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In Reason, Matt Welch notes that twenty years ago, the world witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and Communist Europe. Yet the MSM is barely mentioning the anniversary of this momentous occasion and the dramatic effects seen around the world.

On August 23, 1989, officials from the newly reformed and soon-to-be-renamed Communist Party of Hungary ceased policing the country’s militarized border with Austria. Some 13,000 East Germans, many of whom had been vacationing at nearby Lake Balaton, fled across the frontier to the free world. It was the largest breach of the Iron Curtain in a generation, and it kicked off a remarkable chain of events that ended 11 weeks later with the righteous citizen dismantling of the Berlin Wall. …

…In 1988, according to the global liberty watchdog Freedom House, just 36 percent of the world’s 167 independent countries were “free,” 23 percent were “partly free,” and 41 percent were “not free.” By 2008, not only were there 26 additional countries (including such new “free” entities as Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia), but the ratios had reversed: 46 percent were “free,” 32 percent were “partly free,” and just 22 percent were “not free.” There were only 69 electoral democracies in 1989; by 2008 their ranks had swelled to 119.

And even these numbers only begin to capture the magnitude of the change. The abject failure of top-down central planning as an economic organizing model had a profound impact even on the few communist governments that survived the ’90s. Vietnam, while maintaining a one-party grip on power, launched radical market reforms in 1990, resulting in some of the world’s highest economic growth in the last two decades. Cuba, economically desperate after the Soviet spigot was cut off, legalized foreign investment and private commerce. And in perhaps the single most dramatic geopolitical story in recent years, the country that most symbolized state repression in 1989 has used capitalism to pull off history’s most successful anti-poverty campaign. Although Chinese market reforms began in the late ’70s, and were temporarily stalled by the Tiananmen Square massacre (which, counterintuitively, emboldened anti-communists in Europe), China’s post-Soviet recognition that private enterprise should trump the state sector helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. …

…It was no accident that, in the midst of Washington’s illegal and ill-fated bailout of U.S. automakers, Swedish Enterprise Minister Maud Olofsson, when asked about the fate of struggling Saab, tersely announced, “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.”

When Western Europeans are giving lectures to Americans about the dangers of economic intervention, as they have repeatedly since Barack Obama took office, it’s a good time to take stock of how drastically geopolitical arguments have pivoted during the last two decades. …

Camille Paglia is here. This is the month she responds to reader’s letters.

I have been deeply impressed by the citizen outrage that spilled out into town hall meetings this year. And I remain shocked at the priggish derision of the mainstream media (locked in their urban enclaves) toward those events. This was a moving spectacle of grassroots American democracy in action. Aggrieved voters have a perfect right to shout at their incompetent and irresponsible representatives. American citizens are under no duty whatever to sit in reverent silence to be fed propaganda and half-truths. It is bizarre that liberals who celebrate the unruly demonstrations of our youth would malign or impugn the motivation of today’s protestors with opposing views.

The mainstream media’s failure to honestly cover last month’s mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. was a disgrace. The focus on anti-Obama placards (which were no worse than the rabid anti-LBJ, anti-Reagan or anti-Bush placards of leftist protests), combined with the grotesque attempt to equate criticism of Obama with racism, simply illustrated why the old guard TV networks and major urban daily newspapers are slowly dying. Only a simpleton would believe what they say.

Tony Blankley reaffirms what we already know. Washington is insane and out of control.

Want to hear a real laugher? Despite the current disharmony in politics, there’s one policy on which all of Washington agrees. Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, president and Congress all agree that after last fall’s financial crisis, the federal government has to more closely regulate the financial industry to protect our economy from risk of systemic financial collapse.

Here’s the joke. As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It’s the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians – the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street. …

…And yet, the same Congress and president who want to stop the banks from taking too much risk cannot stop themselves from ever more deficits. Indeed, so intoxicated – nay, hypnotized! – by debt is the current government that it is not even proposing to try to cut back. …

Lawrence Kadish, in the WSJ, explains why something must be done to stop Washington’s spending.

…When the government spends more than its revenue, there is a budget deficit. These deficits are paid for by Washington selling interest bearing Treasury securities. If the government were ever to default on its promise to pay periodic interest payments or to repay the debt at maturity, the United States economy would plunge into a level of chaos that would make the Lehman bankruptcy look like a nonevent. …

…In stark but simple terms, unless Americans are made aware of this financial crisis and demand accountability, the very fabric of our society will be destroyed. Interest rates and interest costs will soar and government revenues will be devoured by interest on the national debt. Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education, national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained. Left unchecked, this destructive deficit-debt cycle will leave the White House and Congress with either having to default on the national debt or instruct the Treasury to run the printing presses into a policy of hyperinflation.

It is against this background that Washington is now debating whether to create social programs it can’t afford. …

Robert Samuelson writes that projected per capita GDP increases through 2030 will be surpassed by government spending. Legislators are mortgaging future generations’ earning power to the hilt.

…Downward mobility is possible. Expanding health spending would raise taxes (to pay for government insurance), lower take-home pay (to pay for employer-provided insurance) or increase out-of-pocket medical costs. Other drains also loom: higher energy prices to combat global warming; higher taxes to pay for underfunded state and local government pensions and repair aging infrastructure; higher federal taxes to cover deficits and payments to retirees (much of which reflect health spending). The pressures will undermine private living standards and other public services (schools, police, defense).

The young’s future has been heavily mortgaged. Taken together, all these demands might neutralize gains in per capita incomes, especially if the economy’s performance, burdened by higher taxes or budget deficits, deteriorated. One study by Steven Nyce and Sylvester Schieber of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a consulting firm, examined just health spending. The continuation of present trends would result in “falling wages at the bottom of the earnings spectrum and very slow wage growth on up the earnings distribution. These dismal wage outcomes would persist over at least the next couple of decades.”

To be sure, extra health care enhances our well-being. Some care extends life and improves quality of life. But the connections between being healthy and more health spending are loose. The health of most people reflects personal habits and luck. They get few benefits from high spending. The healthiest 50 percent of Americans account for just 3 percent of annual spending, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation; the sickest 15 percent represent nearly 75 percent. Half of spending goes to those 55 and over, a third to those 65 and over. Any expansion of health care tends to be a transfer from young to old. …

We hear from another liberal today. In The Nation, John Nichols tells the Obama administration to stop complaining about its press coverage. He says the prez has become the “Whiner in Chief.”

…In fact, presidents should go out of their way to accept invites from media that can be expected to poke, prod and pester them. The willingness to take the hits suggests that a commander-in-chief is not afraid to engage with his critics. It also reminds presidents, who tend to be cloistered, that there are a lot of Americans who get their information from sources that do not buy what the White House press office is selling. …

…If the Fox interviewers are absurdly unfair, the American people will respond with appropriate consternation. On the other hand, if they are aggressive and pointed in their challenges, Obama will rise or fall on the quality of his responses. His aides, if they have any faith in their man’s abilities, should bend over backwards to accept some Fox interviews. They should also accept an invite from PBS’ Bill Moyers, who would pose tougher – and, yes, more informed — questions than the Foxbots. …

…As for the Obama administration, whether the grumbling is about Republicans on Fox or bloggers in pajamas, there’s a word for what the president and his aides are doing. That word is “whining.” And nothing — no attack by Glenn Beck, no blogger busting about Guantanamo — does more damage to Obama’s credibility or authority than the sense that a popular president is becoming the whiner-in-chief.

And we have interesting technology news. Paul Taylor, in the Financial Times, reports on Dyson’s new bladeless fan.

First there was the bagless vacuum cleaner, then the towel-less hand dryer: Now James Dyson, the British inventor, has developed a bladeless electric fan which went on sale Tuesday in the US and Australia.

The Dyson Air Multiplier fan – which looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie – uses advancements in airflow engineering instead of traditional blades to ‘multiply’ air 15 times and push out 119 gallons of smooth and uninterrupted air every second.

As a result, Dyson claims the bladeless fan, which works by forcing a jet of air out of a narrow circular slit and then over an aerofoil-shaped blade, is at least as efficient as its bladed counterpart, more comfortable and much safer. …

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Revisiting the prize controversy, Pickerhead thought it would be nice to put a face to some of the people who made the decision. We attached a picture of the head of the committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, to a Financial Times interview with the committee’s secretary. The article closes with this defense, “Some of our most controversial {picks} have been the most successful.” So you see, they’re not reacting to what someone or some institution did. They want to be in the game. They want to have influence. Perhaps if the kid president soon decides to bug out of Afghanistan, then next year the Nobel Peace Prize Committee can award the prize to …….. the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. How is that for the ultimate self-gratification? Or would that be a circle jerk?

… The Peace prize is the only Nobel award handled by the Norwegian committee. All the others are decided by institutions in Alfred Nobel’s native Sweden. He allocated the responsibilities in his will without any explanation for why Norway should oversee the Peace prize.

Some have speculated that he viewed Norway as more peace-loving than his own country and feared the prize would become a tool of Swedish foreign policy. Others say it reflects his admiration for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, a Norwegian novelist and peace activist.

There was nothing in the will to insist that committee members must be Norwegian and there have been frequent calls for foreigners to be admitted. Mr Lundestad says that, while an all-Norwegian panel is “hard to defend,” there are “strong practical reasons” for the status quo.

It would be difficult for an international panel to hold the numerous meetings involved – the committee met seven times this year to review 205 nominees – and harder still to decide which countries should be represented, he argued. … (Maybe Norway has no internet)

Jennifer Rubin says that liberal reaction and concern has made the Obama peace prize helpful to the nation.

Conservatives couldn’t have dreamed up a clarifying event this effective. But thanks to the Nobel Peace Prize, an epidemic of common sense and queasiness about multiculturalism is breaking out even among liberals.  Howard Fineman writes:

“Obama isn’t going to be sworn in as planetary president. But it doesn’t matter; in his mind, he already is.  …

Fineman is inspired enough by this spasm of international foolishness to remind his Newsweek readers that playing to the Nobel Prize Committee and like-minded fans in the “international community” just may not be a good thing. Turns out that the international community doesn’t always want what’s in our best interests:

“For one, what the world wants is not necessarily what America needs, or what the voters care about. Most of the world wants us to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan right now. Most of the world would like to see the dollar lose its role as the reserve currency. Many, many citizens of the world think that Hugo Chávez is a cool dude and that Iran has every right to buy uranium centrifuges and stash them underground.” …

In The NY Times, Ross Douthat writes that Obama should have refused the prize.

…People have argued that you can’t turn down a Nobel. Please. Of course you can. Obama is a gifted rhetorician with world-class speechwriters. All he would have needed was a simple, graceful statement emphasizing the impossibility of accepting such an honor during his first year in office, with America’s armed forces still deep in two unfinished wars. …

…In any case, it will be far more offensive when Obama takes the stage in Oslo this November instead of Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s heroic opposition leader; or Thich Quang Do, the Buddhist monk and critic of Vietnam’s authoritarian regime; or Rebiya Kadeer, exiled from China for her labors on behalf of the oppressed Uighur minority; or anyone who has courted death this year protesting for democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran. …

…Obama gains nothing from the prize. No domestic constituency will become more favorably disposed to him because five Norwegians think he’s already changed the world — and the Republicans were just handed the punch line for an easy recession-era attack ad. (To quote the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, anticipating the 30-second spots to come: “He got a Nobel Prize. What did you get? A pink slip.”) …

J. E. Dyer, in Contentions, has an update on Iran, and the Obama administration’s continued foreign policy missteps, made all the more tragic by Obama receiving the peace prize.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post suggest that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to Iran’s imprisoned and battered reform protesters (specifically, said the Post, to Neda Agha-Soltan) instead of to Barack Obama. Both op-eds focus on the encouragement such an award would have been for the cause of political reform in Iran; the Journal also speculates that a Nobel might have made a difference to the fate of the three Iranian dissidents sentenced to death over the weekend for their participation in the post-election protests. …

…In a like spirit, former president Mohammad Khatami, a political moderate now publicly aligned with besieged reform leaders Mousavi and Kourabi, posted a defiant declaration on his website after the death sentences were announced, assuring Iranians that the reform movement would not die.

In the face of this bravery, our Nobel-winning president has gone beyond his original hands-off posture on Iran’s internal business, and even beyond his administration’s affirmation in early August that Ahmadinejad is Iran’s “elected president.” Now Obama’s USAID organization has decided to cut off funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The IHRDC, whose principal current project is documenting abuse of reform protesters since the June election, was first funded under Bush five years ago and has extensively documented the brutality of the Islamic revolutionary regime, including its assassination campaign against dissidents abroad and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners.

