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David Warren reviews The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, by Alison Gopnik.

…Gopnik’s may not be the best for the purpose, but is nevertheless among the most accessible books that show how recent empirical research into the behaviour of the littlest human folk has utterly demolished the assumptions and “theories” of such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget. …

…At the very least, Gopnik shows that human apprehension of an objective moral order — founded on the Golden Rule: to do as you would be done by — is innate. This sense of justice is present long before adults have had a decent chance to tamper with it, or to impose ideological blinders.

From a very young age, even before continuous memory has set, the babe is playing with hypotheticals and counterfactuals in a remarkably knowing way, and is in little doubt about the goodness or badness of his behaviour. That even a babe is capable of evil — of doing the bad in defiance of the good, in the absence of sufficient self-control — is made wonderfully apparent in Gopnik’s book, and many other empirical studies.

The importance of play, in the development of children, is seldom so well stressed as by Gopnik. The child’s empathy is also innate, and first appears, as if spontaneously, in the loving return of the gaze of his mother. It is developed through his imagination, in which he posits imaginary creatures, from invisible playmates to magical dragons. …

Caroline Glick has a fascinating article on what is really happening with US foreign policy in the Middle East. The first part of the article reports evidence that Obama’s message of Hope and Appeasement have not fazed terrorist groups.

…At the conference, Fatah’s supposedly feuding old guard and young guard were united in their refusal to reach an accommodation with Israel. Both old and young endorsed the use of terrorism against Israel. Both embraced the Aksa Martyrs Brigades terror group as a full-fledged Fatah organization.

Both demanded that all Jews be expelled from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem ahead of the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state.

Both claimed that any settlement with Israel be preceded by an Israeli withdrawal to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and by Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state through its acceptance of millions of foreign-born, hostile Arabs as immigrants within its truncated borders.

Both demanded that all terrorists be released from Israeli prisons as a precondition for “peace” talks with Israel.

Both accused Israel of murdering Yasser Arafat.

Both approved building a strategic alliance with Iran. …

The latest sales pitch for Obamacare is that preventive care will save money. Charles Krauthammer counters this economic fallacy.

…This inconvenient truth comes, once again, from the CBO. In an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf writes: “Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.”

How can that be? If you prevent somebody from getting a heart attack, aren’t you necessarily saving money? The fallacy here is confusing the individual with society. For the individual, catching something early generally reduces later spending for that condition. But, explains Elmendorf, we don’t know in advance which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case, “it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway.” And this costs society money that would not have been spent otherwise.

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care. …

…This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be preventing illness. Of course we should. But in medicine, as in life, there is no free lunch. The idea that prevention is somehow intrinsically economically different from treatment — that treatment increases costs and prevention lowers them — is simply nonsense. Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the whole premise of medicine. …

Karl Rove looks at some of the tactics being used in the Obamacare campaign.

…For example, there’s a video being circulated online of Barack Obama telling the Illinois AFL-CIO in 2003, “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health-care program . . . we may not get there immediately” and then telling an SEIU Health Care Forum in 2007, “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out where we’ve got a much more portable system.”

The White House now insists that the president doesn’t want to enact a single-payer health-care system or eliminate private insurance. What’s more, a White House spokeswoman attacked the video, saying its compilers “Take a phrase here and there—they simply cherry-pick and put it together—and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”

That’s laughable. Mr. Obama’s remarks are straightforward and indisputable. Rather than saying his views have changed as he has worked to create a national consensus, the administration denies what is obviously true. …

Thomas J. Sugrue in WSJ takes a look at the home ownership.

…Surveys show that Americans buy into our gauzy platitudes about the character-building qualities of home ownership—at least those who still own them. A February Pew survey reported that nine out of 10 homeowners viewed their homes as a “comfort” in their lives. But for millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure, the home has become something else altogether: the source of panic and despair. Those emotions were on full display last week, when an estimated 53,000 people packed the Save the Dream fair at Atlanta’s World Congress Center. Its planners, with the support of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, brought together struggling homeowners, housing counselors, and lenders, including industry giants Bank of America and Citigroup, to renegotiate at-risk mortgages. Georgia’s housing market has been devastated by the current economic crisis—338,411 homes in the Peachtree state went into foreclosure in May and June alone.

Atlanta represents the current housing crisis in microcosm. Since the second quarter of 2006, housing values across the United States have fallen by one third. Over a million homes were lost to foreclosure nationwide in 2008, as homeowners struggled to meet payments. The number of foreclosures reached an all-time record last month—when owners of one in every 355 houses in the country received default or auction notices or were seized by creditors. The collapse in confidence in securitized, high-risk mortgages has also devastated some of the nation’s largest banks and lenders. The home financing giant Fannie Mae alone held an estimated $230 billion in toxic assets. Even if there are signs of hope on the horizon (home prices ticked upward by 0.5% in May and new housing starts rose in June), analysts like Yale’s Robert Shiller expect that housing prices will remain level for the next five years. Many economists, like the Wharton School’s Joseph Gyourko, are beginning to make the case that public policies should encourage renting, or at least put it on a level playing field with home ownership. A June 2009 survey commissioned by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, found a deep-seated pessimism about home ownership, suggesting that even if renting doesn’t yet have cachet, it’s the only choice left for those who have been burned by the housing market. One third of respondents don’t believe that they will ever be able to own a home. And 42% of those who once purchased a home, but don’t own one now, believe that they’ll never own one again. …

The Economist reports on a different kind of space race, looking for another planet that might support life.

IN 1995, when Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva detected the first exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star other than the sun) he started a race that has gained pace ever since. Some 360 such planets have now been detected, but none is exactly equivalent to the Earth.

The closest so far is Gliese 581c, which was discovered in 2007 by Dr Mayor’s colleague, Stéphane Udry. It is both rocky and orbits its parent star at a distance where liquid water could reasonably be expected to exist. However, since its parent star is a red dwarf—a far smaller and fainter object than the sun—that orbit is, in fact, much smaller that the Earth’s around the sun. That, in turn, suggests Gliese 581c is likely to be tidally locked to its orbital period, so that one side of the planet always faces the star and the other never does. Having half a planet in permanent daylight and the other half in permanent darkness does not sound like a good recipe for life.

As astronomers heard this week at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Rio, two new missions—a French one launched in December 2006 and an American one launched on March 6th—are in the process of trying to add to the list. Dr Mayor told the meeting that the French mission, CoRoT, has now found 80 exoplanets. It does so by watching for small diminutions in the amount of light from a star as the planet in question passes in front of it, a phenomenon known technically as a transit. The details of all but seven of these transiting planets are still unpublished, but Dr Mayor gave the meeting a preview.

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David Warren packs a lot into his article in the Ottawa Citizen. It includes a rundown on some of the administration’s czars who have avoided much-needed public scrutiny.

…Tell you the candid truth, I don’t like “nice” people. Conversely, I have a sneaking regard for real political enemies who are prepared to state candidly what they are about. Which is why I mentioned Obama’s long list of policy czars, above — people like John Holdren (1970s advocate of forced abortions and mass sterilization) the new science czar, Van Jones (declared Communist) the new green jobs czar, Vivek Kundra (convicted shoplifter) the new infotech czar, Adolfo Carrion (pay-for-play scandals) the new urban subsidies czar, Nancy DePerle (lobbyist-to-regulator) the new health czar, Cass Sunstein (behaviourist and animal rights wacko) the new regulatory czar, and so on.

There are dozens of these, altogether. They are Obama’s “shadow cabinet,” with the advantage over his more presentable official cabinet that they can avoid congressional scrutiny in almost everything they do. They didn’t need to face the Senate confirmation revelations that lost Obama so many of his earliest cabinet appointments. A mere Internet search for quotes reveals that many of them are capable of great candour, at least in the radical leftist environments from which most of them came. …

Roger L. Simon posts on Obama’s distorted ideas about fairness which is his “f” word.

I first noticed this during what was, for me anyway, one of the seminal moments of the campaign – Charles Gibson asking the candidate about the correlation between a cut in capital gains taxes and an actual increase in government revenue. For a moment it seemed Obama didn’t know what Gibson meant or had never heard of this before, but then he covered himself with the f-word. Even if this were the case, Obama said, it wasn’t “fair” to cut capital gains. Peculiar, no, given that an increase in government revenues would be more money to spend on O’s pet programs that allegedly would help those people that were suffering?

Mark Steyn discusses the quality of life problems that arise when government is in charge of healthcare.

…The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decide that you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.” Well, he had a good innings. He was 57. …

…Well, amazingly, millions of freeborn citizens exercising their own judgment as to which of the latest drugs, tests and procedures suits their own best interests has given Americans a longer, better, more fulfilling old age to the point where there are entire states designed to cater to it. (There is no Belgian or Scottish Florida.) I had an elderly British visitor this month who’s had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly, and so we took her to Emergency. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she’s had in the past decade in Britain – even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable “resources.” So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It’s the difference between health “care” (i.e., going to the doctor’s every month to no purpose) and health treatment – and on the latter America is the best in the world.

President Barack Obama has wondered whether this is a “sustainable model.” But, from your point of view, what counts is not whether the model’s sustainable but whether you are. I am certainly in favor of reform. I would support a Singapore-style system of personal health accounts – and Singapore, for Mayor Bloomberg’s benefit, has the third-highest life expectancy in the world. But, under any government system that interjects a bureaucracy between you and your health, the elderly and not so elderly get denied treatment. And there’s nothing you can do about it because, ultimately, government health represents the nationalization of your body. You’re 84, 72, 63, 58, you’ve had a good innings. It’s easy for him to say. And even easier for his army of bureaucrats. …

David Harsanyi uses Obama’s own sales pitch against him.

