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In a piece titled ”A vote? We don’t need no stinking vote!,” Orange County Register editorial writer explains why the Dems are attracted to the “deem and pass” rule.

… Give Nancy Pelosi a certain amount of credit for frankness. She says of the three possible ways to come to a vote, at this point she is leaning toward this one because it doesn’t require lawmakers in vulnerable districts to cast a potentially unpopular vote. They can hide behind process. “It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” she said in a roundtable with bloggers on Monday, “But I like it, because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.” Give her points for openness in acknowledging that evasion of accountability is a prize greatly to be valued in today’s Congress. Of course it might be unconstitutional, but who pays much attention to that old scrap of parchment anyway? …

Streetwise Professor explores an analogy in “Woodrow Obama.”

The analogy is not exact—historical analogies never are—but there is more than a passing similarity between Obama’s health care battle and Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the League of Nations; there are also striking similarities between the men themselves.  Obama should mark well the lesson—but I doubt he will.

Like Wilson, Obama is a self-styled progressive who is deeply skeptical of the Founders’ creation.  Like Wilson, Obama is firmly convinced of his own rectitude and his moral superiority over his political foes.  As with Wilson, this makes Obama firmly opposed to compromise with these foes; he views compromise as betrayal of a fundamental belief, and as Wilson did, he views his opponents as morally defective.  Obama, like Wilson, is a Nobel Peace Price winner (although Wilson actually did something to merit it). …

In the WSJ, Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn write about the outrageous actions of dishonorable lawyers aiding the Gitmo terrorists, and a shameful Attorney General who doesn’t recognize that he is a public servant.

…Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp’s layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that “we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing” and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with “interviews” of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees. …

…Last August, the Washington Post reported that three lawyers defending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his 9/11 co-conspirators showed their clients photographs of covert CIA officers in an attempt to identify the individuals who interrogated them after they were captured overseas. Lawyers working for the John Adams Project, formed to support the legal team representing KSM and his cohorts, provided the defense attorneys with the photographs, according to the Post. None of the attorneys under investigation were identified in the Post report. …

…It is entirely legitimate to ask who else among Mr. Holder’s hires from the Gitmo bar is shaping or influencing national security policy decisions. Meanwhile, the public can decide whether the lawyers at Paul, Weiss who are volunteering at Guantanamo are an example of the legal profession’s noblest traditions.

…On Feb. 20, 2007, a post on the Paul, Weiss Web site proudly announced “Paul, Weiss achieves more victories for Guantanamo detainees.” Two detainees were released from Gitmo to their home in Saudi Arabia. One was Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi…The Web site needs an update. The Pentagon has identified Al Joudi as a “confirmed” recidivist who is “directly involved” with the facilitation of “terrorist activities.”

Yousef Al Shehri, the detainee who led his cell block in the feeding tube rebellion, was also released in November 2007. In early 2009 he was listed on the Saudi Kingdom’s list of 85 “most wanted” extremists. Yousef was killed last October during a shootout with Saudi security forces on his way to a martyrdom operation. He and another jihadist, disguised as women and wearing suicide vests, killed a security officer in the clash. Yousef’s brother-in-law, Said Al Shehri, also released from Gitmo, is currently the second in command of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch that launched the Christmas Day airline attack last year.

In the Corner, Andy McCarthy summarizes the disgraceful activities of the Al Qaeda lawyers.

That’s the title of of a mind-blowing op-ed by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. Debra and Tom make mince-meat of the hallucination that casts the Gitmo Bar as modern John Adamses. The essay recounts, among other things…

…The Gitmo Bar incited the detainees against the military guards.

The Gtimo Bar posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

The Gitmo Bar facilitated enemy combatants in communicating messages and interviews to their confederates and the outside world. …

…The Gitmo Bar provided the detainees with news accounts about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, including reports that U.S. forces were sustaining devastating casualities from IED attacks. (Again, it was a court-ordered condition of the lawyers’ access to these war prisoners that they not be given information relating to military operations, intelligence, arrests, political news and current events, and the names of U.S. government personnel.)…

In a word, sickening.

Andy McCarthy has more. The Al Qaeda lawyers and the John Adams Project lawyers have endangered the lives of Americans and their families. And this was done merely to further a political agenda. Where are the MSM who were outraged about Valerie Plame, the desk “agent” whose cover was supposedly blown? The thing that is most disgusting about liberals is that politics trumps the safety of Americans.

…Actually, I would call the enterprise — just for starters — a wartime felony violation of the federal law barring disclosure of the identities of U.S. intelligence officers (Title 50, United States Code, Section 421), as well as a wartime felony violation of the espionage act (Title 18, United States Code, Section 793), which prohibits, among other things, obtaining national defense information with reason to know it will be used to the injury of the United States (including taking and using photographs “of anything connected with the national defense”).

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz has more on the indefensible Gitmo Bar and its indispensable DOJ protectors. To summarize, a cabal of the enemy’s volunteer lawyers, led by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and calling itself the “John Adams Project,” is alleged to have hired investigators who staked out CIA agents believed (no doubt based on classified discovery in the detainee court cases) to have been interrogators. The investigators snapped pictures of the CIA agents — in some instances, apparently, in the vicinity of their homes where they reside with their families — and gave them to the lawyers, who, in turn, got them to other members of the Gitmo Bar (including at least some military lawyers) who showed them to top al-Qaeda detainees, enabling them to identify the CIA agents.

The scandal was uncovered because there are a lot of the photos and they’ve evidently been circulating around the detention camp, so some were discovered and seized by military guards. The CIA went appropriately ballistic over the patent security breach. But the Justice Department — which, as we’ve been noting, is rife with lawyers who volunteered their services to the detainees during the Bush years — insisted that the security breach was no big deal. …

Thomas Sowell looks at some of the political strategies being used to pass Obamacare.

In a swindle that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur, Barack Obama has gotten a substantial segment of the population to believe that he can add millions of people to the government-insured rolls without increasing the already record-breaking federal deficit.

Those who think in terms of talking points, instead of realities, can point to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has concurred with budget numbers that the Obama administration has presented.

…any budget — is not a record of hard facts but a projection of future financial plans. A budget tells us what will happen if everything works out according to plan.

The Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies. Those numbers may well be consistent with each other, even if they are wholly inconsistent with anything that is likely to happen in the real world. …

Robert Samuelson debunks some claims by healthcare reform advocates.

…Though it seems compelling, covering the uninsured is not the health-care system’s major problem. The big problem is uncontrolled spending, which prices people out of the market and burdens government budgets. Obama claims his proposal checks spending. Just the opposite. When people get insurance, they use more health services. Spending rises. …

…Unless we change the fee-for-service system, costs will remain hard to control because providers are paid more for doing more. Obama might have attempted that by proposing health-care vouchers (limited amounts to be spent on insurance), which would force a restructuring of delivery systems to compete on quality and cost. Doctors, hospitals and drug companies would have to reorganize care. …

…Whatever their sins, insurers are mainly intermediaries; they pass along the costs of the delivery system. In 2009, the largest 14 insurers had profits of roughly $9 billion; that approached 0.4 percent of total health spending of $2.472 trillion. This hardly explains high health costs. What people need to know is that Obama’s plan evades health care’s major problems and would worsen the budget outlook. It’s a big new spending program when government hasn’t paid for the spending programs it already has.

In AOL News, Joel Kotkin has a fascinating article on projected population growth rates.

…Even more remarkably, America will expand its population in the midst of a global demographic slowdown. Global population growth rates of 2 percent in the 1960s have dropped to less than half that rate today, and this downward trend is likely to continue — falling to less than 0.8 percent by 2025 — largely due to an unanticipated drop in birthrates in developing countries such as Mexico and Iran. … The world’s population, according to some estimates, could peak as early as 2050 and begin to fall by the end of the century.

Population growth has very different effects on wealthy and poor nations. In the developing world, a slowdown of population growth can offer at least short-term economic and environmental benefits. But in advanced countries, a rapidly aging or decreasing population does not bode well for societal or economic health, whereas a growing one offers the hope of expanding markets, new workers and entrepreneurial innovation.

In fact, throughout history, low fertility and socioeconomic decline have been inextricably linked, creating a vicious cycle that affected such once-vibrant civilizations as ancient Rome and 17th-century Venice and that now affects contemporary Europe , Russia and Japan. …

From Slate we learn what it is like to cruise across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2.

…But as we unfurled ourselves on deck chairs on the Deck 7 promenade roughly midway through the trip, I realized that the timelessness around us was not entirely of the sort Cunard intended. The ship’s staff was constantly trying to manufacture a certain sense of lost grandeur, but just by virtue of being at sea for six nights and six days, surrounded by nothing but water and existing nowhere other than a specific longitude and latitude, we were literally timeless. We had nowhere to be. None of the many activities, ranging from dance lessons to lectures to sushi demonstrations and art auctions were compulsory, and for the first time in years, we couldn’t call each other on our cell phones to track each other’s progress through the day. We made approximate plans to meet somewhere for lunch at noon or 1 o’clock and knew that we had all the time in the world to stand around and wait if the other person was late.

Even time itself was ever-shifting. On five of our six days at sea, we set our clocks back by one hour each night so that we would arrive in New York on Eastern Standard Time. As a result, we were never quite sure what time it was, and in the rare moments when we did know, it felt like a different time, anyway, since we were structureless—maybe Berlin time, which we had been accustomed to, or U.K. time, in which we had spent three days at a friend’s house before boarding the ship. Every afternoon, a deck officer rang the ship’s bell eight times to mark “the exact time of midday,” but it seemed like a futile effort to connect us to the world on land. We soon learned to ignore it, because eight little rings did nothing to put a dent in the vastness of the ocean all around us and the ceaseless sliding by of the horizon.

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He has cynical views on Iraq and Afghanistan, but despite them we have Spengler‘s thoughts on the Iranian nuclear issue and US foreign policy.

…There is no Obama administration as such; there is only Obama, who appears to run the entire show out of his Blackberry. As David Rothkopf wrote in his Foreign Policy blog March 12, Obama’s is “an administration in which seeking the favor of the president has taken on an importance that is in fact, much more reminiscent of the historical czars than is the role being played by anyone with this now devalued moniker”.

As I wrote on this space February 18: “Israel has a strategic problem broader than the immediate issue of Iran’s possible acquisition of nuclear weapons: it is an American ally at a moment when America has effectively withdrawn from strategic leadership. That leaves Israel at a crossroads. It can act like an American client state, or a regional superpower. Either decision would have substantial costs.”(See The case for an Israeli strike against Iran, Asia Times Online, February 18) …

A Corner post by Joel Rosenberg does a good job of summarizing the current Israeli/Obama flap. Yesterday we led with Nile Gardner’s piece on our continuingly crumbling relationship with Great Britain. Now we see how the Obama administration is fanning the flames over the settlement incident which could have settled down without serious repercussions. But, it seems Obama is intent on destroying another key relationship with a close ally.

As Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington this weekend to address the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, relations between the U.S. and Israel appear to be headed for a train wreck. Indeed, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., told Israeli diplomats in a conference call over the weekend that U.S.-Israel relations face their worst crisis in more than three decades.

Here’s what happened and why. …

Abby Thernstrom and Tim Fay alert us to a racial incident in a Philadelphia school. Thernstrom and Fay ask whether the Departments of Education and Justice will address the situation, given that the perpetrators in this instance were black.  They also draw our attention to the problem of violence in public schools.

…Duncan wants to eliminate racial disparities in education in general, including in student discipline in particular. …But what will they do in response to a formal complaint filed by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School (SPHS)? AALDEF has charged that the district acted with “deliberate indifference” to the harassment of Asian students and with “intentional disregard” of their welfare.

…Even before the SPHS incident, the Philadelphia Office of the Safe Schools Advocate (OSSA) had issued a blistering report about the level of violence in the system and the inability, or unwillingness, of school officials to take meaningful action. Ironically, OSSA was “defunded” this past summer. According to press accounts, “defunded” is Pennsylvania edu-speak for “we didn’t like the fact that OSSA accurately reported on this issue when we told them not to, so we closed the office and let the staff go.”

Urban school systems in general try to keep the truth about violence and chaos well hidden. A revealing 2007 report by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General makes the obvious point that no school wants to be labeled as “persistently dangerous.” And as long as schools can set the criteria by which persistent danger is measured, they can escape the label. …

…Federal data tells a much more chilling story. According to a 2000 survey conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 71 percent of public elementary and secondary schools experienced at least one violent incident during the 1999–2000 school year (including rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attacks or fights with and without a weapon, threats of physical attack with and without a weapon, and robbery with and without a weapon). In 20 percent of public schools, what NCES calls “serious violent incidents” occurred. These data, of course, do not include incidents of bullying and the host of disruptive behaviors that make teaching and learning very difficult. …

In Forbes, Nouriel Roubini says that news on the economy is troubling.

A slew of poor economic data over the past two weeks suggests that the U.S. economy is headed for a U-shaped recovery–at best–in 2010. The macro news, including data on consumer confidence, home sales, construction and employment, actually suggests a significant downside risk even to the anemic levels of growth which I forecast for H1 (the first half of the year). The U.S. faces continued challenges in H2–particularly as historic levels of fiscal stimulus fade–and appears far too close to the tipping point of a double-dip recession.

This is not the conventional wisdom. Heated debate continues to rage in the U.S. on whether the economic recovery will be V-shaped (with a rapid return to robust growth above potential), U-shaped (slow anemic, subpar, below trend growth for at least the next two years) or W-shaped (a double-dip recession). …

…a slew of new U.S. macro data have come out. They have been almost uniformly poor, if not outright awful. Consumer confidence, based on the Michigan survey, has tanked. On the real estate front, new home sales are collapsing again, existing home sales are also falling sharply and construction activity (both residential and commercial) is sharply down. Durable goods orders are down, and initial claims for unemployment benefits remain stubbornly high (way above the 400,000 mark). Real disposable income for Q4 has been revised downward while real disposable income (before transfers) for January was negative again. …

David Warren responds to a feminist who disparaged him in an article.

…What I found most telling, was another parenthetical assertion, about persons of my ilk. “(Personally, I don’t even know any men like that — not among family, friends or neighbours.)”

That she doesn’t, strikes me as a measure of the bubble in which the “liberal intelligentsia” are living, and with which I am over-familiar from my own dealings within the “mainstream media.” Indeed, it is how Fox came to trounce CNN, MSNBC, and other purveyors of television news; how a specialized business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, came to have such a large circulation; how “talk radio” got started, along with the whole “vast rightwing conspiracy” in the blogosphere. …

In Power Line, John Hinderaker comments on one story that gives big business a bad name.

The failing business would be the New York Times Company, which, like most newspapers, has fallen on hard times and laid off many employees. The greedy executives include Chairman Pinch Sulzberger:

Top executives at the beleaguered New York Times Company reaped hefty rewards last year, with Chairman Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger more than doubling his total compensation to $6 million. CEO Janet Robinson got even more, reaping $6.3 million, a 31.9 percent hike.

The increases come against a backdrop of declining ad revenue, layoffs, frozen pension plans, unpaid vacations and a 5 percent pay cut for most of the rank-and-file workers last year.

Hypocrisy, your name is Pinch. …

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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the Obami’s latest efforts at alienating a key ally.

…And The Times article does not even delve into the latest fallout from the joint Clinton-Kirchner press conference in Buenos Aires last week. Hillary Clinton’s astonishing statement of support for Argentine demands for UN-brokered negotiations with Britain over the Falklands has to be the biggest US diplomatic slap in the face for Great Britain in recent history. I suspect it played a key role in the Foreign Secretary’s decision not to visit Washington during his trip to the United States this week, a highly significant move in light of the pressing transatlantic concerns over the war in Afghanistan and the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The rising tensions between Great Britain and the United States over the Falklands is threatening to become a full-blown diplomatic row, with significant long-term damage to the Anglo-American Special Relationship. It is the last thing the alliance needs as US and British forces battle the Taliban and as well as al-Qaeda in a global war against Islamist terrorism.

The Obama administration’s reckless and destructive stance over the Falklands is a major strategic error of judgment by Washington, and yet another demonstration of a poorly conceived foreign policy doctrine that attaches little importance to preserving friendships and alliances, while currying favour with anti-American regimes. It is a monumentally foolish approach that will significantly undercut support for the United States among the British people. It is also a shameful betrayal of a decades-long partnership forged through several wars in the defence of the free world.

Charles Krauthammer gives us an insightful article on how the Dems return to power has tempered liberal thinking in some areas of governance.

As the Afghanistan war intensifies …it has come to be seen as Obama’s war.

Not so. It’s become America’s war. When the former opposition party — habitually antiwar for the past four decades — adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized.

And legitimized. Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn’t see a serious push in Congress to cut off funds?

…When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, the party adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born. …

In Forbes, Amity Schlaes has an informative piece on price controls.

…the Obama Administration’s move toward price controls on health insurance and credit cards. The Administration may not be calling its plans “price controls.” It would describe what it’s doing as establishing a Health Insurance Rate Authority and creating new offices and practices to protect consumers from predatory lenders. Still, such entities are laying the ground for price controls when they set premiums or the Visa interest rate. …

…Consider the last time the federal government aggressively controlled the price of something deeply important to consumers. …

…The Administration’s Cost of Living Council–yes, that was its name–ordained, tweaked and exhorted, all at different points. In the summer of 1973, for example, it froze gasoline prices. Many consumers welcomed the break. But their choice was not between high price and low price; it was between gas and no gas.  …

David Warren opines on the fiscal crises of Iceland and Greece.

…Indeed, why should anyone pay off debts? It’s an old-fashioned concept, and from what I can see, the only reason Icelanders are discussing the question at all, is that the other Europeans are withholding aid and the succour of further loans until the “Icesave” issue is dealt with.

But consider: there’s another one born every minute. The Greeks have extricated themselves from their short-term fiscal emergency, even before their government has delivered on promised austerity measures, simply by floating new bonds to private investors at an exceptionally agreeable interest rate — and even while their civil servants demonstrate violently against the whole idea of fiddling with their extravagant bonuses and early retirement plans. I gather the new issue was over-subscribed.

And that would be an argument against letting Iceland default. The very idiots who lent them money in the first place might well turn around and lend them more. Still, that is the lenders’ problem. Stupidity on that scale has to be punished. …

Thomas Sowell discusses aspects of the economic crisis.

…You don’t lend when politicians are making it more doubtful whether you are going to get your money back — either on time or at all. From the White House to Capitol Hill, politicians are coming up with all sorts of bright ideas for borrowers not to have to pay back what they borrowed and for lenders not to be able to foreclose on people who are months behind on their mortgage payments.

…more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job. …

…The theory is that, if one thing doesn’t work, it is just a matter of trying another. But, in an atmosphere where nobody knows what the federal government is going to come up with next, people tend to hang on to their money until they have some idea of what the rules of the game are going to be.

David Harsanyi looks at the Colorado state legislature’s attempt to overburden companies doing business on the internet.

…Actually, if anyone ever needed an obvious illustration of how government overreach can damage an economy, they need look no further than the Colorado legislature’s foolish attempt to wheedle a few extra bucks out of consumers via an Internet sales tax.

After legislation forcing online companies to collect sales tax passed, Amazon.com moved to protect its consumers and long-term interests by severing its ties with Colorado. Unfortunately, this meant closing its associates program, which involved an estimated 5,000 jobs. …

…And as a recent Tax Foundation study on “Amazon laws” concluded, online companies would have to deal with more than 8,000 different tax computations should every state join Colorado’s effort. Amazon would be nuts not to fight. …

In Contentions, Liam Julian comments on the Education Department focusing on affirmative action rather than improving schools that are failing.

…The latest emission comes with Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement this week that his department’s Office of Civil Rights will “reinvigorate civil rights enforcement” in the nation’s schools in an effort “to make Dr. King’s dream of a colorblind society a reality.” There is an obvious contradiction in trying to create a colorblind society through an inherently hyper-color-aware approach. And there’s a panoply of problems with a big, brash federal office opening “equity” investigations into the discipline decisions, course allotments, teacher assignments, etc. of individual schools. Here’s just one:

Duncan said that the country must ensure “that low-income Latino and African American students” have the same access to AP (Advanced Placement) classes as do other students. This assumes that black and Latino pupils are mostly denied access to AP courses because of their ethnicities; the reality is that black and Latino high-school students are simply less likely than their white and Asian counterparts to have attained the requisite academic skills that would enable them to handle AP assignments. The solution is not to police the AP roll; the solution is to worry about the lousy elementary schools and middle schools where so many black and Latino kids are permitted to sit through years of classes while learning next to nothing in them.
Packing into AP courses students unprepared for AP coursework can have only deleterious results: Either an unprepared pupil will grow frustrated and fail, or his teacher will accommodate him by making the class easier. The first outcome is unfair to one group of students, the second outcome is unfair to another. This is not civil rights.

The WaPo editors comment on the latest funding battle in the D.C. voucher program.

