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Marty Peretz blogs on an article from NY Times on India, a true ally. They are searching a North Korean ship.

…There is no international community. But if there were more Indias we’d be on our way.

A New York Times article by Lydia Polgreen of a few moments ago reports that “India Searches N. Korean Ship for Nuclear Materials.” The Security Council sanctioned such activity in the presence of suspicious cargo and suspicious maritime routing. No country has as yet challenged North Korea and, for that matter, Iran either.

But now India has taken the step, partly because the cargo ship M V San anchored in the Bay of Bengal, off two islands, without asking for or getting authorization. …

Christopher Hitchens has an interesting take on North Korea’s release of the American journalists.

I call your attention to a small detail about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists who were wrongfully arrested, illegally detained, and then capriciously released by the crime family that controls the northern section of the Korean peninsula and treats all its inhabitants as slave-prisoners and all the neighbors within its missile range as hostages.

The two young women were picked up in March and released in August. That means they spent almost half a year in the North Korean prison system. Yet to judge by the photographs of them arriving back on U.S. soil, they were in approximately the same physical condition as they had been when they were first unlawfully apprehended.

Now, I spent less time than that as an honored guest in North Korea and still managed to lose weight during my stay. The shattering statistic that everybody now knows about North Korea is that its citizens are on average 5 to 6 inches shorter than South Koreans. And by that I mean to say “on average”—it seems to be true even of North Korean soldiers. The stunting and shortening of the children of the last famine generation may be still more heartbreaking when we come to measure it. And the fate of those who are in the North Korean gulag can, by this measure, only be imagined. There is a starvation regime within the wider nightmare of the slave system. Yet Ling and Lee had obviously not been maltreated or emaciated in the usual way that even a North Korean civilian, let alone a North Korean prisoner, could expect to be.

The logical corollary of this is obvious. The Kim Jong-il gang was always planning to release them. They were arrested in order to be let go and were maintained in releasable shape until the deal could be done. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz comments on the failings of the Obamacare campaign.

…This would have to do with the fact that the real Barack Obama—product of the academic left, social reformer with a program, is now before that audience, and what they hear in this lecture about one of the central concerns in their lives—his message freighted with generalities—they are not prepared to buy. They are not prepared to believe that our first most important concern now is health-care reform or all will go under.

The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.

He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them. …

Lee Siegel in the Daily Beast likes Obamacare, but says that critics are right about the limitations on end-of-life care.

For those of us who believe that the absence of universal health care is America’s burning shame, the spectacle of opposition to Obama’s health-care plan is Alice-in-Wonderland bewildering and also enraging—but on one point the plan’s critics are absolutely correct. One of the key ideas under consideration—which can be read as expressing sympathy for limitations on end-of-life care—is morally revolting. And it’s helping to kill the plan itself.

Make no mistake about it. Determining which treatments are “cost effective” at the end of a person’s life and which are not is one of Obama’s priorities. It’s one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal healthcare affordable. …

…This reeks of the Big Brother nightmare of oppressive government that the shrewd propagandists on the right are always blathering on about. Except that this time, they could not be more right. …

Liberal Ed Koch has questions about Obamacare.

…Most alarming for people like me, who at 84 years of age recently needed a quadruple bypass and aortic valve replacement, are the pronouncements of President Obama’s appointee, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who, according to a New York Post op ed article by Betsy McCauley, former Lt. Governor of the State of New York, stated, “Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, ‘as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others’ (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).” He also stated, “…communitarianism’ should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those ‘who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens…An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.’ (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96). ”

Opponents of Obama’s health care proposals raise the specter of a panel making decisions on who should receive health care. I am not aware of any proposed panel. However, an article in today’s New York Times, referring to a Senate bill, stated, “The legislation could have significant implications for individuals who have bought coverage on their own. Their policies might be exempted from the new standards, but the coverage might not be viable for long because insurers could not add benefits or enroll additional people in noncompliant policies.” …

Even Eugene Robinson has ObamaDoubts. Jennifer Rubin has the story.

Eugene Robinson almost acknowledges that the president might have some responsibility for the voters’ irate reaction to the government’s takeover of their health care. No critic of the president, Robinson nevertheless concedes there are plenty of “confused and concerned” Americans at these events. Why so upset? Why, they fear “they’re not being told the whole truth.” Well, yes, that might be it. …

Last, but by no means least, Camille Paglia lets fly. First she bows to the Obama she thought she was voting for. Then she tears into the Obama we got.

… I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted, as well as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, and hope it’s a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.

Case in point: the administration’s grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton’s megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises — or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down. …

… But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished. …

… Of course, it didn’t help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted “stupidly” in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama’s automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president’s standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn’t help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown. …

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Thinking outside the Beltway box, Robert J. Samuelson has ideas on how to reform Medicare.

…Just imagine what the health-care debate would be like if it truly focused on controlling spending.

For starters, we wouldn’t be arguing about how to “pay for” the $1 trillion or so of costs over a decade of Obama’s “reform.” Congress wouldn’t create new benefits until it had disciplined the old. We’d be debating how to trim the $10 trillion, as estimated by the CBO, that Medicare and Medicaid will spend over the next decade, without impairing Americans’ health. We’d use Medicare as a vehicle of change. Accounting for more than one-fifth of all health spending, its costs per beneficiary, now about $12,000, rose at an average annual rate of 8.5 percent a year from 1970 to 2007. (True, that’s lower than the private insurers’ rate of 9.7 percent. But the gap may partly reflect cost-shifting to private payers. When Medicare restrains reimbursement rates, hospitals and doctors raise charges to private insurers.)

Medicare is so big that shifts in its practices spread to the rest of the delivery system. But changing Medicare, and through it one-sixth of the U.S. economy, requires more than a few demonstration projects of “comparative outcomes” research or economic incentives. What’s needed is a fundamental restructuring. Fee-for-service medicine — Medicare’s dominant form of payment — is outmoded. The more doctors and hospitals do, the more they get paid. This promotes fragmentation and the overuse of services.

We should move toward coordinated care networks that take responsibility for their members’ medical needs in return for fixed annual payments (called “capitation”). One approach is through vouchers; Medicare recipients would receive a fixed amount and shop for networks with the lowest cost and highest quality. Alternatively, government could shift its reimbursement of hospitals and doctors to “capitation” payments. Limited dollars would, in theory, force improvements in efficiency and effective care. …

Debra J. Saunders comments on Obamacare, including politicians’ unwillingness to grasp economic realities.

…Only in Washington do people assert with a straight face that they can expand who gets covered and what everyone gets – and it will be cheaper. And because many readers believe this fable, allow me to note that after Massachusetts passed a universal plan three years ago, already cost increases have led to cutbacks. …

…As I watched Pelosi on Tuesday, I thought: It’s the California Budget Mess all over again – with big promises of more government and more benefits and no across-the-board taxes to pay for the package. Democrats like to congratulate themselves for their noble intentions. But they have offered no plan to pay for them, and so they are bound to fail. …

Liberal Mitch Albom defends conservatives’ right to free speech.

I have no illusions about protesters at the recent town hall meetings on health care.

Some are fueled by angry conservative groups. Some are hopped up on radio hosts’ rants and ravings. Some are Barack Obama haters. Some use one piece of wrong information to smear an entire event.

And some just think the whole idea of government health care stinks.

But all of them — all of them — have the right to be there, and the right to their point of view. Liberal-minded thinkers who regularly speak up for the poor and underprivileged cannot suddenly yank the rug when it comes to free speech for others. …

Mark Steyn posts on the ultimate outsourcing.

My jaw doesn’t often drop, but this story had it heading for the basement:

Thousands of Canadians who are infertile in Canada have to place all their hopes on just 33 men who are Canadian sperm donors.

What? A nation of 30 million people has just 33 sperm donors? Apparently so. Now why would that be?

At one time Canada had two dozen sperm banks but when the Assisted Human Reproduction Act made it illegal to pay for sperm or egg donors they dried up in 2004. …

Byron York points out that the New York Times’ bias is showing.

The front page of the New York Times is filled with hope about the nation’s economic situation.  The lead story, “Job Losses Slow, Signaling Momentum for a Recovery,” reporting a decline in the unemployment rate from 9.5 percent in June to 9.4 percent in July, begins by declaring that, “The most heartening employment report since last summer suggested on Friday that a recovery was under way — and perhaps gathering steam.”

“Employers are no longer in a panic,” one expert tells the Times.  The paper reports that Obama administration officials “credited the stimulus package” for the improvement, and “some said” job losses would be far worse had the $787 billion stimulus not been passed.  The paper quotes President Obama saying his administration has “rescued our economy from catastrophe.” …

…The Times hasn’t always been so optimistic when it comes to one-tenth-of-a-point declines in the unemployment rate.  On this very day in 1992, in the midst of the presidential campaign between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the government also reported that the unemployment rate ticked downward by one tenth of a point, and the Times’ treatment was far more restrained.

“Jobless Rate Dips a Notch to 7.7% in Mixed Showing,” was the front-page headline of the August 8, 1992 Times.  “The nation’s jobless rate improved marginally last month, edging down to 7.7 percent from 7.8 percent,” the Times reported.  “But the improvement was not enough to signal a stronger economic recovery or to help President Bush as he heads into the Republican National Convention.”  Even though the number of jobs actually went up in July 1992 (as opposed to the decline of 247,000 jobs in July 2009), the 1992 Times reported that the economic news “gave no suggestion that the economic recovery was breaking out of its painfully slow pace or, more important, that the job growth was picking up enough to push the unemployment rate down significantly before the election in November.” Pollster Peter Hart told the paper that, “There couldn’t be worse political news for George Bush.” …

A Chicago Tribune editorial tells how politicians in the City Council are trying to prevent the opening of a Wal-Mart during this recession.

