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In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby reminds us of one of the most inspiring events we have witnessed – the fall of the wall.

…And yet, against all odds and to the astonishment of the world, it was communism that came to a close before our very eyes. Twenty years ago this season, Moscow’s Eastern European satellites threw off their chains. In a matter of months, the communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were consigned – as Ronald Reagan had foretold – to the ash heap of history. But not even Reagan had imagined that the dominoes would fall so quickly, or that Moscow would stand aside and let them fall.

“I learned in prison that everything is possible, so perhaps I should not be amazed,’’ said Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist president. “But I am.’’

We all were. And some of us still are. The collapse of the Iron Curtain was the most remarkable political development of my lifetime. Even now, the images from those days can take the breath away: East German youths dancing and drinking atop the hated Berlin Wall. The reappearance of Alexander Dubcek, 21 years after he was exiled for flirting with reform during the Prague Spring. Romanians flooding the streets of Bucharest, waving flags with the Communist emblem torn out of the center.

1989 exemplified with rare power the resilience of Western civilization. In our time, too, there are brutal despots who imagine that their power is unassailable: that their tanks and torturers can keep them in power forever. But the message of 1989 is that tyranny is not forever – and that the downfall of tyrants end can come with world-changing speed.

In Contentions, Rick Richman explains why Obama should go to the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

President Obama has reportedly informed the German government that he will not travel to Berlin on November 9 to participate in the 20th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is an unfortunate decision on multiple counts.

First, it is another slight to another European ally — one that is going all-out to celebrate the event. The invitation to Obama was extended personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel last June.

Second, it is a failure to correct the historical misstatement of his citizen-of-the-world address last year in Berlin, when he credited the fall of the wall to the “world standing as one” and failed even to mention the names of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Third, it is an embarrassment for the United States not to be represented at the highest level for the commemoration of an event of this magnitude. As Matt Welch writes in the November issue of Reason magazine, November 1989 was “the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history” — the end of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe and a 50-year Cold War that was a worldwide ideological battle. It was battle led by America. …

Jennifer Rubin also posts on the President’s unfortunate decision.

Rick, for the reasons you enumerate, it is almost unimaginable that Obama has chosen to absent himself from the Berlin Wall commemoration. It is disappointing — and telling — considering how much he has relied on presidential presence as a tool of foreign policy.

Recall his heartfelt desire to travel to the “Muslim World” as part of his Middle East outreach and embrace of the Palestinian-ized view of history (e.g., enslaved victimhood, Israel’s legitimacy rests on the Holocaust). However objectionable and counterproductive the strategy, he well understood the symbolism of a presidential appearance.

So too at the UN Security Council, where he became the first American president to chair the proceedings. His message again was clear — multilateralism is swell, the U.S. takes the UN very seriously, and our aim is to integrate America into that “international community,” whose institutions have become our institutions and whose goals (global warming, international wealth redistribution) have become ours. …

…So, Rick, the decision not to be present has superadded meaning: the triumph of the West and a reminder of Soviet imperialism are not part of the agenda. They are inconvenient truths that Obama would rather not dwell on. It is another in a series of unmistakable symbols that this president’s vision of America and its role in the world is radically different from that of his predecessors — and comes with potentially tragic consequences.

Abe Greenwald says that the commemoration doesn’t fit in the President’s global vision.

Rick and Jennifer, don’t hold your breath waiting for Barack Obama to change his mind and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama sees it as his job to move us (as in the people of planet Earth) past the “the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” That’s how he put it in his UN address a few weeks ago.

The Cold War is not merely ancient history to our president; its memory constitutes an obstacle to a “reset” with Russia and to his vision of a mutually collaborative future for all nations. Let’s not dwell on the past — too many skeletons in the imperial closet. A communist world versus a free one, you say? Don’t be so dramatic. Washington and Moscow were the Hatfields and McCoys, fighting so long they forgot what they were fighting about. No need to rub the Kremlin’s face in defeat. Putin might get sore and stop telling us what to do next.

As for Germany and Merkel, Obama covered that at the UN too: “alignments of nations” rooted in that same ancient Cold War “make no sense.” Why give a friendly European democracy the false impression that we’re on its side? What would all the unfriendly autocratic regimes think? …

David Warren tells us about the latest outrageous events at the UN.

…we watched the latest anti-Israel stunt unfold in the United Nations, whose corrupt Human Rights Council — loaded with some of the worst violators of real human rights on the planet — commissioned the Goldstone report to advance the international battle against Israel.

This investigation of “war crimes,” during the Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, was explicitly anti-Israel, for it began from the premise that a legitimate sovereign state, governing an open society, could be put on a level with a terrorist organization ruling a closed society.

The conclusion was cheaply, “both sides committed war crimes,” but the open celebration of the report by Hamas, and outrage even from liberal elements in Israeli society, tells us what we need to know about it.

David Harsanyi comments on the important work the White House is doing, bad-mouthing news organizations that don’t print what the White House wants.

…It’s about time someone charged the White House with the task of “making sure” news coverage is “fair.” It’s “important” work, you see. After all, who better than the executive branch — supposedly in the business of representing the entire nation — to decide whether a station qualifies as a legitimate news organization?

Then again, does biased political coverage disqualify one from reporting legitimate and useful news stories? Fox News may not be able to unsheathe the intellectual rigor of Obama favorites David Letterman and Jay Leno, but it has covered numerous stories in the past few months that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Remember that ACORN’s penchant for aiding the child-enslaving pimp set was a valid story. Uncovering the radical ramblings of Van Jones — a man tasked with creating “green” jobs, though he had never created a job for anyone but himself — was legitimate enough for the czar to abdicate his crown. The National Endowment for the Arts’ attempt to politicize art was genuine enough to elicit a White House apology.

And whatever its intent, Dunn’s inane admission that all-star mass murderer Mao Tse-tung was one of her “favorite political philosophers” (insert Hitler for Mao, a Bush administration figure for Dunn and stir) is a story worth hearing. …

Robert Tomsho, in the WSJ, has surprisingly good news from DC.

The District of Columbia’s embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.

Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients’ private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive. …

…The Opportunity Scholarship Program provides about 1,700 students from low-income families with annual scholarships of as much as $7,500 to attend private schools. It isn’t the largest voucher program in the country. But unlike similar efforts controlled at the state or local level, it was created and has been funded by Congress, which has broad authority over the District. That has kept the debate over vouchers percolating on Capitol Hill even though they have made relatively little political headway elsewhere. …

…Created as a five-year pilot project by a Republican-controlled Congress in early 2004, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is the nation’s only federally funded voucher program. It is open to students who live in the long-struggling Washington school district and whose families have incomes at or below 185% of the federal poverty level — about $40,000 for a family of four. Recipients are chosen by lottery, although preference is given to those attending traditional schools deemed to be in need of improvement under federal law. …

John Stossel writes about one Nobel prize that went to a worthy recipient.

Pundits and politicians act as if government can solve almost any problem. At the slightest hint of trouble, the ruling class reflexively assumes that knowledgeable, wise and public-spirited government regulators are capable of riding to the rescue. This certainly is the guiding philosophy of the Obama administration.

So how remarkable it is that this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was shared by Elinor Ostrom, whose life’s work demonstrates that politicians and bureaucrats are not nearly as good at solving problems as regular people. Ostrom, the first woman to win the prize (which she shared with Oliver Williamson of UC-Berkeley), is a political scientist at Indiana University. The selection committee said that she has “challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource-users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts” …

Ostrom’s work concentrates on common-pool resources (CPR) like pastures and fisheries. Policymakers assume that such situations are plagued by free-rider problems, where all individuals have a strong incentive to use the resource to the fullest and no incentive to invest in order to enhance it. Analysts across the political spectrum theorize that only bureaucrats or owners of privatized units can efficiently manage such resources.

Few scholars actually venture into the field to see what people actually do when faced with free-rider problems. Ostrom did. It turns out that free people are not as helpless as the theorists believed.

She writes in her 1990 book, “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,” that there is no shortage of real-world examples of “a self-governed common-property arrangement in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them.”

In other words, free people work things out on their own.

Not only is government help often not needed, Ostrom says it usually screws things up because bureaucrats operate in an ivory tower ignorant of the local customs and the specific resource.

In Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft explains that Democrats are happy to force Obamacare on us, because they’ll have better.

Congress will keep their gold-plated insurance plans as they force the rest of the country into a rationed health care government plan.
Townhall reported, via Free Republic:

‘Personal doctors on call 24/7. Coverage that knows no caps. No exemptions for pre-existing conditions.

Those are the sorts of benefits members of Congress currently enjoy on the taxpayer’s dime, and the kinds of benefits Americans on a government-run public health care plan will never see if Obamacare passes.

“One thing is certain: Congress will exempt itself from whatever lousy health care system it forces on we little people,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute. “Congress will get better insurance than you do because politicians always get a better deal under government-run health care.” ’…

As if we need more reason to reject Obamacare: Marie Woolf in the Times, UK reports that British National Health Service staff get private healthcare.

The National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.

More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling — all widely available on the NHS. …

News Biscuit says a new sat-nav system was introduced. It allows users to find themselves.

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It’s another Ladies Day!

All of today’s “radical right-wing rants” come from the distaff side. And we have an enjoyable juxtaposition with the first two. Sarah Palin leads off with some of her common sense in a NR piece on oil exploration titled “Drill.” Next from Beth Healy at the Boston Globe, we learn how the bien pensants at Harvard not only lost billions in their endowment, they mixed the grocery money, (i.e. current accounts) with the endowment and lost an additional $1.8 billion there. Let’s send some more of them to Washington.

Here are excerpts from Sarah Palin’s article.

…Those who oppose domestic drilling are motivated primarily by environmental considerations, but many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas. …

…In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.

Building an energy-independent Amer­ica will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security. …

…Alternative sources of energy are part of the answer, but only part. There’s no getting around the fact that we still need to “drill, baby, drill!” And if those in D.C. say otherwise, we need to tell them: “Yes, we can!”

And Beth Healy’s article.

Harvard University, one of the world’s richest educational institutions, stumbled into its financial crisis in part by breaking one of the most basic rules of corporate or family finance: Don’t gamble with the money you need to pay the daily bills.

The university disclosed yesterday that it had lost $1.8 billion in cash – money it relies on for the school’s everyday expenses – by investing it with its endowment fund, instead of keeping it in safe, bank-like accounts. The disclosure was made in the school’s annual report for the fiscal year that ended June 30. …

…But Harvard placed a large portion of its cash with Harvard Management Co., the entity that runs the university’s endowment and invests in stocks, hedge funds, and other risky assets. It has been widely reported that Harvard Management’s endowment investments were battered in the market crash – down 27 percent in its last fiscal year. Not revealed until yesterday was that the school’s basic cash portfolio had also been caught in the undertow. …

The executive branch should be protecting free speech, not railing against news agencies that they don’t like, says Claudia Rosett.

…This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets. The president has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That includes protecting free speech, not dispatching White House staff and advisers to hold forth publicly as media critics denouncing news outlets they don’t like. …

…The matter of deciding whether a news outlet has “a perspective” — and many do — is something that in a free country, if the country is to remain free, should be left to the private customer. There are legions of critics in the private sector who spend their time analyzing and debating which outlets provide the most reliable news, what’s entertainment, who’s opinionated, and how, and who’s not. They are easy to find. You can tune in, subscribe, and decide for yourself. These folks, like the media they criticize, are subject to the market test — in which private consumers freely make their own choices about what or whom they trust, what they pay for, what they pay attention to, and why.

Government personnel getting into this act is altogether different. These are people paid out of the public purse, and speaking under the imprimatur of public institutions — in this case the White House. Here they are, urging White House-favored news outfits to follow the White House lead, and ostracize a specific news outlet the White House doesn’t like. This is Banana Republic stuff, a stock tactic of pressure and intimidation. The effect of such stuff, as a rule, is not to promote accurate news coverage, but to cover up stories the government doesn’t want aired, and shut up critics. …

Mary Katherine Ham posts on the Weekly Standard blog that the White House is receiving criticism from their friends in the news media for its petty attacks on Fox.

Well, it’s not the first time the Grande Liberal Dame of the press corps has had words for the Obama White House, but today Helen Thomas is voicing more unlikely sentiments by telling the White House attack dogs to heel in the Fox News fight.

In an interview with MSNBC, the columnist ..stressed the White House ought to “stay out of these fights.”

“They can only take you down. You can’t kill the messenger,” said Thomas, who has covered every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama.

The New York Times also joined the chorus of folks telling the White House to chill this weekend. The Grey Lady may be in danger of being labeled a “wing of the Republican Party,” for using such uncharacteristically sharp language in criticizing the president, but I’m sure they’ll scrub the offending parts when the White House rings. In the meantime, enjoy …

…People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones. A blog on the White House Web site that uses a “truth-o-meter” against a particular cable news network would not seem to qualify. As it is, Reality Check sounds a bit like the blog of some unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement, not an official communiqué from Pennsylvania Avenue. …

Ruth Marcus, in WaPo, summarizes much of the commentary against the White House deciding to battle with Fox.

