan matters at all, something on the order of what we are attempting there now is necessary. If you think Afghanistan doesn’t matter and should be allowed to fall to hell, that’s another thing. But the problem is that it abuts another country that inarguably matters and whose border regions are a haven to al Qaeda. That’s why there’s no easy escape …

Mark Steyn also responds wondering what our objectives are in Afghanistan.

Rich, Kathryn et al, I’m less hostile to the George Will column. It seems to me we have no very clear war aims in Afghanistan, which is never a good position to be in.

Are we “nation-building”? With US commanders talking about ending Afghanistan’s “culture of poverty”, it sounds like it. Yet, even assuming you could build a nation in any meaningful sense of the word on Afghan soil, such a nation would be profoundly uncongenial to us. …

…The much misunderstood British strategy in Afghanistan was, by contrast, admirably clear-sighted, and worked (for them) for over a century. They took a conscious decision not to incorporate the country formally within the Indian Empire because they didn’t want a direct British land border with Russia. So instead they were content with a highly decentralized semi-client state and a useful buffer between the British Empire and the Tsars, a set-up that worked well (from London’s point of view) for over a century until it all fell apart in the Sixties when Moscow started outbidding the Brits for the loyalty of various factions – or what passes for loyalty in that part of the world.

The British strategy was cold and calculated and, if you care about Afghan child mortality rates and women’s rights, very unprogressive. But it was less deluded than asking western troops to die in pursuit of the chimera of ending a “culture of poverty” while in reality providing multilateral window-dressing for the country’s slippage back to warlordism and Sharia.

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David P. Goldman, in Spengler’s blog, makes the case for the US returning to its former policy of supporting Israel.

Why should the US support Israel? There are two reasons.

The first is strictly practical: Israel has the strongest military in the region and America wants to ally with strength. Washington should use its own resources to neutralize Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons, in my view, but the fact that Israel has the capability to do so gives America the capacity to achieve just this result without taking directly responsibility if it so chooses. Iran’s nuclear capacity is only the most obvious area in which Israeli capability benefits America (think also of the North Korean nuclear reactor installed in Syria which Israel destroyed last year).

By the same token, it is in American interests to monopolize Israeli friendship as much as possible. If (as the Lebanon Star’s Michael Young suggests) the blunders of the American administration and its failure of will lead to “terminal irrelevance” in the region, the vacuum will be filled by Russia, India and China—and Israel will adjust its policies accordingly. That would make the world a more dangerous and less stable place, and America is far better off having Israel inside the tent shooting out.

But there is a far more fundamental reason for America to support Israel. Israel is part of America’s DNA. As Michael Novak showed so effectively in his book On Two Wings, America’s founding drew on the uniquely Hebrew concept of holiness of the individual and divine love for the weak and powerless, as much as it did on the natural law tradition of Grotius and Locke. The destiny of the United States of America and the people of Israel are inextricably intertwined for that reason, and America’s affinity for Israel and deep interest in the welfare of the Jewish people are bred in American marrow. …

In Newsweek, Robert J. Samuelson takes Democrats and Republicans to task for not dealing with budget deficits. Aside from Samuelson’s inaccurate assumption that raising taxes will increase federal revenues, he makes some important points.

…The truth is that government, again under both parties, has promised far more in benefits than can be covered by existing taxes. Only borrowing could reconcile the rhetorical claims with underlying economic realities. There have been 43 deficits in the past 48 years.

Until recently, the borrowings, though usually undesirable, were not alarming. But the recession and an aging population signify that we have crossed a threshold where actual and prospective borrowings are so huge that no one can foresee the consequences. The best measure of debt burden is its relation to the nation’s annual income, or gross domestic product. The same approach applied to a household with $25,000 of debt and $50,000 of income would produce a debt-to-income ratio of 50 percent.

In 1946, after World War II, the ratio of publicly held federal debt to GDP was 108.6 percent. Since then, the economy (our income) has generally grown faster than the debt. In 1974, the debt-to-GDP ratio reached a post-World War II low of 23.9 percent, and even in 2007, it was only 36.9 percent. That was manageable.

By contrast, today’s prospective colossal borrowings dwarf likely economic growth. The Obama administration’s latest projections, released last week, show nearly $11 trillion of borrowing from 2009 to 2019. In 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 76.5 percent. This could be too optimistic, because it assumes some spending restraint and tax increases. A projection by the Concord Coalition, a watchdog group, adds about $5 trillion in borrowing in that period. In 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio could be roughly 100 percent. …

George Will discusses unrealistic legislation that has so many Americans concerned.

…Another reason that reasonable people are wary of any government plan for a grandiose rearrangement of the health-care sector’s 17 percent of the economy is that, regarding grandiosity, the president, after less than eight months in office, is a recidivist. His health-care crusade comes after a $787 billion stimulus (which has effectively made the Energy Department into the nation’s largest venture-capital firm, scattering scores of billions of dollars to speculative energy investments) and the semi-nationalization of two car companies. August ended with the unembarrassable administration uttering a $2 trillion “Oops!” by estimating that the 10-year budget-deficit projection is about $9 trillion rather than $7.1 trillion. The supposed means of paying for the president’s $1 trillion health-care plan include substantial Medicare cuts that will never happen, and the auction of carbon-emission permits that, instead, would be given away by the Waxman–Markey cap-and-trade legislation the House has sent to the Senate.

