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Besides Israel, Christopher Hitchens lists six more reasons why Iran can’t have nuclear weapons.

With Russia’s ever-helpful policy of assisting Iran to accelerate its reactor program, allied to the millimetrical progress of sanctions on the Ahmadinejad regime and the increasingly hopeless state of negotiations with the Palestinians, there is likely to be no let-up in the speculation about an Israeli “first strike” on Iran’s covert but ever-more-flagrant nuclear weapons installations. I have lost count of the number of essays and columns on the subject that were published this month alone. The most significant and detailed such contribution, though, came from my friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg in a cover story in the Atlantic. From any close reading of this piece, it was possible to be sure of at least one thing: The government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants it to be understood that, in the absence of an American decision to do so, Israel can and will mount such an attack in the not-too-distant future. The keyword of the current anguished argument—the word existential—is thought by a strategic majority of Israel’s political and military leadership to apply in its fullest meaning. To them, an Iranian bomb is incompatible with the long-term survival of the Israeli state and even of the Jewish people.

It would be a real pity if the argument went on being conducted in these relatively narrow terms. …

IBD editors review Thomas Sowell’s latest book.

Doomsters are a dime a dozen. But when a leading economist who’s been called “the nation’s greatest contemporary philosopher” sees serious trouble ahead, we’d better listen up.

Thomas Sowell’s 45th book, “Dismantling America,” is a collection of 100 of the Hoover Institution scholar’s best newspaper columns. For book purposes, they’re called essays — but they retain the brevity, clarity and simple profundity of the columns that have graced our “On The Right” column for years.

Like Sowell’s other books, they range over many political, economic, cultural and legal topics.

As a whole, they amount to a stern denunciation of America’s direction. Sowell sees the national equivalent of a “perfect storm,” a gathering of “dangerous forces (that) have been building .. . for at least a half-century.”

Yes, he says, our great nation has weathered many storms. But, he quickly notes, so did the Roman Empire before it collapsed. “Is that where America is headed?” Sowell asks upfront. “I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet — and that nothing is inevitable until it happens.”

Tunku Varadarajan has more thoughts on the Mosque Mess.

The November elections are very close to becoming—if they haven’t already so become—the first national elections in the United States whose results are determined by the location of a mosque. Call them, in fact, the “Mosque Elections.”

Forget health-care reform and unbridled stimulus spending; forget perceived errors in Iraq and Afghanistan; forget unemployment and our economy’s endless night; forget, if you can, the toxic questions of illegal immigration and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. If the promoters of the mosque near ground zero do not pack up their Korans and prayer mats within the next week or so, there is every danger that they will cause the Democrats grievous harm in November—in an election that is already one in which the Democrats are bracing for a rout. 

And why is that? Because Barack Obama has made the mosque-near-ground zero an election issue, placing this house of Islamic worship bang-center on the electoral stage. …

Peter Wehner weighs in too.

… Prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues and one of the qualities that is most important for political leaders to have. It involves, among other things, the ability to anticipate the effects of one’s words and actions. What Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama have done is to undermine the very cause they say they are trying to defend. By implicitly and explicitly siding with Feisal Abdul Rauf’s effort and trying to turn this matter into a false debate about religious freedom, they are sharpening the divisions in our country in a way that is both unnecessary and harmful.

Well done, gentlemen.

The latest federal bail-out of state budgets had a poison pill attached. Editors of Las Vegas Review-Journal have the story.

President Obama and Congress sold their latest bailout of America’s public employees as an emergency measure needed to prevent the layoffs of 160,000 teachers.

“We can’t stand by and do nothing while pink slips are given to the men and women who educate our children,” the president said Tuesday.

Then news trickled out that the debt-growing legislation was a payday loan, not a charitable donation. Some $10 billion in federal handouts can’t be used to fill budget gaps created by recession-driven revenue shortfalls. No, the money must grow stretched education budgets, and as a condition of accepting the money, states must agree to maintain or increase education spending, as a percentage of total state revenues, next fiscal year.

It is, as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said, a “federal government hijacking” of state budgets that will force lawmakers everywhere to raise taxes or slash spending elsewhere over the next year. …

According to a story in the LA Times, Ray Bradbury is a kindred soul.

… “I think our country is in need of a revolution,” Bradbury said. “There is too much government today. We’ve  got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”

The native of Waukegan, Ill., has never been shy about expressing himself — he described President Clinton with a word that rhymes with ”knithead” back in 2001 …

There is a breast cancer drug that costs $8,000 a month. That cost is part of the post by Ed Morrissey.

When Barack Obama and the Democrats spent most of a year pushing their deeply unpopular health-care system overhaul, they repeatedly insisted that government intervention in the market would not mean that treatment decisions would come down to cost issues — even while demonizing providers as Tonsil Vultures and amputation-happy predators.  Today, however, the Washington Post reports on an effort at the FDA to decertify Avastin as a treatment for breast cancer and its implications for cost savings at Medicare:

“Federal regulators are considering taking the highly unusual step of rescinding approval of a drug that patients with advanced breast cancer turn to as a last-ditch hope.” …

A couple of pics from a photo essay on Russian fires in English Russia. The first is a dramatic scene at the front. The other is St. Basil’s which is at the southeastern edge of Red Square.

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We have to admit to admiring the statement the president made in support of the mosque in lower Manhattan. Then he proved to be the craven creep we always knew he was. Three of our favorites have comments. First Tunku Varadarajan.

… Many of us who are libertarian—in other words, people opposed as much to the subversion of private rights by a majoritarian maumau-ing as we are to curbs on private affairs by government intervention—found ourselves in pleasantly astonished agreement with the most statist president since FDR. No one hearing his remarks, or reading of them, could have been in any doubt that he was fully, unequivocally, behind the construction of the mosque. So much so that New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the first public official of consequence to stand up to the mosque’s opponents, described the president’s remarks as “a clarion defense of the freedom of religion.”

The infatuation was not to last more than a day: …

Craig Pirrong as the Streetwise Professor is next.

…Michael Kinsley once said that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.  A corollary to that is that whenever a politician “clarifies” his remarks, it’s because everybody understood perfectly well what the original remarks meant, and that the politician meant them–to his surprise and regret.

Many Democrats are despairing over Obama’s three-left-foot intervention into this extremely touchy issue.  He just threw gasoline on the bonfire that is roaring to roast his party in November. And the spinning is just blowing air to feed the fire.  Quite a performance.

Jennifer Rubin has an opinion too.

It would be hard to think how Obama could have done a worse job on the Ground Zero mosque controversy. He took a position objectionable to the vast majority of Americans, within 24 hours chickened out, and then sent his press minions forward to assure his base and the Muslim World and its American community (over which he fawns incessantly) that he really does think we must accept a mosque that will produce nothing but pain for his countrymen and a sense of vindication to those who incinerated 3,000 Americans. It’s bad policy, bad politics, and bad execution, with a side order of political cowardice. …

George Will mined his trip to Israel for another column.

When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had to use mostly small arms to repel attacks by six Arab armies. Today, however, Israel feels, and is, more menaced than it was then or has been since. Hence the potentially world-shaking decision that will be made here, probably within two years.

To understand the man who will make it, begin with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s belief that stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program is integral to stopping the worldwide campaign to reverse 1948. It is, he says, a campaign to “put the Jew back to the status of a being that couldn’t defend himself — a perfect victim.”

Today’s Middle East, he says, reflects two developments. One is the rise of Iran and militant Islam since the 1979 revolution, which led to al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah. The other development is the multiplying threat of missile warfare.

Now Israel faces a third threat, the campaign to delegitimize it in order to extinguish its capacity for self-defense. …

David Harsanyi reacts to the claims the tea parties are filled with radicals. 

… “The Republican Party agenda has become the Tea Party agenda, and vice versa,” Democratic Party chairman Tim Kaine recently explained.

The Dems have pulled together a helpful guide called “Tea Party Contract with America,” which, despite its various chilling exaggerations, is actually not an altogether awful agenda compared to the one being implemented in Washington.

If Republicans were smart — lol, right? — they would welcome a debate on radicalism and extremism. A radical, after all, is one who “departs markedly from the usual or customary.” Wasn’t that the promise of the Obama presidency? In that case, the past two years have been a study in economic radicalism.

First, the GOP should concede that they do have a few quirky candidates running around the country who lack the political sophistication of, say, an Alan Grayson or Maxine Waters.