There’s only one thing dumber than picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel — picking a fight with people who don’t even have to buy ink. The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters. …

…Where the White House has gone way overboard is in its decision to treat Fox as an outright enemy and to go public with the assault. Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC. “Opinion journalism masquerading as news,” White House communications director Anita Dunn declared of Fox. Certainly Fox tends to report its news with a conservative slant — but has anyone at the White House clicked over to MSNBC recently? Or is the only problem opinion journalism that doesn’t match its opinion? On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace replayed a quote from an Obama interview: “I don’t always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that’s part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we’re not supposed to all be in lock step here.”

Maybe he should tell the rest of the team.

Debra Saunders follows up on the Obamacare bill, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

…The worst suspicions of the plan’s critics thus have been confirmed. Under ObamaCare, those who have health care will be paying more – fair enough – but for less health care – which is not so fair.

As for proposed limits on what insurers can charge based on age or gender – again, these schemes don’t control costs. They shift costs. And cost shifting is the practice that has led to runaway health care spending in America.

With all the freebies thrown into versions of the package – with millions of additional people covered, no denials for pre-existing conditions, free checkups and preventive procedures – ObamaCare can only increase the nation’s health care tab. …

…If there’s one thing this Congress cannot do, it’s subtract.

Jennifer Rubin gives the latest poll numbers showing the public does not want Obamacare, but the Dems are still determined to ram this down our throats.

A new poll from the Galen Institute provides fresh evidence the public isn’t buying what Democrats are pushing. The poll tells us:

Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said they would oppose “a new law saying that everyone either would have to obtain private or public health insurance approved by the government or pay a tax of $750 or more every year.” Only 21 percent said they would support the law. More than half (54 percent) of all respondents indicate a “strong” opposition to the individual mandate, including 58 percent of those 45-54 years of age and 58 percent of those 55 years and older.

Sixty-eight percent don’t like the idea of reducing “some health insurance benefits for senior citizens in order to expand health insurance for some people who are uninsured.” That includes 86 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Independents, and 59 percent of Democrats. By a 58 to 39 percent margin, respondents disagree (44 percent “strongly”) with the idea of ”an increase in taxes on the working and middle class if it would help provide health insurance to more Americans.” Seventy-one percent are worried that their health care will change if Congress passes health-care-reform legislation. And 49 percent like a ”targeted approach that addresses a few problems at a time.”

Yet the Democrats seem determined to push through — along party lines and with a parliamentary sleight of hand — a bill that the majority of Americans don’t want. It’s an almost unprecedented act of political hubris, but it’s also politically reckless. Democrats seem to think everyone will “learn to like it” and have to live with it once it’s in place. But of course they won’t have to; there’s always another election, and there are consequences for legislative malpractice. The only question remains whether moderate and conservative Democrats can be strong-armed into voting for a bill that may well provide the grounds for a political backlash. They may not care greatly if the bill is antithetical to Americans’ interests, but they’ll at least pause before voting for something that is potentially contrary to their own.

In the LA Times, Bett Morrison has an enlightening interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman of Somali Muslim descent, who has spoken out for women’s rights, and now lives under guard in the United States.

When it comes to women in Africa, is the U.S. using too many of its values or too few?
There is too much apologizing for what freedom means. In Africa, you’re told, “Oh, this is our custom — polygamy is our custom, female genital mutilation is our custom, these are our values.” Then you have the Americans and the Europeans being very shy and saying, “Oh, I’m really sorry, it’s your custom.”

Will any country ever go to war for rights and women’s safety?
It looks like it will not happen. But I am very, very optimistic — not about going to war but about human beings changing their minds. You’ll remember how communism was stigmatized. The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women’s rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid — people will insist that it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and that’s when change happens.

I’ve asked other feminists this question: Why are women’s rights always the ones up for negotiation?
Yes, isn’t that interesting? Women are mainly oppressed by their own fathers, their own brothers, their own mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, so it’s the most intimate kind of oppression. Another thing: Western feminism still defines the white man as the oppressor, but right now it’s the brown man, the black man, the yellow man. When you tell them, “Stop oppressing your women,” they’ll tell you, “Don’t impose your culture on me.” It would have been fantastic if, when [President] Obama went to Cairo, he [had said], “We have taught the white man that bigotry is bad and he has given it up, at least most of it. Now bigotry is committed in the name of the black man, the brown man, the yellow man, whatever color.”

Do you make a distinction between mainstream and radical Islam?
I refuse to do that because one gives birth to the other. You are born into mainstream Islam. You are taught: Do not question the prophet; everything in the Koran is true. And then the radicals come and they expand on that, they build on that. So it is up to so-called mainstream Islam to tackle the radical element. [Mainstream Muslims] have to question the infallibility of the prophet Muhammad. They have to quit teaching children and young people that everything in the Koran is true and has to be taken seriously.

You can see it in the Christian world. You have pockets of very radical Christians who refuse to change. But most Christians have decided to reform, to introduce new ways of looking at [the Bible] and to allow freedom of thought and speech. So if people move away from the radical ideas, they’re not killed, they’re not beheaded. …

Jennifer Burns, in Foreign Policy, reports that Ayn Rand has found a following in India.

…Rand’s celebration of independence and personal autonomy has proven to be powerfully subversive in a culture that places great emphasis on conforming to the dictates of family, religion, and tradition. Gargi Rawat, a correspondent and news anchor for top tv channel ndtv and a former Rand admirer, says Rand’s theory of the supremacy of reason and the virtue of selfishness adds up to “the antithesis” of Indian culture, which explains the attraction for Rawat in her youth and for many rebellious Indian teens today.

Unlike in the United States, Rand’s most popular novel in India-anecdotally at least-is not the overtly political Atlas Shrugged, but her earlier novel, The Fountainhead, in which Rand’s political views are muted. The novel tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect who refuses to compromise his designs for clients or the public in a heroic expression of personal will. It is Rand’s most accessible work, and also the one that makes the strongest emotional appeal to those who feel suppressed by attempts to put the collective ahead of the individual.

In recent years, the so-called “Howard Roark effect” has swept across wealthy Indian society. Shortly after winning Miss India Earth, the country’s top beauty pageant, in 2005, Niharika Singh cited The Fountainhead as her favorite book. “Ayn Rand helped me win the crown,” she declared. Other stars, including biotech queen Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, actress Preity Zinta, and soccer-player-turned-dancer Baichung Bhutia have all credited Rand with helping them succeed. …

In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery discusses current events (Polanski, Letterman, and Nobel) that have shown a negative light on the glitterrati.

Three times in the past several weeks, fortune has seemed to beam on conservatives, in unexpected and unprompted ways. Not that they’ve won much, but their tormentors keep losing. Three days in fall 2009 damaged or neutralized three liberal institutions, whose powers have now been curtailed.

Break number one came on September 26, when Roman Polanski, on his way to collect a lifetime achievement award from the Zurich Film Festival, was intercepted by Swiss police and tossed into prison, pending extradition to the United States, which he had fled 30 years earlier to avoid a jail sentence for drugging and raping a girl of 13 (a crime he had pleaded down to unlawful sex with a minor). This outrage–the arrest, not the rape–stunned the global artistic community, which quickly drew up a petition in protest, signed by la crème de la crème of stage and screen, including Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols (Mr. Diane Sawyer), Martin Scorsese, Isabelle Huppert, Diane von Furstenberg (Mrs. Barry Diller), and Woody Allen, famous for having married his former flame’s daughter, whom he seduced when she was still in her teens. The excuses were many, and flew very fast. Whoopi Goldberg exonerated the French-Polish director on the grounds that it wasn’t “rape-rape” and thus not important. French sage Bernard-Henri Lévy, who organized a petition of support, called it a “youthful indiscretion” (Polanski was 43 at the time). Debra Winger, the Zurich festival’s president, called the arrest “philistine collusion” with puritanical America and typical of the persecutions that beset artists everywhere. ….

… For years–even more so since 2002, when the Nobel Peace Prize committee smiled on ex-President Carter (as a slap at George Bush, it freely admitted)–conservatives have longed in vain to see the Norwegian parliamentarians exposed as a gaggle of partisans. It only got worse when the committee gave its prize in 2005 to Mohamed ElBaradei, the anti-U.S., pro-Iran U.N. arms inspector, and in 2007 to Al Gore, who had lost to Bush in 2000 in an exceedingly close and contentious election and railed against him ever since as a warmongering liar, and worse. Conservatives struggled for years but failed to gain traction with their critiques. So picture their glee on the morning of October 9 when they awoke to discover that the committee had contrived to discredit itself. In its ultimate slap at George Bush (who is no longer in office, but why should this stop them?), it had given the peace prize to Barack Obama for doing not much of anything beyond setting a new “tone.” …

…Back in America, the Los Angeles Times said that the committee’s award had embarrassed Obama and diminished its own credibility. “I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce,” said Peter Beinart in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast. “Let’s hope the Nobel Committee’s decision meets with such a deafening chorus of chortles and jeers that it never does something this stupid again.”

It may or may not, but it no longer matters, as it is clear that the jig is up. For decades, the peace prize committee has seemed to speak with the voice of humanity, or of the world community, or of the Almighty, but it is clear now that it speaks with the voice of five more or less insular nitwits, of great self-regard and no great distinction, too clueless and tone-deaf to sense how their choice would be seen. Like the culture elites defending Polanski and Letterman, they have no sense of irony, much less of perspective or rectitude.

If there were a Nobel Prize for shark-jumping, these people would share it: They have proved themselves more inane than their critics imagined. With friends such as these, the left hardly needs enemies. And with enemies such as these, the right may not really need friends.

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In case you wondered why you should care, John Tierney discusses one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel prize for economics. It is about how we get along without an overbearing government.

Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shared the prize for her research into the management of “commons,” which has been a buzzword among ecologists since Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His fable about a common pasture that is ruined by overgrazing became one of the most-quoted articles ever published by that journal, and it served as a fundamental rationale for the expansion of national and international regulation of the environment. His fable was a useful illustration of a genuine public-policy problem — how do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone? — but there were a couple of big problems with the essay and its application. …

…But too often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats who lacked the expertise or the incentives to do the job properly. Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs. Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for her work analyzing those local institutions. …

…Another Nobel laureate economist, Vernon Smith, described her work in an interview with Ivan Osorio for the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

“She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high (altitude wise), and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.” …

…”The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units”. …

Mark Steyn contrasts a made-up quote attributed to Rush with a hair-raising quote from Anita Dunn, White House communications director.

…Rush Limbaugh is so “divisive” that to get him fired Leftie agitators have to invent racist sound bites to put in his mouth.

But the White House communications director is so undivisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America’s young.

From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse Tung, and the few that aren’t know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or “agrarian reformer.” What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby’s book “Modern China,” is the great man in a nutshell:

“Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 million to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.”

Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to within 30 million. Still, as President Barack Obama’s communications director says, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50-80 million Chinamen you may have your work cut out. But let’s stick with the Fenby figure: He killed 40-70 million Chinamen. Whoops, can you say “Chinamen” or is that racist? Oh, and sexist. So hard keeping up with the Sensitivity Police in this pansified political culture, isn’t it? But you can kill 40-70 million Chinamen, and that’s fine and dandy: You’ll be cited as an inspiration by the White House to an audience of high school students. You can be anything you want to be! Look at Mao: He wanted to be a mass murderer, and he lived his dream! You can, too! …

David Warren looks at journalism and teaching, and the barriers to entry, and administrative expense, that have developed in both.

There was a time when teachers did not necessarily require a high school certificate. Most were taught, even self-taught, on the job, which is an extremely effective way to weed out those not suited to it. The number of teachers tended to swell and shrink with the number of pupils to be “educated,” and of course there were no unions.

And hardly any administration, either. Our ancestors couldn’t afford such things, and the unavoidable administrative tasks tended to be pieced out among the teachers. A principal was in effect the senior-most teacher, captain of the team hired by a very local school board.

Today, we have layers of specialized administration, reporting to a vast provincial bureaucracy, and while a teacher may aspire to be promoted into the administrative ranks, the people who make the key pedagogical decisions have generally no experience of teaching whatever. …

…Administrative departments are smaller than in the “public sector,” but nevertheless huge, because of the scale and complexity of the government reporting requirements to which they must answer from hour to hour.

Looking back, over 40 summers, I realize that this is by far the biggest change: the metastasis of bureaucracy. …

…By contrast, the way of the world, before, was simpler and more comprehensible. You learned, you mastered, or you were out. …

David Harsanyi takes aim at Republican mavericks.

…It is always curious to hear irascible members of one political party accuse members of the opposing party of “playing politics” as if it were a bad thing. Can you imagine? Politics. In Washington, no less.

