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If you’re like Pickerhead, the daily Obama drama is getting tiring. So how about an edition that ignores the current DC mess? We start with John Tierney’s famous NY Times Magazine article on recycling. Then a Mark Steyn send-off for Dominick Dunne, late of Vanity Fair. Next we learn the good news that scallops are making a comeback in Long Island’s Peconic Bay. Dilbert and Dave Barry close things out in the humor section.

Thirteen years ago this June, John Tierney set a NY Times record for irate reader’s letters with a piece he wrote suggesting recycling was a waste. Now that is something to aspire to when contemplating what might be on your tombstone.

…We’re a wicked throwaway society. Plastic packaging and fast-food containers may seem wasteful, but they actually save resources and reduce trash. The typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American household, but it produces one-third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale. Those apples in Dittersdorf’s slide, protected by plastic wrap and foam, are less likely to spoil. The lightweight plastic packaging requires much less energy to manufacture and transport than traditional alternatives like cardboard or paper. Food companies have switched to plastic packaging because they make money by using resources efficiently. A typical McDonald’s discards less than two ounces of garbage for each customer served — less than what’s generated by a typical meal at home.

Plastic packaging is routinely criticized because it doesn’t decay in landfills, but neither does most other packaging, as William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, has discovered from his excavations of landfills. Rathje found that paper, cardboard and other organic materials — while technically biodegradable — tend to remain intact in the airless confines of a landfill. These mummified materials actually use much more landfill space than plastic packaging, which has steadily been getting smaller as manufacturers develop stronger, thinner materials. Juice cartons take up half the landfill space occupied by the glass bottles they replaced; 12 plastic grocery bags fit in the space occupied by one paper bag. …

…”I don’t understand why anyone thinks New York City has a garbage crisis because it can’t handle all its own waste,” says James DeLong, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. “With that kind of logic, you’d have to conclude that New York City has a food crisis because it can’t grow all the vegetables its people need within the city limits, so it should turn Central Park into a farm and ration New Yorkers’ consumption of vegetables to what they can grow there.” Some politicians in other states have threatened to stop the importing of New York’s garbage — it’s an easy way to appeal to some voters’ chauvinism — but in the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would only be depriving their own constituents of jobs and tax revenue.

We’re cursing future generations with our waste. Dittersdorf’s slide showing New Yorkers’ annual garbage output — 15 square blocks, 20 stories high — looked frightening because the trash was sitting, uncompressed, in the middle of the city. But consider a different perspective — a national, long-term perspective. A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side. …

…Are reusable cups and plates better than disposables? A ceramic mug may seem a more virtuous choice than a cup made of polystyrene, the foam banned by ecologically conscious local governments. But it takes much more energy to manufacture the mug, and then each washing consumes more energy (not to mention water). According to calculations by Martin Hocking, a chemist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, you would have to use the mug 1,000 times before its energy-consumption-per-use is equal to the cup. (If the mug breaks after your 900th coffee, you would have been better off using 900 polystyrene cups.) A more immediate environmental impact has been demonstrated by studies in restaurants: the average number of bacterial organisms on reusable cups, plates and flatware is 200 times greater than on disposable ones. …

Mark Steyn writes about the life, and coincidental events, of the late Dominick Dunne.

…In 1991 the diminutive scribbler in the owlish glasses and the baggy suit was in Palm Beach covering the rape trial of Ted’s nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Had he not been there, he would never have heard the tantalizing tidbit that young William had been in the Skakel house in Connecticut on the night in 1975 when Martha Moxley was murdered. Had he not picked up that unfounded bit of gossip, his curiosity might not have been awakened and he might never have written a fictionalized account of the case, A Season In Purgatory, a roman à clef compressing three generations of Kennedy gossip into one book. Had his novel not reactivated interest in the murder, he might not have had leaked to him a copy of a private investigator’s report on Michael Skakel. Had he not been in court in Los Angeles in 1995 when O.J.’s dream team played the “race card” crudely but effectively against Mark Fuhrman, he might not have felt so sorry for the LAPD detective that he struck up a friendship and forwarded the Skakel investigator’s leaked report. Had Fuhrman not used the Skakel report to write a damning book on the Moxley case, the state of Connecticut might never have reopened it and put Michael Skakel on trial. It was a very slender thread that led to a rare Kennedy conviction. “It is a fact of my life that coincidences happen to me,” says the narrator in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. For Dunne, the greatest coincidence was as stark as a gravestone: Martha Moxley was killed on the same date—Oct. 30—as his own daughter. …

