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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. …

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Fouad Ajami writes that Obama has rushed into foreign policy issues where angels have feared to tread.

President Barack Obama did not “lose” Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America’s 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to “unclench” its fist.

It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the “diplomacy of freedom” that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to “engage” them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted — just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran’s rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world. …

David Warren says in Iran you win, or you die. We will root for the regime to lose, because many good things will come from that.

Everything is on the line in Iran, at present — not only the future of the Iranian regime, but also of the Middle East, and by extension, the most tangible western interests.

Consider: if the Iranian regime were to fall, by far the largest organized threat to peace in the region would be removed. This includes not only a fairly proximate nuclear threat to Israel (for all we know North Korea’s second nuclear test was actually Iran’s first), but sponsorship of the most efficient part of the world’s Islamist terror apparatus.

Hezbollah and Hamas are both, today, for all practical purposes, Iranian proxies. Through them, and through other channels, the regime of the ayatollahs makes money, materiel, and expertise available to terror cells as far away as Argentina, Sweden, the Philippines.

But more significantly, Hezbollah and Hamas together represent an Iranian veto on any Palestinian settlement, or any attempt to ameliorate that conflict, with all that that implies.

The Syrian regime, most dangerous of Israel’s neighbours, would, in the absence of Iranian support, have to make accommodations, indeed find new allies.

North Korea’s chief conduit into the illicit Middle Eastern arms trade would be lost.

The principal external threat to Iraq would be removed, along with sponsorship of Iraq’s own domestic insurgencies. Afghanistan would also be more secure.

In economic terms, the threat of a world crisis provoked by the interdiction of oil shipments from the Persian Gulf would disappear. …

Michael Gerson says Obama reminds of George Bush the elder. Can you say Chicken Kiev?

PRESIDENTS dealing with foreign uprisings are haunted by two historical precedents. The first is Hungary in 1956, in which Radio Free Europe encouraged an armed revolt against Soviet occupation, a revolt that the US had no capability or intention of materially supporting. In the contest of Molotov cocktails v tanks, about 2500 revolutionaries died; 1200 were later executed.

The second precedent is Ukraine in 1991, where the forces that eventually destroyed the Soviet Union were collecting. President George HW Bush visited that Soviet republic a month before its scheduled vote on independence. Instead of siding with Ukrainian aspirations, he gave a speech that warned against “suicidal nationalism” and a “hopeless course of isolation”.

William Safire dubbed it the “chicken Kiev” speech, which fit and stuck. The first Bush administration was so frightened of geopolitical instability that it managed to downplay American ideals while missing a strategic opportunity. Ukrainian independence passed overwhelmingly.

In President Barack Obama’s snail-mail response to Iran’s Twitter revolution, he has tended toward the chicken Kiev model, which should come as no surprise. During the presidential campaign, Obama summarised his approach to foreign affairs: “It’s an argument between ideology and foreign-policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George HWBush.” …

Samizdata notes bizarre happenings at Newsweek.

Unlike the dismal Economist, Newsweek magazine does not claim to be a free market supporting publication.

Henry Hazlitt stopped writing for Newsweek back in 1966 and his replacement, as a free market voice, Milton Friedman was fired (asked to stop writing for the magazine – which is being ‘fired’ as far as I am concerned) many years ago – which is the reason I stopped subscribing to Newsweek, which I had done as a youngster.

In recent years Newsweek magazine has been fairly openly socialist (although it does not formally admit this). …

Popular Mechanics says there are things in your back yard that want to have you for lunch.

… When Europeans settled the New World, they dealt with predators by showing them the business end of a gun. Wherever pioneers settled, populations of large predators—mountain lions, bears, wolves, alligators—plummeted or disappeared entirely. That search-and-destroy mission continued virtually unabated until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s, when the national attitude began to evolve. People came to believe that what was left of wilderness and its inhabitants should be preserved for future generations.