Are these Republican oddballs a bit batty? For sure. But unlike the “stimulus” legislation, a plan to uncover the Hawaiian bunker with the president’s Indonesian passport probably won’t cost taxpayers $1 trillion and millions of jobs.

What’s worse, after all? Suffocating the economy or being a bit cautious?

Also, please keep in mind: Nationalizing health care is not radical. Neither is tripling the budget deficit in two years. …

Investor’s Business Daily Editors figure the administration’s failures might be caused by the cabinet’s lack of real world experience.

… But then, Solis is no different from any number of administration officials who by their comments or actions demonstrate almost daily that they know nothing about creating jobs or anything else to improve the economy.

And why should they? There’s never been an administration led by so few people with any experience in the private sector — including the president, the vice president and even the treasury secretary, who last week wrongly called it a “myth” that raising taxes on high-income Americans would hurt small business.

Solis, for example, has always worked for government, from the Carter White House’s Office of Hispanic Affairs, through a turn as a Los Angles County insurance commissioner, to the California Assembly and Senate, and then to Washington as the representative from California’s 32nd District.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner began his career at the consulting firm Kissinger Associates. But most of his experience has been in government, not the private sector. …

Karlyn Bowman says the GOP faces an uphill battle to win the house.

… the news for Democrats is grim. But picking up 39 seats in the House is still a steep climb for the Republicans. Here are six reasons for the GOP to be cautious.

Vital Statistics on Congress provides the historical comparisons of how anti-incumbent, anti-Washington moods translate into minority party gains. There have been only three occasions in the past 50 years when either party has picked up 39 seats. So the path ahead for Republicans will be hard.

Second, although the Democrats in Congress aren’t popular, neither are the Republicans. Thirty-one percent in the new Quinnipiac poll approved of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job. Just 29% approved of how the Republicans are doing theirs.

A third reason to be cautious is that unlike 1994, Democrats are well aware of the challenges they face. …

It is no longer, “Go west young man.”  It is, “Go to work for Uncle Sugar.”  USA Today has the story on pay for federal employees. 

At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.

The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year. …

Telling Samizdata Quote of the Day.

In most every election, 80% of blacks vote Democratic – the perceived party of free stuff – rather than for the party that ended slavery. 

There is a form of Gresham’s Law operating in politics. It its caused by the racial gerrymandering that creates black majority congressional districts. Instead of having to appeal to a broad cross section of the American public, the winners in those districts instead are the most disgusting politicians. Jonah Goldberg explains Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangel in that light.  

… But the culprit here isn’t racism, it’s the corruption that is almost inevitable when any politician — black or white — is given a job for life. Charlie Rangel, the 80-year-old deposed chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is also in ethical hot water for a list of reasons too lengthy to recount here (but they include failure to pay taxes on unreported income — awkward, given that he was, until recently, in charge of writing the tax laws). Rangel, one of Washington’s most charming characters, ran his office like a pasha — because he could.

Indeed, that’s long been the problem with the CBC (Congressional Black Caucus): its scandalous lack of accountability. Because of racial gerrymandering (cynically abetted by the GOP in the 1980s), black representatives have been insulated, even more than other incumbents, from democratic competition. Worse, the older generation of CBCers in particular actually believes this claptrap about being the “conscience of the Congress” (the Caucus motto). This has put the CBC to the left not just of the average voter but of the average black voter. Less than 10 percent of the CBC voted to ban partial-birth abortion in 2003, even though a majority of blacks support the ban. A majority of blacks oppose racial quotas and support school choice, but the CBC claims to speak for them when taking the opposite positions. …

Thomas Sowell is tired of the race bean counters.

The bean-counters have struck again– this time in the sports pages. Two New York Times sport writers have discovered that baseball coaches from minority groups are found more often coaching at first base than at third base. Moreover, third-base coaches become managers more often than first-base coaches.

This may seem to be just another passing piece of silliness. But it is part of a more general bean-counting mentality that turns statistical differences into grievances. The time is long overdue to throw this race card out of the deck and start seeing it for the gross fallacy that it is.

At the heart of such statistics is the implicit assumption that different races, sexes and other subdivisions of the human species would be proportionately represented in institutions, occupations and income brackets if there was not something strange or sinister going on. …

The Hill has a piece that says either Joe Sestak is lying or Bill Clinton is. Anybody care to guess?

Either former President Bill Clinton is lying, or Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak is. Both can’t be right.

You may remember a few months ago, prior to defeating incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, Rep. Sestak went public with allegations the Obama White House sent an emissary to offer him an administration job as a sort of bribe to drop his challenge to Specter. …

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David Warren comments on the Russian reactor in Iran.

… when we have no reason whatever to trust the motives or behaviour of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and plenty of evidence it had acted insincerely on previous agreements, Hillary Clinton went to Moscow with her ludicrous “reset button,” and Barack Obama followed with a new “START,” that jumbles the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons — again, just what the Russians wanted.

Likewise on Iran: the persistent and ridiculous assumption that the Russians have been acting in good faith, has left us entirely free of leverage. Instead, we are now gaping at a fait accompli.

In the end — and we are approaching the end, when Iran is established as a nuclear power, and the Israelis must make their “existential” decision on whether and how to take that threat out — we have not been rendered powerless by the enemy. We began with insuperable moral and material advantages, and we have rendered ourselves powerless by frittering them away.

George Will contrasts the pretend president to a leader with substance.

… Arguably the most left-wing administration in American history is trying to knead and soften the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history. The former shows no understanding of the latter, which thinks it understands the former all too well.

The prime minister honors Churchill, who spoke of “the confirmed unteachability of mankind.” Nevertheless, a display case in Netanyahu’s office could teach the Obama administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old — 200 years younger than Jerusalem’s role as the Jewish people’s capital. The ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: Netanyahu.

No one is less a transnational progressive, less a post-nationalist, than Binyamin Netanyahu, whose first name is that of a son of Jacob, who lived perhaps 4,000 years ago. Netanyahu, whom no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policymakers who hope to make Netanyahu malleable: “You live in Chevy Chase. Don’t play with our future.”

All of a sudden the Economist has decided the state has grown too big. Where were they over the past ten years?

… Throughout the rich world, government has simply got too big and Mr Cameron’s crew currently have the most promising approach to trimming it. Others—and not just the tottering likes of Greece and Spain—will surely follow. That includes America. At present, unlike in the 1980s, there is no Reaganesque echo from the other side of the Atlantic: despite the Tea Partiers’ zeal, the Republicans seem as clueless as Mr Obama in producing a credible medium-term plan to balance America’s budget. But pretty soon, as in Europe, somebody will have to come up with one—and Britain, for better or worse, is likely to be the place they will come to for ideas.

Rich Rickman posts on a Christopher Hitchens visit to the Daily Show.

… Hitchens: Oscar Wilde used to say that a map of the world that doesn’t include Utopia isn’t worth looking at. I used to think that was a beautiful statement. I don’t think that at all anymore. I tell you, to be honest, the most idealistic and brave and committed and intelligent young people that I know have joined the armed forces. And they are now guarding us while we sleep in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. … I never would have expected that would be what I would say about the students I have to teach.

Stewart’s audience, which is often raucous, listened to this in silence.

Hitchens writes in Hitch-22 that these days he thinks about “the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest [for Utopia] has led” and that he came to realize that “the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one.” His appearance on the Daily Show was an example not only of his physical courage but also of the intellectual audacity that pervades his book.

Along those lines, we have a video for you  -  Troops Surprising Loved Ones 

Some of our favorites have called BS on the reporting of the primary in Colorado. John Podhoretz deals with the NY Times first.

I’ve read some cracked political analysis in my time, but a story on the New York Times website this afternoon called “A Primary Victory Boosts White House, for Now” may be the San Andreas Fault of cracked political analyses. It seems, according to the reporter Jeff Zeleny, that the White House is rejoicing today in the primary victory of Colorado Senate candidate (and sitting Senator by appointment) Michael Bennet over an insurgent Democrat named Andrew Romanoff:

“President Obama and his White House on Wednesday were savoring one of their sweetest victories of the midterm election season, as Senator Michael Bennet’s triumph in the Colorado Democratic primary on Tuesday interrupted the political storyline that all incumbents are doomed by voter discontent.”

The story goes on to say that Obama had invested his political capital in Bennet, that if Bennet had gone down it would have demonstrated his weakness, and so on. …

David Harsanyi is next with guffaws for a piece in The Atlantic.

