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Peter Wehner has kudos for Obama’s visit to Dover.

… Barack Obama did the right thing in the right way, and he deserves credit for it.

There are three big races in the elections next week. The polls, for all of them, took good turns in the last few days. What will this mean? Jennifer Rubin has ideas.

… If — BIG if — these margins hold, next Tuesday may be an eye-opening vote for the Washington crowd. They have gone blithely on their way, spending and spending and churning this and that plan to take over health care. Meanwhile, the country is fuming. Voters, especially independents, didn’t think that this was what hope-n-change was all about. If Republicans win big next week on messages of fiscal conservatism and opposition to big-government liberalism, maybe the inside-the-Beltway set will wake up. …

Michael Barone saw the first three races and raised one more.

Six days from now the voters of New Jersey and Virginia will elect governors. Voters in the 23rd district of New York and the 10th district of California will elect new members of the House of Representatives to replace incumbents, a Republican and a Democrat, who were appointed to positions in the Obama Defense and State departments.

All four of these constituencies voted for Barack Obama 51 weeks ago. Obama won 57 percent of the vote in New Jersey, 53 percent (his national average) in Virginia, 52 percent in New York 23 and 65 percent in California 10.

Yet all of this territory was once Republican. Suburb-dominated New Jersey voted 56 percent for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Southern-accented Virginia hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. The last time the territory covered by New York 23 elected a Democratic congressman was in 1870. And the incumbent who is being replaced in California 10 won her seat by beating a Republican in 1996.

In other words, the 2009 contests are a reasonably fair test of the strength and durability of the Democratic majority that Obama and his ticketmates assembled in 2008, a majority that was only made possible by gains in hitherto Republican territory. It is also a test of the capacity of Republicans to regain turf they have lost.

Yes, the character of the individual candidates and local issues can make a difference. But the basic issues in these four contests are reasonably congruent with the national issues now being debated in Congress and debated this summer in town halls across the nation. …

Karl Rove’s fourth race was for the PA’s Supreme Court.

… Finally, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, Judge Joan Orie Melvin, is mounting a strong effort against Democrat Jack Panella, despite a $1 million ad blitz targeting her that’s bankrolled by Philadelphia trial lawyers. A GOP victory would indicate trouble for Democrats in a state Mr. Obama carried by 10 points.

A year ago, Democrats crowed that Mr. Obama had reshaped the political landscape to their advantage. Voters have lived under Democratic rule for nine months, and many of them, especially independents, don’t like what they’re seeing.

Tuesday’s election will provide the most tangible evidence so far of how strong a backlash is building—and just how frightened centrist Democrats should be of 2010. For Republicans, it looks as if hope and change are on the way.

German magazine Der Spiegel interviewed Charles Krauthammer.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?

Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it’s not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.

SPIEGEL: Why does it?

Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today’s politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.

SPIEGEL: It hardly makes sense to blame him for losing the Olympic bid in one week, and then for winning the Nobel Prize the next.

Krauthammer: He should have simply said: “This is very nice, I appreciate the gesture, but I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve.” But he is not the kind of man that does that.

SPIEGEL: Should he have turned down the prize?

Krauthammer: He would never turn that down. The presidency is all about him. Just think about the speech he gave in Berlin. There is something so preposterous about a presidential candidate speaking in Berlin. And it was replete with all these universalist clichés, which is basically what he’s been giving us for nine months.

SPIEGEL: Why do Europeans react so positively to him?

Krauthammer: Because Europe, for very understandable reasons, has been chaffing for 60 years under the protection, but also the subtle or not so subtle domination of America. Europeans like to see the big guy cut down to size, it’s a natural reaction. You know, Europe ran the world for 400 or 500 years until the civilizational suicide of the two World Wars. And then America emerged as the world hegemon, with no competition and unchallenged. The irony is America is the only hegemonic power that never sought hegemony, unlike, for example, Napoleonic France. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. Of course Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.

John Stossel columns again on Elinor Ostrom’s Economic Nobel.

… Ostrom made her mark through field studies that show people solving one of the more vexing problems: efficient management of a common-pool resource (CPR), such as a pasture or fishery. With an unowned “commons,” each individual has an incentive to get the most out of it without putting anything back.

If I take fish from a common fishing area, I benefit completely from those fish. But if I make an investment to increase the future number of fish, others benefit, too. So why should I risk making the investment? I’ll wait for others to do it. But everyone else faces the same free-rider incentive. So we end up with a depleted resource and what Garrett Harden called “the tragedy of the commons”.

Except, says Ostrom, we often don’t. There is also an “opportunity of the commons.” While most politicians conclude that, depending on the resource, efficient management requires either privatization or government ownership, Ostrom finds examples of a third way: “self-organizing forms of collective action,” as she put it in an interview a few years ago. Her message is to be wary of government promises.

“Field studies in all parts of the world have found that local groups of resource users, sometimes by themselves and sometimes with the assistance of external actors, have created a wide diversity of institutional arrangements for cooperating with common-pool resources.”  …

Ed Morrissey on the latest silliness from global warming freaks.

If people want a glimpse of what the world will be like with global-warming hysterics in charge, Lord Stern of Brentford lets the veil slip in an interview with the Times of London.  Stern admits that the upcoming Copenhagen talks would produce a pact on energy usage that would send the cost of meat “soaring.”  That suits Stern just fine, because he wants to push the world into vegetarianism anyway: …

… Seven hundred years ago, man farmed and raised cows and pigs on the entire island of Greenland.  When they do that again, perhaps I’ll worry about bovine flatulence as a global threat.  Until then, I consider creeping elitism from horse’s asses a much more elitist threat than methane from cow’s butts.

It’s hard to overstate how stupid governments are. Some perfect examples are the simple scams in the first time housing tax-credit. WSJ Editors have the story.

… As a “refundable” tax credit, it guarantees the claimants will get cash back even if they paid no taxes. A lack of documentation requirements also makes this program a slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone for scammers. The Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department are pursuing more than 100 criminal investigations related to the credit, and the IRS is reportedly trying to audit almost everyone who claims it this year.

Speaking of the IRS, apparently its own staff couldn’t help but notice this opportunity to snag an easy $8,000. One day after explaining to Congress how many “home-buyers” were climbing aboard this gravy train, Mr. George appeared on Neil Cavuto’s program on the Fox Business Network. Mr. George said his staff has found at least 53 cases of IRS employees filing “illegal or inappropriate” claims for the credit. “In all honesty this is an interim report. I expect that the number would be much larger than that number,” he said.

The program is set to expire at the end of November, so naturally given its record of abuse, Congress is preparing to extend it. Republican Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia is so pleased with the results that he wants to expand the program beyond first-time buyers and double the income limits. …

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Reason Magazine reviews two books in the historian’s war over the end of the Cold War.

We don’t know the exact hierarchy of motives, but it is certain that Chris Gueffroy was willing to leave his family and friends to avoid conscription into the army. Considering the associated risks, it’s likely that the 20-year-old was also strongly motivated to escape the stultifying sameness, the needless poverty, the cultural black hole that was his homeland. In his passport photo, he wore a small hoop earring, an act of nonconformity in a country that prized conformity above all else. But Gueffroy’s passport was yet another worthless possession, for he had the great misfortune of being born into a walled nation, a country that brutally enforced a ban on travel to “nonfraternal” states.

On February 6, 1989, Gueffroy and a friend attempted to escape from East Berlin by scaling die Mauer—the wall that separated communist east from capitalist west. They didn’t make it far. After tripping an alarm, Gueffroy was shot 10 times by border guards and died instantly. His accomplice was shot in the foot but survived, only to be put on trial and sentenced to three years in prison for “attempted illegal border-crossing in the first degree.”

Twenty years ago this month, and nine months after the murder of Gueffroy, the Berlin Wall, that monument to the barbarism of the Soviet experiment, was finally breached. The countries held captive by Moscow began their long road to economic and cultural recovery, and to reunification with liberal Europe. But in the West, where Cold War divisions defined politics and society for 40 years, the moment was not greeted as a welcome opportunity for intellectual reconciliation, for fact-checking decades of exaggerations and misperceptions. Instead, then as now, despite the overwhelming volume of new data and the exhilaration of hundreds of millions finding freedom, the battle to control the Cold War narrative raged on unabated. Reagan haters and Reagan hagiographers, Sovietophiles and anti-communists, isolationists and Atlanticists, digested this massive moment in history, then carried on as if nothing much had changed. A new flurry of books timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse reinforces the point that the Cold War will never truly be settled by the side that won. …

Paul Greenberg says the UN is outrageous again.

It won’t do, at least not in polite society, to propose wiping a country off the map. That mantra has been left to Iran’s raving leader.

Instead, this year’s tactic at the always-busy United Nations is to deny Israel the right to defend itself. Which would lead to its destruction soon enough. And that would be the practical effect of bringing its generals and ministers to trial for their “war crimes” in Gaza. That’s where the Israelis, after absorbing years of rocket attacks across their southern border, went in and attacked the source of the attacks. Their border with Hamas-controlled Gaza has been quieter since.

Naturally the United Nations, which is a lot better at condoning aggression than enforcing the peace, is outraged — and doing its best to stir things up again. Its “Human Rights” Council, which has little if anything to do with protecting human rights, especially in Islamic dictatorships, has demanded that Israel be brought before the International Court of Justice for daring to defend itself. …

David Warren on making decisions.

The extreme delay in getting decisions out of Washington that were urgent many months ago, on how to proceed in Afghanistan, was made sickly comic on Monday when President Barack Obama told a military audience that he would not “rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm’s way.”

Morale had been descending in Afghanistan, from what I could make out, among an under-manned allied force in serious need of reinforcement; casualties rising on uncovered flanks.

And then they hear this strange man in Washington, playing Hamlet with himself, dramatizing his own role in what should be a clear-headed and quick, unemotional decision-making process. After all, he announced his (vacuous) “comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” to great fanfare last March. All he has to do now is give it substance.

The Bush administration was, for all its misjudgments in other areas, good at making clear, clean, practical decisions with troops in harm’s way. Bush himself commanded overwhelming support in the military vote for his re-election in 2004. John McCain, who could also be taken as having some idea about military issues, largely kept that vote. If Obama thinks he can now win the trust of soldiers, by blathering to them about the solemnity of his own august personal angst, he is as much of a fool as he looks to them already. …

Thomas Sowell wonders if we’ll recognize our country when Obama is finally dispatched back to Chicago.

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments? …

WSJ’s Bill McGurn says he’s not the post-partisan prez. He’s the post-gracious one.

Nine months after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, his most adamant critics must concede he’s delivered on “change.” And we see it in our first post-gracious presidency.

The most visible manifestations of the new ungraciousness are the repeated digs the president and his senior staffers continue to make against George W. Bush. Recently, the administration has given us two fresh examples. The first is about Afghanistan, the other about the economy.

On Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff went on CNN’s “State of the Union” earlier this month to discuss the presidential decision on Afghanistan that everyone is waiting for. “It’s clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that’s adrift,” said Rahm Emanuel. “That we’re beginning at scratch, and just from the starting point, after eight years.” Translation: If we screw up Afghanistan, blame Mr. Bush. …

Toby Harnden in Telegraph, UK says it’s time to put aside campaigning and start governing.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the land of the permanent campaign has produced a president like Barack Obama. During his White House bid, Mr Obama’s staff argued that his masterful oversight of the machinery that ultimately got him elected was his highest achievement.