This ideology has clearly worked: Since the passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, 14 species of animals that were on the brink of extinction have recovered. Alligators were removed from the list in 1987; gray wolves in 2009. The grizzly bear, confined mostly to Yellowstone National Park in the lower 48 states, was delisted in 2007. As for once heavily hunted mountain lions, some 50,000 of the big cats now inhabit North America, with populations in the United States as far east as North Dakota. Experts predict that lions eventually will reinhabit the Adirondacks in New York, the Maine woods and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

Few people anticipated that rebounding populations would create a new problem: an increase in animal attacks as predators returned to former ranges now occupied by humans. In August 2002, a black bear killed a 5-month-old girl in the Catskills, a hundred miles northwest of New York City; the baby had been sleeping in a carriage on the porch. In January 2004, a mountain lion killed a male bicyclist in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park in Orange County, Calif., then attacked a 31-year-old woman a few hours later. Other bicyclists managed to save the victim, but not before she sustained serious injuries. In October 2007, an alligator snatched and killed an 83-year-old woman outside her daughter’s home in Savannah, Ga. The next day, her body was found in a pond, hands and a foot missing. And, in May 2008, a coyote bit a 2-year-old girl playing in a Chino Hills, Calif., park and attempted to drag her off.

Though the trend is worrisome, the absolute number of attacks remains small. Fatal black bear attacks on humans have doubled since the late 1970s, increasing from one to just two incidents per year. (About six people are injured each year.) Between 1890 and 2008, there were 110 mountain lion attacks in North America; half of the 20 fatalities resulting from these attacks occurred in the past two decades. Despite an alligator population too large to count, the U.S. had just 391 attacks and 18 fatalities between 1948 and 2005. Coyotes have caused only one known fatality in the U.S.

Still, the relationship between animals and humans is proving to be more complex than simply kill ’em all or love ’em all—even though some of the old, romantic ideas about living at one with nature linger. …

The humor section starts with a review of a book about Jimmy Carter’s presidency. You know, the one the One is imitating.

On July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation from the Oval Office about the energy crisis then gripping America. The address has become known as “the malaise speech” even though Mr. Carter never once spoke the “m” word. It is now the subject of Ohio University history professor Kevin Mattson’s excellent “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”

Mr. Carter had already tried to raise consciousness about energy with a speech two years earlier, in April 1977. “This difficult effort,” he said then, “will be the moral equivalent of war.” Moral equivalent of war led to the unfortunate acronym MEOW, which seemed especially apt when neither congressional action nor ­public mobilization ensued. …

… Jimmy Carter was elected largely because he promised never to lie to the American people. Of all the ­un-Nixons on offer in 1976—the ­Democratic primary field included Sens. Frank Church and “Scoop” ­Jackson—Mr. Carter was the most convincing. But his administration never seemed to gel managerially; most of his programs went nowhere legislatively; and he turned out to be aloof and a little prickly. (He confided to his diary: “It’s not easy for me to accept criticism and to reassess my ways of doing things.”) Democratic leaders worried that Mr. Carter was turning into Nixon, but without the charm. By 1978, a movement to draft Ted Kennedy for the 1980 presidential race was flourishing. By May 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale was contemplating resigning. …

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Mark Steyn’s weekly column deals with Iran events.

The polite explanation for Barack Obama’s diffidence on Iran is that he doesn’t want to give the mullahs the excuse to say the Great Satan is meddling in Tehran’s affairs. So the president’s official position is that he’s modestly encouraged by the regime’s supposed interest in investigating some of the allegations of fraud. Also, he’s heartened to hear that O.J. is looking for the real killers. “You’ve seen in Iran,” explained President Obama, “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”

“Supreme Leader”? I thought that was official house style for Barack Obama at Newsweek and MSNBC. But no. It’s also the title held by Ayatollah Khamenei for the past couple of decades. If it sounds odd from the lips of an American president, that’s because none has ever been as deferential in observing the Islamic republic’s dictatorial protocol. Like President Obama’s deep, ostentatious bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, it signals a fresh start in our relations with the Muslim world, “mutually respectful” and unilaterally fawning.

And how did it go down? …

Marty Peretz at another way station in his growing understanding of the weakness of the kid president.

