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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This ought to end well …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Samuelson contrasts the millennial generation with previous generations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nile Gardiner comments on the Hurt Locker win.

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

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

David Harsanyi asks, What’s in a name?

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

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

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

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Purple fingers in Iraq again. Story in The Corner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Krauthammer comments on the Obamacare death march.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greg Sargent observes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Sowell completes his hat trick on medical care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week’s Newsweek magazine has this cover story; Victory at Last – The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq. Kathryn Lopez starts off a few Corner posts on the subject. We’ll end with Peter Wehner.

… In 2006, the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami wrote a powerful and stylistically beautiful book, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. That gift, Ajami said, was the idea of consensual government. It is a gift we gave the Iraqis at the cost of many American lives and much treasure. It is a gift they appear to have received.

“Iraq seemed the most forbidding place for a campaign of reform, the hardest soil,” Ajami wrote during the darkest days of the war. “Yet every now and then, that country offered glimpses of hope that Iraqis may yet pull off a decent political world that works. There were days its sectarianism seemed like an affliction that would never go away. Then there were hints that the multiplicity of its communities could yet support a politics, and a culture, of pluralism.”

The Iraqis were not as enchanted with tyranny or indifferent to democracy as some critics of the war insisted.

What America has done for Iraq, which had been brutalized for so long, may not be the noblest act in our history. But it ranks quite high. The Iraq war was, in fact, a war of liberation. And the liberation appears to be working. Nothing is guaranteed; “Everything in Iraq is hard,” Ambassador Crocker once said. But regardless of where one stood on the war and the surge, what we see unfolding in Iraq today is something to be grateful for, and to take pride in.

In the NY Times, Efraim Karsh discusses the lack of cohesion amongst the Islamic states and the implications for US foreign policy.

…So, if the Muslim bloc is just as fractious as any other group of seemingly aligned nations, what does it mean for United States policy in the Islamic world?

For one, it should give us more impetus to take a harder line with Iran. Just as the Muslim governments couldn’t muster the minimum sense of commonality for holding an all-Islamic sports tournament, so they would be unlikely to rush to Iran’s aid in the event of sanctions, or even a military strike.

Beyond the customary lip service about Western imperialism and “Crusaderism,” most other Muslim countries would be quietly relieved to see the extremist regime checked. It’s worth noting that the two dominant Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been at the forefront of recent international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. …

In the WSJ, Bret Stephens writes about how Milton Friedman, and free market ideas, helped Chile to become South America’s most prosperous nation.

…In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina’s.

What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman’s academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile’s “Chicago Boys” had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on.

…Pinochet … In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.

…By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet’s democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America’s richest people. They have the continent’s lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

Chile also has some of the world’s strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. …

Bill Kristol says that Republicans did not stop Obama. Here’s who did:

(1) President Obama himself. As one wag commented, Obama turned out to be quite an effective community organizer. But the community he organized was a majority of the American people in opposition to his agenda of big-government liberalism.

(2) Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Republicans, facing overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, should thank their lucky stars to have squared off against an ideologically blinkered speaker of the House and a short-tempered, incompetent majority leader of the Senate.

(3) Conservative and independent grassroots activists. It’s this simple: No Tea Parties, no defeat of Obamacare. It wasn’t just the practical and political effect of the demonstrations across the nation. It was the example of people not being intimidated by elite opinion, the example of their  willingness to fight what was supposed to be an inevitable new era of liberal big government, and the enterprise that self-generating and self-organizing activists showed in resisting the Obama agenda. …

Robert Samuelson says that politicians on both sides of the aisle have delusions about the budget. We disagree with part of Samuelson’s assessment regarding tax cuts, as the Reagan tax cuts fueled economic growth after the disastrous Carter years. However, Republicans have done little in recent decades to restrain government growth or reduce spending, which has contributed to the current economic crisis and increased the national debt.

