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The upcoming trial in Germany of John Demjanjuk will throw the spotlight on part of the Holocaust that is not widely known. Der Speigel reports on Hitler’s European Helpers. Long before the ovens were fired up at the camps, Gemans killed a million and a half people in occupied Eastern Europe. It is grimly ironic Himmler pushed for the gas chambers because of humanitarian concerns. Seems he as worried about his men having to kill people at close range.

The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler’s foreign helpers. …

…Denunciation was so common in Poland that there was a special term for paid informants “Szmalcowniki” (previously a term for a fence). In many cases, the denouncers knew their victims. And while the French, Dutch or Belgians could submit to the illusion that the Jews deported to the east from Paris, Rotterdam or Brussels would be all right in the end, the people in Eastern Europe learned through the grapevine what lay in store for the Jews in Auschwitz or Treblinka.

For sure, many counter-examples can easily be found. A senior officer in Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for the murder of more than 100,000 people, complained that the Ukrainians lacked “pronounced anti-Semitism based on racial or ideological reasons.” The officer wrote that “there is a lack of leadership and of spiritual impetus for the pursuit of Jews.”

Historian Feliks Tych estimates that some 125,000 Poles rescued Jews without being paid for their services. It’s clear that the perpetrators always made up a small minority of their respective population. But the Germans relied on that minority. The SS, police and the army lacked the manpower to search the vast areas where the Nazi leadership planned to kill all people of Jewish origin. Across the 4,000 kilometers stretching from Brittany in western France to the Caucasus, the Nazis were bent on hunting down their victims, deporting them to extermination camps or to local murder sites, preventing escapes, digging mass graves and then carrying out their bloody handiwork.

Of course only Hitler and his entourage or the army could have stopped the Holocaust. But this doesn’t invalidate the argument that without the foreign helpers, countless thousands or even millions of the approximately six million murdered Jews would have survived. …

Looking at Demjanjuk’s background:

…It was a gigantic killing program in which most of Poland’s Jews, 1.75 million, were murdered. The SS preferred to recruit its helpers among Ukrainians or ethnic Germans in prisoner-of-war camps where Red Army soldiers like Demjanjuk faced the choice of killing for the Germans or starving to death. Later, increasing numbers of volunteers from western Ukraine and Galicia joined the unit. The men had to sign a declaration that they had never belonged to a communist group and had no Jewish ancestry. Then they were taken to Travniki in the district of Lublin in south-eastern Poland where they were trained for their deadly profession on the site of a former sugar factory. In mid-1943 some 3,700 men were stationed in Travniki. Training for the Holocaust took several weeks. The SS men showed the new recruits how to carry out raids and how to guard prisoners, often using live subjects. Then the unit would drive to a nearby town and beat Jewish residents out of their homes. Executions were carried out in a nearby forest, probably to make sure that the recruits were loyal.

At first the Travniki were used to guard property and to prevent supply depots from being plundered. Then their German masters sent them to clear ghettos in Lviv and Lublin, where they were remorseless in rounding up their Jewish victims. Finally they were put to work in eight-hour shifts in the extermination camp. “Everyone jumped in where he was needed,” recalled one SS officer. Everything worked “like clockwork.”

Historians estimate that a third of the Travniki absconded despite the punishment that entailed if they were caught. Some were executed for disobedience. And the others? Why didn’t they try to get out of the killing machine? Why didn’t Demjanjuk? Die he allow himself to be corrupted by the feeling of “having attained total power over others,” as historian Pohl argues. Was it the prospect of loot? In Belzec and Sobibor the Travniki engaged in brisk bartering with the inhabitants of surrounding villages and paid with items they had seized from the prisoners.

Perhaps there was something else, something even more disturbing that many people have deep in their psyche: following orders from authorities even if they ran counter to their conscience. Total and utter obedience. …

Rick Richman presents striking parallels between the Carter and Obama presidencies.

…Hedrick Smith, in a long analysis in the January 8, 1978, New York Times, summarized what had happened:

Jimmy Carter first surprised and impressed the professional pols in 1976 with the cold, cocksure, methodical manner with which he stalked the Presidency. The surprise of 1977 was that Jimmy Carter was actually not the master politician they had imagined. . . . President Carter’s exaggerated aspirations and his profusion of proposals invited inevitable disappointment.

Four years later, Carter published his memoirs, which (in the words of Times reviewer Terrence Smith in 1982) admitted he had “overloaded the legislative agenda” in his early months in office and “the result was that his most cherished domestic initiatives—welfare and tax reform and a national health program—went down to early defeat.” His presidency never fully recovered. …

…After a year in office, it became apparent that a great slogan, image, and autobiography were not by themselves sufficient for an inexperienced politician with grandiose ideas to govern the United States. And Carter’s foreign-policy disasters were still ahead of him. …

…Jimmy Carter faced a more dangerous world and soon had crises to deal with in Iran and Afghanistan for which he was woefully unprepared. Three decades later, a president is pursuing exaggerated aspirations and a profusion of proposals while a storm is gathering abroad. It is not a situation that will be solved by triangulation

Matt Welch wrote a wonderful piece on big government, ending with the “Top Ten Obama Government Grabs”. Here is the opening:

It’s been a hilarious August, watching media supporters of President Obama’s health care package puzzle over the obscure motivations of the noncompliant Americans rallying against it.

“Racial anxiety,” guessed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

“Nihilism,” theorized Time’s Joe Klein.

“The crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy,” historian Rick Perlstein proclaimed in the Washington Post.

While the commentariat’s condescension is almost comical, the whole evil-or-stupid explanation misses the elephant in Obama’s room: Americans of all stripes, it turns out, aren’t very keen about the government barging into their lives. …

Liberal anger is back. Matthew Continetti has the details.

…The Angry White Liberal finds it simply incomprehensible that somebody might honestly and in good faith disagree with the Democrats’ efforts. On August 14, blogger Steve Benen wrote on the Huffington Post that the “far-right apoplexy is counter-intuitive.” After all, “Why would people who stand to benefit from health care reform literally take to the streets and threaten violence in opposition to legislation that would help them and their families?”

Forget Benen’s exaggerated claim of threatened violence. Note, instead, that Benen cannot conceive that someone might actually think the costs to the Democrats’ program outweigh the unrealized and perhaps unachievable benefits. …

…The Angry White Liberal directs his fury not only at conservatives. Another target is the Obama administration itself. After all, the White House has been unable to convince a majority of Americans that liberals are right and their health care reform is necessary. Comedian Jon Stewart opened a recent Daily Show by saying, “Mr. President, I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi–10 steps ahead of everything–or if this whole health care thing is kickin’ your ass.” In the Washington Post, Robert Kuttner blamed Obama’s economic team, which is “far too cozy with Wall Street.” For columnist Richard Cohen, Obama’s “klutziness” has hampered reform. MSNBC host Ed Schultz said the White House was “dazed and confused.” His colleague Rachel Maddow thinks the Democrats are “too scared of their own shadow.”

All this vituperation, this unrelenting urge to discredit opposing views, builds and builds. It’s uncontainable. Inconsolable. First the Angry White Liberal blames conservatives, then Democrats, then Obama . . . before you know it, he’ll be blaming the entire country for the failure to pass “comprehensive health care reform.” Everyone, that is, but himself.

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Russia’s first Time of Troubles, the 15 year interregnum between the Rurik and Romanov dynasties took place 1598 to 1613. Perhaps future historians will call the present day the second Time of Troubles. We have two items today on Russia and its prospects.

Richard Pipes gives us a penetrating look into the Russian psyche, and ends with implications for US foreign policy.

…We are right in objecting strenuously to Russia treating her one-time colonial possessions not as sovereign countries but dependencies lying in her “privileged zone of influence.” Even so, we should be aware of their sensitivity to introducing Western military forces so close to her borders. The Russian government and the majority of its citizens regard NATO as a hostile alliance. One should, therefore, be exceedingly careful in avoiding any measures that would convey the impression that we are trying militarily to “encircle” the Russian Federation. After all, we Americans, with our Monroe Doctrine and violent reaction to Russian military penetration into Cuba or any other region of the American continent, should well understand Moscow’s reaction to NATO initiatives along its borders.

This said, a line must be drawn between gentle manners and the hard realities of politics. We should not acquiesce in Russia treating the countries of her “near abroad” as satellites and we acted correctly in protesting last year’s invasion of Georgia. We should not allow Moscow a veto over the projected installation of our anti-rocket defenses in Poland the Czech Republic, done with the consent of their governments and meant to protect us against a future Iranian threat. These interceptors and radar systems present not the slightest threat to Russia, as confirmed publicly by Russian general Vladimir Dvorkin, an officer with long service in his country’s strategic forces. The only reason Moscow objects to them is that it considers Poland and the Czech Republic to lie within its “sphere of influence.”

Today’s Russians are disoriented: they do not quite know who they are and where they belong. They are not European: This is attested to by Russian citizens who, when asked. “Do you feel European?” by a majority of 56% to 12% respond “practically never.” Since they are clearly not Asian either, they find themselves in a psychological limbo, isolated from the rest of the world and uncertain what model to adopt for themselves. They try to make up for this confusion with tough talk and tough actions. For this reason, it is incumbent on the Western powers patiently to convince Russians that they belong to the West and should adopt Western institutions and values: democracy, multi-party system, rule of law, freedom of speech and press, respect for private property. This will be a painful process, especially if the Russian government refuses to cooperate. But, in the long run, it is the only way to curb Russia’s aggressiveness and integrate her into the global community.

John O’Sullivan believes that Russia is setting its sights on Ukraine.

…Also, the Kremlin has just introduced legislation into the Duma (certain to be passed) that enables the president to send troops abroad to “defend Russian soldiers and citizens, fight piracy, and defend foreign nations against threats.” This looks more like a domestic political tidying-up to clarify who in government has the power to order troop movements than a move to intimidate neighbors. As several pundits have pointed out, it tacitly admits that last year’s invasion of Georgia was illegal. Nonetheless it clears the constitutional decks for actions such as an invasion of Ukraine. Neighbors therefore have to take it seriously.

