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In The Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady reviews the Honduran situation and the inexplicable stand that the Obama administration has taken.

…Thousands of readers have written to me asking how all this can happen in the U.S., where democratic principles have been recognized since the nation’s founding. Many readers have written that they are “ashamed” of the U.S. and have asked, in effect, “How can I help Honduras?” A more pertinent question may turn out to be, how can they help their own country?

In its actions toward Honduras, the Obama administration is demonstrating contempt for the fundamentals of democracy. Legal scholars are clear on this. “Judicial independence is a central component of any democracy and is crucial to separation of powers, the rule of law and human rights,” writes Ahron Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and a prominent legal scholar, in his compelling 2006 book, “The Judge in a Democracy.”

“The purpose of the separation of powers is to strengthen freedom and prevent the concentration of power in the hands of one government actor in a manner likely to harm the freedom of the individual,” Mr. Barak explains—almost as if he is writing about Honduras.

He also warns prophetically about the Chávez style of democracy that has destroyed Venezuela and that Hondurans say they were trying to avoid in their own country. “Democracy is entitled to defend itself from those who seek to use it in order to destroy its very existence,” he writes. Americans ought to ask themselves why the Obama administration doesn’t seem to agree.

Michael Barone, in The Washington Examiner, comments on liberals’ difficulty in respecting other points of view.

…”Mainstream media” try to help. In the past few weeks, we have seen textbook examples of how MSM have ignored news stories that reflected badly on the administration for which it has such warm feelings. It ignored the videos in which the White House “green jobs czar” proclaimed himself a “communist” and the “truther” petition he signed charging that George W. Bush may have allowed the Sept. 11 attacks.

It ignored the videos released on Andrew Breitbart’s biggovernment.com showing ACORN employees offering to help a supposed pimp and prostitute evade taxes and employ 13- to 15-year-old prostitutes. It downplayed last spring’s Tea Parties — locally organized demonstrations against big government that attracted about a million people nationwide — and downplayed the Tea Party throng at the Capitol and on the Mall Sept. 12.

Actually, “mainstream media” are doing their friends in the Obama administration and the Democratic Party no favors, at least in the long run. Obama comes from one-party Chicago, and the House Democrats’ nine top leadership members and committee chairmen come from districts that voted on average 73 percent for Obama last fall. They need help in understanding the larger country they are seeking to govern, where nearly half voted the other way. Instead, they get the impression they can dismiss critics as racist or “Nazis” or as indulging in (as Sen. Harry Reid said) “evil-mongering.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned us that there’s a danger that intense rhetoric can provoke violence, and no decent person wants to see harm come to our president or other leaders. But it’s interesting that the two most violent incidents at this summer’s town hall meetings came when a union thug beat up a 65-year-old black conservative in Missouri and when a liberal protester bit off part of a man’s finger in California.

These incidents don’t justify a conclusion that all liberals are violent. But they are more evidence that American liberals, unused to hearing dissent, have an impulse to shut it down.

Jennifer Rubin reports on the cover story the President is using for his witch hunt at the CIA.

The president on Sunday was asked about the letter by seven former CIA directors imploring him to annul Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to re-investigate CIA agents who used enhanced interrogation techniques:

“I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look after an institution that they helped to build, but I continue to believe that nobody’s above the law,” Obama told CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “I want to make sure that as President of the United States that I’m not asserting in some way that my decisions overrule the decisions of prosecutors who are there to uphold the law.”

This is jaw-dropping even for Obama. The entire reinvestigation of the CIA is a giant exercise in second-guessing the “decisions of prosecutors who are there to uphold the law.” Holder and Obama are doing precisely what Obama deplores—throwing out the decision of expert career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who already investigated these matters and determined that there could be no successful prosecution of the CIA operatives. And that is what the CIA directors in their letter took Obama and Holder to task for doing.

Instances like these suggest that when the going gets tough, the president’s modus operandi is to resort to the most disingenuous rhetoric he can get away with. He simply operates on the presupposition that no one is paying close enough attention to the hypocrisy and half-truths. But there are plenty of people who do—the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, our enemies, and many informed voters who cringe at the unseemly sight of a war against those who protected us. They all understand the political gamesmanship at work here and the lack of real concern by the president for our intelligence community.

Roger Simon reports that the lies keep coming.

But Obama has always been a liar. We have known that since he claimed he didn’t know anything about the extreme views of Jeremiah Wright – after having spent twenty years in Rev. Wright’s church (the same church Oprah Winfrey had left eight years before because she was uncomfortable with the views of the bigoted minister). The MSM gave him a pass on this whopper, enabling his election, because he was their candidate. They were evidently unfazed by the ancient Roman legal principal: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

Well, there have been plenty of omnibuses since, but few so risible as Obama’s answers this Sunday to George Stephanopoulos concerning the ACORN scandal:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?
OBAMA: You know, if — frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.
OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not committing to — to cut off the federal funding?
OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.

