Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Today we explore at length the decision making process regarding force levels in Afghanistan. This foolishness has taken so long, card carrying liberals like David Broder and Doyle McManus are fed up. We elected this sophomoric president and now we watch as he apparently thinks there is some perfect decision. There isn’t. There are only less bad choices. The important thing is we make sure no country allows al-Qaeda to set up shop again.

We start with an illustration by Gary Schmitt in American.com who notes that after the 9/11 attack we asked Afghanistan to turn over bin Laden. (Remember Bush; “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”) They refused. So on October 7th we started airstrikes and on November 14th Kabul fell to our forces. That took 64 days. Obama got McChrystal’s request August 30th. That was 78 days ago; and six or seven years since Obama and the Dems began telling us we were ignoring the war of necessity in Afghanistan. Makes you long for ”the Decider.”

Sarah Palin’s book is upon us. Telegraph, UK’s Toby Harnden, who has recently become a favorite, has amusing and perceptive thoughts about her future role.

Obama wants to be the anti-Bush president. Unfortunately Obama is succeeding in one instance, as evidenced by Gary Schmitt’s post in the American.com.

A friend from overseas emailed me to note that it was a span of 65 days between when the World Trade Center towers fell in New York on 9/11 and Kabul fell to American and coalition forces on 11/14. And between the attacks on 9/11 and the start of airstrikes against Kabul on 10/7, less than a month. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of American and allied forces in Afghanistan, delivered his Afghanistan strategy to President Obama on 8/30 this year and President Obama has yet to make a decision. That’s 73 days and counting. Maybe there is something to being “the decider” after all.

Jennifer Rubin comments on the news that the ambassador to Afghanistan is against troop buildup, and Obama is giving this some thought.

Are we back to square one, or is someone in the Obami camp simply trying to gum up the works? Maybe the president would like some more research. Maybe another round of meetings. Who knows? The process seems to have taken on a life of its own, and the president appears unwilling to make a decision, any decision.

Certainly even the most die-hard defenders of the president must be appalled. This is no way to run a war. We are close to a decision. No we aren’t. Gen. Stanley McChrystal will get his men. Oh, maybe not. It is hard to recall a more excruciating decision-making process.

And yet we are told, “The White House has chafed under criticism from Republicans and some outside critics that Obama is dragging his feet to make a decision.” They seem blissfully unaware that the Obami are becoming a ludicrous spectacle, a cringe-inducing display of equivocation. So maybe they’ll take a few more weeks. Consider some more options. Have some more meetings. And what about the troops who are in the field, week after week, awaiting a strategy and support? Oh yes, them. Well, the president can’t be rushed.

NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s comments about Afghanistan.

…And the other uncertainty is about Obama’s commitment himself. The issue is: If he takes this long, and if he gives all these excuses — which you talked about just a moment ago, about how we may not have a partner in Afghanistan, we may not have a partner in Pakistan — you’re expressing doubts about our allies in the region, and you’re implying that somehow this is a kind of social work, that the reason that we’re at war is to bolster these allies.

It’s protection of the American homeland. It’s what Petraeus had talked about — keeping out al-Qaeda and preventing the regrouping of al-Qaeda and their allies. It’s our war, and it’s in the name of our security.

If the president expresses all of this uncertainty and takes this long in agonizing, you got to wonder, is his heart in it? He has to make a speech after his decision to demonstrate that he really is committed to success in this, because all of this delay and these excuses about Afghan/Pakistani partners gives the impression of an administration that will be looking for an excuse of a certain point of withdrawing or pulling back.

In Contentions, Max Boot had this reaction to the possibility of more extended reviews.

This quote from an unnamed White House official, reported in today’s New York Times, filled me with dread:

“I’m not saying that we’ll be in a perpetual state of review, but the time the president has taken so far should signal to people that he will not hesitate to take a hard look at things and question assumptions if things are not moving in the right direction,” a senior White House official said.

Please, please say it ain’t so — that we won’t see another review like the present one for a long, long time. Bad enough that the White House has been ostentatiously and publicly reviewing all options in Afghanistan since August — for the second time this year! — while efforts to win the war are effectively put on hold. Worse is the possibility that we could see another such process as soon as next year.

Every president reacts, I suppose, to the perceived mistakes of his predecessors. George W. Bush thought that Bill Clinton was too professorial and vowed not to hold any of the aimless, grad-school-type chat sessions that were a hallmark of the Clinton decision-making process. Bush styled himself as the decider-in-chief and placed a premium on reaching decisions with a minimum of hand-wringing or second thoughts. The result was, as we know, some terrible decisions — especially in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. So now Obama, reacting to what he perceives as the lack of thought and debate that characterized decision-making in the Bush White House, is going too far in the other direction by publicizing every permutation of his Afghanistan thought process, and letting his subordinates suggest that the second-guessing and questioning will never stop.

Obviously it’s a good thing to be thoughtful and reflective and to take all factors into account before reaching a decision. But at some point the commander in chief has to say, “Enough! I’ve reached my decision, and now I’m going to give my commanders time and room to carry out the plan.” President Obama has not yet reached that point, and as the quote from his unnamed aide suggests, he may never reach that point. If he doesn’t, he will be doing terrible damage to our war effort. Success in war requires determination and will above all — even more than resources. If the commander in chief does not convey the determination to prevail, no matter what setbacks may arise, then the commitment of extra resources will not be all that effective because our enemies will be encouraged to think that they can simply wait us out and expect our will to snap at some point not too far in the future.

In the Corner, Rich Lowry thinks that the Procrastinator in Chief needs to decide on the big picture and leave the details to the generals.

At this point, Obama needs to settle for a “dumb” Afghan strategy. He’s clearly trying to be too cute and clever, and micro-managing aspects of the military campaign that are beneath his pay-grade. If he believes success in Afghanistan is important and a counter-insurgency campaign is the best way to achieve it, he should give McChrystal the troops he says he needs (actually, he should probably give him more if possible, to reduce the risk of failure). This business of examining the troop numbers province-by-province, and devising various “off ramps,” and parsing out what troop commitment will best pressure Karzai is a foolish attempt at an impossible exactitude. No plan so finely tuned from on high is going to survive its first contact with reality. Obama needs a “dumb” approach — figure out the basic strategy, resource it, and leave it at that. If it’s a successful strategy, most of the other things will probably follow — the off ramps, the welcome effect on Karzai, etc. This is not to say the implementation of the strategy shouldn’t be savvy and adaptive. But that’s for his generals. Obama just needs to make the simple — if not easy — decision and provide the political leadership to back it up. The world is waiting.

And in another post in Contentions, Peter Wehner makes some important points about the Afghanistan indecision.

…I have not begrudged President Obama the time to carefully think through a decision on Afghanistan — but this is ridiculous. This issue should have been front and center for the administration the moment it was clear Obama won the presidency. He has already presented (in March) his “new” strategy for Afghanistan. The fact that he wants to revisit his decision may be understandable, except for the fact that his foot-dragging is now harming us. Sometimes presidents are forced to make decisions based on external events and pressing outside needs. “The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance,” Henry Kissinger wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years. Governing the nation does not afford you the luxuries you have when conducting a college seminar.

President Obama not only needs to make a decision soon; once he does, assuming he does, we face the logistical challenges of getting the troops in place. Precious time has already been lost. If after all the time that’s been lost, Obama is now jettisoning all the options he has been presented with, including the McChrystal option, then what we are witnessing is extraordinarily irresponsible. Sometimes you can lose a war by not choosing. And that is the path we may well be on right now, if media reports are correct. …

Jamie Fly also posts about Afghanistan indecision in the Corner, and ends with an e-mail from a veteran.

As a retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant emailed to me after reading one of my Corner posts:

“Our service members are dying and the president is dithering. I have been in the military while a president dithered or failed to make a tough decision, it is eviscerating, and a rot settles in. “Commander in Chief” is not just a fancy title. The president is the ultimate officer and like any poor officer his failure to make tough decisions is seen as a weakness by his NCOs and men. Morale, that most fragile base of any good military unit suffers immediately. When our officers are fearful and indecisive, we become fearful and indecisive.

NCOs find reasons not to patrol or to avoid high-risk areas, Convoys are diverted to avoid possible confrontation, our allies desert us and the advantage is ceded to the enemy.

And this happens quickly, weeks are all that’s left to keep the advantage in Afghanistan. After a certain point in time “mission weariness” begins to settle in and the edge is lost on our weapon and almost impossible to regain. Quite frankly I fear that the time to make a difference is quickly slipping away and even if he eventually approves the fully levy of Gen McChrystal’s request the momentum may have been permanently lost.”

Now it’s the liberal’s turn to lose patience. Time to back McChrystal, says David Broder.

…In all this dithering, it’s easy to forget a few fundamentals. Why are we in Afghanistan? Not because of its own claim on us but because the Taliban rulers welcomed the al-Qaeda plotters who hatched the destruction of Sept. 11, 2001. The Taliban also oppressed its own people, especially women, but we sent troops because Afghanistan was the hide-out for the terrorists who attacked our country.

We knew that governing Afghanistan would never be easy. It had resisted outside forces through the ages, and its geography, tribal structure, absence of a democratic tradition and poverty all argued that once we went in, it would be hard to get out. …

…That imperative is reinforced by the presence of Pakistan, a shaky nuclear-armed power across a porous mountain border. If the Taliban comes back in Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda cells already in Pakistan will operate even more freely — and nuclear weapons could fall into the most dangerous hands.

Given all of this, I don’t see how Obama can refuse to back up the commander he picked and the strategy he is recommending. It may not work if the country truly is ungovernable. But I think we have to gamble that security will bring political progress — as it has done in Iraq. …

Jennifer Rubin picks up another from the Washington Post.

Jackson Diehl points out that the decision on an Afghanistan-war policy isn’t really as difficult as the Iraq challenge that George W. Bush faced when “there was no clear way forward.” For one thing, there was no precedent of an Iraq surge precedent to look at. But Obama has plenty of data, the experience of Iraq, and the best military team ever to wrestle with such issue already in place. For all the whining and protestations from the Obami that this is such a hard decision, it really isn’t. Diehl observes: …

And now Doyle McManus from the LA Times.

… the battle in Washington is causing real problems for U.S. foreign policy, beginning with mixed messages to both allies and adversaries.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates described the dilemma succinctly last week: “How do we signal resolve — and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this isn’t an open-ended commitment?”

The long debate has made Obama look indecisive and uncertain — because he has been. And the leaks of conflicting positions have given his critics ammunition for the postmortem debate over any decision he makes. If Obama chooses to go small, hawks will accuse him of ignoring the advice of his own military commander, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who asked for 40,000 additional troops. If he goes big, doves will accuse him of ignoring the advice of Ambassador Eikenberry, who said the additional troops wouldn’t do much good.

When he ran for president, “no drama Obama” prided himself on a campaign organization that never aired internal disputes and always closed ranks in common cause. Not in this process, which has turned into a very un-Obamalike battle of leaks and counterleaks. This much transparency, alas, creates a problem: Washingtonians love to keep track of winners and losers. A well-managed process gives losers a chance to lick their wounds in private, without suffering public damage to their reputations. This one is more likely to end in public recriminations. …

Rick Richman is back with more commentary on the bit parts that world events play in the Obama epic.

President Obama’s decision to send a video of himself to Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he said that “few would have foreseen [on that day in 1989] that . . . their American ally would be led by a man of African descent,” is not the first time he assigned that world-historical event a bit part in his own saga. The Wall also played a walk-on role in his election-night victory speech, included in a long litany of “Yes We Can” paragraphs (“A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination”). He mentioned it in his Berlin citizens-of-the-world speech, attributing the fall to the world standing as one.