… To have crumbled precisely while the regime of the ayatollahs is facing a real crisis of confidence at home and something of a challenge to its legitimacy abroad is, well, just that: crumbling. It certainly does not testify to American resilience, even diplomatically. My instinct here is that the president and Mrs. Clinton are so eager to engage–engage even for its own sake–that they’ll do anything to please the other. This does not come as a result of analysis. It is, I am sorry to say, a predicated formula. …

Ed Morrissey notes the administration now thinks missile defense might be a good idea.

The Obama administration has decided that missile defense might come in handy after all.  Following reports that Kim Jong-Il might launch a Taepodong-2 missile at Hawaii for a Fourth of July message to the White House, the Pentagon has ordered missile-defense systems bolstered around the 50th state.  Those preparations include the deployment of a radar system that Obama strangely left in storage during the previous North Korean missile launch: …

… The last time Kim launched a T-2, in April of this year, the US had plenty of notice.  However, Obama and the Pentagon neglected to pull its most sophisticated missile-defense radar out of Pearl Harbor in time to at least exercise it under real-world conditions.  At that time, the White House didn’t want to “provoke” Kim by using our defense against the weapons with which Kim explicitly threatened us and our allies in April.

How did that strategy pay off?  Ask the people of Hawaii when Kim lights the candle on the next T-2, and see if they would have preferred a test run for those missile-defense systems when we had the chance.  We certainly now see why the US needs to keep funding those systems.

We get a preview of an upcoming Commentary piece by Joshua Muravchik on Obama’s abandonment of democracy.

Iranian exiles in the U.S. are receiving calls from back home asking why President Obama has “given Khamenei the green light” to crack down on the election protestors. To conspiracy-minded Middle Easterners, that is the obvious meaning of Obama’s equivocal response to the Iranian nation’s sudden and unexpected reach for freedom. How to explain that this interpretation is implausible? That the more likely reason for Obama’s behavior is that he is imprisoned in the ideology of loving your enemies and hating George W. Bush?

Whatever the reason, Obama’s failure may destroy his presidency. His betrayal of democracy and human rights through a series of pronouncements and small actions during his first months in office had been correctable until now. But the thousand daily decisions that usually make up policy are eclipsed by big-bang moments such as we are now witnessing. Failure to use the bully pulpit to give the Iranian people as much support as possible is morally reprehensible and a strategical blunder for which he will not be forgiven. …

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. …

… Thus, the Cairo oration was a culmination of the themes of Obama’s early months. He had blamed America for the world financial crisis, global warming, Mexico’s drug wars, for “failure to appreciate Europe’s role in the world,” and in general for “all too often” trying “to dictate our terms.” He had reinforced all this by dispatching his Secretary of State on what the New York Times dubbed a “contrition tour” of Asia and Latin America. Now he added apologies for overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953, and for treating the Muslim countries as “proxies” in the Cold War “without regard to their own aspirations.”

Toward what end all these mea culpas? Perhaps it is a strategy designed, as he puts it, to “restor[e] America’s standing in the world.” Or perhaps he genuinely believes, as do many Muslims and Europeans, among others, that a great share of the world’s ills may be laid at the doorstep of the United States. Either way, he seems to hope that such self-criticism will open the way to talking through our frictions with Iran, Syria, China, Russia, Burma, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela, and the “moderate” side of the Taliban.

This strategy might be called peace through moral equivalence, and it finally makes fully intelligible Obama’s resistance to advocating human rights and democracy. For as long as those issues are highlighted, the cultural relativism that laced his Cairo speech and similar pronouncements in other places is revealed to be absurd. Straining to find a deficiency of religious freedom in America, Obama came up with the claim that “in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.” He was referring, apparently, to the fact that donations to foreign entities are not tax deductible. This has, of course, nothing to do with religious freedom but with assuring that tax deductions are given only to legitimate charities and not, say, to “violent extremists,” as Obama calls them (eschewing the word “terrorist”).