But that leaves open the question of whether such an invasion would be likely to succeed. Writing in the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor, the respected Russian military commentator Pavel Felgenhauer is pretty skeptical all round: “The Russian military at present is clearly not ready to take on an offensive ‘liberation’ campaign deep within Ukraine. The Ukrainian armed forces are ineffective, but the territory of the possible theater of conflict is vast and densely populated, requiring a massive deployment of well-prepared troops. Russia needs at least three more years of radical military modernization and some rearmament, before it may contemplate a Crimea and Ukraine mission.” After the unexpected mauling that its forces got at the hands of the small Georgian army, Russia is unlikely to take needless risks. In the meantime, however, Russia may continue to wage economic- and political-destabilization campaigns against Ukraine, Georgia, and other parts of the post-Soviet space on which its paranoia alights — with the potential military threat hovering in the background. …

…For as long as Russia felt unable to use force — at least three years in the above calculation — the Moscow–Kiev battle would be waged mainly over economics and, in particular, over the European Union’s policy towards both countries. Should closer EU-Russia economic cooperation go ahead? Should Russia be admitted to the EU’s Eastern Partnership, which is designed to protect Ukraine and other post-Soviet Eastern countries outside the Union?

Europe itself is bitterly though quietly divided over how to deal with these questions. In July, a stratospherically distinguished group of Central and East European statesmen, including Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, sent their own open letter to the Obama administration appealing for stronger U.S. intervention in European affairs — in effect because Western Europe alone could not be relied upon to defend democracy, national sovereignty, and the maintenance of a common Atlantic defense. …

Bill Kristol comments that Republicans are sticking to conservative principles.

…Meanwhile, as a decision looms for Obama on a new strategy requiring increased numbers of troops in Afghanistan, a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week discovered that “majorities of liberals and Democrats alike now, for the first time, solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction of troop levels.” Conservatives and Republicans are far more supportive of the war–they “remain the war’s strongest backers”–and a majority of conservatives don’t merely support the war but say they approve of President Obama’s handling of it.

So much for charges of knee-jerk or unprincipled partisanship. Conservatives support a president they generally distrust because they think it important the country win the war in Afghanistan. And despite temptations to make political hay out of a war that’s getting more unpopular, and despite doubts about Obama as commander in chief, Republican political leaders remain supportive of the war effort. They are urging Obama to commit himself unambiguously to win the war and to approve General Stanley McChrystal’s coming request for more troops. And in urging the administration to follow this course, they are willing to see the president get credit for doing the right thing.

In sum: In opposing Obamacare and supporting victory in Afghanistan, conservatives and Republicans are behaving as a loyal opposition. Those who were worried that partisanship would trump patriotism among conservatives, and that loathing of Obama would overcome loyalty to the country among Republicans, have so far been proved wrong. And those who were worried that timidity would prevent vigorous opposition where warranted in domestic policy have been so far proven wrong as well. The Republican party and the conservative movement are behaving in a way that can make Republicans and conservatives proud.

As for today’s liberals: They just don’t want America to win wars, do they? They’re ready, willing, and able to see America lose in Afghanistan. Luckily, President Obama seems to understand that the United States can and ought to win. And the Obama administration will benefit from the support of a loyal opposition if it chooses to surge to victory.

Jennifer Rubin thinks the White House is getting the wrong message from Town Halls.

… It is a measure of just how politically tone deaf the Obama team has become that they choose to attack ordinary Americans rather than absorb the message being sent. They have become so used to the echo chamber of their fellow liberals and the mainstream media (I repeat myself) that they still seem unaware of the vast gulf between themselves and citizens motivated enough to turn out in record numbers to express their concerns.

After weeks of this and a mound of polling data to confirm what we are seeing and hearing, the president has yet to acknowledge that he hears what citizens are saying or understands the need to rethink health-care reform. He persists in decrying “misinformation”—implying that voters are dim and have been duped by nefarious forces. It is a politically dangerous place for a president to be—defaming voters and ignoring their pleas. It is one thing to go to war with the opposition party but quite another to go to war with voters. In his hubris, Obama has forgotten who is in charge.

Shorts from National Review. Here are two:

Rather than leave students free to choose, the professor of Economics 301 at the University of Chicago assigned seating by alphabet. That put Rose Director and Milton Friedman next to each other. They married in 1938, forming one of the 20th century’s most important intellectual and personal partnerships. As a free-market economist, Milton earned scholarly respect and popular fame. Rose was his constant collaborator, especially on books and columns that involved questions of public policy. Friends regarded her as a bit more practical — and a bit more conservative — than her libertarian husband. Pres. George W. Bush once joked that she was the only person known to have won an argument with him. Until Milton’s death in 2006, they were almost inseparable, often seen holding hands in public, as if their 1930s romance had never ended. Rose Friedman died as this issue was going to press, age 98. R.I.P.

The Left’s main complaint about the stimulus was that it was too small. Looking overseas, Paul Krugman and economists of his stripe contended that stimulus packages in Germany, France, and other major economies also were too small. The United States spent 2 percent of GDP, while Germany, whose export-driven economy had taken a much harder hit, spent only 1.5 percent. France spent even less. It is true that “automatic stabilizers” — countercyclical features of the Euro-welfare state — complicate the picture a little, but even accounting for those, the Europeans spent less in response to more radical contractions. If the neo-Keynesians were not immune to evidence, they might find it persuasive that Germany and France have shown unexpected growth and have exited the global recession, in spite of their allegedly anemic emergency measures. Also on the rebound: China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Our idea for a stimulus would have been much cheaper: Export Paul Krugman.

Raymond Sokolov takes a culinary tour around Richmond, Virginia.

…In the down-home department, Richmond offers the barbecue lover a high density of way stations at which to feed his habit. After some studious inquiry, I settled on two expert purveyors of meat slow-cooked in pits. For a Saturday lunch, I joined some clean-cut families in Bermuda shorts at Buz and Ned’s Real Barbecue, where reality lay suspended somewhere between the spic and span patio, with its vertical rolls of paper toweling meant to invoke some backwoods haunt, and a fine-looking modern car wash. The smoky, juicy ribs were worth the slight detour from downtown, but the brisket sandwich wasn’t.

Further out of town, on a stretch of Jefferson Davis Highway not beautified by Lady Bird Johnson or anybody else, I hunkered down happily at the counter of Hank’s Pit Cooked Barbecue, in view of the full-size Elvis replica, a big American flag and assorted collectibles. Hank’s was founded in 1963 by Bill and Helen Hanchey (whence the “Hank”), who brought their notion of Q with them from Rose Hill, N.C. (pop. 1,330, alleged home of the world’s largest frying pan and muscadine winery). If you want barbecue at Hank’s, your choice boils down to pork shoulder, sliced or chopped, both with a strong vinegar tang. We picked chopped and reveled in the austere, sour pigginess of the experience. Hank’s is an import to the Commonwealth of Virginia, sure, but once you are inside you’ll have no trouble imagining yourself at some country crossroads south of Raleigh.

You get a similar whiff of what Horace the Roman poet called “boondocks in the city” (rus in urbe) at Comfort, found in a re-emerging Richmond neighborhood. Chef Jason Alley acquired his knowledge of fried green tomatoes, okra and catfish at his birthplace in Appalachia, Va., but seasoned himself in serious kitchens from Atlanta to Illinois before heading here and staking a claim for food that, he says, won’t scare people. The night I stopped by, the minimalist dining room was very full of nice people deciding whether to try the meatloaf or the grilled pork chop. Comfort is a superficially simple but culinarily expert nod to the basics of its region. But if you just must cater to your inner gourmet, you can order the Kobe skirt steak.

Or you could drive your Prius to the other side of town, to an un-picturesque stretch of Main Street down the hill from the pristine old Richmond neighborhood where Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death, and see what’s on for dinner at Millie’s Diner. …

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Mark Steyn gives us an excellent article on political correctness, Islamist-style. One of the anecdotes he relates involves the Yale University Press publishing a book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons, without the cartoons.

…The official explanation was the threat of violence. Not any actual violence, and, as it turns out, not even any actual threats. After Roger Kimball poked around a bit, it emerged that the decision to ban both the Danes and Doré was driven not by editors or publishers at YUP but by the very biggest bigwigs of the university itself. The experts were contacted by “the Office of the President,” no less. On its face, the decision to gut its own reputation for editorial and scholarly integrity seems to owe less to unspecified fears of jihadist nuts blowing up a university bookstore than to a cooler calculation of its strategic interests, including (so Mr. Kimball suggests) continued access to wealthy Muslim benefactors.

Yale has thus provided us with a perfect snapshot of where we’re headed. When I fought back against attempts by the Canadian Islamic Congress to get my writing criminalized north of the border, various American readers wrote to say: “Why bother? Who cares about Canada? We’ve got the First Amendment, and nobody’s going to ban you here.” That’s not how the world works, no matter the fond isolationist illusions of Ron Paul types. Restive European Muslims and unlimited Saudi money can put pressure on American publishers, institutions, and media that will eventually render the First Amendment moot. In Denmark and other countries, craven accommodationists can at least plead that they have incendiary majority-Muslim suburbs with 50 percent youth unemployment. That’s not true of New Haven, where the honchos seem to be using fear of violence as a cover for the appetites of their endowment. In other words, they’re merely posing as contemptible Euroweenies. Which, when you think about it, is even more contemptible.

In 2006, during the original cartoon jihad, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto spelled it out: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

It sounded vaguely ridiculous at the time. And yet, without the demographic pressures of Europe, a scholarly publisher in Connecticut now “obeys Islamic law.” Who’s next?

Turns out Fareed Zakaria recommended the cartoons be censored. What was he thinking? Did he ever hear of a free press?

Claudia Rosett posts on the release of the Lockerbie terrorist.

…If you’d like to learn more about the freed terrorist, al-Megrahi, and why Gaddafi might be so pleased to have him back, there’s an illuminating article on Forbes.com, written just before al-Megrahi’s release: “Don’t Let The Lockerbie Bomber Go Free.”

