Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Michael Young, in Beirut’s Lebanon Daily Star, explains that just being anti-Bush is not a cohesive policy for the Middle East.

There is great discomfort these days among those who backed Barack Obama’s “new” approach to the Middle East when he took office 10 months ago. That shouldn’t surprise us. Everything about the president’s shotgun approach to the region, his desire to overhaul all policies from the George W. Bush years simultaneously, without a cohesive strategy binding his actions together, was always going to let the believers down.  …

…Obama feels that an America forever signaling its desire to go home will make things better by making America more likable. That’s not how the Middle East works. Politics abhor a vacuum, and as everyone sees how eager the US is to leave, the more they will try to fill the ensuing vacuum to their advantage, and the more intransigent they will be when Washington seeks political solutions to prepare its getaway. That explains the upsurge of bombings in Iraq lately, and it explains why the Taliban feel no need to surrender anything in Afghanistan.

Engagement of Iran and Syria has also come up short, though a breakthrough remains possible. However, there was always something counterintuitive in lowering the pressure on Iran in the hope that this would generate progress in finding a solution to its nuclear program. Engagement is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end among countless others. Where the Obama administration erred was in not seeing how dialogue would buy Iran more time to advance its nuclear projects, precisely what the Iranians wanted, while breaking the momentum of international efforts to force Tehran to concede something – for example temporary suspension of uranium enrichment. For Obama to rebuild such momentum today seems virtually impossible, when the US itself has made it abundantly clear that it believes war is a bad idea. …

Roger L. Simon blogs on an unlikely topic. Al Jazeera more informative than CNN? And his comments get even better.

It’s probably no surprise to readers of this blog that no hotel we have stayed on our European vacation has had Fox News. CNN International and BBC World have been the exclusive English language stations, so it’s easy to guess the view of America that was projected – not a lot about the Tea Party movement but endless blather about how Teddy Kennedy was the greatest statesman since Cicero and thank various deities that massive health care reform in the backward USA will soon be enacted in his memory. Nauseating, of course, but you watch because it’s the only thing on. Call it MA (Masochism Abroad).

And then it seemed to get worse. We checked into the Hotel Villa Malaspina in a southern suburb of Verona and found neither CNN, nor the BBC on our room TV. No English-language channel at all, only something listed as “ALLJAZZ,” which I took to be easy listening and dismissed. Only accidentally surfacing for a soccer match did I discover it was Al Jazeera in English! …

I expected the worst, of course, but was soon astonished. Except for those stories when the “I”-word was prominent (you know, that little country south of Lebanon), Al Jazeera was clearly better, more honest, more informative and more entertaining than CNN International or the BBC. And kinder to the US. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Also, since much of the news they reported was coming from the Middle East, they seemed better informed about such things as the death of the Iraqi Shiite leader Hakim (they referred to Saddam Hussein flatly as a fascist, something you rarely hear on CNN) and the Al Qaeda suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia (they had nothing but withering contempt for Al Qaeda – no pussy-footing “insurgent” rhetoric for them). …

David Warren comments that previous generations have coped with more severe pandemics.

That “Spanish flu” of 1918-19 — which infected perhaps one-third of the world’s population, and killed up to one-fifth of those — focused chiefly on healthy young adults. Perhaps 100 million died. There is no way to establish an accurate number, but this was possibly more than the Black Death of the 14th century, in volume, if not proportion to previous population. More, by far, than died violently in the course of the Great War, and yet the sufferings in the trenches play a larger part in our historical memory. …

This struck me when reading English mediaeval history. Perhaps one-third of the English were wiped out in the “Great Pestilence” of 1348-50, and many villages disappeared from the landscape. (In other parts of Europe, three-quarters or more of the people were lost, and whole regions became de-populated). The event hardly went unnoticed, but it is not writ so large in contemporary accounts. Dynastic changes take precedence in the chronicles. The fallout from the plague is nearly ignored: such demographic effects as the loss of all the clergy in many places, who had to expose themselves repeatedly in the course of delivering last rites; the sudden loss of cultural continuities that this entailed. …

… Our ancestors took these things in their stride.

Should we? Granting, of course, that we should do whatever is in our power to limit death and suffering — as human beings have always done, according to their lights — should we give the matter more or less weight than our ancestors did?

There was a tendency in the past, especially the Christian past, to look upon plagues, and every other unavoidable disaster, as acts of divine judgment. …

…It is a paradox, worth pondering, that with such “backward” attitudes, and suspicions of divine retribution, our ancestors may have done a better job of coping with disaster.

Seems the Center for Disease Control is thinking of promoting circumcision. David Harsanyi thinks government agencies should be more circumscribed. His point is this new  CDC campaign shows the folly of socialized medicine.

… And what would a proactive CDC mean when government operated health care insurance? No, I don’t believe Washington would deploy a phalanx of grinning, twisted doctors to perform coerced circumcisions. But when the CDC dispenses medical advice of the “universal” brand, it’s difficult to accept that a government-run public insurance outfit wouldn’t heed advice and act accordingly.

What if the CDC, through meticulous study, realized that circumcision was an entirely worthless procedure? Why would “we” waste $400 a pop? Would the CDC campaign to “universally remove” the operation from hospitals? Today, incidentally, government- run Medicaid doesn’t pay for the procedure in 16 states. Most private insurers, on the other hand, do.

Though dismissed by public-option proponents, this is an example of how government persuasion can influence our decisions — first by nudging and then, inevitably, by rationing.

The larger, more pertinent point for today is that government has zero business running campaigns — and these things inevitably turn into scare- mongering efforts — that try to influence our choices regarding our children and our bodies. Especially when the procedure has so little to do with society’s collective health. Circumcision is a personal choice.

Well, a personal choice for everyone except that poor little sucker lying on the chopping block.

John Stossel explains how market forces ensure the efficient use of resources.

…What Obama says in favor of a public option — as of today, at least — tells us how little he understands competition. The public option’s virtue, he told Smerconish, is that “there wouldn’t be a profit motive involved.” But as St. Lawrence University economist Steven Horwitz writes in The Freeman magazine, profit is not just a motive (http://tinyurl.com/m4nd2j). Profit (along with loss) is what enables competition to perform its discovery role:

“Suppose for a moment that we try to take the profit motive out of health care by going to a system in which government pays for and/or directly provides the services. … (P)ublic-spirited politicians and bureaucrats have replaced profit-seeking firms.

“By what method exactly will the officials know how to allocate resources? By what method will they know how much of what kind of health care people want? And more important, by what method will they know how to produce that health care without wasting resources? … In markets with good institutions, profit-seeking producers can get answers to these questions by observing prices and their own profits and losses in order to determine which uses of resources are more or less valuable to consumers. … (P)rofits and prices signal the efficiency (or lack thereof) of resource use and allow producers to learn from those signals.” …

Daily Mail, UK reports on the first image taken of a single molecule.

…Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule.

‘This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,’ lead researcher Leo Gross said. …

…To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand. …

Generation Y may be tech savvy, but may have difficulty understanding nonverbal communication, writes Mark Bauerlein in a WSJ op-ed.

…In Silicon Valley itself, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, some companies have installed the “topless” meeting—in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned—to combat a new problem: “continuous partial attention.” With a device close by, attendees at workplace meetings simply cannot keep their focus on the speaker. It’s too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: “I’m not interested.” So the tools must now remain at the door.

Older employees might well accept such a ban, but younger ones might not understand it. Reading a text message in the middle of a conversation isn’t a lapse to them—it’s what you do. It has, they assume, no nonverbal meaning to anyone else.

It does, of course, but how would they know it? We live in a culture where young people—outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another—are ever less likely to develop the “silent fluency” that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to “read” the behavior of others, they are all thumbs. …

Slate’s Tom Vanderbilt, argues for increased enforcement of traffic laws.

… Which brings us to the first social benefit of the traffic ticket: It is a net for catching bigger fish. One reason simply has to do with the frequency of the traffic stop, particularly in a country like the United States, where the car is the dominant mode of transportation: Most crimes involve driving. But another factor is that people with off-road criminal records have been shown, in a number of studies, to commit more on-road violations. A U.K. study (whose findings have been echoed elsewhere) that looked at a pool of driving records as compared with criminal records found that “2.5% of male drivers committed at least one primary non-motoring offense between 1999 and 2003 but this group accounted for 30.6% of the men who committed at least one ‘serious’ motoring offense.” (Interestingly, the proportion was even more marked for women.) …

…Which raises the second benefit of traffic tickets: They help keep people—drivers and those outside the car—alive. Several studies have found a “negative correlation” between someone receiving a traffic violation and their subsequent involvement in a fatal traffic crash.

The consequences of not issuing tickets were shown in a recent study of traffic violations in New York City. From 2001 to 2006, the number of fatalities in which speeding was implicated rose 11 percent. During the same period, the number of speeding summons issued by the NYPD dropped 11 percent. Similarly, summonses for red-light-running violations dropped 13 percent between 2006 and 2008, even as the number of crashes increased. …

…The “folk crime” belief helps thwart increased traffic enforcement: Why should the NYPD, whose resources and manpower are already stretched, bust people for dangerous driving when they could be going after murderers? Well, apart from the fact that more people are killed in traffic fatalities in New York City every year than they are in “stranger homicides,” there is the idea, related to the link between on-and-off-road criminality, that targeting traffic violators might be an effective way to combat other crimes. Which brings us to the third benefit of traffic tickets: increased public safety. Hence the new Department of Justice initiative called DDACTS, or Data Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety, which has found that there is often a geographic link between traffic crashes and crime. By putting “high-visibility enforcement” in hot spots of both crime and traffic crashes, cities like Baltimore have seen reductions in both. …

Jonathan Pearce has Samizdata’s quote of the day.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Harsanyi updates one of life’s important dictums; “Nobody’s life, liberty or property is safe while congress is in session.”

…You know what Americans could really use these days? A high-quality, five-tiered, color-coded warning-system to caution us about the threat level coming out of Washington. As one of those clueless, frothing-at-the-mouth, slack-jawed yokel extremists, I know I certainly could use a color scheme to help me get a handle on such a complex issue.

• Code Green is easy. A low risk of economic attack. The default color code for those wondrous days when Congress is on recess and the president is enjoying Martha’s Vineyard, Camp David or a Broadway play. We can home in on First Pets and swoon over Barack Obama’s extraordinary reading list. Isn’t he brilliant? …

• Code Yellow. Significant threat of economic attack. Elected officials hunker down and pretend to write legislation that’s already been authored by crony capitalists and progressive agenda groups.

Meanwhile, lesser elected officials take brilliantly ambiguous positions on legislation they will never read while waiting for literature they will intensely examine: namely, poll numbers.

The White House starts doling out treats and threats. The general populace hears words like “public option” and “death panels” for the first time. …

Kimberly A. Strassel recaps the liberal demonization of the CIA.