In many respects this was true, though Mr Obama was more chairman than CEO. Even Republican political operatives acknowledge that the Obama ’08 campaign was a thing of beauty.

Essentially, however, Mr Obama won because of his persona – post-racial, healing, cool, articulate and inspirational. In a sense, therefore, his greatest achievement in life is being Barack Obama. Or the campaign version, at least.

Therein lies the problem. While campaigning could centre around soaring rhetoric, governing is altogether messier. It involves tough, unpopular choices and cutting deals with opponents. It requires doing things rather than talking about them, let alone just being.

Mr Obama is showing little appetite for this. Instead of being the commander-in-chief, he is the campaigner-in-chief. …

Jillian Melchior in Contentions reports how trade wars get started.

Predictably, Beijing has retaliated against Barack Obama’s protectionist trade policy. (Last week), the Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a preliminary ruling that puts a 36 percent tariff on U.S.-made nylon. That tariff, like the initial one, will hurt American industry and American consumers, and it could have been avoided.

If only Obama had been more … diplomatic. By upholding his campaign promises to labor unions, he backtracked on his promise to avoid protectionism. And tariffs are a surefire way to irk overseas friends.

The fray began in September. The United Steelworkers, who make the metal wiring that goes into tires, complained to the International Trade Commission that the high number of Chinese tire imports was disrupting and directly threatening the market. …

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Christopher Booker has written a book on global warming. He uses an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, UK to retail his thesis.

… By any measure, the supposed menace of global warming – and the political response to it – has become one of the overwhelmingly urgent issues of our time. If one accepts the thesis that the planet faces a threat unprecedented in history, the implications are mind-boggling. But equally mind-boggling now are the implications of the price we are being asked to pay by our politicians to meet that threat. More than ever, it is a matter of the highest priority that we should know whether or not the assumptions on which the politicians base their proposals are founded on properly sound science.

This is why I have been regularly reporting on the issue in my column in The Sunday Telegraph, and this week I publish a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?.

There are already many books on this subject, but mine is rather different from the rest in that, for the first time, it tries to tell the whole tangled story of how the debate over the threat of climate change has evolved over the past 30 years, interweaving the science with the politicians’ response to it.

It is a story that has unfolded in three stages. The first began back in the Seventies when a number of scientists noticed that the world’s temperatures had been falling for 30 years, leading them to warn that we might be heading for a new ice age. Then, in the mid-Seventies, temperatures started to rise again, and by the mid-Eighties, a still fairly small number of scientists – including some of those who had been predicting a new ice age – began to warn that we were now facing the opposite problem: a world dangerously heating up, thanks to our pumping out CO? and all those greenhouse gases inseparable from modern civilisation. …

… In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”

Such is the truly extraordinary position in which we find ourselves.

Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.

How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?

Turning our attention to health care, Matthew Continetti says maybe it won’t pass.

… But a left-liberal health care reform is a dicey proposition. Consider what happened last week in the Senate. Medicare is scheduled to reduce doctor’s payments by more than 20 percent in 2010. The Democrats wanted to restore those cuts at a cost of $247 billion in unfunded liabilities. But, when Harry Reid tried to end debate on the measure last week, he failed. Joe Lieberman and 12 Democrats voted against the Senate Democratic leadership and for fiscal responsibility. Reid can’t get 60 votes for a payoff to the American Medical Association. What makes the White House think he can get 60 for Obamacare?

The Calendar. Obama originally wanted a bill before summer’s end. Didn’t happen. Back in September, lawmakers expected Pelosi to hold a vote by the end of that month. No go. Then the deadline was the end of October. Another fantasy. Now we’re told the vote won’t come before early November.

But November features off-year gubernatorial elections that look favorable for Republicans. In Virginia, Republican Bob McDonnell holds a commanding lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds. When Obama won the state last year, the reigning opinion was that his coalition was strong enough to move the Old Dominion firmly into the Democratic column. A McDonnell victory would shatter this illusion. It would give pause to the center-right Democrats about to tie their fortunes to the president. It would show that the enthusiasm in American politics is all on the right. Southern and Western Democrats may begin to ask, What’s the rush? And then the longer the health care debate goes on, the more the momentum for grand reform will fade. Big schemes will be abandoned.

The health-reform Calvinists are wrong. Politics isn’t physics. Legislative logrolling isn’t gravity. Nothing is inevitable.

Let’s see, the government can’t get vaccine produced on time, and we’re supposed to hand over our health care to them? Mark Tapscott asks the question in his blog.

President Obama’s late-night declaration of a nationwide public health emergency last night shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the most important lesson of the developing swine flu crisis – The same government that only weeks ago promised abundant supplies of swine flu vaccine by mid-October will be running your health care system under Obamacare.

On Sept. 13, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, told ABC’s This Week program that the government was on schedule to deliver an “ample supply” of swine flu vaccine by mid-October:

“We’re on track to have an ample supply rolling by the middle of October. But we may have some early vaccine as early as the first full week in October. We’ll get the vaccine out the door as fast as it rolls off the production line.”

But here we are five weeks later and news reports are coming in from across the nation of long waiting lines of people wanting the shot, but being turned away because of grossly inadequate supplies. The typical explanation from public health officials is that the swine flu vaccine requires more time to be cultivated than seasonal flu vaccine. …

NewsBusters wonders if the Obama folks are going to go after CBS after the “60 Minute” bit on Medicare fraud?

“60 Minutes” did a fabulous exposé Sunday on Medicare fraud that should be required viewing for all people who support a government run healthcare program in this country.

The facts and figures presented by CBS’s Steve Kroft were disturbing as were the details concerning how shysters bilk the system for an estimated $60 billion a year.

As Kroft warned viewers in the segment’s teaser, “We caution you that this story may raise your blood pressure, along with some troubling questions about our government’s ability to manage a medical bureaucracy” …

Rocco Landesman is Obama’s boot-licking head of the National Endowment for the Arts. John Steele Gordon posts in Contentions.

… It’s amazing how many people seem not to know where to look information up, or perhaps don’t care, as they have things other than accuracy on their agenda. Take Rocco Landesman, the new head of the National Endowment of the Arts. In a speech in Brooklyn last week, he said of Barack Obama, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”

Oh, dear, where do I begin? Well, let’s start with grammar. It’s “the first president who,” not “the first president that.”

Second, he implicitly accuses Presidents Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Hoover, Coolidge, and Wilson of having had their memoirs, autobiographies, and other works ghosted. …

The Vatican’s outreach to Anglicans attracted David Warren’s attention.

There has been very big news out of Rome, this past week, for all English-speaking Christians — regardless of denomination, as I have realized from much e-mail. (The reader may recall that I am myself a Roman convert, from Anglicanism, and thus a natural recipient of such mail.)

The North American media have downplayed it, and focused coverage on the pettiest controversial points: “Is the Pope a homophobe?” “Was the Archbishop of Canterbury blindsided?” “Does this mean Catholic priests can now marry?” and other such questions, to each of which the answer is, very obviously, no. (In England, it was rather more front-page.)

What happened? In a sentence, the Vatican announced arrangements by which traditionalist Anglican congregations, in all the English-speaking countries, may apply and be received into communion with the Roman “universal” or Catholic church. (The word “catholic” means universal.)

One crucial point: that this was not an instance of the Vatican “poaching.” For many years, since the Anglican communion started coming to pieces over the issue of female ordination in the 1970s, traditional Anglicans have been appealing to Rome for just what Rome finally offered: to be in full communion while also being allowed to keep their distinctive liturgical forms (founded in the magnificent Book of Common Prayer), and to “grandfather” several of their received customs, such as married priests. …

WaPo op-ed advocates legalizing pot.

And just as escalating the drug war over the past three decades hasn’t caused a decrease in supply and demand, there’s no good reason to believe that regulating drugs instead of outlawing them would cause an increase. If it did, why are drug usage rates in the Netherlands lower? People start and stop taking drugs for many different reasons, but the law seems to be pretty low on the list. Ask yourself: Would you shoot up tomorrow if heroin were legal?

Nobody wants a drug free-for-all; but in fact, that’s what we already have in many communities. What we need is regulation. Distribution without regulation equals criminals and chaos — what police see every day on some of our streets. People will buy drugs because they want to get high, and the question is only how and where they will buy them.

History provides some lessons. The 21st Amendment ending Prohibition did not force anybody to drink or any city to license saloons. In 1933, after the failure to ban alcohol, the feds simply got out of the game. Today, they should do the same — and last week the Justice Department took a very small step in the right direction.

Without federal control, states, cities and counties would be free to bar or regulate drugs as they saw fit. Just as with alcohol and tobacco regulation, one size does not fit all; we would see local solutions to local problems.

Even without federal pressure, most states and cities would undoubtedly start by maintaining the status quo against drugs. That’s fine. In these cases, police with or without federal assistance should focus on reducing violence by pushing the drug trade off the streets. An effort to shift the nature of the illegal trade is different than declaring a war on drugs.

Regulating and controlling distribution is far more effective at clearing the corners of drug dealers than any SWAT crackdown. One can easily imagine that in some cities — San Francisco, Portland and Seattle come to mind — alternatives to arrest and incarceration could be tried. They could learn from the experience of the Dutch, and we could all learn from their successes and failures.

Regulation is hard work, but it’s not a war. And it sure beats herding junkies.

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Ed Morrissey reviews recent foreign policy flops.

… President George Bush decided to pursue his own coalition of nations to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Iraq when then-French President Jacques Chirac double-crossed the US and the UK at the United Nations.  Despite having dozens of nations in the coalition, the lack of an eighteenth resolution from the UN and the public opposition of Chirac’s France allowed the American Left to paint Bush as a go-it-alone cowboy on the international stage.

When Nicolas Sarkozy replaced Chirac, he and Bush created closer ties between the two nations than had been seen in decades.  The two partnered on the war on terror, with France taking the unusual position last year of scolding its European partners for not contributing more combat troops to the effort in Afghanistan.  Sarkozy and Bush also formed a tight alliance against Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Now who’s the go-it-alone cowboy?  Obama has damaged relations with the UK, France, the Czech Republic, and Poland, which even Joe Biden was forced to admit yesterday.  Instead, Obama has focused his friendlier attention on Russia and Iran.  What has Obama and the US received in return?  Laughter over Hillary Clinton’s amateurish “reset button” and zero cooperation on Iranian nuclear weapons.  And this is “smart power”?

Steve Hayes reports on the detailed Afghanistan study the Bushies left for Obama and wonders why the present administration denigrates that effort.

… Not surprisingly, Republicans were among the most outspoken supporters of Obama’s strategy announced in March. And while Democrats on Capitol Hill did not, for the most part, voice their opposition in public, they registered their concerns in private conversations with White House officials.

They had a receptive audience. Several top White House officials, including Emanuel, Jones, David Axelrod, and Joe Biden, remain skeptical of escalating U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan. And according to the man who conducted the Afghanistan review for the Obama White House, Bruce Riedel, politics is at the center of those concerns.

“I think a big part of it is, the vice president’s reading of the Democratic party is this is not sustainable,” Riedel told the New York Times. “That’s a part of the process that’s a legitimate question for a president–if I do this, can I sustain it with political support at home? That was the argument the vice president was making back in the winter.”

It is a legitimate question for a president. Why then, as Obama again nears a decision on the way forward in Afghanistan, would Rahm Emanuel pick a fight with Republicans–the very people who gave the president his most ardent backing the last time he announced a new strategy?