DON’T BE FOOLED by the excuses offered by Senate Democratic leaders about why no vote has been scheduled to reauthorize the District’s federally funded private school voucher program. The truth is that opponents know how bad it would look to vote against a program that has helped low-income, minority children get a better education. So instead they take no action and hope the program dies a slow, quiet death. Those championing vouchers are right to call out Senate leaders for their cowardly refusal to — at the very least — allow a fair hearing for this successful program. …

…Unless Congress acts soon or the D.C. government decides to assume responsibility, the voucher program, which has benefited so many students since its inception in 2004, is in grave danger. The Obama administration closed the program to new students; children currently enrolled, while supposedly assured of getting vouchers until they graduate from high school, face uncertainty as the program’s administrator pulls out. This is exactly what the program’s chief antagonists, the teachers unions… Given that a rigorous, federally mandated study confirmed the program’s effectiveness and that local leaders such as D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee have supported it, we understand why Mr. Reid sits on his hands. What possible explanation could Democrats devise for killing something that has been so crucial in the lives of thousands of poor D.C. children? How would it look? No, better to do nothing and hope the issue goes away. …

In Pajamas Media, Christopher Monckton directs scathing commentary at the global warming crowd, and the editors of Nature in particular.

The once-respected science journal Nature recently published a whining editorial to the effect that climate scientists are not criminals, really; that attacks on them by increasingly-skeptical news media are soooo unfair; and that the fundamental science showing that the planet is doomed unless the economies of the West are shut down at once is unchallengeable.

No doubt most climate scientists are not criminals. However, some are. Many of the two dozen Climategate emailers, who have for years driven the IPCC process, tampered with peer review in the learned journals, and fabricated, altered, concealed, or destroyed scientific data are criminals. Whether they or Nature like it or not, they will eventually stand trial, and deservedly so.

After all, the biofuel scam that is one of many disfiguring spin-offs from the “global warming” scare — driven by the poisonous clique of mad scientists whom Nature so uncritically defends — has taken millions of acres of farmland away from growing food for people who need it and towards growing biofuels for clunkers that don’t. Result: a doubling of world food prices, mass starvation, and death, leading to food riots in a dozen major regions of the globe. …

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Jonathan Tobin compares and contrasts Palestinians and Israelis and their regard for murderers.

… It is true that the video did include a bit where one man sang a song in praise of Baruch Goldstein, the mad Israeli who murdered 29 Muslims in Hebron on Purim in 1994. That is offensive. But for those who see this as the equivalent of Arab incitement, it is worth pointing out that this is just one Jewish extremist. No one could credibly assert that the Israeli government or the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people share his views. In fact, such despicable beliefs are completely marginal in Israel. But while Baruch Goldstein is a hero only to a tiny fragment of a percentage of Israelis, Dalal Mughrabi is a heroine to virtually all Palestinians. Rather than an illustration of how both sides are mired in mutual hate, the reaction of the Israeli and Palestinian publics to these two names actually shows how different the two cultures are at this point in time.

Indeed, true peace will only be possible when Palestinians think of Mughrabi the same way most Israelis view Goldstein.

In Commentary, Tevi Troy reviews the past twenty years of healthcare politics.

…There are, however, alternatives to the expensive and cumbersome approach promoted by the Democrats thus far. Some proposals, if packaged in a smaller bill, could potentially secure bipartisan support. Although President Obama has recognized physician complaints regarding the high cost and perverse incentives generated by an uncontrolled medical–malpractice system, he has until now been unwilling to accept the well-reasoned position that punitive damages should be capped. Another proposal, long promoted by Republicans, is to expand the insurance market by allowing individuals to purchase insurance across state lines. A third idea, the expansion of high-risk pools, would help individuals with pre-existing health conditions secure insurance policies. The point is not that Democrats and Republicans agree substantially about these issues right now but that these are matters for both parties to talk about.

Unfortunately, while the Brown election has upset Obama’s plans in the short term, it has not caused the Democratic leadership in Congress and the White House to question whether they are right on either the merits or the politics of the health-care issue. The merits can be debated endlessly, but this review of the past two decades indicates the foolhardiness of Democratic certainty regarding health care’s political advantages. Not only do Republicans have the ability to play in the health-care arena, but the recent debates have also further diminished the American people’s faith in the Democrats, both on the issue itself and on the larger question of profligate government spending. …

In WaPo, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen comment on their polling results about Obamacare, and what it should mean to Democrats.

…As pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively, we feel compelled to challenge the myths that seem to be prevailing in the political discourse and to once again urge a change in course before it is too late. At stake is the kind of mainstream, common-sense Democratic Party that we believe is crucial to the success of the American enterprise. …

…Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.

However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data. …

In The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez posts excerpts from Thomas Friedman. He wants to do an Iraq victory lap about now, but where was he when the heavy lifting had to be done?

Thomas Friedman today:

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Thomas Friedman in 2006:

It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war. . . .

Leaving, while bringing other problems, might also make it easier to build coalitions to deal with post-U.S. Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah and Syria.

In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby discusses Iraqi democracy, in light of their elections.

RONALD REAGAN liked to say that there was no limit to what a man could accomplish if he didn’t mind who got the credit. The transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy will be recorded as a signal accomplishment of George W. Bush’s presidency, and he probably doesn’t mind in the least that the Obama administration would like to take the credit.

This week’s parliamentary elections in Iraq brought 12 million voters to the polls – a remarkable 62 percent turnout, notwithstanding a wave of Election Day bombings that killed 38 people.

…Iraqis have paid a steep price for their burgeoning young democracy; tens of thousands of lives were wiped out in the horrific insurgency that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps that awful butcher’s bill explains the fervor with which Iraqis have embraced democratic self-governance. In Sunday’s elections, 6,200 candidates representing 86 political parties contended to fill 325 seats in parliament. (Would that our own congressional elections were so competitive.) Such democratic passion would be impressive anywhere. To see it flourish in one of the world’s most dangerous and undemocratic neighborhoods is downright heroic. …

That the Obami have made no course corrections is still a source of amazement. In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery comments suggesting the president needs and intervention.

Denial is a river that runs through the White House, where the denizens are in the grip of two major delusions: One, that the country really wants really expensive big government, and two, that Obama is “sort of like God.”

Since early last spring, they’ve been waging a fight with the reality principle, convincing themselves (and fewer and fewer in the larger political universe) that in the very next speech, Obama will recapture that old campaign magic. …

…A year in, the Obamatrons barely seem to have noticed that they have divided the Democrats, lost independents, and revived the small-government forces as never before. …

In The Corner, Veronique de Rugy posts on spending issues.

The Hill reports that in a rare 100-0 roll call vote “The Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to tell the public when it isn’t paying for new spending or tax cuts.” The amendment, which would be applied to the job bill, “would create a running tally on the secretary of the Senate’s website of any new mandatory spending that isn’t paid for through offsetting spending cuts or tax increases.”

Still, “Coburn wasn’t optimistic over the chances his proposal will end up becoming law.” That is because Democrats may replace it with one authored by Sen. Max Baucus “that requires the Secretary of the Senate to create a new website that links to Congressional Budget Office information,” and “would only be updated every three months.” …

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We started the week pointing to the House where many think the health care plan will live or die. Michael Barone in WSJ looks at Pelosi’s prospects.

… “If there is a path to 216 votes, I am confident the Speaker will find it,” writes Bush White House legislative strategy analyst Keith Hennessey on his blog. “She has a remarkable ability to bend her colleagues to her will.” True, but perhaps that ability has led Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill to embark on what will be remembered as a mission impossible.

Mrs. Pelosi, whom I have known for almost 30 years, may turn out to be even shrewder than I think. But she may be facing a moment as flummoxing as the one when Democratic Speaker Thomas Foley lost the vote on the rule to consider the crime and gun control bill in August 1994, or when Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert saw the Mark Foley scandal explode on the last day of the session in September 2006. Both were moments when highly competent and dedicated House speakers saw their majorities shattered beyond repair.

That moment, if it comes, will occur some time between now and the Easter recess. The Democrats’ struggle to get 216 votes is high stakes poker.

Jennifer Rubin has an optimistic post that even the senior Dems don’t want to pass Obamacare.

Even among high-ranking and dependable veteran House Democrats, enthusiasm for ObamaCare is underwhelming. The Hill reports:

A handful of House committee chairmen are either undecided about or plan to reject the healthcare reform bill that is expected to be voted on as early as next week….

Needless to say, if committee chairmen are underwhelmed with the president’s arguments, it may be hard to corral the rank and file. Jake Tapper and Hotline are keeping tabs, and so far, there are a lot of noes and undecideds. …The issue has been and remains whether moderate Democrats can be persuaded to vote for something their constituents hate and that, if they vote for it, will quite possibly end their careers. Stay tuned.

Jennifer Rubin also comments on the state of liberalism, and the kamikaze president.

…Then there is Obama (”it’s the rise in his disapproval ratings from the mid-20s in early March 2009 to the mid-40s now that ought to be troubling for Democratic strategists”) and all those disaffected independents who have gone “from virtually mirroring the sentiments of Democrats during the last two election cycles to now more closely resembling the views of Republicans.” …

…Obama has already hinted that a single term might be good enough for him. But in his hubris (hubris is like this, of course) he has neglected to recognize that his own political nosedive has real-world consequences both for his agenda (no one is taking his political advice all that seriously) and for his party. That may all become clear after November. As he said, that’s what elections are for.

In Forbes, Paul Johnson says that confidence in leadership has been damaged by the recession. Perhaps we should say that the recession has merely exposed the erosion of morals and principles that has been underway.

The world is groaning beneath a mountain of debt, but that’s not the real problem. History shows repeatedly that debt can quickly be paid off once confidence is restored and men and women set to work with a will. But for that to happen we must have trust in those who lead us.

Trust is missing. We do not trust–and with good reason–either our elected leaders or the corporate elite who constitute the top echelons of society. Seldom in modern history has the lack of trust, now verging on contempt, been so deep, universal and comprehensive. …

Andy McCarthy blogs in the Corner about the Gitmo lawyers and various aspects of the circulating arguments.

You can tell that the lawyers who’ve come to the aid of DOJ’s al-Qaeda lawyers don’t have a coherent case. Every time they open their mouths, they embarrass themselves.

First there was the comparison of lawyers who took up the enemy’s cause to John Adams. As Cesar Conda aptly put it earlier today, that comparison is ludicrous. The United States was not at war at the time of the Boston massacre, the British soldiers Adams agreed to represent were not uninformed terrorists, and those soldiers were defendants in a criminal trial. No one is claiming that defendants in a criminal trial are not entitled to counsel or that those who defend them are not performing a constitutionally valuable function.

But the al-Qaeda terrorists are at war with the United States, and they do not have a right to counsel to challenge their status as detainees. …

We have more thoughts from Jennifer Rubin, this time on the president’s lack of decorum during the State of the Union address.