…Construction of the store would create 200 jobs. The store, once it was running, would provide nearly 500 jobs.

But the City Council wants none of that, so all the Chicagoans who like to shop at Wal-Mart and all the Chicagoans who would like to work at Wal-Mart have to go to one of those dots on the map. They’re all in the suburbs, save the one Wal-Mart that has been allowed to open in Chicago.

When that Chicago store opened in 2006, it was flooded with applicants for 450 jobs. But the aldermen want to dodge a vote to allow another Wal-Mart — the first on the South Side — because they’re petrified over the influence of organized labor on local elections.

Organized labor doesn’t like Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart doesn’t have union jobs. It just has jobs (with an average hourly wage of $12.05 in Chicago).

The aldermen, of course, already have jobs. They get paid $110,556 a year and they figure that as long as they keep the labor unions off their backs, they’ll keep making $110,556 a year. Who says the City Council doesn’t generate jobs? If you’re one of the 50 aldermen, your unemployment rate is 0 percent.

But the unemployment rate for the rest of Chicago is above 10 percent….

Dennis Byrne also comments on the disgrace of allowing political pressure to triumph over the economic well-being of so many Chicago residents. But he says that the Chicago City Council is not just bowing to union pressure.

…But it would be a mistake to chalk this up solely to organized labor’s stranglehold on the City Council. Progressives, from their North Side enclaves, are full-throated in their opposition to a major job generator—elsewhere in the city. The liberal lakefront wards—44, 46, 48 and 49—all are home to some of the city’s strongest opposition. In stark contrast, the heavily black and lower-income wards on the South and West sides record the highest levels of support. Up on the Northwest Side, home to many blue-collar organized workers, support is weakest. What should be of some concern is the relatively weaker support for the new store in Hispanic wards; apparently minorities are not as unified as we are led to believe.

This column will inspire the usual howls of protest from “progressives,” who would have us believe that, from their distant perch, they only have the welfare of the oppressed and impoverished in mind. Even though their progressive roosts are blessed with an abundance of jobs and places to shop. They don’t have to get on a bus to travel outside the city to work or shop. From their roosts, they are comfortable and self-satisfied in their ideological hatred of Wal-Mart, brushing aside pleas from those most in need of jobs and access to shopping.

Progressives will portray themselves as guardians of those pleading for the Wal-Mart. Progressives say they are only are trying to “protect” those poor people from low wages, insufficient benefits and part-time work. Progressives have decided that for “those people” no jobs are better than jobs that they want and need. Progressives will cite their opposition to Wal-Mart as evidence of their compassion and, well, progressiveness. …

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Jennifer Rubin has more from UN Watch on Mary Robinson’s record of bias against Israel at the UN.

…In a separate post, UN Watch concludes:

The evidence is clear. As described by the late Tom Lantos, throughout the lead-up to the 2001 Durban conference Mary Robinson was part of the problem, not the solution. At preparatory sessions in Tehran and Geneva she consistently justified and encouraged a selective focus on Israel. While she did make statements against anti-Semitic manifestations at the conference itself, these were too little and too late. Robinson may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but she is its preeminent symbol.

The problem was not just Durban. UN Watch interacted with Robinson when she was U.N. rights chief in Geneva from 1997 to 2002 and closely monitored her tenure. Though she did speak out aptly in various instances, Robinson consistently displayed one-sided criticism of Israel matched with indifference to Palestinian terrorism.

The U.S. government rightly stood up for principle in April when it opposed any reaffirmation of the flawed 2001 Durban declaration. Whatever her other accomplishments, Robinson’s actions in the Durban process and the bias she displayed throughout her tenure as UN human rights chief were not worthy of this award. …

Marty Peretz also comments Mary Robinson’s.

I give him the benefit of a doubt. He may not himself have made the decision to honor the contemptible Mary Robinson, arguably a real bigot, with the Medal of Freedom. But, then, there is someone in his entourage who is leading him astray, gravely astray. And that someone has it in for Israel and for American Jews, too. The fact is that there is only so much that can be explained. …

…In the real world bestowing the Medal of Freedom on Mary Robinson is only important as a symbol. Take a look at the Medal of Freedom winners. There are many mediocre men and women on the list. But, overall, you will brim with pride, as the clichéd phrase puts it. Robinson had a commendable career as president of Ireland, mostly filled with symbolics, but important symbolics. It has been downhill ever since, a good deal of it in the gutter of anti-Semitism.

She was the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights when the commission began to specialize in the practice of supporting governmental repression and calling it freedom–as, frankly, Obama has done with the burqa, also in Cairo. But Robinson’s biggest role on the world stage was as chair of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban.  She planned it, she mostly ran it and she is responsible for that Witch’s Sabbath of hate against both Israel and America, actually the west and western values in general and in particular. Since then, she has been doing the time-consuming NGO thing, talking mostly to one another and soliciting grants from American foundations.

Robinson’s base in the world is the G-77 which has watched amiably as many of its member states increasingly preside over atrocities committed against their own inhabitants. Not much to honor here. …

Jennifer Rubin explains why the Obama administration’s ‘evenhandedness’ in the Middle East is a lie.

The Obama administration and its sycophantic spinners explain the dramatic shift in U.S. tone toward and treatment of Israel as an effort to be more “evenhanded” and to assume the role of “honest broker.” As events unfold, it becomes more apparent day by day that this is simply bunk. We are not seeing “evenhandedness” but one-sidedness. The only country receiving a daily barrage of public and private complaints and insults is Israel….

…And what about the hate-filled textbooks that remain in use in Saudi Arabia? Earlier this year, Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner implored Hillary Clinton to undertake a review of the books that, as Weiner explained, still teach ”young students that Jews should be killed, that Muslims who convert, question, or doubt Islam must repent or be killed, and that parents have the right to force their children into marriages against their will.” I don’t recall Obama or Clinton dragging in the Saudi ambassador to lecture him on the need to put a halt to this. …

The White House wants you to help out Big Brother by turning in anti-Obamacare e-mails. Debra J. Saunders has the story.

Imagine it’s four years ago and an aide to President George W. Bush posted a blog on the Whitehouse.gov Web site that bemoaned Internet criticism of the Iraq war, then continued: “These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversations.

Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about anti-war protests that seem fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

Substitute the words “health insurance reform” for “anti-war protests,” and you get the exact wording of a blog posted by Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media, on Tuesday.

“I can only imagine the level of justifiable outrage had your predecessor asked Americans to forward e-mails critical of his politics to the White House,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote in a letter to President Obama. “I suspect that you would have been leading the charge in condemning such a program.” …

Charles Krauthammer has a prescription for health care reform.

…1) Tort reform: As I wrote recently, our crazy system of casino malpractice suits results in massive and random settlements that raise everyone’s insurance premiums and creates an epidemic of defensive medicine that does no medical good, yet costs a fortune.

An authoritative Massachusetts Medical Society study found that five out of six doctors admitted they order tests, procedures and referrals — amounting to about 25 percent of the total — solely as protection from lawsuits. Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant — $20,000 for a family of four — to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance). …

…(2) Real health-insurance reform: Tax employer-provided health-care benefits and return the money to the employee with a government check to buy his own medical insurance, just as he buys his own car or home insurance.

There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer. This entire system is an accident of World War II wage and price controls. It’s economically senseless. It makes people stay in jobs they hate, decreasing labor mobility and therefore overall productivity. And it needlessly increases the anxiety of losing your job by raising the additional specter of going bankrupt through illness. …

David Limbaugh explains one of the ways in which government intervention has increased the cost health insurance, and ironically suggests Obama’s push for health care run by the state, may mean some meaningful free market reforms.

…In her “The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care,” Sally Pipes documents that in 1979, there were only 252 mandate laws in force, but by 2007, there were 1,901. Many of these mandates, she notes — such as those pertaining to massage therapy, breast reduction and hair prosthesis — “are hardly critical components of a good health insurance policy.” But they exist, she says, because special interest groups have successfully lobbied state lawmakers to require all policies to cover them.

She provides a sampling of excessive state-mandated treatments that are covered, including: acupuncture, alcoholism treatment, athletic trainers, breast reduction, contraceptives, dieticians, drug abuse treatment, hair prosthesis, home health care, hormone replacement therapy, in vitro fertilization, marriage therapy, massage therapy, nature treatments, pastoral counseling, Port-stain elimination, professional counseling, smoking cessation, speech therapy and varicose vein removal.

When you force every insurance company to cover these things, you’re bound to drive up insurance costs. People who wouldn’t consider paying for these treatments themselves get them because they’re covered, thus increasing demand and prices. …

There is widespread belief Vitamin D and fish oil have health benefits, yet widespread research is not undertaken. John Calfee in The American.com explains why, and concludes it is a cautionary tale when contemplating health care “reform” that may eliminate profit motives in the drug field.

… it will be quite a while before we know what most want to know about vitamin D and fish oil. Research is proceeding very slowly on the most important front, the mounting of large-scale human trials necessary to provide definitive tests of the most essential hypotheses. These trials cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run, possibly even a few billion when one takes account of the difficulty of devising exactly the right kind of trials.

Just about everyone in the scientific community knows why research is moving so slowly on such important topics. There is no “intellectual property,” i.e., no one owns patents on substances like fish oil and vitamin D, which were discovered and isolated decades or more ago. But that should be no problem if government steps in to fill the gap. …

Hugo Lindgren has a novel economic indicator.

As if it wasn’t unpleasant enough, this recession comes with an info glut, all this economic data purporting to answer a simple question: Are things getting better? The answer is rarely straightforward. The numbers aren’t just confusing. They seem to be measuring some other planet.

In New York, we have our own economic indicators, often based on the degree to which people are being thwarted by the lack of opportunity. An old standby is the Overeducated Cabbie Index. The Squeegee Man Apparition Index is another good one. There’s also the Speed at Which Contractors Return Calls Index: within 24 hours, you’re in a recession; if they call you without prompting, that’s a depression.