The author, Mohamed Eljahmi, had an older brother, Fathi Eljahmi, who was Libya’s most prominent democratic dissident. I say “was,” because after five solid years of imprisonment by Gaddafi, Fathi Eljahmi died this past April. There was no compassion shown by Gaddafi of any kind. Isolated much of the time, held in filthy conditions, incarcerated for a long stretch in a Libyan “psychiatric” facility, Fathi Eljhami was deprived of adequate medical care, and blocked from any direct communication with the outside world. He deserved a hero’s salute from both the democratic world and his fellow Libyans, but Gaddafi saw to it that from the day Eljahmi was arrested in 2004 until the day he died in April, 2009, he was never seen or heard in public again. …

Thomas Sowell explains that the price of Hope and Change is Freedom.

…The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.

What they are trying to do is to create an America very unlike the America that has existed for centuries — the America that people have been attracted to by the millions from every part of the world, the America that many generations of Americans have fought and died for.

This is the America for which Michelle Obama expressed her resentment before it became politically expedient to keep quiet.

It is the America that Reverend Jeremiah Wright denounced in his sermons during the 20 years when Barack Obama was a parishioner, before political expediency required Obama to withdraw and distance himself.

The thing most associated with America — freedom — is precisely what must be destroyed if this is to be turned into a fundamentally different country to suit Obama’s vision of the country and of himself. But do not expect a savvy politician like Barack Obama to express what he is doing in terms of limiting our freedom.

He may not even think of it in those terms. He may think of it in terms of promoting “social justice” or making better decisions than ordinary people are capable of making for themselves, whether about medical care or housing or many other things. Throughout history, egalitarians have been among the most arrogant people. …

If you can get through the nuttiness and affectations of Peggy Noonan, once and a while a great column pops up.

Looking back, this must have been the White House health-care strategy:

Health care as a subject is extraordinarily sticky, messy and confusing. It’s inherently complicated, and it’s personal. There are land mines all over the place. Don’t make the mistake the Clintons made and create a plan that gets picked apart, shot down, and injures the standing of the president. Instead, push it off on Congress. Let them come up with a dozen plans. It will keep them busy. It will convince them yet again of their importance and autonomy. It will allow them to vent, and perhaps even exhaust, their animal spirits. Various items and elements within each bill will get picked off by the public. Fine, that’s to be expected. The bills may in fact yield a target-rich environment. Fine again. Maybe health care’s foes will get lost in the din and run out of ammo. Maybe they’ll exhaust their animal spirits, too.

Summer will pass, the fight confined to the public versus Congress. And at the end, in the fall, the beauty part: The president swoops in and saves the day, forcing together an ultimate and more moderate plan that doesn’t contain the more controversial elements but does constitute a successful first step toward universal health care. …

Sunday Morning Rasmussen reported Obama’s popularity hit a new low.

David Limbaugh presents a convincing explanation for Obama’s declining poll numbers.

…Surely people can now see that it is no accident that he sat at the feet of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, that his mother was a leftist activist and cultural Marxist, that his main early mentor was radical Frank Marshall Davis, that he was a member of the far-left New Party in Chicago, that his main vocation in life has been street organizing and agitation and that he didn’t think the revolutionarily, transformative Warren court was liberal enough.

Since assuming office, Obama has been on a mission to fundamentally alter the social compact between the government and a once powerfully sovereign people.

The litany of his shocks to the system is too voluminous to detail in full, but just consider his calculated takeover of GM, his fraudulently marketed trillion-dollar spending schemes, his cap-and-trade boondoggle, his unilateral declaration of an end to the war on terror, his policy to Mirandize terrorists on the battlefield, his cavorting with terrorist dictators, his soft betrayal of Israel, his ceaseless foreign-soil apologies for America, and his crusade to subsume the health care industry.

These are not tweaks to a glorious constitutional republic, but a frantic effort to undo this republic brick by brick. And the American people have finally gotten wise to what’s going on and are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. …

David Warren discusses global warming junk science, and then turns his attention to a book about some real science.

…This has been brought home to me with force, by a magnificent little book, recently published by the Friends of Algonquin Park, and just fallen into my hands. It is the first of their new field guide series, on The Dragonflies and Damselflies of Algonquin Provincial Park and the Surrounding Area — an area extending to Ottawa. The reader who wishes to fill his heart with hope, joy, and beauty, will run out immediately and buy this book, whose authors are Colin D. Jones, Andrea Kingsley, Peter Burke, and Matt Holder.

It was recommended to me, owing to my own love for the Odonates, and all pond life, by a very devout and pious Darwinist of my acquaintance, who has fortunately never read my columns, and who may never speak to me again when he finds that I harbour “designist” heresies.

Indeed, a dragonfly is a wonder of pure brilliant mechanical design — this little roving eye of nature, that first appears, fully-formed with incredible precision, in the fossil records for more than 300 million years ago. And there is little as unforgettable as to watch a dragonfly emerge from its dead larva skin, and crawl tenuously out on a log — pale, utterly feeble, and crinkled. And then, before your eyes in the space of minutes, its abdomen extends, its wings fill out, its colouring begins to appear, and a glorious creature takes its first flight, towards the woods. It is a miracle that will help you contemplate the mysteries of Creation and Resurrection.

This Algonquin field guide is something of which Canadians may boast: I have never seen a better insect field guide, nor one so beautifully and intelligently put together. The existence of the growing market it serves is the more inspiring: for in the background of so much ideological, joke science (or “scientism”), real science is reviving, closely allied with art. It is the science of the field, of close and honest observation, of inferences that can be tested and checked. And like all true science, it teaches reverence.

Andy McCarthy posts on Cash for Clunkers.

Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money — between $3500 and $4500.  How hard is that?

Pretty hard, apparently. The Washington Times reports this morning that this simple, basic Big Gummint program has spun totally out of control:  it was clearly not thought through (even a little), it was under-budgeted by 2 or 3 hundred percent (and counting), and it was woefully under-resourced — such that staff have to be hired from the outside or pulled away from other government functions (like running air-traffic control) in order to clear the back-log.  Clearing the back-log, by the way, is a 24/7 operation that’s also requiring additional budgeting for overtime pay and a training program. …

…All this from the people who, Mark Steyn reminds us this morning, tell you that the way to control healthcare costs is to set up a huge new entitlement program (even as the ones they’ve already set up sink deeper into a multi-trillion dollar sea of unfunded liabilities). Why do we trust them to do anything other than the very few things for which you actually need a government? …

Volokh Conspiracy linked to a coup de grace delivered to a clunker. In this case, a Corvette.

WSJ Editors write on the clunker program.

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Mark Steyn opens with good news about the recession; for other countries.

…Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan and much of Continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Due to Obama, one of the least-indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted – and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country, after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page, trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He’s spending your future. And by “future” I don’t mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on “the rich,” but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in “the richest 5 percent” before this binge is over. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of Americans now expect higher taxes under Obama.

But the silver-tongued salesman sails on. Why be scared of a government health program? After all, says the president, “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” and if “we’re able to get something right like Medicare,” we should have more “confidence” about being able to do it for everyone.

On the other hand, says the president, Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money.” …

In The Corner, Mark adds an addendum.

David Harsanyi responds to Obama playing the morality card regarding healthcare reform.

Morality — whether derived from religion or a Starbucks coffee cup — is only one of the many considerations Americans take into account when thinking about policy. As an atheist, for instance, my core moral concern is that elected officials stop telling me what my core moral concerns should be.

While we have no clue what Jesus would make of a public option, we do have plenty of evidence that government tends to act immorally, corruptly and incompetently — especially a government with too much power. And the self-righteous elected official who has complete moral certitude on his side also has a tendency to ignore any other concerns. That detail has been painfully obvious in this debate.

“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies,” wrote C.S. Lewis, a man who knew a thing or two about religion. “The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

As Black Panther-gate continues to smolder, John Fund reports that Justice continues to refuse to provide more information.

…Justice spokesman Alejandro Miyar says the dismissal was “based on a careful assessment of the facts and the law.” But Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.), has been asking for more information. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Welch, for example, claims in a July 13 letter to Mr. Wolf that charges against the New Black Panther Party itself were dropped because there wasn’t “evidentiary support” to prove they “directed” the intimidation. But Mr. Wolf notes in a letter sent to Justice that one defendant, Black Panther Party Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz, said on Fox News just after the election that his activities at the polling station were part of a nationwide effort. Mr. Shabazz added that the Black Panther activities in Philadelphia were justified due to “an emergency situation.”

Mr. Wolf’s demands that Justice make the career attorneys on the case available for questions have been rebuffed. He also wants the House Judiciary Committee to hold hearings. A spokesman for House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers was noncommittal as to whether any hearing would be held.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights voted on Aug. 7 to send a letter to Justice expanding its own investigation and demanding more complete answers. “We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law,” its letter stated. It noted “the peculiar logic” of one Justice argument, that defendants’ failure to show up in court was a reason for dismissing the case: “Such an argument sends a perverse message to wrongdoers—that attempts at voter suppression will be tolerated so long as the persons who engage in them are careful not to appear in court to answer the government’s complaint.”  …

Paul Greenberg also summarizes Black Panther-gate and reports that it is being reviewed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

…The leading lights of the Democratic Party in and out of Congress may have turned a blind eye to this outrage, but the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hasn’t. In a letter to the attorney general, it has demanded an explanation for this kind “justice” from the Justice Department:

“We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law and raises other serious questions about the department’s law enforcement decisions.”

It sounds as if the commission is getting some subpoenas ready for high Justice Department officials, and it should be. The commission is obliged under law to issue an annual report on some aspect of law enforcement, and at least one of the commissioners — Todd Gaziano — has suggested that the Justice Department’s kid-glove handling of the Black Panthers be the focus of its 2010 report.

Nothing may actually be done to protect Philadelphia’s voters under this administration, but at least there ought to be a full investigation and comprehensive report by somebody official, even if it has to be somebody outside Congress. The record needs to show just how cynical this president and his attorney general can be when it comes to their promises about upholding the rule of law. Not to mention every American voter’s right to cast a secret ballot without being harassed.  …

Victor Davis Hanson believes that Obama’s descent in the polls centers around Obamacare.