Consider this alleged peccadillo of America’s in comparison to the state of religious freedom in Egypt, where Christians may not build, renovate or repair a church without written authorization from the President of the country or a provincial governor (and where Jews no longer find it safe to reside). Or compare it to the practices at the previous stop on Obama’s itinerary, Saudi Arabia, where no church may stand, where Jews were for a time not allowed to set foot, and where even Muslims of non-Sunni varieties are constrained from building places of worship. …

Roger Simon has part one of a series on the NY Times.

… it took me many years … until about the time I started blogging… to realize what a pernicious influence The Times had had and how no single media outlet ought to have that much power in a democracy… something, by the way, that its editor Bill Keller admitted to me, when we were still friends, back before I fully put on my pajamas… Even now, with its business model failing to the extent that it is selling off its own landmark building while borrowing millions at a usurious rate from a Mexican billionaire, the Times still has an excessive influence, still moves the agenda more than any other media outlet, defining itself with a slogan so cloaked in bogus objectivity – “All the News That’s Fit to Print” – that it might make a Pravda editor blush.

Because, as we know, no one is objective. I’m not, you’re not and certainly not the New York Times. We’re all biased. I could say bias is as American as apple pie, but this is far from just an American trait. It’s a global one. Bias is as human as bread.

But this is nothing new.

What surprised me when I finally woke up to the extreme bias of the New York Times was that it had had a long history – which is what I am going to deal with in the next episodes of this show in my own, and undoubtedly biased, way. …

David Harsanyi starts the humor section with thoughts on teaching his daughters about sex. He has a serious point too.

… In his thought-provoking book “Fooled by Randomness” Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the case that we are constantly affixing deep meaning to meaningless statistics. Did you know, for instance, that as teen birth rates rise, there has also been a national trend of higher rates among women in their 20s, 30s and 40s? What does that tell us?

In this case, none of the numbers prove that kids are becoming more promiscuous or acting less safe than they did 5 or 10 years ago. There is also no proof that either abstinence or sex education programs have had a real effect on teen behavior.

Teen sexual behavior is driven by myriad social, demographic and economic factors (and, perhaps, most importantly: family.) As long we use the thin gruel of these kind of studies to hammer home some ideological point, parents aren’t being helped.

The best antidote is probably some hybrid of abstinence programs and others that teach about disease, pregnancy and birth control.

Certainly we shouldn’t dictate to parents (or, in my case, a wife) how they should teach their kids about sex. We should also avoid mass panic when it comes to teen sex.

Individual panic? Now, that’s a different story.

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Good Corner post from Andrew McCarthy on whether to meddle or not.

As someone who has favored for years a policy of regime change in Iran (see, e.g., here, here, here, here and here), what stuns me about the commentary over the last couple of days is the perception that the regime has done something shocking with this election. The regime isn’t any different today than it was the day before the election, the days before it gave logistical assistance to the 9/11 suicide hijacking teams, the day before it took al-Qaeda in for harboring after the 9/11 attacks, the day before Khobar Towers, or every day of combat in Iraq. Throughout the last 30 years, this revolutionary regime has made war on America while it brutalized its own people. The latter brutalization has ebbed and flowed with circumstances, depending on how threatened (or at least vexed) the regime felt at any given time. …

Mort Zuckerman answers Cairo.

… Now comes President Obama to undermine a commitment made by the United States. To appreciate what is at stake, we have to look at the record. Israel of its own volition withdrew settlers and settlements from Gaza, though this evacuation was not required by the road map. The Bush administration acknowledged in return that settlement construction in the West Bank would be permitted within the existing construction line—not new settlement but building to cope with the growth of families. This understanding was confirmed by senior members of the National Security Council and in letters from the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser. Among other things, the letters said, “In the framework of the agreed principles on settlement activity, we will shortly make an effort to better delineate the settlement construction line in Judea and Samaria.” Former Sharon aide Dov Weisglass wrote recently reaffirming “that the administration recognized Israel’s right under the road map to development from within the existing construction line.”

For years, Israel has relied on these understandings for developments of homes within the guidelines set down, without objection from the U.S. government and without denials when this policy was reported in the New York Times and in the Washington Post.