That legislation is a particularly lurid illustration of why no serious person nowadays takes seriously Washington’s increasingly infantile bandying of numbers. The point of cap-and-trade is to impose a ceiling on the nation’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions—primarily carbon dioxide. The legislation endorses the goal of holding the global carbon–dioxide level to a maximum of 450 parts per million by 2050. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute do the math. The 450 level is less than the 2030 projected level for all countries other than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 30 developed nations. Which means the global goal would be unreachable even if in 2030 those 30 disappear—if they have zero emissions. Waxman–Markey endorses the goal of reducing all of this nation’s GHG emissions 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. In 2005, the United States’ carbon-dioxide emissions were 6 billion tons, so an 83 percent -reduction would permit about 1 billion tons—what America’s emissions were in 1910, when the population was 92 million and the economy was one twenty-fifth of today’s. But by 2050, the population probably will be about 420 million, so per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be 2.4 tons—one quarter of 1910′s per capita emissions. …

Peter Foster, in Canada’s National Post, writes that the debate on global warming is not settled simply because the “authorities” have spoken.

…We rely on authority for the vast majority of what we believe, but global warming theory does not rank as knowledge of the same order as whether Iceland exists or the moon is made of green cheese. My reason for believing in the existence of Iceland is that a conspiracy to conjure it out of geographical thin air is passing unlikely. But anthropogenic global warming is different. Far from being an established fact, it is a hypothesis whose allegedly disastrous consequences will occur sometime in the relatively distant future. It also comes attached to considerable psychic satisfactions and political advantages for its promoters.

It conforms to a broad view — long and fondly promoted by fans of Big Government — that capitalism is essentially short-sighted and greed-driven (just look at the subprime crisis!). This stance is not merely appealing to activist politicians and bureaucrats, it is pure gold for the vast and growing army of radical NGO environmental lobby groups, whose raison d’être — and fundraising — are closely related to the degree to which nature is seen to be “endangered.” It is also appealing to rent seeking businessmen who see the profit potential in the vast array of controls and subsidies.

Nevertheless, most ordinary people reasonably imagine in the face of such a weight of “authority” that the case must be closed. It isn’t. For a start, the weight of authority is based on the political doctoring of studies that are in any case designed to countenance no other conclusion than that man-made carbon dioxide drives the climate. Moreover, the very fact that the theory’s promoters are so reluctant to actually engage in scientific debate (No time to talk. Must act!) is highly suspicious. …

Claudia Rosett fills us in on the UN’s latest excuse to spend money.

From the United Nations, source of so many wonders, we now have word that “The past is no longer a good indicator of the future.”

So says Michel Jarraud, the French head of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, opining about climate change at a press briefing in Geneva. Jarraud, who is part of the UN gang pushing for a multi-trillion dollar attempt to re-engineer the climate of the planet, seems to believe our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a world of unswerving certainties about the future — possessed of all the relevant facts and armed with collated crop statistics. Today’s uncertainty about the future, he said, “Is something completely new — to make decisions not on facts or statistics about the past, but on the probabilities for the future.” …

…But what’s Jarraud’s answer to all this uncertainty he now predicts? You guessed it — he wants the UN to plan the future for you. To this end, in the approach to the grand climate jamboree scheduled for Copenhagen this December, the UN is convening yet another in its endless series of conferences, this one to be held next week in Geneva and attended by what Reuters describes as “About 1,500 policy-makers, researchers and corporate leaders.” (For these UN hunter-gatherers, there is of course endless justification for the jet fuel, carbon emissions and meat entrees they would like to ration to the rest of us). …

Bjørn Lomborg believes that global warming is occurring and that we can do something about it. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, he discusses climate engineering options.

…Other more speculative approaches deserve consideration. In groundbreaking research, J. Eric Bickel, an economist and engineer at the University of Texas, and Lee Lane, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, study the costs and benefits of climate engineering. One proposal would have boats spray seawater droplets into clouds above the sea to make them reflect more sunlight back into space—augmenting the natural process where evaporating ocean sea salt helps to provide tiny particles for clouds to form around.

Remarkably, Mr. Bickel finds that about $9 billion spent developing this so-called marine cloud whitening technology might be able to cancel out this century’s global warming. The benefits—from preventing the temperature increase—would add up to about $20 trillion.

Climate engineering raises ethical concerns. But if we care most about avoiding warmer temperatures, we cannot avoid considering a simple, cost-effective approach that shows so much promise.

Nothing short of a technological revolution is required to end our reliance on fossil fuel—and we are not even close to getting this revolution started. Economists Chris Green and Isabel Galiana from McGill University point out that nonfossil sources like nuclear, wind, solar and geothermal energy will—based on today’s availability—get us less than halfway toward a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050, and only a tiny fraction of the way towards stabilization by 2100. …

The Daily Mail, UK reports on the inconvenient truths about the UK weather supercomputer.

The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters. …

…It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power more than 1,000 homes. …

…However the Met Office’s HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution – responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

It says 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer meaning the machine is officially one of the country’s least green machines.

Green campaigners say it is ‘ironic’ that a computer designed to help stave-off climate change is responsible for such high levels of pollution. …

…It is the second time the Met Office has been criticised this year – after the machine famously helped predict a “BBQ summer” which turned out to be another wash-out. …

Chicagoans probably don’t think much of the global warming hype. CBS Chicago tells why.

