NO UNIVERSALITY, NO DEAD BABIES, NO PUBLIC OPTION...:

The pro-choice argument against health care reform. (William Saletan, Sept. 30, 2009, Slate)

This week, the Senate finance committee is considering amendments that would bar coverage of abortions under federally subsidized health insurance. Pro-choice groups are up in arms. After all, says NARAL Pro-Choice America, "In the current insurance marketplace, private plans can choose whether to cover abortion care—and most do." If Congress enacts subsidies that exclude abortion, "women could lose coverage for abortion care, even if their private health-insurance plan already covers it!" The organization urges lawmakers to "vote against any plan that takes coverage for abortion away from women who already have it in their private insurance plans."

...unless they own stock in insurance companies, there's nothing in this bill for the Left.

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ANOTHER MAN OFF THE UNICORN RIDE:

Barack Obama’s great test: The American president’s attitude towards international allies, partners and adversaries reveals the limits of his political leadership, says (Godfrey Hodgson, 30 - 09 - 2009, Open Democracy)

A whirlwind week of international diplomacy in the United States, in which Barack Obama was at the very centre, provides as true a measure as any of the emerging character of his political leadership. The news is not good. For this intense series of high-profile events and meetings on 22-25 September 2009 - from the United Nations climate-change conference to the UN general-assembly circus and a range of bilateral meetings with foreign leaders - confirms the limitations of Obama's style and approach. [...]

Barack Obama is increasingly coming to look like Lyndon B Johnson, a brilliantly gifted politician whose ambition to build a "great society" was sacrificed because of the war in Vietnam. [...]

No one questions Barack Obama's personal goodwill, still less his political intelligence. But on the basis of his first nine months in office, his commitment to a serious reassessment of the limitations of American power - let alone to an acknowledgment of the implications of the country's relative decline - is not yet clear.

They repeat the notion of his intelligence like a mantra, but all it does is prevent them from analyzing him clearly. It's the flip-side of the insistence, likewise refuted by the facts, that W is an idiot.

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ACTUALLY...

The Limits of Charisma: Mr. President, please stay off TV. (Howard Fineman, Sep 26, 2009, Newsweek)

If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He's a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked "done." This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he's not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.

The president's problem isn't that he is too visible; it's the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube.

...he'd have less chance of being re-elected if he achieved any of those goals. His best shot is to be an ineffective disaster until the GOP takes Congress in '10 and then work with them to pass W's unfinished business.

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BESIDES HIS OWN SELF-ABSORPTION...:

Time to Act Like a President (Richard Cohen, September 29, 2009, Washington Post)

Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief. [...]

The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" -- and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health-care plan -- and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees -- and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health-care legislation -- "Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town . . . " -- and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence -- meet it or else.

Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran.

...there was a reason that the UR ran a content free campaign--he doesn't want to be the Chief Executive, just to be able to add a line to his resume. He has no interest in command, nor ability to do so.

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AN AESTHETIC ISSUE, NOT AN ECONOMIC ONE (via BookForum):

Is Britain bust?: For 300 years our best minds have fretted over the threat of national bankruptcy. As government debt surges upwards, they are doing so again. How worried should we be? James Buchan, 7/27/09, Prospect)

Well, the country is not about to be invaded at the urging of irate foreign bondholders, as occurred in Mexico in the 1860s or Egypt in the 1880s. Nor is it yet subject to the civilised modern equivalent, last seen here in 1976, when the government of the time agreed to restrictions on its spending devised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But there have been anxious moments in recent months at both the treasury and the Debt Management Office. An auction of £1.75bn in super-long gilts on 25th March did not attract enough bids. Stheeman also suffered a bad quarter of an hour on 21st May when the rating agency Standard & Poor’s lowered its assessment on British sovereign debt from “stable” to “negative.” Yet Britain can borrow, and in its own currency, at 4 per cent interest and an average maturity of nearly 15 years which only a handful of countries in history have ever been able to do. The foreign appetite for the sterling liabilities of the British government is rising not falling. This appetite has not been soured by recent falls in the sterling exchange rate, which at points exceeded the great devaluations of 1931 and 1949, and the lesser of 1967 and 1992. “My opinion,” says Stheeman, “is that this thing has nothing to do with an excessive supply of gilts. It is to do with the market’s perception of the UK economy, which is not as dire as it was three months ago.”

Moreover the accumulated British national debt in relation to GDP—at 75 per cent—is still lower than in powerful trading countries such as Germany (about 78 per cent) and Japan (about 190 per cent). It is also lower in relation to the productive wealth of Britain than after the two world wars of the 20th century or in the elongated 18th century between the glorious revolution of 1688 and the battle of Waterloo in 1815.

During that period, England and then England and Scotland ran a national debt far higher in relation to its trade than the IMF would tolerate in a developing country today. The best minds in England and Scotland—Swift, Bolingbroke, Hume, Smith—forecast national bankruptcy. As if in mockery of their reasoning, Britain emerged from the field at Waterloo the richest and most powerful state on earth. The only time when Britain came close to grief was, perversely, when it attempted to liquidate the national debt in the speculation known as the South Sea bubble in 1720-21. In short, debt is as British as the village green or the public house.

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THE CAR WAS A BAD IDEA, LET IT DIE:

Why Remaking the Auto Industry Makes No Sense: The auto industry doesn't work by the basic laws of the market—governments just won't let dead companies go (Maryann N. Keller , 9/29/09, Business Week)

This year, governments around the world have invested well over a hundred billion dollars to keep their auto champions afloat. Taxpayers everywhere lost, and auto companies, like Ford (F), were placed at a competitive disadvantage as a result of government self-interest. The only consolation may be that we can get back some of our money when we buy cheap cars made possible by excess capacity.

All this simply means that the future of the auto industry will look like the past: Neither theory of remaking the industry will come to pass. Upstart entrepreneurs will never achieve the mass scale necessary to produce vehicles at relevant prices for most consumers. While the startups may pioneer the use of some technology, any successes will be copied by the large manufacturers, which have greater resources, including government support, as well as an existing infrastructure. The startups will fail or remain relegated to niche markets. At the same time, governments around the world will continue to prop up their domestic automakers (either directly or through domestic market protections), thus distorting natural market forces.

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AMEN, MMQ:

Palmer, Favre and an unsung receiver added to Week 3 drama (Peter King, 9/28/09, SI)

I can't emphasize enough -- though I've said it a few times in this column over the years -- how marvelous train travel is up and down the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. I now take the train on Saturday at different times from Back Bay Station in Boston to Penn Station in Manhattan. Because we had no Saturday obligations at NBC this weekend, I took the regular Amtrak train at 4:45 p.m. from Boston to New York, stopping at the Kingstons and New Londons, and when we got into the little train station in Old Saybrook, Conn., just off Long Island Sound, there was a slight sunset struggling to be seen through the cloud cover.

Four placid hours, having a couple of Heineken Lights and banging through some elements of this column. I think you could save 60 or 90 minutes by taking the Delta shuttle, but then you wouldn't see the people walking on the seashore where Rhode Island meets Connecticut in a part of the country not many people know.

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BLUE ON BLUE:

The Dems in a circular firing squad (Joseph Curl, 9/29/09, Washington Times)

Democrat lashed out at Democrat on Tuesday, interrupting, snubbing and dissing each other before splintering apart over the issue of . . . a public health care option?

After months building up to the moment when the core of President Obama's health care agenda would take center stage on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats quickly devolved into petty intraparty bickering -- not quietly, in private, but right there in the capacious Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building.

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YOU CAN'T UNTETHER IT FROM JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES:

Beyond the Third Way: What Is Wrong with Social Democracy? (Matt Browne, Ruy Teixiera and John Halpin, 9/30/09, Der Spiegel)

One can discern four reasons, common to many social democratic parties in Europe, each rooted in shortcomings of the Third Way.

First, European social democrats have done a poor job of defining what they stand for or how it differs from conservatives. The Third Way reconciled progressive thought with the market economy, individualism and globalization. This helped Bill Clinton in the US, Tony Blair in Britain and Gerhard Schröder in Germany establish political hegemonies in an era of conservative dominance. All three projects were egalitarian, but in rejecting many signature policies of social democratic thinking, they allowed conservatives to blur the differences between themselves and social democrats. Moreover, the social democrats' current difficulties in defining an alternative economic paradigm stem from gaps in Third Way thought, most notably with regards to industrial renewal.

Second, social democrats have failed to connect with the values of voters and thus struggle to respond to the populist anger that is typically rooted in these values. The Third Way's rejection of ideology was once a strength; it has now become a weakness. Social democratic politicians often suffer from "seminaritis" -- treating the political process as a matter of compiling data, evidence and the best ideas.

You can reject ideology, but you can't reject morality and build a decent society.

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A SERIOUS PEOPLE:

The beginning of an electric car revolution: The founder of 'Better Place' said at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show that the electric transportation grid will go live in Israel in 2011 (Vandana Gombar, September 30, 2009, Times of India)

The first time I heard about what 'Better Place' wanted to do for sustainable transportation, I was impressed. To reduce the world's dependence on crude oil -- a commodity with a finite supply and volatile price -- this young company proposed to replace the liquid fuel transportation network with an all-electric network. The idea was so simple at the time that it was surprising no one had thought of it before.

Quintessentially, this California-headquartered company proposed a dare to replace petrol/diesel cars on the road with electric vehicles and petrol pumps with battery recharging/replacing vends. It wanted to yank out the oil model for transportation and replace it with an environment-friendly renewable energy model.

One of the first countries which committed to replace its petrol vends with battery feeders and substitute its liquid-fuel cars with battery-operated vehicles was Israel. For obvious reasons, Israel wants to end its dependence on oil.

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OPPOSITE!

'Reform' horrors: O's Total Disconnect (SALLY PIPES, September 30, 2009, NY Post)

For starters, every bill would make everyone buy a plan that offers a government-designed benefits package. So, while they wouldn't directly force people to shift plans, they'd force most employers to change what they offer their workers -- and employer-provided coverage is the top way Americans get insurance.

Worse, the mandates would price many employers out of the insurance market -- dumping their employees onto the government-provided backup, whether that's the "public option" that liberals prefer or the "co-ops" being offered as a compromise. The Lewin Group has estimated that "reform" will push 119 million people out of their current coverage.

Second, the Democratic plans largely come up with some cash by looting GOP-created programs. Democrats want to cut over $100 billion from Medicare Advantage, for example -- a "reform" that will force millions of seniors back into traditional Medicare, a state-of-the-art plan for 1965.

Obama's answer to this problem? Pure denial: Pressed by ABC's George Stephanopoulos on the issue, he replied, "No, these folks are going to be able to get Medicare that is just as good."

Other Democratic plans would restrict Health Savings Accounts -- which, when coupled with a high-deductible plan, now meet the health-care needs of millions of Americans. Same for Flexible Spending Accounts, which are also on Congress' chopping block. In both cases, "reform" is a two-fer -- a tax increase and reduction in coverage.

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KEEP CHANGING LEADERSHIP, WE'LL MAKE MORE:

Hakimullah's brother killed in US drone attack in Pak (PTI. 30 September 2009)

Pakistani Taliban new chief Hakimullah Mehsud's brother was among 15 militants killed in two US drone attacks in the country's lawless tribal belt, reports said on Wednesday.

Hakimullah's brother Kalimullah was among six militants who were killed in the first drone attack in the Sararogha area of South Waziristan Agency yesterday afternoon, Express 24/7 news channel reported.

Nine militants were killed in the second drone attack, which was carried out in the evening in the Dandey Darpakhel area of North Waziristan Agency.

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BUT...BUT...BUT...THE RIGHT PROMISED US SOCIALISM!:

Senate Panel Rejects Pair of Public Options in Health Plan (DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, 9/29/09, NY Times)

The committee on Tuesday afternoon voted, 15 to 8, to reject an amendment proposed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, to add a public option called the Community Choice Health Plan, an outcome that underscored the lack of support for a government plan among many Democrats.

Mr. Baucus voted no, as did Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and Bill Nelson of Florida, joining all 10 Republicans in opposition.

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DISAPPEARING DOWN HIS OWN HOLE (via Bruno Behrend):

Is it not possible that by eschewing all the traditional emblems of his office that he's squandering the opportunity to be identified with it? After all, if it's more important to him to be seen as the One than as the President then why should we see him as President? A continuous campaign based on the idea that he's not of the office may well make him not the occupant of it.

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THEY'RE MENTALLY ILL, NOT PHYSICALLY:

More women with breast cancer opt to remove healthy one, study finds: Researchers find a rising trend in prophylactic mastectomy among women with breast cancer, even though there is little evidence that it actually improves survival. (Shari Roan, September 28, 2009, LA Times)

Lead author Dr. Stephen B. Edge, a professor of surgery and oncology at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., says there are no data to demonstrate that having prophylactic mastectomy actually improves survival.

Yet the study found almost 5,000 New York women chose a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy during the 11-year period, with the number more than doubling from 1995 through 2005.

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CONSIDER THAT THE BEST FACE YOU CAN PUT ON IT IS THAT THE UR'S A BUNGLER:

Poles indignant that U.S. altered missile-shield plans: The American decision to back out of a Bush-administration agreement has played into fears that Obama is willing to sacrifice Central Europe to repair relations with Russia. (Megan K. Stack, September 29, 2009, LA Times)

Washington's decision to back out of the missile shield agreement forged by the Bush administration -- and opposed by Russia -- has evoked memories among Poles of Cold War helplessness, of being brushed aside as casualties of great power politics.

In Poland and among other members of the old Soviet bloc, the U.S. announcement played into a historical sense of uncertainty. Warsaw's political elite spoke of a visceral fear that the Obama administration is willing to sacrifice Central Europe in its eagerness to repair badly damaged relations with a resurgent Russia.

The indignation is partly fueled by bruised feelings over what many here describe as bungled American diplomacy in breaking the news to Warsaw. But there is also concern over the perception that the United States overhauled its defense strategy in part to appease Moscow.

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TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE:

Gordon Brown and Alan Johnson to promise new crackdown on antisocial behaviour (Patrick Wintour and Andrew Sparrow, 29 September 2009, The Guardian)

Brown will concentrate on the issue in his conference speech, outlining a return to the Blairite agenda of tough measures on irresponsible parenting and social breakdown.

The speech offers the beleaguered prime minister an opportunity to reconnect with middle Britain and rescue his drifting leadership.

Labour has already ceded Thatcherism/Blairism to the Tories. Now they just seem desperate.

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STRONG COUNTRY, WEAK UNICORN RIDER:

Musharraf: Afghan debate shows U.S. weak (Sara A. Carter, 9/29/09, Washington Times))

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Monday that the U.S. would make a "disastrous" mistake if it withdrew from Afghanistan and warned that a delay in sending more troops would be seen as a sign of weakness. [...]

Asked by reporters and editors at The Washington Times whether the U.S. and its allies might be seen as weak because of the prolonged debate over whether to send more forces to Afghanistan, Mr. Musharraf said, "Yes, absolutely. ... By this vacillation and lack of commitment to a victory and talking too much about casualties [it] shows weakness in the resolve."

With Obama Wavering, Congress Seeks to Chart a Course on Afghanistan (Jay Newton-Small, Sep. 29, 2009, TIME)

President Barack Obama is taking out a blank sheet of paper this week as he weighs his options in Afghanistan, and Congress stands more than willing to fill it in. The Senate on Sept. 29 is expected to debate amendments to the 2010 defense appropriations bill that are likely to include everything from timelines for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan to proposals to send upwards of 40,000 more. But, unlike health-care reform, this isn't a decision Obama can leave in the hands of the legislative branch — however undecided he remains today.

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JUST KEEP TALKIN':

The Obama Show: Time to change the channel. (Matthew Continetti, 10/05/2009, Weekly Standard)

What's truly unusual is that the president persists in this media strategy even though it shows no signs of succeeding. Obama's job approval may be decent, but it has fallen quickly and dramatically and now hovers slightly above 50 percent in the Gallup poll. More people continue to disapprove than approve of the president's approach to health care, with significant numbers of seniors and independents turning against him. Last week's NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that the Republicans have narrowed the Democrats' advantage in the congressional generic ballot to three points, the best number for the GOP since 2004. And Republicans are favored in November's elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

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TIME FOR FURTHER RATE CUTS:

Gasoline prices fall for second week in a row despite refinery fires (Ronald D. White, September 29, 2009, LA Times)

The U.S. average fell 5.3 cents to $2.499 a gallon, $1.133 lower than a year earlier.

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IN FAIRNESS TO THE UR...:

Passive-Aggressive at the U.N.: Obama boldly proclaims a new meekness (Andrew Ferguson, 10/05/2009, Weekly Standard)

The bipolar world of the "long-gone Cold War," in which two powerful nations pushed or pulled the world this way or that, is no longer possible, he said. And then he went an unexpected step further: Even the unipolar world, in which one country assumes leadership by virtue of its wealth or moral standing, isn't going to work, either. The president himself would see to that, by relinquishing any claim to indispensability. He was introducing us to the no-polar world.

In the no-polar world, according to the president, everybody is doing everything all at once. "Persistent action," the president called it. "The future will be forged by deeds and not simply words." The deeds, however, will entail a great many words; on most occasions, words exclusively. There will be summits, conferences, negotiations, and consultations. And in this important work, "America intends to keep our end of the bargain," which isn't to say we'll be bossing anybody around. [...]

Yet there's a kink in the logic of the president's performance, and it will become hard to ignore. For his speech was a particularly grandiose refusal to be grandiose--a high-handed refusal to be high-handed. Who is he, after all, to declare a no-polar world? Only the leader of the most powerful nation in the world would have the nerve to announce to the world that from now on, by his decree, no nation will be more powerful than any other.

...we're long past the point where it's fair to take one of his speeches seriously.

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I JUST KNOW ISOLATIONISM WILL WORK THIS TIME!:

The end of the Pax Americana?: Obama has the chance to end our Cold War hangover, and start an era where the U.S. is not the sole global policeman (Michael Lind, 9/29/09, Salon)

It is too early to tell whether there is a real chance in Washington for an alternative to the Cold War Plus strategy of perpetually containing Russia and Germany, China and Japan, and Iran and Iraq that Democrats and Republicans alike have pursued since the Berlin Wall fell. But there are some encouraging signs.

The G-20 looks very much like a nascent concert of power. Its inclusive membership and flexibility might make it a de facto replacement for the rigid, outdated U.N. Security Council in the security realm. The coordination of their stimulus packages by the G-20 nations in the past year was a remarkable exercise in Keynesianism on a global scale. And the Obama administration, unlike its predecessor, has made it clear that the U.S. can no longer be the market of first resort for China and other export-oriented countries. The administration's tariffs on Chinese tires are a signal that the offer of unilateral market access is being reconsidered by the U.S.

While the brutality and militancy of the Iranian regime may foreclose a rapprochement, the Obama administration has backed away somewhat from the policy of encircling Russia by canceling NATO missile defense systems in Poland, whose purpose was to intimidate Russia, not Iran. And following a period of low-key military rivalries among the U.S. and China, Obama seems more interested in partnering with the world's most populous country than in provoking it into a needless arms race.

But there was a chance to move from confrontation to concert back in the early 1990s, as well. Let's hope that President Obama, unlike Presidents Clinton and Bush, will push for a genuine new world order rather than perpetual containment and perpetual cold war.

If only the Chicoms and Ba'athists hadn't reverted to form...

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THEY SHOULD BE SO LUCKY:

Angela Merkel, the new Maggie Thatcher: Free from the shackles of her centre-left coalition, Germany's leader can launch a bold new era (Alan Posener, 9/28/09, guardian.co.uk)

Goodness knows, the country needs a shake-up. The economic crisis has exposed Germany's vulnerability to international markets. The social safety net may have cushioned the impact of the industrial downturn, but the costs are horrific, and the Opel fiasco illustrates the dangers of relying too much on engineering skills and industrial prowess. Anything we can do, the Chinese can do better. And cheaper. But the whole system, from education via immigration to taxation, is geared to producing, protecting and pampering the famed Facharbeiter, the skilled industrial worker, and the mammoth companies that employ him (it's still mostly him, as it is in the German boardroom).

Smaller entrepreneurs and professionals have been squeezed from all sides: overtaxed, burdened by high payments for the social system, strict rules on hiring and firing and minimum wages – and unable to get hold of credit. The resulting frustration has led to the rise of the liberal Free Democrats, Merkel's new partners in government.

As well as lower taxes, a reform of costly healthcare and a more Anglo-Saxon approach to the labour market, the new government will probably want to keep Germany's nuclear plants running longer, to keep energy prices down and meet carbon targets. Look for an emphasis on competitiveness rather than consensus; growth rather than greenery; smart social systems rather than solidarity.

Merkel II, as Germans are just beginning to realise, means the end of an era: 11 years of Social Democrats in power (seven with the Greens, four with Merkel's Christian Democrats). It's not far-fetched to say that the era of New Labour is coming to an end in Europe. Tony Blair hijacked Conservative positions and profited from capitalism's 20-year boom. In Germany, Gerhard Schröder did much the same. Now David Cameron is hijacking New Labour's positions, as Merkel has been hijacking Social Democrat positions, with devastating effect. In opposition, Labour and the Social Democrats will inevitably drift to the left; in Germany, this will include some kind of rapprochement with the ex-Communist Left party – which should make them unelectable for the next decade.

In Europe a triumvirate of Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Cameron – backed by José Manuel Barroso, the newly elected commission president – should ensure that the EU becomes leaner, meaner and more competitive. Germany's incoming foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, is inexperienced, but Merkel has always been her own foreign minister, so don't expect any major changes.

Every election is determined by which of the two parties is more Third Way.

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HOW WOULD PRICES GO UP WHEN YOU HAVE MORE DEATHS THAN BIRTHS:

Japan's Prices Fall at Record Pace (MEGUMI FUJIKAWA, 9/29/09, WSJ)

Japan's core consumer price index fell at its fastest pace on record for the fourth straight month in August, as commodities prices became cheaper compared with a year earlier and economic uncertainty deterred consumers from spending.

The core CPI, which excludes volatile fresh food prices, fell 2.4% on year in August, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Tuesday.

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COOKIES WITH THE DICTATOR (via John Thacker):

U.S. Envoy's Outreach to Sudan Is Criticized as Naive (Stephanie McCrummen, 9/29/09, Washington Post)

[O]bama's special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, ...is pushing toward normalized relations with the only country in the world led by a president indicted on war-crimes charges.

Although Gration describes the approach as pragmatic and driven by a sense of urgency, his critics here and in the United States say it is dangerously, perhaps willfully, naive. During a recent five-day trip to Sudan, Gration heard from southern officials, displaced Darfurians, rebels and others who complained uniformly that he is being manipulated by government officials who talk peace even as they undermine it.

Still, at the end of the visit, Gration maintained a strikingly different perspective. He had seen signs of goodwill from the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, he said, and viewed many of the complaints as understandable yet knee-jerk reactions to a government he trusts is ready to change.

"We've got to think about giving out cookies," said Gration, who was appointed in March. "Kids, countries -- they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement."

W liberates the South from him, the UR sucks up to him....

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JUST LET US ROLL THEM OVER IN PERPETUITY (via The Other Brother):

The Fight Over Flexible Spending Accounts (RON LIEBER, 9/29/09, NY Times)

Flexible spending accounts allow people to take money out of their paychecks before paying taxes on it and to set it aside to use for health care expenses that insurance doesn’t cover. There is no legal limit on how much you can set aside each year, though employers generally set a cap around $4,000 or $5,000.

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and author of the Senate health care bill, would like to place a much lower $2,500 annual limit on what people can save, among other restrictions. The House-Senate Joint Committee on Taxation figures this will allow the government to take in $14.6 billion from 2011 and 2019. So far so good right? We have to pay for the health care bill somehow.

The problem, however, is that to people who put more than $2,500 away each year, this looks an awful lot like a tax increase. After all, if they can’t put as much money aside, they’ll pay more in income and payroll taxes. And President Obama, when he was running for office, promised that no family earning under $250,000 would see higher taxes.

Now, a not-quite grass-roots effort has sprung up, led by companies that administer flexible spending accounts and others. At savemyflexplan.org, the group encourages individuals to write their representatives in Washington and sound off.

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THEY DESERVE ONE OF THE 5 SECURITY COUNCIL SEATS, BUT THE OLYMPICS IS A START:

For Brazil, Olympic Bid Is About Global Role (ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO, 9/28/09, NY Times)

Leaders here say winning the Olympics would be a transformational moment for Brazil, an affirmation of its rising global importance and a shot in the arm to the self-esteem of Cariocas, Rio’s residents, 85 percent of whom supported the Olympic bid in a recent poll by the International Olympic Committee.

“It would be overwhelming for our city, for our citizens and for Brazil as a whole,” said Carlos Osorio, the secretary general of Rio’s Olympic bid committee.

While three other finalists — Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo — have also mounted strong bids, Rio has drawn support outside of Brazil’s borders. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who has been negotiating military deals with Brazil, said he supported Rio’s bid “100 percent.” King Juan Carlos of Spain has said he will throw his support behind Rio if Madrid is eliminated in the first round of voting.

