Lessons From The New Deal

From the 1930's comes a reminder of why socialism simply doesn't work in real life:

[New Deal officials] constructed a town for 200 garment-worker families (selected from a pool of about 800 applicants). Each family paid $500 - about a year's rent in New York—to become a member of the cooperative.

Proponents included Albert Einstein; detractors included William Randolph Hearst's New York Evening Journal, which called the project 'Boondoggle Manor.'

Almost immediately, [resident] Ticktin says, 'the dream collided with reality.'

There were many problems, including opposition by the New York-based garment workers union and a recession in 1937.

Above all, photographer and local resident Edwin Rosskam observed in a 1972 memoir that the workers were inexperienced in managing a factory in such a cutthroat industry and more concerned about their own wages and working conditions than the factory's success.

Each worker thought he knew best, Rosskam wrote, and 'idealist cooperators were few. You didn't think people would strike against themselves. But they did.'

The farm was no better. Most of the factory workers were unwilling to till the soil for a lower wage, according to a 1942 federal study. Many weren't good at it. 'My father used to say that most of them didn't know which end of an onion to put in the ground,' says Shirley Marcus, 75.

Thirty years later, hippies would try the same thing with communes that also didn't work for many of the same reasons. These Utopian schemes aren't new, but for some reason people keep trying them anyway, with the same result.

Use Your Climate Change Illusion

E.D. Kline opines:

Carbon credits, like papal indulgences, don’t actually limit carbon emissions anymore than indulgences sped one’s soul to heaven. Perhaps in theory they do, but in reality the concessions to industry are always too great, the compromises entrenching industry status quo and crowding out innovators and alternative energy start-ups. But meaningless legislation does wonders to ease a guilty conscience – the conscience of a liberal, perhaps, who sneers that opponents of Waxman-Markey have a “contempt for hard science” that is “unforgivable.”

Perhaps doing nothing is not, in fact, the worst course of action, when doing something is little more than an expensive illusion.

But the illusion seems so much easier to sell, doesn't it?

Iraq, After

Tom Ricks is worried about what happens next:

All the basic issues that faced Iraq before the surge are still hanging out there: How to share oil revenue? What is the power relationship between Shia, Sunni and Kurd? Who holds power inside the Shiite community? What is the role of Iran, the biggest winner in this war so far? And will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what happens when all the refugees outside the country and those displaced inside it, who I think are majority Sunni, try to go back to their old houses, now largely occupied by Shiites and protected by Shiite militias?

All of these are valid concerns. The important thing is, they can now be called Iraq's problems.

A Nation Of Borrowers

When it comes to our debt, how bad is it? As a country, we're apparently in hock up to our collective eyebrows:

Foreigners now hold nearly 50 percent of the federal government's publicly held debt. If foreign investors significantly reduce their purchase of future U.S. Treasury debt securities, without even dumping their current holdings, U.S. interest rates could soar and the dollar could collapse, analysts fear.

At minus $3.47 trillion, America's net debtor status with foreigners represents nearly 25 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, the highest level in history.

'Three decades of massive [trade] deficits have converted the United States from the world's banker - able to 'pay any price and bear any burden in the cause of freedom' - to the world's largest debtor, utterly dependent on China and other foreign interests,' said Charles McMillion, chief economist of Washington-based MBG Information Services.

Is it too late to change this? Our economic fortunes are now entwined with those of China, so on the one hand they still need us-but for how much longer? What happens when we can't beg or borrow any more?

The Cristina Effect

I wonder if she'll try and stage a coup:

Hurt by a faltering economy and her own confrontational style, Mrs. Kirchner saw her faction of the governing Peronist party lose control of both houses of Congress. Meanwhile the Congressional slate headed by her husband and predecessor, Nestor, lost in Buenos Aires province, the most populous and economically important. Kirchner-backed legislative candidates even lost in Nestor's home state of Santa Cruz.

Analysts said the vote was a rejection both of the Kirchners' combative style and the populist policies, including price controls, high farm taxes and heavy intervention in the economy. 'Argentina has shifted towards the center,' says Carlos Germano, a Buenos Aires political consultant. 'Argentines voted for moderates who seek dialogue and build consensus.'

The article goes on to note that this is a largely symbolic victory for her opponents, but it should be a warning not just to other Latin American lefties but to Team Obama and the Democrats that the same thing could happen to them. When it plays its cards right, the center cannot only hold, it can thrive and prosper.

Memories Are Made Of This

Shades of Philip K. Dick:

Scientists have achieved a new milestone in brain imaging: we have seen a memory in the process of being formed. Using brain cells from a lowly sea slug, which actually makes a good model for our brains, images were captured of proteins forming between the neurons. These proteins distinguish the memory as a long-term one rather than short-term, as the proteins solidify the memory in the neurons. This process had been suspected but not visualized until now.

Kelsey Martin's team at the University of California focused their imaging on the synapse, the communication junction between two neuron cells. Scientists first coated certain proteins with a fluorescent dye that starts out green, but turns red when exposed to UV light. They blasted the neurons with UV light and shifted everything to red, just to prove the dye was there. Then they bathed the cells in serotonin, a chemical that can stimulate memory formation. They were then able to watch as new green fluorescent proteins were created as the memory was made.

This could have huge medical and legal implications. False and supressed memories could be revealed or discounted, for example. Of course we're not yet at the stage where they can actually be photographed, but it looks like we're getting there.

What Happened In Honduras

Perhaps Team Obama should take a closer look at who it is they're defending:

Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

Is the military's behavior the best way to handle this? If history is any indication, probably not, but it's not quite the same as a generalissimo simply taking over and installing himself as el presidente.

They Can't Handle The Truth

Let's hear it for transparency!

A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

'He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA,' Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he's ordered an investigation. 'We're going to expose it.'

The controversy comes after the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, one that Inhofe said will be 'dead on arrival' in the Senate despite President Obama's energy adviser voicing confidence in the measure.

The Bush administration as rightfully criticized for distorting medical science in the name of supporting a fundamentalist agenda. The fact that Team Obama seems to be doing the same thing when it comes to the environment shouldn't excuse it, but with liberals it apparently is.

The Handover

The Iraqis are happy, Dick Cheney, not so much. Meanwhile, Marc Lynch points out:

American forces have been drawing down in line with the Status of Forces Agreement expectations for months now --- it's not like tomorrow all of the Americans will suddenly click the heels of their ruby slippers and vanish in a puff of smoke. Tomorrow's deadline is far more important symbolically than practically. And here, the Obama administration and General Odierno's team deserve a lot of credit for their careful, rigorous, and publicly affirmed adherence to the agreement.

Perhaps someone should remind Cheney that the agreement began under his old boss's watch. And the Awakening Councils had as much to do with the political turnaround that made this possible as anything Obama might have done. At any rate, Iraq is increasingly being turned back over to the Iraqis, and that's a good thing.

He Was Against It Before He Was For It

And it looks like another campaign promise may soon fall by the wayside.

The White House left open the possibility Sunday that President Barack Obama might pay for his health care overhaul by taxing employer-provided health insurance even though he had campaigned on not raising taxes on middle-class families.

White House adviser David Axelrod said the administration wouldn't rule out taxing some employees' benefits to fund a health care agenda that has yet to take final form. The move would be a compromise with fellow Democrats, who are pushing the proposal as a way to pay for the massive undertaking without ballooning the federal deficit.

'There are a number of formulations and we'll wait and see. The important thing at this point is to keep the process moving, to keep people at the table, to the keep the discussions going,' Axelrod said. 'We've gotten a long way down the road and we want to finish that journey.'

But if Obama compromises on that point, it would reverse his promise not to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000.

'I pledge that under my plan, no one making less than $250,000 a year will see any type of tax increase,' Obama told a crowd in Dover, N.H., last year. 'Not income tax, not capital gains taxes, not any kind of tax.'

Considering the administration's recent track record on pledges, I'm not holding my breath.

The Final Pitch

It's the end of an era in the infomercial world:

Billy Mays, the burly, bearded television pitchman whose boisterous hawking of products such as Orange Glo and OxiClean made him a pop-culture icon, has died. He was 50.

Tampa police said Mays' wife found him unresponsive Sunday morning. A fire rescue crew pronounced him dead at 7:45 a.m. It was not immediately clear how he died. He said he was hit on the head when an airplane he was on made a rough landing Saturday, and his wife, Deborah Mays, told investigators he didn't feel well before he went to bed about 10 p.m. that night.

There were no signs of a break-in at the home, and investigators do not suspect foul play, said Lt. Brian Dugan of the Tampa Police Department, who wouldn't answer questions about how Mays' body was found because of the ongoing investigation. The coroner's office expects to have an autopsy done by Monday afternoon.

'Although Billy lived a public life, we don't anticipate making any public statements over the next couple of days,' Deborah Mays said in a statement Sunday. 'Our family asks that you respect our privacy during these difficult times.'

This guy was just on The Tonight Show recently. His was the kind of delivery that was either annoying or exciting, depending on your POV. R.I.P.

Information, Please

In noting how little substance there seems to be at the official White House website, Jim Harper may have coined a new word:

Information is harder to find on the Obama Web site than it was on the site created and run by the Bush administration, according to Web site experts.

“It doesn’t seem to be quite in line with the notion of the pillars of government 2.0 being openness and transparency. It seems just the opposite,” said Mark Drapeau, a columnist for Federal Computer Week who writes frequently on the ways that new technologies can be used by the government…

“It’s lots of PR and not a lot of data,” said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, who called the site “brochureware.”

Well, if you have to advertise, do it well, I suppose.

If You Print It, They Will Come

Welcome to the age of printable buildings:

The thin layers of the structure are held together by an inorganic binder, not the normal steel reinforcements that most buildings have. This allows for strength and design freedom not available before. The structure was designed using CAD/CAM software and then exported directly to the printer. Once printed, it only takes about 24 hours for the material to fully set. The process is also pretty environmentally sound, and if any of the building material remains unused, it can be recycled.

So far only a 3-by-3-by-3 meter model has been made of the Radiolaria Pavilion, but that's enough to prove the process works. Considering the ease of moving from design programs to finished building, this could transform building construction. Without the need for rigid steel reinforcement, it could also usher in an era of more free-flowing and organic architectural design. Soon we might be living in printed sandstone buildings that rival those on Tattooine.

Not too shabby. Now, if they could come with one of those aircars like the one Luke Skywalker had...

Kaus for Celebration

Has it really been ten years? Congrats, then, and to the other bloggers (Sullivan, who explained why he blogs here, Glenn Reynolds, etc) who have been able to stay in the game for so long.

Fox On The Run

Maybe this is why Obama has a problem with them:

THE 'fair and balanced' network is heading for its best year of ratings ever, averaging 2.1m viewers while CNN plunges to 805,000 and MSNBC rises to 787,000. James Hibberd of the Hollywood Reporter theorises that 'a dominant political party... can fuel the popularity of opposing voices', and Fox is going through the boom that Rush Limbaugh experienced during the Clinton years and Jon Stewart experienced during eight years of George W. Bush.

I don't know that it's just Fox that will benefit from being critical of Obama. When even Bill Maher is criticizing Obama (albeit from a liberal POV), it seems that opposition can make for some strange bedfellows.

Apocalypse Not Yet

Wired has a good article on how the Swine Flu apocalypse isn't living up to the hype:

H1N1 had an RØ of about 1.3, high enough to spread the virus but low enough that a strong isolation program could break its back. Its case fatality rate was a wussy 1.9 percent in Mexico and 0.1 percent worldwide. By comparison, the 1918 Spanish flu had an RØ of 2.7 and a case fatality rate of up to 5 percent, making it far more deadly. A real apocalypse, like the killer flu in The Stand — Stephen King's opus of epidemiologic eschatology — would be off the chart, with an RØ of 5 to 6 and a case fatality rate of 99 percent.

Ther'es more information at the link, along with charts and maps. So apparently there's no fear of Captain Trips, at least for now.

Does Everything, Solves Nothing

Arnold Kling points to four areas as examples of how Obama seems to want to do less with too much:

1) The stimulus failed to meet Larry Summers’ famous criteria of timely, targeted, or temporary.

2) The cap and trade legislation maximizes rent-seeking (favoritism toward particular businesses) and minimizes carbon reduction.

3) The proposed financial reforms are mostly cosmetic and fail to address the key issues of housing policy and regulatory capital arbitrage.

4) In championing health care reform, the President stresses the unsustainability of our current system, while insisting that nothing will change (you can keep your insurance, keep your doctor, etc.).

The pattern that I see is one of following the path of least political resistance, even if it means failing to make any significant contribution to solving the actual public policy problem.

In other words, Obama seems to want to let the problems take care of themselves while giving them lip service. Didn't we have that in the last administration?

The Return Of The Birchers

Is the John Birch Society making a comeback?:

For some, that name means nothing. Or it sparks flashbacks to the 1960s, when the John Birch Society was synonymous with seeing red here, there and everywhere.
....

Yet for others, the John Birch Society is urgently relevant to the matters of today, in its support of secure borders and limited government, its distrust of the Federal Reserve and the United Nations, and its belief in a conspiracy to merge Mexico, Canada and the United States.

This so-called North American Union, it asserts, is part of a larger plot by an amorphous, amoral group of powerful elite — including but not limited to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefellers — to take over planet Earth. Call it the New World Order.

Some of these theories may sound like cable television chatter, or the synopsis of a Dan Brown bestseller. But Birch leaders say this plot is real, with roots going back more than 200 years to a secret, insidious brotherhood called the Illuminati, and with most American presidents among its many dupes and abettors.

“We’ve always referred to it as a Satanic conspiracy,” said Arthur Thompson, the society’s chief executive, sitting beside an American flag.

The society, which was established in 1958, says its membership has doubled in recent years, thanks to rising interest in these beliefs and, lately, to the policies of the Obama administration. But it will not provide firm numbers, other than to say it has tens of thousands of members.

“We don’t want to let our enemies know our strengths or our weaknesses,” Mr. Thompson explained.

I suppose that includes the three or four people in Mr. Thompson's basement...

You might call the Birchers the original paleocons, but I have the feeling they'd have felt right at home on the Internets.

Cap'n'Cost

So how much will cap and trade cost? Nate Silver takes a look:

There is a fair amount of state-to-state variance, although it is exaggerated somewhat by the presence of a couple of outliers: Florida and D.C. on the one side and Wyoming and Alaska, which I think are being punished for the use of personal jet travel, on the other. The key question for the bill's passage might be whether Democrats can pick up some Republican votes in large, coastal states like Florida, California, New York, and North Carolina, each of which appears to be associated with below-average costs to end-users. Conversely, most of the places with the highest direct costs are places where the Democrats weren't likely to pick up many votes anyway, although this does suggest that votes like Mark Begich's in Alaska and Mary Landireu's in Louisiana will be tough ones if this gets to the Senate.

So, are Democratic states more equal than others? Meanwhile, Matt Steinglass says critics should just shut up and take their medicine:

The hour of geeky wonkitude is past. Now we are where we are. This is the bill we have. The question is whether it will go through or not. That’s the only question. If the bill fails, it will mean victory has gone to those forces who are quite literally working to destroy Planet Earth. That is all that is happening here. There is no room here for skeptics and doubters and cavillers and doomsday-morning quarterbacks.

Well, pardon me if I'm more on the side of those who are "Destroying the Earth" here. Speaking of which, Jim Boehner wants a filibuster. It probably wouldn't work, although considering that the Dems apparently don't want the Republicans invited to their Greening of America party, I'm not surprised.

The Dark Side Of The Man In The Mirror

Much will be said about Michael Jackson's legacy over the coming days, but Andrew Sullivan sums up what ultimately destroyed him:

Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.

I loved his music. His young voice was almost a miracle, his poise in retrospect eery, his joy, tempered by pain, often unbearably uplifting. He made the greatest music video of all time; and he made some of the greatest records of all time. He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

Michael Jackson seemed to represent the two-sided face of fame better than few other performers in our era. Elvis was one; so was Marilyn Monroe. Like them, Jackson reached a level of fame through a culture that has a habit of building up its icons and then tearing them down. His music will endure for a thousand years. Hopefully, the cynicism of the mass pop culture that he was a part of won't.

The King Is Dead? UPDATE: Michael Jackson Dead At 50

Drudge has a siren and headline on this developing story, which at this point seems to be that Michael Jackson is in a coma and may be dead or dying. If so, that makes him number three, and a huge one at that.

Update: It now looks official:

Pop giant Michael Jackson, who took to the stage as a child star and went on to set the world dancing to the thumping rhythms of his music for decades, died Thursday, TMZ website reported. He was 50.

"We've just learned Michael Jackson has died," TMZ said.

"Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon and paramedics were unable to revive him. We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back," the entertainment site said.

Regardless of what you might think of him now, here he is in better days. R.I.P.

The Veto Starts Here

You hve to admit, it's more than President Bush ever did:

The U.S. House of Representatives was poised to approve on Thursday a $550.4 billion defense authorization bill for fiscal 2010 that has drawn a veto threat from President Barack Obama because it contains money for fighter jets he does not want.

The bill also authorizes $130 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the fiscal year that begins October 1.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said it supported the overall bill but the president's senior advisers would recommend a veto unless some provisions were dropped.
One congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the White House veto threat as 'a bargaining tool.'