Benjamin Kerstein has written an eloquent reminder that the fall of Communism was not the result of the world standing as one, but of the long and often despairing efforts of certain people to fight a future to which much of the world was resigned:

This anniversary, this triumph, this vindication, does not belong to all of us. It belongs to the anti-communists of all countries and all parties who fought for it, sometimes at great cost to reputation, family, friendship, sanity, and often life and limb. …

Some, like Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, and many, many others, had to face prison, expulsion, harassment, and the constant threat of death in order to make their plight known to the world. …

…“Tear down this wall” has entered the lexicon of great presidential utterances, but the president who uttered it went unmentioned this week by President Obama. Undoubtedly, as huge numbers of people rushed to freedom 20 years ago, few of them would have foreseen that Obama would become president of the United States. Even fewer would have foreseen that one day an American president would decline to join his fellow heads of state in Berlin to celebrate what happened that day.

In the Boston Phoenix, Steven Stark writes that Obama has already peaked.

…Obama still doesn’t seem to grasp that the collective Election Night reverie is over, and that now we are waiting for him to lead us in real time. Sure, a little bit of hubris was probably inevitable, but it led Obama to conclude, despite what he said back then, that the historic election had been about him. When in the end, as always, it was about us.

That night began to reveal an unfortunate truth: having reached a pinnacle on the day he was elected, Obama’s popularity and relationship with the American people had nowhere to go but down. …

…Something similar was bound to happen with Obama. Some figures grow during their time in the presidency; others diminish. Obama’s path was pre-ordained: unless he was able to achieve significant political victories immediately, he was destined to become — at least for a while — the incredible shrinking president. …

…Now that we, as a nation, have awakened from our post-election, post-racial dream state, we’ve begun to notice that our president may not be much interested in being a chief “executive,” given that he’s never run anything before or expressed the slightest inclination to do so. He has big ideas, to be sure, but that’s only a small part of the job. The hard, nitty-gritty labor of figuring out how government can actually work better — the operative word is “governing” — seems to hold no appeal for him. …

Now for a change of pace. One of our favorites, Toby Harnden, thinks the proper role for Sarah in the coming years is to replace Oprah.

…Perhaps there’ll be another vacancy in 2012 that might suit Mrs Palin.

In three years, it might well be time for Oprah Winfrey to move on. Her role as his biggest celebrity cheerleader last year already seems a teeny bit embarrassing and Obamamania will be as old hat as Smurfs and Rubik’s Cubes by then.

There is, though, someone who would be Oprah’s perfect successor. She’s got the fame, the huge book deals and, love her or hate her, she is an object of fascination for every American. We’ll see this week that she makes compulsive viewing while holding forth from that sofa.

I can see the bumper stickers now: “Time for O to go – Sarah Palin in 2012.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn says that a mass murder apparently isn’t reason enough to cause the Army to use common sense in assessing diversity.

…Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is, we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence.” Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out.

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the “shalwar kameez,” to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage. …

In Forbes, Tunku Varadarajan ends with practical processes that the Army should follow in order to keep soldiers and citizens safe.

…The PC–political correctness–problem is an obvious and thorny issue that the U.S. Army, at least, has to tackle. The Army had a self-identified Islamic fundamentalist in its midst, blogging about suicide bombings and telling everyone he hated the Army’s mission; and yet, they did, or could do, nothing about it. In effect, the “don’t-jump-to-conclusions” mentality was underway long before this man killed his colleagues.

So, first, it should be part of the mandatory duty of every member of the armed forces to report any remarks or behavior of fellow service members that could be construed as indicating unfitness for duty for any reason.

Second, there should be a duty to report such data up the chain of command, regardless of the assessment of the local commander.

Third, there should be a single high-level Pentagon or army department that follows all such cases in real time, whether the potential ground for alarm is sympathy with white supremacism, radical Islamism, endorsement of suicide bombing or simple mental unfitness.

Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.

David Warren comments on the political correctness that aided in the act of terrorism.

…There were reports from within the base (Fox News as usual seized on what other networks didn’t), that accused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had not merely been making anti-war remarks about Iraq and Afghanistan, but adding things like, “Muslims should stand up against the aggressor.” Do we still have a category for treason? He has been quoted from Internet postings comparing Islamist suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade. Another clue? …

…Time is certainly required to sort through such reports, and separate wheat from chaff, but the initial information alone was inconsistent with the media’s clichéd presentation of the “tragedy of a man in despair.”

This deadly enemy of the West — the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination — is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this…

…It also means ripping through the politically-correct drivel that is put in the way of investigators. They should surely be allowed to assume that every loyal Muslim will be eager to give information to help them identify any potential killers in their midst. …

Karl Rove looks at Obama’s sliding poll numbers.

…That’s only the beginning of Mr. Axelrod’s problems. If the 2010 midterms are nationalized, they will be a referendum on Mr. Obama’s increasingly unpopular policies. For example, in the newest Gallup survey released on Monday, only 29% say they’d advise their congressman to vote for the health-care bill. This is down from 40% last month. A Rasmussen poll out this week shows that 42% of Americans strongly oppose the bill, while only 25% strongly favor it. …

…High unemployment and the president’s low approval on jobs and the economy (which is at 46% in a CNN/Opinion Research poll released last week), won’t by themselves sink Democrats. But what will hurt are the beliefs that Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill was a flop and that he doesn’t know how to speed up the economic recovery.

Mr. Obama’s approval on handling the deficit in the CNN/Opinion Research survey is now 39%. The president’s plans to triple the deficit over the next decade is causing a level of angst among independents that we haven’t seen since Ross Perot ran for president in the 1990s. This angst has given Republicans a four-point lead in Gallup’s generic ballot (48% to 44%), putting the party in a better position than it was in spring 1994, just a few months before its historic takeover of Congress. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts in the Corner about the issues Bush inherited. And he didn’t whine about it.

George W. Bush inherited a recession. He also inherited the Iraq no-fly zones, a Middle East boiling after the failed last-minute Clintonian rush for an imposed peace, an intelligence community wedded to the notion of Saddam’s WMD proliferation, a Congress on record supporting “regime change” in Iraq, a WMD program in Libya, a Syrian occupation of Lebanon, Osama bin Laden enjoying free rein in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a renegade Pakistan that had gone nuclear on Clinton’s watch with Dr. Khan in full export mode, and a pattern of appeasing radical Islam after its serial attacks (on the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, U.S. embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole).

In other words, Bush inherited the regular “stuff” that confronts most presidents when they take office. What is strange is that Obama has established a narrative that he, supposedly unlike any other president, inherited a mess.

At some point, Team Obama might have at least acknowledged that, by January 2009, Iraq was largely quiet; Libya was free of WMD; Syria was out of Lebanon; most of the al-Qaeda leadership had been attrited or was in hiding; a homeland-security protocol was in place to deal with domestic terror plots; European governments were mostly friendly to the U.S. (unlike during the Chirac-Schröder years); and the U.S. enjoyed good relations with one-third of the planet in China and India.

The fact that in the Bush years we were increasingly disliked by Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chávez, Kim Jong Il, Morales, Ortega, and Putin, may in retrospect seem logical, just as their current warming to the U.S. may prove to be cause for alarm, given the repugnant nature of these strongmen. …

John Stossel explains that the current problems we have with health care are caused by the government.

…Government cannot do simple things efficiently. The bureaucrats struggle to count votes correctly. They give subsidized loans to “homeowners” who turn out to be 4-year-olds. Yet congressmen want government to manage our medicine and insurance. …

…Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that’s impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won’t talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?

Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians’ refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won’t solve our problems.

Freedom will.

Walter Williams, in Townhall, discusses Congress’ unconstitutional attempts to control society.

…Speaker Pelosi’s constitutional contempt, perhaps ignorance, is representative of the majority of members of both the House and the Senate. Their comfort in that ignorance and constitutional contempt, and how readily they articulate it, should be worrisome for every single American. It’s not a matter of whether you are for or against Congress’ health care proposals. It’s not a matter of whether you’re liberal or conservative, black or white, male or female, Democrat or Republican or member of any other group. It’s a matter of whether we are going to remain a relatively free people or permit the insidious encroachment on our liberties to continue.

Where in the U.S. Constitution does it authorize Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance? If Congress gets away with forcing us to buy health insurance, down the line, what else will they force us to buy; or do you naively think they will stop with health insurance? We shouldn’t think that the cure to Congress’ unconstitutional heavy-handedness will end if we only elect Republicans. Republicans have demonstrated nearly as much constitutional contempt as have Democrats. The major difference is the significant escalation of that contempt under today’s Democratically controlled Congress and White House with the massive increase in spending, their proposed legislation and the appointment of tyrannical czars to control our lives. It’s a safe bet that if and when Republicans take over the Congress and White House, they will not give up the massive increase in control over our lives won by the Democrats.

In each new session of Congress since 1995, John Shadegg, R-Ariz., has introduced the Enumerated Powers Act, a measure “To require Congress to specify the source of authority under the United States Constitution for the enactment of laws, and for other purposes.” The highest number of co-sponsors it has ever had in the House of Representatives is 54 and it has never had co-sponsors in the Senate until this year, when 22 senators signed up. The fact that less than 15 percent of the Congress supports such a measure demonstrates the kind of contempt our elected representatives have for the rules of the game — our Constitution. …

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor Jr. argues for less prison time for nonviolent offenders. Another unintended consequence of the drug war.

The November 9 Supreme Court arguments on whether it is cruel and unusual to impose life in prison without parole on violent juveniles who have not killed anybody understandably got prominent media coverage.

But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it’s a running sore that rarely generates dramatic “news.” That is our criminal-justice system’s incarceration of a staggering 2.3 million people, about half of them for nonviolent crimes, including most of the 500,000 locked up for drug offenses.

Forty percent of these prisoners are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are poor and uneducated. This has had a devastating impact on poor black families and neighborhoods, where it has become the norm for young men — many of them fathers — to spend time in prison and emerge bitter, unemployable, and unmarriageable. (These numbers come from studies cited by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a reform group.) …

The Economist reports on the growing deer problem in the U. S.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The WSJ editorial board comments on the aftermath of Kelo v New London.

The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London stands as one of the worst in recent years, handing local governments carte blanche to seize private property in the name of economic development. Now, four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo’s land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.’s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut.

The aftermath of Kelo is the latest example of the futility of using eminent domain as corporate welfare. While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other “desirable” elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation. …

…Kelo’s silver lining has been that it transformed eminent domain from an arcane government power into a major concern of voters who suddenly wonder if their own homes are at risk. According to the Institute for Justice, which represented Susette Kelo, 43 states have since passed laws that place limits and safeguards on eminent domain, giving property owners greater security in their homes. State courts have also held local development projects to a higher standard than what prevailed against the condemned neighborhood in New London.

If there is a lesson from Connecticut’s misfortune, it is that economic development that relies on the strong arm of government will never be the kind to create sustainable growth.

Today we hear from Camille Paglia on Pelosi’s version of Obamacare.

…A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it’s printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!

And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It’s as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies. Republicans, on the other hand, have basically sat on their asses about healthcare reform for the past 20 years and have shown little interest in crafting legislative solutions to social inequities. The usual GOP floater about private medical savings accounts is a crock — something that, given the astronomical costs of major medical crises, would be utterly unworkable for families of even average household income.

International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what’s the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure. Limited, targeted reforms can ban gouging and unfair practices and can streamline communications now wastefully encumbered by red tape. But insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry are not the sole cause of mounting healthcare costs, and constantly demonizing them is a demagogic evasion.