Following the flap over Obama’s State of the Union attack on the Supreme Court’s decision striking down a portion of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, I wrote that it would be a good idea for the justices to skip the event in the future, since it has become a partisan affair that needlessly embroils them in political matters. I am delighted to see that I am on the same wavelength as the chief justice:

Chief Justice John Roberts told students at the University of Alabama Tuesday that President Obama’s State of the Union address, in which he singled out a recent Supreme Court decision on campaign finance law for criticism, was “very troubling” and said the annual event has “degenerated into a political pep rally,” the A.P. reports.

Taking a question from a law school student, Roberts said anyone is welcome to criticize the court. “I have no problems with that,” he said. “On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum. The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court – according the requirements of protocol – has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling. . . I’m not sure why we’re there,” he said.

… At least one thing is clear: this supposedly post-partisan president, who ran for office decrying old-style politics, has hyper-charged with partisanship nearly everything with which he comes in contact — the census, the Court, and the Justice Department, for starters. It’s good to see that not everyone is playing along. And it’s better still to see Chief Justice Roberts defend the dignity and apolitical nature of the Court. Obama may lose his props, but we should all benefit from the reminder that the justices are not in the business of cheerleading the president nor duty bound to perform the role of mute extras in his political drama.

The Obami had to get in the last word. Jennifer Rubin follows up on her last post.

Jan Crawford (h/t Glenn Reynolds), among the best of the mainstream media Supreme Court reporters, socks it to the White House for its juvenile insistence on getting the last word on its running spat with the Court. After Chief Justice John Roberts made the fine suggestion that the Court should abstain from the State of the Union, Robert Gibbs seemed to make Roberts’ point for him by replaying the president’s slap at the Court. (”What is troubling is that this decision opened the floodgates for corporations and special interests to pour money into elections – drowning out the voices of average Americans.”)…

…This is par for the course at this White House. It’s the perpetual rat-tat-tat, the quintessential campaign quick-response mode. There is no respect for the Chief Justice or the Court as an institution, nor for the point the Chief Justice was making: that it’s unseemly for the Court to appear and to get dragged into partisan brawls. In their partisan vitriol, the Obami, of course, proved the Chief Justice’s case. But then, self-awareness was never the White House’s strong suit.

In Contentions, David Hazony discusses the building going on in Jerusalem.

…One of the worst things about the Oslo Accords was the logic that said, “Let’s take care of the easy things first, and wait on the hard issues until later.” And so, while the Palestinians were allowed to create a heavily armed, ideologically belligerent, terror-supporting government in the territories Israel vacated, Israel gained nothing in terms of security, while the “hard issues” like Jerusalem and the repatriation of millions of Palestinians remained up in the air, not as questions to be resolved, but as threats hanging over Israelis’ heads: You can give us these, and face demographic and symbolic decimation; or you can refuse, and face a renewal of violence. When it became clear to Arafat that Israel had no intention of giving in on these core issues, all the “trust” that had been built was suddenly meaningless. He launched the second intifada, and the rest is too well known.

In making the move on Jerusalem, the Israeli government is trying to avoid the ambiguities that were the undoing of Oslo. Anyone hoping for a successful negotiation leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they are saying, had better forget about the division of Jerusalem. Sometimes, it’s the timing that drives the point home.

Jennifer Rubin points out that once again, the Obami have made poor choices in foreign relations, and further alienated a friend.

Joe Biden’s Israel trip has turned into a semi-fiasco, as David has noted. He was a poor substitute, the Israelis thought, for Obama. Then he condemned the Israelis’ decision to build 1,600 homes in their nation’s capital…

And notice the language Biden employed: “condemn.” A Capitol Hill Republican leadership adviser sends this keen observation:

What kind of language is this?  Isn’t “condemn” reserved for things like beating dissidents, or even terror attacks? Whatever you think of the decision, the Obama administration couldn’t have said they felt it undermined the peace process, were “very disappointed,” saw it as “a step backward” or something like that?…

In the National Review, Stephen Spruiell discusses Gore’s political entrepreneurship. As we read yesterday, some people get rich by playing the political system rather than producing an item or service that improves people’s lives.

…Only a small part of Gore’s investment portfolio is tied to cap-and-trade. Most of the companies in which he invests would benefit from the other parts of the Democrats’ energy bill — the parts that would be much easier for Congress to pass. Congress has been subsidizing green programs for decades, and that support increased dramatically with the 2005 energy bill. But the Democrats want to pump it up still more, even though the consensus for dramatic action on climate change is buckling like a shoddy roof in a blizzard of scientific scandals. The U.S. government, facing record-setting deficits and debt, cannot afford new subsidies. Yet with “green jobs” as their rallying cry, Gore and other advocates for more green-tech largesse will push to pick the taxpayers’ pockets — lining their own all the while. …

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From Anne Applebaum we learn more about discord in Euro-relations.

“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And sell the Acropolis too!”—headline, Bild newspaper, March 4, 2010

…What he meant, though, was more accurately reflected in that Bild headline: The Germans are fed up with paying Europe’s bills. They don’t want to bail out the feckless Greeks with their flagrantly inaccurate official statistics; they resent being Europe’s banker of last resort; they object to the universal demand that they plug the vast holes in the Greek budget deficit in the name of “European unity”; and for the first time in a long time they are saying it out loud. Not only are tabloids demanding the sale of the Acropolis, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s deeply serious paper of record, has pointed out that while the Greeks are out protesting the raising of the pension age from 61 to 63, Germany recently raised its pension age from 65 to 67: “Does that mean that the Germans should in future extend the working age from 67 to 69, so that Greeks can enjoy their retirement?’ …

…Germany is still effectively in recession; unemployment is relatively high; and the new ruling coalition has sworn to curtail spending. That means that for the first time in a long time, Germans are feeling a direct pinch on their incomes, on their pensions, and on state institutions, including schools. If they don’t feel like bailing out other people at this particular moment in the economic cycle—particularly people with an earlier retirement age—no one can blame them. …

…Which is why this wave of German indignation over the Greek bailout is so important. After all, Germany is now run by a generation with no personal memories of the war. … Sooner or later, the Germans will collectively decide that enough sacrifices have been made and that the debt to Europe has been paid. Thanks to the ungrateful Greeks with their island villas and large pensions, that day may arrive more quickly that we thought it would.

In the Telegraph, UK, Simon Heffer looks at the undoing of Obama. Coming from a socialist democracy, Heffer assumes that Fox is causing part of the liberals’ problem, rather than realizing that Fox reflects the perspectives of more Americans than the left-biased MSM. But with that caveat, he has some interesting commentary.

…”Obama’s big problem,” a senior Democrat told me, “is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN.” The Fox network is a remarkable cultural phenomenon which almost shocks those of us from a country where a technical rule of impartiality is applied in the broadcast media. … The public loves it, and it is manifestly stirring up political activism against Mr Obama, and also against those in the Republican Party who are not deemed conservatives. However, it is arguable whether the now-reorganising Right is half as effective in its assault on the President as some of Mr Obama’s own party are.

Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism. The sound of the squealing of brakes is now audible all over the American press; but the attack is being directed not at the leader himself, but at those around him. There was much unconditional love a year or so ago of Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s Chief of Staff… Now, supporters of the President are blaming Mr Emanuel for the failure of the Obama project, not least for his inability to construct a deal on health care. …

…The root of the problem seems to be the management of expectations. The magnificent campaign created the notion that Mr Obama could walk on water. Oddly enough, he can’t. That was more Mr Axelrod’s fault than Mr Emanuel’s. And, to be fair to Mr Emanuel, any advice he has been giving the President to impose his will on Congress is probably well founded. The $783 billion stimulus package of a year ago was used to further the re-election prospects of many congressmen, not to do good for the country.  … The health care Bill, apparently so humane in intent, is being “scrubbed” (to use the terminology of one Republican) by its opponents, to the joy of millions of middle Americans who see it as a means to waste more public money and entrench socialism. For the moment, this is a country vibrant with anger. …

Nile Gardiner blogs about a WaPo editorial from Jackson Diehl on Obama’s lack of foreign friends.

…Jackson Diehl is one of the most influential and thoughtful writers on US foreign policy inside the Beltway, and his latest take on Obama’s struggling international leadership will cause some consternation in The White House, not least as it comes from the heart of the media establishment.

…Diehl’s central thesis is correct. Barack Obama has failed to invest time in cultivating critically important alliances as well as friendships with key strategic partners.

One only has to look at the appalling treatment Great Britain has received at the hands of the Obama administration to grasp the scale of the problem. At the same time, though Diehl does not go into this, the president has spent a huge amount of effort “engaging” with hostile regimes, from Iran to Sudan to Venezuela, in a futile attempt to change their behaviour. …

Mark Steyn writes about how government encroachment is reaching critical mass.

… A Californian reader of mine, standing slack-jawed before the “Permit to Sell Bedding” hanging at the back of his local Wal-Mart, channeled a bit of (misattributed) George Orwell: “We sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough bureaucrats from the Bureau of Home Furnishings stand ready to do violence to those who would sell us unlicensed pillowcases. “…
There is a deal of ruin in a nation, but by the time you’ve got a Bureau of Home Furnishings you’re getting awful near the limit. Of all the petty regulatory burdens piled upon the citizen in the Age of Micro-Tyranny, I dislike especially the food-handling licensing requirements in an ever-multiplying number of jurisdictions from Virginia to Oregon that have put an end to such quintessentially American institutions as the bake sale and the lemonade stand. So civic participation withers, and a government monopoly not just of power but of basic social legitimacy is all that remains. …

…In this election season, if you’re not committed to fewer programs from fewer agencies with fewer bureaucrats on less pay, you’re not serious. I’d say we need something closer to Thatcher-scale privatization in Britain 30 years ago, or Sir Roger Douglas’s transformative Rogernomics in New Zealand in the mid-Eighties, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe’s economic liberalization in the early Nineties. Aside from the restoration of individual liberty, a side benefit to closing down or outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you’d also be in effect privatizing public-sector unions, which are now one of the biggest threats to freedom and civic integrity. …

In the New Editor we learn about Obama’s next focus. Perhaps Congress could keep him tied up with Obamacare summits for a few more months.

Look out, here comes the next big political shakedown… the Obama Administration is uneasy “with the increasing control a handful of corporations have over the nation’s food supply” and wants to “examine the concentration of power in rural America.”

Administration officials “emphasized that no action would be taken if competition was deemed fair. The point is to listen and learn.”

This ought to end well …

In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger helps rectify one aspect of American history unfairly condemned by liberal educators.

…a small classic by Hillsdale College historian Burton W. Folsom called “The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America” (Young America’s Foundation). Prof. Folsom’s core insight is to divide the men of that age into market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs.

Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant. Rockefeller took on and beat the world’s dominant oil power at the time, Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.

Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. …

If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public subsidies… Politically connected entrepreneurs will spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies, congressional committees and Beltway door openers. …

…Great employment markets are discoverable only by people who create opportunities or see them in the cracks of what already exists—a Federal Express or Wal-Mart….

From News Busters, we get the skinny on Dan Rather’s watermelon remarks. We are also struck by how incoherent he was.

HDNet’s Dan Rather stepped on one mine after another in the racial minefield that exists when talking about the nation’s first black President as the former CBS anchor, on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show over the weekend, uttered the following take on the President’s ability to get health care passed and how the GOP and independents would view it. [audio available here]

DAN RATHER: Part of the undertow in the coming election is going to be President Obama’s leadership. And the Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument. “Listen he just hasn’t been, look at the health care bill. It was his number one priority. It took him forever to get it through and he had to compromise it to death.” And a version of, “Listen he’s a nice person, he’s very articulate” this is what’s been used against him, “but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”

While Rather may not have been being intentionally racist one has to wonder what the reaction would be if a conservative had used similiar language on the show.

We are happy to have Dilbert back. He has more issues with his Shop-Vac.

Yesterday I decided to make some man points. (-1 for knowing I need them.) Recently we purchased online a big metal rack to hold free weights. (+1). The delivery guy left the package outside the door when we were gone. I wasn’t strong enough to carry it inside. (-1 for having no upper body strength.) So I tipped it on its end and “walked” it into the garage. (+1 for using science to move a heavy object.)

The rack required assembly. This was a problem because all of my tools had been stolen from the garage last week. (-1 for leaving tools unprotected. -1 for having so few tools that they all fit in one basket. -1 for not replacing them the same day. -1 for not having an attack dog in the garage.)

The main tool I needed was a rather huge Allen wrench. I didn’t own that sort of tool even in the days when I had tools. (-1 for inadequate toolage.) So I dropped everything, jumped in the car, and headed to Home Depot for a tool buying spree. (+1 for going on a hunt for tools. -1 for calling it a spree. +1 for intending to buy tools for which I had no immediate use.) …

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In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Stuttaford reviews the Greek fiscal crisis from Germany’s point of view.

…Throwing Greece out of the eurozone might be emotionally satisfying (over half of German voters are in favor, though it probably isn’t even legally possible), but inevitably the result, pushing the country into default, would achieve nothing constructive. What would make sense is for Germany and the other countries at the eurozone’s core to abandon the currency. The euro would slump, giving the nations that still use it the devaluation they so badly need. But that’s not going to happen either. The European elites have sunk too much political capital into the single currency to give it up now. They will plough forward regardless of the current crisis. If the logic of that course provides the rationale, or at least an excuse, for the even deeper EU integration that most European voters do not want, then so much the better.

But the opinions of the electorate no longer count for that much anywhere within the EU. With feelings running as they are in her country, Chancellor Angela Merkel has to be seen to be talking tough and doing everything she can to avoid Germany being stuck with the Greeks’ bills. At one level she may mean it, but she knows it is just theater. Merkel will huff and Merkel will puff, but she will not risk bringing down what is left of Athens’s ruins. If a rescue party has to be put together, Germany will be a prominent part of it.

To be fair, it’s not all bad news for Germany. If Greece is indeed bailed out by some or all of its EU partners, the longer-term impact will be both to weaken the euro (which will help Germany’s important export sector) and, by preserving the eurozone as it is, keep many of Germany’s competitors within the eurozone most helpfully hobbled. The combination of higher levels of cost inflation, lower levels of efficiency, and a shared, hard currency has eroded much of the price advantage that was once the main selling point for the industries of Europe’s less-advanced economies. It is estimated that the PIIGS would have to devalue by more than 30 percent to restore their competitive position against Germany, a situation that is only going to get worse. …

In the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone contrasts Texas and California. Texas demonstrates how low taxes, fiscal conservatism, and less government produce a more robust economy.

…Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes — and no state income taxes — and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California’s year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.

But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California’s. But its test scores — and with a demographically similar school population — are higher. California’s once fabled freeways are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In the meantime, Texas’ economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small and large generate new jobs. …

So how are the Dems doing on the health care vote in the House? John Fund posts on Pelosi’s troubles.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s iron grip on the House of Representatives may be slipping. The latest whip count shows she has fewer than 200 hard votes to pass the Senate health care bill that President Obama is insisting on. She needs 216 votes.

Several episodes last week have combined to make Speaker Pelosi’s job difficult. She was forced to back down from her support of embattled Rep. Charles Rangel as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee when faced with threats by her own members that they would side with Republicans in a motion against Mr. Rangel. She next tried to install Rep. Pete Stark, a fellow Californian, as a Rangel replacement but was forced to retreat when Committee members revolted. Then she ended the week by claiming she had no knowledge of sexual harassment charges against now-resigned Rep. Eric Massa of New York, even though her deputies had known about them for a month. …

We have a hat-trick of posts from Jennifer Rubin. First she reviews the column of a distraught liberal who can’t understand why Obama isn’t succeeding.

…Frankly, Obama has a big picture. It’s just the wrong one — a statist spend-a-thon that seeks to reorient the balance between private and public sectors, grow the scope of the federal government, and do it all without popular support. As for the governance problem, however, Hunt is right that neither Obama nor his flock of supposedly smart people are good at devising, negotiating, and selling policy. They are at heart pols who peaked during a cynical campaign in which they sold Obama to the public as something he was not (e.g. moderate, prepared, pro-Israel). But then it’s nearly impossible to govern from the far Left of the political spectrum in a Center-Right country.

Now the Obami are trapped in a thicket of overstuffed legislation and beset upon by a public chagrined to find that Obama isn’t what he was cracked up to be. So the infighting starts. The backstabbing goes public. The excuse-mongering revs up. All that, however, stems from a central difficulty: a erudite but inexperienced president with a surplus of hubris is trying to impose a radical vision on an unwilling populace. It’s bound to fail. And so far, it is.

Jennifer Rubin also looks at a couple of Dems who haven’t been persuaded yet to sacrifice their political careers.

“If the House and Senate can’t work out cost containment, I don’t see how I could support a bill that doesn’t help our business community,” Rep. John Adler (D., N.J.) said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’m not sure we’ve gone far enough in terms of fixing the underlying system to make it affordable for businesses and taxpayers.”

Rep. Jason Altmire (D., Pa.), also appearing on Fox, said he needed “to see a much clearer picture of the cost containment.” He suggested strengthening provisions in the bill aimed at shifting the way providers are reimbursed, to be based on quality of care rather than the number of procedures performed.”

…So all that is left is to see if the congressional leaders can cajole their members into passing something that is neither substantively nor politically sound. Unfortunately, the bribery and strong-arming needed to do that only intensifies the public’s disgust for the process and for the lawmakers who are pushing this on them. The longer this goes on, the less sense ObamaCare makes, especially to those who really have no reason to throw themselves over a cliff so that Obama-Reid-Pelosi can spare themselves humiliation. After all, the troika can come up with a face-saving, bare-bones deal, the lawmakers can tell the voters they did something, and they can get back to the Democratic members’ real concern — trying to save themselves from the angry electorate.

Jennifer Rubin discusses how passing Obamacare doesn’t end the pressure on politicians.

Explaining the road ahead on ObamaCare, Rich Lowry said on Meet the Press:

“So they, so they have to try to force it through just on sheer partisan muscle. They’re going to come down with the full force of the party and, and the president on every single one of these members. And Nancy Pelosi’s going to channel Ataturk and his famous order of the battle of Gallipoli:  “I don’t order you to attack, I order you to die.” And Democrats, they seem to think that if they pass this they’re going to put it behind him. They’ll really put it right back in front of them again. This will be a debate for years because this bill has serious legitimacy problems.”

This strikes me as a key point. The only way to put this issue behind Democrats, get back to focusing on the economy, and defuse the electorate’s anger is to vote this down. By passing it, the Democrats will invite perpetual challenges — a never-ending stream of  measures to repeal it and a continuous campaign (beginning this year and extending to 2012 and beyond) to rip it out by the roots. …

The question, then, isn’t just whether proponents can jam ObamaCare through Congress with a legislative sleight of hand and on a narrow partisan basis. It is, rather, what would happen next: how the entire political landscape could potentially be upended. But in the case of ObamaCare, it’s perhaps worse for its supporters than abortion or any other hot-button issue – after all, two-thirds of the public disapproves of what they’re doing right now. And that’s before the taxes and the Medicare cuts hit. …

Robert Samuelson contrasts the millennial generation with previous generations.

Consider a study of the 50 million millennials 18 and over by the Pew Research Center. The report found some surprising and some not-so-surprising developments. …

…In many ways, millennials merely extend existing social trends. Since the end of the draft in the early 1970s, military service has become increasingly rare. Just 2 percent of millennial men are veterans; at a similar age, 13 percent of boomers and 24 percent of older Americans were. Every younger generation shows more racial and sexual openness. Half of millennials favor gay marriage; among boomers and older Americans, support is a third and a quarter, respectively. Only 5 percent of millennials oppose interracial marriage, compared with 26 percent among those 65 and over.

What’s also striking are the vast areas of continuity. Pew asked about having a successful marriage. More than four-fifths of all age groups rate it highly important. Homeownership? About three-quarters of all age groups say it’s also highly important. The belief in God is widespread: 64 percent of millennials, 73 percent of those 30 and over. There’s consensus on many values, even if ideals (stable marriages, for instance) are often violated. …

…Millennials could become the chump generation. They could suffer for their elders’ economic sins, particularly the failure to confront the predictable costs of baby boomers’ retirement. This poses a question. In 2008, millennials voted 2-1 for Barack Obama; in surveys, they say they’re more disposed than older Americans to big and activist government. Their ardor for Obama is already cooling. Will higher taxes dim their enthusiasm for government?

Roger Simon says it’s time to see more non-left films.

The 2010 Academy Awards may not have marked the end of “liberal Hollywood” as we know it, but they certainly put a solid dent in it. With the pro-military “The Hurt Locker” winning over the enviro-pabulum of “Avatar” and Sandra Bullock garnering the Best Actress Oscar for a Christian movie, the times are a-changin’ at least somewhat, maybe even a lot.

But one thing is now certain. It is time for conservative, center-right and libertarian filmmakers to stop feeling sorry for themselves and go out and just do it. Their “victocrat” days are over. No more excuses. “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” have proven that it can be done. … If you want to make a film with themes you believe in, quit whining about Industry prejudice and start writing that script and trying to get it made. That’s not an easy thing, no matter what your politics.