And some International Olympic Committee members have been reported to be enamored of the idea of correcting the Games’ historic neglect of South America.

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ONCE AGAIN...:

Swiss Move Against Polanski Outrages His Sympathizers (DAVID JOLLY and MICHAEL CIEPLY, 9/29/09, NY Times)

As European officials and artists lined up to defend the filmmaker, Mr. Polanski’s lawyer said he would fight extradition.

“There is no reason, either in law or in fact, nor on the terrain of the most elementary justice, to keep Roman Polanski in prison for even one day,” Hervé Temime, his lawyer in Paris, said on France Info radio. In a statement, he added: “Taking into account the extravagant circumstances of his arrest, his Swiss lawyer is seeking his release as soon as possible.” [...]

The reaction in Europe on Monday appeared to be one of astonishment. Nearly 100 entertainment industry professionals, including the movie directors Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar Wai and Wim Wenders called in a petition for Mr. Polanski’s release, saying: “Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.”

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, said that for Europeans the development showed that the American system of justice had run amok.

While Mr. Polanski had committed “a grave crime,” Mr. Lang said, “he is a great creator and artist...."

...we see how prescient Mary Eberstadt was

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YOU'RE GOING DOWN ANYWAY; PLAY THE KID:

American striker wants to make a splash across the pond: Jozy Altidore, 19, raised in Florida by Haitian immigrants, is a starter on an English Premier League team. (Chuck Culpepper, September 28, 2009, LA Times)

Out-of-the-way Hull (population 257,000) was bombed horrendously during World War II and seriously deflated with the fishing industry's collapse during the North Sea "Cod Wars" with Iceland in the 1970s, and it continues to get up from that. It's friendly and unpretentious and possessed of a pretty Old Town, and it was unmistakably energized by Hull City's ascent from England's fourth division in 2003 clear to the top in 2008, even if one tour guide cheerfully says, "It's not really on the way to anything."

Yet the son of Haitian immigrants who met on a bus in Orange, N.J., lives temporarily in a modest hotel where the staffers all know him and chirp when he phones, "Hey, Jozy, what'll it be this time?" His BMW arrived from Spain, so he drives on the left with a steering wheel on the left ("I'm always hitting the curb."). He's absorbing everything while craving American morsels such as the upcoming NFL game in London two hours south, maybe a Jay-Z show in London and definitely the urge to stay up late for Lakers-Cavaliers games, his fondness for Kobe Bryant owing to Bryant's not being "a soccer hater."

Having dealt with the loneliness of the far-flung -- "I know how to handle it now," he said -- Altidore beams an enthusiasm that wanes only when he hops up to escape a pushy bee, explaining that such creatures terrify him.

Still, maybe the best part is the wide-eyed young man in the widely watched league.

He marvels at the pace: "I just think the league has an intensity about it and has a way about it that there's no other way to play in the league. You have to play at a high intensity or you're going to be punished." He marvels at the environment: "I played my first game, and just the energy, it was electrifying. . . . I think the players kind of feed off it and find a kind of second or third wind."

He marvels at the players: "The smallest guy on the field will head-butt you. . . . It's just gritty and just different. . . . They're not naive players." And he marvels at the fans: "There'll be fans walking by you in the city when you're with a friend and you're not even thinking about it and, 'Hey, you better win on Saturday!' It just shows you, it's a different type of responsibility" for a player.

Having navigated the work-permit wrangle plus wailing babies on the plane to finally arrive on Aug. 21, and then enter the game in the 60th minute on Aug. 22, he quickly set up Kamel Ghilas for the goal in the 1-0 win against Bolton. Manager Phil Brown called Altidore "a big, bubbly character" the fans would fancy. Altidore scored in a Carling Cup match just after, and he can't wait to see the colossal stadiums of Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal.

Of course, it's going to get very trying, so maybe the best part will be seeing what a young luminary on the U.S. national team can forge through the inevitable duress, even if his mighty body should help with the mighty physicality.

His first start in a 1-0 loss received mixed-to-dour notices. A Sky TV pundit thought he looked "lost." The Guardian noted that any creativity from Hull's 4-4-2 formation "invariably foundered" when reaching the strikers. Some fans thought Altidore got insufficient support, most cheered him upon his 63rd-minute exit and seemingly all say they don't expect too much because he needs games.

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SOCIALISM'S GREATEST HOUR?:

Polish Privatization Will Narrow Budget Gap: Treasury Is Planning to Raise $12.8 Billion by Selling State Assets (MALGORZATA HALABA, 9/28/09, WSJ)

Poland's government, faced with a 2010 budget likely to include a ballooning deficit and heavy borrowing, has little choice but to proceed with its ambitious privatization plan while hoping for a quick recovery, economists say. [...]

In late July, the Polish Treasury presented an updated privatization plan aimed at raising 36.7 billion zlotys ($12.8 billion) by the end of 2010 through the sale of state-owned assets. The ministry expects to sell 25 billion zlotys in assets next year, effectively drawing Poland's privatization process to a close 20 years after the end of communism.

"In the short term, accelerated privatization is the only way -- privatization, a fast economic recovery and a strong zloty," said Radoslaw Bodys, an economist with Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London. "If not, it will be impossible to avoid tax increases in the long term."

When capitalism has a "crisis" we respond with more capitalism and folks wonder whether this is really the End of History?

---

SPEAKING OF BEDDING DOWN WITH DICTATORS:

An 'Election' Burma's People Don't Need (U Win Tin, September 9, 2009, Washington Post)

Much attention has been focused on Sen. James Webb's recent visit to my country and his meetings with Senior Gen. Than Shwe and incarcerated Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. I understand Webb's desire to seek a meaningful dialogue with the Burmese ruling authorities. Unfortunately, his efforts have been damaging to our democracy movement and focus on the wrong issue -- the potential for an "election" that Webb wants us to consider participating in next year as part of a long-term political strategy. But the showcase election planned by the military regime makes a mockery of the freedom sought by our people and would make military dictatorship permanent.

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WHO NEEDS REFORM WHEN YOU HAVE ZEN NONSENSE?:

Japan's 'Change' Agenda (Fred Hiatt, September 28, 2009 , Washington Post)

By voting for change, Hatoyama told me during an interview last week, "each individual in the United States has gained vitality within themselves. We too, by changing our closed politics, have been able to generate vitality within each individual in Japan." [...]

But is there a coherent agenda? To the United Nations last week, Hatoyama brought a promise to reduce Japan's greenhouse gas emissions by far more than his predecessors had pledged. At home, meanwhile, his government is reducing the gasoline tax, fulfilling one of many populist promises his party made to win election.

You can change undertakers, but you still end up buried.

---

DUBIE US:

Vermont GOP’s Gov Hopes Hinge on What Dubie Will Do (Jessica Benton Cooney, 9/28/09, CQ)

In order to compete, the Vermont Republicans will have to come up with a prominent candidate, and they don’t have a deep bench of prospects. Much rides on Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, who is weighing whether to take a shot at the state’s top job.

Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run separately and not as a single ticket in Vermont, and Dubie points out that he received more popular votes than Douglas in 2008. He also predicts that any other Republican contemplating a possible bid for governor “would step aside for me.”

There has been some chatter about a possible GOP bid by state Auditor Tom Salmon, whose father, Democrat Thomas P. Salmon, served as governor from 1973 to 1977. The younger Salmon was elected as a Democrat in 2006 and 2008, but on Sept. 8 switched to the Republican Party — a rare move in Vermont these days — based on his view that the Democrats had moved too far to the left.

Salmon said at the time of his party switch that he would likely run for re-election for auditor, with “a 10 percent chance,” as he put it, that he will run for governor or lieutenant governor instead.

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MAINSTREAMING CHILD-RAPE:

Justice for Polanski (Gerald Posner, 9/28/09, Daily Beast)

Back in March 1977, when Polanski was arrested at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and charged with six felony counts—two charges of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, child molestation, and furnishing drugs (Quaaludes, the 1970s’ version of a date rape drug), to a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Geimer—the prosecutor’s case seemed ironclad.

But even those familiar with the details seem to have long since forgotten them.

Nearly two years after Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was killed by Charles Manson’s cult followers, the director met Samantha’s mother and arranged for the girl to visit him alone, ostensibly to pose for French Vogue. At their first meeting, Polanski took pictures of Samantha, including some of her topless. At the second get-together, two weeks later, at Jack Nicholson’s empty Bel Air home, he gave her champagne and a Quaalude, and then had sex with her. By the time she returned home from that encounter, Samantha’s mother had discovered the topless Polaroids. After her mother quizzed her, the child broke down in tears, confessed the details of the attack, and her mother called the police. [...]

Polanski faced up to 50 years in prison. But he pleaded guilty, on August 8, 1977, to a single count of unlawful sexual contact with a minor: “I had sexual intercourse with a female person not my wife, under the age of 18,” he told the court. Many people concluded somehow that the prosecutor’s case was weak and that Polanski pleaded guilty only to get rid of the matter. In fact, the transcript from his guilty plea shows that only reason the prosecutors agreed to the arrangement was that Samantha and her parents were desperate to avoid the publicity of a full-blown trial. The press had kept Samantha’s identity a secret (years later, she herself disclosed it).

“Of course, if there were to be a trial in this case, the anonymity of my clients would be at an end,” said their attorney, Lawrence Silver. “[M]y view, based upon advice from experts, and the view of the girl’s parents, is that such a trial may cause serious damage to her.”

Because of the massive publicity, Silver argued that the harm to Samantha might be greater than the crimes committed against her, and said “a stigma would attach to her for a lifetime.” [...]

[H]ours before he was to be sentenced, Polanski fled to Paris. He was “exhausted,” said his friends, from the battery of psychiatric tests. “I’ve been tortured by this for a year and that’s enough,” he told the BBC.

That’s how it mostly remained—unfinished justice, Polanski a fugitive. [...]

Hollywood is split over Polanski. In 2002, he was awarded an Academy Award for directing The Pianist. And while some celebrities believe he has suffered enough by his three-decade ban from the U.S., others think he has never paid for his original crime. Polanski, for his part, has let it be known through friends that he thought the U.S. statutory rape laws are puritanical at best and utterly stupid at worst. The victim was, he is said to have told his closest friends, a temptress in the mold of Nabokov’s Lolita.

Just some facts to keep in mind when we see folks defending him....

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WHICH WOULD ALSO SETTLE THE CFR DEBATE:

A new push to define 'person,' and to outlaw abortion in the process: Some abortion foes think the rationale for Roe vs. Wade is vulnerable. They're trying to amend state constitutions -- including California's -- to define personhood from conception. (Robin Abcarian, September 28, 2009, LA Times)

Across the country, [abortion foes] have revived efforts to amend state constitutions to declare that personhood -- and all rights accorded human beings -- begins at conception.

From Florida to California, abortion foes are gathering signatures, pressing state legislators and raising money to put personhood measures on ballots next year. In Louisiana, a class at a Catholic high school is lobbying state legislators as part of a civics exercise.

"We have big and small efforts going on in 30 states right now," said Keith Mason, co-founder of Colorado-based Personhood USA. "Our goal is to activate the population."

Critics deride the effort as the "egg-as-person" movement and say it threatens in vitro fertilization; some kinds of birth control, including IUDs and pills; and stem cell research. They say that Americans will reject it as a government intrusion into their privacy.

"It's a backdoor abortion ban," said Ted Miller, spokesman for NARAL Pro-Choice America, which has worked with Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups to defeat such measures.

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THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM AND CAPITALISM...:

Mandate for Change in Germany: Merkel's Center-Right Coalition Wins, Opening Door to Tax Cuts and Labor Revamp (MARCUS WALKER, 9/28/09, WSJ)

A center-right alliance led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel was set for victory in Germany's national elections on Sunday, opening the door to modest tax cuts and labor-market changes that could help strengthen the fragile recovery in Germany's crisis-battered economy.

Ms. Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union and its pro-business ally, the Free Democratic Party, were set to win a small majority in Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, according to early results. [...]

"For corporate Germany, this is a good signal," said Thorsten Polleit, economist at Barclays Capital in Frankfurt. "The FDP, which will feel very confident now, and much of the CDU will want to bring down government spending in order to cut income taxes."

...could hardly be working out any better fir conservatives and capitalists.

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THE OTHER FRONT IN THE WAR:

Despite pressure, McChrystal to hold firm on request for troops (Aaron Blake - 09/27/09, The Hill)

Gen. Stanley McChrystal said he will not back down from his request for additional troops in Afghanistan, even though Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration have been hesitant to embrace it.

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ONE ODDITY ABOUT THIS MEME...:

Bill Clinton Says Right-Wing Conspiracy Now After President Obama (KRISTINA WONG, Sept. 27, 2009, ABC News)

Former President Bill Clinton says the right-wing conspiracy that attacked him during his presidency now is after President Obama.

When asked whether the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is still present today, the former president answered without hesitation, "Oh you bet."

...is that the majority is seldom considered part of a conspiracy. Typically, it's some minority group that is felt to wield power disproportionate to its numbers. Of course, the Left doesn't consider conservatism to be legitimate, so it can't fathom why Republicans win.

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YES, THEY PREFER A PURE MINORITY:

Majority Report: Some liberals think Democrats should purge their more conservative members, but do they want to be in the minority? (Eleanor Clift, Sep 25, 2009, Newsweek)

Liberals are in no mood to give moderate Democrats a pass. Indeed, liberals sound a lot like Republicans did when Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter switched parties—good riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Imagine how much nicer life would be without all these apostates blocking reform. Purge the caucus, as many on the left would like to see, and there goes the majority. The price of acquired power for the Democrats is more conservatives on their side of the aisle and fewer liberal Republicans to offset the influx. Republicans are a lot more unified now, having purged their ranks of the more sensible members; they're also a minority party.

Obama has to deal with the Congress he has, not the one that liberals wish he had. The irony is that all those red-state lawmakers giving Obama fits are a result of a strategy set in motion by Rahm Emanuel, who as White House chief of staff now must search for a consensus that can keep enough of them together to pass Obama's agenda. Emanuel recruited candidates best suited for their district and state, which means they won, but they are not reliable votes for Obama.

The challenge for Democrats is whether they can turn their arithmetical majority into a governing majority, says Bill Galston, a veteran of the Clinton health-care fight who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank. Calling it "a test of liberal maturity," he points out that it's the minority of the majority—the newer,more conservative members—who make the Democrats a majority. "The simple fact that in the House liberals outnumber conservatives three to one doesn't mean they get three quarters of what they want," says Galston.

Especially when that's just within the Party.

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HEAVENLY HOSTS HASTEN HACK:

    -OBIT: William Safire, Nixon Speechwriter and Times Columnist, Is Dead at 79 (ROBERT D. McFADDEN, September 27, 2009, NY Times)

Behind the fun, readers said, was a talented linguist who could not resist his addiction to alliterative allusions. There was a consensus too that his Op-Ed essays, mostly written in Washington and syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, were the work of a sophisticated analyst with voluminous contacts and insights into the way things worked in Washington.

Mr. Safire called himself a pundit — the word, with its implication of self-appointed expertise, might have been coined for him — and his politics “libertarian conservative,” which he defined as individual freedom and minimal government. He denounced the Bush administration’s U.S.A. Patriot Act as an intrusion on civil liberties, for example, but supported the war in Iraq.

He was hardly the image of a buttoned-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

Typical of a New York Times house conservative, he endorsed Bill Clinton in 1992. But his book, Freedom, is terrific.

MORE:

    -OBIT: Pulitzer winner William Safire dies at 79 (AP, 9/27/09)

    -Columnist Biography: William Safire (NY Times)

    -TIMES TOPICS: William Safire

    -WIKIPEDIA: William Safire

    -GOOGLE BOOKS: William Safire

    -GOOGLE BOOK: Freedom by William Safire

    -REVIEW ESSAY: Reviews of New Lincoln Books: Lincoln Monuments (William Safire, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of NO PLACE TO HIDE By Robert O'Harrow Jr. (William Safire, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of A GOOD LIFE Newspapering and Other Adventures. By Ben Bradlee (William Safire, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of MAN OF THE HOUSE The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O'Neill. With William Novak (William Safire, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of WILLIAM COBBETT The Poor Man's Friend. By George Spater. Two-Volume Set (William Safire, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of ERIC PARTRIDGE IN HIS OWN WORDS Edited by David Crystal and WORDS FAIL ME By Philip Howard (William Safire, NY Times Book Review)

-TRIBUTE: In Memoriam: William Safire (1929–2009) (Jacob Neusner - 09/27/09, First Principles)
-TRIBUTE: Remembering Bill Safire (Morton Janklow, 9/28/09, Daily Beast)

    -PROFILE: WILLIAM SAFIRE: Prolific Purveyor Of Punditry (WALTER SHAPIRO, Feb. 12, 1990, TIME)

    -PROFILE: Apres Safire: Up from the ghetto. (Jonah Goldberg, 11/23/04, National Review)

For decades he was the only conservative at the Times, nominal or otherwise — which made him one of the country's most influential conservatives. Simply by adopting an argument he made it credible. When, for example, he tackled the fishiness of Vince Foster's suicide (or I should say the fishiness of the Clinton White House's reaction to it) he automatically made this line of inquiry credible in the eyes of the establishment media. With his writing talent and reporting skills he did invaluable service in the same cause our own Bill Buckley launched nearly 50 years ago: making conservatism not merely respectable but admirable.

I don't want to discuss Safire's motives because I don't know what they are. But I do know that he loved to declare that he was taking a position not because he necessarily believed it, but because it was the "contrarian" position. A quick Nexis search finds nearly 40 columns in which he essentially bragged about or celebrated being a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. And there have been countless others in which he may not have used the word, but the same spirit moved him. Now, I like contrary thinking, but contrary thinking for its own sake isn't admirable, it's silly: "Everyone says two plus two is four; I say it's a monster called Gamblor!"

More to the point, contrariness for its own sake is not remotely conservative. Conservatism is most often a defense of settled truths, not an instinct to topple them willy-nilly for entertainment value.

Again, I don't want to psychoanalyze. But by constantly calling himself a contrarian or — as he often did when convenient — a "libertarian," by going for the pun rather than the punch, for bending-over backward to appear "reasonable" and nonpartisan, Safire at times gave the impression that he wasn't comfortable calling himself a conservative. He endorsed Bill Clinton in 1992 (no doubt in part because he wanted a Pulitzer for his unending BCCI columns) on the grounds that George H. W. Bush was a liar. This was a bit like courting Helen Thomas because Cameron Diaz has bad skin some mornings. Safire was a godsend for conservatives when he was originally hired by the Times — which happened, ironically enough, in part because Safire had written Vice President Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" speech. And he has done heroic service. But he is a hero of an old war.

    -ESSAY: The Safire tirade (William F. Buckley, Jr., 4/10/87, National Review)

    -PROFILE: The Propaganda of William Safire (David Corn, 2/25/04, The Nation)

    -VIDEO INTERVIEW: William Safire (Charlie Rose, PBS)

    -ARCHIVES: "william safire" (Find Articles)

    -REVIEW: of Freedom by William Safire (William S. McFeely, NY Times Book Review)

IT is a courageous author who begins a thousand-page novel with a learned discussion of a legal writ, but William Safire has done just that. Abraham Lincoln, alone in his capital in April 1861, senses that the city is as defenseless as he himself feels. To correct matters, he takes the bold, perhaps illegal action of suspending the writ of habeas corpus so that rebels in Baltimore, obstructing the passage of troops to Washington, can be jailed. In his courtroom in Baltimore, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney tries to force the Chief Executive to honor the civil rights of even those who would obstruct troop movements. Without backing down, the man in the Executive Mansion shrewdly avoids a direct constitutional confrontation with Taney.

''Great men grow in power,'' Secretary of State William Henry Seward declares early in ''Freedom,'' announcing its theme. From that moment on, we follow the President as, hand over hand, he grasps the elements of power necessary to win a war, though that victory lies beyond the book's close. If the Constitution needs bending, he will bend it.

The plot is familiar. We follow Lincoln in the first 21 months of the Civil War as he changes from a man determined to restore the Union without disturbing slavery to one committed to abolishing the institution in order to achieve reunion.

With his engrossing tale well told, a writer candid enough to call his history fiction would seem to have granted himself immunity from scholarly criticism. But the author's subjects - freedom, war, power - are too important to escape such scrutiny and questions arise whether we view ''Freedom'' as a study in politics, a novel or history, although it can be read as all three.

Many novels of the American Civil War, which saw the devastation of a vast region, bring to mind Tolstoy's ''War and Peace,'' but reading ''Freedom,'' my mind ran to Trollope and ''The Prime Minister.'' There is, of course, in an account of the mustering of sufficient force to fight a war growing more savage with each battle, little room for the Englishman's gentle, witty irony, but the scenes in Mr. Safire's book are remarkably reminiscent of Trollope's. At Francis Preston Blair's country seat, political arrangements are made; in Kate Chase's parlor (and bedroom) sex and power meet; in the house of a notoriously alluring hostess, Rose Greenhow, intrigue (to the point of lethal spying) occurs; and, finally, in the Executive Mansion, all power is gathered into one pair of strong hands.

It is not surprising that a one-time Presidential aide turned Washington columnist (for this newspaper) should have chosen the capital, and not the battlefield or beleaguered countryside, as his central canvas. On this, Mr. Safire has crowded vividly drawn Congressmen, generals, confidants and Cabinet members, all trying to impose their will on the President. (Interestingly, it is a woman, Anna Ella Carroll, the formidably aggresssive political theorist and military strategist, who comes closest to succeeding.) What the author achieves as a novelist is an imagining of motives and a depiction of personal tensions, as Lincoln, resisting those impositions, finds his own objectives and imposes his own will on the nation.

    -REVIEW: of Freedom (James W. Tuttleton, Commentary)

To anchor his novel in a sea of swirling facts, Safire provides the reader with a long appendix of 150 pages that he calls the “Under-book.” There he presents the historical sources of his imagined scenes, confesses to what is real and what is invented, provides a bibliography of Civil War readings, and clarifies the debates of the historians over the political meaning of Civil War events. Repeatedly in this appendix we are told things like: “The interview with [Benjamin] Wade is fictional, but Lincoln's dialogue is taken from his letter to Orville Browning.” Or “Some of my mind reading of [Salmon P.] Chase is fictional, and several meetings are telescoped into two, but on the whole the chapter is based on [Gideon] Welles's diary.” Or “Fiction. That is what I think Lincoln was thinking in late May 1862.” This stratagem, which allows us to discriminate between the actual and the invented, also delivers Safire from the charge of misleading readers and falsifying history for the sake of his plot.

But is the result historical truth? Since many readers are likely to get their information about the Civil War from novels like Freedom rather than from works of history, there is something ethically responsible about Safire's alerting us to where he deviates from the factual into the imaginary. In doing so, however, he is also implicitly acknowledging the legitimacy of the distinction, and paying obeisance as well to some ideal of historical truth which he as a novelist is trying to serve with no less devotion than would a professional historian. In all this Safire seems grandly oblivious to the attack, within the discipline of history itself, on the adequacy of any narrative history to tell the truth about the past.

For too many current historians, a historical narrative is itself a work of the imagination. An instance is the view of Hayden White of the University of California at Santa Cruz who complains in Tropics of Discourse (1978) that people are reluctant “to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.” For historians like White, it is naive to “expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past ‘correspond’ to some preexistent body of ‘raw facts.’” For White, all historians are novelists; and all history is an imaginary construction of found facts. Given such views, is it any wonder that the discipline of history is now collapsing into subjective ideologies and tending toward cognitive nihilism?

Luckily, Safire is innocent of this kind of academic skepticism. He may argue about the meaning of past events, but the existence of historical truth as such he never calls into question. Just as the responsible narrative history can tell a truthful story about the past, so the well-researched historical novel can recreate the continuity of intimate human relations, personal psychology, and public events. Happily indifferent to the inanities of current historical theory, Safire gets on with the task.

    -REVIEW: of Freedom (Joe Mysak, National Review)

    -REVIEW: of Scandalmonger by William Safire (Thomas Flanagan, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Scandalmonger (Katharine Whittemore, Salon)

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ONE THING THE WHITE HOUSE MIGHT HAVE WANTED TO KEEP IN MIND...:

Barack Obama's churlishness is unforgivable (David Hughes, September 24th, 2009, Daily Telegraph)

The juxtaposition on our front page this morning is striking. We carry a photograph of Acting Sgt Michael Lockett - who was killed in Helmand on Monday - receiving the Military Cross from the Queen in June, 2008. He was the 217th British soldier to die in the Afghan conflict. Alongside the picture, we read that the Prime Minister was forced to dash through the kitchens of the UN in New York to secure a few minutes “face time” with President Obama after five requests for a sit-down meeting were rejected by the White House.