The CATO Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter interprets this USAID decision as a “relatively minor concession” by the Obama administration to establish “Washington’s goodwill” in talks with Iran. The State Department has declined to give a reason for the funding cut-off. We should expect none, of course. A Nobel Peace Prize means never having to explain your lack of interest in human rights.

One last item on the prize for now. Camille Paglia should be out soon, and, no doubt, will have something to add. Your servant will provide that as soon as it shows up. This last piece is by George Friedman of Stratfor who explains why the prize makes sense to left-wing Europeans. It’s here so you can learn something, but Pickerhead still thinks they are free-riding Euro-weenies.

…The Europeans experienced catastrophes during the 20th century. Two world wars slaughtered generations of Europeans and shattered Europe’s economy. Just after the war, much of Europe maintained standards of living not far above that of the Third World. In a sense, Europe lost everything — millions of lives, empires, even sovereignty as the United States and the Soviet Union occupied and competed in Europe. The catastrophe of the 20th century defines Europe, and what the Europeans want to get away from. …

…Between 1945 and 1991, Western Europe lived in a confrontation with the Soviets. The Europeans lived in dread of Soviet occupation, and though tempted, never capitulated to the Soviets. That meant that the Europeans were forced to depend on the United States for their defense and economic stability, and were therefore subject to America’s will. How the Americans and Russians viewed each other would determine whether war would break out, not what the Europeans thought.

Every aggressive action by the United States, however trivial, was magnified a hundredfold in European minds, as they considered fearfully how the Soviets would respond. In fact, the Americans were much more restrained during the Cold War than Europeans at the time thought. …

…For Europe, prosperity had become an end in itself. …Today’s Europeans value economic comfort above all other considerations. After Sept. 11, the United States seemed willing to take chances with the Europeans’ comfortable economic condition that the Europeans themselves didn’t want to take. They loathed George W. Bush for doing so. …

…The Norwegian politicians gave their prize to Obama because they believed that he would leave Europeans in their comfortable prosperity without making unreasonable demands. That is their definition of peace, and Obama seemed to promise that. …

…The Norwegians awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the president of their dreams, not the president who is dealing with Iran and Afghanistan. Obama is not a free actor. He is trapped by the reality he has found himself in, and that reality will push him far away from the Norwegian fantasy. In the end, the United States is the United States — and that is Europe’s nightmare, because the United States is not obsessed with maintaining Europe’s comfortable prosperity. The United States cannot afford to be, and in the end, neither can President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize or not.

Thomas Sowell gives a clear overview of the housing crisis and recession. And he fixes the ultimate blame where it belongs – on the politicians meddling with the economy.

…Politicians to the rescue: Federal regulatory agencies leaned on banks to lend to people they were not lending to before — or else. The “or else” included not having their business decisions approved by the regulators, which could cost them more money than making risky loans.

Mortgage lending standards were lowered, in order to raise the magic number of home ownership. But, with lower lending standards, there were — surprise! — more mortgage payment delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures.

This was a problem not only for banks and other lenders but also for those in the business of buying mortgages from the original lenders. These included semi-government enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Wall Street firms that bought mortgages, bundled them together and issued securities based on the anticipated income from those mortgages.

In other words, all these economic transactions were “interconnected,” … And when the people who owed money on their mortgages stopped paying, the whole house of cards began to fall.

Politicians may not know much — or care much — about economics, but they know politics and they care a lot about keeping their jobs. So a great distracting hue and cry has gone up that all this was due to the market not being regulated enough by the government. In reality, it was precisely the government regulators who forced the banks to lower their lending standards. …

Debra J. Saunders, in The San Francisco Chronicle, picks up on Paul Hudson’s global warming article posted in Pickings yesterday.

…Western Washington University geologist Don J. Easterbrook presented research last year that suggests that the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) caused warmer temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s. With Pacific sea surface temperatures cooling, Easterbrook expects 30 years of global cooling.

EPA analyst Alan Carlin – an MIT-trained economist with a degree in physics – referred to “solar variability” and Easterbrook’s work in a document that warned that politics had prompted the Environmental Protection Agency and countries to pay “too little attention to the science of global warming” as partisans ignored the lack of global warming over the past 10 years. At first the EPA buried the paper, then it permitted Carlin to post it on his personal Web site. …

…Over the years, global warming alarmists have sought to stifle debate by arguing that there was no debate. They bullied dissenters and ex-communicated nonbelievers from their panels. In the name of science, disciples made it a virtue to not recognize the existence of scientists such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Colorado State University’s William Gray.

For a long time, that approach worked. But after 11 years without record temperatures that had the seas spilling over the Statue of Liberty’s toes, they are going to have to change tactics. …

Old fool that he is, the Archbishop of Canterbury has silly advice on the globalony front. Wants people to grow stuff in their backyards. Cool thing is, the London Times linked to a piece debunking the churchman’s claims. We have that, and then some more on the ”locavore” movement.  Ben Webster writes:

In an interview with The Times, Dr Rowan Williams said that families needed to respond to the threat of climate change by changing their shopping habits and adjusting their diets to the seasons, eating fruit and vegetables that could be grown in Britain.

He said that the carbon footprint of peas from Kenya and other airfreighted food was too high and families should not assume that all types of food would be available through the year. Dr Williams called for more land to be made available for allotments, saying that they would help people to reconnect with nature and wean them off a consumerist lifestyle.

The Archbishop was accused, however, of threatening the livelihoods of a million families in sub-Saharan Africa, who depended on exports of fresh produce to Europe. …

Tristan McConnell, in The Times, UK, gives a snapshot of the Kenyon agriculture export business.

…Pre-industrial methods are still the norm, with fields tilled by hand or with ox-drawn ploughs. For many Kenyans, the money earned pays for school fees and better diets for their children.

Last month the Africa Research Institute, a London-based think-tank, published a report praising Kenya’s fruit, veg and flower industry for its environment-friendly carbon footprint. “The vast majority of Kenyan produce exported to Europe is carried in the hold of passenger aircraft carrying Western tourists home from the safari parks and beaches of East Africa,” Mark Ashurst, its director, said.

“To suggest that this shouldn’t happen is to penalise a globally competitive African industry for the carbon footprint of European holidaymakers.”

Brian Dunning, on SkepticBlog.org, discusses how locally grown doesn’t mean efficiently delivered. Dunning consulted for a market chain, he writes.

…In their early days, they did indeed follow a true farmers’ market model. Farmers would either deliver their product directly to the store, or they would send a truck out to each farmer. As they added store locations, they continued practicing direct delivery between farmer and store. Adding a store in a new town meant finding a new local farmer for each type of produce in that town. Usually this was impossible: Customers don’t live in the same places where farms are found. Farms are usually located between towns. So Henry’s ended up sending a number of trucks from different stores to the same farm. Soon, Henry’s found that the model of minimal driving distance between each farm and each store resulted in a rat’s nest of redundant driving routes crisscrossing everywhere. What was intended to be efficient, local, and friendly, turned out to be not just inefficient, but grossly inefficient. Henry’s was burning huge amounts of diesel that they didn’t need to burn.

You can guess what happened. They began combining routes. This meant fewer, larger trucks, and less diesel burned. They experimented with a distribution center to serve some of their closely clustered stores. The distribution center added a certain amount of time and labor to the process, but it (a) still accomplished same-day morning delivery from farm to store, and (b) cut down on mileage tremendously. Henry’s added larger distribution centers, and realized even better efficiency.  …

…Locally grown produce is rarely efficient. Apply a little mathematics to the problem, and you’ll find that the ugly alternative of giant suburban distribution centers accomplishes the same thing – fresh produce into stores on the same day it’s picked – but with much less fuel burned. …

…Too often, environmentalists are satisfied with the mere appearance and accoutrements of environmentalism, without regard for the underlying facts. Apply some mathematics and some economics, and you’ll find that a smaller environmental footprint is the natural result of improved efficiency.

The Borowitz Report has more awards to give Obama.

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Americans have choices ahead. Charles Krauthammer explains the direction that liberalism is leading our nation, through its foreign policy of apologies and appeasement, and through its domestic policy of increasing governmental control, restraining our economy and threatening security. He ends with how we can change directions. Brace yourselves, Charles went long today in this adaptation of a speech he made last week.

…my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands. …

…Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome. …

…The New Liberalism will protest that despite its rhetoric, it is not engaging in moral reparations, but seeking real strategic advantage for the United States on the assumption that the reason we have not gotten cooperation from, say, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, or even our European allies on various urgent agendas is American arrogance, unilateralism, and dismissiveness. And therefore, if we constrict and rebrand and diminish ourselves deliberately–try to make ourselves equal partners with obviously unequal powers abroad–we will gain the moral high ground and rally the world to our causes. …

…This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naïve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory–as policy–has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. …

…Domestic policy, of course, is not designed to curb our power abroad. But what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. Decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism’s ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.

This is not the place to debate the intrinsic merits of the social democratic versus the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. There’s much to be said for the decency and relative equity of social democracy. But it comes at a cost: diminished social mobility, higher unemployment, less innovation, less dynamism and creative destruction, less overall economic growth. …

…This shift in resources is not hypothetical. It has already begun. At a time when hundreds of billions of dollars are being lavished on stimulus and other appropriations in an endless array of domestic programs, the defense budget is practically frozen. Almost every other department is expanding, and the Defense Department is singled out for making “hard choices”–forced to look everywhere for cuts, to abandon highly advanced weapons systems, to choose between readiness and research, between today’s urgencies and tomorrow’s looming threats.

Take, for example, missile defense, in which the United States has a great technological edge and one perfectly designed to maintain American preeminence in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile. Missile defense is actually being cut. The number of interceptors in Alaska to defend against a North Korean attack has been reduced, and the airborne laser program (the most promising technology for a boost-phase antiballistic missile) has been cut back–at the same time that the federal education budget has been increased 100 percent in one year. …

…Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?

First, accept our role as hegemon. And reject those who deny its essential benignity. There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance–as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.

And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen. …

…There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world’s reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. …

…Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.

The other looming threat to our economy–and to the dollar–comes from our fiscal deficits. They are not out of our control. There is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt–threatening the dollar, the entire economy, and consequently our superpower status abroad. …

Jennifer Rubin starts with an amazing call to Obama from Bob Kerry to act more like Bush. She then makes an important point, that Obama feels himself to be above any obligations of national or historical context. He feels he is above the presidency, above the nation. Whether he believes he must keep his own word remains to be seen.

…What is at stake, Kerrey argues, is whether Obama can cut through the cant about another Vietnam (the war hero explains: “This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror”) and keep his word. He argues: “When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more than your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership.” …

…Now maybe Obama doesn’t consider the promises of his predecessors to be binding on him. After all, he remarked after sitting through a Daniel Ortega rant that he didn’t want to be held responsible for the Bay of Pigs, which occurred when he was 3 years old. In other words, he may not see himself as the successor to previous presidents’ obligations. He stands above and apart from mere parochial Americanism. He is in essence a free agent, without the burden of deals, understandings, and obligations undertaken by those who came before him, and most particularly George W. Bush.

But Afghanistan is different. He was the one who defined it as a critical war. He was the one who set the strategy to defeat the Taliban. He was the one who hired Gen. Stanley McChrystal to come up with an alternative to the losing counterterrorism strategy. So it’s not merely a case here of stepping apart from his predecessors’ promises, but from his own. If he can’t manage to do even that, friends and allies soon will see America as unreliable and untrustworthy. It will be the dawning not of an age of multilateral nirvana, but of every-country-for-itselfism. The result will be a more dangerous and less predictable world. And it won’t be at all what the Nobel Committee had in mind.

More bad news from that Universal Health Care Wonderland, Massachusetts. Wendy Williams writes that they are being fined because the state changed the rules on health care.

My husband retired from IBM about a decade ago, and as we aren’t old enough for Medicare we still buy our health insurance through the company. But IBM, with its typical courtesy, informed us recently that we will be fined by the state.

Why? Because Massachusetts requires every resident to have health insurance, and this year, without informing us directly, the state had changed the rules in a way that made our bare-bones policy no longer acceptable. Unless we ponied up for a pricier policy we neither need nor want—or enrolled in a government-sponsored insurance plan—we would have to pay $1,000 each year to the state. …

…IBM seems like a rock of stability compared to the state of Massachusetts. It’s apparent that state health-care policies can change at the whim of politicians in Boston, and we might not be able to adjust to the new rules. The way we figure it, if we sign up for a state-subsidized plan we will be at the mercy of the state.