…In his pitch to the masses on health care, President Barack Obama says that a public option “will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health-care market . . . and keep the insurance companies honest.”

So let’s agree, then, that the more we inject competition into a marketplace, the more consumers benefit from lower prices and innovation. Consequently, there should be no problem infusing this open-minded brand of policymaking into an array of issues. You know, to keep everyone honest.

All one needs to do is employ the president’s logic and it becomes patently obvious that the time is right for a “private option” in Social Security. This would free citizens to extract themselves from a failing program and pay into a private one that offers more than a 1 percent return (like a savings account or a tooth fairy, for instance). Since injecting competition into markets is healthy and desirable and all that good stuff . . . it should be painless. …

…And what about those vulnerable children? If health care is a “right,” then education is a sacred moral imperative. How could an enlightened society allow a “public” education monopoly to run our precious schools into the ground? Let’s get moving on a private option by means of vouchers so parents — or “victims,” in this case — can blunt the influence of “villainous” super-funded special interest groups like the National Education Association. …

Michael Barone looks at the huge increase in government spending.

…The tea parties this spring and the so-called “mobs” of protesters against the health care bill seem to have sprung up largely spontaneously; it is those who support the Democrats who appear in organized busloads with mass-produced signs.

And the tea party and health care protesters, in their often unsophisticated way, are raising an issue that seems to have become central to our politics: Should we vastly increase the size and scope of the federal government? This issue was long dormant, with a consensus prevailing during the quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth from the early 1980s to the financial crisis of 2008.

Now it’s clearly presented, thanks to the Democrats’ plans. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke noted on June 3, the national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product will increase from about 40 percent in 2007 to 70 percent in 2011 — the highest level since the years after the massive debt buildup in World War II. “The fundamental decision that the Congress, the administration and the American people must confront,” Bernanke testified, “is how large a share of the nation’s economic resources to devote to federal government programs.” …

Ann Coulter counters Kathleen Parker’s attempt to play the race card.

…Throughout the presidential campaign last year, liberals were champing at the bit to accuse Americans of racism for not supporting Barack Obama. That was a tough argument on account of the obvious facts that: (1) for every vote he lost because he’s black, Obama picked up another 20 votes for being black; (2) Obama won the election in (3) a country that’s 87 percent non-black.

So the accusations of racism had to be put on hold until … the first note of dissent from his agenda was sounded.

Inasmuch as Obama was just elected and his policies have turned out to be the most left-wing the country has ever seen, it wasn’t going to be easy to claim the electorate suddenly decided they didn’t like the mammoth spending bills or socialist health care bills because they just noticed Obama is black.

But Kathleen Parker has leapt into the fray to explain that the opposition to Obama’s agenda is pure Southern racism. And she’s from the South, so it must be true! …

…How one gets from “we don’t want socialized medicine” to “we hate black people” was a tough equation. As my algebra teacher used to say: “Please show your work.” …

John Stossel says that big business is happy to use government to its own gain.

…Not that Big Pharma and Big Insurance like every detail of the Democratic plan. Drug companies don’t want Medicare negotiating drug prices — for good reason. If it forces drug prices down, research and development will be discouraged. (Depending whom you believe, Obama may or may not have agreed with the drug companies on this point.)

As for the insurance companies, they worry — legitimately — that a government insurance company — the so-called public option” — would drive them out of business. This isn’t alarmism. It’s economics. The public option would have no bottom line to worry about and therefore could engage in “predatory pricing” against the private insurers.

But despite these differences, the biggest companies in these two industries are on board with “reform.”

It illustrates economist Steven Horwitz’s First Law of Political Economy: “No one hates capitalism more than capitalists”. In this case, big business wants to shape — and profit from — what inevitably will be an interventionist health-care reform. Can you think of the last time a major business supported a truly free market in anything?  …

Arthur W. Herman in NR reviews Allis and Ronald Radosh’s book A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.

In most world capitals, the creation of Israel — which used to be seen through a heroic lens, as in the film Exodus — is now viewed as a matter of regret. The current U.S. administration, too, is rather cool toward Israel. So this is a good time to be reminded of how and why Israel was founded in the first place, and how one American’s role in that founding rose to the heroic. Allis and Ronald Radosh have given us an invaluable and compelling account of Pres. Harry Truman’s fight against enormous and unscrupulous opposition from within his own administration, in order to make sure America played a public role in the creation of Israel. …

…The State Department did everything it could to prevent that birth. It importuned the British to remain in Palestine. When that failed, at the last minute Truman’s U.N. ambassador sabotaged the president’s clearly stated policy by switching the U.S. vote from supporting partition of Palestine to supporting a more or less permanent U.N. trusteeship. A furious Truman had to read the riot act to Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett. It was as close as Truman and his semi-deified secretary of state came to breaking publicly on an issue. Marshall relented, but told Truman he intended to vote against him in the upcoming presidential election. …

…And it may also come from a lingering sense, as Winston Churchill put it, that the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is an event “to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Supporting Israel was and is an act of gratitude toward the religion and people who stood at the founding of Western civilization, and without whom we would not exist. Men like Churchill and Truman understood it was important to return the favor.

Nose on Your Face.com reports Obama named Mike Tyson as “Town Hall Debate Czar”.

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John Bolton gives us more of Mary Robinson’s extreme views.

…In fact, Ms. Robinson wanted U.N. control over NATO’s actions: “It surely must be right for the Security Council . . . to have a say in whether a prolonged bombing campaign in which the bombers choose their target at will is consistent with the principle of legality under the Charter of the United Nations.” One wonders if this is also Mr. Obama’s view, given the enormous consequences for U.S. national security.

This February, asked whether former President George W. Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes, Ms. Robinson answered that it was “premature,” until a “process” such as an “independent inquiry” was established: “[T]hen the decision can be taken as to whether anybody will be held accountable.” In particular, she objected to the Bush administration’s “war paradigm” for dealing with terrorism, saying we actually “need to reinforce the criminal justice system.” Asked about Mr. Obama’s statements on “moving forward,” Ms. Robinson responded that “one of the ways of looking forward is to have the courage to say we must inquire.”

Ms. Robinson’s award shows Mr. Obama’s detachment from longstanding, mainstream, American public opinion on foreign policy. The administration’s tin ear to the furor over Ms. Robinson underlines how deep that detachment really is.

Rick Richman looks at whether Mary Robinson’s radical views were known by the White House.

…It is highly unlikely that the nomination was the result of poor vetting, which involves nominating someone who appears appropriate and then discovering he has a tax problem, for example. But if you know about the tax problem and nominate him anyway—because you think his services are necessary to solve a more important problem—the issue is not one of vetting but of judgment, as well as what you are trying to achieve with the nomination.

Ed Lasky has marshaled a lot of evidence indicating that the person responsible for selecting and/or vetting Robinson was the president’s close friend and White House adviser Samantha Power, who would likely have been familiar with Robinson’s background. Robinson’s record at Durban did not, in any event, need a background check; it was in the foreground of her public record (see Tom Lantos’s lengthy Durban report). It was not a hidden tax problem but a known quality deemed not disqualifying given the larger problem to be solved by the nomination.

What was that problem? In an important 7,345-word post (with a 1,700-word follow-up), Catherine Fitzpatrick—who was at Durban I and watched Robinson’s performance there, and who is both her defender and her critic—says the nomination was “an effort to deflect criticism of the United States coming furiously from some leftist groups for the U.S. decision not to participate in the follow-up conference in Durban in April.” She concludes that “at the end of the day, the Obama Administration chose Mary Robinson because they felt she was one of their own.”…

Rick Richman thinks Obama’s Cairo speech fit a Mary Robinson quote hand-in-glove.

One of the most controversial parts of Barack Obama’s Cairo speech was the portion in which he appeared to draw a moral equivalence between the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the Palestinian “dislocation” and “occupation” arising from the wars against the Jewish state in 1948 and 1967.

It is worth revisiting that portion of the Cairo address in connection with the continuing Mary Robinson controversy. Here is what Obama said in Cairo:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. . . .

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people—Muslims and Christians— have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. . . . They endure the daily humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation.

The “on the one hand/on the other hand” character of Obama’s discussion of the Holocaust caused an adverse reaction among the Israeli public as well as among a significant portion of American Jews and helped create the widespread lack of trust in Obama that now exists in Israel. …

Paul Johnson discusses the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

How worried should we be about Iran? Should we encourage the Israelis to make a defensive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities? Israel has carried out similar strikes twice before–once against Saddam Hussein’s French-built reactor in Iraq and, more recently, against a Syrian nuclear plant. Both were successful.

Knocking out Iran’s nuclear capability would be much more difficult because of the distance to be covered by Israeli aircraft and because the plants are underground. These difficulties must be weighed against the fact that the Iranian regime is unpopular everywhere because of its recent crooked election and the savagery with which protests against the results were put down.

The extent of this unpopularity is evidenced by Saudi Arabia’s recent agreement to allow Israeli aircraft to fly over Saudi territory en route to Iran. The agreement was secret but was widely leaked by the Saudis–a message to Tehran that its stance and putative bomb are unpopular in the Muslim world. In fact, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States and Iraq–all with which Iran has had longstanding and bitter territorial disputes–are more scared of Iran’s bomb being used against them than are the Israelis. …

John Fund wonders if the next thing to trip up congress will be the grab bag called “per diems”. Remember what Mark Twain said. “There is no native American criminal class …… except for congress.

