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David Warren packs a lifetime of wisdom, absorbed and reflected, in today’s look at potentials in developing world economies. This optimistic view of things will serve as a tonic for items that follow.

… Thailand had a history of freedom. So did the U.S. and Canada, for that matter, when our people opened the vast granaries of our west. And it is just this history of freedom that is lacking in other, benighted lands.

There were fewer mental obstacles in Thailand to letting the people solve their own problems. That and, to my mind, that alone, made it a shining example for agricultural and every other form of economic development — even while the country provided a rather poor example of democratic constitutional development, with one pathetic coup after another since the fall of the old Siamese absolute monarchy in 1932.

Indeed, here is the most heretical thought. It may be precisely because the politicians rendered themselves so ineffectual in Thailand that the country has prospered.

On paper and in principle — in common sense — the problems of food supply can be solved. Foreign aid gets in the way, both by removing incentives to expand local production and by lining the pockets of dictators who persist with heavily statist schemes. The “global warming” environmental movement, meanwhile, assures an ever-heavier hand for this statism in the future, which is why it is so evil.

The London Times thinks the administration misreads the power structure in Moscow.

President Obama has made his first mistake in Russia even before he arrives in Moscow today. His attempt to cast Vladimir Putin as yesterday’s man and to drive a wedge between the Prime Minister and President Medvedev demonstrates a misreading of relations in the Kremlin.

Mr Medvedev is in office but not in power and whether he becomes President in more than name depends on Mr Putin’s support and intentions. Mr Medvedev may represent a more accommodating face of Russia but this is only because Mr Putin wants him to.

Mr Obama declared: “I think that it’s important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev that Putin understand that the old Cold War approaches to US-Russian relations is outdated . . . Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.” That suggests that Mr Medvedev’s outlook differs from that of his mentor despite a lack of evidence. Mr Putin is not known as a bad judge of character and he himself described his successor as “no less a Russian nationalist than I am”. …

… Mr Obama is coming to the table like a card shark to a casino, ready to charm his hosts and pull aces from his sleeve to win support for crucial objectives in Afghanistan and Iran. But Russia is a land of chess players, cautious and calculating. Mr Putin does not respond to charm — and he has just closed Russia’s casinos.

Kevin Hassett thinks CA’s budget woes should sink health care “reform”.

Last week, we discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU’s in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper.

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.

It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors.

California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger. …

David Harsanyi’s latest looks at stimulus results.

After being asked when the public should begin judging the success of the nearly $800-billion stimulus plan, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs answered, “I think we should begin to judge it now.”

Let’s take his advice.

The administration warned that if we failed to support a stimulus package, unemployment would hit a dire 9 percent by 2010. With the stimulus, unemployment, it claimed, would stay in the 8-percent range.

This week, the Labor Department announced that the jobless rate jumped to 9.5 percent, higher than any time since August 1983.

It’s not as if the administration was close. As the New York Times notes, “the difference between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs. It’s as if every worker in the city of Los Angeles received an unexpected layoff notice.”

Don’t get too dejected, though. We still have an economic plan with a heaping dose of hope. …

Roger Simon posts pessimism.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my country so divided and depressed on the Fourth of July in my lifetime and – no matter what Bob Dylan dreamed up – I’m not young, forever or otherwise. That includes the Vietnam War period when both sides at least had some conviction and excitement for the future, even if wrong. Not so now. The current situation is grim.

Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan – if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all – has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. …

More of this from Power Line.

Country Store asks why Obama and the dems don’t just offer US taxpayer funded health care to everyone in the world? Makes sense to Pickerhead. After all, the One says his health care plan will save money. We’ll save more money still if we cover the world!

… Such a deal – we install a massive bureaucracy, pay 1.5 trillion additional dollars in taxes, and ration healthcare to the elderly so that everyone who sneaks across the border gets great medical care. Why not cut down on wear and tear on the Border patrol and just pay for all medical care for everyone in the world. I’m sure the US taxpayers would mind too much.

WSJ reports some toll roads have banished cash.

… On Saturday, an authority that runs the E-470 toll road near Denver is ditching its coin handlers and going entirely cashless. Drivers will no longer be able to dig through piles of loose change in their dashboard trays to come up with toll money. Instead, they will have to equip their vehicles with transponders that deduct tolls automatically, or face the prospect of paying heftier fees when a bill arrives in the mail.

The Denver switchover follows a similar move on Wednesday by the North Texas Tollway Authority, which turned the 32-mile President George Bush Turnpike outside Dallas into an entirely cashless facility. Together, transportation experts say, these conversions mark the first time in the U.S. that existing toll roads have abandoned their pay-with-cash lanes and gone entirely electronic. …

Counterintuitive enough to have attracted our interest, an Economist article tracing babies’ names seems to indicate the internet has shrunk our contacts.

Under the heading of; You Can’t Make It Up, a picture from the NY Times story of Madoff payments to Austrian banker reveals Bernie Madoff’s long lost sister. The WSJ was kinder to her. It remains to be seen whether she actually made off with some money.

WSJ with interesting elephant pic.

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Have the best 4th ever. From Reason TV.

Michael Ledeen has an interesting way to look at the Fourth.

And the WSJ reports on efforts to find better fireworks.

The technology is from China. The 45,000 pounds of explosives, monitored from a command center on the Intrepid battleship, will need to soar as high as 1,000 feet in the sky. Around 9:20 p.m., a new, experimental model known as the “ghost shell” will explode across the night sky, then vanish—only to reappear and disappear several more times in a wave pattern.

This year’s Fourth of July fireworks show in New York—more than 10 times larger than the one in Washington—needs to be bigger, brighter, longer and louder than last year’s.

The U.S. has set off fireworks on Independence Day since the first celebration in 1776 when John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that July 4 should be marked with “illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forevermore.” …

David Warren has July 4th thoughts from north of the border.

The Dow has been tanking again, and new figures show the U.S. economy shedding jobs at an accelerating rate. One might criticize the U.S. government for the first trillion or two of “stimulus” spending, by observing that it hasn’t worked. But that would be too easy.

Yes, it was crazy, in the middle of a crisis created by debt, to see how far they could run up debt. It was crazy to shore up nearly worthless assets, in the face of irresistible market forces. At a time when the entire investment system desperately needs to be de-leveraged, it was crazy to oil the gears.

But it gets crazier. In the middle of this economic mess, the U.S. politicians are debating not one, but two new programs of unprecedented size, without the slightest understanding of the economic consequences. One is a vast new “health care” plan, to be sold almost entirely on emotion, with President Obama’s snake-oil skills. …

Mark Steyn’s first look at Palin’s news reflects his good sense.

… National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.

Charles Krauthammer has a go at the Ricci decision.

… At the near half-century mark of the Civil Rights Act, racial minorities have seen remarkable social advancement. The younger generation is infinitely more racially tolerant and accepting. We’ve made great racial progress. But the fundamental unfairness that underlies the racial spoils system continues to rankle. That’s what animated the Ricci case.

We’re 45 years beyond passage of the Civil Rights Act. We have a black attorney general and a black president. As with every passing year we move generationally away from the era of Jim Crow, it becomes less and less justified for the government to mandate “remedial” racial discrimination. Which is why Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in one of her last opinions wrote that “the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

The import of Ricci, which raised the bar on reverse discrimination, is that it heads us once again toward that day — and back to true colorblindness that was the original vision, and everlasting glory, of the civil rights movement.

Megan McArdle thinks too much credulity greeted Wal-Mart’s advocacy of corporate health care mandates.