…On the left, President Obama and Democrats have spent the past year arguing that, despite the government’s massive deficits and overspending, they can responsibly propose even more spending. Future deficits are to be ignored (present deficits, to be sure, partially reflect the economic slump). The proposal is “responsible” because it’s “paid for” through new taxes and spending cuts. Even if these financing sources were completely believable (they aren’t), the logic is that the government can undertake new spending before dealing with the consequences of old spending. Of course, most households and businesses can’t do this.

Politicians can, because it’s all make-believe. They pretend to deal with budget deficits when they aren’t. Just recently, the Democratic Congress passed a new version of the “pay-go” budget rule. Under pay-as-you-go rules, if Congress cuts taxes or increases spending beyond present policies, it must find offsets by raising taxes or cutting spending elsewhere. This seems a prudent discipline, and Obama bragged about being “responsible.” What he didn’t say is that this new pay-go contains huge exceptions. These include the renewal of most of the Bush tax cuts, revisions of the alternative minimum tax, higher Medicare reimbursements for doctors and overhaul of the estate tax. Over the next decade, these exceptions could be worth about $2.5 trillion, says Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. …

David Harsanyi examines the conflict of interest in the government investigating Toyota while owning GM.

…The other majority shareholder in GM (also on your dime) is the United Auto Workers union. As Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner recently uncovered, 59 Democrats serving on the two congressional panels involved in the investigation of the non-unionized Toyota had received re-election campaign contributions from UAW.

Then there is the administration. Less than a year ago, Ford — a private, non-government good ol’ American corporation — issued the largest single recall in its long history. A total of 4.5 million vehicles were recalled after it was learned that faulty switches were fire hazards.

At the time, the Obama administration’s overmatched Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood gently prodded customers “to pay attention.” When news of Toyota’s problems began to emerge, before we even knew what it was all about, LaHood told Americans to “stop driving” them. (He later claimed to have misspoke.) …

…There is, however, an unsettling conflict of interest. Whatever happened with these cars, the subsequent investigation creates suspicion about the motives of those involved. And just another of countless reasons that Washington should stay out of the car business.

In the NY Times, Ross Douthat sees presidential material in Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.

…Since then, though, he’s become America’s best governor. In a just world, Daniels’s record would make him the Tea Party movement’s favorite politician. During the fat years of the mid-2000s, while most governors went on spending sprees, he was trimming Indiana’s payroll, slowing the state government’s growth, and turning a $800 million deficit into a consistent surplus. Now that times are hard, his fiscal rigor is paying off: the state’s projected budget shortfall for 2011, as a percentage of the budget, is the third-lowest in the country.

But Daniels hasn’t just been a Dr. No on policy. His “Healthy Indiana” plan, which offers catastrophic coverage to low-income residents, aspires to eventually cover 130,000 people, about a third of the state’s long-term uninsured. He’s pushed targeted investments in kindergarten programs, the police force and the child welfare office. And he’s been a pragmatic free-marketeer, rather than a strict ideologue. His controversial decision to lease the Indiana toll road reaped $3.8 billion for the state. But when an attempt to outsource welfare enrollment went awry, Daniels yanked the system back into the public sector.

…And unlike both CPAC-goers and his party’s leadership, Daniels was blunt about the challenges of deficit reduction. “There’s been some very healthy hell-raising going on in the country,” he said of the Tea Parties. “But to my knowledge, nobody’s gotten up in front of those rallies and explained what’s going to have to happen.” His ideal approach to the deficit would look like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, all spending restraint and no new taxes. But one way or another, deficit reduction “has to be done” — even if “you have to take the second- or third-best method.” …

Nancy Pelosi’s hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has an article from Sally Pipes on the dismal state of the Canadian healthcare system.

