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Jennifer Rubin continues to follow the story of the meet and greet with Jewish leaders.

It seems that Obama’s obnoxious advice to American Jews to “engage in serious self-reflection” isn’t going over so well with some Democrats. Marty Peretz writes:

Frankly, I am sick and tired of President Obama’s eldering–more accurately, hectoring–Israel’s leaders. It is, after all, they whose country is the target of an armed and ideological cyclone that Obama has done precious little to ease. …

Spengler writes of Michael as metaphor for our culture. This mini obit of Michael Jackson is not as tightly written as is his norm, but it contains some important ideas.

… The public’s grief was unfeigned and profound, for Jackson embodied the desire of a generation, that is, never to grow up. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray had a portrait that revealed his inner decay, and Michael Jackson had a nose. If one image captures the spirit of the times, it is that nose, which narrowed, shrank and finally fell in, in emulation of the failing youth of his fans.

They forgave Jackson his dysmorphia and even his alleged pedophilia, for Jackson only expressed in extreme form his generation’s refusal to age. In his self-disfigurement and eventual self-destruction, this fey child-man fought madly against maturity with a reckless abandon that his fans secretly admired. They loved him, not in spite of his personality failures, but because of them.

America’s cult of youth persists, despite the rapid aging of its population. During the next 10 years, the country’s elderly dependent ratio will rise to 25%, after holding steady for three decades at around 19%. Still, the baby boomers flee from the awful reality. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of cosmetic procedures per year rose fivefold, from 2 million to 10 million, according to the industry association. Its polling data states that 29% of Americans without children, and 24% of Americans with children, would consider plastic surgery. …

… Something astonishing had happened, compared to which the tulip bulb craze and the South Sea bubble seem like models of sobriety. The eternal adolescence that Michael Jackson so ably represented in fantasy turned into the foundation for the great investing wave of the 1990s. The best minds America could train worked hundred-hour-weeks in pizza-box-strewn lofts to launch the next site for web-based greeting cards or virtual-reality sex. Stock analysts valued new issues in proportion to their “burn rate”, assuming that the more money they lost, the more they were worth. The sort of things the world really needed – hardier seeds, safer nuclear energy, more efficient electrical batteries – never turned up on the radar screen.

Equity markets collapsed and never came back. In nominal dollars, the technology-centered NASDAQ index stands at one-third of its February 2000 peak. Real returns to investment in youth culture followed the same trajectory as Michael Jackson’s nose. Undaunted, Americans stopped speculating in technology stocks and speculated instead in houses. The Peter Pan syndrome continued to afflict the American economy. Rather than save, as aging people should, they borrowed more to acquire bigger houses. The housing bubble prolonged America’s collective adolescence for a few more years, for it allowed Americans to spend money on toys rather than saving for the retirement that came rushing at the baby boomers like an oncoming express train.

Youth culture disoriented the entrepreneurs of America so thoroughly that conventional wisdom – including that of the Vatican and the Barack Obama administration – now ignores the entrepreneur as a source of economic growth. …

David Harsanyi writes of the new “science czar”.

Dr. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — better known as the “science czar” — has been a longtime prophet of environmental catastrophes. Never discouraged, but never right.

Thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts online from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s called “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment.”

In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions.

It’s not surprising. Holdren spent the ’70s boogying down to the vibes of an imaginary population catastrophe and global cooling. He also participated in the famous wager between scientist Paul Ehrlich, the now-discredited “Population Bomb” theorist (and co-author of “Ecoscience), and economist Julian Simon, who believed human ingenuity would overcome demand. …

David Warren uses a Sarah Palin WaPo Op-Ed as a jumping off place in an essay on the media’s politics.

… I think it is worth considering here the “evolution” of North American media into what is now a liberal monolith — except Rupert Murdoch’s holdings, and what bleats on talk radio and the Internet.

This is a slightly deeper history than is generally supposed, with some non-political causes. These were economic developments as big as the growth of two-income families, and as subtle as the traffic jams that started to prevent efficient daytime distribution of newspapers. Their aggregate effect was to put America’s afternoon dailies progressively out of business, from the 1950s forward.

Morning papers circulated chiefly in the city cores, among a readership more liberal, and tended to be Democrat. Evening papers circulated more beyond the city, among a readership more conservative, and tended to be Republican. But from any given city, there were two distinct party points of view, and better-informed people read both newspapers. (In Canada, same thing, but Liberal and Conservative parties; in this very town, the examples were the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Journal.)

The loss of those evening papers, and their replacement with network TV news, and other national media such as newsmagazines — guided ultimately by the attitudes of editors and directors in New York City — helps to explain what happened. The media ground on which American political discussion rests, shifted, largely eliminating public expression of conservative views.

The outrage expressed, today, at the very existence of Sarah Palin, not only by progressive Democrats but by urbane “establishment” Republicans, is in many ways the product of this shift. Increasingly, I find, people on the left simply cannot accept any right-wing view as legitimate. The mere fact it can be so labelled puts it beyond the pale. …

Ed Morrissey comments on the Soto Show.

… her performance adds fuel to the Republican argument that Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor not because she was the best possible candidate and not because she was a moderate, but strictly for political purposes.  None of this will affect her tenure on the Supreme Court, but it will provide further evidence that Obama has a big problem in selecting people for his administration, and that there seems to be little effort at vetting nominees for important positions.

In short, every prevarication and stumble Sotomayor makes deepens the impression that Obama is not a competent executive.  That’s the real danger for Obama in these hearings, and the tough questioning of Jeff Sessions and Lindsey Graham has made it a reality.

Karl Rove says they can’t change their minds now about what the stimulus was supposed to accomplish.

So what’s a president to do when the promises he made about his economic stimulus program fail to materialize? If you’re Barack Obama, you redefine your goals and act as if America won’t remember what you said originally. That’s a neat trick if you can get away with it, but Mr. Obama won’t. His words are a matter of public record and he will be held to them.

When it came to the stimulus package, the president and his administration promised, in the words of National Economic Director Larry Summers, “You’ll see the effects begin almost immediately.” Now it’s clear that those promised jobs and growth haven’t materialized.

So Mr. Obama is attempting to lower expectations retroactively, saying in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post that his stimulus “was, from the start, a two-year program.” That is misleading. Mr. Obama never said if his stimulus were passed things might still get significantly worse in the following year.

In February, Mr. Obama said this about the goals of his stimulus package: “I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving four million jobs.” He later explained the stimulus’s $787 billion would “go directly to . . . generating three to four million new jobs.” And his Council of Economic Advisors issued an official analysis showing that the unemployment rate would top out in the third quarter of this year at just over 8%.

That quarter began on July 1, and unemployment is now 9.5%, up from 7.6% when Mr. Obama took office. There are 2.6 million fewer Americans working than there were on the day Mr. Obama was sworn in. …

ABC’s Jake Tapper on Obama’s cabinet as Chicago thugs.

… On This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said of the $787 billion stimulus package, “the reality is it hasn’t helped yet. Only about 6.8 percent of the money has actually been spent. What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it.”

A day later, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer received letters from Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood,  Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar all pointing out the billions headed to Arizona.