Could it be that Emanuel hopes to foreclose one of Obama’s options–the one Emanuel opposes–before the president makes his decision?

Jennifer Rubin has thoughts about the Hayes piece.

What to make of this? Well, it seems as though the most “transparent” administration in history operates, at least in its “public” diplomacy, by deceit. The administration released the enhanced-interrogation memos but held back documentation substantiating that the techniques had worked. The president announces that he will look forward, not backward, with regard to CIA operatives but has unleashed Attorney General Eric Holder to gin up a special prosecutor to re-investigate CIA employees. The administration knew of the Qom facility yet remained silent and clung to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which declared that Iran had shut down its weapons program. And now the administration, lacking the will or the management skill to announce a new Afghanistan war policy, has concocted blatant lies about the preceding administration.

This administration’s thin skin is not its only point of similarity with the Nixon White House. It seems as though they also share an aversion to truth-telling.

Jennifer also posts on Liz Cheney.

… Cheney delivers a very tough message with serenity and with no trace of anger. It defies the image of the grumpy or angry conservative. To borrow a phrase, she has a “superior temperament.” And that temperament stands in contrast, ironically, to Obama’s. He used to be the calm one but now is increasingly seen as partisan and testy.

Second, there is an opening for Cheney’s message precisely because Obama has proved to be a more radical figure than most imagined. Had he made a definitive decision on Afghanistan or decided against throwing the netroots a bunch of bones by investigating CIA interrogators and discontinuing the full funding of key defense programs (e.g., F-22, missile defense), there would be much less for her to talk about. It’s only because Obama chose a George McGovern model over a Bill Clinton model that there is so much running room to his right. …

And on the other Cheney.

… Cheney showed in the Guantanamo debate that the president’s popularity (much reduced since then) is no substitute for cogent argument and smart policies. The White House once again will no doubt snarl in response, as they are wont to do in lieu of reasoned rebuttal. (And what would they say? ” We are not dithering!”) But Cheney’s point is the central one for the American people and for elected leaders: just how do Obama’s policies (e.g., reinvestigation of CIA operatives, release of interrogation memos and halt to enhanced interrogation techniques, delay on formulating an Afghanistan policy) improve America’s safety? Unless the president can provide a concrete answer, he remains vulnerable. More important, so does America.

George Will introduces us to Michelle Bachmann.

When Marcus Bachmann came home that Saturday evening in 2000, he checked the telephone answering machine and was mystified by the many messages congratulating his wife for something. “Michele,” he said, “do you have something to tell me?” She did.

The state senator from her district in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul had been in office for 17 years, had stopped being pro-life and started supporting tax increases, so that morning Michele Bachmann had skipped washing her hair, put on jeans and a tattered sweatshirt and went to the local Republican nominating caucus to ask the incumbent a few pointed questions. There, on the spur of the moment, some similarly disgruntled conservatives suggested that she unseat him. After she made a five-minute speech “on freedom,” the caucus emphatically endorsed her, and she handily won the subsequent primary.

After six years in the state Legislature, she ran for Congress and now, in her second term, has become such a burr under Democrats’ saddles that recently the New York Times profiled her beneath a Page One headline: “GOP Has a Lightning Rod, and Her Name Is Not Palin.” She is, however, a petite pistol that occasionally goes off half-cocked. …

Bjørn Lomborg thinks worrying about global warming misses the mark.

… Torethy’s life would not be transformed by foreign countries making immediate carbon cuts.

What would change her life? Having a boat in the village to use for fishing, transporting goods to sell, and to get to hospital in emergencies. She doesn’t want more aid money because, “there is too much corruption in the government and it goes in people’s pockets,” but she would like microfinance schemes instead. “Give the money directly to the people for businesses so we can support ourselves without having to rely on the government.”

Vanuatu’s politicians speak with a loud voice on the world stage. But the inhabitants of Vanuatu, like Torethy Frank, tell a very different story.

Writing in the Times, UK, Jeremy Clarkson says it’s not true he doesn’t think about the environment.

… “Recently, Boris Johnson jokingly wondered what had happened to all those Trots and Bolsheviks from the 1970s. Boris, my dear chap, they never went away. And now there are many more of them, living among us, posing as normal, respectable members of the human race. It’s just that they’re not called Trots and Bolsheviks any more. They’re called environmentalists and health and safety officers. Think about it. A single health and safety man can inflict more damage on business and industry than an army of Red Robboes. And the goals of an environmentalist far exceed the aspirations of even the most hardbitten 1970s communist.”  …

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A new Lenin biography says he died of syphilis. David Warren comments.

… A fairly convincing retrospective diagnosis of terminal syphilis in Lenin appeared in the European Journal of Neurology five years ago. Three Israeli physicians sifted the evidence to this conclusion. This week’s “news alert” came from the recently published book, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile, by the respected British historian Helen Rappaport. I have not read that book, but I gather that she has coordinated all of the evidence in an unanswerable way.

Diagnoses of syphilis have previously been made for several other of the great monsters of history, including Lenin’s predecessor Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII of England, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler. And I further recall glancing in a book that purported to show the dark influence of syphilis upon most of the “symbolist” poets of 19th-century France.

As a man who lived in Bangkok, for more years than he can comfortably admit, I have often suspected that sexually-transmitted disease plays a larger part in human events than the prim could ever imagine. Indeed, that sex, generally, plays an important role, at more levels than they could enumerate. And the beauty of it — if one may apply the term “beauty” to the genius with which evidence is concealed — is that we cannot know and will never know the half of it. A few discovered highlights must illuminate the unplumbed depths. …

Mark Steyn writes on the tough guy in the White House.

… The trouble is it isn’t tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real “Untouchables” here? In Moscow, it’s Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) they’re still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it’s Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle. We were told that Obama would use “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama’s soft power is so soft it doesn’t even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders’ very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama’s “smart diplomacy” is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.

But, if you’re doing the overnight show on WZZZ-AM, Mister Tough Guy’s got your number.

Charles Krauthammer too.

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’s bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led [by] and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing “green jobs” czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.

At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House “pool” news organizations — except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. …

Jay Nordlinger, in The Corner, has a couple of comments on the childish side of the kid president.

Barack Obama is pretty interesting when he gets in front of his money-givers — his biggest fans, I guess. In New York, he said, “Democrats are an opinionated bunch. You know, the other side, they just kinda sometimes do what they’re told. Democrats, y’all thinkin’ for yourselves.” Last year, in San Francisco, he said of Middle Americans, “It’s not surprising . . . they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them . . .” …

… I have 30 more things to say, of course, but here’s one more: Do you recall President Bush insulting Democrats, as Obama has insulted us, explicitly? Sometimes our post-partisan president can be a rather nasty piece of work.

Michael Barone comments on bad Chicago habits the prez brought to DC.

“His father was a great friend of my father.” The reference to William Ayers’ father was how Mayor Richard J. Daley began his defense of Barack Obama for his association with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. Daley’s father of course was Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Ayers’ father was head of Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based utility, from 1964 to 1980.

You bet they were great friends. That’s governance, Chicago style. The head of government is friends with the heads of every big business, lobby and union, and together they make decisions on how everyone else will live. Those on the inside get what they want. Those on the outside — well, they get what the big guys want them to have. That’s life in the big city.

It’s not the worst way to run a city. I know; I’m from Detroit, which might be better off if it had mayors named Daley for 41 of the last 54 years. But it’s not the optimal way to run a national administration, at least if you’ve promised to bring in a new era of bipartisanship and mutual respect. Even so, it appears to be the way that Obama, who once aspired to be mayor of Chicago, has decided to run his administration. …

Kim Strassel in the WSJ has similar comments.

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way.

–Jim Malone,

“The Untouchables”

When Barack Obama promised to deliver “a new kind of politics” to Washington, most folk didn’t picture Rahm Emanuel with a baseball bat. These days, the capital would make David Mamet, who wrote Malone’s memorable movie dialogue, proud.

A White House set on kneecapping its opponents isn’t, of course, entirely new. (See: Nixon) What is a little novel is the public and bare-knuckle way in which the Obama team is waging these campaigns against the other side.

In recent weeks the Windy City gang added a new name to their list of societal offenders: the Chamber of Commerce. For the cheek of disagreeing with Democrats on climate and financial regulation, it was reported the Oval Office will neuter the business lobby. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett slammed the outfit as “old school,” and warned CEOs they’d be wise to seek better protection.

We’ll close this section with Jennifer Rubin.

… First, the administration is digging in and doubling down even though its conduct has invited scorn from pundits of every political persuasion and become the object of ridicule. The belligerence is remarkable and suggests that the White House behaves in illogical and self-destructive ways. (Attention pundits: stop looking for rational explanations for the Obamis’ irrational behavior.)

Second, the administration is doing the impossible — offending the mainstream press and forcing some of Fox’s toughest critics to ride to its defense. Nice work, fellas.

Third, it’s disturbing that at a time when we still lack a strategy decision on Afghanistan, unemployment is sky high, and health-care reform is in disarray, this is what consumes the White House. For an administration that was supposed to transcend petty partisanship, it has become, yes, the spitting image of the Nixon White House — defensive, vengeful, and self-destructive. …

David Harsanyi points out some of the problems of having a pay czar.

… writes Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University and blogger at the popular MarginalRevolution.com, “most of these executives will quit and get higher paying jobs elsewhere. Executives not directly affected by the pay cuts will also quit when they see their prospects for future salary gains have been cut. Chaos will be created at these firms as top people leave in droves. Will the administration then order people back to work?”

Hey, why not?

Despite this undercurrent, the administration continues to expand needless intervention and “investments” into the economy that offer only the illusion of safety and a reality of stagnation.

And that’s exactly what empty words, unlimited taxpayer funding and uninhibited regulatory power can buy you.

The Economist says it’s timely for two new Ayn Rand biographies.

FOR all its faults socialism is manifestly superior to capitalism in one area: the making of myths. Capitalists can never equal the emotional appeal of socialism’s martyred heroes. Ayn Rand, however, is a conspicuous exception to this rule. She has been given short shrift by the intellectual establishment. Literary critics bemoan her cardboard characters and tabloid style. Political theorists dismiss her as a shallow thinker whose appeal is restricted to adolescents. But such disdain has done nothing to damage her popular appeal.

Rand’s books have enjoyed impressive sales since her death in 1982. But America’s shift to the left—the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 and Barack Obama’s election two years later—has put her back at the heart of the political debate. Conservative protesters carry posters asking “Who is John Galt?”, referring to one of Rand’s heroes. Conservative polemicists suggest that Mr Obama, by stepping in to rescue the banks and industrial behemoths such as General Motors, is ushering in the collectivist dystopia that Rand gave warning against. Sales of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” have surged. Rumours swirl that a film based on “Atlas Shrugged” is in the works. …

Dilbert has figured out Obama. Perhaps he’ll have him do a cameo in the comic strip.

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In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby reminds us of one of the most inspiring events we have witnessed – the fall of the wall.

…And yet, against all odds and to the astonishment of the world, it was communism that came to a close before our very eyes. Twenty years ago this season, Moscow’s Eastern European satellites threw off their chains. In a matter of months, the communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were consigned – as Ronald Reagan had foretold – to the ash heap of history. But not even Reagan had imagined that the dominoes would fall so quickly, or that Moscow would stand aside and let them fall.