As you know, Democrats claim to be above such petty, divisive and low-brow behavior, especially on those days they are running both houses of Congress and the White House. What this country really needs, we are incessantly reminded, are more mavericks. Well, Republican mavericks. Folks who say “yes.” …

…Consider that for possibly the first time in American history, a vote in a Senate committee was the lead story for news organizations across the country, simply because the ideologically bewildered Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, used her inconsequential vote to move forward a government-run health care bill. …

…”Forget Sarah Palin,” remarked The Associated Press. “The female maverick of the Republican Party is Sen. Olympia Snowe.” …

…Mavericks dismiss ideology because it would bind them to consistent and principled votes. John McCain, for example, often displays the muddled and mercurial thinking of a person with no political, intellectual or economic philosophy. …

Bet against Biden’s horse if you want to win, says Toby Harnden, in the Daily Telegraph, UK.

Want to know how to deal with a momentous issue of war or grand strategy? You could do a lot worse than check out what Vice-President Joe Biden thinks – and plump for the opposite. …

…On all the big questions, he has been – to put it politely – on the wrong side of history. In 1990, he voted against American forces expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. He voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and advocated splitting it into three states along ethnic lines. He opposed the Iraq troop surge of 2007 that pacified the country and rescued the US from the jaws of defeat.

Now, Mr Biden is pushing a policy of what he terms “counter-terrorism plus” …

We have shorts from National Review.

Remember the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran? It was a cruise missile fired by an intellectually dishonest State Department bureaucracy into the heart of George W. Bush’s Iran policy. In a footnote, the authors very cleverly defined the term “nuclear-weapons program” to refer only to facilities and activities explicitly dedicated to the production of warheads; then they revealed that Iran had once operated such a program but had abandoned it in 2003. “Iran Abandoned Nuclear-Weapons Program in 2003” became a headline the world over, as the authors knew it would. Of course, even as those headlines were published, Iran was ramping up its enrichment efforts at sites that could be devoted to civilian or military use. It was these nominally ambiguous sites that had prompted fears in the first place — and the new information that Iran had as recently as 2003 operated an explicit weapons program, if presented non-tendentiously, would only have heightened them. As presented, it tricked the public into thinking the time was right to release a flock of doves in Tehran’s direction. The revelation of the Qom site and further displays of Iranian bellicosity (cf. its recent missile tests) confirm the foolishness of the strategic view that motivated this NIE. But time favors the proliferator, and the price has been paid.

The Federal Trade Commission has embarked upon a daft assault on free speech, specifically social-media users’ endorsement of products or businesses. The FTC has propounded rules that will impose fines of up to $11,000 on bloggers, Facebook users, or Twitter tweeters (for whom surely we could invent a more dignified name?) who fail to disclose financial relationships with businesses they write about. Such relationships include the receipt of merchandise gratis — meaning that online critics who receive free books or press passes to a concert will find themselves in violation of federal law if they fail to satisfy Washington’s disclosure demands. Such arrangements are longstanding custom and are of particular value to small, independent publications (print or electronic) that cannot afford to pay retail prices for access to the materials they review. And it ought to go without saying that the FTC has no business policing Facebook updates, period. That the FTC would make a federal case out of such a triviality suggests that this bloated and arrogant agency is overdue for a deep cut in staff and budget. If some unemployed bureaucrats become bloggers, all the better.

Christopher Hitchens thinks we should have noticed Australia’s dust storms.

… There’s no absolutely firm evidence about this, but the huge dust storms that have been hitting China, Iraq, and East Africa are thought by some experts to be harbingers of worse than just deforestation, dust bowls, and further drought. It also seems probable that they can carry alarming diseases such as meningitis among humans in Africa and foot-and-mouth among animals in Britain. (Saharan dust is now reportedly being blown far north of the Alps—last year the British Meteorological Office detected it in “old” South Wales.) There is also the problem of soot, which is thought by some to be the cause of the shrinkage of the Himalayan glaciers, coated in fine carbon particles that have reduced their ability to reflect back the warming rays of the sun. As with all arguments that touch on climate change, it’s hard to be sure whether the seemingly mounting occurrence of massive dust storms reflects an upward trend or a cyclical one (Sydney had a storm like this in the 1940s), or just better reporting. But the increasing probability is that dust from somewhere you hardly ever think about is on its way to somewhere near you.

In the New York Times, Joe Nocera reviews The Great Depression: A Diary.

In January 1931, a lawyer named Benjamin Roth, 38 years old, solidly Republican, a solo practitioner in Youngstown, Ohio, decided to start a diary. Realizing that he was “living through an historic thing that will long be remembered” — as he put it in one early entry — he wanted to keep a record for posterity. …

…Events that we know about from the history books he was reacting to in real time. He was furious to learn, thanks to a series of highly publicized Congressional hearings, that some of the nation’s most prominent bankers did terrible things during the Roaring Twenties. (“By manipulation the officers boosted and unloaded on the public their own stock in National City Bank as high as $650 per share when its book value was only $60.”) But he makes no mention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose birth was the direct result of those incendiary hearings.

Mr. Roth is skeptical of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and worries that the president’s fondness for deficit spending will ultimately be disastrous. He keeps thinking inflation is right around the corner. He worries about the rise of Hitler. He writes about gangs of farmers who threaten sheriffs, judges and anyone else who tries to foreclose on a farm. …

Reuters look like fools for not doing some basic fact-checking. Iain Murray posts on The Corner. Even though they’re based in Great Britain, they are full fledged members of our biased media.

Jaws dropped around Washington today as Reuters reported on a press release from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announcing that high-profile defections had led to a reversal of their stance against the job-destroying global-warming bill.

Far more jaws dropped, however, in disbelief that Reuters could have fallen for such an obvious hoax. The press release is not on the Chamber’s website, but on a fake one. And who owns it? That happy band of anti-capitalist culture jammers, The Yes Men.

What amazes me is that this sort of fact-checking takes just a couple of mouse clicks. …

…All of which suggests that major news organizations are simply machines for regurgitating press releases, real or not, that accord with their view of where the world should be going. …

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David Goldman, as Spengler tries to help us make sense of the weekend’s suicide bombing in Iran. This is unusually topical for him and is not one of his better efforts. Perhaps because he didn’t take more time. But it did allow him to retail some of his armchair Obama psychoanalysis previously spiked by Asia Times editors.

… The mass assassination of Iranian officers most likely represented a gesture from Pakistan as to what the future will bring. America’s use of the Pakistani army to chase the Taliban around Waziristan has about the same effect as shaking a warm bottle of cola before opening it.

What is most astonishing is that official Washington seems entirely oblivious to the crack-up of American influence occurring in front of its eyes. None of the wonkish foreign policy blogs, let alone the mainstream press, seems able to focus. That is not surprising, for official Washington and unofficial Washington have a wheel-and-spoke relationship. As the staff at US State Department and National Security Council work up policy papers, they send out feelers to the think-tank community and get feedback. This is what feeds the Washington rumor mill.

The difference between this administration and every other administration I have observed is that there appears to be no staff work, no departmental effort, no National Security Council – nothing but President Barack Obama. Obama’s penchant for policy czars has become the source of continuing controversy, with his opponents at Fox News and elsewhere complaining he has bypassed cabinet departments (whose senior staff require senate confirmation) in favor of 29 “policy czars” who report directly to him.

Like Poo-bah in the Mikado, the president seems to be Lord High Everything Else, Secretary of Everything and a non-stop presence before the television cameras. Some of his supporters are chagrined. The New Republic’s publisher Marty Peretz, who evinces buyer’s remorse over Obama’s Middle East policy, diagnosed the president with “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” in his blog on October 4.

The reason for Obama’s peculiar mode of governance, though, may have less to do with his apparent narcissism than with his objectives. It is a credible hypothesis that this president holds views that he cannot easily share, even with his own staff. As he told the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, he truly wants a world without superpowers: “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”

What does Obama mean by this? How strongly does he feel that America should not be elevated above any other nation? There is some basis for the conjecture that his innermost sentiment is hard-core, left-wing Third World antipathy to the United States. …

Following along on the thread of strange emanating from Washington, Jennifer Rubin has another short, sweet commentary, this time on the Afghanistan rethink and on the Obama policy decision-making process.

David Ignatius concedes that Obama is conducting a do-over on Afghanistan. (”What’s odd about the administration’s review of Afghanistan policy is that it is revisiting issues that were analyzed in great detail — and seemingly resolved — in the president’s March 27 announcement of a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”) But what is most horrifying is the description of the process — academic, indecisive, and seemingly designed to get to the lowest common denominator:

As Obama’s advisers describe the decision-making process, it sounds a bit like a seminar. National security adviser Jim Jones gathers all the key people so that everyone gets a voice. A top official explains: “We don’t get marching orders from the president. He wants a debate. . . . We take the competing views and collapse them toward the middle.” This approach produced a consensus on Iran and missile defense, and as National Security Councils go, Obama’s seems to work pretty smoothly.

Yikes. Works smoothly? Well, if the point is to reach some blissful, mushy middle ground on virtually everything without regard to the real-world consequences of the actions, then it’s like silk. But is the presidency a graduate course on international relations? This one appears to be — filled with platitudes and catch-phrases one would hear in the Ivy League (”interdependence” is right up there), disdain for military force (”Never solves anything!” — er, except slavery and Nazism), and the fetish for “consensus.” It’s all very smooth and polite and the results are very well disastrous. …

Peter Wehner adds incisive comments about decision making in government.

…In the David Ignatius column Jen links to, Ignatius also quotes an Obama adviser as saying: “We don’t get marching orders from the president. He wants a debate. . . . We take the competing views and collapse them toward the middle.”

But this assumes that the “collapse them toward the middle” approach will, almost like the laws of physics, lead to the right outcome. Yet here’s how such an approach often works in practice: Some people (like the commanding general in Afghanistan) might argue we should pursue a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that will require 40,000 or more additional troops. Others believe we should withdraw most of our combat troops and pursue a strictly counterterrorism strategy. So the answer must lie at the Golden Mean between these two positions. Or take Iraq: Before the surge, some people argued for it; others argued that we should essentially abandon Iraq, since the war was unwinnable. The “collapse them toward the middle” approach led to the Iraq Study Group (chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton). But if the Bush administration had followed the consensus approach, which was embodied in the study group’s report, it would have led to failure in Iraq. And if President Obama chooses the Biden approach instead of the McChrystal approach, it will lead to failure in Afghanistan.

Sometimes — in fact, much of the time — the “third way” is a road to failure. Consensus opinions are often wrong; in Ignatius’s column, for example, he writes that the “collapse them toward the middle” process produced a consensus on Iran and missile defense — which, as I argue here, have been, so far, failures.

In the first volume of his brilliant memoirs, The White House Years, Henry Kissinger writes this:

“Before I served as a consultant to [President] Kennedy, I had believed, like most academicians, that the process of decision-making was largely intellectual and that all one had to do was to walk into the President’s office and convince him of the correctness of one’s views. This perspective I soon realized is as dangerously immature as it is widely held. . . . Almost all his callers are supplicants or advocates, and most of their cases are extremely plausible — which is what got them into the Oval Office in the first place. As a result, one of the President’s most difficult tasks is to choose among endless arguments that sound equally convincing. The easy decisions do not come to him; they are taken care of at lower levels.”

Earlier, Kissinger writes:

“The complexity of modern government makes large bureaucracies essential; but the need for innovation also creates the imperative to define purposes that go beyond administrative norms. Ultimately there is no purely organizational answer; it is above all a problem of leadership. . . . Statesmanship requires above all a sense of nuance and proportion, the ability to perceive the essential among a mass of apparent facts, and an intuition as to which of many equally plausible hypotheses about the future is likely to prove true.”

That is a sophisticated, thoughtful account of how decisions ought to be made. And most of the time, taking an assortment of competing views and collapsing them toward the middle is not.

Jennifer Rubin also posts on the President’s indecision.

Dana Milbank observes:

As the administration continues its extended deliberations in pursuit of a new strategy for the war, allies in Afghanistan have begun to grumble about American dithering. The pace of the policy review is causing worry in both parties on Capitol Hill. . . . There seems to be less urgency at the White House, where the president completed his fifth meeting on the subject this week. But the only thing that seems to emerge from these sessions are new adjectives the White House press office uses to describe the conversation.

Among those grumbling are Democrats who have the queasy feeling that the longer this goes on, the worse it looks and the less credible the commander in chief becomes. But this is par for the passive presidency. Milbank argues, “It has caused Obama’s Afghanistan policy to be made for him. . . . Obama is therefore left with various split-the-difference options that will please neither side — not unlike the way the health-care legislation has developed.” …

…Maybe there is some rhyme or reason to deferring to Nancy Pelosi on the stimulus, to everyone on health care, and to the White House seminars on a war. But the cumulative effect is to paint the president as weak and perhaps uncertain of what he wants. Obama wanted to be president, but now that he’s in office, what does he want to do with the presidency? Win a war or pinch pennies for his domestic spend-a-thon? Enact a bipartisan health-care bill or fulfill the Left’s historic dream of government-run health care? He hasn’t told us yet, but he will soon. Well . . . once he makes up his mind.