How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind. …

Jennifer Rubin calls Camille Paglia’s article “a must-read”.

…But amid the rollicking putdowns are some very serious indictments of the Democrats. …

…Moreover, Paglia doesn’t understand why we are doing this at all:

“And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It’s as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.”

Well yes, they are in the business of passing a liberal fantasy that’s been rattling around for years — government-run health care. They aren’t in the business of making it work or picking up the pieces after its disruptive impact ripples through the economy and the health-care system. …

In an article in Pajamas Media, Rand Simberg discusses what would have helped the economy more than a stimulus pay-off.

…But certainly there were things that could have been done which would have been much more stimulating. And in fact there were things that could have been done even before he became president.

The most straightforward thing would have been a payroll tax holiday. It might have added even more to the deficit this year than the porkulus, but it would have had the benefit of actually encouraging businesses — particularly small businesses — to retain and hire people. He could also have promised to keep in place the Bush tax rate cuts, due to expire next year, providing more confidence in the future of the economy. He could have let his campaign promises about nationalizing health care and dramatically raising the costs of energy with cap ‘n’ tax expire, as all of his statements and promises eventually do.

But something he could have done — that would have cost nothing at all — would have been to not scare the bejesus out of business in the first place during his campaign.

Obama talked of increasing capital gains taxes for reasons of “fairness ,” even if it actually hurt government revenue. He talked of “spreading the wealth around.” He gave soaring speeches exalting the glory of the state and public service, while the contributions of business and capitalism were ignored. He treated “profit” like a four-letter word and promised to “raise taxes on the rich.” He made economically insane and historically ignorant arguments blaming the meltdown of the financial system on “capitalists” and “deregulation.” …

Bloomberg News reports on a speech in Chicago by the head of Emerson Electric who lets fly at the administration’s economic policies.

Emerson Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer David Farr said the U.S. government is hurting manufacturers with regulation and taxes and his company will continue to focus on growth overseas.

“Washington is doing everything in their manpower, capability, to destroy U.S. manufacturing,” Farr said today in Chicago at a Baird Industrial Outlook conference. “Cap and trade, medical reform, labor rules.”

Emerson, the maker of electrical equipment and InSinkErator garbage disposals with $20.9 billion in sales for the year ended September, will keep expanding in emerging markets, which represented 32 percent of revenue in 2009. About 36 percent of manufacturing is now in “best-cost countries” up from 21 percent in 2003, according to slides accompanying his speech.

Companies will create jobs in India and China, “places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something,” Farr said.

Clive Crook, in Financial Times, says that the election results were caused by deafness of the Left. Obama and the Democrat leadership will have to start listening to voters if they want to remain in power.

…Last week’s elections went badly for the Democrats. New York was the outlier – unless Democrats expect their opponents to field two warring candidates in every seat. The Republican party is leaderless and incompetent, but not insane – and not, by the way, as divided as the Democrats. For the Republicans the New York loss was salutary, and the lesson inescapable: unite or lose.

The lesson for the Democrats was almost as clear, but their learning disability is more severe. The centre of the US electorate – loosely attached Democratic voters, self-declared independents and loosely attached Republican voters – decides elections. …

…This comes in a country in which 40 per cent of voters call themselves conservatives, 36 per cent moderates and 20 per cent liberals. …

We hear from another voice of reason about effective and affordable health care reforms: this time from Steven Malanga in Real Clear Markets.

…What both sides in this White House debate don’t understand is that they are at loggerheads because the legislation being considered in Washington will attempt to reform the system from the top down, by fiat from the government. As a result, any cost savings will be those dictated from Washington after decades when individual Americans and health providers have grown resistant to such mandates. To take just one recent example out of dozens: some White House advisers want more savings in the legislation from hospitals, but the administration has already promised hospitals that it won’t demand more of them in exchange for their support of health reform. This is the way our health system is being revamped, one political favor at a time.

This is why the only truly effective way to reform our health system, including slowing the growth of costs, is not from the top down, as mandated by Washington, but from the bottom up, by putting health care dollars and choices back into the hands of individuals. We can do that by eliminating the business deduction for health insurance and transferring tax credits to individuals who can use them to purchase their own insurance. We can establish health savings accounts where people can accumulate the money they save on health insurance to pay big bills. If we feel we need a safety net, we can establish government pools that protect people against the most catastrophic costs.

In these ways we would slow the growth of health costs not by gigantic, unpopular mandates from Washington but through millions of individual decisions by people acting with their own money and in their own best interests. Under such a system there should be no need for the White House to cut Machiavellian deals with hospitals or doctors or AARP for their support in exchange for political favors that undermine the greater goal of reform. …

George Will has good news: global warming hysteria is cooling down.

…In their new book, “SuperFreakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist, worry about global warming but revive some inconvenient memories of 30 years ago. Then intelligent people agreed (see above) that global cooling threatened human survival. It had, Newsweek reported, “taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.” Some scientists proposed radical measures to cause global warming — for example, covering the arctic ice cap with black soot that would absorb heat and cause melting.

Levitt and Dubner also spoil some of the fun of the sort of the “think globally, act locally” gestures that are liturgically important in the church of climate change. For example, they say the “locavore” movement — people eating locally grown foods from small farms — actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. They cite research showing that only 11 percent of such emissions associated with food are in the transportation of it; 80 percent are in the production phase and, regarding emissions, big farms are much more efficient.

Although the political and media drumbeat of alarm is incessant, a Pew poll shows that only 57 percent of Americans think there is solid evidence of global warming, down 20 points in three years. …

In WSJ, Holman Jenkins Jr. comments on the disappearance of global warming.

…In retrospect, a significant moment was the falling apart or debunking of two key attempts seemingly well-suited to clinch matters for a scientifically literate public. One, the famous hockey stick graph, which suggested the temperature rise of the past 100 years was unprecedentedly steep, was convincingly challenged. The other, a mining of the geological record to show past episodes of warming were sharply coupled with rising CO2 levels, fell victim to a closer look that revealed that past warmings had preceded rather than followed higher CO2 levels.

These episodes from a decade ago testified to one important thing: Even climate activists recognized a need for evidence from the real world. The endless invocation of computer models wasn’t cutting it. Yet today the same circles are more dependent than ever on predictions made by models, whose forecasts lie far enough in the future that those who rely on them to make policy prescriptions are in no danger of being held accountable for their reliability.

For a while the media could patch over the scientific shortfall by reporting evidence of warming as if it were evidence of what causes warming. Inconveniently, however, just as temperature-measuring has become more standardized and disciplined and less reliant on flaky records from the past (massaged to the Nth degree), the warming trend seems to have faded from the recent record. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Harsanyi starts his article on the twentieth anniversary of Eastern Europe’s liberation by telling the story of his parents’ escape. He then discusses the liberation.

…On Sept. 11, 1989, as an Associated Press story from the time relays, “thousands of East Germans, crying, laughing and shouting with happiness, poured into Austria from Hungary early today en route to freedom in West Germany . . . .”

The Hungarian government had opened its border with Austria and allowed citizens from other communist nations to leave. This decision triggered a series of events (from 1989 to 1991) that ended a 40-year war that pitted liberal democracies against communist tyrannies. The lack of blood spilled in this victory was, by any historical standard, an anomaly.

The question today is: Do we give this incredible historical achievement the attention it deserves?

This month is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most lasting image of victory. Matt Welch of Reason magazine recently pointed out that “November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe.” …

In the Telegraph, UK,  Nile Gardiner comments on Obama’s “shameful absence from Berlin”.

…It is shameful when the US president can’t even be bothered to show up at a ceremony marking one of the most momentous events of modern times. As Rich Lowry wrote in his column for National Review, “Obama’s failure to go to Berlin is the most telling nonevent of his presidency.” Newt Gingrich put it well when he described Obama’s foolhardy decision as “a tragedy”. Writing in The Washington Examiner, Gingrich declared:

“To commemorate, after all, is to remember. And Americans need to remember, not just that the Wall fell, but why it fell. We need to remember that the Berlin Wall was the symbol of more than just the Cold War, more than just the division of Europe. It was the symbol of an evil ideology that denied human dignity, denied truth, and respected only power. When the Wall fell, truth and human dignity, in a rare moment in the 20th century, triumphed over power. But that victory is not permanent.” …

…The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to avoid doing anything to offend the Russians, as part of its “reset” strategy. This was exemplified by its monumental surrender to Moscow by reversing the American policy of installing Third Site missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic. In effect, Barack Obama threw key US allies in eastern and central Europe under the bus in order to placate Russian demands. The White House no doubt calculated that Obama’s presence in Berlin would be interpreted by hawks in Russia as provocative triumphalism on the part of the Americans. Embarrassingly for President Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev actually showed up at the Berlin celebrations, while the leader of the free world was nowhere to be seen. …

Toby Harnden is next in the round of criticism, posting in the Telegraph, UK.

There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”. …

…Marty Peretz is gloomy about what his non-appearance says about Obama’s world view and his approach on Iran. Newt Gingrich calls the failure to go to Berlin “a tragedy”. Paul Rahe at Powerline wonders if Obama is signalling his administration’s intent to enact a “process of turning its back on our erstwhile allies in Europe”. Certainly, he seems to have a prickly relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Whatever the reasons, it’s another revealing mistake by Obama. This deserved to be marked by more than just  a proclamation penned by a staffer:

Rick Richman posts in Contentions on Obama’s video clip sent to Berlin. Apparently the fall of the Berlin Wall was really about Obama.

Last summer, Berlin served as a backdrop for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, as he gave his citizen-of-the-world speech that began by noting that he did not “look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” His speech referred to Berlin as a place “where a wall came down,” without describing how that happened (other than through a world that “stands as one”) — and without mentioning the names of the prior U.S. presidents whose Berlin speeches were part of the reason the wall eventually came down.

Yesterday, the heads of state of Germany, France, England, and Russia stood as one in Berlin, marking one of the most historic days of the 20th century. President Obama chose not to attend and sent a two-minute video instead. In it, he noted that “few would have foreseen [on that day in 1989] that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

There used to be a newscaster in Los Angeles whose legendary self-regard generated an oft-repeated description: he thought “the news was there to bring you him.” The fall of the Berlin Wall apparently played a similar role in the history of Barack Obama.

Fouad Ajami reviews the threat that has arisen since the fall of the Wall.

…It would stand to reason that 45 years of vigilance would spawn a desire for repose. The disputations of history had ended, we came to believe. Such was the zeitgeist of the ’90s, the Nasdaq era, a decade of infatuation with globalization. The call of blood and soil had receded, we were certain then. Bill Clinton defined that era, in the way Ronald Reagan had defined his time. This wasn’t quite a time of peace. Terrorists were targeting our military installations and housing compounds and embassies. A skiff in Aden rode against one of our battleships. But we would not give this struggle the label—and the attention—it deserved.

A Harvard academic had foreseen the shape of things to come. In 1993, amid this time of historical and political abdication, the late Samuel P. Huntington came forth with his celebrated “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. With remarkable prescience, he wrote that the end of the Cold War would give rise to civilizational wars.

He stated, in unadorned terms, the threat that would erupt from the lands of Islam: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”  …

Jay Nordlinger, in the National Review, wrote an article about Charles Krauthammer. Did you know that he used to be a liberal?