…The record low for Aug. 31 is 47 degrees, set in 1872. Overnight Sunday into Monday, the nippy readings were close, and in some areas even lower. …

Overall in Chicago, this August has hardly been what one would call the dog days of summer. There was only one day where the temperatures reached the 90s. On Aug. 9, temperatures climbed into the mid-90s.

In fact, Aug. 9 was only one of four days this summer where the temperature exceeded 90 degrees. Temperatures also reached the 90s in June 23, 24 and 25. July had no 90-degree days at all.

Consumer Reports turns into government tattletale. Story in The Corner.

The venerable Consumer Reports reviewed shower heads in its latest issue. Now what would you expect they’d do if they found one that provides an excellent shower, with a really forceful spray? Recommend it to its readers? No, it reported it all right, but to the EPA. CEI’s Sam Kazman takes up the story:

Consumer Reports states that the British-made Hudson Reed Theme Thermostatic Shower Panel had a forceful spray that “seemed too good to be true—or legal.”  Environmental Protection Agency regulations limit shower head water flow to no more than 2.5 gallons per minute.  Consumer Reports acknowledges that many shower fixtures get around this rule by using several shower heads, but the magazine decided to report the new single-head fixture to authorities, anyway.  (In its words, “We’ve contacted EPA….”)

“Consumer Reports has it backwards,” stated CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman.  “Its duty is to consumers, not bureaucrats.  It should not be acting as a nosy bathroom cop, trying to toss good products in the slammer just because they violate some intrusive federal regulation.  More basically, people ought to be able to use whatever shower fixtures they want, just like they can decide how long a shower to take.  This is a really victimless crime.”  …

And Scrappleface makes fun of the Justice Department.

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Michael Young, in Beirut’s Lebanon Daily Star, explains that just being anti-Bush is not a cohesive policy for the Middle East.

There is great discomfort these days among those who backed Barack Obama’s “new” approach to the Middle East when he took office 10 months ago. That shouldn’t surprise us. Everything about the president’s shotgun approach to the region, his desire to overhaul all policies from the George W. Bush years simultaneously, without a cohesive strategy binding his actions together, was always going to let the believers down.  …

…Obama feels that an America forever signaling its desire to go home will make things better by making America more likable. That’s not how the Middle East works. Politics abhor a vacuum, and as everyone sees how eager the US is to leave, the more they will try to fill the ensuing vacuum to their advantage, and the more intransigent they will be when Washington seeks political solutions to prepare its getaway. That explains the upsurge of bombings in Iraq lately, and it explains why the Taliban feel no need to surrender anything in Afghanistan.

Engagement of Iran and Syria has also come up short, though a breakthrough remains possible. However, there was always something counterintuitive in lowering the pressure on Iran in the hope that this would generate progress in finding a solution to its nuclear program. Engagement is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end among countless others. Where the Obama administration erred was in not seeing how dialogue would buy Iran more time to advance its nuclear projects, precisely what the Iranians wanted, while breaking the momentum of international efforts to force Tehran to concede something – for example temporary suspension of uranium enrichment. For Obama to rebuild such momentum today seems virtually impossible, when the US itself has made it abundantly clear that it believes war is a bad idea. …

Roger L. Simon blogs on an unlikely topic. Al Jazeera more informative than CNN? And his comments get even better.

It’s probably no surprise to readers of this blog that no hotel we have stayed on our European vacation has had Fox News. CNN International and BBC World have been the exclusive English language stations, so it’s easy to guess the view of America that was projected – not a lot about the Tea Party movement but endless blather about how Teddy Kennedy was the greatest statesman since Cicero and thank various deities that massive health care reform in the backward USA will soon be enacted in his memory. Nauseating, of course, but you watch because it’s the only thing on. Call it MA (Masochism Abroad).

And then it seemed to get worse. We checked into the Hotel Villa Malaspina in a southern suburb of Verona and found neither CNN, nor the BBC on our room TV. No English-language channel at all, only something listed as “ALLJAZZ,” which I took to be easy listening and dismissed. Only accidentally surfacing for a soccer match did I discover it was Al Jazeera in English! …

I expected the worst, of course, but was soon astonished. Except for those stories when the “I”-word was prominent (you know, that little country south of Lebanon), Al Jazeera was clearly better, more honest, more informative and more entertaining than CNN International or the BBC. And kinder to the US. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Also, since much of the news they reported was coming from the Middle East, they seemed better informed about such things as the death of the Iraqi Shiite leader Hakim (they referred to Saddam Hussein flatly as a fascist, something you rarely hear on CNN) and the Al Qaeda suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia (they had nothing but withering contempt for Al Qaeda – no pussy-footing “insurgent” rhetoric for them). …

David Warren comments that previous generations have coped with more severe pandemics.

That “Spanish flu” of 1918-19 — which infected perhaps one-third of the world’s population, and killed up to one-fifth of those — focused chiefly on healthy young adults. Perhaps 100 million died. There is no way to establish an accurate number, but this was possibly more than the Black Death of the 14th century, in volume, if not proportion to previous population. More, by far, than died violently in the course of the Great War, and yet the sufferings in the trenches play a larger part in our historical memory. …

This struck me when reading English mediaeval history. Perhaps one-third of the English were wiped out in the “Great Pestilence” of 1348-50, and many villages disappeared from the landscape. (In other parts of Europe, three-quarters or more of the people were lost, and whole regions became de-populated). The event hardly went unnoticed, but it is not writ so large in contemporary accounts. Dynastic changes take precedence in the chronicles. The fallout from the plague is nearly ignored: such demographic effects as the loss of all the clergy in many places, who had to expose themselves repeatedly in the course of delivering last rites; the sudden loss of cultural continuities that this entailed. …

… Our ancestors took these things in their stride.