In the Daily Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden says that judging by the White House press releases, Obama is not quite humbled at receiving the peace prize.

The conventional wisdom is that President Barack Obama was embarrassed by the patently ludicrous award to him of the Nobel Peace Prize. And to be fair it did seem so when he accepted the honour (a term I use loosely) last Friday, quoting his daughter Malia as saying: “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” (call me a cynic but that’s a fabricated quote if ever I heard one).

Since then, however, it’s become abundantly clear that Obama isn’t even faintly sheepish about the award. Yeah, there’s all the usual guff about him being humbled, it’s about us not him blah blah blah. But this can’t mask the fact that he’s as pleased as punch about landing the prize. He’s lapping it up and seems to view it – sadly and mistakenly – as a major validation.

Apart from the clue that he’s going to skip over to Oslo to pick up the gong personally (great opportunity for a wonderful speech), consider the emails his White House is sending out. No opportunity to shoehorn in a mention of the Nobel prize is being missed …

Thank goodness big government is here to keep us safe from Cheerios, writes David Harsanyi.

…You know what we are desperately crying out for? An army of crusading federal regulatory agents with unfettered power. Who else has the fortitude and foresight to keep us all safe?

Mercifully, as The Washington Post recently reported, many of President Barack Obama’s appointees “have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life . . . awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products and most items found in pantries and medicine cabinets.”

If there’s anything Americans are hankering for in their everyday lives, it’s a vast regulatory apparatus. Hey, it’s dangerous out there. …

…This is why I am grateful that one courageous soul has finally stood up to the menacing influence of Big Cereal. Yes, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg has had enough of deceitful infiltration of Cheerios, demanding that General Mills cease and desist a marketing campaign that peddles the fallacious claim that the oat-based cereal can lower cholesterol.

Why stop with oats? Trix are not only for kids, you know. Lucky Charms are nowhere close to being “magically” delicious. …

Melanie Phillips, in the Spectator, UK, includes an embarrassing news story for global warming conspiracists: poor field studies of Arctic icemelt revealed.

The BBC’s brief and historic outbreak of sanity here last Friday when it asked timorously “What happened to global warming?” gave way to normal service today when it reported a prediction that the Arctic could be free of ice in the summer within two decades. The prediction was made by Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was speaking at the launch of the findings of the Catlin Arctic Survey …

But the Catlin Arctic Ice Survey was an embarrassing joke, as detailed on the Watts Up With That? website which describes it as

“nothing more than a badly executed public relations stunt covered with the thinnest veneer of attempted science.”

Among other things, WUWT says Pen Hadow and his team … surveyed very little of the ice and returned very little data, that some of this data was wrongly presented and that another, aerial, survey of the Arctic with a towed radar array from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research revealed that the ice cover was thicker than expected.

In World Climate Report, Patrick Michaels reports on the lowest recorded level of snowmelt during this most recent Antarctic summer.

Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?

The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.

Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season. …

Jack Kelly gives an account of Phelim McAleer’s question to Gore regarding the inaccuracies in An Inconvenient Truth. Pickings had an article from McAleer yesterday.

…But in the audience was Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who asked him about a 2007 finding by a British judge that “An Inconvenient Truth” is riddled with scientific errors.

Justice Michael Burton had to rule on the veracity of Mr. Gore’s claims because a parent objected to having the film shown in schools. He found nine “significant errors” made in “the context of alarmism and exaggeration.” Screening the film in British secondary schools violated laws barring the promotion of partisan political views in the classroom, Justice Burton said.

When Mr. McAleer asked Mr. Gore what he was doing to correct the errors Justice Burton identified, Mr. Gore, after much stammering, said: “the ruling was in favor of showing the movie in schools.”

That response was technically true, but evasive. Justice Burton said “An Inconvenient Truth” could be shown, but only if Mr. Gore’s “one-sided” views were balanced.

When Mr. McAleer pressed Mr. Gore on his evasion, the Society of Environmental Journalists cut off his microphone and escorted him away. …

Ilya Somin, in the Volokh Conspiracy, discusses an article by Matt Welch about the government handouts that the New York Yankees are receiving.

Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason, takes up an issue that I have written about on numerous occasions: the inexcusable gargantuan public subsidies for the New York Yankees’ new stadium:

“This year the Yankees moved into a new stadium. According to baseball economist Neil deMause of the excellent Field of Schemes website, the facility cost a stunning $1.56 billion, and the total project (including replacing 22-acres of parkland that had been destroyed by the construction) totaled $2.31 billion [pdf]. Both figures are all-time records in the history of sports stadia. “Of that,” deMause estimates, “the public—city, state, and federal taxpayers—are now covering just shy of $1.2 billion, by far the largest stadium subsidy ever…..”

To sum up: The most successful, most opulent, and most hated baseball franchise in North America, widely known as “the Evil Empire,” receives an unprecedented amount of government giveaways in a time of recession and government budget-squeezes.” …

…As numerous studies show, sports stadium subsidies virtually always create far more costs for the public. If the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner and his fellow millionaire owners want to build new stadiums, they should pay for it themselves. …

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In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger asks whether Obama will make the tough choices.

…The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.

When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state. …

…The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. …

…This isn’t to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life’s primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore’s unstoppable sermons. …

Charles Krauthammer asks what Obama’s apologies and appeasements have gotten us. You’ll love his paraphrase of Churchill’s famous description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

…And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection. …

…Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naïveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Peter Wehner comments on the news that Russia will not back sanctions against Iran.

…Apart from the fact that White House officials are presumably able to hide their glee today, what ought we to make of these developments?

The first is that President Obama looks to have been taken to the cleaners by the Russians. The United States bowed before Russian demands when it came to retooling a missile-defense system for Poland and the Czech Republic. We gave up something tangible and important — and in return we got a vague promise that Russia might be amenable to tougher sanctions against Iran. Now that vague promise appears to be inoperative — but the decision to scrap the Bush-era missile-defense program remains in place.

This episode captures Obama’s approach to international affairs and underscores its dangers. The president is weak and flaccid when it comes to our adversaries, and unreliable and unsteady when it comes to our allies. America’s enemies don’t respect us, and our allies increasingly don’t trust us. President Obama garners praise from the man attempting to lead a Marxist revolution in Latin America, Hugo Chavez, and is criticized by the hero of Solidarity, Lech Walesa. We pressure friends like Israel, Honduras, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and place our hopes in the goodwill and reasonableness of regimes like Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And in the process, some of the world’s foremost spokesmen for democracy publicly express their concern that Obama is “softening on human rights.” …

Jennifer Rubin adds her comments.

Pete, not only has Obama badly embarrassed himself but he’s also made many moderate supporters look awfully foolish. They vouched for his savvy negotiating skills, assuring us that Obama wouldn’t sell our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic down the river for nothing. (If you’re going to betray allies, at least don’t go home empty-handed.) …

…Obama has been sucked into — or rushed into, depending on your assessment of his motives — talks that have forestalled sanctions and provided Iran breathing room. In fact, the Iranians are no longer in the spotlight, facing harsh judgment for their violations of existing sanctions, a secretive enrichment site, and human rights atrocities. No, they’re sitting in cushy meeting rooms in Geneva getting encouragement to keep at it. Are we further ahead or further behind from six months ago in preventing a nuclear Iran?

It seems that the entire engagement gambit was based on a false premise: the administration would be competent and maximize its leverage. Instead, we’ve tossed leverage away like confetti and have been, as Pete says, taken to the cleaners at each encounter with an adversary. At some point, even those inclined toward soft power will recognize that it’s time to get out of conference rooms if all we’re going to do is make concessions and provide cover for despots.

The latest liberal to come to his senses is John MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s who asks, “Is this ‘smart’ president really really stupid?”

…Of course, failure to bag the Olympics is just one crack in the “smart” Obama image. I well understand that clever politicians make cynical choices to gain power, even when they know those choices will probably hurt the broader public. So far, Obama’s most cynical choice was to align himself with Robert Rubin and Wall Street in order to raise money for his presidential campaign. Second is his campaign pledge to escalate the occupation of Afghanistan to counter Republican claims that he and the Democrats were appeasers on “terrorism.” In third place is his decision to hand Max Baucus (the senator from Montana who moonlights as an insurance-company lobbyist) the task of “reforming” health care, thus guaranteeing that there would be no genuine reform. …

…But maybe such cynicism isn’t altogether so smart in 2009. Wall Street, unpunished and unrepentant after three decades of recklessness, is poised to embark on new, unregulated financial adventures, such as the issuance of securitized life-insurance policies known as “life settlement” bonds. Rewarded for their failures with huge sums of public money, the newly emboldened casino managers are liable to sink the ship next time, instead of just flooding it.

In Afghanistan, American soldiers are consistently dying in small batches (under orders from their Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader) while Afghan civilians continue to perish in far greater numbers under American and British bombs supposedly aimed at the Taliban. You don’t even have to remember Vietnam or the Russian occupation of Afghanistan to recognize the profound absurdity of the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy. Respectable experts, from Edward Luttwak on the right to George McGovern and William Polk on the left to Andrew J. Bacevich somewhere in the middle, have demolished the notion that such a military campaign can succeed in subduing a nationalist or tribal rebellion.

As for Baucus and health care, it’s clear that whatever bill comes out of the Finance Committee, large numbers of Americans will remain uninsured or underinsured. This means that the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York will continue to overflow with poor children who come for primary care because their parents can’t afford a pediatrician. And it means that America’s industrial corporations will continue to suffer from a competitive disadvantage with manufacturers based in civilized countries where health care is considered a public trust and a right and the government pays the bill.

Does this sound smart? Or does it sound really, really stupid?

Mark Steyn has cutting remarks for the educationbots of Delaware’s Christina School District.

A few weeks ago, Zachary Christie of Newark, in Joe Biden’s Grand Duchy of Delaware, joined the Cub Scouts. In the course of so doing, he acquired one of those combination knife-fork-spoon utensils that come in so useful when you’re tucking in to a hearty meal round the campfire. …
But six-year old Zachary is to blame for finding his knife-fork-spoon utensil so cool he decided one October morn to take it to school to eat lunch with it. Knives are banned. Because they’re weapons. The first-grader was summoned to a disciplinary-committee hearing and sentenced to at least 45 days in reform school. Don’t get mad at the “educators.” “We have to follow the policy as it is written consistently because this is the code of conduct that is applied to all of our students in our district,” droned the School District spokesdrone, Wendy E. Lapham.

Indeed. This is the same Christina School District that in April attempted to expel sixth-grader Kasia Haughton. Kasia took a cake to school for her fellow students, and, in helping her pack it, her grandmother helpfully put a knife in the bag. Her teacher placed the cake on the desk, used the knife to cut it, passed round the slices, and then reported Kasia for bringing a “deadly weapon” to school. The grandmother packed the knife. The teacher used the knife. Kasia never touched it. … As the self-same spokesdrone Wendy E. Lapham droned on this occasion, any knife three inches or longer is classified as a deadly weapon. Have to follow the policy. Can’t make any exceptions. Despite having undergone years of expensive credentialization to qualify to serve in positions of authority, School District officials are prohibited by law from exercising any discretion, using any judgment, demonstrating any sense of proportion, or displaying other qualities hitherto associated with sentient human beings. …

…Unless, of course, you’re a Sikh. Sikhs like to carry their traditional kirpans — knives up to eight inches — and the New York City Board of Education and the Supreme Court of Canada, among many others, have ruled that boys are permitted to take them to school. Why? Because, in the ideological hierarchy, multiculturalism trumps “safety.” …

In Slate, Daniel Gross gives an eye-opening explanation of some of the current stock market activity.

…Perhaps the most compelling reason of all for investors to fret is that private equity firms are selling shares in companies they control to the public. Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman is feeling optimistic and, as Reuters reported earlier this week, the private equity firms he runs plans to take as many as eight companies in its portfolio public. Last week, Blackstone filed a $100 million IPO for Team Health, a hospital-staffing company it controls. As I predicted in back in June, private equity giant KKR is planning an IPO for Dollar General. Sources suggest that HCA, the hospital chain taken private by in November 2006 by KKR, Bain Capital, and Merrill Lynch’s private equity arm, could be taken public soon as well. RailAmerica, a railroad operator taken private by Fortress Investment Group in the spring of 2007, had an IPO earlier this week.

Why could a slew of such public offerings be bad news for the stock markets? After all, the billionaires behind these private equity firms are offering individual investors like you and me the opportunity to join them as shareholders of companies that have benefitted from their guidance and counsel.