Most of the national coverage of yesterday’s Colorado primary races really has me shaking my head. And few topped Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic. Though I usually enjoy and respect Ambinder’s work, in this instance, he seems to be engage in wishful thinking, or perhaps he’s getting the bulk of his information from the Michael Bennet camp. It wouldn’t be surprising considering the Senator’s brother is his boss.

Now, it may turn out that Bennet runs a brilliant general campaign, captures Colorado independents in droves and runs away with the race. But as of right now, Republican Ken Buck is leading in almost every poll I’ve seen (there is a PPP poll showing Bennet with a slight lead, though the same poll had Norton edging Buck — hat-tip Mike Booth). And the only “energized” party around here seems to be the party that wants to drive out incumbents.

You wouldn’t know that reading most national coverage. And in just a few posts, Ambinder describes Bennet as a brilliant campaigner (he spent millions more than Andrew Romanoff) as “relatively independent” (he voted down the line for the Obama agenda) an “education innovator” (DPS has, at best, mixed results) and so on. …

Along the lines of, “You really can’t make this shit up,” we learned last week Jerry Brown has a secret pension. Roger Simon has the story.

… What’s troubling in all this is not that Brown makes a good pension — or even than there may be some discrepancy about how much he makes versus how much he deserves. It is that the whole thing is SECRET! (rare use of caps and exclaim very deliberate).

Let’s think this through for half a second. At a time when pension funds are bankrupting or potentially bankrupting states all across the country, when aging populations are forcing the reconsideration of all sorts of social security programs on practically every country on Earth (countries that have them, anyway), and when the state of California — the sixth, or is it seventh, biggest economy in the world — is about to, once again, pay its employees with vouchers because it’s got zippity-do-dah in the bank, some officials of that state are receiving pensions whose size and identity we do not know and are not allowed to see.

Yes, there are secret state pensions in California. (Sounds like Novosibirsk, doesn’t it?) And we the citizens of that state are paying for them!

There is only word for this: criminal. … 

Here’s an amazing story from der Spiegel.

As Germany’s wild boar population has skyrocketed in recent years, so too has the number of animals contaminated by radioactivity left over from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Government payments compensating hunters for lost income due to radioactive boar have quadrupled since 2007.

It’s no secret that Germany has a wild boar problem. Stories of marauding pigs hit the headlines with startling regularity: Ten days ago, a wild boar attacked a wheelchair-bound man in a park in Berlin; in early July, a pack of almost two dozen of the animals repeatedly marched into the eastern German town of Eisenach, frightening residents and keeping police busy; and on Friday morning, a German highway was closed for hours after 10 wild boar broke through a fence and waltzed onto the road.

Even worse, though, almost a quarter century after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Ukraine, a good chunk of Germany’s wild boar population remains slightly radioactive — and the phenomenon has been costing the German government an increasing amount of money in recent years. …

This is a good start to the humor section. If you’re wondering what Al Gore is up to, James Delingpole blogging in the Telegraph, UK has an answer.

“This battle has not been successful and is pretty much over for this year,” a shaken Al Gore has told his supporters, conceding that there is now next to no chance of US Congress passing a Climate Bill in 2010. (H/T Julian Morris).

As recorded by Steve Milloy at the Green Hell Blog, the bloated sex poodle was on magnificently paranoid form, lashing out in all directions at the enemies responsible for his mission’s failure, up to and including the US President:

‘ Gore bitterly denounced the Senate and federal government stating several times, “The U.S. Senate has failed us” and “The federal government has failed us.” Gore even seemed to blame President Obama by emphasizing that “the government as a whole has failed us… although the House did its job. [emphasis added]” ‘ …

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Fouad Ajami comments on the political end of Obama’s presidency.

…There is little evidence that the Obama presidency could yet find new vindication, another lease on life. Mr. Obama will mark time, but henceforth he will not define the national agenda. He will not be the repository of its hopes and sentiments. The ambition that his would be a “transformational” presidency—he rightly described Reagan’s stewardship in these terms—is for naught. …

…It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails. The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

In the Telegraph, UK, Nile Gardiner discusses our version of Marie Antoinette and the coming liberation in November.

…It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

The timing of this lavish European vacation could not have come at a worse moment, when unemployment in America stands at 10 percent, and large numbers of Americans are fighting to survive financially in the wake of the global economic downturn. It sends a message of indifference, even contempt, for the millions of Americans who are struggling just to feed their families on a daily basis and pay the mortgage, while the size of the national debt balloons to Greek-style proportions. …

…There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

David Harsanyi advocates a balanced budget amendment to control the addicts in power in Washington.

The first step in any recovery is accepting that you can’t control your addictions. So, while Republicans may stumble back into power, they should admit that, like Democrats, they probably can’t be trusted to control themselves.

That’s why it’s nice to hear that four Senate Republicans — Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Tom Coburn — are moving forward with a balanced budget amendment — requiring that the federal government spend no more than it takes in. …

…Most of all, one hopes that Republicans are laying genuine groundwork for a federal balanced budget amendment, which has failed by agonizingly slender margins on a number of occasions. After decades of grousing from alternating parties about reckless spending, here’s a chance to constrain Washington, whether it wants to be constrained or not.

Up to this point, most of the opposition to the proposal has been based on one argument: Republicans are a bunch of silly hypocrites for failing to pass this when they were in charge of both houses and the presidency — and, need it be reiterated, were busy creating their own debt. Which, of course, is only another argument to support the amendment.

Tony Blankley comments on the opinions of the nation and what we may see from Washington in the future.

…Despite itself, a majority GOP, driven powerfully by the unambiguous vox populi of such an election, almost certainly would go about trying to repeal Obamacare and put serious, current-fiscal-year spending cuts into place – necessarily including “entitlements.” Republicans would try to reduce some taxes and start serious oversight of federal regulatory intrusions into traditional American freedoms – including a powerful push-back on administration regulatory efforts on climate change, illegal immigration and other left-wing agenda items. With sufficient votes in the Senate, they would block future liberal judicial appointments – from the trial court to the Supreme Court.

If they didn’t go all-out for such a basic conservative agenda in 2011 after such an election as is possible, Republican Party leaders would know that across the nation, even 50-year party regulars such as I would walk out and seek a third party to carry out the people’s business. …

…Two months ago, though, a poll by the Democracy Corps, a polling group run by Democratic operative James Carville and Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, asked how well the term “socialist” fit President Obama. Fifty-five percent of all Americans said “well” or “very well.” In that same month, the Gallup poll reported that Americans self-identify themselves as 42 percent conservative (a historic high), 35 percent moderate and 20 percent liberal. …

Robert Samuelson looks at the politics of population decline.

Among the government’s most interesting reports is one that estimates what parents spend on their children. Not surprisingly, the costs are steep. For a middle-class, husband-and-wife family (average pretax income in 2009: $76,250), spending per child is about $12,000 a year. Assuming modest annual inflation (2.8 percent), the report estimates that the family’s spending on a child born in 2009 would total $286,050 by age 17. A two-child family would cost about $600,000. All these estimates may be understated, because they don’t include college costs.

These dry statistics ought to inform the deficit debate, because a budget is not just a catalog of programs and taxes. It reflects a society’s priorities and values. Our society does not—despite rhetoric to the contrary—put much value on raising children. Present budget policies punish parents, who are taxed heavily to support the elderly. Meanwhile, tax breaks for children are modest. If deficit reduction aggravates these biases, more Americans may choose not to have children or to have fewer children. Down that path lies economic decline.

Societies that cannot replace their populations discourage investment and innovation. They have stagnant or shrinking markets for goods and services. With older populations, they resist change. …

Thomas Sowell gives us another example of what is wrong with schools today.

A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times. I hope it doesn’t go to his head, because what he said was so illogical that it was an indictment of the mush that is being taught at even our elite educational institutions. …

…Young Mr. Hudson’s concern, apparently, is about what he referred to as the “demographics” of the school– 41 percent white and 47 percent Asian, with blacks, Hispanics and others obviously far behind. “I refuse to accept” that “the distribution of intelligence in this city” varies by neighborhood, he said.

Native intelligence may indeed not vary by neighborhood but actual performance– whether in schools, on the job or elsewhere– involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society. …

Walter Williams helps dispel the liberal version of the Great Depression.

…The Great Depression did not end until after WWII. Why it lasted so long went unanswered until Harold L. Cole, professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lee E. Ohanian, professor of economics at UCLA, published their research project “How Government Prolonged the Depression” in the Journal of Political Economy (August 2004). Professor Cole explained, “The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes. Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.” Professors Cole and Ohanian argue that FDR’s economic policies added at least seven years to the depression. …

…Between 1787 and 1930, our nation has seen both mild and severe economic downturns, sometimes called panics, that have ranged from one to seven years. During that interval, no one considered it to be the business of the federal government to try to get the economy out of a depression because there was no constitutional authority to do so. It took Hoover, FDR and a frightened and derelict U.S. Supreme Court to turn what might have been a three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 15-year meltdown.