Should we? Granting, of course, that we should do whatever is in our power to limit death and suffering — as human beings have always done, according to their lights — should we give the matter more or less weight than our ancestors did?

There was a tendency in the past, especially the Christian past, to look upon plagues, and every other unavoidable disaster, as acts of divine judgment. …

…It is a paradox, worth pondering, that with such “backward” attitudes, and suspicions of divine retribution, our ancestors may have done a better job of coping with disaster.

Seems the Center for Disease Control is thinking of promoting circumcision. David Harsanyi thinks government agencies should be more circumscribed. His point is this new  CDC campaign shows the folly of socialized medicine.

… And what would a proactive CDC mean when government operated health care insurance? No, I don’t believe Washington would deploy a phalanx of grinning, twisted doctors to perform coerced circumcisions. But when the CDC dispenses medical advice of the “universal” brand, it’s difficult to accept that a government-run public insurance outfit wouldn’t heed advice and act accordingly.

What if the CDC, through meticulous study, realized that circumcision was an entirely worthless procedure? Why would “we” waste $400 a pop? Would the CDC campaign to “universally remove” the operation from hospitals? Today, incidentally, government- run Medicaid doesn’t pay for the procedure in 16 states. Most private insurers, on the other hand, do.

Though dismissed by public-option proponents, this is an example of how government persuasion can influence our decisions — first by nudging and then, inevitably, by rationing.

The larger, more pertinent point for today is that government has zero business running campaigns — and these things inevitably turn into scare- mongering efforts — that try to influence our choices regarding our children and our bodies. Especially when the procedure has so little to do with society’s collective health. Circumcision is a personal choice.

Well, a personal choice for everyone except that poor little sucker lying on the chopping block.

John Stossel explains how market forces ensure the efficient use of resources.

…What Obama says in favor of a public option — as of today, at least — tells us how little he understands competition. The public option’s virtue, he told Smerconish, is that “there wouldn’t be a profit motive involved.” But as St. Lawrence University economist Steven Horwitz writes in The Freeman magazine, profit is not just a motive (http://tinyurl.com/m4nd2j). Profit (along with loss) is what enables competition to perform its discovery role:

“Suppose for a moment that we try to take the profit motive out of health care by going to a system in which government pays for and/or directly provides the services. … (P)ublic-spirited politicians and bureaucrats have replaced profit-seeking firms.

“By what method exactly will the officials know how to allocate resources? By what method will they know how much of what kind of health care people want? And more important, by what method will they know how to produce that health care without wasting resources? … In markets with good institutions, profit-seeking producers can get answers to these questions by observing prices and their own profits and losses in order to determine which uses of resources are more or less valuable to consumers. … (P)rofits and prices signal the efficiency (or lack thereof) of resource use and allow producers to learn from those signals.” …

Daily Mail, UK reports on the first image taken of a single molecule.

…Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule.

‘This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,’ lead researcher Leo Gross said. …

…To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand. …

Generation Y may be tech savvy, but may have difficulty understanding nonverbal communication, writes Mark Bauerlein in a WSJ op-ed.

…In Silicon Valley itself, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, some companies have installed the “topless” meeting—in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned—to combat a new problem: “continuous partial attention.” With a device close by, attendees at workplace meetings simply cannot keep their focus on the speaker. It’s too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: “I’m not interested.” So the tools must now remain at the door.

Older employees might well accept such a ban, but younger ones might not understand it. Reading a text message in the middle of a conversation isn’t a lapse to them—it’s what you do. It has, they assume, no nonverbal meaning to anyone else.

It does, of course, but how would they know it? We live in a culture where young people—outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another—are ever less likely to develop the “silent fluency” that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to “read” the behavior of others, they are all thumbs. …

Slate’s Tom Vanderbilt, argues for increased enforcement of traffic laws.

… Which brings us to the first social benefit of the traffic ticket: It is a net for catching bigger fish. One reason simply has to do with the frequency of the traffic stop, particularly in a country like the United States, where the car is the dominant mode of transportation: Most crimes involve driving. But another factor is that people with off-road criminal records have been shown, in a number of studies, to commit more on-road violations. A U.K. study (whose findings have been echoed elsewhere) that looked at a pool of driving records as compared with criminal records found that “2.5% of male drivers committed at least one primary non-motoring offense between 1999 and 2003 but this group accounted for 30.6% of the men who committed at least one ‘serious’ motoring offense.” (Interestingly, the proportion was even more marked for women.) …

…Which raises the second benefit of traffic tickets: They help keep people—drivers and those outside the car—alive. Several studies have found a “negative correlation” between someone receiving a traffic violation and their subsequent involvement in a fatal traffic crash.