…Health-care take overs and socialized medicine have terrified not just the right and conservatives, but the elderly of all persuasions who fear their shaky Medicare funds will be diverted to Obama’s new plans. In short, they believe their care will be rationed and given to all sorts of new recipients. And they fear age will be a basis for meriting treatment; as if the gang banger with a long felony record of mayhem at 22 would be more deserving before a federal health panel than would someone at 90 who scrimped and saved for insurance in case of some future need for a hip replacement (and was still active and productive; cf. great octogenarians from Sophocles to Barzun who did their best work in their late lives).

It was an insane political move to demonize these town-hallers, when streaming video showed the participants scared and angry, but not violent, trying to get answers from smug politicos who either cell phoned away, ridiculed questioners in the manner of Barney Frank, or mocked their interrogators. These were for the most part not Code Pink/Cindy Sheehan type protestors. …

…Who made the following decisions? 1) to propose a 1,000 page bill that no one had read, much less could explain?; 2) to ram down the greatest change in the US economy in fifty years by the August recess?; 3) to talk loosely of the “uninsured” without knowing why they were not insured, how much it would cost to insure them, or whether they currently in fact find some sort of care?; 4) to reference Rahm Emanuel’s doctor brother as a source of wisdom? 5) to demonize the health-care industry as greedy? …

Charles Krauthammer tries to bring rational thought to end of life care. Pickerhead still thinks some government creeps will reduce our lives to a “death score.”

…We also have to tell the defenders of the notorious Section 1233 of H.R. 3200 that it is not quite as benign as they pretend. To offer government reimbursement to any doctor who gives end-of-life counseling — whether or not the patient asked for it — is to create an incentive for such a chat. …

…So why get Medicare to pay the doctor to do the counseling? Because we know that if this white-coated authority whose chosen vocation is curing and healing is the one opening your mind to hospice and palliative care, we’ve nudged you ever so slightly toward letting go.

It’s not an outrage. It’s surely not a death panel. But it is subtle pressure applied by society through your doctor. And when you include it in a health-care reform whose major objective is to bend the cost curve downward, you have to be a fool or a knave to deny that it’s intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.

Thomas Sowell addresses a number of the deceptive tactics being used in the campaign for Obamacare. Here is the first:

Amid all the controversies over medical care, no one seems to be asking a very basic question: Why does it take more than 1,000 pages of legislation to insure people who lack medical insurance?

Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans do not have medical insurance, hardy souls who have actually read the mammoth medical care legislation being rushed through Congress have discovered all sorts of things there that have nothing whatever to do with insuring the uninsured — and everything to do with taking medical decisions out of the hands of doctors and their patients, and transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.

That’s called “bait and switch” when an unscrupulous business advertises one thing and tries to sell you something else. When politicians do it, it is far more dangerous to far more people.

Deception is not an incidental aspect of this medical care legislation, but is at the very heart of it.

The NRO staff posted some of Charles Krauthammer’s comments from Fox News All-Stars.

On Obama blaming Republicans for obstructing health-care reform:

This is typical Obama. He speaks for truth and justice, and anybody who opposes him is a rabid partisan who does it for personal partisan reasons.

Look, this is disingenuous, and it’s dishonest. He knows that the reason his proposals are in trouble is because of two things: Democrats in Congress, and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. …

David Friedman thinks that we will adapt to the projected effects of global warming pretty easily.

…But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen, and I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade over the next hundred years, resulting in a sea level rise of about a foot and a half. What I find implausible is the claim that changes on that scale at that speed would be catastrophic—sufficiently so to justify very expensive measures now to prevent them. …

…Even if the planet has not been optimized for us, we have optimized our activities for the planet, with the details depending in part on the local climate. Hence any change in either direction can be expected to be a worsening, making our present way of doing things less well adapted to the new conditions.

That would be a persuasive argument if we were talking about a substantial change occurring over five or ten years. But we aren’t. We are talking about a not very large change occurring over a century. In the course of a century, most existing houses will be replaced. If temperatures are rising, they will be replaced with houses designed for a (slightly) warmer climate. If sea levels are rising, they will be replaced, in low lying coastal areas, with houses a little farther inland. Over a century, farmers will change at least the varieties they are growing, very possibly the kind of crop, multiple times, in response to the development of new crop varieties, shifting demand, and similar changes. If temperatures are rising, they will gradually shift to crops adapted to a (slightly) warmer climate. …

The Economist gives us a peek at a coming trend.

NEGOTIATING his way across a crowded concourse at a busy railway station, a traveler removes his phone from his pocket and, using its camera, photographs a bar code printed on a poster. He then looks at the phone to read details of the train timetable displayed there. In Japan, such conveniences are commonplace, and almost all handsets come with the bar code-reading software already loaded. In America and Europe, though, they are only just being introduced.

Actually, calling them bar codes is a bit old-fashioned, because they store information in a two-dimensional (2-D) matrix of tiny squares, dots or other geometric patterns, rather than a stripe of black-and-white lines of varying thickness. When an image of the matrix is captured, software in the phone converts it into a web address, a piece of text or a number. If a number, it is sent to a remote computer which responds with an instruction that tells the phone to perform an action associated with that particular bar code.

In the case of the traveler, this might be calling up a web page on which the train timetable is displayed. Other 2-D bar codes might add an event to a calendar or display a coupon that entitles the bearer to a discount on a hamburger. …

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Spengler writes on the lives of Palestinians. As is his wont, he will provide a view of the situation you haven’t seen before.

… The standard tables of gross domestic product (GDP) per capital show the West Bank and Gaza at US$1,700, just below Egypt’s $1,900 and significantly below Syria’s $2,250 and Jordan’s $3,000. GDP does not include foreign aid, however, which adds roughly 30% to spendable funds in the Palestinian territories. Most important, the denominator of the GDP per capita equation – the number of people – is far lower than official data indicate. According to an authoritative study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies [1], the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. The numbers are inflated to increase foreign aid.

Adjusting for the Begin-Sadat Center population count and adding in foreign aid, GDP per capita in the West Bank and Gaza comes to $3,380, much higher than in Egypt and significantly higher than in Syria or Jordan. Why should any Palestinian refugee resettle in a neighboring Arab country?

GDP per capita, moreover, does not reflect the spending power of ordinary people. Forty-four percent of Egyptians, for example, live on less than $2 a day, the United Nations estimates. The enormous state bureaucracy eats up a huge portion of national income. New immigrants to Egypt who do not have access to government jobs are likely to live far more poorly than per capita GDP would suggest.

Other data confirm that Palestinians enjoy a higher living standard than their Arab neighbors. A fail-safe gauge is life expectancy. The West Bank and Gaza show better numbers than most of the Muslim world: …

The chattering classes have continued to discuss Yale’s flight from reason. Christopher Hitchens weighs in.

The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn’t even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture. A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of “protest” and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. (The competition was itself a response to the sudden refusal of a Danish publisher to release a book for children about the life of Mohammed, lest it, too, give offense.) By the time the hysteria had been called off by those who incited it, perhaps as many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed.

Yale University Press announced last week that it would go ahead with the publication of the book, but it would remove from it the 12 caricatures that originated the controversy. Not content with this, it is also removing other historic illustrations of the likeness of the Prophet, including one by Gustave Doré of the passage in Dante’s Inferno that shows Mohammed being disemboweled in hell. (These same Dantean stanzas have also been depicted by William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, and Auguste Rodin, so there’s a lot of artistic censorship in our future if this sort of thing is allowed to set a precedent.) …

American Thinker notes the growing realization Obama does not know what he’s talking about.

… When questions of Obama’s lack of experience were raised during the Presidential campaign, those questions were brushed off as racist.  We have been treated to an incessant refrain from the antique media celebrating Barack’s sterling intellect.  But Barely the President’s miscues along the health-care campaign trail have been so glaring that even the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is turning on him:

“Mr. President,” the “Daily Show” host said Monday night, “I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi – 10 steps ahead of everything – or if this whole thing is kickin’ your ass. “

And it’s not just Jon Stewart.  Watch the video at The Politico to see Obama ripped by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann as well.   Even the authors of the Washington Post’s compliant editorial corps who faithfully supplied the props to support Obama’s fantasy Presidential campaign are bailing out.   Eugene Robinson asks: “Where’s Mr. Transformer?” while Richard Cohen regrets “The klutziness of Obama’s effort.” .

Caroline Baum in Bloomberg with the same thoughts.

… Impromptu Obamanomics is getting scarier by the day. For all the president’s touted intelligence, his un-teleprompted comments reveal a basic misunderstanding of capitalist principles.

For example, asked at the Portsmouth town hall how private insurance companies can compete with the government, the president said the following:

“If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete.”

Self-sustaining? The public option? What has Obama been doing during those daily 40-minute economic briefings coordinated by uber-economic-adviser, Larry Summers?

Government programs aren’t self-sustaining by definition. They’re subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we’d be off the hook. …

Thomas Sowell continues with his series on who will make medical decisions.

When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said: “Because that’s where the money is.”

For the same reason, it is as predictable as the sunrise that medical care for the elderly will be cut back under a government-controlled medical system. Because that’s where the money is.

My experience is probably not very different from that of many other people in their seventies. My medical expenses in the past year have been more than in the first 40 years of my life — and I did not spend one night in a hospital all last year or go to an emergency room even once.

Just the ordinary medical expenses of keeping an old geezer going along in good health are high. Throw in a medical emergency or two and the costs go through the roof. So long as my insurance company and I are paying for it, it is nobody else’s business what my medical expenses are. But once the government is involved, everything is their business.

It is not just a question of what the government will pay for. The logic of their collectivist thinking — and the actual practice in some other countries with government-controlled health care — is that you cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if the powers that be decide that “society” cannot let its resources be used that way, or that it would not be “social justice” for some people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because some people “happen to have money.”