President Barack Obama fought hard for the former California congressman during his uncertain February confirmation fight. That’s about the last thing the president has done for his spy chief. Quite the opposite: If the latest flap over CIA interrogations shows anything, it’s that Mr. Panetta has officially become the president’s designated fall guy. …

…Reversing prior promises not to prosecute CIA officials who “acted in good faith,” Mr. Holder appointed a special counsel with the ability to prosecute officials who acted in good faith. This was paired with release of a 2004 CIA report that the administration spun as more proof of agency incompetence. As a finishing touch, the White House yanked the interrogation program out of Mr. Panetta’s hands, relocating it with the FBI. With friends like these . . .

If Mr. Panetta has learned one lesson on the job, it’s that he’s alone. In the wake of the Pelosi blow-up, he took a stab at reconciliation with Democrats, trekking to Capitol Hill to tell the intelligence committees about a previously undisclosed (though hardly shocking) CIA idea for killing al Qaeda brass. His repayment was a letter, leaked to the press, from House Intelligence Chair Silvestre Reyes, claiming the new briefing simply proved the CIA had indeed previously lied to Congress. …

Most of what has appeared in the media on Kennedy has been vapid. Pickings was going to ignore the whole thing, but The Corner at National Review had many good items you might not see elsewhere, which after all, is why we blog.

Kathryn Jean Lopez has a profound thought to start us off.

Rev. Robert A. Sirico of The Acton Institute has a hilarious story and comments on Kennedy and Catholicism.

Many will speak and write of the legacy of Ted Kennedy in the days ahead. For me, as an East Coast “ethnic” grandchild of immigrants, Kennedy’s death symbolizes several cogent moments in Catholic America.

It marks the passing of a generation that thought that being Catholic, Democratic, and pro–New Deal were synonymous. We now live in an age where many Catholic Americans are very happy to be described as pro-market and are suspicious of New Deal–like solutions — as, of course, they are entitled to be in a way that they are not on, for example, life issues. Senator Kennedy had it exactly the wrong way around.

Kennedy’s death also brings the Church face-to-face once again with the fact that there is a massive problem of basic Catholic education — catechesis — among the faithful. So many Catholics — even some clergy — make an absolute out of prudential issues such as economic policy, while relativizing absolutes, such as abortion, euthanasia, and marriage. This is done in the face of clear, binding teachings from John Paul the Great, who said that no other right is safe unless the right to life is protected, or, as Pope Benedict wrote recently in Caritas in Veritate, that life issues must be central to Catholic social teaching. …

Charles Krauthammer addresses Kennedy’s political extremism.

And he was the titular and the de facto head of American liberalism as an ideology. And trying to look at it as a future historian might, I think they might say that his political life marks and heavily influenced the trajectory of American liberalism.

In a sense, they might conclude that he was one of its champions, but he took it too far. He overshot.

I will give you two examples. Civil rights: He and his brother Bobby were early, dedicated, and sincere champions — courageous — of civil rights. But Teddy took it into affirmative action and reverse discrimination, which were more highly problematic.

Secondly was in the social safety net. He was a strong supporter of Social Security, extending it to the disabled, and [of] Medicare, children’s health. But he took it way into the Great Society which created a whole culture of dependency which ironically had to be undone by a moderate Democrat, President Clinton.

Rich Lowry received this e-mail about Kennedy:

It has always seemed to me that the modern era of “the politics of personal destruction” began not with right-wing hatred for Bill Clinton but with the Teddy Kennedy-led character assassination of Robert Bork.

Now from an unlikely source comes support for that view — at least as far as judicial nominations are concerned. In an online article, the New Yorker’s legal man, Jeffrey Toobin, concedes that Kennedy’s attack on Bork was “crude and exaggerated.” And, Toobin adds that his passion in that episode “has defined Supreme Court fights ever since.”

I wish that some of the GOP senators who were so charmed by Kennedy’s clubbish good humor in their private corridors would give a little more attention to the damage that this man’s public conduct did. . . .

Andy McCarthy wonders if attaching Kennedy’s name to ObamaCare will really help.

… Why does ObamaCare necessarily need a person’s name attached to it, anyway?  Why can’t they just call it, say, a “Man-Caused Disaster”? Or maybe a “domestic contingency operation” — or, better, “a domestic contingency to prevent you from getting an operation”?

Mark Hemingway comments on a Carl M. Cannon article.

Carl M. Cannon has a terrific and thoughtful column on Ted Kennedy’s failings that really must be read. He does his best to acknowledge Kennedy was a generous man and competent politician, but ultimately Cannon says he’s concerned that many are trying to whitewash his profound failings…

…Further, Cannon makes the salient point that the actual facts involved in the Chappaquiddick rarely enter the debate over Kennedy because they are so indefensible and uncomfortable for liberals. He goes into the whole incident in detail:

“Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone. When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner’s inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity. …”

A post that suggests Kennedy’s coattails did little to help Obama beat Clinton is next.

Mark Steyn closes this section with his weekly column from the Orange County Register.

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

“Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …”

That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

“Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? …

… The senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

Back to the living, David Warren contrasts Western political maneuverings with Gaddafi’s candor.

…The lie — that the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi had nothing to do with direct negotiations between Brown and Gaddafi (and others) last month — has not washed with anyone. To update my Sunday column, it would now appear that Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, was the naive character left finding excuses for a deal already cut well over his head. …

…There is a kind of candour in Gaddafi’s behaviour that becomes almost attractive in comparison with western business calculations. For the Libyan master terrorist, oil money is important, but only as a means to ends that have nothing to do with economic development. Gaddafi’s plain talk, thanking Brown, Prince Andrew, and even our Queen for springing his murderous operative, rings with truth — confirmed by a glance at the grovelling “Dear Moammar” letter Brown sent him.

Similarly, Gaddafi’s open boasting about, for instance, the impending Muslim demographic takeover of Europe, shines with candour in comparison to western essays in political correctness. Like Lenin, Hitler, and every other totalitarian on whom he has modeled himself, Gaddafi long ago realized there was no need to hide his intentions. The “sophistication” of the west is such that if you openly state, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them,” our diplomatists will go to work explaining this away, while organizing another trade mission. …

The Washington Post editors take up the school voucher issue.

President Obama reportedly has a hefty reading list while vacationing this week, but we would like to offer two additions, both hot off the presses. One is an article by the education expert who studied the D.C. voucher program; the second is a study on school safety in the city’s public and private schools. Read together, they might cause the president to rethink his administration’s wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students.

He should start with Patrick J. Wolf’s article in the new issue of Education Next. Mr. Wolf, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. He was unequivocal in his findings: “The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.” Equally adamant was his opinion that vouchers paid off for the students lucky enough to win them: “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.”  …

Jillian Melchior in the WSJ discusses the benefits of community colleges.

…One of the biggest misperceptions is that a community-college education is inherently second-rate. While the overall goals are often utilitarian, students who seek deeper learning may well find instructors who are willing to accommodate them and who have the time to do it, thanks to small class sizes—on average, fewer than 30 students, according to student-loan giant Sallie Mae. I knew drama instructors who gave private acting lessons to students, unpaid, and music teachers who worked overtime with kids who couldn’t read notes but wanted to join the choir. Friends who attended other community colleges reported the same level of faculty attention. Often, because students are so varied, community colleges cultivate instructors flexible enough to teach according to the needs of individual students.

Even the Government Accountability Office acknowledged community colleges’ impressive array in its report “Community Colleges and One-Stop Centers Collaborate to Meet 21st Century Workforce Needs,” issued last year. “With generally low tuition and unrestrictive admissions policies that emphasize open enrollment,” the report said, community colleges “serve individuals ranging from those earning their first educational credential to midcareer professionals seeking to upgrade their skills or reenter the workforce.” About 11.5 million students were taking community-college classes in January 2008, according to the latest data from the American Association of Community Colleges. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Christopher Hitchens gives us the background on the newly nominated Iranian defense minister.

President Obama has said that he wants “the Islamic Republic of Iran” to be welcomed back into the “community of nations.” Unfortunately, it is precisely the fact that it is an Islamic republic that excludes it from such consideration. A pointed reminder of this was provided last week, when the country’s dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, freshly blooded from his recent military coup, nominated his choice of defense minister. This turns out to be Ahmad Vahidi, who if confirmed will be the only holder of the defense portfolio in the world to be simultaneously wanted by Interpol.

Vahidi used to head the so-called “Quds Force,” a shadowy arm of the “Revolutionary Guards” that conducts covert operations overseas. In 1994, according to an Argentine indictment adopted by Interpol’s “red list” or “most wanted” index, he was one of those responsible for “conceiving, planning, financing and executing” the demolition of the Jewish community’s cultural center in Buenos Aires. There were 85 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Among the five other named co-conspirators in this atrocity were Mohsen Rezaee, formerly the head of the Revolutionary Guards and more recently a candidate for the presidency, and the late Imad Mugniyeh, the Damascus-based leader of Hezbollah’s military wing, itself a declared proxy of the Islamic Republic. …

…The term Revolutionary Guard was not, until recently, as much of a byword as it has since become. But this year’s military coup in Tehran, of which that organization was the main engine, has put it at the forefront of our attention. The rape and torture of young Iranians, the sadistic public bullying and sometimes murder of women, the closing of newspapers and the framing-up in a show trial of opposition politicians and intellectuals—all this is the fruit of “Revolutionary Guard” activity and ambition. We may be limited in what we can do to help and defend the Iranians who are confined within their own borders. But surely it is time that the international community spoke with one voice and said that the leaders of this criminal gang must stay inside their own borders as well. Perhaps fewer invitations to “President” Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia University and perhaps fewer countries putting out the red carpet for his defense minister. As for the sending of known supervisors of murder and torture to human rights summits in Geneva: Conceivably that could become a slight no-no as well. Some of these people have bank accounts overseas, in consequence of their years of fleecing the helpless and torpid Iranian economy: Freeze these accounts or confiscate them and hold them in escrow for the day when democracy comes. …

We have Marty Peretz ‘s comments on the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Peretz throws in a paragraph trying to pin this on the last administration’s overtures to Gadhafi while ignoring the steady stream of Obama insults towards Great Britain. For example, as soon as he could Obama returned the bust of Churchill Tony Blair had loaned to Bush for display in the Oval Office. When visiting here, Gordon Brown brought thoughtful gifts to The One, like a pen and pencil set carved from timbers from one of the ships used to close down the slave trade. Obama gave Brown a boxed DVD set of 25 American movies formatted for our TV, not England’s. When the kid president went to England he gave the queen an IPod loaded with his speeches. Any wonder the Brits did not give much thought to how Obama might feel about the release of the Lockerbie bomber? For more on Obama’s insults to our closest ally read from the Daily Telegraph.

…The release of al-Megrahi is an enormity all its own, a sabotage of justice. It tells you a lot about the new America’s persuasive powers with its closest ally that it could not preclude his unfettering. Why the American government did not raise the issue of setting the murderer free before he was rescued by British financial interests is left to speculation. What is certainly true is that neither Brown nor Obama could get a believable commitment that the freeing of al-Megrahi would not be accompanied by a taunting of the United States. And if this taunting was preordained or foreshadowed, would it not have been better that Washington be defeated in honorable glory rather than being led into humiliation and ignominy by craven London and Edinburgh?