That’s exactly why we should beware. Generally speaking, private equity investors are very smart traders. Stephen Schwarzman and Henry Kravis have amassed large fortunes because they’ve figured out how to buy low (using lots of borrowed money) and sell high. You’ll recall that the Blackstone Group’s ultimate offering—the sale of shares in itself to the public—came in June 2007, when the Dow was at about 13,500, close to the top. The IPO price marked a top for Blackstone Group’s stock, which fell almost immediately and now stands about 45 percent below the offering price.

In a typical public offering of stock, a company creates shares and sells them to the public, with the cash raised going into its coffers. The public is thus dealt in on future gains. In initial public offerings of privately held companies—especially of venture-capital and private-equity backed firms—it’s more common for existing shareholders to sell big chunks of their own holdings to the public. Much of the cash raised in these IPOs doesn’t go to the company to pay down debt or fund future investment. It goes into the pockets of the shareholders, who often substantially reduce their holdings by offloading their stakes on less sophisticated investors. That’s why private equity types refer to such events as “exits.” Take this week’s RailAmerica IPO. A total of 22 million shares were sold to the public at $15 per share, raising about $300 million after fees. But fewer than half—10.5 million shares—were sold by the company. The rest were sold by Fortress. So only about $157.5 million of the total raised went to the company. The rest went to Fortress, which got to shed some of its investment in RailAmerica and pocket a small fortune for its owners. RailAmerica could certainly have used all that $300 million. It has more than $700 million in debt. In the first half of 2009, interest costs ate up about three-fourths of operating income, and its underlying business is slumping. (Go here and click on the Sept. 29 registration statement to see the latest data.) In its first two days of trading, RailAmerica’s stock has fallen. (Fortress, it should be noted, still owns most of the company’s shares.) …

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge.com puts more stock market news in perspective.

Another great representation of the amazing loss of purchasing power by the US public are today’s oblivious statements about the Dow at 10,000. While in absolute terms the Dow may cross whatever the Fed thinks is a necessary and sufficient mark before QE begins to taper off (Dow crosses 10k just as Treasury purchases expire), the truth is that over the past 10 years (the first time the DJIA was at 10,000) the dollar has lost 25% of its value. Therefore, we present the Dow over the last decade indexed for the DXY, which has dropped from 100 to about 75. On a real basis (not nominal) the Dow at 10,000 ten years ago is equivalent to 7,537 today! In other words, not only have we had a lost decade for all those who focus on the absolute flatness of the DJIA, but it is also a decade where the US Consumer has lost 25% of purchasing power from the perspective of stocks! You won’t hear this fact on the MSM. …

Phelim McAleer, in Investors Business Daily, writes about how, in the midst of the recession, and with global warming debunked, the Senate is looking to hamstring the economy with a cap-and-trade bill. McAleer is the journalist who recently had the effrontery to challenge Al Gore. You remember, the one who had his mike shut off by his fellow reporters.

…The evidence of environmentalism run amok abounds in Europe. Spain believed the spin that environmental regulation can create “green jobs” and boost the economy. Now the country has 18% unemployment. Britain could suffer blackouts because of policies that require the country to replace coal with fuels like solar and wind power that aren’t readily available or reliable.

Unfortunately for Americans, many of the lawmakers who represent them in Congress seem unwilling to learn from Europe’s mistakes.

The Senate is now considering a bill that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., co-authored to create a European-style “cap and trade” system for carbon dioxide emissions, and he just won the endorsement of a key swing senator. International pressure on the United States to adopt such legislation also will increase in December at climate talks in Copenhagen.

That’s bad news for taxpayers. The Obama administration reluctantly admitted last month that cap-and-trade would cost the average American family $1,761 a year.

That is a rosy prediction. A Heritage Foundation analysis pegs the cost at an average of $2,979 a year and as much as $4,600 a year by 2035. Jobs will disappear, energy prices will skyrocket, and the American Dream will become an unattainable fantasy for many. …

Gerald Eskenazi reviews three new books about baseball for the WSJ.

…Leading off is “The First Fall Classic,” about the 1912 World Series, which wasn’t the “first”—that was the best-of-nine Series in 1903. But the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox World Series was, according to Mike Vaccaro, the first “classic.” He makes a persuasive case. Here we are in a world of train travel, of boozing, of sitting in the stands next to bookmakers openly shouting the odds, of men in fedoras, of a sport with 14 guys in the big leagues nicknamed “Rube.” Astonishingly, it was also a time when, according to Mr. Vaccaro, John J. “Muggsy” McGraw, the Giants’ legendary manager, could run pool halls in partnership with the mobster and gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein without raising eyebrows. …

…There have been more World Series since 1912 that deserve the “classic” label, but only one postseason game can be called perfect: Yankee pitcher Don Larsen’s no hits, no walks, no errors jewel on Oct. 8, 1956, against the Brooklyn Dodgers. In “Perfect,” Lew Paper recounts the game through the eyes of the 19 players who saw action that afternoon at Yankee Stadium, basing his story on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters and family members. Mr. Larsen’s feat was not just the first (and still the only) World Series no-hitter; it was also baseball’s first perfect game since the Roaring ’20s. It had been such a long time since anyone had thrown a perfect game that Mr. Larsen didn’t even know there was such a term for retiring all 27 opposing batters in a row. …

…Batting third in this collection is Joe Posnanski’s “The Machine,” the breathless story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, also known as the Big Red Machine during their years of dominance in the 1970s, when they won three National League pennants and two World Series titles. The book is written in a style reminiscent of Pete Rose’s head-first dives into second base. Here is Mr. Posnanski in the opening paragraph, describing Mr. Rose trying to inspire his teammates: “He stopped in front of each man, glared, his face a mask of rage, an angry drill sergeant, a harsh father, an unforgiving judge. . . . He could already feel the acid of defeat seething in his guts.” …

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In Reason, Matt Welch notes that twenty years ago, the world witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and Communist Europe. Yet the MSM is barely mentioning the anniversary of this momentous occasion and the dramatic effects seen around the world.

On August 23, 1989, officials from the newly reformed and soon-to-be-renamed Communist Party of Hungary ceased policing the country’s militarized border with Austria. Some 13,000 East Germans, many of whom had been vacationing at nearby Lake Balaton, fled across the frontier to the free world. It was the largest breach of the Iron Curtain in a generation, and it kicked off a remarkable chain of events that ended 11 weeks later with the righteous citizen dismantling of the Berlin Wall. …

…In 1988, according to the global liberty watchdog Freedom House, just 36 percent of the world’s 167 independent countries were “free,” 23 percent were “partly free,” and 41 percent were “not free.” By 2008, not only were there 26 additional countries (including such new “free” entities as Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia), but the ratios had reversed: 46 percent were “free,” 32 percent were “partly free,” and just 22 percent were “not free.” There were only 69 electoral democracies in 1989; by 2008 their ranks had swelled to 119.

And even these numbers only begin to capture the magnitude of the change. The abject failure of top-down central planning as an economic organizing model had a profound impact even on the few communist governments that survived the ’90s. Vietnam, while maintaining a one-party grip on power, launched radical market reforms in 1990, resulting in some of the world’s highest economic growth in the last two decades. Cuba, economically desperate after the Soviet spigot was cut off, legalized foreign investment and private commerce. And in perhaps the single most dramatic geopolitical story in recent years, the country that most symbolized state repression in 1989 has used capitalism to pull off history’s most successful anti-poverty campaign. Although Chinese market reforms began in the late ’70s, and were temporarily stalled by the Tiananmen Square massacre (which, counterintuitively, emboldened anti-communists in Europe), China’s post-Soviet recognition that private enterprise should trump the state sector helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. …

…It was no accident that, in the midst of Washington’s illegal and ill-fated bailout of U.S. automakers, Swedish Enterprise Minister Maud Olofsson, when asked about the fate of struggling Saab, tersely announced, “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.”

When Western Europeans are giving lectures to Americans about the dangers of economic intervention, as they have repeatedly since Barack Obama took office, it’s a good time to take stock of how drastically geopolitical arguments have pivoted during the last two decades. …

Camille Paglia is here. This is the month she responds to reader’s letters.

I have been deeply impressed by the citizen outrage that spilled out into town hall meetings this year. And I remain shocked at the priggish derision of the mainstream media (locked in their urban enclaves) toward those events. This was a moving spectacle of grassroots American democracy in action. Aggrieved voters have a perfect right to shout at their incompetent and irresponsible representatives. American citizens are under no duty whatever to sit in reverent silence to be fed propaganda and half-truths. It is bizarre that liberals who celebrate the unruly demonstrations of our youth would malign or impugn the motivation of today’s protestors with opposing views.

The mainstream media’s failure to honestly cover last month’s mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. was a disgrace. The focus on anti-Obama placards (which were no worse than the rabid anti-LBJ, anti-Reagan or anti-Bush placards of leftist protests), combined with the grotesque attempt to equate criticism of Obama with racism, simply illustrated why the old guard TV networks and major urban daily newspapers are slowly dying. Only a simpleton would believe what they say.

Tony Blankley reaffirms what we already know. Washington is insane and out of control.

Want to hear a real laugher? Despite the current disharmony in politics, there’s one policy on which all of Washington agrees. Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, president and Congress all agree that after last fall’s financial crisis, the federal government has to more closely regulate the financial industry to protect our economy from risk of systemic financial collapse.

Here’s the joke. As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It’s the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians – the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street. …

…And yet, the same Congress and president who want to stop the banks from taking too much risk cannot stop themselves from ever more deficits. Indeed, so intoxicated – nay, hypnotized! – by debt is the current government that it is not even proposing to try to cut back. …

Lawrence Kadish, in the WSJ, explains why something must be done to stop Washington’s spending.

…When the government spends more than its revenue, there is a budget deficit. These deficits are paid for by Washington selling interest bearing Treasury securities. If the government were ever to default on its promise to pay periodic interest payments or to repay the debt at maturity, the United States economy would plunge into a level of chaos that would make the Lehman bankruptcy look like a nonevent. …

…In stark but simple terms, unless Americans are made aware of this financial crisis and demand accountability, the very fabric of our society will be destroyed. Interest rates and interest costs will soar and government revenues will be devoured by interest on the national debt. Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education, national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained. Left unchecked, this destructive deficit-debt cycle will leave the White House and Congress with either having to default on the national debt or instruct the Treasury to run the printing presses into a policy of hyperinflation.

It is against this background that Washington is now debating whether to create social programs it can’t afford. …

Robert Samuelson writes that projected per capita GDP increases through 2030 will be surpassed by government spending. Legislators are mortgaging future generations’ earning power to the hilt.

…Downward mobility is possible. Expanding health spending would raise taxes (to pay for government insurance), lower take-home pay (to pay for employer-provided insurance) or increase out-of-pocket medical costs. Other drains also loom: higher energy prices to combat global warming; higher taxes to pay for underfunded state and local government pensions and repair aging infrastructure; higher federal taxes to cover deficits and payments to retirees (much of which reflect health spending). The pressures will undermine private living standards and other public services (schools, police, defense).

The young’s future has been heavily mortgaged. Taken together, all these demands might neutralize gains in per capita incomes, especially if the economy’s performance, burdened by higher taxes or budget deficits, deteriorated. One study by Steven Nyce and Sylvester Schieber of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a consulting firm, examined just health spending. The continuation of present trends would result in “falling wages at the bottom of the earnings spectrum and very slow wage growth on up the earnings distribution. These dismal wage outcomes would persist over at least the next couple of decades.”

To be sure, extra health care enhances our well-being. Some care extends life and improves quality of life. But the connections between being healthy and more health spending are loose. The health of most people reflects personal habits and luck. They get few benefits from high spending. The healthiest 50 percent of Americans account for just 3 percent of annual spending, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation; the sickest 15 percent represent nearly 75 percent. Half of spending goes to those 55 and over, a third to those 65 and over. Any expansion of health care tends to be a transfer from young to old. …

We hear from another liberal today. In The Nation, John Nichols tells the Obama administration to stop complaining about its press coverage. He says the prez has become the “Whiner in Chief.”

…In fact, presidents should go out of their way to accept invites from media that can be expected to poke, prod and pester them. The willingness to take the hits suggests that a commander-in-chief is not afraid to engage with his critics. It also reminds presidents, who tend to be cloistered, that there are a lot of Americans who get their information from sources that do not buy what the White House press office is selling. …

…If the Fox interviewers are absurdly unfair, the American people will respond with appropriate consternation. On the other hand, if they are aggressive and pointed in their challenges, Obama will rise or fall on the quality of his responses. His aides, if they have any faith in their man’s abilities, should bend over backwards to accept some Fox interviews. They should also accept an invite from PBS’ Bill Moyers, who would pose tougher – and, yes, more informed — questions than the Foxbots. …

…As for the Obama administration, whether the grumbling is about Republicans on Fox or bloggers in pajamas, there’s a word for what the president and his aides are doing. That word is “whining.” And nothing — no attack by Glenn Beck, no blogger busting about Guantanamo — does more damage to Obama’s credibility or authority than the sense that a popular president is becoming the whiner-in-chief.