I find it hard to believe that none of the liberal commentators breathlessly celebrating Wal-Mart’s “capitulation” on national health care have even entertained the most parsimonious explanation:  that Wal-Mart is in favor of this because it raises the barriers to entry in the retail market, and hammers Wal-Mart’s competition.  Yet somehow, this appears nowhere in any of the analysis. …

One of the cap and trade bill’s most obnoxious provisions makes The Corner.

… the Waxman-Markey bill contains a little-publicized provision that would require private homeowners to retrofit their homes to meet federally-mandated energy-efficiency  standards when they put their homes up for sale. …

Mark Steyn comments.

… speaking as a foreigner, I confess I’m finding it harder and harder to see why you fellows bothered holding a revolution. Under this bill, it will be illegal for me to sell my property to a willing buyer without first bringing it into line with some twerp bureaucrat’s arbitrary and ever shifting “environmental” regulations originally designed for California, and which have helped turn the Golden State into the foldin’ state, …

Shorts from National Review.

London Times reports new swine flu cases in Great Britain are expected to reach 100,000 daily by the end of the month.

More than 100,000 swine flu cases could be diagnosed every day by the end of next month, the Health Secretary has warned. Britain has moved past the stage of trying to contain the spread of the virus and into the “treatment phase”, Andy Burnham told the House of Commons.

Cases of the H1N1 virus were doubling each week in Britain and could reach six figures daily by the end of August if current trends continued, he added. Anyone with flu-like symptoms will be advised to stay at home and telephone their GP for advice. Doctors have warned that “several million” people could become ill as the flu season returns in autumn and winter.

Mr Burnham emphasised that most people who had become infected with the virus had developed only mild symptoms but widespread disruption to the economy is expected as people take days off work with flu. …

Borowitz reports Ruth Madoff has broken her silence.

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Neal Boortz comments on our Honduras policy.

North Korea launches a missile and it takes Barack Obama and the UN five days to respond. Iran holds fraudulent elections, kills protesters and it takes weeks before Barack Obama can stand up and say that he is “concerned” about the situation.

Then the people of Honduras try to uphold their constitution and laws of the land from being trampled by a Chavez-wanna be … and it takes Barack Obama one day to proclaim that this was not a legal coup.

Why the sudden decisiveness? …

Peter Wehner writes in Commentary on the important milestone in Iraq.

… The ultimate wisdom in initiating the Iraq war is still to be validated by contingent events still to unfold. What is happening today is a transition, not a final triumph. And while Iraq is today a legitimate, representative, and responsible democracy, it remains fragile. Hard-earned progress can still be undone. The Iraqi military will have to prove it can provide security to its citizens. Relations between the Iraqi government and the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in the north, particularly over the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, are tense. None of us can foretell the future, and almost all of us have been wrong about some aspect of the war or another.

Still, it is worth pointing out that those who wrote off the war as unwinnable and a miserable failure, who made confident, sweeping arguments that have been overturned by events, and who had grown so weary of the conflict that they were willing to consign Iraqis to mass slaughters and America to a historically consequential defeat — they were thankfully, blessedly wrong. And the Land between the Rivers, which has known too much tyranny and too many tears, may yet bind up its wounds.

And Max Boot reminds us of the continuing challenges in Iraq.

Amid the hullabaloo regarding the handover of Iraqi cities to Iraqi security forces yesterday, it is easy to lose sight of the war still going on. Despite dramatic drops in violence in Iraq since 2006-2007 — and a corresponding increase in violence in Afghanistan — Iraq remains by several statistical measures the more violent of the two.

So far this year 101 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq versus 86 in Afghanistan. Figures for civilian casualties are less exact but they also indicate more deaths in Iraq — 893 in Iraq compared to 680 in Afghanistan. …

Michael Barone says the firefighter case shows us the more disgusting side of racial politics.

… Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. It shows how a combination of vote-hungry politicians and local political agitators — you might call them community organizers — worked with the approval of elite legal professionals like Judge Sotomayor to employ racial quotas and preferences in defiance of the words of the Civil Rights Act.

One of the chief actors was the Rev. Boise Kimber, a supporter of Mayor John DeStefano; the mayor testified for him as a character witness in a 1996 trial in which he was convicted of stealing prepaid funeral expenses from an elderly woman. DeStefano later appointed Kimber the head of the board of fire commissioners, but Kimber resigned after saying he wouldn’t hire certain recruits because “they just have too many vowels in their name.” After the results of the promotion test were announced, showing that 19 white and one Hispanic firefighter qualified for promotion, Kimber called the mayor’s chief administrative officer opposing certification of the test results.

The record shows that DeStefano and his appointees went to work, holding secret meetings and concealing their motives, to get the Civil Service Board to decertify the test results. Kimber appeared at a board meeting and made “a loud, minutes-long outburst” and had to be ruled out of order three times. …

Krauthammer’s take on events in Iraq.

… Nonetheless, it [Iraq] is a democracy, and that’s what makes it unique and distinctive, and an amazing achievement in a sea of autocracies and dictatorships—having an effect, by example, on Lebanon, on the Gulf states, and even on Iran, where Iranians look to their west and see a country which is also Shiite, Arab, (which the Persians consider culturally inferior), and yet it has a democracy, it has elections, it has an Ayatollah Sistani who says the clerics ought to stay out of politics, and the Iranians are living under a sixth-century dictatorship run by mullahs.

So it’s a remarkable achievement, and we ought to emphasize what we have achieved in terms of democracy.

And it’s a pity that the president ignores that because the democratic nature of Iraq will establish the basis for a strategic alliance between America and Iraq in the future. …

Contentions post tells us about the EPA report that was suppressed.

… Dr. Carlin’s paper is substantial and deserves to be read in its entirety. But his takeaway is clear: the best explanations for global temperature fluctuations are changes in the amount of energy emitted by the sun, and, especially, oscillations in the temperatures of the oceans. The explanatory power of CO2 levels is much weaker, and, over the past decade, almost non-existent.

So why, when the House has just passed a “global warming” bill, is this report only available via a leak from CEI? Because, as Dr. Carlin puts it, “I’ve been involved in public policy since 1966 or 1967…. There’s never been anything exactly like this. I am now under a gag order.” The internal EPA e-mails between Dr. Carlin and his superiors that were leaked along with the report back up this claim. …

Daily Mail, UK reports the continuing evidence of the value of statins.

Statins cut the risk of heart attacks by 30 per cent even in healthy people, researchers say. The cholesterol-busting drugs also reduce the chances of death from all causes by 12 per cent. The findings, from a review of studies involving people without heart disease, will renew the heated debate over whether everyone over the age of 50 should be prescribed the powerful drugs.

At present they are given only to those at significant risk of a heart attack or stroke. Many experts say wider access to the cheap drug could save hundreds of thousands of lives while also saving the NHS billions every year. But others warn of the dangers of ‘mass medicalisation’ of the population. …

Slate tells us how McDonald’s conquered France.

… And the company was very adept at catering to French proclivities, a point brought home to me on a visit to a McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées in June 2007. I was part of a group of journalists being given a guided tour by Jean-Pierre Petit, who had succeeded Hennequin as the chief executive of McDonald’s France. We had come to this particular McDonald’s because Petit wanted to show us the newest addition to the company’s product line in France: McCafé, a stand-alone espresso bar offering lattes, macchiatos, and the like, along with fruit tarts, macarons, and other classic French sweets. The company was planning to open McCafés all over France, and the Champs-Élysées location was home to one of the first. Some of the other journalists eagerly ordered espresso drinks and pastries, but I wouldn’t be so easily gulled—this was still McDonald’s. Petit began making the rounds with a plate of macarons and insisted I try one. I took a pistachio. Not bad, I thought, but no Ladurée. As if reading my mind, Petit immediately chimed in, “We get the macarons from Holder, the company that owns Ladurée.” Touché.