… The total cost for congressional overseas travel is never made public because the price tag for State Department advance teams and military planes used by lawmakers are folded into much larger budgets. Members of Congress must only report the total per diem reimbursements they receive in cash for hotels, meals and local transport.

They don’t have to itemize expenses—a convenient arrangement since most costs are covered by the government or local hosts. Some trips subtract some hotel and meal costs from the per diems, others do not. “The policy is completely inconsistent,” one House member told me. Total per diem allowances (per person, including staff) can top $3,000 for a single trip. Unused funds are supposed to be given back to the government, but congressional records show that rarely happens. …

The Democrats still play the victims, says David Harsanyi.

They own the bully pulpit. They enjoy a mandate. They can move the votes. They dictate the debate. They write the legislation. They monopolize the coverage.

When it comes to politics, Democrats are U.S. Steel, Ma Bell and Google all rolled into one. And yet, due to a mystifying cosmic event, they are also victims.

In a recent editorial in USA Today, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and sidekick Steny Hoyer grumbled about how reactionaries were shutting down the voices of the enlightenment on health care. …

…If the government-run health bill doesn’t pass, it won’t be the result of anyone’s voice being quashed. In fact, I would be curious to meet the Herculean life form that has the capability to “drown out” either President Barack Obama or Pelosi. …

Walter Williams asks what benefit Blacks have from their increased political power.

… Blacks hold high offices and dominate the political arena in Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and other cities. Yet these are the very cities with the nation’s most rotten schools, highest crime rates, high illegitimacy rates, weak family structure and other forms of social pathology. I am not saying that blacks having political power is the cause of these problems. What I am saying is that the solution to most of the major problems that confront many black people won’t be found in the political arena and by electing more blacks to high office. In fact, politicians tend to be hostile to some of the solutions to problems many blacks face such as school choice as a means to strengthen education, the elimination of oppressive licensing restrictions for various occupations, and supportive of job-destroying labor legislation such as minimum wage laws. …

Jonah Goldberg posts in The Corner on a statement by America’s surgeons.

… We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President’s remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients. …

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann have an interesting note on Cash for (American) Clunkers.

The only part of the stimulus program that is working, the cash-for-clunkers program is, in reality, a subsidy to foreign car companies, proving that Barack Obama is the best president Japan ever had.

The Department of Transportation reports that the ten leading trade-ins are all American branded cars while six of the top ten new cars purchased – and four of the top five – are foreign. So the United States Senate is about to pass additional funds to subsidize the trade-in of American cars and the purchase of foreign cars. …

Thomas Sowell shares some wonderful random thoughts with us. Here are three:

…Different people have very different reactions to President Barack Obama. Those who listen to his rhetoric are often inspired, while those who follow what he actually does are often appalled.

New York and Chicago have both recently had their coldest June in generations. If they had had their hottest month, it would have been trumpeted from the media 24/7 by “global warming” zealots. But the average surface temperature of the earth has not changed in more than a decade, according to the Cato Institute.

…What did we learn from the “beer summit” on the White House lawn, except that Vice President Joe Biden doesn’t drink alcoholic beverages? Considering the many gaffes that the vice president has made while cold sober, the thought of an intoxicated Joe Biden boggles the mind. …

How’s this for a start to the humor section. Yale University publishes a book on the Muhammad cartoon controversy. Guess what they wouldn’t put in the book? Allahpundit at Hot Air has the story. Quoting the NY Times;

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí…

Commenting on the story, Mark Steyn says;

… What all these stories – from this disgusting act to the no-donuts-at-Ramadan “recommendations” now common at European businesses - have in common is acceptance of the same general principle: that the most extreme interpretation of Islamic “law” now applies to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. As Pat Condell says, what other freedoms are you willing to surrender?

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Marty Peretz blogs on an article from NY Times on India, a true ally. They are searching a North Korean ship.

…There is no international community. But if there were more Indias we’d be on our way.

A New York Times article by Lydia Polgreen of a few moments ago reports that “India Searches N. Korean Ship for Nuclear Materials.” The Security Council sanctioned such activity in the presence of suspicious cargo and suspicious maritime routing. No country has as yet challenged North Korea and, for that matter, Iran either.

But now India has taken the step, partly because the cargo ship M V San anchored in the Bay of Bengal, off two islands, without asking for or getting authorization. …

Christopher Hitchens has an interesting take on North Korea’s release of the American journalists.

I call your attention to a small detail about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists who were wrongfully arrested, illegally detained, and then capriciously released by the crime family that controls the northern section of the Korean peninsula and treats all its inhabitants as slave-prisoners and all the neighbors within its missile range as hostages.

The two young women were picked up in March and released in August. That means they spent almost half a year in the North Korean prison system. Yet to judge by the photographs of them arriving back on U.S. soil, they were in approximately the same physical condition as they had been when they were first unlawfully apprehended.

Now, I spent less time than that as an honored guest in North Korea and still managed to lose weight during my stay. The shattering statistic that everybody now knows about North Korea is that its citizens are on average 5 to 6 inches shorter than South Koreans. And by that I mean to say “on average”—it seems to be true even of North Korean soldiers. The stunting and shortening of the children of the last famine generation may be still more heartbreaking when we come to measure it. And the fate of those who are in the North Korean gulag can, by this measure, only be imagined. There is a starvation regime within the wider nightmare of the slave system. Yet Ling and Lee had obviously not been maltreated or emaciated in the usual way that even a North Korean civilian, let alone a North Korean prisoner, could expect to be.

The logical corollary of this is obvious. The Kim Jong-il gang was always planning to release them. They were arrested in order to be let go and were maintained in releasable shape until the deal could be done. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz comments on the failings of the Obamacare campaign.

…This would have to do with the fact that the real Barack Obama—product of the academic left, social reformer with a program, is now before that audience, and what they hear in this lecture about one of the central concerns in their lives—his message freighted with generalities—they are not prepared to buy. They are not prepared to believe that our first most important concern now is health-care reform or all will go under.

The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.

He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them. …

Lee Siegel in the Daily Beast likes Obamacare, but says that critics are right about the limitations on end-of-life care.

For those of us who believe that the absence of universal health care is America’s burning shame, the spectacle of opposition to Obama’s health-care plan is Alice-in-Wonderland bewildering and also enraging—but on one point the plan’s critics are absolutely correct. One of the key ideas under consideration—which can be read as expressing sympathy for limitations on end-of-life care—is morally revolting. And it’s helping to kill the plan itself.

Make no mistake about it. Determining which treatments are “cost effective” at the end of a person’s life and which are not is one of Obama’s priorities. It’s one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal healthcare affordable. …

…This reeks of the Big Brother nightmare of oppressive government that the shrewd propagandists on the right are always blathering on about. Except that this time, they could not be more right. …

Liberal Ed Koch has questions about Obamacare.

…Most alarming for people like me, who at 84 years of age recently needed a quadruple bypass and aortic valve replacement, are the pronouncements of President Obama’s appointee, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who, according to a New York Post op ed article by Betsy McCauley, former Lt. Governor of the State of New York, stated, “Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, ‘as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others’ (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).” He also stated, “…communitarianism’ should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those ‘who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens…An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.’ (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96). ”

Opponents of Obama’s health care proposals raise the specter of a panel making decisions on who should receive health care. I am not aware of any proposed panel. However, an article in today’s New York Times, referring to a Senate bill, stated, “The legislation could have significant implications for individuals who have bought coverage on their own. Their policies might be exempted from the new standards, but the coverage might not be viable for long because insurers could not add benefits or enroll additional people in noncompliant policies.” …

Even Eugene Robinson has ObamaDoubts. Jennifer Rubin has the story.

Eugene Robinson almost acknowledges that the president might have some responsibility for the voters’ irate reaction to the government’s takeover of their health care. No critic of the president, Robinson nevertheless concedes there are plenty of “confused and concerned” Americans at these events. Why so upset? Why, they fear “they’re not being told the whole truth.” Well, yes, that might be it. …

Last, but by no means least, Camille Paglia lets fly. First she bows to the Obama she thought she was voting for. Then she tears into the Obama we got.

… I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted, as well as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, and hope it’s a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.

Case in point: the administration’s grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton’s megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises — or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down. …

… But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished. …

… Of course, it didn’t help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted “stupidly” in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama’s automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president’s standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn’t help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown. …

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Thinking outside the Beltway box, Robert J. Samuelson has ideas on how to reform Medicare.

…Just imagine what the health-care debate would be like if it truly focused on controlling spending.

For starters, we wouldn’t be arguing about how to “pay for” the $1 trillion or so of costs over a decade of Obama’s “reform.” Congress wouldn’t create new benefits until it had disciplined the old. We’d be debating how to trim the $10 trillion, as estimated by the CBO, that Medicare and Medicaid will spend over the next decade, without impairing Americans’ health. We’d use Medicare as a vehicle of change. Accounting for more than one-fifth of all health spending, its costs per beneficiary, now about $12,000, rose at an average annual rate of 8.5 percent a year from 1970 to 2007. (True, that’s lower than the private insurers’ rate of 9.7 percent. But the gap may partly reflect cost-shifting to private payers. When Medicare restrains reimbursement rates, hospitals and doctors raise charges to private insurers.)

Medicare is so big that shifts in its practices spread to the rest of the delivery system. But changing Medicare, and through it one-sixth of the U.S. economy, requires more than a few demonstration projects of “comparative outcomes” research or economic incentives. What’s needed is a fundamental restructuring. Fee-for-service medicine — Medicare’s dominant form of payment — is outmoded. The more doctors and hospitals do, the more they get paid. This promotes fragmentation and the overuse of services.

