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David Warren likes the president more and more.

…Now, before we start, I should correct a reader misapprehension about my views on President Barack Obama — who has just announced that he wants to give radical healthcare legislation another try, notwithstanding the electoral setbacks the last round cost his Democratic Party.

In a strange way I’m on his side. I want him to go for broke on this, and can only offer encouragement. …

…Far from despising the poor beleaguered man, who is being abandoned by more and more of his supporters every day, and now risks being turned on by the previously adoring mainstream media, the way they turned on Tiger Woods, I am beginning to adore Obama. I can’t think of any American since Ronald Reagan who has done so much to advance the cause of conservatism.

The Tea Party movement, which is currently changing the ground rules of U.S. politics, would be inconceivable without a President Obama; just as Ronald Reagan might never have been elected without a President Carter to precede him. Thus Carter, too, should be a hero to the right…

Mark Steyn explains the fall-out from Ponzi-scheme entitlements.

…We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. …

And for the ever-dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward there’s precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that’s before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year of Greeks who retire at 58.

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less-profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out, anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. …

In Powerline, John Hinderaker blogs about the teachable moment that Representative Paul Ryan gave the president at the healthcare summit.

…Since the Congressional Budget Office can’t score your bill, because it doesn’t have sufficient detail, but it tracks very similar to the Senate bill, I want to unpack the Senate score a little bit.

And if you take a look at the CBO analysis, analysis from your chief actuary, I think it’s very revealing. This bill does not control costs. This bill does not reduce deficits. Instead, this bill adds a new health care entitlement at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have. …

…And so when you take a look at all of this; when you strip out the double-counting and what I would call these gimmicks, the full 10- year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit. …

And we’ve been talking about how much we agree on different issues, but there really is a difference between us. And it’s basically this. We don’t think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control. And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference.

… we are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I’ve got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you’re not listening to them.

So what we simply want to do is start over, work on a clean-sheeted paper, move through these issues, step by step, and fix them, and bring down health care costs and not raise them. And that’s basically the point. …

The last three minutes of Paul Ryan are available on YouTube.

VodkaPundit catches a screen shot of Obama’s death stare during Paul Ryan’s discourse.

Power Line posts on the continuing collapse of Obama’s popularity.

Tunku Varadarajan discusses the healthcare summit. Did the Obami really think that this was going to help?

…The marathon TV teach-in—in which Obama was more schoolmarm than president—should be regarded by Democrats as a great disappointment. They made no clear gain, and won no clear argument. It became apparent from the very beginning—when a testy Obama said “Let me finish, Lamar!” to the courtly Lamar Alexander—that this was not to be an open-minded exploration of the issues in question. It was, instead, a simulacrum of a debate, a pretend-conversation, one in which Obama established, yet again, his command over fact and detail, but in which he also revealed reflexive superciliousness, intolerance of different opinions, and a shortness of patience unbecoming of a president. (He also showed that he’s a tedious clock-Nazi, cutting people off all the time, while showing no inclination to edit himself.)

What was so striking about the summit was the preparedness of the Republicans. All of them had done their homework: Lamar Alexander, Tom Coburn, Jon Kyl, John McCain, Dave Camp, John Barrasso, and Paul Ryan.

…The meeting wound down forlornly, with Obama attempting to enumerate issues that the two sides had in common. But there could be no escape from the one, fundamental difference that divides the two sides: The Democrats want this bill and the Republicans don’t. That—and the latter’s preference for market solutions and the former’s rejection of them—ensured that the summit was a total waste of our time and Obama’s. …

David Harsanyi thinks that libertarian ideas may be useful, but that Ron Paul is not.

…None of which is new. …Ronald Reagan explained to Reason magazine back in 1975 that “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” …

A serious libertarian, David Boaz at the Cato Institute, found that 14 percent of American voters could be classified as libertarian. “Other surveys,” he points out, “find a larger number of people who hold views that are neither consistently liberal nor conservative but are best described as libertarian.”

Since the two top concerns at CPAC were “reducing size of federal government” (35 percent) followed by “reducing government spending,” it is obvious the message of individual freedom and small government has resonance. But accepting Ron Paul as the leader of this — or, actually, any — charge is a mistake for both parties.

Charles Krauthammer comments on Toyota’s problems.

…And don’t imagine that we do not coldly calculate the price of a human life. In 1974, the speed limit was lowered to 55 mph to conserve oil. That also led to a dramatic drop in traffic fatalities — approximately 3,000 lives every year. This didn’t stop us, after the oil crisis, from raising the speed limit back to 65 and beyond — knowing that thousands of Americans would die as a result.

The calculation was never explicit but it was nevertheless real. We were quite prepared to trade away a finite number of human lives for speed, and for the efficiency and convenience that come with it. …

…But it is no disrespect to the memory of those killed, and the sorrow of those left behind, to simply admit that even the highest technology produced by the world’s finest companies can be fallible and fatal, and that the intelligent response is not rage and retribution but sober remediation and recognition of the very high price we pay — willingly pay — for modernity with all its wondrous, dangerous bounty.

John Stossel gives us a few examples of how government “protection” has gone overboard.

…The most basic questions are: Who owns you, and who should control what you put into your body? In what sense are you free if you can’t decide what medicines you will take?…

…The FDA’s intrusion on our freedom is supplemented by another agent of the NannyState. The Drug Enforcement Agency’s war on drug dealers has led them to watch pain-management doctors like hawks. Drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin provide wonderful pain relief. But because they are also taken by “recreational” drug users, doctors go to jail for prescribing quantities that the DEA considers “inappropriate.” As a result, pain specialists are scared into underprescribing painkillers. Sick people suffer horrible pain needlessly.

Think I exaggerate? Check out the website of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) (aapsonline.org). It warns doctors not to go into pain management. “Drug agents now set medical standards. … There could be years of harassment and legal fees,” says the AAPS. Today, even nursing-home patients, hardly candidates for drug gangs, don’t get pain relief they need. …

…All drugs involve risk. In a free country, it should be up to individuals, once we’re adults, to make our own choices about those risks. Patrick Henry didn’t say, “Give me absolute safety, or give me death.” He said “liberty.” That is what America is supposed to be about.

In the Corner, John Miller posts on Vancouver’s olympic-sized bill.

I’ve enjoyed watching the Olympics this week. I’m also delighted not to be stuck with the bill:

As for Vancouver’s municipal government and the taxpayers, the bad news is already in. The immediate Olympic legacy for this city of 580,000 people is a nearly $1 billion debt from bailing out the Olympic Village development. Beyond that, people in Vancouver and British Columbia have already seen cuts in services like education, health care and arts financing from their provincial government, which is stuck with many other Olympics-related costs.

Obama’s failure to secure the 2016 summer games is one of the best things that’s happened to Chicago lately.

Linda Robertson reviews Kim Yu-Na’s gold medal skating performance for the Miami Herald.

…She took women’s figure skating to an ethereal level with her performance to Gershwin’s exuberant Concerto in F, landing all 11 of her jumps, seven in combination. She looked like she was dancing down Broadway.

Her delicacy belied her dominance. Has any skater been so far ahead of her opposition since Sonja Henie commanded the sport 70-plus years ago? …

…It was a show that took your breath away. It was both lyrical and athletic, balletic and bold. Kim nailed six triple jumps and looked weightless on takeoffs and landings. …

And here is video footage of Kim’s performance.

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Foreign Policy posted a photo by Jeroen Oerlemans of a young man holding books in the rubble of a building. This is part of a series of war photos you can access by following the link.

…Dutch photojournalist Oerlemans took this photograph while reporting from Tyre, in southern Lebanon, during the 34-day summer war with Israel. “I was just returning from shooting the arrival of some humanitarian aid to the besieged town,” he recalls, “when, right in front of me, a five- or six-story building went up in smoke.” Oerlemans ran toward the wrecked building, where, he says, “I witnessed the first casualties being carried away from the scene. In the smoldering ruins, dazed people were stumbling around, some trying to get themselves together, others frantically pulling others from underneath the rubble.” An air alarm went off, indicating the Israeli bombers might return. “Everyone fled,” Oerlemans says. But this boy remained, “stoically” wandering through the smoke. “We never spoke,” the photographer recalls. “I’m not sure why he was picking up those books.”

In Contentions, Rick Richman discusses Hillary Clinton’s surprise that appeasement has not helped US relations with Iran. Shrugging one’s shoulders is not an acceptable Plan B when dealing with thugs intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. Perhaps she will move past surprise and actually think about what has worked in the past.

In an interview last week with Al Arabiya, Hillary Clinton expressed surprise that “engagement” has failed, since “so many experts” thought it would succeed:

“People say to me all the time, what happened to Iran? … When President Obama came in, he was very clear that he wanted to engage, and that’s what he’s been trying to do — reaching out to the Iranian people, reaching out to the Iranian leadership. And you have to ask yourself, why, when so many experts thought that there would be a positive response to President Obama’s outreach, has there not?”

It’s a puzzler. But who were those experts who thought an outstretched hand, a video, an apology, a private letter, and a speech would cause Iran to slow (much less agree to stop) its nuclear weapons program? How many thought a nine-month period for response would produce anything other than nine months of uninterrupted centrifuge-spinning? …

The Streetwise Professor gives an example of the idiocy of ideology.

There are reports that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are planning to implement health care deform legislation through a reconciliation procedure that would require only 50 votes (plus Biden’s) to pass the Senate.

Obama assures us that he is not an ideologue.  His supporters assert that he is very intelligent.  But only an ideologue or an idiot would attempt to use such parliamentary chicanery to force the passage of transformational legislation that will affect the life of every American against the intense opposition of a healthy majority of the electorate.

The immediate political consequences of this action would be devastating to those who take it.  The substance is bad enough.  But adding procedural insult to substantive injury will intensify the fury of the backlash.  An idiot would not know: an ideologue would not care.

But an ideologue would be willing to incur these political costs in order to achieve a deeply held desire to increase vastly the intrusions of the state into our lives, knowing that such a change would be (a) very difficult to reverse, and (b) would fundamentally alter the relationship the citizenry and the state in a way s/he greatly desires; the ideologue would reason that the long term political consequences would be well worth the short term political costs. …

The Streetwise Professor also discusses the more destructive effects of Obama’s version of Obamacare.

Thirteen months into his administration, Obama has deigned to release an outline of his proposal for his signature policy issue: health care “reform.”  …

…In a nutshell: it strips out from the pending bills noxious but irrelevant-in-the-scheme-of-things elements like Bribes for Ben; takes the worst elements from the House and Senate bills; and adds (as hard as it is to believe) even more destructive elements.

Two features are particularly destructive: the creation of a body empowered to review and reject insurer premium increases, and taxes on capital income to finance the huge costs of the proposal.

Hard as it is to believe, the Obama proposal is even more costly than the Senate bill; definitive estimates are unavailable (and would be unbelievable in any event) due to the paucity of details, but guesstimates put the cost within hailing distance of a trillion dollars.   (Leading me to endorse the wisdom of a bumper sticker I saw: “I hope Obama doesn’t know what comes after trillion.”) …

In Contentions, John Steele Gordon praises Walter Russell Mead’s article on the Tea Party movement.

… I’ve just finished reading Walter Russell Mead’s blog post over at the American Interest on the Tea Party movement. It’s a brilliant piece of work and, indeed, “I wish I’d said that.”

Mead puts the movement firmly in the context of American history, demonstrating the similarity of this movement with previous populist movements in the Jacksonian, Progressive, and New Deal eras. All those movements changed the country profoundly and were anti-elitist in nature. As Mead explains,

The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver.

While it is way too early to tell how powerful the Tea Party movement will prove to be, it is certainly anti-elitist to the core. But this time, unlike in Jackson’s and Roosevelt’s days, the elite doesn’t really recognize itself as being an elite. They think they are doing the people’s work, even if the people are too stupid to know what’s good for them. Like Mead, I think those elites are soon to find out what the word democracy really means. …

And here is Walter Russell Mead’s piece in the American Interest.