The Senate Armed Services Committee was to unveil its defense authorization bill for 2010 later on Thursday, but the legislation was unlikely to be approved by the full Senate until September. House and Senate negotiators must then hammer out a compromise version before final passage.

Some defense contractors (and the politicians who provide them with their pork) might not be happy, but Obama deserves some credit for paying attention to stuff like this.

The Scarlet Sign

Apparently deciding that it hasn't gone far enough in being the health police, the city of New York has decided to shame cigarette sellers out of business.

The New York City health department is moving forward with a plan that would require about 12,000 cigarette retailers to post large anti-smoking signs.

It's billed as the first such regulation in the United States.

The eye-level signs would have information about the harmful effects of smoking, possibly with an image.

The assistant commissioner for tobacco control, Sarah B. Perl, says it can be effective to display gruesome health effects such as amputations and throat cancer.

The city's Board of Health is now seeking public comment. At the earliest, it would vote in September.

If the proposal is passed, the department says it's poised to fend off lawsuits.

I'll be they are. Meanwhile, the nannystating will continue on schedule.

The Health Care Bomb

Apparently I wasn't the only one who didn't watch it:

President Obama's town hall meeting on health care delivered a sickly rating Wednesday evening.

The one-hour ABC News special 'Primetime: Questions for the President: Prescription for America' (4.7 million viewers, 1.1 preliminary adults 18-49 rating) had the fewest viewers in the 10 p.m. hour (against NBC's 'The Philanthropist' debut and a repeat of 'CSI: NY' on CBS). The special tied some 8 p.m. comedy repeats as the lowest-rated program on a major broadcast network.

Questions about Obamacare aside, this doesn't look good for the man who's supposed to be such a gifted speaker (or maybe that's only when he's campaigning). But if you consider it an actual informercial, then it was probably on par with the rest of them.

Match Game

It looks like retirement may soon be a luxury most companies can't afford to give their employees:

About a quarter of companies have either suspended their 401(k) plan match or are considering doing so because of the economic downturn, according to a recent survey by CFO Research Services and Charles Schwab. The list of companies that have suspended matches includes Hewlett-Packard, Sears Holdings, Starbucks and Eastman Kodak.

However, a recent survey by Watson Wyatt found that nearly half of large companies that have reduced or suspended their 401(k) match plan to reinstate it within 12 months. Only 5% of companies said they don’t plan to reinstate the match.

But some companies are considering changing the amount of the match, or the way it’s calculated, employee benefits analysts say.

With an older population and a graying work force already in play, getting older seems to be an increasingly expensive proposition.

Heads Or Tails

In his response to Jeffrey Rosen's critique of Sonia Sotomayor, Jacob Sullum concludes:

Sotomayor is not only a mixed bag from a libertarian point of view; according to Rosen, she is all over the map methodologically. After six years as a trial judge and 11 years on the 2nd Circuit, Rosen writes, 'Sotomayor still hasn't settled on a consistent judicial philosophy....She samples from different judicial philosophies in different cases. Sometimes Sotomayor sounds like a textualist in the Scalia style, and sometimes she sounds as enthusiastic as Justices Ginsburg and Breyer in her devotion to international law and the living constitution.' This inconsistency is not exactly encouraging, but even if Sotomayor chooses sides by flipping a coin she might still turn out better (or at least no worse) than David Souter, and Obama easily could have chosen someone more consistently bad.

This is one area where Obama's vaunted pragmatism seems to have come through. I only wish he showed more of it on the economy and health care, as well.

Twittering The Great Firewall

What hath Twitter wrought? First Iran, now China?

The People’s Republic of China has apparently barred its citizens from visiting a host of Google properties, including the main search engine, Google Apps, Google Reader and Gmail. A search on Twitter reveals that many Chinese are complaining, particularly about not being able to use the search engine, although it appears Google.cn can still be reached at this point.

It makes me wonder what might have happened had twitter been available in 1765, when the Stamp Act was passed and the first real stirrings of American independence began. Would the American Revolution have happened ten years early?

Southbound And Gone

The left has succeeded in driving those evil capitalists out of California. So, where have they gone? To a part of the country that's actually succeeding in creating new jobs:

If you wonder how 'soak the rich' liberalism will play out with the New Left regime in D.C., just look at California. As Ronald Reagan said, 'People vote with their feet.' The reason Texas, Tennessee and Florida (all zero-income-tax-states) grow is because entrepreneurs flee high-tax states, and bring their businesses and jobs with them. I joke that my home state, Tennessee, is called 'The Volunteer State' because they can't make you live there. Yet few leave.

The South gets a lot of knocks, some of it deserved, but one thing it can do is rebuild and reinvent itself. And it doesn't need to "Redistribute income" to do it.

Durability Endures

Finally, some good economic news:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An unexpected jump in U.S. durable goods orders last month backed hopes the economy was healing, a prospect cautiously supported by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday.

The Federal Reserve said the economy was now contracting at a more moderate pace, as it left interest rates at the current range of zero to 0.25 percent, as expected, at the close of its two-day policy meeting.

News from the hard-hit housing market remained mixed, however, underlining the challenges to an economic recovery.

The Commerce Department reported that new orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods rose by 1.8 percent in May, surprising analysts who had expected a decline.

Manufacturing accounts for about one-third of the economy, and provides a good barometer for overall business health.

"The data is another positive sign for the U.S. economy," said Brian Kim, a currency strategist at UBS in Stamford, Connecticut.

Does this mean that spending is making a comeback? If so, will the Democratic hopes for more economic intervention be rendered unecessary? One can only hope.

The Neocon Within

Reihan Salam says Obama should pick up where Bush left off:

Rather than reassure the Iranians with a wink and a nod that we’re ready to do business, President Obama should be building an international coalition to isolate a recalcitrant Iran as thoroughly as the the West once isolated apartheid-era South Africa. Bush, to the chagrin of the neocons, could never pull this off. But Obama can.

But the question is, should he? Once again, the neocons seem to be looking at Iran through their own prism of how things should be, when it's not about us.

The Girl From Argentina

Well, I guess this explains a few things:

South Carolina GOP Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday to an affair, and resigned his position as chair of the Republican Governor's Association following a strange week in which the governor dropped off the grid and could not be located.

Later in the day, Sanford's wife Jenny released a statement saying the couple had begun a trial separation two weeks ago.

“I have been unfaithful to my wife. I developed a relationship with what started out as a dear, dear friend from Argentina,” Mark Sanford said in a rambling and often emotional news conference at the state capital in Columbia.

“I’m a bottom line kind of guy I’m just gonna lay it out. It’s gonna hurt and I’m going to let the chips fall where they may,” said Sanford, often touted as a potential 2012 presidential hopeful.

I think it's safe to say those chances have now pretty much disappeared. First John Ensign and now this. It has not been a good month for would-be Obama challengers.

The Health Ration Board

From Slate, a look at where we might be headed:

The concern isn't who writes the checks or who writes the bills. The real question is who makes the tough decisions about the limits of the checks and bills—in other words, who ultimately rations the money. Not everybody can have everything, and the sooner we admit that, the sooner our health care debate will get realistic.

In the haphazard Massachusetts plan, rationing fell to individuals, who then skimped on important prescriptions and routine visits. Gawande would leave rationing to properly incentivized doctors, but we have no data about whether this can be done widely. Others advocate for bodies like the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (an impartial medical Federal Reserve Board), which can make the hard calls to promote and limit certain kinds of medical care. Britain, for example, has a national institute that makes precisely these decisions, like limiting drug-eluting stents for coronary artery disease and certain pricey drugs for kidney cancer. And health insurance executives here are again talking about 'capitation,' or fixed global budgets in which a group of health providers gets fixed monthly fees to handle all of a person's health needs.

In the meantime, one thing is sure: Without a smart plan to ration our resources well—that is, stick to a budget—and improve health, simply mandating that employers and individuals buy health insurance will only worsen the mess.

Unfotunately, making things worse tends to be one of the few things government is good at. But I'm sure Obama will appoint a "Ration Czar" to deal with the problem like he has everything else.

Looking For Mr. Sanford

So just where the heck was he?

On Tuesday, sources told News 4's Nigel Robertson that a state vehicle is missing and was tracked down, not to the Appalachian Trail, but to the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta. Sources told Robertson that a federal agent spotted Sanford in the airport boarding a plane. Robertson was told that the governor was not accompanied by security detail.

This story seems to be getting odder and odder. I initially bought Sanford's claim that he just needed to clear his head, but now I just don't know.

Skepticism We Can Believe In

Maybe this is why he's been having trouble selling Obamacare on Capitol Hill:

Just a few months after congressional passage of the administration's whopping $787-billion economic stimulus plan, a new national poll shows Americans' confidence in its efficacy fading, especially in the Midwest, where Biden is heading.

Just about half (52%) believe the much-touted stimulus plan will or has had any impact restoring the economy, down from 59% in April. The Washington Post-ABC Poll found Obama's personal popularity remains high, in part because his Republican opposition remains in such disarray unable to offer a coherent political alternative.

The poll found:

The shift in public assessments of the stimulus package has clear political ramifications: At the 100-day mark of Obama's presidency, 63 percent of people in states that were decided by fewer than 10 percentage points in November said the stimulus act had or would boost the economy.

Today, in the telephone poll of 1,001 Americans conducted Thursday through Sunday, the number has plummeted to 50 percent in those closely contested states, with nearly as many now saying the stimulus program will not help the national economy.

The new poll confirms other surveys showing the president's popularity dipping slightly, his disapproval rating jumping about 5% and particular unhappiness focused on his handling of the automobile manufacturing crisis and the federal deficit.

Given half a chance, the average American will usually display more common sense than most politicians. Of course, that may be because most of them live in the real world, where they have to deal with the financial fallout of government actions.

Big Czar Is Watching You

Well, this is discouraging:

Citing White House sources, Time magazine on Friday identified the the former head of the Government Reform Committee as the president’s number one candidate for the new position. Davis’ reputation as a tech-smart moderate who knows his way around D.C. makes him an attractive pick for the administration, the magazine reported.

But an examination of Davis’ record in Congress shows that he’s been on the wrong side of key privacy issues, including the controversial REAL ID Act, which aims to turn state driver’s licenses into a de facto national identification card linked by shared databases and strict federal authentication standards.

“Given his role in REAL ID, Tom Davis would not be a good choice for privacy, which is something that President Obama specifically promised to protect in his remarks on the cyber security strategy,” says Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Many cyber security planners refer obliquely to ‘authentication’ and ‘identity management’ programs that would devastate privacy, anonymity and civil liberties. Davis would probably work to roll past these issues rather than solve them.”

Maybe we need a Privacy Czar to counteract the impact of the Orwellian Czar. Or would that be just one Czar too many?

City High

According to this interview, L.A. has apparently become the pot capitol of Southern California (which is saying something).

JEFF TYLER: In some Los Angeles neighborhoods, there are more medical marijuana dispensaries than there are Starbucks or McDonald's. Most sell more varieties of weed than Baskin-Robbins has ice cream flavors. City councilman Dennis Zine says calling it a boom is an understatement.

DENNIS ZINE: It's bigger than a boom. It's a major explosion with these facilities opening up, and they're opening up every single day in the city of Los Angeles.
At last count, there were 600 medical pot clinics in Los Angeles. That's right — 600.
....

Zine says the city council is working on new regulations to crack down on these free-wheeling pot pharmacies. Many will be closed.

Zine: Oakland, for example, has four medicinal marijuana facilities. That's easy to regulate and control. When you have 600, you can't regulate and control. We will bring this down to a reasonable number.

While the city tries to curb the growth of pot clinics, the marijuana economy in California seemingly can't be stopped.

To be quite honest, if I were one of those still trapped in California, I'd probably want to get high, too. Now, I can be as libertarian as the next person when it comes to this stuff. But the clinics were supposed to be for people with, you know, real medical needs. An excuse to get legally stoned doesn't seem to be one of them.

Dead Politicians' Party

What happens to a party on a long losing streak? They join the ranks of the undead:

Zombie parties are a recurrent feature of electoral democracies. Unable to articulate any coherent or workable governing philosophy, they mindlessly jab at cultural hot buttons, mechanically repeat hardwired tropes ('cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes'), nurse tribal resentments, ostracize independent thinkers. Above all, they feel positively proud of their doggedness. You can’t talk them out of it. Think of the Republicans in the FDR years, the Democrats in the Reagan years, the British Labour Party in the Thatcher period, and the British Conservative Party in the Blair period. Think of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party for most of the past half-century, or France’s Socialists today. To get a new brain, zombie parties usually need to spend years out of power or wait until a new generation rises to leadership.

Or they can just eat their followers and turn them into zombies, too...

A party that spends years in the wilderness typically faces two choices-they can evolve and adapt to their new environment until they're ready to return to the food chain, or they can face extinction. Or, like birds, they can evolve from their ancestors into something more attractive, and useful to their environment.

Sotomayor Still A Go?

Apparently the anti-Sotomayor train isn't running anymore:

Nearly a month after President Barack Obama picked her for the Supreme Court, Republican senators say Sonia Sotomayor isn’t serving as the political lightning rod some in their party had hoped she would be.

“She doesn’t have the punch out there in terms of fundraising and recruiting, I think — at least so far,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who most likely will be elected as the No. 4 Republican in Senate leadership this week.

The calculus could certainly change when Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings begin July 13. But the Republican senators’ initial review of Sotomayor’s record, together with the meetings they’ve had with her, have left them doubting that she’ll be controversial enough to help them or hurt the Democrats heading into the 2010 elections.

It does appear that her own record is actually closer to where the current Court is on some issues than some liberals and libertarians would like. Are the Republicans finally facing reality? Or do they need Limbaugh's permission first?

When Rappers Attack

So Perez Hilton apparently got beat up for calling 'em as he sees 'em:

Hilton, who is openly gay, said in interview with The Associated Press that he called will.i.am a 'faggot,' a gay slur, inside the club after the musician told the blogger not to write about his band on his Web site.

'He was like 'You need to respect me.' He was in my face. He was obviously trying to intimidate me and scare me,' Hilton said. 'I was like 'I don't need to respect you. I don't respect you and I did say this, and I knew that it would be the worst thing I could possibly say to him because he was acting the way he was. I said 'You know what, I don't respect you and you're gay and stop being such a faggot.'"

Fisticuffs aside, I have to wonder about this, given the amount of homophobia there is in rap music (more about that here). At any rate, rappers do seem to have thin skins when it comes to questioning their manhood.

One Of Our Governors Is Missing

You can all relax-he's just fine.

South Carolina GOP Gov. Mark Sanford is safe and secure, his office said Monday afternoon, moving to tamp down speculation that he had gone missing.

Sanford has not been in touch with his office since Thursday and left Columbia without his state police detail.

His communications director, Joel Sawyer, wouldn’t disclose Sanford’s location but said that before the governor left town last week “he let staff know his whereabouts and that he'd be difficult to reach.”

“Should any emergencies arise between the times in which he checks in, our staff would obviously be in contact with other state officials as the situation warrants before making any decisions,” said Sawyer.

Sanford’s wife, Jenny, told The Associated Press Monday that she was unconcerned and that the second-term governor is “writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids.”

Sawyer added: “The governor put in a lot of time during this last legislative session, and after the session winds down it's not uncommon for him to go out of pocket for a few days at a time to clear his head. Obviously, that's going to be somewhat out of the question this time given the attention this particular absence has gotten.”

But it does raise an interesting question of just how much privacy a public official has these days. Is it saying something that taking a little time off can now be cause for concern? Or is it just that the media in South Carolina might just have a little too much free time on its hands?

Too Big To Borrow

Robert Samuelson has some dire warnings on the future of our health care under Obamacare:

The system has promised more than it can realistically deliver. We are borrowing not to finance investment in the future but to pay for today’s welfare — present consumption. Sooner or later, the huge debt will weaken the economy. Nor would paying for all promised benefits with higher taxes be desirable. Big increases in either debt or taxes risk depressing economic growth, making it harder yet to pay promised benefits.

The U.S. welfare state is weakening; insecurity is rising. The sensible thing would be to decide which forms of public welfare are needed to protect the vulnerable and to begin paring others. Our inaction poses another dreary parallel with GM. It was obvious a quarter-century ago that GM the auto company could not support GM the welfare state. But the union wouldn’t surrender benefits, and the company acquiesced. Inertia prevailed, and the reckoning came.

The same cycle, repeated on a national scale with sums many multiples higher, would be correspondingly more fearsome.

It's this tendency to borrow as if there was no tomorrow, which the Bush administration also did, that has brought us to this state of affairs. Ultimately, as California has shown, such a system will be unsustainable. Right now, health care seems "Too big to fail." The scary part is, eventually it might not be.

Promises Not To Keep

You can call him the Great Promiser, if nothing else:

Of the six campaign promises PolitiFact says Obama has unquestionably broken, five would have limited his own power, provided tax breaks, or provided more accountability and transparency to the federal government. One was mostly symbolic (recognizing the Armenian genocide). So far, he hasn't broken a single promise that would grow or expand the government, though he has compromised on a few, and many have been stalled.