Kyl “publicly questioned whether the stimulus is working and stated that he wants to cancel projects that aren’t presently underway,” LaHood wrote to Brewer, a Republican. “I believe the stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know.”  …

Jennifer Rubin has a three Contentions posts today on Sotomayor that are quite good.

After two days of Sotomayor testimony I thought of Jeffrey Rosen’s piece on Sotomayor back in May (before he had to backpedal and support her so as not to embarrass the “team”). I don’t think much of his temperament criticism, but his analysis of her legal and intellectual capabilities seems exactly on the money: …

… Rosen was trying to warn his liberal compatriots that they could do “better” than Sotomayor. He was right and should get some credit for his effort. Imagine if Diane Wood or Kathleen Sullivan, both liberal in philosophy but undeniably impressive, had been up there over the last couple of days. I suspect that conservatives would have been staring at their shoes, struggling for reasons to say “no” and grudgingly acknowledging that the nominee was going to add something to the Court beyond her gender.

The question is not whether Sotomayor will get through, but why the president felt so compelled to select her. If he was desperate to find a Latina, he should have found a wise one.

Daily Beast has a story on liberal hypocrites. Imagine that.

The nation’s largest fundraiser for progressive causes issued checks to thousands of former workers in the last several weeks after settling a $2.15 million class-action suit alleging it subjected workers to grueling hours without overtime pay.

The nonprofit Fund for Public Interest Inc. was set up in 1982 as the fundraising arm of the network of Public Interest Research Groups, which was founded by Ralph Nader. It deploys legions of door-to-door and street canvassers—and once counted a young Barack Obama as one of its New York City organizers—to solicit contributions for the Human Rights Campaign, the Sierra Club, Environment America, and other groups that together spend millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress.

Those organizations often battle with deep-pocketed corporations; the money raised by canvassers is an important source of funds. In many cases, however, the employees collecting those donations made an hourly rate that worked out to less than minimum wage.

The abrupt shuttering of its Los Angeles office after employees took steps to unionize also brought allegations of illegal union-busting from many, including Christian Miller, an L.A. employee from 2002 to 2006 who filed the suit on behalf of 12,000 canvassers and directors. …

It was 30 years ago Jimmy Carter went on TV and told us it was all our fault. Marty Peretz remembers the “malaise” speech.

… It was not only that there was no gasoline. Or that interest rates and unemployment rates were very high. (Remember, if you’re old enough, the “pain index.”)

A catastrophe had also befallen American foreign policy. The shah had fallen and been replaced by the regime of the ayatollahs. …

Couple of Corner posts from Ed Whelan on the baseball frauds – Obama and Sotomayor.

It turns out that I was too quick to let President Obama off the hook for his reference to the longtime stadium of his supposedly beloved White Sox. First, I failed to take note that Obama referred to “Cominskey Field” (rather than “Park”). As one e-mailer puts it:

When race-car driver Jeff Gordon led “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at Wrigley Field and referred to it as as “Wrigley Stadium,” he was booed mercilessly.  At least Gordon had some excuses: he’s not from Chicago, he’s apparently not a baseball fan, and a central feature of his job is not public speaking.  Obama has no excuse, especially given that he said “Cominskey Field” while insinuating that Cubs fans are too high-brow to be real baseball fans. …

Reuters has the pitch of the girly man.

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Jennifer Rubin posts more on the Jewish organizations meeting with Obama.

Was there any dissent? Well, just a smidgen:

The only signs of contention — from Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, and Malcolm Hoenlein, the Presidents Conference’s executive vice chairman — had to do with how Obama was handling his demand for a settlements freeze, not with its substance.

Hoenlein said that peace progress was likelier when there was “no daylight” between Israel and the United States. Obama agreed that it must always be clear that Israel has unalloyed U.S. support, but added that for eight years there was “no daylight and no progress.”

Hmm. Could there have been no progress because the Palestinians, after being offered their own state by Hillary Clinton’s spouse, have chosen rejectionism and violence? No one in attendance raised that possibility, it appears.

Rick Richman reviews the past eight years of Israeli concessions and Palestinian belligerence.

… After the Palestinians rejected an offer of a state at Camp David in 2000, rejected the Clinton Parameters in 2001, and conducted a terror war against Israeli civilians from September 2000-2002, Israel nevertheless agreed in 2003 to the “Performance-Based Roadmap” for the creation of a Palestinian state, despite reservations about the manner in which that plan would actually be implemented.

In 2003 and thereafter, Israel ceased all settlement activity — as it understood that Phase I Roadmap obligation (no new settlements; no building outside settlement boundaries; no financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements) — and believed American officials agreed with its interpretation of that obligation.

In 2004, after the Palestinian Authority failed to meet its own Phase I Roadmap obligation (sustained efforts to dismantle terrorist groups and infrastructure), Israel nevertheless proposed to dismantle every existing settlement in Gaza (not just “outposts”), remove every Israeli soldier, and turn over the entire area to the Palestinian Authority — in exchange for a written American commitment to defensible borders and retention of the major settlement blocs necessary to insure them. …

Abigail Thernstrom voices concerns about Sotomayor.

America is supposed to be a land in which individuals are seen as … individuals. Too many, too few: that is the language of un-American quotas.

Sotomayor has suggested that race and ethnicity, to a substantial degree, define individuals.

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences … our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging,” she said in a 2001 speech.

At her confirmation hearings, she will undoubtedly dance away from such ethnic determinism. But it would appear to be what she believes, since she has reiterated the point several times in different venues.

Andy McCarthy has a rundown of the presidential first pitch.

Though it’s not a widely appreciated fact, we right-winger sports nuts have long known that the sports press is among the media’s leftiest precincts.  So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at how little was said (as in nothing at all) about the reception President Obama received last night when he came out on the field to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the baseball all-star game in St. Louis.  It was a packed house (over 50,000 in attendance), and the jeers were easily discernible.

Don’t get me wrong: there was more cheering than booing.  But that’s to be expected: It was a festive national occasion, and most of us who disagree intensely with Obama’s policies would be more apt to stand and cheer our president respectfully.  That’s what made the booing all the more noticeable to anyone — other than a sports journalist — who heard it.

The media fawning really is so shameless it’s become self-parody.

Mark Steyn recounts the White House response to Senator Kyl’s comments that the stimulus isn’t working.

Heather Mac Donald takes an in-depth look at crime and New York City.

…The cause of this bust-to-boom revival is largely uncontested: the city’s victory over crime. If New York’s lawlessness had remained at its early 1990s levels, the city by now would be close to a ghost town. But the cause of the crime rout itself remains hotly contested. Though New York policing underwent a revolution in 1994, vast swaths of the criminology profession continue to deny that that revolution was responsible for the crime drop. They are wrong—and dangerously so. The transformation of New York policing is the overwhelming reason why the city’s crime rate went into free fall in 1994. And that transformation, in turn, was aided by an increase in the size of the police department.

This truth means that government budget woes must not be allowed to jeopardize the department’s ability to keep crime rates low. The FBI’s designation of New York as the safest big city in the country is an economic marketing tool of immeasurable worth. Lose that designation, and Gotham’s ability to climb out of the recession and retain and attract businesses and residents will be dealt a severe blow.