…Danny Williams, the premier of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, traveled to the United States earlier this month to undergo heart valve surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. With his trip, Williams joined a long list of Canadians who have decided that they prefer American medicine to their own country’s government-run health system when their lives are on the line. …

…Lawmakers should take Williams’ case to heart. Canada’s experience shows that government health care leads to waiting lists, rationing and lower quality of care. …

…Canadian patients also face wait times for medical procedures. Nearly 700,000 Canadians are on a waiting list for surgery or other treatments.

A Canadian patient has to wait roughly four months for the average surgical or other therapeutic treatment. Wait times were similar a decade ago – even though the government has substantially increased health care spending since then. …

This is an editorial from the Chicago Tribune that was posted in Pickings last August. Chicago aldermen had been trying to prevent a Wal-Mart from opening on the south side of Chicago. This is background for the next story.

…When that Chicago store opened in 2006, it was flooded with applicants for 450 jobs. But the aldermen want to dodge a vote to allow another Wal-Mart — the first on the South Side — because they’re petrified over the influence of organized labor on local elections.

Organized labor doesn’t like Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart doesn’t have union jobs. It just has jobs (with an average hourly wage of $12.05 in Chicago).

The aldermen, of course, already have jobs. They get paid $110,556 a year and they figure that as long as they keep the labor unions off their backs, they’ll keep making $110,556 a year. Who says the City Council doesn’t generate jobs? If you’re one of the 50 aldermen, your unemployment rate is 0 percent.

But the unemployment rate for the rest of Chicago is above 10 percent. …

Chicago Business.com tells us about a coalition of South-side ministers prepared to fight the Chicago government to get Wal-Marts built in Chicago. This is not your president’s community organizing. It’s much better.

…The alliance of just over 200 ministers, representing more than 100,000 congregants, will first demand that Mayor Richard M. Daley grant administrative approval to begin construction of a Wal-Mart at the Chatham Market shopping center, saving that project from falling into foreclosure. The group also will pressure aldermen to approve that store and others in retail-starved neighborhoods such as Englewood and Pullman.

If, as appears likely, more Wal-Marts don’t get the green light this year, the ministers say they’ll mount a campaign against aldermen who oppose the big retailer’s expansion. Taking a page from union groups that have held Wal-Mart back, the ministers say they will support candidates in favor of the store with political advertising and urge their congregants to vote against dissenters.

“The pressure must be applied, starting with the mayor,” says the Rev. Larry Roberts of Trinity All Nations Ministries on the South Side. “The procrastination is just bringing more damage to the city and the communities.”

…The pastors are betting that community sentiment in favor of Wal-Mart has grown immensely as store closings and job losses have piled up, leaving Wal-Mart the only viable hope in many poor neighborhoods

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David Goldman comments on the state of the economy and what lies ahead.

…We see the magical incantation, “There’s no place like home!,” in numerous guises. The unemployed–20% of Americans according to a Gallup poll of 20,000 individuals–are more likely to support President Obama than the general public. They still hope against hope that Obama will wave a magic wand and allow them to click their heels and go home. I dubbed him “Obama bin Lottery” in January 2008 after his surprise South Carolina primary victory. With nothing to lose, the unemployed might as well hope…

…Americans have trouble realizing how much trouble they have. The numbers trickling out during the past couple of weeks suggest a Wile E. Coyote effect, to mix pop culture metaphors. During 2009, most people just didn’t look down. But with 30% of home mortgages at the waterline or below it, and a 20% effective unemployment rate, the household balance sheet is shot–and so is the balance sheet of small business. In January, Americans took a collective look down, and the numbers began to plunge like the Road Runner’s canine nemesis. The first to go, of course, was consumer confidence, a squishy number to be sure, but one that does not often show a 10-point drop. …

…The US economy simply can’t run on 20% unemployment. Consumers will go to the mattresses, retail and service business will drop like flies, investors will pull in their horns, and things will get worse. The only way to reverse the problem is to persuade capital to take more risk, and the only available policy lever to accomplish this is the elimination of taxes on capital income–interest, dividends, and capital gains. As the Obama administration is proposing the precise opposite (an increase in taxation of all these categories supposedly for Medicare) it is more likely that policy will aggravate the problem rather than cure it. …

John Hinderaker of Power Line posts about the Obami refusal to back the UK in the newest dispute with Argentina.