The consequences of not issuing tickets were shown in a recent study of traffic violations in New York City. From 2001 to 2006, the number of fatalities in which speeding was implicated rose 11 percent. During the same period, the number of speeding summons issued by the NYPD dropped 11 percent. Similarly, summonses for red-light-running violations dropped 13 percent between 2006 and 2008, even as the number of crashes increased. …

…The “folk crime” belief helps thwart increased traffic enforcement: Why should the NYPD, whose resources and manpower are already stretched, bust people for dangerous driving when they could be going after murderers? Well, apart from the fact that more people are killed in traffic fatalities in New York City every year than they are in “stranger homicides,” there is the idea, related to the link between on-and-off-road criminality, that targeting traffic violators might be an effective way to combat other crimes. Which brings us to the third benefit of traffic tickets: increased public safety. Hence the new Department of Justice initiative called DDACTS, or Data Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety, which has found that there is often a geographic link between traffic crashes and crime. By putting “high-visibility enforcement” in hot spots of both crime and traffic crashes, cities like Baltimore have seen reductions in both. …

Jonathan Pearce has Samizdata’s quote of the day.

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David Harsanyi updates one of life’s important dictums; “Nobody’s life, liberty or property is safe while congress is in session.”

…You know what Americans could really use these days? A high-quality, five-tiered, color-coded warning-system to caution us about the threat level coming out of Washington. As one of those clueless, frothing-at-the-mouth, slack-jawed yokel extremists, I know I certainly could use a color scheme to help me get a handle on such a complex issue.

• Code Green is easy. A low risk of economic attack. The default color code for those wondrous days when Congress is on recess and the president is enjoying Martha’s Vineyard, Camp David or a Broadway play. We can home in on First Pets and swoon over Barack Obama’s extraordinary reading list. Isn’t he brilliant? …

• Code Yellow. Significant threat of economic attack. Elected officials hunker down and pretend to write legislation that’s already been authored by crony capitalists and progressive agenda groups.

Meanwhile, lesser elected officials take brilliantly ambiguous positions on legislation they will never read while waiting for literature they will intensely examine: namely, poll numbers.

The White House starts doling out treats and threats. The general populace hears words like “public option” and “death panels” for the first time. …

Kimberly A. Strassel recaps the liberal demonization of the CIA.

President Barack Obama fought hard for the former California congressman during his uncertain February confirmation fight. That’s about the last thing the president has done for his spy chief. Quite the opposite: If the latest flap over CIA interrogations shows anything, it’s that Mr. Panetta has officially become the president’s designated fall guy. …

…Reversing prior promises not to prosecute CIA officials who “acted in good faith,” Mr. Holder appointed a special counsel with the ability to prosecute officials who acted in good faith. This was paired with release of a 2004 CIA report that the administration spun as more proof of agency incompetence. As a finishing touch, the White House yanked the interrogation program out of Mr. Panetta’s hands, relocating it with the FBI. With friends like these . . .

If Mr. Panetta has learned one lesson on the job, it’s that he’s alone. In the wake of the Pelosi blow-up, he took a stab at reconciliation with Democrats, trekking to Capitol Hill to tell the intelligence committees about a previously undisclosed (though hardly shocking) CIA idea for killing al Qaeda brass. His repayment was a letter, leaked to the press, from House Intelligence Chair Silvestre Reyes, claiming the new briefing simply proved the CIA had indeed previously lied to Congress. …

Most of what has appeared in the media on Kennedy has been vapid. Pickings was going to ignore the whole thing, but The Corner at National Review had many good items you might not see elsewhere, which after all, is why we blog.

Kathryn Jean Lopez has a profound thought to start us off.

Rev. Robert A. Sirico of The Acton Institute has a hilarious story and comments on Kennedy and Catholicism.

Many will speak and write of the legacy of Ted Kennedy in the days ahead. For me, as an East Coast “ethnic” grandchild of immigrants, Kennedy’s death symbolizes several cogent moments in Catholic America.

It marks the passing of a generation that thought that being Catholic, Democratic, and pro–New Deal were synonymous. We now live in an age where many Catholic Americans are very happy to be described as pro-market and are suspicious of New Deal–like solutions — as, of course, they are entitled to be in a way that they are not on, for example, life issues. Senator Kennedy had it exactly the wrong way around.

Kennedy’s death also brings the Church face-to-face once again with the fact that there is a massive problem of basic Catholic education — catechesis — among the faithful. So many Catholics — even some clergy — make an absolute out of prudential issues such as economic policy, while relativizing absolutes, such as abortion, euthanasia, and marriage. This is done in the face of clear, binding teachings from John Paul the Great, who said that no other right is safe unless the right to life is protected, or, as Pope Benedict wrote recently in Caritas in Veritate, that life issues must be central to Catholic social teaching. …

Charles Krauthammer addresses Kennedy’s political extremism.

And he was the titular and the de facto head of American liberalism as an ideology. And trying to look at it as a future historian might, I think they might say that his political life marks and heavily influenced the trajectory of American liberalism.

In a sense, they might conclude that he was one of its champions, but he took it too far. He overshot.

I will give you two examples. Civil rights: He and his brother Bobby were early, dedicated, and sincere champions — courageous — of civil rights. But Teddy took it into affirmative action and reverse discrimination, which were more highly problematic.

Secondly was in the social safety net. He was a strong supporter of Social Security, extending it to the disabled, and [of] Medicare, children’s health. But he took it way into the Great Society which created a whole culture of dependency which ironically had to be undone by a moderate Democrat, President Clinton.

Rich Lowry received this e-mail about Kennedy:

It has always seemed to me that the modern era of “the politics of personal destruction” began not with right-wing hatred for Bill Clinton but with the Teddy Kennedy-led character assassination of Robert Bork.