…After the defeat of Carter-Mondale, Krauthammer joined the staff of The New Republic. In fact, he started on Inauguration Day, when Reagan and Bush were being sworn in, and the American hostages in Iran were being released. While at The New Republic, he wrote sterling essays of tough-minded liberalism. People of various stripes felt they had to read them, and wanted to read them. By 1984, he was not so Democratic — he did not vote in the election that year. He would have voted for Reagan, in a very tight race: if he had had some theoretical decisive vote. But he stayed home from the polls out of respect for Mondale, now the Democratic nominee. What had caused the shift in Krauthammer’s political thinking? According to him, it was more a shift in the Democrats: They were completely irresponsible out of power. For instance, they promoted a nuclear freeze, and they opposed almost everything that contributed to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse. There was more, however — more than foreign policy in Krauthammer’s shifting. Like a good many others, he read Losing Ground, the book by Charles Murray about the effects of a welfare state on the poor. “I have a little bit of a science background,” he says with understatement, “and I’m open to empirical evidence.” Murray provided that evidence, convulsively. It is one thing if welfare is failing to help the poor, another if it is outright hurting them. …

…Many Jews, particularly American ones, are nervous or scornful about the support that American evangelicals have shown for Israel. They say that this support is double-edged, or bad news, or embarrassing. Krauthammer will have none of it. “I embrace their support unequivocally and with gratitude. And when I speak to Jewish groups, whether it’s on the agenda or not, I make a point of scolding them. I say, ‘You may not want to hear this, and you may not have me back, but I’m going to tell you something: It is disgraceful, un-American, un-Jewish, ungrateful, the way you treat people who are so good to the Jewish people. We are almost alone in the world. And here we have 50 million Americans who willingly and enthusiastically support us. You’re going to throw them away, for what? Because of your prejudice.’ Oh, I give ’em hell.” …

…In a recent exchange, a Washington conservative said that Krauthammer reminded him of something Edward R. Murrow said about Churchill: “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” A great many are doing this, of course, from Rush Limbaugh, with a mass audience, to skillful bloggers with hardly any audience at all. But no one is doing it better than Krauthammer, whose hour is now.

In the New York Post, Michael Tanner gives some of the specifics that we “shall” be forced to do if the House version of Obamacare passes.

President Obama has gone to great pains to deny that his proposed health-care reform is a government takeover of the health-care system.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he has said.

Yet it’s hard to see the 1,994-page bill that the House passed last night as anything else. After all, the bill uses the command “shall” — as in “you shall do this,” “businesses shall do that” and “government shall do some other thing” — 3,345 times. …

…To make sure that we obey these “shalls,” the bill would create 111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar bearing the Orwellian title “commissioner of health choices.” …

Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe, has a fascinating fact from the Constitution.

.. the Constitution does not stipulate the number of House members, other than allowing no more than one representative for every 30,000 residents. Sixty-five men were elected to the first House of Representatives, but it was taken for granted that the membership would increase with the nation’s population. …

…the House remains frozen at 435, even as the US population has surged to 305 million. There are now more than 700,000 Americans per House member, which is another way of saying that the average congressional district is home to 700,000 constituents.

…Since every state is entitled to at least one House seat, and since every state cannot be divided evenly into multiples of 700,000, the number of residents in each congressional district varies sharply. At the extremes, Montana’s lone US representative has 967,000 constituents, while the member from Wyoming represents fewer than 533,000. That disparity – more than 430,000 between the largest congressional district and the smallest – means that residents of some states have considerably more voting power in Congress than residents of others. And that, insist the plaintiffs in a lawsuit making its way through a federal court in Mississippi, violates the principle of one-person, one-vote.

The lawsuit argues that only by enlarging its membership to at least 932 – or better yet, 1,761 – can the House return to districts of equal size. Whether the suit will succeed is an open question. But what a blessing if it did! Quadruple the size of the House, and congressional districts would again be small and compact, ideally suited to the retail politics of an earlier era, and more closely aligned with discrete communities and neighborhoods. Enlarge the House, and it would fill with new blood, new thinking, and new energy. Elections would be more competitive, since it would take fewer votes to win. The House would grow more diverse, more lively, more representative. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Former Reagan speechwriter, Anthony Dolan, in WSJ, described the genesis of Reagan’s famous Berlin speech. Dolan ends by articulating Reagan’s thoughts on appeasement, and how to effectively deal with communist and other oppressive governments.

…Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind’s abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan’s understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall’s collapse 20 years ago today.

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran’s rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan’s. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration’s systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what “good vs. evil” rhetoric can do.

Also in WSJ, Mark Spitznagel has an excellent article on how government, through the Federal Reserve, causes market distortions that threaten the economy.

Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists world-wide as he warned of a credit crisis in the 1920s. We ignore the great Austrian at our peril today.

… Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money supply, and how this was magnified by government intervention. Left alone, interest rates would adjust such that only the amount of credit would be used as is voluntarily supplied and demanded. But when credit is force-fed beyond that (call it a credit gavage), grotesque things start to happen.

Government-imposed expansion of bank credit distorts our “time preferences,” or our desire for saving versus consumption. Government-imposed interest rates artificially below rates demanded by savers leads to increased borrowing and capital investment beyond what savers will provide. This causes temporarily higher employment, wages and consumption.

Ordinarily, any random spikes in credit would be quickly absorbed by the system—the pricing errors corrected, the half-baked investments liquidated, like a supple tree yielding to the wind and then returning. But when the government holds rates artificially low in order to feed ever higher capital investment in otherwise unsound, unsustainable businesses, it creates the conditions for a crash. Everyone looks smart for a while, but eventually the whole monstrosity collapses under its own weight through a credit contraction or, worse, a banking collapse. …

…With interest rates at zero, monetary engines humming as never before, and a self-proclaimed Keynesian government, we are back again embracing the brave new era of government-sponsored prosperity and debt. And, more than ever, the system is piling uncertainties on top of uncertainties, turning an otherwise resilient economy into a brittle one.

How curious it is that the guy who wrote the script depicting our never ending story of government-induced credit expansion, inflation and collapse has remained so persistently forgotten. Must we sit through yet another performance of this tragic tale?

Peter Schiff, writing in Euro Pacific Capital, looks deeper into the pseudo recovery and gives a prescription for true market corrections and growth.

…To generate legitimate economic growth and meaningful jobs, we must reverse the trends that brought us down. Consumers may have led us into this recession, but they can’t lead us out. The road to recovery is a one-way street, and it’s paved with savings, capital investment, and production. It’s not an easy road, but we must follow it to ensure our future prosperity.

As a first step, our politicians must stop pushing us backward. Rather than imposing more market-distorting regulations, we should repeal those most responsible for inefficient resource allocation. Rather than creating new moral hazards, we should withdraw guarantees for large financial institutions and irresponsible consumers. Rather than continuing the Greenspan policy of keeping interest rates too low, we should let them rise. Rather than trying to prop up asset prices, we should let them fall to market levels. Rather than increasing the burden of bureaucracy on the economy, we should look for ways to lighten the load. Rather than encouraging people to borrow and spend, we should reward those who save and produce.

Until we acknowledge these fundamental errors, more of our citizens will lose their jobs. As those that stay employed are funneled into unproductive industries like the federal bureaucracy, the country will sink further into stagnation. Worse still, everyone taking jobs in these sectors will be laid off in the next phase of the crisis – and will have lost this opportunity to build practical skills for the new economy.

Reviewing the Obamacare passage, Jennifer Rubin posts on the congressmen that crossed party lines, and looks at what’s to come in the Senate.

The New York Times has a handy chart and concise description of which lawmakers voted against PelosiCare:

Only one Republican voted for the bill, and 39 Democrats opposed it, including 24 members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition. An overwhelming majority of the Democratic lawmakers who opposed the bill — 31 of the 39 — represent districts that were won by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, in the 2008 presidential election, and a third of them were freshmen. Nearly all of the fourteen freshmen Democrats who voted “no” represent districts that were previously Republican and are considered vulnerable in 2010. Geographically, 22 lawmakers from southern states formed the largest opposition bloc.

The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is doubtful that it, or any variation with the public option, can pass. Lindsay Graham on Face the Nation declared that it was “dead on arrival to the Senate.” As he noted, Pelosi’s bill is ”written for liberals, by liberals.” It is not only Graham, all his Republican colleagues and Joe Lieberman who stand in the way. What about the Senate counterparts to those 39 House “no” voters — Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Michael Bennett of Colorado, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, for example. All are in unsafe seats with considerable numbers of independent and Republican voters who are not likely to look kindly on the massive tax and regulatory measure or on the new mandates and fines requiring them to purchase insurance. …

In the Corner, Jeffrey Anderson also comments on the Obamacare drama.

It was always clear that the real health-care battle would be in the Senate.  But what would have been shocking eight months ago is to hear that it would take until November for the Democrats to pass a bill even in the House.  It would have been even more shocking to have heard that, even after a full-court-press by the White House, the bill would pass by only five votes — meaning that if just three of the 435 members had changed their minds, it would have changed the bill’s fate.  And it would have been shocking to have heard that 39 Democrats would jump ship.

The House bill has passed — barely and belatedly — and it is now dead.  Nothing like it will ever pass the Senate.  The question now is whether anything will, now that the voters have spoken in New Jersey and Virginia — and now that the exceedingly narrow margin in the House will likely invite even greater scrutiny of that which is being proposed. …

Thomas Sowell continues to use economic theory and logic to dispel the illusions and false promises made in Washington.

…If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?

…Price controls create lower prices for open and legal transactions — but also black markets where the prices are higher than they were before, because the risks of punishment for illegal activity has to be compensated. Price controls also lead to shortages and quality deterioration.

But politicians who take credit for lower prices blame all these bad consequences on others. Diocletian did this in the days of the Roman Empire, leaders of the French Revolution did this when their price controls on food led to hungry and angry people, and American politicians denounced the oil companies when price controls on gasoline led to long lines at filling stations in the 1970s. It is the same story, whatever the country, the times or the product or service. …

…Waiting in long gasoline lines at filling stations was exasperating back in the 1970s, but waiting weeks to get an MRI to find out why you are sick, and then waiting months for an operation, as happens in countries with government-run medical systems, can be not only painful but dangerous.

You can be dead by the time they find out what is wrong with you and do something about it. But that will “bring down the cost of medical care” because you won’t be around to require any.

David Harsanyi discusses a study about stress, and points out the silver lining.

…For me, the most stressful element of life has been the mysterious emergence of children. Kids, bless them, are a pain. They’re expensive. Though rarely coherent, they never shut up. They are as insubordinate as they are willfully unhygienic. Yet, you love them so much that your existence is now one of everlasting anxiety.

How many parents would trade children for serenity? In many other ways, stress signifies positive life experiences. Stressing about a mortgage and work can mean you own a home worth caring about and a job worth keeping.

…The underlying concern, says the APA, is how long-term stress contributes to chronic health disorders. (Talk to a psychologist for more information!) No doubt. But according to a recent NBC report, some researchers believe temporary increases in stress can strengthen the immune system, help fight Alzheimer’s and keep your brain cells busy. Another study suggested that stress can help prevent breast cancer. …

Shorts from National Review.

When democratic protests broke out in Iran last summer, the Obama administration gave the impression of considering such protests a nuisance — a hindrance to the real work of dealing with the regime in place. The administration has now cut off funding to several groups working to help the Iranian democrats. One of them is the Connecticut-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, which does much to let the world know what is going on inside that dark country. The center will have to shut down unless private funds come in. The administration is right to deal with the world as it is. But the Iranian democracy movement, and the weakness of the regime of the mullahs, are realities too.

Back to the Economics Nobels, Richard Epstein, in Forbes, comments on the impact of microeconomics.