…Why Barack Obama hates England is hard to say, but his antipathy is distressingly real. Now, Obama has declared that the U.S. is neutral with regard to the Falklands. The Telegraph headlines: “Et tu, Barack? America betrays Britain in her hour of need”:

Washington has declined to back Britain in its dispute with Argentina over drilling rights in the waters surrounding the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. …

…For this alliance to survive, both countries must recognise their obligations and, from time to time, that involves one of us setting aside more localised concerns for the sake of the cause. Tony Blair would have preferred it if President Bush had been prepared to wait for a second UN resolution before launching the invasion of Iraq, but he decided that Britain should follow America into battle nevertheless. He recognised that the preservation of the Atlantic alliance had to be prioritised above all else, both for our sake and the sake of the world. …

…So it is truly shocking that Barack Obama has decided to disregard our shared history and insist that we have to fight this battle on our own. …

It is astonishing that any administration could make such a mess of both domestic and foreign policy in barely more than a year. One wonders whether we will have any allies left by the end of President Obama’s term in January 2013.

Toby Harnden has a post on Jeb Bush criticizing Sarah Palin.

…Bush then delivers what amounts to a devastating critique of Palin: “I don’t know what her deal is. My belief is in 2010 and 2012 public leaders need to have intellectual curiosity. The world is really an amazing place but it is very complex, it is very fast moving. If you think you’ve got it all figured out, the minute you start thinking that is the first day of your demise.”

Just in case Bush thinks he’s stopped talking about Palin, he adds: “So if she has those skills and she wants to run then she’ll be a great candidate.”

It is hard to dispute that Bush is right on both counts. Palin clearly possesses a rare and natural political talent. But thus far she has displayed very little willingness to build on this by studying the world and coming up with some intelligent conclusions or questions about it. …

In Investor’s Business Daily, David Hogberg interviews Thomas Sowell about his new book, Intellectuals and Society.

…IBD: What incentives and constraints do intellectuals face?

Sowell: One of the incentives is that, to the extent that intellectuals stay in their specialty, they have little to gain in terms of either prestige or influence on events. Say, an authority in ancient Mayan civilization just writes about ancient Mayan civilization, then only other specialists in ancient Mayan civilization will know what he is talking about or even be aware of him.

So intellectuals have every incentive to go beyond their area of expertise and competence. But stepping beyond your area of competence is like stepping off a cliff — you may be a genius within that area, but an idiot outside it. …

…IBD: How about those who argue that we can use government to move society in a more conservative direction, like compassionate conservatism? Do they suffer from the vision of the anointed?

Sowell: To some extent, yes. Compassionate conservatism meant that Republicans added to the housing problems created by the Democrats rather than mitigating them.

George W. Bush, for example, was for a law that allowed the Federal Housing Administration to do away with nuisances like down payments on houses. And even his father was for the notion that the federal government should intervene if there were statistical differences among groups in housing or mortgage approvals.

These are people who seem to think that the way to be clever politically is to accept some of the premises of Democrats but reach different conclusions. But if you accept the premises, in many cases you’ve accepted the conclusions. …

In the Atlantic, Corby Kummer reports on a fascinating agricultural movement afoot. And Wal-Mart is behind it.

…I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

Ron McCormick, the senior director of local and sustainable sourcing for Walmart, told me that about three years ago he came upon pictures from the 1920s of thriving apple orchards in Rogers, Arkansas, eight miles from the company’s headquarters. Apples were once shipped from northwest Arkansas by railroad to St. Louis and Chicago. After Washington state and California took over the apple market, hardly any orchards remained. Cabbage, greens, and melons were also once staples of the local farming economy. But for decades, Arkansas’s cash crops have been tomatoes and grapes. A new initiative could diversify crops and give consumers fresher produce. …

John Tierney looks at the latest nutritional mandate in the making; the evidence for which you can take with a grain of …something.