RealClearPolitics.com highlights an article from the Boston Herald by Deroy Murdock. Murdock comments on the fight to stop Obamacare and what the elections could do.

…Americans increasingly would applaud such a House vote. A July 30-31 Rasmussen survey shows that among 1,000 likely voters, 59 percent want ObamaCare overturned. Despite relentless Democratic preening over ObamaCare, pro-repeal sentiments have risen from 55 percent (42 percent opposed) on March 24, when Obama signed this bill.

The American people can kill this monster in its crib. Handing Republicans the keys to Congress on Nov. 2 could smother this $2.5 trillion extravagance in its infancy. While a GOP repeal vote surely would earn a presidential veto, a Republican Congress could defund this law’s implementation.
Instead, Republicans should administer a pro-market antidote to ObamaCare’s poison: Health-insurance vouchers, medical malpractice reform; universal, tax-free Health Savings Accounts; and individual, portable medical plans – all available across state lines. …

 In the Whittier Daily News, Hector Gonzalez reports on the cool summer that southern California is experiencing. Sorry, Al.

It hasn’t been the coolest summer on record, but it’s been close, forecasters say.

The average temperature in July was 79 degrees, five degrees below normal, and the first eight days of this month also have been five to six degrees below normal, weather experts said.

That could put Southern California on track for a near-record-low summer, but it’s still too early to say, according to weather experts. The Los Angeles area, in fact, has had below-normal temperatures every month since April. …

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From Commentary we learn the politically correct thundering ignorance of the president was on display yet again, this time at the Hiroshima remembrance when for the first time the American ambassador attended.

That this should occur during the administration of Barack Obama is no surprise. No previous American president has been at such pains to apologize for what he thinks are America’s sins. So while, thankfully, Ambassador John Roos did not speak at the Hiroshima event, the import of his presence there was undeniable.

In theory, there ought to be nothing wrong with an American representative appearing in Hiroshima. Mourning the loss of so many lives in the bombing is both understandable and appropriate. But the problem lies in the way Japan remembers World War II. One of the reasons why it would have been appropriate for the United States to avoid its official presence at this ceremony is that the Japanese have never taken full responsibility for their own conduct during the war that the Hiroshima bombing helped end. Indeed, to listen to the Japanese, their involvement in the war sounds limited to the incineration of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the fire bombings of many other urban centers in the country, followed by a humiliating American occupation. The horror of the two nuclear bombs didn’t just wipe out two cities and force Japan’s government to finally bow to the inevitable and surrender. For 65 years it has served as a magic event that has erased from the collective memory of the Japanese people the vicious aggression and countless war crimes committed against not only the Allied powers but also the peoples of Asia who fell under their cruel rule in the 1930s and 1940s.

Five years ago The Weekly Standard published a lengthy review of the surprises that came from a release of all the “Magic” intercepts of Japanese signals.

… Starting with the publication of excerpts from the diaries of James Forrestal in 1951, the contents of a few of the diplomatic intercepts were revealed, and for decades the critics focused on these. But the release of the complete (unredacted) “Magic” Far East Summary, supplementing the Diplomatic Summary, in the 1990s revealed that the diplomatic messages amounted to a mere trickle by comparison with the torrent of military intercepts. The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan’s armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender.

Ultra was even more alarming in what it revealed about Japanese knowledge of American military plans. Intercepts demonstrated that the Japanese had correctly anticipated precisely where U.S. forces intended to land on Southern Kyushu in November 1945 (Operation Olympic). American planning for the Kyushu assault reflected adherence to the military rule of thumb that the attacker should outnumber the defender at least three to one to assure success at a reasonable cost. American estimates projected that on the date of the landings, the Japanese would have only three of their six field divisions on all of Kyushu in the southern target area where nine American divisions would push ashore. The estimates allowed that the Japanese would possess just 2,500 to 3,000 planes total throughout Japan to face Olympic. American aerial strength would be over four times greater.

From mid-July onwards, Ultra intercepts exposed a huge military buildup on Kyushu. Japanese ground forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of four. Instead of 3 Japanese field divisions deployed in southern Kyushu to meet the 9 U.S. divisions, there were 10 Imperial Army divisions plus additional brigades. Japanese air forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of two to four. Instead of 2,500 to 3,000 Japanese aircraft, estimates varied between about 6,000 and 10,000. One intelligence officer commented that the Japanese defenses threatened “to grow to [the] point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one (1) which is not the recipe for victory.”

Concurrent with the publication of the radio intelligence material, additional papers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been released in the last decade. From these, it is clear that there was no true consensus among the Joint Chiefs of Staff about an invasion of Japan. The Army, led by General George C. Marshall, believed that the critical factor in achieving American war aims was time. Thus, Marshall and the Army advocated an invasion of the Home Islands as the fastest way to end the war. But the long-held Navy view was that the critical factor in achieving American war aims was casualties. The Navy was convinced that an invasion would be far too costly to sustain the support of the American people, and hence believed that blockade and bombardment were the sound course.

The picture becomes even more complex than previously understood because it emerged that the Navy chose to postpone a final showdown over these two strategies. The commander in chief of the U.S. fleet, Admiral Ernest King, informed his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945 that he did not agree that Japan should be invaded. He concurred only that the Joint Chiefs must issue an invasion order immediately to create that option for the fall. But King predicted that the Joint Chiefs would revisit the issue of whether an invasion was wise in August or September. Meanwhile, two months of horrendous fighting ashore on Okinawa under skies filled with kamikazes convinced the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, that he should withdraw his prior support for at least the invasion of Kyushu. Nimitz informed King of this change in his views in strict confidence. …

A NY Post OpEd has more.

… Sadly, it is the myths about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that dominate the White House’s moral calculus, not the actual facts.

Those myths are that the dropping of the bomb on Japan was an overt act of racism by an American government that saw the Asians who’d be killed as inferior and therefore expendable; and that in building the atomic bomb, America created a weapon so terrible and barbaric that its presence poses a constant threat to civilization and the planet — which is why nuclear disarmament must be not only a strategic, but a moral imperative.

The first myth distorts historical truth. The second may doom us to a permanently perilous world. Both also ignore certain ineluctable facts.

First, the Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb for use on the Germans, not the Japanese. It was pure accident that the Third Reich collapsed before the bomb could be dropped in Europe, and became available to use on Japan instead.

Second, the number of Japanese who died in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings — some 300,000 in all — would have been dwarfed by the 2 million or so who’d have perished in a full-scale invasion of Japan — along with the 1 million Americans GIs, Marines, sailors and airmen whom US military planners calculated would also be killed or wounded in that assault. …

A lot of ink has been spilled claiming American companies are swimming in cash. Market Watch says that is a canard, and that we must look at balance sheets to see what really is happening.

… American companies are not in robust financial shape. Federal Reserve data show that their debts have been rising, not falling. By some measures, they are now more leveraged than at any time since the Great Depression.

You’d think someone might have noticed something amiss. After all, we were simultaneously being told that companies (a) had more money than they know what to do with; (b) had even more money coming in due to a surge in profits; yet (c) they have been out in the bond market borrowing as fast as they can.

Does that sound a little odd to you?

A look at the facts shows that companies only have “record amounts of cash” in the way that Subprime Suzy was flush with cash after that big refi back in 2005. So long as you don’t look at the liabilities, the picture looks great. Hey, why not buy a Jacuzzi?

According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial firms borrowed another $289 billion in the first quarter, taking their total domestic debts to $7.2 trillion, the highest level ever. That’s up by $1.1 trillion since the first quarter of 2007; it’s twice the level seen in the late 1990s. …

An economist drills down into the last employment report for The Daily Beast.

… With the end of the inventory cycle, a huge wave of state and local cutbacks, and further declines in house prices on the way, the situation looks bleak for the second half of 2010. Temporary employment is falling rapidly, suggesting weaker job growth ahead.

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The State Department appears to be another government department that selectively enforces laws and policies based on the whims of government employees’ opinions. Andy McCarthy thinks it is time for State to call a spade a spade, and name the Taliban as a terrorist organization

…Yesterday, after three months of delay, the State Department finally issued its congressionally mandated annual terrorism report. It shows that the United States has not even designated the Taliban as a terrorist organization — not in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan. Similarly, the government has also failed to designate both the Haqqani Network and HIG. (Hekmatyar himself, in his individual capacity, has been designated as a “global terrorist” since 2003.)