PolitiFact also gives Obama more credit than he deserves on some promises. For example, Obama's promise that 'Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,' was broken when he signed a bill raising taxes on cigarettes to pay for an expansion of the SCHIP program. PolitiFact calls this a 'compromise.' But 'not any of your taxes' seems pretty clear. Obama didn't say, 'not any of your taxes, so long as you don't smoke' or 'so long as you don't have habits the government finds distasteful.'

In short, I think it's safe to say that Obama has been willing to spend plenty of political capital on his promises that vastly expand the size and scope of the federal government, and relatively little on promises related to eliminating waste, putting limits on his own power, or making the government more transparent and accountable.

But maybe he'll eventually "Compromise" on those, too. After all, he wouldn't want people to think he was actually lying, would he?

California, Here We Don't Come

How bad are things in the Golden State? Even illegals don't want to work there these days.

Since 2006, illegal immigration to the United States seems to be leveling off, after a huge spike in the 1990s and early '00s. These days, we're holding steady at a crop-pickin', lawn-mowin', dish-washin' 11.9 million.

The immigrants who do come, according to today's Pew Daily Number, have been shifting to states other than the traditional California option. Since the state is in a spending binge, population bleed, and general downward spiral, you have to give the illegals credit for being forward looking.

Like everybody else, they know where the jobs are. Maybe they won't need that fence after all...

The War On Cereal

You cannot make this stuff up:

The FDA sent a warning to Cheerios maker General Mills Inc. that it is in serious violation of federal rules.

'Based on claims made on your product's label, we have determined that your Cheerios Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is promoted for conditions that cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease' the FDA letter said. '[Cheerios] may not be legally marketed with the above claims in the United States without an approved new drug application.'

So what about whole grain cereals or Healthy Choice dinners? Is all food whcih claims to be healthy-even if those claims are generally true-now to be considered in the same vein as crack? Which is apparently what these bureaucrats have been smoking?

The Obama Effect

Over at Politico, Carl Owen gives Obama credit for what's been happening in the Muslim world:

Since Barack Obama has taken the presidential oath of office we have witnessed: a) Hezbollah lose a shoo-in election in Lebanon, b) Pakistan begin serious efforts to control the Taliban and al Qaeda elements inside its borders, c) Netanyahu of Israel mumble support about a two state solution and rethink settlements and, d) A major awakening of the Iranian citizenry against the heavy-handedness of the mullahs. What hasn't changed? The simple-minded thuggery of the Right when it comes to foreign policy (and Grover Norquist, someone should gently remind him that it's 2009, not 1989). They have long preferred a modified Teddy Roosevelt approach. Speak loudly and wail away with the biggest stick you can find. I don't know if all this is the results of one speech in Cairo by the President but if it is I hope he gives a second, and soon.

I think this is sort of simplistic, just as blaming Bush was for the Left, but there is a segment of the Right that seems bent on not allowing the Islamic world to change on its own. And there is something to be said for a less confrontational attitude towards that part of the world. Not all of this is Obama's doing, of course. But to deny that he's had any effect at all is the mark of a movement that has no ideas of its own when it comes to foreign policy.

That's The Chicago Way

Team Obama apparently learned it from the worst:

The use of political muscle may be prohibited in the mythic transcendental fairyland where much of the Obama spin originates, sprouting green and lush, like the never-ending fields of primo Hopium.

But our president is from Chicago. Obama’s Media Merlin David Axelrod and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel come right from Chicago Democratic machine boss Mayor Richard Daley. They don’t believe in fairies.

Daley can’t wait to be rid of his own inspector general, David Hoffman, who had the audacity to question why Daley’s nephew received $68 million in city pension funds to invest. The mayor insists he didn’t know anything about it. Nobody with a functioning brain believes the mayor.

Well, a little nepotism and despotism can go a long way in politics. Just ask the Bushes or the Clintons...

Some Forms Of Speech Are More Equal Than Others

The Calgary Herald goes after those Canadian "Human Rights" Commissions:

In these despotic forums, the vehicle of choice for those who wish to silence those whose opinions they don’t like, what is conventionally called a human rights complaint is less accusation, than old-style Soviet denunciation. Not surprisingly, with no right to plead truth or fair comment, and with no obligation upon the prosecution to prove intent or follow rules of evidence–circumstantial evidence and hearsay is accepted in human-rights cases — defendants hardly ever emerge victorious from these proceedings.

But remember, it's all in the name of "Diversity."

Change He Doesn't Believe In?

First it was gay rights, now it's health care. Here's what Obama told the AMA just last week:

"No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people," Obama said Monday, addressing the American Medical Association. "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

He didn't let up.

"If you like what you're getting, keep it," Obama said. "Nobody is forcing you to shift."

Now, here's what his own people are saying this week:

White House officials suggest the president's rhetoric shouldn't be taken literally: What Obama really means is that government isn't about to barge in and force people to change insurance.

That very issue became a huge political problem for former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. His proposal would have required many employees to change how they got insurance, by joining new purchasing co-ops. Opponents branded it a big-government power grab.

The last thing Obama wants is a groundswell of opposition, driven by Americans' fears of being forced to change their insurance or losing it.

"The president is committed to enacting reform that will lower costs, protect choice of doctors and plans, and assure quality and affordable health care for all Americans," said Linda Douglass, a spokeswoman for the White House health reform office. "He has made it clear that we would not support a reform plan that would require people to leave their current insurance plans."

If Obama "Really means" something other than what he said, why can't he just come out and say what he originally meant? Instead of Change, how about some consistency we could believe in?

The Buck Used To Stop Here

From their website, the Cato Institute offers some old but true advice:

The Cato Institute argues that well-crafted budget cuts would be positive from many perspectives. They would enlarge personal freedom and responsibility, they would allow the economy to expand more rapidly, and they would leave a positive fiscal legacy to the next generation.

Check out the links provided. They may prove useful some day.

Sachs Of Gold

Well, this should surprise no one:

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm’s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Who says a depression can't be profitable?

The Decline And Fall Of Neoconservatism

When it comes to the "We are all Iranians now" crowd, Steven Benen notes how they're marginalizing themselves on Iran:

We’re not dealing with a dynamic that pits the left vs. the right, or Dems against Republicans. Rather, this is a situation featuring neocons vs. everyone else.

You’ll notice that President Obama’s strategy has not only been endorsed by Democratic lawmakers, but also prominent Republicans who are in office (Dick Lugar), served in Republican administrations (Henry Kissinger, Gary Sick, and Nick Burns), or are prominent Republican voices in the media (George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Pat Buchanan).

In other words, this is the moment when sane conservatives and Republicans are finding their voice. While Obama has been wisely sepping back (IMO), the neocon holdovers from the days of "Spreading democracy" are finding themselves increasingly sidelined as historical events take place without them. And they can't figure out why.

Risk On, Risk Off

From Forbes, how we became a society too afraid of risk to even allow it.

Unfortunately, our federal and local governments think it's their job not to help us manage risk but to get rid of it for us. Their nanny-state strategies have gone too far. Consider the New Jersey Board of Cosmetology and Hairstyling's proposal to ban Brazilian waxing after just two cases where women who underwent the procedure suffered infections because of unsanitary practices. The proposal was thwarted only after women (and men?) cried out against what they saw as the product of state overreaction.

In a similar vein, the Wall Street Journal reported that 14 states have outlawed the unusual practice of fish pedicures, in which you dip your feet in a specially designed tank so that tiny fish can munch the dead skin off of them. Even if such a practice constitutes a health risk (which I doubt), it is trivial enough to leave under the personal purview of individuals.

The fact of the matter is that you can never escape risk. For example, all medications carry risks--even trusted, over-the-counter drugs like aspirin. But if items like aspirin, penicillin or many other everyday drugs were submitted for FDA approval today, the FDA--under its current risk-averse criteria--would likely reject the medicine for being too dangerous. It happens with potentially lifesaving drugs all the time, making the pharmaceutical industry less willing and less able to develop innovative drugs that could benefit countless consumers. In this way, hyper-vigilance in minimizing risk can even endanger those who are being 'protected.'

Ultimately, such protection in the name of keeping us safe from ourselves is no protection at all. At some point in life, you have to take the training wheels off, learn how to walk on your own, and so forth. In its desire to be our superparent, however, Nanny Government won't even allow that much these days.

Speaking In Rhetorical Tongues

In a post about health care reform and the rhetoric used to support it, Tim Cavanaugh recalls why it failed in California as a warning to the rest of us:

Back when I was merely middle-aged and the Golden State was considering a mandated-insurance statewide health care reform proposal, I had fun trying to get Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to use the word 'coercion' in describing how he was going to get hundreds of thousands of Californians who didn't want to buy insurance to buy insurance. His response -- that he was seeking to change the 'mentality of people' in order to make Californians more closely resemble the Austrians he once bragged about fleeing -- was instructive. Schwarzenegger's health care overhaul failed specifically because its breezy assumptions couldn't survive the light of day. And that was in the land of the nuts and the fruits. Imagine how much bogus language remains to be unpacked as the realities of multi-trillion-dollar state-run programs and death's inescapable victory reveal themselves through the summer.

If there's one thing politicians and bureaucrats love, it's the use of language to make something much more complicated-and expensive-than it has to be.

When In Doubt, Spin

First, they were in denial mode over the scope of what's happening in Iran. Then they were in hoping for epic fail mode. Now that the protests have gained some real steam, the neocons are going in for revisionist history.

Veteran spinmeister Ari Fleischer, a former Bush White House spokesman, appears to have been the first out the box, at 11:55 a.m., with an interesting analysis. No one yet knew the final outcome, he wrote in an e-mail to our colleague Glenn Kessler, but 'one of the reasons there is a substantial reform movement in Iran -- particularly among its young people -- is because of George W. Bush's tough policies.' He noted that Bush's policies in Lebanon also helped in the recent elections there.

'A big push for reform is because of the desire of Iranians to get out from sanctions, to put an end to the country's international ostracism,' Fleischer wrote and, most interestingly, 'because Shiites in particular see Shiites in Iraq having more freedoms than they do. Bush's tough policies have helped give rise to the reformists and I think we're witnessing that today.'

Plus there was all this 'outreach to the people of Iran,' he wrote, at the State Department, with those 'people-to-people exchange programs' involving artists and doctors and film folks and so forth. We especially recall the 14 artists then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met two years ago. All in all, they doubtless reached more people than Obama did with his Cairo speech on June 4."

So "I think it's fair to say the George Bush's Freedom Agenda planted seeds that have started to grow in the Middle East," Fleischer concluded.

Really? You could also make the counter-argument that sanctions helped keep Ima Dinnerjacket in power by giving him the Great Satan as a convenient target.

Bush did remove two brutal dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that's to his credit. But real reform ultimately comes from within, claims of how much we did to the contrary. Giving Bush all the credit for what's going on in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East is just as narrow and ultimately arrogant as blaming him for all the world's ills over the last eight years. Just as not everything was his fault, so too is not everything his success.

The Iranian Conservative Versus the Iranian Fundamentalists

Mousavi has issued his latest statement in support of his followers. This part caught my attention:

I had come to show that it was possible to live spiritually while living in a modern world. I had come to repeat Imam’s warnings about fundamentalism. I had come to say that evading the law leads to dictatorship; and to remind that paying attention to people’s dignity does not diminish the foundations of the regime, but strengthens it.

I had come to say that people wish honesty and integrity from their servants, and that many of our perils have arisen from lies. I had come to say that poverty and backwardness, corruption and injustice were not our destiny. I had come to re-invite to the Islamic revolution, as it had to be, and Islamic republic as it has to be. In this invitation, I was not charismatic [articulate], but the core message of revolution was so appealing that it surpassed my articulation and excited the young generation who had not seen those days to recreate scenes which we had not seen since the days of revolution[1979] and the sacred defense. The people’s movement chose green as its symbol. I confess that in this, I followed them.

You'll note that he's not rejecting the original 1979 revolution, but what it became. Essentially, Mousavi is waging a fight against those whom he feels hijacked the revolution's original ideals-much as many conservatives in this country have been complaining about the religious right. This is essentially a conservative revolt against fundamentalism. It may not necessarily be about democracy and "Freedom" as we understand them (or as our politicians love to hyperbolize), but it is a way past the ideology that has consumed Iran for so many years.

"We Are Not All Iranians Now"

Peggy Noonan responds to the neocons:

To insist the American president, in the first days of the rebellion, insert the American government into the drama was shortsighted and mischievous. The ayatollahs were only too eager to demonize the demonstrators as mindless lackeys of the Great Satan Cowboy Uncle Sam, or whatever they call us this week. John McCain and others went quite crazy insisting President Obama declare whose side America was on, as if the world doesn't know whose side America is on. 'In the cause of freedom, America cannot be neutral,' said Rep. Mike Pence. Who says it's neutral?

Apparently we're too neutral if the President prefers caution over doing or saying something that would only encourage the Supreme Leader or Ima Dinnerjacket and his Basiji thugs. Roger Cohen adds his thoughts. Jonathan Chait responds to the latest neocon attacks here.

It does seem that some on the right are desperate to keep Dinnerjacket in power just so that they can have an enemy for the next few years at least. Remember when conservatives were supposed to be for freedom?

They Write The Songs And Make The Whole World Pay

I really hope this loses on appeal:

The Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, and other record labels were awarded $1.92 million on Thursday in the retrial of a Minnesota woman accused of swapping music over the Kazaa Internet service.

The federal jury in Minneapolis said the woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, of Brainerd, should pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs that were posted on the site so others could download them.

The first time the case went to trial, in 2007, a jury awarded $9,250 a song, or $222,000.
....

After the verdict, Ms. Thomas-Rasset, a natural resources coordinator for the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe, said she was disappointed that she had not been able to convince the jury that she had not posted the songs. “The only thing I can say is good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”

Her lawyer, Kiwi Camara of Camara & Sibley in Houston, said Ms. Thomas-Rasset might appeal the verdict, or try to negotiate a settlement.

“The disproportionate size of the verdict raises constitutional questions,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the consumer group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has criticized the music industry’s tactics.

More on the history of recording industry lawsuits here. The classic South Park response here.

Too Socialist To Fail

From the People's Republic of Venezuela comes the latest success story of the Revolution.

Chavez began regulating access to dollars and making it harder for businesses and people to transfer money in 2003, after confidence in his government was shaken by a failed coup and a subsequent strike. Venezuelans must now apply to the currency agency Cadivi for dollars at the official rate of 2.15 bolivars to import goods or take vacations.

These controls have backfired with a vengeance _ businessmen, companies and private citizens transferred some $72.7 billion out of Venezuela over the last six years _ nearly double the outflow of the previous six years, according to the Central Bank _ distorting the economy, fueling inflation and discouraging private investment.

But the controls themselves haven't led to a political backlash, perhaps because Venezuelans with means tend to be opposed to Chavez's socialist policies already. Poorer Venezuelans haven't been as affected, partly because the government subsidizes food and free health care.

That could change now that oil income has plunged from last year's record highs. Oil represents 93 percent of Venezuela's exports, and with crude prices at 52 percent below their July peak, the inflow of dollars is expected to drop by half this year to about $42 billion, said Alejandro Grisanti, an economist at Barclays Capital in New York.

The oil price drop has roughly cut in half the amount of goods Venezuela can afford to import, so the government has had to tighten currency controls even more and ration the dollars it supplies to travelers and importers in response, Finance Minister Ali Rodriguez said.

When you can't afford a Revolution, the people tend to notice it. This is how capitalism begins.

It's The Symbolism, Stupid

Here we go again:

The Senate has unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and racial segregation and sent the measure to the House.

Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin first introduced the measure years ago but wanted it passed Thursday on the eve of Juneteenth - a day of celebration commemorating the end of the Civil War and the release of African Americans from slavery. He said the House is to take it up soon and that a formal celebration will be held next month in the Capitol Rotunda.

The Senate has passed such nonbinding but highly symbolic resolutions before, apologizing for such things as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The resolution passed Thursday includes a disclaimer saying that nothing in it supports or authorizes reparations by the United States.

At some point, we will be able to clone Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Then the former can apologize to the latter for wiping them out, and the cycle of applogy can be complete.

It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Super Regulator!

As expected, not everyone is on board with the idea of creating the mother of all government programs:

President Barack Obama's plan to transform the Federal Reserve into a super-regulator ran into skepticism Thursday from lawmakers who worry that the central bank is not the best suited to keep an eye on firms deemed so big and influential that their demise could hurt the economy.

Senators voiced misgivings as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner began a marathon day of selling Obama's financial regulatory plan to give the Fed more authority, create a new consumer protection agency and bring unregulated sectors of the financial markets under government oversight.

'I do not believe that we can reasonably expect the Fed or any other agency to effectively play so many roles,' said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., noting that it also sets monetary policy, regulates banks and handles an array of other functions.

Some lawmakers have proposed that the job of overseeing large institutions be left to a council of regulators, not a single agency.

Geithner anticipated that point in his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, saying in his opening remarks: 'You cannot convene a committee to put out a fire.'

But feeding that fire by creating another tinderbox doesn't seem to be the answer either, does it, Mr. Geithner?

They Rant, Therefore They Are

In writing about talk radio, Conor Friedersorf points out what sensible conservatives have always known:

Effective opposition requires a clear-eyed, unsentimental assessment of reality, not paranoid, uncharitable rants. The right understood this very well when they talked about The Angry Left, and how its visceral hatred for George W. Bush distorted its judgment. Too many seem to have forgotten this lesson, and aren't the least bit skeptical at analysis offered by a man assuming of his opponent the most awful motivations imaginable.