And we have interesting technology news. Paul Taylor, in the Financial Times, reports on Dyson’s new bladeless fan.

First there was the bagless vacuum cleaner, then the towel-less hand dryer: Now James Dyson, the British inventor, has developed a bladeless electric fan which went on sale Tuesday in the US and Australia.

The Dyson Air Multiplier fan – which looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie – uses advancements in airflow engineering instead of traditional blades to ‘multiply’ air 15 times and push out 119 gallons of smooth and uninterrupted air every second.

As a result, Dyson claims the bladeless fan, which works by forcing a jet of air out of a narrow circular slit and then over an aerofoil-shaped blade, is at least as efficient as its bladed counterpart, more comfortable and much safer. …

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Revisiting the prize controversy, Pickerhead thought it would be nice to put a face to some of the people who made the decision. We attached a picture of the head of the committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, to a Financial Times interview with the committee’s secretary. The article closes with this defense, “Some of our most controversial {picks} have been the most successful.” So you see, they’re not reacting to what someone or some institution did. They want to be in the game. They want to have influence. Perhaps if the kid president soon decides to bug out of Afghanistan, then next year the Nobel Peace Prize Committee can award the prize to …….. the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. How is that for the ultimate self-gratification? Or would that be a circle jerk?

… The Peace prize is the only Nobel award handled by the Norwegian committee. All the others are decided by institutions in Alfred Nobel’s native Sweden. He allocated the responsibilities in his will without any explanation for why Norway should oversee the Peace prize.

Some have speculated that he viewed Norway as more peace-loving than his own country and feared the prize would become a tool of Swedish foreign policy. Others say it reflects his admiration for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, a Norwegian novelist and peace activist.

There was nothing in the will to insist that committee members must be Norwegian and there have been frequent calls for foreigners to be admitted. Mr Lundestad says that, while an all-Norwegian panel is “hard to defend,” there are “strong practical reasons” for the status quo.

It would be difficult for an international panel to hold the numerous meetings involved – the committee met seven times this year to review 205 nominees – and harder still to decide which countries should be represented, he argued. … (Maybe Norway has no internet)

Jennifer Rubin says that liberal reaction and concern has made the Obama peace prize helpful to the nation.

Conservatives couldn’t have dreamed up a clarifying event this effective. But thanks to the Nobel Peace Prize, an epidemic of common sense and queasiness about multiculturalism is breaking out even among liberals.  Howard Fineman writes:

“Obama isn’t going to be sworn in as planetary president. But it doesn’t matter; in his mind, he already is.  …

Fineman is inspired enough by this spasm of international foolishness to remind his Newsweek readers that playing to the Nobel Prize Committee and like-minded fans in the “international community” just may not be a good thing. Turns out that the international community doesn’t always want what’s in our best interests:

“For one, what the world wants is not necessarily what America needs, or what the voters care about. Most of the world wants us to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan right now. Most of the world would like to see the dollar lose its role as the reserve currency. Many, many citizens of the world think that Hugo Chávez is a cool dude and that Iran has every right to buy uranium centrifuges and stash them underground.” …

In The NY Times, Ross Douthat writes that Obama should have refused the prize.

…People have argued that you can’t turn down a Nobel. Please. Of course you can. Obama is a gifted rhetorician with world-class speechwriters. All he would have needed was a simple, graceful statement emphasizing the impossibility of accepting such an honor during his first year in office, with America’s armed forces still deep in two unfinished wars. …

…In any case, it will be far more offensive when Obama takes the stage in Oslo this November instead of Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s heroic opposition leader; or Thich Quang Do, the Buddhist monk and critic of Vietnam’s authoritarian regime; or Rebiya Kadeer, exiled from China for her labors on behalf of the oppressed Uighur minority; or anyone who has courted death this year protesting for democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran. …

…Obama gains nothing from the prize. No domestic constituency will become more favorably disposed to him because five Norwegians think he’s already changed the world — and the Republicans were just handed the punch line for an easy recession-era attack ad. (To quote the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, anticipating the 30-second spots to come: “He got a Nobel Prize. What did you get? A pink slip.”) …

J. E. Dyer, in Contentions, has an update on Iran, and the Obama administration’s continued foreign policy missteps, made all the more tragic by Obama receiving the peace prize.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post suggest that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to Iran’s imprisoned and battered reform protesters (specifically, said the Post, to Neda Agha-Soltan) instead of to Barack Obama. Both op-eds focus on the encouragement such an award would have been for the cause of political reform in Iran; the Journal also speculates that a Nobel might have made a difference to the fate of the three Iranian dissidents sentenced to death over the weekend for their participation in the post-election protests. …

…In a like spirit, former president Mohammad Khatami, a political moderate now publicly aligned with besieged reform leaders Mousavi and Kourabi, posted a defiant declaration on his website after the death sentences were announced, assuring Iranians that the reform movement would not die.

In the face of this bravery, our Nobel-winning president has gone beyond his original hands-off posture on Iran’s internal business, and even beyond his administration’s affirmation in early August that Ahmadinejad is Iran’s “elected president.” Now Obama’s USAID organization has decided to cut off funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The IHRDC, whose principal current project is documenting abuse of reform protesters since the June election, was first funded under Bush five years ago and has extensively documented the brutality of the Islamic revolutionary regime, including its assassination campaign against dissidents abroad and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners.

The CATO Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter interprets this USAID decision as a “relatively minor concession” by the Obama administration to establish “Washington’s goodwill” in talks with Iran. The State Department has declined to give a reason for the funding cut-off. We should expect none, of course. A Nobel Peace Prize means never having to explain your lack of interest in human rights.

One last item on the prize for now. Camille Paglia should be out soon, and, no doubt, will have something to add. Your servant will provide that as soon as it shows up. This last piece is by George Friedman of Stratfor who explains why the prize makes sense to left-wing Europeans. It’s here so you can learn something, but Pickerhead still thinks they are free-riding Euro-weenies.

…The Europeans experienced catastrophes during the 20th century. Two world wars slaughtered generations of Europeans and shattered Europe’s economy. Just after the war, much of Europe maintained standards of living not far above that of the Third World. In a sense, Europe lost everything — millions of lives, empires, even sovereignty as the United States and the Soviet Union occupied and competed in Europe. The catastrophe of the 20th century defines Europe, and what the Europeans want to get away from. …

…Between 1945 and 1991, Western Europe lived in a confrontation with the Soviets. The Europeans lived in dread of Soviet occupation, and though tempted, never capitulated to the Soviets. That meant that the Europeans were forced to depend on the United States for their defense and economic stability, and were therefore subject to America’s will. How the Americans and Russians viewed each other would determine whether war would break out, not what the Europeans thought.

Every aggressive action by the United States, however trivial, was magnified a hundredfold in European minds, as they considered fearfully how the Soviets would respond. In fact, the Americans were much more restrained during the Cold War than Europeans at the time thought. …

…For Europe, prosperity had become an end in itself. …Today’s Europeans value economic comfort above all other considerations. After Sept. 11, the United States seemed willing to take chances with the Europeans’ comfortable economic condition that the Europeans themselves didn’t want to take. They loathed George W. Bush for doing so. …

…The Norwegian politicians gave their prize to Obama because they believed that he would leave Europeans in their comfortable prosperity without making unreasonable demands. That is their definition of peace, and Obama seemed to promise that. …

…The Norwegians awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the president of their dreams, not the president who is dealing with Iran and Afghanistan. Obama is not a free actor. He is trapped by the reality he has found himself in, and that reality will push him far away from the Norwegian fantasy. In the end, the United States is the United States — and that is Europe’s nightmare, because the United States is not obsessed with maintaining Europe’s comfortable prosperity. The United States cannot afford to be, and in the end, neither can President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize or not.

Thomas Sowell gives a clear overview of the housing crisis and recession. And he fixes the ultimate blame where it belongs – on the politicians meddling with the economy.

…Politicians to the rescue: Federal regulatory agencies leaned on banks to lend to people they were not lending to before — or else. The “or else” included not having their business decisions approved by the regulators, which could cost them more money than making risky loans.

Mortgage lending standards were lowered, in order to raise the magic number of home ownership. But, with lower lending standards, there were — surprise! — more mortgage payment delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures.

This was a problem not only for banks and other lenders but also for those in the business of buying mortgages from the original lenders. These included semi-government enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Wall Street firms that bought mortgages, bundled them together and issued securities based on the anticipated income from those mortgages.

In other words, all these economic transactions were “interconnected,” … And when the people who owed money on their mortgages stopped paying, the whole house of cards began to fall.

Politicians may not know much — or care much — about economics, but they know politics and they care a lot about keeping their jobs. So a great distracting hue and cry has gone up that all this was due to the market not being regulated enough by the government. In reality, it was precisely the government regulators who forced the banks to lower their lending standards. …

Debra J. Saunders, in The San Francisco Chronicle, picks up on Paul Hudson’s global warming article posted in Pickings yesterday.

…Western Washington University geologist Don J. Easterbrook presented research last year that suggests that the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) caused warmer temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s. With Pacific sea surface temperatures cooling, Easterbrook expects 30 years of global cooling.

EPA analyst Alan Carlin – an MIT-trained economist with a degree in physics – referred to “solar variability” and Easterbrook’s work in a document that warned that politics had prompted the Environmental Protection Agency and countries to pay “too little attention to the science of global warming” as partisans ignored the lack of global warming over the past 10 years. At first the EPA buried the paper, then it permitted Carlin to post it on his personal Web site. …

…Over the years, global warming alarmists have sought to stifle debate by arguing that there was no debate. They bullied dissenters and ex-communicated nonbelievers from their panels. In the name of science, disciples made it a virtue to not recognize the existence of scientists such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Colorado State University’s William Gray.

For a long time, that approach worked. But after 11 years without record temperatures that had the seas spilling over the Statue of Liberty’s toes, they are going to have to change tactics. …

Old fool that he is, the Archbishop of Canterbury has silly advice on the globalony front. Wants people to grow stuff in their backyards. Cool thing is, the London Times linked to a piece debunking the churchman’s claims. We have that, and then some more on the ”locavore” movement.  Ben Webster writes:

In an interview with The Times, Dr Rowan Williams said that families needed to respond to the threat of climate change by changing their shopping habits and adjusting their diets to the seasons, eating fruit and vegetables that could be grown in Britain.

He said that the carbon footprint of peas from Kenya and other airfreighted food was too high and families should not assume that all types of food would be available through the year. Dr Williams called for more land to be made available for allotments, saying that they would help people to reconnect with nature and wean them off a consumerist lifestyle.

The Archbishop was accused, however, of threatening the livelihoods of a million families in sub-Saharan Africa, who depended on exports of fresh produce to Europe. …

Tristan McConnell, in The Times, UK, gives a snapshot of the Kenyon agriculture export business.

…Pre-industrial methods are still the norm, with fields tilled by hand or with ox-drawn ploughs. For many Kenyans, the money earned pays for school fees and better diets for their children.

Last month the Africa Research Institute, a London-based think-tank, published a report praising Kenya’s fruit, veg and flower industry for its environment-friendly carbon footprint. “The vast majority of Kenyan produce exported to Europe is carried in the hold of passenger aircraft carrying Western tourists home from the safari parks and beaches of East Africa,” Mark Ashurst, its director, said.

“To suggest that this shouldn’t happen is to penalise a globally competitive African industry for the carbon footprint of European holidaymakers.”

Brian Dunning, on SkepticBlog.org, discusses how locally grown doesn’t mean efficiently delivered. Dunning consulted for a market chain, he writes.

…In their early days, they did indeed follow a true farmers’ market model. Farmers would either deliver their product directly to the store, or they would send a truck out to each farmer. As they added store locations, they continued practicing direct delivery between farmer and store. Adding a store in a new town meant finding a new local farmer for each type of produce in that town. Usually this was impossible: Customers don’t live in the same places where farms are found. Farms are usually located between towns. So Henry’s ended up sending a number of trucks from different stores to the same farm. Soon, Henry’s found that the model of minimal driving distance between each farm and each store resulted in a rat’s nest of redundant driving routes crisscrossing everywhere. What was intended to be efficient, local, and friendly, turned out to be not just inefficient, but grossly inefficient. Henry’s was burning huge amounts of diesel that they didn’t need to burn.

