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

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

Washington Times editors are on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Davis in the Dallas Morning News on Gates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But whatever it is, we should be for it.

Am I missing something? …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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James Kirchick has interesting thoughts about American hegemony.

… What’s clear is that without the United States serving as a benevolent regional hegemon, Honduras would be in a far worse place than the fraught standoff that characterizes the situation today. Whatever America’s history in the region, we have a far better chance of resolving the crisis than do any of the other nations vying for the role of referee. Honduras’s interim government rightly feels bullied by a bloc of left-wing Latin American populists, namely Chavez, who has threatened to invade Honduras if the interim government does not reinstate his ally. Micheletti accused neighboring Nicaragua (led by the former Sandinista rebel Daniel Ortega) of amassing troops on the border. For all we know, a small-scale war could have erupted without American intervention.

As for the regional organization that prophets of American decline would point to as the natural and rightful arbitrator, the OAS has largely discredited itself over the past few years by becoming the plaything of left-wing populists like Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. Ostensibly meant to promote democracy and good governance, it has recently made way for the readmission of Cuba, which it banned nearly five decades ago after Fidel Castro turned the country into a communist dictatorship.

From the Taiwan Strait to the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe, the projection of American power keeps the world safe, allows for free commercial exchange, and protects global liberty. …

Theodore Dalrymple, who is a British doctor, tells us a few things we should know about government health care.

… The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world.

Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world. Even Greeks living in Britain return home for medical treatment if they are physically able to do so. …

The National Review Online has a number of interesting posts. One post was on the capture of an al-Qaeda member.

“Not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions.” …

… two Washington Post reporters boldly declared on March 29. The problem with this assertion? It’s simply untrue, as Marc Thiessen explained on National Review Online’s blog The Corner — and as the reporters themselves conceded (without actually admitting they’d gotten anything wrong) in a second story. According to that story, Zubaida became a “font of information” after the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and only then provided the information that led to the capture of al-Qaeda’s José Padilla — who was apprehended in Chicago on a mission to carry out attacks in the U.S. This brings the tradeoff we face into sharp relief: Sometimes it takes harsh treatment to elicit information about mortal threats. It would be easy if enhanced interrogation didn’t work; we could simply end it without consequence. But the world is not so simple. …

Thomas Sowell brings concise clarity to a number of race-related issues.

Many people hoped that the election of a black President of the United States would mark our entering a “post-racial” era, when we could finally put some ugly aspects of our history behind us.

That is quite understandable. But it takes two to tango. Those of us who want to see racism on its way out need to realize that others benefit greatly from crying racism. They benefit politically, financially, and socially.

Barack Obama has been allied with such people for decades. He found it expedient to appeal to a wider electorate as a post-racial candidate, just as he has found it expedient to say a lot of other popular things– about campaign finance, about transparency in government, about not rushing legislation through Congress without having it first posted on the Internet long enough to be studied– all of which turned to be the direct opposite of what he actually did after getting elected. …

… What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.

To think that someone who has spent years promoting grievance and polarization was going to bring us all together as president is a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.

Not only Barack Obama’s past, but his present, tell the same story. His appointment of an attorney general who called America “a nation of cowards” for not dialoguing about race was a foretaste of what to expect from Eric Holder.

The way Attorney General Holder has refused to prosecute young black thugs who gathered at a voting site with menacing clubs, in blatant violation of federal laws against intimidating voters, speaks louder than any words from him or his president. …

Roger L. Simon looks at victim-mentality in a post-racial world.

…But when the rules change, when values change, not everyone can adjust with it — not only the racist, but also those who depended on being victims of racism. For all his brilliance, Henry Lewis Gates is evidently such a man. Otherwise, why cry out about being victimized as a “black man in America” before there is any evidence that that is the case? …

…Our universities are havens for this form of nostalgia, so it is not amazing that Gates would suffer from it. You don’t get a job in our academic world by saying America has conquered racism, even to a small degree, even after it has elected an African-American president. You don’t get a job with an NGO either by making such an “outrageous statement.” Large sectors of our society are dependent on an increasingly non-existent racism, not just obvious parties like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright. We have a whole fabric of our culture endlessly clamoring for a “diversity” that is already accepted. Every business and social activity I have been involved with has for decades been desperate to enlist people-of-color and yet many insist it is not happening and demand more. There is something self-defeating in that, like a societal jack story. The secret wish of these people, buried not far from the surface, is for things not to have changed. They have a nostalgia for an evil past when they could feel self-righteous and victimized. …

A Bill Kristol post suggests this is not a black/white thing, but just “Gates is an insufferable snob thing”.

… In a short note in the August 2007 Travel and Leisure magazine, Gates explains why Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard is his favorite place:

“I started going to Oak Bluffs in 1981 and fell in love with the light. It reminded me of the light in the south of France, near St.-Paul-de-Vence, which for me was a déjà vu experience—it evoked the summer of 1973, when I spent a wonderful time in France with James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. …

Power Line sees the same thing.

A Minneapolis attorney writes to add a note in the matter of Harvard Professor Henry Gates. When asked to come out of his house to talk to the police in connection with the report of a possible break-in, Gates exclaimed: “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” Our correspondent suggests otherwise. He writes:

I know that this Gates incident is getting plenty of play in all quarters right now, but I have yet to see the proper context set out for the police response. In a past life (both before and during law school), I was a Minneapolis cop for eight years. I left in 2002 as a Sergeant supervising a dogwatch shift (9:00 pm -7:00 am), to take my first legal job at a Minneapolis firm. …

…In the Gates incident, the police were not dispatched to simply “check on a couple of guys acting suspiciously around a home.” They were almost certainly responding to a report of a “burglary of dwelling in progress.” This is typically one of the highest-priority calls that an officer will encounter during a shift.

Let me explain, and I know this will require a huge leap of faith for certain segments of the population. The vast majority of police officers are deeply, deeply committed to protecting the public from the type of criminal that would force their way into someone else’s home. When a “burglary of dwelling in progress” call comes over the radio, officers literally drop everything (yes friends, even doughnuts . . .) and risk life-and-limb driving as fast as possible to get to the scene as quickly as possible.

Cops don’t do this simply out of desire to catch “bad-guys.” They do it because — due to prior experience — they assume that the “dwelling” in issue is occupied, and they have seen first-hand the devastation left behind when an innocent family is confronted with a violent home-invasion, burglary/rape scenario, or something similar.

Sergeant Crowley responded out a desire to ensure the safety of Gates’s home and its inhabitants without regard to the race of the homeowner. Period. In return, he was subjected to abusive race-baiting from a purported “scholar” that apparently didn’t rise above the intellectual level of a playground taunt. Gates is, quite simply, a jerk. …

Michael Barone says, beyond the aura, there isn’t much to Obama.

…Obama is not so good at argument. Inspiration is one thing, persuasion another. He created the impression on the campaign trail that he was familiar with major issues and readily ticked off his positions on them. But he has not proved so good at legislating.

One reason, perhaps, is that he has had little practice. He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.

In other words, he’s never done much work putting legislation together — especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people’s lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year — the stimulus, cap and trade, health care — the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas. …

Scrappleface says that Obamacare will cover Blue Dog Syndrome.

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Even with the gratuitous Bush-bashing, The Economist special report on changes coming to the Arab world is worthwhile.

…Some in the West are wary of Arab elections, fearing that Islamists would exploit the chance to seize power on the principle of “one man, one vote, one time”. Yet Islamists seem to struggle to raise their support much above 20% of the electorate. Non-Arab Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia suggest that democracy is the best way to draw the poison of extremism. Repression only makes it more dangerous.

Democracy is more than just elections. It is about education, tolerance and building independent institutions such as a judiciary and a free press. The hard question is how much ordinary Arabs want all this. There have been precious few Tehran-style protests on the streets of Cairo. Most Arabs still seem unwilling to pay the price of change. Or perhaps, observing Iraq, they prefer stagnation to the chaos that change might bring. But regimes would be unwise to count on permanent passivity. As our special report in this issue argues, behind the political stagnation of the Arab world a great social upheaval is under way, with far-reaching consequences.

In almost every Arab country, fertility is in decline, more people, especially women, are becoming educated, and businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are creating a great agitation under the surface. The old pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve to survive. At some point it will almost certainly collapse. The great unknown is when.

Mark Steyn has an appropriately bleak view of the slippery slope the US is headed down.

What’s the end game here? I suppose it’s conceivable that there are a few remaining suckers out there who still believe Barack Obama is the great post-partisan, fiscally responsible, pragmatic centrist he played so beguilingly just a year ago. The New York Times’s David Brooks stuck it out longer than most: Only a few weeks back, he was giddy with excitement over the president’s “education” “reforms” (whatever they were). But now he says we’re in “the early stages of the liberal suicide march.” For a famously moderate moderate, Mr. Brooks seems to have gone from irrational optimism over the Democrats’ victory to irrational optimism over the Democrats’ impending downfall without the intervening stage of rational pessimism.

The end game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent,” I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: You’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: A vast population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or education subventions) than it thinks it contributes while another vast population is managing the ever-expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a government health bureaucracy) and yet another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another — say, the privately owned franchisee of a government automobile company, or the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what programs they’re eligible for. In any case, what you get from government — whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit, or a government contract — is a central fact of your life. …

Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press liberal, figures out the Dems class warfare.