So we are sticking with our plan and paying the tax. But what bothers me most is that a similar health-care mandate is being proposed in Washington, and some of the same promises that were made here are being made again—such as that the mandate will never hit middle-class folks with a new tax. …

…The mandate in Massachusetts was sold as something that wouldn’t penalize people like my husband and me. But those political promises were only good for as long as it took to get the mandate enacted into law.

Paul Hudson, on the BBC News, asks what happened to global warming. He looks at the current theories.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?  …

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Responsible governing means making tough choices. Obama has generals who give realistic assessments about Afghanistan. Obama also has advisers who promise everything can be won for one low price, or alternatively that promises can be broken, explains Charles Krauthammer.

…The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm’s-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of “counterterrorism” in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world’s expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy — “counterinsurgency,” meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge — you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he’ll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world’s foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago — Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans — the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s remarks on Afghanistan from Fox News All-Stars. Says Krauthammer, Obama’s Afghanistan rethink is all politics.

…Then he goes through all the people he consulted with [in that review]: the commanders on the ground, allies, NGOs and the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan and members of Congress. It was a serious review in March.

He appoints his own general later and then he says two months ago it is a war of necessity. You would think he has thought it through.

And now all of a sudden he is rethinking it. It is because of the political pressure. The public opinion polls are going negative on him. He has gotten [resistance from] his left in the party, and it is all about the politics. It is not about the strategy. …

Congress is still hard at work trying to force socialized medicine down our throats, writes David Harsanyi. First, they beat the CBO into submission:

If you’ve been watching noted alchemist and Democratic Sen. Max Baucus conjure up health-care gold this week, you probably know what I mean. …

…Just think of legislation as abstract art. The Congressional Budget Office does.

The CBO’s new estimate, which magically meets every one of President Barack Obama’s preconditions, is based on “conceptual” language provided by Baucus rather than any of those maddeningly specific Arabic numerals.

That’s because the estimate isn’t rooted in an actual bill, per se . . . nor does it incorporate hundreds of amendments that will be part of any final product, well, not exactly . . . What we do have is a CBO that has been browbeaten long enough by the White House to finally summon the conviction to get a figure that so many wanted to hear.

It’s also, believe it or not, free. …

…How exactly does health care “reform” pay for itself in Wonderland? In this case, it pays for itself by charging taxpayers new “fees,” delivering new mandates and penalties, adding pass-through costs and cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. …

Then they want to start taxing us in 2010 for their legislation that won’t be enacted in 2013:

…CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had previously warned that Medicare Advantage payment cuts had the potential to hurt seniors’ private health plans, which, of course, is the point of “reform.”

The most exhilarating aspect of this plan, however, isn’t that it does nothing to contain costs for average consumers, it’s that the average consumer will help pay for it long before they fail to receive any tangible benefits.

According to Democrats, health care reform must be passed this very moment even though it would not kick in until 2013. But don’t worry, it would start taxing Americans in 2010, three years before you get nothing. …

Liberal speechwriter Wendy Button moved to Massachusetts, where many of the proposed healthcare reforms have been enacted. She can no longer afford health insurance. Her commentary is in Politics Daily.

…here’s how I lost my insurance: I moved. That’s right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care.

In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount.

In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven’t changed. I didn’t stop writing and become a stunt double. … There has been no change in the way I live my life except my zip code — to a state with universal health care.

Massachusetts has enacted many of the necessary reforms being talked about in Washington. There is a mandate for all residents to get insurance, a law to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition, an automatic enrollment requirement, and insurance companies are no longer allowed to cap coverage or drop people when they get sick because they forgot to include a sprained ankle back in 1989 on their application. …

…How could all of these weeks and months go by and no one is examining and talking about what has worked and what hasn’t worked in Massachusetts?

While the state has the lowest rate of uninsured, a report by the Commonwealth Fund states that Massachusetts has the highest premiums in the country. The state’s budget is a mess and lawmakers had to make deep cuts in services and increase the sales tax to close gaps. The number of people needing assistance has at times overwhelmed the state. The mandate means that some people who can’t afford insurance are now being slapped with a fine they also can’t afford. There is no “public option” in the way the president describes it, no inter-state competition, no pool for small businesses and self-employed individuals like me to buy into groups that negotiate cheaper rates. …

…What makes this a double blow is that my experience contradicts so much of what I wrote for political leaders over the last decade. That’s a terrible feeling, too. I typed line after line that said everything Massachusetts did would make health insurance more affordable. If I had a dollar for every time I typed, “universal coverage will lower premiums,” I could pay for my own health care at Massachusetts’s rates. …

John Stossel points out that paying Paul less means the government can rob Peter less.

“The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul,” George Bernard Shaw once said.

For a socialist, Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested. …

…Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th-century French economist, defined the state as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” I don’t know if he envisioned one half of the population living off the other half. …

…The built-in unfairness of the tax system has prompted a range of tax-reform proposals, such as a flat tax and replacing the income tax with a sales tax. These alternatives are better, but they have their drawbacks, too. For that reason, there is something more urgent than tax reform: spending reform.

The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is not the tax level but the spending level. Taxation is just one way for the government to get money. The other ways — borrowing and inflation — are also burdens on the people. The best way to lighten the tax burden is to lessen the spending burden. If government spends less, it takes less. And if it takes less, the tax system will weigh less heavily on us all. …

Walter Williams gives different examples in which a society has allowed its government to increase in power and control, for the stated purpose of “social justice”.  When a society starts accepting that the ends justify the means, ruthless leaders with murderous means have come to power.

…The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii’s Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, “Death by Government.” Statistics are provided at his website. The Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and those in nations they captured. Between 1917 and 1987, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there’s little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation’s elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement “social justice.” Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century’s notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn’t over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings.

In the WSJ, Hannah Karp paints an enjoyable portrait of Joe Torre and his pre-game interviews.

The Los Angeles Dodgers limped disappointingly into the division series this week, but there’s still one record Joe Torre can boast about as he enters his 14th consecutive postseason: His pregame media sessions are, by a landslide, the longest and most honest in baseball.

Described by beat writers over the years as “a must-listen,” “a delight” and “baseball’s version of the sermon on the mount,” Mr. Torre’s daily meetings with the press have become the stuff of legend. For nearly an hour before every home game, the soft-spoken 69-year-old sits cross-legged like a Zen master in the Dodgers’ dugout, sipping green tea or chomping pink gum and gazing out toward the palm trees that surround the stadium as he waxes poetic about everything from players’ antics to his own days as a catcher to the time he took his daughter to a Jonas Brothers concert. On a slow day he might tell the one about the Boston fan he once met in an elevator who told him he’d rather see the Red Sox beat the Yankees than see the U.S. capture Saddam Hussein, or he might reminisce about how relievers were rumored to sneak out of Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia to a local bar through a secret passageway near the bullpen. …

…While the baseball world is salivating over the prospect of a World Series matchup between Mr. Torre’s Dodgers and his former team, the New York Yankees, the skipper’s sessions with the press rarely focus on such grandiose questions. Last week he regaled reporters with stories about his recent conversations with director Spike Lee, insisted that his players deserved to pop champagne even if they lost their last series with the Colorado Rockies, expressed relief that his 13-year-old daughter was now wearing Andre Ethier jerseys to games (she routinely sported Yankees attire to Dodgers Stadium last season) and joked about how Derek Jeter used to flex his muscles around the locker room.

“I like to humanize some of the players that people think are plastic,” says Mr. Torre. …

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Today we are, all Prize, all the time, since many of our favorite pundits have comments on the latest attempt of free-riding, left-wing Euro-weenies to interfere in U. S, politics. The week started with Saturday Night Live joking about Obama, and the Nobel committee kept it going. They have truly “jumped the shark.” Conservatives are mostly amused, but liberals are aghast as the hollowness is plain for all to see.

And, think about poor Bill Clinton. When not fighting off the Lewinsky mess, Clinton spent his second term campaigning for this. He took his eye off the job of protecting our country and didn’t pursue bin Laden because angering the Arab world might have prevented some murky Israeli peace deal that could put him over the top.

Read on and enjoy John Fund, Mark Steyn, David Warren, Peter Wehner, Jennifer Rubin, Abe Greenwald, Claudia Rosett, Ed Morrissey, Richard Cohen, and Michael Graham. The joke continues with Scrappleface, the Borowitz Report, and eight cartoonists led by Michael Ramirez who hangs the prize on a tele-prompter.

John Fund

This year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama can only hasten the decline in prestige of an award that has already gone to people like Yasser Arafat, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan (who presided over the Iraqi oil-for-food scam) and the fabulist Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu. For this year’s Nobel, the deadline was February 1, barely ten days after Mr. Obama had assumed the presidency. Though the Nobel committee of five Norwegian politicians presumably considered the evidence over the summer, it’s fair to say their award represents little more than wishful thinking that Mr. Obama’s diplomatic efforts will ultimately bear fruit.

Other U.S. Presidents have won Nobels, but for actual accomplishments. Teddy Roosevelt helped broker a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. Woodrow Wilson worked to build a lasting peace after the end of World War I, however unsuccessful that effort later proved. Even Jimmy Carter won the Peace Prize in 2002 after more than two decades of humanitarian efforts as a former president.

Of course Mark Steyn has an excellent piece. We start first with his hilarious opening:

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics Web site the other day was: “Is Obama Becoming A Joke?” With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize. Up next: His stunning victory in this year’s Miss World contest. Dec. 12, Johannesburg. You read it here first.

For what, exactly, did he win the Nobel? As the president himself put it:

“When you look at my record, it’s very clear what I have done so far. And that is nothing. Almost one year and nothing to show for it. You don’t believe me? You think I’m making it up? Take a look at this checklist.”

And up popped his record of accomplishment, reassuringly blank.

Oh, no, wait. That wasn’t the real President Barack Obama. That was a comedian playing President Obama on “Saturday Night Live.” And, for impressionable types who find it hard to tell the difference, CNN – in a broadcast first that should surely have its own category at the Emmys – performed an in-depth “reality check” of the SNL sketch. That’s right: They fact-checked the jokes. Seriously. “How much truth is behind all the laughs? Stand by for our reality check,” promised Wolf Blitzer, introducing his in-depth report with all the plonking earnestness so cherished by those hapless Americans stuck at Gate 73 for four hours with nothing to watch but the CNN airport channel.

Read on for the serious commentary:

…For these and other “extraordinary efforts” in “cooperation between peoples”, President Obama is now the fastest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history. Alas, the Alas, the extraordinary efforts of those first 12 days are already ancient history. Reflecting the new harmony of U.S.-world relations since the administration hit the “reset” button, The Times of London declared the award “preposterous,” and Svenska Freds (the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society) called it “shameful.” There’s something almost quaintly vieux chapeau about the Nobel decision, as if the hopeychangey bumper stickers were shipped surface mail to Oslo and only arrived last week. Everywhere else, they’re peeling off …

…From about a year after the fall of Baghdad, Democrats adopted the line that Bush’s war in Iraq was an unnecessary distraction from the real war, the good war, the one in Afghanistan that everyone – Dems, Europeans, all the nice people – were right behind, 100 percent. No one butched up for the Khyber Pass more enthusiastically than Barack Obama: “As President, I will make the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban the top priority.” (July 15, 2008)

But that was then, and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, “War kills off great reform movements.” As the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues. Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

Gosh, given their many assertions that Afghanistan is “a war we have to win” (Obama to the VFW, August 2008), you might almost think …that it’s the president and water-bearers like Gunga Dionne who are the “cynics.” In a recent speech to the Manhattan Institute, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that, in diminishing American power abroad to advance statism at home, Obama and the American people will be choosing decline. There are legitimate questions about our war aims in Afghanistan, and about the strategy necessary to achieve them. But, eight years after being toppled, the Taliban will see their return to power as a great victory over the Great Satan, and so will the angry young men from Toronto to Yorkshire to Chechnya to Indonesia who graduated from Afghanistan’s Camp Jihad during the 1990s. And so will the rest of the world: They will understand that the modern era’s ordnungsmacht (the “order maker”) has chosen decline.

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy – for America and the world.

Alfred Nobel took steps to try to prevent his prize from being used to influence world leaders and events, according to David Warren.