Now from an unlikely source comes support for that view — at least as far as judicial nominations are concerned. In an online article, the New Yorker’s legal man, Jeffrey Toobin, concedes that Kennedy’s attack on Bork was “crude and exaggerated.” And, Toobin adds that his passion in that episode “has defined Supreme Court fights ever since.”

I wish that some of the GOP senators who were so charmed by Kennedy’s clubbish good humor in their private corridors would give a little more attention to the damage that this man’s public conduct did. . . .

Andy McCarthy wonders if attaching Kennedy’s name to ObamaCare will really help.

… Why does ObamaCare necessarily need a person’s name attached to it, anyway?  Why can’t they just call it, say, a “Man-Caused Disaster”? Or maybe a “domestic contingency operation” — or, better, “a domestic contingency to prevent you from getting an operation”?

Mark Hemingway comments on a Carl M. Cannon article.

Carl M. Cannon has a terrific and thoughtful column on Ted Kennedy’s failings that really must be read. He does his best to acknowledge Kennedy was a generous man and competent politician, but ultimately Cannon says he’s concerned that many are trying to whitewash his profound failings…

…Further, Cannon makes the salient point that the actual facts involved in the Chappaquiddick rarely enter the debate over Kennedy because they are so indefensible and uncomfortable for liberals. He goes into the whole incident in detail:

“Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone. When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner’s inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity. …”

A post that suggests Kennedy’s coattails did little to help Obama beat Clinton is next.

Mark Steyn closes this section with his weekly column from the Orange County Register.

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

“Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …”

That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

“Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? …

… The senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

Back to the living, David Warren contrasts Western political maneuverings with Gaddafi’s candor.

…The lie — that the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi had nothing to do with direct negotiations between Brown and Gaddafi (and others) last month — has not washed with anyone. To update my Sunday column, it would now appear that Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, was the naive character left finding excuses for a deal already cut well over his head. …

…There is a kind of candour in Gaddafi’s behaviour that becomes almost attractive in comparison with western business calculations. For the Libyan master terrorist, oil money is important, but only as a means to ends that have nothing to do with economic development. Gaddafi’s plain talk, thanking Brown, Prince Andrew, and even our Queen for springing his murderous operative, rings with truth — confirmed by a glance at the grovelling “Dear Moammar” letter Brown sent him.

Similarly, Gaddafi’s open boasting about, for instance, the impending Muslim demographic takeover of Europe, shines with candour in comparison to western essays in political correctness. Like Lenin, Hitler, and every other totalitarian on whom he has modeled himself, Gaddafi long ago realized there was no need to hide his intentions. The “sophistication” of the west is such that if you openly state, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them,” our diplomatists will go to work explaining this away, while organizing another trade mission. …

The Washington Post editors take up the school voucher issue.

President Obama reportedly has a hefty reading list while vacationing this week, but we would like to offer two additions, both hot off the presses. One is an article by the education expert who studied the D.C. voucher program; the second is a study on school safety in the city’s public and private schools. Read together, they might cause the president to rethink his administration’s wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students.

He should start with Patrick J. Wolf’s article in the new issue of Education Next. Mr. Wolf, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. He was unequivocal in his findings: “The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.” Equally adamant was his opinion that vouchers paid off for the students lucky enough to win them: “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.”  …

Jillian Melchior in the WSJ discusses the benefits of community colleges.

…One of the biggest misperceptions is that a community-college education is inherently second-rate. While the overall goals are often utilitarian, students who seek deeper learning may well find instructors who are willing to accommodate them and who have the time to do it, thanks to small class sizes—on average, fewer than 30 students, according to student-loan giant Sallie Mae. I knew drama instructors who gave private acting lessons to students, unpaid, and music teachers who worked overtime with kids who couldn’t read notes but wanted to join the choir. Friends who attended other community colleges reported the same level of faculty attention. Often, because students are so varied, community colleges cultivate instructors flexible enough to teach according to the needs of individual students.

Even the Government Accountability Office acknowledged community colleges’ impressive array in its report “Community Colleges and One-Stop Centers Collaborate to Meet 21st Century Workforce Needs,” issued last year. “With generally low tuition and unrestrictive admissions policies that emphasize open enrollment,” the report said, community colleges “serve individuals ranging from those earning their first educational credential to midcareer professionals seeking to upgrade their skills or reenter the workforce.” About 11.5 million students were taking community-college classes in January 2008, according to the latest data from the American Association of Community Colleges. …

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Christopher Hitchens gives us the background on the newly nominated Iranian defense minister.

President Obama has said that he wants “the Islamic Republic of Iran” to be welcomed back into the “community of nations.” Unfortunately, it is precisely the fact that it is an Islamic republic that excludes it from such consideration. A pointed reminder of this was provided last week, when the country’s dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, freshly blooded from his recent military coup, nominated his choice of defense minister. This turns out to be Ahmad Vahidi, who if confirmed will be the only holder of the defense portfolio in the world to be simultaneously wanted by Interpol.