The indicator I prefer is the Hot Waitress Index: The hotter the waitresses, the weaker the economy. In flush times, there is a robust market for hotness. Selling everything from condos to premium vodka is enhanced by proximity to pretty young people (of both sexes) who get paid for providing this service. That leaves more-punishing work, like waiting tables, to those with less striking genetic gifts. But not anymore. …

Debra Cassens Weiss says that Justice Thomas may be camping in a Wal-Mart parking lot near you.

If you see an RV in a Wal-Mart parking lot this summer, take a second look. One of the occupants could be U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas’ wife, Ginni, told interviewers on a morning radio show called The Takeaway that she and her husband have traveled through 27 states in their recreational vehicle, and they love to stay in Wal-Mart parking lots.

“We have been in dozens of Wal-Mart parking lots throughout the country. Actually it’s one of our favorite things to do if we’re not having to plug in and we’ve got enough electricity and all that,” Ginni Thomas said, according to a transcript by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. “But you can get a little shopping in, see part of real America. It’s fun!” …

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Good news! Jennifer Rubin says they have recovered their senses in the administration about their condemnation of Honduras.

The White House may be in the process of reversing one of its egregious foreign-policy blunders. The Wall Street Journal reports that in answering questions from Sen. Richard Lugar, the State Department is beginning to hedge its bets on ousted president Manuel Zelaya. …

Today’s Pickings devotes much space to the health care debate. First up, David Harsanyi deals with the White House treatment of the folks who criticize them.

If you’re a virtuous and patriotic American, you may find this column either offensive or misleading. If so, please forward it to White House authorities at the Department of Fishy Activity. (E-mail the good people at flag@whitehouse.gov.)

As many of you have heard, the White House now requests that the public tattle on those of us spreading “fishy disinformation” regarding Washington’s proposed takeover . . . oops, I mean “reform” . . . of your health care. This step, naturally, is for our own good.

Now, don’t get overly paranoid, you freaky right-wing zealots. Judging from the Obama administration’s track record, the program will do absolutely nothing other than add billions to the deficit. …

Roger Simon comments on the same program.

Peter Wehner too.

… What we are seeing unfold today, online as well as in town-hall meetings and protests across the country, sounds very much like community-organizing, but for a conservative rather than a liberal cause. So in the eyes of some, community-organizing and political activism have gone from being virtues to being vices. …

And in Krauthammer’s Take from The Corner.

Well, the White House accuses it of being orchestrated. Orchestrated is a synonym for organized. And I thought that community organizing was a high calling. I mean, our president — he used to deploy it every day when he was a campaigner as a sign of his altruism.

This is unbelievable hypocrisy, and it’s because the administration has a hard time defending itself on the merits of the case. The support for health-care reform is sinking, and that’s because…as you look, as you unpack what is happening here and what’s in the bill, it is a monstrosity. …

Mark Steyn joins the chorus.

… When the community starts organizing against the organizer, the whole rigmarole goes to hell. Not that these extremists showing up at town hall meetings are real members of the “community.” Have you noticed how tailored they are? Dissent is now the haut est form of coutur ism. Senator Barbara Boxer has denounced dissenters from Obama’s health care proposals as too “well-dressed” to be genuine. Only the Emperor has new clothes. Everyone knows that.

Thankfully, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has seen through the “manufactured anger” of “the Brooks Brothers brigade.” Did he announce this in a crumpled suit? He’s a Press Secretary who won’t press. Apparently, the health care debate now has a dress code. Soon you won’t be able to get in unless you’re wearing Barack Obama mom-jeans, manufactured at a converted GM plant by an assembly line of retrained insurance salesmen. Any day now, Hollywood will greenlight a new movie in which an insane Sarah Palin figure picks out her outfit for spreading disinformation (The Lyin’, The Witch And The Wardrobe).

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, added her own distinctive wrinkle to the Brooks Brothers menswear. She disdained the anti-Obamacare protests as fake grassroots. “I think they’re AstroTurf,” she declared. “They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.”

Is this one of those Chinese Whispers things? Obama told Gibbs to tell Boxer to tell Reid, and by the time it reached Pelosi, it came out as uniforms night: Brooks Brothers. Mel Brooks. Springtime for Hitler. Swastikas. Or is the Speaker right to sound the alarm about this army of goosestepping dandies? A veritable Garbstapo jackbooting down the Interstate like it’s a catwalk in Milan. …

Michael Barone points out Obama’s plans for the military and health care will stifle creativity.

… The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The danger is that we will freeze medicine in place and no longer be the nation that produces innovations that do so much for us and the rest of the world. …

Jennifer Rubin responds to the Dems’ assertion that the Town Hall protests are an insurance company plot.

The Obama administration would have us believe that the outcry from voters at health-care town halls is a concoction of the insurance industry. Well, those insurance execs must be awfully sneaky — they seem to have infiltrated the polls as well. The Wall Street Journal reports on the Democrats’ woes:

A new Quinnipiac University poll out this morning underscores the challenge facing them as they and their Republican (and some conservative Democratic) critics spend the month pressing their respective cases.

For instance, the Quinnipiac national poll -– with an unusually large sample of more than 2,000 interviews –- found that almost three in four Americans don’t believe Mr. Obama’s promise that any health reform that he signs will not add to the federal deficit. …

Theodore Dalrymple says animals get better care in Great Britain.

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.

As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.

The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs. The relatives are united by their concern for the welfare of each other’s loved one. They are not terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they. …

Corner Post on the passing of John Hughes.

The revered director and screenwriter died of at heart attack this morning at age 59. His impressive comedic talent was responsible for several classic films in the 80s and early 90s, including Planes, Trains and Automobiles, National Lampoon’s Vacation, and Home Alone.

But he’ll primarily be known for pretty much defining the American high-school experience for generations to come — Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, et al. They’re all classics. …

Ben Stein says goodbye to the man who cast him in Ferris Bueller.

… the insight that will make him immortal came in his teen movies, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and my favorite, the one that changed my life, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This insight was that the modern American white middle class teen combines a Saudi Arabia-sized reservoir of self-obsession and self-pity with a startling gift for exultation and enjoyment of life. …

WSJ reviews tonight’s ESPN documentary of Luis Tiant’s return to Cuba after 46 years in exile playing baseball.

One of the main attractions of sports is that they’re a welcome escape from the ­politics of the day and the things men do to one ­another in the name of this or that cause. Occasionally, however, the world of sports and politics collide. And when they do, it’s usually without a happy outcome—think of the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists; Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics; and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

It should come as no surprise then, that “The Lost Son of Havana,” an ESPN Films documentary about Red Sox pitching great Luis Tiant’s return to Cuba after 46 years of exile, is not a happy tale (Sunday, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. ET on ESPN Deportes; Monday, 10 p.m. ET on ESPN). It is, rather, the story of a refugee’s rise to major-league stardom and the torment of returning home decades later to visit family on an island gulag.

“Things could have been different,” says Mr. Tiant, overcome with emotion at his aunt’s cramped and run-down Havana home. He is, of course, right. The wealth he accumulated in the ­major leagues could have helped lift his entire family out of poverty. But ­Castro’s revolution dashed any hopes he might have had of playing professionally in his country or returning home to help support his family and the community he left behind. In 2007, he was finally allowed back into Cuba as part of a goodwill baseball game ­between American amateurs and ­retired Cuban players. …

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Christopher Hitchens starts us off on an optimistic note.

This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental. The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival.

Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. …

David Harsanyi points out some of the ecological and economic failures of Cash for Clunkers.

…To begin with, building a new car consumes energy. It is estimated that 6.7 tons of carbon are emitted in process. So a driver who participates in the “cash for clunkers” program would need to make up for that wickedness. There around 250 million registered vehicles in the United States. Only a micro-slither of those cars will be traded in — and a slither of that number could be deemed a “clunker” outside the Beltway.

A survey of car dealerships found a relatively small differential in fuel efficiency of cars traded in and those replacing them. A Reuters analysis concluded — even with the extended program in place — cash for clunkers would trim U.S. oil consumption by only a quarter of 1 percent.

As an economic stimulus, the plan is equally impotent. As James Pethokoukis, a columnist at Reuters, succinctly explained, “the program gets much of its juice via stealing car sales from the near future rather than generating additional demand.”

The point of a stimulus should be to create new demand, not to move existing demand around to score political points. Then again, for this administration, economic recovery always takes a back seat to moral recovery. …

Howard Kurtz posts on what appears to be the death of Obamacare plan A.

With the flap over the Cash for Clunkers program, the media-political establishment is questioning whether the president’s health-care plan is a clunker as well.

The opposition — including a very screechy woman who confronted Kathleen Sebelius at a town hall meeting — is asking how the administration can remake one-sixth of the economy if it can’t handle a used-car program. …

Richard A. Epstein has a piece on Cash for Clunkers.

Human interactions take place either by agreement or force. There is no third way. As a general matter, the good libertarian prefers the former to the latter, except of course where force is used in self-defense. We don’t make people buy off their assailants, because we don’t want to invite future aggressors to come out of the woodwork to collect their bounty. Only negative incentives of defensive force keep mischief makers in line.

Every child grasps this principle, with the notable exception of the children in Congress. Or at least those who dreamed up the once ballyhooed cash for clunkers program that cratered within a week of its launch. As usual, this road to hell has been paved with good intentions. But the sad truth remains that we’re no better at getting clunkers off the road than removing lead from books and buttons. Just show Congress a noble social cause, and its innate sense of regulatory overdrive will send it crashing over a cliff. …

Jennifer Rubin has excellent comments on an insightful article from Elliott Abrams on the current US policy towards Israel.