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Yesterday Chris Hitchens linked to a New Republic article on Iran’s brand of Islam. We have that today.

… The roots of Iran’s current divide to a great extent lie at the turn of the century, when the country’s ayatollahs essentially split into two camps on questions of religion and politics. The first was led by Ayatollah Na’ini, an advocate of what is called the “Quietist” school of Shiism–today best exemplified in the character and behavior of Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq. According to Na’ini, true “Islamic government” could only be established when the twelfth imam returned. Such a government would be the government of God on earth: Its words, deeds, laws, and courts would be absolute and could tolerate no errors. But humans, Na’ini said, were fallible and thus ill-fitted to the sacred task of establishing God’s government. As the pious await the return of the infallible twelfth imam, they must in the interim search for the best form of government. And the form most befitting this period, Na’ini argued, was constitutional democracy. The role of ayatollahs under this arrangement would be to “advise” the rulers and ensure that laws inimical to sharia were not implemented. But it would not be to rule the country themselves.

Opposing Na’ini was an ayatollah named Nuri. He dismissed democracy and the rule of law as inferior alternatives to the divine, eternal, atemporal, nonerrant wisdom embodied in the Koran and sharia. As Ayatollah Khomeini would declare more than once, his own ideas were nothing but an incarnation of Nuri’s arguments. But for the moment, at least, those ideas were on the defensive. It would be decades before they would reemerge to dominate Iranian politics. …

Bill Kristol thinks the American public does not believe in big-government liberalism.

The air is seeping out of the Great Liberal Hot Air Balloon. American liberals have been hoping, wishing, and praying–okay, maybe not praying–for over a quarter-century for an end to the ghastly interlude of conservative dominance ushered in by Ronald Reagan. Surely it was all a bad dream, a waking nightmare, a bizarre deviation from the preordained path of history.

With the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, the nightmare seemed to be ending. And in November 2008, with the election of Barack Obama and increased congressional majorities, it seemed to be over. A new era had dawned.

But did it? Maybe we’re now experiencing a liberal interlude, not a liberal inflection point. After all, only six months into the new administration, even a talented hot air blower like President Obama, assisted by friendly gusts of wind from the media, is having trouble keeping the liberal blimp afloat.

The stimulus hasn’t worked. Cap-and-trade and health care reform are in trouble. The can’t-we-all-get-along foreign policy isn’t leading to a more peaceful world. And the administration seems to have no idea what to do about Guantánamo.

Congressional Democrats are nervous. Even Obama’s media base is concerned. …

Jennifer Rubin has answers to the president’s WaPo op-ed.

… The reality is that the president’s central task — getting the economy back on track — is not going well. So long as the public sees a worsening economic picture and a president busy on items unrelated to the task at hand (saving and creating those jobs) the president is not likely to foil the criticism with a disingenuous op-ed column or two. People are looking for results, precisely what the president has not produced.

Ed Morrissey too.

When a candidate offers platitudes on the stump and avoids specifics, most people consider it smart politics — keeping options open and offending few.  When a President continues to offer the same platitudes after more than five months in office and in the middle of a deepening economic crisis, it becomes clear that the Oval Office has nothing but platitudes to offer.  In practically a rerun of Saturday’s weekly radio address, Barack Obama wastes space in the Washington Post by offering a campaign speech and a cheerleader rally for a failed stimulus bill …

Robert Samuelson says Americans are going to have to decide how much government they want.

The question that President Obama ought to be asking—that we all should be asking—is this: how big a government do we want? Without any-one much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.

We face an unprecedented collision between Americans’ desire for more government services and their almost equal unwillingness to be taxed. The conflict is obscured and deferred by today’s depressed economy, which has given license to all manner of emergency programs, but its dimensions cannot be doubted. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (“The Long-Term Budget Outlook”) makes that crystal-clear. The easiest way to measure the size of government is to compare the federal budget with the overall economy, or gross domestic product (GDP). The CBO’s estimates are daunting. …

Gawker.com says the press corps is getting cozy with the prez.

Reporters from roughly 30 television networks, newspapers, magazines, and web sites celebrated the Fourth of July with Barack Obama at the White House last weekend. Why didn’t you know that? Because they were sworn to secrecy.

We reported yesterday that Politico’s Mike Allen was spotted milling about as a guest at the White House’s “backyard bash” by the pool reporter, who was allowed into the event for 40 minutes and kept in a pen before being ushered out. When Allen quoted from the pool report in his Playbook column the next day, he deleted a reference to his own name and didn’t bother to tell his readers that he was actually at the party. …

Rick Newcombe, head of Creator’s Syndicate, gives us a peek into what it’s like to do business in LA.

If New Yorkers fantasize that doing business here in Los Angeles would be less of a headache, forget about it. This city is fast becoming a job-killing machine. It’s no accident the unemployment rate is a frightening 11.4% and climbing.

I never could have imagined that, after living here for more than three decades, I would be filing a lawsuit against my beloved Los Angeles and making plans for my company, Creators Syndicate, to move elsewhere.

But we have no choice. The city’s bureaucrats rival Stalin’s apparatchiks in issuing decrees, rescinding them, and then punishing citizens for having followed them in the first place. …

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Jennifer Rubin says it’s time for Israel’s supporters to be heard.

News reports indicate that the president will be meeting with heads of Jewish organizations at the White House today. One can imagine that Iran and the U.S. position on Israeli settlements will be on the agenda. We now have “a test,” as Moshe Arens wrote recently, of whether Israel’s self-proclaimed friends in the U.S. have the nerve to tell the president that his policies, if continued, will imperil the security of the Jewish state and do damage to the historic relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

It is tempting and natural for Jewish leaders, many of whom are Democrats and supported the president’s campaign, to pull their punches. Who wants a confrontation with the president? Really, might not the president’s policies “improve” with time? As Jonathan Tobin aptly detailed in his discussion of Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Obama’s Israel policy, the temptation to apologize and rationalize is great. But it is also foolhardy and dangerous. Israel faces an existential threat and U.S.-Israeli relations are at a crossroads. Muteness by American Jewish leaders, or even worse, encouragement of a U.S. policy that is more hostile toward Israel than any in recent memory, may have tragic consequences.

So the question remains: is there a Peter Bergson for the 21st Century? For those needing to freshen up their knowledge of history, this story summarizes how Bergson and a small group of American Jews made a difference at a time when world Jewry also faced an existential threat: …

The D.C. city council wants to be heard about vouchers. They think kids are more important than union leaders.

… The D.C. Council’s letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level and that the opposition exists mainly at the level of the national Democratic Party. Mr. Durbin has suggested that he included the D.C. Council provision in deference to local control. “The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want it in their school district,” he said in March. Well now we know where D.C. stands. We will now see if the national party stands for putting union power and money above the future of poor children.

Christopher Hitchens with a thought about Iran that’ll drive the Dems nuts.

… Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about “the liberation of Iraq,” he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran’s regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a “let’s pretend” election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself. …

David Warren doesn’t think Iran is over.

… The people still in the streets of Iran are … long past disputing the results of their Potemkin presidential election. They are, to paraphrase an old Czech saying from 1968, demanding a new government, while the government demands a new people.