We should move toward coordinated care networks that take responsibility for their members’ medical needs in return for fixed annual payments (called “capitation”). One approach is through vouchers; Medicare recipients would receive a fixed amount and shop for networks with the lowest cost and highest quality. Alternatively, government could shift its reimbursement of hospitals and doctors to “capitation” payments. Limited dollars would, in theory, force improvements in efficiency and effective care. …

Debra J. Saunders comments on Obamacare, including politicians’ unwillingness to grasp economic realities.

…Only in Washington do people assert with a straight face that they can expand who gets covered and what everyone gets – and it will be cheaper. And because many readers believe this fable, allow me to note that after Massachusetts passed a universal plan three years ago, already cost increases have led to cutbacks. …

…As I watched Pelosi on Tuesday, I thought: It’s the California Budget Mess all over again – with big promises of more government and more benefits and no across-the-board taxes to pay for the package. Democrats like to congratulate themselves for their noble intentions. But they have offered no plan to pay for them, and so they are bound to fail. …

Liberal Mitch Albom defends conservatives’ right to free speech.

I have no illusions about protesters at the recent town hall meetings on health care.

Some are fueled by angry conservative groups. Some are hopped up on radio hosts’ rants and ravings. Some are Barack Obama haters. Some use one piece of wrong information to smear an entire event.

And some just think the whole idea of government health care stinks.

But all of them — all of them — have the right to be there, and the right to their point of view. Liberal-minded thinkers who regularly speak up for the poor and underprivileged cannot suddenly yank the rug when it comes to free speech for others. …

Mark Steyn posts on the ultimate outsourcing.

My jaw doesn’t often drop, but this story had it heading for the basement:

Thousands of Canadians who are infertile in Canada have to place all their hopes on just 33 men who are Canadian sperm donors.

What? A nation of 30 million people has just 33 sperm donors? Apparently so. Now why would that be?

At one time Canada had two dozen sperm banks but when the Assisted Human Reproduction Act made it illegal to pay for sperm or egg donors they dried up in 2004. …

Byron York points out that the New York Times’ bias is showing.

The front page of the New York Times is filled with hope about the nation’s economic situation.  The lead story, “Job Losses Slow, Signaling Momentum for a Recovery,” reporting a decline in the unemployment rate from 9.5 percent in June to 9.4 percent in July, begins by declaring that, “The most heartening employment report since last summer suggested on Friday that a recovery was under way — and perhaps gathering steam.”

“Employers are no longer in a panic,” one expert tells the Times.  The paper reports that Obama administration officials “credited the stimulus package” for the improvement, and “some said” job losses would be far worse had the $787 billion stimulus not been passed.  The paper quotes President Obama saying his administration has “rescued our economy from catastrophe.” …

…The Times hasn’t always been so optimistic when it comes to one-tenth-of-a-point declines in the unemployment rate.  On this very day in 1992, in the midst of the presidential campaign between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the government also reported that the unemployment rate ticked downward by one tenth of a point, and the Times’ treatment was far more restrained.

“Jobless Rate Dips a Notch to 7.7% in Mixed Showing,” was the front-page headline of the August 8, 1992 Times.  “The nation’s jobless rate improved marginally last month, edging down to 7.7 percent from 7.8 percent,” the Times reported.  “But the improvement was not enough to signal a stronger economic recovery or to help President Bush as he heads into the Republican National Convention.”  Even though the number of jobs actually went up in July 1992 (as opposed to the decline of 247,000 jobs in July 2009), the 1992 Times reported that the economic news “gave no suggestion that the economic recovery was breaking out of its painfully slow pace or, more important, that the job growth was picking up enough to push the unemployment rate down significantly before the election in November.” Pollster Peter Hart told the paper that, “There couldn’t be worse political news for George Bush.” …

A Chicago Tribune editorial tells how politicians in the City Council are trying to prevent the opening of a Wal-Mart during this recession.

…Construction of the store would create 200 jobs. The store, once it was running, would provide nearly 500 jobs.

But the City Council wants none of that, so all the Chicagoans who like to shop at Wal-Mart and all the Chicagoans who would like to work at Wal-Mart have to go to one of those dots on the map. They’re all in the suburbs, save the one Wal-Mart that has been allowed to open in Chicago.

When that Chicago store opened in 2006, it was flooded with applicants for 450 jobs. But the aldermen want to dodge a vote to allow another Wal-Mart — the first on the South Side — because they’re petrified over the influence of organized labor on local elections.

Organized labor doesn’t like Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart doesn’t have union jobs. It just has jobs (with an average hourly wage of $12.05 in Chicago).

The aldermen, of course, already have jobs. They get paid $110,556 a year and they figure that as long as they keep the labor unions off their backs, they’ll keep making $110,556 a year. Who says the City Council doesn’t generate jobs? If you’re one of the 50 aldermen, your unemployment rate is 0 percent.

But the unemployment rate for the rest of Chicago is above 10 percent….

Dennis Byrne also comments on the disgrace of allowing political pressure to triumph over the economic well-being of so many Chicago residents. But he says that the Chicago City Council is not just bowing to union pressure.

…But it would be a mistake to chalk this up solely to organized labor’s stranglehold on the City Council. Progressives, from their North Side enclaves, are full-throated in their opposition to a major job generator—elsewhere in the city. The liberal lakefront wards—44, 46, 48 and 49—all are home to some of the city’s strongest opposition. In stark contrast, the heavily black and lower-income wards on the South and West sides record the highest levels of support. Up on the Northwest Side, home to many blue-collar organized workers, support is weakest. What should be of some concern is the relatively weaker support for the new store in Hispanic wards; apparently minorities are not as unified as we are led to believe.

This column will inspire the usual howls of protest from “progressives,” who would have us believe that, from their distant perch, they only have the welfare of the oppressed and impoverished in mind. Even though their progressive roosts are blessed with an abundance of jobs and places to shop. They don’t have to get on a bus to travel outside the city to work or shop. From their roosts, they are comfortable and self-satisfied in their ideological hatred of Wal-Mart, brushing aside pleas from those most in need of jobs and access to shopping.

Progressives will portray themselves as guardians of those pleading for the Wal-Mart. Progressives say they are only are trying to “protect” those poor people from low wages, insufficient benefits and part-time work. Progressives have decided that for “those people” no jobs are better than jobs that they want and need. Progressives will cite their opposition to Wal-Mart as evidence of their compassion and, well, progressiveness. …

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Jennifer Rubin has more from UN Watch on Mary Robinson’s record of bias against Israel at the UN.

…In a separate post, UN Watch concludes:

The evidence is clear. As described by the late Tom Lantos, throughout the lead-up to the 2001 Durban conference Mary Robinson was part of the problem, not the solution. At preparatory sessions in Tehran and Geneva she consistently justified and encouraged a selective focus on Israel. While she did make statements against anti-Semitic manifestations at the conference itself, these were too little and too late. Robinson may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but she is its preeminent symbol.

The problem was not just Durban. UN Watch interacted with Robinson when she was U.N. rights chief in Geneva from 1997 to 2002 and closely monitored her tenure. Though she did speak out aptly in various instances, Robinson consistently displayed one-sided criticism of Israel matched with indifference to Palestinian terrorism.

The U.S. government rightly stood up for principle in April when it opposed any reaffirmation of the flawed 2001 Durban declaration. Whatever her other accomplishments, Robinson’s actions in the Durban process and the bias she displayed throughout her tenure as UN human rights chief were not worthy of this award. …

Marty Peretz also comments Mary Robinson’s.

I give him the benefit of a doubt. He may not himself have made the decision to honor the contemptible Mary Robinson, arguably a real bigot, with the Medal of Freedom. But, then, there is someone in his entourage who is leading him astray, gravely astray. And that someone has it in for Israel and for American Jews, too. The fact is that there is only so much that can be explained. …

…In the real world bestowing the Medal of Freedom on Mary Robinson is only important as a symbol. Take a look at the Medal of Freedom winners. There are many mediocre men and women on the list. But, overall, you will brim with pride, as the clichéd phrase puts it. Robinson had a commendable career as president of Ireland, mostly filled with symbolics, but important symbolics. It has been downhill ever since, a good deal of it in the gutter of anti-Semitism.

She was the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights when the commission began to specialize in the practice of supporting governmental repression and calling it freedom–as, frankly, Obama has done with the burqa, also in Cairo. But Robinson’s biggest role on the world stage was as chair of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban.  She planned it, she mostly ran it and she is responsible for that Witch’s Sabbath of hate against both Israel and America, actually the west and western values in general and in particular. Since then, she has been doing the time-consuming NGO thing, talking mostly to one another and soliciting grants from American foundations.

Robinson’s base in the world is the G-77 which has watched amiably as many of its member states increasingly preside over atrocities committed against their own inhabitants. Not much to honor here. …

Jennifer Rubin explains why the Obama administration’s ‘evenhandedness’ in the Middle East is a lie.

The Obama administration and its sycophantic spinners explain the dramatic shift in U.S. tone toward and treatment of Israel as an effort to be more “evenhanded” and to assume the role of “honest broker.” As events unfold, it becomes more apparent day by day that this is simply bunk. We are not seeing “evenhandedness” but one-sidedness. The only country receiving a daily barrage of public and private complaints and insults is Israel….

…And what about the hate-filled textbooks that remain in use in Saudi Arabia? Earlier this year, Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner implored Hillary Clinton to undertake a review of the books that, as Weiner explained, still teach ”young students that Jews should be killed, that Muslims who convert, question, or doubt Islam must repent or be killed, and that parents have the right to force their children into marriages against their will.” I don’t recall Obama or Clinton dragging in the Saudi ambassador to lecture him on the need to put a halt to this. …

The White House wants you to help out Big Brother by turning in anti-Obamacare e-mails. Debra J. Saunders has the story.