In a must-read critique of the Obama approach to Israel, Elliott Abrams attempts to piece together how we got from the warmest relationship with Israel in recent memory to the most hostile. Yes, part of it is the perceived desire by Obama to affect regime change in Israel. But it’s worse than that:

The deeper problem — and the more complex explanation of bilateral tensions — is that the Obama administration, while claiming to separate itself from the “ideologues” of the Bush administration in favor of a more balanced and realistic Middle East policy, is in fact following a highly ideological policy path. Its ability to cope with, indeed even to see clearly, the realities of life in Israel and the West Bank and the challenge of Iran to the region is compromised by the prism through which it analyzes events. …

…The takeaway here is deeply sobering. Ideologues don’t accept new evidence or recognize that their theories aren’t bearing fruit. Failures are always attributed to a lack of time or effort. We simply have to keep at it, we will be told. That does not bode well for a course correction. They have their worldview, and they are sticking with it. …

And this is the article from Elliott Abrams. Here he discusses the Obama administration’s plan:

…Instead, in keeping with its “yes we can” approach and its boundless ambitions, it has decided to go not only for a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, but also for comprehensive peace in the region. Mr. Mitchell explained that this “includes Israel and Palestine, Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon and normal relations with all countries in the region. That is President Obama’s personal objective vision and that is what he is asking to achieve. In order to achieve that we have asked all involved to take steps.” The administration (pocketing the economic progress Israel is fostering in the West Bank) decided that Israel’s “step” would be to impose a complete settlement freeze, which would be proffered to the Arabs to elicit “steps” from them.

But Israelis notice that already the Saudis have refused to take any “steps” toward Israel, and other Arab states are apparently offering weak tea: a quiet meeting here, overflight rights there, but nothing approaching normal relations. They also notice that Mr. Mitchell was in Syria last week, smiling warmly at its repressive ruler Bashar Assad and explaining that the administration would start waiving the sanctions on Syria to allow export of “products related to information technology and telecommunication equipment and parts and components related to the safety of civil aviation” and will “process all eligible applications for export licenses as quickly as possible.” While sanctions on certain Syrian individuals were renewed last week, the message to the regime is that better days lie ahead. Of this approach the Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid told the Wall Street Journal, “The regime feels very confident politically now. Damascus feels like it’s getting a lot without giving up anything.” Indeed, no “steps” from Syria appear to be on the horizon, except Mr. Assad’s willingness to come to the negotiating table where he will demand the Golan Heights back but refuse to make the break with Iran and Hezbollah that must be the basis for any serious peace negotiation.

None of this appears to have diminished the administration’s zeal, for bilateral relations with everyone take a back seat once the goal of comprehensive peace is put on the table. The only important thing about a nation’s policies becomes whether it appears to play ball with the big peace effort. The Syrian dictatorship is viciously repressive, houses terrorist groups and happily assists jihadis through Damascus International Airport on their way to Iraq to fight U.S. and Coalition forces, but any concerns we might have are counterbalanced by the desire to get Mr. Assad to buy in to new negotiations with Israel….

David P. Goldman discusses Rahm Emanuel’s view of the Israel-Palestinian peace process.

…Why is Emanuel, the son of an Israeli pediatrician who served in the Irgun (the illegal pre-state underground), bashing Israel over settlements? The answer is simple, and well documented by the Israeli newspaper feature. His views have remained frozen in time since he arranged the 1993 handshake inthe White House Rose Garden between then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat, like those of Oslo Accord negotiator Yossi Beilin. He still believes with religious fervor in the old peace process, while events have convinced the vast majority of Israelis that it is a dreadful idea. Ha’aretz reports,

When he was president Clinton’s adviser, Emanuel orchestrated the handshaking ceremony between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. It is even said that after Rabin’s assassination, it was he who suggested to Clinton that he include the expression “Shalom, haver” (Goodbye, friend) in his eulogy to Rabin. But in spite of the disappointments of the intifada and his criticism of the Palestinians and the Arab states, which he called on to impose “pressure” on the Palestinians – he has not forgotten the September 13, 1993, ceremony at the White House, which moved him profoundly.
He was one of the only two Jews in Congress who agreed to support the Geneva Initiative, in 2003….

…After hundreds of death by terrorism and the Palestinian refusal to accept Ehud Barak’s peace offer as brokered by then President Clinton in 1998, the Israeli public repudiated Beilin’s ideological fanaticism. Not so American Jews, whose left-wing sympathies and sentimental attachment to secular universalism come cheap, like the poor man’s whitefish. Israelis pay for the experiments of leftist leaders in blood, and American liberals like Rahm Emanuel respond: “Believe me, it’s worth it.”…

Stuart Taylor has again essayed on the problems with the Sotomayor nomination. We’ve been running long, so we have a Jennifer Rubin post on Taylor’s piece. There is a link you can follow if you wish.

One of the more troubling aspects of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court is the degree to which her testimony attempted to conceal or misrepresent her own record. On the topic of Ricci alone, she repeated again and again two falsehoods. First, she insisted that she had not deprived plaintiffs of their day in court because they had filed for an en banc review. Not so. She is taking credit for the sua sponte action by her colleague Judge Cabranes, who dug the case out and insisted that the full circuit consider the matter. Second, she argued that her decision was determined by Second Circuit precedent. Wrong again.

Stuart Taylor takes us through the applicable case law. He explains: …

John Stossel gives us the bottom line on Obamacare.

…With the collapse of the socialist countries, we ought to understand that bureaucrats cannot competently set prices. When they pay too little, costs are covertly shifted to others, or services dry up. When they pay too much, scarce resources are diverted from other important uses and people must go without needed goods. Only markets can assure that people have reasonable access to resources according to each individual’s priorities.

Assume Medicare reimbursements are cut. When retirees begin to feel the effects, AARP will scream bloody murder. The elderly vote in large numbers, and their powerful lobbyists will be listened to.

The government will then give up that strategy and turn to what the Reagan administration called “revenue enhancement”: higher taxes on the “rich.” When that fails, because there aren’t enough rich to soak, the politicians will soak the middle class. When that fails, they will turn to more borrowing. The Fed will print more money, and we’ll have more inflation. Everyone will be poorer. …

Congress can’t stop spending our money, blogs Ed Morrissey.

Remember when Congress erupted in outrage over the arrival in Washington DC of the CEOs of the three major American automakers in private jets?  The bumbling public relations of the Big Three gave elected officials an opportunity to indulge in populist spleen-venting at rich fat cats and their greed.  Public pressure pushed the automakers to dump their private fleets of corporate jets and focus belt-tightening in the executive suites as well as on the manufacturing floor. …

…Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.

But apparently Congress is not philosophically averse to private air travel: At the end of July, the House approved nearly $200 million for the Air Force to buy three elite Gulfstream jets for ferrying top government officials and Members of Congress.

The Air Force had asked for one Gulfstream 550 jet (price tag: about $65 million) as part of an ongoing upgrade of its passenger air service.

But the House Appropriations Committee, at its own initiative, added to the 2010 Defense appropriations bill another $132 million for two more airplanes and specified that they be assigned to the D.C.-area units that carry Members of Congress, military brass and top government officials. …

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Pickerhead’s been waiting for a Frederic Bastiat “teachable moment” to come out of the clunker program. Jonah Goldberg does the honors.

… That Washington is shocked by the news that Americans like getting free money shows how thick the Beltway bubble really is.

Like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, Washington can only see the economic activity it has created, not the activity it has destroyed.

For starters, who says the smartest thing for people with working cars is to buy new ones? Personal debt is supposed to be a problem, so why not look at this as bribing consumers into taking out car loans they don’t need? Even with the $4,500 subsidy, not all of these customers are going to be paying cash for their new cars. So they’ll be swapping serviceable-but-paid-for cars for nicer cars that are owned by banks.

Besides, maybe some people would be smarter to buy a savings bond or max out their kid’s college fund or — here’s a crazy thought — buy health insurance. But instead they’ve been seduced into spending the equivalent of their six francs on a car they don’t really need.

But, you might say, some buyers surely do need a new car. True. But if they needed a new car, they’d get one anyway, eventually. Indeed, they might already have gotten it, but rationally opted to wait for the program to kick in. …

Jonah’s readers respond.

Radley Balko in The Agitator Blog has more.

… Last night, (Jon) Stewart mentioned the “Cash for Clunkers” program, and credulously and uncritically repeated the Obama administration’s line that the program as been an unqualified success. Now maybe the show has taken some real shots at Cash for Clunkers in prior episodes. I don’t watch regularly any more. Seems to me, though, there’s quite a bit of TDS sarcastic humor to be mined from all of this. You mean the government is offering people free money . . . and they’re taking it? And they’re measuring the program’s success by how many people . . . are willing to take free money? Shocker that it’s been so successful, huh? …

Jennifer Rubin chronicles alarming events at the Justice Department.

In the litany of criticisms leveled at President George W. Bush none was repeated more often than the accusation that he had “politicized the administration of justice.” In endless television show appearances and congressional hearings, Democratic lawmakers like Senator Chuck Schumer railed against the politicization of the Justice Department, lecturing all who would listen about how Justice “is different than any other department. In every other department, the chief cabinet officer is supposed to follow the president’s orders, requests, without exception. But the Justice Department has a higher responsibility: rule of law and the Constitution.”

Democrats loved to berate the often hapless Alberto Gonzales, who they claimed failed to uphold this standard as attorney general. Although the alleged offenses occurred primarily on the watch of Gonzales (who served only two and a half of Bush’s eight years), the criticism stuck and lingered long after Gonzales departed. Inspector general investigations and oversight hearings maintained the drumbeat of accusations. And when the distinguished federal judge Michael Mukasey was nominated to replace Gonzales, he was peppered by Senators Joe Biden, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy, among others, with questions about just how badly the department had been “politicized.” The average American couldn’t help but conclude that something had gone terribly awry.