The full list of designated terrorist organizations is here. The designation is very important, and not just because it stands as a formal declaration by our government. Providing material support to an organization once it has been designated a serious federal crime — and prosecution for it helps us starve terror organizations of resources, making it harder for those organizations to attack our country. Yet, as you can see, the State Department does not list the Taliban organizations with which we are at war, even though it continues to list the Basques, the Tamil Tigers, Kahane Chai (an Israeli group that disbanded about 16 years ago), a renegade wing of the Irish Republican Army, and several other groups that have nothing to do with anti-American terrorism. …

…Why has our government failed to declare that the Taliban branches, the Haqqani Network, and HIG are both terrorist organizations and our enemies in the war? If they are sinister enough for us to commit our troops to fight them, shouldn’t we be taking every legal step to support that effort?

Ed Morrissey comments on what the Obami will do next in their failed attempts to mandate economic growth.

…The departure of Christine Romer puts Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in the driver’s seat for economic policy — and Kudlow says that’s bad news indeed.  Geithner’s already on record saying that extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for wealthier earners will put the recovery in peril, when the evidence above shows that Obama needs investors to put their cash into the private sector instead of having the government seize it.  Kudlow calls it Geithner’s war against investment, and with Romer out of the way, he expects it to escalate.

This explains James Pethokoukis’ warning about the rumored write-off at Fannie for underwater mortgages.  That will either drop a bomb on Wall Street or on the national debt, which has already hit the crisis stage.  Kudlow hears the same rumors (although it’s not clear whether he heard them from Pethokoukis’ column), and more.  The Fed will extend its lax monetary policy even further at its meeting this month and may announce further expansion of the money supply, a move that will further depress an already sinking dollar.  It’s a kitchen-sink, flailing approach to command-economy policies that clearly have failed to produce a real recovery and instead have delivered exactly what the same kind of approach delivered the last time it was tried in the 1970s: stagnation. …

Michael Barone thinks that Republicans simply being anti-Obama is just as vacuous as Obama’s rigid anti-Bush stance.

…Some young House Republicans have put out a call for voters to e-mail their ideas. And House Republican leaders say they’ll put together something in the nature of a 1994-style Contract With America over the August recess. …

…There are some obvious targets for Republicans if they win big this year. Democrats have jacked up domestic spending sharply; some reversal should be possible. The many glitches in Obamacare, some apparent now and others as yet undiscovered, could form a basis for derailment if not repeal.

Giveaways to labor unions, like the $26 billion package for the teacher unions which the House is to be summoned back from its recess to pass, presumably will be off the table.

Larger issues need to be addressed. We’re overdue for a simplifying tax reform. And there is the looming crisis in entitlements –Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. …

Along the same lines, Republicans need to come up with practical ways of dealing with problems. Peter Wehner once again voices criticism over altering the 14th amendment.

…There is plenty policymakers can do to curb illegal immigration (including securing the southern border, toughening enforcement policies, and expediting the legal process to cut the average deportation time) and improve our overall approach to immigration (including narrowing the scope of the family-reunification privilege to the nuclear family, adjusting upward our quotas for high-skilled labor, and making assimilation a central national priority). Pushing for altering the 14th amendment, though, is worse than unhelpful; it is substantively unwise and politically harmful.

Republicans are practicing the politics of symbolism in the worst way possible. They are embracing a policy that doesn’t have any realistic chance of becoming law, that will be unnecessarily divisive and inflammatory, and that, in the long term, will be politically counterproductive. …

Perhaps one issue that Republicans can address is banning government employee unions, which have dramatically increased the fiscal problems that so many local and state governments are facing. In the NY Daily News, Eileen Norcross and Todd Zywicki look at the problem. Are you willing to pay for a bail out of New York City so thousands of employees can collect their six-figure-per-year pensions?

…But loopholes and gamesmanship aren’t the only reason why public pension systems nationwide face massive funding shortfalls. They are the result of a perfect storm of flawed accounting, which fueled unrealistic employee demands that were then underfunded by politicians. In plans across the country, during booming years of the late 1990s, many workers were promised retirement payouts that were “too good to be true” and, thus, impossible to make good on.

…Professor Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University projects that even if public sector plans earn 8% on their investments, four states – Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Indiana – will run out of assets to pay retirees by the end of the decade. States and local governments will soon find themselves up against a painful tradeoff: between closing schools and libraries and cutting other essential services or paying inflated pensions to 50-year-old retirees.

No one begrudges a secure retirement for police officers, firefighters and other public servants. But unless states act now by closing insolvent plans to new hires and reducing the rate of benefit accrual for current employees, they won’t be able shore up enough to guarantee at least some of what’s been promised.

For now, unions have been unyielding to proposals that alter pension formulas for current workers. When Colorado froze the Cost of Living Adjustment in the state’s pension formula, the union sued, noting the move erodes retirees’ purchasing power.

That’s one reason why most pension reforms affect benefits only for new hires, which won’t make a real difference in the tab for many years. Unions instead seem to prefer that states go bankrupt to pay the full bill. All while workers in the private sector are confronting their own retirement losses, high unemployment, and the certainty of higher future taxes, leaving everyone who isn’t in a public sector plan with a much bleaker future to look forward to. …

The Streetwise Professor comments on the recent Russian ban on exporting wheat.

Russia is going to ban wheat exports, and is “coordinating” with the members of its “Customs Union,” Kazakhstan and Belarus, to do the same.  This ban has caused a worldwide spike in wheat prices… Moreover, the cancellation is undermining Russia’s reputation (yeah, I know) as a reliable trading partner.

Cargill makes the point that Adam Smith made in the Wealth of Nations in the chapter “A Digression on the Corn Trade:”

‘Cargill, the world’s biggest trader of agricultural commodities, criticised Moscow’s move. “Such trade barriers further distort wheat markets by making it harder for supplies to move from areas of surplus to areas of deficit, and by preventing price signals from reaching wheat farmers,” it said.’

…Russian exporters argue that the precipitous announcement will make it harder for Russia to export going forward…

The Streetwise Professor explains some of the economics behind his previous comments.

…So this isn’t a Russia thing or a Putin thing.  It is an economics thing.  Restricting trade is a bad idea.  And one of the effects of an embargo is that it harms the commercial reputation of the country imposing the embargo.  Indeed, imposing embargoes at exactly the time when importing nations are most in need of the commodity is particularly damaging; fair weather suppliers, like fair weather friends, are not friends at all.  Once you get that rap, people will find ways to reduce their reliance on you, which will have long term consequences.

And given Russia’s track record on trade and embargoes, it has precious little reputational capital to draw upon in such circumstances.  It has even less now.  It wants to build up its ag export business in a big way.  It just made that a whole lot harder.  More Putinist short-termism that will impose long term damage on the Russian economy. …

Jonah Goldberg says the government is forcing poor people to helping rich people buy green cars.

…Because the Volt’s sticker price might be too high for even that crowd, the government is offering a federal subsidy of up to $7,500 (Californians have a state subsidy, too), which means that working-class people will be helping to pay for playthings for upper-income people.

“Like the EV1 that GM tried to peddle in the California market,” Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says, “the Volt is a vanity car for the well-off that will be subsidized by less well-off taxpayers at all stages, from R&D to sales and to the construction of charging stations.”

Indeed, the Volt’s price is $41,000, but the cost is much higher. “Government Motors” is already selling the car at a loss. According to the blogger Doctor Zero, if you apply the subsidies that have gone directly into the car to just the first 10,000 vehicles, the cost is more like $81,000 per car. …

…If the government weren’t taking taxpayer money and spending it on toys for upscale urban liberals (Obama’s strongest base of support outside of black voters and labor unions), there’d be no reason to care about the Volt. If rich people want to be “early adopters” and buy expensive gadgets that help them preen the plumage of their political sanctimony, that’s great. It’s not so great when the government gets involved in wealth redistribution, and it’s outrageous when it involves redistributing wealth upwards.

John Hinderaker of Power Line figures out Michelle’s excellent adventure.

… I think the Obamas’ tone-deafness, which was on exhibit long before Michelle’s Spanish vacation, more likely results from their inexperience and the fact that if you are a significant figure in Democratic Party politics, you spend a great deal of time with rich people. That can skew one’s perspective.