Right siders can take inspiration too from Sunday’s Oscar ceremonies themselves. They weren’t defamed for a moment. Missing in action was the usual libo-babble, no extended hymns to the cause du jour or ritual Bush-bashing. And Barack Obama wasn’t even mentioned. Not once. But the troops were – several times by Kathryn Bigelow. …

Nile Gardiner comments on the Hurt Locker win.

I’m glad The Hurt Locker triumphed over Avatar at tonight’s Oscars. Not only is Hurt Locker a far superior film – with standout performances, an intelligent and brilliantly executed script, as well as three dimensional lead characters – it is also a tremendously patriotic film which pays tribute to the courage of American troops serving in Iraq. For all these reasons I named it as one of the top 10 conservative movies of the last decade. The film won six awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow), and Best Original Screenplay.

I acknowledge that Hurt Locker has attracted a good deal of controversy and has divided opinion in the States over aspects of historical accuracy, and the debate will continue to rage. But I believe it thoroughly deserved its Oscar wins, and that the powerful message it projects about the US mission in Iraq and those who serve in the American armed forces, is an overwhelmingly positive one. …

David Harsanyi asks, What’s in a name?

…Is there no better way to let everyone know how special your über-gifted little one is than digging deep into Irish folklore, Apocryphal Gospel or Tolkien for a name? Is the humiliation of sending him to school with something as pedestrian as “Joe” too much to bear? …

…My childhood acquaintances were a monotonous blend of Jeffreys and Lisas and Tonys — and even “Butch,” who, unlike today’s Finn or Adonia (kids who, let’s face it, have no choice but to be creative writing majors or strippers) is undoubtedly, unlike myself, engaged in some manner of productive and masculine work. …

…It’s not like we need to fret too much about “following rules.” Any individualism or free thinking is wrung from those little souls with ruthless urgency as public schools relentlessly instill the importance of “collective good” early and often.

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Purple fingers in Iraq again. Story in The Corner.

Marty Peretz reviews various commentary on the success of Iraq. Here he looks at Tom Ricks’ description of the catch-22 that Obama has created for himself.

…There are three especially compelling personal testimonies arguing that Iraq is on its way to making its own inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian history, and it will be a relatively democratic history. …

…The second of these pronunciamientos comes from Tom Ricks, authoritative or especially believable because of his authorship of two critical books on the American venture in Iraq, Fiasco and The Gamble. In “Extending Our Stay in Iraq,” an op-ed in last Wednesday’s Times, Ricks focuses on President Obama’s coming predicament. Having pledged to start removing American troops early on, Obama may find that his withdrawal will come just at a time when U.S. personnel are needed most. The president put himself long ago–during the campaign, when he played to the crowds–in this Iraqi conundrum. In his West Point address, he repeated the promise of withdrawal from Afghanistan when our presence there could be most important. This is a tic of the president’s, as a recent TNR editorial pointed out and as Dexter Filkins argued in the same issue. Ricks concludes that American and Iraqi leaders “may come to recognize that the best way deter a return to civil war is to find a way to keep 30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come. … As a longtime critic of the American invasion of Iraq, I am not happy about advocating a continued military presence there. Yet… just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you should leave it stupidly.”

In one way or another, the logic of this last sentence will be taken up by the Obami in their irresistible volte face on Iraq. It will be an embarrassment, an enormous one. But there is no alternative save shame and defeat. …

Fouad Ajami also comments on one of the most amazing events in the Middle East. All of the cynicism from the Left regarding how we came to invade Iraq cannot tarnish the remarkable democracy of this once tortured nation.

…As Iraq approaches its general elections on March 7, we should take yes for an answer. The American project in Iraq has midwifed that rarest of creatures in the Greater Middle East: a government that emerges out of the consent of the governed. We should trust the Iraqis with their own history. That means letting their electoral process play out against the background of the Arab dynasties and autocracies, and of the Iranian theocracy next door that made a mockery out of its own national elections. …

…There was willfulness in this reading of de-Baathification. In the new Iraq, released by American power from its long nightmare, it was either de-Baathification or mass slaughter of yesterday’s tormentors. The American regency in Iraq made its share of blunders. But that order No. 1 issued by proconsul Paul Bremer, banning the Baath, was a boon to the new Iraq. On the whole, the hand of vengeance was stayed. It was remarkable how little violence was unleashed on those who had perpetrated on Iraqis a reign of the darkest terror. …

…Of all that has been said about Iraq since the time that country became an American burden, nothing equals the stark formulation once offered by a diplomat not given to grandstanding and rhetorical flourishes. Said former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker: “In the end, what we leave behind and how we leave will be more important than how we came.”

We can already see the outline of what our labor has created: a representative government, a binational state of Arabs and Kurds, and a country that does not bend to the will of one man or one ruling clan.

You don’t have access to Pickings circa 2005, but we do. We replay a Mark Steyn column from The Australian on the occasion of the first elections in post-war Iraq. This is from February 1, 2005.

… Three years ago, Jonathan Kay of Canada’s National Post wrote that if Robert Mugabe turned up at an Arab League meeting he’d be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. That’s no longer true.

What happened on Sunday was a victory for the Iraqi people and a vindication for a relatively small group of Western politicians — most notably the much-maligned US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose faith in those Iraqi people turned out to be so much shrewder than the sneers of his detractors.

John Kerry is wrong. It’s time for him and Ted Kennedy and Kim Beazley and Paul McGeough to stop under-hyping. If freedom isn’t on the march, it’s moving forward dramatically in a region notoriously inimical to it.

This weekend’s election was a rebuke to the parochial condescension of the West’s elites.

“These elections are a joke,” Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan, told Reuters. Sorry, professor, the joke’s on you. And the modern Middle East history is being made by the fledgling democracy of the new Iraq.

As if global warming alarmists don’t have enough problems, now Paul Ehrlich is coming to their defense. Mitch Berg has the story in Hot Air.

… Ehrlich started his academic career as an entomologist, an expert on Lepidoptera – butterflies.  But in 1968 he wrote one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of pseudo-scientific literature, The Population Bomb.  In it, Ehrlich reprised the work of Thomas Malthus, arguing that population growth would eventually, inevitably lead mankind to three choices:  Stop making new humans, stop consuming resources, or starve to death.  The book started ”The battle to feed all of humanity is over … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He spent much of the next decade writing other books and articles in support of his thesis in Population Bomb, adding in a later article “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”  The book and his body of “work” through the seventies proposed a number of radical solutions to the overpopulation crisis; dumping sterilizing agents into water supplies, allowing only selected people the privilege of reproduction, and performing mass “triage” of nations, the same way an emergency room triages patients – between those who don’t need help (North America, Australia, parts of Europe), those who can be saved, and those who are beyond help – India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of Asia, which he predicted would be hell on earth by the 1980’s; he essentially gave up all hope for Africa and India.  Our ecology was going to strike back at us; in a 1969 article, “Eco-Catastrophe!”, he predicted that by the end of the century the population of the US would be under 20 million, and our life expectancy would be around 40 years – due not to starvation, but to pesticides. …

In the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward looks at the fortunate demise of the global warming conspiracy. He neglects to cover one thing: will the Climategate hackers win the Nobel Prize too?

…Two weeks ago the World Meteorological Association pulled the rug out from under one of Gore’s favorite talking points—that climate change will mean more tropical storms. A new study by the top scientists in the field concluded that although warmer oceans might make for stronger tropical storms in the future, there has been no climate-related trend in tropical storm activity over recent decades and, further, there will likely be significantly fewer tropical storms in a warmer world. “We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said lead author Chris Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. …

…A London Times headline last month summarizes the shocking revision currently underway: “World May Not Be Warming, Scientists Say.” … Skeptics such as Anthony Watts, Joseph D’Aleo, and Stephen McIntyre have been pointing out the defects in the surface temperature record for years, but the media and the IPCC ignored them. Watts and D’Aleo have painstakingly documented (and in many cases photographed) the huge number of temperature stations that have been relocated, corrupted by the “urban heat island effect,” or placed too close to heat sources such as air conditioning compressors, airports, buildings, or paved surfaces, as well as surface temperature series that are conveniently left out of the IPCC reconstructions and undercut the IPCC’s simplistic story of rising temperatures. The compilation and statistical treatment of global temperature records is hugely complex, but the skeptics such as Watts and D’Aleo offer compelling critiques showing that most of the reported warming disappears if different sets of temperature records are included, or if compromised station records are excluded.

The puzzle deepens when more accurate satellite temperature records, available starting in 1979, are considered. There is a glaring anomaly: The satellite records, which measure temperatures in the middle and upper atmosphere, show very little warming since 1979 and do not match up with the ground-based measurements. Furthermore, the satellite readings of the middle- and upper-air temperatures fail to record any of the increases the climate models say should be happening in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. … Bottom line: Expect some surprises to come out of the revisions of the surface temperature records that will take place over the next couple of years.

Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? Two recently published studies funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, one by Brookhaven Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and one by MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi in Geophysical Research Letters, both argue for vastly lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. …

Thomas Sowell continues with his health care columns explaining one of the unintended effects of comprehensive health insurance plans. When doctors have to deal with the hassles of third-party bureaucracy to get paid, much less Obamacare socialist medicine, we have less doctors.

…Those who are old enough to have paid off their medical school debts long ago, and successful enough that they can afford to retire early, or to take jobs as medical consultants, can opt out of the whole elaborate third-party payment system and its problems. What the rising costs of medical liability insurance has already done for some, other hassles that bureaucracies and politicians create can have the same effect for others.

There is another group that doesn’t have to put up with these hassles. These are young people who have reached the stage in their lives when they are choosing which profession to enter, and weighing the pluses and minuses before making their decisions.

Some of these young people might prefer becoming a doctor, other things being equal. But the heady schemes of government-controlled medicine, and the ever more bloated bureaucracies that these heady schemes will require, can make it very unlikely that other things will be equal in the medical profession. …

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Today we’re health care all the time. Mark Steyn explains the reason for the big push by the Dems.

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

John Steele Gordon in Contentions writes on the year since the drive for health care “reform” was launched.

… “I just want to figure out what works,” Obama told them.

Too bad he didn’t do that. Instead he turned everything over to the ultraliberal Pooh-Bahs of Congress, who produced a bill (or rather two bills, one in the House the other in the Senate) the unpopularity of which has only grown with time. That Obama wanted everything wrapped up by last year’s August recess now seems a long-ago bad joke.

Today there is certainly still a call coming from the bottom up. Unfortunately for the Democrats, it’s an ever-rising groundswell of opposition to ObamaCare, one that threatens to become a political hurricane that could sweep the Democrats out of the majority in both houses of Congress and render the president politically impotent for the rest of his term. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on the Obamacare death march.

…Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health-care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

Which is what drove even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett to go public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down, and the bill doesn’t do it. Buffett’s advice would be to start over and get it right with a bill that says “we’re just going to focus on costs and we’re not going to dream up 2,000 pages of other things.” …

The WSJ editors review Paul Ryan’s teachable moment with Obama at the healthcare summit, featured here last Monday.

…Nearby, we reprint Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s remarks at the health summit last week, which methodically dismantle the falsehoods—there is no other way of putting it—that Mr. Obama has used to sell “reform” and repeated again yesterday. No one in the political class has even tried to refute Mr. Ryan’s arguments, though he made them directly to the President and his allies, no doubt because they are irrefutable. If Democrats are willing to ignore overwhelming public opposition to ObamaCare and pass it anyway, then what’s a trifling dispute over a couple of trillion dollars? …

…Mr. Obama’s fiscal assertions are possible only because of the fraudulent accounting and budget gimmicks that Democrats spent months calibrating. Readers can find the gory details in Mr. Ryan’s pre-emptive rebuttal nearby, though one of the most egregious deceptions is that the bill counts 10 years of taxes but only six years of spending. …

…The President was (miraculously) struck dumb by Mr. Ryan’s critique, and in his response drifted off into an irrelevant tangent about Medicare Advantage…

In the Corner, Jeffrey Anderson says to call your congressman now if you don’t want Obamacare. He explains why:

All of the talk about “reconciliation” seems to have distracted people — like a red herring — from a simple but crucial fact: If the House goes first, as now appears to be the plan, and passes the Senate health-care overhaul, the president would then have a bill in hand that had passed both houses of Congress, and — whether reconciliation subsequently succeeded or failed in the Senate — we would have Obamacare.

Reconciliation would then be like the exhibition ice skating in the Olympics after the medals have been awarded: interesting to some, but wholly irrelevant to anything that really matters.

The attention is on the Senate, but the battle is in the House. It’s time for Americans from coast to coast to communicate their clear desires to their congressmen. If Americans don’t want Obamacare — and every indication is that they emphatically don’t — now is the time for swing-district Democrats to hear that full chorus of opposition: loudly, clearly, and forcibly.

Rich Lowry agrees with Jeffrey Anderson’s assessment. If the House passes the Senate version, Obamacare can be signed into law.

This is an important point. I don’t think people understand that reconciliation isn’t really that important except as a promise to members of the House. Even Charles Krauthammer, if I understood him correctly, said last night that he thinks the bill will pass the House but fail during the reconciliation process. But if the bill passes the House, the same bill has passed the Senate and the House and Obama can just sign the thing. It won’t matter if the reconciliation process bogs down, except to those Democrats who thought the bill would be “fixed.” But once they’ve voted, they’ve voted. Obama can say, “See you in the Rose Garden and we’ll try to fix it next year.” Jeffrey Anderson makes this point here. …

Also in the Corner, Yuval Levin clarifies how the Democrat leadership in the House is trying to persuade congressmen.

It’s worth reiterating something Rich and Jeff Anderson have pointed out: The focus on reconciliation in the past few days confuses things a bit. The question in the health-care debate at the moment is whether Nancy Pelosi can get enough of her members to vote for the version of Obamacare that passed the Senate late last year. If the House passes that bill, it will have passed both houses, will go to the president, and will become law.

Some liberal House Democrats have problems with that bill — especially with some of its tax provisions, though also a few other things. So to get some of their votes, the leadership is now telling them that if they vote for the Senate bill, the House could then pass another bill that amends the Senate bill to fix some of what they don’t like about it. The Senate could then pass that amendment bill by reconciliation and it would also become law, and so the sum of the two laws would be closer to what they want.

But that amending bill wouldn’t change the basic character of what would be enacted (and to the extent it would change it at the edges, it would be mostly for the worse): Either way, if the House passes the Senate bill then Obamacare would become law, complete with its massive, overbearing, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended to replace the American health-insurance industry with an enormous federal entitlement while failing to address the problem of costs. Just about everything the public hates about the bill is in both versions. The prospect of reconciliation is just one of the means that the Democratic leadership is employing to persuade members of the House to ignore the public’s wishes and their own political future and enact Obamacare.

The fate of Obamacare therefore now rests not in the Senate but in the House. It is members of the House who must decide if it will be enacted, and it needs to be clear to voters exactly where their opposition to the Democrats’ approach to health care should be focused now.

Yuval Levin also blogs about Georgia Congressman Nathan Deal, who is resigning. Deal decided to remain in the House long enough to vote against Obamacare.

Republican Congressman Nathan Deal of Georgia announced last week that he would resign from the House on March 8, to devote his time to running for governor. His departure would have meant that House Democrats only needed 216 votes, rather than 217, to pass their health-care bill. But Deal has just announced that he has decided to stay in Congress until the end of the month, which would be after the Democrats’ self-imposed deadline for passing the bill (and would take them into the Easter recess, when members must again confront constituents, and which Speaker Pelosi therefore very much wants to avoid). He was not coy about the reason for his decision:

“Yesterday, as I listened to President Obama’s aggressive push for a quick vote on ‘Obama-Care,’ it was clear that I must stay in Congress and continue to fight against the most liberal health care agenda ever proposed.”

That makes Pelosi’s job just a little bit harder.

And Daniel Foster, in the Corner, updates a few more votes that the Dems may not have.

More bad news for Pelosi. Greg Sargent reports that Rep. Frank Kratovil (D., Md.), who voted ‘no’ on the first bill and was hitherto thought of as undecided on the Senate bill, has confirmed he will now vote no.

Also, freshman Rep. Kurt Schrader (D., Ore.), another ‘yes’ on the first bill, is now undecided.

Jennifer Rubin draws some conclusions about what is happening with the liberals over Obamacare.

Greg Sargent observes:

One possible scenario that reform proponents dread is that Congress fails to pass reform before the Easter break — leaving Congressional Dems in the position of returning to their constituents empty-handed, just as they did over last summer’s recess. In the Capitol just now, a top spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi refused to endorse the White House’s preferred timetable for passing reform. Yesterday Robert Gibbs declared, perhaps unrealistically, that the White House would like the House to pass the Senate bill by March 18th, before the President goes abroad.

There are a few points worth noting. First, it’s quite obvious that Pelosi is a long way from getting her votes lined up. There is no reason to drag this out, unless, of course, Pelosi still can’t put together a majority. Jake Tapper has been keeping an unofficial whip count and there is far more bad news than good news for Pelosi, as the no’s are hardening and previous supporters are turning undecided. Second, the underlying problem, as it was last year, is that their members need to be kept as far from the voters as possible. Send them back home with the vote still pending and they risk an avalanche of opposition. Not in recent memory (or ever?) can I recall congressional leaders so wary of their members’ encounter with the electorate. That alone should tell those wavering members something. …

In the Weekly Standard Blog, Matthew Continetti posts on Congressman Paul Ryan.

This is Paul Ryan’s moment. If national security or social policy were at the center of debate, the Wisconsin congressman wouldn’t be nearly as prominent as he is today. But President Obama wants to reshape the American economy and welfare state so that it looks more like a Western European social democracy. And since fiscal policy is Ryan’s specialty, he’s become the GOP point man when it comes to entitlements and health care. I continue to get emails from readers applauding Ryan’s performance at the health care summit a week ago. Type Ryan’s name into Google search and the fifth prompt that comes up is “Paul Ryan for President.” (Ryan says he won’t run in 2012.)

In other entitlement news, Ryan recently published a Politico Ideas piece on America’s looming fiscal crisis. And Newsweek’s website featured Reason’s Peter Suderman’s take on Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future.

Then there’s health care reform. Ryan’s deconstruction of the claim that Obamacare reduces the deficit has become a minor YouTube classic. …

David Harsanyi is concerned that if Obamacare passes, Republicans will never have the courage to repeal it. Harsanyi brings up a valid concern, given the bipartisan spending spree that the government has been on.

…Remember that Congress estimated Medicare’s cost at $12 billion for 1990 (adjusted for inflation) when the program kicked off in 1965. Medicare cost $107 billion in 1990 and is quickly approaching $500 billion. Who’s going to stop it?

The template is used over and over again. Government is a growth industry. …

Thomas Sowell discusses some of the economic issues behind the rising costs of healthcare.

…What is the biggest complaint about the current medical care situation? “It costs too much.” Yet one looks in vain for anything in the pending legislation that will lower those costs.

One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians’ answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government.

Back when the “single payer” was the patient, people were more selective in what they spent their own money on. You went to a doctor when you had a broken leg but not necessarily every time you had the sniffles or a skin rash. But, when someone else is paying, that is when medical care gets over-used — and bureaucratic rationing is then imposed, to replace self-rationing.  …

…Nothing would lower costs more than having each patient pay those costs. And nothing is less likely to happen. …

Thomas Sowell also looks at some simple ways that healthcare costs could be lowered, and government power could be decreased.

…If medical insurance simply covered risks — which is what insurance is all about — that would be far less expensive than covering completely predictable things like annual checkups. Far more people could afford medical insurance, thereby reducing the ranks of the uninsured.

But all the political incentives are for politicians to create mandates forcing insurance companies to cover an ever increasing range of treatments, and thereby forcing those who buy insurance to pay ever higher premiums to cover the costs of these mandates.

…One of the ways of reducing the costs of medical insurance would be to pass federal legislation putting an end to state regulation of insurance companies. That would instantly eliminate thousands of state mandates, which force insurance to cover everything from wigs to marriage counseling, depending on which special interests are influential in which states.

It would also promote nationwide competition among insurance companies — and competition keeps prices down better than politicians will. Moreover, competition can bring down the costs behind the prices, in part by forcing less efficient insurance companies out of business. …

Thomas Sowell completes his hat trick on medical care.

… If medical insurance simply covered risks — which is what insurance is all about — that would be far less expensive than covering completely predictable things like annual checkups. Far more people could afford medical insurance, thereby reducing the ranks of the uninsured.

But all the political incentives are for politicians to create mandates forcing insurance companies to cover an ever increasing range of treatments, and thereby forcing those who buy insurance to pay ever higher premiums to cover the costs of these mandates.

That way, politicians can play Santa Claus and make insurance companies play Scrooge. It is great political theater. Politicians who are pushing for a government-controlled medical care system say that it will “keep insurance companies honest.” The very idea of politicians keeping other people honest ought to tell us what a farce this is. But if we keep buying it, they will keep selling it. …

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London’s Daily Mail provides some beautiful images of planet earth.

Much of the imagery came from a space camera onboard the NASA satellite Terra, which is orbiting 435 miles above the Earth’s surface.

A spokesman from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which released the pictures, said: ‘These are spectacular “blue marble” images, which show the beauty of our small planet.’

In Contentions, Noah Pollak has some insights into why the Obami are still pursuing UN resolutions against Iran.