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Spengler writes on the power vacumn created by this feckless administration.

There’s a joke about a man who tells a psychiatrist, “Everybody hates me,” to which the psychiatrist responds, “That’s ridiculous – everyone doesn’t know you, yet.” Which brings me to Barack Obama: one of the best-informed people in the American security establishment told me the other day that the president is a “Manchurian Candidate”.

That can’t be true – Manchuria isn’t in the business of brainwashing prospective presidential candidates any more. There’s no one left to betray America to. Obama is creating a strategic void in which no major power will dominate, and every minor power must fend for itself. The outcome is incalculably hard to analyze and terrifying to consider.

Obama doesn’t want to betray the United States; he only wants to empower America’s enemies. Forcing Israel to abandon its strategic buffer (the so-called settlements) was supposed to placate Iran, so that Iran would help America stabilize Iraq, where its influence looms large over the Shi’ite majority.

America also sought Iran’s help in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Obama’s imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition – empowered by Washington’s turn against Israel – would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi’ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama’s face.

Iran already has made clear that casting America’s enemies in the leading role of an American operation has a defect, namely that America’s enemies rather would lose on their own terms than win on America’s terms. Iran’s verbal war with the American president over the violent suppression of election-fraud protests leaves Washington with no policy at all. …

… Obama’s policy reduces to empowering America’s enemies in the hope that they will conform to American interests out of gratitude. Just the opposite result is likely to ensure: Iran, Pakistan and other regional powers are likely to take radical measures. Iran is threatened with a collapse of its Shi’ite program from Lebanon to Afghanistan, and Pakistan is threatened with a breakup into three or more states.

Obama has not betrayed the interests of the United States to any foreign power, but he has done the next worst thing, namely to create a void in the region by withdrawing American power. The result is likely to be a species of pandemonium that will prompt the leading players in the region to learn to live without the United States.

In his heart of hearts, Obama sees America as a force for evil in the world, apologizing for past American actions that did more good than harm. An example is America’s sponsorship of the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the left-leaning government of Mohammed Mossadegh. …

… Obama’s continuing obsession with America’s supposed misdeeds – deplorable but necessary actions in time of war – is consistent with his determination to erode America’s influence in the most troubled parts of the world. By removing America as a referee, he will provoke more violence than the United States ever did. We are entering a very, very dangerous period as a result.

Abby Thernstrom writes on the Ricci/New Haven decision.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano is very good news. The court said clearly and decisively that employment law only rarely permits quotas to remedy racial imbalance.

Most racial preferences — for example, in college admissions — are shrouded in secrecy and dishonesty. Not here. In 2003, after 58 whites, 23 blacks and 19 Hispanics took tests to determine who would qualify as captains and lieutenants, no blacks and two Hispanics ended up eligible for promotion. The city’s civil service board refused to certify the results, denying promotions to all who had earned them. As the chairman of the New Haven Board of Fire Commissioners had earlier told the firefighters, many of whom were Italian, some men would not be hired because “they just have too many vowels in their name[s].”

Seventeen white candidates and one Hispanic sued, claiming a violation of their legal and constitutional rights. They struck out in the district court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. …

Another of our favorites, Jennifer Rubin, liked Abby’s piece.

… It is tempting for the Senate not to dwell on Ricci or on the upcoming Sotomayor confirmation hearing. After all, there is the economy, healthcare reform, and many less controversial topics. But nothing can be more important.

We forget how critical these nominations and confirmation hearings can be. After all, without the nomination and confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, Frank Ricci could well have been stuck with his terse dismissal from the Second Circuit. The very fiber of our society may be altered by one or more of the appointments Obama is likely to make to the Court during his presidency. Are we to look the other way when the victimization mongers raise a fuss? Or do we as a society tell employers to stand up to intimidation and resist the urge to discriminate against those without a civil rights lobby behind them?

It behooves the Senate to take seriously its responsibilities, to question Sotomayor and to consider why it is that she could not discern the issues, articulate her reasoning, and reach a defensible result in Ricci. Future Frank Riccis who may come before the Court in the years to follow deserve nothing less.

Thomas Sowell on health care.

… Politicians may talk about “bringing down the cost of medical care,” but they seldom even attempt to bring down the costs. What they bring down is the price — which is to say, they refuse to pay the costs.

Anybody can refuse to pay any cost. But don’t be surprised if you get less when you pay less. None of this is rocket science. But it does require us to stop and think before jumping on a bandwagon.

The great haste with which the latest government expansion into medical care is being rushed through Congress suggests that the politicians don’t want us to stop and think. That makes sense, from their point of view, but not from ours.

They may be anecdotal, but Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg have some government-run health care stories.

David Harsanyi comments on cap and trade.

Facts. Costs. Consequences. Who cares?

We’re in the middle of pretending to save the planet, baby.

If it’s about helping the environment, suspend reason and salvation is yours. I’m sure you’ve also had a lot of smart and compassionate folks tell you lately: Doing something — anything! — is better than doing nothing.

So the House did something. It passed a “cap-and-trade” bill that would ration energy, destroy productive jobs, levy the largest tax increase in U.S. history and, for kicks, penalize foreign trade partners who failed to engage in comparable economic suicide.

Now, assuming there are no speed- reading clairvoyants in Congress, no one who voted for the 1,200-page bill — plus the 300-page amendment dropped the morning of the vote — could possibly have read it. …

Scrappleface says Sotomayor may sue Supremes over their Ricci ruling.

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Before we get to the cap and trade, we’ll have a look at the Honduras flap where once again the kid president gets it wrong. Charles Krauthammer is first.

… Well, the president has a knack for getting all of these big decisions wrong. Two weeks ago, he refuses to meddle in a country where peaceful demonstrators are getting shot by a theocratic dictatorship. He doesn’t want to choose sides.

And now he’s eager to meddle on behalf of the president in Honduras who is a Chavez wannabe, who is strong-arming his way to a referendum—that has been declared illegal by his Supreme Court—as a way to…establish a constituent assembly which will establish a new constitution, which will be a Chavez-like dictatorship. …

And Peter Wehner in Contentions.

… Obama was clearly trying to pacify the theocratic leadership of the repressive, terror-sponsoring Iranian regime. In the case of Honduras, Obama is “meddling” in order to protect the legitimacy of an authoritarian president who is acting as if he were above the law, is violating Honduras’s Constitution, and is supported by Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Fidel Castro (see this Wall Street Journal column for more). …

The passage Friday of the Cap and Trade bill was a low point in our history. We have many comments from some of our favorites.

John Steele Gordon comments on the Cap-and-Trade bill.

According to an infomercial masquerading as an AP news story,  the “climate bill may spur energy revolution.” Overlooked by the AP and other minions of the left is the fact that the revolution has been underway, largely without the federal government’s help, for more than a generation now. In 1970 a one-percent increase in GDP meant a one-percent increase in oil consumption. Today its means less than a third of one percent increase in oil consumption. It would be considerably less than that had the left not brought the development and exploitation of nuclear power to a screeching halt thirty years ago…

Jennifer Rubin has some highlights from the House debate.

Minority Leader John Boehner, who under the rules for the vote had unlimited time to speak, decided to start reading the 300-page amendment that was added at 3 am into a bill already 1200 pages long. Few if any members had read, let alone located, the new bill on which they were voting.  Politico described the scene which unfolded…

John Steele Gordon posts another piece on global warming.

Do climate scientists in general and liberal politicians to a man want global warming to be both real and anthropogenic in origin? You bet, because it’s in their self-interest for it to be so. After all, if it is, then both groups are greatly empowered by the necessity to do something about it. Only government–guided by experts–would be able to reverse a gathering climate catastrophe. The government would need vast new powers to do so. And as James Madison explained two centuries ago, “Men love power.”