The medical care stampede is about much more than medical care, important as that is. It is part of a whole mindset of many on the left who have never reconciled themselves to an economic system in which how much people can withdraw from the resources of the nation depends on how much they have contributed to those resources. …

Ann Coulter has started a series – Liberal Lies About National Health Care.

(1) National health care will punish the insurance companies.

You want to punish insurance companies? Make them compete.

As Adam Smith observed, whenever two businessmen meet, “the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” That’s why we need a third, fourth and 45th competing insurance company that will undercut them by offering better service at a lower price.

Tiny little France and Germany have more competition among health insurers than the U.S. does right now. Amazingly, both of these socialist countries have less state regulation of health insurance than we do, and you can buy health insurance across regional lines — unlike in the U.S., where a federal law allows states to ban interstate commerce in health insurance.

U.S. health insurance companies are often imperious, unresponsive consumer hellholes because they’re a partial monopoly, protected from competition by government regulation. In some states, one big insurer will control 80 percent of the market. (Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.)

Liberals think they can improve the problem of a partial monopoly by turning it into a total monopoly. That’s what single-payer health care is: “Single payer” means “single provider.”

It’s the famous liberal two-step: First screw something up, then claim that it’s screwed up because there’s not enough government oversight (it’s the free market run wild!), and then step in and really screw it up in the name of “reform.” …

Gunzip.weebly provides a very clever use of Obama graphics to display the red ink flowing from his administration.

Outgoing head of Greenpeace says they “emotionalize” to reach their goals. Abe Greenwald has the story in Contentions.

Oops:

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.” Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.

Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.

“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. . . . That may have been a mistake,” he said.

But Leipold admitted to something far more destructive than a mistaken press release. “We, as a pressure group, have to emotionalize issues,” he said, “and we’re not ashamed of emotionalizing issues.”

That is a bald confession of contempt for science. Greenpeace is “proud” to fudge data, to do violence to the scientific method and the tradition of empirical analysis. …

How’s this for a story to start the humor section? Seems that in 2004 Dems in Massachusetts were distressed at the prospect of GOP Gov. Romney naming a replacement for Senator Kerry after he became president. So, they passed a law requiring a vote for senator within five months thus preventing a GOP appointment. Now it would mean the state would have only one senator for the five months following Ted Kennedy’s reunion with Mary Jo Kopechne. So now the Dems want to change the law back. Kathryn Jean Lopez has the story for The Corner.

More on this from John Fund who seems to know everything.

More humor from the Dems as they say the law of unintended consequences is of no consequence. Russ Roberts in Cafe Hayek has the story.

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John Fund sends off Bob Novak.

Robert Novak had planned to continue writing his three-times-a-week newspaper column and appearing on TV as an analyst until, as he told me, “the good Lord decides my time is up.” The discovery of a malignant brain tumor a year ago upset his plans and forced him into early retirement. But he continued writing occasional articles until late last year and was able to lucidly discuss current events after that as he battled the disease that claimed him yesterday at age 78.  …

… When I joined Bob and Rowly as the first reporter ever hired to work with the duo back in 1982, I asked Bob what made him most proud about the column. He told me he was pleased that every column the pair wrote contained at least one nugget of news that hadn’t appeared elsewhere. …

Same from John Podhoretz.

… He was a difficult man in many ways, but I always found him interesting, lively, and friendly. And I have to say that, toward the end of his life, he wrote a riveting I-can’t-quite-believe-I’m-reading-this memoir entitled The Prince of Darkness, which may offer, in its unsparing portrait of his own character and how he maneuvered his way through a 50-year career, the most accurate (and most dispiriting) picture of life in Washington and the journalism game published in my lifetime. It was an unexpected achievement, because he surely knew he was leaving his readers with a bad taste in their mouths. But he was determined to get it all down and get it right, and he did.

Left libertarian, Nat Hentoff, formerly of the Village Voice, says now we have a White House that makes him fearful. He is reacting to the end of life possibilities of ObamaCare. Pickerhead thinks we’ll have “life scores” just as we have credit scores. We won’t even have death panels. Some government creep will create some scoring process that will total up what we’re worth.

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law.

The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to “Dr. Obama,” particularly among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).

Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that “allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination.” (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing — which is fundamental to Obamacare goals — “the complete lives system.” You see, at 65 or older, you’ve had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks. ..

Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson, former Bush W aides, have a lengthy and thoughtful piece on ideas and issues with which to rebuild the Republican Party.

Here are some excerpts:

…A moral component to our foreign policy is, moreover, part of the American DNA. It would have been impossible to maintain the seemingly endless exertions of the Cold War without the American people’s instinctual concern for those held captive and their no less instinctual abhorrence of oppression. The same is true in the conflict with Islamist extremism and other current global challenges. Americans have an interest in liberty and human rights because they are Americans—and because America’s safety is served by the hope and health of others. Republicans can be forthright about the foreign-policy tradition that mixes toughness with generosity, the willingness to confront threats forcefully with the active promotion of development, health, and human rights. Since the midpoint of the last century, this has been the GOP’s watchword. Among younger Americans focused on global issues like genocide, poverty, women’s rights, religious liberty, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, it can resonate loudly. …

…Republicans will also have to put forth a comprehensive reform agenda. There is no shortage of issues at the federal level: converting the labyrinthine U.S. tax code into something far less burdensome and far more family-friendly; repairing a budget process that is broken, corrupt, and inefficient; developing a modern-day regulatory system in the aftermath of the collapse of our financial institutions; remaking a tort system that imposes wholly unnecessary upward pressure on the costs of health care; insisting that foreign-aid expenditures are both generous and outcome-oriented; and so forth. …

…As it happens, the GOP has successful reformers to whom it can look to and learn from, including popular governors or former governors like Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, and Jeb Bush. Daniels’s health-care plan in Indiana facilitated the transfer of money previously consigned to Medicaid into individual health-savings accounts and simultaneously extended coverage to more than 130,000 uninsured individuals. In a state carried by Obama last year, Daniels won re-election by 18 points. The Daniels plan is worth emulating on its own merits. Politically, it is worth studying as a case history in what the country cries out for: leadership dedicated to fixing what can be fixed at a cost that can be afforded and in a spirit of inclusiveness untainted by class resentment and a manipulated antipathy toward “the rich.” …

…It is, in, fact, vital for Republican leaders to press the case for economic growth in general. Americans achieve their dreams not through the redistribution of wealth but through the creation of wealth. As the late Jack Kemp never tired of stressing, growth-oriented economic policies are a simple matter of justice and equity. At the same time, they offer fertile opportunity for innovation by applying conservative and free-market ideas to the task of encouraging savings and wealth-building among the aspiring poor, rather than debt and dependency. Such innovative ideas can range from local efforts to nurture financial literacy to ambitious KidSave proposals that would create savings accounts for every child at birth, subsidized for low-income families. Whatever its particular expression in policy, asset-building should be a hallmark of the Republican party, on the sound theory that ownership encourages social mobility, community, and family stability. …

Thomas Sowell gives clarity to the government taking over our healthcare decisions. He ends with a discussion of the controversial ‘death panels’.

…As for a “death panel,” no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. “End of life” care under the “guidance” of “some independent group” sounds so much nicer — and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.

He said, “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there.” He added: “It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.”  …

A Corner post suggests Cheney’s memoirs are widely anticipated within the beltway.

Summertime in Wyoming is usually quite pleasant for the Cheney family. Last Thursday, the day before Lynne Cheney’s 68th birthday party, the Washington Post soured spirits just a bit with this headline: “Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush.” The front-page story detailed, with the help of numerous unnamed “associates,” how former vice president Dick Cheney’s upcoming book will supposedly open a “second front” against “Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush.” Team Cheney was not amused.

“From the first sentence, the piece was clearly biased and inaccurate,” Mary Matalin, Cheney’s former White House counselor, told NRO. Matalin now works as editor-in-chief of Threshold Editions — the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster — which will publish the former veep’s yet-to-be-titled memoir in spring 2011.

What irked Matalin was the Post’s reliance on whispers from sources alleged to have been present at the “informal conversations” Cheney is having with colleagues — where, the Post reports, the former vice president “broke form when asked about his regrets.” Matalin says “inaccuracies were evident since I was privy to what transpired at the book meetings. What was claimed to be said in them and about the vice president’s book was flatly and categorically untrue.”

Matalin, though miffed about the Post piece, admits it did get one thing right: Cheney’s book will uncloak many new things — just not a vendetta against George W. Bush. Cheney’s sense of humor, for starters, will be on full display. “He has some slap-your-mama funny tales from the around the world,” she says. …

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, for the WSJ, reviews The Anti-Communist Manifesto and gives a brief biography of each author who had a book selected for this work.

Although the Cold War was a “great game” played out on the field of diplomacy, a conflict between military superpowers that sometimes turned hot, it was also the 20th century’s war of religion: a clash of beliefs and a battle of the books. This mortal combat ­between Communism and liberal democracy produced a vast literature, some books famous in their day, some ­famous still.

Now John V. Fleming has had the excellent idea of telling the story of four of them, and the result is the readable and fascinating “The Anti-Communist ­Manifestos.” It may be all the better because Mr. ­Fleming, an emeritus professor at Princeton, isn’t a modern historian by trade but an authority on medieval literature who knows how to read a text and its context. His four manifestos are “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler’s novel about the Soviet show ­trials, and three memoirs: “Out of the Night,” by the pseudonymous “Jan Valtin,” a mysterious ­Communist ­agitator; “I Chose ­Freedom,” by the ­Soviet defector ­Victor Kravchenko; and “Witness,” by Whittaker ­Chambers, best known to history as the man who ­accused Alger Hiss of ­espionage.

These books are, of course, chosen from a long ­potential list that could include eyewitness accounts of the early Soviet ­regime—like Bertrand ­Russell’s “The Practice and ­Theory of Bolshevism” (1920) and Emma Goldman’s “My Disillusionment in Russia” (1923)—or George Orwell’s “1984.” Orwell’s book has just passed its 60th birthday and has been described as the most influential novel ever written.