In explaining why it was OK to sock a new 5.4% tax on the highest earners in this country — to pay for health care reform — President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said this:

“The president believes that the richest 1% of this country has had a pretty good run of it for many, many, many years.”

Ah. So that’s it. The old “You’ve had it good enough for long enough” policy. That’s why a family earning a million dollars a year should now cough up $54,000 of that — in addition to all the other taxes it pays — to cover health care for people who may not pay a penny of new tax themselves.

Because, after all, those rich folks have had a pretty good run of it.

Now, it is not that I don’t think we need health care reform. We do. It is not that the rich should not pay fair taxes. They should.

But to justify a grossly overweighted tax by saying “You people have had it good long enough” is to engage in the worst and most destructive form of politics: class warfare. …

WaPo liberal, Robert Samuelson, continues his run of trashing the administration’s health care “reform” fantasies.

The most misused word in the health care debate is “reform.” Everyone wants “reform,” but what constitutes “reform” is another matter. If you listen to President Obama, his “reform” will satisfy almost everyone. It will insure the uninsured, control runaway health spending, subdue future budget deficits, preserve choice for patients and improve quality of care. These claims are self-serving exaggerations and political fantasies. They have destroyed what should be a serious national discussion of health care. …

And the world is upside down as David Broder warns us about another aspect of ObamaCare.

Americans are familiar with — if not altogether comfortable about — unelected officials exercising great authority over our lives. The nine justices on the Supreme Court and hundreds of other jurists exert their power from the bench. The economy is managed by the Federal Reserve Board, though no one ever forced Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke to campaign for a vote.

If President Obama has his way, another such unelected authority will be created — a manager and monitor for the vast and expensive American health-care system. As part of his health-reform effort, he is seeking to launch the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, or IMAC, a bland title for a body that could become as much an arbiter of medicine as the Fed is of the economy or the Supreme Court of the law.

The idea has gained a warm initial reaction on Capitol Hill. But with the delay in action on the overall reform effort until fall, there will be more time for reflection on IMAC and its authority. …

Jennifer Rubin explains that Obamacare is rationed health care.

The Democrats are plainly nervous about the “R” word. As they have shown more of their health-care plan, it has become increasingly obvious that the only way to make ObamaCare fly is to squeeze costs — and that means regulating and limiting care. Yes, that is rationing.

The Democrats go to great lengths to deny this. Sen. Herb Kohl assures us that all this talk about rationing is a myth:

I want to be clear that lowering costs has nothing to do with limiting access to care, though opponents of health care reform will try to convince America otherwise. The idea of “rationing” is a myth, and anything resembling it will not be a part of health care reform. No American should ever be kept from a treatment they need. But if we can cut back on unnecessary testing and over-treatment, then our health care system — and America’s patients — will be in better shape.

Got that? It is just whatever is deemed “unnecessary” that will be eliminated. And who will decide? Why, the government. Just as they do in Canada and the U.K., where health care is, well, rationed. In their less guarded moments, supporters of government-run medicine concede that in fact care will be limited. That is what all the “comparative effectiveness” research is about. …

Jennifer Rubin also posts on more Obamacare abominations.

Obama’s stupidly uninformed comments on the arrest of his Harvard professor friend distracted us from his other ridiculous gaffe: the accusation that doctors are taking out kids’ tonsils for no good reason. As with Gates-gate, Obama got it wrong. Tonsillectomies are less common than they used to be but are still essential for certain patients. In short, Dr. Obama is in no position to judge who’s getting the right tonsillectomy treatment and who’s not.

Greg Mankiw comments that the CBO keeps bringing the Obama and the Dems back to fiscal reality, this time on a proposed cost-saving measure for Medicare.

…Damn that CBO! They keep killing all these great ideas with, like, analysis and numbers and all that stuff. Everything would work out just fine if only they would close their eyes, click their heels together three times, and say, “There is no policy like reform…there is no policy like reform….”

Ed Morrissey has interesting details on the OMB’s treatment of the CBO.

The White House went to war with the Congressional Budget Office after Friday’s announcement that the proposed changes to Barack Obama’s health-care plan to realize big cost savings would only recover $2 billion over 10 years, at best — about 0.2% of ObamaCare’s lowest projected cost.  Budget director Peter Orszag published a statement yesterday that accused the CBO of essentially lying in its analysis:

…White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said the CBO’s analysis — which it relayed to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday — could feed a perception of the office’s bias toward “exaggerating costs and underestimating savings.”

Obama called Elmendorf to the White House after the CBO director testified that the present House bill would add $239 billion to the deficit over the next ten years, creating a rift between moderate and liberal Democrats in the House and abruptly halting the effort in the Senate.  Obama denied that he intended to intimidate Elmendorf into providing more sympathetic numbers in subsequent analyses, but the White House got roundly criticized for inappropriately interfering with Congress’ independence in fiscal analysis. …

…In a Hot Air exclusive, I contacted Chuck Blahous of the Hudson Institute, formerly the deputy director of George Bush’s National Economic Council about the open and aggressive attack on the CBO from Orszag and the White House.  Blahous finds it unseemly:

“It’s routine for OMB and CBO to have scoring differences. It’s also routine for the two agencies to separately acknowledge, explain and quantify them. What’s not routine is for each to overtly criticize the other. This is a bad road to go down in any case, but even more so because OMB probably has the glass house here. Institutionally, they’re just different; CBO is purely a referee, while OMB is part referee, part player because they’re part of the President’s policy development team. Moreover, OMB’s February budget presentation attracted a lot of justified criticism for its economic assumptions and for moving various deficit-expanding policies into the budget baseline. Furthermore, most of the claims about long-term cost savings from health care reform have been purely speculative, with no data from the actuaries to back them up. …”

Andrew Stuttaford posts on amusing new allegations in the Berlusconi scandal.

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David Warren says that Rush was right to hope that Obama fails.

…The stock markets soared in the middle of this week, immediately after Barack Obama turned in a rather dismal performance in a press conference aimed at rallying the troops behind his socialized medical scheme. As Lawrence Auster, and several other rude conservative commentators on the Internet asked, why would it do so?

They also answered their question: Wall Street rallied because investors began to think Obama-care will fail. The president will not be able to get that revolution through Congress. He looks as if he is beginning to realize this himself. Enough cosmetic measures may pass through to do some permanent damage, both economic and moral; but at the end of the day, it will be nothing on the scale that was feared.

There are innumerable other Obama failures for which one might wish devoutly: that he will fail to get out of Iraq, and Afghanistan; fail to pressure Israel into abandoning her frontiers; fail to negotiate with the mullahs in Iran; fail to make a missile deal with Putin’s Russia; fail to reach an international climate accord, while failing to fully cap, tax, and cripple the U.S. energy industry. Likewise, one might reasonably hope that he will fail to stack the Supreme Court with “culture of death” aficionadi, and fall “tragically” short of delivering any number of other domestic horrors. …

Jennifer Rubin writes that the president has more to learn than he has to teach.

…In his self-serving press appearance on Friday, the president instructed the less enlightened of us that the Gates episode would be a “teachable moment” about race. This, of course, is a favorite and frequent tactic by Obama. Call it the “politics of condescension.” You see, Americans don’t understand race and need to learn about “police brutality” and “race profiling.” (No, there is no evidence either occurred in this case, but we’re teaching here, so the facts don’t matter.) Jewish leaders are told to engage in “self-reflection” about Israeli-U.S. relations. (Yes, they have spent their lives doing so, wrestling with morally agonizing issues, but Obama doesn’t think they’ve gotten it right. So back to school for them.)

The irony is that it was the president who got it wrong. The “teachable moment” might well be utilized by him, not the rest of us. Michael Moynihan reminds us that Cambridge police officer Sergeant James Crowley taught race-profiling classes and was a model officer. Hmm. It seems he’s had plenty of instruction on race. Then there are the specifics of this case…

…None of this has prevented Gates from seizing on the incident to, as Moynihan explains, also insist this is a “teachable moment.” Hmm. The president and Gates seem strangely and perfectly in sync. The purpose of Gates’s directive (and the president’s, we suspect), he told an interviewer, was to make sure we all know that America ”is just as classist and just as racist as it was the day before the elections.” Got that?…

Robert Gibbs admits the prez was prepared for a Gates query. This from a Corner post by a pseudynomymous LA cop who has some advice for all of us.

… And now we are told, in a further attempt at damage control, that the Gates arrest can serve to educate all those mouth-breathing cops out there who may yet stumble into an unpleasant encounter with some other Ivy Leaguer.  It’s our hope, said Gibbs, invoking that insufferable locution that one hopes will soon fade from common usage, that the Gates arrest can be “part of a teachable moment.”

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: …

Theodore Dalrymple reviews Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.