…Dunne was a stage manager on The Howdy Doody Show and a producer of C-list movies before a chance encounter with Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown led to his reinvention as a writer. The preoccupations of the last half of his adult life are summed up in the title of another book, An Inconvenient Woman, a thinly disguised fictionalization of Alfred Bloomingdale’s murdered mistress Vicki Morgan. In both his crime reporting and his novels, there’s usually a powerful man and an “inconvenient woman”—sure, she’s hot, she’s fun, she’s cute, but there comes a point when she’s an inconvenience. And then you lawyer up and make the inconvenience go away. That’s what Kennedys do, with both the passing fancies—the waitresses, the campaign cuties, the gal next door—and with their routinely “annulled” first marriages. That’s what Ted did with Joan, the wife he drove to alcoholism. That’s what he did with Mary Jo, swimming up from the depths of that Chappaquiddick pond and leaving her down there pressed up against a shrinking air pocket waiting for the rescue team he never called. Nice girl, but inconvenient. So he got back to the hotel, worked the phones, called in the family fixers, squared the local authorities, started the speechwriters working on the statement.

Dominick Dunne couldn’t go along with the “dream teams” and the rest of the flim-flam, not after the murderer of his 22-year- old daughter got a three-year sentence. So he was there for the “inconvenient women,” all the way to his last big trial, when Phil Spector became the latest big shot to date a gal to death. Poor Lana Clarkson wasn’t a “legend” or a “troubled genius,” like Phil, just a one-time B-movie queen who wound up in a B-movie ending. …

…An assistant of mine loved his fiction. “This is the way airport novels should be,” she said. Which is a good way of putting it. Any competent hack can do the brand names and the restaurants and the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous stuff, but Dunne understood the subtler currents coursing just below the surface. He liked the parties and the gossip and the name-dropping; the movie stars and the dispossessed Euro-princelings and the Kennedy cousins. He was of them, but not one of them, not entirely. And so, notwithstanding who got top billing, there was a kind of symmetry in his and Ted Kennedy’s all but simultaneous expiry: a man who disposed of inconvenient women, and a man who ensured they weren’t forgotten. …

In the NY Times, Dindya Bhanoo reports on the scallop restoration effort and the mysterious brown tide that had decimated the bivalve population.

…The recovery resulted partly from dedicated efforts by scientists to rebuild the scallop population, said Stephen Tettelbach, a professor of biology at Long Island University.

Dr. Tettelbach is in the fifth year of a five-year, $2.3 million bay scallop restoration project, financed by Suffolk County, that has released nearly five million scallops into Peconic Bay waters. Working with researchers from Cornell Cooperative Extension — a university outreach group — and the State University at Stony Brook, Dr. Tettelbach has helped create densely packed scallop sanctuaries, primarily in Orient Harbor, Hallock Bay and Flanders Bay. …

…In a separate effort, the Nature Conservancy in New York has released hundreds of thousands of baby scallops into the Peconic Bay since 2002.

Yet, considerable mystery still surrounds the onset and the waning of brown tide, said Christopher J. Gobler, a professor at Stony Brook who studies toxic algae.

Scientists know that the toxins in brown tide, which tints the water a coffee brown, slow the rhythmic movements of scallop gills and prevent feeding. Brown tide also blocks sunlight from reaching the bay’s bottom, where eelgrass beds grow and scallops nest.

…“We know if a water body is more likely to get brown tide,” Dr. Gobler said. “But it can also break suddenly, and we have no idea why.” …

Dilbert’s Scott Adams has a hilarious story. Here’s the warm-up.