“I learned in prison that everything is possible, so perhaps I should not be amazed,’’ said Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist president. “But I am.’’

We all were. And some of us still are. The collapse of the Iron Curtain was the most remarkable political development of my lifetime. Even now, the images from those days can take the breath away: East German youths dancing and drinking atop the hated Berlin Wall. The reappearance of Alexander Dubcek, 21 years after he was exiled for flirting with reform during the Prague Spring. Romanians flooding the streets of Bucharest, waving flags with the Communist emblem torn out of the center.

1989 exemplified with rare power the resilience of Western civilization. In our time, too, there are brutal despots who imagine that their power is unassailable: that their tanks and torturers can keep them in power forever. But the message of 1989 is that tyranny is not forever – and that the downfall of tyrants end can come with world-changing speed.

In Contentions, Rick Richman explains why Obama should go to the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

President Obama has reportedly informed the German government that he will not travel to Berlin on November 9 to participate in the 20th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is an unfortunate decision on multiple counts.

First, it is another slight to another European ally — one that is going all-out to celebrate the event. The invitation to Obama was extended personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel last June.

Second, it is a failure to correct the historical misstatement of his citizen-of-the-world address last year in Berlin, when he credited the fall of the wall to the “world standing as one” and failed even to mention the names of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Third, it is an embarrassment for the United States not to be represented at the highest level for the commemoration of an event of this magnitude. As Matt Welch writes in the November issue of Reason magazine, November 1989 was “the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history” — the end of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe and a 50-year Cold War that was a worldwide ideological battle. It was battle led by America. …

Jennifer Rubin also posts on the President’s unfortunate decision.

Rick, for the reasons you enumerate, it is almost unimaginable that Obama has chosen to absent himself from the Berlin Wall commemoration. It is disappointing — and telling — considering how much he has relied on presidential presence as a tool of foreign policy.

Recall his heartfelt desire to travel to the “Muslim World” as part of his Middle East outreach and embrace of the Palestinian-ized view of history (e.g., enslaved victimhood, Israel’s legitimacy rests on the Holocaust). However objectionable and counterproductive the strategy, he well understood the symbolism of a presidential appearance.

So too at the UN Security Council, where he became the first American president to chair the proceedings. His message again was clear — multilateralism is swell, the U.S. takes the UN very seriously, and our aim is to integrate America into that “international community,” whose institutions have become our institutions and whose goals (global warming, international wealth redistribution) have become ours. …

…So, Rick, the decision not to be present has superadded meaning: the triumph of the West and a reminder of Soviet imperialism are not part of the agenda. They are inconvenient truths that Obama would rather not dwell on. It is another in a series of unmistakable symbols that this president’s vision of America and its role in the world is radically different from that of his predecessors — and comes with potentially tragic consequences.

Abe Greenwald says that the commemoration doesn’t fit in the President’s global vision.

Rick and Jennifer, don’t hold your breath waiting for Barack Obama to change his mind and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama sees it as his job to move us (as in the people of planet Earth) past the “the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” That’s how he put it in his UN address a few weeks ago.

The Cold War is not merely ancient history to our president; its memory constitutes an obstacle to a “reset” with Russia and to his vision of a mutually collaborative future for all nations. Let’s not dwell on the past — too many skeletons in the imperial closet. A communist world versus a free one, you say? Don’t be so dramatic. Washington and Moscow were the Hatfields and McCoys, fighting so long they forgot what they were fighting about. No need to rub the Kremlin’s face in defeat. Putin might get sore and stop telling us what to do next.

As for Germany and Merkel, Obama covered that at the UN too: “alignments of nations” rooted in that same ancient Cold War “make no sense.” Why give a friendly European democracy the false impression that we’re on its side? What would all the unfriendly autocratic regimes think? …

David Warren tells us about the latest outrageous events at the UN.

…we watched the latest anti-Israel stunt unfold in the United Nations, whose corrupt Human Rights Council — loaded with some of the worst violators of real human rights on the planet — commissioned the Goldstone report to advance the international battle against Israel.

This investigation of “war crimes,” during the Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, was explicitly anti-Israel, for it began from the premise that a legitimate sovereign state, governing an open society, could be put on a level with a terrorist organization ruling a closed society.

The conclusion was cheaply, “both sides committed war crimes,” but the open celebration of the report by Hamas, and outrage even from liberal elements in Israeli society, tells us what we need to know about it.

David Harsanyi comments on the important work the White House is doing, bad-mouthing news organizations that don’t print what the White House wants.

…It’s about time someone charged the White House with the task of “making sure” news coverage is “fair.” It’s “important” work, you see. After all, who better than the executive branch — supposedly in the business of representing the entire nation — to decide whether a station qualifies as a legitimate news organization?

Then again, does biased political coverage disqualify one from reporting legitimate and useful news stories? Fox News may not be able to unsheathe the intellectual rigor of Obama favorites David Letterman and Jay Leno, but it has covered numerous stories in the past few months that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Remember that ACORN’s penchant for aiding the child-enslaving pimp set was a valid story. Uncovering the radical ramblings of Van Jones — a man tasked with creating “green” jobs, though he had never created a job for anyone but himself — was legitimate enough for the czar to abdicate his crown. The National Endowment for the Arts’ attempt to politicize art was genuine enough to elicit a White House apology.

And whatever its intent, Dunn’s inane admission that all-star mass murderer Mao Tse-tung was one of her “favorite political philosophers” (insert Hitler for Mao, a Bush administration figure for Dunn and stir) is a story worth hearing. …

Robert Tomsho, in the WSJ, has surprisingly good news from DC.

The District of Columbia’s embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.

Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients’ private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive. …

…The Opportunity Scholarship Program provides about 1,700 students from low-income families with annual scholarships of as much as $7,500 to attend private schools. It isn’t the largest voucher program in the country. But unlike similar efforts controlled at the state or local level, it was created and has been funded by Congress, which has broad authority over the District. That has kept the debate over vouchers percolating on Capitol Hill even though they have made relatively little political headway elsewhere. …

…Created as a five-year pilot project by a Republican-controlled Congress in early 2004, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is the nation’s only federally funded voucher program. It is open to students who live in the long-struggling Washington school district and whose families have incomes at or below 185% of the federal poverty level — about $40,000 for a family of four. Recipients are chosen by lottery, although preference is given to those attending traditional schools deemed to be in need of improvement under federal law. …

John Stossel writes about one Nobel prize that went to a worthy recipient.

Pundits and politicians act as if government can solve almost any problem. At the slightest hint of trouble, the ruling class reflexively assumes that knowledgeable, wise and public-spirited government regulators are capable of riding to the rescue. This certainly is the guiding philosophy of the Obama administration.

So how remarkable it is that this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was shared by Elinor Ostrom, whose life’s work demonstrates that politicians and bureaucrats are not nearly as good at solving problems as regular people. Ostrom, the first woman to win the prize (which she shared with Oliver Williamson of UC-Berkeley), is a political scientist at Indiana University. The selection committee said that she has “challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource-users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts” …

Ostrom’s work concentrates on common-pool resources (CPR) like pastures and fisheries. Policymakers assume that such situations are plagued by free-rider problems, where all individuals have a strong incentive to use the resource to the fullest and no incentive to invest in order to enhance it. Analysts across the political spectrum theorize that only bureaucrats or owners of privatized units can efficiently manage such resources.

Few scholars actually venture into the field to see what people actually do when faced with free-rider problems. Ostrom did. It turns out that free people are not as helpless as the theorists believed.

She writes in her 1990 book, “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,” that there is no shortage of real-world examples of “a self-governed common-property arrangement in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them.”

In other words, free people work things out on their own.

Not only is government help often not needed, Ostrom says it usually screws things up because bureaucrats operate in an ivory tower ignorant of the local customs and the specific resource.

In Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft explains that Democrats are happy to force Obamacare on us, because they’ll have better.

Congress will keep their gold-plated insurance plans as they force the rest of the country into a rationed health care government plan.
Townhall reported, via Free Republic:

‘Personal doctors on call 24/7. Coverage that knows no caps. No exemptions for pre-existing conditions.

Those are the sorts of benefits members of Congress currently enjoy on the taxpayer’s dime, and the kinds of benefits Americans on a government-run public health care plan will never see if Obamacare passes.

“One thing is certain: Congress will exempt itself from whatever lousy health care system it forces on we little people,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute. “Congress will get better insurance than you do because politicians always get a better deal under government-run health care.” ’…

As if we need more reason to reject Obamacare: Marie Woolf in the Times, UK reports that British National Health Service staff get private healthcare.

The National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.

More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling — all widely available on the NHS. …

News Biscuit says a new sat-nav system was introduced. It allows users to find themselves.

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It’s another Ladies Day!

All of today’s “radical right-wing rants” come from the distaff side. And we have an enjoyable juxtaposition with the first two. Sarah Palin leads off with some of her common sense in a NR piece on oil exploration titled “Drill.” Next from Beth Healy at the Boston Globe, we learn how the bien pensants at Harvard not only lost billions in their endowment, they mixed the grocery money, (i.e. current accounts) with the endowment and lost an additional $1.8 billion there. Let’s send some more of them to Washington.

Here are excerpts from Sarah Palin’s article.

…Those who oppose domestic drilling are motivated primarily by environmental considerations, but many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas. …

…In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.

Building an energy-independent Amer­ica will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security. …

…Alternative sources of energy are part of the answer, but only part. There’s no getting around the fact that we still need to “drill, baby, drill!” And if those in D.C. say otherwise, we need to tell them: “Yes, we can!”

And Beth Healy’s article.

Harvard University, one of the world’s richest educational institutions, stumbled into its financial crisis in part by breaking one of the most basic rules of corporate or family finance: Don’t gamble with the money you need to pay the daily bills.

The university disclosed yesterday that it had lost $1.8 billion in cash – money it relies on for the school’s everyday expenses – by investing it with its endowment fund, instead of keeping it in safe, bank-like accounts. The disclosure was made in the school’s annual report for the fiscal year that ended June 30. …

…But Harvard placed a large portion of its cash with Harvard Management Co., the entity that runs the university’s endowment and invests in stocks, hedge funds, and other risky assets. It has been widely reported that Harvard Management’s endowment investments were battered in the market crash – down 27 percent in its last fiscal year. Not revealed until yesterday was that the school’s basic cash portfolio had also been caught in the undertow. …

The executive branch should be protecting free speech, not railing against news agencies that they don’t like, says Claudia Rosett.

…This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets. The president has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That includes protecting free speech, not dispatching White House staff and advisers to hold forth publicly as media critics denouncing news outlets they don’t like. …

…The matter of deciding whether a news outlet has “a perspective” — and many do — is something that in a free country, if the country is to remain free, should be left to the private customer. There are legions of critics in the private sector who spend their time analyzing and debating which outlets provide the most reliable news, what’s entertainment, who’s opinionated, and how, and who’s not. They are easy to find. You can tune in, subscribe, and decide for yourself. These folks, like the media they criticize, are subject to the market test — in which private consumers freely make their own choices about what or whom they trust, what they pay for, what they pay attention to, and why.