This year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics to two Americans, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. The description that the Academy gave for its award will sound as dry as dust to people who are not familiar with the nature of economic inquiry.

Ostrom received her prize for showing the various mechanisms that parties can use to control the operations of various forms of common pool resources, e.g., fisheries, in order to prevent their overconsumption and premature exhaustion. Williamson has written extensively on the various devices that are used to control the internal operations of the firm, including internal hierarchies, i.e., permanent relations among individuals in a firm that can be used to eliminate conflicts of interests, and opportunistic behavior in various exchange transactions that might otherwise be conducted on a case-by-case basis.

Issuing the award to these two economists is a welcome trend because it once again leads us to focus on the microeconomic issues that have, when aggregated, macroeconomic consequences. In times of great economic stress, the tendency of many people is to think that the cure for all our social ailments lies in macroeconomics. …

A short column of this sort cannot begin to describe the complex institutional trade-offs that must be mastered to secure the efficient deployment of these resources. But it is important for these purposes to note that these so-called microeconomic issues quickly multiply. There are thousands of firms and thousands of commons. Generating improvements to all these multiple challenges goes straight to the bottom line. Better management of firm and common resources can increase the level of social production and human satisfaction. In their own way, each of these small adjustments may seem to be of no consequence relative to the big macroeconomic changes. But the small changes are additive in a way the large ones are not. Understanding the processes to which Ostrom and Williamson have devoted their professional lives shows us how quiet ventures, properly executed, can generate immense improvements in individual and social welfare. We all owe them a debt of gratitude.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Ronald Reagan comments on the fall of the wall.

For the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rich Noyes, at Newsbusters.com, posts an interview with Ronald Reagan and footage of Germans celebrating at the Wall. Follow the link above to see the video.

On June 12, 1987, as the liberal media elite were toasting the leader of the Soviet Union as a great champion of progress, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to put his money where his mouth was: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Gorbachev did not open the gate or tear down the Berlin Wall, but two years later the people of East Germany did. News broke in the U.S. late in the afternoon (Eastern Time) on November 9, 1989 that the communist government would no longer restrict travel to West Berlin. Just a few hours later, ABC’s PrimeTime Live hosted former President Ronald Reagan to celebrate what would turn out to be the death blow against communism in Eastern Europe. We found the tape in our archives, and posted a video …

Looking back at communism in WaPo, Paul Hollander explains how the supposedly noble ends justified murderous means in the eyes of many idealists.

…While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — hostile or sympathetic — actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media’s fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction.

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.  …

…The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans motivated by lofty ideals are capable of inflicting great suffering with a clear conscience. But communism’s collapse also suggests that under certain conditions people can tell the difference between right and wrong. The embrace and rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deluded and destructive idealism to the realization that human nature precludes utopian social arrangements and that the careful balancing of ends and means is the essential precondition of creating and preserving a decent society.

Ilya Somin, in Volokh Conspiracy, posts on Paul Hollander’s article.

…As he points out, communist atrocities have not received their full due in the West, despite the fact that the victims of communism (including some 100 million dead) far outnumber even those of the Nazis. Part of the reason is that the communists, unlike the Nazis, were perceived as having noble motives. However, this is a poor distinction. After all, Hitler and his supporters also believed they were doing the right thing, every bit as strongly as Lenin or Stalin did.

The second distinction often drawn between the two is that the Nazis killed people because of immutable characteristics such as race and ethnicity, while the communists did not. This argument also fails, for two reasons that I discussed in greater detail in this series of posts. First, Communist regimes often did kill people based on immutable characteristics. For instance, they often murdered people because of their class origins; no one could help being born a “Kulak” or a “bourgeois.” Also, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and several other communist rulers targeted various ethnic minorities for deportation and extermination. Second, it is not clear that the distinction between killing innocent people for immutable characteristics and killing them because of mutable ones carries any moral weight. In my view, the case for distinguishing them falls apart on close inspection (see here and here).

Yet even if one ultimately concludes that the Nazis were somewhat worse than the communists, that still does not justify the massive size of the disparity between the enormous attention paid to the crimes of the former and the relative neglect of the latter. …

Mark Steyn sees balloon boy as a metaphor for something else full of gas.

…Thus, Frank Rich of the New York Times decided to treat his readers to a dissertation of “what ‘balloon boy’ says about 2009.” So off trots Frank Rich, marveling at “how practised we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labelled news,” whether it’s a balloon drifting “buoyantly through the skies for hours with a six-year-old boy hidden within its contours” or “WMDs in Iraq.” “The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources,” observed Rich. “But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq.”

…Democrats run everything—the presidency, the House, the Senate, the media, the movies, the lot. Yet, “George W. Bush” remains the only answer on the liberal Rorschach test: whatever ink blot you lay before them, it’s Bush’s fault. …

…Any self-respecting cultural critic not trapped in the spring of ’03 ought to be able to do this in his sleep: there he was, Barack the Balloon Boy, wafted ever upwards on great gaseous clouds of hope and change, only to have his approval numbers crash farther faster than any president of the last 60 years. He found the reality TV show of campaigning more congenial than the reality of governing. He thought his multi-trillion-dollar ballooning debt could defy the laws of economic gravity …

In the LA Times, Peter Nicholas reports that the Obama administration has changed strategies for attacking Fox News.

…One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox, he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.

The message was, ” ‘We better not see you on again,’ ” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that “clients might stop using you if you continue.” …

…White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said Thursday night that she had checked with colleagues who “deal with TV issues” and they had not told people to avoid Fox. On the contrary, they had urged people to appear on the network, Dunn wrote in an e-mail.

But Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and a former pollster for President Carter, said he has spoken to Democratic consultants who have been told by the White House to avoid appearances on Fox. He declined to give their names. …

Ann Coulter uses the election night results to set up lots of zingers, from the title to the end. Democrats, please skip to the next article.

…At 49 percent for Republican Chris Christie versus 44 percent for Corzine, the election wasn’t even close enough to be stolen by ACORN. (Although Corzine did extremely well among underaged Salvadoran prostitutes living in government housing.) …

… the problem is that voting for Obama a year ago was a fashion statement, much like it was once a fad to buy Beanie Babies, pet rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids. But instead of ending up with a ridiculous dust-collector at the bottom of your closet, the Obama fad leaves you with higher taxes, a reduced retirement fund, no job and a one-year wait for an MRI. …

…The good news: Next time Corzine is in a major car accident after speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, he’ll be able to see a doctor right away.

The media will try to rescue health care by talking about nothing but the 23rd district of New York, where the Democrat won Tuesday night. Congratulations, Democrats — you won a congressional seat in New York! Next up: A Catholic elected pope! …

Clive Crook, in the Atlantic, posts on liberal pundits’ comments on the elections. Says if he was a Dem, he wouldn’t be smiling.

…Even Charlie Cook, doyen of poll-gazers and a reliably informative commentator, comes off a little blase in this piece for National Journal. He says Tuesday did not tell us anything we didn’t already know. (Maybe he meant anything he didn’t already know.) We already knew that independents were turning in droves against the Democratic party. We already knew that Jon Corzine was so unpopular he would lose even to a divided opposition. We already knew that a staunchly conservative Republican could win a purple state by a big margin if he “projects a moderate, mainstream, nonthreatening, tolerant image”. Did we really know all those things? If I were a Republican, I’d still be pleased to have them confirmed, and if I were a Democrat I definitely wouldn’t be smiling.

Veronique de Rugy posts on the Corner about the negative effect of the homebuyers’ tax credit.

…Here the president identifies several state actions that caused or enabled the financial meltdown, ranging from problems in the financial sector to the collapse of housing prices. He noted both monetary and fiscal policy that made money incredibly cheap, thus incentivizing anybody who could to borrow more and more money. The government spent too much money AND he tips his hat to government programs designed to increase the percentage of people who owned homes.

Yet, all he has done since he took office is to do more of the same things that got us in this mess in the first place — just at a bigger scale. The extension and expansion of the $8,000 tax credit is a good example of that. The cost of the whole thing is $11 billion. And who wants to bet it will be more, not to mention the terrible distortions such a program introduces to the economy?

This morning, even the Washington Post and the New York Times editorialized against the tax credit.

Here is the Post:

The credit is a bad idea. It merely shifts demand from elsewhere in the economy to one sector government has chosen to help — having been urged to do so by a powerful lobby — and from the future to the present. …

de Rugy also comments on the jobless numbers in the context of other economic indicators.

One of the obvious implications is that the stimulus spending is far from having the impact promised by the administration back in February. It is also a rather burning indictment of  Christina Romer’s ability to predict job-creation numbers. Remember that the statement about unemployment reaching 8.8 percent next year without the stimulus?

Here is something intriguing: According to this piece in yesterday’s New York Times, worker productivity in the U.S. has surged in the third quarter:

In the first report, the Labor Department says productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, was rising at an annual rate of 9.5 percent in the third quarter, much better than the 6.4 percent gain economists had expected. Unit labor costs fell at a 5.2 percent rate.

Usually, a productivity surge is the sign of looming recovery. In this case, it isn’t. Are we about to become like Europe, where many economies have high productivity and high unemployment? Or are we entering a lost decade, as the Japanese did in the 1990s?

Thomas Sowell clarifies several important points about Obamacare. First, he explains health care in economic terms:

…There is no question that you can reduce the payments for medical care by having either a lower quantity or a lower quality of medical care. That has already been done in countries with government-run medical systems.

In the United States, the government has already reduced payments for patients on Medicare and Medicaid, with the result that some doctors no longer accept new patients with Medicare or Medicaid. That has not reduced the cost of medical care. It has reduced the availability of medical care…

…You can even save money by cutting down on medications to relieve pain, as is already being done in Britain’s government-run medical system. You can save money by not having as many high-tech medical devices like CAT scans or MRIs, and not using the latest medications. Countries with government-run medical systems have less of all these things than the United States has.

But reducing these things is not “bringing down the cost of medical care.” It is simply refusing to pay those costs — and taking the consequences. …

He then explains the difference between health care and medical care, and comments on the higher US rates of cancer survival:

For those who live by talking points, one of their biggest talking points is that Americans do not get any longer life span than people in other Western nations by all the additional money we spend on medical care.

Like so many clever things that are said, this argument depends on confusing very different things — namely, “health care” and “medical care.” Medical care is a limited part of health care. What we do and don’t do in the way we live our lives affects our health and our longevity, in many cases more so than what doctors can do to provide medical care.

Americans have higher rates of obesity, homicide and narcotics addiction than people in many other Western nations. There are severe limits on what doctors and medical care can do about that.

…If we want to compare the effects of medical care, as such, in the United States with that in other countries with government-run medical systems, then we need to compare things where medical care is what matters most, such as survival rates of people with cancer. The United States has one of the highest rates of cancer survival in the world — and for some cancers, the number one rate of survival. …

In Forbes, Diana Furchtgott-Roth shreds the medical bankruptcy argument, and also backs up the higher rates of cancer survival in the US.

…Some proponents support a public option on the grounds that 62% of personal bankruptcies are due to high medical expenses. They contend that even Americans with health insurance are being bankrupted by health care costs.

This argument for a larger government role ignores data from the Federal Reserve showing that debt from buying goods and services, including medical care, rose from only 5.5% of all debt in 2001 to 5.8% in 2007, and that less than 1% of Americans enter bankruptcy each year. …

…In fact, the cancers are survivable precisely because we find them early. Study after study has shown that cancer patients live longer in America than in Europe. …

…Evidence shows that more advanced technology and drugs result in longer life even across different states in the United States. Columbia Business School professor Frank Lichtenberg has examined the effects on life expectancy in the 50 states of diagnostic imaging procedures, drugs and physician quality. Not surprisingly, he found that “our indicators of the quality of diagnostic imaging procedures, drugs and physicians almost always had positive and statistically significant effects on life expectancy.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn points to the blind spot in tolerating diversity that made the Ft Hood shootings possible.