…That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to. …

…Dr. McCarron and his colleagues analyzed surveys from 33 countries around the world and reported that, despite wide differences in diet and culture, people generally consumed about the same amount of salt. There were a few exceptions, like tribes isolated in the Amazon and Africa, but the vast majority of people ate more salt than recommended in the current American dietary guidelines.

The results were so similar in so many places that Dr. McCarron hypothesized that networks in the brain regulate sodium appetite so that people consume a set daily level of salt. If so, that might help explain one apparent paradox related to reports that Americans are consuming more daily calories than they used to. Extra food would be expected to come with additional salt, yet there has not been a clear upward trend in daily salt consumption evident over the years in urinalysis studies, which are considered the best gauge because they directly measure salt levels instead of relying on estimates based on people’s recollections of what they ate…

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David Goldman (AKA Spengler) gives ten reasons why the economy is not recovering. He discusses his number one reason at some length in the post. Here are three of his other reasons:

7. State fiscal crises continue to worsen. “Doomsday is here for the state of Illinois,” California’s last set of cosmetic measures do little to address a $20 billion deficit, Baltimore has no idea how to close a $120 billion deficit. On top of this year’s $200 billion deficit, states face a trillion-dollar shortfall in pension funds.

5) Regional banks continue to drop like flies, with 702 banks holding assets of $403 billion on the danger list.

3) What bank credit is available is funding the US Treasury deficit in the mother of all crowdings-out, replacing commercial loans on banks’ balance sheets…

In the WaPo, Senator Tom Coburn says that government spending is the our biggest problem.

For the past several weeks the American people have been inundated with analysis about what’s wrong with Washington largely from the perspective of Washington insiders who are frustrated about health care and political retirements. We’re told that gridlock, procedural holds, partisanship and extreme ideology are preventing members of Congress from working together. While some of this analysis is true — Washington is petty, partisan and shortsighted — few are acknowledging that Congress does enjoy remarkable unity in one critical area: spending beyond our means.

In the past two years, an institution supposedly paralyzed by gridlock has succeeded in passing the most consequential pieces of legislation it handles every year — appropriations bills — by 3-to-1 margins. In the past few weeks, Congress has increased the debt limit from $12.1 trillion to $14.3 trillion but made no effort to eliminate any wasteful or duplicative spending. Since 1994, both parties have worked together to create 90,000 new earmarks, with only a handful of earmarks going down to defeat. …

…The message of hope that America needs to hear is that individual citizens really do have the power to fire and replace members of the spending supermajority. Since just 1994, the country has experienced several “change” elections that resulted in shifts in power in Washington. These change elections show that our political system is working. When the American people are engaged, new representatives and senators are elected.

The gridlock theorists should remember the wise words of Thomas Jefferson: “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” …

Prepare to be nauseated. In Reason, Steven Greenhut explains the numerous ways in which the government rich are getting richer and more powerful while the rest of us are getting poorer.

Politicians allow government employees to break laws.

In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks—out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide—were protected by a “shield” in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy.

“Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity,” the Register’s Jennifer Muir reported. “Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome. Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that drivers are ‘one of their own’ or related to someone who is.” …

Politicians approve large salaries for people who produce nothing in the economy. Although they do produce more bureaucracy, rules, and regulations that we must pay for and follow.

…There was a time when government work offered lower salaries than comparable jobs in the private sector but more security and somewhat better benefits. These days, government workers fare better than private-sector workers in almost every area—pay, benefits, time off, and job security. And not just in California.

According to a 2007 analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Asbury Park Press, “the average federal worker made $59,864 in 2005, compared with the average salary of $40,505 in the private sector.” … As Heritage Foundation legal analyst James Sherk explained to the Press, “The government doesn’t have to worry about going bankrupt, and there isn’t much competition.”