Now that I’m married, one of the questions I fear the most is “Can you look in the X and see if you can find the Y?” Oh, I try. But my wife refuses to learn that I will never succeed.

X and Y might represent, for example, the special cheese hiding in the fridge, or the “good pillow” hiding in the bedroom, or the yellow folder hiding in the kitchen. There are a variety of reasons I will not succeed in finding the desired item. About 25% of the time the item is not in the room, or pile, or container where it should be. Another 25% of the time the item is inadequately described, as in “the light brown socks in the drawer with the other brown socks, but not camel colored or reddish brown, and not the old ones.”

But the biggest reason for my seek-and-find failures can be attributed to Transdimensional Materialization Phenomena (TMP). This involves items not being where they belong when I look for them, but tunneling through a wormhole and materializing right where they belong when my wife looks in the same place two minutes later. Apparently this phenomenon is triggered by just the right coupling of exasperation and sarcasm. …

Parents of young children, in particular, will appreciate stories of theme birthday parties gone wild. Dave Barry tells an amusing tale.

Things are tense in our house. Our daughter is about to turn 4, which means we have to hold a birthday party, which means my wife is, at the moment, insane.

Like many moms, my wife believes that a child’s birthday party requires as much planning as a lunar landing — more, actually, because you have to hire a clown. Serious moms plan birthday parties months in advance, choosing a theme …and relentlessly incorporate this theme in every element of the party, including invitations, decorations, music, games, craft projects, snacks, cake, entertainment, favors, little gift bags for the favors, ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, name tags for the ribbons for the little gift bags for the favors, and on and on until the mom has lost all touch with human reality. If you want proof, go to one of the Internet sites devoted to birthday planning, such as birthdaypartyideas.com, where moms report, in detail, the deranged lengths to which they have gone to stage birthday parties for small children. They sound like this:

“Our theme for Meghan’s third birthday was `The Enchanted Fairy Forest.’ To create a `forest’ in the family room, I made full-size `trees’ out of fiberglass, which I painted brown and festooned with 17,000 `leaves’ I cut by hand from green felt, accented with live squirrels that I caught using a galvanized-steel trap baited with Peter Pan creamy peanut butter. For the `forest floor,’ I brought in four tons of mulch with a Lawn Boy yard tractor. For the `sky,’ I used the actual sky, which was visible because I removed the ceiling and roof with a chainsaw, which is when my husband, Ed, left me, but the overall effect was well worth it.”

You think I’m exaggerating, but that’s only because you haven’t browsed “birthdaypartyideas.com.”

It would be different if dads planned birthday parties. First off, the party would be about a month after the child’s actual birthday, which is when Dad would remember it. Dad’s party theme would be “delivery pizza,” which would also serve as the cake, the craft project and the party favor. The entertainment would be pulling Dad’s finger. The kids would have just as much fun. …

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Today’s themes are jobs and recovery. We start with Peter Schiff, then add Ed Morrissey, IBD editors, Nouriel Roubini, James Pethokoukis, and Robert Samuelson. Daniel Gross was the one outlier who said job growth will start soon. So he’s here too. Fair and (somewhat) balanced, you decide.

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff explains why Obama’s economic policies are not creating jobs.

…Obama is pursuing, with unprecedented vigor, the same policies that have for decades undermined our industrial base and yoked us to an unsustainable consumer/credit driven economy. This doubling down on Washington’s past failures is destroying jobs at an alarming rate. Today we learned that the September trade deficit surged by 18.2%, the largest gain in ten years. Much of the deficit resulted from Americans spending Cash-for-Clunkers stimulus money on imported cars – or “American” cars loaded to the sunroof with imported parts. In exchange for more domestic debt, we have succeeded only in creating foreign jobs. …

…As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. …

…If profit opportunities exist, jobs will be created. Otherwise, they will not. Of course, anything the government does to raise the cost of employment, such as a higher minimum wage, mandated heath care, or greater regulatory burdens, not only prevents new jobs from being created but also causes many that already exist to be destroyed. Anything that diminishes the profit potential of extra hiring will diminish the number of job opportunities that are created. Also, since it is after-tax profits against which employers measure risk, the higher the marginal rate of income tax, the less likely employers will be able to hire. …

In Hot Air, Ed Morrissey comments on the last month’s deficit that is even higher than predicted. The deficit for the first month of the fiscal year was $176.36. Eleven more months like that we’ll have a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit; just about $6 billion a day.