But Mr. Fleming’s quartet has a linking theme. All his authors were anticommunists who had once been ­Communist activists. …

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Rick Richman comments on a post from Israeli blogger Arlene Kushner. Apparently Israel has seen enough of Obama to know that they want their deals in writing.

Israeli blogger Arlene Kushner writes that there are “rumors afloat about the specifics on U.S.-Israel negotiations with regard to a ‘temporary’ freeze on settlement building.” She cites an Israeli press report that “the U.S. wants a two year freeze because Obama figures that’s how long forging a peace deal will take,” while Netanyahu is offering three months (with the right to resume building if Arab states do not respond with normalization steps).

But the real sticking point may be something else that she notes in her post:

Both Netanyahu and Barak (who reportedly would accept a six-month freeze) want the deal in writing, since Obama claimed there was no deal with Bush that had to be honored because there was nothing that was an explicit written commitment. Obama is said to be balking at this as he doesn’t want to go on record as formally authorizing building in the settlements under any conditions.

This is what happens when you renege on established oral understandings on the grounds they are “unenforceable.” …

George Jonas in Canada’s National Post also comments on US-Israeli relations.

…”Think about that for a moment,” wrote Jeff Jacoby in theBoston Globe recently. “Six months after Barack Obama became the first black man to move into the previously all-white residential facility at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, he is fighting to prevent integration in Jerusalem.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Obamists’ chutzpah was unequivocal, though not as intemperate as mine would have been. He didn’t tell Obama and his officials to go fly a kite. He simply reminded everyone that with Israel being a free country, the residents of Jerusalem, regardless of ethnicity or religion, were free to purchase property wherever they liked. Just as Arabs could live in west Jerusalem if they chose, Jews could live in east Jerusalem. “This is the policy of an open city,” he said.

It’s not the policy of Obamaniac liberals, though. Their “two-state” solution is to turn the Jewish State into a multicultural caravanserai but make the Palestinian State judenrein. It’s not Zionism that is racist; it’s rampant liberalism, liberalism run amok. The United Nation’s infamous Zionism=racism doesn’t compute, but after the left’s — not only the American or European, but even theIsraeli left’s — display of visceral aversion to Jewish settlements in the Holy Land, liberalism=racism isn’t far off the mark.

Recently, America’s uber-liberal President had the temerity to advise Israel to engage in introspection. That’s a joke. Whatever Israel’s failings, there hasn’t been a more introspective country on Earth. Whatever Obama’s qualities, there hasn’t been a more cocksure occupant of the Whiter House. …

The Wall Street Journal editorial board tells us about a truly amazing occurrence.

We witnessed that rarest of things last week—a politician’s public humility. When France, along with Germany, reported an unexpected uptick in economic growth for the second quarter, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde called the return to growth “very surprising.” Imagine that—a major global economy stops shrinking, without the benefit of trillion-dollar stimulus packages or major reforms, and a politician doesn’t rush to claim credit for the achievement.

Politicians don’t “grow” an economy like a vegetable garden, and the reasons behind economic growth in the global economy are at least as mysterious to our political class, if not more so, than they are to the rest of us. Ms. Lagarde, who spent decades in the private sector, is perhaps better placed than many politicians to appreciate this fact. A single quarter of 0.3% growth hardly means it’s off to the races for France or Germany, and the euro zone’s economy as a whole still shrank in the quarter, by 0.1% of GDP.

But at a time when politicians around the world are desperate for any sign of a turnaround, it’s refreshing to hear the minister responsible for France’s economy speak the truth about growth. It is the product of literally millions of decisions made by millions of people about what to produce, buy and sell. Politicians can influence all that decision making, especially by increasing or decreasing the incentives to produce, work and innovate. But they can’t control today’s multi-trillion-dollar economies, no matter how much they’d like to take credit for doing so when things start looking better. …

Richard A. Epstein takes another look at Gates-gate now that the police tapes have been released.

…Who, then, is likely to make a blunder–someone who follows the book, or someone who in righteous indignation falls back on his own deep-seated conviction that whites, police officers included, suffer from unconscious racial biases? Again the tapes go a long way to answering that question. It is no wonder that police officers, white and black, took offense at the president’s remarks. The color of the uniform matters more than the color of the skin.

In these circumstances, it was ungracious for Obama to damn Crowley by faint praise. Of course an “outstanding officer” like Sgt. Crowley with “a fine record of racial sensitivity” can have interactions with members of the African-American community that are “fraught with misunderstanding.” This Solomonic effort to split the baby is undercut by one simple fact: Crowley’s compliance with protocol in the face of Gates’ gratuitous confrontation. Gates is hardly covered with glory because his own abusive conduct may not be criminal. Common civility requires more.

There is a larger lesson to be learned. No national dialogue will improve race relations by treating a model officer like Crowley as if he were a rogue cop. The rate of racial progress in Cambridge makes these harsh denunciations hurtful. Gates could have contributed to improving relations by keeping his cool after the incident was over. Yet, no matter how one views the case, standard statistical protocols caution against sad generalizations about race relations from one unfortunate incident. Professor Gates and President Obama would have done a lot better if they had reined in their own harsh charges. Sometimes silence is golden.

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute blog has a lot of fun tracking the NY Times efforts to cover for the kid president.

… Well – Obama quite clearly talked about the hip replacement as a quality of life decision, not a “curative” treatment, said it was a tough call, said end-of-life care is a huge cost driver, and spoke in favor of a final legislative package that included “voluntary” guidelines established by government wise men to balance expense and efficacy.  Denial is probably the best tactic for Obama’s supporters on this one.

However, the Times has now pointed themselves into a corner – their recent faux-careful examination of the “death panel” rumors that have dogged Obama completely failed to note Obama’s own contribution to the debate in April.  The Times has decreed that the notion that Obama has ever hinted at support for anything like a death panel (or cost oriented trade-offs for end-of-life care) is “false”, despite their own past reporting to the contrary.

So what are they going to do when Obama starts talking about his grandmother and insisting that his only takeaway from that experience was that he is opposed to death panels or any sort of government advisory role in end-of-life care?  Are you kidding?  They are going to move on.  Nothing in the latest Gay Stolberg story hints that Obama is re-spinning his grandmother’s tale with a new “lesson learned” or that the folks now accused of being “dishonest” can point to Obama’s own words as printed in the Times.

It’s Times-world – Obama can say whatever he wants and later say whatever else he wants, then denounce the people still grappling with the previous version.

Imagine my surprise.

Steve Chapman does a great job dispelling the myth that Americans don’t live as long as the unfortunate citizens of countries with socialized healthcare.

…It’s true that the United States spends more on health care than anyone else, and it’s true that we rank below a lot of other advanced countries in life expectancy. The juxtaposition of the two facts, however, doesn’t prove we are wasting our money or doing the wrong things.

It only proves that lots of things affect mortality besides medical treatment. Actor Heath Ledger didn’t die at age 28 because the American health-care system failed him.

One big reason our life expectancy lags is that Americans have an unusual tendency to perish in homicides or accidents. We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks.

In their 2006 book, “The Business of Health,” economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider set out to determine where the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer? First place.

That discovery indicates our health-care system is doing a poor job of preventing shootouts and drunk driving but a good job of healing the sick. All those universal-care systems in Canada and Europe may sound like Health Heaven, but they fall short of our model when it comes to combating life-threatening diseases. …

Ross Douthat discusses seniors, Medicare, and Republican strategy.

…That’s why Republicans find themselves tiptoeing into an unfamiliar role — as champions of old-age entitlements. The Democrats are “sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare,” Mitch McConnell declared. They want to “cannibalize” the program to pay for reform, John Cornyn complained. It’s a “raid,” Sam Brownback warned, that could result in the elderly losing “necessary care.”

The controversy over “death panels” is just the most extreme manifestation of this debate. Obviously, the Democratic plans wouldn’t euthanize your grandmother. But they might limit the procedures that her Medicare will pay for. And conservative lawmakers are using this inconvenient truth to paint the Democrats as enemies of Grandma.

You can understand why Republicans, after decades of being demagogued for proposing even modest entitlement reforms, would relish the chance to turn the tables. But this is a perilous strategy for the right.

Medicare’s price tag, if trends continue, will make a mockery of the idea of limited government. For conservatives, no fiscal cause is more important than curbing this exponential growth. And by fighting health care reform with tactics ripped from Democratic playbooks, and enlisting anxious seniors as foot soldiers, conservatives are setting themselves up to win the battle and lose the longer war. …

The Economist walks us through Tristram Hunt’s new book, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.

When the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.

The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital. …

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David Warren reviews The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, by Alison Gopnik.

…Gopnik’s may not be the best for the purpose, but is nevertheless among the most accessible books that show how recent empirical research into the behaviour of the littlest human folk has utterly demolished the assumptions and “theories” of such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget. …

…At the very least, Gopnik shows that human apprehension of an objective moral order — founded on the Golden Rule: to do as you would be done by — is innate. This sense of justice is present long before adults have had a decent chance to tamper with it, or to impose ideological blinders.

From a very young age, even before continuous memory has set, the babe is playing with hypotheticals and counterfactuals in a remarkably knowing way, and is in little doubt about the goodness or badness of his behaviour. That even a babe is capable of evil — of doing the bad in defiance of the good, in the absence of sufficient self-control — is made wonderfully apparent in Gopnik’s book, and many other empirical studies.

The importance of play, in the development of children, is seldom so well stressed as by Gopnik. The child’s empathy is also innate, and first appears, as if spontaneously, in the loving return of the gaze of his mother. It is developed through his imagination, in which he posits imaginary creatures, from invisible playmates to magical dragons. …

Caroline Glick has a fascinating article on what is really happening with US foreign policy in the Middle East. The first part of the article reports evidence that Obama’s message of Hope and Appeasement have not fazed terrorist groups.

…At the conference, Fatah’s supposedly feuding old guard and young guard were united in their refusal to reach an accommodation with Israel. Both old and young endorsed the use of terrorism against Israel. Both embraced the Aksa Martyrs Brigades terror group as a full-fledged Fatah organization.

Both demanded that all Jews be expelled from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem ahead of the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state.