…In this well-written and wide-ranging examination of the causes and consequences of the mass immigration into Europe, Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell gives us the history of the shifting justifications for that immigration employed by the European political elites. First, of course, Europe had a labor shortage after the war, and tried to prop up its decaying and obsolete industries for a time by the importation of cheap labor. This was short-sighted, because, in a world of free, or free-ish, trade, cheap labor in expensive countries can never be as cheap as cheap labor in cheap ones, and so cannot be the basis of successful competition. …

…Not surprisingly, Caldwell devotes more than half his book to the question of Islamic immigration into Europe. Is there a specific problem attributable to Islam? It certainly seems so. In Britain, for example, both unemployment and imprisonment rates for young Hindus and Sikhs are below those of young whites, while those of young Muslims are well above. While Hindus and Sikhs outperform whites in education, Muslims have even lower educational levels than whites. Unless British racists are pro-Hindu and pro-Sikh, but anti-Muslim, which seems prima facie unlikely, the racism of the host country cannot explain these differences. They must reside in the characteristics of the immigrant groups. …

…For Caldwell, the problem boils down to a confrontation between a civilization that has lost confidence in itself and a resurgent religion that is self-confident. The Europeans now have such a foreshortened sense of history that they suppose that homosexual marriage and an equal representation of women in parliament and the boardroom have been their core values since at least the time of Julius Caesar; the religious roots of their civilization are to them either not evident or a cause for embarrassment and apology. This means that they think it normal to apologize for the Crusades and for Muslims not to apologize for Islamic imperialism; this is a manifestation of the strange European complex of self-denigration and arrogance, according to which only Europeans are sufficiently human to do real wrong. …

Antonia Senior in the London Times compares greenism with fascism and communism.

Britain is, thankfully, an ideologically barren land. The split between Right and Left is no longer ideological, but tribal. Are you a nice social liberal who believes in markets, or a nasty social liberal who believes in markets? Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, published this week, reveal a different age, one in which fascism and communism were locked in a seemingly definitive battle for souls.

Blunt talks of “the religious quality” of the enthusiasm for the Left among the students of Cambridge. There is only one ideology in today’s developed world that exercises a similar grip. If Blunt were young today, he would not be red; he would be green.

His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx. Blunt evokes a febrile atmosphere in which each student felt his own decision had the power to shape the future. Where once they raged about the fleecing of the proletariat and quaked at the march of fascism, Blunt and his circle, transposed to today’s college bar, would rage about the fleecing of the planet and quake at its imminent destruction. If you squint, red and green look disarmingly similar. …

Nicholas Wade gives us a fascinating glimpse of academic conformity.

“Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.”

So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview with Constance Holden in the journal Science.

Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.

The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.” …

Mark Steyn posts a picture of Thomas Friedman’s “super-sized carbon footprint”.

Mark Steyn discusses global warming.

…But I like the way Professor Ian Plimer puts it:

I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.

In the mid-nineties, which climatologist and which model predicted the cooling trend of the turn of the century and the oughts? And, if they didn’t, on what basis do you trust their claims for 2050 or 2100?

The Economist looks at Israeli innovations in solar energy. They’re in a race with the Arab world to create viable solar. Ha Ha!

ISRAEL is a country with plenty of sunshine, lots of sand and quite a few clever physicists and chemists. Put these together—having first extracted the oxygen from the sand, to leave pure silicon—and you have the ingredients for an innovative solar-power industry. Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity (the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms), but it is also the most expensive. The scientists are what you need to make the process cheaper. And that is what two small companies based in Jerusalem are trying, in different ways, to do. …

Volokh Conspiracy tipped us to The 100 Best Movie Line in 200 Seconds.

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We have a large section devoted to the “post racial” president’s knee jerk, race-baiting reaction to the arrest of a college prof who mouthed off to police in Cambridge, MA. First of all, it is obvious the question from Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times was a sweetheart deal of a planted inquiry the kid president was saving for the end of the presser. Our second item from Andy McCarthy points that out. If you don’t believe him, watch it here on You Tube. The question is 51 minutes in and the answer takes three and a half minutes. This part ends with Mark Steyn’s weekly from the OC Register.

Yuval Levin comments first on the unpresidential response.

… It’s the kind of question to which a president would normally reply with something like: “That’s a local police matter, I don’t know the details and I know it will be worked out responsibly,” and move along. (Instead) Obama gave a lengthy review of the facts, called the police officers involved stupid, and implied they are also liars. Very odd behavior for a president.

Andy McCarthy posts on the Q&A setup and the lack of judgment involved.

To Yuval’s insightful observations, I’d add that the Gates question smelled like a set-up to me. Obama went out of his way to call on that reporter as the last questioner of the night — even when some confusion about whether he’d called on someone else resulted in his having to go back to her after taking another question.

For a wartime president managing a slew of manufactured “crises” in a reeling economy, he was sure armed with an astonishing level of detail about the arrestee’s side of the story …

Jay Nordlinger suggests that the president needs to apologize.

Obviously, I am not a fan of President Obama and his policies. (“Obviously,” because I am a National Review person.) But never before, until his comments on the Cambridge, Mass., cops, have I had the following thought: What a jerk. …

Rich Lowry has a photo of the arrest and points out that one of the police officers is black.

And Kathryn Jean Lopez posts that the arresting officer teaches a class about racial profiling.

…Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley has taught a class on racial profiling for five years at the Lowell Police Academy after being hand-picked for the job by former police Commissioner Ronny Watson, who is black, said Academy Director Thomas Fleming.

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“I have nothing but the highest respect for him as a police officer. He is very professional and he is a good role model for the young recruits in the police academy,” Fleming told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The course, called “Racial Profiling,” teaches about different cultures that officers could encounter in their community “and how you don’t want to single people out because of their ethnic background or the culture they come from,” Fleming said.

Rich Lowry’s article at NRO gave Gates’ response after the arrest.

Recouping in Martha’s Vineyard, Gates is considering devoting his next documentary to racial profiling. He says if Officer Crowley apologizes, he will do him the favor both of accepting it and educating “him about the history of racism in America.” Since Harvard students pay $33,000 a year for the privilege of getting lectured by Henry Louis Gates, perhaps he sees this as a generous offer rather than another stupendously arrogant gesture.

The Corner posted Charles Krauthammer’s take.

Peter Wehner’s commentary includes a brief description of the arrest.

…Here are the facts as we know them. Sgt. Crowley — who according to reports is an outstanding officer, something of a role model, and a police-academy expert on racial profiling — responded to Gates’s home near Harvard University last week to investigate a report of a burglary and demanded Gates show him identification. (According to media reports, the incident began when a woman caller reported that a man was trying to force his way into a home. Gates said he was unable to enter his damaged front door after returning from a week in China. Crowley arrived on the scene to investigate.) Police say Gates at first refused and then accused the officer of racism.

Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, with police accusing him of being uncooperative, refusing to initially provide identification, and “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior” by repeatedly shouting at a policeman in front of people gathered on the street in front of his house. (The charges were later dropped.)

“I acted appropriately,” Crowley told WBZ Radio Thursday. “Mr. Gates was given plenty of opportunities to stop what he was doing. He didn’t. He acted very irrational; he controlled the outcome of that event. There was a lot of yelling, there was references to my mother, something you wouldn’t expect from anybody that should be grateful that you were there investigating a report of a crime in progress, let alone a Harvard University professor.” …

Mark Steyn adds his witty commentary.

..And I certainly sympathize with the general proposition that not all encounters with the constabulary go as agreeably as one might wish. Last year I had a minor interaction with a Vermont state trooper, and, 60 seconds into the conversation, he called me a “liar.” I considered my options:

Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered into submission and possibly shot while “resisting arrest”;

Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship between law enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized societies.

I chose the latter course, and received a letter back offering partial satisfaction and explaining that the trooper would be receiving “supervisory performance-related issue-counseling,” which, with any luck, is even more ghastly than it sounds and hopefully is still ongoing.

Professor Gates chose option a), which is just plain stupid. … When Sgt. Crowley announced through the glass-paneled front door that he was here to investigate a break-in, Gates opened it up and roared back: “Why? Because I’m a black man in America?”

Gates then told him, “I’ll speak with your mama outside.” Outside, Sgt. Crowley’s mama failed to show. But among his colleagues were a black officer and a Hispanic officer. Which is an odd kind of posse for what the Rev. Al Sharpton calls, inevitably, “the highest example of racial profiling I have seen.” But what of our post-racial president? After noting that “‘Skip’ Gates is a friend” of his, President Obama said that “there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” But, if they’re being “disproportionately” stopped by African American and Latino cops, does that really fall under the category of systemic racism? Short of dispatching one of those Uighur Muslims from China recently liberated from Gitmo by Obama to frolic and gambol on the beaches of Bermuda, the assembled officers were a veritable rainbow coalition. …

John Fund discusses the hidden victims and the hidden political pressure behind ObamaCare.

President Barack Obama’s health-care sales pitch depends on his ability to obfuscate who is likely to get hurt by reform. At Wednesday’s news conference, for example, he was asked “specifically what kind of pain and sacrifice” he would ask of patients in order to achieve the cost savings he promises.

He insisted he “won’t reduce Medicare benefits” but instead would “make delivery more efficient.” The most Mr. Obama would concede is that some people will have to “give up paying for things that don’t make you healthier.” That is simply not credible.