Repudiating these understandings is an extraordinary breach of the normal behavior of governments and stands in juxtaposition to U.S. demands that the Israeli government adhere to commitments made by its predecessors. …

Krauthammer’s Take has become one of the best features of the net.

… The president is also speaking in code. The Pope [John Paul II] spoke in a code which was implicit and understood support for the forces of freedom.

The code the administration is using is implicit support for this repressive, tyrannical regime.

We watched Gibbs say that what’s going on is vigorous debate. The shooting of eight demonstrators is not debate. The knocking of heads, bloodying of demonstrators by the Revolutionary Guards is not debate. The arbitrary arrest of journalists, political opposition, and students is not debate.

And to call it a debate and to use this neutral and denatured language is disgraceful. …

David Harsanyi asks, “What’s the big hurry?”

Weren’t we promised some methodical and deliberate governance from President Barack Obama? Where is it?

The president claims that we must pass a government-run health insurance program — possibly the most wide-ranging and intricate government undertaking in decades — yesterday or a “ticking time bomb” will explode.

If all this terrifying talk sounds familiar, it might be because the president applies the same fear-infused vocabulary to nearly all his hard-to-defend policy positions. You’ll remember the stimulus plan had to be passed without a second’s delay or we would see 8.7 percent unemployment. We’re almost at 10.

A commonly utilized Obama strawman states that “the cost of inaction” is unacceptable. “Action,” naturally, translates into whatever policy Obama happens to be peddling at the time. …

And Karl Rove says ObamaCare can be stopped.

… Republican efforts will be helped by a recent Congressional Budget Office report that found that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health-care reform would cost at least $1 trillion over the next 10 years and still leave 36 million Americans uninsured (it may be slightly more once all the details are released). Estimates for the health-care bill that the Senate Finance Committee is drafting with help from the White House are coming in around $1.6 trillion over 10 years.

As the debate now shifts from broad generalities to the specifics of how health-care reform would work and how the government will pay for it, the GOP has an opportunity to stop the nationalization of the health-care industry. The more scrutiny it gets, the less appealing Obama-Care will become. And the more Democrats have to talk about creating a new value-added tax or junk food taxes to pay for it, the more Americans will recoil.

Republican credibility on health care depends on whether the party offers positive alternatives that build on the strengths of American medicine. As long as the choice was between reform and the status quo, the public was likely to go with the reformers. But if the debate is whether to go with costly, unnecessary reforms or with common-sense changes, then Republicans have a chance to appeal to fiscally conservative independents and Democrats and win this one. It is still possible to stop ObamaCare in its tracks. If Republicans can do that, they will win public confidence on an issue that will dominate politics for decades.

Ilya Somin reminds us there is a Supreme Court nominee out there somewhere.

… Indeed, Didden is probably even more telling than the cases Obama had in mind it was considerably easier than most cases in the 5 percent. It was precisely the kind of “pretextual” taking that even the Kelo majority considered to be unconstitutional.The “truly difficult” challenge here was justifying in favor of the government without even allowing the property owners to present their evidence of a pretextual taking before a jury; it would have been relatively easy to defend a decision going the other way. It is revealing that Sotomayor not only got the outcome wrong, but seemed to think it wasn’t even close. If Sotomayor didn’t believe that there was a serious property rights issue even in this extreme case, it is unlikely that she would protect property rights under the Takings Clause in any other situations likely to come before the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: Although less important, in my view, than Didden and Ricci, it’s also worth noting that Sotomayor made another dubious constitutional ruling in Doninger v. Niehof, an important free speech case where she upheld a public school’s decision to punish a student for an internet blog post that she wrote on her own time outside of school grounds. I briefly discussed Doninger in the first part of my LA Times debate with Erwin Chemerinsky. Liberal legal scholars Jonathan Turley and Paul Levinson have been even more critical of Sotomayor’s Doninger opinion than I was.

Since Sotomayor has made no more than a handful of important constitutional rulings in her judicial career, the fact that she got three of them badly wrong must be given great weight in assessing her nomination.