It is almost impossible to find out what is happening on the ground there, in the absence of concerted western efforts to find out. I have seen encouraging accounts of full-dress Revolutionary Guards turning against plainclothed Basij thugs, rather than let them attack unarmed civilians. There are crowd-control issues emerging because the mullahs have arrested more prisoners than their jails can hold, and must therefore herd the new ones into such places as sports arenas — inside which, once there is a quorum, the chants of “death to Khamenei,” “death to the regime,” and “God is great” simply resume. I have also been seeing reports of demonstrators setting fires in various parts of Tehran — a serious matter in the middle of a big drought, with dust storms.

But of course I am not in Iran, and have no way to confirm these things. Nor, as a gravely responsible journalist, can I take the accounts at face value, even of purported eyewitnesses who may well be far too emotionally involved to describe, impartially, the scene before them.

All I or my reader can do is pray. So I suggest we pray very hard for Persia.

Mark Steyn wonders what future is portended for a country that can’t focus on the cap and trade power grab because of Michael Jackson’s death.

Two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, that French bloke who toured Jacksonian America (Andrew, I mean), foresaw our descent into Jacksonian America (Michael, I mean), fretting that the citizens of a self-governing republic would decay into “an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” But even the worst journeyman hack peddling a fin de la civilisation potboiler might find the juxtaposition of the rulers ramming through a massive power grab and tax hike while the oblivious proletariat is feasting on round-the-clock coverage of a self-mutilated misfit of dubious sexual predilections a bit too crude to be plausible. But apparently it works: bread and circus freaks.

At such moments, democracy in America (in Tocqueville’s phrase) seems alarmingly like the zombies in the late Mr. Jackson’s “Thriller” video: It can still stagger about with a certain mesmeric energy but it’s ever more the living dead. As is now traditional, our legislators had not read the bill they voted for. However, for once they had a decent excuse: A 300-page amendment to the original pithy 1,000-page bill was introduced at three in the morning on the day of passage and, alas, because Big Government has now effortlessly outpaced the nimble typing fingers of congressional stenographers, there was no actual physical copy of the bill in existence at the time the House voted for it.

Is that even legal? To pass a law that’s not in writing? Hey, relax. Someone probably tweeted the high points. It’ll be out there somewhere. The White House asked Ashton Kutcher to tweet National HIV Testing Day, so I’m sure they asked Lady Gaga or Perez Hilton to tweet National Unread Unwritten 1,000-Page Bill Day. No taxation without Twitterization!

If George III had put the tea clause 247 pages into a 300-page amendment to a 1,000-page bill, he might still have the colonies.

Debra Saunders notes the religious aspects of global warming belief.

… Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion. While Obama was in Italy preaching big cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, he was losing some of his flock in Washington. The House may have passed the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill largely unread, but Senate Democrats are combing the fine print and not liking what they see. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said of the bill, “We need to be a leader in the world but we don’t want to be a sucker.”

Republicans who oppose the legislation are positively gleeful. For some issues, it can be more fun being part of the opposition, as Democrats are discovering.

During the last administration, Senate Dems could slam President George W. Bush for not supporting the 1997 Kyoto global-warming treaty, secure in the knowledge that they would never have to vote yea or nay on a treaty that they knew could be poison for the coal industry and family checkbooks.

That’s why the Senate in 1997 voted 95-0 against any global-warming treaty that exempted developing nations like China. Now China wants none of the G8′s goal for it to halve its greenhouse gases — and the Dems are stuck with a leader who wants to save the planet.

When the GOP was in the White House, Democrats got to play scientific martyrs. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, would go running to the New York Times or Washington Post with the lament that the Bushies were trying to muzzle his pro-global-warming science. No matter how many times he appeared on TV, the stories kept reporting on allegations that Bush was censoring science.

Now GOP senators have their own Hansen: Alan Carlin of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. …

The Economist reports on the growing dichotomy between Texas and California.

… It is easy to find evidence that California is in a funk. At the start of this month the once golden state started paying creditors, including those owed tax refunds, business suppliers and students expecting grants, in IOUs. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, also said that the gap between projected outgoings and income for the current fiscal year has leapt to a horrible $26 billion. With no sign of a new budget to close this chasm, one credit agency has already downgraded California’s debt. As budgets are cut, universities will let in fewer students, prisoners will be released early and schemes to protect the vulnerable will be rolled back. …

… By contrast, Texas … has coped well with the recession, with an unemployment rate two points below the national average and one of the lowest rates of housing repossession. In part this is because Texan banks, hard hit in the last property bust, did not overexpand this time. But as our special report this week explains, Texas also clearly offers a different model, based on small government. It has no state capital-gains or income tax, and a business-friendly and immigrant-tolerant attitude. It is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state—64 compared with California’s 51 and New York’s 56. And as happens to fashionable places, some erstwhile weaknesses now seem strengths (flat, ugly countryside makes it easier for Dallas-Fort Worth to expand than mountain-and-sea-locked LA), while old conservative stereotypes are being questioned: two leading contenders to be Houston’s next mayor are a black man and a white lesbian. Texas also gets on better with Mexico than California does. …

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Miguel Estrada, who is from Honduras, provides background on events there.

… Something clearly has gone awry with the rule of law in Honduras — but it is not necessarily what you think. Begin with Zelaya’s arrest. The Supreme Court of Honduras, as it turns out, had ordered the military to arrest Zelaya two days earlier. A second order (issued on the same day) authorized the military to enter Zelaya’s home to execute the arrest. These orders were issued at the urgent request of the country’s attorney general. All the relevant legal documents can be accessed (in Spanish) on the Supreme Court’s website. They make for interesting reading.

What you’ll learn is that the Honduran Constitution may be amended in any way except three. No amendment can ever change (1) the country’s borders, (2) the rules that limit a president to a single four-year term and (3) the requirement that presidential administrations must “succeed one another” in a “republican form of government.”

In addition, Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection “shall cease forthwith” in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any “infraction” of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.

As detailed in the attorney general’s complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. …

Last week we posted items on the fundamental dishonesty of the law firm name of Sotomayor & Associates. Stuart Taylor writes on the improper way Soto and her court buddies tried to dispose of the Ricci case.

For all the publicity about the Supreme Court’s 5-4 reversal of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s decision (with two colleagues) to reject a discrimination suit by a group of firefighters against New Haven, Conn., one curious aspect of the case has been largely overlooked.

That is the likelihood that but for a chance discovery by a fourth member of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the now-triumphant 18 firefighters (17 white and one Hispanic) might well have seen their case, Ricci v. DeStefano, disappear into obscurity, with no triumph, no national publicity and no Supreme Court review.

The reason is that by electing on Feb. 15, 2008, to dispose of the case by a cursory, unsigned summary order, Judges Sotomayor, Rosemary Pooler and Robert Sack avoided circulating the decision in a way likely to bring it to the attention of other 2nd Circuit judges, including the six who later voted to rehear the case.

And if the Ricci case — which ended up producing one of the Supreme Court’s most important race decisions in many years — had not come to the attention of those six judges, it would have been an unlikely candidate for Supreme Court review. The justices almost never review summary orders, which represent the unanimous judgment of three appellate judges that the case in question presents no important issues.