What are we to make of this? This country has proved, through the bravery of men like Acting Sgt Lockett, America’s staunchest ally in Afghanistan. In return, the American President treats the British Prime Minister with casual contempt. The President’s graceless behaviour is unforgivable. As most members of the Cabinet would confirm, it’s not a barrel of laughs having to sit down for a chat with Gordon Brown. But that’s not the point. Mr Obama owes this country a great deal for its unflinching commitment to the American-led war in Afghanistan but seems incapable of acknowledging the fact. You might have thought that after the shambles of Mr Brown’s first visit to the Obama White House - when there was no joint press conference and the President’s “gift” to the Prime Minister was a boxed DVD set - lessons would have been learned. Apparently not.

..the UR is going to need photo ops with the next British PM just as much as this one needs them with our president, but sine that'll be a Tory he'll have even less reason to offer them.

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THANKS, W:

Merkel’s Party Claims Victory in German Elections (NICHOLAS KULISH, 9/28/09, NY Times)

Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed victory in national elections Sunday, with projections by public television stations putting her conservative party on a path to form a new center-right government and achieve Mrs. Merkel’s goal of ending the country’s “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats.

If the slim lead for her conservative Christian Democrats and the pro-business Free Democrats holds after all the ballots are tallied, Mrs. Merkel will finally have the chance to enact the kind of liberalizing economic reforms she proposed when she first ran for chancellor four years ago. [...]

The Social Democrats’ chancellor candidate, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called the election night “a bitter defeat” for his party, which suffered the worst decline ever by a party in a German parliamentary election.

Gerhard Schroeder came out of the Iraq War about as well off as Chretien, Chirac, & Saddam.

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NOW THAT'S rEALISM:

SAUDIS WILL LET ISRAEL BOMB IRAN NUCLEAR SITE (Gordon Thomas and Camilla Tominey, September 27,2009, Sunday Express)

INTELLIGENCE chief Sir John Scarlett has been told that Saudi Arabia is ready to allow Israel to bomb Iran’s new nuclear site.

The head of MI6 discussed the issue in London with Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Saudi officials after British intelligence officers helped to uncover the plant, in the side of a mountain near the ancient city of Qom.

What's not for them to love about a war between Jews and Shi'ites?

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AS IN ALL THINGS...:

What Bush got right offers clues for Obama (Mark Bowden, 9/27/09, Philadelphia Inquirer)

President Bush made a courageous decision in the summer of 2006 to reverse direction, but not the reversal sought by Congress (including then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden), the American public, the overwhelming majority of the press (including this newspaper), and even most of his own military advisers. Instead of cutting our losses and pulling out of Iraq, as we did in Vietnam, Bush doubled down. He invested more troops and, more important, embraced an entirely new strategy.

And Bush was right. What had happened beneath all of the politics was a small revolution in war-fighting philosophy, championed and implemented by an unlikely military leader, Gen. David Petraeus, a soldier/intellectual molded as much by the think tank as the battlefield. He calls the movement his "Counterinsurgency Nation," and it has rewritten the way America fights. It is not a completely new idea - there are few of those in the study of war - but its basic principles came into clearer and clearer focus as a new generation of military officers fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its guiding principle is simple: The prize in these countries is not territory, but people.

Now President Obama must decide whether to let this new generation of battle-tested soldiers apply what it has learned to Afghanistan. Those who argue that the methods employed in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan are right and wrong. They are right that the two conflicts are not identical. What worked in Iraq will not apply in all cases in Afghanistan. But they are wrong to assume the lessons of Iraq have no application in Afghanistan. The counterinsurgency consensus grew out of experience in both wars. America's new military leaders have been managing both conflicts simultaneously for most of this decade, and the hard-won lessons they have learned derive from both.

I am not a military expert, but I suspect that most wars that last for more than a few weeks follow a roughly similar trajectory. Established generals misjudge the war, and once the battle is joined, a generation of younger leaders discovers the truth, adapts by hard necessity, making life-and-death decisions on the battlefield, and learns, often by trial and error, how to define and fight the new war on its own terms. If the national leadership is smart enough to embrace this knowledge and experience, as Bush was, the tide turns.

...success for the UR lies in the degree to which he apes W.

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OUR NEIGHBOR'S DAD IS VISITING...:

Let’s have a train that goes where we want to: Beauty of rail, as seen on East Coast, is that it can get right to cities’ hearts (Brian Greenspun, Sept. 27, 2009, Las Vegas Sun)

As a youngster I used to ride the train from what is now the Plaza on Main Street — that’s where the train station was — all the way to San Bernardino.

The conductors called it San Berdu and it took well over six hours to make the trip. It could have taken days because riding the trains was a treat for those us who knew what it was like to drive through Baker, Calif., in the summer without air conditioning in the car.

But, enough of my boyhood. Let’s talk about trains like adults.

This past week I rode the train from Washington, D.C., to New York City and back. I could have flown but, all in, that would have taken me three hours or more — most of it waiting and driving — to reach my destination.

Instead, I sat in a very comfortable chair, had breakfast, read my newspapers, talked politics and golf, stopped in places such as Baltimore, Wilmington, Del.; Philadelphia; and someplace in New Jersey — for no more than two minutes in each place — before we pulled into Penn Station in the middle of Manhattan.

...and he took the train here from California. Lucky stiff.

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WAS IT THE TICKING CROCODILE THAT SCARED THEM?:

Somali Pirates Pushed off Ship, But Kill Captain (Alan Boswell, 26 September 2009, VOA News)

Somali pirates attempted to hijack a ship Thursday night in the Mogadishu port but were eventually scared away by a rescue effort.

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DO WE THINK IT'S THE SOURCE OF THE STORY OR THE SUBJECT?:

Tuning In Too Late (CLARK HOYT, 9/27/09, NY Times)

ON Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”

What the article didn’t say — but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew — was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes. The young woman in streetwalker’s clothes and her companion were actually undercover conservative activists with a hidden camera.

It was an intriguing story: employees of a controversial outfit, long criticized by Republicans as corrupt, appearing to engage in outrageous, if not illegal, behavior. An Acorn worker in Baltimore was shown telling the “prostitute” that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an “independent artist” and claim 15-year-old prostitutes, supposedly illegal immigrants, as dependents.

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

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WE'RE GONNA NEED MORE FOYLE:

Smarts and Stiff Upper Lip in Times of War and Murder (MIKE HALE, 9/27/09, NY Times)

AMERICAN television has its share of taciturn policemen, but none quite like Christopher Foyle, the top cop in Hastings, England, who enforces the civilian laws while World War II rages not many miles away in France. As portrayed by the marvelous actor Michael Kitchen in the British series “Foyle’s War,” he is sometimes so reserved — not eerily quiet or threateningly quiet, just quiet — that he actually appears to be thinking, something few American telecops are likely to be accused of.

Mr. Kitchen has played the modest but prickly Foyle through 19 episodes, shown on ITV in Britain beginning in 2002 and repeated on PBS. The entire run has now been collected in a five-DVD box, “Foyle’s War: From Dunkirk to VE Day” (Acorn, $149.99), which comes out this week. [...]

[I]TV later commissioned three more, which were shot this year, will be shown in 2010 and will take Foyle to V-J Day.

I realize it's crazy, but I refuse to watch the last episode of such shows--still haven't seen the last Morse, Frost, etc. Now I can watch that 19th Foyle with more coming....

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ALL ABOUT PROXIMITY:

Rethinking Which Terror Groups to Fear (SCOTT SHANE, 9/27/09, NY Times)

[M]any students of terrorism believe that in important ways, Al Qaeda and its ideology of global jihad are in a pronounced decline — with its central leadership thrown off balance as operatives are increasingly picked off by missiles and manhunts and, more important, with its tactics discredited in public opinion across the Muslim world.

“Al Qaeda is losing its moral argument about the killing of innocent civilians,” said Emile A. Nakhleh, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency’s strategic analysis program on political Islam until 2006. “They’re finding it harder to recruit. They’re finding it harder to raise money.” [...]

[S]ome government officials do take quiet, if wary, satisfaction in two developments that they say underlie the broad belief that Al Qaeda is on a downhill slope. One is the success of military Special Operations units, the C.I.A. and allies in killing prominent terrorists.

Three days apart in mid-September, American special forces in Somalia firing from helicopters killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader of a Somalian organization, Al Shabab, which is allied with Al Qaeda, and the police in Indonesia killed the most-wanted terrorist in Southeast Asia, Noordin Muhammad Top, in an assault on a house in Java.

In Pakistan, missile strikes from C.I.A. drone aircraft have taken a steady toll on Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies since the Bush administration accelerated these attacks last year, a policy reinforced by President Obama. A count of such strikes, compiled by the Center for American Progress in Washington, found a handful in 2006 and 2007, rising rapidly to 36 in 2008, and another 36 so far in 2009, nearly all in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

In addition to thinning the ranks of potential plotters, the constant threat of attack from the air makes it far harder for terrorists to move, communicate, and plan, counterterrorism officials say. And while the officials say they worry about a public backlash in response to the civilians killed during the air attacks, those officials also say the strikes may be frightening away potential recruits for terrorism.

The second trend is older and probably more critical. The celebration in many Muslim countries that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has given way to broad disillusionment with mass killing and the ideology behind it, according to a number of polls.

Between 2002 and 2009, the view that suicide bombings are “often or sometimes justified” has declined, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, from 43 percent to 12 percent in Jordan; from 26 percent to 13 percent in Indonesia; and from 33 percent to 5 percent in Pakistan (excluding some sparsely populated, embattled areas). Positive ratings for Osama bin Laden have fallen by half or more in most of the countries Pew polled.

Peter Mandaville, a professor of government and Islamic studies at George Mason University, says a series of public recantations” by prominent Islamist scholars and militants in recent years have had an effect. But the biggest catalyst has been bombings close to home.

“Right after 9/11, people thought, wow, America is not invincible,” Mr. Mandaville said. “It was a strike against the U.S., and they were for it.” But when large numbers of innocent Muslims fell victim to attacks, “it became more and more difficult to romanticize Al Qaeda as fighting the global hegemons — basically, ‘sticking it to the man.’ ”

It turns out, the Far Enemy was much closer than they thought and fellow Arabs don't actually think of themselves as the Near Enemy.

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SORRY, NICK, WHO'S BEING NAIVE?:

UN leaders back nuclear resolution but grow impatient with Iran (Alex Spillius, 24 Sep 2009, Daily Telegraph)

World leaders have backed a landmark resolution calling for a world without nuclear weapons at a United Nations Security Council hosted by Barack Obama. [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, came close to mocking his American counterpart for the good intentions, which Mr Obama had heralded as an "historic" step towards nuclear abolition, even though it set no specific targets or fresh mandates.

"We live in a real world not a virtual world," the Frenchman told the 15-member council. "And the real world expects us to take decisions.

"President Obama dreams of a world without weapons ... but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.

"Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions."

When push last came to shove on a member state violating UN Resolutions, France bailed. Why should we or the Iranians take them seriously now? Internal politics forces Mr. Obama to act against Iran. Where will France be?

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OUR THING:

Obama’s age of atonement (Christopher Caldwell, September 25 2009, Financial Times)

Mr Obama talks about giving “meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations. That is the future America wants.” Well, if he is right, then Americans have been lying to pollsters for a long time. Naturally, there are good arguments that the US should submit to the same international norms as everybody else. But those arguments need to be made to Americans, not to foreign heads of state. [...]

Mr Obama has committed his citizens to an expensive and open-ended period of reparation and repentance, and placed himself in a logical contradiction. He promised in his speech that the US would “be a leader in bringing about change”, “lead by example”, move “from a bystander to a leader in international climate negotiations” and accept an “obligation to lead” on the environment. But US leadership is a political fact, not a law of nature. The thing that the US leads is the world system that Mr Obama wants us to repudiate. If “the old habits and arguments are irrelevant”, as he says, then why should the US lead? Why shouldn’t someone else lead? Systems that elevate one nation over another can indeed be unjust. But the only alternative on the horizon is to let groups of nations with common interests (whether “the international community” or the UN) harass small countries they disapprove of, from Serbia to Honduras to Israel. Some may like the outcomes better. But it is no advance for legitimacy.

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PERIOD:

Sex, Drugs, Music, Mud: Woodstock at 40. (P.J. O'Rourke, 08/31/2009, Weekly Standard)

No social phenomenon can be completely analyzed, thoroughly critiqued, and given its full philosophical due in just one word. Except Woodstock. Altamont.

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NOW THAT'S PIGOVIAN:

Don’t Tell Congress What Comes After Trillion (Kurt Brouwer, September 23rd, 2009, Fundmastery)

[I]n less than a year, we have moved on from budget deficits in the billions to trillion dollar plus deficits. So, I wondered, what comes next? This Associated Press report gives us the answer...

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OH, YEAH, THAT'S WHAT AN ACTUAL ECONOMIC CRISIS LOOKS LIKE...:

The Worst Economy Since…. the 1980s? (Mark J. Perry, September 25, 2009, The American)

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ON THE OTHER HAND...:

All About Obama (Michael Gerson, September 26, 2009, Washington Post)

[T]his address grows more disturbing on further reading. Some major presidential speeches deserve to be remembered, quoted and celebrated. Some deserve to be forgotten. A few deserve to be remembered and criticized, because they dishonor the history of presidential rhetoric.

Obama’s rhetorical method in international contexts -- given supreme expression at the United Nations this week -- is a moral dialectic. The thesis: pre-Obama America is a nation of many flaws and failures. The antithesis: The world responds with understandable but misguided prejudice. The synthesis: Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be. How great a world we all should see, if only all were more like…me.

On several occasions, Obama attacked American conduct in simplistic caricatures a European diplomat might employ or applaud. He accused America of acing “unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others” -- a slander against every American ally who has made sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan. He argued that, “America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy” -- which is hardly a challenge for the Obama administration, which has yet to make a priority of promoting democracy or human rights anywhere in the world.

...Mr. Obama's universal disavowal of democratization is unselective.

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SINCE THE "MODERATE" VERSION IS UNACCEPTABLE...:

For Democrats, Cracks in a United Front (JACKIE CALMES, 9/26/09, NY Times)

The liberals do not expect to win in the moderate-to-conservative-leaning committee. But Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said, “That’s just the first battle of a war, and the least friendly battlefield.”

The Senate floor, and certainly a conference with the more liberal House, will be more receptive arenas, Mr. Schumer and others predict. Ultimately, the liberals in Congress, as well as their allies in organized labor, expect to be able to shape the final product more than they had hoped just weeks ago.

That unnerves the more conservative Democrats, many of them from Republican-leaning districts and states.

Liberals have been emboldened by two factors. One is the failure of Senator Max Baucus of Montana, a more conservative Democrat who heads the Finance Committee, to get any Republicans to support his draft legislation, after months of trying. That doomed President Obama’s goal of bipartisan backing for a health care overhaul, and now leaves party liberals arguing for a distinctly Democratic health plan.

...we may as well force the liberal one on our moderates?

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THE YOKE OF DIGNITY:

EXCERPT: The Tragic Misunderstanding of Atheist Humanism (Henri de Lubac | From Chapter One of The Drama of Atheist Humanism)

Man, to be sure, is made of dust and clay; or, as we should say nowadays, he is of animal origin--which comes to the same thing. The Church is not unmindful of this, finding a warrant for it in the same passage of Genesis. Man, to be sure, is also a sinner. The Church does not cease to remind him of that fact. The self-esteem that she endeavors to instill into him is not the outcome of a superficial and ingenuous view of the matter. Like Christ, she knows "what there is in man". But she also knows that the lowliness of his origin in the flesh cannot detract from the sublimity of his vocation, and that, despite all the blemishes that sin may bring, that vocation is an abiding source of inalienable greatness. The Church thinks that this greatness must reveal itself even in the conditions of present-day life, as a fount of liberty and a principle of progress, the necessary retaliation upon the forces of evil. And she recognizes in the mystery of God-made-man the guarantee of our vocation and the final consecration of our greatness. Thus in her liturgy she can celebrate each day "the dignity of the human substance" even before rising to the contemplation of our rebirth.

These elementary truths of our faith seem commonplace today--though we neglect their implications all too often. It is difficult for us to imagine the disturbance they created in the soul of man in the ancient world. At the first tidings of them humanity was lifted on a wave of hope. It was stirred by vague premonitions that, at the recoil, sharpened its awareness of its state of misery. It became conscious of deliverance. To begin with, needless to say, it was not an external deliverance--not that social liberation which was to come, for instance, with the abolition of slavery. That liberation, which presupposed a large number of technical and economic conditions, was brought about slowly but surely under the influence of the Christian idea of man. "God", says Origen, in his commentary on Saint John, "made all men in his own image, he molded them one by one." But from the outset that idea had produced a more profound effect. Through it, man was freed, in his own eyes, from the ontological slavery with which Fate burdened him. The stars, in their unalterable courses, did not, after all, implacably control our destinies. Man, every man, no matter who, had a direct link with the Creator, the Ruler of the stars themselves. And lo, the countless Powers--gods, spirits, demons--who pinioned human life in the net of their tyrannical wills, weighing upon the soul with all their terrors, now crumbled into dust, and the sacred principle that had gone astray in them was rediscovered unified, purified and sublimated in God the deliverer! It was no longer a small and select company that, thanks to some secret means of escape, could break the charmed circle: it was mankind as a whole that found its night suddenly illumined and took cognizance of its royal liberty. No more circle! No more blind destiny! No more Moira! No more Fate! Transcendent God, God the "friend of men", revealed in Jesus, opened for all a way that nothing would ever bar again.

Hence that intense feeling of gladness and of radiant newness to be found everywhere in early Christian writings. It is much to be regretted that this literature for so many reasons, not all of which are insuperable, should be so remote from us today. What wealth and force our faith is forfeiting by its ignorance of, for instance, the hymns of triumph and the stirring appeals that echo in the Protrepticus of Clement of Alexandria!

But if we look down the course of the ages to the dawn of modern times we make a strange discovery. That same Christian idea of man that had been welcomed as a deliverance was now beginning to be felt as a yoke. And that same God in whom man had learned to see the seal of his own greatness began to seem to him like an antagonist, the enemy of his dignity. Through what misunderstandings and distortions, what mutilations and infidelities, what blinding pride and impatience this came about would take too long to consider. The historical causes are numerous and complex. But the fact remains, simple and solid. No less than the Early Fathers, the great medieval scholars had exalted man by setting forth what the Church had always taught of his relation to God: "In this is man's greatness, in this is man's worth, in this he excels every creature." But the time came when man was no longer moved by it. On the contrary, he began to think that henceforward he would forfeit his self-esteem and be unable to develop in freedom unless he broke first with the Church and then with the Transcendent Being upon whom, according to Christian tradition, he was dependent. At first assuming the aspect of a reversion to paganism, this urge to cut loose increased in scope and momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until, after many phases and many vicissitudes, it came to a head in the most daring and destructive form of modern atheism: absolute humanism, which claims to be the only genuine kind and inevitably regards a Christian humanism as absurd.

This atheist humanism is not to be confused with a hedonist and coarsely materialist atheism--a commonplace phenomenon to be found in many periods of history. It is also quite contrary in principle-if not in its results-to an atheism of despair. But it would be dangerous to call it a critical atheism and let it go at that. It does not profess to be the simple answer to a speculative problem and certainly not a purely negative solution: as if the understanding, having, on the attainment of maturity, set itself to "reconsider" the problem of God, had at last been obliged to see that its efforts could lead to nothing or even that they were leading to an end that was the opposite of what they had long believed. The phenomenon that has dominated the history of the mind during the last few centuries seems both more profound and more arbitrary. It is not the intelligence alone that is involved. The problem posed was a human problem--it was the human problem--and the solution that is being given to it is one that claims to be positive. Man is getting rid of God in order to regain possession of the human greatness that, it seems to him, is being unwarrantably withheld by another. In God he is overthrowing an obstacle in order to gain his freedom.

Modern humanism, then, is built upon resentment and begins with a choice. It is, in Proudhon's word, an "antitheism".

The tragedy of humanism is the failure to recognize that freedom lies in the choice between Good and Evil, not in a right to decide which is which.

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THIS WEEK'S PAULINE KAEL AWARD:

Spoonfuls of Sugar: Americans' continued love affair with the John Roberts Court (Dahlia Lithwick, Sept. 26, 2009, Slate)

Fifty percent of Americans currently believe the court is neither too liberal nor too conservative; that's up from 43 percent last year. And the number of Americans who believe the court is too conservative has dropped from 30 percent to 19 percent.

All this lavish new public affection for the court's moderation came the same week the court was hearing a hugely important case that may dismantle a long-standing system of campaign finance restrictions—including a ban on direct federal campaign spending by corporations that has existed for a century. But the issue in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, is not limited to the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. The reason court-watchers got themselves so worked up about this case is that it squarely tests Chief Justice John Roberts' stated commitments to preserving precedent, deference to the elected branches, and issuing narrow rulings instead of sweeping ones.

Oral argument in the Citizens United case revealed that the court's five conservatives feel nothing but contempt for campaign finance regulations that demonize corporations, restrict core political speech, and—to quote the chief justice—"put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats." Trying to square the tone of that argument with the Gallup pole results of the same week requires ignoring either one or the other almost entirely.

Because, as is obvious to anyone in Ms Lithwick's social milieu, the majority of Americans can't be contemptuous of the CFR regime.

[Of course, the problem with the specific case is that the Court will show deference to precedent instead of to the Constitution.]

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WHICH IS WHY LIBERAL DETECTIVES MAKE NO SENSE:

PD James, Queen of Detective Fiction: Interview: PD James talks to Jake Kerridge about detective fiction, her new book, and the technical problems of murder (Jake Kerridge, 9/26/09, Daily Telegraph)

The 89-year-old Lady James is trying to recall what first drew the teenage Phyllis, along with millions of other readers in the Thirties, to the so-called Golden Age detective stories.

“Those books suggested we live in a moral, comprehensible universe, at a time when there was a great deal of disruption and violence at home and abroad, and of course the ever-present risk of war. And we live in times of unrest now, so perhaps we may soon enter another Golden Age.”

It is one thing to read detective fiction voraciously, another to write it for five decades in the spare moments of a busy life spent working first for the NHS and then the police and criminal law departments of the Home Office, while bringing up two daughters and coping with the stresses of being married to somebody who was mentally ill: her late husband, Connor Bantry White, developed a form of schizophrenia after he returned from war service.

She says that writing was a compulsion – and it had to be detective fiction. “I don’t think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.” [...]

In her book, James makes somewhat austere fun of her beloved Dorothy L Sayers over the scene at the end of Busman’s Honeymoon in which Lord Peter Wimsey breaks down in tears when the murderer he has brought to justice is hanged.

I say that I can’t imagine James’s own creation, the poet-policeman Adam Dalgliesh, being similarly affected. “No, he wouldn’t weep as the murderer was taken off to be hanged, or now of course it would be off to 10 years in jail."

Ouch!

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TWO THINGS ARE CERTAIN...:

The End of Oil?: a review of CRUDE WORLD: The Violent Twilight of Oil By Peter Maass (MICHAEL HIRSH, NY Times Book Review)

“Just as every un­happy family is unhappy in its own way, every dysfunctional oil country is dysfunctional in its own way,” he writes.

Equatorial Guinea’s savage leader, Teodoro Obiang, plunders virtually every cent of his nation’s wealth, aided by Riggs Bank of Washington, which sometimes sent employees to the embassy to pick up bulging suitcases of cash. Locals don’t even get the benefit of jobs because the manual labor is supplied by Indians and Filipinos brought in by Marathon Oil. Walking around the capital, Malabo, one night, Maass does manage to find a booming source of local employment: young Guinean girls called “night fighters” because they jostle for a chance to sell their bodies to the oilmen from Texas or Oklahoma. “The men in Malabo might not find jobs in the oil industry, but it is clearly possible for their desperate sisters to earn a few dollars,” he writes. Traveling to Ecuador, Maass discovers graffiti on one of the pipelines that cut through what was once pristine Amazonian rain forest: “Más Petróleo = Más Pobreza.” More oil equals more poverty. For him, it sums up the confiscatory approach that Texaco took to that country, leaving it a stripped land oozing with toxic pollutants.

The major oil producing nations have fared little better. Seventy years after the discovery of its first great reservoir, Saudi Arabia remains a medieval principality with a bare patina of modernity. The country’s long reign as the world’s No. 1 oil supplier has been good for the Saudi princes but a Faustian bargain for the rest of us, having led to the petrodollar-funded spread of extremism and the rise of Osama bin Laden. Post-Soviet Russia has become a kind of petro-fascist state where the head of Lukoil slavishly keeps a picture of Vladimir Putin on his desk rather than photos of his family. Venezuela is resurrecting socialism, this time as farce, under the buffoonish Hugo Chávez, who hosts a TV talk show called “Aló Presidente” while turning his national oil company into a “development agency with oil wells” that furthers his hold on power. Iran’s whole modern history has been twisted out of shape by its oil riches, starting with the American-British coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The unhappiest countries are those where oil has led to war, none more so than Iraq, even if no one will acknowledge the truth about America’s 2003 invasion. “The refining process transforms this black swill into a clear fluid without which our civilization would collapse,” Maass writes. “Quite often a corollary process of political refining occurs to sanitize the truth of what’s done to keep oil in the hands of friendly governments. Just as cars cannot run on unrefined crude, political systems choke at the unfiltered mention of war for oil.” He cites George W. Bush’s claims that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with oil. Still, the question hangs out there: Why was the Oil Ministry one of the only places guarded by United States troops in the early days of looting?