…Today in the United States many of our core institutions are fundamentally out of sync with reality: they cost more than we can pay but they don’t do what we need.  We have colleges our people cannot afford — and that often leave graduates without a basic grounding in either the history of our civilization or the practicalities of contemporary life.  We have a health system that we cannot pay for and which fails to cover enough people.  We have a public school system which has been failing too many of our children for far too long, costs unconscionably large amounts of money considering its poor performance — and vested interests block necessary reforms.  Our federal, state and local governments are locked into an employment system and mode of organization that we cannot pay for — and that does not do the job.  Our retirement system is a time bomb and all our political class can do is watch the fuse burn. …

…My guess would be that the Tea Party movement is part of a very big wave.  The link between a business driven agenda of modernization and reform and a populist agenda for empowerment, deregulation and attacks on privileged professions which are also costly economic bottlenecks is what, historically, has driven many of the populist movements that change the face of the country.  …

…What this means for conventional politics is harder to predict.  American populism is notoriously turbulent and unstable.  …

…The sorting out process seems to be happening fast, though.  “Birthers” and “truthers” are being gently but firmly ushered to the door.  For now at least, many Tea Partiers seem to want a populist coalition that focuses on economic and government reform while moving more slowly on social issues. Perhaps the movement is pulling itself together more quickly than past populist upsurges have done because the combination of higher education levels and better communications make today’s populists a little more ready for prime time than some of their predecessors.  The ability to organize populist political movements quickly and effectively on a national scale may be one of the ways in which the United States has progressed in the last fifty years.  The gap in education and skills between the ‘peasants’ and the elites is not as large as it used to be, and so when the ‘peasants’ are unhappy they can move much more quickly than they used to. …

Tunku Varadarajan says that partisanship means the political process is working.

…We have here a situation where the party in power is having trouble enacting legislation because the party in opposition is doing its utmost to frustrate the process. The party in power says that this is unconscionable. Since when, however, does a party have the right to facile lawmaking? After all, the entire structure of American constitutionalism works on the assumption that the greater risk lies in too many laws, not too few. That is why we do have two houses, and presidential vetoes, with a two-thirds override.

What’s so wrong with political and legislative partisanship, anyway? It’s the best thing for transparency in government, with each side quarrying for information, and keeping a close eye on the other’s activities. Furthermore, partisanship is both the cause and the result of a peculiarly American sense of self-help, of a kind of democratic idealism that leads Americans to believe that nothing is inevitable or hopeless in government. …

…Partisanship is all about finding policy flaws in politicians, rather like finding character flaws. That’s why it seems so ad hominem, something that brings politicians down to our level: They are mere mortals, like us, as flawed and perfectible as we are. In other lands, they develop ineffable mystique, but not here. In terms of ideas, partisanship has the benefit of forcing the sides to differentiate themselves and come up with ideas that separate them from the other side. It’s a living, dynamic force that keeps inventing new political ideas. Exposure to partisan criticism helps a politician to refine a policy and to beware of policies which have no support. A good blast of partisan ridicule acts like a pumice stone. It knocks away the dead skin and leaves the body-politic cleaner. …

Theresa Poulson, in the National Journal, interviews Charlie Cook.

NJ: How seriously should we be taking the Tea Party movement?

Cook: Well I think in politics in general and particularly in midterm elections, intensity matters. And whether a movement is constituted by tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people or not, if it’s a sizable enough group with enough intensity, they can make a huge impact.

And I think back in July and August during the town meetings, there was an enormous amount of intensity and it was really sort of the early warning signal that something was going horribly wrong for the president and Democrats in Congress, to build up that kind of intensity of opposition so early on and creating a political environment which a lot of Democratic members of Congress had to be looking at their $173,000 a year pay stubs and thinking, “Gosh, this isn’t nearly enough money to put up with this kind of abuse.” And they did have abused heaped on them.

But I think the Democratic problems and the president’s problems, they, by a factor of a hundred, go beyond the Tea Party movement, but the Tea Party movement is sort of the tip of the sword.

In Slate, James Ledbetter comments on the silence that money buys at the New York Times.

A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim increased his stake in the New York Times Company (NYT), I wrote “I pity the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn’t out of favor with the paper’s new sugar daddy.” Now we have a very clear example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it’s not pretty, and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.

…This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world’s largest banks, a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants. Under any other circumstances, the business section of the Times would be expected to cover it, as the Journal and Bloomberg have. Yet as of Saturday midday, I cannot find a single mention of any aspect of this case, anywhere in the physical New York Times, or on its Web site–not even a blog post or a wire story. Perhaps as the lawsuit moves on, the Times will be compelled to cover it. But for the moment, it certainly appears that Carlos Slim’s investment has bought the silence of one of the world’s most important newspapers.

The Economist reports on the disintegration of an ice shelf in the Antarctic that appears to be caused by an event that scientists know little about.

…The Wilkins shelf may or may not have been the victim, ultimately, of climate change. Regardless of what weakened it, though, it was not rising temperatures that caused the sudden break up. Peter Bromirski of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego thinks he knows what did: a little-studied phenomenon called infragravity waves.

Ocean waves come in several varieties. Normal swells, known technically as gravity waves, are created by wind pushing the surface of the sea up and gravity then pulling it down, causing it to bounce. Gravity waves have a frequency of about once every 30 seconds. When such swells hit the coast, however, part of their energy is transformed into vibrations that have periods ranging from 50 to 350 seconds. These are infragravity waves, so called because they are sub-harmonics of the original gravity waves.

…The original analysis had detected storm-driven swell shaking the ice. Dr Bromirski’s work showed a second signal. Waves with longer periods were also shaking the Ross shelf—indeed, they were inducing a much larger response than the storm waves were. Dr Bromirski and his colleagues report in Geophysical Research Letters that the movements caused by infragravity waves were three times larger than those induced by the swell. …

…Applying this model to the Wilkins ice shelf, Dr Bromirski concludes the likely explanation for its sudden disappearance is that it was shivered to pieces by infragravity waves generated by a series of storms on the coast of Patagonia. A case, then, of being both shaken and stirred.

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In the WSJ, Bret Stephens remarks on the absurd logic, and market-choking bureaucracy, that come from the premise that big government is good.

…”All European economic policies are the cultural derivatives of one dominant, nearly totalitarian statist ideology: the state is good, the market is bad,” says French economist Guy Sorman. The free market, he adds, is “perceived as fundamentally American, while statism is the ultimate form of patriotism.”

…Then there is the media. Last week, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who leads the country’s market-friendly Free Democrats, took to the pages of Die Welt to lament that Germany’s working poor make less than welfare recipients. “For too long,” he wrote, “we have perfected in Germany the redistribution [of wealth], forgetting where prosperity comes from.”

For his banal observations, Mr. Westerwelle was roundly accused of “[defaming] millions of welfare recipients” and urged to apologize to them. It takes a remarkably stultified intellectual climate for an op-ed to spark this kind of brouhaha: It is the empire of the Emperor’s New Clothes, adapted to the 21st century welfare state.

This is all the more remarkable given that Europe’s economic travails aren’t exactly difficult to grasp. Greece in a nutshell? It costs $10,218 to obtain all the permitting needed to start a new business there, according to Harvard economist Alberto Alesina. In the U.S., it takes $166. But tyrannies of thought are hard to break, especially when the beneficiaries of state largess—from college students to government workers to captains of subsidized industries—become a political majority. The U.S. may now be approaching just such a point itself. …

Robert Samuelson joins the conversation on Greece.

It would be possible in other circumstances to disregard the ongoing story of Greece and its debts as a tedious tale of financial markets. But there’s much more to it than that. What’s happening in Greece speaks to two larger issues affecting hundreds of millions of people everywhere: the future of the welfare state and the fate of Europe’s single currency — the euro. The meaning of Greece transcends high finance.

…But in practice, a bailout is proving hugely controversial. If Greece is aided, won’t other countries demand — or require — rescues? Is this possible, considering that even France and Germany have high debts and that a Greek bailout is unpopular, especially in Germany? One way to mute the problems is for Greece to embrace a harsh austerity that reduces its borrowing. Greece has already pledged to cut its government workforce and raise taxes on alcohol, tobacco and fuel. The other euro countries want more. Their dilemma is that either rescuing or abandoning Greece is a gamble.

…Conceived as a way to unite Europe, the euro increasingly divides. No one wants Greece to default, but no one wants to pay the price of prevention. With its own currency, Lachman thinks, Greece would pursue depreciation to spur exports and economic revival. If other countries dump the euro, currency wars could ensue. The threat to the euro bloc ultimately stems from an overcommitted welfare state. Greece’s situation is so difficult because a low birth rate and rapidly graying population automatically increase old-age assistance even as the government tries to cut its spending. At issue is the viability of its present welfare state. …

Jennifer Rubin says that the new version of Obamacare gives more power to the federal government than the versions that passed in Congress. The audacity of the Obami is startling; the public doesn’t like the previous Obamacare bill, so they made it even worse.

…We do have some idea what’s in it, however. Matt Continetti explains: “Obama’s new, improved plan is more expensive than the Senate bill, does not address the concerns of pro-life House Democrats over the Senate’s abortion language, maintains the tax exemption for the Democrats’ union friends, and will effectively turn insurance companies into heavily regulated public utilities.”

What we do know is that under ObamaCare’s latest incarnation, you really don’t get to keep your existing health-care plan. And we know that it seeks to federalize the regulation of the health-insurance industry. (”The big new idea in the president’s plan is to federalize regulation of health insurance, creating a Health Insurance Rate Authority to conduct ‘reviews of unreasonable rate increases and other unfair practices of insurance plans.’ This reflects the overall strategy to give more and more control over the health sector to Washington.”) And it seems that there are $136B worth of new taxes to be imposed on the people Obama said he’d never tax, namely those families making less than $250,000.

What we don’t know is why anyone who opposed the last version(s) of ObamaCare would accept this one. It is still a mammoth tax-and-spend bill and still seeks to federalize health care. If Nancy Pelosi has 218 votes for this, I’d be surprised. If Senate Democrats want to walk the plank for a retread of the bill that voters in Massachusetts sent Scott Brown to the Senate to oppose, I’d be surprised. But I suppose we’ll find out.

John Steele Gordon adds his thoughts on the new version of Obamacare.

I certainly agree with Jennifer that the latest iteration of a health-care bill out of the White House is same-old same-old.

There is basically just one new idea, and it’s a terrible one — the Health Insurance Rate Authority. This board would have the power to roll back health-insurance-premium hikes that were “unreasonable.” Needless to say, the definition of “unreasonable” would be determined by politicians, who would take political considerations (there are a lot more health-care buyers than sellers), not economic ones, into account. That’s why rent controls have been everywhere and always a disaster. The result will be that every health-insurance company in the country will go broke (which is probably what the Obama administration has in mind anyway, come to think of it). …

…The people have spoken just as clearly as they can about what they think of the health-care bills that have already, if barely, passed the House and Senate. Many members of each chamber will have to be willing to commit political suicide to pass this one.  Like Jennifer, I’d be surprised. Very surprised.

Jennifer Rubin has more on Obamacare.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Fox News Sunday declined to say if there were enough votes to block Harry Reid from jamming ObamaCare through using reconciliation. He did, however, seem quite pleased to use the prospect of reconciliation to taunt the Democrats:

“You know, we’ve witnessed the ‘Cornhusker kickback,’ the ‘Louisiana purchase,’ ‘the Gatorade,’ the special deal for Florida. Now they are suggesting they might use a device which has never been used the for this kind of major systemic reform. We know it would be — the only thing bipartisan about it would be the opposition to it, because a number of Democrats have said, ‘Don’t do this. This is not the way to go.’ I think they’re having a hard time getting the message here. The American people do not want this bill to pass. And it strikes me as rather arrogant to say, ‘Well, we’re going to give it to you anyway, and we’ll use whatever device is available to achieve that end.’” …

Obama does not appear to be capable of learning from his mistakes, comments Jennifer Rubin. Perhaps the president doesn’t recognize that he has made mistakes.

…Obama lacks judgment. We were told during the campaign that he had loads of judgment, and it would offset his experience gap. But alas, he lacked the judgment to assess nearly every critical issue he faced — the Iranian nuclear threat, the Middle East “peace process,” health-care reform, and his entire domestic agenda. He might lack intuition – the ability to foresee how events will unfold – but more critically, he also lacks the ability to assess events once they do unfold. He lacked the foresight to see that Iran would not respond to video valentines, but then he persisted in frittering away a year on engagement and standing idly by when democratic protestors could have used our help. And he has compounded his error by taking military force off the table and seemingly laying the groundwork for itty-bitty, ineffective sanctions. In sum, he doesn’t learn.

That inability to assess events, make adjustments, and correct course promptly may be attributable to a lack of life experience (e.g., he has never seen his ideological assumptions rejected so thoroughly, nor has he had to shift course so abruptly). It may also stem from arrogance – the belief that he has a monopoly on virtue and wisdom and that his opponents are rubes and/or operate out of bad faith. And then again, he may simply be weighed down by silly ideas (e.g., government can create jobs) and a lack of executive acumen. We don’t know, and we don’t know whether he can improve. …

Roger Simon, who wrote detective stories, is intrigued by the Dubai assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. He offers his conjectures on what happened.