What better way to kick off Barack Obama’s first full budget year as President than with a deficit that exceeded the White House’s own projections as well as analysts’ expectations?  The federal government busted the budget worse than last October by $20 billion with a deficit of $176.36 billion for the month.  That used to be considered a decent deficit target … for an entire year…

…Higher deficits mean more borrowing.  More borrowing means more debt service.  As deficits continue to rise, the federal government will have to direct more and more of its revenues to paying the interest on the accumulated debt.  In September, that came to over $17 billion — just for the interest, not for principle reduction.  Investors Business Daily warns that Obama’s spending spree will eventually force Washington to spend 40% of its revenues on debt service…

…Obama now says he wants to attack the deficit, but without serious spending cuts and reduction in the size of government, any such reductions would have to rely on heavier taxation — which would kill the economy, reduce federal revenues, and put us even further behind on debt reduction.  The only way to fix the problem is to dismantle Leviathan, and unfortunately Obama is headed in the opposite direction.

Call off the jobs summit! The IBD Editorial board has a simple plan to create jobs.

…This isn’t rocket science. Any business owner, entrepreneur or manager can tell you that job creation requires new businesses, new investment in plant and equipment, and economic policies conducive to both….

…Job creation closely tracks investment in plants and equipment. So anything the government does to remove barriers to business investment — whether by cutting regulations, slashing taxes or reducing government spending — will lead to more jobs.

Of particular importance are small businesses, which — as a new report from the Kauffman Foundation noted — created virtually all the new jobs from 1980 to 2005.

Today, small firms suffer the most damage from congressional incompetence. The newly passed health care bill, for example, slaps families with more than $500,000 in income with an added 5.4% tax. But, according to Congress’ Joint Tax Committee, a third of this will be paid by small, family-owned businesses. …

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Nouriel Roubini says there are two economies and the larger one is still suffering.

While the United States recently reported 3.5 per cent GDP growth in the third quarter, suggesting that the most severe recession since the Great Depression is over, the American economy is actually much weaker than official data suggest. In fact, official measures of GDP may grossly overstate growth in the economy, as they don’t capture the fact that business sentiment among small firms is abysmal and their output is still falling sharply. Properly corrected for this, third-quarter GDP may have been 2 per cent rather than 3.5 per cent.

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Consider the following facts. While America’s official unemployment rate is already 10.2 per cent, the figure jumps to a whopping 17.5 per cent when discouraged workers and partially employed workers are included. And, while data from firms suggest that job losses in the past three months were about 600,000, household surveys, which include self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs, suggest a number above two million. …

In The Street.com, Doug Kass does a take-off of an SNL skit in a piece titled; “What Recovery!?!”

Of course, this is a takeoff from “Saturday Night Live’s” Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers. If you are not familiar with their “SNL” schtick during their Weekend Updates, here are a few of their Really!?! segments.

Really, the economy is recovering? Really, economists?

I mean, really!?! …

…And, really, an economic recovery without job growth? According to the household survey, nearly 600,000 jobs were lost last month, and 15.7 million Americans are out of work. Really!?!

The credit mechanisms of the shadow-banking system and the securitization market remain adrift, and banks aren’t lending. An economic recovery without credit? Really!?!

How about the state and local governments that have provided an anchor to growth in previous economic periods? Only two states have balanced budgets, and New York is letting out prisoners early to save money. Really!?!  …

In Reuters, James Pethokoukis reviews a report from economist David Rosenberg, who says that unemployment will get worse.

Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg, formerly of Merrill Lynch, thinks the unemployment rate is going to at least 12 percent, maybe even 13 percent. Optimists, Rosenberg explains, underestimate the incredible damage done to the labor market during this downturn. And even before this downturn, the economy was not generating jobs in huge numbers. If he is right, all political bets are off. I think the Democrats could lose the House and effective control of the Senate.  I think you would also be talking about the ise of third party and perhaps a challenger to Obama in 2012.

So here is what I gleaned from Rosenberg’s latest report (bold is mine):

2. During this two-year recession, employment has declined a record 8 million. Even in percent terms, this is a record in the post-WWII experience.

10. But when we do start to see the economic clouds part in a more decisive fashion, what are employers likely to do first? Well, naturally they will begin to boost the workweek and just getting back to pre-recession levels would be the same as hiring more than two million people. Then there are the record number of people who got furloughed into part-time work and again, they total over nine million, and these folks are not counted as unemployed even if they are working considerably fewer days than they were before the credit crunch began.

12. After all, the recession ended in November 2001 with an unemployment rate at 5.5% and yet the unemployment rate did not peak until June 2003, at 6.3%. The recession ended in March 1991 when the jobless rate was 6.8% and it did not peak until June 1992, at 7.8%. In both cases, the unemployment rate peaked well more than a year after the recession technically ended. The 2001 cycle was a tech capital stock deflation; the 1991 cycle was the Savings & Loan debacle; this past cycle was an asset deflation and credit collapse of epic proportions. And economists think that the unemployment rate is in the process of cresting now? Just remember it is the same consensus community that predicted at the beginning of 2008 that the jobless rate would peak out below 6% this cycle.

Pethokoukis also blogs on Obamacare.

…It turns out the Chinese are curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Nothing happening in Washington today should give Beijing any comfort or confidence about what may happen tomorrow. Healthcare reform was originally promoted as a way to “bend the curve” on escalating entitlement costs, the major part of which is financing Medicare and Medicaid. That is looking more and more like an overpromise that can’t be delivered. …

In WaPo, Robert Samuelson discusses the hypocrisy of forcing Obamacare on the nation during such a serious recession.

There is an air of absurdity to what is mistakenly called “health-care reform.” Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. As we recover slowly from a devastating recession, it’s widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending and curb massive future deficits. The administration estimates these at $9 trillion from 2010 to 2019. The president and all his top economic advisers proclaim the same cautionary message.

So what do they do? Just the opposite. Their far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system — which Congress is halfway toward enacting — would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he’s doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both. …

…Equally misleading, Obama’s top economic advisers assert that the present proposals would slow the growth of overall national health spending. Outside studies disagree. Three studies (two by the consulting firm the Lewin Group for the Peterson Foundation and one by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency) conclude that various congressional plans would increase national health spending compared with the effect of no legislation. The studies variously estimate that the extra spending, over the next decade, would be $750 billion, $525 billion and $114 billion. The reasoning: Greater use of the health-care system by the newly insured would overwhelm cost-saving measures (bundled payments, comparative effectiveness research, tort reform), which are either weak or experimental. …

With a different take on the economy, Daniel Gross, in Slate, thinks that unemployment will improve soon. Gross is here often, so we thought we should include his job comments.

…But some recent data points, and an understanding of the behavior of companies at different phases of the business cycle, suggest we’ll have job creation sooner rather than later.

Before things get better, they have to get worse more slowly. That’s already happening. After the credit meltdown, companies prepared for Armageddon by hacking jobs indiscriminately. Between November 2008 and April 2009, employers reduced payrolls by 645,000 per month. But in October, BLS reported that the U.S. economy lost 190,000 jobs, and it revised down the job loss figures for August and September. First-time unemployment claims are falling.