Roger Simon’s liberal friends no longer want to discuss global warming. He comments on cap-and-trade.

Jim Lindgren in Volokh weighs in on Cap-and-Trade.

The cap-and-trade bill, if passed by the Senate and actually implemented over the next few decades, would do more damage to the country than any economic legislation passed in at least 100 years. It would eventually send most American manufacturing jobs overseas, reduce American competitiveness, and make Americans much poorer than they would have been without it.
The cap-and-trade bill will have little, if any, positive effect on the environment — in part because the countries that would take jobs from US industries tend to be bigger polluters. By making the US — and the world — poorer, it would probably reduce the world’s ability to develop technologies that might solve its environmental problems in the future.

Lindgren also highlights a quote from blogger Maxed Out Mama regarding the House passing Cap-and-Trade.

This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in my lifetime.
Let’s hope it can be stopped in the Senate. Even if it is, our nation has lost something here, and that something is the principal legislative body’s grasp on reality. It is as if the House of Representatives suddenly passed a vote to reduce gravity by 10 percent in order to lessen the costs of obesity to putatively cut Medicare costs in the future. Truly amazing.

Michael Barone analyzes the cap and trade votes and speculates on Senate passage.

… This bill was passed by the votes of one-third of the nation—the Northeast (New England, NY, NJ, DE, MD) and the Pacific coast (CA, OR, WA, HI), as the following table shows. Just over half the votes cast for it came from those two regions.

UNITED STATES               219         212

Northeast & Pacific             110          31

Rest of US                             109         181

To oversimplify just a bit, the one-third of the nation that doesn’t depend on coal for its electricity passed this over the less unanimous opposition of the two-thirds of the nation that does. This was true despite Democrats’ gains in House seats in the rest of the nation in 2006 and 2008. Seven of the 8 Republicans who voted for the bill came from the Northeast & Pacific; 39 of the 44 of the Democrats who voted against it came from the rest of the nation. By the way, despite the opposition of Greenpeace and some other environmental restriction groups, only 3 of the Democrats who voted against this seem to have done so for similar reasons: Peter DeFazio (OR 4), Dennis Kucinich (OH 10) and Pete Stark (CA 9). Only three members did not vote on the bill, Jeff Flake (AZ 6), Alcee Hastings (FL 23), and John Sullivan (OK 1). Nancy Pelosi made an exception to the usual custom that the speaker does not vote by casting an aye vote, indicating the importance she attached to the measure. …

Ed Morrissey points out that the president refused to limit his family’s healthcare needs to Obamacare.

Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.["]

The Economist has an interesting article. There is evidence that ancient people stored grain one thousand years before agrarian society is dated to have developed.

THE period when humans stopped hunting and gathering and settled down to become farmers is one of the most important in history. It ranks with the original human exodus from Africa about 60,000 years ago, which led to Homo sapiens becoming a global species, and the beginning of the industrial revolution, 250 years ago, when many people stopped being farmers and began to earn their livings in other ways. Yet it is not well understood. A piece of research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant, may shed more light on the matter. …

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Mark Steyn echoing a chapter from Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, says you give more power to government, and you’ll get more creeps like Mark Sanford.

… “Why are politicians so weird?” a reader asked me after the Sanford news conference. But the majority of people willing to live like this will be, almost by definition, deeply weird. So big government more or less guarantees rule by creeps and misfits. It’s just a question of how well they disguise it. Writing about Michael Jackson a few years ago, I suggested that today’s A-list celebs were the equivalent of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria or the loopier Ottoman sultans, the ones it wasn’t safe to leave alone with sharp implements. But, as Christopher Hitchens says, politics is show business for ugly people. …

David Warren says tyranny arrived softly.

… In contemporary Canada we also face tyranny, but of a sort that we have brought upon ourselves in ways no Czechs, no Persians, ever did. There is no regime in Ottawa that seized power by violence, and imposed the “politically correct” ideology on us from a party manifesto. The advance of this tyranny — of the Nanny State and all its trappings — has been accomplished in plain view, by incremental advances, with our co-operation.

In two generations, we have witnessed a transformation, and nearly an inversion, of all the moral and ethical principles that guided us through countless generations before. The “revolution” has been accomplished by such means as George Orwell predicted: by changing the meanings of words.

Most overtly it has been done with “rights language” — by the construction of new, artificial and quite abstract “group” rights that are anathematic to individual freedom. But beneath this, we have watched court and legislative interventions to redefine such basic ideas as manhood, fatherhood; womanhood, motherhood — a purposeful destruction of the family in the cause of extending the powers of the state. We have likewise watched the religious order of society being systematically undermined, so that atheism or “irreligion” has become the default position from which the state now issues its ukases. …

John Fund reports the Obey/Waters spat.

… House Appropriations Chairman David Obey and Rep. Maxine Waters of California are both Democrats but you couldn’t tell yesterday after the two shouted at each other on the House floor and Ms. Waters apparently pushed or shoved Mr. Obey. The two had to be separated by other Members. …

WSJ Editors on the ways NY, NJ, and CA went broke.

President Obama has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It’s hard to miss the irony that he’s pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years — California, New Jersey and New York.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

These states have been models of “progressive” policies that are supposed to create wealth: high tax rates on the rich, lots of government “investments,” heavy unionization and a large government role in health care.

Here’s a rundown on the results: …

In The Atlantic, Phillip Howard says DC needs a world-class spring cleaning.

Just a few months ago, members of Congress took turns wagging their fingers at CEOs of the automakers for not making tough choices–not shedding “legacy costs,” not making products consumers wanted, not cutting bloated bureaucracies.  Detroit had become self-referential, unable to compete because it was unwilling to deal with its internal constituents.

Now Washington faces a series of domestic crises that will shape the health of our society for decades–unaffordable healthcare, balkanized financial regulation, and a mind-boggling deficit, to name three.  But Washington will likely fail–indeed, may even make the problems worse–unless it deals with its own “legacy costs” and bloated bureaucracies, which currently make it impossible to achieve new focus and efficiencies.

Detroit is Google compared to Washington.  Year after year, Congress makes laws but almost never repeals them.  Washington is like a huge monument to legacy costs.  Laws from the Depression will send tens of billions in unnecessary subsidies this year to farmers, organized labor and other groups thought to be in need–80 years ago.  Bloat is also notorious–it’s nearly impossible to fire anyone under civil service laws, so layers of middle management have grown exponentially.  Professor Paul Light found 32 levels in some agencies (compared to 5 levels in most well-run enterprises). …

David Harsanyi says politicians are world-class practitioners of lying with statistics.

Did you know that around 300 million Americans went without food, water and shelter at some point last year?

I am a survivor.

If you were blessed with the prodigiously creative and cunning mind of a politician, that kind of statistic — meaningless, but technically true — could be put to good use.

In the entertaining 1954 classic, “How to Lie with Statistics,” Darrell Huff writes that “misinforming people by the use of statistical material might be called statistical manipulation . . . or statisticulation.”

One of the most persistent examples of modern-day statisticulation is the sufficiently true claim that 46 million (it becomes 50 million when senators really get keyed up) Americans are without health insurance.

Set loose on the public’s compassion, this number is a powerful tool in the hands of eloquent orators like President Barack Obama when peddling government-run health care reform. And no matter how often the figure is debunked, no matter how many studies point to its inexact nature, it’s just too politically inviting not to embrace. …

Unintended consequences, thy name is “black liquor.” WSJ editors with the story.