Imagine it’s four years ago and an aide to President George W. Bush posted a blog on the Whitehouse.gov Web site that bemoaned Internet criticism of the Iraq war, then continued: “These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversations.

Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about anti-war protests that seem fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

Substitute the words “health insurance reform” for “anti-war protests,” and you get the exact wording of a blog posted by Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media, on Tuesday.

“I can only imagine the level of justifiable outrage had your predecessor asked Americans to forward e-mails critical of his politics to the White House,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote in a letter to President Obama. “I suspect that you would have been leading the charge in condemning such a program.” …

Charles Krauthammer has a prescription for health care reform.

…1) Tort reform: As I wrote recently, our crazy system of casino malpractice suits results in massive and random settlements that raise everyone’s insurance premiums and creates an epidemic of defensive medicine that does no medical good, yet costs a fortune.

An authoritative Massachusetts Medical Society study found that five out of six doctors admitted they order tests, procedures and referrals — amounting to about 25 percent of the total — solely as protection from lawsuits. Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant — $20,000 for a family of four — to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance). …

…(2) Real health-insurance reform: Tax employer-provided health-care benefits and return the money to the employee with a government check to buy his own medical insurance, just as he buys his own car or home insurance.

There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer. This entire system is an accident of World War II wage and price controls. It’s economically senseless. It makes people stay in jobs they hate, decreasing labor mobility and therefore overall productivity. And it needlessly increases the anxiety of losing your job by raising the additional specter of going bankrupt through illness. …

David Limbaugh explains one of the ways in which government intervention has increased the cost health insurance, and ironically suggests Obama’s push for health care run by the state, may mean some meaningful free market reforms.

…In her “The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care,” Sally Pipes documents that in 1979, there were only 252 mandate laws in force, but by 2007, there were 1,901. Many of these mandates, she notes — such as those pertaining to massage therapy, breast reduction and hair prosthesis — “are hardly critical components of a good health insurance policy.” But they exist, she says, because special interest groups have successfully lobbied state lawmakers to require all policies to cover them.

She provides a sampling of excessive state-mandated treatments that are covered, including: acupuncture, alcoholism treatment, athletic trainers, breast reduction, contraceptives, dieticians, drug abuse treatment, hair prosthesis, home health care, hormone replacement therapy, in vitro fertilization, marriage therapy, massage therapy, nature treatments, pastoral counseling, Port-stain elimination, professional counseling, smoking cessation, speech therapy and varicose vein removal.

When you force every insurance company to cover these things, you’re bound to drive up insurance costs. People who wouldn’t consider paying for these treatments themselves get them because they’re covered, thus increasing demand and prices. …

There is widespread belief Vitamin D and fish oil have health benefits, yet widespread research is not undertaken. John Calfee in The American.com explains why, and concludes it is a cautionary tale when contemplating health care “reform” that may eliminate profit motives in the drug field.

… it will be quite a while before we know what most want to know about vitamin D and fish oil. Research is proceeding very slowly on the most important front, the mounting of large-scale human trials necessary to provide definitive tests of the most essential hypotheses. These trials cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run, possibly even a few billion when one takes account of the difficulty of devising exactly the right kind of trials.

Just about everyone in the scientific community knows why research is moving so slowly on such important topics. There is no “intellectual property,” i.e., no one owns patents on substances like fish oil and vitamin D, which were discovered and isolated decades or more ago. But that should be no problem if government steps in to fill the gap. …

Hugo Lindgren has a novel economic indicator.

As if it wasn’t unpleasant enough, this recession comes with an info glut, all this economic data purporting to answer a simple question: Are things getting better? The answer is rarely straightforward. The numbers aren’t just confusing. They seem to be measuring some other planet.

In New York, we have our own economic indicators, often based on the degree to which people are being thwarted by the lack of opportunity. An old standby is the Overeducated Cabbie Index. The Squeegee Man Apparition Index is another good one. There’s also the Speed at Which Contractors Return Calls Index: within 24 hours, you’re in a recession; if they call you without prompting, that’s a depression.

The indicator I prefer is the Hot Waitress Index: The hotter the waitresses, the weaker the economy. In flush times, there is a robust market for hotness. Selling everything from condos to premium vodka is enhanced by proximity to pretty young people (of both sexes) who get paid for providing this service. That leaves more-punishing work, like waiting tables, to those with less striking genetic gifts. But not anymore. …

Debra Cassens Weiss says that Justice Thomas may be camping in a Wal-Mart parking lot near you.

If you see an RV in a Wal-Mart parking lot this summer, take a second look. One of the occupants could be U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas’ wife, Ginni, told interviewers on a morning radio show called The Takeaway that she and her husband have traveled through 27 states in their recreational vehicle, and they love to stay in Wal-Mart parking lots.

“We have been in dozens of Wal-Mart parking lots throughout the country. Actually it’s one of our favorite things to do if we’re not having to plug in and we’ve got enough electricity and all that,” Ginni Thomas said, according to a transcript by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. “But you can get a little shopping in, see part of real America. It’s fun!” …

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Good news! Jennifer Rubin says they have recovered their senses in the administration about their condemnation of Honduras.

The White House may be in the process of reversing one of its egregious foreign-policy blunders. The Wall Street Journal reports that in answering questions from Sen. Richard Lugar, the State Department is beginning to hedge its bets on ousted president Manuel Zelaya. …

Today’s Pickings devotes much space to the health care debate. First up, David Harsanyi deals with the White House treatment of the folks who criticize them.

If you’re a virtuous and patriotic American, you may find this column either offensive or misleading. If so, please forward it to White House authorities at the Department of Fishy Activity. (E-mail the good people at flag@whitehouse.gov.)

As many of you have heard, the White House now requests that the public tattle on those of us spreading “fishy disinformation” regarding Washington’s proposed takeover . . . oops, I mean “reform” . . . of your health care. This step, naturally, is for our own good.

Now, don’t get overly paranoid, you freaky right-wing zealots. Judging from the Obama administration’s track record, the program will do absolutely nothing other than add billions to the deficit. …

Roger Simon comments on the same program.

Peter Wehner too.

… What we are seeing unfold today, online as well as in town-hall meetings and protests across the country, sounds very much like community-organizing, but for a conservative rather than a liberal cause. So in the eyes of some, community-organizing and political activism have gone from being virtues to being vices. …

And in Krauthammer’s Take from The Corner.

Well, the White House accuses it of being orchestrated. Orchestrated is a synonym for organized. And I thought that community organizing was a high calling. I mean, our president — he used to deploy it every day when he was a campaigner as a sign of his altruism.

This is unbelievable hypocrisy, and it’s because the administration has a hard time defending itself on the merits of the case. The support for health-care reform is sinking, and that’s because…as you look, as you unpack what is happening here and what’s in the bill, it is a monstrosity. …

Mark Steyn joins the chorus.

… When the community starts organizing against the organizer, the whole rigmarole goes to hell. Not that these extremists showing up at town hall meetings are real members of the “community.” Have you noticed how tailored they are? Dissent is now the haut est form of coutur ism. Senator Barbara Boxer has denounced dissenters from Obama’s health care proposals as too “well-dressed” to be genuine. Only the Emperor has new clothes. Everyone knows that.

Thankfully, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has seen through the “manufactured anger” of “the Brooks Brothers brigade.” Did he announce this in a crumpled suit? He’s a Press Secretary who won’t press. Apparently, the health care debate now has a dress code. Soon you won’t be able to get in unless you’re wearing Barack Obama mom-jeans, manufactured at a converted GM plant by an assembly line of retrained insurance salesmen. Any day now, Hollywood will greenlight a new movie in which an insane Sarah Palin figure picks out her outfit for spreading disinformation (The Lyin’, The Witch And The Wardrobe).

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, added her own distinctive wrinkle to the Brooks Brothers menswear. She disdained the anti-Obamacare protests as fake grassroots. “I think they’re AstroTurf,” she declared. “They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.”

Is this one of those Chinese Whispers things? Obama told Gibbs to tell Boxer to tell Reid, and by the time it reached Pelosi, it came out as uniforms night: Brooks Brothers. Mel Brooks. Springtime for Hitler. Swastikas. Or is the Speaker right to sound the alarm about this army of goosestepping dandies? A veritable Garbstapo jackbooting down the Interstate like it’s a catwalk in Milan. …

Michael Barone points out Obama’s plans for the military and health care will stifle creativity.

… The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The danger is that we will freeze medicine in place and no longer be the nation that produces innovations that do so much for us and the rest of the world. …

Jennifer Rubin responds to the Dems’ assertion that the Town Hall protests are an insurance company plot.

The Obama administration would have us believe that the outcry from voters at health-care town halls is a concoction of the insurance industry. Well, those insurance execs must be awfully sneaky — they seem to have infiltrated the polls as well. The Wall Street Journal reports on the Democrats’ woes:

A new Quinnipiac University poll out this morning underscores the challenge facing them as they and their Republican (and some conservative Democratic) critics spend the month pressing their respective cases.

For instance, the Quinnipiac national poll -– with an unusually large sample of more than 2,000 interviews –- found that almost three in four Americans don’t believe Mr. Obama’s promise that any health reform that he signs will not add to the federal deficit. …

Theodore Dalrymple says animals get better care in Great Britain.

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.

As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.

The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs. The relatives are united by their concern for the welfare of each other’s loved one. They are not terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they. …

Corner Post on the passing of John Hughes.