Government personnel getting into this act is altogether different. These are people paid out of the public purse, and speaking under the imprimatur of public institutions — in this case the White House. Here they are, urging White House-favored news outfits to follow the White House lead, and ostracize a specific news outlet the White House doesn’t like. This is Banana Republic stuff, a stock tactic of pressure and intimidation. The effect of such stuff, as a rule, is not to promote accurate news coverage, but to cover up stories the government doesn’t want aired, and shut up critics. …

Mary Katherine Ham posts on the Weekly Standard blog that the White House is receiving criticism from their friends in the news media for its petty attacks on Fox.

Well, it’s not the first time the Grande Liberal Dame of the press corps has had words for the Obama White House, but today Helen Thomas is voicing more unlikely sentiments by telling the White House attack dogs to heel in the Fox News fight.

In an interview with MSNBC, the columnist ..stressed the White House ought to “stay out of these fights.”

“They can only take you down. You can’t kill the messenger,” said Thomas, who has covered every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama.

The New York Times also joined the chorus of folks telling the White House to chill this weekend. The Grey Lady may be in danger of being labeled a “wing of the Republican Party,” for using such uncharacteristically sharp language in criticizing the president, but I’m sure they’ll scrub the offending parts when the White House rings. In the meantime, enjoy …

…People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones. A blog on the White House Web site that uses a “truth-o-meter” against a particular cable news network would not seem to qualify. As it is, Reality Check sounds a bit like the blog of some unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement, not an official communiqué from Pennsylvania Avenue. …

Ruth Marcus, in WaPo, summarizes much of the commentary against the White House deciding to battle with Fox.

There’s only one thing dumber than picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel — picking a fight with people who don’t even have to buy ink. The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters. …

…Where the White House has gone way overboard is in its decision to treat Fox as an outright enemy and to go public with the assault. Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC. “Opinion journalism masquerading as news,” White House communications director Anita Dunn declared of Fox. Certainly Fox tends to report its news with a conservative slant — but has anyone at the White House clicked over to MSNBC recently? Or is the only problem opinion journalism that doesn’t match its opinion? On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace replayed a quote from an Obama interview: “I don’t always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that’s part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we’re not supposed to all be in lock step here.”

Maybe he should tell the rest of the team.

Debra Saunders follows up on the Obamacare bill, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

…The worst suspicions of the plan’s critics thus have been confirmed. Under ObamaCare, those who have health care will be paying more – fair enough – but for less health care – which is not so fair.

As for proposed limits on what insurers can charge based on age or gender – again, these schemes don’t control costs. They shift costs. And cost shifting is the practice that has led to runaway health care spending in America.

With all the freebies thrown into versions of the package – with millions of additional people covered, no denials for pre-existing conditions, free checkups and preventive procedures – ObamaCare can only increase the nation’s health care tab. …

…If there’s one thing this Congress cannot do, it’s subtract.

Jennifer Rubin gives the latest poll numbers showing the public does not want Obamacare, but the Dems are still determined to ram this down our throats.

A new poll from the Galen Institute provides fresh evidence the public isn’t buying what Democrats are pushing. The poll tells us:

Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said they would oppose “a new law saying that everyone either would have to obtain private or public health insurance approved by the government or pay a tax of $750 or more every year.” Only 21 percent said they would support the law. More than half (54 percent) of all respondents indicate a “strong” opposition to the individual mandate, including 58 percent of those 45-54 years of age and 58 percent of those 55 years and older.

Sixty-eight percent don’t like the idea of reducing “some health insurance benefits for senior citizens in order to expand health insurance for some people who are uninsured.” That includes 86 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Independents, and 59 percent of Democrats. By a 58 to 39 percent margin, respondents disagree (44 percent “strongly”) with the idea of ”an increase in taxes on the working and middle class if it would help provide health insurance to more Americans.” Seventy-one percent are worried that their health care will change if Congress passes health-care-reform legislation. And 49 percent like a ”targeted approach that addresses a few problems at a time.”

Yet the Democrats seem determined to push through — along party lines and with a parliamentary sleight of hand — a bill that the majority of Americans don’t want. It’s an almost unprecedented act of political hubris, but it’s also politically reckless. Democrats seem to think everyone will “learn to like it” and have to live with it once it’s in place. But of course they won’t have to; there’s always another election, and there are consequences for legislative malpractice. The only question remains whether moderate and conservative Democrats can be strong-armed into voting for a bill that may well provide the grounds for a political backlash. They may not care greatly if the bill is antithetical to Americans’ interests, but they’ll at least pause before voting for something that is potentially contrary to their own.

In the LA Times, Bett Morrison has an enlightening interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman of Somali Muslim descent, who has spoken out for women’s rights, and now lives under guard in the United States.

When it comes to women in Africa, is the U.S. using too many of its values or too few?
There is too much apologizing for what freedom means. In Africa, you’re told, “Oh, this is our custom — polygamy is our custom, female genital mutilation is our custom, these are our values.” Then you have the Americans and the Europeans being very shy and saying, “Oh, I’m really sorry, it’s your custom.”

Will any country ever go to war for rights and women’s safety?
It looks like it will not happen. But I am very, very optimistic — not about going to war but about human beings changing their minds. You’ll remember how communism was stigmatized. The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women’s rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid — people will insist that it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and that’s when change happens.

I’ve asked other feminists this question: Why are women’s rights always the ones up for negotiation?
Yes, isn’t that interesting? Women are mainly oppressed by their own fathers, their own brothers, their own mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, so it’s the most intimate kind of oppression. Another thing: Western feminism still defines the white man as the oppressor, but right now it’s the brown man, the black man, the yellow man. When you tell them, “Stop oppressing your women,” they’ll tell you, “Don’t impose your culture on me.” It would have been fantastic if, when [President] Obama went to Cairo, he [had said], “We have taught the white man that bigotry is bad and he has given it up, at least most of it. Now bigotry is committed in the name of the black man, the brown man, the yellow man, whatever color.”

Do you make a distinction between mainstream and radical Islam?
I refuse to do that because one gives birth to the other. You are born into mainstream Islam. You are taught: Do not question the prophet; everything in the Koran is true. And then the radicals come and they expand on that, they build on that. So it is up to so-called mainstream Islam to tackle the radical element. [Mainstream Muslims] have to question the infallibility of the prophet Muhammad. They have to quit teaching children and young people that everything in the Koran is true and has to be taken seriously.

You can see it in the Christian world. You have pockets of very radical Christians who refuse to change. But most Christians have decided to reform, to introduce new ways of looking at [the Bible] and to allow freedom of thought and speech. So if people move away from the radical ideas, they’re not killed, they’re not beheaded. …

Jennifer Burns, in Foreign Policy, reports that Ayn Rand has found a following in India.

…Rand’s celebration of independence and personal autonomy has proven to be powerfully subversive in a culture that places great emphasis on conforming to the dictates of family, religion, and tradition. Gargi Rawat, a correspondent and news anchor for top tv channel ndtv and a former Rand admirer, says Rand’s theory of the supremacy of reason and the virtue of selfishness adds up to “the antithesis” of Indian culture, which explains the attraction for Rawat in her youth and for many rebellious Indian teens today.

Unlike in the United States, Rand’s most popular novel in India-anecdotally at least-is not the overtly political Atlas Shrugged, but her earlier novel, The Fountainhead, in which Rand’s political views are muted. The novel tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect who refuses to compromise his designs for clients or the public in a heroic expression of personal will. It is Rand’s most accessible work, and also the one that makes the strongest emotional appeal to those who feel suppressed by attempts to put the collective ahead of the individual.

In recent years, the so-called “Howard Roark effect” has swept across wealthy Indian society. Shortly after winning Miss India Earth, the country’s top beauty pageant, in 2005, Niharika Singh cited The Fountainhead as her favorite book. “Ayn Rand helped me win the crown,” she declared. Other stars, including biotech queen Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, actress Preity Zinta, and soccer-player-turned-dancer Baichung Bhutia have all credited Rand with helping them succeed. …

In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery discusses current events (Polanski, Letterman, and Nobel) that have shown a negative light on the glitterrati.

Three times in the past several weeks, fortune has seemed to beam on conservatives, in unexpected and unprompted ways. Not that they’ve won much, but their tormentors keep losing. Three days in fall 2009 damaged or neutralized three liberal institutions, whose powers have now been curtailed.

Break number one came on September 26, when Roman Polanski, on his way to collect a lifetime achievement award from the Zurich Film Festival, was intercepted by Swiss police and tossed into prison, pending extradition to the United States, which he had fled 30 years earlier to avoid a jail sentence for drugging and raping a girl of 13 (a crime he had pleaded down to unlawful sex with a minor). This outrage–the arrest, not the rape–stunned the global artistic community, which quickly drew up a petition in protest, signed by la crème de la crème of stage and screen, including Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols (Mr. Diane Sawyer), Martin Scorsese, Isabelle Huppert, Diane von Furstenberg (Mrs. Barry Diller), and Woody Allen, famous for having married his former flame’s daughter, whom he seduced when she was still in her teens. The excuses were many, and flew very fast. Whoopi Goldberg exonerated the French-Polish director on the grounds that it wasn’t “rape-rape” and thus not important. French sage Bernard-Henri Lévy, who organized a petition of support, called it a “youthful indiscretion” (Polanski was 43 at the time). Debra Winger, the Zurich festival’s president, called the arrest “philistine collusion” with puritanical America and typical of the persecutions that beset artists everywhere. ….

… For years–even more so since 2002, when the Nobel Peace Prize committee smiled on ex-President Carter (as a slap at George Bush, it freely admitted)–conservatives have longed in vain to see the Norwegian parliamentarians exposed as a gaggle of partisans. It only got worse when the committee gave its prize in 2005 to Mohamed ElBaradei, the anti-U.S., pro-Iran U.N. arms inspector, and in 2007 to Al Gore, who had lost to Bush in 2000 in an exceedingly close and contentious election and railed against him ever since as a warmongering liar, and worse. Conservatives struggled for years but failed to gain traction with their critiques. So picture their glee on the morning of October 9 when they awoke to discover that the committee had contrived to discredit itself. In its ultimate slap at George Bush (who is no longer in office, but why should this stop them?), it had given the peace prize to Barack Obama for doing not much of anything beyond setting a new “tone.” …

…Back in America, the Los Angeles Times said that the committee’s award had embarrassed Obama and diminished its own credibility. “I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce,” said Peter Beinart in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast. “Let’s hope the Nobel Committee’s decision meets with such a deafening chorus of chortles and jeers that it never does something this stupid again.”

It may or may not, but it no longer matters, as it is clear that the jig is up. For decades, the peace prize committee has seemed to speak with the voice of humanity, or of the world community, or of the Almighty, but it is clear now that it speaks with the voice of five more or less insular nitwits, of great self-regard and no great distinction, too clueless and tone-deaf to sense how their choice would be seen. Like the culture elites defending Polanski and Letterman, they have no sense of irony, much less of perspective or rectitude.

If there were a Nobel Prize for shark-jumping, these people would share it: They have proved themselves more inane than their critics imagined. With friends such as these, the left hardly needs enemies. And with enemies such as these, the right may not really need friends.

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In case you wondered why you should care, John Tierney discusses one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel prize for economics. It is about how we get along without an overbearing government.

Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shared the prize for her research into the management of “commons,” which has been a buzzword among ecologists since Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His fable about a common pasture that is ruined by overgrazing became one of the most-quoted articles ever published by that journal, and it served as a fundamental rationale for the expansion of national and international regulation of the environment. His fable was a useful illustration of a genuine public-policy problem — how do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone? — but there were a couple of big problems with the essay and its application. …

…But too often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats who lacked the expertise or the incentives to do the job properly. Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs. Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for her work analyzing those local institutions. …

…Another Nobel laureate economist, Vernon Smith, described her work in an interview with Ivan Osorio for the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

“She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high (altitude wise), and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.” …

…”The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units”. …

Mark Steyn contrasts a made-up quote attributed to Rush with a hair-raising quote from Anita Dunn, White House communications director.

…Rush Limbaugh is so “divisive” that to get him fired Leftie agitators have to invent racist sound bites to put in his mouth.

But the White House communications director is so undivisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America’s young.

From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse Tung, and the few that aren’t know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or “agrarian reformer.” What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby’s book “Modern China,” is the great man in a nutshell:

“Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 million to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.”

Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to within 30 million. Still, as President Barack Obama’s communications director says, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50-80 million Chinamen you may have your work cut out. But let’s stick with the Fenby figure: He killed 40-70 million Chinamen. Whoops, can you say “Chinamen” or is that racist? Oh, and sexist. So hard keeping up with the Sensitivity Police in this pansified political culture, isn’t it? But you can kill 40-70 million Chinamen, and that’s fine and dandy: You’ll be cited as an inspiration by the White House to an audience of high school students. You can be anything you want to be! Look at Mao: He wanted to be a mass murderer, and he lived his dream! You can, too! …

David Warren looks at journalism and teaching, and the barriers to entry, and administrative expense, that have developed in both.

There was a time when teachers did not necessarily require a high school certificate. Most were taught, even self-taught, on the job, which is an extremely effective way to weed out those not suited to it. The number of teachers tended to swell and shrink with the number of pupils to be “educated,” and of course there were no unions.

And hardly any administration, either. Our ancestors couldn’t afford such things, and the unavoidable administrative tasks tended to be pieced out among the teachers. A principal was in effect the senior-most teacher, captain of the team hired by a very local school board.

Today, we have layers of specialized administration, reporting to a vast provincial bureaucracy, and while a teacher may aspire to be promoted into the administrative ranks, the people who make the key pedagogical decisions have generally no experience of teaching whatever. …

…Administrative departments are smaller than in the “public sector,” but nevertheless huge, because of the scale and complexity of the government reporting requirements to which they must answer from hour to hour.

Looking back, over 40 summers, I realize that this is by far the biggest change: the metastasis of bureaucracy. …

…By contrast, the way of the world, before, was simpler and more comprehensible. You learned, you mastered, or you were out. …

David Harsanyi takes aim at Republican mavericks.

…It is always curious to hear irascible members of one political party accuse members of the opposing party of “playing politics” as if it were a bad thing. Can you imagine? Politics. In Washington, no less.

As you know, Democrats claim to be above such petty, divisive and low-brow behavior, especially on those days they are running both houses of Congress and the White House. What this country really needs, we are incessantly reminded, are more mavericks. Well, Republican mavericks. Folks who say “yes.” …

…Consider that for possibly the first time in American history, a vote in a Senate committee was the lead story for news organizations across the country, simply because the ideologically bewildered Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, used her inconsequential vote to move forward a government-run health care bill. …

…”Forget Sarah Palin,” remarked The Associated Press. “The female maverick of the Republican Party is Sen. Olympia Snowe.” …

…Mavericks dismiss ideology because it would bind them to consistent and principled votes. John McCain, for example, often displays the muddled and mercurial thinking of a person with no political, intellectual or economic philosophy. …

Bet against Biden’s horse if you want to win, says Toby Harnden, in the Daily Telegraph, UK.

Want to know how to deal with a momentous issue of war or grand strategy? You could do a lot worse than check out what Vice-President Joe Biden thinks – and plump for the opposite. …

…On all the big questions, he has been – to put it politely – on the wrong side of history. In 1990, he voted against American forces expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. He voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and advocated splitting it into three states along ethnic lines. He opposed the Iraq troop surge of 2007 that pacified the country and rescued the US from the jaws of defeat.

Now, Mr Biden is pushing a policy of what he terms “counter-terrorism plus” …

We have shorts from National Review.

Remember the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran? It was a cruise missile fired by an intellectually dishonest State Department bureaucracy into the heart of George W. Bush’s Iran policy. In a footnote, the authors very cleverly defined the term “nuclear-weapons program” to refer only to facilities and activities explicitly dedicated to the production of warheads; then they revealed that Iran had once operated such a program but had abandoned it in 2003. “Iran Abandoned Nuclear-Weapons Program in 2003” became a headline the world over, as the authors knew it would. Of course, even as those headlines were published, Iran was ramping up its enrichment efforts at sites that could be devoted to civilian or military use. It was these nominally ambiguous sites that had prompted fears in the first place — and the new information that Iran had as recently as 2003 operated an explicit weapons program, if presented non-tendentiously, would only have heightened them. As presented, it tricked the public into thinking the time was right to release a flock of doves in Tehran’s direction. The revelation of the Qom site and further displays of Iranian bellicosity (cf. its recent missile tests) confirm the foolishness of the strategic view that motivated this NIE. But time favors the proliferator, and the price has been paid.

The Federal Trade Commission has embarked upon a daft assault on free speech, specifically social-media users’ endorsement of products or businesses. The FTC has propounded rules that will impose fines of up to $11,000 on bloggers, Facebook users, or Twitter tweeters (for whom surely we could invent a more dignified name?) who fail to disclose financial relationships with businesses they write about. Such relationships include the receipt of merchandise gratis — meaning that online critics who receive free books or press passes to a concert will find themselves in violation of federal law if they fail to satisfy Washington’s disclosure demands. Such arrangements are longstanding custom and are of particular value to small, independent publications (print or electronic) that cannot afford to pay retail prices for access to the materials they review. And it ought to go without saying that the FTC has no business policing Facebook updates, period. That the FTC would make a federal case out of such a triviality suggests that this bloated and arrogant agency is overdue for a deep cut in staff and budget. If some unemployed bureaucrats become bloggers, all the better.

Christopher Hitchens thinks we should have noticed Australia’s dust storms.

… There’s no absolutely firm evidence about this, but the huge dust storms that have been hitting China, Iraq, and East Africa are thought by some experts to be harbingers of worse than just deforestation, dust bowls, and further drought. It also seems probable that they can carry alarming diseases such as meningitis among humans in Africa and foot-and-mouth among animals in Britain. (Saharan dust is now reportedly being blown far north of the Alps—last year the British Meteorological Office detected it in “old” South Wales.) There is also the problem of soot, which is thought by some to be the cause of the shrinkage of the Himalayan glaciers, coated in fine carbon particles that have reduced their ability to reflect back the warming rays of the sun. As with all arguments that touch on climate change, it’s hard to be sure whether the seemingly mounting occurrence of massive dust storms reflects an upward trend or a cyclical one (Sydney had a storm like this in the 1940s), or just better reporting. But the increasing probability is that dust from somewhere you hardly ever think about is on its way to somewhere near you.

In the New York Times, Joe Nocera reviews The Great Depression: A Diary.

In January 1931, a lawyer named Benjamin Roth, 38 years old, solidly Republican, a solo practitioner in Youngstown, Ohio, decided to start a diary. Realizing that he was “living through an historic thing that will long be remembered” — as he put it in one early entry — he wanted to keep a record for posterity. …

…Events that we know about from the history books he was reacting to in real time. He was furious to learn, thanks to a series of highly publicized Congressional hearings, that some of the nation’s most prominent bankers did terrible things during the Roaring Twenties. (“By manipulation the officers boosted and unloaded on the public their own stock in National City Bank as high as $650 per share when its book value was only $60.”) But he makes no mention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose birth was the direct result of those incendiary hearings.

Mr. Roth is skeptical of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and worries that the president’s fondness for deficit spending will ultimately be disastrous. He keeps thinking inflation is right around the corner. He worries about the rise of Hitler. He writes about gangs of farmers who threaten sheriffs, judges and anyone else who tries to foreclose on a farm. …

Reuters look like fools for not doing some basic fact-checking. Iain Murray posts on The Corner. Even though they’re based in Great Britain, they are full fledged members of our biased media.

Jaws dropped around Washington today as Reuters reported on a press release from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announcing that high-profile defections had led to a reversal of their stance against the job-destroying global-warming bill.

Far more jaws dropped, however, in disbelief that Reuters could have fallen for such an obvious hoax. The press release is not on the Chamber’s website, but on a fake one. And who owns it? That happy band of anti-capitalist culture jammers, The Yes Men.

What amazes me is that this sort of fact-checking takes just a couple of mouse clicks. …

…All of which suggests that major news organizations are simply machines for regurgitating press releases, real or not, that accord with their view of where the world should be going. …

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David Goldman, as Spengler tries to help us make sense of the weekend’s suicide bombing in Iran. This is unusually topical for him and is not one of his better efforts. Perhaps because he didn’t take more time. But it did allow him to retail some of his armchair Obama psychoanalysis previously spiked by Asia Times editors.

… The mass assassination of Iranian officers most likely represented a gesture from Pakistan as to what the future will bring. America’s use of the Pakistani army to chase the Taliban around Waziristan has about the same effect as shaking a warm bottle of cola before opening it.

What is most astonishing is that official Washington seems entirely oblivious to the crack-up of American influence occurring in front of its eyes. None of the wonkish foreign policy blogs, let alone the mainstream press, seems able to focus. That is not surprising, for official Washington and unofficial Washington have a wheel-and-spoke relationship. As the staff at US State Department and National Security Council work up policy papers, they send out feelers to the think-tank community and get feedback. This is what feeds the Washington rumor mill.

The difference between this administration and every other administration I have observed is that there appears to be no staff work, no departmental effort, no National Security Council – nothing but President Barack Obama. Obama’s penchant for policy czars has become the source of continuing controversy, with his opponents at Fox News and elsewhere complaining he has bypassed cabinet departments (whose senior staff require senate confirmation) in favor of 29 “policy czars” who report directly to him.

Like Poo-bah in the Mikado, the president seems to be Lord High Everything Else, Secretary of Everything and a non-stop presence before the television cameras. Some of his supporters are chagrined. The New Republic’s publisher Marty Peretz, who evinces buyer’s remorse over Obama’s Middle East policy, diagnosed the president with “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” in his blog on October 4.

The reason for Obama’s peculiar mode of governance, though, may have less to do with his apparent narcissism than with his objectives. It is a credible hypothesis that this president holds views that he cannot easily share, even with his own staff. As he told the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, he truly wants a world without superpowers: “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”

What does Obama mean by this? How strongly does he feel that America should not be elevated above any other nation? There is some basis for the conjecture that his innermost sentiment is hard-core, left-wing Third World antipathy to the United States. …

Following along on the thread of strange emanating from Washington, Jennifer Rubin has another short, sweet commentary, this time on the Afghanistan rethink and on the Obama policy decision-making process.

David Ignatius concedes that Obama is conducting a do-over on Afghanistan. (”What’s odd about the administration’s review of Afghanistan policy is that it is revisiting issues that were analyzed in great detail — and seemingly resolved — in the president’s March 27 announcement of a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”) But what is most horrifying is the description of the process — academic, indecisive, and seemingly designed to get to the lowest common denominator:

As Obama’s advisers describe the decision-making process, it sounds a bit like a seminar. National security adviser Jim Jones gathers all the key people so that everyone gets a voice. A top official explains: “We don’t get marching orders from the president. He wants a debate. . . . We take the competing views and collapse them toward the middle.” This approach produced a consensus on Iran and missile defense, and as National Security Councils go, Obama’s seems to work pretty smoothly.