McClatchy Newspapers report Soto’s backers go after Ricci.

Supporters of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are quietly targeting the Connecticut firefighter who’s at the center of Sotomayor’s most controversial ruling.

On the eve of Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearing, her advocates have been urging journalists to scrutinize what one called the “troubled and litigious work history” of firefighter Frank Ricci. …

Now Hampshire says Sotomayor polls like Harriet Miers.

Charles Krauthammer looks at the START treaty the kid president signed in Moscow.

… Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama’s intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers — the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) — induced the curtailment of anyone’s programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.

The pursuit of such an offensive weapons treaty could nonetheless be detrimental to us. Why? Because Obama’s hunger for a diplomatic success, such as it is, allowed the Russians to exact a price: linkage between offensive and defensive nuclear weapons.

This is important for Russia because of the huge American technological advantage in defensive weaponry. We can reliably shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. They cannot. And since defensive weaponry will be the decisive strategic factor of the 21st century, Russia has striven mightily for a quarter-century to halt its development. Gorbachev tried to swindle Reagan out of the Strategic Defense Initiative at Reykjavik in 1986. Reagan refused. As did his successors — Bush I, Clinton, Bush II. …

Prince Charles announced we have “96 months left” to save the planet. His grandmum lived to be 100. We can hope Elizabeth does the same. Mark Steyn comments on the devastation that would be created by the “warm-mongers”.

… “I don’t think a lot of electricity is a good thing,” said Gar Smith of San Francisco’s Earth Island Institute a few years back. “I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity,” he continued, regretting that African peasants “who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot-pedal-powered sewing machines” are now slumped in front of “Desperate Housewives” reruns all day long.

One assumes Gar Smith is sincere in his fetishization of bucolic African poverty, with its vibrantly rampant disease and charmingly unspoilt life expectancy in the mid-forties. But when an hereditary prince starts attacking capitalism and pining for the days when a benign sovereign knew what was best for the masses he gives the real game away. Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th century Russian peasant, and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.

Environmentalism opposes that kind of mobility. It seeks to return us to the age of kings when the masses are restrained by a privileged elite. Sometimes they will be hereditary monarchs, such as the Prince of Wales. Sometimes they will be merely the gilded princelings of the government apparatus – Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi. In the old days, they were endowed with absolute authority by God. Today, they’re endowed by Mother Nature, empowered by Gaia to act on her behalf. But the object remains control – to constrain you in a million ways, most of which would never have occurred to Henry VIII, who, unlike the new cap-and-trade bill, was entirely indifferent as to whether your hovel was “energy efficient.” The old rationale for absolute monarchy – Divine Right – is a tough sell in a democratic age. But the new rationale – Gaia’s Right – has proved surprisingly plausible. …

David Harsanyi asks, “What if Sarah Palin was president?”

Can you believe the gall of these Sarah Palin cultists? Presidential aspirations? This is a woman who named one of her kids “Track,” for God’s sake. (Well, if it really is her kid.)

William Buckley once wrote that he would rather “entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

But running government is no longer a suitable vocation for the bumbling proletariat. It’s for folks with schoolin’ and such. It’s a job for herculean thinkers with Ivy League degrees. In other words, no one from Alaska need apply.

Former sports reporters certainly won’t do. We need former constitutional scholars. Who else, after all, has a better understanding of how to undermine the document?

Really, where would we be if a bumpkin like Palin were president? With her brainpower, we’d probably be stuck with a Cabinet full of tax cheats, retreads and moralizing social engineers.

If Palin were president, chances are we’d have a gaffe-generating motor mouth for a vice president. That’s the kind of decision-making one expects from Miss Congeniality.

The job of building generational debt is not for the unsophisticated. Enriching political donors with taxpayer dollars takes intellectual prowess, not the skills of a moose-hunting point guard. …

Michael Barone thinks the American public is finally deciding the Dems are too far left.

The financial system collapsed. Housing prices cratered. Unemployment is at a record high for the last quarter-century. The Democratic president has a solidly positive job rating.

And yet we Americans have not suddenly become collectivists. The economic distress of the 1930s led Americans to favor less reliance on markets and more on government. The economic distress of the 1970s led Americans to favor less reliance on government and more on markets. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect, as many political liberals have been predicting, that the economic distress of the late 2000s will produce a shift in the 1930s direction. But it doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

Or so the polling evidence tells us. Last month’s Washington Post/ABC poll reported that Americans favor smaller government with fewer services to larger government with more services by a 54 to 41 percent margin — a slight uptick since 2004. The percentage of Independents favoring small government rose to 61 percent from 52 percent in 2008.  …

Even the Toronto Globe and Mail is getting the message.

… We’ve seen him in action for a bit more than six months. What we can say with confidence, now that we have the evidence of his actions, is that had he run on (a) transforming the U.S. economy by massive federal government intervention, (b) taking an owner’s stake in the automobile industry, (c) transforming the rules of America’s energy economy, (d) instituting a national health-care system – all of these simultaneously and in the centre of a financial meltdown – Barack Obama wouldn’t merely have lost the election, he wouldn’t have got as many votes as gnarly old Ross Perot did in an election long past. He wouldn’t, in other words, have beaten a bad-tempered, egotistical spoiler.

We have also seen enough to make some observations on the observations of his once and now-no-more mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. You will remember when the ravings of Mr. Wright finally got too much for the candidate, when the more pacific words of the “great speech” on race that he could “no more disown him than I can my white grandmother” were rendered inoperative by Mr. Wright’s persistently obnoxious presence. Mr. Obama pushed him aside.

The pastor had one last shot of his own about his onetime “son.” That was the line, “He’s a politician; I’m a pastor. He’s got to do what politicians do.” We know what he meant by “politician”: one who is “forced” to say one thing to get elected, and do another; a person who conceals an agenda under cloudy rhetoric, a person whose calling – politics – is implicitly, essentially, deceptive.

The description is faithful to the commonplace understanding of “politician” today. It matches the stereotype, because the stereotype is a match for (most) of the reality. Mr. Wright may have been wrong in very much, but he knew his “son.” Mr. Obama is a politician, and very much a politician in that harsh, unflattering and somewhat cruel understanding Mr. Wright gave the term. …

The Economist reports on the current scheme to collect solar power in the Sahara.

Jon Stewart turns his dimples against The One in “That’s Great, Now Fix the Economy.”

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Claudia Rosett writes on the visit to Moscow.

… In Obama’s version of history, Soviet communism (which he referred to not by name but as “old political and economic restrictions”) came to an end through some sort of brotherly mass movement: “The change did not come from any one nation,” he told an audience of Russian students. “The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.”

Apart from such details as Soviet killings in the Baltics, violent upheaval in Georgia, the slaughter in Romania that preceded the overthrow of President Nicolae Ceausescu, the early stirrings of war in Chechnya, the genocide amid the breakup of Yugoslavia, and what not, Obama is broadly correct. The Cold War ended without the feared exchange of nuclear weapons and all-out global conflagration. And, yes, it ended thanks in significant part to the courage and determination of a great many people in places such as Prague, Warsaw and Moscow itself.