…It is also perhaps worth exculpating Alfred Nobel, for the farce his peace prize has become. The man took various precautions in his will to make sure it would not be cheaply politicized, and specifically that it would never be used as a means to influence current events. It was to be a retrospective award, for specific accomplishments universally acknowledged, and thus the opposite of a partisan statement. But Nobel’s will was written in 1895, by the brilliant entrepreneur who converted a failing iron and steel mill into an extremely successful munitions factory. And as students of philanthropy should know, “good intentions” generally go the way of the Munich agreement. …

…Instead, I think the intention of the prize, for which nominations closed on Feb. 1 — less than a fortnight after Obama took office — is in fact designed as an essay in pre-emption. The left-wing, pacifist committee wanted to saddle the new U.S. president with their little “hope diamond,” in case he got any ideas about killing more jihadis in Afghanistan. Or hesitated to do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain did to Czechoslovakia.

Peter Wehner contrasts Arafat, a terrorist who received the Nobel peace prize, and Bush, a leader who worked for the liberation of two nations of people.

… Bush, during his presidency, took the courageous step of sidelining Arafat rather than building a delusional “peace process” around him. It was Bush who spoke out in a forthright fashion about the need for a Palestinian state – but only if the Palestinians made their own inner peace with the Jewish state and gave up terrorism as an instrument of policy.

…Bush spent much of his presidency working to liberate the enslaved people of Iraq and Afghanistan and helping Iraq become the only democracy in the Arab world. That effort cost Americans a lot in blood and treasure. His presidency was damaged in the process. But the wars themselves were noble efforts — wars of authentic liberation — and ones that Democrats initially supported before the going got tough and they began to flake off.

The Noble Committee long ago ceased to be a serious entity; this choice merely confirms that judgment. It is a tendentious organization. And the easiest way — not the only way, but the easiest way — for Westerners to win praise and honors from it is to be critical of America and Israel. George W. Bush would never do that; he loves and has defended both nations. Sometimes virtue is its own reward.

Jennifer Rubin comes up with an excellent reason why so many liberals are uncomfortable with Obama’s win.

…But what is a bit eye-opening is the level of embarrassment — cringing, really — among those rather sympathetic to Obama. Take a look through the Washington Post’s Post-Partisan blog. Yes, the conservatives are somewhere between appalled and bemused. But so are Richard Cohen, Ruth Marcus, and David Ignatius.

Marcus:

“This is ridiculous — embarrassing, even. I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama. But the peace prize? This is supposed to be for doing, not being — and it’s no disrespect to the president to suggest he hasn’t done much yet. Certainly not enough to justify the peace prize.”

Ignatius:

“The Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama seems so goofy — even if you’re a fan, you have to admit that he hasn’t really done much yet as a peacemaker. But there’s an aspect of this prize that is real and important — and that validates Obama’s strategy from the day he took office.”

Mickey Kaus is cringing also. And the AP’s Jennifer Loven is stumped, verging on incredulous. Even the Huffington Post is somewhat mortified. In fact, liberals seems more upset on some level than conservatives, because I think the Left takes this award seriously. Conservatives stopped doing that around the time Yasir Arafat got his. …

Abe Greenwald has wonderful comments about liberals and reality.

Why would Obama have to do anything to earn the Nobel Peace Prize? Has everyone forgotten how he became president of the United States? …

…Today we only deal in make-believe. The Left abhors evidentiary standards. There is global warming in the absence of rising temperature, Israeli war crimes in the absence of unlawful conduct, institutionalized racism in the absence of prejudicial treatment, American imperialism in the absence of empire, and so on.

Seeing what isn’t there is half the job of being on the Left. The other half is changing what isn’t there through costly, intrusive, and ill-conceived initiatives (save 10 percent for keeping Charlie Rangel out of trouble). …

Obama won the Nobel peace prize for disparaging and discrediting the United States in the eyes of the world, writes Peter Wehner. He quotes Charles Krauthammer’s speech about Obama choosing decline for America.

…In his address, Krauthammer says,

“…as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional — exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world. …”

That, in two sentences, explains why Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Now the Nobel Committee couldn’t quite come out and say that directly; it decided to couch the award in this language, taken from the citation: “[Obama’s] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

There you have it: Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America — and it’s not flattering. That much of the world — composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity — isn’t happy with the United States is not news. What is news is that an American president would validate many of those charges. I find that deeply disquieting. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not surprisingly, considers it worthy of its highest honor.

Claudia Rosett looks at another possible motivation for the Nobel committee’s actions. She also notes that many enjoy peace due to the actions of the United States, not due to the positive thinking of the Nobel committee.

…What, more specifically, might they be expecting of Obama? For starters, Norway, along with neighboring Sweden and Denmark, has been banging the drum for America to hand over to the United Nations enormous control over and constraints upon the U.S. economy, in the name of (warming/cooling/take-your-pick) climate change. Thus did Norway’s Nobel committee bestow its favors in 2007 on Al Gore and the UN’s Self-Interested Panel of Politically Corrupted Science — excuse me, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And this December the UN is convening a big climate conference in Copenhagen, with which the U.N. hopes to “seal” its growth-stunting UN-enriching climate “deal.” …

…America, in the course of defending its own freedoms, has long extended to the likes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden a protective umbrella. Under that shelter, too many Europols have come to believe that peace is a function of nothing more than talk and hope and dreams and …premature prizes.

Obama said on Friday morning that he will accept this award as “a call to action.” Action on whose behalf? The five Norwegians who make up the Nobel peace prize committee chose to give him this award, for their own purposes. Obama, and America, owe them nothing. The real hope is that Obama will remember he took an oath (twice) not to serve as global spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Before his presidency is over, keeping faith with that oath may require him to do things would knock the stuffing out of the featherbed philosophy of this sanctimonious crowd of Scandinavian free-riders.

Ed Morrissey reviews liberals’ reactions to the news.

Many of us assumed that the mainstream media outlets would cheer Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award today, but as Byron York notices, they seem as stunned as everyone else — and also as skeptical.  For instance, the Washington Post reminds readers that two other sitting American Presidents have won the Nobel, but only in their second terms, and only after they’d, er, actually achieved something:

“Obama is the third sitting U.S. president–and the first in 90 years–to win the prestigious peace prize. His predecessors won during their second White House terms, however, and after significant achievements in their diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson was awarded the price in 1919, after helping to found the League of Nations and shaping the Treatise of Versailles; and Theodore Roosevelt was the recipient in 1906 for his work to negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese war.

In contrast, Obama is struggling over whether to expand the war in Afghanistan, preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and searching for ways to build momentum to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and assemble an international effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program.” …

Richard Cohen extends the farce.

…And again in a stunning coincidence, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences announced the Oscar for best picture will be given this year to the Vince Vaughn vehicle “Guys Weekend to Burp,” which is being story-boarded at the moment but looks very good indeed. Mr. Vaughn, speaking through his publicist, said he was “touched and moved” by the award and would do everything in his power to see that the picture lives up to expectation and opens big sometime next March.

At the same press conferences, the Academy announced that the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award would go this year to Britney Spears for her intention to “spend whatever it takes to save the whales.” The Academy recognized that Spears had not yet saved a single whale, but it felt strongly that it was the intention that counted most. Spears, who was leaving a club at the time, told People magazine that she would not want to live in “a world without whales.” People put it on the cover.

The sudden spate of awards based on intentions or plans or aspirations was attributed to the decision by the Norwegian Nobel committee to award the peace prize to Barack Obama for his efforts in nuclear disarmament and his outreach to the Muslim world. .. Some cynics suggested that Obama’s award was a bit premature since, among other things, a Middle East peace was as far away as ever and the world had yet to fully disarm. Nonetheless, the president seemed humbled by the news and the Norwegian committee packed for its trip to the United States, where it will appear on Dancing with the Stars.

There are too many Corner posts to spend time mentioning here in the summary. Just scroll down to enjoy. Honorable mention though goes to Andy McCarthy.

… After a number of years, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy after its most fitting recipient — it’s now called the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I’d like to see the Nobel Foundation follow suit. If today’s headlines said, “Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize,” that would be perfect.

Michael Graham delivers some well-deserved sarcasm.

…A prize President Obama earned, the Nobel Committee claims, for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”

This will no doubt come as great comfort to the democracy protesters in Iran, the oppressed citizens of North Korea, the Afghan women being beaten by the Taliban, and the people of Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia, etc., feeling the hot breath of the growling Russian bear. They’re all basking in that Obama-inspired “peace.” …

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The end of the week, and another great Pickings to keep you warm over the weekend. Dilbert’s here with the story of Saudi Arabia’s a**bomber. And be sure to get to the cartoons to see a view of the world from DemonBaby.com that reminds of the iconic Steinberg New Yorker cover with the U. S. as seen from Ninth Ave.

Read in Commentary what Nixon did to support Israel in the Yom Kippur war and understand why Obama is one of their least favorite U. S. presidents.

…What is clear, from the preponderance of information provided by those directly involved in the unfolding events, is that President Richard Nixon — overriding inter-administration objections and bureaucratic inertia — implemented a breathtaking transfer of arms, code-named Operation Nickel Grass, that over a four-week period involved hundreds of jumbo U.S. military aircraft delivering more than 22,000 tons of armaments.

This was accomplished, noted Walter J. Boyne in an article in the December 1998 issue of Air Force Magazine, while “Washington was in the throes of not only post-Vietnam moralizing on Capitol Hill but also the agony of Watergate …

…“It was Nixon who did it,” recalled Nixon’s acting special counsel, Leonard Garment. “I was there. As [bureaucratic bickering between the State and Defense departments] was going back and forth, Nixon said, this is insane. . . . He just ordered Kissinger, “Get your ass out of here and tell those people to move.”

When Schlesinger initially wanted to send just three transports to Israel because he feared anything more would alarm the Arabs and the Soviets, Nixon snapped: “We are going to get blamed just as much for three as for 300. . . . Get them in the air, now.” …

…As for Meir herself, to the end of her life she referred to Nixon as “my president” and told a group of Jewish leaders in Washington shortly after the war: “For generations to come, all will be told of the miracle of the immense planes from the United States bringing in the materiel that meant life to our people.”

Wrote Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose:

“Those were momentous events in world history. Had Nixon not acted so decisively, who can say what would have happened? The Arabs probably would have recovered at least some of the territory they had lost in 1967, perhaps all of it. They might have even destroyed Israel. But whatever the might-have-beens, there is no doubt that Nixon . . . made it possible for Israel to win, at some risk to his own reputation and at great risk to the American economy.

He knew that his enemies . . . would never give him credit for saving Israel. He did it anyway.”

David Warren takes us along on his thoughts about China.

The 20th century was a disaster in the history of China, even before the Communists came to power in 1949.

An ancient empire that was also an ancient civilization had already endured a massive collision with the civilization of Europe, in which Europe had prevailed. The latter was quite aggressive, the former by its circumstances mostly passive, and the conventional wisdom is that this alone explains the dissolution of the former.

Conventional views are usually wrong, but can be interesting insofar as they may point to the truth by their very inversion of it. The Opium Wars and other military encounters are perhaps over-emphasized in what was more comprehensively a “clash of civilizations” — a collision between European and Chinese understandings of the world itself, in which the self-confidence of the Middle Kingdom was lethally undermined.

The mind of China became partially westernized; the mind of Europe, for all the pleasure it took in acquiring a taste for Chinoiserie — from the admirable Analects of Confucius to the incomparable stoneware pots of the Song Dynasty — did not become Sinified.

To my dangerously self-tutored historical sense, it seems that China had been overrun by “barbarians” before — by Mongols, and Manchurians — and yet assimilated each conqueror and “raised” them to the standards of Chinese civilization. But the European “barbarians” who began arriving at China’s gates half a millennium ago were the end of everything. …

Nine months ago in January 4th’s Pickings, Pickerhead said, “We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him.” That is the central problem of electing a teleprompted empty suit. WSJ editors provide an overview of the mess made with Afghan policy as the Dems now have zeroed in on the general.

…As we’ve learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, successful counterterrorism requires intelligence. This comes from earning the trust of the people, which in turn can only happen if they are protected. The Biden approach would pull U.S. soldiers back behind high walls, far from the field of battle, and turns security over to the Afghan army and police before they are prepared for the job.

The sudden Afghan rethink also jeopardizes progress in Pakistan, the world’s leading sanctuary for al Qaeda. The Pakistani willingness to expand American drone strikes and launch a military campaign in their tribal regions dates squarely to the Administration’s recommitment to the region. Now that Mr. Obama is having second thoughts, so might the Pakistanis.