The headline says it all: “Clinton appears to extend timeline for Iran sanctions.” …

…Why all the delays? The reason is that China and Russia are refusing to join a sanctions resolution. Obama’s response is becoming increasingly clear: deny that the Security Council is a dead end, extend deadlines, say that everyone’s coming around, and submerge the Iranian nuclear crisis in the interminable machinations of the “international community.”

…There are two reasons, I think. The first is that acknowledging Russia and China’s unwillingness to help would strike the most powerful blow yet to Obama’s central foreign-policy message: that his personality and eagerness for engagement would open up doors for America that were slammed shut by the Bush administration’s alleged arrogance and quickness to go to war. Acknowledging that the Security Council will never allow strong sanctions would be tantamount to admitting that the very logic and premises of Obama’s foreign policy is flawed. Thus, this isn’t really about Iran. It’s about the politics of failure and Obama’s increasingly desperate attempt to shield his presidency from the hard realities of the world.

And there is a practical reason why Obama may never admit that the Security Council is a dead end: doing so would force him to move to a new strategy — and there is no new strategy. So instead of thinking seriously about a Plan B, the administration is simply burying Plan A in a process with no chance of success and no expiration date. …

Jennifer Rubin also comments on the buck-passing that the Obami claim as foreign policy on Iran.

For those of us accustomed to watching the Obami try very hard to do as little as possible on Iran, this should come as no surprise:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday it could take months for new UN sanctions against Iran…

…The Obami’s “deadlines” and “timelines” come and go with nary a backward glance. There is no resolve, no determination to draw a line, for that would require action and raise the prospect of conflict, something Obama studiously tries to avoid on the foreign-policy front, no doubt so he can pursue his true passions: health care and climate change, which also are going nowhere.

We seem to have no game plan for those crippling sanctions and no intention of using military force. Obama refuses to pursue regime change. So we sit and wait as the mullahs inch closer to obtaining a nuclear-weapons capability. And this, it seems, more than the catastrophic failure of his domestic agenda, will be the Obama legacy: a revolutionary Islamic state with nuclear weapons.

Christopher Hitchens says that the likelihood of surviving an earthquake is in proportion to how democratic the government is in the area.

…Professor Amartya Sen made a reputation some decades ago for pointing out that in the 20th century no serious famine had occurred in an open or democratic society, however poor. In the classic case that he studied—that of Bengal under British colonial occupation in the 1940s—tens of thousands of people had starved to death in areas that had overflowing granaries. It was not a shortage of food, but of information and of proper administration, that had led to the disaster. The Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, as was pointed out by Robert Conquest in his book The Harvest of Sorrow, was the result of a dictatorial policy rather than any failure of the crops.

Taking this as an approximate analogy or metaphor, people are beginning to notice that the likelihood of perishing in an earthquake, or of being utterly dispossessed by it, is as much a function of the society in which one lives as it is of proximity to a fault. …

…This general point was specified in a dramatic way by a sentence buried in the middle of the Times article. “In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti.” (Italics added.) Tehran is built in “a nest of surrounding geologic faults,” and geologists there have long besought the government to consider moving the unprotected and crumbling capital, or at least some of its people, in anticipation of the inevitable disaster. …

Claudia Rosett posts on the UN Environment Program’s lavish “meetings” in Bali. Could someone remind me why we fund the UN?

…Recall that in December, 2007, as the common folk shivered in the wintry vicinity of the UN’s well-appointed offices in New York, Bonn and Geneva, a horde of UN climateers decamped to the far side of the globe for a fortnight of conferencing by the Indonesian beaches of Bali’s ritzy Nusa Dua resort (and convention center). There, up close and personal, they braved the preview of a world beset by warm temperatures and ocean waters, as you can see in this virtual tour of the adjacent beach resort — complete with its freshwater pool, beachside cocoons, seafood buffets and winding paths beneath the palm trees.

Now they’re at it again. The UN Environment Program, which is based in Nairobi, is convening a set of meetings this week – not in Nairobi, or New York, but at the same Bali beach resort (and convention center) where they sacrificed all that time for the greater good in 2007. Never mind the UN’s continuing campaign — in the face of its crumbling “climate science” — to restrict and control carbon emissions. Yet again, we are asked to believe the UN deserves special exemptions from its own preachings. Its conferees are jetting to Bali for the greater good of all the little folk, whose job is merely to pay the bills for such pleasures, and live with any resulting rationing and regulation. According to the Jakarta Post, some 1,500 people from 192 countries are expected to attend this shindig — where UNEP claims that envoys of some 140 governments will be present. The pre-session events (the UN goes in for a lot of those on Bali) have already begun.

…Part of this UN bash will be a special session of the UNEP governing council. That council includes not only such members as the U.S., Canada and Japan, but also Russia, China, Cuba, and Iran – Iranian government officials being free to join in overseeing and attending such shindigs, despite Iran’s being under UN sanctions for its continuing pursuit of nuclear weapons (which, in Iran’s hands, would be terrible for a lot of things, including the environment). …

Peter Schiff explains why the government’s actions will prolong the recession.

…I would challenge those who fantasize about a consumer-led recovery to describe where the spending money will come from. Most consumers are tapped out, millions are unemployed, and home equity has been wiped out. The only reasonable thing for them to do is to pay down debt and sock away as much money as possible to rebuild their savings. …

…During the run up to the crash, excess spending had created economic distortions that have yet to be resolved. Too many resources, including land, labor, and capital, were devoted to servicing an unsustainable economic model in which Americans borrowed money to buy homes, products and services they really could not afford. In many cases consumer behavior was influenced by overly optimistic assumptions regarding real estate related riches. …

…Some will argue that the new jobs created by government stimulus spending will provide the additional purchasing power necessary to revitalize consumer spending. There are two problems with this expectation. First, those jobs being “created” by the government are outnumbered by those being destroyed by government domination of resources. …

In WaPo, Steven Mufson and John Pomfret lived in China and present a clearer picture of the Chinese economy than we get from politicians or the MSM.

…Take green technology. China does make huge numbers of solar devices, but the most common are low-tech rooftop water-heaters or cheap, low-efficiency photovoltaic panels. For its new showcase of high-tech renewable energy in the western town of Ordos, China is planning to import photovoltaic panels made by U.S.-based First Solar and is hoping the company will set up manufacturing in China. Even if government subsidies allow China to more than triple its photovoltaic installations this year, it will still trail Germany, Italy, the United States and Japan, according to iSuppli, a market research firm.

China does have dozens of wind-turbine manufacturers, but their quality lags far behind that of General Electric, not to mention Europe’s Vestas and Siemens. …

…In other areas, politicians and pundits also have a tendency to overestimate China’s strengths — in ways that leave China looking more ominous than it really is. Recent reports about how China is threatening to take the lead in scientific research seem to ignore the serious problems it is facing with plagiarism and faked results. … It is going to be the first nation in the world to grow old before it gets rich. By the middle of this century the percentage of its population above age 60 will be higher than in the United States, and more than 100 million Chinese will be older than 80. China also faces serious water shortages that could hurt enterprises from wheat farms to power plants to microchip manufacturers.

And about all those engineers? In 2006, the New York Times reported that China graduates 600,000 a year compared with 70,000 in the United States. The Times report was quoted on the House floor. Just one problem: China’s statisticians count car mechanics and refrigerator repairmen as “engineers.” …

Joel Kotkin writes in Forbes on the efforts to centralize power in DC.

From health care reform and transportation to education to the environment, the Obama administration has–from the beginning–sought to expand the power of the central state. The president’s newest initiative to wrest environment, wage and benefit concessions from private companies is the latest example. But this trend of centralizing power to the federal government puts the political future of the ruling party–as well as the very nature of our federal system–in jeopardy.

Of course, certain times do call for increased federal activity–legitimate threats to national security or economic emergencies, such as the Great Depression or the recent financial crisis, for example.

John Steele Gordon blogs about a cost-saving measure for healthcare that Governor Mitch Daniels has implemented in Indiana.

…If you want a textbook example of how to “bend the cost curve down,” I recommend taking a look at the state of Indiana and how it funds health care for its employees. The governor, Mitch Daniels, explained it yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. The state of Indiana puts $2,750 into a medical savings account for every state employee who signs up for this sort of coverage. (When it started five years ago, 4 percent signed up; this year 70 percent signed up.) The employee then pays all medical expenses out of that account. If there is money left over at the end of the year, it’s the employee’s to keep. If expenses exceed that sum, the state shares expenses up to an out-of-pocket maximum of $8,000 and covers all expenses above that sum.

The program has been a huge success, saving millions for both employees and the state. Why? As Governor Daniels explains,

It turns out that, when someone is spending his own money alone for routine expenses, he is far more likely to ask the questions he would ask if purchasing any other good or service: “Is there a generic version of that drug?” “Didn’t I take that same test just recently?” “Where can I get the colonoscopy at the best price?”

In other words, a system that incentivizes health-care consumers (that’s everybody) to ask the magic question, “How much is this going to cost?” will drain billions of wasted money out of the health-care system, as Indiana has already demonstrated.

The “great mentioner” is increasingly mentioning Governor Daniels as a possible 2012 Republican nominee for president. Michael Barone explains why. He’s a man to watch.

A couple of items now about the Oscars. Roger Simon first.

Are values, family or otherwise, something we look for in the movies? They used to be – a loooong time ago. But that was before (at least) 1972 when Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris made hip sexuality King of the Cinema. Now I don’t have anything against sex in the movies – or outside of them, for that matter – but it is worth noting the winds may be heading the other way now, away from the ultra-edginess of Last Tango and toward the traditional morality of The Blind Side, the true story of a white Christian housewife who saves a lost child of the ghetto. Surprisingly… well, maybe not so surprisingly… the heart-warming Sandra Bullock film is the audience favorite going into Sunday night’s Oscars. …

In WaPo, Christian Davenport discusses the negative reaction from the troops to the film The Hurt Locker.

Time magazine called “The Hurt Locker” “a near-perfect war film,” but Ryan Gallucci, an Iraq war veteran, had to turn the movie off three times, he says, “or else I would have thrown my remote through the television.”

…Many in the military say “Hurt Locker” is plagued by unforgivable inaccuracies that make the most critically acclaimed Iraq war film to date more a Hollywood fantasy than the searingly realistic rendition that civilians take it for.

… a rising backlash from people in uniform, such as this response on Rieckhoff’s Facebook page from a self-identified Army Airborne Ranger:

“[I]f this movie was based on a war that never existed, I would have nothing to comment about. This movie is not based on a true story, but on a true war, a war in which I have seen my friends killed, a war in which I witnessed my ranger buddy get both his legs blown off. So for Hollywood to glorify this crap is a huge slap in the face to every soldier who’s been on the front line.” …