At its best, this stuff might be good for catharsis and populist venting. But ultimately conservatism has to be won in the arena of ideas, not just angry rhetoric. Talk radio hosts-and, for that matter, some areas on the Intertubes-aren't necesasarily the best place for that these days.

The Graduates

If you want some of that fancy book-learning, it turns out that the profit motive can help you out just as well, if not better than, public colleges.

One might expect students at for-profit colleges to fare less well than their peers at other types of institutions, and by at least one measure they do, the study acknowledges: Smaller proportions of full-time and part-time freshmen in four-year programs at career colleges return the following fall than at private nonprofit and public colleges, although career colleges retain students in two-year programs at better rates than do community colleges, according to the Imagine America study.
....

But the picture looks very different when you examine students at institutions that serve significant numbers of low-income students, the study suggests.

At institutions where at least 75 percent of the students are eligible for Pell Grants, for instance, about 55 percent of career college students graduate, compared to 39 percent at four-year private and 31 percent at four-year public universities, and 45 percent of two-year private and 24 percent of two-year public colleges.

And when looking at graduation rates by race, career colleges fare better than public colleges and within reach of private nonprofit institutions, the study finds.

Darn that evil profit motive, helping students get real jobs!

Don't Regulate On Me

Who knew that a liberal Democratic president would be able to do so much for the Second Amendment?

The Montana Firearms Freedom Act seeks to exempt from federal regulation any firearm, gun component or ammunition made and kept within the state's borders. The legislation, signed by Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, becomes law Oct. 1, though federal officials will likely act quickly to keep the measure from taking effect.

Legal experts are skeptical Montana will prevail in court, and even some proponents express their doubts. But supporters say the fight is a necessary step to change Washington's attitude. Similar bills have been introduced in nearly a half dozen states, and lawmakers in about a dozen more have expressed interest.

'We need 15, 25, 30 states to pass these types of legislation, so that we send a clear message to the country and to the national government,' said Utah Rep. Carl Wimmer, a Republican from suburban Salt Lake City.

In addition to supporting a version of Montana's gun law, Wimmer is drafting legislation that would forbid local authorities to help enforce federal statutes inside Utah -- another bill that, if passed, would surely trigger a court fight.

Some of this-such as Mark Sanford, Sarah Palin, and Rick Perry's refusal to take stimulus money-is political grandstanding. But there does seem to be a real undercurrent out there, one that's not necessarily limited to the fringe. Again, this is something the Republicans could take advantage of-if they could ever get their act together.

Too Big To Risk

If more Americans are expressing their doubts over Obama's grand schemes (see below), this is part of the reason why:

The administration's plan would create what are essentially government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in every sector of the financial economy—insurers, securities firms, finance companies, bank holding companies, and hedge funds—where these specially regulated firms are to be designated. The result will be devastating for competition. Larger firms will squeeze out smaller ones and aggressive small companies will have less opportunity to overcome the government-backed winners.

Moreover, the administration's proposal to provide a special bailout mechanism for large firms confirms the likelihood that these firms will never be closed down or liquidated. Citing the market turmoil that followed Lehman's collapse, the administration will argue that failures like this are 'disorderly.' But failure comes from risk-taking—the very source of our economy's strength—and it is ultimately risk-taking and its consequences that the administration's plan is intended to prevent.

But when you have the government there to enable you every time, why bother with risk? The administration seems to want to treat the economy like educators now treat kids-as those who must be protected from themselves at all costs, so that they won't ever have to face disappointment and failure. The problem is, encouraging such an attitude will only ensure that they won't know what to do when they do fail at some point-and we're the ones who are going to have to pay for cleaning up the mess.

Change We No Longer Believe In

A growing number of Americans are becoming skeptical of Obama's plans. As Jacob Sullum reports:

Asked whether Congress should worry more about 'keeping the deficit down' or 'boosting the economy,' 58 percent said the former, 35 percent the latter. Since the economy is still in recession and the question assumes that stimulus spending will work as intended, that's a pretty remarkable finding. The stimulus package that Obama insisted was necessary to save us from a never-ending recession might still get some of the credit once the economy improves, although the timing seems to be off.

Notably, a lot more of the respondents (46 percent) blamed George W. Bush for the budget deficit than blamed Obama (6 percent), which is fair enough for the current fiscal year (although spending supported by Obama made the deficit he inherited bigger) but will not be tenable going forward. Given Obama's fiscal plans, he may soon be perceived (accurately) as continuing, if not amplifying, his highly unpopular predecessor's mistakes. Another sign that's ominous for Obama (but encouraging for advocates of limited government) is that 69 percent of respondents said they were concerned 'a great deal' or 'quite a bit' about expanded government intervention in the economy, as exemplified by the nationalization of G.M. and a greater role in health care.

If the GOP wasn't currently run by jackasses, they might be able to tap into this and look forward to regaining the House in 2010. As it is, the public may just have to start the conservative revival without them.

Lowering The Bar

The Ted Stevens case has exposed a whole host of problems within the ranks of the supposed watchdogs.

Two months after prosecutors abandoned the criminal conviction of former senator Ted Stevens, the Justice Department unit that polices public corruption remains in chaos, coping with newly discovered evidence that threatens to undermine other cases while department leaders struggle to reshuffle the ranks.

William Welch and Brenda Morris, senior managers in the department’s Public Integrity Section who supervised the case against the Alaska Republican, have been moved into other roles following the transfer this month of two of their subordinates, who worked on lengthy investigations of Alaskan influence peddling, according to four sources.

At the same time, document-sharing lapses that provoked the Stevens turnaround are also affecting other bribery prosecutions in the state, prompting authorities to take the extraordinary step of releasing two Alaska lawmakers from prison late last week. A new team of government lawyers and FBI agents is reviewing thousands of pages of evidence, trying to assuage the concerns of judges and fielding complaints from defense attorneys.

Bush may be gone, but it seems the attitude he created towards little things like evidence and rule of law remained behind.

The Right Course

Matt Steinglass has some words of caution for those who want Obama to do more than he has on Iran:

It would be similarly cruel and immoral to give Iranian demonstrators the false idea that we in the democratic world can offer them anything more than our sympathy. We can’t. We will not invade Iran, and nothing else we do will have much of an effect on the behavior of a regime fighting to retain its hold on power. The demonstrators in Iran must know that they have to win the struggle for a fair election on their own, and must be prepared to face the consequences of failure. And they do know this. That is precisely what makes them so courageous. It would be stupid and irresponsible of the US to use their struggle as an occasion for ineffectual rhetorical grandstanding, and fortunately President Obama, unlike our last President, seems able to resist the temptation.

Neocon dreams of a massive air strike on Iran are just wishful thinking on their part. This is Iran's moment to remake itself, not ours to do it for them.

From One Infomercial To Another

The GOP has planned a video response of their own to ABC's Obama show:

On Wednesday, June 24th, the ABC News network will devote an entire day of programming to President Barack Obama’s health care agenda. According to an ABC News report, in addition to a primetime health care reform “town hall” at the White House, Good Morning America, World News, Nightline and ABC’s web news “will all feature special programming on the president’s health care agenda.”

The Republican National Committee asked ABC News to include Republicans in their health care reform programming on June 24th but our request was denied. This means that President Obama and the Democrats will have an entire day to push their government-run health care agenda without hearing Republicans’ policy ideas and principles on health care reform.

Next Wednesday, the RNC will make our television studio available, for the entire day, for House and Senate Republicans to conduct satellite interviews with local network affiliates in their home states or congressional districts, including the 211 ABC affiliates nationwide. The RNC will absorb the cost of the satellite time and offer assistance in setting up the satellite interviews with the local affiliates. Republican Members of Congress can use this opportunity to discuss his or her views on health care reform as well as to respond to President Obama’s health care plan.

Of course, considering the shape they're in, I have to wonder how many people will actually be able to see this rebuttle and which affiliates will actually go for it. Still, I guess they should be given credit for trying.

Iran, Meet Internet

Try as they might, the Iranian government can't stop everyone from tweeting the revolution:

Iran clamped down Tuesday on independent media in an attempt to control images of election protests, but pictures and videos leaked out anyway — showing how difficult it is to shut off the flow of information in the Internet age.

The restrictions imposed by the government made such social-networking sites as Twitter and Flickr more prominent — with even the U.S. State Department calling on Twitter to put off a scheduled shutdown for maintenance.

Iranians were posting items online, but it wasn't known how much of that information was being seen by others inside the country. And although some of the posts on Twitter appeared to be from users in Tehran, others clearly were not.

Following a massive opposition rally Monday, authorities restricted journalists — including Iranians working for foreign media — from reporting on the streets. They could effectively only work from their offices, conducting telephone interviews and monitoring official sources such as state TV.

You'll note that other thuggish regimes, from North Korea on down, also have strict control over the Intertubes and things like cell phones. Dictators around the world must be looking at what is going on and wondering how long before the next Web revolt starts in their back yards.

Meanwhile, a Sullivan reader points out the differences between the reaction from today's neocons and how Reagan would have handled things, Mike Pence can't seem to decide whose side he's on, some Republicans try to make the protests all about them, and John Cole wonders why these same people can't seem to remember their history. It does seem to be a far cry from the Republican Party of old these days.

"That's Not A Knife"

Well, it is, sort of:

Industrial designer and aichmophobic, John Cornock, has designed a kitchen knife with a rounded edge making it almost impossible to stab your relatives during a tedious Christmas dinner. Mr Cornock was inspired to make the knife after watching a documentary in which doctors advocated banning traditional knives. 'It can never be a totally safe knife, but the idea is you can't inflict a fatal wound. Nobody could just grab one out of the kitchen drawer and kill someone,' Cornock said. The knife will sell for between £40-50.

Next up: the anti-shooting gun, the anti-sticking fork, and other deterrents against murderous relatives.

The Senator Was Indiscreet

From Nevada comes more on the odd details of John Ensign's affair:

Sen. John Ensign acknowledged Tuesday that he had an affair with a campaign staffer — an admission that stunned his colleagues, hurt his chances for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and called into question his future as a leader of the Senate GOP.

The Nevada Republican admitted in Las Vegas Tuesday that he had “violated the vows” of marriage by having an affair with a staffer. He did not identify the woman except to say that she and her husband were both “close friends” who worked for him, and that “the closeness” of their relationship had “put me in situations which led to my inappropriate behavior.”

But current and former aides to the Nevada Republican say the woman was 46-year-old Cynthia Hampton, a campaign staffer whose husband was a top aide in Ensign’s Senate office.

“It was known in [Ensign’s] inner circle that they were involved,” a former aide told POLITICO.
....

Hampton is married to Douglas Hampton, who, according to Senate records, served as Ensign’s administrative assistant in his personal office from November 2006 to May 2008 — around the same time Cynthia Hampton left Ensign’s committees.

A call to the Hamptons’ Las Vegas home Tuesday night was not returned; in a statement, Ensign’s wife said the situation has “been difficult on both families.”

Douglas Hampton was paid about $101,000 in 2008 and $144,000 in 2007 as Ensign’s administrative assistant. But a financial disclosure form he filed in 2007 and 2008 – required for senior congressional staffers - showed only checking and savings account worth a maximum $30,000 combined.

Does this mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. But you'd think the Republicans would have learned something from Vitter-who at least never had to pay anybody off, at least as far as I know.

The Obama Broadcasting Company

State-run media? What state-run media?

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care -- a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special -- 'Prescription for America' -- originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.

But ABC News assures us it's all good:

"ABCNEWS prides itself on covering all sides of important issues and asking direct questions of all newsmakers -- of all political persuasions -- even when others have taken a more partisan approach and even in the face of criticism from extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. ABCNEWS is looking for the most thoughtful and diverse voices on this issue.

"ABCNEWS alone will select those who will be in the audience asking questions of the president. Like any programs we broadcast, ABC News will have complete editorial control. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair to both our journalists and our audience."

Yeah, except they'll essentially be shilling for the Obama administration. There's bias-which we've come to expect from the MSM-and then there's blatant propaganda. Ethical concerns, indeed.

Three Con Kings

If you've ever gotten one of their calls, you'll be glad to know that the three companies behind it have been busted.

Court documents filed last month in a Federal Trade Commission civil lawsuit against the three companies allege that their illegal calls have resulted in at least $10 million of ill-gotten gains since 2007. The FTC alleges that the firms' deceptive practices violated the Federal Trade Commission Act by misrepresenting or omitting material facts in their sales pitches, and that they violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule by 'flatly ignoring' rules that prerecorded calls disclose the identity of the seller 'promptly, and in a clear and conspicuous manner,' according to court documents.

Those documents contained few details about Cowart, the Dunnes and Kohlfeld. But a FOXNews.com investigation of the four reveals misleading online resumes, lengthy criminal histories, claims of innocence all around — and a great deal of finger-pointing.

There is a special place in Hell reserved for these particular scam artists and their truly annoying phone calls. Hopefully other attorney generals will now have better luck against similar operations elsewhere.

In The Room

Team Obama says who its visitors are is none of your business:

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions. Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present.

Obama knows who his friends are. He just doesn't want anyone else to.

Who's Your Mommy?

Science, icky though it may be, marches on:

The mere idea of lesbian couples (or gay men using a surrogate mother) having a baby with their own genetic material is sure to horrify some people.

As the religious mother of one of the women in “The Baby Formula” says: “Who do you think you are, God? ... You’re stealing the Immaculate Conception from Jesus.”

Yet Caulfield wonders if safety issues could someday be overcome, “is there anything inherently wrong with allowing a lesbian couple to give birth. I don’t know that there is.”

“I think we have to move beyond the sort of yuck response,” he says. “When we start regulating and curtailing technologies and setting up barriers, I do think we need to do it on a principle basis.”

It wasn’t that long ago that sperm donation and test-tube babies were thought disgusting by some, he says. Now they’re accepted practice.

“I think the yuck response is a good reason for caution and a good reason for reflection, but it’s not a justification for prohibition.”

I have to agree, even though the thought of medical science making guys even more irrelevant is less than appealing. Maybe we'll all wind up on reservations, swapping genetic material of our own someday...

The Joker

So, Letterman apologizes for real this time. But some people still aren't satisfied.

I'm sorry, but at some point people are going to haveto move on from this. Letterman was an ass, but sometimes that's what a comedian is. I doubt they're going to can him over this, and at any rate, you'd think conservatives would have bigger fish to fry what with Obamacare and all instead of a grumpy, once-hip talk show host. This is the sort of thing that can make the right look foolish over time, and they certainly don't need any more of that right now.

Walls In The Hood

Shades of Escape from New York:

In the latest reality show 'social experiment,' CBS has walled off eight homes in an Atlanta suburb, forcing the neighbors inside to spend time with each other.

The Mike Fleiss project was previously announced as a game show, but some intriguing new details have emerged.

'It will be a bizarre [experience] for all of them,' Fleiss said. 'This is ambitious as it gets.'

Tentatively called 'Block Party,' the families in will be trapped inside the 20' maximum security-looking wall for about three weeks for a cash prize.

Is it just me, or are they running out of ideas for these shows?

This Is An Ex-Felon

Maybe he's just restin':

Hawkins was a felon, convicted of second-degree murder and assault, and a heroin addict who spent most of his adult life in and out of prison and on and off parole. The system lost track of him one day in July 2007, after he had been out on parole for about two years and failed a drug test at his rehab center. Although parole officers spent countless hours making more than 340 attempts to find him -- phone calls to relatives and friends, certified letters, arrest record checks, visits to his last place of employment (Goodwill) and his last known address (the Samaritan Inn), sometimes with police officers in tow -- they never found him.

Hawkins died one year later, in July 2008, at 54, of metastatic lung cancer. His family has the death certificate and certificate of cremation to prove it.

The system still hasn't found him.

Hawkins should have been easy to track when he was alive: He was receiving Social Security disability checks and Medicaid coverage for his cancer treatment and his last months of hospice care.

The case is still active, Len Sipes said yesterday. Sipes is the spokesman for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, or CSOSA, the federal agency that took over the D.C. parole office nine years ago when the federal government assumed responsibility for the city's prison system. According to its records, a warrant for Hawkins's arrest, issued in April 2008, is still outstanding. He is to be supervised on parole until April 27, 2016.
Last month, Hawkins's parole officer called one of his sisters to ask whether she had seen him lately.

"They said they were trying to get in touch with him because he'd been violating parole and they needed a number for him," said Maria Watson, Hawkins's younger sister. "I said, 'Well, you can call 1-800-G-O-D.' "

As Watson recalled, the parole officer hung up, only to call back five minutes later. "He wanted to know if I could send him the death certificate, because it would be easier and quicker than if he had to go get it himself," she said.

The phone call was only the latest frustrating twist for Hawkins's family. Parole officers have called other siblings for the past several months, they said, and they have all told the officers the same thing: Edward is dead.

Isn't that the system for you? Even when you're dead, they still won't let you go.

Shaggy Dog Story

From Florida comes the strange tale of the superdog that apparently wasn't:

Harass could supposedly do things no other dog could: tracking scents months later and even across water, according to his handler, John Preston.