Both claimed that any settlement with Israel be preceded by an Israeli withdrawal to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and by Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state through its acceptance of millions of foreign-born, hostile Arabs as immigrants within its truncated borders.

Both demanded that all terrorists be released from Israeli prisons as a precondition for “peace” talks with Israel.

Both accused Israel of murdering Yasser Arafat.

Both approved building a strategic alliance with Iran. …

The latest sales pitch for Obamacare is that preventive care will save money. Charles Krauthammer counters this economic fallacy.

…This inconvenient truth comes, once again, from the CBO. In an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf writes: “Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.”

How can that be? If you prevent somebody from getting a heart attack, aren’t you necessarily saving money? The fallacy here is confusing the individual with society. For the individual, catching something early generally reduces later spending for that condition. But, explains Elmendorf, we don’t know in advance which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case, “it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway.” And this costs society money that would not have been spent otherwise.

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care. …

…This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be preventing illness. Of course we should. But in medicine, as in life, there is no free lunch. The idea that prevention is somehow intrinsically economically different from treatment — that treatment increases costs and prevention lowers them — is simply nonsense. Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the whole premise of medicine. …

Karl Rove looks at some of the tactics being used in the Obamacare campaign.

…For example, there’s a video being circulated online of Barack Obama telling the Illinois AFL-CIO in 2003, “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health-care program . . . we may not get there immediately” and then telling an SEIU Health Care Forum in 2007, “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out where we’ve got a much more portable system.”

The White House now insists that the president doesn’t want to enact a single-payer health-care system or eliminate private insurance. What’s more, a White House spokeswoman attacked the video, saying its compilers “Take a phrase here and there—they simply cherry-pick and put it together—and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”

That’s laughable. Mr. Obama’s remarks are straightforward and indisputable. Rather than saying his views have changed as he has worked to create a national consensus, the administration denies what is obviously true. …

Thomas J. Sugrue in WSJ takes a look at the home ownership.

…Surveys show that Americans buy into our gauzy platitudes about the character-building qualities of home ownership—at least those who still own them. A February Pew survey reported that nine out of 10 homeowners viewed their homes as a “comfort” in their lives. But for millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure, the home has become something else altogether: the source of panic and despair. Those emotions were on full display last week, when an estimated 53,000 people packed the Save the Dream fair at Atlanta’s World Congress Center. Its planners, with the support of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, brought together struggling homeowners, housing counselors, and lenders, including industry giants Bank of America and Citigroup, to renegotiate at-risk mortgages. Georgia’s housing market has been devastated by the current economic crisis—338,411 homes in the Peachtree state went into foreclosure in May and June alone.

Atlanta represents the current housing crisis in microcosm. Since the second quarter of 2006, housing values across the United States have fallen by one third. Over a million homes were lost to foreclosure nationwide in 2008, as homeowners struggled to meet payments. The number of foreclosures reached an all-time record last month—when owners of one in every 355 houses in the country received default or auction notices or were seized by creditors. The collapse in confidence in securitized, high-risk mortgages has also devastated some of the nation’s largest banks and lenders. The home financing giant Fannie Mae alone held an estimated $230 billion in toxic assets. Even if there are signs of hope on the horizon (home prices ticked upward by 0.5% in May and new housing starts rose in June), analysts like Yale’s Robert Shiller expect that housing prices will remain level for the next five years. Many economists, like the Wharton School’s Joseph Gyourko, are beginning to make the case that public policies should encourage renting, or at least put it on a level playing field with home ownership. A June 2009 survey commissioned by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, found a deep-seated pessimism about home ownership, suggesting that even if renting doesn’t yet have cachet, it’s the only choice left for those who have been burned by the housing market. One third of respondents don’t believe that they will ever be able to own a home. And 42% of those who once purchased a home, but don’t own one now, believe that they’ll never own one again. …

The Economist reports on a different kind of space race, looking for another planet that might support life.

IN 1995, when Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva detected the first exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star other than the sun) he started a race that has gained pace ever since. Some 360 such planets have now been detected, but none is exactly equivalent to the Earth.

The closest so far is Gliese 581c, which was discovered in 2007 by Dr Mayor’s colleague, Stéphane Udry. It is both rocky and orbits its parent star at a distance where liquid water could reasonably be expected to exist. However, since its parent star is a red dwarf—a far smaller and fainter object than the sun—that orbit is, in fact, much smaller that the Earth’s around the sun. That, in turn, suggests Gliese 581c is likely to be tidally locked to its orbital period, so that one side of the planet always faces the star and the other never does. Having half a planet in permanent daylight and the other half in permanent darkness does not sound like a good recipe for life.

As astronomers heard this week at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Rio, two new missions—a French one launched in December 2006 and an American one launched on March 6th—are in the process of trying to add to the list. Dr Mayor told the meeting that the French mission, CoRoT, has now found 80 exoplanets. It does so by watching for small diminutions in the amount of light from a star as the planet in question passes in front of it, a phenomenon known technically as a transit. The details of all but seven of these transiting planets are still unpublished, but Dr Mayor gave the meeting a preview.

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David Warren packs a lot into his article in the Ottawa Citizen. It includes a rundown on some of the administration’s czars who have avoided much-needed public scrutiny.

…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. …

Roger L. Simon posts on Obama’s distorted ideas about fairness which is his “f” word.

I first noticed this during what was, for me anyway, one of the seminal moments of the campaign – Charles Gibson asking the candidate about the correlation between a cut in capital gains taxes and an actual increase in government revenue. For a moment it seemed Obama didn’t know what Gibson meant or had never heard of this before, but then he covered himself with the f-word. Even if this were the case, Obama said, it wasn’t “fair” to cut capital gains. Peculiar, no, given that an increase in government revenues would be more money to spend on O’s pet programs that allegedly would help those people that were suffering?

Mark Steyn discusses the quality of life problems that arise when government is in charge of healthcare.

…The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decide that you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.” Well, he had a good innings. He was 57. …

…Well, amazingly, millions of freeborn citizens exercising their own judgment as to which of the latest drugs, tests and procedures suits their own best interests has given Americans a longer, better, more fulfilling old age to the point where there are entire states designed to cater to it. (There is no Belgian or Scottish Florida.) I had an elderly British visitor this month who’s had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly, and so we took her to Emergency. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she’s had in the past decade in Britain – even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable “resources.” So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It’s the difference between health “care” (i.e., going to the doctor’s every month to no purpose) and health treatment – and on the latter America is the best in the world.

President Barack Obama has wondered whether this is a “sustainable model.” But, from your point of view, what counts is not whether the model’s sustainable but whether you are. I am certainly in favor of reform. I would support a Singapore-style system of personal health accounts – and Singapore, for Mayor Bloomberg’s benefit, has the third-highest life expectancy in the world. But, under any government system that interjects a bureaucracy between you and your health, the elderly and not so elderly get denied treatment. And there’s nothing you can do about it because, ultimately, government health represents the nationalization of your body. You’re 84, 72, 63, 58, you’ve had a good innings. It’s easy for him to say. And even easier for his army of bureaucrats. …

David Harsanyi uses Obama’s own sales pitch against him.

…In his pitch to the masses on health care, President Barack Obama says that a public option “will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health-care market . . . and keep the insurance companies honest.”

So let’s agree, then, that the more we inject competition into a marketplace, the more consumers benefit from lower prices and innovation. Consequently, there should be no problem infusing this open-minded brand of policymaking into an array of issues. You know, to keep everyone honest.

All one needs to do is employ the president’s logic and it becomes patently obvious that the time is right for a “private option” in Social Security. This would free citizens to extract themselves from a failing program and pay into a private one that offers more than a 1 percent return (like a savings account or a tooth fairy, for instance). Since injecting competition into markets is healthy and desirable and all that good stuff . . . it should be painless. …

…And what about those vulnerable children? If health care is a “right,” then education is a sacred moral imperative. How could an enlightened society allow a “public” education monopoly to run our precious schools into the ground? Let’s get moving on a private option by means of vouchers so parents — or “victims,” in this case — can blunt the influence of “villainous” super-funded special interest groups like the National Education Association. …

Michael Barone looks at the huge increase in government spending.

…The tea parties this spring and the so-called “mobs” of protesters against the health care bill seem to have sprung up largely spontaneously; it is those who support the Democrats who appear in organized busloads with mass-produced signs.

And the tea party and health care protesters, in their often unsophisticated way, are raising an issue that seems to have become central to our politics: Should we vastly increase the size and scope of the federal government? This issue was long dormant, with a consensus prevailing during the quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth from the early 1980s to the financial crisis of 2008.

Now it’s clearly presented, thanks to the Democrats’ plans. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke noted on June 3, the national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product will increase from about 40 percent in 2007 to 70 percent in 2011 — the highest level since the years after the massive debt buildup in World War II. “The fundamental decision that the Congress, the administration and the American people must confront,” Bernanke testified, “is how large a share of the nation’s economic resources to devote to federal government programs.” …

Ann Coulter counters Kathleen Parker’s attempt to play the race card.

…Throughout the presidential campaign last year, liberals were champing at the bit to accuse Americans of racism for not supporting Barack Obama. That was a tough argument on account of the obvious facts that: (1) for every vote he lost because he’s black, Obama picked up another 20 votes for being black; (2) Obama won the election in (3) a country that’s 87 percent non-black.

So the accusations of racism had to be put on hold until … the first note of dissent from his agenda was sounded.

Inasmuch as Obama was just elected and his policies have turned out to be the most left-wing the country has ever seen, it wasn’t going to be easy to claim the electorate suddenly decided they didn’t like the mammoth spending bills or socialist health care bills because they just noticed Obama is black.

But Kathleen Parker has leapt into the fray to explain that the opposition to Obama’s agenda is pure Southern racism. And she’s from the South, so it must be true! …

…How one gets from “we don’t want socialized medicine” to “we hate black people” was a tough equation. As my algebra teacher used to say: “Please show your work.” …

John Stossel says that big business is happy to use government to its own gain.