While Democrats on Capitol Hill dispute claims that individuals will lose their existing coverage under their reform plans, on other issues many Democrats privately acknowledge some people will indeed get whacked to pay for the new world of government-dominated health care.

Democrats have been brilliant in keeping knowledge about the pain and sacrifice of health reform from the very people who would bear the brunt of them. They’ve done so by convincing health-care industry groups not to run the kind of “Harry and Louise”-style ads that helped sink HillaryCare in 1993.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) says the pressure not to run ads has been “intense, bordering on extortion.” …

John Stossel calls on Fredrich Hayek and Adam Smith for insight in the health care debate.

It’s crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It’s even crazier to do it by August.

Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, “to reinvent the nation’s health care system”.

Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system. …

Charles Krauthammer writes about the trouble with Obamacare.

What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health-care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.

But you can’t fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.

President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats’ health-care plans, says the CBO, increase costs on the order of $1 trillion plus. …

Karl Rove comments on Obamacare and the dwindling poll numbers.

On Monday, the Washington Post/ABC poll reported that 49% of Americans approve of his handling of health care while 44% disapprove. What many people missed is that those who strongly disapprove of the president’s approach on health care now outnumber those who strongly approve by 33% to 25%. That presages further decline. Already, 49% of independents disapprove of the president’s approach, up from 30% in April, a staggering shift in 11 weeks.

Mr. Obama is also slipping on the economy. Those who strongly disapprove now outnumber those who strongly approve of his handling of the economy (35% to 29%), of deficits (38% to 19%), and of unemployment (31% to 26%). On Tuesday, Gallup showed Mr. Obama’s personal approval was 55%, down from more than 60% a few weeks ago and lower than the 56% George W. Bush had at this point in his first term. …

The Economist reviews a new clear-eyed history of WW II.

… Mr Roberts hops nimbly between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though Asian readers may feel a bit shortchanged: the fighting in China gets particularly short shrift. Again and again he chides his readers for overestimating the importance of famous British and American battles in the West and overlooking much larger ones on the eastern front: more than 2m Germans were killed in the east, over ten times the number who died fighting in the west. “Britain provided the time, Russia the blood, America the money and the weapons,” he concludes.

He presents stylish penmanship, gritty research and lucid reasoning, coupled with poignant and haunting detours into private lives ruined and shortened. Mr Roberts shows boyish pleasure and admiration at the great feats of arms he describes. But the underlying tones of this magnificent book are in a minor key: furious sorrow at the waste of it all.

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Yesterday we started off with a plea from leaders of Eastern Europe to our president asking him to live up to the responsibilities of world leadership. Today, we start with a similar plea from historian Paul Johnson.

Although the U.S. comes under criticism from all quarters, some facts need to be remembered:

–Since 1945 America has voluntarily accepted leadership of the democratic West and therefore, ultimately, the responsibility for preserving peace in the world.

–Since the end of WWII there has been no major war, no open conflict between great powers.

–This is the longest such period of peace, nearly 65 years, in the recorded history of the world, which is objective testimony to the quality and success of American leadership.

The questions we now face as Barack Obama is subjected to his first practical tests as world security leader are: Can the U.S. continue in this role? Has it the power, the self-confidence and the will to do so? And if America declines to continue as world sheriff, will anyone else take on the duty? …

Abe Greenwald reports that India is refusing to play ball with Obama on CO2 limits.

…“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told Mrs. Clinton and her delegation. …

…First, Obama is taking our allies for granted — and cracks are now showing. In all Obama’s travels since taking office, he hasn’t visited India once. During Hillary Clinton’s first trip to East Asia as secretary of state, she blew off India, citing scheduling problems. George W. Bush forged bold energy and trade deals to ensure excellent relations with the emerging subcontinent; if Obama thinks he can coast on that record, he’s in for a surprise.

Second, the administration has an absurd faith in the power of its own PR. India has been wracked by the global financial crisis. Even putting that aside, it’s a country where 42.5 percent of children under five are malnourished. For India, economic dynamism isn’t a luxury; it’s a miracle. Do Obama and Hillary think Indians will hobble their own industry just because the Change Express is sweeping through town yammering about cooperation?

Third, its carbon moratorium is madness. Climate panic is an outgrowth of Western decadence. Pushing it on emerging powers is exactly what the Left means by cultural imperialism (or what it should mean, anyway). If the Obama administration bossed around our enemies with half the energy it puts into bossing around our friends, perhaps the planet wouldn’t look like a rogue nations’ free-for-all right now.

A foreign policy theme is emerging: the Obama administration is wasting the goodwill we have with our global allies, by pushing for untenable positions. Jennifer Rubin comments on the pressure for Israel to make more concessions.

…we unfortunately see once again how the Obama administration seems determined to flunk Diplomacy 101 when it comes to the Middle East. While Iran proceeds apace with its nuclear program, the Obama administration remains obsessed with the settlements. I can only add a couple of points emphasizing how terribly misplaced and counterproductive this fixation is.

First, under any circumstances, this would be yet another ill-advised and unwarranted bit of “meddling” by the U.S. government. What other country do we lecture on where its citizens might live — in its own capital, no less? …

Moderate David Brooks feels that we’ve seen this political cycle before. This time the liberals have overreached in thinking that they have a mandate.

…This ideological overreach won’t be any more successful than the last one. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday confirms what other polls have found. Most Americans love Barack Obama personally, but support for Democratic policies is already sliding fast.

Approval of Obama’s handling of health care, for example, has slid from 57 percent to 49 percent since April. Disapproval has risen from 29 percent to 44 percent. As recently as June, voters earning more than $50,000 preferred Obama to the Republicans on health care by a 21-point margin. Now those voters are evenly split.

Most independents now disapprove of Obama’s health care strategy. In March, only 32 percent of Americans thought Obama was an old-style, tax-and-spend liberal. Now 43 percent do. …

Roger Simon sets the tone for today’s health care coverage.

We all live in polarities. He who seems the most self-confident is often the most insecure, etc.

Thus Barack Obama – the man who rose so fast to the presidency that he did not pass GO, though he did collect $200. He moves like someone with a preternatural fear of being found out, as if all would crumble if he stops for a second. And now it’s healthcare healthcare healthcare all the time and incessantly as if we were a country of three hundred million suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer. Saith the man: In an interview aired this morning on NBC’s “Today” show, Obama defended his insistence on Congress passing healthcare overhaul legislation before its August summer recess. “If you don’t set a deadline in this town, nothing happens,” the president said, adding, “And the deadline isn’t being set by me. It’s being set by the American people.”

Well, no. Not any American people I’ve met anyway. They all just wish this fella would slow down for a moment, not to smell the roses, but at least to add up the bucks and think things through. …

Thomas Sowell points out that government is not doing a great job handling the healthcare programs already under its purview.

…A bigger question is whether medical care will be better or worse after the government takes it over. There are many available facts relevant to those crucial questions but remarkably little interest in those facts.

There are facts about the massive government-run medical programs already in existence in the United States — Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ hospitals — as well as government-run medical systems in other countries.

None of the people who are trying to rush government-run medical care through Congress before we have time to think about it are pointing to Medicare, Medicaid or veterans’ hospitals as shining examples of how wonderful we can expect government medical care to be when it becomes “universal.” …

Rich Lowry says that for Obama, “Hope and Change” has been overshadowed by “Do It Now”.

When Barack Obama pilfered Martin Luther King Jr.’s line about the “fierce urgency of now,” he wasn’t kidding. The line has come to define his presidency. His legislative strategy moves in two gears — heedlessly fast and recklessly faster.

As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama’s poll numbers return to earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new program. …

Rich Lowry also posts on aspects of Obamacare that Obama is not being honest about.

Ann Coulter is smokin’ good on health care today.

… The government also “helped” us by mandating that insurance companies cover all sorts of medical services, both ordinary — which you ought to pay for yourself — and exotic, such as shrinks, in vitro fertilization and child-development assessments — which no normal person would voluntarily pay to insure against.

This would be like requiring all car insurance to cover the cost of gasoline, oil and tire changes — as well as professional car detailing, iPod docks, and leather seats and those neon chaser lights I have all along the underbody of my chopped, lowrider ’57 Chevy.

But politicians are more interested in pleasing lobbyists for acupuncturists, midwives and marriage counselors than they are in pleasing recent college graduates who only want to insure against the possibility that they’ll be hit by a truck. So politicians at both the state and federal level keep passing boatloads of insurance mandates requiring that all insurance plans cover a raft of non-emergency conditions that are expensive to treat — but whose practitioners have high-priced lobbyists.

As a result, a young, healthy person has a choice of buying artificially expensive health insurance that, by law, covers a smorgasbord of medical services of no interest to him … or going uninsured. People who aren’t planning on giving birth to a slew of children with restless leg syndrome in the near future forgo insurance — and then politicians tell us we have a national emergency because some people don’t have health insurance.

The whole idea of insurance is to insure against catastrophes: You buy insurance in case your house burns down — not so you can force other people in your plan to pay for your maid. You buy car insurance in case you’re in a major accident, not so everyone in the plan shares the cost of gas. …

Jennifer Rubin posts that Bill Kristol has explained the ugliest truth about Obamacare.