Yikes. Works smoothly? Well, if the point is to reach some blissful, mushy middle ground on virtually everything without regard to the real-world consequences of the actions, then it’s like silk. But is the presidency a graduate course on international relations? This one appears to be — filled with platitudes and catch-phrases one would hear in the Ivy League (”interdependence” is right up there), disdain for military force (”Never solves anything!” — er, except slavery and Nazism), and the fetish for “consensus.” It’s all very smooth and polite and the results are very well disastrous. …

Peter Wehner adds incisive comments about decision making in government.

…In the David Ignatius column Jen links to, Ignatius also quotes an Obama adviser as saying: “We don’t get marching orders from the president. He wants a debate. . . . We take the competing views and collapse them toward the middle.”

But this assumes that the “collapse them toward the middle” approach will, almost like the laws of physics, lead to the right outcome. Yet here’s how such an approach often works in practice: Some people (like the commanding general in Afghanistan) might argue we should pursue a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that will require 40,000 or more additional troops. Others believe we should withdraw most of our combat troops and pursue a strictly counterterrorism strategy. So the answer must lie at the Golden Mean between these two positions. Or take Iraq: Before the surge, some people argued for it; others argued that we should essentially abandon Iraq, since the war was unwinnable. The “collapse them toward the middle” approach led to the Iraq Study Group (chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton). But if the Bush administration had followed the consensus approach, which was embodied in the study group’s report, it would have led to failure in Iraq. And if President Obama chooses the Biden approach instead of the McChrystal approach, it will lead to failure in Afghanistan.

Sometimes — in fact, much of the time — the “third way” is a road to failure. Consensus opinions are often wrong; in Ignatius’s column, for example, he writes that the “collapse them toward the middle” process produced a consensus on Iran and missile defense — which, as I argue here, have been, so far, failures.

In the first volume of his brilliant memoirs, The White House Years, Henry Kissinger writes this:

“Before I served as a consultant to [President] Kennedy, I had believed, like most academicians, that the process of decision-making was largely intellectual and that all one had to do was to walk into the President’s office and convince him of the correctness of one’s views. This perspective I soon realized is as dangerously immature as it is widely held. . . . Almost all his callers are supplicants or advocates, and most of their cases are extremely plausible — which is what got them into the Oval Office in the first place. As a result, one of the President’s most difficult tasks is to choose among endless arguments that sound equally convincing. The easy decisions do not come to him; they are taken care of at lower levels.”

Earlier, Kissinger writes:

“The complexity of modern government makes large bureaucracies essential; but the need for innovation also creates the imperative to define purposes that go beyond administrative norms. Ultimately there is no purely organizational answer; it is above all a problem of leadership. . . . Statesmanship requires above all a sense of nuance and proportion, the ability to perceive the essential among a mass of apparent facts, and an intuition as to which of many equally plausible hypotheses about the future is likely to prove true.”

That is a sophisticated, thoughtful account of how decisions ought to be made. And most of the time, taking an assortment of competing views and collapsing them toward the middle is not.

Jennifer Rubin also posts on the President’s indecision.

Dana Milbank observes:

As the administration continues its extended deliberations in pursuit of a new strategy for the war, allies in Afghanistan have begun to grumble about American dithering. The pace of the policy review is causing worry in both parties on Capitol Hill. . . . There seems to be less urgency at the White House, where the president completed his fifth meeting on the subject this week. But the only thing that seems to emerge from these sessions are new adjectives the White House press office uses to describe the conversation.

Among those grumbling are Democrats who have the queasy feeling that the longer this goes on, the worse it looks and the less credible the commander in chief becomes. But this is par for the passive presidency. Milbank argues, “It has caused Obama’s Afghanistan policy to be made for him. . . . Obama is therefore left with various split-the-difference options that will please neither side — not unlike the way the health-care legislation has developed.” …

…Maybe there is some rhyme or reason to deferring to Nancy Pelosi on the stimulus, to everyone on health care, and to the White House seminars on a war. But the cumulative effect is to paint the president as weak and perhaps uncertain of what he wants. Obama wanted to be president, but now that he’s in office, what does he want to do with the presidency? Win a war or pinch pennies for his domestic spend-a-thon? Enact a bipartisan health-care bill or fulfill the Left’s historic dream of government-run health care? He hasn’t told us yet, but he will soon. Well . . . once he makes up his mind.

In the Daily Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden says that judging by the White House press releases, Obama is not quite humbled at receiving the peace prize.

The conventional wisdom is that President Barack Obama was embarrassed by the patently ludicrous award to him of the Nobel Peace Prize. And to be fair it did seem so when he accepted the honour (a term I use loosely) last Friday, quoting his daughter Malia as saying: “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” (call me a cynic but that’s a fabricated quote if ever I heard one).

Since then, however, it’s become abundantly clear that Obama isn’t even faintly sheepish about the award. Yeah, there’s all the usual guff about him being humbled, it’s about us not him blah blah blah. But this can’t mask the fact that he’s as pleased as punch about landing the prize. He’s lapping it up and seems to view it – sadly and mistakenly – as a major validation.

Apart from the clue that he’s going to skip over to Oslo to pick up the gong personally (great opportunity for a wonderful speech), consider the emails his White House is sending out. No opportunity to shoehorn in a mention of the Nobel prize is being missed …

Thank goodness big government is here to keep us safe from Cheerios, writes David Harsanyi.

…You know what we are desperately crying out for? An army of crusading federal regulatory agents with unfettered power. Who else has the fortitude and foresight to keep us all safe?

Mercifully, as The Washington Post recently reported, many of President Barack Obama’s appointees “have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life . . . awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products and most items found in pantries and medicine cabinets.”

If there’s anything Americans are hankering for in their everyday lives, it’s a vast regulatory apparatus. Hey, it’s dangerous out there. …

…This is why I am grateful that one courageous soul has finally stood up to the menacing influence of Big Cereal. Yes, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg has had enough of deceitful infiltration of Cheerios, demanding that General Mills cease and desist a marketing campaign that peddles the fallacious claim that the oat-based cereal can lower cholesterol.

Why stop with oats? Trix are not only for kids, you know. Lucky Charms are nowhere close to being “magically” delicious. …

Melanie Phillips, in the Spectator, UK, includes an embarrassing news story for global warming conspiracists: poor field studies of Arctic icemelt revealed.

The BBC’s brief and historic outbreak of sanity here last Friday when it asked timorously “What happened to global warming?” gave way to normal service today when it reported a prediction that the Arctic could be free of ice in the summer within two decades. The prediction was made by Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was speaking at the launch of the findings of the Catlin Arctic Survey …

But the Catlin Arctic Ice Survey was an embarrassing joke, as detailed on the Watts Up With That? website which describes it as

“nothing more than a badly executed public relations stunt covered with the thinnest veneer of attempted science.”

Among other things, WUWT says Pen Hadow and his team … surveyed very little of the ice and returned very little data, that some of this data was wrongly presented and that another, aerial, survey of the Arctic with a towed radar array from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research revealed that the ice cover was thicker than expected.

In World Climate Report, Patrick Michaels reports on the lowest recorded level of snowmelt during this most recent Antarctic summer.

Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?

The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.

Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season. …

Jack Kelly gives an account of Phelim McAleer’s question to Gore regarding the inaccuracies in An Inconvenient Truth. Pickings had an article from McAleer yesterday.

…But in the audience was Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who asked him about a 2007 finding by a British judge that “An Inconvenient Truth” is riddled with scientific errors.

Justice Michael Burton had to rule on the veracity of Mr. Gore’s claims because a parent objected to having the film shown in schools. He found nine “significant errors” made in “the context of alarmism and exaggeration.” Screening the film in British secondary schools violated laws barring the promotion of partisan political views in the classroom, Justice Burton said.

When Mr. McAleer asked Mr. Gore what he was doing to correct the errors Justice Burton identified, Mr. Gore, after much stammering, said: “the ruling was in favor of showing the movie in schools.”

That response was technically true, but evasive. Justice Burton said “An Inconvenient Truth” could be shown, but only if Mr. Gore’s “one-sided” views were balanced.

When Mr. McAleer pressed Mr. Gore on his evasion, the Society of Environmental Journalists cut off his microphone and escorted him away. …

Ilya Somin, in the Volokh Conspiracy, discusses an article by Matt Welch about the government handouts that the New York Yankees are receiving.

Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason, takes up an issue that I have written about on numerous occasions: the inexcusable gargantuan public subsidies for the New York Yankees’ new stadium:

“This year the Yankees moved into a new stadium. According to baseball economist Neil deMause of the excellent Field of Schemes website, the facility cost a stunning $1.56 billion, and the total project (including replacing 22-acres of parkland that had been destroyed by the construction) totaled $2.31 billion [pdf]. Both figures are all-time records in the history of sports stadia. “Of that,” deMause estimates, “the public—city, state, and federal taxpayers—are now covering just shy of $1.2 billion, by far the largest stadium subsidy ever…..”

To sum up: The most successful, most opulent, and most hated baseball franchise in North America, widely known as “the Evil Empire,” receives an unprecedented amount of government giveaways in a time of recession and government budget-squeezes.” …

…As numerous studies show, sports stadium subsidies virtually always create far more costs for the public. If the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner and his fellow millionaire owners want to build new stadiums, they should pay for it themselves. …

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In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger asks whether Obama will make the tough choices.

…The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.

When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state. …

…The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. …

…This isn’t to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life’s primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore’s unstoppable sermons. …

Charles Krauthammer asks what Obama’s apologies and appeasements have gotten us. You’ll love his paraphrase of Churchill’s famous description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

…And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection. …

…Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naïveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Peter Wehner comments on the news that Russia will not back sanctions against Iran.

…Apart from the fact that White House officials are presumably able to hide their glee today, what ought we to make of these developments?

The first is that President Obama looks to have been taken to the cleaners by the Russians. The United States bowed before Russian demands when it came to retooling a missile-defense system for Poland and the Czech Republic. We gave up something tangible and important — and in return we got a vague promise that Russia might be amenable to tougher sanctions against Iran. Now that vague promise appears to be inoperative — but the decision to scrap the Bush-era missile-defense program remains in place.

This episode captures Obama’s approach to international affairs and underscores its dangers. The president is weak and flaccid when it comes to our adversaries, and unreliable and unsteady when it comes to our allies. America’s enemies don’t respect us, and our allies increasingly don’t trust us. President Obama garners praise from the man attempting to lead a Marxist revolution in Latin America, Hugo Chavez, and is criticized by the hero of Solidarity, Lech Walesa. We pressure friends like Israel, Honduras, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and place our hopes in the goodwill and reasonableness of regimes like Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And in the process, some of the world’s foremost spokesmen for democracy publicly express their concern that Obama is “softening on human rights.” …

Jennifer Rubin adds her comments.

Pete, not only has Obama badly embarrassed himself but he’s also made many moderate supporters look awfully foolish. They vouched for his savvy negotiating skills, assuring us that Obama wouldn’t sell our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic down the river for nothing. (If you’re going to betray allies, at least don’t go home empty-handed.) …

…Obama has been sucked into — or rushed into, depending on your assessment of his motives — talks that have forestalled sanctions and provided Iran breathing room. In fact, the Iranians are no longer in the spotlight, facing harsh judgment for their violations of existing sanctions, a secretive enrichment site, and human rights atrocities. No, they’re sitting in cushy meeting rooms in Geneva getting encouragement to keep at it. Are we further ahead or further behind from six months ago in preventing a nuclear Iran?