You can guess what happened. They began combining routes. This meant fewer, larger trucks, and less diesel burned. They experimented with a distribution center to serve some of their closely clustered stores. The distribution center added a certain amount of time and labor to the process, but it (a) still accomplished same-day morning delivery from farm to store, and (b) cut down on mileage tremendously. Henry’s added larger distribution centers, and realized even better efficiency.  …

…Locally grown produce is rarely efficient. Apply a little mathematics to the problem, and you’ll find that the ugly alternative of giant suburban distribution centers accomplishes the same thing – fresh produce into stores on the same day it’s picked – but with much less fuel burned. …

…Too often, environmentalists are satisfied with the mere appearance and accoutrements of environmentalism, without regard for the underlying facts. Apply some mathematics and some economics, and you’ll find that a smaller environmental footprint is the natural result of improved efficiency.

The Borowitz Report has more awards to give Obama.

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Americans have choices ahead. Charles Krauthammer explains the direction that liberalism is leading our nation, through its foreign policy of apologies and appeasement, and through its domestic policy of increasing governmental control, restraining our economy and threatening security. He ends with how we can change directions. Brace yourselves, Charles went long today in this adaptation of a speech he made last week.

…my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands. …

…Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome. …

…The New Liberalism will protest that despite its rhetoric, it is not engaging in moral reparations, but seeking real strategic advantage for the United States on the assumption that the reason we have not gotten cooperation from, say, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, or even our European allies on various urgent agendas is American arrogance, unilateralism, and dismissiveness. And therefore, if we constrict and rebrand and diminish ourselves deliberately–try to make ourselves equal partners with obviously unequal powers abroad–we will gain the moral high ground and rally the world to our causes. …

…This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naïve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory–as policy–has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. …

…Domestic policy, of course, is not designed to curb our power abroad. But what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. Decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism’s ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.

This is not the place to debate the intrinsic merits of the social democratic versus the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. There’s much to be said for the decency and relative equity of social democracy. But it comes at a cost: diminished social mobility, higher unemployment, less innovation, less dynamism and creative destruction, less overall economic growth. …

…This shift in resources is not hypothetical. It has already begun. At a time when hundreds of billions of dollars are being lavished on stimulus and other appropriations in an endless array of domestic programs, the defense budget is practically frozen. Almost every other department is expanding, and the Defense Department is singled out for making “hard choices”–forced to look everywhere for cuts, to abandon highly advanced weapons systems, to choose between readiness and research, between today’s urgencies and tomorrow’s looming threats.

Take, for example, missile defense, in which the United States has a great technological edge and one perfectly designed to maintain American preeminence in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile. Missile defense is actually being cut. The number of interceptors in Alaska to defend against a North Korean attack has been reduced, and the airborne laser program (the most promising technology for a boost-phase antiballistic missile) has been cut back–at the same time that the federal education budget has been increased 100 percent in one year. …

…Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?

First, accept our role as hegemon. And reject those who deny its essential benignity. There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance–as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.

And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen. …

…There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world’s reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. …

…Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.

The other looming threat to our economy–and to the dollar–comes from our fiscal deficits. They are not out of our control. There is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt–threatening the dollar, the entire economy, and consequently our superpower status abroad. …

Jennifer Rubin starts with an amazing call to Obama from Bob Kerry to act more like Bush. She then makes an important point, that Obama feels himself to be above any obligations of national or historical context. He feels he is above the presidency, above the nation. Whether he believes he must keep his own word remains to be seen.

…What is at stake, Kerrey argues, is whether Obama can cut through the cant about another Vietnam (the war hero explains: “This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror”) and keep his word. He argues: “When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more than your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership.” …

…Now maybe Obama doesn’t consider the promises of his predecessors to be binding on him. After all, he remarked after sitting through a Daniel Ortega rant that he didn’t want to be held responsible for the Bay of Pigs, which occurred when he was 3 years old. In other words, he may not see himself as the successor to previous presidents’ obligations. He stands above and apart from mere parochial Americanism. He is in essence a free agent, without the burden of deals, understandings, and obligations undertaken by those who came before him, and most particularly George W. Bush.

But Afghanistan is different. He was the one who defined it as a critical war. He was the one who set the strategy to defeat the Taliban. He was the one who hired Gen. Stanley McChrystal to come up with an alternative to the losing counterterrorism strategy. So it’s not merely a case here of stepping apart from his predecessors’ promises, but from his own. If he can’t manage to do even that, friends and allies soon will see America as unreliable and untrustworthy. It will be the dawning not of an age of multilateral nirvana, but of every-country-for-itselfism. The result will be a more dangerous and less predictable world. And it won’t be at all what the Nobel Committee had in mind.

More bad news from that Universal Health Care Wonderland, Massachusetts. Wendy Williams writes that they are being fined because the state changed the rules on health care.

My husband retired from IBM about a decade ago, and as we aren’t old enough for Medicare we still buy our health insurance through the company. But IBM, with its typical courtesy, informed us recently that we will be fined by the state.

Why? Because Massachusetts requires every resident to have health insurance, and this year, without informing us directly, the state had changed the rules in a way that made our bare-bones policy no longer acceptable. Unless we ponied up for a pricier policy we neither need nor want—or enrolled in a government-sponsored insurance plan—we would have to pay $1,000 each year to the state. …

…IBM seems like a rock of stability compared to the state of Massachusetts. It’s apparent that state health-care policies can change at the whim of politicians in Boston, and we might not be able to adjust to the new rules. The way we figure it, if we sign up for a state-subsidized plan we will be at the mercy of the state.

So we are sticking with our plan and paying the tax. But what bothers me most is that a similar health-care mandate is being proposed in Washington, and some of the same promises that were made here are being made again—such as that the mandate will never hit middle-class folks with a new tax. …

…The mandate in Massachusetts was sold as something that wouldn’t penalize people like my husband and me. But those political promises were only good for as long as it took to get the mandate enacted into law.

Paul Hudson, on the BBC News, asks what happened to global warming. He looks at the current theories.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?  …

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Responsible governing means making tough choices. Obama has generals who give realistic assessments about Afghanistan. Obama also has advisers who promise everything can be won for one low price, or alternatively that promises can be broken, explains Charles Krauthammer.

…The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm’s-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of “counterterrorism” in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world’s expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy — “counterinsurgency,” meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge — you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he’ll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world’s foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago — Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans — the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s remarks on Afghanistan from Fox News All-Stars. Says Krauthammer, Obama’s Afghanistan rethink is all politics.

…Then he goes through all the people he consulted with [in that review]: the commanders on the ground, allies, NGOs and the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan and members of Congress. It was a serious review in March.

He appoints his own general later and then he says two months ago it is a war of necessity. You would think he has thought it through.

And now all of a sudden he is rethinking it. It is because of the political pressure. The public opinion polls are going negative on him. He has gotten [resistance from] his left in the party, and it is all about the politics. It is not about the strategy. …

Congress is still hard at work trying to force socialized medicine down our throats, writes David Harsanyi. First, they beat the CBO into submission:

If you’ve been watching noted alchemist and Democratic Sen. Max Baucus conjure up health-care gold this week, you probably know what I mean. …

…Just think of legislation as abstract art. The Congressional Budget Office does.

The CBO’s new estimate, which magically meets every one of President Barack Obama’s preconditions, is based on “conceptual” language provided by Baucus rather than any of those maddeningly specific Arabic numerals.

That’s because the estimate isn’t rooted in an actual bill, per se . . . nor does it incorporate hundreds of amendments that will be part of any final product, well, not exactly . . . What we do have is a CBO that has been browbeaten long enough by the White House to finally summon the conviction to get a figure that so many wanted to hear.

It’s also, believe it or not, free. …

…How exactly does health care “reform” pay for itself in Wonderland? In this case, it pays for itself by charging taxpayers new “fees,” delivering new mandates and penalties, adding pass-through costs and cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. …

Then they want to start taxing us in 2010 for their legislation that won’t be enacted in 2013:

…CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had previously warned that Medicare Advantage payment cuts had the potential to hurt seniors’ private health plans, which, of course, is the point of “reform.”

The most exhilarating aspect of this plan, however, isn’t that it does nothing to contain costs for average consumers, it’s that the average consumer will help pay for it long before they fail to receive any tangible benefits.

According to Democrats, health care reform must be passed this very moment even though it would not kick in until 2013. But don’t worry, it would start taxing Americans in 2010, three years before you get nothing. …

Liberal speechwriter Wendy Button moved to Massachusetts, where many of the proposed healthcare reforms have been enacted. She can no longer afford health insurance. Her commentary is in Politics Daily.

…here’s how I lost my insurance: I moved. That’s right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care.

In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount.

In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven’t changed. I didn’t stop writing and become a stunt double. … There has been no change in the way I live my life except my zip code — to a state with universal health care.

Massachusetts has enacted many of the necessary reforms being talked about in Washington. There is a mandate for all residents to get insurance, a law to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition, an automatic enrollment requirement, and insurance companies are no longer allowed to cap coverage or drop people when they get sick because they forgot to include a sprained ankle back in 1989 on their application. …

…How could all of these weeks and months go by and no one is examining and talking about what has worked and what hasn’t worked in Massachusetts?

While the state has the lowest rate of uninsured, a report by the Commonwealth Fund states that Massachusetts has the highest premiums in the country. The state’s budget is a mess and lawmakers had to make deep cuts in services and increase the sales tax to close gaps. The number of people needing assistance has at times overwhelmed the state. The mandate means that some people who can’t afford insurance are now being slapped with a fine they also can’t afford. There is no “public option” in the way the president describes it, no inter-state competition, no pool for small businesses and self-employed individuals like me to buy into groups that negotiate cheaper rates. …

…What makes this a double blow is that my experience contradicts so much of what I wrote for political leaders over the last decade. That’s a terrible feeling, too. I typed line after line that said everything Massachusetts did would make health insurance more affordable. If I had a dollar for every time I typed, “universal coverage will lower premiums,” I could pay for my own health care at Massachusetts’s rates. …

John Stossel points out that paying Paul less means the government can rob Peter less.

“The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul,” George Bernard Shaw once said.

For a socialist, Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested. …

…Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th-century French economist, defined the state as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” I don’t know if he envisioned one half of the population living off the other half. …

…The built-in unfairness of the tax system has prompted a range of tax-reform proposals, such as a flat tax and replacing the income tax with a sales tax. These alternatives are better, but they have their drawbacks, too. For that reason, there is something more urgent than tax reform: spending reform.

The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is not the tax level but the spending level. Taxation is just one way for the government to get money. The other ways — borrowing and inflation — are also burdens on the people. The best way to lighten the tax burden is to lessen the spending burden. If government spends less, it takes less. And if it takes less, the tax system will weigh less heavily on us all. …

Walter Williams gives different examples in which a society has allowed its government to increase in power and control, for the stated purpose of “social justice”.  When a society starts accepting that the ends justify the means, ruthless leaders with murderous means have come to power.

…The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii’s Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, “Death by Government.” Statistics are provided at his website. The Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and those in nations they captured. Between 1917 and 1987, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there’s little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation’s elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement “social justice.” Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century’s notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn’t over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings.

In the WSJ, Hannah Karp paints an enjoyable portrait of Joe Torre and his pre-game interviews.

The Los Angeles Dodgers limped disappointingly into the division series this week, but there’s still one record Joe Torre can boast about as he enters his 14th consecutive postseason: His pregame media sessions are, by a landslide, the longest and most honest in baseball.

Described by beat writers over the years as “a must-listen,” “a delight” and “baseball’s version of the sermon on the mount,” Mr. Torre’s daily meetings with the press have become the stuff of legend. For nearly an hour before every home game, the soft-spoken 69-year-old sits cross-legged like a Zen master in the Dodgers’ dugout, sipping green tea or chomping pink gum and gazing out toward the palm trees that surround the stadium as he waxes poetic about everything from players’ antics to his own days as a catcher to the time he took his daughter to a Jonas Brothers concert. On a slow day he might tell the one about the Boston fan he once met in an elevator who told him he’d rather see the Red Sox beat the Yankees than see the U.S. capture Saddam Hussein, or he might reminisce about how relievers were rumored to sneak out of Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia to a local bar through a secret passageway near the bullpen. …

…While the baseball world is salivating over the prospect of a World Series matchup between Mr. Torre’s Dodgers and his former team, the New York Yankees, the skipper’s sessions with the press rarely focus on such grandiose questions. Last week he regaled reporters with stories about his recent conversations with director Spike Lee, insisted that his players deserved to pop champagne even if they lost their last series with the Colorado Rockies, expressed relief that his 13-year-old daughter was now wearing Andre Ethier jerseys to games (she routinely sported Yankees attire to Dodgers Stadium last season) and joked about how Derek Jeter used to flex his muscles around the locker room.

“I like to humanize some of the players that people think are plastic,” says Mr. Torre. …

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Today we are, all Prize, all the time, since many of our favorite pundits have comments on the latest attempt of free-riding, left-wing Euro-weenies to interfere in U. S, politics. The week started with Saturday Night Live joking about Obama, and the Nobel committee kept it going. They have truly “jumped the shark.” Conservatives are mostly amused, but liberals are aghast as the hollowness is plain for all to see.