…And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity – as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base. …

…Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers, recommend, judged people by their actions – flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own.

But we’re scrupulously nonjudgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from nonradical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate.  …

Lots of commentary on the elections. Up first is John Fund with a breakdown of the Republican gains.

…”What we’re seeing is the suburbs that drifted away from Republicans in the 1990s over social issues, and were even further estranged by the economic strains of the last few years, are coming back to them,” notes Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, who says the results should give the White House pause. “You combine that with the crushing victory of Republicans in the coal-producing rural counties of Virginia, and I would be very nervous if I were a Blue Dog Democratic member of Congress,” he tells me.

The pattern of GOP gains in the suburbs was repeated in other states. Joan Orie Melvin, a Republican judge from Pittsburgh, won control of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for Republicans by winning key Philadelphia suburbs that have trended Democratic for the past two decades. She won every suburban county around Philadelphia except for Montgomery, which she lost to Democrat Jack Panella by a few hundred votes. …

…In New York, Republicans were disappointed in losing the wild and widely-watched special House election in the rural North Country near Canada. But in the suburbs around New York City, they made surprising gains. Four years ago, Republican Rob Astorino won only 42% of the vote in his challenge to Democratic County Executive Andrew Spano in tony Westchester County, which includes Scarsdale and White Plains. This year the results were exactly reversed as Mr. Astorino ousted Mr. Spano by a 16-point margin. In Nassau County, on Long Island, Republicans won back control of the county legislature and the race for county executive will head to a recount. …

John Fund also says that Speaker Pelosi is out of touch with the nation, and out of touch with political reality.

…More than a few Democrats in Congress are perplexed and worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting on ramming through a 1,900-page health care bill on Saturday, just days after her party took heavy losses in Tuesday’s elections. “It reminds me of Major Nicholson, the obsessed British major in the film ‘Bridge on the River Kwai,’” one Democrat told me. “She is fixated on finishing her health care bridge even as she’s lost sight of where it’s going and what damage it could cause to her own troops.” …

…That’s also the message from Moody’s Mark Zandi, who has become the de facto chief outside economic adviser to the Democratic Congress in recent months and has been telling House Democrats to expect unemployment to be “sticky and stubborn,” remaining near 10% a year from now. A similar warning comes from Christina Romer, chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, who predicts unemployment will be 9.5% when midterm elections occur a year from now. …

…One Democratic House moderate says the leadership has mislearned a lesson from the 1994 collapse of Hillary Clinton’s health care bill. “They believe they lost the elections that year because they failed to pass anything,” he says. “But they forget it might have been even worse if they’d passed the wrong bill.”  …

Toby Harnden lists the points to take home from the elections. Here are three:

2. Sarah Palin roared and had a considerable impact in New York’s 23rd District, which the Democrat narrowly won. Trouble is for her that the result showed the limits of her appeal. There was no exit polling and so there is much supposition but it seems that her intervention energised conservatives but alienated centrists. Perhaps the national Republican who came out best was Mitt Romney, who decided not to get involved.

5. The national Republican party is in disarray. If they don’t get their act together then Obama will win a second term by default if nothing else.

10. It’s the economy stupid and despite all the White House spin, it seems they get that.

Giles Whittell, in the Times, UK, reviews the top stories from election night, comments on some back stories, and looks to the future.

…In northern Virginia, turnout was low among the young and black voters who backed Mr Obama in droves last year. As one analyst put it last night: “This shows that the Obama coalition came out for him but can’t be counted on to come out for other Democrats.”  …

…Besides campaigning in person for both Mr Deeds and Mr Corzine, Mr Obama deployed his political campaign arm, Organising for America, to try to ensure the swarms of party loyalists and new voters he attracted in 2008 would turn out. …

…The Democrats’ most serious challenges next year will come in swing states like Ohio, Colorado and Nevada. In 2010, most governors, a third of the Senate and all members of the House of Representatives will be up for re-election.

Karl Rove looks to 2010 and the damage that Obamacare could do to the nation and the Democrat party.

…Even a five-point swing in 2010 could bring a tidal wave of change. Today, Democrats enjoy 60 votes in the Senate, Republicans a mere 40. Had there been a five-point swing away from Democrats last fall, the party would have started this year with 54 seats and the Republicans 46.

A five-point shift in 2006 would have left the GOP in control of the House. In 2008, a five-point shift would have produced a Democratic loss of six House seats rather than a gain of 21. It would also have put John McCain into the White House with 279 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama’s 259.

Looking ahead, the bad news for Democrats is that the legislation that helped lead to the collapse of support for their party on Tuesday could yet inflict more pain on those foolish enough to support it. The health-care bill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to vote on this week could sink an entire fleet of Democratic boats in 2010. …

…Tuesday’s results were the first sign that voters are revolting against runaway spending and government expansion. But Democrats likely ain’t seen nothin’ yet if they try to ram through health-care reform. There is nothing in the House bill that would do anything to reverse the voter trend we saw this week.

Charles Krauthammer says the 2009 election allows us to see the 2008 election in proper perspective.

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008. …

…This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The ’08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points. …

…The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm — deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years — because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America — from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy. …

Samuel Thernstrom, at American.com, takes a closer look at Kyoto and helps us understand why Obama, when it comes to the environment, has become Bush-Lite.

The Obama administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol (ensuring it will expire), adopted some of former President George W. Bush’s key positions in international climate negotiations, and demurred when asked about reports that the president has decided to skip the December climate summit in Copenhagen. United Nations climate negotiator Yvo de Boer has concluded that it is “unrealistic” to expect the conference to produce a new, comprehensive climate treaty—which also describes the once-fond hopes for passage of domestic climate legislation this year—or even in Obama’s first term.

This is not how it was supposed to be.

Among all the things that President Bush did to infuriate environmentalists, none was more inexcusable than his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and it was assumed that Obama’s election meant a triumphant American return to the Kyoto fold—symbolically, at least, if not literally. Backed by large majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama was widely expected to quickly pass a Kyoto-style domestic cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, positioning America to take the moral high ground in Copenhagen, thus luring (or compelling) China and India to accept emissions targets.

Congress’s inaction—and its continued concern about trade competitiveness questions—has forced Obama, in effect, to take the Bush position.

The story, at least on the international side, is complicated by our actual history with Kyoto, which is not as simple as some greens would portray it today. Rejection of Kyoto—in 1997, three years before Bush’s election—was a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on climate policy; the Senate voted unanimously (95-0) against its basic tenets, and the Clinton-Gore administration never submitted it for ratification. (Even a little-known state legislator from Illinois named Barack Obama voted to condemn Kyoto and prohibit the state from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.) …

Jeff Jacoby advocates three revisions to make health care more affordable.

Tear down the barriers to buying insurance across state lines. …

…When it comes to almost any other product or service, Americans would find a ban on interstate commerce and competition intolerable: Imagine being told that you could buy a car only if it was manufactured in your state. Consumers in the market for a mortgage are free to do business with an out-of-state lender; those in the market for health insurance should be equally free to do business with an out-of-state insurer.

Repeal mandatory benefits that make health insurance needlessly expensive. Compounding the lack of interstate competition is the way states drive up the cost of health insurance by making certain types of coverage compulsory. Consumers and insurers should be free to work out for themselves just how comprehensive or limited a policy should be. But state mandates prevent such flexibility by requiring insurance companies to sell a fixed array of benefits that many customers may not want. Individuals seeking plain-vanilla health insurance – a policy that will cover them, say, in case of major surgery or catastrophic illness – may find themselves forced to pay for a policy that also covers acupuncture, in vitro fertilization, alcoholism therapy, and a dozen additional treatments.

When compulsion takes the place of competition, the result is invariably less choice at higher cost.

De-link health insurance from employment. Nothing distorts America’s health insurance market like the misbegotten tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance. Until that preference is removed, millions will continue to rely on their employers’ health plan, rather than buying insurance for themselves. Fix the tax code, and no longer could insurance companies routinely bypass employees and deal only with their employers. Instead we would see intense competition for individual customers – and the lower premiums such competition would yield.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Spengler takes a surprising and ruthlessly pragmatic view of foreign affairs and where the US should direct its attention.

…The Pentagon, as I noted two weeks ago, views with realistic horror the possibility that Israel might exchange military technology with Russia and India. An immediate concern is the Russian-Indian joint venture to produce a fifth-generation fighter, but drone, anti-missile, and other technology are also a concern. That, there is reason to believe, explains why the US administration abruptly dropped its demand for a complete Israeli freeze on settlement construction and accepted the Israeli offer of a freeze on acquiring new land, once 3,000 homes at present under construction are complete. …

…Israel’s contribution might be decisive in a number of fields, for example avionics and especially drone technology. Among the million Russians who emigrated to Israel during the breakdown of the Soviet Empire are more than 10,000 scientists, including some who designed Russia’s best weapons systems. Moscow’s impulse to reunite the old team is understandable. Throw Israel into the briar patch, and America might not like the result. …

…China is the fulcrum of American strategy. The world’s two largest economies have a natural self-interest in strengthening each other. Francesco Sisci and I proposed an economic alliance between America and China in this space a year ago (see US’s road to recovery runs through Beijing Asia Times Online, November 15, 2008). …

…Russia is a spoiler, but a bargainer. America has no interest in color revolutions in the Russian “near abroad” (just what is the strategic significance of the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrzgyzstan?). Georgia and the Ukraine are respectively last and second-to-last in the world fertility tables and will cease to exist as national entities by mid-century. Why should America make commitments there? …

…I have maintained that Iran faces internal implosion, not only because of the disaffection of its educated youth, but because it will run out of young people and run out of oil at roughly the same time, that is, about 20 years from now (see Why Iran will fight, not compromise Asia Times Online, May 30, 2007). Iran is in a position similar to that of the Soviet Union in 1980: it must break out, or break down. …

…America requires the cooperation of other countries, and in different ways. China is crucial to economic and monetary success; Russia is crucial to containing nuclear weapons; and India has a key role to play in deterring potential terrorists, including (as my Asia Times Online colleague M K Bhadrakumar has suggested) training and arming Afghanistan’s northern tribes against the Taliban.

In lean times, even hyper-powers cannot indulge themselves in the sort of luxuries that feed their sense of moral superiority, or coddle their squeamishness: for example hosting the Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer or the Dalai Lama, or helping brave little Georgia stand up to nasty big Russia, or promoting color revolutions in odd fragments of the former Soviet Union.

We have to focus on core interests and concentrate on those countries that have the competence and will to assist us in pursuing our core interests. Most of the world will ruin itself quickly enough without our help. Our attention should abide with those countries that demonstrate long-term viability.

David Harsanyi pinpoints the heart of the political struggle we are in.

…The angry-hard-right-radical-insane (etc.) conservative base has hijacked the Republican Party, and in the process, further alienated a beleaguered nation — a nation that is apparently hankering for tripling deficits and government takeovers of the health care, energy, banking and car industries.

Like Democrats, I too hope Republicans suffer. By focusing on needless culture wars, nurturing government centralization and growth, and spending without restraint, the GOP has downgraded fiscal conservatism to nothing more than election-time rhetoric over the past decade. And, not surprisingly, Republican identification is also at an all-time low.