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In the WSJ, Elliot Abrams looks at a number of players in the Middle East, and the current issues facing them. Abrams discusses the irony of reluctant understandings forming between Israel and some Arab states as the Iranian nuclear threat grows.

…And two weeks ago, the Israeli press carried reports of a visit to Saudi Arabia by Gen. Meir Dagan, chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency; Gen. Dagan is the point man on Iran for the Israeli government. This follows stories in the Times of London two months ago claiming that the Saudis would suspend their air defense operations to permit Israeli fighter planes to cross Saudi air space en route to an attack on Iran. …

…The Egyptian regime feels no love for the Israelis, but there is significant security cooperation between the two countries; Egypt’s rulers see the Shia in Iran, not the Jewish state, as the more dangerous threat to Arab power in the region. Egypt’s decisions in late July to bar an Iranian Red Crescent ship carrying aid to Gaza from entering the Suez Canal and to prevent four Iranian parliamentarians from crossing the border into Gaza are the most recent proof of this Egyptian attitude. …

…The Gulf regimes have long relied on American protection, and the U.S. maintains large bases in the UAE, Bahrain (the Fifth fleet’s headquarters), Qatar and Kuwait. For these regimes and for the Saudis, Iran is a constant threat and the issue of the day is who will be, to use the old British phrase, “top country” in the region. Repeated American offers to negotiate with Iran, and statements from Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates respectively that an attack on Iran would be “incredibly destabilizing” or “disastrous” do not reassure them. They want Iran stopped. They are not sure the need to do that is understood as well in Washington as it is in Jerusalem—and at Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv. …

Ed Morrissey comments on Christina Romer’s departure.

…Romer’s legacy will probably mostly focus on the Porkulus chart that argued for a $775 billion stimulus package and predicted it would hold the unemployment rate at 8% or below. …

…Romer also played a big role in botching the future deficits projection last year, missing the mark by $2 trillion.  King Banaian showed the arbitrary (and unsupportable) assumptions that went into Romer’s initial figures, and the lame excuses that followed their exposure.  Romer made a career in this administration of making unsupportable claims and bad bets, and she should have resigned a year ago over that amateurish episode.

That makes two key members of Obama’s economic team to depart this summer.  Peter Orszag, the budget director who couldn’t spot Romer’s $2 trillion error and who presided over the biggest deficit expansion in modern history, hit the road for family obligations earlier.  With approval ratings on the economy for Obama and Democrats crashing while unemployment skyrockets, it looks as though the White House wants to clean house and argue for a fresh start just before the midterms.  Until that “fresh start” begins to reduce spending, taxes, and regulatory burdens, though, the composition of Obama’s economic team isn’t going to make any difference at all.

Ed Morrissey also interprets some recent economic statistics for us.

…They also forget the point about job losses being cumulative, as they almost always do, by attempting to cheer people up about layoffs and terminations having “moderated significantly”:

Despite the tepid private sector jobs growth, the pace of layoffs has moderated significantly from the first quarter of last year, when employers were culling an average of 752,000 jobs a month.

Well, yeah — because those jobs are still lost.  No one thought that pace would continue forever, regardless of the economic policies of the Democrats.  The point is that a year later, we should be looking at significant gains in recovering those jobs, not tooting horns because the slope of the decline has shallowed out.

Christopher Hitchens shares his thoughts on the discovery and diagnosis of his cancer.

…Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not? …

Karl Rove says there’s good news in many gubernatorial elections, for GOP candidates and for the economy if the GOP works to reign in government.

…The GOP’s edge in statehouse contests could have major ramifications for a long time to come, including next year’s redistricting of the House of Representatives. The more GOP governors, the stronger Republican dominance of the process will be. Eighteen of the 21 states that could add or lose congressional seats have governors’ races this fall. There also will be a lot more Republican legislators after November to help draw redistricting lines for the coming decade.

Republicans are poised to elect a new generation of leaders. After this fall’s election, the GOP could have two Indian-American, two Hispanic, and as many as seven women governors. This would provide powerful evidence of the GOP’s diversity and help refurbish the party’s image.

…Already, the GOP victors in last year’s gubernatorial contests are providing powerful contrasts to Mr. Obama’s policies. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell erased his state’s nearly $2 billion deficit without raising taxes. Facing a $13 billion shortfall, a hostile Democratic legislature and more than $7 million in negative ads launched against him by labor unions, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie nonetheless balanced the budget while cutting taxes. …

In Forbes, Reihan Salam reports on the success of Amazon’s Kindle, and where new technologies may lead society.

In the 33 months since the launch of Amazon’s Kindle platform, sales of Kindle e-books have surpassed sales of hardcover books. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicts that e-book sales will surpass paperback sales within the next 12 months, and combined hardcover and paperback sales soon after that. This despite the fact that the 600,000 titles in the Kindle bookstore represents only a fraction of Amazon’s inventory.

That the success of the Kindle is good news for Amazon should go without saying. But it represents a remarkable environmental advance as well. The publishing industry in the U.S. felled roughly 125 million trees and generated vast amounts of wastewater. And, of course, physical books have to be transported by trucks, which generate carbon emissions, exacerbate congestion, increase traffic fatalities and cause wear-and-tear on already overburdened roads. One assumes that Bezos didn’t have the environment foremost in mind when he pushed the Kindle concept forward, yet he’s arguably done more to fight climate change by threatening hardcovers and paperbacks with extinction than any number of environmental activists. …

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Charles Krauthammer makes excellent points about the consent of the governed and separation of powers. And he gives examples of how disregard for these constitutional principles leads to government agencies governing citizens as they choose, rather than enforcing existing law. This disregard of constitutional principles also produces a menacing executive branch, where the Bully-In-Chief will get his way through subtle threat of how the government will make life difficult for those who do not bow to his will.

…How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country’s nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.

So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.

Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was) and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That’s bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.

That’s called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people’s representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.

The Obami are considering mortgage debt forgiveness to improve the Dems political situation, writes the Investor’s Business Daily editors, instead of looking at measures that would help all Americans. Perhaps someone should remind the creeps that a similar initiative started the Tea Party.

It appears that Democrats will receive a severe beating in the fall elections. What can save them? How about the administration wiping out large swaths of debt for underwater mortgage holders?

James Pethokoukis, a Reuters columnist who once wrote for IBD, reported Thursday that the White House might have an August Surprise in the works. …

…It would be irresponsible for the administration to order the forgiveness of so much debt. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee more than $5 trillion in mortgages, or roughly half the U.S. total, are now wards of the federal government. They’ve needed $145 billion from Washington just to keep their heads above water.

Last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that “The operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added $291 billion to CBO’s August 2009 baseline estimate of the federal deficit for fiscal year 2009 and $99 billion to the total deficit projected for the 2010—2019 period.”

Clearly, writing off parts of mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will put an even greater burden on taxpayers who have helped keep the sick enterprises alive. …

In Foreign Policy, Peter Feaver comments on the classless administration Iraq policy

President Obama’s speech on Iraq was a disappointment. Not a surprise, but a disappointment.

It was disappointing because it was yet another missed opportunity. He could have shown real statesmanship by acknowledging he was wrong about the surge. He could have reached across the aisle and credited Republicans who backed the policy he vigorously opposed and tried to thwart, a policy that has made it possible (but by no means certain) to hope for a responsible end to the Iraq war. He could have told the truth about his Iraq strategy, that what he has pursued thus far has not been what he was arguing for in the campaign — that would have involved the departure of all U.S. troops by mid 2008 — but rather he has followed, in a more or less desultory fashion, a script written in the status of forces agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki.

Instead of giving such a speech, Obama gave a campaign address trying to claim credit for anything that is going well in Iraq and trying to avoid blame for anything that is going poorly. That may be shrewd campaign politics, but it is not the statesmanship the occasion warranted. The commander-in-chief missed an opportunity, and I worry that it will come back to haunt us. …

Ralph Peters has a perceptive piece in the NY Post about Obama’s neglect of Iraq.

…Ignoring his own opposition to the liberation of Iraq, supporting our troops and the surge, Obama spoke as if all’s well in Baghdad — thanks to him.

As part of his weird victory lap, the president rightfully praised the way “our troops adapted and adjusted” to the insurgency in Iraq, then stressed that 90,000 service members have come home during his administration. …

…While that country has passed its military crisis, it’s now in political turmoil — from which our government has utterly disengaged. We won that war, but we still can lose the peace. Obama shunned the fact that, almost half a year after its last national election, Iraq doesn’t have a new government. Determined to abandon “Bush’s war,” Obama’s been AWOL in Baghdad.