By the end of Maass’s long indictment, one wants the horror to end. Let’s all move on from oil already. Indeed, it is tempting to imagine what sort of globalization we might have today if Max Steineke and his exploratory team from Standard Oil of California hadn’t discovered quite so much petroleum when they pierced Saudi Arabia’s first great reservoir in 1938. If less human ingenuity had been applied to finding oil over the last 70 years, and more to developing other sources of energy, the world economy — and the environment — might be far healthier. The World Trade Center might even still be standing.

But Maass doesn’t fully deliver on the promise of his subtitle. Is this really the twilight of the oil economy? We still seem utterly drenched in the gunk...

...we'll never run out nor will we move away from such a cheap source because of any broad-based moral imperative--only government action can make it expensive enough to end the oil age.

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WE MAY ACTUALLY GET TO SEE NEWS ANCHORS WEEP NEXT NOVEMBER:

Senate Leader Reid Becomes GOP Target in Nevada (JIM CARLTON, 9/26/09, WSJ)

As Senate majority leader, Harry Reid stands with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as part of a triumvirate that rules Washington. But back home in Nevada, the Democratic lawmaker is just another incumbent with a bull's-eye on his back.

Mr. Reid, 69 years old, is facing mounting criticism in his home state and is trailing in the polls against two Republican challengers for his Senate seat: former University of Nevada at Las Vegas basketball star Danny Tarkanian and Nevada Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Lowden. According to an independent Mason-Dixon poll Aug. 23, Mr. Reid lagged behind Mr. Tarkanian by 49% to 38% and 45% to 40% against Ms. Lowden. Meanwhile, a Sept. 2 poll by liberal Web site Daily Kos found 52% of likely voters holding an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Reid.

Driving up Mr. Reid's unpopularity at home is the liberal agenda that he has been championing for Democrats nationwide -- including the health-care overhaul and $787 billion stimulus package -- which is alienating some residents in his mostly moderate state.

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THE OBAMA EFFECT?:

Federal Tories pull away in new poll (Bruce Campion-Smith, 9/26/09, Toronto Star)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is outshining rival Michael Ignatieff and putting the Conservatives on track for a possible majority in the next election, a new Angus Reid Strategies/Toronto Star poll has found.

While party numbers remain static, Harper outscores Ignatieff on key questions of leadership that stand to give him a vital competitive edge among voters, said Jodi Shanoff, vice-president of public affairs for Angus Reid Strategies.

"This is not good news for Michael Ignatieff. ... Stephen Harper should be emboldened by numbers like these. They are pretty encouraging for him," she said yesterday.

Not that he deserves any, but it's impressive that Mr. Harper is avoiding any blame for the recent economic unpleasantness (it obviously helps that Canada is outperforming 6-7 peers).

One wonders if having President Obama and Congressional Democrats so nearby hasn't discredited a party of the Left as a viable alternative.

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WHAT ABOUT THE PINE CONES?:

With conditions right, acorns go nuts: Bumper crop plumps up squirrels while humans duck and cover (David Abel, September 26, 2009 , Boston Globe)

[I]n many parts of the region this time of year, particularly this year, the sky is falling - or at least it feels that way. Hard-shelled orbs are cracking windshields, thwacking gardeners, and tripping up joggers on their daily slog.

They are also making squirrels and other rodents pleasantly plump, leading to a potential bulge in their population.

Given this year’s bountiful rains and the mysterious cycles of nature, oak trees are producing one of the region’s largest crops of acorns in memory, forcing people to run for cover or gingerly avoid what can feel like a carpet of marbles on sidewalks and backyards.

On a recent afternoon along the Muddy River, the spike-tipped, leathery shells plunged like cluster bombs with every gust of wind from the surrounding oaks, leaving thousands of them littering the paved paths that connect Boston and Brookline.

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WE'RE GONNA NEED A LOT MORE TIN FOIL:

MORE:
American libertarianism is dancing to the shock-jocks (Jurek Martin, September 25 2009, Financial Times)

[I]t is becoming increasingly evident that libertarianism is a common thread in the patchwork quilt of vocal opposition to Barack Obama’s attempts to change the way America is run. Not only does it pull many of the organisational strings behind the often raucous public protests of the last few months, but its essential philosophy, that the less government the better, is espoused by some of the titular leaders of the mob.

Chief among these is Glenn Beck, the radio and television demagogue who emotionally peddles socialist-and-worse conspiracy theories to an unquestioning audience four hours a day, five days a week.

[I]f you listen to his rambling rants, as I force myself to from time to time, the libertarian strain in his thinking becomes quite clear; far more so than Mr Limbaugh’s, whose shtick is much more of the authoritarian but orthodox anti-liberal variety. And where El Rushbo deploys bombast and heavy-handed sarcasm, Mr Beck, often near real or fake tears, comes over as much closer to Howard Beale in the film Network – “I’m as mad as hell and can’t take it any more.”

Garden variety libertarians devoted to notions of economic and personal liberty might be uncomfortable with this combustible approach, but they are not above going along for the ride. That certainly seems to be the case with former Congressman Dick Armey and his pressure group Freedom Works, as well as more established outfits such as the Ayn Rand Institute, named after the author. Both have been active in organising the tea party, town hall and Washington protest events that marked this summer.

Mr Armey, once number two Republican in the House of Representatives in spite of a sometimes very impolitic temper, has never hidden his libertarianism. Nor, for that matter, did Alan Greenspan, ruler of the Federal Reserve for so long. The fact that the role of government expanded so much in the presidency of George W. Bush induced Mr Armey to resign from Congress.

And don't the Libertarians and the Larouchies deserve each other?

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TRUTH IS REAVEALED TO US, NOT BY US:

On The "Great Crime" of the Gentiles (Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., September 25, 2009, Ignatius Insight)

We might describe mankind over time as a body of truth-seekers who have not found the truth, or at least not all of it, or not yet. Implicit in that description can be the assumption we can find what we set out to find all by ourselves. That is, not a few people would evidently reject truth if they did not themselves "make" it. The idea that truth might be given to them and require honest acknowledgement strikes at the very foundation of much ancient and modern thought.

Still, the very fact we do seek to know the truth means that already something in us urges us to do so. Even when he holds that there is no truth, no man is comfortable with the proposition: "I do not seek truth." We have the power to recognize truth at least when we find it. No one wants to establish his dignity on the basis of his principled rejection of any truth. He must at least cling to the contradictory proposition, "It is true that there is no truth."

Benedict XVI would perhaps modify that last statement about recognizing truth by saying we have the power to know the Truth when it "finds us." We often assume "truth" is a kind of inert thing just sitting out there waiting to be found. And some of it is, no doubt. Yet, if Truth is a Person, there is the possibility of that Person finding us. We also recognize that the dynamics of accepting truth involve what can only be called a personal relationship, which we can accept or reject for any number of reasons. As the New Testament records, several of those who saw the Truth either went away sad or went out to kill He who proclaimed it.

The drama of our given being, created and fallen, is that each of us can in this life reject this Person who is the Truth.

Or, as Michael Oakeshott put it:

There are some minds which give us the sense that they have passed through an elaborate education which was designed to initiate them into the traditions and achievements of their civilization; the immediate impression we have of them is an impression of cultivation, of the enjoyment of an inheritance. But this is not so with the mind of the Rationalist, which impresses us as, at best, a finely tempered, neutral instrument, as a well-trained rather than as an educated mind. Intellectually, his ambition is not so much to share the experience of the race as to be demonstrably a self-made man. And this gives to his intellectual and practical activities an almost preternatural deliberateness and self-consciousness, depriving them of any element of passivity, removing from them all sense of rhythm and continuity and dissolving them into a succession of climacterics, each to be surmounted by a tour de raison. His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void. And having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than a training in a technique of analysis, he is apt to attribute to mankind a necessary inexperience in all the critical moments of life, and if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving. With an almost poetic fancy, he strives to live each day as if it were his first, and he believes that to form a habit is to fail.

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FAILING UPWARDS:

White House Regroups on Guantanamo: Counsel Craig Replaced as Point Man on Issue as Deadline for Closing Looms (Anne E. Kornblut and Dafna Linzer, 9/25/09, Washington Post)

White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig, who initially guided the effort to close the prison and who was an advocate of setting the deadline, is no longer in charge of the project, two senior administration officials said this week.

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. "I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives," he said.

In May, one of the senior officials said, Obama tapped Pete Rouse -- a top adviser and former congressional aide who is not an expert on national security but is often called in to fix significant problems -- to oversee the process. Senior adviser David Axelrod and deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer were brought in to craft a more effective message around detainee policy, the official said. [...]

Three administration officials said they expect Craig to leave his current post in the near future, and one said he is on the short list for a seat on the bench or a diplomatic position.

When you decide not to change the policy, change the message and promote the incompetent who was in charge?

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BACK TO BISMARCK:

Mr. Policy Hits a Wall (David S. Broder, September 24, 2009, Washington Post)

[William Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal], like many others, was struck by the "sheer ambition" of Obama's legislative agenda and by his penchant for centralizing authority under a strong White House staff replete with many issue "czars."

Schambra sees this as evidence that "Obama is emphatically a 'policy approach' president. For him, governing means not just addressing discrete challenges as they arise, but formulating comprehensive policies aimed at giving large social systems -- and indeed society itself -- more rational and coherent forms and functions. In this view, the long-term, systemic problems of health care, education, and the environment cannot be solved in small pieces. They must be taken on in whole."

He traces the roots of this approach to the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when rapid social and economic change created a politics dominated by interest-group struggles. The progressives believed that the cure lay in applying the new wisdom of the social sciences to the art of government, an approach in which facts would heal the clash of ideologies and narrow constituencies.

Wow, we haven't had a president who undertook such a systematic approach to public policy since...the Ownership Society and Neconomics of George W. Bush. Indeed, if we grant for the sake of argument that the UR has a broad overview guiding him, the main difference between the two would appear to be that W's was based on the results that the social sciences rendered while Mr. Obama is stuck on failed theory. Take, for instance, health care: W's solution to the problems of people not being able to afford their own care when they sicken later in life and to the over-use of medicine by the healthy was HSAs, which allow the healthy young to save money for later and turn patients back into consumers, unleashing the market forces that no one any even bothers denying force down prices. Mr. Obama, by contrast, not only proposes that the healthy be forced to buy insurance--a nearly complete waste of their money--but that we consume even more useless health care in the form of "preventive medicine." In effect, money the young could be setting aside for when they'll need it is to be spent while they're healthy and rather than reduce the consumption of medicine we'll force its increase, driving costs higher in the absence of any market discipline. Mr. Obama isn't adopting a 19th century framework for testing policy prescriptions, he's adopting the policies of those 19th century progressives. It's as if we never saw the Second Way fail, never went through the 20th century.

There was a hilarious article in the Washington Post this week, that reflects this same level of obtuseness:

France has long been proud of its national health insurance, part of a many-tentacled and costly social protection system designed to embrace almost everyone who is legally in the country. Most French people have grown up with the idea that the government is the ultimate guarantor of health care, even for people who cannot afford to pay. The concept has become so ingrained over the past half-century that it is an untouchable part of the political landscape, making the debate over President Obama's proposals in Washington and the fading chances for a public option seem, in the words of the newspaper Le Monde, "altogether surreal."

But the fast-rising cost of drugs and medical care, particularly for the elderly in their final days, has raised the question of how long France can afford the health care it has come to expect. Seeking to beat back rising deficits, the government has reduced the reimbursement rate for many medicines and routine medical services, opening a growing market for private insurance policies, called mutuals, to cover the steadily increasing co-payments.

Without abandoning the bedrock of health care for all, therefore, the French system has begun to evolve toward something resembling Medicare, the health insurance for older people in the United States, except that it covers people of all ages. The shift is regarded as inevitable, specialists said, but increasingly it is raising the delicate question of how much the government will be forced to resort to even higher co-payments in the years ahead.

The French model is failing, why don't Americans want it?!?

MORE:
Doubling Down on a Flawed Insurance Model: Obama's plan takes the problems of the current system—mandates, runaway spending and more—and makes them worse. (JOHN F. COGAN, R. GLENN HUBBARD, AND DANIEL KESSLER , 9/25/09, WSJ)

The administration's plan will impose mandates that employers provide coverage, mandates that individuals obtain coverage, and mandates about the form this coverage will have to take. These will remove the freedom to choose one's health-insurance plan, because government, in its effort to correct perceived inequities, will dictate which health-care services must be covered and which health-care providers must be used.

The proposed unprecedented intrusion of government into private markets will have adverse effects on people with insurance in both the short and the long run.

The mandates will lead to large increases in the cost of health insurance for everyone. Research studies have shown that as people become insured, especially under a health plan that offers broad coverage and low copayments, they consume more health-care services. The best estimates indicate that each newly insured person will approximately double his or her health spending.

With 30 million to 40 million newly insured persons under the administration's plan, aggregate health-care demand will increase significantly. But when demand expands prices increase. We estimate that the higher demand will increase health insurance premiums for the typical family plan by about 10%. Because an employer-sponsored family insurance plan cost $12,680 in 2008, this translates into an increase of about $1,200 in the typical annual premium.

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WHEN YOU CAN'T EVEN MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME:

A Break In China's Communist Wall: The latest party meeting suggests fissures. (Gordon G. Chang, 09.25.09, Forbes)

Has a crack just appeared in China's mighty Communist Party?

The Fourth Plenum of the Party's 17th Central Committee ended on Sept. 18, and the big news is that virtually nothing happened during the four-day meeting of 357 top party members in Beijing. "Silence and inaction," one report termed the result. There was no post-meeting press conference, delegates were mum after the session ended and the official communiqué said almost nothing.

And why is this momentous? It is, perhaps, the most significant news to come out of China in years because it may mean that the world's largest political organization has ended two decades of internal unity and begun a long process of splintering.

Isn't the point of totalitarianism to get rid of divided government?

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DIDN'T HE USED TO BE AN ECONOMIST?:

It’s Easy Being Green (PAUL KRUGMAN, 9/25/09, NY Times)

Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Second, the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.

If you aren't imposing any noticeable increased costs on the way we currently obtain and use energy then why would we change our behaviors?

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THUS DO THE PARENTS KICK THE CHICKS FROM THE NEST:

Talking Transparency Isn't the Same as Seeing It Through (Dana Milbank, September 24, 2009, Washington Post)

Somewhere, in a secure, undisclosed location, John Ashcroft is chuckling.

President Obama campaigned on a promise to restore transparency to government. But now the time has come to renew the USA Patriot Act, the bete noire of civil libertarians. When the Obama administration's point man on the legislation came to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, he sounded very much like his predecessors in the Bush administration. [...]

The performance must have been disheartening for Democrats, because [Assistant Attorney General David Kris] was supposed to be one of the good guys. Once a Clinton and Bush Justice Department official, he scolded his former Bush colleagues in 2006 for their "weak justification" of the warrantless wiretapping program.

But if disappointing, Kris's guardedness was to be expected. Obama may have promised new openness, but "so far, the continuities between the Obama and Bush administration overwhelm the differences," says Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

Apparently, responsibility makes you grow up fast.

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TO INHERIT THE FUTURE YOU NEED TO REBRAND THE PAST:

The history wars: It is time for British politicians to stop bickering about the past and confront the future (Bagehot, Sep 24th 2009, The Economist)

[A]rguments about history are a kind of comforting displacement activity. Talking about the past, for some politicians, may be less a way of understanding the future than of avoiding it.

For more than a decade, the business of politics has been spending: the dispensation of baubles, pork and promises to assorted groups; the divvying up of an ever-expanding cake. This is the world most politicians on every front bench grew up in. It has now vanished. Suddenly everyone parrots the need for spending cuts, like courtiers paying hurried obeisance to a new king. But the two main parties are coy about the details, either because these are too alarming to share, or because nobody knows what they are. Likewise, another pressing worry—how to make the British economy less dependent on financial services—is mostly discussed in vapid generalisations about “green” jobs. Much easier to revisit bygone choices than confront new ones.

In democratic politics, it is not quite true that he who controls the past controls the future. In a way, the reverse is the case: opinions of a party’s image and prospectus retroactively alter the way their histories are regarded. At their conferences, Labour and the Tories need to end the history wars and, if they want to inherit it, concentrate on the future.

Whichever party is most closely identified with the Third Way politics that have dominated Britain since 1979 will win, so long as they pretend that they are doing something new to get their base to come along.

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WHICH PUTS PAID TO THE CRAZY NOTION THAT ALL BANKERS ARE JEWISH:

Democrats Are Jarred by Drop In Fundraising (Paul Kane, 9/25/09, Washington Post)

Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party's harsh rhetoric about big business.

The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP's long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees' receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.

The vast majority of those declines were accounted for by the absence of large donors who, strategists say, have shut their checkbooks in part because Democrats have heightened their attacks on the conduct of major financial firms and set their sights on rewriting the laws that regulate their behavior.

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WHICH IS WHY YOU HAVE TO RUN AGAINST SPENDING, NOT THE ECONOMY:

World Trade Volumes Surge in July (PAUL HANNON, 9/25/09, WSJ)

In another sign the global economy is emerging from its downturn, data released Friday showed world trade volumes rose at the fastest rate in over five years in July.

Trade volumes increased by 3.5% from June, the largest increase in a single month since December 2003, according to the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, known as the CPB.

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NOW WE'RE TALKIN'!:

Will House "De-Fund ACORN Bill" De-Fund Military Contractors? (Jake Tapper, September 24, 2009, ABC News: Political Punch)

"We can't have a situation where the laws of justice are applied to one organization and not to any of the others, particularly when there are organizations that are polluting water for our soldiers and electrocuting them," [Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida] says.

Contractor KBR installed electrical wiring in Iraq that led to electrocution deaths of US soldiers. One such death, of Green Beret Sgt. Ryan Maseth, was classified by the Army Criminal Investigations Division as a "negligent homicide," though the Pentagon ruled it would not pursue criminal charges.

The Florida Democrat says that the legislation the House passed characterized as banning federal funds from ACORN is actually much more broadly written than that, and could impact hundreds of companies if signed into law.

The House bill, offered by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., bans Federal contracts, grants, funds, and agreements from any covered organization -- including "(a)ny organization that has filed a fraudulent form with any Federal or State regulatory agency."

Using it to attack military contractors would cure any bill of attainder flaws.

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FIFTY YEARS OF TALKING POINT DOWN THE DRAIN:

Poll: Health-care reform no big deal to most (CHRIS BRENNAN, 9/24/09, Philadelphia Daily News)

Want to know why President Obama continues to have trouble gaining traction in the national debate about health-care reform?

A Franklin & Marshall College poll to be released today offers a few key clues. The national survey of 1,046 people, including 900 registered voters, found that only one in five considered health care to be the most important problem facing their families today.

In case you wondered how they've managed not to pass a health care plan since Truman tried...

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CONSTITUTIONS ARE STUBBORN THINGS:

CRS: House ACORN ban may be unconstitutional (Glenn Thrush, 9/24/09, Politico)

The Congressional Research Service has analyzed the case law and other legal issues surrounding last week's ACORN ban passed in the House and found the measure could be interpreted as a "bill of attainder" and therefore unconstitutional, according to copy of the report obtained by POLITICO.

A bill of attainder – which is prohibited in Article 1 of the Constitution -- is a law targeted to hurt or help an individual. If a bill is regarded primarily as punitive, instead of being strictly regulatory, it could be interpreted as an attainder bill, according to legal experts.

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IF YOU'RE STARTING A JEWGRASS BAND...:

Jewish Bluegrass: Lovers of the banjo, fiddle and mandolin blend cultural identity and religious faith to create a uniquely American sound (Jen Miller, 9/24/09, Smithsonian.com)

This Passover, my friend Lester Feder sat at the head of his family’s Seder table, strumming away on his banjo and belting out Hebrew lyrics with a big-voiced Appalachian twang. As a bluegrass and old-time musician myself, I was familiar with Lester’s wailing sound. As a Jew, I’d been to countless Seders. But the transposition of these traditions was like nothing I’d ever imagined.

For Feder, a Northern Virginia native, fusing his American identity with his religious heritage through music was a natural development. “I feel far more connected to the old time traditions of the upper South than the Ashkenazi traditions of Eastern Europe,” he said. “I wanted to make a Seder that was my own.”

“Jewgrass,” as this fusion is sometimes called, is played by a diverse group of old-time and bluegrass musicians. Among them are New York City Jews who grew up during the 1960s folk revival, orthodox Jews who sing Hebrew prayers set to bluegrass melodies and klezmer musicians who infuse their music with Appalachian fiddle tunes. These lovers of the banjo, the fiddle and the mandolin have found a uniquely American way to express their Jewish cultural identity and religious faith.

...don't you have to call yourselves The Hillelbillies?

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HOMEY KNOWS HIS WAY AROUND TURTLE BAY:

Netanyahu Blasts Ahmadinejad at U.N. (CHRISTOPHER RHOADS, 9/24/09, WSJ)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a blistering attack on the floor of the United Nations Thursday on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying the hearing granted the Iranian president the night before amounted to a "disgrace of the U.N. charter."

Mr. Netanyahu dramatically held up copies of minutes of the meeting of Nazi officials in 1942 where plans were made for the extermination of the Jews, as well as constructions plans of Nazi concentration camps.

"Are these protocols lies?" he asked, waving them in his hand. "Are the successive German governments that have kept these documents for posterity all liars?"

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IT'S NOT A BIG ENOUGH TENT TO LET THESE LUNATICS IN:

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life: Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him (Alexander Zaitchik, Sep. 16, 2009, Salon)

Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."

[M]ore interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap." [...]

By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends."

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from "any individual or party" that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society," was the nation's most prominent Birch defender.

Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power.

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called "Tragedy and Hope." Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. "Tragedy and Hope," Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley's book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called "The Naked Capitalist." Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen's nephew Joel).

In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

"The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."

Skousen was unbowed. In 1971, he founded the Freeman Institute, a research organization devoted to the study of the super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. (The institute later changed its name to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which has offices in Malta, Idaho, and continues to publish Skousen's books, including Glenn Beck's favorite work of history, "The 5,000 Year Leap.")

By the end of the 1970s, the death of Skousen's biggest allies within the Mormon church hierarchy cleared the way for an official disavowal of his work. In 1979, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball issued an order to every Mormon clergyman in the U.S. stating "no announcements should be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute lectures or events that are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said during such lectures."

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP.

"Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity," says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. "By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years."

In 1981, Skousen published "The 5,000 Year Leap," the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn't that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan's second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text "The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, "The Making of America" explained that "[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains."

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THE BEGINNING OF ALL WISDOM...:

Labour’s betrayal of society: The dominant legacy of the left is state authoritarianism and private libertarianism (Phillip Blond, 24 September 2009, New Statesman)

Why and how is the political philosophy that is most evidently social, and claims all righteousness and power as a result in fact so asocial and unilateral? The answer is that, for the most part, socialism is founded on liberalism and liberalism is founded on a hatred of society. Modern liberalism begins with Rousseau and Rousseau begins with the idea that our emergence into society constitutes our original imprisonment: "Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains." Society so conceived is fundamentally sinister because it compels man to inauthenticity. As such, the task of an individual in a society is to construe a settlement that protects individual will and insulates its subjective desires from the corrupting influence of others. Society for a liberal is valid only if it is composed of others exactly like himself. Rousseau invents the "general will" through which the individual, in obeying others, is obeying only himself because all have become the same.

But this autonomy can be protected only if others do not violate its bounds; and this is a role that can be played by the state only. The state then becomes the great policer and equaliser of humanity, and through the general will it must reconcile each individual with every other. As such, the state must strip society and people of all differential ties, beliefs and values in order to ensure equality and fairness; naked and denuded we now stand equal and alone before the state as the ultimate guarantor of our freedom.

Thus does modern liberalism underwrite all the great totalitarianisms of our age, from the terror of revolutionary France to the Cultural Revolution of Mao in China.

...is the recognition that the authentic man is evil.

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YOU EVER NOTICE...:

Free will is not an illusion after all (Anil Ananthaswamy, 9/23/09, New Scientist)

Long sceptical of Libet's interpretation, Jeff Miller and Judy Trevena of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, attempted to tease apart what prompts the RP using a similar experiment, with a key twist.

They also used scalp electrodes, but instead of letting their volunteers decide when to move, Miller and Trevena asked them

to wait for an audio tone before deciding whether to tap a key. If Libet's interpretation were correct, Miller reasoned, the RP should be greater after the tone when a person chose to tap the key.

While there was an RP before volunteers made their decision to move, the signal was the same whether or not they elected to tap. Miller concludes that the RP may merely be a sign that the brain is paying attention and does not indicate that a decision has been made.