But missing from Obama’s philosophy is the immense role played by the U.S. America stood for decades as a bulwark of freedom. Americans fought real wars in such places as Korea and Vietnam. Americans kept brilliantly alive a philosophy of democratic government and free markets, which offered a beacon to oppressed people of the world, and exported both ideas and inventions that have vastly enriched mankind. Following the fiascoes of Jimmy Carter–on whose watch the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Iran had its Islamic revolution–Americans elected Ronald Reagan. His version of “reset” was to stop the appeasing and apologizing, and to reassert America’s system as one of virtue and America’s global role as one of both moral and military strength. …

Now that we have had a good long look at this president, Rasmussen reports his polls have gone from +30 to -8. Will he learn? Probably not. He will retreat to the scene of his only triumphs – a teleprompted speech. Thing is, someday nobody will tune in.

It’s been a week since Sarah’s swan song. Some of our favorites have comments. John Fund is first.

… Karl Rove acknowledges the unusual battering Ms. Palin has endured in recent months, but told Fox News that GOP leaders are still puzzled by her decision. “If she wanted to escape the ethics investigations and save the taxpayers money, she’s now done that,” he said. Unfortunately, he added, her decision “sent a signal that if you do this kind of thing to a sitting governor like her, you can drive her out of office.”

But Palin friends say such commentary misses the real point. “The Beltway media can’t understand someone not consumed with presidential ambition,” one told me. “Maybe Sarah Palin won’t run for president and maybe her family situation made it tougher to handle the barrage of attacks that come with that territory. The real issue that should be asked is why a mean-spirited system has to treat people who run like that, instead of why someone may choose not to go through it.”

All good points, and they lead me to conclude that Ms. Palin mostly likely will not run for president — in 2012, at least. She made many mistakes after suddenly being thrust into the national spotlight last year, but hasn’t merited the sneering contempt visited upon her by national reporters. She simply was not their kind of feminist — and they disdained the politically incorrect life choices she had made. …

David Warren.

… Her course cannot be easy: she knows the enemy, and she knows that the enemy “debates” by demonizing people, not by rational argument. From her view, she has received a significant personal insight into just how degrading her political enemies can be, and the whole “progressive” culture that supports them.

The word “populist” could mean many things, both good and bad. To my mind, Palin currently has both good and bad populist qualities. But these include the very best quality: a real, visceral identification, amounting to love, for the people who actually do America’s work, take America’s risks, raise America’s children, and believe in God. These people are held in contempt by the progressive elites — they are tax fodder — just as Palin is held in contempt, as “Caribou Barbie.”

Quite frankly, she has scores to settle, and on behalf of all those people. That is what got her into politics to begin with, at the PTA level, and that is what will animate the woman on the national stage. She has the heart of a lion, and she will not run away.

And Tony Blankley.

Professional politicians and political journalists don’t waste energy on political corpses. They reserve their energy — positive or negative — for viable politicians.

Thus, an intriguing part of the Sarah Palin phenomenon is the intensity of response to her every word and move — from both Republican Party and Democratic Party professionals and from the conventional media. The negative but sustained passion being expressed by the professional Washington political class against her tends to belie its almost unanimous assertion that she is washed-up.

I happened to be on CNN Friday just as the story was breaking of Palin’s resignation as governor of Alaska, and for the next hour, I was the only on-air guest — Republican, Democrat, journalist, politician — who was not overtly contemptuous and dismissive of Palin and her political future. On Sunday, as a panelist on ABC’s “This Week,” I was similarly situated.

What is it about Palin that elicits such furious bipartisan Washington dismissiveness? …

Camille Paglia gets to weigh in too.

… She does her own thing with seat-of-the-pants gusto. It’s why she remains hugely popular with the Republican grass-roots base — as I know from listening to talk radio. Callers coming fresh from her rallies are always heady with infectious enthusiasm.

Of course you’d never know that from reading hit jobs like Todd Purdum’s sepulchral piece on Palin in the current Vanity Fair. Scurrying around Alaska with his notepad, Purdum still managed to find comically little to indict her with. Anyone with a gripe is given the floor; fans are shut out. This exercise in faux objectivity is exposed at key points such as Purdum’s failure to identify the actual instigator of Palin’s extravagant clothing bills (a crazed, credit-card-abusing stylist appointed by the McCain campaign) and his prissy characterization of Palin’s performance at the vice-presidential debate as merely “adequate.” Hey, wake up — Palin cleaned Biden’s clock! By the end, Biden was sighing and itching to split.

Whether Palin has a national future or not will depend on her willingness to hit the books at some point and absorb more information about international history and politics than she has needed to know in her role as governor. She also needs a shrewder, cooler take on the mainstream media, with its preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags. The Northeastern media establishment is in decline, and everyone knows it. Palin should not have gotten into a slanging match with David Letterman or anyone else who has been obsessively defaming her or her family. Let surrogates do that stuff. …

Karl Rove says the administration can’t be trusted with numbers.

… Mr. Biden has admitted that the administration “misread” the economy. But he explained that away on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday by saying the administration had used “the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there” to draw up its stimulus plan. That’s not true.

The Blue Chip consensus is an average of some four dozen economic forecasts. In January, the consensus estimated that GDP for 2009 would shrink by 1.6% and that unemployment would top out at 8.3%. Team Obama assumed both higher GDP growth (it counted on a contraction of 1.2%) and lower peak unemployment (8.1%) than the consensus.

Instead of relying on the Blue Chip consensus, Mr. Obama outsourced writing the stimulus to House appropriators who stuffed it with every bad spending idea they weren’t previously able to push through Congress. Little of it aimed to quickly revive the economy. More stimulus money will be spent in fiscal years 2011 through 2019 than will be spent this fiscal year, which ends in September.

On Sunday, Mr. Biden, backpedaling from his drop-kick comments, said that “no one anticipated, no one expected that the recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of the money.” …

Rasmussen reports Sotomayor’s polls have declined. Corner with details.

An interesting by-play has arisen in the Sotomayor quest for the Court. Seems her moon-lighting as Sotomayor & Associates has struck some nerves. This from a NY personal injury attorney.

It’s been bugging me since I saw it in the New York Times this morning: Sonia Sotomayor gave a lousy defense to an ethics charge over the name of her solo law practice, “Sotomayor & Associates.”

To backtrack a bit, she had a home office that overlapped her tenures at the District Attorney’s office and her stint at Pavin & Harcourt back in 1983-1986. Despite it being a solo practice, she called it “Sotomayor & Associates,” which is misleading since the Times has now confirmed what I had guessed at a month ago: That there were no actual associates.

Here is the defense, as laid out by an expert that the White House apparently retained after my posting appeared: The authority for prohibiting the misleading firm name was merely “advisory.”

That defense is — as defenses go when you are awaiting confirmation to the highest court in the land — just awful. I mean not just a little bit bad, but truly wretched to the point of embarrassing. ..

Turns out some states are quite clear in regarding “& Associates” as unethical. Culled from Volokh Conspiracy.

… Subject to qualifications below, the use of the word “Associates” in a law firm name, letterhead or other professional designation—such as “Doe Associates”—is false and misleading if there are not at least two licensed attorneys practicing law with the firm. Similarly, the use of the phrase “& Associates” in a firm name, letterhead or other professional designation—such as “Doe & Associates”—is false and misleading if there are not at least three licensed attorneys practicing law with the firm. …

Along comes Justice Ginsburg to tell us Sotomayor should be confirmed.