The President’s very public waver is already doing strategic harm. The Taliban are getting a morale boost and claiming victory, while our allies in Europe have one more reason to rethink their own deployments. Such a victory, as the head of the British army Sir David Richards warned on Sunday, would have an “intoxicating effect” on extremist Islam around the world. …

…In an interview with Newsweek, Gen. McChrystal said he wouldn’t resign if the President rejects his request for more troops. If he were really trying to dictate policy, he’d have given a different answer. But we don’t think Gen. McChrystal should stay to implement a Biden war plan either. No commander in uniform should ask his soldiers to die for a strategy he doesn’t think is winnable—or for a President who lets his advisers and party blame a general for their own lack of political nerve.

Jennifer Rubin explains why keeping General McChrystal from talking with Congress hurts the administration.

Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings … therefore argues that there isn’t merely a “right to speak if a policy debate becomes too far removed from reality” but, in essence, an obligation to do so. (”We need to hear from him because he understands this reality far better than most in Washington.”) And O’Hanlon reminds his fellow Democrats that they were the ones pleading with the military to step forward (testify in front of Congress before Donald Rumsfeld’s departure) when Bush’s Iraq policy was faltering.

McChrystal’s forthrightness and the defensive reaction of the White House tell us several things. First, the White House doesn’t have a good response on the merits. “Shut up” is not a policy analysis. Second, whatever processes exist within the White House for decision-making have stalled and malfunctioned, causing the debate to go public. Had a decision been promptly made, none of this would have occurred. And third, now the entire country knows the unified position of the military and understands that the opposition comes from the likes of Joe Biden. The public-relations problem for the White House has gotten much worse.

When we put aside the conflict between the military and the White House, we are still left with the underlying question: Will Obama implement the recommendation of his general to achieve his policy, and if not, why not? Eventually, if he rejects his commanders’ advice, the president will have to live with the consequences, both on the battlefield and at home. And right now, many voters are wondering why the White House is telling its most respected military leaders not to tell the public the unvarnished truth about a war that just seven weeks ago the president declared to be critical to our national security.

Peter Wehner adds his thoughts: the public relations issue may be unpleasant, but the most important result is making a good choice.

…Having worked in three administrations, I understand the agitation that a story like McChrystal’s can cause. But having worked in three administrations I can also testify that it’s imperative that there be open, honest, and rigorous debate; that different points of view be considered; that the strongest arguments against any case be amassed and made; and that what people should say ought to be judged on the merits rather than on the short-term political furor it creates. That’s fairly easy to say from the outside, when you’re not being pounded by the political class or feeling as if you have been boxed into a corner.

But what matters in the end is getting the policy right — and if a painful process leads to a better outcome in the end, it’s more than worth it. That’s easy to forget when you’re working at the highest levels of government and in the line of fire. But it’s precisely because you’re working at the highest level of government and in the line of fire that those lessons need to learned, internalized, and acted on.

If I were working in the Obama administration, I imagine that my first reaction to General McChrystal’s comments would have been negative. But I hope, on reflection, that I would see something else as well — that while McChrystal’s comments may have made life more difficult in the short run for the Obama administration, McChrystal has, in fact, done the administration and the public a favor. Stanley McChrystal deserves to be praised, not criticized, for his candor. We need more of it, at every level of government. It helps, of course, that he also happens to be quite right in his recommendation.

The president thinks too highly of himself, and needs new speechwriters, says George Will.

In the Niagara of words spoken and written about the Obamas’ trip to Copenhagen, too few have been devoted to the words they spoke there. Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance.

Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about . . . themselves. Although the working of the committee’s mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games on aesthetic grounds — unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport. …

Becoming solemn in Copenhagen, Obama said: “No one expects the Games to solve all our collective problems.” That’s right, no one does. So why say that? …

…. But Obama quickly returned to speaking about . . . himself:

“Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night, people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of the U.S. presidential election. Their interest wasn’t about me as an individual. Rather . . .”  …

Liberal Richard Cohen says the Copenhagen trip shows that President does not understand the importance of his position.

Barack Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago for the Olympics would have been a dumb move whatever the outcome. But as it turned out (an airy dismissal would not be an unfair description), it poses some questions about his presidency that are way more important than the proper venue for synchronized swimming. The first, and to my mind most important, is whether Obama knows who he is.

This business of self-knowledge is no minor issue. It bears greatly on the single most crucial issue facing this young and untested president: Afghanistan. Already, we have his choice for Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, taking the measure of his commander in chief and publicly telling him what to do. This MacArthuresque star turn called for a Trumanesque response, but Obama offered nothing of the kind. Instead, he used McChrystal as a prop, adding a bit of four-star gravitas to that silly trip to Copenhagen by having the general meet with him there.

This is the president we now have: He inspires lots of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs, where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama. If he remains consistent to his rhetoric of just seven weeks ago, he will send more troops to Afghanistan and more of them will die. “This is not a war of choice,” he said. “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”

Obama could have gone further. Not only would the Taliban be restored, but the insurgency might consume Pakistan. If that happens, then a nuclear power could become a failed state — Pakistan’s pretty close to that now — and atomic weapons could fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. India, just next door and with mighty antipathy for Muslim terrorism, could well act on its own. …

Excellent piece by David Harsanyi on the types of people who go to the government to create chaos.

Mr. Hoover knows everything. He attended a high-brow graduate school and worked as a Senate aide before becoming a policy expert. (He even pretends to understand Jeremy Bentham.) He is a man who craves acceptance from the other smart people who surround him. …

…If you put a man like Mr. Hoover in charge of government, he’d take to the task with an unrestrained confidence. Since he’s so much smarter than you, he’d have no compunction forcing you to do the right thing on an array of issues, from your light bulbs to your health care. …

…The United States has from its inception squabbled over the appropriate role of government — one that pundits on cable TV, for all their bluster, rightly label a debate between socialism and free markets. Yes, this debate pits the theoreticians against the doers, but it is largely a fight between the state and the individual.

So let’s have the debate. But before we do, let’s understand that Mr. Hoover is going to win. Mr. Hoover always wins. He takes no real risk. If he can’t convince us, he has the power to bribe, print money, “compel” citizens, bully and monopolize the process. It’s no more complicated than that. …

Peter Wehner recounts how E. J. Dionne goes from Afghan hawk to Afghan bug-out.

…On September 15, 2006, he wrote this:

“Both [Joe Biden and John Kerry] emphasized what should be a central element in the debate, the potential disaster looming in Afghanistan. The administration, Mr. Biden said last week, “has picked the wrong fights at the wrong times, failing to finish the job in Afghanistan, which the world agreed was the central front in the war on radical fundamentalism, and instead rushing to war in Iraq, which was not a central front in that struggle.” On Saturday, Mr. Kerry condemned the administration’s “stand-still-and-lose strategy” and called on the administration to send 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan to quell the Taliban insurgency. . . . These speeches reflect a growing consensus among many Democrats: First, that Iraq is a blind alley, a distraction from the war on terror, not its “central front.” Second, that the United States needs a responsible way to disengage from Iraq , re-engage in Afghanistan, and prepare itself to deal with the rising power of Iran, so far a real winner from Mr. Bush’s Iraq policies.”

There is more — but what’s clear is that what was once a “war of necessity” is now, for liberals, a tiresome and troublesome war. Not that long ago, success in Afghanistan was in the vital long-term interest of the country. It was the “central front” in the war against militant Islam, a just conflict in which to re-engage (including by sending more troops). Nation-building was in — especially for “Bush’s new Democratic allies.” Failure to rebuild Afghanistan would be a grave error. And Iraq was a mistake in part because it left the Afghan war “unfinished.” Apparently those arguments have become inoperative.

Why the volte-face? And why the frantic efforts to urge Obama to reject the recommendation by General Stanley McChrystal, who believes that without additional troops our mission in Afghanistan “will likely result in failure” and “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” Perhaps, as the great Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami has written, the “good war” of Afghanistan was “the club with which the Iraq war was battered.” Regardless of the reason, the inconsistency and inconstancy on Afghanistan by Dionne and his fellow liberals are both obvious and damning. They are reminding us, one more time, why they cannot be trusted on matters of national security.

Jay Nordlinger posts some responses he received about guns in America, from the people who cling to them.

A little more mail, based on my Impromptus today, and an earlier Corner post …

Jay,

I grew up in Baltimore City. In seventh grade (1965-ish), my parents allowed my brothers and me to take our .22 rifles on the transit bus to the end of the line, where we did some target practice and hunted for small animals in the woods. My mother was always a “free-range” mom — as the newly discovered parenting style is being called — so the fact that she was fine with us carrying guns cross-town on a bus is normal to me. What is strange to me now is that the Maryland Transit Authority was fine with it, too. As long as we showed the driver that the clip was out of the gun, he waved us by.

Another:

Jay,

A few years ago on Christmas morning while walking my little dogs, as I do every morning, I heard the noise of gunshots coming from several different directions. I live in a small town in Utah. It was then that I realized how fortunate I am to live here. Not for one minute did I think any violence or crime was being committed. You see, it was just folks trying out their new Christmas gifts by firing a few rounds off.

Many Americans would be amazed that such places exist, in America; many other Americans would be amazed at their countrymen’s amazement. …

It’s not enough Obama will lower the oceans, Investor’s Business Daily editors catch the White House suggesting the recent NY terror plot was unearthed by The One’s interest. Normally IBD editorials aren’t in the humor section, but this one belongs.

National Security: Intelligence officials say alleged terrorist plotter Najibullah Zazi was caught not thanks to domestic surveillance but by CIA tracking of al-Qaida. The White House says the president did it. …

…Zazi was reportedly tracked down through the CIA’s discovery of his communications with a high-level al-Qaida contact. But to hear the White House describe it, you’d think a satellite was transmitting real-time video to the Situation Room showing Zazi as he drove across the country.

“Senior officials added the case to Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office,” the Washington Post was told by presidential aides, after which “the case quickly piqued Obama’s curiosity and led to what aides called an intensive three-week White House focus on the case.”

What a juggling act: While pushing Congress for radical health reform, reneging on our commitment to the Poles and the Czechs on missile defense, pondering whether to take the advice of the general he appointed to run the war in Afghanistan, and horning into Israel’s domestic policies regarding settlements, the commander in chief managed to laser in on the Zazi case at a point when the professionals “had only fragmented information about Zazi.” …

Scott Adams has the details on an amusing terrorist scheme. If only all our enemies would use these enemas.

I assume that most of you have heard about the so-called Ass Bomber. He was a terrorist who tried to kill a Saudi Deputy Interior Minister by putting a bomb up his ass and detonating it when they met. Unfortunately for the terrorist, the bomb was only big enough to kill the Ass Bomber himself.

This raises many interesting questions. At the top of my list: Why did the Ass Bomber think that killing the Deputy Interior Minister was worth shoving a bomb up his own ass? Sure, I could see if it was the Interior Minister himself, but the deputy?

I think Saudi Arabia played this wrong. Instead of telling the state controlled media that the ASSassination attempt failed, they should have reported that the Deputy Interior Minister was dead, and so was everyone else in the building. And they should have said there was no way to stop this sort of brilliant attack. Within weeks, every member of Al Qaeada would have shoved a too-small bomb up his ass and detonated it in a market or mosque. The innocent bystanders would be startled and perhaps a little bit slimed, but otherwise unhurt. Terrorism would have a quick and amusing conclusion. …

Make sure to go to the cartoons to see a hilarious view of the world from demonbaby.com that reminds us of Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker covers.

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We start with three items on the economy.

Spengler takes a dim view of our short term economic prospects and presents an excellent step-by-step explanation of what we are seeing in the markets in reaction to the government’s foolish attempts to help. Below are the beginning and ending summaries.

President Barack Obama may be remembered for permanent depression, the way that Leon Trotsky’s name is linked with permanent revolution. Fiscal stimulus combined with near-zero interest rates have proven to be a toxic cocktail for the United States, the macroeconomic equivalent of barbiturates and alcohol. Keynesian spending creates a deficit that sucks all the available capital out of the grassroots economy and transfers it to the Treasury market. Easy funding terms from the Federal Reserve allow financial institutions to make money in government bonds while shutting off credit to the rest of the economy. It’s classic crowding out, in which the government’s misguided effort to spend its way out of recession pushes the productive economy deeper into the hole.  …

…The parallels between America in 2009 and Japan in 1989 are uncanny. An asset price bubble has collapsed, just before a tsunami of prospective retirements that the asset bubble was supposed to fund. Demand for savings is bottomless, and the government satisfies demands for savings by running a huge deficit and issuing debt. The crippled banking system borrows at an interest rate of zero and buys government securities. And the economy shrivels up and dies.