Miller and Trevena also failed to find evidence of subconscious decision-making in a second experiment. This time they asked volunteers to press a key after the tone, but to decide on the spot whether to use their left or right hand. As movement in the right limbs is related to the brain signals in the left hemisphere and vice versa, they reasoned that if an unconscious process is driving this decision, where it occurs in the brain should depend on which hand is chosen. But they found no such correlation.

...that folks who deny free will still get upset if you punch them in the face and take their wallet?

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HAS THE UR EVER MET AN ANTI-SEMITIC MEGALOMANIAC HE DOESNT SUPPORT?:

They're torturing me, Honduras' Zelaya claims: Honduras' fallen leader told The Miami Herald he is being subjected to mind-altering gas and radiation -- and that `Israeli mercenaries' are planning to assassinate him. (FRANCES ROBLES, 9/23/09, MiamiHerald.com)

Honduran police spokesman Orlin Cerrato said he knew nothing of any radiation devices being used against the former president.

"He says there are mercenaries against him? Using some kind of apparatus?'' Cerrato said. ``No, no, no, no. Sincerely: no. The only elements surrounding that embassy are police and military, and they have no such apparatus.''

Police responded to reports of looting throughout the city Tuesday night. Civil disturbances subsided Wednesday afternoon, when a crush of people rushed grocery stores and gas stations in the capital.

Israeli government sources in Miami said they could not confirm the presence of any "Israelis mercenaries'' in Honduras. [...]

The Obama administration suspended economic aid to Honduras and withdrew the visas of members of the current administration.

About 75 percent of Honduras' commerce depends on the United States, Zelaya said. And because powerful economic forces were behind Zelaya's ouster, Obama should hit those forces where it hurts most, Zelaya said.

"I have told this to Obama, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the U.S. Embassy here and anyone else who will listen,'' Zelaya said. "They know how to act."

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DEAD END OF HISTORY THAT IS:

Europe's Center-Left Parties Stuck in a Dead End (Manfred Ertel, Hans-Jürgen Schlamp and Stefan Simons, 9/24/09, Der Spiegel)

The decline of left-leaning parties is more than a Scottish or even a British problem. The malaise, like a stubborn virus, has afflicted virtually every European social democratic party.

In a week in which left-leaning Germans are hoping that at least one in four voters will vote for the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) in next Sunday's election, their counterparts from Malmö to Lisbon face their biggest crisis ever. Some 26 years ago, the respected German-British sociologist Lord Ralf Dahrendorf predicted the end of the social democratic era. Now it looks like his prophecy is finally becoming reality.

At the beginning of the new century, social democrats and socialists, at the pinnacle of their power, controlled the governments in 12 of the European Union's 15 members. Reflecting the sentiments of then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, British Prime Minister Tony Blair proudly proclaimed: "We are the new radicals." The mantra of the modernization of their traditional political ideas was intoned in ponderous strategy papers. The frequently invoked "third way" was expected to lead to a "new center," in a bid to adapt social democratic policies to conform to a new social and economic reality -- and to make them appeal to new classes of voters.

The two model socialists, Schröder and Blair, met in Florence with Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, US President Bill Clinton, Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and EU Commission President Romano Prodi for a "summit of modernizers" -- a meeting of the world's social democratic movers and shakers.

Today, none of these reformers is still in office, and their "third way" has proven to be a dead end.

Decline of the Left

Ironically, the decline of the social democratic movement began in Scandinavia, a model region for leftists. A center-right coalition has ruled Denmark since 2001, and in 2006 then Prime Minister Göran Persson lost the general election in Sweden to the conservatives. In Sweden, the conservatives call themselves the Moderates, are perceived as the real modernizers and -- an even sharper thorn in the side of Swedish leftists -- as "modern social democrats."

Finland, Greece and the Netherlands were next to shift into the conservative camp. In Italy, the leaders of a social-democratically oriented party alliance were brought down in rapid succession. After the fall of leftist politician Massimo D'Alema and then Prime Minister Romano Prodi, Walter Veltroni, the popular former mayor of Rome, resigned his leadership of the newly founded Democratic Party.

Lionel Jospin failed to win the French Socialist Party's nomination for president, and in 2007 Blair resigned to make way for Brown. Last September, then Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer lost another six points in a legislative election, marking his Austrian Social Democratic Party's worst result in postwar history. Gusenbauer's successor, Werner Faymann, only managed to hold onto power with a smaller grand coalition government.

Since the European election in June, Europe's social democrats and socialists now hold only a quarter of seats in the European Parliament -- a historic low -- and they could face their next series of disappointments in German and Portuguese parliamentary elections on Sunday. The only bright spot is in oil-rich Norway, which is not part of the EU and has remained largely untouched by the global economic crisis, where Social Democratic Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's coalition government won reelection in mid-September. [...]

On the one hand, the social democrats' zealous pursuit of modernization and reform has put off some of their traditional supporters. In the search for new voters, center-left parties have neglected their base. [...]

The conservative parties, for their part, abandoned their excursions into market radicalism, reduced their demands for deregulation and embarked -- rhetorically, at least -- on a return to the center.

The reality is that voters don't particularly care whether they're governed by a party traditionally of the Left or of the Right, so long as it is currently Third Way. But the party bases care passionately, even derangedly, and would rather lose power by forcing a return to outdated ideological purity than continue succeeding by compromising between the First and the Second. Thus, the Tories dispose of Maggie and Labour tires of Blair--though the voters don't--and Al Gore runs against his own vice presidency as surely as the House GOP rages against the most successful period in the Party's own history.

Logically, one would expect Third Way third parties to arise under such circumstances. But the divide between liberals and conservatives on religious faith and, therefore, on morality is so stark these days that it's not likely to happen. If Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Leon Panetta, Newt Gingrich, Joe Lieberman and a few others announced they were establishing a new party and nominating Jeb Bush and Evan Bayh as their presidential ticket, it would be truly formidable. But the party's platform on abortion, gay marriage, and the like would be so divisive it would struggle to cohere.

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THAT, MY CHILDREN, WAS WHAT A REAL ECONOMIC CRISIS WAS LIKE:

Econoclasts: The following is excerpted from Chapter 1 of Econoclasts (Brian Domitrovic, 09/24/09, First Principles)

From 1968 to 1982, the American stock market nearly collapsed, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 70 percent of its real value. The “misery index,” whereby the inflation and unemployment percentages are represented as real numbers and summed, blew through the historical trend of 6 to 8 early in the 1970s, plateaued in the double digits, then hit unlucky 21 in 1980. Interest rates also hit 21—no misprint, a 21 percent prime rate—in 1980. Big things that never were supposed to go bust declared default: New York City, most famously, and Chrysler, too.

Those who tried to wait out the chaos by saving money were brutally punished. The greatest inflation since the Revolutionary War destroyed the value of funds in bank accounts, the stock market was in free fall, and municipal-bond issuers missed payments. The only thing to do was to stash cash in commodities. Because commodities originated in the geologic history of the planet, commodities had a guaranteed delimitation of supply and therefore could hold their value against inflation. Gold, oil, gas, land—everything in the commodities universe went up in the 1970s, as if everything in the earth had suddenly become impossibly scarce.

The halcyon “postwar prosperity” that had characterized the years after 1945 seemed to be in terminal decline, a brilliant flash that had lasted for an unusually long spell and had given the illusion of permanence. It was hard to put a finger on what was going on. Sometime around 1970, everything started getting worse, economically, with every passing year.

Inflation had hitherto been rather unheard of. Now it reliably hit double-digit rates. Unemployment, theoretically a converse of inflation, and low since World War II, went up, too. Unemployment in tandem with inflation led to the popularization of a new word, “stagflation” (from stagnation plus inflation), which was on everyone’s lips by the last days of disco. Entrepreneurial startups, the very stuff of the “American dream,” passed from the scene; venture capital was waiting things out in commodities.

Then there was the government. Throughout the long 1970s, the federal government of the United States preoccupied itself with such things as fixing prices, pressuring labor unions not to take wage increases, begging shoppers to rein in their spending, mistaking nominal for real income in the tax code, adding regulations, running deficits, reneging on the pledge to exchange dollars for gold, and gobbling up an ever-increasing share of the gross national product. This was no ordinary downturn. It was not exactly the Great Depression, either. And it was hard to pin the blame on “business” for what was going on.
WIN button

What was going on? Unsure, President Ford asked the nation in 1974 to “Whip Inflation Now.” He also asked people to sign a pledge saying that they would refrain from new purchases, in the interest of holding down inflation. Five years later, with the same problems still raging, a memo to President Jimmy Carter proposed that America had gotten caught up in a “malaise,” whatever that meant. In other words, leadership was befuddled. It had no answers.

What Happened?

The most important fact about the economic funk of the 1970s, the stagflation decade, was that it stopped. [...]

The unique ability of the United States to maintain a historic rate of economic growth over the long term is what has rendered this nation the world’s lone “hyperpower,” as the French are sometimes wont to say. The only other realistic aspirants to that status—China and India—will not see economic maturity for decades to come.

The exception to this trend was the stagflation decade: 1973–82. That was the only period since 1945 when the United States did not sustain a 3.3 percent rate of growth. Before and after this interregnum, there was the odd, mild recession or boom year, but the growth trend remained at that steady, historically high rate. Growth was 3.3 percent from 1945 to 1973, and it was 3.3 percent from 1982 to 2007. From 1973 to 1982, however, growth averaged 1.8 percent, essentially the rate that prevailed in the long semi-stasis that gripped Japan and Western Europe in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

That the 1973–1982 period proved to be an interregnum—as opposed to an augury of a new trend—is the most significant fact in the postwar economic history of the United States. It is also, from a geostrategic perspective, one of the most significant facts in the postwar history of world power relations. [...]

Supply-side economics was never meant to be a sustained policy requiring annual recalibration and reapplication. In this it differed markedly from Keynesianism. Rather, the purpose of supply-side economics was to solve one problem: the great stagflation. Establishing a high trend line of American growth was the furthest thing from the supply-siders’ minds in the 1970s, because that trend line already had been definitively established by history. The matter at hand was re-establishing the trend line. Once that discrete matter was dealt with, the supply-siders would allow the economy to achieve its healthy potential.

A metaphor from Spanish bullfighting can perhaps illustrate the point. A toreador can bring a muscular, energetic bull to a full stop simply by lowering a sash in front of its face. With the lifting of the sash, the bull surges forward for as long as it desires. So it was with the American economy. Bursting with potential in the 1970s, a potential inherent in the nation’s inherited entrepreneurial knack and enhanced by a technological revolution of historic dimensions, the American economy found itself held in place by a master wielding a sash. The master was the government, the sash a destabilized means of exchange and a punitive tax system. Come a certain juncture, the sash was lifted, the bull surged, and the lore since has been of the energy, dynamism, and insatiability of the bull.

Meanwhile, Paul Volcker--very nearly the only thing Jimmy Carter got right--was killing the bull of inflation.

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IN COLLEGE IN THE EARLY '80s...:

Prisoners get drunk on swine flu hand gel (Daily Telegraph, 9/24/09)

Inmates have been drinking the liquid soap placed on their wing after realising it contained alcohol.

The detergent was meant to beat off the threat of swine flu in the Verne Prison on Portland, Dorset.

However, instead of rubbing it into their hands, inmates at the category C prison have been placing their mouths over the dispensers and consuming it.

...though mainstream Academia and the commentariat still took the USSR seriously, we were fortunate enough to have a political science professor at Colgate who knew they were through. One of the things he'd have us do is read the journals (in translation) that the Soviets produced for their own citizens. One regular story that had us all laughing was where they'd admonish workers and pilots at military bases to stop drinking the jet fuel. As he said, a state that has made alcohol so scarce and life so bad that guys are willing to kill themselves that way just to escape for a few moments is doomed.

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EXEMPTIONS ARE WHAT HE DOES BEST:

Proposal would limit scope of new oversight agency (ANNE FLAHERTY, 9/23/09, Associated Press)

Ceding ground amid growing business opposition, the Obama administration on Wednesday signaled a willingness to exempt retailers, real estate brokers, lawyers, auto dealers, cable companies and accountants from oversight of its proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. [...]

The proposed agency, CFPA for short, is the centerpiece of Obama's broader effort...

Suppose you bwere going to spoof a Democratic presidential administration; is there anything you'd do differently than what the UR has in real life?

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AND THERE IS ONLY ONE AMERICAN REACTION TO THE STORY:

Subaquatic homesick blues: Is Melville’s Moby-Dick the ultimate American novel? Even today, it haunts a nation’s thoughts and dreams (Greil Marcus, 24 September 2009, New Statesman)

Even without rereading the book, even with only a TV Guide sense of the tale, one is rereading the book when one chances on John Wayne's Tom Dunson in Red River on late-night TV, a movie made in 1948; or recalls Elvis Presley two decades later, facing an audience for the first time in years and against the blankness of that unknown hoisting a mike stand like a harpoon, thrusting it over the crowd, and shouting "Moby Dick!"; or watches a black boy, one "Woody", an early incarnation of Bob Dylan, pitched out of a boxcar by hobo thugs and into a river, only to see a right whale gliding towards him, in the 2007 film I'm Not There; or channel-switches into the 2008 episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent where the tormented police detective Bobby Goren comes face to face with the unmistakable handiwork of the escaped serial killer Nicole Wallace, once a literature professor whose speciality was Melville. She lectures in a flashback: "The descent into madness is usually preceded by obsession. What characterises Ahab's obsession? I always fancied it was man's unrelenting pursuit of his own potency." "I'm told she's your white whale," Goren's boss says to him - just before Goren receives a card postmarked Pittsfield, Massachusetts. When, early on in the book, Captain Peleg asks Ishmael, "Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye yet clapped eye on Captain Ahab?" and Ishmael answers, "Who is Captain Ahab, sir?" we're surprised he hasn't heard of him; we have.

Did Melville somehow know, or hope, that his country would always seek out the mysteries that, in his big book - the book that would for the rest of his life erase his name from the memories of his fellow citizens - he took down as if they were the plainest, most obvious facts, himself the sub-sub-librarian he so confidently laughed off? That letter from Hawthorne, the letter in which he showed Melville that he "understood the book", the letter that, unlike Melville's response to Hawthorne, does not survive - it could have been one of Poe's hoaxes, were he still around to forge it, a trick to keep the characters alive, running their histories through history yet unmade, unmaking history as they left it behind and continued
on their way.

What did Hawthorne say? No, Melville may not have kept letters, as Hawthorne did, but one can imagine a ceremony a little more to the point than taking out the trash. "Cool as an icicle," as Ishmael says of Queequeg sitting among the other sailors in the Spouter-Inn, his harpoon at hand, "reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly." So how cool, how genteel of you, Herman, sitting in your writing room late at night, with no one to glimpse a single word as you burned the pages!

There was no better way to keep us reading; with its author more than a century dead, the book is the sea we swim in.

In the scene following the Epilogue doesn't Ishmael have to rally the Rachel to go after the fish?

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MORGENTHAU SMILES:

The Miracle of Dullness (ROGER COHEN, 9/24/09, NY Times)

Every risk-averse fiber in Merkel’s body proclaims the social-market consensus has prevailed, even through financial crisis.

The extent of discord may be measured by the fact that Merkel’s chief opponent is also her foreign minister in the governing Grand Coalition: Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democrat leader. He’s a likeable technocrat who always seems to be wondering how he ever ended up as a politician.

None of the above should suggest there’s nothing at stake. There is: a little. If Merkel gets her favored option — a center-right coalition with the liberal Free Democrats — tax cuts, nuclear power and support for the Afghan mission (Germany has sent more than 4,000 troops) will get a boost. If not, well, more of the same is in order. My sense is most Germans feel market reforms of recent years have gone far enough.

Germans are hunkered down, not unhappy but uninspired. This has been a campaign of astonishing intellectual nullity. I spoke of hope and concern: The former springs from Germany’s absorption of its eastern third and passage into normality, the latter from the country’s numbness.

Nothing — not the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, not the faltering direction of the European Union (once a German obsession, now a sideshow), not financial Armageddon — seems able to stir Germans from contemplation of their navels.

Usually when the Democrats see a body with a prognosis like Germany's they fight for the honor of pulling the plug.

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WHAT'S THE POINT OF STORMING OUT ON A GUY YOU'LL TALK TO WITHOUT PRECONDITIONS?:

US, NZ and Australia storm out of UN (Mindfood, Sep 24, 2009)

"It is disappointing that Mr Ahmadinejad has once again chosen to espouse hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric," Mark Kornblau, a spokesman to the US mission to the United Nations, said.

Maybe Mr. Kornblau was just hustling to another room for the Administration's private meetings with Ahmedinejad?

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THE PROBLEM ISN'T THAT WE MIGHT GET RATIONING...:

Prof. discusses health care costs (Christina Wray, September 24, 2009 , The Dartmouth)

Reducing health care spending is both economically important and beneficial to health care quality, [Dartmouth Medical School professor H. Gilbert Welch] said, noting that excessive treatment can often have negative effects.

“Excessive intervention is particularly problematic at two extremes of health: the well and the dying,” Welch said. “Aggressive care for the dying is inhumane, and as for the well, it’s hard to make them any better.”

Welch cited a study by DMS professor Elliott Fisher, director of population health for TDI, that found effective care was provided equally to multiple patients with a particular illness, regardless of how much money the patients spent on care.

“The more money you spend, the worse patients tend to do,” Welch said, noting that aggressive treatment can often cause greater harm than the initial problem.

“Let’s not deliver services that don’t work, and let’s not deliver services that patients don’t want,” Welch said.

...but that the rationing regime wouldn't be strict enough.

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ALL THAT CASH IS BARELY ENOUGH TO COUNTER THE GLOBAL DEFLATION:

Federal Reserve leaves interest rates near zero (Dion Lee, 9/24/09, LA Times)

The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that it would keep short-term interest rates near zero for the foreseeable future, even though the central bank acknowledged that the economy was recovering from its long downturn.

The announcement after a two-day Fed meeting makes clear that the agency is in no hurry to raise interest rates despite concerns that the federal government's soaring deficits and the Fed's extraordinary stimulus measures will eventually drive up inflation.

Oil stays below $69 as US crude supplies jump (GEORGE JAHN, 9/24/09, Associated Press)

Oil prices dropped further below $69 a barrel Thursday, after an unexpected jump in U.S. crude inventories suggested consumer demand remains in the doldrums.

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DREAMING BIG:

India's new class of entrepreneurs (Arvind Singhal , September 24, 2009, Times of India)

This new middle class of entrepreneurs is fundamentally different to entrepreneurs of yesteryears.

They are, in many ways, more "genuine" entrepreneurs since most of them are starting out in a field that is much more level than ever, and hence the competitive landscape for them is also much more challenging.

Further, the aspirations of most of this new breed of entrepreneurs are way beyond just achieving a comfortable living. They dream big, and while they may have respect for the mega-entrepreneurs of today -- which include, beyond the Tata, Birla and Godrej [ Get Quote ] families, the Ambanis and the Mittals, Mahindras, Ruias and Munjals -- they are not overawed by them. Indeed, many such till-recently "middle-class" entrepreneurs (Adani, GMR and GVK, to name a few) have already joined the ranks of mega-entrepreneurs.

Hundreds more will do so in the next decade.

These Gen Next entrepreneurs are also far more attuned to the emerging needs of the Indian (and global) economy and hence are more aggressively entering potentially exciting sectors such as agri- and biotechnology, food processing, healthcare delivery, education, clean and efficient energy, consumer-oriented services such as travel and hospitality, food services, micro-finance, etc, setting themselves up to join the ranks of the next decade's mega-entrepreneurs.

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DID THE UR REALLY THINK GROVELLING WOULD GET THEM TO CO-OPERATE?:

China opposes Iran nuclear sanctions (AFP, 24 September 2009)

China on Thursday reiterated its opposition to sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme, as Tehran came under mounting pressure from world leaders at the United Nations to stop uranium enrichment.

"We always believe that sanctions and pressure are not the way out," foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters.

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THE UR'S "I AM NOT A CROOK" MOMENT:

Did Netanyahu Best Obama in Mideast-Peace Tussle? (Tony Karon, 9/23/09, TIME)

On Wednesday, Sept. 23, President Barack Obama used his first-ever address to the U.N. General Assembly to try and reverse the impression that his ambitious Middle East peace effort had suffered a reversal at the hand of Israel's hawkish Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. "I am not naive," Obama told the gathered world leaders.

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THE WAVE BUILDS:

GOP gets big bump of donors in August (Fredreka Schouten and Matt Kelley, 9/24/09, USA TODAY)

Despite being in the minority in Congress, Republican campaign committees outraised Democrats by $1.7 million in August as they have aggressively collected political cash amid the rancorous debate over health care.

Republicans also held an edge over Democrats in the amount of money available, when counting debts, as both parties set the stage for the 2010 elections, in which more than three dozen competitive House and Senate seats are at stake.

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OF COURSE, IF HE WERE CAPABLE OF GIVING A DECENT SPEECH HE WOULDN'T HAVE TO BE OUT EXPLAINING IT AWAY:

The President Risks Getting Stale (Karl Rove, 9/24/09, WSJ)

Mr. Obama made a classic mistake of politicians on a downward-bending arc. He jumps out in front of the cameras without having something fresh to offer.

As a result, he was on the defensive and failed to win over the slice of America that opposes his plans. His refusal to sit down with Fox News's Chris Wallace made him look petulant if not fearful, and his answers weakened his credibility.

Take, for example, his dustup on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" over whether requiring Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine was a tax. Legislation in the House and Senate defines it as a tax, and Mr. Stephanopoulos said it fit Merriam-Webster's definition of a tax. But the president insisted it was not a tax. That's because by favoring the mandate Mr. Obama is breaking his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

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THANKS, W:

White House backs accountability of 'No Child' law (LIBBY QUAID, 9/24/09, AP)

The Obama administration is committed to the testing and school accountability at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law championed by former President George W. Bush, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

In a speech prepared for delivery Thursday, Duncan gave the law credit for shining a spotlight on kids who need the most help. No Child Left Behind pushes schools to boost the performance of minority and poor children, who lag behind their white peers on standardized tests.

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THEY'LL STILL BE LOOKING FOR THAT PEAK WHEN THE RAPTURE COMES:

Oxy oil discovery could spark new interest in California's energy potential (Ronald D. White, September 23, 2009, LA Times)

In July, Occidental revealed it had found 150 million to 250 million barrels of oil and natural gas in an undisclosed part of Kern County using techniques that the oil company's executives would rather not talk about. It was California's biggest find in 35 years.

Some experts say it could herald a period of new exploration in California and the U.S.

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OF ALL PEOPLE, THE UR OUGHT NOT BE AVOIDING A LEADER JUST BECAUSE HE'S A DEAD MAN WALKING:

Barack Obama snubs Gordon Brown over private talks: White House spurned five requests from PM's aides for bilateral meeting (Patrick Wintour, 9/23/09, Guardian)

Gordon Brown lurched from being hailed as a global statesman to intense embarrassment tonight, after it emerged US President Barack Obama had turned down no fewer than five requests from Downing Street to hold a bilateral meeting at the United Nations in New York or at the G20 summit starting in Pittsburgh today.

The prime minister, eager to portray himself as a leading player on the international stage in America this week, was also forced to play down suggestions from inside his own party that he might step down early, either due to ill health or deteriorating eyesight.

Try to imagine W snubbing the British leader. You can't.

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FUNNY WHAT PERSPECTIVE DOES:

Neo-conservatism: Irving Kristol’s living legacy: The pioneer of one of the United States’s most potent intellectual-political currents has died. But it is far too early for an obituary of the neo-conservative movement. (Cas Mudde, 23 - 09 - 2009, Open Democracy)

The Public Interest, an enterprise in which Kristol was joined by the renowned sociologist Daniel Bell (who would never fully embrace neo-conservatism), was at the outset a politically broad-based publication featuring both conservative and liberal authors. It published accessible social-scientific analyses of the relevant policy-issues of the day, with a particular emphasis on welfare. The basic intellectual framework was a kind of conservative liberalism: the goals conservative, the means to achieve them quite liberal. This generation appeared to be seeking a blueprint for a "conservative welfare state" (as one of Kristol's prominent essays was titled); opponents on the right would label it "big-government conservatism".

The Public Interest in its early years encompassed a range of political positions, and tended to be quite cautious in its recommendations. It exhibited a high degree of trust in social science (in sharp contrast to traditional conservatism); at the same time authors were aware of the complexities of human relations and society, and avoided overly strong and simplistic conclusions. [...]

[T]he modern neo-conservative movement has in a sense strayed from its originating outlook and priorities - though this was also true of Irving Kristol himself, who became increasingly partisan in later decades (to the extent of aligning with the religious right). In any event, Kristol and his contemporaries' achievement is considerable; it could be said with only a touch of exaggeration that while their foreign-policy agenda has been to a degree tainted by their offspring, their domestic agenda has become established at the heart of American politics and society.

Indeed, while many commentators have identified the Ronald Reagan era as the highpoint of neo-conservative power (notwithstanding contemporary criticism of the "feelgood president" from the ideological right), there is a case for arguing that Bill Clinton's administrations in the 1990s were a closer fit with the formative neo-conservative agenda of conservative liberalism. More generally, virtually all administrations since Reagan's have based their domestic agenda on the key values of initial neo-conservatism: including a strong belief in the market coupled with a conservative welfare state, as forces that together are expected to regulate socio-economic change and socio-cultural manners.