Other data give more reason to hope. In the third quarter, productivity—econospeak for companies doing more work with the same amount of labor—rose at a 9.5 percent annual rate. We’ve just witnessed the fastest two-quarter productivity surge since the first year of the Kennedy administration. Economists can read these omens the way Roman priests read chicken entrails. And here’s one of their explanations: Just as investors and businesspeople don’t believe things could ever go wrong at the peak of the boom, they have difficulty imagining things can get better at the trough of the bust. And so they respond to rising demand not by hiring new employees but by coaxing existing employees to work harder. But just as hamsters can run only so fast on their treadmills, there are limits to productivity growth. “If you look at economies over many centuries, you can’t grow productivity for 7 or 9 percent for more than two or three quarters,” said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at New York-based Economic Cycle Research Institute, whose leading employment indicators are looking up. “At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work.” Should the economy expand in the fourth quarter at the same 3.5 percent annual rate it did in the third quarter—as it shows every sign of doing—companies won’t have any choice but to hire, says Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners. “There’s an outside chance we could see job growth by the end of the year.” …

The Economist reports on the increase in college enrollment.

A business that jacks up its prices during a recession is usually asking to lose customers. Not so America’s colleges, which are simultaneously raising tuition fees and experiencing record levels of enrolment. The Technical College System of Georgia, for instance, whose 28 campuses teach everything from power-line maintenance to dental hygiene, has sharply raised its fees, yet the number of students is up 24% from a year earlier. Campus parking lots are so full that “we got them parking in cow pastures,” says a spokesman.

Across the country, college enrolment rates are at an all-time high. In October 41% of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in either two-year colleges (which specialise in vocational training) or four-year colleges (which grant undergraduate degrees) or higher, up from 39% a year earlier. Yet tuition fees have risen by an average of 4-7%.

The economy is the most immediate culprit. The unemployment rate hit 10.2% in October, up sharply from 9.8% in September, the first time it has reached double digits since 1983. Among 16-to-24-year-olds, it was a dismal 19.1%. Faced with the worst job prospects in a generation, many young people are deciding to go to college instead. …

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Yesterday it was Afghan force levels. Today the KSM trial in New York City.

The decision to prosecute terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through the US court system is being criticized for the national security threat it poses, the damage to intelligence and intelligence-gathering, and the security threat for New York and those involved in the trial. We hear from a number of commentators on these topics, and on the inefficiency and illogical disruption of the military prosecutorial process already started, as well as the political ideology and poor judgment by Obama and Holder that led to this.

Investor’s Business Daily starts a five part series on the housing crisis written by Thomas Sowell.

And the cartoonists go crazy with Obama’s bow to the emperor of Japan.

Peter Wehner posts in Contentions about the upcoming terrorist trial.

The Obama administration is pursuing the prosecution of the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York. In light of this astonishing decision, I was reminded by a friend that, according to the New York Times, Sheikh Mohammed met his captors with cocky defiance at first, telling one veteran CIA officer that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer. It looks as though Sheikh Mohammed has seen his defiance vindicated. He has now found an administration more amenable to his view of justice than was the previous one. The Holderization of American justice continues. And I suspect that there will be bad consequences all around for this action.

Bill Kristol comments on Holder’s lack of judgment regarding several aspects of the upcoming trial.

Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York will be “truly the trial of the century.”

It’s unbelievable that the attorney general would use that phrase in the course of justifying his decision. …

…Leave aside all the practical problems with trying KSM and his henchmen in a civilian court. Doesn’t Eric Holder realize he’s inviting a circus-like “juicy tabloid trial” for men who have the blood of thousands of Americans on their hands? Does he really think such a trial will contribute to “fairness and justice,” as he claims? Does he think military tribunals aren’t fair and just? And did it never occur to him to ask whether giving the terrorists the chance to create a tabloid spectacle is an appropriate way to honor our dead and those who continue to fight the jihadists?

I’m very doubtful a “trial of the century” will serve the cause of fairness and justice. I’m certain it won’t help the cause of victory.

Andy McCarthy comments that Obama’s and Holder’s political agenda is more important to them than national security. He gives some background, then discusses the trial.

…Today’s announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.

Let’s take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs’ execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today. …

…So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Turns out David Paterson, NY Governor, also thinks it’s a terrible decision.

Gov. David Paterson openly criticized the White House on Monday, saying he thought it was a terrible idea to move alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists to New York for trial.

“This is not a decision that I would have made. I think terrorism isn’t just attack, it’s anxiety and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country,” he said.