The revered director and screenwriter died of at heart attack this morning at age 59. His impressive comedic talent was responsible for several classic films in the 80s and early 90s, including Planes, Trains and Automobiles, National Lampoon’s Vacation, and Home Alone.

But he’ll primarily be known for pretty much defining the American high-school experience for generations to come — Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, et al. They’re all classics. …

Ben Stein says goodbye to the man who cast him in Ferris Bueller.

… the insight that will make him immortal came in his teen movies, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and my favorite, the one that changed my life, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This insight was that the modern American white middle class teen combines a Saudi Arabia-sized reservoir of self-obsession and self-pity with a startling gift for exultation and enjoyment of life. …

WSJ reviews tonight’s ESPN documentary of Luis Tiant’s return to Cuba after 46 years in exile playing baseball.

One of the main attractions of sports is that they’re a welcome escape from the ­politics of the day and the things men do to one ­another in the name of this or that cause. Occasionally, however, the world of sports and politics collide. And when they do, it’s usually without a happy outcome—think of the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists; Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics; and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

It should come as no surprise then, that “The Lost Son of Havana,” an ESPN Films documentary about Red Sox pitching great Luis Tiant’s return to Cuba after 46 years of exile, is not a happy tale (Sunday, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. ET on ESPN Deportes; Monday, 10 p.m. ET on ESPN). It is, rather, the story of a refugee’s rise to major-league stardom and the torment of returning home decades later to visit family on an island gulag.

“Things could have been different,” says Mr. Tiant, overcome with emotion at his aunt’s cramped and run-down Havana home. He is, of course, right. The wealth he accumulated in the ­major leagues could have helped lift his entire family out of poverty. But ­Castro’s revolution dashed any hopes he might have had of playing professionally in his country or returning home to help support his family and the community he left behind. In 2007, he was finally allowed back into Cuba as part of a goodwill baseball game ­between American amateurs and ­retired Cuban players. …

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Christopher Hitchens starts us off on an optimistic note.

This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental. The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival.

Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. …

David Harsanyi points out some of the ecological and economic failures of Cash for Clunkers.

…To begin with, building a new car consumes energy. It is estimated that 6.7 tons of carbon are emitted in process. So a driver who participates in the “cash for clunkers” program would need to make up for that wickedness. There around 250 million registered vehicles in the United States. Only a micro-slither of those cars will be traded in — and a slither of that number could be deemed a “clunker” outside the Beltway.

A survey of car dealerships found a relatively small differential in fuel efficiency of cars traded in and those replacing them. A Reuters analysis concluded — even with the extended program in place — cash for clunkers would trim U.S. oil consumption by only a quarter of 1 percent.

As an economic stimulus, the plan is equally impotent. As James Pethokoukis, a columnist at Reuters, succinctly explained, “the program gets much of its juice via stealing car sales from the near future rather than generating additional demand.”

The point of a stimulus should be to create new demand, not to move existing demand around to score political points. Then again, for this administration, economic recovery always takes a back seat to moral recovery. …

Howard Kurtz posts on what appears to be the death of Obamacare plan A.

With the flap over the Cash for Clunkers program, the media-political establishment is questioning whether the president’s health-care plan is a clunker as well.

The opposition — including a very screechy woman who confronted Kathleen Sebelius at a town hall meeting — is asking how the administration can remake one-sixth of the economy if it can’t handle a used-car program. …

Richard A. Epstein has a piece on Cash for Clunkers.

Human interactions take place either by agreement or force. There is no third way. As a general matter, the good libertarian prefers the former to the latter, except of course where force is used in self-defense. We don’t make people buy off their assailants, because we don’t want to invite future aggressors to come out of the woodwork to collect their bounty. Only negative incentives of defensive force keep mischief makers in line.

Every child grasps this principle, with the notable exception of the children in Congress. Or at least those who dreamed up the once ballyhooed cash for clunkers program that cratered within a week of its launch. As usual, this road to hell has been paved with good intentions. But the sad truth remains that we’re no better at getting clunkers off the road than removing lead from books and buttons. Just show Congress a noble social cause, and its innate sense of regulatory overdrive will send it crashing over a cliff. …

Jennifer Rubin has excellent comments on an insightful article from Elliott Abrams on the current US policy towards Israel.

In a must-read critique of the Obama approach to Israel, Elliott Abrams attempts to piece together how we got from the warmest relationship with Israel in recent memory to the most hostile. Yes, part of it is the perceived desire by Obama to affect regime change in Israel. But it’s worse than that:

The deeper problem — and the more complex explanation of bilateral tensions — is that the Obama administration, while claiming to separate itself from the “ideologues” of the Bush administration in favor of a more balanced and realistic Middle East policy, is in fact following a highly ideological policy path. Its ability to cope with, indeed even to see clearly, the realities of life in Israel and the West Bank and the challenge of Iran to the region is compromised by the prism through which it analyzes events. …

…The takeaway here is deeply sobering. Ideologues don’t accept new evidence or recognize that their theories aren’t bearing fruit. Failures are always attributed to a lack of time or effort. We simply have to keep at it, we will be told. That does not bode well for a course correction. They have their worldview, and they are sticking with it. …

And this is the article from Elliott Abrams. Here he discusses the Obama administration’s plan:

…Instead, in keeping with its “yes we can” approach and its boundless ambitions, it has decided to go not only for a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, but also for comprehensive peace in the region. Mr. Mitchell explained that this “includes Israel and Palestine, Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon and normal relations with all countries in the region. That is President Obama’s personal objective vision and that is what he is asking to achieve. In order to achieve that we have asked all involved to take steps.” The administration (pocketing the economic progress Israel is fostering in the West Bank) decided that Israel’s “step” would be to impose a complete settlement freeze, which would be proffered to the Arabs to elicit “steps” from them.

But Israelis notice that already the Saudis have refused to take any “steps” toward Israel, and other Arab states are apparently offering weak tea: a quiet meeting here, overflight rights there, but nothing approaching normal relations. They also notice that Mr. Mitchell was in Syria last week, smiling warmly at its repressive ruler Bashar Assad and explaining that the administration would start waiving the sanctions on Syria to allow export of “products related to information technology and telecommunication equipment and parts and components related to the safety of civil aviation” and will “process all eligible applications for export licenses as quickly as possible.” While sanctions on certain Syrian individuals were renewed last week, the message to the regime is that better days lie ahead. Of this approach the Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid told the Wall Street Journal, “The regime feels very confident politically now. Damascus feels like it’s getting a lot without giving up anything.” Indeed, no “steps” from Syria appear to be on the horizon, except Mr. Assad’s willingness to come to the negotiating table where he will demand the Golan Heights back but refuse to make the break with Iran and Hezbollah that must be the basis for any serious peace negotiation.

None of this appears to have diminished the administration’s zeal, for bilateral relations with everyone take a back seat once the goal of comprehensive peace is put on the table. The only important thing about a nation’s policies becomes whether it appears to play ball with the big peace effort. The Syrian dictatorship is viciously repressive, houses terrorist groups and happily assists jihadis through Damascus International Airport on their way to Iraq to fight U.S. and Coalition forces, but any concerns we might have are counterbalanced by the desire to get Mr. Assad to buy in to new negotiations with Israel….

David P. Goldman discusses Rahm Emanuel’s view of the Israel-Palestinian peace process.

…Why is Emanuel, the son of an Israeli pediatrician who served in the Irgun (the illegal pre-state underground), bashing Israel over settlements? The answer is simple, and well documented by the Israeli newspaper feature. His views have remained frozen in time since he arranged the 1993 handshake inthe White House Rose Garden between then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat, like those of Oslo Accord negotiator Yossi Beilin. He still believes with religious fervor in the old peace process, while events have convinced the vast majority of Israelis that it is a dreadful idea. Ha’aretz reports,

When he was president Clinton’s adviser, Emanuel orchestrated the handshaking ceremony between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. It is even said that after Rabin’s assassination, it was he who suggested to Clinton that he include the expression “Shalom, haver” (Goodbye, friend) in his eulogy to Rabin. But in spite of the disappointments of the intifada and his criticism of the Palestinians and the Arab states, which he called on to impose “pressure” on the Palestinians – he has not forgotten the September 13, 1993, ceremony at the White House, which moved him profoundly.
He was one of the only two Jews in Congress who agreed to support the Geneva Initiative, in 2003….

…After hundreds of death by terrorism and the Palestinian refusal to accept Ehud Barak’s peace offer as brokered by then President Clinton in 1998, the Israeli public repudiated Beilin’s ideological fanaticism. Not so American Jews, whose left-wing sympathies and sentimental attachment to secular universalism come cheap, like the poor man’s whitefish. Israelis pay for the experiments of leftist leaders in blood, and American liberals like Rahm Emanuel respond: “Believe me, it’s worth it.”…

Stuart Taylor has again essayed on the problems with the Sotomayor nomination. We’ve been running long, so we have a Jennifer Rubin post on Taylor’s piece. There is a link you can follow if you wish.

One of the more troubling aspects of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court is the degree to which her testimony attempted to conceal or misrepresent her own record. On the topic of Ricci alone, she repeated again and again two falsehoods. First, she insisted that she had not deprived plaintiffs of their day in court because they had filed for an en banc review. Not so. She is taking credit for the sua sponte action by her colleague Judge Cabranes, who dug the case out and insisted that the full circuit consider the matter. Second, she argued that her decision was determined by Second Circuit precedent. Wrong again.

Stuart Taylor takes us through the applicable case law. He explains: …

John Stossel gives us the bottom line on Obamacare.