UPDATE #2: While I don’t want to comment extensively on Ricci v. DeStefano, I should perhaps point out that my disagreement with that decision does not rest on the view that affirmative action is categorically unconstitutional. To the contrary, I think it may well be both morally and legally defensible when used to provide genuine compensation for past racial discrimination. Ricci, however, did not involve any such effort at compensatory justice. For reasons elaborated in Jonathan Adler’s posts, Sotomayor’s ruling in the case raises many troubling questions even for people who believe, as I do, that the use of racial classifications for affirmative action is sometimes permissible.

John Derbyshire treats us to some of the public pensions in New York State.

… The two “Click here” links at the bottom of that story put names to the dollars.

•  James Hunderfund, an employee of Commack school district, will retire September 1 with a monthly pension of $26,353.75. (Nothing underfunded about his pension plan, ho ho.)

•  Richard Brande of Brookhaven-Comsewogue will also be heading for the golf course September 1 with a monthly pension of $24,222.43.

•  William Brosnan cleans out his desk at Northport-East Northport July 1, and for the rest of his life will trouser a monthly pension of $19,058.80.

No offense to these guys — well, not much offense — but they are small-town education bureaucrats. Not only will they be getting annual pensions in the quarter-million-dollar range for the rest of their naturals, they are getting these numbers by law. If New York State’s pension-fund managers goof on the investments, or the market craters, we taxpayers have to make up the difference.

It’s not just edbiz either, though of course edbiz exhibits the greatest outrages. (Can’t we please just GET RID OF PUBLIC EDUCATION?) Local-gummint seat-warmers are on the same gravy train.

•  Dvorah Balsam of Nassau [County] Health Care Corp., annual pension $191,380.32

•  Stanley Klimberg of Long Island Power Authority: $191,380.32.

•  Gerald Shaftan, Nassau Health Care Corp. again, $181,457.76. …

A Derbyshire reader puts those in perspective by comments on his navy retirement.

… I read your Corner post on local government pensions. Unbelievable. I work for the Navy, am on the old retirement system that was replaced by a less generous system 25 years ago, and there is no way I can come close to those numbers. At best, I can retire with 80 percent of my pay … after 42 years of service. And the base pay scale isn’t that impressive.

These local and state pensions are absurd. If Obama wants to appoint czars, let him appoint one to control local and state government pay. …

A New Republic blog post tells us what a bullet we dodged when John Edwards flamed out.

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Spengler comments on events in Iran.

In Wonderland, Alice played croquet with hedgehogs and flamingos. In the Middle East, United States President Barack Obama is attempting the same thing, but with rats and cobras. Not only do they move at inconvenient times, but they bite the players. Iran’s presidential election on Friday underscores the Wonderland character of American policy in the region.

America’s proposed engagement of Iran has run up against the reality of the region, namely that Iran cannot “moderate” its support for its fractious Shi’ite allies from Beirut to Pakistan’s northwest frontier. It also shows how misguided Obama was to assume that progress on the Palestinian issue would help America solve more urgent strategic problems, such as Iran’s potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. …

… If Tehran were playing a two-sided chess game with Washington, a moderate face like that of Hossein Mousavi would have served Iranian interests better than Ahmadinejad, as Pipes suggests. But Tehran also has to send signals to the sidelines of the chess match. With the situation on its eastern border deteriorating and a serious threat emerging to the Shi’ites of Pakistan, Iran has to make its militancy clear to all the players in the region. Washington’s ill-considered attempts at coalition building are more a distraction than anything else.

Because Tehran’s credibility is continuously under test, it cannot hold its puppies of war on a tight leash. Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon will continue to nip at the Israelis and spoil the appearance of a prospective settlement. The louder Iran has to bark, the less credible its bite. Iran’s handling of last weekend’s presidential election results exposes the weakness of the country’s strategic position. That makes an Israeli strike against its alleged nuclear weapons facilities all the more likely – not because Tehran has shown greater militancy, but because it has committed the one sin that never is pardoned in the Middle East – vulnerability.