His neglect may prove disastrous. And the saddest aspect is that the Iraqis wanted us to step in and act as referees, to press them to get past their political differences.

The Iraqi elections were so close that both main camps claimed victory. In the macho atmosphere of Iraq, neither side could back down or compromise after that without an excuse (“Those mean Americans made me do it!”). Our essential and dirt-cheap role would have been to hand the posturing parties a fig leaf. …

Roger Simon comments on Michelle Obama’s lavish vacation outside the US.

Several weeks ago I wrote I thought Barack Obama didn’t really want to be president. The post generated a fair amount of discussion, pro and con.

Michelle’s $375,000 Spanish vacation — with the Daily Mail dubbing her a “modern-day Marie Antoinette” — is further proof of my thesis. What man who wanted to be re-elected (or see his party do well in November) would let his wife go off on such an “excellent adventure” in these economic times? Of course no one denies the right of people to have vacations – I’m coming to the end of one myself on my beloved Bainbridge Island — but closing Mediterranean beaches while booking 60-plus rooms in a five star Marbella hotel for her entourage? It is beyond tone deaf, perhaps to the level of subconscious (or even deliberate) self-sabotage. …

David Harsanyi has an unusual view on the gay marriage debate.

In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made “state registration and church consecration” a dual requirement of matrimony.

We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn’t it about time we freed marriage from the state?

Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman — or no one at all — and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called and go about the business of their lives. …

NPR posted a transcript of Talk of the Nation featuring an interview with Andrew Hacker, author of Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It. We had a WSJ review of this last Tuesday.

…COX: We also have another couple of emails. They’re really coming in. People are very interested in this topic. This comes from Keith… in Boston, Massachusetts. Keith writes: Higher ed is not broken, but it is in trouble because it attempts to follow a for-profit business model. It has become unaffordable, because starting with the Reagan administration the federal government has not supported education. Is Keith right or wrong?

Prof. HACKER: He’s right and wrong. Currently, as you indicated at the outset, Tony, at a private college, its going to cost you really up toward $50,000 a year. Imagine that, $50,000 a year. That’s over what the typical American worker makes. Now, why is that? Its because colleges know they can keep raising their prices as they’ve been doing, well ahead of inflation, and the students will come and take out loans. In other words, our colleges are being really built on the indebtedness that young people, starting at the age of 18, are signing papers that they are going to live with until they’re 38. We regard this as totally immoral. …

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Roger Simon wonders if the GOP is really the party of the rich.

… We live in an era — the worst economically since the Depression — when the daughter of the first couple of the Democratic Party has a multi-million dollar, Marie Antoinette-style wedding with port-a-potties almost as luxurious as a toilette in Baden Baden; its self-proclaimed environmental leader, the first global warming billionaire, sprouts “green” McMansions from Nashville to Montecito; and its already multi-billionaire senator from Massachusetts moors his yacht in another state to escape taxes we hoi polloi could only dream of paying. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks the Clintons are looking good – comparatively speaking.

… In polarized political times and with growing frustration with the Obama administration (liberals dismayed, conservatives gloating), there is something refreshing — and unifying – about the Clinton-watching these days. We can all agree that Clinton was/is a badly flawed character whose presidency fell victim to his own excesses and lack of discipline. And many Americans from the vantage point of the Obama era view the Clinton presidency (like that of George W. Bush’s) much more favorably. Frankly, Obama’s greatest accomplishment to date may be to improve his predecessors’ images and forge a new not-Obama coalition. Not exactly what he had in mind, I grant you.

Richard Epstein discourses on the four rotten policy planks of this administration.

Two recent developments, one economic and the other political, should raise no eyebrows. The first is the somber economic news that the U.S.’s halting recovery is already losing steam, without regaining the levels of production and employment that the economy had more two years ago. As against historical averages, the nation faces a double whammy: a later start and a weaker boost. The second point is not unrelated to the first: President Obama has decided not to go on the hustings to campaign for the re-election of members of the House and Senate. First-term House Democrats, in particular, know that a weak president will only remind the electorate that not all economic problems can be laid at the feet of the Republicans.

This sorry state should come as no surprise given that four weak planks are sufficient to sink the ship. …

Anne Applebaum reminds us of the free-spending GOP.

… Here is a more accurate assessment: “President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ.” I didn’t write that; the astute libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy did. She also points out that during his eight years in office, Bush’s “anti-government” Republican administration increased the federal budget by an extraordinary 104 percent. By comparison, the increase under President Bill Clinton’s watch was a relatively measly 11 percent (a rate, I might add, lower than Ronald Reagan’s). In his last term in office, Bush increased discretionary spending—that means non-Medicare, non-Social Security—by 48.6 percent. In his final year in office, fiscal year 2009, he spent more than $32,000 per American, up from $17,216.68 in fiscal year 2001.

But Bush is not the only culprit. After all, the federal government usually spends money in response to state demands. Look, for example, at the demands made by Alaska, a state that produces a disproportionate quantity of anti-government rhetoric, which has had Republican governors since 2002, and which has a congressional delegation dominated by Republicans. Nevertheless, for the last decade, Alaska has been among the top three largest state recipients of federal funding, per capita. Usually, Alaska is far ahead—sometimes three times as far ahead—of most other states in the union.

Largely, this is because of one famous Alaskan, Sen. Ted Stevens—a Republican—who devoted himself to securing federal funding for his state during more than four decades in the Senate. Not only were his efforts extremely popular among his Republican constituents—he was re-elected multiple times—they won him many, many imitators. Timothy Noah has pointed out that Sarah Palin, when mayor of Wasilla, hired Stevens’ former chief of staff as a Washington lobbyist. As a result, the 6,700 inhabitants of Wasilla enjoyed $27 million in federal earmarks over a four-year period. …

Corner Post with good news from Michigan’s primary vote.

… Not even Detroit royalty was spared. The self-described Kennedys of Detroit lost their final officeholder — U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick — as voters decided that even the mother of convicted ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was too many Kilpatricks on the public payroll.

Michigan’s roar against the political class bodes well for November. Republicans are in the catbird’s seat to take back two, perhaps three, congressional districts as well as a swing-state governor’s mansion.

Investor’s Business Daily editors note how the bureaucracy will get amnesty by the back-door.

Polls show Democrats have decisively lost the debate over granting amnesty to illegals. But has that stopped them? Hardly. Using the federal bureaucracy as their agent, they plan to do it anyway.

This is what happens when big government becomes so powerful that those who run it feel they can do whatever they want — no matter what the Constitution allows or the people prefer.

Americans strongly oppose amnesty for those here illegally. Democrats have been frightened away from trying to pass an amnesty bill because they’re terrified of the political consequences.

But as the Associated Press reports, that doesn’t mean amnesty is dead. Far from it. Indeed, the White House and Congress have apparently decided on a policy of “backdoor amnesty” — giving the U.S.’ immigration bureaucracy the go-ahead to enforce an amnesty law that has never been passed. …

Robert Samuelson adds his thoughts to the good news about shale gas.

You probably have never heard of oilman George Mitchell, but more than anyone else, he has changed the global energy outlook. In 1981, Mitchell’s small petroleum company faced dwindling natural gas reserves. He proposed a radical idea: drill deeper in the company’s Texas fields to reach gas-bearing shale rock more than a mile down. Because the gas was tightly packed, most engineers believed it was too costly to extract profitably. But after nearly two decades of trying, Mitchell proved doubters wrong. The result: The world has far more available natural gas than anyone suspected.

The BP oil spill cast a cloud over almost all energy news. Well, shale gas is good news. Here’s why.

Until recently, scarce U.S. natural gas reserves suggested increasing dependence on expensive foreign supplies of liquefied natural gas. No more. Also, natural gas emits about 50 percent less carbon dioxide — the major greenhouse gas — than coal. Substituting gas for coal in electricity plants could temper emissions. Finally, shale gas in Europe and Asia has huge geopolitical implications. It could reduce dependence on Russian natural gas and frustrate any gas cartel mimicking OPEC. …

Jonah Goldberg, writing for USA Today, points out why Haiti’s poverty will probably always be with us.

A recent episode of NPR’s This American Life (quite possibly the best reportorial journalistic enterprise going today — an admission that might cost me my right-wing decoder ring) focused on the plight of Haiti. The island nation was a basket case long before last January’s horrific earthquake. Indeed, despite the fact that the country hosts some 10,000 aid groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it has gotten worse over the past half-century. Haitians on average make half as much as they did 50 years ago. Despite the best of intentions, aid agencies simply haven’t made the country better.