If it sounds hard to believe, there's a good reason.

After providing prosecutors with testimony for years, Preston was finally discredited by a judge who had the sense to do what others had not: test the dog for himself.

But not until after Preston and his dog had appeared in dozens of cases.

We know that at least three of those cases were overturned — after the defendants collectively spent more than a half-century in prison.

So how was this scam finally exposed?

In the middle of a trial in which the dog was once again providing miraculous evidence — supposedly detecting tracks left by suspects six months prior — Goshorn ordered the dog to perform a much simpler test.

The dog failed miserably.

In an affidavit written after he retired, Goshorn said: "The dog simply could not track anything."

The judge went on to say: "In short, I believe that Preston was regularly retained to confirm the state's preconceived notions about cases."

It's bad enough when cops use lying informants in cases, but you'd think somebody would have challenged the Superdog in the past. At least Preston didn't claim the mutt was psychic.

Too Big To Starve

Obama's one-size-fits-all approach has had some unintended consequences.

When President Barack Obama increased unemployment benefits as part of his economic stimulus, he also made some Americans ineligible for hundreds of dollars a month in food stamps.

Under the economic recovery plan, laid-off workers have seen a $25 weekly bump in their unemployment checks as part of a broad expansion of benefits for the poor. But the law did not raise the income cap for food stamp eligibility, so the extra money has pushed some people over the limit.

Laid-off workers and state officials are only now realizing the quirk, a consequence of pushing a $787 billion, 400-page bill through Congress and into law in three weeks.
And for people hurt by the change, there’s no way around it.

“Everybody tells you, ‘Yeah, I can understand why you’re frustrated. It doesn’t sound right.’ But nobody knows where to go,” said Mark Milota, 47, of Marietta, Ga., who was laid off in November from his job at a medical billing company.

Liberals will say they can't remake America without breaking a few eggs-or hearts, in this case. But does that mean Obama has to do everything all at once? This is part of the problem with an activist presidency-too much too soon often winds up with not enough for anyone in the long run.

The Oppression Of Appeasement

Goldfarb notes how liberals may beturning against Ima Dinnerjacket, and what that might mean for the Obama administration:

The left, which may have reviled Ahmadinejad but was willing to do business with him anyway, seems to have become deeply hostile to any kind of diplomacy that could be seen as legitimizing this election result. The administration hasn't quite caught up to this reality, offering weak statements about 'irregularities' in the voting but no real sign that it will stand up and support the Iranian kids who are pleading for help as they're beaten in the streets. I suspect it will soon.

I'm personally leery of Obama saying anything at this point, as the Dinnerjacket goon squad could spin it as interfering in their affairs, but will this mean that the MSM will finally start waking up and actually cover what is going on?

The Revolution Will Be Twittered

That tweeting you hear is CNN's epic fail in the face of potentially world-changing events:

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes--nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran--reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.

'The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government,' The New York Times cited senior officials as having said Saturday, 'despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.'

Yet even as word of the urban strife, seemingly led by those posting to Twitter, spread next around the world on news networks like the BBC, NPR, and the Times, CNN remained mostly mute. Even when the network's Internet site finally posted a story late Saturday, the network's first 'story highlight' was, 'Ahmadinejad plans rally after winning second presidential term.'

Increasingly, Twitter has become the go-to source for breaking news about any kind of notable event, be it an earthquake, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, or post-election riots in Tehran. Yet many Twitter users found CNN's lack of attention to what could end up being one of the biggest stories in years appalling.

Thirty years ago, CNN was envisioned as the upstarts who would shake up news broadcasting with their 24-7 coverage. Now, like much of the rest of the MSM, they're stuck on the sidelines, apparently ignorant of anything outside of their normal news cycle. But how much longer can the ignorance last?

Neocon Panic Time

Over at Balloon Juice, Tim F. notes how, like Batman and the Joker, the necons and the terrorists actually need each other as a reason for living.

Why aren’t Republicans happy?

Answer: who said they’re not?

It seems to me that we have underestimated how deeply fringe actors like al Qaeda and the neocons or Ahmadinejad and Bibi need each other for political survival. The relationship isn’t even antagostic, it’s a symbiotic mutualism. Intractable, crazy antagonists legitimize the position of extremists who oppose them.

Think about how easily ordinary muslims could believe that American planned an imperialist, anti-muslim religious crusade when that is exactly how Bush administration officials described their own behavior. Now, less than six months after we elect a black guy with a muslim middle name who believes in squishy crap like cultural understanding and rapprochement, al Qaeda’s messaging is in shambles and its leaders are panicking.

Maybe that explains why the neocons seem so happy with Ima Dinnerjacket's "Win". They know that if they can keep him around for the next few years, their dreams of continuing the Bush doctrine on "Spreading democracy" our way as opposed to letting the people of Iran do it themselves can still make a comeback.

But Obama seems more interested in letting them do it their way. His speech to the Muslim world was as much of a challenge to the neocons as it was to Muslim countries-embrace reform, recognize that it's not up to us to remake the world in our image, and the rest of the world may actually start to listen to us again. Hopefully, we are starting to see that in Iran with the rejection of Dinnerjacket's "Victory".

Paranoia Will Destroy You

Frank Rich warns:

Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

***

...Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren't warned.

As I've said before, this is what happens when you allow the fringe become the mainstream. Being out of power unhinged the Democrats; now that the shoe is on the other foot, paranoia and Clinton-era conspiracy theories seem to be back in style. It will get worse before it gets better-if it does.

The Price Of Government Health

As expected, Obamacare won't come cheap:

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.

House Democrats plan to release their legislation next week. Obama is working with Congress to get legislation to his desk by October.

So it looks like we'll still wind up paying for the bulk of Obamacare whether we like it or not. When he said he'd control spending, Obama apparently forgot about the taxpayers' part.

1979, The Sequel?

So Ima Dinnerjacket "Won". But apparently the actual voters disagree.

Iran declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner Saturday of an election that pitted the conservative establishment against candidate with broad backing from the country's youth. Riot police attacked opposition supporters, beating them with clubs and smashing cars.

A statement from Mousavi posted on his Web site condemned what he described as the 'manipulation' of election results.

Demonstrators wearing the trademark green color of Mir Hossein Mousavi chanted slogans condemning the results that gave 62.6 percent of the vote to Ahmadinejad. Protesters set fire to tires outside the Interior Ministry in the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade.

Witnesses also said a commercial bank elsewhere in the city was set on fire.

Police attacked the demonstrators near the Interior Ministry, where the election results were announced, beating them with clubs and smashing cars. Police also moved to disperse any large gatherings of people around the city.

Is this the start of something greater? Has the Iranian Revolution finally started to come full circle?

Bright Lights, Small City

The Obama administration literally wants cities to go back to nature:

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.

This is actually not a bad idea, as there is in fact a great deal of denial over what has happened in the Rust Belt and this might be a much-needed wake-up call. But what happens to surrounding real estate when the new green areas are off-limits? Will it actually discourage new growth and recovery?

The Doctors

The American Medical Association is against Obamacare:

In comments submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, the American Medical Association said: “The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans.”

If private insurers are pushed out of the market, the group said, “the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.”

The real issue here seems to be whether or not we can afford the kind of Canadian/European style of health care that Obama seems to want. Mort Kondrack says we should look at a government health care plan we already have. Meanwhile, even some Democrats are concerned.

With an aging population and a Social Security system set to implode, there's no doubt that streamlining of the current health care system is necessary. But will replacing one health care bureaucracy with another really be the best solution? I think not.

Don't Make A Federal Case Out Of It

Andrew Sullivan and the gay rights community might not like it, but personally I think this is the right call:

The U.S. Justice Department has moved to dismiss the first gay marriage case filed in federal court, saying it is not the right venue to tackle legal questions raised by a couple already married in California.

The motion, filed late Thursday, argued the case of Arthur Smelt and Christopher Hammer does not address the right of gay couples to marry but rather questions whether their marriage must be recognized nationwide by states that have not approved gay marriage.

'This case does not call upon the Court to pass judgment ... on the legal or moral right of same-sex couples, such as plaintiffs here, to be married,' the motion states. 'Plaintiffs are married, and their challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act ('DOMA') poses a different set of questions.'

It's a different case from a recent federal lawsuit by two unmarried gay couples in California who claim a civil right to marry under the U.S. Constitution.

The government said Smelt and Hammer seek a ruling on 'whether by virtue of their marital status they are constitutionally entitled to acknowledgment of their union by states that do not recognize same-sex marriage, and whether they are similarly entitled to certain federal benefits.

'Under the law binding on this Court, the answer to these questions must be no,' the motion states."

If you believe in federalism (as I do) then this is a good thing. In this case, the court sided with states that don't yet recognize same-sex marriage and don't want to be forced to do so. So, it is in fact a genuinely conservative response to an issue, IMO.

I Want My DTV

Did you notice that today's the day analog TV officially died? Via Reason, a roundup of coverage:

National Association of Broadcasters says 82 percent of America's 'at risk' households -- i.e., those that use antennas (antennae?) to watch the tube are 'fully prepared for the nationwide switch to digital television (DTV).'

Federal Communications Commission says the transition is going smoothly, claims 1,030 U.S. TV stations had made the analogue-to-digital switch as of midday. UPI says the 'ensuing public response to the changeover appears to be positive.'

The New York Times says they're panicking in Greensboro! Acting FCC fossil-in-chief Michael Copps says do not panic; stay in your homes; disruptions in service must be expected.

TV Newsday says minorities hardest hit. And though you might have thought analogue shutoff would cause the most violent nursing home rioting since the Lawrence Welk Show was canceled, it turns out the elderly are best prepared for the crisis.

As for those who are purportedly now left in the dark, Jacob Sullum notes:

According to the Times, "The latest survey by the Nielsen Company indicates that as of the end of May, more than 10 percent of the 114 million households that have television sets are either completely or partly unprepared." But it turns out that total includes "nine million homes that subscribe to cable or satellite services but that have spare television sets—typically in bedrooms and kitchens—that are not connected to any service." By this definition, I am a victim of the digital switchover, one of the millions whose screens have gone blank, even though I continue to watch cable TV on two sets. (The other three are rigged for DVDs, VHS tapes, and video games, so they are not, strictly speaking, "blank," except when they're off.) The remaining 3 million households "do not subscribe to cable or satellite services," so they are "totally unprepared for the transition." I'm not sure this counts as a crisis, especially since that number must include people who don't have cable or satellite service because they don't watch TV much.

It reminds me of the Y2K scare of a decade ago (remember that one, when planes were supposed to fall out of the sky and everyone's computer was going to explode?) The mainstream media as a whole doesn't seem to be all that technically literate (which is evidenced by their slow but steady death spiral), but this was a story of the moment to hype. Now that the moment's over, the Panic Brigades are back on hold.

What Are You Doing, Dave?

The war against David Letterman seems to be heating up:

New York State Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb, a Republican, is calling on the CEO of CBS to fire David Letterman for crude comments he made about Sarah Palin and her daughter.
In the letter to CBS chief Les Moonves, Kolb said he took Letterman to task for the 'shockingly inappropriate' jokes.

“As the proud father of a daughter, and as a husband, I wanted Mr. Moonves to hear from me directly about Mr. Letterman’s disparaging remarks,' Kolb said in a written statement.

“Firing Mr. Letterman would send a clear message that CBS will not tolerate any of its employees — even an established media figure like Mr. Letterman — making demeaning and degrading comments about women.”

The request came after the late-night host stopped short of apologizing for 'jokes' he had made about Palin, the former Republican vice presidential nominee, and her family, including one that referred to her daughter being 'knocked up' by New York Yankees baseball star Alex Rodriguez.

I haven't considered Letterman to be funny or relevant for several years now, and the jokes were in bad taste. But I don't agree with calling for him to be fired any more than I agreed with liberal demands for Imus to be canned for his basketball girls' flap. And not everyone on the right is on board with the idea, either:

As the Limbaugh-Letterman comparisons proliferate across the web and cable news shows, some Republican strategists question the wisdom of trying to make a political target out of the 62-year-old comedian.

“If the right goes after Letterman they make him look big and themselves small,” says Mark McKinnon, a campaign advisor to George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “It’s win-win for Letterman.”

So, as they say in show business, any publicity is good publicity-and Dave is now getting more attention than he has in a long time. But it does go back to the issue of who's responsible for what they say. Are Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, for example, responsible for the rise of extremist violence? If not (and I don't think they are, although they need to distance themselves from the fringe) then neither is Dave, who, after all, is a comedian whose job is to tell jokes, no matter how bad.

And The Winner Is...

So who won? Nobody seems to know, including the candidates:

The Associated Press is reporting that the state media in Iran has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner in that country's presidential election. But Reuters writes that Ahmadinejad's top challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has called himself the 'definite winner.' Shades of Bush vs. Gore in 2000?

Meanwhile, Joe Klein points out how the ballots make Florida's look easy:

The candidates are listed by name and by number...and also by code. You vote by writing down the candidate's name and then his...what? Number...or code? No one is quite sure. The leading reformer, Mir-Hussein Moussavi, has the number 4 and the code 777. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the number 1 and the code 444. So the question arises: If you vote for Moussavi and list his number as 4...have you actually voted for Ahmadinejad? And why on earth have they devised such a complicated ballot in the first place?

I am shocked that an election in a theocratic system might have been rigged. Which makes it more probable that Mr. Mousavi is in fact the winner. But will they actually let him declare victory?

Waiting On The Future

Laura Rozen says there's a reason for the Obama administration's apparent silence on Iran:

The last thing officials want to do is say anything to jinx a process underway in Iran whose outcome is entirely outside of their control -- and yet may ease one of their most pressing challenges.

A Mousavi win would not mean smooth sailing for Washington's efforts to engage Iran, analysts caution. It could deepen fissures in the Iranian leadership or even prompt a hard-line backlash or crackdown that could further paralyze U.S. efforts to engage Iran, they say. But the voting out of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would undoubtedly be seen in Washington and the West as a welcome sign that the Iranian public supports greater liberalization and a less hostile attitude toward the West.

A greater question is what a Mousavi win would do to the neocons who are still pressing for military action against Iran. Would it be similar to what happened to the Cold War crowd in 1989? In other words, will they find themselves as irrelevant as the Cheney/Rove wing of the conservative movement?

Ahmadinebush

An interesting comparison:

Ahmadinejad's supporters are the Iranian equivalent of American evangelicals: a small percentage of the population with outsize political influence given their high voter turnout. While his divine inspirations, lack of introspection, and polarizing rhetoric have frequently earned comparisons to George W. Bush, what's unclear is whether Ahmadinejad is the Bush of 2004 (who got the benefit of the doubt) or the Bush of 2008, whose legacy was shunned even by his own party. There are increasing signs of the latter.

Is there a lesson here for America's religious conservatives? If so, will they heed it?

Give Me Mockery

Those right-wing fringe types who aren't there are apparently keeping busy.

The Liberty Counsel — a Christian right group whose support is courted by mainstream GOP politicians — is still raising cash by mocking the “right wing extremists” report, despite the identification of the suspect in yesterday’s Holocaust Museum shooting as a white supremacist and anti-government zealot.

The Liberty Counsel, which is affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, is a non-profit that describes itself as “dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the traditional family.” It allies with GOP politicians in legislative fights such as the one against hate-crimes legislation, and no less a mainstream Republican than John McCain courted its support during last year’s presidential race.

But right now, the group is still mocking the “right wing extremists” report right there on its Web site, offering people tongue in cheek ID cards labeling them “right wing extremists” and asking for donations in exchange.

When the "Mainstream" (like John McCain) aligns itself with folks like these, what is considered fringe anymore?

Create, But Verify

Suderman calls out Team Obama on their either/or claims when it comes to jobs:

President Obama claims that his economic recovery efforts have already “created or saved” 150,000 jobs, and that they’ll create or save an additional 600,000 over the next few months. Problem is, thanks to the addition of the last two words — “or saved” — there’s no way to measure this. Not only is there no administration entity assigned to measure saved jobs, it would still be impossible to accurately measure if there were. Even the unnamed “independent analysts” called upon to verify the administration’s claims, which are reportedly “based on macroeconomic models and projections,” by the New York Times admit that the figure cannot be measured, and will only say that the numbers are, at best, “plausible.”

Maybe they need a Job Measuring Czar? They've got one for everything else.

The Iranian Gorbachev?

Marc Lynch wonders what would happen if Ima Dinnerjacket finds himself out of a job.

I imagine that many of the Arabs who see democracy as an important and positive issue find this Iranian election inspiring (as they did Khatemi's 1997 campaign). The Arab public may regard a Mousavi victory as the same kind of opportunity to rethink relations with Iran as Obama's victory offered for relations with the United States. Arab leaders may find it harder to mobilize opposition to Iran with the seemingly reasonable Mousavi in office than with the cheerfully inflammatory Ahmedenejad.

If a 'Mousavi Effect' could open a window of opportunity for Iranian public diplomacy and soft power, the big question -- just as it was for Obama -- would be whether Iran would use that moment to reinforce existing lines of conflict or to break them down. Could direct renewed Iranian soft power towards rebuilding strained relations with Arabs and overcoming the 'moderate camp vs resistance camp' narrative preferred by Ahmedenejad (and by the Bush administration and key Arab leaders such as Hosni Mubarak)? How would the Obama administration respond to such an Iranian public diplomacy offensive? In the end, that may be more important than the nuclear question for the future of the region.