In the wake of the official delirium awaiting al-Megrahi in Tripoli, the president was quoted as characterizing the images as “highly objectionable” and “disturbing.” A group representative of survivors of the 270 dead did much better, branding them “perfidious, repulsive and sickening.” It is not as if Obama is usually shy with emotional oratory, although he is rather shy in admonishing Muslims, a difficulty he seems not to have with the Israelis. …

…I have my theory about the inertness (perhaps that’s too kind a description) of the Obama response to this grotesque spectacle: He is befuddled. His entire grand strategy rested on our ability to transform dozens of Libyas; his persuasive powers would make allies out of the rogue’s gallery of the Middle East. That was never an approach grounded in the hard realities of history or more than a surface understanding of his supposed interlocutors. It is a dream that should have died, once and for all, with the pep rally greeting al-Megrahi. But will this humiliation of Anglo-America change our policy? Unlike Obama, I have no illusions.

David P. Goldman who we first knew as Spengler discusses the divided opinion in Jewish-American society over Obama.

In case anyone failed to catch my drift last week, permit me to reiterate my distaste for yet another protest from the collected Jewish leadership over a supposed Catholic agenda to convert us. When Jews get together at the moment, do you think they complain about how many of our co-religionists we are losing to the Catholic Church? No, they don’t worry about the Catholic Church. They talk about Obama. Let me correct that: they do not exactly talk about Obama. They shout, stamp, and throw things. After Obama’s betrayal of Israel (and Elliot Abrams’ published reports of pre-existing deals between the US and Israel over limited expansion of settlements makes “betrayal” the operative word), the major Jewish organizations are in trouble. Not just fundraising, but jobs are on the line. Except for the Zionist Organization of America, all the major organizations bowed to the 78% Jewish majority for Obama and kowtowed to the president. Rabbis I know who privately abominate Obama for his betrayal do not dare say so in public because they would lose congregants–a lot of congregants. Except for the Reconstructionists, who would follow Obama back to Buchenwald if he led them there, and a few of the Orthodox who never went along with Obama in the first place, every synagogue in the US is split over Obama. …

…In a much smaller way, Obama is doing the same thing, by placing responsibility for the mess in the Muslim world at Israel’s doorstep: if only Israel could placate Muslim opinion by making visible and painful sacrifices of its own interests, then perhaps the Iranians could be made to act rationally, and so forth. It is unspeakably stupid, but the alternative is to concede that the entire project of the enlightened since the schemes for universal peace of Leibniz and Kant has gone down the drain.

Enlightened opinion sooner will believe that the Israeli army murders Palestinians in order to harvest their organs, then believe in its own redundancy. The stronger the evidence that the Muslim world will not come to terms with the West, the more fanatically enlightened opinion will demand that Israel accept responsibility. Someone must accept responsibility; the Iranian government is too busy suppressing its own voters, the Iraqis are too busy getting on with civil war, the Afghanis are too busy growing opium, the Pakistanis are too busy supporting the Taliban, the Libyans are too busy celebrating a mass murder, and so forth. Are the Muslims recalcitrant, hostile, even murderous? All the more reason to force concessions on Israel! Waxing Muslim rage and distress reveals the entire project of enlightened opinion to hang by a thread. If it should fail, then horrors will ensue to dwarf those of the bloody 20th century.

Jews have been prominent in the project of enlightened opinion, which now has turned upon them and demanded sacrifices that they cannot accept–apart from the extreme secular left of American Jewry. That is tearing the Jewish organizations apart, and possibly many congregations. …

Ann Coulter continues her series on health care.

With the Democrats getting slaughtered — or should I say, “receiving mandatory end-of-life counseling” — in the debate over national health care, the Obama administration has decided to change the subject by indicting CIA interrogators for talking tough to three of the world’s leading Muslim terrorists.

Had I been asked, I would have advised them against reinforcing the idea that Democrats are hysterical bed-wetters who can’t be trusted with national defense while also reminding people of the one thing everyone still admires about President George W. Bush.

But I guess the Democrats really want to change the subject. Thus, here is Part 2 in our series of liberal lies about national health care.

(6) There will be no rationing under national health care.

Anyone who says that is a liar. And all Democrats are saying it. (Hey, look — I have two-thirds of a syllogism!)

Apparently, promising to cut costs by having a panel of Washington bureaucrats (for short, “The Death Panel”) deny medical treatment wasn’t a popular idea with most Americans. So liberals started claiming that they are going to cover an additional 47 million uninsured Americans and cut costs … without ever denying a single medical treatment!

Also on the agenda is a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake that will actually help you lose weight! But first, let’s go over the specs for my perpetual motion machine — and it uses no energy, so it’s totally green! …

Caroline Baum advocates market-driven healthcare reform.

…Medicare, for example, has used a fee-for-service model since its inception in 1965. It encourages volume (more tests, procedures, surgery) over results, rewarding “incompetent doctors and bad hospitals,” according to Irwin Savodnik, a psychiatrist and philosopher on the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Poor diagnosis and treatment may mean more tests and additional surgeries. “The worst rise to the top,” Savodnik says.

And Medicare-for-all is President Barack Obama’s model for health-care reform?

Health care is an overwhelmingly complicated issue, which is probably the best reason the task of reform should be assigned to Mr. Market rather than politicians. The market would “respond and develop tools to make price and value decisions,” Cato’s Tanner says. …

Fouad Ajami looks at liberals’ unrealistic expectations regarding the American public.

So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These “townhallers” who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled “evil-mongers” (Harry Reid), “un-American” (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the “loudest voices” are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed. …

…American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the “mandate of heaven” is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics. …

Robert J. Samuelson comments on another expensive program with little benefit being pushed by the Obama administration: high-speed rail.

…In a blog-posted analysis, Glaeser made generous assumptions for trains (“Personally, I almost always prefer trains to driving”) and still found that costs vastly outweigh benefits. Consider Obama’s claim about removing the equivalent of 1 million cars. Even if it came true (doubtful), it would represent less than one-half of 1 percent of the 254 million registered vehicles in 2007.

What works in Europe and Asia won’t in the United States. Even abroad, passenger trains are subsidized. But the subsidies are more justifiable because geography and energy policies differ.

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it’s 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile. Trains can’t pick up most people where they live and work and take them to where they want to go. Cars can.

Distances also matter. America is big; trips are longer. Beyond 400 to 500 miles, fast trains can’t compete with planes. Finally, Europe and Japan tax car transportation more heavily, pushing people to trains. In August 2008, notes the GAO, gasoline in Japan was $6.50 a gallon. Americans regard $4 a gallon as an outrage. Proposals for stiff gasoline taxes (advocated by many, including me) go nowhere. …

Division of Labour provides a round-up of death videos from Cash for Clunkers. This is the first iteration of Obama death panels.

… A nice looking 2001 Mazda light truck with 75,000 miles bites the dust here. Here’s a good looking Volvo prematurely destroyed. This SUV would look at home in any tony U.S. suburb. …

Ed Morrissey reports the big winners in the Cash for Clunks were foreign makers.

… Why did GM and Chrysler, both owned in part by the same government that launched C4C, do so poorly?  In part, they didn’t have cars to sell.  Both GM and Chrysler had curtailed their production during their bankruptcies but had worked to have inventory ready for the new sales year.  By launching C4C in the middle of the summer, when most dealers are already cutting prices to move inventory off the lot, the administration practically guaranteed that C4C would leave them on the sidelines.  Chrysler had the worst inventory problems, but GM also had serious inventory issues.  Ford, which didn’t take the bailout, had continued production and had inventory ready to sell.

Shouldn’t the owner of GM and Chrysler had known this?  Didn’t anyone on the Auto Task Force — say, Ron Bloom, the auto czar with no automaking experience — bother to check whether their companies were ready to compete in this program, and whether July was a smart time to launch this even apart from that?  This is what happens when government enters the private sector; it makes decisions based on politics rather than sound business sense, and it picks leaders based on cronyism and political payoffs rather than expertise and competence. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The upcoming trial in Germany of John Demjanjuk will throw the spotlight on part of the Holocaust that is not widely known. Der Speigel reports on Hitler’s European Helpers. Long before the ovens were fired up at the camps, Gemans killed a million and a half people in occupied Eastern Europe. It is grimly ironic Himmler pushed for the gas chambers because of humanitarian concerns. Seems he as worried about his men having to kill people at close range.

The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler’s foreign helpers. …

…Denunciation was so common in Poland that there was a special term for paid informants “Szmalcowniki” (previously a term for a fence). In many cases, the denouncers knew their victims. And while the French, Dutch or Belgians could submit to the illusion that the Jews deported to the east from Paris, Rotterdam or Brussels would be all right in the end, the people in Eastern Europe learned through the grapevine what lay in store for the Jews in Auschwitz or Treblinka.

For sure, many counter-examples can easily be found. A senior officer in Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for the murder of more than 100,000 people, complained that the Ukrainians lacked “pronounced anti-Semitism based on racial or ideological reasons.” The officer wrote that “there is a lack of leadership and of spiritual impetus for the pursuit of Jews.”

Historian Feliks Tych estimates that some 125,000 Poles rescued Jews without being paid for their services. It’s clear that the perpetrators always made up a small minority of their respective population. But the Germans relied on that minority. The SS, police and the army lacked the manpower to search the vast areas where the Nazi leadership planned to kill all people of Jewish origin. Across the 4,000 kilometers stretching from Brittany in western France to the Caucasus, the Nazis were bent on hunting down their victims, deporting them to extermination camps or to local murder sites, preventing escapes, digging mass graves and then carrying out their bloody handiwork.

Of course only Hitler and his entourage or the army could have stopped the Holocaust. But this doesn’t invalidate the argument that without the foreign helpers, countless thousands or even millions of the approximately six million murdered Jews would have survived. …

Looking at Demjanjuk’s background:

…It was a gigantic killing program in which most of Poland’s Jews, 1.75 million, were murdered. The SS preferred to recruit its helpers among Ukrainians or ethnic Germans in prisoner-of-war camps where Red Army soldiers like Demjanjuk faced the choice of killing for the Germans or starving to death. Later, increasing numbers of volunteers from western Ukraine and Galicia joined the unit. The men had to sign a declaration that they had never belonged to a communist group and had no Jewish ancestry. Then they were taken to Travniki in the district of Lublin in south-eastern Poland where they were trained for their deadly profession on the site of a former sugar factory. In mid-1943 some 3,700 men were stationed in Travniki. Training for the Holocaust took several weeks. The SS men showed the new recruits how to carry out raids and how to guard prisoners, often using live subjects. Then the unit would drive to a nearby town and beat Jewish residents out of their homes. Executions were carried out in a nearby forest, probably to make sure that the recruits were loyal.

At first the Travniki were used to guard property and to prevent supply depots from being plundered. Then their German masters sent them to clear ghettos in Lviv and Lublin, where they were remorseless in rounding up their Jewish victims. Finally they were put to work in eight-hour shifts in the extermination camp. “Everyone jumped in where he was needed,” recalled one SS officer. Everything worked “like clockwork.”