Why?

The usual answer from the left is a long indictment of America and the West’s legacy of racism, imperialism and slavery. But even if you concede all of that, it won’t get you very far in explaining why Haiti has only gotten worse as that legacy has faded further into the past and the West has grown in generosity. (Roughly half of all American households donated to earthquake relief.)

This American Life, hardly a capitalist hotbed, has a more constructive answer: Haiti’s problems in large part boil down to a culture of poverty. Haitians do not lack the desire to make their lives better, nor do they reject hard work. But what they sorely lack is a legal, social and intellectual culture that favors economic growth and entrepreneurialism. …

Jennifer Rubin suggests a Hirohito monument at Pearl Harbor.

The controversy over the mosque — all fifteen stories of it– planned for Ground Zero is one of those issues that divide ordinary Americans from elites. It is a debate that convinces average Americans that the governing and media elites are not cut from the same cloth as they. In fact, it strikes many as evidence that our “leaders” are stricken with a sort of political and cultural insanity, an obtuseness that defies explanation. …

Rubin posts that even Juan Williams had a moment of sanity.

On Fox News Sunday, the panelists discussed the Ground Zero mosque. Ceci Connolly supplied the standard liberal line: freedom of religion requires that we allow the mosque to be constructed on the site where the ashes of 3,000 Americans blew through the air like confetti. Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney took the opposite view; Cheney was most concerned about the shadowy funding and the imam’s connection to jihadists (”the same groups that attacked us on 9-11?), while Kristol urged that out of “decency and propriety,” we shouldn’t allow a mosque to “tower over” Ground Zero.

The real surprise in the discussion was Juan Williams, who one expected to take Connolly’s side. Williams, however, didn’t parrot the left’s “tolerance” line. Instead, like Cheney, he criticized the lack of “transparency” in funding. But he did not stop there. He called building the mosque a “thumb in the eye” of those who lost their lives and suffered trauma. He concluded that, contrary to the imam’s claimed intention, the construction is “not promoting dialogue or understanding; in fact it is polarizing.” …

Shorts from National Review.

The chilly little welfare state to our north, Canada, is running relatively tiny deficits, having engaged only in relatively sober stimulus measures. To no one’s great surprise, Canada’s freedom from heavy government debt and its comparatively liberal economic environment (the Heritage Foundation now ranks its economy as more free than that of the United States) have enabled a much stronger recovery — to the extent that Canada, which has about one-tenth as many people as the United States, added 10,000 more jobs in June: 93,200 to our 83,000. Canada has recovered 97 percent of the jobs lost in the recent economic turmoil. Say what you like about aping the European welfare states, the Canadians do a better job of it than do Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.

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Christopher Hitchens comments on Hugo Chávez’s sanity after visiting with the dictator.

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez’s politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela’s capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America’s rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written article by Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government’s seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar’s constituent parts. He went on:

‘I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, “Yes, it is me.” Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: “It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.” ‘ …

…Many people laughed when Chávez appeared at the podium of the United Nations in September 2006 and declared that he smelled sulfur from the devil himself because of the presence of George W. Bush. But the evidence is that he does have an idiotic weakness for spells and incantations, as well as many of the symptoms of paranoia and megalomania. …

In the National Review, Daniel Foster gives us details on Chris Christie’s battles in New Jersey.

It was supposed to have been the biggest fight of Chris Christie’s young administration: a May showdown over what Democrats in Trenton were calling the “millionaires’ tax,” designed, like each of the 115 statewide tax increases of the last decade, to paper over a small part of a yawning structural deficit by soaking the rich, one last time. Never mind that half the filings and a third of the revenue from the tax were to come from New Jersey’s business community, already battered by a perfect storm of overtaxation, capital flight, and recession. The Democrats were loaded for bear, and had the legislative majorities in place to pass the measure, having spent all winter threatening a government shutdown should Christie use his veto pen.

Democratic senate president Stephen Sweeney had even admonished, in a turn of phrase eminently Trentonian in its sheer backwardness, that “to give up $1 billion to the wealthy during this crisis is just wrong.” He promised that the millionaires’ tax was where the Democrats would “make our stand.”

The tax passed on party-line votes in the assembly and senate on May 20. Sweeney then certified the bill and walked it across the statehouse to Christie’s office, where the governor — who had vowed to balance the budget without raising taxes, and who’d developed a bewildering habit of keeping his promises — vetoed it. The whole thing took about two minutes.

“We’ll be back, governor,” Sweeney told Christie on being dispatched with the dead letter.

“All right, we’ll see,” came the reply.

And just like that, the biggest obstacle standing between Christie and the realization of his sea-changing, fiscally conservative first-year agenda was gone.

“We have not found our footing,” Democratic state senator Loretta Weinberg later said, still reeling from the decisive defeat. “I think a lot of people underestimated Chris Christie.”…

… The New Jersey that Chris Christie inherited was one that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University had ranked 46th in the Union on its economic-freedom index, and one whose business-tax climate the Tax Foundation had called the worst in the nation. Its narrow tax base had been in a death spiral for years: High-tech, high-paying jobs were fleeing — one Boston College study estimated $70 billion in wealth had left between 2004 and 2008 alone — and being replaced by low-wage, low-tech ones. For decades Trenton had jacked up taxes on the wealth that remained — inspiring new rounds of capital flight — and relied on weak budgetary rules and accounting tricks to kick growing shortfalls down the road. As a July 2009 study by Mercatus’s Eileen Norcross and Frederic Sautet concluded,

“the government of New Jersey has resorted to fiscal evasion — avoiding the rules meant to constrain spending — and has sustained spending growth through fiscal illusion, obscuring the full costs of policies by relying on intergovernmental aid and debt to achieve the current level of spending. The state has long emphasized current spending at the expense of higher taxes for future taxpayers. The costs of this approach are now coming due.”

Come due they had for Christie, who after less than a day on the job was being advised to borrow his way out of crisis. What he did instead set the tone for everything that followed. …

In the WaPo, Tom Shales pans Christiane Amanpour’s Sunday morning debut.

…It’s not that Amanpour seemed personally uncomfortable or constrained in her weekend debut — opening night was Sunday morning — but rather that she proved that she’s miscast for the role, her highly touted global orientation coming across as inappropriate and contrived on a broadcast that for three decades has dealt primarily with domestic politics, policies and culture.

…Amanpour announced her intention to “open a window on the world” now that she runs “This Week,” but the show was hardly a haven for isolationists, and refashioning it to take advantage of Amanpour’s specialty could, in a word, ruin it.

Exhibit A: During the roundtable portion of the show — from the beginning, “This Week’s” centerpiece and best feature — Amanpour didn’t stick to discussing news of the week with the show’s estimable, exceptional panelists — among them George F. Will and Donna Brazile — but instead brought in a foreign journalist seen earlier in the program, Ahmed Rashid (momentarily stationed in Madrid), for his views via satellite. It was awkward in form and proved negligible in content.

In fact, it became ludicrous when, near the end of the segment, the U.S. economy was discussed and Amanpour called upon Rashid, the Taliban expert, again even though he seemed of dubious relevance and authority to the topic at hand.  …

And we have NRO shorts. Here are two:

We didn’t have to wait long to see the first unintended consequence of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Democrats’ financial-regulation overhaul. Due to a last-minute change in the laws governing legal liability for the ratings agencies, bond raters such as Moody’s and Fitch asked bond issuers not to use their ratings until they got a “better understanding” of their legal exposure. This shut down the bond markets until the SEC was forced to temporarily suspend requirements that all bond offerings come packaged with credit ratings. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works,” Sen. Chris Dodd famously said of the bill that bears his name. That is one thing he got right.

When the House Natural Resources Committee considered an amendment to end the Gulf drilling moratorium, 22 representatives voted in favor and 21 voted against. Yet the amendment failed — because five delegates, representing assorted U.S. territories, voted no. (Delegates can vote in committees but not on a bill’s final passage.) Of the five, one represents Puerto Rico, which, as a Caribbean island with 4 million people, perhaps deserves some voice in the matter. But the others were from Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a combined population short of 500,000. That’s considerably fewer than a congressional district — yet these four delegates cast deciding votes on a vital question of national policy. The practice of giving micro-territories a voice in Congress is questionable in any case, since it is essentially representation without taxation; but having four members on one committee from flyspecks that amount to Democratic pocket boroughs, each with a full vote, makes a joke of the strict democracy that the House of Representatives is supposed to stand for.