If you’ve studied polar bears for more than 30 years and you don’t think they are threatened, what do you think will happen to you? UK’s Daily Telegraph has the story.

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group. …

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David Warren comments on the Iranian insurrection.

The former U.S. president, George W. Bush — a man of solid moral convictions, ridiculed for his supposed ignorance — was abundantly clear about Iran, and about North Korea for that matter. These two regimes have continued to offer the most pressing threats to the peace of the world since Saddam Hussein’s lawless regime was eliminated. Bush referred to all three as an “axis of evil.” Continued close co-operation between Iran and North Korea vindicates both terms.

Bush also consistently distinguished the regime from the people of Iran. He was well briefed, at least through his first term, not by the CIA and the State Department, but by a handful of so-called “neoconservatives,” operating mostly out of the Pentagon, whose knowledge of the Persian language, and firsthand experience of Persian realities, provided a view unobscured by the bureaucratic myopia.

He thus knew that the Persian people were the most pro-American in the Middle East, and he could be confident in identifying U.S. interests with the domestic opponents of the “Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Our enemies are their enemies, he said.

Much of the goodwill engendered by Bush — who was understood and respected behind enemy lines, as President Reagan before him was understood and respected by people trapped behind the Iron Curtain — is already dispersed. It was plain even before his appalling Cairo speech that Barack Obama had only the fashionable, glib-liberal idea about foreign policy — which is, peace through appeasement. We watch Obama floundering now, as actual events in Iran confirm the fatuity of his proposal to “go the extra mile,” and extend the hand of friendship to the bloody butchers of Tehran.

Peter Wehner posts in Contentions on Ahmadinejad’s response to Obama.

For the entire campaign and much of his presidency, Barack Obama has laid the blame for Iran’s actions on George W. Bush rather than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama would, unlike Bush, engage the Iranian regime. He would bring the Sweet Voice of Reason to the dialogue. Obama’s skills at international diplomacy, so evident during his years in the Illinois state senate, would tame the terrorist-sponsoring, Holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening, election-frauding, America-is-the-Great-Satan believing president of Iran and the mullahs who support him. So long as we didn’t provoke the Iranian regime — and so long as our president spoke respectfully of it and took the obligatory subtle jabs at the U.S. in the process — all things were possible. After all, how could Ahmadinejad be unmoved by the young, sophisticated, charismatic Barack Hussein Obama, author of The Cairo Speech (already deemed by Rahm Emanuel as one of the greatest foreign policy speeches ever made by an American president)?

Quite easily, it turns out.

Jennifer Rubin and Tom Gregg comment on Wehner’s post.

Michael Barone has psychological insights into the actions of newly inaugurated presidents in general, and Obama in regards to his foreign policy.

There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so.

Some of this is a legitimate response to the political process: Voters tend to elect presidents who seem to possess qualities and views they thought lacking in their predecessors. But some of it, and especially in the case of Barack Obama, seems to come from an adolescentlike confidence that everything done by those who came before is (insert your own generation’s expletive here).

We have seen this spectacularly in the dozen days since the June 12 Iranian election. Back in July 2007, Obama said that he would meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and other tyrants without preconditions. Grown-up squares like George W. Bush wouldn’t talk to these guys, so as the avatar of the generation of hope and change, Obama would. Obama figured he was cool enough to get the mullahs to agree to renounce nuclear weapons and all that hate stuff.

Obama has held to this ever since. Before June 12 he said he would give the Iranian leaders till the end of the year to be enchanted…

…But he clearly hasn’t abandoned his policy of seeking the good opinion of tyrants. He didn’t even rescind the State Department’s invitations of Iranian diplomats to attend U.S. embassy Fourth of July celebrations (halal hot dogs, anyone?). If Bush refused to entertain the emissaries of the Iranian theocrats, it must be right to do the opposite.

But even anonymous State Department officials are saying that the chances are dismal for fruitful negotiations with Ahmedinejad or the tyrant Obama insists on calling “the supreme leader” by Obama’s deadline —something that seemed obvious to me and many others well before June 12. A regime of tyrants dedicated to hatred of America, Britain and Israel is not going to be persuaded to abandon a central goal by even the most dazzling display of adolescent charm.

Robert Kaplan examines the implications of a democratic Iran on foreign affairs.

The now-joined struggle for Iranian hearts and minds is where the universal battle of ideas — democracy vs. tyranny — meets the dictates of Middle Eastern geography. Whereas Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are puzzle pieces carved out of featureless desert, with no venerable traditions of statehood, the roots of a great Persian power occupying the Iranian plateau date to the Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanid empires. With nearly 70 million people occupying the tableland between the oil-rich Caspian Sea and the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Iran is the Muslim world’s universal joint.

Iranian power, both soft and hard, is felt from the Mediterranean to the Indus. Indeed, Iran’s influence in southern Lebanon and Gaza is part of a historical tradition of empire and Shiite rule. By puncturing the legitimacy of the clerical authority, the demonstrations in Tehran and other cities have the capacity to herald a new era in Middle Eastern and Central Asian politics.

Natan Sharansky writes about the dynamics of Iranian dissent.

Every totalitarian society consists of three groups: true believers, double-thinkers and dissidents. In every totalitarian regime, no matter its cultural or geographical circumstances, the majority undergo a conversion over time from true belief in the revolutionary message into double-thinking. They no longer believe in the regime but are too scared to say so. Then there are the dissidents — pioneers who dare to cross the line between double-thinking and everything that lies on the other side. In doing so, they first internalize, then articulate and finally act on the innermost feelings of the nation.

People in free societies watching massive military parades or vociferous displays of love for the leaders of totalitarian regimes often conclude, “Well, that’s their mentality; there’s nothing we can do about it.” Thus they and their leaders miss what is readily grasped by local dissidents attuned to what is happening on the ground: the spectacle of a nation of double-thinkers slowly or rapidly approaching a condition of open dissent.

To see the telltale signs, sometimes it helps to have experienced totalitarianism firsthand. More than once in recent years, former Soviet citizens returning from a visit to Iran have told me how much Iranian society reminded them of the final stages of Soviet communism. Their testimony was what persuaded me to write almost five years ago that Iran was extraordinary for the speed with which, in the span of a single generation, a citizenry had made the transition from true belief in the revolutionary promise into disaffection and double-thinking. Could dissent be far behind?

Claudia Rosett reports that once again, style wins over substance at the U.N.

People are being killed in Iran. Where is the U.N.? What institution could be better positioned to relieve President Obama of his worries about America standing up unilaterally for freedom in Iran? The U.N. is the self-styled overlord of the international community, committed in its charter to promote peace, freedom and “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.”

Iran’s regime is already in gross violation of a series of U.N. sanctions over a nuclear program the U.N. Security Council deems a threat to international peace. The same regime has now loosed its security apparatus of trained thugs and snipers on Iranians who have been, in huge numbers, demanding their basic rights. Surely top U.N. officials such as Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon should be leading the charge for liberty and justice, with the strongest possible criticism and measures against the Iranian regime.

But that’s not happening. While Iranian protesters have been risking their necks to try to rid their country of a malignant despotism, the U.N. has hardly even qualified as voting “present.”

Kimberly Strassel writes that global warming dissent is warming up.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

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What is it like to live in hell? There are few people who know better than Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s widow. She gave a speech in Norway recently. It is here courtesy of The New Republic.

… At the age of 14, I was left without my parents. My father was executed, my mother spent 18 years in prison and exile. My grandmother raised me and my younger brother. The poet Vladimir Kornilov, who suffered the same fate, wrote: “And it felt that in those years we had no mothers. We had grandmothers.” There were hundreds of thousands of such children. Ilya Ehrenburg called us “the strange orphans of 1937.”