Japan, though, had one advantage: it knew how to export. There is only one way to drastically increase savings while maintaining full employment, and that is to export. America has neither the export capacity nor the customers. It could get them, but that is a different story. Francesco Sisci and I told it here US’s road to recovery runs through Beijing (Asia Times Online, November 15, 2008).

SeekingAlpha.com writes that despite the stock market gains, the economy does not appear to be recovering. The starting place for their analysis is heavy insider selling.

… For the latest week, ending October 1, 2009, insider selling to buying soared 44:1. Total insider buying was just $11.9MM for the week while insiders continued selling en masse – a staggering total of $532MM in selling. Perhaps most alarming is recent evidence from insiders themselves that confirm why they have been selling. …

…The recent Business Roundtable Survey results showed that 49% of all CEOs expect their sales to be flat or down in the coming 6 months. 51% expect an increase. 79% of all CEOs surveyed expect their capital spending to be flat or down in the coming 6 months. 87% of all CEOs expect to do no hiring in the coming 6 months…

…If you missed the recent interview with Ken Langone I highly recommend you take a few minutes and watch it in its entirety. Langone is an insider amongst insiders. Not only is he one of the co-founders of Home Depot (HD) (one of the companies at the heart of this economic downturn), but he is a board member at Yum! Brands, ChoicePoint, and former board member of the NYSE (NYX) and GE. In the interview Langone was brutally honest about the state of the recovery. Not only does he believe that the government is lying about the recovery, but he says the economy is actually getting worse:

“I’m confused. All of the people that I respect as investors and as people are all scratching their heads saying “we don’t get it”. All the businesses that I talk to – I spend a lot of my time now reaching out to people that are running companies, running businesses – I’m getting it back from everybody: it’s terrible, it’s getting worse, September was worse than August…I think this (rally) is a reflection of the fact that you get nothing in the way of rate of return in the bond market….”

The weekly rail data, weak retail sales, lack of revenue growth, extraordinary job losses and recent downturn in housing data all validate the actions taken by corporate insiders – the rally is not sustainable because the economy is not actually recovering…..

Robert Samuelson spends more time looking in the rear view mirror as he spins the tale of averting catastrophe. He talked with Christina Romer, who chairs the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. She says that government intervention averted a depression, but that the road to recovery is still unclear.

…The anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in mid-September inspired much commentary that saving the investment bank wouldn’t have averted the crisis. Too many other lenders held bad loans. True. But allowing Lehman to fail almost certainly made the crisis worse. By creating more unknowns — which companies would be rescued, how much were “toxic” securities worth? — Lehman’s bankruptcy converted normal anxieties into extreme fears that triggered panic.

As credit markets froze, stock prices collapsed. By year-end, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 23 percent from its pre-Lehman level and 34 percent from a year earlier. Financial panic poisoned popular psychology. In September 2008, the Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence was 61.4. By February, it was 25.3. Shoppers recoiled from buying cars, appliances and other big-ticket items. Spending on such “durables” dropped at a 12 percent annual rate in 2008′s third quarter and at a 20 percent rate in the fourth. With a slight lag, businesses canned investment projects; that spending fell at a 20 percent rate in the fourth quarter and a 39 percent rate in 2009′s first quarter.

That these huge declines didn’t lead to depression mainly reflects, as Romer argues, countervailing government actions. Private markets for goods, services, labor and securities do mostly self-correct; but panic, driven by the acute fear of the unknown, feeds on itself and disarms these stabilizing tendencies. In this situation, only government can protect the economy as a whole, because most individuals and companies are involved in the self-defeating behavior of self-protection. …

Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor who was Pickerhead’s first choice for McCain’s running mate has a WaPo Op-Ed on the conservative case for health care reform.

…So here are 10 ideas to increase the affordability and quality of health care. Some of these are buried within various Republican and Democratic plans that have been floated. They offer a path forward toward significant bipartisan reform. These proposals would require insurance companies to do their jobs and spread risk over large populations, restore patients’ power to make their own health-care decisions, and focus our system on quality instead of activity.

– Voluntary purchasing pools: Give individuals and small businesses the opportunities that large businesses and the government have to seek lower insurance costs.

– Portability: As people change jobs or move across state lines, they change insurance plans. By allowing consumers to “own” their policies, insurers would have incentive to make more investments in prevention and in managing chronic conditions. …

– Require coverage of preexisting conditions: Insurance should not be least accessible when it is needed most. Companies should be incentivized to focus on delivering high-quality effective care, not to avoid covering the sick.

– Transparency and payment reform: Consumers have more information when choosing a car or restaurant than when selecting a health-care provider. Provider quality and cost should be plainly available to consumers, and payment systems should be based on outcomes, not volume. Today’s system results in wide variations in treatment instead of the consistent application of best practices. We must reward efficiency and quality. …

WSJ editors explain why Cash for Clunkers did not help the economy.

Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”

If that’s true, heaven help the other programs. Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%. Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted. …

…The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.

Jonah Goldberg defends Glenn Beck against liberal and conservative criticism.

…The conservative criticism has more bite. Many conservatives believe Beck is undermining conservatism with his often goofy style and his sometimes outlandish and paranoia-tinged diatribes. In an ode to conservatives such as William F. Buckley, my friend Charles Murray writes, “Don’t tell me that we have to put up with the Glenn Becks of the world to be successful. Within living memory, the right was successful. The right changed the country for the better — through good arguments made by fine men.” Murray is nostalgic for conservative leaders who were, like Murray himself, soft-spoken intellectuals.

There are problems with such nostalgia. First, there has always been a populist front on the right, even during the “glory days” when Buckley was saying he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than the faculty at Harvard. Moreover, whatever Beck or Limbaugh’s faults, they are more cheerful — and more responsible — warriors than the populist right-wingers of yesteryear. The Tea Partiers may be rowdy and ideologically diffuse, but their goals — like Beck’s — are indisputably libertarian. And from a conservative perspective, popular libertarian uprisings should be preferable to the sort of statist populism so often celebrated on the left.

Most important, popularity is what the intellectuals were fighting for: to create a conservative culture (Americans describe themselves as conservative over liberal 2-1 ). By definition, making conservatism popular means making it less stuffy and intellectual and more accessible. Not only is Beck good at that, he actually gets people to read serious books in ways Buckley never could. Why defenestrate him from the house of conservatism merely to preserve the rarefied air?

Besides, why should conservatives support an unfair double standard? Liberals never see the antics of their more flamboyant celebrities as an indictment of liberalism itself. Perhaps it’s time conservatives adopted a more liberal standard.

In the LA Times, Thomas H. Maugh II reviews the studies, just published in Science, of a recently discovered ancestor of the human species, “Ardi.”

A treasure trove of 4.4-million-year-old fossils from the Ethiopian desert is dramatically overturning widely held ideas about the early evolution of humans and how they came to walk upright, even as it paints a remarkably detailed picture of early life in Africa, researchers reported Thursday.

The centerpiece of the diverse collection of primate, animal and plant fossils is the near-complete skeleton of a human ancestor that demonstrates our earliest forebears looked nothing like a chimpanzee or other large primate, as is now commonly believed. Instead, the findings suggest that the last common ancestor of humans and primates, which existed nearly 2 million years earlier, was a primitive creature that shared few traits with modern-day members of either group.

The findings, analyzed in a large group of studies published Thursday in the journal Science, also indicate that our ancestors began walking upright in woodlands, not on grassy savannas as prior generations of researchers had speculated.

The discovery of the specimen called Ardipithecus ramidus “is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution,” said paleoanthropologist David Pilbeam of Harvard University, who was not involved in the research. “The find itself is extraordinary, as were the enormous labors that went into the reconstruction of a skeleton shattered almost beyond repair,” he said in an e-mailed statement. …

…”These fossils are much more important than Lucy,” the 3.2-million-year-old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis that was found in the Afar desert in the 1970s, said paleoanthropologist Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the research. “The reason is that when Lucy was found, we already knew the major features of Australopithecus from fossils found in the 1940s. . . . These fossils are of a completely unknown creature, and are much stranger and more primitive than Australopithecus.” …

In the WSJ, Frans de Waal looks at one of the theories postulated by the discovery of “Ardi.” The fossil evidence suggests to some that apes as a family, including humans, had peaceful ancestors, and that the aggressive chimpanzees are the aberrant line of our genetic family.

Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?

The behavior of our ape relatives, known as peaceful vegetarians, once bolstered the view that our actions could not be traced to an impulse to dominate. But in the late 1970s, when chimpanzees were discovered to hunt monkeys and kill each other, they became the poster boys for our violent origins and aggressive instinct. …

…Doubts about this macho origin myth have been on the rise, however, culminating in the announcement this past week of the discovery of a fossil of a 4.4 million year old ancestor that may have been gentler than previously thought. Considered close to the last common ancestor of apes and humans, this ancestral type, named Ardipithecus ramidus (or “Ardi”), had a less protruding mouth equipped with considerably smaller, blunter canine teeth than the chimpanzee’s impressive fangs. This ape’s canines serve as deadly knives, capable of slashing open an enemy’s face and skin, causing either a quick death through blood loss or a slow one through festering infections. Wild chimps have been observed to use this weaponry to lethal effect in territorial combat. But the aggressiveness of chimpanzees obviously loses some of its significance if our ancestors were built quite differently. What if chimps are outliers in an otherwise relatively peaceful lineage?

Consider our other close relatives: gorillas and bonobos. Gorillas are known as gentle giants with a close-knit family life: they rarely kill. Even more striking is the bonobo, which is just as genetically close to us as the chimp. No bonobo has ever been observed to eliminate its own kind, neither in the wild nor in captivity. This slightly built, elegant ape seems to enjoy love and peace to a degree that would put any Woodstock veteran to shame. Bonobos have sometimes been presented as a delightful yet irrelevant side branch of our family tree, but what if they are more representative of our primate background than the blustering chimpanzee? …

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Marty Peretz continues to see things more clearly.

… So this question arises: If Obama could not get Chicago over the finish line in Copenhagen, which was a test only of his charms, how will he persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear weapons capacity or the Arabs, to whom he has tilted (we are told) only tactically, to sit down without their 60 year-old map as guide to what they demand from Israel.

What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an “optimal margin of illusion,” that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?

Chicago will survive its disappointments and Obama will, as well. It is the other stage sets on which the president struts–like he strutted in Cairo and at the United Nations–that concern me.

I know that the president believes himself a good man. My nervy query to him is: “Does he believe America to be a good country?”

Jennifer Rubin asks some questions about Honduras policy.

… Once again we’re left wondering: What was the Obama team thinking? It’s not as if Zelaya’s relationship with Chavez was a secret or that Chavez’s record was unknown. The Obama administration didn’t get ambushed here. No, it willfully ignored inconvenient facts and applicable history as it pursued with a singular focus its effort to atone for alleged past American sins in the region and ensure that Chavez didn’t have cause to complain about the president—who likes very much to be liked by those who don’t like America. …

WSJ Op-Ed on how the teacher’s unions lost the media.

Quick: Which newspaper in recent editorials called teachers unions “indefensible” and a barrier to reform? You’d be excused for guessing one of the conservative outlets, but it was that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times. A month ago, The New Yorker—yes, The New Yorker—published a scathing piece on the problems with New York City’s “rubber room,” a union-negotiated arrangement that lets incompetent teachers while away the day at full salary while doing nothing. The piece quoted a principal saying that union leader Randi Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”

Things only got worse for the unions this past week. A Washington Post editorial about charter schools carried this sarcastic headline: “Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased.” And the Times weighed in again Monday, calling a national teachers union “aggressively hidebound.”

In recent months, the press has not merely been harsh on unions—it has championed some controversial school reformers. Washington’s schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who won’t win any popularity contests among teachers, enjoys unwavering support from the Post editorial page for her plans to institute merit pay and abolish tenure. …

More National Review shorts.

Since 1991, every president has met with the Dalai Lama, every time the Dalai Lama has traveled to Washington. That means Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43. The Dalai Lama is traveling to Washington this month (October). But President Obama has said no. He is going to China in November, and is not willing to upset Beijing, by receiving the Dalai Lama, until after that trip. He argues that a “strong” U.S.-China relationship can only help the Tibetans. Some supporters of Tibet are grumbling about “appeasement.” They wonder what Obama will have to show for his solicitousness of China. We wonder too. We also note that Obama fears not to offend China by slapping arbitrary tariffs on its goods while fearing to offend China by receiving one of the more admirable men on the planet, speaking for one of the more persecuted peoples on the planet. Maybe Big Labor should adopt the Tibetan cause? …

George Will columns on parts of the climate change debate, and we use that to kick off a few items on current climate controversies. The pieces that follow are better organized than Will’s.