It's true that, even if Mousavi wins, the mullahs will still have much of the same power they did before-but then again, so did the Soviet politburo when Gorbachev first took the reins. The real impact of a Mousavi win may not be on Syria or in Lebanon, but in American "Allies" like Saudi Arabia, which, if anything, is more theocratic than Iran is. What will they do when faced with the prospect of two emerging democracies as neighbors?

My Deficit For A Surplus

Kevin Drum says we need one ASAP:

Eventually, we need to pay down all these loans. That means we need to start running a trade surplus, not merely a smaller deficit. And we have to do this even though oil prices are almost certain to rise in the long term and our dependence on foreign oil is going to continue to grow. I still haven't figured out how this is going to happen, and as near as I can tell, neither has anyone else. All the options seem pretty grim, though.

One of the trade-offs here for Team Obama would seem to be abandoning any ideas for a cap and trade scheme. Trade means increased productivity, another area where there seems to be a considerable deficit these days.

Phases Of The Flu

So how scared should we be, anyway?

The World Health Organization today declared the global outbreak of the novel H1N1 influenza virus to be in Phase 6 -- a full-scale pandemic.

The announcement essentially warns WHO's 194 member nations to expect the arrival of the new flu strain, which is likely to infect up to one-third of the population in the first wave and return in later waves over the next several years.

'The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic of the 21st century,' Margaret Chan, WHO's director general, said this morning. 'We anticipate that this action will raise many questions and that often these questions do not have simple answers.'

I suppose the good news is that we have the means to treat such outbreaks today, anti-vaccination Luddites aside. And it's not nearly as bad as past epidemics. Still, I wonder if this means we'll have to go to plaid.

The Depression Is Now

Forget about Tea Parties. This is what happens when a country faces a real Depression:

After making several pleas to their employers for back pay — at one point crashing a meeting at the mayor's office to demand their jobs back — the workers turned to desperate measures. On June 2, they staged a strike along a major highway linking the city of Vologda to St. Petersburg, blocking the route for hours. Finally Moscow took notice and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin flew in by helicopter to force local politicians and factory owners to pay the town's workers the money owed to them. Now Pikalyovo's shops, cafes and banks are doing good business again, but as the recession sweeps across Russia, small single-industry towns all over the country are just one factory closure away from suffering the same plight.

'You wouldn't have seen anything like this — people were fed up and angry,' says Alexander Plush, 41, another former factory worker standing in line at the ATM. Plush had worked for 17 years at one of the Pikalyovo's cement factories until it closed a few months ago. 'Before we got paid, people were living on bread and water and the food they could grow in their gardens this early in the year,' he says.

The situation was so bleak that, according to Russian media, people in Pikalyovo were forced to eat wild plants, while the city's hot water was shut off after residents couldn't pay their bills.

This is the sort of thing that can lead to much greater unpleasantness for the powers that be later on. Is Putin really paying attention, or just hoping that it all goes away?

Return Of The Crazies

In writing about how the shooting relates to other crimes and how they've covered, Thoreau asks:

Remember the Clinton administration, with people opening fire on the White House, and a plane hitting the White House? It seems that the crazies are back in the news. They don’t need to be statistically significant to grab headlines.

It does seem we're headed that way once again. This is one form of 90's "Nostalgia" I could have done without.

Cap On, Cap Off

Well, good (subscription required for the rest):

The Obama administration is dropping its plan to cap salaries at firms receiving government bailout money, leaving them subject to congressionally imposed limits on bonuses, according to people familiar with the matter.
The move is likely to end months of confusion on Wall Street about separate pay directives from the White House and Congress.

The administration is expected to announce the compromise on Wednesday. In addition to standing behind the restrictions passed by Congress in February, the administration plans to push for broad changes in compensation practices across the financial-services industry, these people say.

This is a better approach than having government trying to dictate how much money someone should make, IMO. Honest pay is one thing, but these golden parachutes that allow CEOs to jump ship when their companies go under aren't exactly representative of what the free market is supposed to be about.

The Crazy Responds

Um...what? Debbie Schlussel says the shooting is the Muslims' fault. Meanwhile, Ed Morrisey thinks the creators of the DHS report should have been psychic. Meanwhile, Greg Sargent wants to know if the "Birthers" in the GOP will shut up now that the shooter has been identified as one of their own:

TPM has unearthed a writing of James von Brunn that seems to show that he’s a “birther,” one of those hearty souls who’s questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s election because he isn’t a natural born American citizen.

The point is not that the “birther” talk is directly to blame for violence like this. But it seems fair to ask whether this kind of stuff, and related fringe wackitude, is playing some kind of role in helping egg it on at a moment when Obama’s agenda is coming into focus.

Unfortunately, I don't expect any real sanity to come from the right over this except from those durn wishy-washy moderates that aren't "Real conservatives".

From Russia With Debt

First, Chinese Communists tell us our money's no good, now former communists are saying it.

Russia may switch some of its reserves from U.S. Treasuries to International Monetary Fund bonds, the central bank said today. The comment drove Treasuries and the dollar lower.

Alexei Ulyukayev, first deputy chairman of Russia’s central bank, said some reserves may be moved from Treasuries into IMF debt, reiterating comments made last month by Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. Ulyukayev’s remarks were confirmed by a Bank Rossii official who declined to be named, citing bank policy.

Treasuries fell, pushing 10-year yields toward the highest level in seven months, in response to Ulyukayev’s statement. The dollar fell against the euro on speculation that Russia will reduce its holdings of U.S. debt.

So, what does this mean? Short term, it looks like Team Obama will find it increasingly difficult to find people to borrow from to pay for their schemes. Long term, it looks like we'll be the ones footing the bill, as usual.

The Extremists Who Aren't There

Ryan Sager says it's time for those Republicans who criticized the DHS report to eat some crow. And he's not alone.

For my own part, I don't think this is representative of what all of conservatism is turning into. But you can't deny that there is a significant fringe crowd out there that showed its ugly face time and time again during the election, and now they're acting out their paranoid wingnuttery with these shootings.

Does this mean that the Republican Party or Rush and Hannity are responsible? No, but it does mean that at some point they have to step up to the plate and clearly say that this is not what the Right is about. And they have to do it without rationalizing these nutcases, the way Bill O'Reilly seemed to do with the Tiller shooting.

Join The Club

Reihan points out the obvious:

Republican stinginess—relative stinginess, as all the proposals will cost massive amounts—could yield political dividends. No Republican plan will pass, of course. But offering a smart, sane, cheap alternative will help restore Republican credibility on the biggest domestic issue facing the country.

Of course, to their credit, some of them have tried. But Reihan does make a point: it's not so much about the role that government should play in health care (to which I am largely opposed) but how much it will cost to the average American in these recessionary times. this is one aspect of the economy that Obama doesn't seem to get-people don't like paying taxes in hard tmes, let alone good. And, as Reihan points out, if the Republicans could get their act together, they could make this a viable issue for them.

Finding His Inner Reagan

Does anyone else find this ironic in the amount of chutzpah it contains?

President Barack Obama sought on Tuesday to show he was serious about improving the U.S. budget picture as he called on Congress to pass new limits on tax cuts and spending programs to avoid adding to deficits.

Obama urged passage of 'pay-as-you-go' legislation that would require any new tax cut or automatic spending program to be paid for within the budget.

'The 'pay as you go' principle is very simple. Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere,' Obama said in a speech at the White House attended by several Democratic members of Congress.

'Entitlement increases and tax cuts need to be paid for. They are not free,' said Obama, who has been criticized by Republicans for proposing a hefty domestic agenda that includes overhauling the health care system, bolstering education and tackling global climate change.

Fair enough. But then, maybe he should practice what he preaches instead of doing the same thing as before.

Mr. Deeds Goes To Richmond?

An interesting result in the race to see who will be the Democratic nominee for Governor in Old Virginia:

Running with the least money and fewest ties to vote-rich Northern Virginia, State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds has won the three-way Democratic primary for governor, paving the way for a rematch with Republican Bob McDonnell in the fall.

Deeds, 51, a country lawyer from Bath County in the western part of the state, was viewed as an unlikely winner against two Northern Virginians with entrenched political ties.

Known for his moderate views on such issues as gun rights, but also appreciated for his folksy style and attention to the Washington suburbs’ cry for road improvements, Deeds was leading in Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun and Prince William counties.

Deeds had almost doubled the vote totals of each of his opponents, Democratic activist Terry McAuliffe and former Del. Brian Moran.

Why is this interesting? Terry McAuliffe is in many ways representative of the worst stereotypes of Democratic politicians. Here, he lost to the underdog who had a better connection with how the voters apparently actually felt. Shades of Obama versus Hillary.

When The Terrorists Win

Things like this happen.

The Wichita abortion clinic run by a doctor who was shot and killed will remain closed permanently, his family said on Tuesday.

Dr. George R. Tiller’s clinic was one of the few in the country to provide abortions to women late in their pregnancies, and for decades, women had traveled there from all over the nation and from overseas. It was also the only remaining abortion clinic, even for first trimester abortions, in the Wichita region.

“The family of Dr. George Tiller announces that effective immediately, Women’s Health Care Services, Inc., will be permanently closed,” according to a statement issued on Tuesday morning by the family’s lawyers. “Notice is being given today to all concerned that the Tiller family is ceasing operation of the clinic and any involvement by family members in any other similar clinic.”

I have to wonder how many of the leaders of the anti-abortion groups are secretly happy that the same guy they denounced as a murderer got them what they wanted.

Feds Go Home

There seems to be a stimulus revolt brewing:

From Idaho to South Carolina and in dozens of other states, Republicans are sponsoring resolutions designed to call attention to what they view as a worrisome expansion of the federal government at the expense of the states.

“What we have is a federal government that is exceeding its authority and blackmailing the states into submission through printed dollars,” said Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Sam Rohrer. “We are trying to say to the federal government, ‘You have a role, but your role stops not too far outside Washington, D.C.’”

Apparently, someone forgot to tell Team Obama. Not everybody needs stimulus money, it seems-and if they don't, why force them to take it?

Day of the Animals

Surprise, surprise. It turns out all those regulations meant to protect Mother Nature have now made Nature part of the problem:

Around the nation, decades of environmental regulation, conservation efforts and changing land use have brought many species, like beavers, so far back from the brink that they are viewed as nuisances. As Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University, put it, “We are finding they are inconvenient.”

In Florida, alligators were once nearly wiped out by hunters; today the state maintains a roster of trappers who remove thousands of nuisance gators each year. The pesticide DDT once left the Pelican State, Louisiana, bereft of the birds; today wildlife organizations say fishermen must guard their bait and catches from the birds. In California, warnings about marauding mountain lions are posted on hiking trails.

Note to "Environmentalists": sometimes nature paractices selective culling for a reason. We're part of the food chain too, boys and girls.

Are You Smarter Than A Two Year Old?

Meet England's newest genius:

Karina Oakley of Guildford, Surrey, near London, has an IQ of 160 — the same as physics professor Stephen Hawking and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, London's Daily Mail reports.

'She has a very good memory,' her mother, Charlotte Fraser, told the Mail. 'She seems to be quite aware of her surroundings, what's going on around her, she's very observant, she talks all the time, asks questions all the time.'

Intrigued by her daughter's exceptional language and memory abilities, Fraser had her tested after seeing a TV show about child prodigies.

'During the test it was noted that she gave imaginative responses to questions,' When Prof. Joan Freeman, a child-psychology expert, administered the classic Stanford-Binet IQ test to the little girl, she noted imaginative responses, the Mail reports.

More child prodigies here. Wiki article here. It does seem that being born a genius has often been an equal mixture of blessing and curse. Does being a prodigy rob someone of their childhood, or spare them of some of the pains of growing up?

Gangsta Gene

Another study has come out claiming to link genes and gangbanging:

Boys who carry a particular variation of the gene Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), sometimes called the 'warrior gene,' are more likely not only to join gangs but also to be among the most violent members and to use weapons, according to a new study from The Florida State University that is the first to confirm an MAOA link specifically to gangs and guns...

'While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon, our investigation shows that variants of a specific MAOA gene, known as a 'low-activity 3-repeat allele,' play a significant role,' said Beaver...

'Previous research has linked low-activity MAOA variants to a wide range of antisocial, even violent, behavior, but our study confirms that these variants can predict gang membership,' he said. 'Moreover, we found that variants of this gene could distinguish gang members who were markedly more likely to behave violently and use weapons from members who were less likely to do either.'

Of course, not everyone agrees. it may be true that genes are in fact responsible for a large part of who we are, but there is still such a thing as free will-otherwise, why try and hold somebody like Scott Roeder accountable for his actions?

The Velvet Plot

Patrick Clawson, the deputy director for research of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says Iran's head mullah is running scared:

Iran's Supreme Leader is worried about the vulnerability of the regime.

The main focus of his public speeches is about the danger of 'soft overthrow' from 'Western cultural invasion.' Khamenei warns that the West is plotting a 'velvet revolution' like that which overthrew the Czechoslovak communist government in a mere one week's time. He is so terrified that the Islamic Republic could be quickly swept away that he has the security forces lock up journalists (like NPR reporter Roxanne Saberi), civil society activists promoting people-to-people exchanges (like the Wilson Center's Haleh Esfandiari), and physicians active in scientific exchange. Presumably Khamenei knows something about his own country, and he worries that the regime is vulnerable. Let us hope he is correct.

It will be very interesting to see what happens to people like Khamenei if Mr. Moussavi wins. Even if he doesn't, hopefully their days will indeed be numbered.

The Future Of Obamanomics

Richard Posner has some advice on how Republicans can reassert themselves against the Democrats:

If the current administration moves the country left, conservatives will be able to campaign from a position of responsible conservatism, rather than pushing a conservative agenda beyond reasonable bounds in order to differentiate conservatism from the centrist policies of moderate Democrats.

Of course, part of the problem for the Republicans is that they currently have goofballs like Jim Inhofe and Sarah Palin as spokespeople. But the question of whether or not Obama's never-ending stimulus will work is starting to become more valid.

I don't know if 2010 will be the turning point the Republicans have been looking for. But even if Obama wins a second term, 2016 could start to look pretty good-if the Republicans can keep the economy as an issue, and dump the "Real conservative", Rush Limbaugh-worshipping baggage.

The Greening Of Iran

Is this Iran's Green Revolution?

Supporters of Iran's main pro-reform presidential candidate formed a human chain that stretched nearly the entire length of Tehran on Monday in their biggest display of political might — sending a powerful challenge to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's backers as both sides poured into the streets in the final days of the race.

The showdown atmosphere reflects the increasingly bitter tone between Ahmadinejad and his main rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, in the campaign blitz before Friday's vote. Both have traded recriminations and engaged in mudslinging as intense as any bare-knuckle American campaign and — in the process — have turned the election into a display of Iran's deep political divides.

Ahmadinejad's supporters applaud his firebrand style that include questions over the Holocaust and his uncompromising defense of Iran's nuclear program. Mousavi's backers — including many young voters — believe Iran's international standing is being undermined and a more flexible approach is needed with critical issues at stake such as possible talks with Washington.

In the battle for campaign images, Mousavi's forces mobilized a stunning scene: a rally that stretched nearly the entire 12-mile (19-kilometer) length of Vali Asr — a famous avenue that bisects Tehran from the conservative strongholds in the older flatland neighborhoods to the south from the liberal-minded bastions on the slopes of the Alborz mountain range in the north.

If true, then Ima Dinnerjacket could indeed be in big trouble. And what will happen to the idea of going to war with Iran if Mousavi pulls this off?

Fail, Baby, Fail

Rush Limbaugh is back in epic fail mode. As TPM reports:

Rush Limbaugh makes no bones about what he wants in his own praise of the idea. The most amazing thing here is that Limbaugh appears to be openly admitting that the purpose of this is economic and political sabotage -- to prevent President Obama from succeeding at something.

Limbaugh reassures any GM workers who might be listening that the boycotters aren't angry at them. 'They don't want to patronize Obama. They don't want to do anything to make Obama's policies work!' he explains. 'This is an untold story, by the way. Of course, the government-controlled media is not gonna report anything like this but there are a lot of people who are not going to buy from Chrysler or General Motors as long as it is perceived Barack Obama is running it, because people do not want his policy to work here because this is antithetical to the American economic way of life.'

I don't like the takeover of GM and I especially don't like that the unions got the better end of the deal. But when have these boycotts ever really succeeded? I might not buy from GM simply because they make lousy cars, but I won't hope against hope that a sitting President fails in a way that makes a bad situation worse. That's antiethical to the American way of life, Rush.

Swedish Webheads

Libertarianism, Swedish style:

A Swedish party that wants to legalise Internet filesharing and beef up web privacy scored a big victory Sunday by winning a European parliament seat, results showed.

The Pirate Party won 7.1 percent of votes, taking one of Sweden's 18 seats in the European parliament, with ballots in 5,659 constituencies out of 5,664 counted.

'Privacy issues and civil liberties are important to people and they demonstrated that clearly when they voted today,' one of the party's candidates, Anna Troberg, told Swedish television on Sunday.