It is therefore surprising that in the first seven months of the Obama administration, a series of hyper-partisan decisions, questionable appointments, and the inexplicable dismissal of a high-profile voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther party have once again fanned suspicions that the Justice Department is a pawn in partisan political battles.

Both in Congress and among a number of current and former Justice Department employees is a growing concern that the Obama administration is politicizing the department in ways the Bush team never imagined. A former Justice employee cautions that every administration has the right and the obligation to set policy. “Elections have consequences,” he affirms. But he thinks that the Obama administration has gone beyond policy reversals and is interfering with prosecutorial decisions, staffing the department with unqualified personnel, and invoking privilege to thwart proper congressional oversight and public scrutiny.

Sitting in his Capitol Hill office, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, speaks in careful, clipped sentences, rephrasing at times to convey precisely what he means. His irritation is apparent. “The whole concern here is an administration that would not politicize the Department of Justice. That was a major campaign rallying cry,” he says. “If it was isolated you’d think it was an exception to the rule. But where you see three or four examples then you really worry whether they themselves are verging on violating the law or the oath of office.” …

… Take the case of Mary Smith, a Native-American Chicago lawyer and Obama supporter. She has been nominated as assistant attorney general in the tax division. While she did serve in the Clinton administration, she has no expertise in tax matters and has not spoken on the topic or taken professional education courses in tax law. She did, however, work on three successive Democratic campaigns (including Obama’s). A former Justice Department official asks of Smith, “This was the best they could do?”

At her confirmation hearing, Senator Sessions voiced his grave displeasure. “Tax law is very specialized and it’s certainly not an area where you learn on the job.” He continued, “You should not put people in a job they’re not prepared to handle.” While the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to confirm her not a single Democrat spoke in her defense. Lamar Smith says, “It is obviously being done for political reasons. It is not supposed to be a reward for politics back home. It is a violation of trust and a disservice to the American people.” One current Justice Department attorney remarks that placing a political supporter in charge of the tax division “sounds like Nixon.”

Attention has also focused on Jennifer Daskal, a former Human Rights Watch lawyer with no prosecutorial background but rather a record of aggressive advocacy on behalf of Guantánamo detainees (e.g., questioning the guilt of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, objecting to the incarceration of a 15-year-old who killed Marines). Her new job, remarkably enough, is on the Guantánamo task force that will make recommendations on detainee policy. She is now free to pursue her agenda from inside the Justice Department.

Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to head OLC quickly became controversial given her record of rabid criticism of the Bush administration, her extreme views on national security and abortion (she once wrote that limits on abortion would be tantamount to “slavery” under the Thirteenth Amendment), and her insistence that the Justice Department should pursue novel legal theories based on “economic justice.” Threatening a “make-over” of OLC, she appeared to be precisely the sort of extreme partisan whom Holder had suggested would be unwelcome in his department. Her nomination has now stalled, with a number of Democratic senators unwilling to support her nomination.

Then there is Les Jin, who was chief of staff to the controversial former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mary Frances Berry, who engaged in such regular political stunts as attempting to prevent the seating of George W. Bush’s lawful nominee to the commission. Jin is now in a senior counselor spot at Justice. Another opening has been staffed by Julie Fernandes, an attorney who, prior to joining the department, worked for a left-wing civil rights organization and routinely weighed in on pending cases. Mark Kappelhoff who was chief of the criminal section of the civil rights division at Justice (and who took the position, while serving in the criminal section, that a campaign mailer reminding voters they must be citizens to cast a ballot was illegal “voter intimidation”) maxed out as an Obama donor and has been boosted to principal deputy attorney general for civil rights. …

Michael Ledeen comments on Iran policy. More on this in Pickings tomorrow.

… It’s worse than Jimmy Carter. It’s all appeasement, all the time, from South America to Central Europe, from the Middle East to South Asia. And it’s a guarantee of greater violence, bigger crises, and more American dead. …

Tunku Varadarajan has fun with the beer summit, then makes some serious points.

…Obama didn’t so much misspeak–in saying that Sergeant Crowley had “acted stupidly” in arresting Prof. Gates–as miscalculate his speech. For a man who measures out his words in coffee spoons, his intervention in the affair was heavy-handed. Suddenly, everyone became acutely interested in the following question: How real is Obama when he speaks to the nation? What does he really think? How much of his true beliefs do we get when he talks to us, and how much of it is speech that has been measured, tailored and tallied beforehand for value and impact? America, suddenly, wants to know. As Shelby Steele wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it.” …

Stephen L. Carter explains the importance of profits.

…To the country, profit is a benefit. Record profit means record taxes paid. But put that aside. When profits are high, firms are able to reinvest, expand and hire. And profits accrue to the benefit of those who own stocks: overwhelmingly, pension funds and mutual funds. In other words, high corporate profits today signal better retirements tomorrow.

Another reason to celebrate profit is the incentive it creates. When profits can be made, entrepreneurs provide more of needed goods and services. Consider an example common to the first-year contracts course in every law school: Suppose that the state of Quinnipiac suffers a devastating hurricane. Power is out over thousands of square miles. An entrepreneur from another state, seeing the problem, buys a few dozen portable generators at $500 each, rents a truck and drives them to Quinnipiac, where he posts them for sale at $2,000 each — a 300 percent markup.

Based on recent experience, it is likely the media will respond with fury and the attorney general of Quinnipiac will open an investigation into price-gouging. The result? When the next hurricane arrives, the entrepreneur will stay put, and three dozen homeowners who were willing to pay for power will not have it. There will be fewer portable generators in Quinnipiac than there would have been if the seller were left alone.

When political anger over profit reduces the willingness of investors to take risks, the nation suffers. According to news reports, one reason the Obama administration has had so much trouble finding buyers for the toxic assets it hopes to remove from financial institutions’ balance sheets is a concern by financiers that should they go along with the plan and make rather than lose money, they will be hauled before Congress to explain themselves.

And although it is easy to be dismayed by excess, trying to regulate profit makes things worse. Capital flows to places where returns are highest. The more exercised our political leaders become when profits rise, the more investment capital will remain abroad. …

Alexis Madrigal, for Wired, reports on the mysterious Atlantic coast high tides this summer.

From Maine to Florida, the Atlantic seaboard has experienced higher tides than expected this summer. At their peak in mid-June, the tides at some locations outstripped predictions by two feet.

The change has come too fast to be attributed to melting ice sheets or anything quite that dramatic, and it’s a puzzle for scientists who’ve never seen anything quite like it.

“The ocean is dynamic. It’s not uncommon to have anomalies like this but the breadth and the intensity and duration were unique,” said Mike Szabados, director of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s tide and current program. …

Seems some folks don’t like the Barack the Joker poster.

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Ross Douthat takes a look at how some red states and blue states are weathering the recession.

…Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November. Fourteen states are facing 2010 budget gaps that exceed 20 percent of their G.D.P.; only two went for John McCain. (Strikingly, they’re McCain’s own Arizona and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.) Of the nine states that have raised taxes this year, closing deficits at the expense of growth, almost all are liberal bastions.

The urban scholar Joel Kotkin has called this recession a blue-state “meltdown.” That overstates the case: The Deep South has been hit hard by unemployment, and some liberal regions are weathering the storm reasonably well. And clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush’s Washington.

But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class. …

Robert J. Samuelson draws parallels between California’s economic troubles, and where the nation is headed.

California’s budget debacle holds a lesson for America, but one we will probably ignore. It’s easy to attribute the state’s protracted budget stalemate, now temporarily resolved with about $26 billion of spending cuts and accounting gimmicks, to the deep recession and California’s peculiar politics. Up to a point, that’s true. Representing an eighth of the U.S. economy, California has been harder hit than most states. Unemployment, now 11.6 percent (national average: 9.5 percent), could top 13 percent in 2010, says economist Eduardo Martinez of Moody’s Economy.com. Meanwhile, the requirement that any tax increase muster a two-thirds vote in the legislature promotes paralysis. Democrats prefer tax hikes to spending cuts, and Republicans can block higher taxes.

All this produced the recent drama: plunging tax revenue and the state’s resulting huge budget deficits; endless negotiations between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders; the deadlock that led the state to issue scrip (in effect, IOUs) to pay bills; and a final agreement on a 2009-10 budget. But there is also a bigger story with national implications. California has reached a tipping point. Its government made more promises than its economy can easily support. For years, state leaders papered over the contradiction with loans and modest changes. By overwhelming these expedients, the recession triggered an inevitable reckoning.

Here’s the national lesson. There’s a collision between high and rising demands for government services and the capacity of the economy to produce the income and tax revenue to pay for those demands. That’s true of California, where poor immigrants and their children have increased pressures for more government services. It’s also true of the nation, where an aging population raises Social Security and Medicare spending. California is leading the transformation of politics into a form of collective torture: pay more (higher taxes), get less (lower services). …

Steve Chapman takes a hard look at states’ lack of fiscal discipline.

…The crisis in state budgets is not an accident, and it wasn’t unforeseeable. For years, most states have spent like there’s no tomorrow, and now tomorrow is here. They bring to mind the lament of Mickey Mantle, who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

If they had known the revenue flood wasn’t a permanent fact of life, governors and legislators might have prepared for drought. Instead, like overstretched homeowners, they took on obligations they could meet only in the best-case scenario—which is not what has come to pass.

Over the last decade, state budgets have expanded rapidly. We have had good times and bad times, including a recession in 2001, but according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, this will be the first year since 1983 that total state outlays have not increased.

The days of wine and roses have been affordable due to a cascade of tax revenue. In state after state, the government’s take has ballooned. Overall, the average person’s state tax burden has risen by 42 percent since 1999—nearly 50 percent beyond what the state would have needed just to keep spending constant, with allowances for inflation. …

Fascinating blog post by Spengler as he illuminates the combined efforts of China and Russia to control assertive Islam in Asia and parts of Europe.