…Bill Kristol, analyzing Ted Kennedy’s column in Newsweek, gets to what lies at the heart of liberal health care:

The government is going to decide — ahead of time, obviously, since deciding after the fact wouldn’t save any money; and based on certain general criteria, since the government isn’t going to review each individual case — what kinds of hospital readmissions for the elderly are “unnecessary” and what kinds aren’t. And it’s going to set up a system “to reward hospitals and doctors for preventing” the unnecessary ones. That is, the government will reward hospitals and doctors for denying care they now provide, care the government will now deem “unnecessary.” …

Closing this section are some good health care ideas from Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana.

…

•Aligned consumer interests. Consumers should be financially invested in better health decisions through health-savings accounts, lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. If they seek care in cost-effective settings, comply with medical regimens, preventative care, and lifestyles that reduce the likelihood of chronic disease, they should share in the savings.

•Medical lawsuit reform. The practice of defensive medicine costs an estimated $100 billion-plus each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which used a study by economists Daniel P. Kessler and Mark B. McClellan. No health reform is serious about reducing costs unless it reduces the costs of frivolous lawsuits.

•Insurance reform. Congress should establish simple guidelines to make policies more portable, with more coverage for pre-existing conditions. Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick. Individuals should also be able to keep insurance as they change jobs or states. …

If you’re like Pickerhead, you long ago gave up on Chris Matthews. Noemie Emery has the story of Chris and fellow Carter speech writers praising Carter’s “malaise” speech. Leading off the humor section is a good spot for this.

Mid-July 2009 is a season of milestones – the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing; the 40th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, the 10th anniversary of the death of John Kennedy Jr. - so it seems just that MSNBC decided to honor an even more poignant occasion – the 30th anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech to an incredulous nation on July 15, 1979.

To most people, this was less a giant step for mankind than one of the low points in what has been justly described as a “slum of a decade,” but Hardball host Chris Matthews, a one-time speech writer for our 39th president, convened two ex-colleagues – Gerald Rafshoon and Hendrik Hertzberg (now at the New Yorker) – to commemorate and discuss the event.

“I think it was a good thing to do,” Hertzberg said of the oration. …

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Jonah Goldberg posts part of an open letter to Obama sent from a group of Central and Eastern European leaders. Follow the link for the full letter.

From, among others, Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. Here’s the open:

We have written this letter because, as Central and Eastern European (CEE) intellectuals and former policymakers, we care deeply about the future of the transatlantic relationship as well as the future quality of relations between the United States and the countries of our region. We write in our personal capacity as individuals who are friends and allies of the United States as well as committed Europeans.

Our nations are deeply indebted to the United States. Many of us know firsthand how important your support for our freedom and independence was during the dark Cold War years. U.S. engagement and support was essential for the success of our democratic transitions after the Iron Curtain fell twenty years ago. Without Washington’s vision and leadership, it is doubtful that we would be in NATO and even the EU today.

We have worked to reciprocate and make this relationship a two-way street. We are Atlanticist voices within NATO and the EU. Our nations have been engaged alongside the United States in the Balkans, Iraq, and today in Afghanistan. While our contribution may at times seem modest compared to your own, it is significant when measured as a percentage of our population and GDP. Having benefited from your support for liberal democracy and liberal values in the past, we have been among your strongest supporters when it comes to promoting democracy and human rights around the world.

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, however, we see that Central and Eastern European countries are no longer at the heart of American foreign policy. As the new Obama Administration sets its foreign-policy priorities, our region is one part of the world that Americans have largely stopped worrying about. Indeed, at times we have the impression that U.S. policy was so successful that many American officials have now concluded that our region is fixed once and for all and that they could “check the box” and move on to other more pressing strategic issues. Relations have been so close that many on both sides assume that the region’s transatlantic orientation, as well as its stability and prosperity, would last forever.

That view is premature….

Debra J. Saunders fills us in on the CIA scandal that wasn’t.

…The news hooks: CIA Director Leon Panetta killed the program last month after he told Senate and House Intelligence committees about the program.

And: Congress allegedly did not know about the nonoperational operation because, according to unnamed sources, former Veep Dick Cheney told the agency not to disclose the program to Congress.

The part of the story that undermined the story: The covert program “never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.”

In plain English that means: Nothing happened – there never were any Jason Bournes – and no one informed the intelligence committees about it. …

…Some unnamed sources say Cheney told the CIA not to tell Congress about the nonoperational operation; other sources claimed Cheney was not involved. Cheney isn’t talking. My guess: If Cheney told the CIA to cork it, someone at the CIA’s Langley headquarters would have leaked the whole story years ago. After all, the Bush years were replete with unnamed sources leaking classified intelligence on Iraq, wiretapping and efforts to squeeze al Qaeda’s finances. …

Tom Raum in WaPo, reports on the Obama administration’s delayed budget update.

The White House is being forced to acknowledge the wide gap between its once-upbeat predictions about the economy and today’s bleak landscape.

The administration’s annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama’s budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.

The release of the update – usually scheduled for mid-July – has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town Aug. 7 on its summer recess.

The administration is pressing for votes before then on its $1 trillion health care initiative, which lawmakers are arguing over how to finance.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Monday blamed the delay entirely on the “transition from one administration to the next” and not from any attempt to deceive Congress. …

We have some interesting commentary on the moon landing. Tom Wolfe is first.

…NASA entered into the greatest crash program of all time, Apollo. It launched five lunar missions in one year, December 1968 to November 1969. With Apollo 11, we finally won the great race, landing a man on the Moon before the end of this decade and returning him safely to Earth.

Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn’t dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration. What was this single combat stuff — they didn’t use the actual term — really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable … how far-seeing … but why don’t we just do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow?

And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! And they don’t need it anymore! Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations. Who couldn’t use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma … made you think of re-election ….

Charles Krauthammer is up next.

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), “travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.” In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton’s incredulity at America’s abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama’s Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy’s enthusiasm for human space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we’d landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing. …

Bret Stephens gives two examples of the character of our astronauts.

…But the really essential ingredient is personal modesty, if not in private than certainly in public. “One day you’re just Gene Cernan, young naval aviator, whatever,” recalls the commander of Apollo 17 in the documentary, “In the Shadow of the Moon.” “And the next day you’re an American hero. Literally. And you have done nothing.”

Mr. Cernan is the last man to have walked on the moon. Nobody can accuse him of lacking for courage. He is simply expressing the very human bewilderment of a sentient person caught in the blandishments of modern celebrity culture. Does America make men like Gene Cernan anymore?

Then again, Mr. Cernan is positively boastful compared to Mr. Armstrong. …

Back on June 21, we started with Roger Simon’s three-part series on the death of the NY Times. Part two, centered on Walter Duranty, is here today.

At the end of Act 1, I promised to discuss what many consider the most egregious case of prevarication on the pages of the New York Times –the misreporting of Joseph Stalin’s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants by the NYT’s Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty.

Some say that policy of Stalin’s was equal in horror and death count to the Holocaust itself. And yet Duranty papered it over in the Times, reporting after a visit to the area that while there were some scattered shortages, a true famine – forced or otherwise – did not exist. After all, as Duranty so often explained, “You had to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”

This was 1932. The Gulag Archipelago – the infamous forced labor camps of the Soviet Union so thoroughly exposed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn – had already been in existence since 1918. A “few eggs” indeed. …

Jack Dunphy, the pseudonym of an LAPD officer, posts part of an essay from Van Jones. Jones wrote this about the 1992 L.A. riots. Van Jones is Obama’s new “Special Advisor for Green Jobs”.

…Our rallying cry was for justice; our demand was that the System be changed!

Yes, the Great Revolutionary Moment had at long last come. And the time, clearly, was ours!

So we stole stuff.

Y’know, stole stuff. Radios, tennis shoes. Well, not everybody, of course.

The vast majority (me included) just marched around and chanted slogans. But some set trash cans on fire. And smashed in car windows. And some kids stoned a few passing cars pretty good.

And stole stuff, like I said. …

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Robert J. Samuelson comments on the lack of effect seen from the stimulus bill.

It’s not surprising that the much-ballyhooed “economic stimulus” hasn’t done much stimulating. President Obama and his aides argue that it’s too early to expect startling results. They have a point. A $14 trillion economy won’t revive in a nanosecond. But the defects of the $787 billion package go deeper and won’t be cured by time. The program crafted by Obama and the Democratic Congress wasn’t engineered to maximize its economic impact. It was mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes.

As a result, much of the stimulus’s potential benefit has been squandered. Spending increases and tax cuts are sprinkled in too many places and, all too often, are too delayed to do much good now. Nor do they concentrate on reviving the economy’s most depressed sectors: state and local governments; the housing and auto industries. None of this means the stimulus won’t help or precludes a recovery, but the help will be weaker than necessary. …

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie review the first six months of hope and change.

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. “Give it to me!” the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to “solve problems” and not “gripe” about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il’s health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party’s left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP. …

Stuart Taylor Jr. contrasts a Sotomayor speech to the responses she gave in the Congressional hearing.