…Not that Big Pharma and Big Insurance like every detail of the Democratic plan. Drug companies don’t want Medicare negotiating drug prices — for good reason. If it forces drug prices down, research and development will be discouraged. (Depending whom you believe, Obama may or may not have agreed with the drug companies on this point.)

As for the insurance companies, they worry — legitimately — that a government insurance company — the so-called public option” — would drive them out of business. This isn’t alarmism. It’s economics. The public option would have no bottom line to worry about and therefore could engage in “predatory pricing” against the private insurers.

But despite these differences, the biggest companies in these two industries are on board with “reform.”

It illustrates economist Steven Horwitz’s First Law of Political Economy: “No one hates capitalism more than capitalists”. In this case, big business wants to shape — and profit from — what inevitably will be an interventionist health-care reform. Can you think of the last time a major business supported a truly free market in anything?  …

Arthur W. Herman in NR reviews Allis and Ronald Radosh’s book A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.

In most world capitals, the creation of Israel — which used to be seen through a heroic lens, as in the film Exodus — is now viewed as a matter of regret. The current U.S. administration, too, is rather cool toward Israel. So this is a good time to be reminded of how and why Israel was founded in the first place, and how one American’s role in that founding rose to the heroic. Allis and Ronald Radosh have given us an invaluable and compelling account of Pres. Harry Truman’s fight against enormous and unscrupulous opposition from within his own administration, in order to make sure America played a public role in the creation of Israel. …

…The State Department did everything it could to prevent that birth. It importuned the British to remain in Palestine. When that failed, at the last minute Truman’s U.N. ambassador sabotaged the president’s clearly stated policy by switching the U.S. vote from supporting partition of Palestine to supporting a more or less permanent U.N. trusteeship. A furious Truman had to read the riot act to Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. It was as close as Truman and his semi-deified secretary of state came to breaking publicly on an issue. Marshall relented, but told Truman he intended to vote against him in the upcoming presidential election. …

…And it may also come from a lingering sense, as Winston Churchill put it, that the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is an event “to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Supporting Israel was and is an act of gratitude toward the religion and people who stood at the founding of Western civilization, and without whom we would not exist. Men like Churchill and Truman understood it was important to return the favor.

Nose on Your Face.com reports Obama named Mike Tyson as “Town Hall Debate Czar”.

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John Bolton gives us more of Mary Robinson’s extreme views.

…In fact, Ms. Robinson wanted U.N. control over NATO’s actions: “It surely must be right for the Security Council . . . to have a say in whether a prolonged bombing campaign in which the bombers choose their target at will is consistent with the principle of legality under the Charter of the United Nations.” One wonders if this is also Mr. Obama’s view, given the enormous consequences for U.S. national security.

This February, asked whether former President George W. Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes, Ms. Robinson answered that it was “premature,” until a “process” such as an “independent inquiry” was established: “[T]hen the decision can be taken as to whether anybody will be held accountable.” In particular, she objected to the Bush administration’s “war paradigm” for dealing with terrorism, saying we actually “need to reinforce the criminal justice system.” Asked about Mr. Obama’s statements on “moving forward,” Ms. Robinson responded that “one of the ways of looking forward is to have the courage to say we must inquire.”

Ms. Robinson’s award shows Mr. Obama’s detachment from longstanding, mainstream, American public opinion on foreign policy. The administration’s tin ear to the furor over Ms. Robinson underlines how deep that detachment really is.

Rick Richman looks at whether Mary Robinson’s radical views were known by the White House.

…It is highly unlikely that the nomination was the result of poor vetting, which involves nominating someone who appears appropriate and then discovering he has a tax problem, for example. But if you know about the tax problem and nominate him anyway—because you think his services are necessary to solve a more important problem—the issue is not one of vetting but of judgment, as well as what you are trying to achieve with the nomination.

Ed Lasky has marshaled a lot of evidence indicating that the person responsible for selecting and/or vetting Robinson was the president’s close friend and White House adviser Samantha Power, who would likely have been familiar with Robinson’s background. Robinson’s record at Durban did not, in any event, need a background check; it was in the foreground of her public record (see Tom Lantos’s lengthy Durban report). It was not a hidden tax problem but a known quality deemed not disqualifying given the larger problem to be solved by the nomination.

What was that problem? In an important 7,345-word post (with a 1,700-word follow-up), Catherine Fitzpatrick—who was at Durban I and watched Robinson’s performance there, and who is both her defender and her critic—says the nomination was “an effort to deflect criticism of the United States coming furiously from some leftist groups for the U.S. decision not to participate in the follow-up conference in Durban in April.” She concludes that “at the end of the day, the Obama Administration chose Mary Robinson because they felt she was one of their own.”…

Rick Richman thinks Obama’s Cairo speech fit a Mary Robinson quote hand-in-glove.

One of the most controversial parts of Barack Obama’s Cairo speech was the portion in which he appeared to draw a moral equivalence between the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the Palestinian “dislocation” and “occupation” arising from the wars against the Jewish state in 1948 and 1967.

It is worth revisiting that portion of the Cairo address in connection with the continuing Mary Robinson controversy. Here is what Obama said in Cairo:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. . . .

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people—Muslims and Christians— have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. . . . They endure the daily humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation.

The “on the one hand/on the other hand” character of Obama’s discussion of the Holocaust caused an adverse reaction among the Israeli public as well as among a significant portion of American Jews and helped create the widespread lack of trust in Obama that now exists in Israel. …

Paul Johnson discusses the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

How worried should we be about Iran? Should we encourage the Israelis to make a defensive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities? Israel has carried out similar strikes twice before–once against Saddam Hussein’s French-built reactor in Iraq and, more recently, against a Syrian nuclear plant. Both were successful.

Knocking out Iran’s nuclear capability would be much more difficult because of the distance to be covered by Israeli aircraft and because the plants are underground. These difficulties must be weighed against the fact that the Iranian regime is unpopular everywhere because of its recent crooked election and the savagery with which protests against the results were put down.

The extent of this unpopularity is evidenced by Saudi Arabia’s recent agreement to allow Israeli aircraft to fly over Saudi territory en route to Iran. The agreement was secret but was widely leaked by the Saudis–a message to Tehran that its stance and putative bomb are unpopular in the Muslim world. In fact, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States and Iraq–all with which Iran has had longstanding and bitter territorial disputes–are more scared of Iran’s bomb being used against them than are the Israelis. …

John Fund wonders if the next thing to trip up congress will be the grab bag called “per diems”. Remember what Mark Twain said. “There is no native American criminal class …… except for congress.

… The total cost for congressional overseas travel is never made public because the price tag for State Department advance teams and military planes used by lawmakers are folded into much larger budgets. Members of Congress must only report the total per diem reimbursements they receive in cash for hotels, meals and local transport.

They don’t have to itemize expenses—a convenient arrangement since most costs are covered by the government or local hosts. Some trips subtract some hotel and meal costs from the per diems, others do not. “The policy is completely inconsistent,” one House member told me. Total per diem allowances (per person, including staff) can top $3,000 for a single trip. Unused funds are supposed to be given back to the government, but congressional records show that rarely happens. …

The Democrats still play the victims, says David Harsanyi.

They own the bully pulpit. They enjoy a mandate. They can move the votes. They dictate the debate. They write the legislation. They monopolize the coverage.

When it comes to politics, Democrats are U.S. Steel, Ma Bell and Google all rolled into one. And yet, due to a mystifying cosmic event, they are also victims.

In a recent editorial in USA Today, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and sidekick Steny Hoyer grumbled about how reactionaries were shutting down the voices of the enlightenment on health care. …

…If the government-run health bill doesn’t pass, it won’t be the result of anyone’s voice being quashed. In fact, I would be curious to meet the Herculean life form that has the capability to “drown out” either President Barack Obama or Pelosi. …

Walter Williams asks what benefit Blacks have from their increased political power.

… Blacks hold high offices and dominate the political arena in Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and other cities. Yet these are the very cities with the nation’s most rotten schools, highest crime rates, high illegitimacy rates, weak family structure and other forms of social pathology. I am not saying that blacks having political power is the cause of these problems. What I am saying is that the solution to most of the major problems that confront many black people won’t be found in the political arena and by electing more blacks to high office. In fact, politicians tend to be hostile to some of the solutions to problems many blacks face such as school choice as a means to strengthen education, the elimination of oppressive licensing restrictions for various occupations, and supportive of job-destroying labor legislation such as minimum wage laws. …

Jonah Goldberg posts in The Corner on a statement by America’s surgeons.

… We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President’s remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients. …

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann have an interesting note on Cash for (American) Clunkers.

The only part of the stimulus program that is working, the cash-for-clunkers program is, in reality, a subsidy to foreign car companies, proving that Barack Obama is the best president Japan ever had.

The Department of Transportation reports that the ten leading trade-ins are all American branded cars while six of the top ten new cars purchased – and four of the top five – are foreign. So the United States Senate is about to pass additional funds to subsidize the trade-in of American cars and the purchase of foreign cars. …

Thomas Sowell shares some wonderful random thoughts with us. Here are three:

…Different people have very different reactions to President Barack Obama. Those who listen to his rhetoric are often inspired, while those who follow what he actually does are often appalled.

New York and Chicago have both recently had their coldest June in generations. If they had had their hottest month, it would have been trumpeted from the media 24/7 by “global warming” zealots. But the average surface temperature of the earth has not changed in more than a decade, according to the Cato Institute.

…What did we learn from the “beer summit” on the White House lawn, except that Vice President Joe Biden doesn’t drink alcoholic beverages? Considering the many gaffes that the vice president has made while cold sober, the thought of an intoxicated Joe Biden boggles the mind. …

How’s this for a start to the humor section. Yale University publishes a book on the Muhammad cartoon controversy. Guess what they wouldn’t put in the book? Allahpundit at Hot Air has the story. Quoting the NY Times;

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí…

Commenting on the story, Mark Steyn says;

… What all these stories – from this disgusting act to the no-donuts-at-Ramadan “recommendations” now common at European businesses - have in common is acceptance of the same general principle: that the most extreme interpretation of Islamic “law” now applies to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. As Pat Condell says, what other freedoms are you willing to surrender?