…I am now going to speculate about what may have happened with the following caveats: 1. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and this could have been just an ordinary, if overly elaborate, hit. 2. When I wrote my detective series, I did so from a position of absolutely no expertise whatsoever (in other words, total amateurism). So “I don’t know nothin’.”

The first notable clue is those “eleven” agents. Why send eleven for an assassination when two or three would do? Why not just knock the Hamas man off with a bombing or cell phone some place? It would be far less risky. And the Israelis clearly had remarkably precise advanced knowledge of al-Mabhouh’s itinerary. The Hamas leader had only left Damascus that morning, supposedly, according to some reports, en route to China via Dubai. And yet the Mossad had a minimum of eleven people in place, waiting for him. No wonder Hamas was so shocked that, when they learned of his “murder” on January 19, they immediately announced terminal cancer had over taken their leader. Hamas itself must have had something closer to a heart attack. To have this much warning of al-Mabhouh’s itinerary, the Israelis must have permeated them pretty thoroughly. The embarrassment alone, not to mention the internal finger-pointing and suspicion, must have been extreme. …

…Nevertheless, the Israelis still must have had some motive for employing so many agents for a hit. After checking into a blacked out room at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel that day, al-Mabhouh went missing for four hours – and this may provide some clues. A meeting with an Iranian official has been reported and denied, also some Palestinian group. In any case, he was doing something and there was information to be gleaned from this man, most probably key information regarding Hamas and its allies (Iran, Syria, etc.) that certainly accounts in part for the elaborate assassination. In a world rapidly becoming nuclear one can only speculate what that information is, but we can be sure it’s not particularly appetizing. It’s also worth considering what al -Mabhouh wanted to obtain from the Chinese. The Mossad was out for al-Mabhouh’s knowledge even more than the revenge that is commonly reported. …

Roger Simon has more. He starts by asking the reader to spot the mistake in a WSJ piece on the assassination. You can go to the full article to try out your detective skills. He poses an interesting question at the end of the post.

…On a far more serious note, the Timesonline (often a conduit for Mossad information) contains a much more extensive account of the incident in its Sunday edition. The Times places the assassination in the context of the ongoing cold war between Israel and Iran and indeed it now appears that Mahboub was en route to Iran’s Bandar Abbas and not China, as previously reported. Read the whole thing, as the saying goes, but I was taken by this particular paragraph:

Yesterday Dhahi Khalfan, the Dubai police chief, said investigators had found that some of the passports had been used in Dubai before. About three months ago it appears Mossad agents using the stolen identities followed Mabhouh when he travelled to Dubai and then on to China. About two months ago they followed him on another visit to Dubai.

Wait a minute. The Mossad had been tracking Mabhouh on two (undoubtedly more) occasions without assassinating him? Why did they finally do it now? I leave that to you, dear reader. …

Roger Simon continues to follow the murder mystery in Dubai.

…As the MSM continues to report on the huffing and puffing of various Eurocrats about the use of stolen or semi-stolen (who really knows?) passports in the murder of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January, you have to look around the edges for the real story. And one of those places today is the Chinese news agency Xinhua. The world’s biggest news agency (by a fair amount) often publishes some fascinating material before its censors get their hands in to do their regulating and squashing. Here’s today’s tidbit – Hamas denies Dubai police accusation:

“Hamas on Monday denied Dubai police chief’s accusation that a Hamas traitor informed Mossad, Israel’s security intelligence service, about its militant leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s visit to Dubai, which led to his assassination on Jan. 20. …

…Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim said an internal “agent” of Hamas leaked the travel information of al-Mabhouh, which resulted in his assassination, calling on Hamas to launch an internal inquiry, the English newspaper of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Gulf News reported on Sunday. …”

Mark Steyn comments on how government greenthink hurts economies.

…In Australia, the Labor government, eager to flaunt its green credentials, instituted a nationwide environmentally friendly roof-insulation program using energy-efficient foil insulation. It certainly reduces the carbon footprint of many Aussies’ homes: At the time of writing, 172 of them have burned down. It reduces your personal carbon footprint, too: Four installers of the foil have been fatally electrocuted. As the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair noted, the foil-insulation program has a higher fatality rate than Oz forces in Afghanistan. And, if the electrician survives long enough to get the installation completed, the good news is that…the electric attic always has plenty of juice: Colin Brierley had the foil insulation put into his Gold Coast home and was electrocuted a week later. The environmentally friendly electric shock entered through his knees, exited from his head, and led to a nice stay in hospital in an induced coma. …

…These are the “green jobs” that Barack Obama says will both save the planet and revitalize the economy: electric Zambo­nis, foil insulation, wind turbines, corn-powered cars. They will put America back on the cutting edge. In reality… they’ll leave the economy full of artificial speed bumps… The Germans subsidize “green jobs” in the wind-power industry to just shy of a quarter million dollars per worker per year. The Spanish government pays $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. This money is taken from real workers with real jobs at real businesses whose growth is being squashed to divert funds to endeavors that have no rationale other than their government subsidies. As the Spanish are discovering, this model is not (le mot juste) sustainable. …
… At Copenhagen, Europe attempted to do to the developed world’s entire economy what Peter Garrett’s foil insulation did to poor old Colin Brierley of Windaroo in the Gold Coast. They were stopped only by Brazil, China, and India, three countries with more conventional (i.e., non-suicidal) concepts of national interest. It took the Chinese Politburo to prevent the Western world’s hurling itself into the blades of a Condor Cuisinart. It’s hard not to conclude that many of our ruling elites are in the grip of a mass psychosis — and at this stage, even Aussie-style electroshock therapy may not work.

Bill McGurn, in the WSJ, reports on a new push for school vouchers in Chicago. This is a hopeful sign for Chicago’s children. And having a prominent Chicago Democrat standing up to the teachers’ union makes for quite a story.

…James T. Meeks does not fit the usual stereotype of a voucher advocate. To begin with, he is founder and senior pastor of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, the largest African-American church in Illinois. He serves as executive vice-president for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Oh, yes: He is a Democratic state senator who chairs both his chamber’s education committee and the legislature’s Black Caucus.

A few years back, Barack Obama named him someone he looked to for “spiritual counsel.” Now the man they call “the Reverend Senator” has done the unthinkable: He’s introduced a bill to provide vouchers for as many as 42,000 students now languishing in Chicago’s worst public schools. He tells me he thinks he can get enough Democrats on his coalition to get it through.

“I’m banking on the difficulty Democrats will have telling these parents, ‘No, you’re not going to have choice. Your kids are locked into these failing schools.’” …

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In Contentions, Max Boot responds to concerns about the rules of engagement in Afghanistan.

…The only way to win in a counterinsurgency — or just about any other war, for that matter — is to send infantrymen with rifles to occupy the enemy’s strongholds. In Afghanistan, those strongholds are among the population. That’s where our troops need to go. In the process of driving the insurgents out of the population centers, it is strategically smart to minimize civilian casualties because that will help us to win the allegiance of the wavering population. That is not an untested theory; it is the reality of successful counterinsurgency campaigns from Malaya to Iraq.

And, yes, our troops will be placed at risk in the process of protecting the population and defeating the insurgents. There is no other way to achieve our goals. In Iraq from 2003 to 2007, we tried the alternative approach of putting our troops into giant Forward Operating Bases and employing copious firepower. Because this strategy failed to defeat the insurgency, it actually resulted in more American casualties. Conversely the surge strategy of 2007, which placed our troops in more exposed Combat Outposts and Joint Security Stations in Iraqi neighborhoods, incurred more casualties in the short run but saved American (and Iraqi) lives in the long run by actually pacifying Iraq. That strategy is also our best bet in Afghanistan. That’s something that Gen. McChrystal realizes and that Stateside naysayers fail to grasp.

Charles Krauthammer’s take on the Afghan ROE.

… So even though I’m sort of instinctively very suspicious and worried about these very constraining rules of engagement, I would defer to the military here because they are making a calculation that this is the best way to win the war.

David Warren believes that Greece is only the first nation to reach a financial crisis.

…today the problem is that freely elected governments of socialist tendency have spent the country into perdition. …

…This is the reality, yet Europe’s finance ministers are still blathering assurance that the Greeks somehow “deserve” to be saved. This not out of any compassion, but from fear the whole European Union will begin unravelling when Greece comes apart.

Yet in this respect Greece is nothing special: a vast, unionized public bureaucracy, which is, under quaint Greek arrangements, paid 14 months a year (12 calendar months plus two of guaranteed annual bonus). The civil servants are going berserk because the Socialist government of George Papandreou is trying to cut them back to 13 months of payment. (And can’t afford that.) We have the spectacle of customs officials on strike, and tax collectors threatening to follow; of their trades union umbrella group declaring that the government’s austerity measures are “an act of war.”

…it is rather necessary to run a structural surplus, to prepare for the long rain of basic demographic facts: the usual aging population. …

In the National Journal, Clive Crook contrasts the US financial situation with that of Greece. Setting aside his assumption that tax increases will help, he has some interesting analysis.

…Perhaps that figure I just mentioned for U.S. general government debt struck you as high. The measure of public debt usually quoted in the U.S. excludes the debts of state and local governments. This and other statistical differences give you a debt ratio for 2010 of just over 60 percent — the figure you might be familiar with — not 90 percent. But it is not obvious why you would want to exclude the debts of state and local governments. Doing so is not standard international practice. If some states approach default, which is by no means unthinkable, some of those debts may end up on the federal government’s books anyway. Even if it does not come to that, the debts are still public obligations, and most countries would fold them into their overall measure of public debt.

Moreover, tunnel into the fiscal practices of America’s state and local governments and you find (as in most countries) plenty of “financial innovation.” Revenue bonds, for instance, securitize future cash flows from taxes, lease payments, lottery profits, federal aid, and what have you. Borrowing against these future income streams can be used to keep spending off the books: Lack of transparency is often part of the attraction. The maneuver also gets around constitutional and other restrictions on borrowing using general obligation bonds. While you’re at it, throw in generous tax advantages for state and local debt. And let’s not forget states’ unfunded pension and health insurance obligations. …

…Perhaps handing the problem off to a commission is as much as the politics will allow. President Obama has promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. He will have to break that promise. Realistically, this cannot happen before November’s elections, and when it does, Obama will need all the political cover he can find. Perhaps the budget commission can provide some. The president has said that the commission should consider all options: As it starts its work, he is not taking tax increases off the table. …

Christopher Hitchens has a send off for Al Haig.

“Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do,” I once wrote. “And I think he is a homicidal buffoon.” I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.

When I moved to Washington in the very early years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, I was pretty sure that Haig, then secretary of state, was delusional (and not even in a good way). What I would not have believed then was what has become apparent since—that his boss, Ronald Reagan, often felt the same way. According to Douglas Brinkley’s splendid edition of the president’s diaries, Reagan wrote as early as March 24, 1981: …

Global analysis by Stratfor’s George Friedman is in Pickings sometimes. In Tablet Magazine, David Goldman (AKA Spengler) analyzes Stratfor’s work product. He is not impressed.

… Friedman is not selling sophistication. Subscribers to his premium service get more items in their inbox than the most avid geopolitics junkie could digest. Friedman’s private CIA, for that matter, isn’t much different from the official version. My old boss from Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council, Norman Bailey, always read the press himself to make sure he caught key items that the CIA analysts missed. Most of the cubicle-dwellers in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence are academics who didn’t get tenure and chose the government’s health and pension benefits over the uncertainties of adjunct teaching.

For all his commercial focus, Friedman does not pander to his readers’ prejudice. The Next 100 Years dismisses the stuff of scare scenarios—Islam taking over Europe, China confronting the United States, a failed Mexican state dumping its surplus millions over the American border—and offers an idiosyncratic vision that will leave most readers confused. Forget Russia and China, Friedman insists: they will collapse of their own weight during the next generation. The great powers of the future are Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and Poland. The great crisis of the mid-21st century, he believes, will be a war between the United States and a fearsome Turkish-Japanese alliance. …

…Warfare no longer depends on demographics, Friedman explains with exquisite patience. With precision-guided munitions and battlefield robotics, Japan can project military power without a large army. Israel, after all, is the biggest military power in the Middle East, and its demographic presence is trivial. “One computer scientist is worth a great many soldiers,” Friedman says. …

…I ask how many doctorates in computer science Mexico graduates each year. Friedman doesn’t know. The correct answer is nine. Japan is going to be a world power despite its vanishing population because it’s got the computer scientists, and Mexico is going to threaten the United States despite its lack of computer scientists because of its large unskilled population.