Then came the war. My generation was cut off nearly at the roots by the war, but I was lucky. I came back from the war. I came back to an empty house. My grandmother had died of starvation in the siege of Leningrad. Then came a communal apartment, six half-hungry years of medical school, falling in love, two children and the poverty of a Soviet doctor. But I was not alone in this. Everyone lived this way. Then there was my dissident period followed by exile. But Andrei [Sakharov] and I were together! And that was true happiness. …

… And another question that has been a thorn for me for a long time. It’s a question for my human rights colleagues. Why doesn’t the fate of the Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit trouble you in the same way as does the fate of the Guantanamo prisoners?

You fought for and won the opportunity for the International Committee of the Red Cross, journalists and lawyers to visit Guantanamo. You know prison conditions, the prisoners’ everyday routine, their food. You have met with prisoners subjected to torture. The result of your efforts has been a ban on torture and a law to close this prison. President Obama signed it in the first days of his coming to the White House. And although he, just like president Bush before him, does not know what to do with the Guantanamo prisoners, there is hope that the new administration will think up something.

But during the two years Schalit has been held by terrorists, the world human rights community has done nothing for his release. Why? He is a wounded soldier, and fully falls under the protection of the Geneva Conventions. The conventions say clearly that hostage-taking is prohibited, that representatives of the Red Cross must be allowed to see prisoners of war, especially wounded prisoners, and there is much else written in the Geneva Conventions about Schalit’s rights. The fact that representatives of the Quartet conduct negotiations with the people who are holding Schalit in an unknown location, in unknown conditions, vividly demonstrates their scorn of international rights documents and their total legal nihilism. …

In his blog, Spengler looks at Iran’s prospects.

The Iranian exile journalist Amir Taheri, the dean of regime critics writing in the English language press, says that civil war is unlikely in Iran.  In the most convincing analysis I have seen to date, Taheri points out that Ahmadinejad has his back to the wall, while regime critics have the option of a comfortable exile. Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guards will fight to the death and–more importantly–kill as much as they need to in order to keep power. Back in 1979, by contrast, it was the Shah and his supporters who preferred exile to bloodshed. He writes:

… In 1979 the ruling elite had little stomach for a fight. Many of its members had homes and investments abroad and thus were not forced to fight with their backs to the wall. Thousands of them just packed up and left. Now, however, the overwhelming majority of the ruling elite has no fallback position. …

Dana Milbank looked askance at the latest presidential presser.

… The use of planted questioners is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world — Iran included — that the American press isn’t as free as advertised. But yesterday wasn’t so much a news conference as it was a taping of a new daytime drama, “The Obama Show.” Missed yesterday’s show? Don’t worry: On Wednesday, ABC News will be broadcasting “Good Morning America” from the South Lawn (guest stars: the president and first lady), “World News Tonight” from the Blue Room, and a prime-time feature with Obama from the East Room.

“The Obama Show” was the hottest ticket in town yesterday. Forty-five minutes before the start, there were no fewer than 107 people crammed into the narrow aisles, in addition to those in the room’s 42 seats. Japanese and Italian could be heard coming from the tangle of elbows, cameras and compressed bodies: “You’ve got to move! . . . Oh, God, don’t step on my foot!” Some had come just for a glimpse of celebrity. And they wanted to know all about him. “As a former smoker, I understand the frustration and the fear that comes with quitting,” McClatchy News’s Margaret Talev empathized with the president before asking him how much he smokes.

Obama indulged the question from the studio audience. “I would say that I am 95 percent cured. But there are times where I mess up,” he confessed. “Like folks who go to AA, you know, once you’ve gone down this path, then, you know, it’s something you continually struggle with.”

This is Barack Obama, and these are the Days of Our Lives. …

David Harsanyi thinks quacks tout preventive medicine.

Despite the extraordinary energy exerted in trying to delay the inevitable, the inconvenient fact is we all die.

So it is no surprise that “preventive” health care, that game-changing fix to policy trotted out relentlessly by both Democrats and Republicans, is so appealing.

And, like many cure-alls, it’s a myth.

Surely, for some, preventive health care is worthwhile. And no one is stopping you from eating an apple. But unless policy changes have the power to stop the Grim Reaper — rather than only postponing his arrival — it will make health care more expensive.

Let’s begin with the morbidly obvious. The longer people hang around the longer they utilize the health care system. End-of-life care is often the most expensive. Old folks just love doctors. (I know I plan to unleash septuagenarian fury on MDs regularly.) As studies on Medicare have proven, easy availability to services at the tail end of life translates into lots of needless services.

Second, a government policy that prods people into incessantly visiting medical offices for checkups, screenings and tests will only raise costs even further. …

Speaking of quacks, Thomas Sowell writes on the ideas lining up for stimulus funds.

Even if the “stimulus” package doesn’t seem to be doing much to stimulate the economy, it is certainly stimulating many potential recipients of government money to start lining up at the trough. All you need is something that sounds like a “good thing” and the ability to sell the idea.

A perennial “good thing” is education. So it is not surprising that leaders of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities have come out with an assertion that “the U.S. should set a goal of college degrees for at least 55 percent of its young adults by 2025.”

Nothing is easier in politics than setting some arbitrary goal– preferably based on numbers– and go after it, in utter disregard of the costs or the repercussions. That is how we got into the housing boom and bust, by mindlessly pursuing ever-higher statistics of home ownership. The same political game can be played by making ever higher miles per gallon the goal for automobiles, ever more “open space,” ever more– you name it.

Sometimes these open-ended political crusades can be given some semblance of rationality by referring to other countries that have bigger numbers in whatever is the goal du jour. …

John Stossel comments on the conceit of folks who think they can fix everything.

President Obama has announced his “sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system.”

We can debate endlessly whether the Constitution authorizes any president to “overhaul” the financial system. But I want to focus on a different matter: whether any president, with all his advisers, is capable of overseeing something as complex as the financial system.

My answer is no, and it is ominous that a bright guy like Obama doesn’t know this. He thinks he must regulate the system because it is so complicated and important. In fact, those are the reasons why he cannot regulate it, and should not try.

As F.A. Hayek said in accepting the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, “[W]ith essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.” So when regulators set out to redesign an economy, they display not wisdom but a “pretence of knowledge”. …

Interesting Contentions post on Bernanke’s culpability.

Fed Chairman Bernanke is up for reappointment next year, and the questions are beginning in earnest about how he’s handled monetary policy. Some of the best-informed people out there insist that the cause of the housing bubble and the subsequent crash was an episode of low interest rates during 2003 and 2004, as the U.S. economy was recovering from the post-9/11 recession. Alan Greenspan was the Fed Chairman at that time, but Bernanke was prominent among the Fed’s governors, and fully supported the loose policy.

It’s always fun to look into the past for someone to blame, but the more important question is what this means for monetary policy going forward. To a careful observer, there can be no question that the crisis had many causes, and was greatly exacerbated by complex interactions that no one could have predicted.

For their part (and I agree with them), Bernanke and Greenspan have both pointed many times to the “savings glut,” a vast accumulation of dollar reserves by the governments of emerging nations. Its effects have been apparent since the mid-Nineties, as the excess capital reduced interest rates and excess production reduced inflationary expectations. Did the savings glut make possible the burst of financial technology that greased the skids of the financial system? No, it didn’t. But without the glut, there would have been far less incentive to find clever (and ultimately unsustainable) ways to increase investment yields.

We haven’t had such a strong deflationary episode since the early Thirties. Bernanke was absolutely right in seeing that coming. …

Would you believe there is some dude retired from the town of Vernon, CA who gets a pension of $499,675? WSJ has the story.