… The world looks radically different than Washington thinks — or thought under the Bush administration. The encounter of Central Asian Turkic Muslims with modernity via China is tragic, and the Chinese will take whatever steps are required to ensure that the tragedy is not theirs. The human rights organizations who squeaked and gibbered over Israel’s incursion into Gaza are about to learn the meaning of the word “crackdown.” Iran is not the pillar of stability for the region that the Obamoids hallucinated, but a dying society flailing out as it falls.

Large tracts of the world are becoming unmanageable. Looming above all these other issues as truly frightening threat is Pakistan, which cannot be stabilized by any measures Washington might undertake. Look for a quiet conversation between India and China as to how to dry this problem out.

Obama’s obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian issue has made him slightly worse than irrelevant. If you betray your friends (as Obama surely did by ignoring agreements with Israel on “organic growth” of settlements) and propitiate your enemies (as Obama attempted to do with Iran and Syria) you merely make yourself an object of ridicule and contempt. The rest of the world is taking measures to address real problems in the absence of American help, and in the fear of American maliciousness.

Never in history has a great power cast away so much influence in so short a period of time.

What are kids being taught at school? Lots of Green gloom and doom, says David Harsanyi.

…In 2006, a poll by the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit education group, found that only 53 percent of students age 13 to 19 were optimistic about the future of the country — a 22-percentage-point drop from 2003.

It is depressing to see children — whose cellphones utilize technology that eclipses the collective advances of entire cultures — down on their futures. …

…Today, my 7-year-old can’t take a bath without re-living the plot of “Crime and Punishment,” because she believes her modest water consumption is knocking off Mother Earth.

Maybe children are confused about what “better” is supposed to mean, as well? We can forgive them, though, as they’ve been fed a steady diet of model-projection Armageddon their whole lives. One poll claims that one out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that the Earth will be destroyed by the time they grow up. …

Kenneth Anderson has a fantastic post in Volokh.  Hoover Institute Senior Fellow, Dr. Scott Atlas listed 10 advantages of American healthcare. Here are three:

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

Richard Cohen of WaPo noticed he’s the only guy who hasn’t had an exclusive interview with the One.

… For me, health-care reform is Missiles Redux — specifically the Reagan-era disputes over SS-20s and such, not to mention throw-weight, which is measured in kilograms or metric tons, whatever they are. I was expected to know something about such matters, being a Washington columnist and all, but I could never keep the damn terms and numbers straight. I would bone up, talk to the experts, read the stupefying reports, write the requisite column — and promptly forget it all. The Soviet Union collapsed anyway.

Now it is health care. As a single (actually, divorced) payer, I cannot for the life of me figure out why Obama did not simply expand Medicare, lowering the eligible age until everyone was covered. This would take one House committee and one Senate committee and one news conference. It would both provide your average patriotic American with health insurance and keep Obama off TV. This is known as a win-win.

Lucky for me, this has not been done, and so I have been ducking that call from the White House, inviting me to exclusively spend the day with the president, exclusively interview the president or — this would be really hard to turn down — exclusively sneak a smoke with him in the Situation Room. My Pulitzer is coming because I alone have not interviewed the president. It turns out, that’s an exclusive.

The Economist reports on exciting advances in X-ray technology.

…Most electronic devices have moved into the era of silicon chips and other solid-state technology. Not X-rays. The machines used to generate them still rely resolutely on vacuum tubes. But that will change shortly if Otto Zhou of the University of North Carolina has his way. Dr Zhou and his colleagues are bringing X-radiography into the world of modern electronics. In doing so they hope to create X-ray machines that are smaller, simpler and able to produce more detailed pictures. These could be used to enhance security screening at airports, to allow engineers to check the structure of materials more easily and, especially, to enhance medical images in a way that would improve cancer therapy. …

…Dr Zhou’s method, by contrast, employs a process called electron-field emission. This dispenses with the heat. Also, instead of having a single metal filament release the electrons, it relies on myriad carbon nanotubes to do the same thing. The result is a compact source of X-rays that can be controlled with great precision.

Such sources can then be built into an array, each element of which is programmed to fire whenever required. That will allow for more accurate CT scans. Existing scanners usually have but a single X-ray tube. This is rotated around the patient, taking pictures as it goes. Though the rotation takes only a few seconds, the overall image will be blurred if the patient moves. An array of field-emission devices, however, will take their exposures simultaneously, so the resulting image should always be pin sharp. …

…Conventional CT scans are used to work out the shape of the place where a dose of radiation needs to be concentrated in order to attack a tumour without damaging nearby healthy tissue. But the scan and the treatment cannot usually be done at the same time, because they interfere with each other. There are, however, no interference problems with field-emission X-ray sources, so these can be used to take high-resolution pictures while treatment is proceeding. This means those administering the treatment will know with precision when to continue and when to stop. …

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Rich Lowry posts a photo from the beer summit and comments on the scene. Obama walks ahead, oblivious, as police officer Crowley assists Gates down the steps at the White House.

American Thinker also posts the photo with comments, and contrasts it to a photo of Bush 43 assisting a feeble Senator Robert Byrd.

… At every stage of the entire Gates affair, Obama has provided a revealing tell. The “acted stupidly” blunder revealed that he automatically blames the police and thinks they really are stupid to begin with. It didn’t trigger a single alarm bell in his mind as he figured out what to say.

Then, the non-apology apology revealed an arrogant man who cannot do what honest people do: admit it when they make a mistake.

Now at stage three, the beer photo op looked OK. It didn’t turn into a disaster.

But then in a small moment that nobody in the White House had the brains to understand, Obama goes and send a body language message like this. …

Victor Davis Hanson speaks to Obama’s true attitude regarding race, and the spin efforts made only after the polls come out.

Perhaps the beer summit will stop the president’s slide in the polls, but I am not so sure, since the public is beginning to catch on that there is a pattern here. On matters racial, the public thought that in Obama they were getting an updated version of Martin Luther King gravitas, but they are learning it may be a more eloquent form of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton bathos.

When Obama was first asked about the Gates incident — and we know he was prepped beforehand about the question — he did not suggest a beer summit, but instead used the adverb “stupidly” to describe the police action and then went into a disquisition on racial profiling as part of his preferred “teachable moment.”

The beer thing came only afterwards, when the polls went south; had they gone north, then no beer summit. Ditto with Reverend Wright. Obama’s natural instinct was to praise the Right Reverend, and he did so in his infamous grandmother-profiling speech. The later correction and disavowal came not immediately after Reverend Wright’s National Press Club outburst, but only when polls suggested that he was beginning really to hurt Obama. Ditto again the corrections to Michelle Obama’s “not previously proud of the United States” asides. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on Obama’s arrogance in the face of his inciting racial tensions.

…This is a typical Obama. He commits an offense against the public good–he imputes racism where there was none–and then he declares it a teachable moment in which he will instruct us on tolerance, understanding, and brotherhood.

Now, he did this before. He does it over and over again. He’s found in bed last year after 20 years with a raving racist. (We had known he had been in the church of Jeremiah Wright, but we didn’t know about his racism until the middle of the campaign.) And what is Obama’s response? He gives a speech on race, another teachable moment, in which he ascribes racism to everyone–white working class, African-Americans, Jeremiah Wright, his own grandmother–except himself. And he stands there hovering above it all, teaching us the ways of tolerance and brotherhood.

Look, he may be a great president or a lousy one, but when he acts in this way, when he stands above the fray in a patronizing and condescending way, instructing us on the ways of the world, I find him insufferable.

Jennifer Rubin also posts on Gates-gate and what it reveals about Obama.

…But perhaps the starry-eyed media learned a lesson: Obama may sound smart, but he doesn’t necessarily know what he is talking about. Whether it is about Crowley’s motives, the blue-red-pill dilemma, the 4 million “saved or created” jobs, or the history of the Middle East, Obama hasn’t seemed grounded in the real world — and it shows. It’s a good lesson that “smooth” doesn’t mean “right.”

Stuart Taylor looks at the attitudes of Sotomayor and Gates regarding race.

Soon-to-be-Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called herself “a product of affirmative action” who was “accepted rather readily into Princeton” despite test scores that were lower than those of more privileged classmates due to “cultural biases built into testing.”

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., capitalizing on the avalanche of publicity he touched off by attributing to racism his July 16 arrest at his home by a white police officer, has declared that America is “racist” and “classist” and that “there haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America…. The only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

What Sotomayor and Gates share is a habit of drawing dubious lessons about race from their own experiences. …

Phillip K. Howard writes for WaPo on the one health care cost the Dems don’t want to discuss.

Health-care reform is bogged down because none of the bills before Congress deals with the staggering waste of the current system, estimated to be $700 billion to $1 trillion annually. The waste flows from a culture of health care in which every incentive is to do more — that’s how doctors make money and that’s how they protect themselves from lawsuits.

Yet the congressional leadership has slammed the door on solutions to the one driver of waste that is relatively easy to fix: the erratic, expensive and time-consuming jury-by-jury malpractice system. Pilot projects could test whether this system should be replaced with expert health courts, but leaders who say they want to cut costs will not even consider them.

What are they scared of? The answer is inescapable — such expert courts might succeed and undercut the special interest of an influential lobby, the trial lawyers. An expeditious and reliable new system would compensate patients more quickly and at a fraction of the overhead of the current medical justice system, which spends nearly 60 cents of every dollar on lawyers’ fees and administrative costs.

Even more compelling, expert health courts would eliminate the need for “defensive medicine,” thereby helping to save enough money for America to afford universal health coverage. …

Norman Borlaug in WSJ writes on what farmers can accomplish.