Politicians legislate excessive pensions that will be paid for by those of us who work in the private sector.

…But the real action isn’t in what government employees are being paid today; it’s in what they’re being promised for tomorrow. Public pensions have swollen to unrecognizable proportions during the last decade. In June 2005, BusinessWeek reported that “more than 14 million public servants and 6 million retirees are owed $2.37 trillion by more than 2,000 different states, cities and agencies,” numbers that have risen since then. State and local pension payouts, the magazine found, had increased 50 percent in just five years.

Then politicians and government workers say there’s not enough money to provide basic services like policing. They don’t tell the truth about why they can’t provide the minimal services that a government should provide its citizens.

In July 2009, Orange County, California, Sheriff Sandra Hutchens proposed more than $20 million in budget cuts to close the gap caused by falling tax revenue. …

…The sheriff failed to identify another reason for the tight budget: In 2001 the Orange County Board of Supervisors had passed a retroactive pension increase for sheriff’s deputies. That policy nearly doubled pension costs from 2000 to 2009, when pension contributions totaled nearly $95 million—20 percent of the sheriff’s budget. So the sheriff decries an economic downturn that is costing her department about $20 million, but she doesn’t mention that a previous pension increase is costing her department more than double that amount. It’s safe to say that had the pension increase not passed, the department would have money to keep officers on the streets and to avoid the cuts the sheriff claims are threatening public safety. …

And the government grows and metastasizes, killing the economy and destroying the standard of living for normal Americans.

…At all levels, state and local government employment grew by 13 percent across the United States from 1994 to 2004. The number of judicial and legal employees increased by 28 percent. The number of public safety workers increased by 21 percent. The number of teachers increased by 22 percent. …

Michael Hodges’ invaluable Grandfather Economic Report uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics to chart the growth in state and local government employees since 1946. Their number has increased from 3.3 million then to 19.8 million today—a 492 percent increase as the country’s population increased by 115 percent. …

Chase Davis, in the Ventura County Star, reports on another perk that California government employees are receiving.

Amid a crippling fiscal crisis, managers throughout California’s government have routinely allowed their employees to amass unused vacation time, enabling hundreds of workers to end their public service careers with payouts topping $100,000, a California Watch investigation has found.

…In one case, James C. Tudor Jr., the former president of the State Compensation Insurance Fund, cashed out six times more vacation time than regulations allow, taking home more than $550,000 after he was fired in 2007 in the wake of an internal probe that “uncovered serious abuses at the highest levels,” according to state Senate documents. …

…State regulations cap the amount of vacation time most employees can accrue at a maximum of 80 workdays, or 640 hours. …

…It also dwarfs caps at some of the state’s largest private employers, including Oracle, Western Digital and Nestlé USA, records and interviews show.

Nestlé in Glendale, for instance, caps its longest-serving employees at 280 hours. …

In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm has the back story on Desiree Rogers’ departure from the White House.

…The departures have started rather early for the Obama Chicago crowd — just 13+ months in. But the power jockeying has been going on inside all along. And today….

…the weeding began. Desiree Rogers, the White House Social Secretary who was such a close Chicago pal of both Obama and his wife Michelle, is gone as of next month. …

You will recall the Obamas’ first-ever White House State Dinner last fall for India’s prime minister, one of dozens of events organized by Rogers. However, the glittery guests included the notoriously uninvited Salahi couple. They were thoroughly searched like everyone else. …

…The Obama political crew, which knows how important family friends are to the boss and, more importantly, the boss’ wife, hung the blame on the Secret Service.

…But here’s Rogers’ problem: She’s not from the Daley Democratic faction that controls the White House now, particularly access to Obama. The Ticket examined the Chicago connections in depth here earlier this month. …

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David Warren likes the president more and more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Krauthammer comments on Toyota’s problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is video footage of Kim’s performance.