The ends are conservative but the means liberal? Sure, if the end is a stable society and the means a welfare net. But if the end is the safety net and the means capitalist innovations thereupon, then the ends are liberal and the means conservative. regardless, you see why he ended up allied mostly with the Christian Right.

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WELL, HE IS AN OBLIGING SORT OF FELLOW:

Barack at the UN: Was this Obama’s most naïve speech ever? (Niles Gardiner, 9/23/09, Daily Telegraph)

It’s always a bad sign when a US president gets several rounds of heavy applause at the UN General Assembly, as Barack Obama did this morning in New York. Needless to say, the loudest cheers from the gathering of world leaders came when he condemned the actions of a close US ally, Israel, in continuing to build settlements in the West Bank. You can always rely on attacks on the Israelis to generate the biggest roars of approval at any meeting of the United Nations, and Obama dutifully obliged.

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THEY JUST WANTED BOTTLES OF LONE STAR:

Science: Another Ice Age? (TIME, Jun. 24, 1974)

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling.

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CAN WE INTERJECT WITH A QUESTION HERE?:

Obama’s Speech to the United Nations General Assembly (President Obama, 9/23/09)

I have been in office for just nine months -- though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences, and outpaced by our problems.

Is he really addressing Burma, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, the PRC, etc. and saying we aren't defined by our differences?

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NOW THAT'S FUNNY:

Dems rejects GOP attempt at greater transparency (AP, Sep 23, 2009)

Senate Finance Committee Democrats have rejected a GOP amendment that would have required a health overhaul bill to be available online for 72 hours before the committee votes.

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S.O.P.:

Rahm's Precedent for Meddling (Lloyd Grove, 9/23/09, Daily Beast)

President Barack Obama’s amazingly awkward attempt to nudge damaged New York Gov. David Paterson out of the race to keep his job—as chronicled in lavish leaks over the weekend by top White House staffers to The New York Times—reminded me of another misstep by a different rookie administration.

It turns out that Paterson, a liberal African American from Harlem, shares a surprising kinship with Sen. Richard Shelby, a conservative white Republican from Alabama: Both have been targeted for extinction by Rahm Emanuel. If history is any guide, Paterson—just like Shelby—might benefit from the experience. [...]

Emanuel—then White House political director, and now President Obama’s chief of staff—eagerly quarterbacked the revenge play. Shelby milked it for all it was worth, casting himself as a courageous independent who couldn’t be muzzled or pushed around. There were two unintended consequences: 1) The senator’s home-state popularity, already robust, shot through the roof; and 2) After the Democrats lost the House and Senate in the next year’s disastrous midterms, Shelby switched parties.

Sixteen years later, Rahm seems to have forgotten the lesson of Shelby’s Teachable Moment.

As Teddy Davis's round-up at The Note demonstrates, there's nothing amazing about an Obama screw-up.

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THAT SHARK'S BEEN JUMPED (via Glenn Dryfoos):

President Obama -- Stop Talking! (Greg Easterbrook, 9/22/09, ESPN: TMQ)

[T]oo-frequent speechmaking devalues the presidential voice. When the president speaks occasionally, he commands attention; a president who speaks all the time becomes just another clanging cymbal in the background yammer. I bet Obama gives 10 speeches for every one given by John Kennedy. At the current rate, by 2010, an Obama speech will no longer be viewed as an important moment.

2010? It had happened by September of his first year, which is pretty nearly the point where W began giving big speeches (he'd already given the stem cell one), 32.1 Million Watch President Obama’s Health Care Address to Congress on TV (Nielsen, 9/10/09)

Viewership to last night’s address was down 38.6% from President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, which aired from approximately 9:00PM to 10:30PM.

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BACK TO THE 90s!:

Congressional Takeover by GOP Would Save, not Wreck, Obama Presidency (Michael Medved, September 23, 2009, Townhall)

Barack Obamas grandiose agenda offers the GOP a grand opportunity in the upcoming Congressional elections. Republicans shouldnt attack the President himself, who remains personally popular (according to all the polls) even while the voters disapprove of his policies. In any event, President Obama will retain the White House until 2013 and fulfill the term he was elected to serve, so the opposition and the public ought to make the most of it by providing President Obama with the balance and even keel that he desperately needs. The GOP should field candidates who promise to pull the president back to the center, back to the mainstream and who decry the ultra-liberal Pelosi-crats who have been dragging him to the extreme left. The nation will benefit, and Barack Obama will probably lead more effectively, when hes forced to cobble-together consensus with a revitalized opposition, rather than competing with his Democratic colleagues in Congress over who maintains the purest commitment to the doctrinaire liberal agenda.

Republicans can plausibly argue that a GOP comeback would help President Obama find a pragmatic, unifying path rather than continuing to pursue the shrill hyper-partisanship of a shallow hack like Harry Reid. If he continues with big Democratic majorities, he may go the way of over-reaching, imperious, ultimately discredited presidents like Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter (whose 292 House seats gave him a veto-proof, two-thirds majority) or even, arguably, George W. Bush. If his supporters want President Obama to enjoy the consistent popularity of practical, deft, consistently popular chief executives like Eisenhower, Reagan and Clinton, they should welcome a GOP takeover of one or both Houses of Congress in 2010.

A Republican comeback a year from now wouldnt destroy the Obama presidency and it may, in fact, promise the best hope for saving it.

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ALEXIS DE RATZINGER:

Biblical Aspects of the Theme of Faith and Politics (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger | From Church, Ecumenism, & Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology , Ignatius Press)

The state is not the whole of human existence and does not encompass all human hope. Man and what he hopes for extend beyond the framework of the state and beyond the sphere of political action. This is true not only for a state like Babylon, but for every state. The state is not the totality; this unburdens the politician and at the same time opens up for him the path of reasonable politics. The Roman state was wrong and anti-Christian precisely because it wanted to be the totality of human possibilities and hopes. A state that makes such claims cannot fulfill its promises; it thereby falsifies and diminishes man. Through the totalitarian lie it becomes demonic and tyrannical. The abolition of the totalitarian state has demythologized the state and thereby liberated man, as well as politicians and politics.

But when the Christian faith falls into ruins and faith in mankind's greater hope is lost, the myth of the divine state rises again, because man cannot do without the totality of hope. Although such promises pose as progress and commandeer for themselves the slogans of progress and progressive thinking, viewed historically they are nevertheless a regression to an era antedating the novum of Christianity, a turning back along the scale of history. And even though their propaganda says that their goal is man's complete liberation, the abolition of all ruling authority, they contradict the truth of man and are opposed to his freedom, because they force man to fit into what he himself can make. Such politics, which declares that the kingdom of God is the outcome of politics and twists faith into the universal primacy of the political, is by its very nature the politics of enslavement; it is mythological politics.

To this, faith opposes Christian reason's sense of proportion, which recognizes what man really can accomplish in terms of a free social order and is content with that, because it knows that mankind's greater expectations are safe in God's hands. To renounce the hope of faith is at the same time to renounce political reason and its sense of proportion. Abandoning the mythical hopes of an authority-free society is not resignation but honesty, which sustains man in hope. The mythical hope of a self-made paradise can only drive man into inescapable anxiety-into fear of the failure of the illusory promises and of the immense emptiness that lurks behind them; into fear of his own power and of its cruelty.

Thus the first service to politics rendered by the Christian faith is that it liberates man from the irrationality of political myths, which are the real threat of our time. Taking a stand for sobriety, which does what is possible and does not cry with an ardent heart after the impossible, is of course always difficult; the voice of reason is not as loud as the cry of unreason.

The cry for the grandiose project has the cachet of morality; restricting oneself to what is possible, in contrast, seems to be the renunciation of moral passion, mere faint-hearted pragmatism. But, as a matter of fact, political morality consists precisely of resisting the seductive force of the big words for which humanity and its chances are being gambled away. The moral thing is not adventurous moralism, which tries to mind God's business, but rather honesty, which accepts man's limits and does man's work within them. Not the uncompromising stance, but compromise is the true morality in political matters. [...]

The Christian faith destroyed the myth of the divine state, the myth of the earthly paradise or utopian state and of a society without rule. In its place it put the objectivity of reason. But that does not mean that it brought an objectivity devoid of values, the objectivity of statistics and mere social dynamics. True human objectivity involves humanity, and humanity involves God. True human reason involves morality, which lives on God's commandments. This morality is not a private matter; it has public significance. Without the good of being good and of good action, there can be no good politics.

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HERE'S A BIPARTISAN IDEA WE CAN ALL GET BEHIND...:

Omnipresent Obama (Brent Bozell, September 23, 2009, Townhall)

Following his usual mantra that "to watch me is to love me," Barack Obama appeared on five Sunday interview shows and since that wasn't enough, then the David Letterman show on Monday night. He remains convinced that the more he plays dust speck in the national eye, the further he'll get in passing his leftist agenda. [...]

Perhaps the most amazing thing Obama did -- over and over -- on Sunday was to scold the media for making the national dialogue coarser by allowing his critics to have a voice on the networks. "Let's face it, the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude," he said.

How about the media not covering either the UR or the Larouchies/Beckies for awhile?

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SHOULDN'T HE HAVE BEEN SPEAKING AT WESTMINSTER?:

Netanyahu: Iran is a Weakling (Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, 9/23/09, IsraelNN.com)

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has labeled the Iran regime as “weaker than people think” and that is susceptible to international pressure. Speaking with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, the Prime Minister said, “The Iranian people detest this regime, as has been plainly evident in the recent election fraud. But, equally, I think that Iran is susceptible because its economy is susceptible. And the time for pressure is now, with or without talks.”

Pretending they're a threat serves the regime. Telling the truth undermines it. That's how Reagan won the Cold War on June 8, 1982.

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DO YOU GET NFL GLASSES WHEN YOU FILL UP?:

Hydrogen Cars Are Still Headed for the Highway: Advances in fuel-cell technology and a commitment from the German government to build a fueling network mean automakers haven't given up on hydrogen (Jack Ewing, 9/22/09, Business Week)

Hydrogen was much hyped early in the decade only to be upstaged by hybrids and electrics. Yet on Sept. 10, the German government, along with Daimler (DAI) and a group of energy companies including Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) announced plans to build 1,000 hydrogen filling stations in Germany by 2015. Two days earlier, automakers Toyota (TM), Ford (F), General Motors, and Hyundai called on energy companies to build an international network of hydrogen filling stations. By then, automakers say, there could be hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road that use fuel cells to convert hydrogen to electrical power, with no emissions except steam.

Electric cars will probably be commercially available sooner than hydrogen cars, and they certainly enjoy higher public awareness. But little-noticed advances have helped hydrogen regain credibility with carmakers. Daimler and other companies like Honda Motor (HMC) have reduced the size of hydrogen fuel-cell systems to the point that they fit into a standard midsize car. Honda has 35 test versions of its FCX Clarity fuel-cell cars on Japanese and U.S. roads. Daimler's prototype, a hydrogen-powered Mercedes B-Class compact, can travel 240 miles before taking three minutes to refuel.

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THE COMPANY HE KEEPS:

The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak (Niles Gardiner, 9/23/09, Daily Telegraph)

It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama’s popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness to downplay American global power. He is the first American president who has made an art form out of apologizing for the United States, which he has done on numerous occasions on foreign soil, from Strasbourg to Cairo. The Obama mantra appears to be – ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do to atone for your country. This is a message that goes down very well in a world that is still seething with anti-Americanism.

It is natural that much of the UN will embrace an American president who declines to offer strong American leadership. A president who engages dictators like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez will naturally gain respect from the leaders of the more than 100 members of the United Nations who are currently designated as “partly free” or “not free” by respected watchdog Freedom House.

It's instructive that while pretty much every speech the UR has given has been forgettable, that notorious moron W gave just one of many great ones at the UN on September 12, 2002. And note, in particular, that it challenges the body to live up to its own supposed ideals:

The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?

The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis -- a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections.

The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.

We can harbor no illusions -- and that's important today to remember. Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He's fired ballistic missiles at Iran and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel. His regime once ordered the killing of every person between the ages of 15 and 70 in certain Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. He has gassed many Iranians, and 40 Iraqi villages.

My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

Events can turn in one of two ways: If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission. The regime will have new power to bully and dominate and conquer its neighbors, condemning the Middle East to more years of bloodshed and fear. The regime will remain unstable -- the region will remain unstable, with little hope of freedom, and isolated from the progress of our times. With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.

If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can arrive at a very different future. The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. These nations can show by their example that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond. And we will show that the promise of the United Nations can be fulfilled in our time.

Neither of these outcomes is certain. Both have been set before us. We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress. We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather. We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. And, delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand, as well.

Thank you very much.

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IN FAIRNESS TO MR. OBAMA...:

Obama and the Politics of Concession: Iran and Russia put Obama to the test last week, and he blinked twice. (Mark Helprin, 9/24/09, WSJ)

During last year's campaign, Sen. Joe Biden famously remarked that, if his ticket won, it wouldn't be long before "the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy" on foreign affairs. Last week, President Obama, brilliantly wielding the powers of his office, managed to fail that test not just once but twice, buckling in the face of Russian pressure and taking a giant wooden nickel from Iran.

...it's not like he's ever had to pass a test before to get what he wanted.

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WHICH RAISES THE OBVIOUS QUESTION...:

Pelosi backs away from deal with Blue Dogs (Mike Soraghan, 09/22/09, The Hill)

Speaker Pelosi is backing away from a deal she cut with centrists to advance health reform, said a source familiar with talks.

Pelosi’s decision to move away from the agreement that was made with a group of Blue Dogs to get the bill out of committee would steer the healthcare legislation back to the left as she prepares for a floor vote.

Pelosi is planning to include a government-run public option in the House version of the healthcare bill.

...do the Blue Dogs have a safety word or will they stay bound and choke-balled?

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IT'S BEEN THE WORST KEPT SECRET IN AMERICAN POLITICS FOR 30 YEARS...:

A Cold Shoulder To Liberty (Michael Gerson, September 23, 2009, Washington Post)

In great-power politics, morality often gets its hair mussed. Every president needs room for diplomatic maneuvering. But rebuffing the Dalai Lama is part of a pattern. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has argued that pressing China on human rights "can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis" -- a statement that left Amnesty International "shocked and extremely disappointed." Support for Iranian democrats has been hesitant. Overtures to repressive governments in Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria and Egypt have generally ignored the struggles of dissidents and prisoners in those nations. So far, the Obama era is hardly a high point of human rights solidarity.

Those who donate to Amnesty International and put "Free Tibet" stickers on their Volvos often assume these commitments are served by supporting liberal politicians. But it really depends. On human rights, modern liberalism is a house divided. In a recent, brilliant essay in the New Republic, Richard Just describes the "contradictory impulses of liberal foreign policy: the opposition to imperialism and the devotion to human rights. If liberals view anti-imperialism as their primary philosophical commitment, then they will be reluctant to meddle in the affairs of other countries, even when they are ruled by authoritarian governments . . . that abuse their own people. But if liberalism's primary commitment is to human rights, then liberals will be willing to judge, to oppose, and even to undermine such governments."

...but it's a truth neither the Right nor the Left can face, so we all pretend not to know it: if you believe in effecting human rights you have to vote for the Christianist Republican, not the secular Democrat.

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MILTON FRIEDMAN, MARGARET THATCHER, ARTHUR LAFFER, & JUDE WANNISKI ALL IN ONE:

Irving Kristol's gone – we'll miss his clear vision: Irwin Stelzer pays tribute to the humanity and intelligence of the godfather of neoconservatism. (Irwin Stelzer, 22 Sep 2009, Daily Telegraph)

It was Kristol, too, who realised an important fact that underlies much of David Cameron's thinking: culture affects economic performance. The family must be preserved, as it is the source of the stability that permits people to look to the future, save and invest. Crime must not be condoned, lest society unravels. Welfare that induces dependence is a disservice to the recipients, even if those who make it available feel good. And capitalism must produce results that are fair and seen to be fair, and be adapted to changing circumstances, which is why he never gave more than Two Cheers for Capitalism (the title of one of his books). To the end of his days, Kristol followed the British press, and worried about the future of the country in which he had lived after the Second World War, and much admired.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that Irving is not the only influential Kristol. His wife, the Victorian historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, argues for Victorian virtues of community, help for the deserving poor, and a willingness to rely on shame to govern individual behaviour, prompting Prime Minister Gordon Brown to become an unabashed fan, even contributing an introductory essay to her book on the British, French and American Enlightenments. This worries Brown's Left wing, but anyone who knows the Prime Minister understands how Himmelfarb's extolling of Victorian morality appeals to his better angels.

Irving Kristol is gone. We will miss him, those whose lives were enriched by association with him, and the far greater number who benefited from his influence on economic and social policy, both in my country and in yours.

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LAST ONE LEFT ON THE UNICORN RIDE?:

Liberals and Civility (Thomas Frank, 9/23/09, WSJ)

Mr. Obama is probably the greatest orator my generation has produced; he swept into office last year with more of a mandate than any president since Ronald Reagan. Mrs. Pelosi commands a large majority in the House of Representatives. [...]

The health-care showdown should have been a one-sided blowout. And yet it is the Democrats who are running to the playground monitor and watching their support drain away.

Why? Because from the beginning they have understood the problem primarily as a technical consumer issue, not a bid for social justice in a manifestly unjust time.

Nevermind that the UR just had to go on 5 network shows to try and explain his greatest speech and, even at that, couldn't acknowledge that what his Senate colleagues refer to as a tax is one. Nevermind that the mandate he won was largely focused on just one issue: John McCain would tax health plans but Mr. Obama wouldn't. Nevermind that Rahm Emanuel made Ms Pelosi Speaker by recruiting Yellow Dog Democrats to run in conservative districts.

No, consider just one point: there are 12 to 14 million immigrants who not oinly won't be covered by the Left's health care plans but about half will lose the coverage they currently have through their employers if the Democrats prevail. Now try and square that with "social justice" and morality...

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SLOUCHING TOWARDS THE PIGOU CLUB:

Obama wants worldwide end of fossil fuel subsidies (SETH BORENSTEIN, 9/24/09, AP)

President Barack Obama is calling on the world to end massive government subsidies that encourage the use of fossil fuels blamed for global warming.

The president, who is set to host the G-20 economic summit opening Thursday in Pittsburgh, will propose a gradual elimination, with the time frame to be determined, according to White House officials.

He's almost there. Now, he just needs to dump cap-n-trade and tax gasoline directly and he's got it.

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ASK NOT WHAT AMERICA CAN DO FOR THE WORLD?:

Obama to world: Don't expect America to fix it all (BEN FELLER, 9/23/09, AP)

Seizing a chance to challenge the world, President Barack Obama says the global community is failing its people and fixing that is not "solely America's endeavor."

If not us, then no one.

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AH, SO THAT'S WHAT "DEMAND" MEANS IN UNICORNISH:

In Mideast Peace Bid, Obama Pivots in His Demands (HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER, 9/24/09, NY Times)

President Obama, who has met immovable resistance from Israel over his demand for a full freeze on settlements in the West Bank, is largely setting that issue aside as a first step toward restarting Middle East peace talks.

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NOT THAT WE OUGHT TO MISS IT...:

Karpov v Kasparov: the Guardian's coverage of an epic world chess championship match: It had everything - accusations of foul play, political symbolism, heckling from the crowd, and a near nervous breakdown from one of the players, but it was also a terrific bore.
(Matthew Weaver, 9/22/09, Guardian)

When the Guardian's chess correspondent Leonard Barden reviewed the longest-running world championship chess match, the headline was "The bored game to end them all".

Sounding almost as exhausted as Karpov, who lost 8kg during the match, Barden wrote: "Proclaimed the chess match of the year, it was a bore for long periods ... Anatoly Karpov, classical stylist, and Garry Kasparov, young dynamic risk-taker, just didn't gel at the board."

The Moscow crowd took out their frustration on the grand masters. When Kasparov and Karpov agreed to one of their many draws after only 17 moves there were boos and whistles from the crowd, and accusations they were playing "anti-chess".

Chess audiences had grown used to more drama. The fireworks of the cold war match between Fischer and Spassky and the intrigue of Karpov versus Korchnoi - coded yoghurt pots and all - were still fresh in the memory.

But the marathon Karpov/Kasparov match ended with an episode to equal anything that had gone before.

...but international sport was an awful lot better when the USSR was around. Now the only evil opponents we have to root against are the Yankees, Manchester United and Jeff Gordon.

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THEY'RE PREVENTION, NOT PUNISHMENT:

Baby, You Can't Drive Your Car: A judge's favorite punishment for drunken drivers—ignition-interlock. (LaDoris Cordell, Sept. 22, 2009, Slate)

Early on, my fellow judges did not support my ignition-interlock sentences. Judges, no less than the rest of us, resist change. My colleagues who were assigned to calendars filled with drunken driving charges wanted to dispose of these cases quickly and quietly, obtaining guilty pleas as early in the process as possible. Completing the additional paperwork that went with ignition-interlock devices did not sit well with them.

Then came the totally unexpected opposition from the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. In their view, the ignition-interlock devices weren't punitive enough; they preferred more jail time for drunken drivers. Incarceration, however, is a temporary remedy. As the recidivism numbers clearly demonstrate, convicted drunken drivers return to the roads in numbers too great to ignore.

And finally, in my own court, as I continued to order the installation of ignition-interlock systems, I started to worry about fairness, since the devices are expensive. (At the time, the installation fee was $150 and the lease fee was $50 per month; prices have gone up a bit.) Convicted drunken drivers are often low-income. I realized that by ordering them to use the devices, I was effectively raising their fines, so I lowered those to offset the fees. That proved unacceptable to Santa Clara County's district attorney's office, which took the position that judges could not lawfully reduce drunken-driving fines. The DA's office took me to court and obtained an order directing me to stop. When I was thereafter rotated to another assignment, no judges were willing to order the devices for convicted drunken drivers. In January 1988, seven months after it started, my ignition-interlock sentencing program came to an end.

Today, almost all 50 states have laws permitting the imposition of ignition-interlock devices as sentencing alternatives for drunken drivers. The devices have a proven track record as an effective deterrent. The American Journal of Preventive Medicine notes that five out of six studies found that interlocks reduced the rate of recidivism for DWI charges. Participants in the interlock programs were 15 percent to 69 percent less likely than other offenders to be rearrested for drunken driving.

And yet, as a recent New York Times op-ed noted, while the effectiveness of the devices is clear, judges often fail to order the installations, even when the law requires it.

Just make them mandatory on all cars and you obviate those inconsistencies, while saving tens of thousands of lives and preventing unmeasurable family sorrow for victims and perpetrators alike.

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WHEN YOU'VE NEVER STOOD UP TO ANYONE...:

Military growing impatient with Obama on Afghanistan (Nancy A. Youssef, 9/19/09, McClatchy Newspapers)

In Kabul, some members of McChrystal's staff said they don't understand why Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" but still hasn't given them the resources they need to turn things around quickly.

Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he'd stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy.

"Yes, he'll be a good soldier, but he will only go so far," a senior official in Kabul said. "He'll hold his ground. He's not going to bend to political pressure."

...you aren't going to start with the US military. Democrats need to face facts: no matter what they'd like the UR to do, he simply doesn't have the political heft or moral gravitas for a fight like that.

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STILL DANGLING:

Seize the Pen: In his essays on the writing life, Michael Greenberg emerges as figure out of Bellow (Adam Kirsch, September 22, 2009, Tablet)

[G]reenberg is engaged with the very subjects that made the first generation of American Jewish writers so elementally vigorous. That is why this slender book makes such a strong impression: it is as though Bellow or Alfred Kazin were transported to post-millennial New York, bringing their toughness and romanticism to bear on our softer and more familiar world. Greenberg himself hints at this quality of his writing in a typically self-deprecatory piece about his early struggles to publish a novel. In the early 1980s, Greenberg writes, he sent his manuscript to the influential editor Ted Solotaroff, who returned it with a note: “This manuscript represents everything I hate in fiction.” Greenberg was devastated, of course; but years later, when he read Solotaroff’s memoir Truth Comes in Blows, he realized that his novel must have struck all too close to home. “With its complicated, immigrant-minded fathers and their sons,” Greenberg now sees, “my novel must have seemed old hat to him, a story of Jewish marginality that, in America at least, was passé.”

In a certain sense, the style of Jewish marginality that Greenberg writes about Beg, Borrow, Steal does seem passé, or at least to belong to the past, if only for socioeconomic reasons. We are accustomed to reading about Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, and their struggling intellectual sons in the 1930s. Follow that lineage down to the present, and the great-grandson who becomes a writer is likely to have an MFA from Iowa and a tenured teaching job; if he writes about Jewishness, it will be in a nostalgic, quasi-magical-realist style.