A campaign to publicize the identities of thousands of people receiving hefty government pensions — from onetime professors to former fire chiefs — is catching on around the country.

The effort was launched earlier this year by a California interest group determined to promote its view that steep pension payments are bankrupting states and localities. Newspapers in New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere have published lists of their six-figure public retirees.

Those named are former public employees and their dependents who receive an annual pension of more than $100,000. Atop one list is a former city administrator from the small Southern California town of Vernon, whose annual pension is $499,674.84. …

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Mark Steyn writes about Britain’s rising protectionist party.

Are you getting just a teensy bit tired of the ol’ “Whither the Right?” navel-gazing? Even with our good friends at the New York Times, the Washington Post, et al. so eager to offer helpful advice, there’s a limit to how much pondering of conservatism’s future a chap can take. So how about, just for a change, “Whither the Left?”

Exhibit A: The European parliamentary elections. The Continent’s economy has taken a far bigger clobbering than America’s: Capitalism is dead, declared Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. In France, President Sarkozy agrees, while being careful to identify the deceased as “Anglo-American capitalism.” And woe betide any Continental foolish enough to have got into bed with it: In Spain, the unemployment rate is 17 percent and rising.

In theory, this ought to be boom time for lefties. As their jobs, homes, and savings vanish, the downtrodden masses should be stampeding back to the embrace of the Big Government nanny’s apron strings. Instead, the Euro-Left got hammered at the polls, the center-right survived, and a big chunk of the electorate switched to the “far right” — the various neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties cleaning up everywhere from Northern England to the Balkans. My favorite of these new and mostly unlovely groupings is Bulgaria’s Attack party, mainly because of its name. I would suggest the Republican party adopt it, but no doubt within a month or two the latest Bush scion would be claiming to stand for a Compassionate Attack movement and governors of coastal states would be declaring themselves fiscally attacking but socially surrendering, and the whole brand would go to hell. …

Christopher Hitchens says that to gain insight into Iranian society, ignore the mullahs. Listen instead to the authors and poets.

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself. I strongly recommend that you get hold of the Modern Library paperback of Pezeshkzad’s novel, produced in 2006, and read it from start to finish while paying special attention to the foreword by Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and the afterword by the author himself, who says:

In his fantasies, the novel’s central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase “My Uncle Napoleon” is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is accompanied by ridicule and laughter. … The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. … [T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy the roots of religion in the people of Iran.

Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn’t even heard that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:

There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran’s internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.

It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.

The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured “experts.”  …

Anne Applebaum says that women’s contributions to the Iranian insurrection have been overlooked.

Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women’s rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: The photographs and video taken this past weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the streets of Tehran.

I don’t know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution‘s symbolic martyr, as some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran over the past week and the women’s rights movement that has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past several years.

In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the Bush administration. Still others want to call this a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook revolution,” as if zippy new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women’s groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help. …

A couple of Corner posts on Obamacare. Larry Kudlow;

… According the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who chose not to sign up, that removes roughly 20 million people. Then take out about 10 million more who are not U.S. citizens, and 11 million who are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason.

So that really leaves only 10 million to 15 million people who are truly long-term uninsured.

Yes, they need help. And yes, I would like to give it to them. But not with mandatory coverage, or new government-backed insurance plans, or massive tax increases. And certainly not with the Canadian-European-style nationalization that has always been the true goal of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. …

George Will writes that the simplest answer to the question, “Why Obamacare?” is the correct one.

To dissect today’s health-care debate, the crux of which concerns a “public option,” use the mind’s equivalent of a surgeon’s scalpel, Occam’s razor, a principle of intellectual parsimony: In solving a puzzle, start with the simplest explanatory theory.

The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America “starting from scratch” he would favor a “single-payer” — government-run — system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer system.

Conservatives say that a government program will have the intended consequence of crowding private insurers out of the market, encouraging employers to stop providing coverage and luring employees from private insurance to the cheaper government option.

The Lewin Group estimates that 70 percent of the 172 million persons privately covered might be drawn, or pushed, to the government plan. A significant portion of the children who have enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program since eligibility requirements were relaxed in February had private insurance.

Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible. Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurers. Competition from the public option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers. Besides, unless the point of a government plan is to be cheaper, it is pointless: If the public option conforms to the imperatives that regulations and competition impose on private insurers, there is no reason for it.

The president characteristically denies that he is doing what he is doing — putting the nation on a path to an outcome he considers desirable — just as he denies any intention of running General Motors. Nevertheless, the unifying constant of his domestic policies — their connecting thread — is that they advance the Democrats’ dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government for more and more things. …

Marc K. Siegel gives a doctor’s opinion about Obamacare by discussing his current experiences with Medicare and Medicaid.

Wondering why the American Medical Association came out against a “public option” in health reform — that is, against government-offered health insurance for every American? For this MD, at least, it’s a simple matter of learning from experience.

As a practicing internist, I’ve been dealing with two government insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, for more than two decades. Over the years, I’ve seen the government shrink reimbursements under first Medicaid and then Medicare — to the point that, in 2005, I finally decided that I couldn’t stay in business unless I stopped taking Medicaid patients, and saw no more than a few Medicare patients each day.

It was costing me more to file the Medicaid paperwork than I got back from the government. I now either charge Medicaid patients a few dollars, or just see them for free. …

David Brooks looks at the Senate’s inner workings to produce healthcare reform.

… In the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, senators don’t run things. Chairmen and their staffs run things. During the spring, as the Obama administration faded to invisibility, the finance and health committees separately put together plans. These plans did not alter the employer exemption. They did build on the current system. They did include approaches that have been around since Richard Nixon.

The problem with the committee plans is that they don’t do much to change the underlying incentives, and consequently don’t do much to control costs. “The single most expensive option is to build on the existing system,” says the health care costs guru John Sheils of the Lewin Group.

The C.B.O. measured the plans, and the results were devastating. A successful plan has to be revenue-neutral for the government over the next 10 years, and it has to reduce the total health care burden over the long term so the country doesn’t go bankrupt. The Senate committee plans failed both criteria. They would cost the government more than $1 trillion this decade and send total health care costs zooming at least twice as fast as the economy as a whole.

The C.B.O. reports sent shock waves through Washington. …

Corner posts following up on NY’s amazing education pensions.

And an interesting article in Popular Science on Iceland’s attempts to advance geothermal energy production.

It’s spring in Iceland, and three feet of snow covers the ground. The sky is gray and the temperature hovers just below freezing, yet Gudmundur Omar Fridleifsson is wearing only a windbreaker. Icelanders say they can spot the tourists because they wear too many clothes, but Fridleifsson seems particularly impervious. He’s out here every few days to check on the Tyr geothermal drilling rig, the largest in Iceland. The rig’s engines are barely audible over the cold wind, and the sole sign of activity is the slow dance of a crane as it grabs another 30-foot segment of steel pipe, attaches it to the top of the drill shaft, and slides it into the well.

Beneath the calm landscape, though, Fridleifsson and his crew of geologists, engineers and roughnecks are attempting the Manhattan Project of geothermal energy. The two-mile-deep hole they’ve drilled into Krafla, an active volcanic crater, is twice as deep as any geothermal well in the world. It’s the keystone in an effort to extract “supercritical” water, stuff so hot and under so much pressure that it exists somewhere between liquid and steam. If they can tame this fluid — if it doesn’t blow up their drill or dissolve the well’s steel lining — and turn it into electricity, it could yield a tenfold increase in the amount of power Iceland can wrest from the land.