Doesn’t all of this seem inconsistent? “Not at all,” Friedman answers. “I look at the discrepancy between economic status and economic potential and draw conclusions from there.” And that, in essence, is what his method entails. He looks for countries with a high growth rate, like Turkey or Mexico, and projects this forward 50 years in a straight line. He is not trying to be sensational; he is simply being academic. Why a country like India, which now produces more graduate students in math and sciences than the United States, does not figure into Friedman’s vision of the future is perplexing. “You can’t speak of India as a unified country,” he says. “They have marvelous technology in Mumbai, and a hundred miles away they have Maoist guerillas. India was invited by the British. It has vast political diversity.”

The fact that India and China are graduating millions of bright young people trained at the cutting edge of technology and conversant with Western culture…doesn’t matter, for Friedman takes for granted that the world’s two largest nations will turn into failed states, while Mexico will become America’s geopolitical rival. …

A Corner post by Bill Burck and Dana Perino gives us the importance of the closing of the investigation parts of Bush’s legal team.

On February 19, Attorney General Eric Holder took part in the time-honored Washington tradition of dumping undesired news on Friday afternoons or evenings. After weeks of leaks, the Justice Department officially exonerated Bush-era lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the authors of the original legal opinions on the lawfulness of the CIA interrogation program, which are known pejoratively as the “torture memos” to critics.

This is bad news for Holder and certain other Obama appointees at Justice — it undermines the story they’ve been telling for years that the lawyers who found the CIA program lawful were sadistic criminals committed to torturing poor souls such as Khalid Sheik Muhammad — but it is a vindication of an important principle that, prior to the Holder reign, had been adhered to across administrations: honestly held legal and policy opinions are not cause for prosecution or professional discipline.

For years now this principle has been under sustained attack by hard-core left-wing congressional partisans such as Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine some of the more wild-eyed among them searching for ways to revoke the law licenses of conservative Supreme Court justices. Fortunately, this country is not Venezuela — at least not yet; we should not rest easy.

This was a very narrow escape that came down to the brave decision of a long-time career official at Justice named David Margolis. …

In the Times, UK, Christina Lamb looks at the trouble with the Obami.

…Obama relies on five people, four of whom are Chicagoans. They are Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, David Axelrod and Jarrett, his political advisers, and Michelle, while the fifth kitchen cabinet member is Robert Gibbs, his chief spokesman, who comes from Alabama.

The president consults them on everything. Military commanders were astounded when they participated in Afghanistan war councils and referred to them as the “Chicago mafia”. …

…The problem may go deeper. Douglas Schoen, former pollster for Bill Clinton, believes the Obama team misinterpreted victory as an endorsement of his liberal agenda when it was really a reaction against George W Bush and the credit crisis. “They need to recognise there is only one fundamental issue in America: jobs,” he said.

What no one disputes is that Obama is extremely clever. Were it not for losing the Kennedy seat and with it the Democrats’ 60-seat super-majority in the Senate, Obama would probably have signed healthcare into law by now. …

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David Warren has a warning.

A spectre is haunting Europe, and America — the spectre of Keynesianism finally gone nuts.

What began, not very innocently, as a suggestion that governments should run deficits in bad times, and surpluses in good times, gradually “evolved.” In the next phase, governments tried to balance at least the operating account during the best of times. In phase three, governments ran deficits by habit during the good times, but much bigger “stimulus” deficits during the bad times. We are now entering phase four. …

… our governments have created vast bureaucracies, employing immense numbers whose livelihoods depend entirely (whether they realize it or not) upon the capacity of profit-earning people to pay constantly increasing taxes.

It should have been grasped, decades ago, that the constant transfer of resources from the productive to the unproductive must eventually tip the ship. And when it does, real people go over the side, who get angry when they are thrown in the water. There are consequences to that anger.

The idea that we can spend our way out of a debt crisis — or what I called above, “Keynesianism gone nuts” — has already been rejected by the Tea Party movement in the U.S., and has always been rejected by voters of conservative tendency. They know what’s wrong with the present order, and have an important teaching function to the rest of the electorate, which doesn’t get it yet.

But more urgently, we are in need of a positive conception of how to rebuild economy and society, when Nanny State collapses under her own weight. For yelling “run!” is only a short-term solution.

Mark Steyn comments on the dangerous incompetence of governments that take away our liberty under the guise of “protecting” us, but fail in the most basic duty of government: to protect us from real threats to our existence.

In Britain, it is traditional on Shrove Tuesday to hold pancake races, in which contestants run while flipping a pancake in a frying pan. The appeal of the event depends on the potential pitfalls in attempting simultaneous rapid forward propulsion and pancake tossing. But, in St. Albans, England, competitors were informed by Health & Safety officials that they were “banned from running due to fears they would slip over in the rain.” Watching a man walk up the main street with a skillet is not the most riveting event, even in St. Albans. In the heat of the white-knuckle thrills, team captain David Emery momentarily forgot the new rules. “I have been disqualified from a running race for running,” he explained afterwards.

…This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of “keeping you safe.” If you’re minded to flip a pancake at speeds of more than 4 miles per hour, the state will step in and act decisively: It’s for your own good. …

…On the other hand, when it comes to “keeping you safe” from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. …

Speaking of threats to our existence, Mark Helprin says we need the F-22.

… As we rapidly disarm, China is just as rapidly arming. Perhaps because Americans do not play much chess we seem not to understand that a nation can be defeated without war, that after failing in the art of balance and maneuver the king may still stand, but motionlessly in check, “soft power” notwithstanding. “Soft power” in the absence of hard power is like flesh without a skeleton.

With self-destructive enthusiasm disguised as reasonableness, we now court costs of a future war (or defeat by maneuver) far greater than those of preparation or deterrence—in this economy or any other. Despite the Pacific interface with China, our fleet is smaller than at any time since 1916, and potentially halved due to China’s physical control of the Panama Canal. The second President Bush built fewer ships than even his feckless predecessor. In abandoning effective missile defense and decimating the nuclear arsenal, we invite proliferation among the minor players, and, after half a century, are making a first strike by the major ones feasible once again. This year, the Air Force will keep 150 fighters in all of Europe, as at one time, while it declined but before it burned, Rome kept only a shadow of legions upon the Rhine and Danube.

In the very long list of such things is the F-22. Its stealth, speed, agility, and advanced sensors are such that in a 2006 exercise against F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, the F-22, its pilots scarcely accustomed to it, scored 241 kills to 2. Famously, before its opponents know it’s there, their aircraft are exploding. Former USAF Lt.-Col. Joseph Sussingham, F-16 Experimental Command Pilot, put it best: “To face a flight of F-22s is to face a wall of death.” …

In Contentions, Abe Greenwald reports on an Obami admission that the US will not use force in dealing with Iran.

In case you missed it, the Obama administration has unequivocally taken the option of a military strike off the Iran-policy table. Here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a February 15 Al Jazeera interview:

MR. FOUKARA: Just as a follow-up to what you said about Iran, Madam Secretary, you said in your speech before the U.S.-Islamic World Forum that more pressure should be applied to Iran. And there are a lot of people in the Middle East wondering if the United States is planning, at any one time, whether before the withdrawal from Iraq or after the withdrawal from Iraq, planning to launch a military attack of one kind or another against Iran.

SECRETARY CLINTON: No. …

Abe Greenwald then contrasts the US response with the Canadian one.

…“Prime Minister (Stephen) Harper has made it quite clear for some time now and has regularly stated that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada,” said Kent, minister of state for foreign affairs (Americas).

Kent made the comments in an interview with the news site Shalom Life, based in Greater Toronto. …

…“I think the realization that it’s a dangerous situation that has been there for some time. It’s a matter of timing and it’s a matter of how long we can wait without taking more serious pre-emptive action.”

He said military action, while a long shot, is still on the table.

What a strange time indeed that finds the U.S. trailing Canada (and France) in its boldness toward a near-nuclear Iran.

Jennifer Rubin comments on Greenwald’s posts and the Obami’s inability to act.

…So what’s up here? Could it be that the Obami are — I know it’s hard to imagine — foot-dragging and trying to downplay the urgency of the situation? Might it be that the policy of  do-nothingism only works as long as the public doesn’t get the idea that the mullahs are doing something, namely making steady progress toward a nuclear weapons capability. Once that becomes apparent, the Obami may be called upon to do something.

At this point, the Obami look feckless (more so than usual) and can only float the idea that, yes, they might be revising that now entirely discredited 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. But for now, it seems that’s the extent of their concern. …

…Thus, the Obami are paralyzed. They show no determination to prevent Iran from moving closer and closer to membership in the nuclear weapons club or to interfere with Iran’s efforts to subvert its neighbor Iraq. Israel and its Arab neighbors have reason to be nervous. The Obama administration seems keen on stopping Israel from striking Iran yet indifferent to any action that would halt the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran bent on regional hegemony and destruction of the Jewish state. One wonders why U.S. lawmakers and Jewish groups aren’t more concerned as we sleepwalk into a world with a nuclear-armed revolutionary Islamic state.

Roger Simon blogs on Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei’s partial responsibility for the Iranian nuclear crisis.

…and now – perhaps worst of all – comes the revelation by the UN IAEA that Iran may actually be working on a nuclear warhead.

Why is that bad for the Norwegian Prize Committee, you ask? After all, everybody and his brother knows the Iranians are working on nuclear weapons. Well, everybody but the IAEA’s previous chief. As Bridget Johnson puts it for The Hill:

The report by the new head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, appears to raise greater concerns about Iran’s capabilities than the assessments of his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei.

“Altogether, this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile,” said the report.

“These alleged activities consist of a number of projects and sub-projects, covering nuclear and missile related aspects, run by military related organizations.”

Of course it’s Mr. ELBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner for 2005, who missed all this. Did he miss it accidentally? Mr. Amano has only had the job for a couple of months. ElBaradei had it for twelve years. As most kids would say, what’s up with that? … My guess is that ElBaradei either deliberately or semi-deliberately turned away from obvious Iranian nuclear weapons development for the better part of a decade or more. In other words, he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize about as much as A. Q. Khan. In fact, if Khan is the father of the Islamic bomb, ElBaradei is probably its uncle. …

Nile Gardiner has a hopeful post on conservatism being embraced by more people. The Obami may have served the purpose of waking more people up to the reality that government will take their money and their freedoms, but government will not take care of them.

…In contrast, the state of conservatism is extremely healthy – from the striking success of Fox News and talk radio to the rise of grass roots movements that have sprung up all over the country to protest against higher taxes, spiraling budget deficits and socialized health care. There is a new sense of optimism and confidence among conservatives that had been missing for many years, amply displayed at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which kicked off yesterday, attended by a staggering 10,000 or so delegates.

They have come from all corners of the country, a large percentage of them under the age of 30, to listen to veteran politicians such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, as well as rising stars such as newly elected Senator Scott Brown and Scott Rubio, the youthful son of Cuban immigrants, now campaigning for a Senate seat in Florida. At a CPAC dinner I attended as a guest last night, emceed by the wonderfully charismatic Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, there was an extremely buoyant, almost festival-like atmosphere across the 1,000-strong crowd, enough to send shivers down the spine of Rahm Emmanuel.

The American Left can only dream of putting together this kind of impeccably managed and intellectually vibrant three-day event, one that covers practically every policy issue under the sun. There is no liberal equivalent of CPAC, not least because liberalism is increasingly bereft of ideas and short on innovative thinking. The spirit of political revolution is in the air in Washington, and the Left should take note. As a series of Gallup polls have categorically shown over the past few months, the United States is not only a conservative nation, but one that is becoming significantly more conservative in the face of the Obama administration. Conservatism is not the past for America, it is the country’s future.

In Contentions, Max Boot gives kudos to General McChrystal for showing appropriate diplomacy to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Not the least of the innovations that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has introduced is changing how the U.S. interacts with Hamid Karzai. The Obama team came into office bashing the president of Afghanistan without lining up a solid alternative. The predictable result: a key ally has been alienated for no good reason. Now McChrystal is working to shore up Karzai’s authority and especially his credentials as a wartime leader.

This Wall Street Journal article shows how McChrystal was careful to brief Karzai on plans for the offensive into Marjah and to get his sign-off before the launching of operations. As the Journal notes:

For both the Americans and the Afghans, who have been fighting together for more than eight years, it was a novel moment. As Mr. Karzai said after being roused from a nap: “No one has ever asked me to decide before.”

This attempt to bolster Karzai and involve him more in NATO decision-making seems a much more productive way to deal with him than the previous approach of scolding him in public. It is just possible that Karzai can undergo a transformation similar to that of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, who established himself as a strong leader in 2008 by becoming the public face of military operations against Sadrist insurgents.

In the Daily Corner, Jon Ward reports that some Democrats are seeing the destructiveness of government unions.

Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell on Wednesday blasted the Obama White House for creating “a world in which there is no dissent,” following his banishment from Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff’s campaign for Senate….