So how is it, some wondered, that a recent Gallup poll claims that “conservative” remains the dominant ideological group in this nation — with between 39 percent and 41 percent voters identifying themselves as either “very conservative” or “conservative”? …

…In the real world, I imagine many non-ideologically inclined voters tend to see themselves as conservative as well. And with a president who has yet to meet an industry he doesn’t believe needs to be managed by the loving, but firm, hands of Washington, this must increasingly mean fiscal conservatism. …

…In fact, as Arthur C. Brooks, American Enterprise Institute president, summed up, “There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.” …

We’ll do this more thoroughly at the beginning of next week, but for now, let’s hear about the election from Peter Wehner. He closes reminding us of Dem triumphalism just a few months ago.

… “Today,” proclaimed the Democratic strategist James Carville earlier this year, “a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” Added Michael Lind after last November’s campaign: “The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.” That 40-year, beginning-of-the-Fourth-Republic reign on power seems to be in a good deal of trouble after only nine months.

Democrats still hold power, however, and Republicans still have ground to make up for. Things can change quickly again. Nothing is set in stone. Still, last night was a significant political moment, one that might be a harbinger for much worse things for Obama and Obamaism.

Democrats have reason to be afraid, very afraid.

In the National Review, Conrad Black explains that the liberals’ fear that Afghanistan will turn into another Vietnam is unjustified.

…If the Democrats will not fight in Afghanistan, it is hard to imagine a campaign they would support. In Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq, the United States has serious allies and a multilaterally (NATO and the U.N.) approved mission. Unlike the Vietnam intervention, it has been properly endorsed by Congress, and the governing party was elected promising a decisive and escalated prosecution of the war. There is not the slightest doubt that this conflict is morally justified, and unassailable in international law, and that it involves the national security of all countries that have been attacked by Islamist terrorists, or might be, including Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. And there is little doubt that it is winnable; a military plan has been put together by the world’s foremost authorities in antiterrorist and counterinsurgency warfare, American generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. …

…There are about 20,000 terrorists in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan; the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had over 600,000 exactingly trained and heavily armed soldiers and guerrillas. The allied casualty rate in Afghanistan, even in October, the costliest month in casualties thus far, is about 4 percent of what the U.S. casualty rate was through most of the Vietnam War.

…This isn’t the attempted “occupation” of Afghanistan; it is counterterrorism, not nation-building. It is assistance to a crudely legitimate government in resisting a barbarously primitive movement that enjoys almost no spontaneous popular support, while the civilized world attacks the principal infestation of terrorists in the world. …

David Warren waxes eloquent in discussing the environmental damage wrought by the first renewable energy source that big government fell in love with: hydroelectric power. His overarching points on renewable energy are as follows:

Will technology solve our energy problems? This seemingly fatuous question is actually stupider than first appears. For we already have the technology to power anything within reason, with minimal if any environmental fallout.

Yet under the inspiration of the Green Zeitgeist, I cannot go into a magazine shop without finding some science-lite cover story on new prospects for harnessing solar, thermal, wind, tidal, or whatever “renewable” forces. There is an immense credulous audience out there, willing to be entertained by such nonsense.

No one with a grasp of high school physics should take any of these schemes seriously. In each case, we are looking at a crank idea from the hippie era, which has not since been significantly improved, because it can’t be. …

…Moreover, we can know that the environmentalists who demand these things will turn on them as soon as they are built. They are, as all utopians, not people who can be satisfied, and it makes sense to frustrate their ambitions decisively — before, rather than after, their tyranny has been consolidated. …

Thomas Sowell states that when you don’t pay the cost of medical services, you pay in consequences.

…There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor’s office and more in taxes — or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.

Costs are not reduced simply because you don’t pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past. …

…Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors’ income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences. …

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, writes that health insurance companies aren’t making the obscene profits that liberals rail about.

…For all the impassioned talk about obscene profits and bodies piling up, reports AP’s Calvin Woodward, “health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent’’ of revenue, a return “that’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries.’’

On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was a mere 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals, which showed a profit margin of 19.3 percent, railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which showed a profit of 5.4 percent. “That’s a less profitable margin,’’ AP noted, “than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers.’’

For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. Makers of software applications, by contrast, are pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent. Strangely, however, MoveOn and the Democrats aren’t demanding a “public option’’ to compete with Oracle and Adobe to drive down their “immoral’’ profits. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The race in the 23rd congressional district in New York is a good example of the competing narratives in the GOP. We have four items on the subject. First Toby Harnden updates his weekend column in the Telegraph, UK, on the race.

NEW YORK state’s 23rd District, which juts into Canada and is bordered by the People’s Republic of Vermont, is an unlikely place to send a message to the Republican party about how to defeat President Barack Obama in 2012. …

…The local Republican bosses feared that the district was trending to the Left and that a conservative candidate might alienate swing voters. What has happened to Mrs Scozzafava, however, is what conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh described before her ignominious withdrawal as a “teachable moment”.

Mr Hoffman shouldn’t have had a prayer but polls indicated he was neck and neck with Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate. Under pressure from Republican leaders who were rapidly re-thinking their initial stance, Mrs Scozzafava, in third place and sinking fast, pulled out of the race yesterday (Sat), making it probable Mr Hoffman will be elected. …

…Candidates imposed from above by party bosses are liable to be rejected in an environment in which trust in government, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this week, is at a 12-year low.

It is, moreover, self-defeating to have a broad church that admits anyone no matter what their beliefs. The message Republican activists have sent from the 23rd is that abandoning conservative principles and going Obama-lite is no way to win back the White House …

We also have Toby Harnden’s post after Scozzafava’s telling endorsement.

If Dede Scozzafava had a shred of political integrity about her she would have backed Doug Hoffman or declined to endorse anyone. The fact that she took the Republican party’s cash, failed miserably as a candidate and then vented her spleen by trying to torpedo the new de facto Republican candidate (the one who would have beaten her in a primary had there been one) underlines what a losing bet she was right from the start. …

…The Scozzafava debacle underlines how badly the 11 local Republican honchos who chose her screwed things up. That’s what happens when an arrogant party imposes an inappropriate candidate. That’s why the primary system in the US tends to work so well – it’s democratic.

This all underscores the potential depth of popular anger against Barack Obama and Obama-lite Republicans.
While the whole thing is being portrayed as Right-wing nutters hijacking poor Dede’s candidacy, the reality is that this is local democracy in action – despite the backing of a major party, ordinary voters, including a substantial number of independents, were rejecting her. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin didn’t fix the polls. …

…There is an angry electorate out there and the Democratic attempts to smear Hoffman as some kind of crazy zealot and their embrace of the politically amoral Scozzafava will only underline the growing feeling that Obama and Co they will do or say anything to cling to power.

Dr. Zero from Hot Air posts on the “stupid party.”

… Meanwhile, the Republicans keep running “moderates” who prove to be very useful to the Democrats… which keeps the growth of the State bubbling along at Bush levels.  The radical nature of the current Administration makes the idea of “moderate” compromise laughable. What’s the moderate position on freedom-crushing trillion-dollar health care and environmentalist legislation? They’re okay, as long as the Democrats pinky-swear to keep the cost under $800 billion? That’s the kind of promise no politician could keep, even if it was made in earnest. A moderate Republican is someone who lives in a state of perpetual surprise as he ponders the monthly bills for nanny-state government. What’s the point of electing people who are guaranteed to spend the rest of their political careers complaining about how they’ve been played for fools?

Too much of the Republicans’ “Stupid Party” strategy is based on the mechanics of getting people with little elephants on their campaign signs elected. They view the election as the conclusion of a contest, when in fact it’s only the beginning. A successful Republican Party doesn’t have to be ideologically rigid, but it should insist on candidates who possess an intellectual foundation of conservative theory, and the ability to explain it at least as well as the thousands of people posting comments on conservative blogs.

Republican voters would be well-advised to ignore the people who engineered the Scozzafava debacle, and listen for the sound of Sarah Palin’s monster truck instead. America needs conservatives more than it needs Republicans.  Both the party, and the country, benefit when they are one and the same.  Next Halloween, just to be on the safe side, we should test the blood of every “moderate” Republican with a hot wire and a petri dish, just to make sure we don’t have another DIABLO on our hands.

Closing the section, Roger Simon has thoughts.

… Hoffman’s capital-C Conservative campaign, however, tried to separate itself from the majority parties by making a big deal of the social issues. He was all upset that Scozzafava was pro-gay marriage, seemingly as upset as he was with her support for the stimulus plan. He projected the image of a bluenose in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear about these things. Hoffman’s is a selective vision of the nanny state – you can nanny about some things but not about others. I suspect America deeply dislikes nannying about anything.

There is, of course, a message in this for the Republican Party going forward. You can choose to emphasize the social issues or not. Today may show the former is a losing proposition.

Victor Davis Hanson pens a mild-mannered Jeremiad.

Obama’s mega-borrowing is predicated on a rather thin margin of safety. We can service nearly $2 trillion in additional debt this year—on top of the existing $11 trillion—only because interest rates are so low.

But as a veteran of the near usury of the 1970s and early 1980s, I see no reason why interest rates won’t shoot up to 10% once the economy recovers and the U.S. has to convince lenders to buy our paper in an inflationary spiral. In other words, we could fork out each year about $150-200 billion in interest costs on our annual red ink, in addition to paying annually another trillion dollars to service the existing debt. (We forget that many of us young people in the 1970s and 1980s simply never bought anything new due to high interest: my first new car was not purchased until 1989 when interest was only 7.2% on it; my parents bought a small condo in 1980 for the unbelievably low rate of 8.8%, due only to redevelopment incentives in a bad neighborhood of Fresno. Inflation will be back, even in this quite different age of globalized competition and low wages.)

When Obama talks of a trillion here for health care, a trillion there for cap-and-trade, it has a chilling effect. Does he include the cost of interest? Where will the money came from? Who will pay the interest? Has he ever experienced the wages of such borrowing in his own life? Did he cut back and save for his college or law school tuition, with part-time jobs? Did he ever run a business and see how hard it was to be $200 ahead at day’s end? …

…Integral to public debt are two eternal truths: a public demands of the state ever more subsidies, and those who pay for them shrink in number as they seek to avoid the increased burden. …

Robert Samuelson says that with governments continuing to spend more than they take in, the levels of debt amassed is bringing us to uncharted finance territory.

The idea that the government of a major advanced country would default on its debt—that is, tell lenders that it won’t repay them all they’re owed—was, until recently, a preposterous proposition. Argentina or Russia might stiff their creditors, but surely not the likes of the United States, Japan, or Great Britain. Well, it’s still a very, very long shot, but it’s no longer entirely unimaginable. Governments of rich countries are borrowing so much that it’s conceivable that one day the twin assumptions underlying their burgeoning debt (that lenders will continue to lend and that governments will continue to pay) might collapse. What happens then?

The question is so unfamiliar that the past provides few clues to the future. Psychology is decisive. To take a parallel example: the dollar. The fear is that foreigners (and Americans, too) lose confidence in its value and dump it for yen, euros, gold, or oil. If too many investors do that, a self-fulfilling stampede could trigger sell-offs in U.S. stocks and bonds. People have predicted such a crisis for decades. It hasn’t happened yet. The currency’s decline has been orderly, because the dollar retains a bedrock confidence based on America’s political stability, openness, huge wealth, and low inflation. But something could shatter that confidence, tomorrow or 10 years from tomorrow.