… Ginsburg offers this feeble defense of Sotomayor’s “wise Latina woman” comment: “Think of how many times you’ve said something that you didn’t get out quite right, and you would edit your statement if you could.” Ginsburg is evidently unaware that Sotomayor’s comment was part of a text that Sotomayor herself prepared and later published as a law-review article (and that she repeated on several occasions). …

Professor Ernö Rubik inventor of Rubik’s Cube now has Rubik’s 360. London Times has the story.

His cube was one of the most popular and infuriating toys of all time. Now Professor Ernö Rubik is hoping that the sphere will bring sleepless nights to the world’s obsessive puzzlers.

The creator of Rubik’s Cube is back with his first new puzzle for almost 20 years and early indications are that it is going to be every bit as irritating as the original.

Rubik’s 360, which goes on sale next week, features six small balls inside three interlocking spheres. The task is to lock each ball into colour-coded capsules on the outermost sphere. Professor Rubik said of his cube that it was “easy to understand the task, but hard to work out the solution”. It is just as aggravating to crack the 360. …

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Using the NY Times article on Obama’s youthful foolishness at Columbia, Caroline Glick warns Israel not to get ambushed by these views since he has yet to embrace the world like an adult.

… THERE IS NOTHING shocking about Obama’s embrace of radical politics as a college student. Particularly at Columbia, adopting such positions was the most conformist move a student could make. What is disturbing is that these views have endured over time, although they were overtaken by events 20 years ago.

Just six years after Obama penned his little manifesto, the Iron Curtain came crashing down. The Soviet empire fell not because radicals like Obama called for the US to destroy its nuclear arsenal, it fell because president Ronald Reagan ignored them and vastly expanded the US’s nuclear arsenal while deploying short-range nuclear warheads in Europe and launching the US’s missile defense program while renouncing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

On Monday Obama arrived in Moscow for a round of disarmament talks with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. According to most accounts, while in Moscow Obama plans to abandon US allies Ukraine and Georgia and agree to deep cuts in US missile defense programs. In exchange, Moscow is expected to consider joining Washington in cutting back on its nuclear arsenal just as the likes of Iran and North Korea build up theirs.

Of course, even if Russia doesn’t agree to scale back its nuclear arsenal, Obama has already ensured that the US will slash the size of its own by refusing to fund its modernization. In short, Obama is working to implement the precise policy he laid out as an unoriginal student conformist 26 years ago.

BY NOW of course, none of this is particularly surprising. Since entering office seven long months ago, Obama has demonstrated that his guiding philosophy for foreign affairs is that the US and its allies are to blame for their adversaries’ hostility toward them. All that needs to happen for peace to break out throughout the world is for the US and its allies to quit clinging to their guns and religions and start apologizing for their rudeness. In furtherance of this goal, Obama has devoted himself to putting the screws on US allies, slashing America’s defense budget and embarking on a worldwide tour apologizing to US adversaries.

The basic reality that the US is being led by a radical ideologue who clings to his views in the face of overwhelming proof of their falsity is the most fundamental fact that world leaders must reckon with today as they formulate policies to contend with the Obama administration. This is first and foremost the case for Israel. …

Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t like the idea of reintroducing beavers to Scotland.

… For me, the problem with reintroducing beavers to Scotland, where they haven’t lived for 400 years, is that pretty soon the Highlands will be a broken and desolate place full of nothing but poisoned oxbow lakes, dead deer and grouse moors that look like the UAE’s empty quarter.

To understand the problem, we need to go back to the 19th century and the creation of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Obviously man knew best, so to make sure it was as diverse as possible, bears and wolves were not encouraged with quite the same fervour as various deery things. Which meant that pretty soon the whole place was awash with elk. Lovely.

Unfortunately, elk absolutely love aspen trees, which meant that soon enough they were all gone. And that was a problem for Johnny beaver, because without the aspens he couldn’t dam the rivers and streams. So he moved out. And without the dams, the water meadows dried hard in the summer months, meaning there was no grass for the deery things to eat. So they started to move out as well.

Unwilling to accept they’d made a mess, the authorities blamed the migration on carnivores and started a cull of wolves and bears. Which meant their numbers started to fall, too. Until in the 1950s pretty much all any visitor could see on a trip to Yellowstone was about a million bored elk wondering if the fender from Wilbur and Myrtle’s Oldsmobile would keep them going till the aspen trees came back.

And then came the clincher. Unlike the Indians, who had regularly burnt the region, the whitey eco-ists had steadfastly waged war against all forest fires. This meant the ground was littered with tinder-dry fallen twigs and branches. So when the lightning struck in 1988 and the fire started, it burnt close to the ground rather than in the trees. This meant it burnt hot and could not be extinguished and the result of that was simple. The soil in the entire park – all 2m acres of it – was rendered sterile and useless.

That’s what will happen to Scotland. Oh, they may say the beavers will be monitored and they’ll be good for the tourist industry. But that’s what Dickie Attenborough said about Jurassic Park just before the T-rex ate his children. …

David Harsanyi thinks we need better standards for cabinet members.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood can’t be serious.

Or, at least, I hope not.

When I had the chance to meet him here at The Post recently, I was fully prepared to endure a healthy dose of rambling about how antiquated, inefficient, money-losing choo-choo trains would replace cars.

One can also be prepared to only laugh on the inside when a Cabinet member asserts, in all earnestness, that cycling our kids to school en masse (and this adult has yet to master the art of driving his kids to school) was the answer to our national congestion problems.

One could even deal with LaHood’s hyperbolic statement, “America is one big pothole,” because as anyone who lives in America knows, this is unqualified bunk. Acting as if everything is falling apart, though, is a rhetorical imperative during stimulus season.

But when LaHood berated me for suggesting that flying in a commercial airplane was a safe mode of transportation, I knew he was perfect for a Cabinet position. …

Jennifer Rubin was watching the Sunday shows. She comments on Colin Powell.

Colin Powell on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday spoke out in favor of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination. It was vintage Powell — the Powell who is light on facts, wedded to affirmative action, dismissive of critics, and either factually ill-informed or banking on his audience being so. Asked about Sotomayor, he declared:

She’s from my neighborhood, yes. She seems like a very gifted and accomplished woman. She certainly has an open and liberal bent of mind, but that’s not disqualifying. But she seems to have a judicial record that seems to be balanced and tries to follow the law.

What we can’t continue to have is to have somebody like a Judge Sotomayor who is announced, and based on one simple tricky but nonetheless case at the Supreme Court has now decided, have her called a racist, a reverse-racist, and she ought to withdraw her nomination because we’re mad at her.

First, there is the trademark provincialism. Obama was “transformative,” as in, how great to have an African American president! And Sotomayor is from his neighborhood. Case closed, right? …

And she noted Joe Biden’s Israel/Iran statements.

With Joe Biden you never know if he is speaking out of school (i.e., candidly revealing what is administration policy) or just making stuff up. On the Sunday circuit he seemed to give Israel the go-ahead to strike Iran: …

And once again Biden is slapped down.