…“I think the public unions are going to take the country and the Democratic party down the tubes,” Caddell said. “They’re in the business of taking care of — of asking taxpayers, asking ordinary people, to pay for people who make twice as much as they make, with benefit packages they will never see, and they’re told, you may not cut those.” …

…“How are you going to tell a person who makes $40,000 that they must pay money to make sure that people keep jobs who make $80,000, roughly, and who have defined pensions that they will never see?” Caddell said. “You cannot ask ordinary Americans who have no jobs, whose pensions have been ransacked, and whose pay has been stagnant, to keep rewarding people who don’t face the same kind of conditions and risk.”

“The people who pay for it are suffering,” he said. “The taxpayers are going to explode. This is the big coming issue of our time.”

In the Denver Post, Mike Rosen comments on Tea Party Derangement Syndrome.

Over the years, I’ve observed Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne move from respectably liberal to left-liberal to delusional-left. …

…Then came the relapse. As Obama’s popularity declined and his leftist agenda stalled, Dionne has become positively apoplectic. Bush Derangement Syndrome has metastasized into Tea Party Derangement Syndrome, which has become epidemic among lefties.

…most of our founders mistrusted a powerful central government, which is why the Constitution enumerated and restricted federal powers, safeguarded the independence of states, and reserved ultimate power to the people. “Progressive” leftists like Dionne are inherent statists with unbounded faith in the virtue and wisdom of elite bureaucrats who share their ideology to run our government, our economy and our lives. …

John Stossel talks about problems with government-run schools.

…Ask James Tooley about that. Tooley is a professor of education policy who spends most of every year in some of the poorest parts of Africa, India and China. For 10 years, he’s studied how poor kids do in “free” government schools and — hold on — private schools. That’s right. In the worst slums, private for-profit schools educate kids better than the government’s schools do.

Tooley finds as many as six private schools in small villages. “The majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school, and these schools outperform government schools at a fraction of the teacher cost,” he says.

Why do parents with meager resources pass up “free” government schools and sacrifice to send their children to private schools? Because, as one parent told the BBC, the private owner will do something that’s virtually impossible in America’s government schools: replace teachers who do not teach.

… Tooley tested kids in both kinds of schools, and the private-school students score better.  …

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In Investor’s Business Daily, Jeffrey Anderson takes measure of Obama’s spending.

…Liberals like to point to deficit spending in the Reagan era. Of the eight congressional budgets that President Ronald Reagan signed, all of which were passed by a heavily Democratic House and nearly half by a Democratic Senate, the average deficit was $177 billion, or 4.1% of GDP. The average projected deficit for the two budgets that President Obama has proposed, also to a heavily Democratic Congress, is $1.412 trillion, or 9.3% of GDP.

Despite not having had to fund Cold War-level expenditures on defense (the defense budget was 64% higher under Reagan than under Obama, even as a percentage of GDP), Obama’s annual deficits are, by any measure, easily doubling Reagan’s — and that’s not even counting his 2009 deficit spending.

In truth, we’ve never amassed deficits remotely approaching those that President Obama and this Congress are amassing when we were not fighting in the World Wars or the Civil War. We’ve never run up deficits that were even close.

The historical record yields an inescapable conclusion: This White House and this Congress have been the most fiscally irresponsible in American history. And that’s setting the record straight.

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece on how liberals are criticizing constitutional processes rather than Obama’s poor leadership.

…Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about “extremists” trying “to eliminate the filibuster” when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health-care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: “Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama’s (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. . . . But in this case there’s a simpler explanation: Barack Obama’s job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed.”

…The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections — Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That’s not a structural defect. That’s a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself — despite the special interests — through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

The Economist also dismisses the claim that American institutions are the problem.

…America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.

Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. …

In the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez relays a letter written by three priests about the defunding of the D.C. voucher program.

Three prominent priests from the University of Notre Dame — one a bit of a liberal icon, another one who honored Barack Obama last May — have written to Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Senator Durbin to protest the “unconscionable” termination of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. They write, in part:

“For the past decade, the University of Notre Dame, through its Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE), has served as the nation’s largest provider of teachers and principals for inner-city Catholic schools.  Since 1993, we have prepared more than 1,000 teachers and hundreds of principals to work in some of the poorest Catholic schools in the nation.  That experience… leads us to an unqualified conclusion: the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program provides an educational lifeline to at-risk children, standing unequivocally as one of the greatest signs of hope for K-12 educational reform.  To allow its demise, to effectively force more than 1,700 poor children from what is probably the only good school they’ve ever attended, strikes us as an unconscionable affront to the ideal of equal opportunity for all.

Three decades of research tell us that Catholic schools are often the best providers of educational opportunity to poor and minority children.  Students who attend Catholic schools are 42 percent more likely to graduate from high school and are two and a half times more likely to graduate from college than their peers in public schools.  Recent scholarship on high school graduation rates in Milwaukee confirms that programs like the OSP can, over time, create remarkable opportunities for at-risk children.  And after only three years, the research commissioned by the Department of Education is clear and strong with regard to the success of the OSP, as you both well know.  … Parents of OSP students argue that their children are doing better in school, and they report that these scholarships have given their families an opportunity to break the cycle of poverty. …”

Michael Barone says rather than sitting around smiling and counting imaginary votes the GOP needs a plan to address the nation’s problems.

…A Republican Congress could take up the suggestion of recently appointed Florida Sen. George LeMieux to cut spending back to 2007 levels. The 2009 stimulus package raised the budget baselines of many domestic programs. They could be cut back again.

But beyond that loom the problems of ever-expanding entitlements: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Rep. Paul Ryan has advanced a “road map” to cut spending by means-testing benefits, replacing Medicare with vouchers to pay for health insurance for beneficiaries currently under age 55, and providing refundable tax credits for health insurance premiums for the nonelderly. It would allow but not require employees under 55 to set up personal retirement accounts in place of the current Social Security program. …

…Better to put into place public policies that will be enduring as party majorities come and go. This is what the Republican Congress elected in 1946 did: It repealed wartime wage and price controls, it revised labor law to reduce unions’ powers and it provided bipartisan support for Harry Truman’s Cold War policies. Democrats won back congressional majorities in 1948, but Republicans’ policies stayed in place, shaping prosperous postwar America.

Americans have rejected the Europeanizing policies of the Obama Democrats. Republicans may get a chance to put us on a better American path. They need to be prepared to do so.

In the WSJ, Dorothy Rabinowitz has some criticisms of Sarah that are worth Palin’s consideration.

…Though it hasn’t attracted wide attention, nothing Mrs. Palin has done recently has been worthier of notice than her endorsement of Rand Paul, now running in Kentucky’s GOP senate primary. Dr. Paul, an ophthalmologist and radical libertarian, holds views on national security and defense that have much in common with those of the far left. …

…On one or two things his own views are clear: He stands opposed to the Patriot Act and he wants to cut defense spending.

Asked about her endorsement of this candidate, Mrs. Palin informed Mr. Wallace she was proud of her choice. She admired Rand Paul’s domestic policies, not of course that she agreed with everything he stood for. It does not, apparently, occur to her that everything he stands for—and can vote on—is precisely what comes into play when, and if, he becomes a senator with her help.

Mrs. Palin regularly invokes the name of the most revered of her heroes, Ronald Reagan—among the sunniest stars ever to mount the political stage, and a leader who spoke to all of America. He did not appeal to the aggrieved. Nor did he see in the oratory of grievance, or talk of real Americans and those who were not, a political platform.

In the Corner, Michael Potemra comments on these and other criticisms.

…Which brings me to George Will, who writes: “Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska’s governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states. Conservatives, who rightly respect markets as generally reliable gauges of consumer preferences, should notice that the political market is speaking clearly: The more attention Palin receives, the fewer Americans consider her presidential timber. The latest Post-ABC News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans — including 52 percent of Republicans — think she is not qualified to be president.” …

…Will admits that Palin is “feisty and public-spirited,” and – as if to validate my comment on the Rabinowitz piece — that “millions of people vibrate like tuning forks to her rhetoric.” The gravamen of his substantive objection to Palin – i.e., as opposed to the highly questionable assertion that she can’t win — is that while she has “showed grit . . . she has also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning.” The thing about seasoning, though, is that it can come with time. I have seen already that Palin is a political natural, so I have little doubt she has the raw political talents to win people’s affections: In this regard, she reminds me of no one so much as of Bill Clinton, who in the 1992 primaries managed to turn catastrophe into political gold. He, too, used every attack against him as an opportunity to make the central political story entirely about himself, and emerged as a result as a highly sympathetic person in the eyes of middle America — sympathetic enough to defeat an incumbent president who not long before had enjoyed a 91 percent approval rating. …

David Harsanyi takes the remaining global-warming-sky-is-falling-you-can’t-see-my-data types to task.

…We’ve all heard the average environmentalist get a bit hysterical with tales of impending catastrophes as a way to motivate us. But these reports were edited by scientists. Can we count on them to always be honest and apolitical? The only way to know is transparency.

So let’s revisit the case of National Center for Atmospheric Research senior scientist Kevin Trenberth, who this week on National Public Radio blamed the heavy snowfall, in part, on global warming, proving that even very smart experts can use weather to further the cause.

Trenberth, who has no problem taking a salary and nearly full funding from taxpayers, is not as keen on complying with Freedom of Information Act requests. …

…Then there is NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Chris Horner at the free market Competitive Enterprise Institute has been trying for years to have the organization release information about the inner workings of Goddard. As a government agency — in this case, without any the national security issues to worry about — it has an obligation to comply. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders discusses greenthink: no matter what the data or the weather is, it must be global warming.

…Last week, Phil Jones, the unit’s director at the time of the e-mail leak, answered tough questions posed by the BBC in an interview, during which he admitted that there has been no statistically significant warming of the planet since 1995. Jones also rejected Al Gore’s mantra when he said he did not believe that “the vast majority of climate scientists think” the debate over climate change is over.

Like the Wicked Witch of Oz, the global-warming machine is melting into a wretched puddle.

…The alarmists also have taken to scolding skeptics who have pointed to this year’s record snowfalls as dimwits who do not know the difference between weather and climate. This is choice – after all the years during which the global-warming believers pointed to every warm season, low-snowfall report and storm as proof that the “tipping point” was near. …

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The problem of Iran and its nukes gets a lot of attention today.

David Warren starts us off.

…We deal only with Iran from abroad, and as currently the principal threat to world peace. In his capacity as captain of the West, President Obama spent his first year trying the policy of appeasement and negotiation with a regime whose word is worthless. It is clear he now understands there is no way to “talk Iran down.” But he has lost precious time and sacrificed continuity from the more advanced confrontational position of the Bush administration.

He is now back to square one: doing what Bush first tried, unsuccessfully, nine years ago. He is appealing to U.S. allies to enforce tougher sanctions, buying them off, one by one, to get them onside. It is a very expensive business, for a proven waste of time. …

…So we now have a double mystery: an extremely dangerous regime in Iran doing we know not what, and standing against it, an American president who does not know what he is doing.

Roger Simon comments on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Saud Al-Faisal statement on Iran going nuclear. Al-Faisal gave implicit agreement to a military strike.

…according to the AP, the Saudi Foreign Minister opined publicly at a Monday meeting with Hillary Clinton:

“‘Sanctions are a long-term solution,” the Saudi minister said. “But we see the issue in the shorter term because we are closer to the threat,” referring to Iran. “We need immediate resolution rather than gradual resolution.’

He didn’t identify a preferred short-term resolution. …

No kidding? I wonder what those other actions might be. …

As for sanctions, who could believe in them? Certainly not a Saudi, who lives across the street from the mad mullahs, or certainly not even any remotely impartial observer who has watched Khamenei & Co. put the boot to their own people since the Iranian election/selection. If they can shoot their own citizens in the streets, do you think they’ll really be worried about sanctions from abroad, sanctions that any un-law-abiding mullah knows never hold up for long anyway? …

Spengler discusses some possible military strike scenarios and repercussions.

…First, the Sunni Arab states have a stronger interest than Israel’s to stop Iran from possibly going nuclear. Israel, after all, possesses perhaps two hundred deliverable nuclear devices, including some very big thermonuclear ones, and is in position to wipe Iran off the map. But none of Iran’s Arab rivals is in such a position. The Saudis have done everything but take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post to encourage the Obama administration to attack Iran. Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, warned on February 15 that sanctions were a long-term measure while the world faces a short-term threat from Iran. Egypt reportedly has allowed Israeli missile ships to pass through the Suez Canal en route to the Persian Gulf.

Secondly, Russia well might prefer to deal with Israel as an independent regional power than as an ally of the United States. A stronger Israeli presence in the region also might contribute to Russia’s market share in missiles and eventually fighter aircraft. Russian-Israeli cooperation in a number of military fields has improved markedly during the past year, including the first-ever sale of Israeli weapons to Russia (drones) and Israeli help for the Russian-Indian “fifth generation” fighter project. …

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick has fallen in love with Sarah Palin.