In Beg, Borrow, Steal, however, the familiar timeline of assimilation and upward mobility has been discarded. Instead of his grandfather, we find Greenberg himself working as a peddler (the time appears to be the early 1970s), selling knockoff cosmetics on Fordham Road in the Bronx. Greenberg befriends a Chilean food-vendor named Lucho, who teaches him the tricks of the trade—above all, which security guard to bribe to avoid being rousted. But this gesture of friendship, like most such gestures in Greenberg’s world, turns out to have been a con. The day before Easter, when Greenberg has done great business and is carrying a lot of cash, Lucho doesn’t show up to work; instead, three teenagers come and rob him, presumably on his friend’s instructions.

The moral is one Bellow would have approved: the life of the mind is okay for idealists, but real life is dog-eat-dog.

If you were putting together a short list of our best regular essayists, we'd at least include the following: Andrew Ferguson, Joseph Epstein, Peter Augustine Lawler, PJ O'Rourke, and Mark Steyn. These are the guys who you don't just read every week--or seemingly every day in Mr. Steyn's case--but whose essay collections you keep on the bedside table so you can dip into them over and over again.

So, I have to confess to some considerable chagrin when the publicist for Mr. Greenberg's column collection sent us a set of materials suggesting that he is one of the great essayists in America. I'd honestly never heard of him. The Google search quickly rendered the reason why: he splits the Freelance column in the Times Literary Supplement, appearing every other issue. Not exactly the most widely read pages around--a problem that kept Mr. Epstein out of the limelight for too long, when he write primarily for The American Scholar.

But I read a few of the pieces he has online and the reviews for his memoir about his daughter's schizophrenia--Hurry Down, Sunshine--are uniformly glowing, so we asked for a copy of this book. Taken in short doses, the essays do not disappoint.

Mr. Greenberg is a terrific writer and he's especially good at packing a punch into the final lines of each essay (a la Mr. Ferguson). Where the other guys listed are mostly political writers though, Mr. Epstein's columns, at least those collected here, probe his own personal life and those of the people around him. His honesty about himself, and about them, is downright discomfiting. Indeed, the title piece is about his high school friend and former landlord, Eric, who has been working on a novel for years and showing him updated versions which Mr. Greenberg commented on favorably mostly to avoid having his rent raised. The author included Eric in the recent memoir and revealed not just that he was lying in his assessment of the novel but that he personally never thought it would be finished. Since his own book was published. Mr. Greenberg had been avoiding his old "friend," realizing what he'd done, but a mutual friend tells him that Eric feels like he has been "stabbed." The closing lines of the essay read:

Eric had once commented on how closely I listened to him. Enough to steal a piece of his soul.

That's an honest enough self-assessment, but it is the author's apparent habit to latch onto characters he meets in real-life in order to make them grist for his essays, which makes this promo piece from YouTube seem appalling:

Are they all really just circus acts and freaks and he the ringmaster? That is how he treats them all too often. He comes across as a kind of Joseph Mitchell but without much empathy.

And that leads into the other curious aspect of the book. There's a revealing scene in William Styron's Sophie's Choice, where Nathan is talking to Stingo and says:

[H]istorically and ethnically, Jews will be coming into their own in a cultural way in this postwar wave. It's in the cards, that's all. There's one novel already that's set the pace. ... it's the work of a young writer of absolutely unquestionable brilliance."

"What's the name of it?" I asked. I think my voice had a sulky note when I added, "And who's the brilliant writer?"

"It's called Dangling Man," he replied, "and it's by Saul Bellow."

Just as Mr. Styron's book and his doppleganger, Stingo, seemed to be trying to borrow Jewishness because it was the in thing, so too does Mr. Greenberg, as Adam Kirsch says, seem stuck in the 1950s, trying to imitate Saul Bellow, or trying to recreate him in the here and now.

Writing in Harper's, Vivian Gornick offered a pretty devastating critique of Bellow and Roth:

As the social reality of Jewish outsiderness waned, the rage at the heart of Jewish-American writing began to lose its natural source of energy. This turn of events delivered an unexpected piece of information about the entire enterprise. The work was inextricably bound up not so much with being kept out as with the sickness of feeling kept out. [...]

In the nineteenth century, Jewish mockery was described by a critic of Yiddish literature as “the sick despair of [those for whom life is] a permanent witticism.” It could never get beyond the limited force of its own excoriating humor. That force held everyone and everything up to superior ridicule, but it could not penetrate its own self-deceptions; hence, it could not deepen psychologically. If you accept this observation as a given—and I do—you cannot help wondering how much of Ur-Bellow and Roth will prove to have transcended its moment of cultural glory. Somehow it’s hard to imagine yesterday’s savaging brilliance transforming into tomorrow’s wisdom.

Well, it is tomorrow now and if we can sort of accept that Bellow and Roth--who at least grew up when Jews were alienated from the prevailing culture--weren't capable of moving on, we do have to wonder why someone like Mr. Greenberg can't.

Norman Podhoretz has been fretting lately about why Jews are so overwhelmingly liberal. He has arrived at the conclusion that liberalism has actually replaced Judaism itself as their faith and that Jewishness for many is just a matter of ethnicity these days, not anything to do with religion:

[I]n virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

All this applies most fully to Jews who are Jewish only in an ethnic sense. Indeed, many such secular Jews, when asked how they would define "a good Jew," reply that it is equivalent to being a good liberal.

Obviously a politics that is unconsidered, just a "racial" birthright, is not a thing of much worth. And it sits so uneasily beside the sort of Bellowian mockery that Mr. Greenberg employs that it creates considerable psychic dissonance. Maybe liberal mockery can't help but be mean-spirited, rather than jokingly insightful?

For all the honesty about the deeds and words in his own life, Mr. Greenberg doesn't really penetrate to the motivations and attitudes that underlie them. And that leaves a huge void.

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ONCE WERE YELLOW DOGS, THEN BLUE...:

Green groups open 'climate war room' (MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI, 9/21/09, Politico)

The cap-and-trade movement, spooked by the pounding health care reform took over the August break, is scrambling to persuade nervous Democrats they won’t suffer politically for taking another tough vote this year.

“When you get your butt kicked, like we did [after the House energy vote], it focuses the mind,” said Steve Cochran, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s National Climate Campaign. “We found out that this is not something to hide from but something to lean on — even in places where coal is king and Blue Dogs were perceived to be running for cover.”

...don't hold your breath waiting for Green.

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THANNE LONGEN FOLK TO GOON ON PILGRIMAGES:

The most sublime constitution ever drafted (Daniel Hannan, 9/21/09, Daily Telegraph))

I love Philly, the city where my parents were married. I have a troop of brilliant, warm, generous (if largely Democrat-leaning) Scots-American cousins here. I never visit them without making my Hajj to the place where the highest concept of British liberty was distilled into the noblest constitution ever put on paper.

This time, I began my journey in Valley Forge, a few miles out of town, where the Campaign for Liberty was meeting. It was an apt place for them to withdraw, these proud sons of the Revolution, after their poor showing in the 2008 presidential poll. Valley Forge was where Washington took the remains of the Continental Army after his defeats at Brandywine and Germanstown. There, in the grip of winter, his soldiers came close to starvation, and their general came close to despair. But, although they didn’t know it, the patriots had turned the corner: from that moment, almost every engagement they fought was successful. In Great Britain, popular sympathy was with the colonists, and there was no stomach for a war against our kinsmen when there were urgent battles to fight against the Bourbons.

It took Washington the better part of a decade to make the short journey from Valley Forge to Philadelphia to sign of the Constitution. It took me half an hour. Thanks to some wonderful conservatives from Ohio - of whom more in a later blog - we had the room to ourselves, and filmed an interview inches away from Washington’s chair.

You all know how I feel about the US Constitution. It was the greatest document of its kind ever drafted, designed to prevent the concentration of power, and written in full awareness of man’s fallen nature.

Amen, Brother.

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AND THE FAILURE OF TRUMAN, IKE AND JFK TO LISTEN TO LEMAY...:

Is Afghan surge Obama's Cuba moment? (Giles Whittell , 9/22/09, Times of London)

There’s a great scene in Thirteen Days, the film about the Cuban missile crisis, in which Kevin Conway as General Curtis LeMay tells President Kennedy: “The big red dog is diggin’ in our backyard, and we are justified in shooting him!”

Kennedy takes a deep breath and a walk along the West Wing colonnade, and rejects LeMay’s advice.

If Barack Obama has seen the film, he will not have forgotten that scene. His generals are not urging him to rain nuclear bombs on the Taleban, but they are putting him in the desperately lonely position that only a President can know, in which as Commander-in-Chief he must give orders to military men who know vastly more about military affairs than he does.

...extended the life of the Soviet Union for forty years and of Castro for over forty.

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A BOON TO THE TRUE BELIEVERS:

Emissions of CO2 Set for Best Drop in 40 Years (JAD MOUAWAD, September 21, 2009, Daily Telegraph)

Global carbon emissions are expected to post their biggest drop in more than 40 years this year as the global recession froze economic activity and slashed energy use around the world.

It's no coincidence that the Left and the Right opposed the bank bailout. After all, if you kill the economy you limit emissions and immigration.

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HOW LONG SHALL FASCISM RULE AMERICA?:

Another 60-day delay for Gitmo trials (Ben Fox, 9/21/09, AP)

A military judge agreed Monday to another delay in the war crimes trial of five Guantanamo prisoners charged in the Sept. 11 attacks to give U.S. officials more time to decide how to try them.

Army Col. Stephen Henley granted the 60-day continuance at the request of President Barack Obama's administration....

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A PERFECT METAPHOR:

Plane crash mars Iran military parade (NASSER KARIMI, 9/22/09, Associated Press)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Iran is stronger than ever and warned that its military will "cut the hand" of anyone who attacks. But a military parade where he spoke was marred when an air force plane crashed, killing seven people, according to state radio.

State TV showed video footage of burning wreckage from the military plane surrounded by fire trucks in farmlands south of Tehran.

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THERE'S NOTHING LESS NEO...:

Three Cheers for Irving (DAVID BROOKS, 9/22/09, NY Times)

Kristol championed capitalism and wrote brilliantly about Adam Smith. But like Smith, he could only give two cheers for capitalism, because the system of creative destruction has victims as well as beneficiaries.

Kristol championed middle-class virtues like faith, family and responsibility, especially during the 1960s when they were so much under attack. But he acknowledged that bourgeois culture could be boring and spiritually unsatisfying.

Kristol championed democracy but understood its limitations. He emphasized that the American founders believed in a democratic system, but were appalled by the democratic faith: the idea that the majority view should be followed in all circumstances. They built a system that was half-democracy and half a republic, designed to acknowledge and also subdue popular will.

Kristol embraced the welfare state (one of his great achievements was to reconcile conservatism with the New Deal), but he was skeptical of most individual proposals. Improving society is so intractably hard that all efforts to do so should be subject to the most careful scrutiny.

His goal, he wrote, was “not to dismantle the welfare state in the name of free-market economics but rather to reshape it so as to attach it to the conservative predispositions of the people.” He believed that government programs that were not paternalistic, but merely provided social insurance, would “engender larger loyalties,” which is “precisely what the art of government, properly understood, is all about.”

...than skepticism about the efficacy of human endeavors.

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ONE MORE REASON TO REGRET THE REVOLUTION:

Prince Charles urges people to abandon car in favour of walking and public transport (Andrew Pierce, 21 Sep 2009, Daily Telegraph)

Speaking about the “domination of the car over the pedestrian”, the future King said: “We must surely be able to organise ourselves... in ways in which we are not dependent on it to such a great extent for our daily needs."

Only a monarch keeps the big picture always in mind.

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THATCHERISM WITH A BEARD:

'The Most Popular Politician on Earth': For nearly seven years, he's done a spectacular job as Brazil's president. But can Lula resist the temptation to throw it away? (Mac Margolis, 9/22/09, Newsweek)

To convince lenders Brazil was serious, Lula increased the "primary budget surplus"—the money the government puts aside every year to pay debt and interest—and boosted lending rates to a scorching 26 percent a year, throttling growth in order to kill inflation. He also kept government wages and pensions under control. "The unions and many people in the party hated it," says Ricardo Kotscho, a friend and former press aide.

International money men still weren't sure. "We knew he'd been a union leader and the president of a political party. What I really wondered was if he had the guns to be president," says former World Bank president James Wolfensohn. So Wolfensohn sent out a feeler, offering to dispatch a team of experts to brief Lula's government on the key issues facing the international economy and Latin America. He didn't know how the new president would respond. "A lot of leaders throw the presidential seal at you," says Wolfensohn. "But Lula lapped it up. He was like a piece of blotting paper. He realized he had a major job to do and that running an election was different from running a country. For me, it characterized the man."

Da Silva has operated that way ever since, putting pragmatism ahead of ideology and, for the most part, fiscal restraint over the quick fix. "No one in their wildest dreams would have thought Lula would behave the way he has," emerging-market investment guru Mark Mobius, of Templeton Asset Management, told me a year ago. Now Templeton has $5 billion in Brazil, more than it does in China. For sure, Lula had plenty to work with. With a web of hydroelectric stations and half its fleet of cars running on clean-burning sugar-cane ethanol, the country has long been the benchmark in renewable energy. Clever agronomists have turned the harsh tropical backlands into a breadbasket, exporting more beef, soybeans, and frozen chickens than any other nation. But Lula also added value by stumping for Brazilian brands abroad. "We had to make it clear that Brazil is not a minor country," he says. "Brazil has the Amazon [rainforest], but also makes airplanes and cell phones." And just as his labor rallies once galvanized the hardhats in São Paulo, his aggressive diplomacy has rallied poorer nations to demand free trade and a new deal in the international economy.

His real genius, however, has been his ability to sell unpalatable reforms to a largely poor population that looked to him as something of a savior. "Lula's popularity helped him make risky decisions that often required sacrifices," says José Dirceu, a former Workers' Party commander who fell to a corruption scandal. More important, unlike the supremos and populist demagogues who abound in Latin America, he did it playing by the rules. "Lula's respect for democracy and elections is a big plus," says former Treasury chief Joaquim Levy. "Very often he has been able to translate key values of democracy in ways that make them more concrete to people." The president still has his work cut out for him, and not much time left to accomplish it. "This is a country that has suffered from low self-esteem," he says. "Brazil needs to recover its pride. And I think things are happening. I hope those who come after me can work to transform Brazil into a great economy."

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COME BACK, BILL!:

Clinton on Gore: "I Thought He Was in Neverland": In a soon-to-be-released book based on taped interviews, Bill Clinton discusses his presidency, while dishing on Al Gore, Maureen Dowd, and GOPers (David Corn, 9/22/09, Mother Jones)

During the discussion, Clinton told his vice president that he was disappointed that Gore had not used him in the last ten days of the 2000 campaign in strategically significant states--Arkansas, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Missouri. But Clinton said he could understand that. What was more upsetting for him, Clinton remarked to Gore, was that Gore had not crafted a more winning message during the campaign, that he had not campaigned on any grand themes. Clinton insisted to Gore that he hadn't cared about how Gore had referred to Clinton—and his personal scandal—during the campaign. Paraphasing this portion of the conversation, Branch writes that Clinton told Gore, "To gain votes, he would let Gore cut off his ear and mail it to reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, the Monica Lewinsky expert."

At one point in the conversation, Gore told Clinton that he was still traumatized by having been caught up in the fundraising scandals of the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign, and he indicated that he blamed Clinton. Clinton could hardly believe this, and he told Branch that Gore was probably in shock from the election or unhinged, remarking, "I thought he was in Neverland." [...]

hen Clinton prepared for military strikes against Iraq in 1998, he griped about former President Jimmy Carter. "[Republican Senator Bob] Dole will support me," he told Branch. "Carter will probably criticize me. Carter always criticizes, but he doesn't have much positive to say." [...]

In 1997, after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an acerbic column about Clinton and golfer Tiger Woods—maintaining that the the two green-eyed hucksters deserved each other—Clinton told Branch, "She must live in mortal fear that there's somebody in the world living a healthy and productive life."

One of the ways God demonstrated the Special Providence was in Al Gore letting W run as the New Democrat.

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ITS INEFFECTIVENESS WAS THE REASON FOR BUILDING IT:

The folly of the fence (San Diego Union-Tribune, 9/22/09)

Consider these findings:

▪ The initiative had originally been scheduled for completion this year, but, according to the GAO, a major part of it is fully seven years behind schedule.

▪ More than $3.7 billion has been poured into the project so far and, once it is completed, GAO says it will cost an additional $6.5 billion to maintain for the next 20 years.

▪ Though the planned 661 miles of physical fencing is nearly complete, and the number of miles along the border considered to be “under control” has increased, Customs and Border Protection has no way to measure the fencing's effectiveness. Is illegal immigration down because of the fence or, more likely, because the severe economic recession means fewer jobs attracting undocumented laborers? CBP can't answer that question. But here's one clue: as of mid-May, there had been 3,363 breaches in the fence, with a cost to repair each one at about $1,300.

▪ The high-tech “virtual” fence, known as SBInet, was originally planned for completion along the entire Southwest border earlier this year. But because of technical problems, it has yet to be deployed anywhere. It is now scheduled to be launched in two areas of the Tucson border sector this November and next March. The virtual fencing in the San Diego sector, originally scheduled for this year, is now not expected until 2014 or 2015.

It's just a sop to the nativists.

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WHERE'S JOE WILSON WHEN YOU NEED HIM?:

Health bill says 'tax' when President Obama said 'not' (CHRIS FRATES & MIKE ALLEN, 9/21/09, Politico)

In the most contentious exchange of President Barack Obama’s marathon of five Sunday shows, he said it is “not true” that a requirement for individuals to get health insurance under a key reform plan now being debated amounts to a tax increase.

But he could look it up — in the bill.

Page 29, sentence one of the bill introduced by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) says: “The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax.”

Health Bill's Proposed Excise Tax Rallies Republicans (JANET ADAMY, 9/21/09, WSJ)

The issue is emerging as a rallying point for Republicans, who are calling for Democrats to scrap the current health overhaul proposals and start over. Mr. Obama has pledged not to increase taxes on families earning below $250,000 a year.

"If it looks like a tax and is enforced like a tax, it's a tax," said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah).

The White House on Monday reiterated that it doesn't view the fee as a tax.

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THE OBAMAMESSIAH WAS SUPPOSED TO PRODUCE THE RAPTURE, NOT THE RUPTURE:

General's Review Creates Rupture (Karen DeYoung, 9/22/09, Washington Post)

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's grim assessment of the Afghanistan war has opened a divide between the military, which is pushing for an early decision to send more troops, and civilian policymakers who are increasingly doubtful of an escalating nation-building effort.

Senior military officials emphasized Monday that McChrystal's conclusion that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure" without an urgent infusion of troops has been endorsed by the uniformed leadership. That includes Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command and architect of the troop "surge" strategy widely seen as helping U.S. forces turn the corner in Iraq. [...]

Obama's public remarks on Afghanistan indicate that he has begun to rethink the counterinsurgency strategy he set in motion six months ago, even as his generals have embraced it.

The problem for the President is that he has so little credibility of national security matters that he can easily be portrayed as selling out the US military and the Afghan people.

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THEY DO IF THEY'RE CONSTITUTIONAL COUPS:

Moving Forward in Honduras (Roberto Micheletti, September 22, 2009, Washington Post)

My country is in an unusual position this week. Former president Manuel Zelaya has surreptitiously returned to Honduras, still claiming to be the country's legitimate leader, despite the fact that a constitutional succession took place on June 28. Amid all of the claims that are likely to be made in coming days, the former president will not mention that the people of Honduras have moved on since the events of that day or that our citizens are looking forward to free, fair and transparent elections on Nov. 29.

The international community has wrongfully condemned the events of June 28 and mistakenly labeled our country as undemocratic. I must respectfully disagree. As the true story slowly emerges, there is a growing sense that what happened in Honduras that day was not without merit. On June 28, the Honduran Supreme Court issued an arrest warrant for Zelaya for his blatant violations of our constitution, which marked the end of his presidency. To this day, an overwhelming majority of Hondurans support the actions that ensured the respect of the rule of law in our country.

Underlying all the rhetoric about a military overthrow are facts. Simply put, coups do not leave civilians in control over the armed forces, as is the case in Honduras today. Neither do they allow the independent functioning of democratic institutions -- the courts, the attorney general's office, the electoral tribunal. Nor do they maintain a respect for the separation of powers. In Honduras, the judicial, legislative and executive branches are all fully functioning and led by civilian authorities.

Coups do not allow freedom of assembly, either. They do not guarantee freedom of the press, much less a respect for human rights. In Honduras, these freedoms remain intact and vibrant. And on Nov. 29 our country plans to hold the ultimate civic exercise of any democracy: a free and open presidential election.

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THAT'S NOT HOW A TIDAL WAVE WORKS:

Senate Democrats Grapple with a Suddenly Less Promising 2010 (Jay Newton-Small, Sep. 21, 2009, TIME)

The political scandal surrounding Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and now Senator Roland Burris handicapped the Democrats' chances of keeping Obama's old Senate seat. Governors in Colorado and New York appointed two relative unknowns to fill Hillary Clinton and Ken Salazar's shoes, respectively, both of whom left for the cabinet. And then Ted Kennedy died, prompting a Massachusetts special election due to be held in January.

Even worse, there are at least five incumbents that are facing competitive races: Barbara Boxer in California, who will be facing off with former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina; Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln, Pennsylvania's new Democratic Senator Arlen Specter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Connecticut's Chris Dodd. Reid and Dodd both have some of the worst polls in the Senate - hovering near 30% approval ratings. "Illinois, Pennsylvania, Connecticut: those will be the most expensive to defend," says Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report, which tracks congressional races. "The more money you have to spend on defense takes away from what you're spending on offense."

In a best case scenario the party in power has to worry about seats like these in a midterm. Democrats are creating a worst case, which means it is some seemingly safe seats that they should be scared about, places like DE, HI, WA, etc..

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UH-OH...:

Window of Opportunism (Richard Cohen, September 22, 2009, Washington Post)

The Defenestration of Prague occurred in 1618 when two royal officials were summarily thrown out of some rather high windows and landed, as luck would have it and history recorded it, on a pile of manure. The Defenestration of New York happened just the other day when Barack Obama tossed New York Gov. David Paterson out of a window, landing him not on a pile of manure but on the front page of the New York Times. In its political consequences, this is a distinction without difference.

The Times story, a deft and lethal leak, explicitly said that the White House had asked Paterson (D) to step aside -- not to seek a full term as governor but to content himself with a graceful exit. [...]

Some will be tempted to credit such hardball tactics to Chicago and its bare-knuckle politics. That, though, is not the case. Obama -- as opposed to Rahm Emanuel -- is not from Chicago. He is from the Land of Ambition. That is a storied realm where all the posted signs warn, "Don't Get Between Me and What I Want." Obama wants a second term, and neither racial fellowship nor bonhomie nor a touching consideration for the bruised feelings of others will, in the end, make a difference. Paterson had to go.

...you're in real trouble when even Richard Cohen has figured out that all you care about is your personal ambitions.

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SO, LET'S SEE IF WE HAVE THIS STRAIGHT...:

Abortion-rights forces vexed by health care debate (DAVID CRARY, 9/21/09, The Associated Press)

For some abortion-rights activists, the debate over health care reform has been frustrating, even disheartening, as they see their political allies on the defensive and their anti-abortion rivals on the attack.

Many in the abortion-rights movement had hoped that a health care overhaul would include a serious discussion of expanding access to abortion for low-income women. That would have included the possible lifting of a 33-year-old ban on federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest and to save the mother's life.

Instead, under pressure from anti-abortion conservatives, the Obama administration and majority Democrats in Congress have focused their recent public comments about abortion on promises that their reform proposals will conform with that ban, which is known as the Hyde Amendment.

...it was only a serious discussion if we lifted the ban, not if we kept it?

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THE UR WOULD DO MORE FOR HEALTH BY BANNING THEM ENTIRELY THAN BY ANY INSURANCE SCHEME:

Smoking ban heart gains 'massive' (BBC, 9/21/09)

Bans on smoking in public places have had a bigger impact on preventing heart attacks than ever expected, data shows.

Smoking bans cut the number of heart attacks in Europe and North America by up to a third, two studies report.

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BEALE STREET BLUES BOY:

Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? (David Von Drehle, 9/17/09, TIME)

Beck is 45, tireless, funny, self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies — if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn't, necessarily; he's just asking questions. He's just sayin'. In cheerful days of yore, he was a terrific host of a morning-zoo show on an FM Top 40 station. But these aren't cheerful times. For conservatives, these are times of economic uncertainty and political weakness, and Beck has emerged as a virtuoso on the strings of their discontent. Rush Limbaugh, with his supreme self-confidence, holding forth with "half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair," found his place as the triumphant champion of the Age of Reagan. Macho Sean Hannity captured the cocky vibe of the early Bush years, dunking the feckless liberal Alan Colmes for nightly swirlies on the Fox News Channel. Both men remain media dynamos, but it is Beck — nervous, beset, desperate — who now channels the mood of many on the right. "I'm afraid," he has said more than once in recent months. "You should be afraid too."