Vahidi used to head the so-called “Quds Force,” a shadowy arm of the “Revolutionary Guards” that conducts covert operations overseas. In 1994, according to an Argentine indictment adopted by Interpol’s “red list” or “most wanted” index, he was one of those responsible for “conceiving, planning, financing and executing” the demolition of the Jewish community’s cultural center in Buenos Aires. There were 85 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Among the five other named co-conspirators in this atrocity were Mohsen Rezaee, formerly the head of the Revolutionary Guards and more recently a candidate for the presidency, and the late Imad Mugniyeh, the Damascus-based leader of Hezbollah’s military wing, itself a declared proxy of the Islamic Republic. …

…The term Revolutionary Guard was not, until recently, as much of a byword as it has since become. But this year’s military coup in Tehran, of which that organization was the main engine, has put it at the forefront of our attention. The rape and torture of young Iranians, the sadistic public bullying and sometimes murder of women, the closing of newspapers and the framing-up in a show trial of opposition politicians and intellectuals—all this is the fruit of “Revolutionary Guard” activity and ambition. We may be limited in what we can do to help and defend the Iranians who are confined within their own borders. But surely it is time that the international community spoke with one voice and said that the leaders of this criminal gang must stay inside their own borders as well. Perhaps fewer invitations to “President” Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia University and perhaps fewer countries putting out the red carpet for his defense minister. As for the sending of known supervisors of murder and torture to human rights summits in Geneva: Conceivably that could become a slight no-no as well. Some of these people have bank accounts overseas, in consequence of their years of fleecing the helpless and torpid Iranian economy: Freeze these accounts or confiscate them and hold them in escrow for the day when democracy comes. …

We have Marty Peretz ‘s comments on the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Peretz throws in a paragraph trying to pin this on the last administration’s overtures to Gadhafi while ignoring the steady stream of Obama insults towards Great Britain. For example, as soon as he could Obama returned the bust of Churchill Tony Blair had loaned to Bush for display in the Oval Office. When visiting here, Gordon Brown brought thoughtful gifts to The One, like a pen and pencil set carved from timbers from one of the ships used to close down the slave trade. Obama gave Brown a boxed DVD set of 25 American movies formatted for our TV, not England’s. When the kid president went to England he gave the queen an IPod loaded with his speeches. Any wonder the Brits did not give much thought to how Obama might feel about the release of the Lockerbie bomber? For more on Obama’s insults to our closest ally read from the Daily Telegraph.

…The release of al-Megrahi is an enormity all its own, a sabotage of justice. It tells you a lot about the new America’s persuasive powers with its closest ally that it could not preclude his unfettering. Why the American government did not raise the issue of setting the murderer free before he was rescued by British financial interests is left to speculation. What is certainly true is that neither Brown nor Obama could get a believable commitment that the freeing of al-Megrahi would not be accompanied by a taunting of the United States. And if this taunting was preordained or foreshadowed, would it not have been better that Washington be defeated in honorable glory rather than being led into humiliation and ignominy by craven London and Edinburgh?

In the wake of the official delirium awaiting al-Megrahi in Tripoli, the president was quoted as characterizing the images as “highly objectionable” and “disturbing.” A group representative of survivors of the 270 dead did much better, branding them “perfidious, repulsive and sickening.” It is not as if Obama is usually shy with emotional oratory, although he is rather shy in admonishing Muslims, a difficulty he seems not to have with the Israelis. …

…I have my theory about the inertness (perhaps that’s too kind a description) of the Obama response to this grotesque spectacle: He is befuddled. His entire grand strategy rested on our ability to transform dozens of Libyas; his persuasive powers would make allies out of the rogue’s gallery of the Middle East. That was never an approach grounded in the hard realities of history or more than a surface understanding of his supposed interlocutors. It is a dream that should have died, once and for all, with the pep rally greeting al-Megrahi. But will this humiliation of Anglo-America change our policy? Unlike Obama, I have no illusions.

David P. Goldman who we first knew as Spengler discusses the divided opinion in Jewish-American society over Obama.

In case anyone failed to catch my drift last week, permit me to reiterate my distaste for yet another protest from the collected Jewish leadership over a supposed Catholic agenda to convert us. When Jews get together at the moment, do you think they complain about how many of our co-religionists we are losing to the Catholic Church? No, they don’t worry about the Catholic Church. They talk about Obama. Let me correct that: they do not exactly talk about Obama. They shout, stamp, and throw things. After Obama’s betrayal of Israel (and Elliot Abrams’ published reports of pre-existing deals between the US and Israel over limited expansion of settlements makes “betrayal” the operative word), the major Jewish organizations are in trouble. Not just fundraising, but jobs are on the line. Except for the Zionist Organization of America, all the major organizations bowed to the 78% Jewish majority for Obama and kowtowed to the president. Rabbis I know who privately abominate Obama for his betrayal do not dare say so in public because they would lose congregants–a lot of congregants. Except for the Reconstructionists, who would follow Obama back to Buchenwald if he led them there, and a few of the Orthodox who never went along with Obama in the first place, every synagogue in the US is split over Obama. …

…In a much smaller way, Obama is doing the same thing, by placing responsibility for the mess in the Muslim world at Israel’s doorstep: if only Israel could placate Muslim opinion by making visible and painful sacrifices of its own interests, then perhaps the Iranians could be made to act rationally, and so forth. It is unspeakably stupid, but the alternative is to concede that the entire project of the enlightened since the schemes for universal peace of Leibniz and Kant has gone down the drain.