…To date, in light of his sinking approval ratings, the main thing Obama has had going for him is that since the presidential election, his political opponents have lacked a leader capable of uniting his opponents around an alternative path. Over the past week, that leader may have emerged.

On Saturday, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin gave the keynote address at the Tea Party Movement convention in Nashville, Tennessee. As she did in the presidential campaign, Palin electrified her audience in Nashville by credibly channeling the populist impulses of American voters. In her signature line she asked, “So how’s that hopey changey stuff working out for ya?” …

…Sarah Palin’s emergence as the mouthpiece of populist opposition to Obama presents Israel’s supporters – and particularly Israel’s Jewish supporters – with an extraordinary opportunity and an extraordinary challenge. Palin’s coupling of support for Israel with her populist domestic agenda marks the first time that support for Israel has been treated as a core, populist issue. The opportunity this presents for American Jews who care about Israel is without precedent. …

The Streetwise Professor looks at some of the current political dynamics in Russia.

…Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s political strategist, defended the system of state control he developed, saying Russia can only modernize if it has a strong central government.“Consolidated power is the instrument of modernization,” Surkov said in an interview in Vedomosti today. “Some call it authoritarian modernization. I don’t care what they call it.” …

…Medvedev wants Russia to establish its own Silicon Valley, Surkov said, possibly outside Moscow or in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok. The main problem facing Russian innovators is a lack of demand, he said. …

…Indeed, Surkov’s performance is a salvo fired in that very cause of obstructing progress.  In this, it provides telling insights on the Putinite-Muscovite response to Medvedev’s tentative liberalization effort.  To derail this effort, Surkov is appropriating the ostensible goal–modernization–but making it clear that the same old Muscovite means will prevail, Medvedev or no.  Note well that Medvedev has explicitly singled out state corporations as an impediment to progress; by endorsing them Surkov is making it quite clear that the Putinists reject completely Medvedev’s plans. …

It is tragic irony to have Amnesty International suspend an employee who spoke her conscience against the Taliban. Christopher Hitchens fills us in.

…This organization is precious to me and to millions of other people, including many thousands of men and women who were and are incarcerated and maltreated because of their courage as dissidents and who regained their liberty as a consequence of Amnesty International’s unsleeping work. So to learn of its degeneration and politicization is to be reading about a moral crisis that has global implications.

Amnesty International has just suspended one of its senior officers, a woman named Gita Sahgal who until recently headed the organization’s “gender unit.” It’s fairly easy to summarize her concern in her own words. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender,” she wrote, “is a gross error of judgment.” One might think that to be an uncontroversial statement, but it led to her immediate suspension. …

In Contentions, Evelyn Gordon criticizes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for ignoring atrocities in Congo. This article has some disturbing descriptions.

…Neither Amnesty nor HRW has issued a single press release or report on Congo so far this year, according to their web sites. Yet HRW found time to issue two statements criticizing Israel and 12 criticizing the U.S.; Amnesty issued 11 on Israel and 15 on the U.S. To its credit, HRW did cover Congo fairly extensively in 2009. But Amnesty’s imbalance was egregious: For all of 2009, its web site lists exactly one statement on Congo — even as the group found time and energy to issue 62 statements critical of Israel. …

…Human-rights organizations clearly should not ignore genuine violations in developed countries, but they do need to maintain a sense of proportion. Instead, the relative frequency of their press releases paints countries such as Israel and the U.S. as the world’s worst human rights violators. The result is that the real worst abuses, like those in Congo, remain largely below the public’s radar. And so the victims continue to suffer in unheard agony.

John Fund writes about Senator Evan Bayh’s retirement and the lesson the Dems can’t seem to learn.

Before Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh suddenly announced he will not seek re-election in November he had issued several warnings to fellow Democrats. Last month, for example, he told Gerald Seib of this newspaper that his party’s liberals were “tone deaf” to the fact that they’d “overreached” in their agenda. “For those people,” he said, “it may take a political catastrophe of biblical proportions before they get it.”

Mr. Bayh knows something about high-water political floods. As a 24-year-old law student he helped run his father’s 1980 Senate re-election and saw him go down to defeat under the Reagan landslide. In 1994, Mr. Bayh was governor of Indiana and thankful he wasn’t before the voters when they revolted against Bill Clinton. “Every 14 or 16 years we seem to have to relearn this lesson,” Mr. Bayh said. “I do have a sense of deja vu, and the movie doesn’t have a happy ending.” …

Thomas Sowell comments on the hypocrisy of politicians forcibly taking money from its citizens, and then judging wealthy people who earn what they make.

…The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But, if we stop and think about it — which politicians don’t expect us to — what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced —and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do. …

In Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce blogs about what he has read in Peter Schiff’s new book. Schiff appears here often. Pearce has reservations and we thought you would be interested.

I have started reading the book, Crashproof 2.0 by Peter Schiff, and I thought I would register some early impressions.

He is a guy who was once mocked for daring to suggest, only a few years ago, that the buildup of debt in the US and parts of the West, and its reliance on what amounts to “vendor financing” from Asia, was bound to end in tears. It did. “Vendor financing”, by the way, relates to the practice of a firm that offers temporary loans to the consumers of its own products. This, more or less, says Mr Schiff, is what happened in the past decade or so: Western consumers bought cheap products from China; Western manufacturers went bust or offshored production to Asia; China used the foreign earnings from its exports to buy up Western debt, enabling even more Western consumer spending, fuelling even more Chinese exports……until the whole process when up in smoke. (This process was aided by an artificially weak Chinese exchange rate, not to mention the recklessly loose monetary policy of the Fed.) So far, so good: Schiff makes a lot of sense in debunking all of this. …

Mark Steyn discusses J.D. Salinger and some of the idiosyncracies of rural New Hampshire living.

I’m not sure I’m the go-to guy for a disquisition on The Catcher in the Rye, but I confess I was always intrigued by the J. D. Salinger lifestyle, at least since I moved to New Hampshire. He was a ways down the Connecticut River from me, but in this neck of the woods it’s a small world. I was once on a BBC current-affairs show and the sneering host produced a Solzhenitsyn quote designed to demonstrate that my view of American preeminence was all hooey, and rounded it out with a snide “I take it you’ve heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “We have the same piano tuner.” Which, at that point, we did. …

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George Will clarifies how government is encroaching in so many areas of our lives: totalitarianism one step at a time.

Only two things are infinite — the expanding universe and Democrats’ hostility to the District of Columbia’s school choice program. Killing this small program, which benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large — the Democrats’ dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government.

Democrats, in their canine devotion to teachers unions, oppose empowering poor children to escape dependency on even terrible government schools. Unions and their poodles say school choice siphons money from public schools. But federal money funds the D.C. program, so killing it denies education money to the District while increasing the number of pupils the District must support. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on an article by Atlantic’s Don Peck about the unemployment crisis.

Pundits are just beginning to realize the magnitude of the unemployment issue. Don Peck has an important story that explains:

“The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work. All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis.

That’s because the underemployment rate is really 17.4 percent. …”

…The longish piece is worth reading in full to get an inkling of the far-reaching economic and social fallout from long-term unemployment. But for that one need only look at Europe, which has seen the erosion of the work ethic, decreased level of growth and wealth creation, and a lack of optimism and social connection for young adults.

On a political level, the situation calls for a dynamic change of course and a jump-start for wealth creation and job growth. In the late 1970s, we faced a similar crisis of economic and political confidence. It took a new president and a new economic outlook — based on a rebirth of faith in the ability of market capitalism to generate prosperity. Lower taxes, reduced regulation, and free trade were the keys. Unfortunately, our current governing class seems to doubt the efficacy of free markets and persists in schemes to suck wealth out of the private sector. It is a recipe for prolonged pain. Voters may sense we need something new. Hope and change, I think.

Starting an extended section on Holder and the problems he has created, Stuart Taylor has a brilliant article on Mirandizing terrorists.

…Now imagine a more realistic scenario, along the lines of Al Qaeda’s aborted 1995 “Bojinka” plot: After learning that Qaeda terrorists with virtually undetectable bombs are planning to blow up 12 airliners carrying almost 4,000 passengers very soon, the FBI captures one of them. Would you want him Mirandized? …

…I return to this subject because the rationalizations by Attorney General Eric Holder and other administration apologists have been so breathtakingly bereft of seriousness about the need for aggressive interrogation to protect our country.

Abdulmutallab might have been the first of a dozen Christmas Day bombers seeking to perfect the Bojinka plot, for all Holder and his colleagues knew at the time. It was sheer luck that this was not the case. …

…The fundamental principle underlying Miranda is the Fifth Amendment right of every person not to be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” And “all the Fifth Amendment forbids is the introduction of coerced statements at trial,” as the late, liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in a 1984 opinion, joined by Justices William Brennan and John Paul Stevens.

In other words, neither the Fifth Amendment nor Miranda forbids aggressive interrogation to protect public safety without Miranda warnings. …

In the Corner, Bill Burck and Dana Perino blog about more of the Obami’s misguided policies regarding terrorists.

…We predicted last month that KSM would get a trial — by military commission. The administration is sending out every signal it can that this is where the situation is heading, with or without Attorney General Holder’s agreement. This is a smart decision. It is also smart for the White House to negotiate a path forward with Sen. Lindsey Graham, as is being reported. Senator Graham is strongly opposed to civilian trials for KSM and other foreign enemy combatants, but he is willing to work with President Obama on his goal to close Guantanamo. The devil will be in the details of any deal they reach — and we are skeptical that closing Guantanamo is wise or even politically viable. But it’s a good sign that the pragmatists — and not the administration’s ideologues — are now talking about a solution.

The White House took our advice to take over the process. Some more unsolicited advice: Rip the Band-Aid off, and set aside completely the idea of civilian show trials for foreign enemy combatants such as KSM. That will make it much easier to work on a bipartisan solution to the Guantanamo question.

Also, consider the notion that the solution to the Guantanamo problem is to start telling the truth about conditions there. It is a much better facility than most prisons in the U.S., and the military gives the detainees far more freedom than the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, which runs federal prisons, would. Their greater freedom at Guantanamo is possible largely because the prison is in a secure location away from civilian populations, and the detainees are separate from run-of- the-mill criminals — who might harm them, whom they might harm, or whom they might recruit into al-Qaeda. Instead of closing Guantanamo, maybe we should be honest about it.

Jennifer Rubin comments on the talk that Holder has been identified as a liability.

…Along comes a report from the New York Times that confirms the degree to which Holder has become a liability. (”Mr. Emanuel and others also worried that political fights over national security issues could hamper progress on the administration’s fundamental goals, like overhauling health care, and seemed to lack confidence in Mr. Holder as an administration spokesman on the volatile issue of terrorism detainees.”) It is so bad, and his performance so tone-deaf, that the White House now insists that they “proposed installing a minder alongside Mr. Holder to prevent further gaffes — someone with better ‘political antennae,’ as one administration official put it.” The report explains …

…The political attacks over terrorism cases were “starting to constrain my ability to function as attorney general,” he said in an interview last week. “I have to do a better job in explaining the decisions that I have made,” Mr. Holder also said, adding, “I have to be more forceful in advocating for why I believe these are trials that should be held on the civilian side.”

All of this is a bit disingenuous, if not downright silly. Holder is painted as such a by-the-book and “on the merits” lawyer that, by gosh, he just didn’t get the politics right. But in fact, his legal defense of Obama policies has been slipshod and the underlying decisions have been deeply flawed and ill-conceived. But I suppose it sounds better to say he’s just a political neophyte than to say he’s a sloppy lawyer or that his decision-making is in thrall to a far-Left agenda (which neatly coincides with the views of lawyers with whom he’s surrounded himself who used to be on the other side, representing terrorists). …

Dana Perino and Bill Burck are back with more in the Corner. Holder may escape getting canned because John Brennan, White House counterterrorism adviser, is succeeding in being a bigger liability. Here is one of the incidents that Perino and Burck discuss:

…After his disastrous television appearances, Brennan was relegated this weekend to giving a speech at the Islamic Center at New York University. Even there, however, he again said something profoundly misguided. Discussing the rate of recidivism of detainees released from Guantanamo, which some have put as high as 20 percent, Brennan said: “People sometimes use that figure, 20 percent, [and] say, ‘Oh my goodness, one out of five detainees returned to some type of extremist activity.’ You know, the American penal system, the recidivism rate is up to something about 50 percent or so, as far as return to crime. Twenty percent isn’t that bad.”