The same logic applies to exploding government debt. We have moved into uncharted territory and are prisoners of psychology. Consider Japan. In 2009, its budget deficit—the gap between spending and taxes—amounts to about 10 percent or more of gross domestic product (GDP). Its total government debt—the borrowing to cover all past deficits—is approaching 200 percent of GDP. That’s twice the size of the economy. The mountainous debt reflects years of slow economic growth, many “stimulus” plans, an aging society, and the impact of the global recession. By 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio could hit 300 percent, says a report from JPMorgan Chase. …

In Forbes, Paul Johnson discusses some of the different types of conservatives, and ends with these thoughts:

…A true conservative today should stress construction, encouragement, moderation and understanding instead of destruction, prohibition, extremism and slogans. A conservative thinks in terms of countless minor corrections and improvements based on experience and experiment rather than in terms of a universal, uniform solution based on theory and enforced by inflexible law.

A conservative, in the best sense, sees the world and its inhabitants as an interdependent organism, comprising innumerable local communities and territories, each adapting to particular conditions. A conservative is someone who goes with the grain of humanity and the nature of the physical world, rather than trying to regiment and fashion a utopia through force of law. And, needless to say, an acceptable conservative is not one who thinks all the answers are obvious but is a modest person who admits that problems are not easily solved, that perfection is unattainable in this world and that it is often necessary to admit mistakes, change one’s mind and start again.

Republicans should start looking now for a person who embodies these characteristics. If one can be found there should be no difficulty in putting Mr. Obama into his true historical place as an interesting and instructive one-term President.

The Economist reports on amazing new technology that desalinates water using solar power

THERE is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or in glaciers. Meanwhile, around a fifth of the world’s population suffers from a shortage of drinking water and that fraction is expected to grow. One answer is desalination—but it is an expensive answer because it requires a lot of energy. Now, though, a pair of Canadian engineers have come up with an ingenious way of using the heat of the sun to drive the process. Such heat, in many places that have a shortage of fresh water, is one thing that is in abundant supply.

Ben Sparrow and Joshua Zoshi met at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, while completing their MBAs. Their company, Saltworks Technologies, has set up a test plant beside the sea in Vancouver and will open for business in November. …

…Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi, by contrast, reckon they can produce that much fresh water with less than 1 kWh of electricity, and no other paid-for source of power is needed. Their process is fuelled by concentration gradients of salinity between different vessels of brine. These different salinities are brought about by evaporation. …

…It is a simple idea that could be built equally well on a grand scale or as rooftop units the size of refrigerators. Of course, a lot of clever engineering is involved to make it work, but the low pressure of the pumps needed (in contradistinction to those employed in reverse osmosis) means the brine can be transported through plastic pipes rather than steel ones. Since brine is corrosive to steel, that is another advantage of Mr Sparrow’s and Mr Zoshi’s technology. Moreover, the only electricity needed is the small amount required to pump the streams of water through the apparatus. All the rest of the energy has come free, via the air, from the sun.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Scott Rasmussen has interesting NY 23rd analysis.

… the New York 23rd Congressional District race will end up being between a Conservative Party candidate and a Democrat. In many ways, that pairing reflects the reality of national match-ups more than the typical partisan competition. There are more conservatives than Democrats in America, and there are more Democrats than Republicans.

One reason for this is that while Republican voters overwhelmingly consider themselves conservative, only 56% of conservative voters consider themselves to be Republicans. In other words, nearly half of all conservatives nationwide reject the Republican Party label. …

Mark Steyn updates us on the current strategies of militant environmentalists.

I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means. Tim Flannery, the jet-setting doomsaying global warm-monger from down under, was in Ottawa the other day promoting his latest eco-tract, and offered a few thoughts on “Copenhagen”—which is transnational-speak for December’s UN Convention on Climate Change. “We all too often mistake the nature of those negotiations in Copenhagen,” remarked professor Flannery. “We think of them as being concerned with some sort of environmental treaty. That is far from the case. The negotiations now ongoing toward the Copenhagen agreement are in effect diplomacy at the most profound global level. They deal with every aspect of our life and they will in?uence every aspect of our life, our economy, our society.”

Hold that thought: “They deal with every aspect of our life.” Did you know every aspect of your life was being negotiated at Copenhagen? But in a good way! So no need to worry. After all, we all care about the environment, don’t we? So we ought to do something about it, right? And, since “the environment” isn’t just in your town or county but spreads across the entire planet, we can only really do something at the planetary level. But what to do? According to paragraph 38 on page 18 of the latest negotiating text, the convention will set up a “government” to manage the “new funds” and the “related facilitative processes.” …

…“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You ?oat a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you. …

… At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way. Nevertheless, occasionally the mask drops and the totalitarian underpinnings become explicit. Take Elizabeth May’s latest promotional poster: “Your parents f*cked up the planet. It’s time to do something about it. Live Green. Vote Green.” As Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan pointed out, the tactic of “convincing youth to reject their parents in favour of The Party” is a time-honoured tradition.

The problem, alas, is that, for the moment, there’s still more than one party. But why? Last year, David Suzuki suggested that denialist politicians should be thrown in jail. And only last month the New York Times’s Great Thinker Thomas Friedman channelled his inner Walter Duranty and decided that democracy has f*cked up the planet. Why, in Beijing, where they don’t have that disadvantage, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically dif?cult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Forward to where? …

The Washington Examiner editorialists comment on the bogus stimulus job numbers and the wasted money.

…Featherbedding occurs when paychecks are issued for nonexistent employees and the money goes directly into union coffers. Thousands of the jobs Obama officials say were saved or created by the stimulus program are no more real than those invisible positions invented by unions to bulk up their treasuries. We know this to be the case because as Obama’s chief economist, Christina Romer, admitted several weeks ago, “It’s very hard to say exactly because you don’t know what the baseline is, right, because you don’t know what the economy would have done without [the economic stimulus program].”

Even if we take at face value the White House claim that it created or saved all these jobs with approximately $150 billion of the economic stimulus money, a little simple math shows the taxpayers aren’t getting any bargains here: $150 billion divided by 650,000 jobs equals $230,000 per job saved or created. Instead of taking all that time required to write the 1,588-page stimulus bill, Congress could have passed a one-pager saying the first 650,000 jobless persons to report for work at the White House will receive a voucher worth $230,000 redeemable at the university, community college or trade school of their choice. That would have been enough for a degree plus a hefty down payment on a mortgage.

Actually, taxpayers would be better off with such a deal, too, compared with the reality of the Obama stimulus program. Among the top 10 stimulus contracts awarded, there is the one for nearly $339 million that allegedly created or saved 41.19 jobs, or about $8.3 million per position. It was even worse with the $258 million contract to Brookhaven Science Associates in New York, where 25 jobs were saved or created, at a cost of $10.3 million per position. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, the ranking House minority member of the Joint Economic Committee, said it best: “What we know for certain is that 2.7 million payroll jobs have been lost since the Obama stimulus was signed into law, hundreds of thousands of more jobs are being lost each month, and America is so deep in debt, China and France are lecturing us to get our financial house in order.”

The IBD editors also criticize the phony results from the ineffective stimulus program.

…As we have noted, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Christina Romer told Congress on Oct. 22: “Most analysts predict that the fiscal stimulus will have its greatest impact on growth in the second and third quarters of 2009. By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to growth.”

In other words, stimulus is dead. This moment of honesty makes it tough for White House officials to pretend the best is yet to come. And if they can’t show real results, they can’t make a case for a second stimulus — as the White House and Congress want. …

…The problem, again, is that none of these numbers is real. No one has gone out and counted actual jobs. It’s all made up. In a scathing critique, the nonpartisan Americans for Tax Reform wrote:

“The data will show that the bulk of the jobs ‘saved/created’ are government jobs, mostly jobs in the unproductive sector of the economy furthering no economic growth, and preventing necessary streamlining of an already bloated bureaucracy.”

Precisely. So don’t be fooled. No jobs are being generated by the stimulus, but a lot are being lost — along with the wealth of an entire generation. What a waste.

Caroline Baum, in Bloomberg.com, states the fundamental flaw behind the stimulus.

…When the government distributes lucre or loot, people spend it. If your interest is national income accounting, spending other people’s money is great. Spending is a back-door way for government statisticians to measure what matters, which is the real output of goods and services.

But the government has no money of its own to spend; only what it borrows or confiscates from us via taxation. Oops.

“Government job creation is an oxymoron,” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business. It is only by depriving the private sector of funds that government can hire or subsidize hiring.

That’s why “jobs created or saved” is such pure fiction. It ignores what’s unseen, as our old friend Frederic Bastiat explained so eloquently 160 years ago in an essay.  …

Jennifer Rubin says the government is merely demonstrating that it is not fit for any serious duty.

…Aside from the taxes, fees, mandates, regulations, and anti-tort-reform provisions, the major failing of the Democrats’ health-care approach is that it asks us to give immense authority to a government that has not earned the trust of the people nor demonstrated its competency in dealing with far less complex issues. How’s this: when they can tell us with precision which jobs were created and which saved, what the baseline for counting was, which are private and which are public sector, and whether those include jobs lost from defense-spending cuts (e.g., the elimination of the F-22), then we can talk about giving them some more responsibility for health care.

The Economist reviews the book Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King, written by Brad Matsen. Jacques, we hardly knew ye.

THIRTY years ago Jacques-Yves Cousteau … was reckoned to be one of the ten most recognised men in the world. This biography, uncritical but revealing, shows how that happened. Nominally a captain in the French navy, Cousteau spent most of his working life pioneering a new form of celebrity, that of the TV explorer. With his ship, the converted minesweeper Calypso, and a crew of divers with attractive French accents and film-star looks, he patrolled the more photogenic corners of the oceans and documented these exploits in books and television programmes that turned him into a global godfather of undersea adventure.

The secret of this success, explains Brad Matsen, the author of many books and articles about the sea, was nothing to do with the science of oceanography or indeed the science of anything. It was to do with television. In “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau”, the documentary series that ran from 1968 and was shown all over the world …, he hit on the thing of which every TV producer dreams: a near-perfect small-screen formula. …

…So what is Cousteau’s legacy? If you consult the index of “A History of Oceanography”, a scholarly account published at the very height of his fame, you will find no entries at all under his name. His real contribution was to stoke the popular imagination with images of life beneath the surface of the seas, as seen by men in well-tailored diving gear.

In Slate.com, Farhad Manjoo tells us how to stay charged up.

Our daily struggle with batteries has spawned a cottage industry of advice about their proper care and feeding. …

…To clear up these annoyances and conflicting theories, I called up Isidor Buchmann, the CEO of Cadex Electronics, a Canadian company that makes battery-testing equipment. Buchman also runs Battery University, a very helpful Web site for battery enthusiasts and engineers. I asked Buchmann how we can make sure that our batteries last a long time. …

… Here are some of Buchmann’s tips:

Laptops: The typical lifespan of a lithium-ion laptop battery is about 18 months to 2 years, Buchmann says, but yours will last much longer if you don’t punish it too much. The main stresses include undercharging, overcharging, and one that few of us consider: heat. Temperatures inside a laptop can reach more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hell for a battery.

Ideally, Buchmann says, you should try to keep your battery charged from 20 percent to 80 percent. Keep in mind that these are guidelines for ideal use—it’s generally inconvenient to unplug your machine before it goes all the way to 100. But even if you’re not on constant guard, be mindful of charging your machine constantly, well past when you know it’s full. You also should be conscious of letting your battery run all the way to zero.

Try to keep your laptop as cool as possible. The best technique here is to charge up your battery when the computer is turned off. When your laptop is turned on and plugged in, you should pull the battery out of your computer. Yes, pull it out. “I know that’s inconvenient,” Buchmann says, “but keeping your laptop plugged in when the battery’s fully charged—that combination is bad for your battery.” …