Historians estimate that a third of the Travniki absconded despite the punishment that entailed if they were caught. Some were executed for disobedience. And the others? Why didn’t they try to get out of the killing machine? Why didn’t Demjanjuk? Die he allow himself to be corrupted by the feeling of “having attained total power over others,” as historian Pohl argues. Was it the prospect of loot? In Belzec and Sobibor the Travniki engaged in brisk bartering with the inhabitants of surrounding villages and paid with items they had seized from the prisoners.

Perhaps there was something else, something even more disturbing that many people have deep in their psyche: following orders from authorities even if they ran counter to their conscience. Total and utter obedience. …

Rick Richman presents striking parallels between the Carter and Obama presidencies.

…Hedrick Smith, in a long analysis in the January 8, 1978, New York Times, summarized what had happened:

Jimmy Carter first surprised and impressed the professional pols in 1976 with the cold, cocksure, methodical manner with which he stalked the Presidency. The surprise of 1977 was that Jimmy Carter was actually not the master politician they had imagined. . . . President Carter’s exaggerated aspirations and his profusion of proposals invited inevitable disappointment.

Four years later, Carter published his memoirs, which (in the words of Times reviewer Terrence Smith in 1982) admitted he had “overloaded the legislative agenda” in his early months in office and “the result was that his most cherished domestic initiatives—welfare and tax reform and a national health program—went down to early defeat.” His presidency never fully recovered. …

…After a year in office, it became apparent that a great slogan, image, and autobiography were not by themselves sufficient for an inexperienced politician with grandiose ideas to govern the United States. And Carter’s foreign-policy disasters were still ahead of him. …

…Jimmy Carter faced a more dangerous world and soon had crises to deal with in Iran and Afghanistan for which he was woefully unprepared. Three decades later, a president is pursuing exaggerated aspirations and a profusion of proposals while a storm is gathering abroad. It is not a situation that will be solved by triangulation

Matt Welch wrote a wonderful piece on big government, ending with the “Top Ten Obama Government Grabs”. Here is the opening:

It’s been a hilarious August, watching media supporters of President Obama’s health care package puzzle over the obscure motivations of the noncompliant Americans rallying against it.

“Racial anxiety,” guessed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

“Nihilism,” theorized Time’s Joe Klein.

“The crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy,” historian Rick Perlstein proclaimed in the Washington Post.

While the commentariat’s condescension is almost comical, the whole evil-or-stupid explanation misses the elephant in Obama’s room: Americans of all stripes, it turns out, aren’t very keen about the government barging into their lives. …

Liberal anger is back. Matthew Continetti has the details.

…The Angry White Liberal finds it simply incomprehensible that somebody might honestly and in good faith disagree with the Democrats’ efforts. On August 14, blogger Steve Benen wrote on the Huffington Post that the “far-right apoplexy is counter-intuitive.” After all, “Why would people who stand to benefit from health care reform literally take to the streets and threaten violence in opposition to legislation that would help them and their families?”

Forget Benen’s exaggerated claim of threatened violence. Note, instead, that Benen cannot conceive that someone might actually think the costs to the Democrats’ program outweigh the unrealized and perhaps unachievable benefits. …

…The Angry White Liberal directs his fury not only at conservatives. Another target is the Obama administration itself. After all, the White House has been unable to convince a majority of Americans that liberals are right and their health care reform is necessary. Comedian Jon Stewart opened a recent Daily Show by saying, “Mr. President, I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi–10 steps ahead of everything–or if this whole health care thing is kickin’ your ass.” In the Washington Post, Robert Kuttner blamed Obama’s economic team, which is “far too cozy with Wall Street.” For columnist Richard Cohen, Obama’s “klutziness” has hampered reform. MSNBC host Ed Schultz said the White House was “dazed and confused.” His colleague Rachel Maddow thinks the Democrats are “too scared of their own shadow.”

All this vituperation, this unrelenting urge to discredit opposing views, builds and builds. It’s uncontainable. Inconsolable. First the Angry White Liberal blames conservatives, then Democrats, then Obama . . . before you know it, he’ll be blaming the entire country for the failure to pass “comprehensive health care reform.” Everyone, that is, but himself.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Russia’s first Time of Troubles, the 15 year interregnum between the Rurik and Romanov dynasties took place 1598 to 1613. Perhaps future historians will call the present day the second Time of Troubles. We have two items today on Russia and its prospects.

Richard Pipes gives us a penetrating look into the Russian psyche, and ends with implications for US foreign policy.

…We are right in objecting strenuously to Russia treating her one-time colonial possessions not as sovereign countries but dependencies lying in her “privileged zone of influence.” Even so, we should be aware of their sensitivity to introducing Western military forces so close to her borders. The Russian government and the majority of its citizens regard NATO as a hostile alliance. One should, therefore, be exceedingly careful in avoiding any measures that would convey the impression that we are trying militarily to “encircle” the Russian Federation. After all, we Americans, with our Monroe Doctrine and violent reaction to Russian military penetration into Cuba or any other region of the American continent, should well understand Moscow’s reaction to NATO initiatives along its borders.

This said, a line must be drawn between gentle manners and the hard realities of politics. We should not acquiesce in Russia treating the countries of her “near abroad” as satellites and we acted correctly in protesting last year’s invasion of Georgia. We should not allow Moscow a veto over the projected installation of our anti-rocket defenses in Poland the Czech Republic, done with the consent of their governments and meant to protect us against a future Iranian threat. These interceptors and radar systems present not the slightest threat to Russia, as confirmed publicly by Russian general Vladimir Dvorkin, an officer with long service in his country’s strategic forces. The only reason Moscow objects to them is that it considers Poland and the Czech Republic to lie within its “sphere of influence.”

Today’s Russians are disoriented: they do not quite know who they are and where they belong. They are not European: This is attested to by Russian citizens who, when asked. “Do you feel European?” by a majority of 56% to 12% respond “practically never.” Since they are clearly not Asian either, they find themselves in a psychological limbo, isolated from the rest of the world and uncertain what model to adopt for themselves. They try to make up for this confusion with tough talk and tough actions. For this reason, it is incumbent on the Western powers patiently to convince Russians that they belong to the West and should adopt Western institutions and values: democracy, multi-party system, rule of law, freedom of speech and press, respect for private property. This will be a painful process, especially if the Russian government refuses to cooperate. But, in the long run, it is the only way to curb Russia’s aggressiveness and integrate her into the global community.

John O’Sullivan believes that Russia is setting its sights on Ukraine.

…Also, the Kremlin has just introduced legislation into the Duma (certain to be passed) that enables the president to send troops abroad to “defend Russian soldiers and citizens, fight piracy, and defend foreign nations against threats.” This looks more like a domestic political tidying-up to clarify who in government has the power to order troop movements than a move to intimidate neighbors. As several pundits have pointed out, it tacitly admits that last year’s invasion of Georgia was illegal. Nonetheless it clears the constitutional decks for actions such as an invasion of Ukraine. Neighbors therefore have to take it seriously.

But that leaves open the question of whether such an invasion would be likely to succeed. Writing in the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor, the respected Russian military commentator Pavel Felgenhauer is pretty skeptical all round: “The Russian military at present is clearly not ready to take on an offensive ‘liberation’ campaign deep within Ukraine. The Ukrainian armed forces are ineffective, but the territory of the possible theater of conflict is vast and densely populated, requiring a massive deployment of well-prepared troops. Russia needs at least three more years of radical military modernization and some rearmament, before it may contemplate a Crimea and Ukraine mission.” After the unexpected mauling that its forces got at the hands of the small Georgian army, Russia is unlikely to take needless risks. In the meantime, however, Russia may continue to wage economic- and political-destabilization campaigns against Ukraine, Georgia, and other parts of the post-Soviet space on which its paranoia alights — with the potential military threat hovering in the background. …

…For as long as Russia felt unable to use force — at least three years in the above calculation — the Moscow–Kiev battle would be waged mainly over economics and, in particular, over the European Union’s policy towards both countries. Should closer EU-Russia economic cooperation go ahead? Should Russia be admitted to the EU’s Eastern Partnership, which is designed to protect Ukraine and other post-Soviet Eastern countries outside the Union?

Europe itself is bitterly though quietly divided over how to deal with these questions. In July, a stratospherically distinguished group of Central and East European statesmen, including Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, sent their own open letter to the Obama administration appealing for stronger U.S. intervention in European affairs — in effect because Western Europe alone could not be relied upon to defend democracy, national sovereignty, and the maintenance of a common Atlantic defense. …

Bill Kristol comments that Republicans are sticking to conservative principles.

…Meanwhile, as a decision looms for Obama on a new strategy requiring increased numbers of troops in Afghanistan, a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week discovered that “majorities of liberals and Democrats alike now, for the first time, solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction of troop levels.” Conservatives and Republicans are far more supportive of the war–they “remain the war’s strongest backers”–and a majority of conservatives don’t merely support the war but say they approve of President Obama’s handling of it.

So much for charges of knee-jerk or unprincipled partisanship. Conservatives support a president they generally distrust because they think it important the country win the war in Afghanistan. And despite temptations to make political hay out of a war that’s getting more unpopular, and despite doubts about Obama as commander in chief, Republican political leaders remain supportive of the war effort. They are urging Obama to commit himself unambiguously to win the war and to approve General Stanley McChrystal’s coming request for more troops. And in urging the administration to follow this course, they are willing to see the president get credit for doing the right thing.

In sum: In opposing Obamacare and supporting victory in Afghanistan, conservatives and Republicans are behaving as a loyal opposition. Those who were worried that partisanship would trump patriotism among conservatives, and that loathing of Obama would overcome loyalty to the country among Republicans, have so far been proved wrong. And those who were worried that timidity would prevent vigorous opposition where warranted in domestic policy have been so far proven wrong as well. The Republican party and the conservative movement are behaving in a way that can make Republicans and conservatives proud.

As for today’s liberals: They just don’t want America to win wars, do they? They’re ready, willing, and able to see America lose in Afghanistan. Luckily, President Obama seems to understand that the United States can and ought to win. And the Obama administration will benefit from the support of a loyal opposition if it chooses to surge to victory.

Jennifer Rubin thinks the White House is getting the wrong message from Town Halls.

… It is a measure of just how politically tone deaf the Obama team has become that they choose to attack ordinary Americans rather than absorb the message being sent. They have become so used to the echo chamber of their fellow liberals and the mainstream media (I repeat myself) that they still seem unaware of the vast gulf between themselves and citizens motivated enough to turn out in record numbers to express their concerns.

After weeks of this and a mound of polling data to confirm what we are seeing and hearing, the president has yet to acknowledge that he hears what citizens are saying or understands the need to rethink health-care reform. He persists in decrying “misinformation”—implying that voters are dim and have been duped by nefarious forces. It is a politically dangerous place for a president to be—defaming voters and ignoring their pleas. It is one thing to go to war with the opposition party but quite another to go to war with voters. In his hubris, Obama has forgotten who is in charge.