Iceland’s geological evolution makes it especially well suited to harvesting geothermal energy. The island is basically one big volcano, formed over millions of years as molten rock bubbled up from the seafloor. The porous rock under its treeless plains sponges up hundreds of inches of rain every year and heats it belowground. Using this energy is simply a matter of digging a well, drawing the hot fluid to the surface, and sticking a power plant on top. …

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David Warren honors fathers.

… I would argue that men suffer most under Islamist regimes, that women suffer most under feminized ones. Outwardly, the “superior sex” obtains a tyrannical power, but inwardly, their souls are stripped of the moderation, and imaginative empathy, that can come only from respectful interaction between the sexes.

As William Wilberforce noticed, the institution of slave-holding has even worse moral consequences for the master than for the slave; and it was in the masters’ ultimate interest that the Royal Navy went to work, putting an end to the obscene trade. But bonded slavery is a mere aside, in a society, compared to the scale of psychic carnage when one of the sexes is methodically depreciated.

I would further argue that dealing with the fallout from the feminist revolution is the most important domestic “issue” in North American society today — for its effects spread thickly across every other domestic issue. And this necessarily requires an attack on the very premise of feminism: its demonization of “patriarchy.”

If fathers cannot be paternal, we have no men.

Charles Krauthammer says the kid doesn’t want “hope and change” for Iran.

Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.

And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence. Then, worse. Three days in, the president makes clear his policy: continued “dialogue” with their clerical masters.

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with — which inevitably confers legitimacy upon — leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”

Where to begin? “Supreme Leader”? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts — a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election. …

Andy McCarthy helps us understand Obama and Iran.

… The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez.  Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden). …

Roger Simon points at Siemens and Nokia for their collaboration with the Iranian regime.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting extensively on the sale of advanced web monitoring equipment to Iran by a joint venture of Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia. …

Volokh Conspiracy tells Twitterers how to help Iranians.

Der Spiegel reports on Neda.

They are shaky, blurred images: A young woman collapses onto the pavement, a dark pool of blood spreads beneath her body. Two men kneel next to the woman and press on her chest, screaming. The camera phone which is filming her zooms in on her face. Her pupils roll to the side, blood streams out of her nose and mouth. “Neda, don’t be afraid! Neda, stay with me. Neda, stay with me!” cries one man. Another man beseeches someone to take her in a car. Then the footage stops.

It cannot be confirmed if the 40-second film, which was posted on the Internet on Saturday, really shows the death of a young Iranian demonstrator. Like almost all the video and photo material coming out of Iran these days, it is impossible to verify its authenticity.

However, even if it may never be certain if these images really show the death of a young woman named Neda, she has still become an icon, a martyr for the opposition in Iran. Neda has given the regime’s brutality a bloody face and a name. Overnight “I am Neda,” has become the slogan of the protest movement. …

More on Neda from the London Times.

Her name was Neda Salehi Agha Soltan and she was a philosophy student. But the manner of her death has turned her into an instant, global symbol of the Iranian regime’s brutality.

This innocent woman aged 26 was shot in the chest during running battles between opposition protesters and Iranian security forces in Tehran on Saturday. Since then, a grainy, 40-second video showing her final moments, blood streaming from her nose and mouth as a man implores her not to die, has ricocheted around the world on YouTube, blogs and social networking sites.

Miss Soltan, whose first name means “voice”, has become a martyr for freedom, Iran’s equivalent of the student who defied China’s tanks in Tiananmen Square. …

WSJ reports on the Iranian regime’s “bullet fee.”

… At the crack of dawn, his father began searching at police stations, then hospitals and then the morgue.

Upon learning of his son’s death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a “bullet fee”—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said.

Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn’t amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. Kaveh Alipour’s body was quietly transported to the city of Rasht, where there is family. …

The Corner interviews Daniel Pipes.

Q: What do you find most surprising/revealing about this post-election crisis in Iran?

Pipes: I am taken aback by the nearly complete absence of Islam in the discussion. One hears about democracy, freedom, and justice, all of which do play a role, but the key issue is the Iranian population’s repudiation of the Islamist ideology that has dominated its lives for the past 30 years. Should the regime in Tehran be shaken by current challenges, this will likely have profound implications for the global career of radical Islam.

Michael Barone analyzes the new administration’s style.

We pundits like to analyze our presidents and so, as Barack Obama deals with difficult problems ranging from health care legislation to upheaval in Iran, let me offer my Three Rules of Obama.

First, Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate. His 2008 campaign was a largely flawless execution of a smart strategy, but he was flummoxed momentarily when the Russians invaded Georgia and when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. On domestic policy, he has been executing his long-range strategy of vastly expanding government, but may be encountering problems as voters show unease at huge increases on spending.

His long-range strategy of propitiating America’s enemies has been undercut by North Korea’s missile launches and demonstrations in Iran against the mullah regime’s apparent election fraud. His assumption that friendly words could melt the hearts of Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad have been refuted by events. He limits himself to expressing “deep concern” about the election in the almost surely vain hope of persuading the mullahs to abandon their drive for nuclear weapons, while he misses his chance to encourage the one result — regime change — that could protect us and our allies from Iranian attack.

Second, he does not seem to care much about the details of policy. He subcontracted the stimulus package to congressional appropriators, the cap-and-trade legislation to Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, and his health care program to Max Baucus. The result is incoherent public policy: Indefensible pork barrel projects, a carbon emissions bill that doesn’t limit carbon emissions from politically connected industries, and a health care program priced by the Congressional Budget Office at a fiscally unfeasible $1,600,000,000,000. …

Barney Frank gets a compliment from Contentions. Sort of.

… you’d be hard-pressed to find a more intelligent member of Congress. It takes a tremendous intellect to be so colossally, consistently wrong — and cause such harm.

Robert Samuelson sees GM as a metaphor for the country in that it provided benefits beyond it’s means.

… We are borrowing not to finance investment in the future but to pay for today’s welfare — present consumption. Sooner or later, the huge debt will weaken the economy. Nor would paying for all promised benefits with higher taxes be desirable. Big increases in either debt or taxes risk depressing economic growth, making it harder yet to pay promised benefits.

The U.S. welfare state is weakening; insecurity is rising. The sensible thing would be to decide which forms of public welfare are needed to protect the vulnerable and to begin paring others. Our inaction poses another dreary parallel with GM. It was obvious a quarter-century ago that GM the auto company could not support GM the welfare state. But the union wouldn’t surrender benefits, and the company acquiesced. Inertia prevailed, and the reckoning came.

The same cycle, repeated on a national scale with sums many multiples higher, would be correspondingly more fearsome.

Stephen Moore defends baby boomers against their critics.

… I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it’s for rearing a generation of pampered kids who’ve been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6. This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known — until now. Today’s high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements. They think their future should be as mapped out as unambiguously as the GPS system in their cars.

CBS News reported recently that echo boomers spend $170 billion a year — more than most nations’ GDPs — and nearly every penny of that comes from the wallets of the very parents they now resent. My parents’ generation lived in fear of getting polio; many boomers lived in fear of getting sent to the Vietnam War; this generation’s notion of hardship is TiVo breaking down. …

Wired Magazine says the boomers’ parents may have effective swine flu immunities.

… “It might be that the H1N1 circulating now (swine-origin influenza virus) has enough antigenic similarity to related H1N1 influenza strains of the past to protect older individuals exposed to them previously,” Mermel wrote in a letter to the journal The Lancet.

That would be good news for public health officials and explain one of the more puzzling aspects of the new swine flu outbreak: why young people seem to be more susceptible to the disease than their parents and grandparents. Regular seasonal flu tends to disproportionately strike the old, not the strapping youthful masses. That can lead to higher morbidity because the elderly population is not as healthy overall. If older people are already immune, public health organizations could allocate what are sure to be small amounts of vaccine to the right populations. …