As one who had hoped for a moderately liberal, intellectually honest nominee and feared the possibility of an unprincipled left-liberal ideologue steeped in identity politics, I am having trouble figuring out Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., captured my own puzzlement when he told Sotomayor on Tuesday that although her 17-year judicial record struck him as “left-of-center but within the mainstream, you have these speeches that just blow me away…. Who are we getting here?”

Graham was talking mainly about a succession of at least five very similar speeches between 1994 and 2003 in which Sotomayor appeared to glorify ethnic and gender identity repeatedly at the expense of the judicial obligation to be impartial and suggested that “a wise Latina woman” would be a better judge than “a white male.”

In response to questions such as Graham’s, Sotomayor and her supporters have touted her judicial decisions as proof that she has been a solid, impartial judge.

They have a point. Sotomayor’s more than 3,000 mostly unremarkable rulings have not been ultra-liberal, have not displayed any broad pattern of bias in race or gender cases, and have closely followed precedent. Ordinarily, a judge’s record on the bench is the best guide to what she would do on the Supreme Court. She has also lived an admirable life.

But how persuasive were Sotomayor’s efforts to explain away those jarring speeches? Below I juxtapose excerpts from a typical speech — in October 2001, to an audience of Hispanic activists and others at the University of California (Berkeley) — with portions of her testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday. …

Krauthammer’s take on the Soto hearings.

It is a waste of time, and it isn’t even an entertaining show. Ever since Robert Bork spoke the truth in answering his questions about his philosophy and was denied a seat on the court, everybody understood that it’s kabuki. …

… Her performance was absolutely incredible in the sense that it was not believable, but it will get her on the court.

And Richard Cohen is underwhelmed by Sotomayor. This is our third item today from the Washington Post that trashes the Obama agenda.

A political ad that lucky New Yorkers get to see on television begins with “A million lawyers in America” and goes on to wonder about certain no-bid contracts in nearby New Jersey that will not concern us today. But every time the ad runs, I cannot help thinking about Sonia Sotomayor: A million lawyers in America, and Barack Obama chooses her for the Supreme Court.

Don’t get me wrong. She is fully qualified. She is smart and learned and experienced and, in case you have not heard, a Hispanic, female nominee, of whom there have not been any since the dawn of our fair republic. But she has no cause, unless it is not to make a mistake, and has no passion, unless it is not to show any, and lacks intellectual brilliance, unless it is disguised under a veil of soporific competence until she takes her seat on the court. We shall see.

In the meantime, Sotomayor will do, and will do very nicely, as a personification of what ails the American left. She is, as everyone has pointed out, in the mainstream of American liberalism, a stream both intellectually shallow and preoccupied with the past. We have a neat summary of it in the recent remarks of Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who said he wanted a Supreme Court justice “who will continue to move the court forward in protecting . . . important civil rights.” He cited the shooting of a gay youth, the gang rape of a lesbian and the murder of a black man — in other words, violence based on homophobia and racism. Yes. But who nowadays disagrees?

What, though, about a jurist who can advance the larger cause of civil rights and at the same time protect individual rights? This was the dilemma raised by the New Haven firefighters’ case. The legal mind who could have found a “liberal” way out of the thicket would deserve a Supreme Court seat. As an appellate judge, Sotomayor did not even attempt such an exercise. She punted. …

Former Oklahoma representative J.C. Watts weighs in with more negative consequences that would result from Obamacare.

Medical specialists are doctors who train for many years to understand every system and nuance of the human body. They complete their residency at the local hospital, and then they commit many more years to the study and understanding of a single human system in order to specialize in a particular surgical technique or diagnosis.

Medical specialists are doctors who can cure what general practitioners are unable to recognize. And they will no longer exist under President Obama’s nationalized health care plan.

The glory of American medicine today is that it encourages students of medicine to dig deeper, work harder and find a specialty niche in which they can invest their time and training because — through these specialties — they will save more lives, offer more choice to America’s sick and ailing population, and yes they will probably make more money. …

…Under President Obama’s nationalized health care program, surgical clinics and highly advanced surgical procedures will be a thing of the past. The goal of nationalizing health care is to standardize services, not to specialize in them. Rather than treating each individual as a unique medical case, everyone will be treated the same.

Government-run health care systems do not encourage personal achievement for doctors, nor do they pay for additional knowledge and expertise. Medical schools in this country will be graduating only general practitioners; specialty fields will no longer be taught because there is no government reward or financial incentive for specializing more than the person next to you. …

Tom Elia posts that members of Congress are already considering how to use the car companies they’ve “bought”.

College student Dan Lawton wrote about the lack of political diversity on his campus.

…I argued that the lifeblood of higher education was subjecting students to diverse viewpoints and the university needed to work on attracting more conservative professors.

I also suggested that students working on right-leaning ideas may have difficulty finding faculty mentors. I couldn’t imagine, for instance, that journalism that supported the Iraq war or gun rights would be met with much enthusiasm.

What I didn’t realize is that journalism that examined the dominance of liberal ideas on campus would be addressed with hostility.

A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail. …

Steve Forbes comments on the economy and what Washington should do to help.

The Obama Administration is making noises about the need for a second stimulus package. This is nuts. Hyped-up government spending is useless, if not damaging, for providing sustained economic growth. Our own experiences, as well as those of other countries, particularly Japan in the 1990s and the early part of this decade, have demonstrated that repeatedly.

Obama’s economic pooh-bahs should instead focus on making the dollar strong and stable. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed head Ben Bernanke should both publicly vow that the Fed will not monetize future government debts and that they will restore the integrity of the U.S. dollar by measuring how it’s doing against other currencies and commodities, particularly gold. Alas, an elastic dollar is seen by these officials as an essential policy tool instead of a weapon that destroys market confidence, thereby retarding investment and risk-taking. …

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George W. Bush’s signature achievement was his perseverance in Iraq. It made possible the uprising in Iran. Guess what Walter “White Flag” Cronkite’s advice was. That’s right. The man who wanted to bug out of Vietnam wished for the same in Iraq. Media Research Center has the story.

David Warren looks at the political tactics behind some of the current topics of the day.

…it is now crystal clear that President Obama’s campaign assurances of moderation were obfuscatory. He is transforming U.S. policies, from established centrist to extreme left, right across the board, through about two dozen radical “policy czars” commanding bureaucratic agencies beyond the practical diurnal reach of a Congress that his party anyway controls.

This is a clever revolutionary tactic, because when any of these czars makes a policy decision that blows up politically, Obama himself can play the “moderate” again, negotiating a middle way between the czar in question, and any potentially Democrat constituency that might be offended. Meanwhile his public relations team tells us, “Don’t call them czars!” and the mainstream media dutifully oblige.

It would take a book, not a column, merely to survey the current horrors. One little example: Patrick Leahy and Harry Reid have embedded Canadian-style “anti-hate” or “thought crimes” legislation in the current U.S. defence appropriation bill, so that senators who don’t want it must also vote to cut off funding to the troops. Count on this legislation being used to stifle their political adversaries, in America at large; just as “human rights” codes are used up here to chill the opponents of the Left’s various social engineering schemes.

From Trudeau’s Omnibus Bill of 1969, forward, I have found, consistently, all my adult life, that this is how the Left operates: in the slimiest and most deceitful available way, in order to short-out public discussion and manufacture the fait accompli. …

David Harsanyi notes that “sticking it to the rich” hurts the economy.

In the United States, the top 20 percent of earners pay 70 percent of all federal taxes. For many, there is no risk in supporting pricey utopian experiments in Washington. “The other half” pays. Certainly, this brand of governance offers little in the way of the celebrated “sacrifice” the president keeps going on about.

Republicans were a major reason for this untenably skewed equation, as they cut taxes as reliably as they increased spending. Democrats, now on a hyper-spending binge for the ages, won’t raise taxes on the vast majority of Americans, either.

As eternal tools of Satan, we understand that the wealthy normally attain their largesse via human misery, corporate plundering and the raping of the environment, but they also tend to be smart. They tend to calculate their taxes and make up any losses by investing less, opening fewer businesses, hiring fewer people and spending less money.

The National Federation of Independent Business claims that the congressional health care plan could cost 1.6 million jobs — most of them in small businesses — and decrease wages across the board.

John Fund posts on an interesting twist in the Obamacare debate. Senator Tom Coburn introduced an amendment that members of Congress must enroll in the federal healthcare program.

..his reading of the 1,000-page health care bill convinced him that everyone would end up being forced into the public plan as private insurance carriers were squeezed out of the market by mandates and regulations. Therefore, if Congress decides a government-run health plan is good enough for the American people, it should be willing to put itself under its care umbrella.

By a 12 to 11 margin, the Senate Health Committee agreed. Senator Kennedy was absent but Chris Dodd, as acting chairman, cast a proxy vote in favor of the Coburn amendment. Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski was the only other Democrat to back the measure. Every Republican save for New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg voted in favor of the Coburn mandate.

Obviously, many members of Congress — who are used to a generous and flexible set of health benefits — have no intention of letting the Coburn mandate become law. …

Fund also posts on the intelligent move Obama made in appointing Hillary to State.

…Ms. Clinton … has kept a low profile not entirely of her own choosing. “Left behind on major presidential trips, overruled in choosing her own staff — Hillary Clinton is the invisible woman at State. But Obama’s brilliant foreign-policy spouse may not stay silent forever,” writes Hillary watcher Tina Brown in her “Daily Beast” column.