Paterson’s comments break with Democrats, who generally support the President’s decision.

“Our country was attacked on its own soil on September 11, 2001 and New York was very much the epicenter of that attack. Over 2,700 lives were lost,” he said. “It’s very painful. We’re still having trouble getting over it. We still have been unable to rebuild that site and having those terrorists so close to the attack is gonna be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers.”

Paterson also said that the White House warned him six months ago this very situation would happen. …

Jennifer Rubin joins in the condemnation. She includes a statement from Senator Lieberman expressing his disapproval.

Pete, the decision to transport Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the U.S. to be tried in an Article III court, presumably with the same rights as common American criminals, is shocking and entirely unnecessary. I would submit that someone in the Obama administration recognizes this. As pointed out to me today by a congressman infuriated by the decision, the president is out of the country. Congress is not in session. It’s a Friday. The ultimate bad-news dump. In this context, it suggests not only a queasy awareness that the American people won’t like this but also, frankly, political cowardice. This is a major decision with long-term consequences. If the president believes what he is doing is right, he should exercise leadership and explain it to the American people. Himself.

But, again, the decision itself is utterly unnecessary. As Sen. Joe Lieberman has pointed out, we have a military-tribunal system designed for precisely these cases. His statement reminded us:

“The military commission system recently signed into law by the President as part of the National Defense Authorization Act provides standards of due process and fairness that fully comply with the requirements established by the Supreme Court and the Geneva Conventions. Earlier this year, when passing the National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate also passed language expressing its clear intent that military commissions rather than civilian courts in the U.S. are the appropriate forum for the trial of these alleged terrorists. I share the views of more than 140 family members of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks who recently wrote to the Senate urging that the individuals charged with responsibility for those attacks should be tried by military commission rather than in civilian courts in the United States: It is inconceivable that we would bring these alleged terrorists back to New York for trial, to the scene of the carnage they created eight years ago, and give them a platform to mock the suffering of their victims and the victims’ families, and rally their followers to continue waging jihad against America.”

And let’s recall how we got here. An informed legal guru observes that we decided to prosecute KSM in a military commission in part because past trials (e.g., those of the “Blind Sheikh” and Ramzi Yousef) may have compromised intelligence. So now we’ve gone back to the very system that, for legitimate national-security reasons, we had abandoned. …

Writing in WSJ, John Yoo has an excellent article on KSM’s background, how the intelligence information from the trial will be used by Al Qaeda, and the military commission option designed to handle such cases.

…Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the “blind Sheikh”), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.

In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.

Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be. …

In the American Spectator, Philip Klein writes about the security issues that former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted in a talk. Mukasey was the judge in the trial from the first World Trade Center attack.

…There would also be tremendous security issues involved with making sure that courthouses, jails, the judge and jury, were all safe.

“It would take a whole lot more credulousness than I have available to be optimistic about the outcome of this latest experiment,” Mukasey said at the conclusion of his formal remarks.

During a question and answer session that followed, Mukasey was asked if he felt the jails in New York were secure enough to make sure terrorists would not escape, but he said that wasn’t really the issue.

“If you ask the wrong question, you’re sure to get the wrong answer,” Mukasey responded. “Of course it’s secure. They’re not going to escape. The question is not whether they’re going to escape, the question is whether not only that facility, but the city at large will then become the focus for mischief in the form of murder by adherents of KSM, whether this raises the odds that it will. And I would suggest to you that it raises them very high. It is also whether the proceeding, even assuming that it goes forward within the lifetime of anybody in this room, is one where confidential information is able to be kept confidential, and a trial is able to proceed in an orderly way.”

He later added that, “to the extent that they are within prisons, they are a threat there as well. Any of these people would be a virtually totemic figure in a prison.” He argued that “shoe bomber” Richard Reid’s success in challenging his solitary confinement shows that there’s no guarantee that convicted terrorists would stay isolated from the rest of the prison population. …

Rachel Adams, in a Weekly Standard blog, posts on Holder’s arrogance and hypocrisy.