Shorts from National Review. Here are two:

Rather than leave students free to choose, the professor of Economics 301 at the University of Chicago assigned seating by alphabet. That put Rose Director and Milton Friedman next to each other. They married in 1938, forming one of the 20th century’s most important intellectual and personal partnerships. As a free-market economist, Milton earned scholarly respect and popular fame. Rose was his constant collaborator, especially on books and columns that involved questions of public policy. Friends regarded her as a bit more practical — and a bit more conservative — than her libertarian husband. Pres. George W. Bush once joked that she was the only person known to have won an argument with him. Until Milton’s death in 2006, they were almost inseparable, often seen holding hands in public, as if their 1930s romance had never ended. Rose Friedman died as this issue was going to press, age 98. R.I.P.

The Left’s main complaint about the stimulus was that it was too small. Looking overseas, Paul Krugman and economists of his stripe contended that stimulus packages in Germany, France, and other major economies also were too small. The United States spent 2 percent of GDP, while Germany, whose export-driven economy had taken a much harder hit, spent only 1.5 percent. France spent even less. It is true that “automatic stabilizers” — countercyclical features of the Euro-welfare state — complicate the picture a little, but even accounting for those, the Europeans spent less in response to more radical contractions. If the neo-Keynesians were not immune to evidence, they might find it persuasive that Germany and France have shown unexpected growth and have exited the global recession, in spite of their allegedly anemic emergency measures. Also on the rebound: China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Our idea for a stimulus would have been much cheaper: Export Paul Krugman.

Raymond Sokolov takes a culinary tour around Richmond, Virginia.

…In the down-home department, Richmond offers the barbecue lover a high density of way stations at which to feed his habit. After some studious inquiry, I settled on two expert purveyors of meat slow-cooked in pits. For a Saturday lunch, I joined some clean-cut families in Bermuda shorts at Buz and Ned’s Real Barbecue, where reality lay suspended somewhere between the spic and span patio, with its vertical rolls of paper toweling meant to invoke some backwoods haunt, and a fine-looking modern car wash. The smoky, juicy ribs were worth the slight detour from downtown, but the brisket sandwich wasn’t.

Further out of town, on a stretch of Jefferson Davis Highway not beautified by Lady Bird Johnson or anybody else, I hunkered down happily at the counter of Hank’s Pit Cooked Barbecue, in view of the full-size Elvis replica, a big American flag and assorted collectibles. Hank’s was founded in 1963 by Bill and Helen Hanchey (whence the “Hank”), who brought their notion of Q with them from Rose Hill, N.C. (pop. 1,330, alleged home of the world’s largest frying pan and muscadine winery). If you want barbecue at Hank’s, your choice boils down to pork shoulder, sliced or chopped, both with a strong vinegar tang. We picked chopped and reveled in the austere, sour pigginess of the experience. Hank’s is an import to the Commonwealth of Virginia, sure, but once you are inside you’ll have no trouble imagining yourself at some country crossroads south of Raleigh.

You get a similar whiff of what Horace the Roman poet called “boondocks in the city” (rus in urbe) at Comfort, found in a re-emerging Richmond neighborhood. Chef Jason Alley acquired his knowledge of fried green tomatoes, okra and catfish at his birthplace in Appalachia, Va., but seasoned himself in serious kitchens from Atlanta to Illinois before heading here and staking a claim for food that, he says, won’t scare people. The night I stopped by, the minimalist dining room was very full of nice people deciding whether to try the meatloaf or the grilled pork chop. Comfort is a superficially simple but culinarily expert nod to the basics of its region. But if you just must cater to your inner gourmet, you can order the Kobe skirt steak.

Or you could drive your Prius to the other side of town, to an un-picturesque stretch of Main Street down the hill from the pristine old Richmond neighborhood where Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death, and see what’s on for dinner at Millie’s Diner. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn gives us an excellent article on political correctness, Islamist-style. One of the anecdotes he relates involves the Yale University Press publishing a book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons, without the cartoons.

…The official explanation was the threat of violence. Not any actual violence, and, as it turns out, not even any actual threats. After Roger Kimball poked around a bit, it emerged that the decision to ban both the Danes and Doré was driven not by editors or publishers at YUP but by the very biggest bigwigs of the university itself. The experts were contacted by “the Office of the President,” no less. On its face, the decision to gut its own reputation for editorial and scholarly integrity seems to owe less to unspecified fears of jihadist nuts blowing up a university bookstore than to a cooler calculation of its strategic interests, including (so Mr. Kimball suggests) continued access to wealthy Muslim benefactors.

Yale has thus provided us with a perfect snapshot of where we’re headed. When I fought back against attempts by the Canadian Islamic Congress to get my writing criminalized north of the border, various American readers wrote to say: “Why bother? Who cares about Canada? We’ve got the First Amendment, and nobody’s going to ban you here.” That’s not how the world works, no matter the fond isolationist illusions of Ron Paul types. Restive European Muslims and unlimited Saudi money can put pressure on American publishers, institutions, and media that will eventually render the First Amendment moot. In Denmark and other countries, craven accommodationists can at least plead that they have incendiary majority-Muslim suburbs with 50 percent youth unemployment. That’s not true of New Haven, where the honchos seem to be using fear of violence as a cover for the appetites of their endowment. In other words, they’re merely posing as contemptible Euroweenies. Which, when you think about it, is even more contemptible.

In 2006, during the original cartoon jihad, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto spelled it out: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

It sounded vaguely ridiculous at the time. And yet, without the demographic pressures of Europe, a scholarly publisher in Connecticut now “obeys Islamic law.” Who’s next?

Turns out Fareed Zakaria recommended the cartoons be censored. What was he thinking? Did he ever hear of a free press?

Claudia Rosett posts on the release of the Lockerbie terrorist.

…If you’d like to learn more about the freed terrorist, al-Megrahi, and why Gaddafi might be so pleased to have him back, there’s an illuminating article on Forbes.com, written just before al-Megrahi’s release: “Don’t Let The Lockerbie Bomber Go Free.”

The author, Mohamed Eljahmi, had an older brother, Fathi Eljahmi, who was Libya’s most prominent democratic dissident. I say “was,” because after five solid years of imprisonment by Gaddafi, Fathi Eljahmi died this past April. There was no compassion shown by Gaddafi of any kind. Isolated much of the time, held in filthy conditions, incarcerated for a long stretch in a Libyan “psychiatric” facility, Fathi Eljhami was deprived of adequate medical care, and blocked from any direct communication with the outside world. He deserved a hero’s salute from both the democratic world and his fellow Libyans, but Gaddafi saw to it that from the day Eljahmi was arrested in 2004 until the day he died in April, 2009, he was never seen or heard in public again. …

Thomas Sowell explains that the price of Hope and Change is Freedom.

…The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.

What they are trying to do is to create an America very unlike the America that has existed for centuries — the America that people have been attracted to by the millions from every part of the world, the America that many generations of Americans have fought and died for.

This is the America for which Michelle Obama expressed her resentment before it became politically expedient to keep quiet.

It is the America that Reverend Jeremiah Wright denounced in his sermons during the 20 years when Barack Obama was a parishioner, before political expediency required Obama to withdraw and distance himself.

The thing most associated with America — freedom — is precisely what must be destroyed if this is to be turned into a fundamentally different country to suit Obama’s vision of the country and of himself. But do not expect a savvy politician like Barack Obama to express what he is doing in terms of limiting our freedom.

He may not even think of it in those terms. He may think of it in terms of promoting “social justice” or making better decisions than ordinary people are capable of making for themselves, whether about medical care or housing or many other things. Throughout history, egalitarians have been among the most arrogant people. …

If you can get through the nuttiness and affectations of Peggy Noonan, once and a while a great column pops up.

Looking back, this must have been the White House health-care strategy:

Health care as a subject is extraordinarily sticky, messy and confusing. It’s inherently complicated, and it’s personal. There are land mines all over the place. Don’t make the mistake the Clintons made and create a plan that gets picked apart, shot down, and injures the standing of the president. Instead, push it off on Congress. Let them come up with a dozen plans. It will keep them busy. It will convince them yet again of their importance and autonomy. It will allow them to vent, and perhaps even exhaust, their animal spirits. Various items and elements within each bill will get picked off by the public. Fine, that’s to be expected. The bills may in fact yield a target-rich environment. Fine again. Maybe health care’s foes will get lost in the din and run out of ammo. Maybe they’ll exhaust their animal spirits, too.

Summer will pass, the fight confined to the public versus Congress. And at the end, in the fall, the beauty part: The president swoops in and saves the day, forcing together an ultimate and more moderate plan that doesn’t contain the more controversial elements but does constitute a successful first step toward universal health care. …

Sunday Morning Rasmussen reported Obama’s popularity hit a new low.

David Limbaugh presents a convincing explanation for Obama’s declining poll numbers.

…Surely people can now see that it is no accident that he sat at the feet of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, that his mother was a leftist activist and cultural Marxist, that his main early mentor was radical Frank Marshall Davis, that he was a member of the far-left New Party in Chicago, that his main vocation in life has been street organizing and agitation and that he didn’t think the revolutionarily, transformative Warren court was liberal enough.

Since assuming office, Obama has been on a mission to fundamentally alter the social compact between the government and a once powerfully sovereign people.

The litany of his shocks to the system is too voluminous to detail in full, but just consider his calculated takeover of GM, his fraudulently marketed trillion-dollar spending schemes, his cap-and-trade boondoggle, his unilateral declaration of an end to the war on terror, his policy to Mirandize terrorists on the battlefield, his cavorting with terrorist dictators, his soft betrayal of Israel, his ceaseless foreign-soil apologies for America, and his crusade to subsume the health care industry.

These are not tweaks to a glorious constitutional republic, but a frantic effort to undo this republic brick by brick. And the American people have finally gotten wise to what’s going on and are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. …

David Warren discusses global warming junk science, and then turns his attention to a book about some real science.

…This has been brought home to me with force, by a magnificent little book, recently published by the Friends of Algonquin Park, and just fallen into my hands. It is the first of their new field guide series, on The Dragonflies and Damselflies of Algonquin Provincial Park and the Surrounding Area — an area extending to Ottawa. The reader who wishes to fill his heart with hope, joy, and beauty, will run out immediately and buy this book, whose authors are Colin D. Jones, Andrea Kingsley, Peter Burke, and Matt Holder.

It was recommended to me, owing to my own love for the Odonates, and all pond life, by a very devout and pious Darwinist of my acquaintance, who has fortunately never read my columns, and who may never speak to me again when he finds that I harbour “designist” heresies.

Indeed, a dragonfly is a wonder of pure brilliant mechanical design — this little roving eye of nature, that first appears, fully-formed with incredible precision, in the fossil records for more than 300 million years ago. And there is little as unforgettable as to watch a dragonfly emerge from its dead larva skin, and crawl tenuously out on a log — pale, utterly feeble, and crinkled. And then, before your eyes in the space of minutes, its abdomen extends, its wings fill out, its colouring begins to appear, and a glorious creature takes its first flight, towards the woods. It is a miracle that will help you contemplate the mysteries of Creation and Resurrection.

This Algonquin field guide is something of which Canadians may boast: I have never seen a better insect field guide, nor one so beautifully and intelligently put together. The existence of the growing market it serves is the more inspiring: for in the background of so much ideological, joke science (or “scientism”), real science is reviving, closely allied with art. It is the science of the field, of close and honest observation, of inferences that can be tested and checked. And like all true science, it teaches reverence.