Adds Ms. Brown: “It becomes clearer by the day how cleverly Obama checkmated both Clintons by putting Hillary in the topmost Cabinet job.”

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton has been increasingly frustrated by a White House that appears to want to smother all cabinet departments with its central control. The State Department was caught by surprise this month when the Obama administration announced it was sending an ambassador to Syria. Foreign Policy magazine notes that “there may not be much time to convince world leaders she is the person to deal with rather than super envoys like Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell.” The magazine cites “a foreign-policy hand in former president Bill Clinton’s administration” as saying that Mrs. Clinton has to assert her authority and “take on some of the key issues that had been tasked to special envoys.”

The Obama administration has become thick with czars and special foreign policy envoys. Richard Holbrooke oversees Afghan and Pakistani policy. Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell handles the Middle East, and there are other envoys tasked with North Korea, Sudan and climate change. That often doesn’t leave much room for the Secretary of State. …

Fund’s last post concerns the amazing leniency Obama’s Justice Department displayed in prosecuting members of the New Black Panther Party that intimidated voters in the last election. Voter intimidation? Given a punt? Are talking we about the United States of America?

The charges against the Black Panthers were serious. They were accused in a civil complaint by the Bush Justice Department of coercion, threats, intimidation, and hurling racial slurs while at a Philadelphia polling station on Election Day last year. Prosecutors say one of the men brandished a nightstick and pointed it at voters near the polling-place door.

Bartle Bull, a civil rights lawyer and former New York state campaign manager for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, said in an affidavit that the behavior he witnessed in Philadelphia was “the most blatant form of voter intimidation. They were positioned in a location that forced every voter to pass in close proximity to them. The weapon was openly displayed and brandished in plain sight of voters.” …

… This is eye-popping stuff. As Mr. Bull notes, the original Bush civil complaint had aimed at enjoining all 28 of the New Black Panther Party’s chapters around the country from certain political activities. Why did the Obama Justice Department punt?

John Stossel comments on GM.

…Business, to survive, must be a supplicant: it must work hard to please its customers, constantly adapt to meet their changing tastes, beg them to even visit the showroom to consider a purchase.  Business is good.  There are a few cheaters—I made a career reporting on them—but they are exceptions. Overwhelmingly, business serves us very well…

In case readers are wondering if Pickings will point out slimy tactics on the right. Read about the American Conservative Union as it tries to shake down Fed-Ex. Volokh Conspiracy has the story.

Fed-Ex and UPS are embroiled in a nasty political fight. In short, UPS is seeking legislative changes that will increase FedEx’s regulatory and labor costs. Specifically, UPS wants to force FedEx to be covered by the National Labor Relations Act, as UPS is, rather than the Railway Labor Act. FedEx is currently under the latter because it primarily relies upon air shipping. UPS is primarily a ground carrier, so it falls under the NLRA. Unions also support the shift, as it would likely increase unionization within FedEx.

Many conservatives have been critical of UPS’ campaign (see here and here). At least one conservative group, the American Conservative Union, also appears to have sought support for a campaign in support of FedEx, only to shift sides when its request was turned down. According to The Politico, ACU sent met with FedEx officials and sent them a letter seeking over $2 million to fund a “grassroots” campaign against the so-called “Brown Bailout.” “We have reviewed your concerns regarding the NLRB and we believe we could strongly support your position,” the letter said.

Apparently FedEx wasn’t buying. So the ACU just turned its energies to other important issues, right? Within weeks of seeking money from FedEx for the anti-UPS effort, ACU Chairman David Keene joined other conservative activists signing a letter bearing the ACU logo that attacked FedEx for calling the pro-UPS policy proposal the “Brown Bailout.” Labeling what UPS seeks as a “bailout” is improper, the second letter said, because “UPS was not seeking any taxpayer funds — only regulatory reform that would insure equal treatment of both companies under our nation?s labor laws.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on another instance of the politization of the Justice Department, from David Ignatius’ piece on the targeting of the CIA. Rubin also brings up the increasingly familiar theme of Obama using good cop-bad cop tactics to advance his political goals.

…David Ignatius, who already has expressed distaste for the political assault launched by the administration and Congress on the CIA, is beside himself after the latest shenanigans. He writes:

The latest “scandals” involving the Central Intelligence Agency are genuinely hard to understand, other than in terms of political payback. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate criminal actions by CIA officers involved in the harsh interrogation of al-Qaeda prisoners. But the internal CIA report on which he’s said to be basing this decision was referred five years ago to the Justice Department, where attorneys concluded that no prosecution was warranted. …

…Ignatius sympathizes with the president who he says is trying (really, he is!) not to look back. He continues:

CIA veterans were skeptical about Obama’s promise, especially when the president said the next day that Holder would make the final decision. But lawyers who studied the case thought Holder would decide against a prosecutor because he almost certainly couldn’t get convictions. It would be impossible to prove “criminal intent” for CIA interrogators who operated within the framework of the Justice Department’s guidance. And as for “unauthorized practices” outside the guidelines — such as kicks, threats and other abuse — that were revealed in a 2004 report by the CIA’s inspector general, Justice Department attorneys had already concluded that these actions didn’t warrant criminal prosecution.

But then there is Eric Holder marching forward, preparing prosecution with no legal basis. So what’s a president to do? Well, that’s where Ignatius frankly cops out. The president has made some pretty speeches, but what is he doing to halt this travesty? He is either a bystander in his own administration, allowing Holder to run amok, or he is playing a deceitful game of good cop-bad cop, perfectly content to allow Holder to proceed and more than happy to satisfy his craven netroot base. Which is it? …

Peter Wehner comments on Rubin’s piece in regards to the demoralization of the CIA.

… It is strange to me that Barack Obama, the candidate of “change and hope,” has, during the last six months, done a mighty fine job of building a bridge to the Democratic past. It is as if he has decided to skip the 1990’s and aimed to recreate the 1970’s and 1980’s. It seems to me that Obama most represents — in economic policies and national security affairs, if not in style and bearing — Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter. There are of course some exceptions; but there are more similarities than Democrats ought to be comfortable with. Why Obama seems intent on resurrecting the worst of modern liberalism — from government spending (and soon, higher taxes) at home to weakness abroad — is a mystery to me. …

Here is David Ignatius’ article.

As other countries watch the United States lacerate its intelligence service — for activities already investigated or never undertaken — perhaps they admire America’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law. More likely, I fear, they conclude that we are just plain nuts.

The latest “scandals” involving the Central Intelligence Agency are genuinely hard to understand, other than in terms of political payback. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate criminal actions by CIA officers involved in the harsh interrogation of al-Qaeda prisoners. But the internal CIA report on which he’s said to be basing this decision was referred five years ago to the Justice Department, where attorneys concluded that no prosecution was warranted.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are indignant that they were never briefed about a program to assassinate al-Qaeda operatives in friendly countries. Never mind that the program wasn’t implemented, or that the United States is routinely assassinating al-Qaeda operatives using unmanned drones. And never mind that Leon Panetta, the new CIA director — fearing a potential flap — briefed Congress about the program soon after he became aware of it. There was a flap anyway — with a new hemorrhage of secrets and a new shudder from America’s intelligence partners around the world. …

Steve Chapman writes on other disingenuous aspects of Obamacare.

Some statements are inherently unbelievable. Such as: “I am an official of the government of Nigeria, and I would like to deposit $60 million in your bank account.” Or: “I’m Barry Bonds, and I thought it was flaxseed oil.” And this new one: “I’m Barack Obama, and I favor more competition in health insurance.” That, however, is the claim behind his support of a government-run health insurance plan to give consumers one more choice. The president says a “public option” would improve the functioning of the market because it would “force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest.”

He has indicated that while he is willing to discuss a variety of remedies as part of health insurance reform, this one is non-negotiable. House Democrats, not surprisingly, included the government plan in the bill they unveiled Tuesday.

It will come as a surprise to private health insurance providers that they have not had to compete up till now. …

James Lileks says that Biden’s “gaffes” often express more truth than the official statements of the Obama administration.

Newsbusters reminds us it’s 40 years since Ted Kennedy abandoned his date Mary Jo Kopechne.

And we have a picture of the car Teddy should have been driving. Hint; it floats.

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Mark Steyn comments on the important work Congress is doing.

On Friday, July 17, the House of Representatives met to debate … Go on, take a guess: Health care? The cap-and-tax racket? Stimulus Two? No, none of the above. Don’t worry, they’re still spending your money. Wild horses couldn’t stop them doing that.