Earlier this month in L’Aquila, Italy, a small town recently devastated by an earthquake, leaders of the G-8 countries pledged $20 billion over three years for farm-investment aid that will help resource-poor farmers get access to tools like better seed and fertilizer and help poor nations feed themselves.For those of us who have spent our lives working in agriculture, focusing on growing food versus giving it away is a giant step forward.

Given the right tools, farmers have shown an uncanny ability to feed themselves and others, and to ignite the economic engine that will reverse the cycle of chronic poverty. And the escape from poverty offers a chance for greater political stability in their countries as well.

But just as the ground shifted beneath the Italian community of L’Aquila, so too has the political landscape heaved in other parts of the world, casting unfounded doubts on agricultural tools for farmers made through modern science, such as biotech corn in parts of Europe. Even here at home, some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food. People should be able to purchase organic food if they have the will and financial means to do so, but not at the expense of the world’s hungry—25,000 of whom die each day from malnutrition. …

The Economist reports on China’s auto industry leader.

AT A time when most carmakers are struggling to cope with the worst crisis the industry has experienced in living memory, the ambitions of Geely, China’s biggest privately owned car firm, are breathtaking. The company is simultaneously developing six modern platforms—an astonishing number even for a global giant such as Toyota—and is committed to launching nine new cars in the next 18 months and up to 42 new models by 2015. Its technical director, Frank Zhao, claims that Geely will have the capacity to make 2m cars a year by then.

Whether Geely will be able to sell anything like that number of cars is another matter. …

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Jonathan Tobin outlines the Obama administration’s strategy for achieving peace in the Middle East, and why it won’t work.

…Many American Jews and other partisan Democrats have adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to the president’s signals, which indicate that he views the Jewish state as an obstacle to his ambition of improving relations with the Arab and Islamic world. Indeed, as the Post explains, Obama hoped that making public his disagreements with Israel would buy him credibility with Arab governments.

While not enthralled with the Israelis’ electing a right-of-center government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu a few months after Americans chose Mr. Obama, the Post observes something Jewish Democrats have been in denial about: Obama’s one-sided pressure has only increased the appetite of Palestinian and Arab leaders for more Israeli concessions and made them less likely to reciprocate. This is a familiar pattern. So long as the Arabs can rely on Americans to pressure Israel, they feel no need to make concessions themselves or take any proactive steps (such as halting terrorism and stopping anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement in their official media) to advance the cause of peace.

As Mahmoud Abbas, the supposedly moderate head of the Palestinian Authority, recently told the Washington Post, he has no intention of dealing with Israel. Instead, he will sit back and wait for Obama to keep applying the screws to America’s only democratic ally in the region. …

Jennifer Rubin posts that Mary Robinson of Durban I infamy will be given the Medal of Freedom by Obama.

Mary Robinson, U.N. Commissioner and former president of Ireland, is being awarded the Medal of Freedom by Obama. Well, isn’t that just dandy. Who is Mary Robinson? You may remember her role in presiding over the infamous Durban I Conference. At the time she joined Rashid Khalidi at Columbia University (no, you can’t make this up), this report summarized the objections to her hiring, given her record in overseeing the infamous Israel-bashing event:

Columbia has “become a hotbed of anti-Israel haters,” said the president of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein. “It’s especially astonishing that a school with such a large Jewish population would insult Jewish people by hiring these haters of the Jewish state of Israel.”

The groups also blame Ms. Robinson for allowing the Durban conference to become a global platform for anti-Israel venting. Ms. Robinson, as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, rejected many American demands to remove anti-Israel language from final conference documents.

“Under Mary Robinson’s leadership the Human Rights Commission was one-sided and extremist. In her tenure at the HRC, she lacked fairness in her approach to the Israeli/Palestinian issue,” said the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, James Tisch. …

… There are no words to describe how atrocious a selection this is. But it does speak volumes about the president’s sympathies. And now, will the same voices that condemned her appointment to Columbia step forward? …

Conspiracy theories take focus away from the very serious attacks that are occurring against capitalism and freedom, says David Harsanyi.

…Those who peddle the Obama birth certificate conspiracy are squandering their chance at making any substantive case against an administration that is waging a completely non-secretive battle against capitalism.

If you want to watch it yourself, just take the time to find the video floating around on YouTube of a Delaware congressman named Mike Castle.

In a town hall meeting, Castle is accosted by mob of ginned-up Republicans, clapping and hollering about Obama’s non-citizenship and, finally, forcing the cowering congressman to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to display his loyalty.

If conservatives believe this kind of indulgence of lunacy is helpful, they are mistaken. …

David Warren discusses other societal ills.

…The SPPI is itself a privately-financed think tank, so will be demonized on that ground, among persons who were never taught in school that guilt-by-association is a logical fallacy. Indeed, even Ian Plimer, perhaps the most independent-minded Australian earth scientist ever to be born, has been taking malicious hits of this sort, from the climate-change lobbyists he has exposed.

Plimer is the prominent geologist whose recent book, Heaven and Earth, subtitled, “Global Warming: The Missing Science”, does the best job I’ve seen of showing that the premise behind all the government-commissioned studies is knowingly false. For it can be demonstrated that, above 50 parts per million, carbon dioxide accumulations do not heat the atmosphere at all. But even without knowing that, we should have been alarmed, by the existence of a monopsony.

Mona Charen reviews a new book with fresh insights on Israel, George Gilder’s The Israel Test.

…Jewish accomplishment is an undeniable fact of history. Many (Murray included) have speculated about the disproportionate number of Jewish intellectuals, musicians, millionaires, scientists and others. Gilder (a Gentile) is interested less in the why of Jewish excellence than in its consequences. A society that is organized to permit individuals to flourish and to realize their potential (like the United States and post-1980s Israel) will broadly share in the increased prosperity those individuals help to create. A society (or a global system) that misunderstands wealth creation and wishes to level society by penalizing success will make life poorer for everyone. …

…Israel has only recently become a technological and economic powerhouse. It got there after a protracted dalliance with socialism that gave Israel high unemployment, anemic growth, and inflation rates that reached 1,000 percent in early 1985. Three catalysts changed everything: 1) the influx of 1 million vehemently anti-socialist immigrants from the former Soviet Union; 2) the addition of a far smaller but still consequential cohort of American Jewish immigrants who had business experience and expertise; and 3) economic reforms urged by Natan Sharansky and Bibi Netanyahu. The results, Gilder writes, were “incandescent.” He cites a 2008 Deloitte & Touche survey showing that in six key areas — telecom, microchips, software, biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and clean energy — “Israel ranked second only to the United States in technological innovation.” Israel’s high-tech research and development puts it at the center of the information revolution. Intel’s microchips, Gilder notes, might as well be tagged “Israel Inside.”

But what has this to do with the Palestinians? In addition to his guided tour through Israel’s equivalent of Silicon Valley, Gilder also provides a taut and clarifying economic and political history of the modern Middle East. The economic piece is key, because Israelis have created prosperity wherever they have touched ground in that otherwise listless part of the globe. And Arabs have responded by flooding into areas they previously disdained after Israelis made them habitable, even desirable. It was so in the Yishuv (the new Jewish settlements in the Holy Land starting in the 1880s). And after Israel reluctantly took control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the economy in the territories became one of the most dynamic on earth, posting 30 percent annual growth. The Arab population, along with per capita income, tripled.

Arabs are and have always been in a position to share in the wealth created by Israel — and to create their own. But they have flunked the “Israel Test” by choosing envy and hatred. It’s a test the outcome of which, Gilder persuasively argues, will determine our own future as well. Gilder has always been right. Read the book.

Mark Steyn thinks we are mistaken making just utilitarian arguments against ObamaCare.

… That’s not why it’s tanking in the polls, of course. It’s floundering because Obama sold it initially on the basis of “controlling costs,” and then the Congressional Budget Office let the cat out of the bag and pointed out that, au contraire, it would cost $1.6 trillion, and therefore either add to an unsustainable deficit, or require massive tax increases, or (more likely) both.

All of which is true. But to object to the governmentalization of health care on that basis implicitly concedes the argument that, if we could figure out a way to bring the price down, it would be fine and dandy. Right now, there are a lot of wonkish and utilitarian objections to what the Democrats want to do, and they’re gaining traction. In The American Spectator, Brandon Crocker points out that this is exactly the way things went over Hillarycare in 1993: Americans took against the plan on practical grounds but not against the underlying principle. “Since we did not win that philosophical argument in 1993,” Mr. Crocker writes, “we now have to fight the same battle today.” And, if we win on utilitarian grounds today, we’ll have to fight it again in 10 years, five years, maybe less – until something passes, and then everything changes, forever: As the IRA famously taunted Margaret Thatcher, we only have to get lucky once; you have to be lucky every day. …

… How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies?

That’s the argument that needs to be won. And, if you think I’m being frivolous in positing bureaucratic regulation of doughnuts and vacations, consider that under the all-purpose umbrellas of “health” and “the environment,” governments of supposedly free nations are increasingly comfortable straying into areas of diet and leisure. Last year, a British bill attempted to ban Tony the Tiger, longtime pitchman for Frosties, from children’s TV because of his malign influence on young persons. Why not just ban Frosties? Or permit it by prescription only? Or make kids stand outside on the sidewalk to eat it? It was also proposed – by the Conservative Party, alas – that, in the interests of saving the planet, each citizen should be permitted to fly a certain number of miles a year, after which he would be subject to punitive eco-surtaxes. Isn’t restricting freedom of movement kind of, you know … totalitarian?

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks – drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high.

Government health care would be wrong even if it “controlled costs.” It’s a liberty issue. I’d rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices.

When it comes to selling Obamacare, hope apparently does not suffice, writes Karl Rove.

On the campaign trail last year, Barack Obama promised to end the “politics of fear and cynicism.” Yet he is now trying to sell his health-care proposals on fear.