It seems that the entire engagement gambit was based on a false premise: the administration would be competent and maximize its leverage. Instead, we’ve tossed leverage away like confetti and have been, as Pete says, taken to the cleaners at each encounter with an adversary. At some point, even those inclined toward soft power will recognize that it’s time to get out of conference rooms if all we’re going to do is make concessions and provide cover for despots.

The latest liberal to come to his senses is John MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s who asks, “Is this ‘smart’ president really really stupid?”

…Of course, failure to bag the Olympics is just one crack in the “smart” Obama image. I well understand that clever politicians make cynical choices to gain power, even when they know those choices will probably hurt the broader public. So far, Obama’s most cynical choice was to align himself with Robert Rubin and Wall Street in order to raise money for his presidential campaign. Second is his campaign pledge to escalate the occupation of Afghanistan to counter Republican claims that he and the Democrats were appeasers on “terrorism.” In third place is his decision to hand Max Baucus (the senator from Montana who moonlights as an insurance-company lobbyist) the task of “reforming” health care, thus guaranteeing that there would be no genuine reform. …

…But maybe such cynicism isn’t altogether so smart in 2009. Wall Street, unpunished and unrepentant after three decades of recklessness, is poised to embark on new, unregulated financial adventures, such as the issuance of securitized life-insurance policies known as “life settlement” bonds. Rewarded for their failures with huge sums of public money, the newly emboldened casino managers are liable to sink the ship next time, instead of just flooding it.

In Afghanistan, American soldiers are consistently dying in small batches (under orders from their Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader) while Afghan civilians continue to perish in far greater numbers under American and British bombs supposedly aimed at the Taliban. You don’t even have to remember Vietnam or the Russian occupation of Afghanistan to recognize the profound absurdity of the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy. Respectable experts, from Edward Luttwak on the right to George McGovern and William Polk on the left to Andrew J. Bacevich somewhere in the middle, have demolished the notion that such a military campaign can succeed in subduing a nationalist or tribal rebellion.

As for Baucus and health care, it’s clear that whatever bill comes out of the Finance Committee, large numbers of Americans will remain uninsured or underinsured. This means that the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York will continue to overflow with poor children who come for primary care because their parents can’t afford a pediatrician. And it means that America’s industrial corporations will continue to suffer from a competitive disadvantage with manufacturers based in civilized countries where health care is considered a public trust and a right and the government pays the bill.

Does this sound smart? Or does it sound really, really stupid?

Mark Steyn has cutting remarks for the educationbots of Delaware’s Christina School District.

A few weeks ago, Zachary Christie of Newark, in Joe Biden’s Grand Duchy of Delaware, joined the Cub Scouts. In the course of so doing, he acquired one of those combination knife-fork-spoon utensils that come in so useful when you’re tucking in to a hearty meal round the campfire. …
But six-year old Zachary is to blame for finding his knife-fork-spoon utensil so cool he decided one October morn to take it to school to eat lunch with it. Knives are banned. Because they’re weapons. The first-grader was summoned to a disciplinary-committee hearing and sentenced to at least 45 days in reform school. Don’t get mad at the “educators.” “We have to follow the policy as it is written consistently because this is the code of conduct that is applied to all of our students in our district,” droned the School District spokesdrone, Wendy E. Lapham.

Indeed. This is the same Christina School District that in April attempted to expel sixth-grader Kasia Haughton. Kasia took a cake to school for her fellow students, and, in helping her pack it, her grandmother helpfully put a knife in the bag. Her teacher placed the cake on the desk, used the knife to cut it, passed round the slices, and then reported Kasia for bringing a “deadly weapon” to school. The grandmother packed the knife. The teacher used the knife. Kasia never touched it. … As the self-same spokesdrone Wendy E. Lapham droned on this occasion, any knife three inches or longer is classified as a deadly weapon. Have to follow the policy. Can’t make any exceptions. Despite having undergone years of expensive credentialization to qualify to serve in positions of authority, School District officials are prohibited by law from exercising any discretion, using any judgment, demonstrating any sense of proportion, or displaying other qualities hitherto associated with sentient human beings. …

…Unless, of course, you’re a Sikh. Sikhs like to carry their traditional kirpans — knives up to eight inches — and the New York City Board of Education and the Supreme Court of Canada, among many others, have ruled that boys are permitted to take them to school. Why? Because, in the ideological hierarchy, multiculturalism trumps “safety.” …

In Slate, Daniel Gross gives an eye-opening explanation of some of the current stock market activity.

…Perhaps the most compelling reason of all for investors to fret is that private equity firms are selling shares in companies they control to the public. Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman is feeling optimistic and, as Reuters reported earlier this week, the private equity firms he runs plans to take as many as eight companies in its portfolio public. Last week, Blackstone filed a $100 million IPO for Team Health, a hospital-staffing company it controls. As I predicted in back in June, private equity giant KKR is planning an IPO for Dollar General. Sources suggest that HCA, the hospital chain taken private by in November 2006 by KKR, Bain Capital, and Merrill Lynch’s private equity arm, could be taken public soon as well. RailAmerica, a railroad operator taken private by Fortress Investment Group in the spring of 2007, had an IPO earlier this week.

Why could a slew of such public offerings be bad news for the stock markets? After all, the billionaires behind these private equity firms are offering individual investors like you and me the opportunity to join them as shareholders of companies that have benefitted from their guidance and counsel.

That’s exactly why we should beware. Generally speaking, private equity investors are very smart traders. Stephen Schwarzman and Henry Kravis have amassed large fortunes because they’ve figured out how to buy low (using lots of borrowed money) and sell high. You’ll recall that the Blackstone Group’s ultimate offering—the sale of shares in itself to the public—came in June 2007, when the Dow was at about 13,500, close to the top. The IPO price marked a top for Blackstone Group’s stock, which fell almost immediately and now stands about 45 percent below the offering price.

In a typical public offering of stock, a company creates shares and sells them to the public, with the cash raised going into its coffers. The public is thus dealt in on future gains. In initial public offerings of privately held companies—especially of venture-capital and private-equity backed firms—it’s more common for existing shareholders to sell big chunks of their own holdings to the public. Much of the cash raised in these IPOs doesn’t go to the company to pay down debt or fund future investment. It goes into the pockets of the shareholders, who often substantially reduce their holdings by offloading their stakes on less sophisticated investors. That’s why private equity types refer to such events as “exits.” Take this week’s RailAmerica IPO. A total of 22 million shares were sold to the public at $15 per share, raising about $300 million after fees. But fewer than half—10.5 million shares—were sold by the company. The rest were sold by Fortress. So only about $157.5 million of the total raised went to the company. The rest went to Fortress, which got to shed some of its investment in RailAmerica and pocket a small fortune for its owners. RailAmerica could certainly have used all that $300 million. It has more than $700 million in debt. In the first half of 2009, interest costs ate up about three-fourths of operating income, and its underlying business is slumping. (Go here and click on the Sept. 29 registration statement to see the latest data.) In its first two days of trading, RailAmerica’s stock has fallen. (Fortress, it should be noted, still owns most of the company’s shares.) …

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge.com puts more stock market news in perspective.

Another great representation of the amazing loss of purchasing power by the US public are today’s oblivious statements about the Dow at 10,000. While in absolute terms the Dow may cross whatever the Fed thinks is a necessary and sufficient mark before QE begins to taper off (Dow crosses 10k just as Treasury purchases expire), the truth is that over the past 10 years (the first time the DJIA was at 10,000) the dollar has lost 25% of its value. Therefore, we present the Dow over the last decade indexed for the DXY, which has dropped from 100 to about 75. On a real basis (not nominal) the Dow at 10,000 ten years ago is equivalent to 7,537 today! In other words, not only have we had a lost decade for all those who focus on the absolute flatness of the DJIA, but it is also a decade where the US Consumer has lost 25% of purchasing power from the perspective of stocks! You won’t hear this fact on the MSM. …

Phelim McAleer, in Investors Business Daily, writes about how, in the midst of the recession, and with global warming debunked, the Senate is looking to hamstring the economy with a cap-and-trade bill. McAleer is the journalist who recently had the effrontery to challenge Al Gore. You remember, the one who had his mike shut off by his fellow reporters.

…The evidence of environmentalism run amok abounds in Europe. Spain believed the spin that environmental regulation can create “green jobs” and boost the economy. Now the country has 18% unemployment. Britain could suffer blackouts because of policies that require the country to replace coal with fuels like solar and wind power that aren’t readily available or reliable.

Unfortunately for Americans, many of the lawmakers who represent them in Congress seem unwilling to learn from Europe’s mistakes.

The Senate is now considering a bill that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., co-authored to create a European-style “cap and trade” system for carbon dioxide emissions, and he just won the endorsement of a key swing senator. International pressure on the United States to adopt such legislation also will increase in December at climate talks in Copenhagen.

That’s bad news for taxpayers. The Obama administration reluctantly admitted last month that cap-and-trade would cost the average American family $1,761 a year.

That is a rosy prediction. A Heritage Foundation analysis pegs the cost at an average of $2,979 a year and as much as $4,600 a year by 2035. Jobs will disappear, energy prices will skyrocket, and the American Dream will become an unattainable fantasy for many. …

Gerald Eskenazi reviews three new books about baseball for the WSJ.

…Leading off is “The First Fall Classic,” about the 1912 World Series, which wasn’t the “first”—that was the best-of-nine Series in 1903. But the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox World Series was, according to Mike Vaccaro, the first “classic.” He makes a persuasive case. Here we are in a world of train travel, of boozing, of sitting in the stands next to bookmakers openly shouting the odds, of men in fedoras, of a sport with 14 guys in the big leagues nicknamed “Rube.” Astonishingly, it was also a time when, according to Mr. Vaccaro, John J. “Muggsy” McGraw, the Giants’ legendary manager, could run pool halls in partnership with the mobster and gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein without raising eyebrows. …

…There have been more World Series since 1912 that deserve the “classic” label, but only one postseason game can be called perfect: Yankee pitcher Don Larsen’s no hits, no walks, no errors jewel on Oct. 8, 1956, against the Brooklyn Dodgers. In “Perfect,” Lew Paper recounts the game through the eyes of the 19 players who saw action that afternoon at Yankee Stadium, basing his story on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters and family members. Mr. Larsen’s feat was not just the first (and still the only) World Series no-hitter; it was also baseball’s first perfect game since the Roaring ’20s. It had been such a long time since anyone had thrown a perfect game that Mr. Larsen didn’t even know there was such a term for retiring all 27 opposing batters in a row. …

…Batting third in this collection is Joe Posnanski’s “The Machine,” the breathless story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, also known as the Big Red Machine during their years of dominance in the 1970s, when they won three National League pennants and two World Series titles. The book is written in a style reminiscent of Pete Rose’s head-first dives into second base. Here is Mr. Posnanski in the opening paragraph, describing Mr. Rose trying to inspire his teammates: “He stopped in front of each man, glared, his face a mask of rage, an angry drill sergeant, a harsh father, an unforgiving judge. . . . He could already feel the acid of defeat seething in his guts.” …