These ludicrous statements almost Fisk themselves, but allow me to do it briefly. …

In The National Review, Richard Vedder explains how the lack of market forces in higher education results in an inferior product with a continually increasing price tag.

In a typical year over the past generation, the cost of attending college has risen at about double the rate of inflation. Family incomes have not kept pace. And despite huge increases in federal financial assistance, the proportion of lower-income Americans in the college population has actually declined over the past 30 years.

The other sector that has seen comparable inflation over the past generation is health care, and this is no accident. In both sectors, government intervention largely neuters the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently, by establishing third parties (neither consumers nor producers) that pay many of the bills. When that happens, the consumer is not very sensitive to prices, and consumes wastefully. For these and other reasons, a good argument can made that we are overinvested, or at least mal-invested, in higher education. …

…Universities do little to measure what students learn, and it is hard to assess the value of their research, so good estimates of academic productivity are hard to come by. Nonetheless, under almost any reasonable assumptions, it is lower than it was 40 years ago — and it is certainly not higher. Yet over the past 30 years or so, the number of non-instructional university employees, adjusted for changing enrollment, has roughly doubled. My university has a sustainability coordinator, a recycling coordinator, and umpteen diversity and public-relations specialists — almost none of whose posts existed when I began teaching. How much do they improve the instructional and research programs? Not at all.

Speaking of research, much of it achieves only trivial refinements of insignificant issues, and is produced for a nearly nonexistent audience. Jeff Sandefer of the Acton School of Business estimates that an academic-journal article costs on average $50,000 — and is read by 200 people. That’s $250 per reader. Mark Bauerlein of Emory University notes that over 22,000 articles about the works of Shakespeare have appeared since 1980. Are there that many new and insightful thoughts to be had about the Bard? Have not diminishing returns set in — for this topic and many others? …

We have NRO shorts. Here is the first:

President Obama has agreed to talks with Iran on the understanding that the Iranian nuclear project is the real issue to be negotiated between the two countries. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has agreed to talks with the United States on the understanding that the nuclear project is an afterthought to the discussion. On behalf of the administration, officials and diplomats are pitching expectations at a level hardly higher than a shrug. On behalf of Iran, officials and diplomats speak as though they have victory over the United States already in their pocket. They want everyone to be as afraid of them as their own population already is. Tehran, they like to emphasize, will never give up its right to produce nuclear fuel, and is ready to defend itself against international pressure and any military strike. As in the fruitless past, talks are to include Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany, and the U.S. has even engaged Javier Solana, the man in charge of foreign policy for the European Union, to be the intermediary. Should the talks fail to materialize, or to provide any meaningful outcome, the next option is sanctions. But Russia will not go along with that, as its foreign minister has made clear. The course of events looks set to move from slow motion to stalemate.

Anjana Ahuja writes in The Times, UK regarding the anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Pickings carried another review for this book on July 30th of this year. The topic was first posted here in August 2008, when the discussion was about the evolutionary effects of eating cooked food. Wrangham’s new book postulates that marriage evolved from cooking as well.

…“I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals,” Wrangham explains in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. “Cooking increased the (calorific) value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social lives.” He argues, as no one else has done before, that cooking was pivotal in our evolution. “If you feed a chimp cooked food for tens of thousands of years, I find it hard to believe that it would end up looking like the same animal.” …

…Cooking would have made a radical difference to the creatures who mastered it: it made plants and meat more calorie-dense; it spared our ancestors from the marathons of mastication required with raw foods (wild chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering food and chewing it); it was easier on the gut. It is utterly within the bounds of belief that the first hominid to put a flame to his food started an extraordinary chain of evolutionary events that culminated in us, the ape in the kitchen.

But Wrangham, who co-wrote Demonic Males, a groundbreaking book on ape violence and its relevance to human violence, strides farther: the advent of cooking led to a restructuring of society and, in particular, liberated men from the chore of chewing but chained women to the stove.

Early human marriages, he suggests, were “primitive protection rackets”, in which men protected women from hungry marauders (attracted by the smoke of the fire) in return for a hot meal at the end of the day and, almost as an afterthought, babies. This is a radical notion — that domestic unions are mainly about food, not sex — but it’s not ridiculous. Anthropologists have noted that many primitive societies will tolerate a married woman sleeping around, but will ostracise her if she feeds any man other than her husband. In the ancestral struggle for survival, it seems, sustenance was more important than sex. …