At his news conference last week, he said “Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage, or lose their job. . . . If we do not reform health care, your premiums and out-of-pocket costs will continue to skyrocket. If we do not act, 14,000 Americans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day. These are the consequences of inaction.”

A Fox News Poll from last week shows that 84% of Americans who have health insurance are happy with their coverage. And because 91% of all Americans have insurance, that means that 76% of all Americans will be concerned about anything that threatens their current coverage. By a 2-1 margin, according to the Fox Poll, Americans want coverage from a private provider rather than the government.

Facing numbers like these, Mr. Obama is dropping his high-minded rhetoric and instead trying to scare voters.

Charles Krauthammer foresees that Obama will settle for health insurance reform that will still result in new requirements, entitlements, and reliance on the state.

…To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no preexisting condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn’t this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers; an end to the dream of imposing European-style health care on the United States; and a president who before Christmas will wave his pen, proclaim victory and watch as the newest conventional wisdom reaffirms his divinity.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the outcome of the beer summit. Apparently the White House is still deciding how to spin the ”teachable moment.”

…Later the president professed amazement that everyone could be so interested in a meeting about what he had previously described as an incident brought on by a ”stupidly” behaving cop, which he then converted into a “teachable moment.” He lectured the media and public:

“It’s an attempt to have some personal interaction when an issue has become so hyped and so symbolic that you lose sight of just the fact that these are people involved, including myself, all of whom are imperfect.”

Said the president, “hopefully instead of ginning up anger and hyperbole, you know, everybody can just spend a little bit of time with some self-reflection and recognizing that everybody has different points of view.”

I think it was he who suggested it was symbolic. But once again — like American Jewish leaders — we’re told to go self-reflect.

What a perfectly disingenuous and arrogant performance. Far from healing racial tensions, Obama inflamed them and then fled the scene of his own making. The weekend comes just in a nick of time — the president certainly needs to get out of the spotlight and regroup.

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Hopefully someone will make more of John Conyers accidentally telling the truth about not reading the laws they pass. For now, we have Mark Steyn’s Corner post which we will put in first place.

… Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. …

Washington Times editors are on it.

… Mr. Conyers might think it’s an antiquated notion that congressmen actually read legislation, but it is the most fundamental responsibility of elected representatives to know and understand laws and how they will affect the lives of their constituents. …

… The notion is put to rest that government might cooperate with doctors and patients to work out what is best for providing care. The health care bill uses the assertive word “shall” 1,683 times. These passages are government mandates that force doctors, consumers and others in the health care profession to do what Congress orders. The word “penalty” is used 156 times for those who don’t follow orders. “Tax” is referred to 172 times. …

George Gilder writes in the American.com about the importance to the world, of Israel and its people.

… At the heart of anti-Semitism is resentment of Jewish achievement. Today that achievement is concentrated in Israel. Obscured by the usual media coverage of the “war-torn” Middle East, Israel has become one of the most important economies in the world, second only to the United States in its pioneering of technologies benefitting human life, prosperity, and peace.

But so it has always been. Israel, like the Jews throughout history, is hated not for her vices but her virtues. Israel is hated, as the United States is hated, because Israel is successful, because Israel is free, and because Israel is good.

As Maxim Gorky put it: “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more capable of work than they are.” Whether driven by culture or genes—or like most behavior, an inextricable mix—the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrable. It can be gainsaid only by people who do not expect to be believed. …

… For all its special features and extreme manifestations, anti-Semitism is a reflection of the hatred toward successful middlemen, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, lenders, bankers, financiers, and other capitalists that is visible everywhere whenever an identifiable set of outsiders outperforms the rest of the population in the economy. This is true whether the offending excellence comes from the Kikuyu in Kenya; the Ibo and the Yoruba in Nigeria; the overseas Indians and whites in Uganda and Zimbabwe; the Lebanese in West Africa, South America, and around the world; the Parsis in India; the Indian Gujaratis in South and East Africa; the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; and above all the more than 30 million overseas Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution reports that in Indonesia the Chinese were 5 percent of the population, but they controlled 70 percent of private domestic capital and ran three-quarters of the nation’s top 200 businesses. Their economic dominance—and their repeated victimization in ghastly massacres—prompts Sowell to comment: “Although the overseas Chinese have long been known as the ‘Jews of Southeast Asia,’ perhaps Jews might more aptly be called the overseas Chinese of Europe.”

As Sowell writes, these “middlemen minorities,” their “wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable,” typically arouse hatred from competing intellectuals. “It is not usually the masses of the people who most resent the more productive people in their midst. More commonly, it is the intelligentsia, who may with sufficiently sustained effort spread their own resentments to others.” …

With his eminent good sense and calm demeanor, Tunku Varadarajan writes on Gates. He gets his dates wrong, but that will serve as a “teachable moment” here. Actually, the arrest was July 16th. It received some notice, but interest had waned until the July 22nd presser. Makes Pickerhead think there’s a back story here. It would be interesting to know what communications existed in the interim between Gates and Obama… or Michelle.

… 8. A final word on how this episode, for all its sordidness, confirms the greatness of America. Where else could a humble cop–a Lilliputian sergeant–stand up so publicly to a president? And not just stand up but invite himself over for a beer with the president?

What theater it has been, what entertainment. And yes, a teachable moment–for Professor Gates, and for President Barack Obama. Sgt. Crowley may believe that he had nothing to learn, but I’m certain he has grasped a small truth or two as well.

Now for a Brit view of Gates gate, Melanie Phillips.

… As regular readers of this blog know, I have been banging on from the start of Obama’s rise to power about the astonishing discrepancy between how he was presented by the media on the issue of race and what he actually had said and done. His whole background from the earliest days onwards was steeped in anti-white grievance politics of the most bitter and corrosive kind. This was all ignored. His two-decade membership of an anti-white church was ignored, his early anti-white mentors such as Frank Marshall Davis were ignored, his participation on the Nation of Islam ‘Million Man march’ and his association with Nation of Islam cadres were ignored.

And as Krauthammer aptly observed – and as I wrote here – Obama’s major speech on race in March 2008 in which he finally ‘renounced’ his former pastor, the anti-white bigot Rev Jeremiah Wright, which was hailed as the greatest piece of oratory since the Gettysburg address and which supposedly transcended racial animosities to create the colour-blind Brotherhood of Man, was anything but. In this speech Obama actually said Wright should not be renounced, and that Wright’s racism was actually all the fault of white people. The fact that so many people failed to hear or read what Obama actually said and instead heard or read only what they wanted to hear was truly frightening. …

Mark Davis in the Dallas Morning News on Gates.

… Every shred of evidence points to this as a police officer following the rules and a citizen blowing his top. But clarity is the first casualty when there are cheap points to be scored in the arena of racial correctness, where all of this “teaching moment” drivel was hatched.

President Barack Obama wants to get in on the “teaching” with an absurd chunk of White House political theater tomorrow, as the properly arrested professor joins him in double-teaming an honorable police sergeant who merely did his job.

In a feeble attempt to appear a racial healer, the president who created this disaster by prematurely taking sides will establish a pernicious and phony moral equivalency between Sgt. James Crowley and the presidential buddy he arrested, a race-baiting professional hothead who saw an opportunity to concoct racial profiling where none existed.

Yet there was profiling at the Gates home that day – police profiling, the unjust presumption that a white cop is up to no good. …

And another liberal questions ObamaCare. This time, Susan Estrich.

The president is “not familiar” with the bill. No one can explain how it will work yet, as Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told a contentious town meeting. There are various plans, and negotiations are still in the early stages.

But whatever it is, we should be for it.

Am I missing something? …

Three weeks before arrests in NJ over organ sales, Jeff Jacoby wrote a column on the subject.

… The result of our misguided altruism-only organ donation system is much the same: too few organs and too much death. More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the national organ waiting list. Last year, 28,000 transplants were performed, but 49,000 new patients were added to the queue. As the list grows longer, the wait grows deadlier, and the shortage of available organs grows more acute. Last year, 6,600 people died while awaiting the kidney or liver or heart that could have kept them alive. Another 18 people will die today. And another 18 tomorrow. And another 18 every day, until Congress fixes the law that causes so many valuable organs to be wasted, and so many lives to be needlessly lost.

In August last year, Pickings had a piece on the importance of cooking to human development. Salon.com has an article next month on the same subject.

Animals of the genus Homo are defined by their little mouths, large guts, big brains — and appetite for bratwurst. This, at least, is the provocative theory of evolution put forth by Dr. Richard Wrangham in his fascinating new book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.”

Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, began his career studying chimpanzees alongside Jane Goodall, and rose to academic acclaim as a primatologist specializing in the roots of male aggression. Naturally, he tends to think of most scientific questions in relation to chimps. And so it was that a few years ago, while sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, he wondered, “What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?” The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.

For years, accepted wisdom has held that it was a transition to meat eating that prompted human evolution — which makes Wrangham’s hypothesis a radical departure. Yet, the more he tested his theory, the more he found the science to back it up: Cooked food is universally easier to process and more nutritionally dense than raw food, which means adopting a cooked diet would have given man a biological advantage. The energy he once spent consuming and digesting raw food could be diverted to other physiological functions, leading to the development of bigger bodies and brains. And Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis” not only explains the physical changes that humans underwent but also the social ones: Cooking created a sexual division of labor that informs our ideas of gender, love, family and marriage even to this day. “Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood,” Wrangham concludes. “And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.” …

John Derbyshire at the Corner has a lot of fun with Pluto’s planet possibilities.

Of all the issues in the public forum right now, I’m hard put to think of one less important than the issue of whether or not we should call Pluto a planet.

Still, it’s a more relaxing topic to contemplate than whether illegal aliens will be able to get sex-change operations on the public fisc under Obamacare, whether our president is actually the offspring of Azerbaijani goat-herds, …