Andy McCarthy posts on Cash for Clunkers.

Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money — between $3500 and $4500.  How hard is that?

Pretty hard, apparently. The Washington Times reports this morning that this simple, basic Big Gummint program has spun totally out of control:  it was clearly not thought through (even a little), it was under-budgeted by 2 or 3 hundred percent (and counting), and it was woefully under-resourced — such that staff have to be hired from the outside or pulled away from other government functions (like running air-traffic control) in order to clear the back-log.  Clearing the back-log, by the way, is a 24/7 operation that’s also requiring additional budgeting for overtime pay and a training program. …

…All this from the people who, Mark Steyn reminds us this morning, tell you that the way to control healthcare costs is to set up a huge new entitlement program (even as the ones they’ve already set up sink deeper into a multi-trillion dollar sea of unfunded liabilities). Why do we trust them to do anything other than the very few things for which you actually need a government? …

Volokh Conspiracy linked to a coup de grace delivered to a clunker. In this case, a Corvette.

WSJ Editors write on the clunker program.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn opens with good news about the recession; for other countries.

…Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan and much of Continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Due to Obama, one of the least-indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted – and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country, after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page, trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He’s spending your future. And by “future” I don’t mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on “the rich,” but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in “the richest 5 percent” before this binge is over. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of Americans now expect higher taxes under Obama.

But the silver-tongued salesman sails on. Why be scared of a government health program? After all, says the president, “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” and if “we’re able to get something right like Medicare,” we should have more “confidence” about being able to do it for everyone.

On the other hand, says the president, Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money.” …

In The Corner, Mark adds an addendum.

David Harsanyi responds to Obama playing the morality card regarding healthcare reform.

Morality — whether derived from religion or a Starbucks coffee cup — is only one of the many considerations Americans take into account when thinking about policy. As an atheist, for instance, my core moral concern is that elected officials stop telling me what my core moral concerns should be.

While we have no clue what Jesus would make of a public option, we do have plenty of evidence that government tends to act immorally, corruptly and incompetently — especially a government with too much power. And the self-righteous elected official who has complete moral certitude on his side also has a tendency to ignore any other concerns. That detail has been painfully obvious in this debate.

“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies,” wrote C.S. Lewis, a man who knew a thing or two about religion. “The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

As Black Panther-gate continues to smolder, John Fund reports that Justice continues to refuse to provide more information.

…Justice spokesman Alejandro Miyar says the dismissal was “based on a careful assessment of the facts and the law.” But Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.), has been asking for more information. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Welch, for example, claims in a July 13 letter to Mr. Wolf that charges against the New Black Panther Party itself were dropped because there wasn’t “evidentiary support” to prove they “directed” the intimidation. But Mr. Wolf notes in a letter sent to Justice that one defendant, Black Panther Party Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz, said on Fox News just after the election that his activities at the polling station were part of a nationwide effort. Mr. Shabazz added that the Black Panther activities in Philadelphia were justified due to “an emergency situation.”

Mr. Wolf’s demands that Justice make the career attorneys on the case available for questions have been rebuffed. He also wants the House Judiciary Committee to hold hearings. A spokesman for House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers was noncommittal as to whether any hearing would be held.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights voted on Aug. 7 to send a letter to Justice expanding its own investigation and demanding more complete answers. “We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law,” its letter stated. It noted “the peculiar logic” of one Justice argument, that defendants’ failure to show up in court was a reason for dismissing the case: “Such an argument sends a perverse message to wrongdoers—that attempts at voter suppression will be tolerated so long as the persons who engage in them are careful not to appear in court to answer the government’s complaint.”  …

Paul Greenberg also summarizes Black Panther-gate and reports that it is being reviewed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

…The leading lights of the Democratic Party in and out of Congress may have turned a blind eye to this outrage, but the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hasn’t. In a letter to the attorney general, it has demanded an explanation for this kind “justice” from the Justice Department:

“We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law and raises other serious questions about the department’s law enforcement decisions.”

It sounds as if the commission is getting some subpoenas ready for high Justice Department officials, and it should be. The commission is obliged under law to issue an annual report on some aspect of law enforcement, and at least one of the commissioners — Todd Gaziano — has suggested that the Justice Department’s kid-glove handling of the Black Panthers be the focus of its 2010 report.

Nothing may actually be done to protect Philadelphia’s voters under this administration, but at least there ought to be a full investigation and comprehensive report by somebody official, even if it has to be somebody outside Congress. The record needs to show just how cynical this president and his attorney general can be when it comes to their promises about upholding the rule of law. Not to mention every American voter’s right to cast a secret ballot without being harassed.  …

Victor Davis Hanson believes that Obama’s descent in the polls centers around Obamacare.

…Health-care take overs and socialized medicine have terrified not just the right and conservatives, but the elderly of all persuasions who fear their shaky Medicare funds will be diverted to Obama’s new plans. In short, they believe their care will be rationed and given to all sorts of new recipients. And they fear age will be a basis for meriting treatment; as if the gang banger with a long felony record of mayhem at 22 would be more deserving before a federal health panel than would someone at 90 who scrimped and saved for insurance in case of some future need for a hip replacement (and was still active and productive; cf. great octogenarians from Sophocles to Barzun who did their best work in their late lives).

It was an insane political move to demonize these town-hallers, when streaming video showed the participants scared and angry, but not violent, trying to get answers from smug politicos who either cell phoned away, ridiculed questioners in the manner of Barney Frank, or mocked their interrogators. These were for the most part not Code Pink/Cindy Sheehan type protestors. …

…Who made the following decisions? 1) to propose a 1,000 page bill that no one had read, much less could explain?; 2) to ram down the greatest change in the US economy in fifty years by the August recess?; 3) to talk loosely of the “uninsured” without knowing why they were not insured, how much it would cost to insure them, or whether they currently in fact find some sort of care?; 4) to reference Rahm Emanuel’s doctor brother as a source of wisdom? 5) to demonize the health-care industry as greedy? …

Charles Krauthammer tries to bring rational thought to end of life care. Pickerhead still thinks some government creeps will reduce our lives to a “death score.”

…We also have to tell the defenders of the notorious Section 1233 of H.R. 3200 that it is not quite as benign as they pretend. To offer government reimbursement to any doctor who gives end-of-life counseling — whether or not the patient asked for it — is to create an incentive for such a chat. …

…So why get Medicare to pay the doctor to do the counseling? Because we know that if this white-coated authority whose chosen vocation is curing and healing is the one opening your mind to hospice and palliative care, we’ve nudged you ever so slightly toward letting go.

It’s not an outrage. It’s surely not a death panel. But it is subtle pressure applied by society through your doctor. And when you include it in a health-care reform whose major objective is to bend the cost curve downward, you have to be a fool or a knave to deny that it’s intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.

Thomas Sowell addresses a number of the deceptive tactics being used in the campaign for Obamacare. Here is the first:

Amid all the controversies over medical care, no one seems to be asking a very basic question: Why does it take more than 1,000 pages of legislation to insure people who lack medical insurance?

Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans do not have medical insurance, hardy souls who have actually read the mammoth medical care legislation being rushed through Congress have discovered all sorts of things there that have nothing whatever to do with insuring the uninsured — and everything to do with taking medical decisions out of the hands of doctors and their patients, and transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.

That’s called “bait and switch” when an unscrupulous business advertises one thing and tries to sell you something else. When politicians do it, it is far more dangerous to far more people.

Deception is not an incidental aspect of this medical care legislation, but is at the very heart of it.

The NRO staff posted some of Charles Krauthammer’s comments from Fox News All-Stars.

On Obama blaming Republicans for obstructing health-care reform:

This is typical Obama. He speaks for truth and justice, and anybody who opposes him is a rabid partisan who does it for personal partisan reasons.

Look, this is disingenuous, and it’s dishonest. He knows that the reason his proposals are in trouble is because of two things: Democrats in Congress, and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. …

David Friedman thinks that we will adapt to the projected effects of global warming pretty easily.

…But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen, and I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade over the next hundred years, resulting in a sea level rise of about a foot and a half. What I find implausible is the claim that changes on that scale at that speed would be catastrophic—sufficiently so to justify very expensive measures now to prevent them. …

…Even if the planet has not been optimized for us, we have optimized our activities for the planet, with the details depending in part on the local climate. Hence any change in either direction can be expected to be a worsening, making our present way of doing things less well adapted to the new conditions.

That would be a persuasive argument if we were talking about a substantial change occurring over five or ten years. But we aren’t. We are talking about a not very large change occurring over a century. In the course of a century, most existing houses will be replaced. If temperatures are rising, they will be replaced with houses designed for a (slightly) warmer climate. If sea levels are rising, they will be replaced, in low lying coastal areas, with houses a little farther inland. Over a century, farmers will change at least the varieties they are growing, very possibly the kind of crop, multiple times, in response to the development of new crop varieties, shifting demand, and similar changes. If temperatures are rising, they will gradually shift to crops adapted to a (slightly) warmer climate. …

The Economist gives us a peek at a coming trend.

NEGOTIATING his way across a crowded concourse at a busy railway station, a traveler removes his phone from his pocket and, using its camera, photographs a bar code printed on a poster. He then looks at the phone to read details of the train timetable displayed there. In Japan, such conveniences are commonplace, and almost all handsets come with the bar code-reading software already loaded. In America and Europe, though, they are only just being introduced.

Actually, calling them bar codes is a bit old-fashioned, because they store information in a two-dimensional (2-D) matrix of tiny squares, dots or other geometric patterns, rather than a stripe of black-and-white lines of varying thickness. When an image of the matrix is captured, software in the phone converts it into a web address, a piece of text or a number. If a number, it is sent to a remote computer which responds with an instruction that tells the phone to perform an action associated with that particular bar code.

In the case of the traveler, this might be calling up a web page on which the train timetable is displayed. Other 2-D bar codes might add an event to a calendar or display a coupon that entitles the bearer to a discount on a hamburger. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Spengler writes on the lives of Palestinians. As is his wont, he will provide a view of the situation you haven’t seen before.

… The standard tables of gross domestic product (GDP) per capital show the West Bank and Gaza at US$1,700, just below Egypt’s $1,900 and significantly below Syria’s $2,250 and Jordan’s $3,000. GDP does not include foreign aid, however, which adds roughly 30% to spendable funds in the Palestinian territories. Most important, the denominator of the GDP per capita equation – the number of people – is far lower than official data indicate. According to an authoritative study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies [1], the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. The numbers are inflated to increase foreign aid.

Adjusting for the Begin-Sadat Center population count and adding in foreign aid, GDP per capita in the West Bank and Gaza comes to $3,380, much higher than in Egypt and significantly higher than in Syria or Jordan. Why should any Palestinian refugee resettle in a neighboring Arab country?

GDP per capita, moreover, does not reflect the spending power of ordinary people. Forty-four percent of Egyptians, for example, live on less than $2 a day, the United Nations estimates. The enormous state bureaucracy eats up a huge portion of national income. New immigrants to Egypt who do not have access to government jobs are likely to live far more poorly than per capita GDP would suggest.