… America needs a national commission appointed to assess the evidence about climate change. Alarmists will fight this because the first casualty would be the carefully cultivated and media-reinforced myth of consensus — the bald assertion that no reputable scientist doubts the gravity of the crisis, doubts being conclusive evidence of disreputable motives or intellectual qualifications. The president, however, could support such a commission because he is sure “there’s finally widespread recognition of the urgency of the challenge before us.” So he announced last week at the U.N. climate change summit, where he said the threat is so “serious” and “urgent” that unless all nations act “boldly, swiftly and together” — “time . . . is running out” — we risk “irreversible catastrophe.” Prince Charles agrees. In March, seven months ago, he said humanity had 100 months — until July 2017 — to prevent “catastrophic climate change and the unimaginable horrors that this would bring.” …

Ronald Bailey in American.Com reports on our “uncrowded” planet. Seriously! For years Pickerhead has been fond of saying that everyone in the world, in families of four, on quarter acre lots could live in Alaska. Everyone. All 6.8 billion. Alaska has a land area of 663,248 square miles, making 424 million acres, providing 1,697 billion quarter acre lots to hold 1,700 billion families. OK we’re a little shy, but you get the idea. Everybody in the world living in Alaska. Now you know why the country looks a little empty when you fly coast to coast.

Every so often, the overpopulation meme erupts into public discourse and imminent doom is declared again. A particularly overwrought example of the overpopulation meme and its alleged problems appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch in a piece by regular financial columnist Paul B. Farrell.

Farrell asserts that overpopulation is “the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world.” Bigger than global warming, poverty, or peak oil. Overpopulation will end capitalism and maybe even destroy modern civilization. As evidence, Farrell cites what he calls neo-Malthusian biologist Jared Diamond’s 12-factor equation of population doom.

It turns out that Farrell is wrong or misleading about the environmental and human effects of all 12 factors he cites. Let’s take them one by one. …

Speaking of idiot doomsayers, John Tierney writes some more on Obama’s science czar, John Holdren.

As a long-time student of John P. Holdren’s gloomy visions of the future, like his warnings about global famines and resource shortages, I can’t resist passing along another one that has just been dug up. This one was made in 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama’s science adviser, in an essay just unearthed by zombietime (a blog that has been republishing excerpts of his past writings). In the 1971 essay, “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

They certainly weren’t the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can’t think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing. …

The humor section starts with a great post from NewsBusters which outlines the NY Times efforts to whitewash the Denmark Debacle.

… I should also note that a supposedly heroic Michelle Obama quote in the original (“‘Take no prisoners,’ she vowed”) also got the memory-hole treatment.

The change in the dateline location is important to the point of this post. The Washington story is not an hours-later update of an older story; the location change means that it is a new story. Yet it carries the same URL as the older one out of Copenhagen (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/sports/03obama.html). There is no journalistically defensible reason for deleting the Copenhagen-based story. Yet it has indeed disappeared. Times searches on word strings deleted from the older item come up empty.

As if the Times needed any more blows to its allegedly still-existing journalistic integrity, this one can’t help but beg the question of who at the White House put pressure on the Times to do what it did. Why would any journalist put themselves in the position of making people wonder if they bow to the wishes of the politically powerful? The answer may be that journalism, once thought to be at least lurking occasionally in its Manhattan hallways, is officially dead at the New York Times.

NY Times admits its readers are in the dark. Scott Johnson from Power Line has the story.

… Here’s an example, from Leigh Allen of San Francisco, who said she relies on The Times to keep her informed: “I often don’t hear about the latest conflict until I read a Facebook rant from an old high school friend or talk on the phone with my mother (both in conservative Orange County, Calif.). It’s embarrassing not to be able to respond with facts when I hadn’t even heard about the issue.” Michele Cusack of Novato, Calif., said that when someone asked if she had heard the latest about Acorn, “I had to answer ‘no’ because I get all my news from The New York Times.” …

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Elliott Abrams notes that we have seen this type of disastrous foreign policy before, but reminds us that the American people see things differently than the White House.

The appearance in Washington last week of Iran’s foreign minister, while the blood is not yet dry from his government’s continuing suppression of student protests, is a reminder of the disastrous foreign policy path the Obama administration has chosen. Not so long ago, proponents of a stronger U.S. foreign policy faced a similar policy of weakness and accommodation. The 1970s saw some pretty dark days of “détente”–when Gerald Ford refused to see Alexander Solzhenitsyn; when the United States allowed Cuban troops to flow into Angola; and when, in the single year of 1979, Jimmy Carter watched a small band of would-be commies take Grenada, the Sandinistas take Nicaragua, and the Soviets go into Afghanistan–not to mention the shah’s fall and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover of Iran.

One begins to wonder how far we will drift into a new period of generalized disaster. In Honduras, we back the Hugo Chávez acolyte and say we won’t respect November’s free elections. In Israel, we latch on to the bizarre theory that settlement growth is the key obstacle to Middle East peace and try to bludgeon a newly elected prime minister into a freeze that is politically impossible–and also useless in actually achieving a peace settlement. In Eastern Europe, we discard a missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czechs and leave them convinced we do not mean to fight off Russian hegemony in the former Soviet sphere.

Manouchehr Mottaki, foreign minister of Iran, visited Washington, as noted, after such visits had been forbidden for a decade. High-ranking American officials have made six visits to Syria, even while the government of Iraq and our commanding general there complain of Syrian support for murderous jihadists. The highest ranking U.S. official to visit Cuba in decades recently toured Castro’s tropical paradise. The president won’t see the Dalai Lama, however, for fear of offending the Chinese. …

…And that’s the final lesson, of Reagan as well as Scoop Jackson: Be of good cheer. No whining, no nasty personal attacks. It’s a political mistake, it’s unattractive, it’s self-defeating, and it’s unwarranted. The American people think our country is indeed “defined by our differences” with murderous Islamist groups and repressive regimes. They don’t agree that our “interests are shared” with such groups, and they believe friends deserve better treatment than enemies. We’re on the American people’s side, and they’re on ours in this struggle over our country’s relations with the world.

Today it’s Dana Milbank’s turn to be the media guy who turns on the new administration.

Helen Thomas is 89 years old and requires some assistance to get to and from the daily White House briefing. Yet her backbone has proved stronger than that of the president she covers.

On Thursday afternoon, Thomas gave a clinic in fortitude to President Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, during the briefing. “Has the president given up on the public option?” she inquired from her front-row-middle seat.

The press secretary laughed at this repetition of a common Thomas inquiry, but this questioner, who has covered every president since Kennedy, wasn’t about to be silenced. “I ask it day after day because it has great meaning in this country, and you never answer it,” she said. …

…”You’re not going to get it,” she advised.

“Then why do you keep asking me?” Gibbs inquired.

“Because I want your conscience to bother you,” Thomas replied. The room erupted; Gibbs reddened.

Actually, conscience isn’t the problem for Gibbs and his boss; it’s spine. Thomas’s question got at an Obama administration trait that is puzzling opponents and demoralizing supporters: Why isn’t the president more decisive and forceful? On many of the most pressing issues — the public option in health reform, troop levels in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran — the administration has hewed to hemming and hawing. …

Frank Rich too. Lisa Schiffren posts at the Corner.

…And then I read Frank Rich’s column in today’s New York Times. I despise pretty much everything political I have ever read by Rich. He very sincerely seems to believe that weakness is powerful, that the U.S. should not win any conflicts, that there is no honest conservatism, only hatred of the world’s have-nots. Normally I don’t read him, but there the column was, posted on my favorite aggregator site. And whoa. What a column. Read it here.

Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to “do our business in the light of day” — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to “restore the vital trust between people and their government.” He said, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge. . . .

Obama’s promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it’s the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans’ continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests . . . is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what’s happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.

The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. …

…Got it? Frank Rich, of all people, concludes that ”the public is not wrong” to mistrust the intentions of an administration that wishes to revamp one-sixth of the economy, given the attendant realities, including serious corruption. This is actual progress in the debate, even if it doesn’t quite get to the libertarian understanding that when government controls the economy, precisely that sort of corruption is inevitable — even if the new president was serious about stopping it. Bravo, Frank.

There’s plenty of Olympicfreude to fill up a couple of days of Pickings. We’ll indulge ourselves with Jennifer Rubin.

As the media and political observers pick over the remains of the failed Olympics-bid debacle, the debate has boiled down to this: Will it be a temporary embarrassment for the president or a long-term problem, an emblem of overreach and underachievement? There is more to this than simply predicting the toll it will take on Obama. Both the rebuff and the Obama team’s stunned reaction have stripped the veneer from the Obama mystique. Suddenly, the entire country realizes that that there is no “master plan” behind what Obama does. In fact, there may be no plan at all….

…Could it be that there is less to Obama and his team of geniuses than we were led to believe? Maybe Obama’s domestic and foreign-policy agenda is all based on wishful thinking: a cost-neutral health-care plan will emerge from Congress, talks with Iran will produce results, sweet-talking the Russian bear will pan out, there is some magic pill to achieve victory in Afghanistan that has escaped the nation’s leading counterinsurgency gurus, and private-sector jobs will return despite the anti-employer policies flowing from Washington. …

…The IOU rebuff may turn out to be Obama’s man-behind-the-curtain moment, straight out of the Wizard of Oz. It may be that the whole Hope and Change routine has been little more than a lot of cheesy special effects—and a cynical game to convince the public that the great and powerful leader really is worthy of awe.

The people are finally figuring out the act.

Mark Steyn says that federal health care will be as good as federal bridge-building.

…Health care isn’t really that complicated, not for you and your dependents. To be sure, if you need a particular operation or course of treatment, it can require a four- or five-figure sum. But, in the course of his life, the average American makes many four-, five-, and even six-figure purchases: They’re called, just to cite the obvious examples, cars and homes. Very few of us stroll into the realtor’s with an attaché case containing a quarter-million dollars in small bills. Yet, remarkably, most of us manage to arrange the acquisition of houses and automobiles without routing the transaction through some vast federal bureaucracy. If you attempt to design a system for hundreds of millions of people, it’s bound to be complicated. Ask your nearest Soviet commissar, whose five-year plans we now seem to be emulating in both their boundless optimism and their entirely predictable consequences.

A few weeks back I mentioned a couple of bridges in a neighboring town of mine, both on dirt roads serving maybe a dozen houses. Bridge A: The town was prevailed upon to apply for some state/town 80/20 funding plan, which morphed under the stimulus into some fed/state 60/40 funding plan. Current estimated cost: $655,000. The town’s on the hook for 20 percent of the state’s 40 percent — or $52,400. There’s no estimated year of completion, or even of commencement, and the temporary bridge the town threw up has worn out.

Bridge B: Following their experience with Bridge A, the town replaced this one themselves, in a matter of weeks. Total cost: $30,000.

Government is simple provided two conditions are met: You do it locally, and you do it without unions. …

…Building a bridge is easy and affordable: America’s settlers did it all the time. What makes it complex and unaffordable is statism. A couple of seasons back, the preferred shorthand for government waste was “Bridge to Nowhere.” In fact, the bridge leads somewhere quite specific, and, if you don’t like where it’s headed, you’d better do something about it before we’re any farther across the river.

Veronique de Rugy looks at the growing federal deficit.

The Bush-era deficits were bad. I know. I spent eight years complaining about the president’s lack of fiscal responsibly (here and here for instance). I even wrote that Republicans during Bush’s time in office made French socialists look like Reagan. However, President Obama’s new projected deficits are truly frightening. And the worse part: we haven’t seen it all yet. …

…First, while President Obama is fond of promoting what he calls a “new ethic of responsibility”—in fact he named his first budget, for fiscal 2010, “A New Era of Responsibility”—that is a misrepresentation of his actual budget plan. For each of Obama’s years in office, the deficit is projected to be larger than any year during Bush’s terms.