Though it is a piece of superficiality worthy of People magazine, the Washington Post’s account of the process by which Eric Holder came to make his decision to try war criminals in federal court is a remarkable–if inadvertent–revelation of just how much, despite their vastly disparate backgrounds, the attorney general resembles his coolly remote boss, the president. …

“…But I think if people will, in a neutral and detached way, look at the decision that I have made today, understand the reasons why I made those decisions, and try to do something that’s rare in Washington–leave the politics out of it and focus on what’s in the best interest of this country–I think the criticism will be relatively muted.”

And there you have it. The dispassion, the self-reverence, the blindness of the man, are marvelous to behold, and so perfectly reflect the president he so perfectly serves. “Neutral and detached” people shall “understand the reasons why” he made those decisions, shall see he has left “the politics out of it,” and shall recognize what’s right–something the rest of us, benighted and bellicose souls that we are, have never managed to do with respect to the disposition of those committing mass murders of Americans in their ongoing war against our civilization.

Investor’s Business Daily hosts a five-part series on housing from one of our favorites, Thomas Sowell. Today Sowell discusses how government intervention drove the housing bubble.

…In reality, government agencies not only approved the more lax standards for mortgage loan applicants, government officials were in fact the driving force behind the loosening of mortgage loan requirements.

Members of Congress from both political parties have urged federal regulatory agencies to press banks and other lenders to lower mortgage loan requirements, and have passed legislation to that end and to subsidize or guarantee loans made under lowered standards. …

…Despite the widespread assumption that government intervention is the key to making housing affordable to people of moderate or low incomes, history shows that it has been precisely in the times and places where government intervention has been greatest that housing costs have been both highest in absolute terms and have taken a larger share of the average income.

This is true whether we compare different places at the same time or different time periods with one another. If we look back to the beginning of the 20th century, when government played a much smaller role in the housing market and there were far fewer restrictions on building, the average American’s housing costs were a smaller share of consumer expenditures than at the end of that century. …

In the Times, UK, Giles Whittell may be left of center, but he sees the big picture: Obamacare is not about health care; it’s about power.

…Deep down, Barack Obama believes it’s his turn. He ran for President promising change, and won. “Change” could mean anything to anyone. That was its chief merit as a slogan. But this Administration believes in its soul that the many meanings of the word should include a willingness to expand the role of the State itself if nothing else works. On economic management that meant taking controlling stakes in banks and car giants to stop them failing. On healthcare, it means proving that the Federal Government can move into running a nationwide low-cost insurance programme, and not screw it up.

My father-in-law believes a screw-up is inevitable. For his generation of Eisenhower Republicans it is axiomatic that anything the private sector can do, the public sector can do only worse. Dick Armey and the army of Tea Party activists that he informally leads go much farther. They call the slightest expansion of the State a step towards Marxism. They say so politely, seriously, despairingly, on battle buses and in town halls across the country, and it is a great mistake to doubt their sincerity. …

…The insurgents also smell blood. As Mr Armey said, this is about power and political control. Mr Obama has staked his presidency on showing that he can win reforms that eluded Mr Clinton in 1994 and generations before that. He has majorities in both houses. Even the legal tussle for a disputed Minnesota Senate seat went the Democrats’ way, adding a self-important comedian to their caucus in the upper house and giving them, in principle, a filibuster-proof majority. Yet the President seems unable to use it. …

…The Tea Party insurgency has blunted the health crusade from the Right. Democratic infighting over tax-funded abortions may do the same from the Left. Slippage deep into next year is entirely possible. So is complete failure, and if Mr Obama fails on healthcare what remains of the bubble of hope he created in his 2008 campaign will deflate faster than a blood pressure cuff in an overpriced private hospital. He will be, at best, a Clinton facsimile; at worst another Carter, undone by his own naivety and shorn of his unused majorities in next year’s mid-terms. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s comments about Afghanistan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Rubin picks up another from the Washington Post.

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

And now Doyle McManus from the LA Times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karl Rove looks at Obama’s sliding poll numbers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shorts from National Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ronald Reagan comments on the fall of the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the Post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not how it was supposed to be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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