And, think about poor Bill Clinton. When not fighting off the Lewinsky mess, Clinton spent his second term campaigning for this. He took his eye off the job of protecting our country and didn’t pursue bin Laden because angering the Arab world might have prevented some murky Israeli peace deal that could put him over the top.

Read on and enjoy John Fund, Mark Steyn, David Warren, Peter Wehner, Jennifer Rubin, Abe Greenwald, Claudia Rosett, Ed Morrissey, Richard Cohen, and Michael Graham. The joke continues with Scrappleface, the Borowitz Report, and eight cartoonists led by Michael Ramirez who hangs the prize on a tele-prompter.

John Fund

This year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama can only hasten the decline in prestige of an award that has already gone to people like Yasser Arafat, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan (who presided over the Iraqi oil-for-food scam) and the fabulist Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu. For this year’s Nobel, the deadline was February 1, barely ten days after Mr. Obama had assumed the presidency. Though the Nobel committee of five Norwegian politicians presumably considered the evidence over the summer, it’s fair to say their award represents little more than wishful thinking that Mr. Obama’s diplomatic efforts will ultimately bear fruit.

Other U.S. Presidents have won Nobels, but for actual accomplishments. Teddy Roosevelt helped broker a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. Woodrow Wilson worked to build a lasting peace after the end of World War I, however unsuccessful that effort later proved. Even Jimmy Carter won the Peace Prize in 2002 after more than two decades of humanitarian efforts as a former president.

Of course Mark Steyn has an excellent piece. We start first with his hilarious opening:

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics Web site the other day was: “Is Obama Becoming A Joke?” With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize. Up next: His stunning victory in this year’s Miss World contest. Dec. 12, Johannesburg. You read it here first.

For what, exactly, did he win the Nobel? As the president himself put it:

“When you look at my record, it’s very clear what I have done so far. And that is nothing. Almost one year and nothing to show for it. You don’t believe me? You think I’m making it up? Take a look at this checklist.”

And up popped his record of accomplishment, reassuringly blank.

Oh, no, wait. That wasn’t the real President Barack Obama. That was a comedian playing President Obama on “Saturday Night Live.” And, for impressionable types who find it hard to tell the difference, CNN – in a broadcast first that should surely have its own category at the Emmys – performed an in-depth “reality check” of the SNL sketch. That’s right: They fact-checked the jokes. Seriously. “How much truth is behind all the laughs? Stand by for our reality check,” promised Wolf Blitzer, introducing his in-depth report with all the plonking earnestness so cherished by those hapless Americans stuck at Gate 73 for four hours with nothing to watch but the CNN airport channel.

Read on for the serious commentary:

…For these and other “extraordinary efforts” in “cooperation between peoples”, President Obama is now the fastest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history. Alas, the Alas, the extraordinary efforts of those first 12 days are already ancient history. Reflecting the new harmony of U.S.-world relations since the administration hit the “reset” button, The Times of London declared the award “preposterous,” and Svenska Freds (the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society) called it “shameful.” There’s something almost quaintly vieux chapeau about the Nobel decision, as if the hopeychangey bumper stickers were shipped surface mail to Oslo and only arrived last week. Everywhere else, they’re peeling off …

…From about a year after the fall of Baghdad, Democrats adopted the line that Bush’s war in Iraq was an unnecessary distraction from the real war, the good war, the one in Afghanistan that everyone – Dems, Europeans, all the nice people – were right behind, 100 percent. No one butched up for the Khyber Pass more enthusiastically than Barack Obama: “As President, I will make the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban the top priority.” (July 15, 2008)

But that was then, and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, “War kills off great reform movements.” As the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues. Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

Gosh, given their many assertions that Afghanistan is “a war we have to win” (Obama to the VFW, August 2008), you might almost think …that it’s the president and water-bearers like Gunga Dionne who are the “cynics.” In a recent speech to the Manhattan Institute, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that, in diminishing American power abroad to advance statism at home, Obama and the American people will be choosing decline. There are legitimate questions about our war aims in Afghanistan, and about the strategy necessary to achieve them. But, eight years after being toppled, the Taliban will see their return to power as a great victory over the Great Satan, and so will the angry young men from Toronto to Yorkshire to Chechnya to Indonesia who graduated from Afghanistan’s Camp Jihad during the 1990s. And so will the rest of the world: They will understand that the modern era’s ordnungsmacht (the “order maker”) has chosen decline.

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy – for America and the world.

Alfred Nobel took steps to try to prevent his prize from being used to influence world leaders and events, according to David Warren.

…It is also perhaps worth exculpating Alfred Nobel, for the farce his peace prize has become. The man took various precautions in his will to make sure it would not be cheaply politicized, and specifically that it would never be used as a means to influence current events. It was to be a retrospective award, for specific accomplishments universally acknowledged, and thus the opposite of a partisan statement. But Nobel’s will was written in 1895, by the brilliant entrepreneur who converted a failing iron and steel mill into an extremely successful munitions factory. And as students of philanthropy should know, “good intentions” generally go the way of the Munich agreement. …

…Instead, I think the intention of the prize, for which nominations closed on Feb. 1 — less than a fortnight after Obama took office — is in fact designed as an essay in pre-emption. The left-wing, pacifist committee wanted to saddle the new U.S. president with their little “hope diamond,” in case he got any ideas about killing more jihadis in Afghanistan. Or hesitated to do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain did to Czechoslovakia.

Peter Wehner contrasts Arafat, a terrorist who received the Nobel peace prize, and Bush, a leader who worked for the liberation of two nations of people.

… Bush, during his presidency, took the courageous step of sidelining Arafat rather than building a delusional “peace process” around him. It was Bush who spoke out in a forthright fashion about the need for a Palestinian state – but only if the Palestinians made their own inner peace with the Jewish state and gave up terrorism as an instrument of policy.

…Bush spent much of his presidency working to liberate the enslaved people of Iraq and Afghanistan and helping Iraq become the only democracy in the Arab world. That effort cost Americans a lot in blood and treasure. His presidency was damaged in the process. But the wars themselves were noble efforts — wars of authentic liberation — and ones that Democrats initially supported before the going got tough and they began to flake off.

The Noble Committee long ago ceased to be a serious entity; this choice merely confirms that judgment. It is a tendentious organization. And the easiest way — not the only way, but the easiest way — for Westerners to win praise and honors from it is to be critical of America and Israel. George W. Bush would never do that; he loves and has defended both nations. Sometimes virtue is its own reward.

Jennifer Rubin comes up with an excellent reason why so many liberals are uncomfortable with Obama’s win.

…But what is a bit eye-opening is the level of embarrassment — cringing, really — among those rather sympathetic to Obama. Take a look through the Washington Post’s Post-Partisan blog. Yes, the conservatives are somewhere between appalled and bemused. But so are Richard Cohen, Ruth Marcus, and David Ignatius.

Marcus:

“This is ridiculous — embarrassing, even. I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama. But the peace prize? This is supposed to be for doing, not being — and it’s no disrespect to the president to suggest he hasn’t done much yet. Certainly not enough to justify the peace prize.”

Ignatius:

“The Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama seems so goofy — even if you’re a fan, you have to admit that he hasn’t really done much yet as a peacemaker. But there’s an aspect of this prize that is real and important — and that validates Obama’s strategy from the day he took office.”

Mickey Kaus is cringing also. And the AP’s Jennifer Loven is stumped, verging on incredulous. Even the Huffington Post is somewhat mortified. In fact, liberals seems more upset on some level than conservatives, because I think the Left takes this award seriously. Conservatives stopped doing that around the time Yasir Arafat got his. …

Abe Greenwald has wonderful comments about liberals and reality.

Why would Obama have to do anything to earn the Nobel Peace Prize? Has everyone forgotten how he became president of the United States? …

…Today we only deal in make-believe. The Left abhors evidentiary standards. There is global warming in the absence of rising temperature, Israeli war crimes in the absence of unlawful conduct, institutionalized racism in the absence of prejudicial treatment, American imperialism in the absence of empire, and so on.

Seeing what isn’t there is half the job of being on the Left. The other half is changing what isn’t there through costly, intrusive, and ill-conceived initiatives (save 10 percent for keeping Charlie Rangel out of trouble). …

Obama won the Nobel peace prize for disparaging and discrediting the United States in the eyes of the world, writes Peter Wehner. He quotes Charles Krauthammer’s speech about Obama choosing decline for America.

…In his address, Krauthammer says,

“…as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional — exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world. …”

That, in two sentences, explains why Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Now the Nobel Committee couldn’t quite come out and say that directly; it decided to couch the award in this language, taken from the citation: “[Obama’s] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

There you have it: Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America — and it’s not flattering. That much of the world — composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity — isn’t happy with the United States is not news. What is news is that an American president would validate many of those charges. I find that deeply disquieting. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not surprisingly, considers it worthy of its highest honor.

Claudia Rosett looks at another possible motivation for the Nobel committee’s actions. She also notes that many enjoy peace due to the actions of the United States, not due to the positive thinking of the Nobel committee.

…What, more specifically, might they be expecting of Obama? For starters, Norway, along with neighboring Sweden and Denmark, has been banging the drum for America to hand over to the United Nations enormous control over and constraints upon the U.S. economy, in the name of (warming/cooling/take-your-pick) climate change. Thus did Norway’s Nobel committee bestow its favors in 2007 on Al Gore and the UN’s Self-Interested Panel of Politically Corrupted Science — excuse me, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And this December the UN is convening a big climate conference in Copenhagen, with which the U.N. hopes to “seal” its growth-stunting UN-enriching climate “deal.” …

…America, in the course of defending its own freedoms, has long extended to the likes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden a protective umbrella. Under that shelter, too many Europols have come to believe that peace is a function of nothing more than talk and hope and dreams and …premature prizes.

Obama said on Friday morning that he will accept this award as “a call to action.” Action on whose behalf? The five Norwegians who make up the Nobel peace prize committee chose to give him this award, for their own purposes. Obama, and America, owe them nothing. The real hope is that Obama will remember he took an oath (twice) not to serve as global spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Before his presidency is over, keeping faith with that oath may require him to do things would knock the stuffing out of the featherbed philosophy of this sanctimonious crowd of Scandinavian free-riders.

Ed Morrissey reviews liberals’ reactions to the news.

Many of us assumed that the mainstream media outlets would cheer Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award today, but as Byron York notices, they seem as stunned as everyone else — and also as skeptical.  For instance, the Washington Post reminds readers that two other sitting American Presidents have won the Nobel, but only in their second terms, and only after they’d, er, actually achieved something:

“Obama is the third sitting U.S. president–and the first in 90 years–to win the prestigious peace prize. His predecessors won during their second White House terms, however, and after significant achievements in their diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson was awarded the price in 1919, after helping to found the League of Nations and shaping the Treatise of Versailles; and Theodore Roosevelt was the recipient in 1906 for his work to negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese war.

In contrast, Obama is struggling over whether to expand the war in Afghanistan, preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and searching for ways to build momentum to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and assemble an international effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program.” …

Richard Cohen extends the farce.

…And again in a stunning coincidence, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences announced the Oscar for best picture will be given this year to the Vince Vaughn vehicle “Guys Weekend to Burp,” which is being story-boarded at the moment but looks very good indeed. Mr. Vaughn, speaking through his publicist, said he was “touched and moved” by the award and would do everything in his power to see that the picture lives up to expectation and opens big sometime next March.

At the same press conferences, the Academy announced that the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award would go this year to Britney Spears for her intention to “spend whatever it takes to save the whales.” The Academy recognized that Spears had not yet saved a single whale, but it felt strongly that it was the intention that counted most. Spears, who was leaving a club at the time, told People magazine that she would not want to live in “a world without whales.” People put it on the cover.

The sudden spate of awards based on intentions or plans or aspirations was attributed to the decision by the Norwegian Nobel committee to award the peace prize to Barack Obama for his efforts in nuclear disarmament and his outreach to the Muslim world. .. Some cynics suggested that Obama’s award was a bit premature since, among other things, a Middle East peace was as far away as ever and the world had yet to fully disarm. Nonetheless, the president seemed humbled by the news and the Norwegian committee packed for its trip to the United States, where it will appear on Dancing with the Stars.

There are too many Corner posts to spend time mentioning here in the summary. Just scroll down to enjoy. Honorable mention though goes to Andy McCarthy.

… After a number of years, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy after its most fitting recipient — it’s now called the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I’d like to see the Nobel Foundation follow suit. If today’s headlines said, “Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize,” that would be perfect.

Michael Graham delivers some well-deserved sarcasm.

…A prize President Obama earned, the Nobel Committee claims, for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”

This will no doubt come as great comfort to the democracy protesters in Iran, the oppressed citizens of North Korea, the Afghan women being beaten by the Taliban, and the people of Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia, etc., feeling the hot breath of the growling Russian bear. They’re all basking in that Obama-inspired “peace.” …