Other data confirm that Palestinians enjoy a higher living standard than their Arab neighbors. A fail-safe gauge is life expectancy. The West Bank and Gaza show better numbers than most of the Muslim world: …

The chattering classes have continued to discuss Yale’s flight from reason. Christopher Hitchens weighs in.

The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn’t even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture. A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of “protest” and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. (The competition was itself a response to the sudden refusal of a Danish publisher to release a book for children about the life of Mohammed, lest it, too, give offense.) By the time the hysteria had been called off by those who incited it, perhaps as many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed.

Yale University Press announced last week that it would go ahead with the publication of the book, but it would remove from it the 12 caricatures that originated the controversy. Not content with this, it is also removing other historic illustrations of the likeness of the Prophet, including one by Gustave Doré of the passage in Dante’s Inferno that shows Mohammed being disemboweled in hell. (These same Dantean stanzas have also been depicted by William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, and Auguste Rodin, so there’s a lot of artistic censorship in our future if this sort of thing is allowed to set a precedent.) …

American Thinker notes the growing realization Obama does not know what he’s talking about.

… When questions of Obama’s lack of experience were raised during the Presidential campaign, those questions were brushed off as racist.  We have been treated to an incessant refrain from the antique media celebrating Barack’s sterling intellect.  But Barely the President’s miscues along the health-care campaign trail have been so glaring that even the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is turning on him:

“Mr. President,” the “Daily Show” host said Monday night, “I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi – 10 steps ahead of everything – or if this whole thing is kickin’ your ass. “

And it’s not just Jon Stewart.  Watch the video at The Politico to see Obama ripped by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann as well.   Even the authors of the Washington Post’s compliant editorial corps who faithfully supplied the props to support Obama’s fantasy Presidential campaign are bailing out.   Eugene Robinson asks: “Where’s Mr. Transformer?” while Richard Cohen regrets “The klutziness of Obama’s effort.” .

Caroline Baum in Bloomberg with the same thoughts.

… Impromptu Obamanomics is getting scarier by the day. For all the president’s touted intelligence, his un-teleprompted comments reveal a basic misunderstanding of capitalist principles.

For example, asked at the Portsmouth town hall how private insurance companies can compete with the government, the president said the following:

“If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete.”

Self-sustaining? The public option? What has Obama been doing during those daily 40-minute economic briefings coordinated by uber-economic-adviser, Larry Summers?

Government programs aren’t self-sustaining by definition. They’re subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we’d be off the hook. …

Thomas Sowell continues with his series on who will make medical decisions.

When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said: “Because that’s where the money is.”

For the same reason, it is as predictable as the sunrise that medical care for the elderly will be cut back under a government-controlled medical system. Because that’s where the money is.

My experience is probably not very different from that of many other people in their seventies. My medical expenses in the past year have been more than in the first 40 years of my life — and I did not spend one night in a hospital all last year or go to an emergency room even once.

Just the ordinary medical expenses of keeping an old geezer going along in good health are high. Throw in a medical emergency or two and the costs go through the roof. So long as my insurance company and I are paying for it, it is nobody else’s business what my medical expenses are. But once the government is involved, everything is their business.

It is not just a question of what the government will pay for. The logic of their collectivist thinking — and the actual practice in some other countries with government-controlled health care — is that you cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if the powers that be decide that “society” cannot let its resources be used that way, or that it would not be “social justice” for some people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because some people “happen to have money.”

The medical care stampede is about much more than medical care, important as that is. It is part of a whole mindset of many on the left who have never reconciled themselves to an economic system in which how much people can withdraw from the resources of the nation depends on how much they have contributed to those resources. …

Ann Coulter has started a series – Liberal Lies About National Health Care.

(1) National health care will punish the insurance companies.

You want to punish insurance companies? Make them compete.

As Adam Smith observed, whenever two businessmen meet, “the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” That’s why we need a third, fourth and 45th competing insurance company that will undercut them by offering better service at a lower price.

Tiny little France and Germany have more competition among health insurers than the U.S. does right now. Amazingly, both of these socialist countries have less state regulation of health insurance than we do, and you can buy health insurance across regional lines — unlike in the U.S., where a federal law allows states to ban interstate commerce in health insurance.

U.S. health insurance companies are often imperious, unresponsive consumer hellholes because they’re a partial monopoly, protected from competition by government regulation. In some states, one big insurer will control 80 percent of the market. (Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.)

Liberals think they can improve the problem of a partial monopoly by turning it into a total monopoly. That’s what single-payer health care is: “Single payer” means “single provider.”

It’s the famous liberal two-step: First screw something up, then claim that it’s screwed up because there’s not enough government oversight (it’s the free market run wild!), and then step in and really screw it up in the name of “reform.” …

Gunzip.weebly provides a very clever use of Obama graphics to display the red ink flowing from his administration.

Outgoing head of Greenpeace says they “emotionalize” to reach their goals. Abe Greenwald has the story in Contentions.

Oops:

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.” Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.

Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.

“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. . . . That may have been a mistake,” he said.

But Leipold admitted to something far more destructive than a mistaken press release. “We, as a pressure group, have to emotionalize issues,” he said, “and we’re not ashamed of emotionalizing issues.”

That is a bald confession of contempt for science. Greenpeace is “proud” to fudge data, to do violence to the scientific method and the tradition of empirical analysis. …

How’s this for a story to start the humor section? Seems that in 2004 Dems in Massachusetts were distressed at the prospect of GOP Gov. Romney naming a replacement for Senator Kerry after he became president. So, they passed a law requiring a vote for senator within five months thus preventing a GOP appointment. Now it would mean the state would have only one senator for the five months following Ted Kennedy’s reunion with Mary Jo Kopechne. So now the Dems want to change the law back. Kathryn Jean Lopez has the story for The Corner.

More on this from John Fund who seems to know everything.

More humor from the Dems as they say the law of unintended consequences is of no consequence. Russ Roberts in Cafe Hayek has the story.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund sends off Bob Novak.

Robert Novak had planned to continue writing his three-times-a-week newspaper column and appearing on TV as an analyst until, as he told me, “the good Lord decides my time is up.” The discovery of a malignant brain tumor a year ago upset his plans and forced him into early retirement. But he continued writing occasional articles until late last year and was able to lucidly discuss current events after that as he battled the disease that claimed him yesterday at age 78.  …

… When I joined Bob and Rowly as the first reporter ever hired to work with the duo back in 1982, I asked Bob what made him most proud about the column. He told me he was pleased that every column the pair wrote contained at least one nugget of news that hadn’t appeared elsewhere. …

Same from John Podhoretz.

… He was a difficult man in many ways, but I always found him interesting, lively, and friendly. And I have to say that, toward the end of his life, he wrote a riveting I-can’t-quite-believe-I’m-reading-this memoir entitled The Prince of Darkness, which may offer, in its unsparing portrait of his own character and how he maneuvered his way through a 50-year career, the most accurate (and most dispiriting) picture of life in Washington and the journalism game published in my lifetime. It was an unexpected achievement, because he surely knew he was leaving his readers with a bad taste in their mouths. But he was determined to get it all down and get it right, and he did.

Left libertarian, Nat Hentoff, formerly of the Village Voice, says now we have a White House that makes him fearful. He is reacting to the end of life possibilities of ObamaCare. Pickerhead thinks we’ll have “life scores” just as we have credit scores. We won’t even have death panels. Some government creep will create some scoring process that will total up what we’re worth.

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law.

The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to “Dr. Obama,” particularly among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).

Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that “allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination.” (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing — which is fundamental to Obamacare goals — “the complete lives system.” You see, at 65 or older, you’ve had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks. ..

Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson, former Bush W aides, have a lengthy and thoughtful piece on ideas and issues with which to rebuild the Republican Party.

Here are some excerpts:

…A moral component to our foreign policy is, moreover, part of the American DNA. It would have been impossible to maintain the seemingly endless exertions of the Cold War without the American people’s instinctual concern for those held captive and their no less instinctual abhorrence of oppression. The same is true in the conflict with Islamist extremism and other current global challenges. Americans have an interest in liberty and human rights because they are Americans—and because America’s safety is served by the hope and health of others. Republicans can be forthright about the foreign-policy tradition that mixes toughness with generosity, the willingness to confront threats forcefully with the active promotion of development, health, and human rights. Since the midpoint of the last century, this has been the GOP’s watchword. Among younger Americans focused on global issues like genocide, poverty, women’s rights, religious liberty, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, it can resonate loudly. …

…Republicans will also have to put forth a comprehensive reform agenda. There is no shortage of issues at the federal level: converting the labyrinthine U.S. tax code into something far less burdensome and far more family-friendly; repairing a budget process that is broken, corrupt, and inefficient; developing a modern-day regulatory system in the aftermath of the collapse of our financial institutions; remaking a tort system that imposes wholly unnecessary upward pressure on the costs of health care; insisting that foreign-aid expenditures are both generous and outcome-oriented; and so forth. …

…As it happens, the GOP has successful reformers to whom it can look to and learn from, including popular governors or former governors like Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, and Jeb Bush. Daniels’s health-care plan in Indiana facilitated the transfer of money previously consigned to Medicaid into individual health-savings accounts and simultaneously extended coverage to more than 130,000 uninsured individuals. In a state carried by Obama last year, Daniels won re-election by 18 points. The Daniels plan is worth emulating on its own merits. Politically, it is worth studying as a case history in what the country cries out for: leadership dedicated to fixing what can be fixed at a cost that can be afforded and in a spirit of inclusiveness untainted by class resentment and a manipulated antipathy toward “the rich.” …

…It is, in, fact, vital for Republican leaders to press the case for economic growth in general. Americans achieve their dreams not through the redistribution of wealth but through the creation of wealth. As the late Jack Kemp never tired of stressing, growth-oriented economic policies are a simple matter of justice and equity. At the same time, they offer fertile opportunity for innovation by applying conservative and free-market ideas to the task of encouraging savings and wealth-building among the aspiring poor, rather than debt and dependency. Such innovative ideas can range from local efforts to nurture financial literacy to ambitious KidSave proposals that would create savings accounts for every child at birth, subsidized for low-income families. Whatever its particular expression in policy, asset-building should be a hallmark of the Republican party, on the sound theory that ownership encourages social mobility, community, and family stability. …

Thomas Sowell gives clarity to the government taking over our healthcare decisions. He ends with a discussion of the controversial ‘death panels’.

…As for a “death panel,” no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. “End of life” care under the “guidance” of “some independent group” sounds so much nicer — and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.

He said, “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there.” He added: “It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.”  …

A Corner post suggests Cheney’s memoirs are widely anticipated within the beltway.

Summertime in Wyoming is usually quite pleasant for the Cheney family. Last Thursday, the day before Lynne Cheney’s 68th birthday party, the Washington Post soured spirits just a bit with this headline: “Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush.” The front-page story detailed, with the help of numerous unnamed “associates,” how former vice president Dick Cheney’s upcoming book will supposedly open a “second front” against “Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush.” Team Cheney was not amused.