The party was founded in January 2006 and quickly attracted members angered by controversial laws adopted in Sweden that criminalised filesharing and authorised monitoring of emails.

Is this the answer to legal battles against the RIAA? Power to the people, indeed!

Next Time, Don't Take The Train

Well, now. Al Gore isn't going to like this.

Taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study.

Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public.

These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple 'tailpipe' tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.

Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.

In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.

This, then, seems to be the problem with most "Green" studies-they don't factor in how bad for the environment other forms of "Green" transportation might be. If I drive into work every day, forexample, am I actually doing less harm than people who waste electricity on trains, subways, or, for that matter, fuel on buses and taxis?

Old Mother Earth

We can all relax:

The Earth could be habitable for another 2.3 billion years, extending previous estimates of life’s horizon by more than 1 billion years.

King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.

If the new idea proves correct and can be extended to other planets with biospheres, it could increase the chances that earthly civilization finds extraterrestrial life by doubling the percentage of time that planets could be inhabited.

“[T]he Earth will be identifiable as an inhabited planet for nearly half the total lifetime of the Sun, an important point to consider in the search for life on extrasolar planets,” the authors write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So, if you're immortal, this is good news. Now I can put my "The End Is Nigh" sign away...

"Norm!"

It appears the fat lady has finally sung:

Seven months after Minnesota’s Senate election, the state’s highest court hasn’t reached a decision but election law experts agree: Norm Coleman doesn’t have a prayer.

These experts see almost no chance Coleman’s lawyers will prevail in their appeal to the state’s high court to count more ballots in a bid to erase Al Franken’s slim lead.

Peter Knapp, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, pointed to the court’s oral arguments on Monday, when the justices expressed skepticism toward Coleman’s lawyer, Joe Friedberg.

“Each of the five justices asked some questions that seemed to hone in on the absence of evidence,” said Knapp, an expert on the Minnesota Supreme Court who has kept a close eye on the case. “And when each of the five are asking those questions, that’s significant.”

Now that Palwenty has effectively washed his hands of this mess, it will be interesting to see where the Coleman brigades will turn to next for salvation. Maybe the Magic Eight Ball?

Flexing What Little Muscle They Have

In trying to decide between the cars of the future and those of the past, GM seems to be betting on the latter.

As General Motors fights for survival, there is something ambivalent about its prescription for saving itself, a conflict implicit in a bit of symbolism that recently greeted arrivals to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport even before they reached baggage claim.

One of GM’s touted new automobiles sat on display in the center of the automaker’s airport gift shop. It was not the coming electric car, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, championed by Bob Lutz, the GM executive most identified with the Hail Mary that the vehicle represents for the bankrupt company, which faces the immediate future as a ward of the federal government. It was not one of the relatively new GM hybrids. It was not even a mid-level sedan called the Chevy Malibu, which has received flattering reviews and awards, in part for its better-than-average fuel economy.

It was instead a car that flies in the face of all the worries about the American automotive industry, all the calls to make it more environmentally responsible and therefore more viable: the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS with a V-8 engine, General Motors’ version of the fast and powerful model that automobile enthusiasts commonly call a muscle car.

Hybrids and electrics may indeed be the coming wave, but GM seems to be running on nostalgic fumes. Of course, the free market will decide whether people want green cars or not, but it might be nice if GM were more serious in promoting them as an alternative.

Killing Them With Kindness

Barack Obama has made a habit of picking some high-profile Republicans for his administration (see Jon Huntsman, Jr.). And it has the remaining Republicans increasingly frustrated-not to mention lonely:

In picking Republicans like Mr. McHugh for top jobs, the Obama administration says it is assembling a coalition government that welcomes qualified members of the opposition. It gives the White House a claim to bipartisanship despite continuing clashes with Republican Congressional leaders.

But the political benefits are an equally strong incentive. Remaining Republican colleagues become discouraged and feel further isolated in the minority. Political vacancies are created. And Republicans can be painted as being hostile to more moderate Republicans or those willing to engage the Democratic administration.

In embracing select Republicans, the Obama administration — notably Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff — seems to be applying this maxim: Hug them until it hurts.

“This Machiavellian strategy is pure Rahm,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former top House aide. “It is brilliant and it is painful for Republicans.”

Machiavellian? This from the party of Karl Rove and company? It seems the real issue for them is how so many of the sane Republicans are now jumping ship-and how thoe left behind can't seem to understand why it's happening.

It's A Shame About Ray

Natterin' Nagin is apparently stuck in China:

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who traveled on Friday to Shanghai, China, on an economic development trip, was informed early Sunday that a passenger on the airplane in which he was traveling was confirmed to have signs and symptoms of an influenza-like illness, suspected to be of the H1N1 -- or swine flu -- subtype.

As a precaution, Nagin, his wife and one member of the mayor's executive protection unit have been placed in a designated quarantine location in Shanghai. The mayor's agenda is on indefinite hold, though he and the others are symptom-free.

'Right now, everything is stopped and we will follow the lead of Shanghai medical officials,' spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett said at a City Hall news conference Sunday afternoon. 'He seemed fine. Just following the procedure.'

We'll see how long it takes for him to complain about how there are no buses available for his entourage...

Bond, Government Bond

You will be shocked to learn that copying the banks hasn't worked out as planned:

The Federal Reserve announced a $1.2 trillion plan three months ago designed to push down mortgage rates and breathe life into the housing market.

But this and other big government spending programs are turning out to have the opposite effect. Rates for mortgages and U.S. Treasury debt are now marching higher as nervous bond investors fret about a resurgence of inflation.

That's the Catch-22 threatening to make an awful housing market potentially worse and keep the economy stuck in a funk. Kick-starting the economy requires higher spending, but rising rates mean fewer Americans will be able to refinance their home loans. And some potential buyers will be shut out of the market by higher monthly payments they won't be able to afford.
....

The White House estimates that the government will rack up an unprecedented $1.8 trillion budget deficit this year - more than four times last year's all-time high.

"The bond market is calling the Federal Reserve out," said Mike Larson, a real estate analyst at Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Fla. "Investors are saying that the Fed can't just print money out of thin air to finance a massive deficit."

In other words, a new mortgage crisis is brewing for the same reasons that caused the last one. Those who don't learn from history, etc.

"We Can See North Korean Missiles From Our Houses"

Are they being paranoid-or just prudent?

Alaskans are concerned over the prospect that North Korea is getting ready to test a long-range missile that could reach strategic targets in their home state.

And they're not buying Defense Secretary Robert Gates' assertion during a visit this past week to one of Alaska's many military installations that the missile is not a threat to the United States.

'I think we would definitely be a target because of the oil and the military,' said Dale Walberg, owner of a small greenhouse business in Eagle River. 'They are just so secretive. What do we really know?'

There's been no direct threat against Alaska or anywhere else, but the missile North Korea is believed to be assembling for a test may have a range of 4,000 miles, putting Hawaii and much of Alaska within reach.

Alaska's two largest cities, Anchorage and Fairbanks, have both Air Force and Army bases. There's also Fort Greely, home of the Missile Defense Complex. The U.S. plans to store 26 ground-based missile interceptors in silos at the base, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks.
Other high-profile potential targets would include Prudhoe Bay, the nation's largest oil field, or Valdez, the terminus of the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline.
....

In the meantime, the state's political leaders are using the missile situation to send a message to the Obama administration: Maintain a strong military presence in Alaska.

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, sent a letter to Gates urging him to reconsider a decision to not complete construction of a second missile defense field at Greely and to place a cap on F-22 fighters at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

"We are sending the wrong message to our enemies by stopping the placement of these interceptors," Young's letter said. "While 30 interceptors may be enough to counter the current threat from North Korea, it is clear that it will not be enough in the future."

Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, said he would continue to push for the installation of the final 14 interceptors.

"It may be just one missile positioned today, but who knows what surprise North Korea will announce next?" Begich said.

Dan Goure, vice president of defense studies at the Lexington Institute in Alexandria, Va., said Alaskans should be outraged by the Obama administration decision to scale back Greely's missile defense program.

"The most desirable targets these guys can hit are all in Alaska and the system that is being deployed is inadequate," Goure said. "You may say I will trust the president to stand up to that threat, but do the people of Alaska want to be put on that front line?"

The good news from a defense position is, Obama seems to be getting tired of Mini-Me's antics. The bad news? Mini-Me most likely won't care.

Right And Left Turns

Socialism as the wave of the future across the pond? Maybe not.

The economic recession should have meant easy votes for Europe's left-wing movements, longtime critics of unchecked capitalism.
Yet as Europe goes to the polls, left-leaning parties across the continent are looking likely to falter. That's true both for those in government, such as in the U.K. and Spain, and in the opposition -- such as France, Germany and Italy.

In America, it was the opposite-here, voters rebelled against a supposedly conservative party and decided to give the opposition a chance. So why didn't it work Over There?

One reason is that as Europe tipped into recession, the right moved left -- appropriating some of the left's long-standing economic policies, including nationalizations and bailouts.

French conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, helped recapitalize French banks, earmarked six billion euros for the auto sector and lashed out at "rascal bosses" with huge pay packages.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has planted her conservative camp firmly in the political center. Ms. Merkel has largely given up her former program of market-oriented reforms, and has gradually approved various kinds of state intervention to protect workers during the current recession, from bailing out carmaker Opel to subsidizing payrolls at companies whose export orders have collapsed.

Even before that, right-wing parties across the continent began offering more pragmatic approaches to policy than they had traditionally done. In the past decade, conservative parties introduced competition or privatized some public services in France, Germany and Italy -- but they refrained from dismantling the health-care and public transport services cherished by voters.

In the past, there was a clear fault line between Europe's left-wing and right-wing parties. The left called for more social welfare programs and public spending. The right wanted the state not to interfere in market forces.

Globalization helped change that. With nations and companies vying on a global scale, it has become difficult for a country to separate the effects of public spending and budget deficits from its labor costs and capacity to compete in export markets. The key moment came as far back as 1994, some political analysts say, when the World Trade Organization was created and much of the world began shifting to a more free-market economy.

"The WTO marked the triumph of the market economy," says Dominique Reynié, head of Paris-based Foundation for Political Innovation. "Since then, the left has been unable to propose another route."

In other words, they partly followed the route our own Republicans did-but they didn't abandon all of their original message, or values, in pursuit of pleasing only the base. There's a lesson in that, somewhere.

On The Beach

OK, it was an honest mistake. But still:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown renamed the famed Omaha beach 'Obama beach' in a slip-up while giving his D-Day commemoration speech in France on Saturday.

Brown, who is fighting for his political survival at home, was meant to be enjoying a few hours' respite in Normandy with US President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prince Charles.

'And so next to Obama beach we join President Obama in paying particular tribute to the spectacular bravery of American soliders who gave their lives on Omaha beach,' Brown said, almost stumbling again when he said Omaha the second time.

No correction was made and Brown went on to give a gracious tribute to the 'sacrifice and valour' of those who died in the World War II landings 65 years ago.

Considering that Mr. Brown is facing his own Omaha Beach back home, I guess it's understandable that he was uner some stress. Even so, I wonder what Obama was thinking when he said it...

Dead Man's Ticket

I wonder how often something like this actually happens and doesn't get any attention:

Police made a gruesome discovery earlier this week while getting ready to tow a heavily-ticketed van – a decomposed body in the back seat.

It was that of a missing man, and now his family wants to know to how officers could ticket the vehicle numerous times -- and never notice what was inside.

Jennifer Morales, who didn't want her face filmed by CBS 2 HD cameras, wondered how her father's body could go unnoticed for so long.

'I'm shocked. I'm surprised, um...,' Morales said.

I guess none of the officers ever bothered to ask Mr. Morales to roll down his window...

Meet the New Health Care Debate, Same As The Old One

In responding to the latest study supporting the need for Obama-style health care "Reform," Nick Gillespie asks:

Is it really that hard to bring the health care debate out of the stinky old swamp of single-payer vs. something like what we have now, only marginally more expensive to individuals?

Any sort of serious reform of the health care question really has to start with definitional questions: What exactly is health care? And what is its relation to health insurance? Why can we draw that simple distinction when it comes to, say, cars and car insurance but we hopelessly conflate the two when it comes to health care? To claim that 'only single-payer' can save us all is simply intellectually unserious.

I'm all for severing the tie between the workplace and health insurance. I know that my employer has better things to do than be some sort of half-assed insurance broker and I'm guessing that I could do a better job picking plans based on my family's needs. But I'm guessing that the plans emanating from Congress in the dog days of this summer won't be heading in that direction.

As he notes, we already have government health care programs that we can try the Plan on before imposing it on the rest of the country. Of course, people aren't cars or houses. But why shouldn't real reform focus on eoncouraging competition to provide better services instead of a monolithic HMO-style system, or covering people-or not covering them-based on their own risky behavior? After all, liberals want to tax people based on what they eat and drink. Why should they be afraid of viewing health care the same way?

The Jailing Judge

Is Sonia Sotomayor actually a cop's best friend?

New York criminal-defense lawyers say she is surprisingly tough on crime for a Democratic-backed appointee—a byproduct, they believe, of her tenure as a prosecutor....

In the Fourth Amendment case in 1999, Judge Sotomayor ruled against Anthony Santa, who was sentenced to 30 months after officers in Spring Valley, N.Y., arrested him and found 2.95 grams of crack cocaine.

Mr. Santa's lawyer said the arrest and search were improper, because officers were acting on a warrant from a neighboring town that had been canceled two years earlier. The Supreme Court had earlier ruled that such mistakes didn't invalidate evidence if court officials were responsible. The issue of responsibility was in dispute in this case, but Judge Sotomayor's ruling assumed the police had acted appropriately and upheld the sentence.

Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford Law School professor who was on the losing side of the January Supreme Court decision [upholding the admission of evidence seized by police who mistakenly believed they had an arrest warrant], says Judge Sotomayor's ruling demonstrates a 'willingness to give police the benefit of the doubt.'

So much for her being a bleeding heart liberal. But will this have a positive or negative impact on the constitutionality of police searches and defendant's rights? Tim Lynch fears the latter, but it does seem to take away the argument that she'll be the kind of left-wing activist judge that her critics fear.

"Are There No Shelters?"

A homeless man describes 21st-century poorhouses:

The shelters I've been to are designed to try to keep alcoholics, drug addicts and criminals from being able to do those things. I don't do those things, so the preventative measures simply needlessly and oppressively impose upon my own adult freedoms. Like going around the corner for a coffee in a cafe and looking for work or some other way to earn money using the wifi.

It does seem that the system tends to treat homelessness more as a criminal rather than a social problem, when in fact it is both. Yes, some of them are junkies, drunks, and criminals, but many aren't. With the economy the way it is, it would seem that the system needs more than a little updating.

A Little Off The Top

Derek Thompson reports:

The GOP has proposed $375 billion of budget cuts to pare it down. That's the good news. The bad news is that when you peak under the hood of the engine, you see two big wrenches. 1) $317 billion of the estimated cuts is just a cap on discretionary spending, which is a make-believe item that will never pass Congress. 2) The new, actionable ideas amount to only $5 billion a year, which is a hardy 0.3% of the estimated deficit.

Given that the Republicans are faced with a Democratic-controlled House and Senate, I'm not sure how much more they could have offered that had any chance of passing. But, as he notes, some of the cuts are actually reasonable:

Tim Fernholtz over at The American Prospect has the right idea that Democrats should take these suggestions seriously. Here are some that seem not crazy:

-Eliminate Wealthier Communities from the Community Development Block Grant Program -- $1.7 Billion
-Require Federal Agencies to Purchase Lowest Cost Vehicles
-Terminate Funding To Promote the Sale of Brand Name Food Products and Alcoholic Beverages (MAP) -- $71.5 Million

These are the kinds of spending cuts I wish the Republicans had focused more on than appealing to the neocon/wingnut base. If they had, they might not have gotten their butts kicked.

One Death In Bangkok

From the L.A. Times, remembering David Carradine:

The actor, who made more than 100 films over a more than 40-year career, was found dead on June 3 in his hotel room in Bangkok, where he had been on location shooting a movie. Details remain murky. Police reported that the actor had been found by a hotel maid, dead in a wardrobe with a rope around his neck and body. But Carradine's manager said the actor had died of natural causes.

A member of the dynastic Carradine acting clan, which also includes family patriarch John Carradine and half-siblings Keith and Robert, David Carradine studied music and served in the Army before taking up stage acting. He landed his first bit-part film role in an adaptation of Louis L'Amour's western novel 'Taggart.'

Carradine's rugged, hard-to-place features and his terse, sometimes laconic manner gave him the ability to be cast in roles as varied as Caine, folk troubadour Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's 'Bound for Glory' (1976), and as a renegade driver in Paul Bartel's 1975 apocalyptic thriller “Death Race 2000,” which prefigured George Miller's 'Mad Max' films.

To those of us of a certain generation he will always be remembered as Kwai Chang Caine, but he was one of those guys that you always seemed to see around-not necessarily an A-List star, but somebody you were almost immediately familiar with, and now he's gone.

At any rate, here he is in the series that brought him fame:




R.I.P., Grasshopper.