…With the collapse of the socialist countries, we ought to understand that bureaucrats cannot competently set prices. When they pay too little, costs are covertly shifted to others, or services dry up. When they pay too much, scarce resources are diverted from other important uses and people must go without needed goods. Only markets can assure that people have reasonable access to resources according to each individual’s priorities.

Assume Medicare reimbursements are cut. When retirees begin to feel the effects, AARP will scream bloody murder. The elderly vote in large numbers, and their powerful lobbyists will be listened to.

The government will then give up that strategy and turn to what the Reagan administration called “revenue enhancement”: higher taxes on the “rich.” When that fails, because there aren’t enough rich to soak, the politicians will soak the middle class. When that fails, they will turn to more borrowing. The Fed will print more money, and we’ll have more inflation. Everyone will be poorer. …

Congress can’t stop spending our money, blogs Ed Morrissey.

Remember when Congress erupted in outrage over the arrival in Washington DC of the CEOs of the three major American automakers in private jets?  The bumbling public relations of the Big Three gave elected officials an opportunity to indulge in populist spleen-venting at rich fat cats and their greed.  Public pressure pushed the automakers to dump their private fleets of corporate jets and focus belt-tightening in the executive suites as well as on the manufacturing floor. …

…Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.

But apparently Congress is not philosophically averse to private air travel: At the end of July, the House approved nearly $200 million for the Air Force to buy three elite Gulfstream jets for ferrying top government officials and Members of Congress.

The Air Force had asked for one Gulfstream 550 jet (price tag: about $65 million) as part of an ongoing upgrade of its passenger air service.

But the House Appropriations Committee, at its own initiative, added to the 2010 Defense appropriations bill another $132 million for two more airplanes and specified that they be assigned to the D.C.-area units that carry Members of Congress, military brass and top government officials. …

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Pickerhead’s been waiting for a Frederic Bastiat “teachable moment” to come out of the clunker program. Jonah Goldberg does the honors.

… That Washington is shocked by the news that Americans like getting free money shows how thick the Beltway bubble really is.

Like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, Washington can only see the economic activity it has created, not the activity it has destroyed.

For starters, who says the smartest thing for people with working cars is to buy new ones? Personal debt is supposed to be a problem, so why not look at this as bribing consumers into taking out car loans they don’t need? Even with the $4,500 subsidy, not all of these customers are going to be paying cash for their new cars. So they’ll be swapping serviceable-but-paid-for cars for nicer cars that are owned by banks.

Besides, maybe some people would be smarter to buy a savings bond or max out their kid’s college fund or — here’s a crazy thought — buy health insurance. But instead they’ve been seduced into spending the equivalent of their six francs on a car they don’t really need.

But, you might say, some buyers surely do need a new car. True. But if they needed a new car, they’d get one anyway, eventually. Indeed, they might already have gotten it, but rationally opted to wait for the program to kick in. …

Jonah’s readers respond.

Radley Balko in The Agitator Blog has more.

… Last night, (Jon) Stewart mentioned the “Cash for Clunkers” program, and credulously and uncritically repeated the Obama administration’s line that the program as been an unqualified success. Now maybe the show has taken some real shots at Cash for Clunkers in prior episodes. I don’t watch regularly any more. Seems to me, though, there’s quite a bit of TDS sarcastic humor to be mined from all of this. You mean the government is offering people free money . . . and they’re taking it? And they’re measuring the program’s success by how many people . . . are willing to take free money? Shocker that it’s been so successful, huh? …

Jennifer Rubin chronicles alarming events at the Justice Department.

In the litany of criticisms leveled at President George W. Bush none was repeated more often than the accusation that he had “politicized the administration of justice.” In endless television show appearances and congressional hearings, Democratic lawmakers like Senator Chuck Schumer railed against the politicization of the Justice Department, lecturing all who would listen about how Justice “is different than any other department. In every other department, the chief cabinet officer is supposed to follow the president’s orders, requests, without exception. But the Justice Department has a higher responsibility: rule of law and the Constitution.”

Democrats loved to berate the often hapless Alberto Gonzales, who they claimed failed to uphold this standard as attorney general. Although the alleged offenses occurred primarily on the watch of Gonzales (who served only two and a half of Bush’s eight years), the criticism stuck and lingered long after Gonzales departed. Inspector general investigations and oversight hearings maintained the drumbeat of accusations. And when the distinguished federal judge Michael Mukasey was nominated to replace Gonzales, he was peppered by Senators Joe Biden, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy, among others, with questions about just how badly the department had been “politicized.” The average American couldn’t help but conclude that something had gone terribly awry.

It is therefore surprising that in the first seven months of the Obama administration, a series of hyper-partisan decisions, questionable appointments, and the inexplicable dismissal of a high-profile voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther party have once again fanned suspicions that the Justice Department is a pawn in partisan political battles.

Both in Congress and among a number of current and former Justice Department employees is a growing concern that the Obama administration is politicizing the department in ways the Bush team never imagined. A former Justice employee cautions that every administration has the right and the obligation to set policy. “Elections have consequences,” he affirms. But he thinks that the Obama administration has gone beyond policy reversals and is interfering with prosecutorial decisions, staffing the department with unqualified personnel, and invoking privilege to thwart proper congressional oversight and public scrutiny.

Sitting in his Capitol Hill office, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, speaks in careful, clipped sentences, rephrasing at times to convey precisely what he means. His irritation is apparent. “The whole concern here is an administration that would not politicize the Department of Justice. That was a major campaign rallying cry,” he says. “If it was isolated you’d think it was an exception to the rule. But where you see three or four examples then you really worry whether they themselves are verging on violating the law or the oath of office.” …

… Take the case of Mary Smith, a Native-American Chicago lawyer and Obama supporter. She has been nominated as assistant attorney general in the tax division. While she did serve in the Clinton administration, she has no expertise in tax matters and has not spoken on the topic or taken professional education courses in tax law. She did, however, work on three successive Democratic campaigns (including Obama’s). A former Justice Department official asks of Smith, “This was the best they could do?”

At her confirmation hearing, Senator Sessions voiced his grave displeasure. “Tax law is very specialized and it’s certainly not an area where you learn on the job.” He continued, “You should not put people in a job they’re not prepared to handle.” While the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to confirm her not a single Democrat spoke in her defense. Lamar Smith says, “It is obviously being done for political reasons. It is not supposed to be a reward for politics back home. It is a violation of trust and a disservice to the American people.” One current Justice Department attorney remarks that placing a political supporter in charge of the tax division “sounds like Nixon.”

Attention has also focused on Jennifer Daskal, a former Human Rights Watch lawyer with no prosecutorial background but rather a record of aggressive advocacy on behalf of Guantánamo detainees (e.g., questioning the guilt of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, objecting to the incarceration of a 15-year-old who killed Marines). Her new job, remarkably enough, is on the Guantánamo task force that will make recommendations on detainee policy. She is now free to pursue her agenda from inside the Justice Department.

Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to head OLC quickly became controversial given her record of rabid criticism of the Bush administration, her extreme views on national security and abortion (she once wrote that limits on abortion would be tantamount to “slavery” under the Thirteenth Amendment), and her insistence that the Justice Department should pursue novel legal theories based on “economic justice.” Threatening a “make-over” of OLC, she appeared to be precisely the sort of extreme partisan whom Holder had suggested would be unwelcome in his department. Her nomination has now stalled, with a number of Democratic senators unwilling to support her nomination.

Then there is Les Jin, who was chief of staff to the controversial former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mary Frances Berry, who engaged in such regular political stunts as attempting to prevent the seating of George W. Bush’s lawful nominee to the commission. Jin is now in a senior counselor spot at Justice. Another opening has been staffed by Julie Fernandes, an attorney who, prior to joining the department, worked for a left-wing civil rights organization and routinely weighed in on pending cases. Mark Kappelhoff who was chief of the criminal section of the civil rights division at Justice (and who took the position, while serving in the criminal section, that a campaign mailer reminding voters they must be citizens to cast a ballot was illegal “voter intimidation”) maxed out as an Obama donor and has been boosted to principal deputy attorney general for civil rights. …

Michael Ledeen comments on Iran policy. More on this in Pickings tomorrow.

… It’s worse than Jimmy Carter. It’s all appeasement, all the time, from South America to Central Europe, from the Middle East to South Asia. And it’s a guarantee of greater violence, bigger crises, and more American dead. …

Tunku Varadarajan has fun with the beer summit, then makes some serious points.

…Obama didn’t so much misspeak–in saying that Sergeant Crowley had “acted stupidly” in arresting Prof. Gates–as miscalculate his speech. For a man who measures out his words in coffee spoons, his intervention in the affair was heavy-handed. Suddenly, everyone became acutely interested in the following question: How real is Obama when he speaks to the nation? What does he really think? How much of his true beliefs do we get when he talks to us, and how much of it is speech that has been measured, tailored and tallied beforehand for value and impact? America, suddenly, wants to know. As Shelby Steele wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it.” …

Stephen L. Carter explains the importance of profits.

…To the country, profit is a benefit. Record profit means record taxes paid. But put that aside. When profits are high, firms are able to reinvest, expand and hire. And profits accrue to the benefit of those who own stocks: overwhelmingly, pension funds and mutual funds. In other words, high corporate profits today signal better retirements tomorrow.

Another reason to celebrate profit is the incentive it creates. When profits can be made, entrepreneurs provide more of needed goods and services. Consider an example common to the first-year contracts course in every law school: Suppose that the state of Quinnipiac suffers a devastating hurricane. Power is out over thousands of square miles. An entrepreneur from another state, seeing the problem, buys a few dozen portable generators at $500 each, rents a truck and drives them to Quinnipiac, where he posts them for sale at $2,000 each — a 300 percent markup.