We’re not making this quote up. The president’s top counterterrorism adviser actually said that a 20 percent terrorist recidivism rate was good enough for government work. About 800 people have been detained at Guantanamo and about 600 have been released or turned over to the custody of other governments. Twenty percent means Brennan thinks it’s not a bad day’s work if 120 or so returned to terrorism. If that’s his definition of success, we would hate to see what failure looks like. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for one, doesn’t care to know and has joined in calls for Brennan’s resignation. Senator Graham’s views matter to the White House because he’s their best hope for a bipartisan solution to Guantanamo.

The problem here is not so much the substance of what Brennan said — there is no definitive study on the percentage of released detainees who return to terrorism, though it is abundantly clear that some have (a fact the Bush administration emphasized in explaining the dangers of closing Guantanamo). What is disturbing is what these comments reveal about Brennan’s mindset. These are not stock swindlers, or identity thieves, or even drug smugglers. This is not Bernie Madoff or even John Gotti. These are people bent on slaughtering Americans, at home and abroad, in the name of jihad and as an act of war. Twenty percent should not be an acceptable recidivism rate by anyone’s standards. …

Jennifer Rubin remarks on Joe Biden taking one more for team Obami.

You sometimes wonder whether the Obami are trying to commit political suicide. They come up with the idea of trying KSM in a civilian court in New York. New Yorkers, along with the rest of the country, think the idea stinks. They retreat, at least as to the venue. And now they pick a fight with New York:

“It’s a sign of just how angry the White House is at having its plans to hold terror trials in New York City thwarted. Vice President Joe Biden took a swing at Mayor Michael Bloomberg, accusing him of inflating estimates of the trial’s security costs. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly put the estimate at $200 million a year for five years, saying it would be an expensive proposition for the City. Biden, however, disputes the numbers. “The mayor came along and said the cost for providing security to hold this trial is x-hundreds of millions of dollars which I think is much more than would be needed,” Biden said. Biden’s surprising outburst is an indication of just how upset President Barack Obama is at having one of his foreign policy goals – showing a kinder face to the Muslim world – meet a solid wall of opposition in New York.”

Ever since his stalwart defense of the administration’s funny stimulus numbers (funny in both senses of the word), Biden has apparently become the designated spokesman to spin unsubstantiated, losing arguments with a paucity of evidence. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on Arizona’s withdrawal from a regional initiative to decrease greenhouse gases.

The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow?

…Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seeing which way the snow is blowing, has issued an executive order saying her state will suspend its participation in the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for businesses and consumers.

…Brewer also ordered Arizona’s Environmental Quality Department to take another look at stricter vehicle emission rules, based on California’s standards, set to take effect in 2012, fearing they would significantly raise new car costs. Slowly but surely, economic reality is trumping climate fantasy. …

In Chicago Boyz, David Foster blogs about the end of a maritime navigation system. Perhaps we could fund LORAN-C and instead pull the plug on Pelosi’s exorbitant and unreasonable travel expenses for her family.

On Monday at 2000 GMT, the U.S. Coast Guard terminated the transmission of the LORAN-C radionavigation signal, marking the end of a system which has been an important factor in maritime navigation (and, to a lesser extent, air navigation) for more than half a century. The termination of LORAN was based on budget considerations and on the conclusion that LORAN’s functions have been supplanted by GPS. I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.

LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation) was developed for military purposes during WWII, with first operational use in 1942. The system was retained after the war because of its usefulness to shipping, commercial fishing, and long-distance air transportation. …

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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on Dick Cheney’s weekend.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney stormed the beachheads of the liberal US media again Sunday with a fiery performance on ABC’s This Week. He offered a stinging rebuke to current VP Joe Biden’s ludicrous claim that Iraq may end up as one of Barack Obama’s “great achievements”, as well as blistering criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of terrorist suspects. He also launched a strike on Biden’s recent comment that another 9/11 scale attack was “unlikely.” …

…In many respects, Cheney’s vision is the antithesis of that of Barack Obama. In contrast to the current occupant of the White House, Cheney firmly believes the West is engaged in an epic global war against a vicious, Islamist enemy. It is striking for example how the recent 108-page Quadrennial Homeland Security Review omitted the words “Islam”, “Islamic” or “Islamist”, preferring to use the term “violent extremist”, a revealing insight into the Obama administration’s refusal to publicly acknowledge the Islamist nature of the enemy the US is fighting in the form of al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

Dick Cheney is a refreshingly forceful advocate of American exceptionalism, and the idea that the United States is a special country with a unique role to play in shaping history. He also understands the importance of maintaining and strengthening America’s key alliances. …

…Perhaps most strikingly, Dick Cheney, like Ronald Reagan before him and in complete contrast to Barack Obama, views the world in terms of good and evil. For Cheney, engagement with America’s enemies such as Iran and North Korea is a surrender of American global power, and a shameful abdication of responsibility by the world’s only superpower. In this new era of appeasement, Cheney’s outspoken criticism, like that of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, is increasingly striking a chord with an American public that is sharply turning against the Obama administration’s agenda.

Charles Lane, in the WaPo, comments on Senator Evan Bayh’s decision to leave Washington.

Millions of Americans long to tell their bosses “take this job and shove it.” Hardly any have the power and money to do so, especially in these recessionary times. Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, however, is the exception. His stunning retirement from the Senate is essentially a loud and emphatic “screw you” to President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For months now, Bayh has been screaming at the top of his voice that the party needs to reorient toward a more popular, centrist agenda — one that emphasizes jobs and fiscal responsibility over health care and cap and trade. Neither the White House nor the Senate leadership has given him the response he wanted. Their bungling of what should have been a routine bipartisan jobs bill last week seems to have been the last straw.

…Let it never be forgotten that Bayh is a perennial Democratic golden boy, the keynote speaker at the party’s 1996 convention, scion of a political dynasty, proven vote-getter in a red state and, in his own mind, prime presidential timber. For him, then, the question was: even if I win, who needs six more years of dealing with these people, after which I might be 60 years old and trying to pick up the pieces of a damaged political party brand? …

…Bayh’s dramatic vote of no-confidence in his own party’s leadership looks like another Massachusetts-sized political earthquake for the Democrats. Not only does it imperil the president’s short-term hopes of passing health care and other major legislation this year. It also makes it much more likely that the Republicans can pick up Bayh’s Senate seat in normally red Indiana and, with it, control of the Senate itself. If present trends continue, November could turn into a Republican rout.

Let the Obami take note: Abigail Thernstrom, in the Corner, discusses a real post-racial election.

Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu is the next mayor of New Orleans. The city is two-thirds black, and he will be the first white elected to the office since 1970, when his father, Moon Landrieu, won the seat.

The election was a true post-racial moment. Four and a half years after Katrina, black voters decided competence trumped race. The prospect of a white mayor would be “an earth-shaking event,” a politically active black lawyer told a New York Times reporter before the election.

… Nagin’s incompetence persuaded black voters that racial solidarity wouldn’t repair the still-broken city.

About a third of the city’s homes are still empty; the murder rate is among the highest in the nation; and the police department is scandal-plagued. …

In Power Line, Scott Johnson discusses an article by Thomas Cooley and Peter Rupert on the jobs picture.

…Cooley and Rupert comment: “Although job losses slowed in December, there is no evidence of recovery in employment. This will be a continuing drag on the economy and on the fiscal condition of both state and federal governments.”

…Yet Cooley allows that the Obama administration has “created some very large sources of uncertainty that impact small businesses and those who would finance them. By pursuing a huge policy agenda without much success they have created large-scale uncertainty about health care costs, cap-and-trade policies, corporate taxes, taxes on incomes over $250,000 and estate taxes.”

Will new jobs be formed on net with the scheduled tax increases and regulatory overhang? It is odd that so little serious attention has been devoted to the problem of job growth in the private sector except insofar as it can be used as an argument to enlarge the size and scope of the government itself.

We have a hat-trick of Pickings favorites who didn’t like Audi’s green police. Mark Steyn gives an example of what happens when kids are taught community-activist-type nonsense.

…Let’s turn to an item from The Philadelphia Inquirer. A young American with a white-bread name (“Nick George”) and a clean-cut mien returns from Jordan to resume his studies at Pomona College in California, and gets handcuffed and detained for five hours by U.S. Immigration and Philly police. Why? Well, he had Arabic-language flash cards in his pocket. Also, upon his return to the United States, his hair was shorter than on his Pennsylvania driver’s license. “That is an indication sometimes,” explained Lt. Louis Liberati, “that somebody may have gone through a radicalization.” Really? As Nick George’s boomer mom remarked, once upon a time long hair was a sign of radicalization. …

…At any rate, the coiffure set off a Code Red alert, and Nick George found himself being asked: “How do you feel about 9/11?”

According to the Inquirer’s Daniel Rubin, “He said he hemmed and hawed a bit. ‘It’s a complicated question,’ he told me by phone.” However, young Nick ended up telling his captors, “It was bad. I am against it.”

My, that’s big of you.

Take it as read that the bozos at the airport called this one wrong. The problem is not that Nick George, his radical haircut notwithstanding, is a jihadist eager to self-detonate on a transatlantic flight. The problem is that he is an entirely typical American college student – one for whom 9/11 is “a complicated question.” After all, to those reared in an educational system where the late Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” (now back in the bestseller lists) is conventional wisdom, such a view is entirely unexceptional. It’s hardly Nick’s fault that the banal groupthink of every American campus gets you pulled over for secondary screening when you’re returning from Amman. …

Jonah Goldberg takes a turn.

…Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism and PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”

…To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless, upscale white men (all the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.” …

…It will be interesting to see whether the ad actually sells cars. The premise only works if you take it as a given that this Gorewellian nightmare is inevitable. But the commercials arrive at precisely the moment when that inevitability is unraveling like an old pair of hemp socks. The global-warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety, and surging popular skepticism (according to a Pew Research Center survey released in January, global warming ranks 21st out of 21 in terms of the public’s priorities). …

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, sees the serious issue of government encroachment on liberty that is highlighted by the Audi ad.

…On Twitter, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom expressed his approval more concisely: “That ‘green police’ Audi commercial hits home.’’ He would know. Under a composting ordinance Newsom signed last year, throwing orange peels, coffee grounds, or greasy pizza boxes in the trash is now illegal in San Francisco, and carries fines of up to $500 per violation.

There was a time when Americans were thought capable of deciding for themselves what to do with their coffee grounds or whether to carry groceries home in paper or plastic bags. It isn’t only in San Francisco, and it isn’t only when it comes to “green’’ issues, that such mundane or personal choices are being supplanted by government coercion. One thin slice at a time, liberties we used to take for granted are replaced with mandates from above. Rather than leave us free to choose, Big Brother increasingly makes the choice for us: On trans fats. On gambling. On smoking. On bicycle helmets. On health insurance.

In Massachusetts, the Globe reported last week, new regulations will soon require thousands of restaurant workers to undergo state-designed training on handling food allergies … In Pennsylvania, the Reading Eagle notes that it is illegal for volunteers to sell pies or cookies at a charity bake sale unless the treats were “prepared in kitchens inspected and licensed by the state Agriculture Department.’’ In Oregon, an eight-year-old boy was suspended from his public school on Monday because he came to class with a tiny plastic toy gun from his G.I. Joe action figure.

It isn’t to evil dictators with a lust for power that Americans have been slowly surrendering their autonomy. It is to well-intentioned authorities who believe sincerely that our freedoms must be circumscribed for our own good. …

In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel tells the sordid tale of Pfizer cozying up to big government. Perhaps the pharmaceutical companies took a pragmatic view of the situation and decided to join the enemy since they couldn’t beat them. It is still disappointing to see the lack of principles that were displayed. Fortunately for us, this story has a happy ending. We think.

The sight of ObamaCare on life support has many Democrats disappointed. It could be worse. They could be Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler.

…Fortune 500 execs could stand up for a free market that benefits consumers and shareholders, or hitch their cart to the new Democratic majority. Pfizer’s Mr. Kindler is a case study in the hitch-and-hope mentality—a CEO who became the motivating force behind Big Pharma’s $80 billion “deal” on reform, and industry support of ObamaCare. …

Pfizer also aggressively shifted political giving. … In 2009 Pfizer became the fourth largest federal lobbyist, spending nearly $25 million. The year before it hadn’t even made the top 20.

With these gestures, Mr. Kindler surely believed Democrats would treat his industry gently. The strategy: The industry would pledge $80 billion to reform. In return it would get greater volume and a requirement that people buy brand-name drugs. Democrats would also fight against drug reimportation and forgo price controls. …

…Critics warned the legislation would lead to a government takeover and price controls. They warned Democrats would take the money and double-cross them. None of it fazed the industry, right up until ObamaCare imploded. …

In the NYTimes, David Kirkpatrick and Duff Wilson write about another side of the Big Pharma sellout story. This about the lobbyist Billy Tauzin.