Second, Obama is right to note that he inherited a large deficit in fiscal 2009. But as we can see here, he is responsible for growing the deficit beyond expectations in fiscal 2009 and thereafter. In fact, in its January 2009 projections, the CBO built in most of the Bush-era policy spending, including the TARP bailout (which President Obama voted for as a senator) and the takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In spite of his rhetoric, President Obama bears most of the responsibility for the red part of the bar in fiscal 2009, which includes, among other things, some auto bailouts and $31 billion of additional funding for the omnibus bill, the share of the stimulus funding spent in that fiscal year.

Third, Obama’s deficits are frightening but they promise to get worse. Each month that goes by the president adds spending to the deficit. The August 2009 projections for instance, do not include any of the president’s healthcare reform spending and they assume that the “temporary” stimulus spending will not be prolonged past fiscal 2011. Finally, they also assume that the economy will recover soon and that it will grow enough to generate increasing tax revenue, in spite of the president’s plan to impose new taxes and regulations on the private sector. In other words, the deficit will likely continue to deteriorate beyond the current projections. …

We have National Review shorts today. Here are two:

Chief Justice John Roberts was taking questions from students at the University of Michigan Law School. Someone asked him whether too many justices come from elite schools. Roberts, a graduate of Harvard College and Law School, said no: “Some went to Yale.”

The peak of William Safire’s early career is a twice-told tale, but it deserves one more telling: As a 29-year-old PR man, he lured Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev to an exhibit of a “typical American house” that he was tending in Moscow, then snapped them debating the merits of capitalism. The photo made instant history; the haunch-faced bureaucrat at Nixon’s side was a young Leonid Brezhnev. Safire wrote speeches for Nixon and Spiro Agnew, then in 1973 began a twice-weekly column for the New York Times. They billed him as their conservative voice, which he wasn’t, quite: Safire was an anti-Communist liberal Republican. He had a sprightly style, a big bag of tricks (year-end predictions, first-person forays into leaders’ thoughts), and a willingness to work the phones and to chase down malefactors of every stripe, including liberal Democrats. He was missed when he retired in 2005; is missed now that he has died, age 79. R.I.P.

The Economist reports on an amazing advancement in the field of medicine.

DIALYSIS is not as bad as dying, but it is pretty unpleasant, nonetheless. It involves being hooked up to a huge machine, three times a week, in order to have your blood cleansed of waste that would normally be voided, via the kidneys, as urine. To make matters worse, three times a week does not appear to be enough. Research now suggests that daily dialysis is better. But who wants to tied to a machine—often in a hospital or a clinic—for hours every day for the rest of his life?

Victor Gura, of the University of California, Los Angeles, hopes to solve this problem with an invention that is now undergoing clinical trials. By going back to basics, he has come up with a completely new sort of dialyser—one you can wear. …

William Amelia in the WSJ, writes about the author and the story that brought the short story to Russian literature.

In his short, tormented life, the Russian novelist Nikolai Vassilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) managed to write for the ages. His oeuvre is huge. Among the familiar masterworks are “Dead Souls,” the first great epic Russian novel; “The Inspector General,” a dramatic success; and volumes of Ukrainian and Petersburg tales, rich in folklore and culture with a froth of the supernatural. He is regarded as one of the major influences in the development of realism in Russian literature.

But it is “The Overcoat,” the last story that Gogol wrote—perhaps his finest and most famous—that particularly characterizes his legacy. It is a remarkable piece of literary art, displaying Gogol’s gift of caricature and imaginative invention. With “The Overcoat,” Gogol introduced the short story as a literary form in Russia, providing a new model for other writers of the time. No one said it better than Dostoevsky: “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.” …

…Vladimir Nabokov allowed that the real Gogol was found only in “The Overcoat.” “When he tried to write in the Russian tradition,” Nabokov said, “he lost all trace of talent. But in the immortal ‘The Overcoat’ he let himself go and became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.”

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Charles Krauthammer gives us the back story on Sarkozy’s response to Obama’s speech on nuclear disarmament at the UN. Sarkozy was also sending a pointed message to Obama for holding back on the Qom news. Sarkozy’s comments were posted by Maura Flynn on BigGovernment.com, which Pickings carried on September 28th.

…Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran’s nuclear program — whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama’s naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.

Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action.

Obama refused. Not only did he say nothing about it, but, reports the Wall Street Journal (citing Le Monde), Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom section of his speech. Obama held the news until a day later — in Pittsburgh. I’ve got nothing against Pittsburgh (site of the G-20 summit), but a stacked-with-world-leaders Security Council chamber it is not.

Why forgo the opportunity? …

… ”The administration told the French,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “that it didn’t want to ‘spoil the image of success’ for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N.” …

Jennifer Rubin also looks at the Sarkozy speech and says the speech is a blueprint for conservatives to spur the White House to action based on reality.

…Sarkozy’s speech is a finely constructed argument against Obama’s open-ended scheme of negotiations and willful ignorance about the events that are unfolding. For conservatives, it provides the necessary building blocks for an alternative foreign policy. Obama has his eyes on the distant horizon; conservatives should urge us to see what’s happening in front of our eyes. Obama would rather skip over inconvenient facts and unhelpful history; conservatives should highlight them and extract relevant lessons. Obama is wary of employing leverage or defining his position; conservatives should insist he do both. And while Obama appeals to some mythical “international community” (as if there actually existed a world composed of nations that shared the same values and aspirations), conservatives would do well to point out that other nations in the world as it is (replete with bad actors and nervous allies) are watching Obama, evaluating his conduct, and making assessments about their own conduct.

The question remains: Will the West follow Sarkozy’s worldview, or Obama’s? Those concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran and a regional nuclear-arms race had better hope it is the former.

David Warren compares Obama and Gorbachev, as two leaders presiding over nations in trouble.

…Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.

Last week three certifiable liberals turned on Obama. Today we have two more; Martin Peretz and Margaret Carlson.

Martin Peretz reports on Hillary’s efforts to protect women, and notes that there are many women in Afghanistan that need our protection.

Hillary Clinton has become the president’s secretary for women’s affairs, and she’s done a good job at it–within the severe limits of what realistically can be done to protect females from sexual violence in war zones.  On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council met, with Hillary in the chair, and as the Associated Press put it, “adopted a resolution … condemning sexual violence in war zones.”  The resolution passed unanimously which is always a bad sign because it signals inadequate measures, which are the only ones that will get support from the five permanent members.

Mrs, Clinton appealed “for global action to end the scourge.”  The council created a “special envoy” (my, how many special envoys there are around the world) to combat the use of rape as a weapon of way. The resolution also mandates the U.N. secretary general “to dispatch a team of experts to advise governments on how best to prosecute offenders.”

Clinton told the council:

It is time for all of us to assume our responsibility to go beyond condemning this behavior to taking concrete steps to end it, to make it socially unacceptable, to recognize it is not cultural, it is criminal … We must act now to end this crisis. …

…PS:  In the meantime, while the president and his secretary of state are worrying about women, there is one decision to be made at the White House that will affect the very lives and dignity of more than 14 million women.  It is the decision over Afghanistan where we–that is, our soldiers and the soldiers of our NATO–have freed millions of Afghan women from a humiliating form of degradation and slavery.  Their fates are also at stake in the issue of whether we stay and fight or not.  But almost nobody has them in the equation.

Margaret Carlson, in Bloomberg News, compares Obama’s trip to the IOC meeting with Nero’s fiddling.

Most of the time those complaining that President Barack Obama is doing too much really wish that he were doing nothing at all. It’s not that he is spreading himself too thin but that he is spreading himself too wide — over health care, executive bonuses and kid’s homework, while pandering to dictators at the United Nations. …

…I rarely have common ground with Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. … Still, Bond has a point when he says “it’s baffling that the president has time to travel to Copenhagen, to be on ‘Letterman’ and every channel except the Food Network, and, yet, he doesn’t have time to talk with and listen to his top general.” …

…Let’s hope General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, wasn’t hoping for a meeting tomorrow. That’s when Obama will be busy upstaging Brazil’s soccer star Pele and Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. According to Bond, who is keeping track, it’s been more than two months since the president had the kind of face time with McChrystal that he’s giving the International Olympic Committee. …

Andrew Stuttaford has a clever post on the Corner.

Chicago is a fine city and a place that I always enjoy visiting. It deserves better than to have the Olympics foisted upon it. What I cannot understand is why President Obama is joining in with the effort to bring this scourge to his home town. The Olympics after all, is a festival of bureaucratic arrogance, financial irresponsibility, internationalist vacuity, and politically correct blather.

Oh . . .

The Boston Globe editors think Obama should have left the IOC well enough alone.

Acting as if he were head of the Chicago chamber of commerce, not the leader of the United States, President Obama is traveling hat in hand to meet with the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen today. He’s pushing for his hometown to host the 2016 Games. In case the judges aren’t dazzled by him and his wife, Michelle, he’s got Oprah Winfrey to help seal the deal. Chicago has much to gain from the Olympics, and no doubt all Americans would love to see the Games on US soil. Obama may help deliver the prize. But he risks diminishing the prestige of his office by mobilizing it behind this narrow cause. And it seems at least possible that some judges will feel so put off by his hard sell that they’ll opt for one of the other finalists.

Obama gained support during the presidential campaign by staying cool amid an economic meltdown, while John McCain marched into Washington in an attempt to show a spirit of action. Instead, McCain showed his futility. Americans don’t like to see their leaders appearing rash or weak. If the Olympic committee rejects the president, Obama becomes just another failed salesman. It’s a mistake for him to sink so much into a cause that may not even need his help. He should have stayed home.

In The National Journal, Stuart Taylor believes that specialized health courts would have better results than tort reform.

…Other states encourage doctors to admit errors, apologize, and offer out-of-court settlements, without fear that such actions will be used against them in court. Some scholars propose tying early offers and settlements to limits on contingent legal fees, with less work for the lawyers to do. These are good ideas — but again, they provide no remedies for groundless claims or defensive medicine.

The most promising proposal is to send malpractice suits to new, specialized health courts that have expert judges and no juries. By efficiently separating valid from invalid claims, health courts could award malpractice victims more-timely, more-certain compensation, with far lower legal and administrative costs.

Health courts would also better protect blameless doctors and thus reduce defensive medicine. By issuing written opinions consistently enforcing reasonable standards of care, they could enable doctors to safely forgo medically unnecessary tests and other interventions.

The health court idea has been championed by the Harvard School of Public Health and by Common Good, a law-reform group headed by Howard. Supporters include consumer groups such as AARP as well as medical organizations and political leaders ranging from former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

The trial lawyer’s lobby and its allies hate the idea. They see juries as an essential safeguard for victims of negligent conduct. Although there is some truth to this view, juries lack the expertise to evaluate complex medical judgments, especially when the plaintiffs are severely injured and the doctors are not to blame. In addition, different juries apply wildly inconsistent standards in different cases, and they are not asked to explain their reasoning. …

Even though it was fought in the 19th Century, the American Civil War was the opening event in 20th Century warfare. The Economist reviews The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan, looking at how previous European wars influenced the US, and how the Civil War influenced future European wars.

A British military historian, even one as distinguished as Sir John Keegan, is hard put to say something new about America’s civil war. Fine American scholars, such as Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote and James McPherson, have explored every inch of its blood-sodden battlefields. Sir John’s achievement is to bring an international perspective to a conflict which, in the number of casualties in relation to population, “bears comparison only with the European losses in the Great War and Russia’s in the Second World War.”

In the 1860s the French army was regarded as supreme by the staff at the American military college at West Point and both sides in the war respected French generalship. Napoleon’s crushing victories at Austerlitz and Jena influenced the South’s Robert E. Lee as he aspired to end the war with a climactic Napoleonic battle. The North’s George McClellan was inspired by the Anglo-French campaign on the Black Sea in the Crimean war (1853-56) when he mounted an amphibious assault on Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. …

…As well as looking back at European influences, Sir John looks forward to how the civil war changed European warfare. Relatively primitive trench warfare on the Confederacy’s northern front in Virginia presaged the slaughter of trench warfare on the Somme and at Passchendaele. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s spoliation of Georgia and the Carolinas “inaugurated a style of warfare that boded the worst sort of ill for peoples unable to keep a conqueror at bay, as Hitler’s campaigns in eastern Europe 75 years later would testify.” …

…As a Southern gentleman, Robert E. Lee is seen by Sir John as peerless, though not as a general, where he rates him inferior to his Unionist counterpart, Ulysses Grant. He praises Lee for his purity of character and describes him as a devout Christian and noble soldier who spared his reunited country the horrors of protracted guerrilla warfare when he accepted defeat with grace. But it was Sherman, not Lee, who set the pattern for modern warfare