Tiananmen At Twenty

Over at Reason, Matt Welch looks back from a generational perspective:

For many of us at or around age 40 there have been exactly two eras: before Tiananmen, and after. Before, our entire horizon was consumed by the Cold War–it would last forever, Kremlin reformer-of-the-week notwithstanding, and history would continue being something we'd only read about, or experienced in crappy Bob Zemeckis movies. Half the world or thereabouts would always be plunged in undifferentiated darkness, and Sting would always sing terrible songs about Oppenheimer's deadly toy.

Afterward, the ground just never felt the same under your feet. Revolutions, it turned out, were no longer just proxy skirmishes in the bloody third world. Also, they would be televised. Life went from dull certainty to vertigo-inducing flux. It was a pretty good time to be 20...unless you were Chinese.

As someone who also remembers those exiting, uncertain times, I can relate. It tragically didn't succeed in China, but the Revolution that followed in Eastern Europe and the big, bad Evil Empire did, to quote Jesus Jones, make the world wake up from history.

The Post-Promotion Era

A lot is being made in some parts of the blogosphere about Obama's line that no government should place itself above another. For the record, here's what he actually said:

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

Now, how is this last part any different than what Geroge W. Bush said in the past? What Obama has done is change the tone by recognizing that it's not up to us to remake the Middle East in our image while recognizing that most of the people in the ME do want freedom.

A God's Life

It's not easy being Buddha:

Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha.

Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. Movies were also forbidden -- except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers. 'I never felt like that boy,' he said.

He is now studying film in Madrid and has denounced the Buddhist order that elevated him to guru status. 'They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal,' said Torres, 24, describing how he was whisked from obscurity in Granada to a monastery in southern India.

Hey, it beats being turned into a System Lord. But still, it raises a question: What happens when the Chosen One no longer wants to be Chosen?

"But Remember, He's Not Hitler"

Jonah Goldberg almost goes there:

I’m not calling Barack Obama a Hitler and I’m not calling him Nazis and all the rest. But, you know, in fascism, we saw the people’s car. We call it the Volkswagen, where the state said what we’re going to do is we’re going to take over the auto industry, government and business and unions are going to get together and we’re going to create cars to fill a political need rather than a market need and give people these cars.

Remember when conservatives mocked the Left for saying the same things about Bush? It was rightfully derided as asinine. This is no different.

For the record, here's a handy chart showing just how "Socialist" Obama's policies really are. I don't like the takeover of GM. But if Obama is the second coming of Stalin that some on the right think he is, he's got a funny way of showing it.

The Candidate

Is this man Iran's Barack Obama, or at least its Gorbachev?

Mr. Moussavi, a former prime minister, was born in Khameneh, a small town near this northwestern city in East Azerbaijan Province. He was speaking here on Tuesday as part of a two-day tour to win the votes of Turkish speakers, nearly one-third of Iran’s eligible voters.

In his speech, Mr. Moussavi denounced the pressure put on student activists through expulsions and jail terms during Mr. Ahmadinejad’s term and called the president’s policies “old and backward.”

He said the major goal of the 1979 revolution was freedom.

“We wanted to become free and be progressive in the world, not faced with backward ideas and notions today,” he said.

The rally was an unusual event in this northwestern city, where political and social restrictions are enforced more fiercely than in the capital, Tehran.

The race may have been fixed, but Ima Dinnerjacket probably wasn't expecting such strong opposition, which is probably why he's resorted to stunts that would put an American politician to shame. At any rate, we will soon find out if Dinnerjacket will get to keep his job-and what happens if he doesn't.

Health Care Reform Lite

Even Tom Daschle is skeptical. And he's not the only one. Meanwhile, Obama himself finally seems to clarifying himself, and it's not quite as radical as feared, or hoped, depending on your POV.

In a letter to two leading Democratic senators, Obama indicated support for a mandate on individuals to buy coverage, an insurance exchange where people can compare and buy plans and a prohibition against denying insurance to people with preexisting conditions. If Congress goes with an individual mandate, Obama said the government must provide a "hardship waiver to exempt Americans who cannot afford it."


Employers “have a responsibility to support health insurance for their employees,” but small businesses should be exempt from a system in which employers are required to provide insurance or pay a fee to the government, Obama said.


On the public plan option, Obama said: “I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive and keep insurance companies honest.”


He outlined his position in a letter sent Wednesday to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Is this political reality setting in, or was it all just talk? At any rate, this would seem to be a better alternative than the "Obamacare" that was originally advertised.

The Tetris Offensive

OK, now I feel old:

Completed by a Soviet programmer in 1984, ''Tetris'' has come a long way from its square roots. It's played by millions, not just on computers and gaming consoles but now on Facebook and the iPhone as well.

''Tetris'' stands out as one of the rare cultural products to come West from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And the addictive rhythm of its task-by-task race against time was an early sign of our inbox-clearing, Twitter-updating, BlackBerry-thumbing world to come.

In her book ''Hamlet on the Holodeck,'' Georgia Tech professor Janet Murray called ''Tetris'' the ''perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans.'' The game, she wrote, shows the ''constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught.''

Those early games were simple and had crude graphics by today's standards, but they were great time-wasters. Sometimes I think today's kids with their Playstations and XBoxes have it too easy...

When In Doubt, Disincorporate

How does a town survive in a recession? Apparently by no longer being one.

Two California towns, Rio Vista and Vallejo, have said they may need to disincorporate to address financial difficulties; Vallejo filed for bankruptcy protection last year. Civic leaders in Mountain View, Colo., have alerted residents that they are left with few options but to disincorporate because the town can't afford to pay salaries and services.

Incorporation brings residents a local government with the ability to raise money through taxes and bond issuances. It also gives them more control of zoning decisions and development, and usually provides for local services such as trash pickup and police as well.

However, it may not be as easy as it sounds:

Most talk of disincorporation appears to be exploratory, and some public-finance experts say towns may not have that option if it is being used to unload financial obligations. "This is somewhat of a legal gray area, because disincorporation was not designed to allow cities to escape financial hardship," said John Knox, a public-finance consultant with the San Francisco office of law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

Mr. Knox, a bankruptcy consultant to Vallejo, said shifting oversight of a city's services to a county or state during the current economic environment would be a tall order. In California and many other states, the county or state must approve such a move, he said. Most counties are ailing as badly as cities, and are unlikely to readily approve a disincorporation, he said.

We hear a lot about states' rights and sovereignity when it comes to dealing with financial burdens and the right to refuse stimulus money. Do local communities have the same option?

Chinese Hum

The vehicle that helped win the Persian Gulf War and which has been a symbol of American patriotism (or excess, depending on your POV) is now going to be made in China.

General Motors has reached a preliminary agreement for the sale of its Hummer brand of large sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks to a machinery company in western China with ambitions to become a carmaker, a person with knowledge of the Chinese government approval process said Tuesday.

The Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd., based in Chengdu, concluded the agreement with G.M., said the person, who insisted on anonymity.

Sichuan Tengzhong is a privately owned company, but Tuesday’s deal required preliminary vetting by Beijing officials, who retain the right to veto any effort at an overseas acquisition by a Chinese company and who give special attention to deals over $100 million.

I often thought that the guys who drove these things were overcompensating in some cases. But the Chinese economy really does seem to have a lot more bragging rights than we do these days, so maybe it only makes sense that their cars should reflect that, too.

Some Taxes Are More Sinful Than Others

Russ Smith wants to know why the eating and drinking habits of the well-to-do and trendy shouldn't be taxed along with the rest of us slobs:

Why stop at soda? How about a tax on every calorie-laden coffee drink served at Starbucks and its competitors? After all, a vanilla bean frappuccino with whipped cream is more than 500 calories, a beverage that health researcher Mike Adams calls 'dessert in a cup.' Throw in a scone or brownie with one of those Starbucks 'desserts' and a consumer is approaching, at mid-morning, the daily recommended calorie intake....

[New sin taxes are always] aimed at the déclassé products, such as soda and fast-food burgers.... If it's true...that 'we' would be thinner and richer by laying off sugary drinks, wouldn't the same apply to the more upscale foodstuffs consumed every day? After all, obesity knows no economic boundaries; there are overweight Americans in every strata of society.

Maybe it's a calorie tax that should be used, if we're to use such a tax at all? It would make everybody have to pay, and we could see how long it lasts with those who love their lattes.

Rage Against the American Machine

There seem to be psychotics all around these days:

A 23-year-old man upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan opened fire from his truck at two soldiers standing outside a military recruiting station here on Monday morning, killing one private and wounding another, the police said.

The gunman, identified by the police as Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad of Little Rock, fled the scene and was arrested minutes later a short distance from the recruiting station, in a bustling suburban shopping center. The police confiscated a Russian-made SKS semiautomatic rifle, a .22-caliber rifle and a handgun from his black pickup truck.

The two privates, who were both from Arkansas, were in Little Rock as part of a recruiting program that typically uses soldiers recently out of basic training to promote the Army in their home regions, Army officials said.

You'll note that loons like this always seem to choose the most Islamic name possible, as if to say "I'm a real Jihadist, all others are poseurs!" As for why he did it:

In a lengthy interview with the police, Mr. Muhammad said he was angry about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chief Thomas said. Previously known as Carlos Bledsoe, Mr. Muhammad told investigators that he had converted to Islam as a teenager, Chief Thomas said.

Chief Thomas said investigators believe that Mr. Muhammad acted alone. He seemed to be familiar with the Army recruiting office because it was not far from his home, the chief said, but might have been on the prowl for anyone in uniform.

“I would say he was looking for any and all targets of opportunity that happened to be military,” the chief said in a telephone interview. “That may have well been the first place he found.”

This, again, is why we don't let people take matters into their own hands when they get ticked off. The irony is, his lawyer(s)will probably use an insanity defense.

The Obama Car Company

I guess this means it's officially a quagmire:

"What I have no interest in doing is running GM," Obama said. His only goal, he said, was to get GM back on its feet and then "to get out quickly."

Yet, the U.S. could end up holding the shares for some time.

Neither Obama nor his spokesman offered an indication of how long the government's involvement with GM would last. "I don't know that there is a timeline," said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

"He has a strong obligation to ensure that there is a management structure in place that is making smart business decisions," Gibbs said. "Is the president going to thumb through engineering reports and each page of the annual report? No."

Steve Rattner, head of the president's auto task force, later told reporters: "We don't have a specific timetable, we don't have a specific deadline."

So how long will it be before taxpayers see the light at the end of this tunnel?

The Poop Of The Penguins

I suppose it makes more sense than having to follow the trail on the ground:

Emperor penguins spend a large part of their lives at sea. But come time to breed, they return to their sea-ice colonies.

This homecoming happens during the Antarctic winter, when temperatures drop to minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 50 degrees Celsius), a difficult time for scientists to monitor the birds movements. (Emperors are the only penguin species that breed during the winter.)
But all those bird bodies crowded together leave reddish brown patches of guano (penguin poop) on the ice. These patches are visible in satellite images, and so can act as a reliable trace of where the penguins have been.

'We can't see actual penguins on the satellite maps because the resolution isn't good enough. But during the breeding season the birds stay at a colony for eight months,' said Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). 'The ice gets pretty dirty and it's the guano stains that we can see.'

I'm sure the penguins would be gratified to know that humans are so interested in their bathroom habits. But how do we know that someone out there isn't doing the same thing to us?

Them Bones

If you're going to steal something, don't do it in somebody's back yard:

A commercial fossil hunter, whose discovery of the world's best-preserved dinosaur brought scientific acclaim, will serve 60 days in jail for stealing raptor bones from private land.

Nathan Murphy, 51, a self-taught paleontologist, was convicted in March of felony theft for taking the raptor fossil from a ranch in northern Montana.

He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 9 in a separate federal case involving more fossils taken from Bureau of Land Management land.

....

Since he was charged last year, Murphy had claimed honest mistakes led to the investigation. But in an interview Monday with The Associated Press, he acknowledged concealing the truth about where the raptor bones were found — and asserted that he is not the only fossil hunter to do so.

'The investigation created a poster boy,' he said. 'They're going to have Nate Murphy to hold up to the public and say, 'Don't pick up nothing on public land, and know where you are at.' They needed somebody like me.'

Ah, the logic of a thief-"Everybody else does it, so I do it, too". I guess that's why so many financial bigwigs and politicians keep getting into trouble.

Dudu, Where's My Talk Show?

I guess this guy won't be getting his own show:

Dudu Topaz, Israel’s former king of comedy, is under investigation for suspected involvement in a series of recent attacks on the nation's top television executives.

The entertainer, 61, who lives in Tel Aviv, is remanded in custody in a case that has dominated headlines and showbusiness gossip.

Shira Margalit, a vice president at Israel's Channel 2 TV, was beaten outside her home in Tel Aviv and hospitalised with a broken nose and fractures to her face last month. Another Channel 2 executive and an actor's agent have also been attacked in the past year. Police claim to have gathered wire-tap and other evidence suggesting that Mr Topaz may have hired heavies to carry out the assaults.

A judge at an initial hearing for the case today described Mr Topaz as a public menace and said: 'There is now concrete material that ties the suspect to the alleged offenses.' The judge told the Jerusalem Post that, once the allegations went public, 'instead of keeping quiet, (Topaz) continued his actions all the more forcefully.'

I think it's a given that most comics are neurotic by nature. I guess the ones with talent are the ones who get the big gigs.

Who Killed GM?

Jonathon Cohn laments:

GM was the symbol of American industrial might and, for three-quarters of a century, the world’s largest carmaker. Now, in order to qualify or government financial assistance, GM is eliminating half of its brands, shedding dealers by the thousands, and laying off a third of its already diminished hourly workforce.

Even if the Obama administration’s plan works—even if GM re-emerges from bankruptcy as a leaner, more competitive company—it will never regain its iconic status. It will be just another company, albeit one whose majority owner is the U.S. government, at least for the time being.

I do feel badly for the one-great carmaker, but isn't it really their own fault for having such outmoded business practices for the last several years, acting like it was still the 1960s (or at least the 1980s) out there, and finally giving the unions a big chunk of what they wanted?

"We Told You So"

Stephen Waldman calls the right to account over the now-famous DHS report on homegrown terrorists:

Conservatives should have said, 'Here! Here! We applaud the efforts to clamp down on terrorism, crime and extremists.' After all, most conservatives have nothing to do with, and deplore, violent extremists. Instead, by saying the report was an attack on conservatism in general, the conservatives -- not the government -- blurred the lines between the violent extremes and the conservative mainstream.
....

In a way, conservatives now face a choice similar to what liberals in the late 1960s and early 1970s faced during the hayday of the Weather Underground. Some on the New Left defended them as legitimate-albeit-excitable members of their broad coalition, while other more traditional liberals attacked them as extremists who violated liberal ideals. My sense of the history is that enough on the New Left defended extremists to tar all of liberalism. Will that happen for conservatives now?

Maybe if the Hannitys and Limbaughs of the world dial down their rhetoric, enough will have the courage to say that this is not what conservatism is all about. To their credit, mainstream pro-lifers have denounced what happened. We'll see if Republicans have the courage to apoligize to Janet Napolitano or not.

I For One Welcome Our New Government Overlords

Marc Ambinder lists the challenges facing the Obama administration-and the American people-as they become GM's new overlords. Here are the top three:

1. Convincing the country that this restructuring -- and they'll call it a 'restructuring' -- is an inevitable consequence of a process that began during the Bush administration. So far, the public seems to believe this, but the longer the government fiddles with the industry, the more Obama will be seen as the fiddler.

2. There is 'an inevitable tension' between taxpayer protection and the length of the government's ownership, an administration official told reporters last night. Put plainly: the longer the government owns GM, the better the chance that taxpayers will see the money put in GM recouped. (BTW: Bankruptcy is scheduled for '60 to 90 days.' It will most certainly take longer, perhaps even into 2010.)

3. In big companies with unions, it's not possible, really, to go through an orderly bankruptcy without involving the unions. The challenge for the administration: explain to Americans why the unions deserve the concessions they're getting and sell the concept that UAW has already given up a lot. So far, the public, in an anti-corporate mood, is OK, but I suspect that since this issue still hasn't forced itself to the forefront of the public attention span, the public hasn't been given the chance to evaluate the deal on fairness terms.

For my own part, it's this last one that people should be the most skeptical about, as the unions, despite what they might say, will almost certainly wind up now being de facto equal partners with the boardroom executives and may indeed wind up making boardroom decisions. Is this really the way the relationship between management and labor is supposed to work?

Beg, Borrow, Or Binge?

And down the rabbit hole we go.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arrived in Beijing with a pledge that the Obama administration will control its borrowing as he sought to reassure China its holdings of U.S. government debt are safe.

“No one is going to be more concerned about future deficits than we are,” Geithner told reporters on the way to two days of meetings that start today in China’s capital.

Geithner will meet with Premier Wen Jiabao, who in March called for the U.S. to “guarantee the safety of China’s assets.” China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt, which so far this year has handed investors the worst loss since at least 1977 on forecasts for ballooning federal budget deficits.

“I hope Geithner’s visit can soothe our nerves,” said Yu Yongding, a senior researcher at the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a former central bank adviser. “The Chinese public is worried about the safety of its foreign- exchange reserves,” Yu said in an e-mail.

When you have to borrow from Communists to pay for socialist policies, something eventually goes out of whack. I wouldn't trust us, either.