After about two dozen years in Congress, Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana was after bigger game — the giant, 200-pound whitetail deer that run through the area of south Texas that hunters call the Golden Triangle.

So in 2003 Mr. Tauzin, then chairman of the powerful energy and commerce committee, made a deal. Though still on a modest Congressional salary, he paid more than $1 million for a 1,500-acre ranch there. And he invited a dozen friends — mostly executives and lobbyists with interests before his committee — to cover its mortgage by paying him dues as members of a new hunting club. It did business as Cajun Creek L.L.C., based in the Baton Rouge office of a lobbyist who was a member.

Now, seven years later, Mr. Tauzin’s friends say, it is to his Texas ranch that Mr. Tauzin, 66, will retreat, to contemplate the apparent collapse of the grandest in a career of fearless deals — a pact to trade the drug industry’s political support for favorable terms under President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. …

In the Vancouver Sun, Randy Boswell reports on an interesting hypothesis about Inuit migration.

One of Canada’s top archeologists argues in a new book that the prehistoric ancestors of this country’s 55,000 Inuit probably migrated rapidly from Alaska clear across the Canadian North in just a few years — not gradually over centuries as traditionally assumed — after they learned about a rich supply of iron from a massive meteorite strike on Greenland’s west coast.

The startling theory, tentatively floated two decades ago by Canadian Museum of Civilization curator emeritus Robert McGhee, has been bolstered by recent research indicating a later and faster migration of the ancient Thule Inuit across North America’s polar frontier than previously believed. …

…McGhee believes the Thule Inuit had learned about the valuable metal at the Cape York meteorite field from contact with Canada’s aboriginal Dorset people, who were already using iron and trading it with Norse sailors from southern Greenland and Iceland. …

…He adds that this interpretation of Inuit origins in Canada — as resulting from “commercial motives” and “mercantile exploration” — challenges the prevailing view that ancient native cultures would only migrate to new territories incrementally and in response to environmental pressures, dwindling food supplies or competition from rival peoples.

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There actually is a plan out there to get government under control. In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson comments on one amazing congressman and his sensible, innovative plan.

Paul Ryan, a six-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is the ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee, has yanked himself from obscurity by doing something no one else in Congress or apparently the White House has done: design a specific plan to control long-term government spending and budget deficits. That he stands virtually alone is a damning commentary on our politics. …

…Here are some features of his plan:

– Social Security: For those 55 or older today, the program would remain unchanged. For those younger, benefits would be reduced — with no cuts for the poorest workers. Workers 55 or younger in 2011 could establish individual investment accounts that would be funded with part of their payroll taxes. Government would guarantee a return equal to inflation.

– Medicare: Current recipients and those enrolling in the next decade would continue under today’s program, though wealthier recipients would pay somewhat higher premiums. In 2021, Medicare would become a voucher program for new recipients (those today 54 or younger). With vouchers, recipients would buy Medicare-certified private insurance. In today’s dollars, the vouchers would ultimately grow to $11,000. Eligibility ages for Medicare and Social Security would slowly increase toward 69 and 70, respectively.

– Spending freeze: From 2010 to 2019, “non-defense discretionary spending” — about a sixth of the federal budget, including everything from housing to parks to education — would be frozen at 2009 levels.

– Simpler taxes: Taxpayers could choose between today’s system or a streamlined replacement with no deductions and virtually no special tax breaks. Above a tax-free amount ($39,000 for a family of four), taxpayers would pay only two rates: 10 percent up to $100,000 for joint filers and 25 percent on income more than that.

In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel tells how the Obami and other liberals are using community organizing tactics to try to smear that plan.

… The cameras rolling, the president praised Mr. Ryan for putting forward a “serious proposal.” He in fact singled out the congressman at least three times. Having done his spotlight bit, Mr. Obama then left it to the rest of the Democratic Party to systematically distort and trash the road map.

Within two days of the retreat, Obama budget director Peter Orszag had begun deflecting questions about the White House’s ugly budget by hammering on Mr. Ryan’s plan, claiming it “shifted costs” to families. Congressional Democrats held a conference call with reporters devoted to road map trashing, howling that it showed that Republicans would privatize Social Security, voucherize Medicare, and give tax breaks to the wealthy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi lambasted the Ryan plan in a speech to the Democratic National Committee.

Democrats used it to turn the health discussion, claiming it was hypocritical of Republicans to hit Democrats for slashing Medicare when Mr. Ryan’s plan would also cut the program. They used it to stoke populist fears. California’s Loretta Sanchez claimed the road map would both “privatize” Social Security and leave it to the “whims of Wall Street.”

Connecticut’s John Larson (a member of the Democratic leadership) introduced a resolution to force Republicans to oppose Social Security “privatization” in a high-profile vote. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already announced ads targeting 12 House Republicans, “calling on them to come clean with seniors” whether they support “House Republicans’ extreme budget plan that privatizes Social Security and Medicare.” As hoped, the assault re-energized liberal bloggers and the base.

Better yet for Democrats, some Republicans are falling into the trap. As with its campaign last year to smear Republican Whip Eric Cantor, the White House’s attack on Mr. Ryan is designed to isolate and discredit one of the GOP’s brightest thinkers. So it only aids the White House when “anonymous” Republican members—annoyed that they must have this debate—gripe to the press that Mr. Ryan doesn’t “speak” for them. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Biden trying to own Iraq success.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, the saying goes. Well, we’ve seen that by the bushel-full from the Obami. First, they hide behind George W. Bush’s skirts on the handling of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists (whom, unlike Bush, they can’t bring themselves to call by name). Now they are claiming credit for the triumph of the Iraq war, …

Max Boot says that it’s actually a good thing for the Obami to claim an Iraqi victory as theirs.

… The best news I’ve read about Iraq in a while is that, as Jennifer points out, Joe Biden is claiming that “a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government … could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Some might dismiss this as chutzpah from someone who, like Barack Obama, opposed the surge needed to stabilize the situation in Iraq. But, brazen or not, it’s great to see the Obama administration taking ownership of Iraq and realizing that simply pulling out all our troops can’t be the sole goal of our policy there. We have to make sure that the Iraq we leave behind is stable, secure, and preferably democratic.

Peter Wehner also weighs in.

…If Obama and Biden had had their way, they would have engineered an epic American military loss. They would have handed jihadists their most important victory ever. And in Iraq mass death, and quite probably genocide, would have followed.

It was also the previous administration, not the Obama administration, which is responsible for the Status of Forces agreement that is unwinding, in a responsible way, American involvement in Iraq.

More important, the success we’re experiencing in Iraq is due above all to the most remarkable fighting force in the world: the United States military; to commanders like David Petraeus, who implemented a new strategy when it was clear the old one was failing; and to the Iraqis themselves, who are taking impressive, if halting, steps toward self-government. …

Abe Greenwald thinks cutting NASA funding is a bad idea. Too bad the astronauts and aerospace engineers aren’t unionized; then Obama would be happy to throw money at them.

Charles Krauthammer points out that, come 2011, “for the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the U.S. will have no access of its own for humans into space — and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.” Barack Obama’s budget kills NASA’s Constellation program, the successor to the Shuttle. …

… China – as the New York Times columnists never tire of telling us — is leading the world in electric bicycles, solar panels, and speed trains. It has been suggested that the next man on the Moon will be Chinese.  The truth is, electric bicycles, solar panels, speed trains, and even Moon travel are decades-old novelties — the kind of stuff that a country desperate to be seen as a great innovator would love to tout. But real innovation won’t come from obscurantist autocracies. It will come from parties living in free countries.  It will come from sources like the Ad Astra Rocket Company of Webster, Texas, which recently developed the most powerful plasma engine in the world; it gets as hot as the surface of the sun. As it happens, the head of Ad Astra is a former NASA astronaut with the beautifully American name, Franklin Chang-Diaz. …

Jonathan Petre, in the Daily Mail, UK, reports on a BBC interview with the Phil Jones the man who ran the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia.

Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made. …

David Warren discusses the lie in the theory of life in the Primordial Soup.

…In a series of laughable experiments through the 1960s and ’70s, Darwinian biologists mixed various recipes for this hypothetical soup, then zapped them with energy this way and that, without any success whatever. Frankenstein’s monster simply would not stir from their puddle.

This soup nonsense is still presented in biology textbooks, as if it were true. But in an important paper in the journal BioEssays this week, William Martin et al., of the Institute of Botany III in Düsseldorf, spilled the last drop of it onto the trash heap of history. They summarize effectively why it not only did not work, but could not work, under laboratory or any other conditions.

Instead, following footsteps of the geochemist Michael J. Russell, they guess the first simple cells originated in geothermal vents under the oceans, where concentrated energy could work upon a rich variety of minerals. My reader must go to the sources to read the new “kick-start” hypothesis. …

John Fund in a send off for Charlie Wilson and John Murtha gives us a taste of how Washington used to work.

…But the secrecy and skullduggery that Wilson said served the country well had a flip side. When Murtha died he had become a symbol of suspect pork-barrel projects linked to campaign contributions. Last May, he dismissed complaints by telling reporters, “If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district.” …

…Murtha was named an unindicted co-conspirator in Abscam, an FBI sting operation in which agents offered members of Congress bribes. A tape showed Murtha describing “the secret” of how a public official can take a bribe and get away with it. He told the undercover agents he was turning them down for now: “You know, you made an offer. . . . After we’ve done some business, well, then I might change my mind.” E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., the special prosecutor appointed by House Ethics Committee, was building a complaint against Murtha; he was also probing links between Abscam and O’Neill’s office.

That prompted O’Neill to shut down the probe. According to Crile’s book, O’Neill called Wilson into his office and said he wanted him to join the Ethics Committee. Wilson had been pestering him to get a lifetime seat on the board of the Kennedy Center. “It’s the best perk in town,” Wilson told Crile. O’Neill would appoint Wilson, but he’d have to join the Ethics Committee to take care of Murtha.

Wilson didn’t need any prodding: “He was a happy warrior as he raced to the rescue of his imperiled friend John Murtha,” Crile wrote. “Before Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation.” …

In the Corner, Lisa Schiffren comments on Charlie Wilson’s war.

Charlie Wilson did not, as the eponymous movie would have it, singlehandedly force the U.S. government to aid the Afghan Mujaheddin in killing Commies and liberating their country from the Soviet grip. Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey, and a large handful of congressmen and senators, dedicated staffers, and a few good people in the national-security apparatus all had a hand. But Wilson did pull strings and push buttons, at the right time, and make important things happen, while imbuing the cause with raffish Texan charm. And, most important, he pushed back hard against the permanent bureaucracy at the CIA that had chosen the wrong guys to back, and the wrong way to back them. …

Michael Rubin adds an interesting twist to this story, in the Corner.

…It’s interesting to read the declassified reports from the time. Here’s the conclusion from a CIA assessment entitled “The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan,” from February 1987:

Despite the increasing trends, however, the economic costs resulting from these operational developments are unlikely, in our view, to be of sufficient magnitude to constitute a significant counterweight to the political and security implications the Soviets would attach to withdrawal under circumstances that could be seen as a defeat.  Indeed, we believe the recent rising trend in economic cost is more a reflection of determination in Moscow to counter a better armed insurgency and this shows continued willingness to incur whatever burden is necessary.

So there you have it. Right before the Soviets decided to withdraw, the CIA concluded that nothing could force the Soviets to withdraw. I always look at this document as a useful reminder to the importance of separating intelligence analysis from policy. Intelligence should color policy, certainly, but it should not supplant it. While raw intelligence can be useful, often the intelligence community’s consensus documents are not. At the very least, they must be taken with a grain of salt. After all, a natural conclusion from this document — perhaps the one which the Agency was pushing — was that we could not win by sponsoring insurgency in Afghanistan; perhaps diplomacy would be better. Men like Charlie Wilson may have been in the minority, but fortunately they were in the right place at the right time and had a president serving over them like Ronald Reagan

John Tierney opines that corporate-backed research does not automatically signify biased research.

…Sure, money matters to everyone; the more fears that Dr. Pachauri and Mr. Gore stoke about climate change, the more money is liable to flow to them and the companies and institutions they are affiliated with. Given all the accusations they have made about the financial motives of climate change “deniers,” there is a certain justice in having their own finances investigated.

But I don’t doubt that Mr. Gore and Dr. Pachauri would be preaching against fossil fuels even if there were no money in it for them, just as I don’t doubt that skeptics would be opposing them for no pay. Why are journalists and ethics boards so quick to assume that money, particularly corporate money, is the first factor to look at when evaluating someone’s work?

One reason is laziness. …