Enlightened opinion sooner will believe that the Israeli army murders Palestinians in order to harvest their organs, then believe in its own redundancy. The stronger the evidence that the Muslim world will not come to terms with the West, the more fanatically enlightened opinion will demand that Israel accept responsibility. Someone must accept responsibility; the Iranian government is too busy suppressing its own voters, the Iraqis are too busy getting on with civil war, the Afghanis are too busy growing opium, the Pakistanis are too busy supporting the Taliban, the Libyans are too busy celebrating a mass murder, and so forth. Are the Muslims recalcitrant, hostile, even murderous? All the more reason to force concessions on Israel! Waxing Muslim rage and distress reveals the entire project of enlightened opinion to hang by a thread. If it should fail, then horrors will ensue to dwarf those of the bloody 20th century.

Jews have been prominent in the project of enlightened opinion, which now has turned upon them and demanded sacrifices that they cannot accept–apart from the extreme secular left of American Jewry. That is tearing the Jewish organizations apart, and possibly many congregations. …

Ann Coulter continues her series on health care.

With the Democrats getting slaughtered — or should I say, “receiving mandatory end-of-life counseling” — in the debate over national health care, the Obama administration has decided to change the subject by indicting CIA interrogators for talking tough to three of the world’s leading Muslim terrorists.

Had I been asked, I would have advised them against reinforcing the idea that Democrats are hysterical bed-wetters who can’t be trusted with national defense while also reminding people of the one thing everyone still admires about President George W. Bush.

But I guess the Democrats really want to change the subject. Thus, here is Part 2 in our series of liberal lies about national health care.

(6) There will be no rationing under national health care.

Anyone who says that is a liar. And all Democrats are saying it. (Hey, look — I have two-thirds of a syllogism!)

Apparently, promising to cut costs by having a panel of Washington bureaucrats (for short, “The Death Panel”) deny medical treatment wasn’t a popular idea with most Americans. So liberals started claiming that they are going to cover an additional 47 million uninsured Americans and cut costs … without ever denying a single medical treatment!

Also on the agenda is a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake that will actually help you lose weight! But first, let’s go over the specs for my perpetual motion machine — and it uses no energy, so it’s totally green! …

Caroline Baum advocates market-driven healthcare reform.

…Medicare, for example, has used a fee-for-service model since its inception in 1965. It encourages volume (more tests, procedures, surgery) over results, rewarding “incompetent doctors and bad hospitals,” according to Irwin Savodnik, a psychiatrist and philosopher on the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Poor diagnosis and treatment may mean more tests and additional surgeries. “The worst rise to the top,” Savodnik says.

And Medicare-for-all is President Barack Obama’s model for health-care reform?

Health care is an overwhelmingly complicated issue, which is probably the best reason the task of reform should be assigned to Mr. Market rather than politicians. The market would “respond and develop tools to make price and value decisions,” Cato’s Tanner says. …

Fouad Ajami looks at liberals’ unrealistic expectations regarding the American public.

So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These “townhallers” who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled “evil-mongers” (Harry Reid), “un-American” (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed. …

…American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the “mandate of heaven” is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics. …

Robert J. Samuelson comments on another expensive program with little benefit being pushed by the Obama administration: high-speed rail.

…In a blog-posted analysis, Glaeser made generous assumptions for trains (“Personally, I almost always prefer trains to driving”) and still found that costs vastly outweigh benefits. Consider Obama’s claim about removing the equivalent of 1 million cars. Even if it came true (doubtful), it would represent less than one-half of 1 percent of the 254 million registered vehicles in 2007.

What works in Europe and Asia won’t in the United States. Even abroad, passenger trains are subsidized. But the subsidies are more justifiable because geography and energy policies differ.

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it’s 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile. Trains can’t pick up most people where they live and work and take them to where they want to go. Cars can.

Distances also matter. America is big; trips are longer. Beyond 400 to 500 miles, fast trains can’t compete with planes. Finally, Europe and Japan tax car transportation more heavily, pushing people to trains. In August 2008, notes the GAO, gasoline in Japan was $6.50 a gallon. Americans regard $4 a gallon as an outrage. Proposals for stiff gasoline taxes (advocated by many, including me) go nowhere. …

Division of Labour provides a round-up of death videos from Cash for Clunkers. This is the first iteration of Obama death panels.

… A nice looking 2001 Mazda light truck with 75,000 miles bites the dust here. Here’s a good looking Volvo prematurely destroyed. This SUV would look at home in any tony U.S. suburb. …

Ed Morrissey reports the big winners in the Cash for Clunks were foreign makers.

… Why did GM and Chrysler, both owned in part by the same government that launched C4C, do so poorly?  In part, they didn’t have cars to sell.  Both GM and Chrysler had curtailed their production during their bankruptcies but had worked to have inventory ready for the new sales year.  By launching C4C in the middle of the summer, when most dealers are already cutting prices to move inventory off the lot, the administration practically guaranteed that C4C would leave them on the sidelines.  Chrysler had the worst inventory problems, but GM also had serious inventory issues.  Ford, which didn’t take the bailout, had continued production and had inventory ready to sell.

Shouldn’t the owner of GM and Chrysler had known this?  Didn’t anyone on the Auto Task Force — say, Ron Bloom, the auto czar with no automaking experience — bother to check whether their companies were ready to compete in this program, and whether July was a smart time to launch this even apart from that?  This is what happens when government enters the private sector; it makes decisions based on politics rather than sound business sense, and it picks leaders based on cronyism and political payoffs rather than expertise and competence. …