So does David Warren.

We could begin by blaming George W. Bush for what is now happening in Iran. Not for everything, of course — not even the crazy Left blames Bush for everything. But the whole intention of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to shake up the Middle East, and introduce some “regime change” into its darkest, most fetid corners.

The broad picture of Saddam Hussein going down — available even to the audiences of tightly-regulated State media — remains, indelible. Precedent is the cutting edge in politics and life; the breaching of taboos. Nothing is possible until it is shown to be possible.

Barack Obama deserves some credit, too. If nothing else, his Cairo speech persuaded those who want an end to tyranny in Iran, as elsewhere in the region, that they are now on their own. The U.S. isn’t going to help them. Instead, as Obama said, the U.S. is going to negotiate in “good faith” — with just such despicable regimes as that of the ayatollahs in Iran.

Quite possibly, in the grander scheme of things, Bush, followed by Obama, will prove a good thing. But if it ends badly, it will end very badly, in Islamist triumph, and perhaps nuclear war. …

And the editors at WSJ.

The President yesterday denounced the “extent of the fraud” and the “shocking” and “brutal” response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

“These elections are an atrocity,” he said. “If [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?” The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

The President who spoke those words was France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era of Obama. …

And Roger Simon.

To those who read this site, it’s no secret that I have never been a fan of Barack Obama’s. Ever since the revelation that the then candidate spent twenty years in the church of Jeremiah Wright, even choosing the title of his memoir from the words of the “Them Jews” reverend, I have had difficulty respecting Obama’s values or character. At best he seemed an opportunist. At worst… well, I don’t want to say. Since becoming President he has done little to reassure me. His principle contribution appears to have been nothing more than spending billions of dollars will-nilly in a manner no one seems to be able to comprehend or track.

So it will be no surprise to readers that I am similarly disturbed at his reaction to the current situation in Iran. …

John Podhoretz wonders if Obama wanted Ahmadinejad to win.

Jennifer Rubin has an answer.

… Get the sense he doesn’t give a fig about which way it turns out? Get the sense all he cares about is preserving the hope of dealing with the regime (a fascistic regime prepared to kill its own people to maintain a fraudulent election)?

No hope. No change.  It never dawns that this might be a game changer — either a regime change and/or a complete discrediting of the notion that these are people with whom one can do business. No sense that the American people and the world at large might, because of this, mount a credible series of sanctions and/or reject the notion of extended negotiations.

It is clear what’s up. All he wants to do is talk, so he can’t give offense.  Fine — he’ll deal with Ahmadinejad if the regime can crush the protesters. He is an enabler now, a cheerleader against regime change. Shameful.

Michael Ledeen posts on a hospital in Iran.

Debra Saunders has a good idea. Let’s get rid of Sarah Palin, the victim.

… These stories don’t tell voters that Palin has the smartest energy policy or that she’s been a more successful governor than California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger – they tell voters that Palin’s life is a nonstop soap opera.

Republicans who want to win back Washington would do well to look for a winner. Not a victim.

Speaking of too much drama: I wish Newt Gingrich would just go away, too. …

Great post from the blog Patriot Room on why Obama is “poor dad” and thus unable to lead the country out of a recession.

Last night, as I reread Robert Kiyosaki’s 1997 Bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad, I realized why Barack Obama will be unable to do what is necessary to fix America’s economy. It’s not just that he believes in government intervention in business, although that’s a big part of it. But what makes it even worse is that President Obama is Poor Dad.

For those who haven’t read the book, let me give you the gist so you can follow along. The author uses a fable, loosely-based on his life growing up. The purpose is to compare and contrast the differences between his highly-educated and professional father (who he refers to as Poor Dad) and his best friend’s father, an informally educated, business savvy mentor (who he calls Rich Dad). I don’t wish to debate the merits of the book, which I believe are plenteous if you can distinguish the good advice from the bad. It’s irrelevant here, because I am only going to focus on the advice that is, in fact, generally good and true.

Let’s get into it… …

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