And, as a matter of fact, that’s the correct answer: wild horses. On Friday, the House passed the Restore Our American Mustangs Act – or ROAM. Like all acronymically cute legislation, its name bears little relation to what it actually does: It’s not about “restoring” mustangs. The federal Bureau of Land Management aims for a manageable population of 27,000 wild mustangs. Currently, there are 36,000, and the population doubles every four or five years. To prevent things getting even more out of hand, the BLM keeps another 30,000 mustangs in holding pens – or, if you prefer, managed-care facilities. That’s to say, under federal management, one in every two “wild” horses now lives in government housing. …

… There aren’t enough of us to pay for all this – for government health care, government banks, government mortgages, government automobiles, government horses, government burros, for cap-and-trade, for stimulating phony-baloney nonjobs like Deputy Executive Associated Assistant Stimulus Resources Manager on the Stimulus Co-ordination & Compliance Commission. The wealthiest 1 percent already pay 40 percent of all taxes, the top 10 percent pay 70 percent of taxes – and there simply are too few of them – or, more to the point, of you: You’ll be surprised what percentage of you fall into “the top 2 percent” by the time Obama is through with you. This isn’t merely Swedenization. As that insouciant 19-million acre annexation suggests, when America Swedenizes, it does it on supersized scale. The salient point of that 1,200-page cap-and-trade monstrosity was that, in its final form, it was so huge that at the time the House voted it into law there was no written version of the bill, because Congressional typists were unable to type as fast as Congress can spend: They’re legislating on such a scale that the poor bleeding typing fingers of the House stenographers can’t keep up. Which means you can’t keep up the payments on it all. If you’ve got a small business, you’re wasting your time. You’re going to be taxed and regulated into the ground because you’re the designated sucker. Tell your kids to forget about the private sector and sign up with the Equine Census Bureau: Jobs for life, early retirement. Government is where it’s at. When in ROAM do as the ROAMens do.

In 1971, the United States Congress recognized mustangs as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” And surely nothing captures the essence of the “pioneer spirit” than living on welfare in a federal care facility while being showered with government contraceptives. Welcome to America in the gelded age.

Jennifer Rubin thinks the future of Obamacare is in question.

…Rasmussen shows how stunning is the rejection of ObamaCare:

Just 35% of U.S. voters now support the creation of a government health insurance company to compete with private health insurers. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 50% of voters oppose setting up a government health insurance company as President Obama and congressional Democrats are now proposing in their health care reform plan. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. In mid-June, 41% of American adults thought setting up a government health insurance company to compete with private health insurance companies was a good idea, but the identical number (41%) disagreed.

The president is often praised for his oratory. But so far his oratory is not convincing the public — or Congress — that we need a government-run health-care plan. And if he can’t do it in July when his approval rating is still in the mid-50’s, when can he? One can understand the push for health-care reform now. The longer they wait, the least attractive both it and its chief salesman seem. …

Rubin also comments on Democrat Ted Van Dyk’s concerns over Obama’s aggressive political strategies.

Democratic veteran Ted Van Dyk does not like what he is seeing:

Frightened by the prospective costs of your health-care and energy plans — not to mention the bailouts of the financial and auto industries — independent voters who supported you in 2008 are falling away. FDR and LBJ, only two years after their 1932 and 1964 victories, saw their parties lose congressional seats even though their personal popularity remained stable. The party out of power traditionally gains seats in off-year elections, and 2010 is unlikely to be an exception.

Van Dyk thinks Obama has delegated too much power to Congress, is over-exposed, has over-promised, and has lost his high-minded tone. On the last point, he observes: “During your campaign, you called for bipartisanship and bridge-building. You promised to reduce the influence of single-issue and single-interest groups in the policy process. Yet, in your public statements, you keep using President Bush as a scapegoat.”

Van Dyk is right on a number of these tactical issues. But he overlooks the central problem with the Obama presidency: he over-estimated his ability to use his personal popularity and an economic crisis to pull the country to the Left. The country didn’t vote for a European welfare state. His mammoth spending plans and attempts to hugely expand government are meeting with skepticism. That is certainly the core of his problem. He’s pushing bad policy ideas to an unreceptive public. …

Paul Wolfowitz reports on the tremendous democratic strides that Indonesia has made. The article was written before the most recent terrorist attacks, yet still gives reason for optimism for this Muslim democracy.

…it seems hard to believe how well Indonesia is doing today. Per capita incomes are more than double what they were when I arrived there as U.S. ambassador 25 years ago. Since 2000, Indonesia’s economy has grown at an average of more than 4% a year. Last year the rate was 6%.

The country has made strides in other areas as well. The war in Aceh has ended. Secessionist sentiment elsewhere in the country has largely disappeared, thanks in part to a transition to democracy. And the Indonesian police have recorded substantial successes against terrorism.

Above all, Indonesia’s political process has displayed a remarkable degree of maturity. Three consecutive free and fair presidential elections is one mark of that. Voters have also shown an impressive degree of common sense. For example, when President Yudhoyono was criticized because his wife often appears in public without a head covering, or jilbab, voters shrugged off the criticism.

No single explanation can account for the progress of such a complex country over the course of the last decade. Mr. Yudhoyono’s leadership deserves a great deal of credit, as does the country’s tradition of tolerance and respect for women. Indonesia’s first two democratically elected presidents were Abdurrahman Wahid, a devout Muslim leader and proponent of religious tolerance, and Megawati Sukarnoputri, a passionate spokeswoman for democracy. Neither presidency was very successful, but the values each embodied were influential. …

Kevin D. Williamson writing in the National Review, looks at the thriving conservatism of the Lone Star State. Compare that to the depression California seems to be entering.

…Texas was among the last states to enter the recession. California is expected to be the last state to leave it. Texas has lots of jobs and not much in the way of taxes. California, the other way around. California has Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Hollywood Republican who presided over enormous expansions of spending and debt. Texas has Rick Perry, a classic conservative hard case who just vetoed a pre-kindergarten spending bill, adding to the record number of vetoes he’s handed down as governor. And it’s not just Perry — the story of Texas politics is full of Democrats who would have been too right-wing to be elected as Republicans in Connecticut or Pennsylvania. Things are a little different down south of the Red River.

Governor Perry sums up the Texas model in five words: “Don’t spend all the money.” Here’s what a good long run of small-government, low-tax conservatism has achieved in Texas: Once a largely agricultural state, Texas today is home to 6 of the 25 largest cities in the country, more than any other state. Texas has a trillion-dollar economy that would make it the 15th-largest national economy in the world if it were, as some of its more spirited partisans sometimes idly suggest it should be, an independent country. By one estimate, 70 percent of the new jobs that were created in the United States in 2008 were created in Texas. Texas is home to America’s highest-volume port, the largest medical center in the world, and the headquarters of more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, having surpassed New York in 2008. While the Rust Belt mourns the loss of manufacturing jobs, Texans are building Bell helicopters and Lockheed Martin airplanes, Dell computers and TI semiconductors. Always keeping an eye on California, Texans have started bottling wine and making movies. And there’s still an automobile industry in America, but it’s not headquartered in Detroit: A couple thousand Texans are employed building Toyotas, and none of them is a UAW member.

There are those who would look at this and say, “Not bad for a state with no income tax and a part-time legislature that meets only every two years.” And there are those who would say, “You could only accomplish this in a state with no income tax and a part-time legislature that meets only every two years.” Texas’s formula for success is classical conservatism: Low spending enables low taxes, while a liberal regulatory environment attracts the capital that makes capitalism work. Texas has a state government that is structurally incapable of taking on the grand political ambitions that states such as California and New York, which leaves the private sector with a relatively open theater of operation. With conservatives at the national level looking to the states for models of what works, Texas can provide a blueprint for a prudent and bipartisan conservatism that is neither hostage to ideological excess nor relegated to merely trying to put Leviathan on a leash. …

Bjorn Lomborg discusses global warming hysteria in the Australian.

… The Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman goes further. After the narrow passage of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill in the US House of Representatives, Krugman said that there was no justification for a vote against it. He called virtually all of the members who voted against it “climate deniers” who were committing “treason against the planet”.

Krugman said that the “irresponsibility and immorality” of the representatives’ democratic viewpoints were “unforgivable” and a “betrayal”. He thus accused almost half of the democratically elected members of the house, from both parties, of treason for holding the views that they do, thereby essentially negating democracy.

Less well-known pundits make similar points, suggesting that people with “incorrect” views on global warming should face Nuremberg-style trials or be tried for crimes against humanity. There is clearly a trend. The climate threat is so great — and democracies are doing so little about it — that people conclude that maybe democracy is part of the problem, and that perhaps people ought not be allowed to express heterodox opinions on such an important topic. …

And John Podhoretz takes a look at the media influence and the passing of Walter Cronkite.

Walter Cronkite has died at the age of 92, and it’s a mark of how the world has changed since his heyday that not a person under the age of 25 will have any idea who he was—and not a person under the age of 25 has probably ever watched the  program that made him, for a time, the most trusted man in America and the most august personage in the news business.

Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called “the adversary culture.” …

… When Rather attempted, in 2004, to bring down a president in the midst of a close reelection bid with a report based on obviously forged papers—a greater journalistic sin than Cronkite’s, by far—he was undone in 12 hours by a lawyer in Atlanta commenting on a blog and a jazz musician in Los Angeles with a blog who demonstrated the papers in question had been produced at least a decade after the report claimed they had. Had there been an Internet in 1968, and military bloggers aplenty, Cronkite’s false conclusion about Tet would have been challenged immediately; we would not have had to wait for Braestrup to publish his enormous book nine years later.

So the passing of Walter Cronkite is a moment to remember an era that has passed, an era toward which we should not experience a moment’s nostalgia.