Based on recent experience, it is likely the media will respond with fury and the attorney general of Quinnipiac will open an investigation into price-gouging. The result? When the next hurricane arrives, the entrepreneur will stay put, and three dozen homeowners who were willing to pay for power will not have it. There will be fewer portable generators in Quinnipiac than there would have been if the seller were left alone.

When political anger over profit reduces the willingness of investors to take risks, the nation suffers. According to news reports, one reason the Obama administration has had so much trouble finding buyers for the toxic assets it hopes to remove from financial institutions’ balance sheets is a concern by financiers that should they go along with the plan and make rather than lose money, they will be hauled before Congress to explain themselves.

And although it is easy to be dismayed by excess, trying to regulate profit makes things worse. Capital flows to places where returns are highest. The more exercised our political leaders become when profits rise, the more investment capital will remain abroad. …

Alexis Madrigal, for Wired, reports on the mysterious Atlantic coast high tides this summer.

From Maine to Florida, the Atlantic seaboard has experienced higher tides than expected this summer. At their peak in mid-June, the tides at some locations outstripped predictions by two feet.

The change has come too fast to be attributed to melting ice sheets or anything quite that dramatic, and it’s a puzzle for scientists who’ve never seen anything quite like it.

“The ocean is dynamic. It’s not uncommon to have anomalies like this but the breadth and the intensity and duration were unique,” said Mike Szabados, director of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s tide and current program. …

Seems some folks don’t like the Barack the Joker poster.

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Ross Douthat takes a look at how some red states and blue states are weathering the recession.

…Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November. Fourteen states are facing 2010 budget gaps that exceed 20 percent of their G.D.P.; only two went for John McCain. (Strikingly, they’re McCain’s own Arizona and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.) Of the nine states that have raised taxes this year, closing deficits at the expense of growth, almost all are liberal bastions.

The urban scholar Joel Kotkin has called this recession a blue-state “meltdown.” That overstates the case: The Deep South has been hit hard by unemployment, and some liberal regions are weathering the storm reasonably well. And clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush’s Washington.

But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class. …

Robert J. Samuelson draws parallels between California’s economic troubles, and where the nation is headed.

California’s budget debacle holds a lesson for America, but one we will probably ignore. It’s easy to attribute the state’s protracted budget stalemate, now temporarily resolved with about $26 billion of spending cuts and accounting gimmicks, to the deep recession and California’s peculiar politics. Up to a point, that’s true. Representing an eighth of the U.S. economy, California has been harder hit than most states. Unemployment, now 11.6 percent (national average: 9.5 percent), could top 13 percent in 2010, says economist Eduardo Martinez of Moody’s Economy.com. Meanwhile, the requirement that any tax increase muster a two-thirds vote in the legislature promotes paralysis. Democrats prefer tax hikes to spending cuts, and Republicans can block higher taxes.

All this produced the recent drama: plunging tax revenue and the state’s resulting huge budget deficits; endless negotiations between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders; the deadlock that led the state to issue scrip (in effect, IOUs) to pay bills; and a final agreement on a 2009-10 budget. But there is also a bigger story with national implications. California has reached a tipping point. Its government made more promises than its economy can easily support. For years, state leaders papered over the contradiction with loans and modest changes. By overwhelming these expedients, the recession triggered an inevitable reckoning.

Here’s the national lesson. There’s a collision between high and rising demands for government services and the capacity of the economy to produce the income and tax revenue to pay for those demands. That’s true of California, where poor immigrants and their children have increased pressures for more government services. It’s also true of the nation, where an aging population raises Social Security and Medicare spending. California is leading the transformation of politics into a form of collective torture: pay more (higher taxes), get less (lower services). …

Steve Chapman takes a hard look at states’ lack of fiscal discipline.

…The crisis in state budgets is not an accident, and it wasn’t unforeseeable. For years, most states have spent like there’s no tomorrow, and now tomorrow is here. They bring to mind the lament of Mickey Mantle, who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

If they had known the revenue flood wasn’t a permanent fact of life, governors and legislators might have prepared for drought. Instead, like overstretched homeowners, they took on obligations they could meet only in the best-case scenario—which is not what has come to pass.

Over the last decade, state budgets have expanded rapidly. We have had good times and bad times, including a recession in 2001, but according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, this will be the first year since 1983 that total state outlays have not increased.

The days of wine and roses have been affordable due to a cascade of tax revenue. In state after state, the government’s take has ballooned. Overall, the average person’s state tax burden has risen by 42 percent since 1999—nearly 50 percent beyond what the state would have needed just to keep spending constant, with allowances for inflation. …

Fascinating blog post by Spengler as he illuminates the combined efforts of China and Russia to control assertive Islam in Asia and parts of Europe.

… The world looks radically different than Washington thinks — or thought under the Bush administration. The encounter of Central Asian Turkic Muslims with modernity via China is tragic, and the Chinese will take whatever steps are required to ensure that the tragedy is not theirs. The human rights organizations who squeaked and gibbered over Israel’s incursion into Gaza are about to learn the meaning of the word “crackdown.” Iran is not the pillar of stability for the region that the Obamoids hallucinated, but a dying society flailing out as it falls.

Large tracts of the world are becoming unmanageable. Looming above all these other issues as truly frightening threat is Pakistan, which cannot be stabilized by any measures Washington might undertake. Look for a quiet conversation between India and China as to how to dry this problem out.

Obama’s obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian issue has made him slightly worse than irrelevant. If you betray your friends (as Obama surely did by ignoring agreements with Israel on “organic growth” of settlements) and propitiate your enemies (as Obama attempted to do with Iran and Syria) you merely make yourself an object of ridicule and contempt. The rest of the world is taking measures to address real problems in the absence of American help, and in the fear of American maliciousness.

Never in history has a great power cast away so much influence in so short a period of time.

What are kids being taught at school? Lots of Green gloom and doom, says David Harsanyi.

…In 2006, a poll by the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit education group, found that only 53 percent of students age 13 to 19 were optimistic about the future of the country — a 22-percentage-point drop from 2003.

It is depressing to see children — whose cellphones utilize technology that eclipses the collective advances of entire cultures — down on their futures. …

…Today, my 7-year-old can’t take a bath without re-living the plot of “Crime and Punishment,” because she believes her modest water consumption is knocking off Mother Earth.

Maybe children are confused about what “better” is supposed to mean, as well? We can forgive them, though, as they’ve been fed a steady diet of model-projection Armageddon their whole lives. One poll claims that one out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that the Earth will be destroyed by the time they grow up. …

Kenneth Anderson has a fantastic post in Volokh.  Hoover Institute Senior Fellow, Dr. Scott Atlas listed 10 advantages of American healthcare. Here are three:

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

Richard Cohen of WaPo noticed he’s the only guy who hasn’t had an exclusive interview with the One.

… For me, health-care reform is Missiles Redux — specifically the Reagan-era disputes over SS-20s and such, not to mention throw-weight, which is measured in kilograms or metric tons, whatever they are. I was expected to know something about such matters, being a Washington columnist and all, but I could never keep the damn terms and numbers straight. I would bone up, talk to the experts, read the stupefying reports, write the requisite column — and promptly forget it all. The Soviet Union collapsed anyway.

Now it is health care. As a single (actually, divorced) payer, I cannot for the life of me figure out why Obama did not simply expand Medicare, lowering the eligible age until everyone was covered. This would take one House committee and one Senate committee and one news conference. It would both provide your average patriotic American with health insurance and keep Obama off TV. This is known as a win-win.

Lucky for me, this has not been done, and so I have been ducking that call from the White House, inviting me to exclusively spend the day with the president, exclusively interview the president or — this would be really hard to turn down — exclusively sneak a smoke with him in the Situation Room. My Pulitzer is coming because I alone have not interviewed the president. It turns out, that’s an exclusive.

The Economist reports on exciting advances in X-ray technology.

…Most electronic devices have moved into the era of silicon chips and other solid-state technology. Not X-rays. The machines used to generate them still rely resolutely on vacuum tubes. But that will change shortly if Otto Zhou of the University of North Carolina has his way. Dr Zhou and his colleagues are bringing X-radiography into the world of modern electronics. In doing so they hope to create X-ray machines that are smaller, simpler and able to produce more detailed pictures. These could be used to enhance security screening at airports, to allow engineers to check the structure of materials more easily and, especially, to enhance medical images in a way that would improve cancer therapy. …

…Dr Zhou’s method, by contrast, employs a process called electron-field emission. This dispenses with the heat. Also, instead of having a single metal filament release the electrons, it relies on myriad carbon nanotubes to do the same thing. The result is a compact source of X-rays that can be controlled with great precision.

Such sources can then be built into an array, each element of which is programmed to fire whenever required. That will allow for more accurate CT scans. Existing scanners usually have but a single X-ray tube. This is rotated around the patient, taking pictures as it goes. Though the rotation takes only a few seconds, the overall image will be blurred if the patient moves. An array of field-emission devices, however, will take their exposures simultaneously, so the resulting image should always be pin sharp. …

…Conventional CT scans are used to work out the shape of the place where a dose of radiation needs to be concentrated in order to attack a tumour without damaging nearby healthy tissue. But the scan and the treatment cannot usually be done at the same time, because they interfere with each other. There are, however, no interference problems with field-emission X-ray sources, so these can be used to take high-resolution pictures while treatment is proceeding. This means those administering the treatment will know with precision when to continue and when to stop. …