IBD editors watched Biden’s stimulus gaffe.

Mark Steyn Corner post on health care.

Good news from Boulder. The execrable Ward Churchill was denied reinstatement. Eugene Volokh has the story.

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Go figure! Gallop releases a poll that says we’re becoming more conservative. Peter Wehner comments.

… This is part of a broader movement we’re seeing since Obama was elected president. The country, by about a two-to-one margin, sees itself moving more toward conservatism than liberalism. And even in the Age of Obama, the tide seems to be with rather than against conservatism. If an ideological realignment is going on, it seems to be somewhat in the opposite direction of what Obama and his supporters had hoped for.

It’s much too early to make any definitive judgments about things at this point; the significance of Obamaism to American conservatism depends on what happens once the effects of his actions hit shore. But I think it’s fair to say that at this point, the public’s wariness about the course the president has set us on is growing and resistance to his policies is increasing. …

Mark Steyn repeats his warning about state health care. This is the ball game.

Health care is a game-changer. The permanent game-changer. The pendulum will swing, and one day, despite their best efforts, the Republicans will return to power, and, in the right circumstances, the bailouts and cap-and-trade and Government Motors and much of the rest can be reversed. But the government annexation of health care will prove impossible to roll back. It alters the relationship between the citizen and the state and, once that transformation is effected, you can click your ruby slippers all you want but you’ll never get back to Kansas. …

… Government-directed health care is a profound assault on the concept of citizenship. It deforms national politics very quickly, and ensures that henceforth elections will always be fought on the Left’s terms. I find it hard to believe President Obama and his chums haven’t looked at Canada and Europe and concluded that health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. He doesn’t say that, of course. He says his objective is to “control costs.” Which is the one thing that won’t happen. Even now, health-care costs rise far faster under Medicare than in the private sector. …

… “Morality” is always the justification. Inaugurating Britain’s National Health Service on July 5, 1948, the health minister, Nye Bevan, crowed: “We now have the moral leadership of the world.” That’s how Obamacare is being sold: Even the New York Times reports (in paragraph 38) that 77 percent of Americans are content with their health care. But they feel bad about all those poor uninsured waifs earning 75 grand a year. So it will make us all feel better if the government “does something.” Not literally “feel better”: We’ll be feeling sicker, longer, in dirtier waiting rooms. But our disease-ridden bodies will be warmed by the glow of knowing we did the right thing. …

… the acceptance of the principle that individual health is so complex its management can only be outsourced to the state is a concession no conservative should make. More than any other factor, it dramatically advances the statist logic for remorseless encroachments on self-determination. It’s incompatible with a republic of self-governing citizens. The state cannot guarantee against every adversity and, if it attempts to, it can do so only at an enormous cost to liberty. A society in which you’re free to choose your cable package, your iTunes downloads, and who ululates the best on American Idol but in which the government takes care of peripheral stuff like your body is a society no longer truly free.

In a nanny state, big government becomes a kind of religion: the church as state. Tommy Douglas, the driving force behind Canadian health care, tops polls of all-time greatest Canadians. In Britain, after the Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” be July 5, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation.

They can call it Dependence Day.

Robert Samuelson asks if economists are so smart, how come they missed the freight train bearing down on us in the last few years?

… One intriguing subplot of the economic crisis is the failure of most economists to predict it. Here we have the most spectacular economic and financial crisis in decades — possibly since the Great Depression — and the one group that spends most of its waking hours analyzing the economy basically missed it. Oh, a few economists can legitimately claim some foresight. But they are a handful. Most were as surprised as the rest of us.

Why? This is a compelling question without, as yet, a compelling answer. Indeed, so far as I can tell, economists have not engaged in rigorous self-criticism to explain their lapse. We’ve had some casual theories and some partisan recriminations: “Free-market ideology” is a standard scapegoat on the assumption that most economists are “free-market ideologues.” But that’s not true. In any case, the crisis surprised liberal and conservative economists, Republicans and Democrats alike. …

Bret Stephens on the wise fool, Robert McNamara. He compares him to another wise fool. Guess who?

Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said that “in preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” Robert S. McNamara, who spent many years thinking about the Vietnam War, first as an architect and then as a critic (and getting it wrong on both ends), was a man who believed mainly in plans.

McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. Whatever else distinguishes JFK’s New Frontier or LBJ’s Great Society from Barack Obama’s “New Foundation,” this too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems — the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate. These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase “the best and the brightest” has been scrubbed of its intended irony.

When McNamara — the “Whiz Kid” from Ford — was first named defense secretary, in December 1960, Time magazine gushed that he “reads widely and well (current choices: The Phenomenon of Man, W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Growth). . . . His mind, says a friend who has seen him in Ann Arbor discussions, ‘is a beautiful instrument, free from leanings and adhesions, calm and analytical.’” …

Jonathan Tobin gives McNamara a once over.

… It would have been far better for McNamara to spend more time apologizing for his inept micromanaging of the war effort that squandered American and Vietnamese lives on a massive scale. It was ironic that in his later years he curried favor among the liberal intellectuals by calling Curtis LeMay a “war criminal” for the massive bombing of Japanese cities in 1945. While in control of the effort in Vietnam, he attempted the opposite strategy, employing American air power in minute pinprick attacks on selected targets in North Vietnam rather than using an overwhelming conventional attack. His tactic of gradual escalation only convinced the North Vietnamese that the Americans were not serious about winning the war and inflicted no serious damage. The lives lost in this campaign were simply thrown away. The North was not brought to the negotiating table until McNamara’s flawed ideas were discarded. …

… McNamara would have also done better to think again about the consequences of his 11 years at the head of the World Bank and its massive building projects in the Third World. Though it would be wrong to dismiss everything that institution has accomplished as meaningless, the truth is, most of the investments it made around the globe during his time as its head served more to reinforce the control of corrupt local elites than to aid the poor. …

Kimberley Strassel follows up on the EPA’s silencing of Alan Carlin, a man-made global warming skeptic.

… Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. “We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA,” the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from “any direct communication” with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: “The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.” Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.

The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. …

Turns out this summer’s heat wave in Europe has created havoc with France’s river-based nuclear generating capacity. London Times has the story.

France is being forced to import electricity from Britain to cope with a summer heatwave that has helped to put a third of its nuclear power stations out of action.

With temperatures across much of France surging above 30C this week, EDF’s reactors are generating the lowest level of electricity in six years, forcing the state-owned utility to turn to Britain for additional capacity.

Fourteen of France’s 19 nuclear power stations are located inland and use river water rather than seawater for cooling. When water temperatures rise, EDF is forced to shut down the reactors to prevent their casings from exceeding 50C. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Harsanyi’s latest looks at stimulus results.

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

Let’s take his advice.

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

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

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

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

Roger Simon posts pessimism.

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

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

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

More of this from Power Line.

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

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

WSJ reports some toll roads have banished cash.

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

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

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

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

WSJ with interesting elephant pic.

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Have the best 4th ever. From Reason TV.

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

And the WSJ reports on efforts to find better fireworks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Krauthammer has a go at the Ricci decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Steyn comments.

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

Shorts from National Review.

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

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

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

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

Borowitz reports Ruth Madoff has broken her silence.