His fears are many — which is lucky for him, because Beck is responsible for filling multiple hours each day on radio and TV and webcast, plus hundreds of pages each year in his books, his online magazine and his newsletter. What's this rich and talented man afraid of? He is afraid of one-world government, which will turn once proud America into another France. He is afraid that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" — which doesn't mean, he hastens to add, that he actually thinks "Obama doesn't like white people." He is afraid that both Democrats and Republicans in Washington are deeply corrupt and that their corruption is spreading like a plague. He used to be afraid that hypocritical Republicans in the Bush Administration were killing capitalism and gutting liberty, but now he is afraid that all-too-sincere leftists in the Obama Administration are plotting the same. On a slow news day, Beck fears that the Rockefeller family installed communist and fascist symbols in the public artwork of Rockefeller Center. One of his Fox News Channel colleagues, Shepard Smith, has jokingly called Beck's studio the "fear chamber." Beck countered that he preferred "doom room."

On the recent anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Beck grew afraid that Americans may no longer be the sort of people who cross mountain ranges in covered wagons and toss hot rivets around in bold bursts of skyscraper-building. Tears came to his eyes (they often do) as he voiced this last fear. But then he remembered that the fiber of ordinary Americans is the one thing Glenn Beck need never fear. So he squared his quivering chin to the camera and held up a snapshot of ground zero, still empty eight long years after the World Trade Center was destroyed.

And he said, "Let me tell you something. I believe that if it were up to you or me, just regular schmoes in America, the Freedom Tower would have been done years ago. And it wouldn't have been the Freedom Tower; it would have been the Freedom Towers — because we would've built both of these towers back the way they were before! Except we would've built them stronger! We would've built them in a way that they would've resisted attack. And you know what? My guess is they would've been 25 stories taller, with a big, fat 'Come and Try That Again' sign on top. We would've built it with our bare hands if we had to, because that's what Americans do. When we fail, when we face a crisis, we pull ourselves up and make things better. I believe the only reason we haven't built it isn't because of Americans. It's because we're being held back. And who is holding us back? Politicians. Special-interest groups. Political correctness. You name it — everybody but you."

Whoever is stopping us from rebuilding those godawful monstrosities is a hero.

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HE'S ON TV MORE THAN LAW & ORDER:

On-the-air prez seems like endless 'infomercial' (CHARLES HURT, September 21, 2009, NY Post)

During his first eight months in office, President Obama has sat down for three times as many television interviews as his most recent two predecessors combined.

And with yesterday's run of the Sunday-morning news show circuit and tonight's airing of "Late Night with David Letterman," Obama continues to blaze through the media hotter than any political figure in modern history.

"He's turning the presidency into an infomercial," warned former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer. "It's not just damaging to the White House. It will also ultimately hurt President Obama's image as a fresh, non-Washington leader."

People will vote against him just to shut him up.

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SOME OF US ARE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER PRIOR CLIMATE CRISES... (via Jim Yates):

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IN ITS OWN WAY...:

Kasparov and Karpov in chess duel (BBC, 9/21/09)

One of the greatest rivalries in the history of chess is due to resume as Garry Kasparov takes on Anatoly Karpov in the Spanish city of Valencia.

The 12-game rematch takes place 25 years after the two chess legends first competed for the world title.

That epic, gruelling encounter lasted five months in Moscow, before being called off without a clear winner.

...that match too signalled the end of the Soviet Union, as they had to intervene to save the apparatchick from the Jew.

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THE TOUGHEST FRAIL:

The Grand Ayatollah unleashes his wrath (Michael Theodoulou, 9/21/09, The National)

Small, frail and in his 80s, he looks no match for Iran’s tough regime. But Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri is made of steel. He wields considerable moral authority as the country’s highest-ranking and most fearless dissident cleric, representing a potent challenge to hardline authorities who have tried and failed to silence him for two decades.

He was once Ayatollah Khomeini’s designated successor but was unceremoniously cast aside by the founder of the Islamic Republic, just months before his death in 1989, because the Grand Ayatollah had criticised human rights abuses by the regime. Since then, despite official harassment of his aides and a six-year period of house arrest, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri has remained the outspoken conscience of Iran’s religious community, an advocate of democratic pluralism and foreign policy moderation.

“Montazeri has refused to go away and is today more vocal and explicit in his criticism than ever,” said Anoush Ehteshami, an Iran expert and professor of international relations at Durham University in England. “If anything, his claim that he stands for freedoms and justice are even more important today,” Prof Ehteshami said in an interview.

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THE ONLY PART OF A NATIONAL HEALTH CARE SERVICE THAT WOULD MAKE SENSE IS THE RATIONING:

Taking a wait and see approach to prostate cancer:
Treatment of men over 65 with locally confined tumors provides little survival benefit, a study finds.
(Thomas H. Maugh II, September 21, 2009, LA Times)

For most men over 65 with localized prostate cancer, conservative management of their tumor -- which might be characterized as "benign neglect," or wait and treat only if symptoms occur -- may be the best course of action, according to a new study that compares modern results with those obtained before 1990.

It's essentially a matter of cosmetics and the curious notion that there is a perfect human form.

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DEMOCRATS VS. MAIN STREET:

A Proposed Tax on the Cadillac Health Insurance Plans May Also Hit the Chevys (REED ABELSON, 9/20/09, NY Times)

As it turns out, though, many smaller fish would get caught in Mr. Baucus’s tax net. The supposedly Cadillac insurance policies include ones that cover many of the nation’s firefighters and coal miners, older employees at small businesses — a whole gamut that runs from union shops to Main Street entrepreneurs.

Under the Baucus plan, insurers selling a plan costing more than $8,000 for an individual and $21,000 for a family would have to pay a 35 percent excise tax on the excess amount.

Although the national average premium is currently $13,375 for a family policy, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, many are much higher than that — particularly in high-cost parts of the country.

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OKAY, THEN WHAT IS IT...:

Obama defends mandate to buy health coverage (Jennifer Haberkorn, 9/21/09, Washington Times)

In a blitz on the Sunday morning talks shows, President Obama rejected the criticism that his proposed mandate that all Americans carry health insurance coverage will burden poor Americans with a new tax and defended critics against claims that their remarks are based on race.

Mr. Obama, who opposed the insurance mandate during the 2008 presidential election, finds himself defending the measure against lawmakers who worry that the exemptions written into the requirement won't relieve enough poor Americans of the cost. [...]

He later denied that the insurance requirement, and subsequent fine for failing to meet it, would amount to a new "tax" on Americans.

"My critics say everything is a tax increase," Mr. Obama said on "This Week." "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase."

...the criminalization of disagreeing with the Democrats?

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THE NEW REACTION:

A Life in the Public Interest: The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. (James Q. Wilson, 9/21/09, WSJ)

It was the right moment. President Lyndon Johnson was trying to create a new political era by asking the government to do things that not even Franklin Roosevelt had endorsed, and to do it in a period of prosperity. The large majorities his party had in Congress as a result of Johnson's decisive defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 made it possible to create Medicare and Medicaid and to adopt major federal funding for local school systems. He created the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Johnson himself called what he was doing the creation of a "Great Society."

I was a small part of that world. I chaired a White House task force on crime for the president. It was a distinguished panel but after much effort we made very few useful recommendations. It slowly dawned on me that, important as the rising crime rate was, nobody knew how to make it a lot smaller. We assumed, of course, that the right policy was to eliminate the "root causes" of crime, but scholars disagreed about what many of those causes were and where they did agree they pointed to things, such as abusive families, about which a democratic government can do very little.

The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many of the writers, myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter's presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.

Whatever the authors were called, their best essays reflected one general view: Let us use social science to analyze an existing policy to see if it works at a reasonable cost. This meant that these writings were backward looking in a world when liberals were relentlessly forward looking. If you look carefully at what has been done rather than announce boldly what ought to be done, you will be called, I suppose, a conservative. We were lucky, I imagine, not to be called reactionaries.

Irving Kristol smiled through all of this

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THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TRANSNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE:

EU: European army no closer as member states put own interests first. (Con Coughlin, 21 Sep 2009, Daily Telegraph)

"The fundamental problem is that all this talk of European security and defence planning is a misnomer," explained Sebastian Giegerich, research fellow for European security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "It is not a defence policy – it is all about crisis management. Whenever there is a crisis everybody looks after their own national interests.

"There are those who are capable and willing, like Britain, and those who are capable but not willing, like the Germans. And there are those who are not capable and not willing, which unfortunately accounts for the overwhelming majority of EU states."

Europe’s inability to acquire a coherent and effective defence policy has been most evident in the conflicts that have arisen since the September 11 attacks in 2001. In the immediate aftermath of September 11 the leaders of Nato’s members states moved quickly to invoke Article 5 of the Nato treaty, by which they are obliged to support any member nation that comes under attack.

But just as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo, it soon became apparent that only a handful of European states, including Britain, were actually prepared to make a tangible military contribution to the campaign to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. And when it came to confronting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, deep divisions appeared among the major European powers over whether or not to support the war.

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SHE WAS SO SHOCKED HER EYES BUGGED RIGHT OUT OF HER HEAD:

Democrats squabble over who will pay health care bill (PATRICK O'CONNOR & CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN, 9/20/09, Politico)

President Barack Obama caught at least one top Democrat by surprise when he told Congress its health care bill should cost less than $900 billion — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. [...]

With that one statement, Obama served notice that he wants the final compromise to come in at less — $100 billion to $200 billion less — than what the House had in mind, cuts that could lead to less coverage and smaller subsidies to buy insurance.

It shouldn’t shock anyone that the health care fight has boiled down to a clash over money — or, more particularly, who pays for what? The problem is that Democrats don’t see eye to eye on who’ll foot the bill, setting up yet another battle inside the party over the final shape of the legislation.

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WHICH MAKES GLEN BECK OUR HOWARD BEALE?:

The real reason for the rage: Americans aren't racist - they're just furious at Obama and Washington (Frank Luntz, September 20th 2009, NY Daily News)

The real reason why 72% of the people I interviewed say that they're "mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore" has nothing to do with racism. No, their rage is about a lack of accountability, a lack of respect, and a lack of progress in the nation's capital.

Let's start with the absence of accountability, because that ranks No. 1 in the hearts and guts of the average American. Washington spends billions to bail out big business and then can't explain where the money went. Washington spends $800 billion on a stimulus package filled with earmarks and pork projects. And now Washington is trying to create a trillion dollar health care experiment when over 85% of Americans are satisfied with their health care just as it is.

This could be forgiven, perhaps, if those elected officials from Washington exhibited even an ounce of respect for the voters who pay their salaries. But the combination of a political class that ignores those with whom they disagree and a business class that ignores the very real suffering of the working class (if they are, in fact, working) while pocketing million-dollar bonuses has convinced the public that no one cares.

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STANDING UP TO THE MAN:

Paterson Says He Will Run Despite White House Pressure (RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and JEFF ZELENY, 9/20/09, NY Times)

Gov. David A. Paterson defiantly vowed to run for election next year despite the White House‘s urging that he withdraw from the New York governor’s race.

He shall not be moved!

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BREIT v. BRIGHTS:

Breitbart: A conservative rebel with a cause (Jennifer Harper, 9/20/09, Washington Times)

He is hybrid journalist, content wrangler, glib analyst. But most of all, Andrew Breitbart relishes running against the grain. For starters, he is an unabashed political conservative in a Hollywood dominated by liberals.

The man has moxie.

Frustrated that like-minded players in his hometown felt too intimidated to speak their mind, he helped organize a support group called "Friends of Abe" as a haven and forum for colleagues with similar ideas and values. The group is now hundreds strong.

A pronounced loathing for celebrity journalists, media conglomerates and glitzy TV networks drew him to contribute to nimble, alternative media sites like the Drudge Report and Huffington Post and ultimately create Breitbart.com, his own "news portal." All three compete with the mainstream media for news consumers on the Web.

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NO MORE SENATORS:

Tim Pawlenty Gets Best of Class (Hunter Baker, 9.19.09, American Spectator)

Pawlenty's presentation of his own record as a budget-balancer in MN was impressive and he sounded like the kind of conservative candidate who knows how to handle himself in a debate. The Minnesota governor came off as smart, tough, and ready for prime time. If he keeps making the rounds speaking the way he did Friday night, he is going to gain supporters in every part of the Republican coalition.

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NOBEL PRIZE IS NEXT ON HIS LIST:

America's next top role model: Lincoln is his idol. So why is Obama starting to talk so much like Jimmy Carter? (Kyle Smith, September 20, 2009, NY Post)

An episode of the PBS program American Experience said of Carter, "His tenacity, so admirable, could shift to stubbornness; his religious faith to self-righteousness. His brilliant mind could be bound up by intricate details." If these things were true of him, are they not even truer of the man who is currently waging a four-front war on the insurance industry, Wall Street, carbon emissions and the recession, not to mention a couple more wars overseas?

The transformation of Obama from Lincoln to Carter, from Great Emancipator to Bitter Scold was foretold by the wise political analysts we ignore at our peril: "The Simpsons."

In 1993, when Springfield yearned to erect a statue of Lincoln, all it got was a cheaper one — of Carter. As the people realized that they'd been had, one of them yelled of Carter, "He's history's greatest monster!" A riot broke out, a vision of tea parties yet to come. On Carter's pedestal were chiseled two words that are starting to sound like the motto of the Obama years: "Malaise Forever."

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BEGINNING?:

President Barack Obama is beginning to look out of his depth (Edward Lucas, 9/20/09, Daily Telegraph)

Regimes in Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran simply pocket his concessions and carry on as before. The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.

The grizzled veterans of the Democratic leadership in Congress have found Mr Obama and his team of bright young advisers a pushover. That has gravely weakened his flagship domestic campaign, for health-care reform, which fails to address the greatest weakness of the American system: its inflated costs. His free trade credentials are increasingly tarnished too. His latest blunder is imposing tariffs on tyre imports from China, in the hope of gaining a little more union support for health care. But at a time when America's leadership in global economic matters has never been more vital, that is a dreadful move, hugely undermining its ability to stop other countries engaging in a ruinous spiral of protectionism.

Of course, he's just fulfilling the promise his resume held. It's not like you can say any of this is surprising.

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THE ENDLESS AWKWARD COURTSHIP:

Reading Iran by the Letter (David Ignatius, September 20, 2009, Washinton Post)

Ahmadinejad defies not only the United States but the entire system of international relations that was created in 1945 at the end of World War II. He sees the world "at the threshold of entering a new era." He wants a "reorganization" of the United Nations, the Security Council, global media networks and other institutions. "The existing mechanisms are not capable to meet the present needs of mankind," said Iran's message this month proposing negotiations.

There's an echo of Robespierre or Mao Zedong in his talk of a new order that enfranchises the dispossessed. It's a personal kind of messianism. "I congratulate you," he wrote to Barack Obama a day after the November presidential election, warning in the same breath that "the nations of the world expect an end to policies based on warmongering, invasion, bullying, trickery [and] the humiliation of other countries."

Ahmadinejad's most peculiar epistle was his rambling May 8, 2006, letter to President George W. Bush. "For some time now I have been thinking, how one can justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena," he began. Noting that he was once a teacher, he went on to prod Bush like a nettlesome inquisitor, asking how he could call himself "a follower of Jesus Christ" and yet pursue aggressive policies.

The Iranian president is even a "truther," insisting that there was a hidden hand behind Sept. 11, 2001.

Iran's Khamenei signals easing in election tension (NASSER KARIMI, 9/20/09, AP)

Iran's Supreme Leader warned government supporters on Sunday against accusing opposition members of wrongdoing without proof, an indication that the Islamic government may be easing up on critics of the June presidential election. [...]

"We do not have the right to accuse without any proof," Khamenei said in a speech marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in which he urged the judiciary and security forces to pursue offenders within the bounds of the law.

Most Iranians favour ties with US but distrust Barack Obama: Poll (AFP, 9/20/09)

Eight in 10 Iranians also say they consider President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be the country's legitimate president despite mass protests following the disputed June 12 vote, according to the survey by WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO).

63% of the 1,003 people surveyed across Iran favoured restoring diplomatic relations with the US, a position at odds with the stance taken by Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. [...]

But despite Obama's outreach to Muslims around the world, only 25% of those surveyed believe he respects Islam, while 59% said he does not.

Obama and Ahmadinejad: The Politics of Face Time (HELENE COOPER, 9/20/09, NY Times)

It was just over two years ago that Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois with aspirations to the presidency, famously pronounced during a Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C., that he would be willing to hold direct talks, without preconditions, with the president of Iran.

This week, President Obama will have the chance to do just that, when Iran’s fiery, diminutive, Israel-bashing, legitimacy-challenged president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joins Mr. Obama and other world leaders who are descending on New York City to speak at the first United Nations General Assembly in the new kinder, gentler, Barack Obama era.

And guess what? Administration officials will be doing everything in their power to make sure the two don’t get within spitting distance of each other.

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THAT'S RACIST:

Romney taunts Democrats with memories of Carter (The Associated Press, 9/20/09)

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney reflects conservatives' growing confidence when he taunts Democrats, saying "I'll bet you never dreamed you'd look back at Jimmy Carter as the good old days."

Why does he have to go hating on the cracker?

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TOP OF THE LIST:

PJ O'Rourke: a hellraiser who had to slow down: PJ O'Rourke, America's favourite living wit, talks to Philip Sherwell about drugs, cars and his recent brush with cancer (Philip Sherwell, 20 Sep 2009, Daily Telegraph)

As a fervent foe of “big government”, he reluctantly accepts the need for the bank bail-out to prevent the entire financial system grinding to a halt. But he has no truck with the attempt to keep afloat the motor industry, most notably General Motors. “Saving GM was folly,” he says. “Millions of investors around the world were looking at GM and all agreed it was worthless. Then a guy who’s a lawyer with an Ivy League liberal arts education [Obama] comes along and tells me that my tax dollars are going to bail out GM. If I had wanted to own part of GM, I’d have a stockbroker.”

He looks across the Atlantic for evidence of where this policy will lead. “We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.” [...]

O’Rourke and his friends did much to shape modern political satire at National Lampoon. Surveying the impact three decades later, he notes: “We may have fostered it a little too well as I’m told now that a majority of young people get their news from The Daily Show [a topical comedy programme]. Or maybe I’m just jealous as there’s only room for so much humour, so my share might be reduced.”

Still, he criticises the smugness and self-importance that he feels has crept into some political satire – not surprisingly, a trait he sees more on the Left than on the Right. “It does not do for a political humourist to be smug. We’re not offering policy alternatives; we’re pointing out political absurdities. We’re the ones switching on the kitchen lights and watching the cockroaches scamper. But we’re not going in there to stamp on them. That shouldn’t be our role.”

His slew of witty one-liners has earned him the status of the most quoted living writer in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations. “Note the emphasis on the living. The moment I die, I’ll drop way down the list.”

As for his own favourite, he opts for an observation he made in 1993 that is enjoying a new lease of life today: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free,” he famously opined at a gala dinner for the libertarian Cato Institute as the then First Lady Hillary Clinton pursued her doomed efforts to reform the health care system.

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HOW DO YOU WORK THIS HERE CONSTITUTION (via Bryan Francoeur):

Obama asks New York governor not to run: report (Reuters, 9/20/09)

President Obama has asked New York Governor David Paterson to withdraw from the state's 2010 governor's race for fear that the embattled fellow Democrat cannot regroup from a series of political setbacks, The New York Times reported on Sunday.

Actually, the people of New York get to choose their governor, not the UR.

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THE VALETUDINARIAN, LIKE THE MALTHUSIAN, GETS PERIODIC CHANCES TO DEMONSTRATE THE ERROR OF HIS WAYS:

The Future of Global Finance (LIAQUAT AHAMED, 9/20/09, NY Times)

It has long been recognized that the global financial structure — built as it is around the dollar as the world’s reserve currency — has a fundamental design flaw that makes it inherently unstable. The problem was first identified back in the early 1960s by the Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin, in “Gold and the Dollar Crisis.” Writing about Europe’s accumulation of dollars, he argued that the system carried the seeds of its own destruction. Foreigners could acquire dollars only if the United States ran current account deficits — that is, spent more than it earned. But lending money to someone who lives beyond his means has obvious dangers, and the same is true of countries. Thus, the American deficits necessary to supply dollars to the world for international transactions simultaneously undermined confidence in the currency. It was only a matter of time, Triffin predicted, before the system would be hit by a crisis — which it duly was in the early 1970s.

At the beginning of the current decade a group of commentators, the most ­articulate being the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, updated Triffin’s critique and applied it to current arrangements. Whereas Triffin had been primarily concerned about the European accumulation of dollars, the spotlight was now on Asia. In the wake of the 1997 financial crisis there, countries in East Asia set out to build up war chests of dollars as insurance against domestic banking runs or downturns in the global economy. At about the same time, China embarked on a program of export-led growth, engineered by keeping its currency artificially low.

Interpretations of what happened next differ. Some argue that to absorb these goods from abroad while avoiding unemployment at home, the United States very consciously stimulated consumer demand. The country, in effect, was forced to live beyond its means. Others believe that the Fed misread the fall in prices as a symptom of inadequate demand rather than for what it was — an astounding, once-in-a-generation expansion in the supply of low-cost goods — and kept interest rates low for an unusually long time, which provoked the real estate bubble.

In either case, the result was an enormous accumulation of dollars in the hands of Asian central banks. Those dollars, when invested in the American bond market, drove long-term interest rates even further down and made credit in the ­United States even more artificially cheap.

The build-up of dollars abroad was also the catalyst for a remarkable transformation in the flow of money around the world. The United States found itself literally operating as a gigantic bank, taking short-term liquid deposits from countries with surpluses and investing the money in long-term, risky assets at home and abroad. The numbers involved were staggering. In 1996, the United States had international assets and liabilities of around $5 trillion. By 2007 the figure was more than $20 trillion. Like any bank, it was vulnerable to a run. The main fear was that the United States at some point would be faced with a modern-day replay of Triffin’s dilemma and would have to deal with the consequences of a collapse in confidence in the dollar.

Instead, what led to the current mess was a somewhat different strain of the same disease. As Wolf traces out so well in his 2008 book “Fixing Global Finance,” the United States was able to absorb all the goods coming out of Asia only by letting its consumers go progressively deeper into debt — a process that had its own limits. Moreover, the flood of money simply overwhelmed the capacity of financial institutions to handle it. A lot, for example, ended up in the most unregulated segments of the global banking system, like off-shore deposits on the books of non-American banks. These banks, now awash with cash and desperate for places to put the money, became easy marks for American investment banks seeking to peddle securitized mortgages. When a large percentage of these loans went bad, instead of a dollar panic we had a global banking crisis.

The ease with which the crisis was dealt with; the immediate return to absurdly high personal savings rates; the reality that global deflation will continue, not end; and the demographics that will force foreigners to put their savings into our credit markets, not their own; all make nonsense of this. But the biggest problem with the theory that there's a design flaw in the system is that countries are generally nothing like someones. If a 70 year old man owes you $1000 you should be worried about ever seeing it--after all, he's no longer earning any money, just spending what he has left, and could die any minute. The 230 year-old democracy that owes you money will be around for centuries after your nation implodes.

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UR-TREKKIES:

John Calvin: Comeback Kid: Why the 500-year-old Reformer retains an enthusiastic following today. (Timothy George, 9/08/2009, Christianity Today)

The most remarkable thing about Calvin's theology is how unremarkable it is, especially when set against the Catholic, Augustinian, and Lutheran traditions he inherited, reframed, and passed on to others. In retrospect, Calvin stands out next to Luther as one of the two great shaping theologians of the Protestant movement. But we should not detach him from other seminal thinkers with whom he shared certain basic assumptions about God, the Bible, human beings, and the work of Christ in the world. Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel, Peter Martyr Vermigli from Italy, and Luther's successor, Philip Melanchthon, were all Calvin's friends and colleagues in the work of reform.

Unlike the Anabaptists, who sought a New Testament church unencumbered by the baggage of history, Calvin and his peers wanted to be nothing more than faithful and obedient members of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. This church, they believed, had fallen into disrepair. It had been led into captivity by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Yet there were points of continuity as well as discontinuity with the Catholic past, and the church needed to be reformed on the basis of the Word of God. Catholic historian Alexandre Ganoczy has said of Calvin: "He never stopped claiming his unshakable attachment to the unity of the Catholic Church, which he did not want to replace, but to restore."
'Preforeordestination'

Mark Twain has Huckleberry Finn refer to a perplexing Calvinist sermon he once heard on "preforeordestination." In agreement with Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Luther before him, Calvin did teach that God was sovereign in salvation no less than in creation, and that divine election was entirely gratuitous—ante praevisa merita, as the scholastic tag went, not based on God's foreknowledge of human achievement. Calvin held this view not because he was a mean man or a dour despot, but because he believed to have found it clearly taught in Holy Scripture. For Calvin, however, the doctrine of predestination was not an a priori metaphysical axiom from which everything else was derived. Rather, it had a Christological focus (with Christ as the mirror of election) and a pastoral import.

In discussing predestination, Calvin foll