“From the first sentence, the piece was clearly biased and inaccurate,” Mary Matalin, Cheney’s former White House counselor, told NRO. Matalin now works as editor-in-chief of Threshold Editions — the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster — which will publish the former veep’s yet-to-be-titled memoir in spring 2011.

What irked Matalin was the Post’s reliance on whispers from sources alleged to have been present at the “informal conversations” Cheney is having with colleagues — where, the Post reports, the former vice president “broke form when asked about his regrets.” Matalin says “inaccuracies were evident since I was privy to what transpired at the book meetings. What was claimed to be said in them and about the vice president’s book was flatly and categorically untrue.”

Matalin, though miffed about the Post piece, admits it did get one thing right: Cheney’s book will uncloak many new things — just not a vendetta against George W. Bush. Cheney’s sense of humor, for starters, will be on full display. “He has some slap-your-mama funny tales from the around the world,” she says. …

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, for the WSJ, reviews The Anti-Communist Manifesto and gives a brief biography of each author who had a book selected for this work.

Although the Cold War was a “great game” played out on the field of diplomacy, a conflict between military superpowers that sometimes turned hot, it was also the 20th century’s war of religion: a clash of beliefs and a battle of the books. This mortal combat ­between Communism and liberal democracy produced a vast literature, some books famous in their day, some ­famous still.

Now John V. Fleming has had the excellent idea of telling the story of four of them, and the result is the readable and fascinating “The Anti-Communist ­Manifestos.” It may be all the better because Mr. ­Fleming, an emeritus professor at Princeton, isn’t a modern historian by trade but an authority on medieval literature who knows how to read a text and its context. His four manifestos are “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler’s novel about the Soviet show ­trials, and three memoirs: “Out of the Night,” by the pseudonymous “Jan Valtin,” a mysterious ­Communist ­agitator; “I Chose ­Freedom,” by the ­Soviet defector ­Victor Kravchenko; and “Witness,” by Whittaker ­Chambers, best known to history as the man who ­accused Alger Hiss of ­espionage.

These books are, of course, chosen from a long ­potential list that could include eyewitness accounts of the early Soviet ­regime—like Bertrand ­Russell’s “The Practice and ­Theory of Bolshevism” (1920) and Emma Goldman’s “My Disillusionment in Russia” (1923)—or George Orwell’s “1984.” Orwell’s book has just passed its 60th birthday and has been described as the most influential novel ever written.

But Mr. Fleming’s quartet has a linking theme. All his authors were anticommunists who had once been ­Communist activists. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Rick Richman comments on a post from Israeli blogger Arlene Kushner. Apparently Israel has seen enough of Obama to know that they want their deals in writing.

Israeli blogger Arlene Kushner writes that there are “rumors afloat about the specifics on U.S.-Israel negotiations with regard to a ‘temporary’ freeze on settlement building.” She cites an Israeli press report that “the U.S. wants a two year freeze because Obama figures that’s how long forging a peace deal will take,” while Netanyahu is offering three months (with the right to resume building if Arab states do not respond with normalization steps).

But the real sticking point may be something else that she notes in her post:

Both Netanyahu and Barak (who reportedly would accept a six-month freeze) want the deal in writing, since Obama claimed there was no deal with Bush that had to be honored because there was nothing that was an explicit written commitment. Obama is said to be balking at this as he doesn’t want to go on record as formally authorizing building in the settlements under any conditions.

This is what happens when you renege on established oral understandings on the grounds they are “unenforceable.” …

George Jonas in Canada’s National Post also comments on US-Israeli relations.

…”Think about that for a moment,” wrote Jeff Jacoby in theBoston Globe recently. “Six months after Barack Obama became the first black man to move into the previously all-white residential facility at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, he is fighting to prevent integration in Jerusalem.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Obamists’ chutzpah was unequivocal, though not as intemperate as mine would have been. He didn’t tell Obama and his officials to go fly a kite. He simply reminded everyone that with Israel being a free country, the residents of Jerusalem, regardless of ethnicity or religion, were free to purchase property wherever they liked. Just as Arabs could live in west Jerusalem if they chose, Jews could live in east Jerusalem. “This is the policy of an open city,” he said.

It’s not the policy of Obamaniac liberals, though. Their “two-state” solution is to turn the Jewish State into a multicultural caravanserai but make the Palestinian State judenrein. It’s not Zionism that is racist; it’s rampant liberalism, liberalism run amok. The United Nation’s infamous Zionism=racism doesn’t compute, but after the left’s — not only the American or European, but even theIsraeli left’s — display of visceral aversion to Jewish settlements in the Holy Land, liberalism=racism isn’t far off the mark.

Recently, America’s uber-liberal President had the temerity to advise Israel to engage in introspection. That’s a joke. Whatever Israel’s failings, there hasn’t been a more introspective country on Earth. Whatever Obama’s qualities, there hasn’t been a more cocksure occupant of the Whiter House. …

The Wall Street Journal editorial board tells us about a truly amazing occurrence.

We witnessed that rarest of things last week—a politician’s public humility. When France, along with Germany, reported an unexpected uptick in economic growth for the second quarter, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde called the return to growth “very surprising.” Imagine that—a major global economy stops shrinking, without the benefit of trillion-dollar stimulus packages or major reforms, and a politician doesn’t rush to claim credit for the achievement.

Politicians don’t “grow” an economy like a vegetable garden, and the reasons behind economic growth in the global economy are at least as mysterious to our political class, if not more so, than they are to the rest of us. Ms. Lagarde, who spent decades in the private sector, is perhaps better placed than many politicians to appreciate this fact. A single quarter of 0.3% growth hardly means it’s off to the races for France or Germany, and the euro zone’s economy as a whole still shrank in the quarter, by 0.1% of GDP.

But at a time when politicians around the world are desperate for any sign of a turnaround, it’s refreshing to hear the minister responsible for France’s economy speak the truth about growth. It is the product of literally millions of decisions made by millions of people about what to produce, buy and sell. Politicians can influence all that decision making, especially by increasing or decreasing the incentives to produce, work and innovate. But they can’t control today’s multi-trillion-dollar economies, no matter how much they’d like to take credit for doing so when things start looking better. …

Richard A. Epstein takes another look at Gates-gate now that the police tapes have been released.

…Who, then, is likely to make a blunder–someone who follows the book, or someone who in righteous indignation falls back on his own deep-seated conviction that whites, police officers included, suffer from unconscious racial biases? Again the tapes go a long way to answering that question. It is no wonder that police officers, white and black, took offense at the president’s remarks. The color of the uniform matters more than the color of the skin.

In these circumstances, it was ungracious for Obama to damn Crowley by faint praise. Of course an “outstanding officer” like Sgt. Crowley with “a fine record of racial sensitivity” can have interactions with members of the African-American community that are “fraught with misunderstanding.” This Solomonic effort to split the baby is undercut by one simple fact: Crowley’s compliance with protocol in the face of Gates’ gratuitous confrontation. Gates is hardly covered with glory because his own abusive conduct may not be criminal. Common civility requires more.

There is a larger lesson to be learned. No national dialogue will improve race relations by treating a model officer like Crowley as if he were a rogue cop. The rate of racial progress in Cambridge makes these harsh denunciations hurtful. Gates could have contributed to improving relations by keeping his cool after the incident was over. Yet, no matter how one views the case, standard statistical protocols caution against sad generalizations about race relations from one unfortunate incident. Professor Gates and President Obama would have done a lot better if they had reined in their own harsh charges. Sometimes silence is golden.

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute blog has a lot of fun tracking the NY Times efforts to cover for the kid president.

… Well – Obama quite clearly talked about the hip replacement as a quality of life decision, not a “curative” treatment, said it was a tough call, said end-of-life care is a huge cost driver, and spoke in favor of a final legislative package that included “voluntary” guidelines established by government wise men to balance expense and efficacy.  Denial is probably the best tactic for Obama’s supporters on this one.

However, the Times has now pointed themselves into a corner – their recent faux-careful examination of the “death panel” rumors that have dogged Obama completely failed to note Obama’s own contribution to the debate in April.  The Times has decreed that the notion that Obama has ever hinted at support for anything like a death panel (or cost oriented trade-offs for end-of-life care) is “false”, despite their own past reporting to the contrary.

So what are they going to do when Obama starts talking about his grandmother and insisting that his only takeaway from that experience was that he is opposed to death panels or any sort of government advisory role in end-of-life care?  Are you kidding?  They are going to move on.  Nothing in the latest Gay Stolberg story hints that Obama is re-spinning his grandmother’s tale with a new “lesson learned” or that the folks now accused of being “dishonest” can point to Obama’s own words as printed in the Times.

It’s Times-world – Obama can say whatever he wants and later say whatever else he wants, then denounce the people still grappling with the previous version.

Imagine my surprise.

Steve Chapman does a great job dispelling the myth that Americans don’t live as long as the unfortunate citizens of countries with socialized healthcare.

…It’s true that the United States spends more on health care than anyone else, and it’s true that we rank below a lot of other advanced countries in life expectancy. The juxtaposition of the two facts, however, doesn’t prove we are wasting our money or doing the wrong things.

It only proves that lots of things affect mortality besides medical treatment. Actor Heath Ledger didn’t die at age 28 because the American health-care system failed him.

One big reason our life expectancy lags is that Americans have an unusual tendency to perish in homicides or accidents. We are 12 times more likely than the Japanese to be murdered and nearly twice as likely to be killed in auto wrecks.

In their 2006 book, “The Business of Health,” economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider set out to determine where the U.S. would rank in life span among developed nations if homicides and accidents are factored out. Their answer? First place.

That discovery indicates our health-care system is doing a poor job of preventing shootouts and drunk driving but a good job of healing the sick. All those universal-care systems in Canada and Europe may sound like Health Heaven, but they fall short of our model when it comes to combating life-threatening diseases. …

Ross Douthat discusses seniors, Medicare, and Republican strategy.

…That’s why Republicans find themselves tiptoeing into an unfamiliar role — as champions of old-age entitlements. The Democrats are “sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare,” Mitch McConnell declared. They want to “cannibalize” the program to pay for reform, John Cornyn complained. It’s a “raid,” Sam Brownback warned, that could result in the elderly losing “necessary care.”

The controversy over “death panels” is just the most extreme manifestation of this debate. Obviously, the Democratic plans wouldn’t euthanize your grandmother. But they might limit the procedures that her Medicare will pay for. And conservative lawmakers are using this inconvenient truth to paint the Democrats as enemies of Grandma.

You can understand why Republicans, after decades of being demagogued for proposing even modest entitlement reforms, would relish the chance to turn the tables. But this is a perilous strategy for the right.

Medicare’s price tag, if trends continue, will make a mockery of the idea of limited government. For conservatives, no fiscal cause is more important than curbing this exponential growth. And by fighting health care reform with tactics ripped from Democratic playbooks, and enlisting anxious seniors as foot soldiers, conservatives are setting themselves up to win the battle and lose the longer war. …

The Economist walks us through Tristram Hunt’s new book, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels.

When the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.

The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital. …