April whiplash injury claims

							April 20, 2009

John Fund on the kid's photo-op with Hugo.
... And what about his treatment of his own people? Mr. Chavez has been locking up most of the leaders of
whatever political opposition he still faces, including the mayor of Caracas, Venezuela's capital. Save for a
brief reference that political prisoners would be included on any list of topics brought up in future diplomatic
talks with the Chavez regime, Mr. Obama was silent on the issue of human rights in both Venezuela and
Cuba. It almost makes one yearn for the days of Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter also practiced a policy of
naiveté in foreign affairs, but at least he never forgot that human rights had to be kept front and center in
dealings with overseas adversaries.

Mark Steyn Corner post on regulatory despotism.
... The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as Pierre
Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster - and the machinery of bureaucracy
barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the
merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of "individual
existence" by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we
have the will to resist it?

London Times Op-Ed claims "green jobs" will become the next "sub-prime."
When everybody seems to have the same big idea, you just know it can only mean trouble. Remember sub-
prime mortgages? Now universally excoriated as the spawn of the devil, the proximate cause of the credit
crunch and all that followed, a few years back “sub-prime” was everyone’s darling. Financiers loved it
because it generated sumptuously high-yielding debt instruments; governments, because it promised to
make even the poor into proud property owners.

Now business lobbyists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have got a new big idea. They call it
“green jobs”. Leading the pack is, as you might expect, Barack Obama. The president recently defended a
vast package of subsidies for renewable energy on the grounds that it would “create millions of additional
jobs and entire new industries”. ...


Jennifer Rubin wonders why the kid's administration has declared war on job creators.
... One wonders where the administration and Congress think jobs come from and what burdens can be
placed on employers already struggling. They seem to operate in a fantasyworld in which burden after
burden can be loaded onto the backs of businesses, no international competition exists, and no loss of U.S.
jobs results. If the Obama team would really like to “save” some jobs they’d call for a time out in the rush to
enact job-killing legislation.

And J. G. Thayer says the feds have become a bunch of thugs.
... President Obama’s hand-picked Car Czar, Steven Rattner has chosen the plan to “save” Chrysler.
Chrysler will be sold off, and Ratner has narrowed down the list of buyers to precisely one: Fiat. And to help
entice Fiat to make the deal, some of Chrysler’s biggest creditors will write off billions of debt.

Why would Chrysler and its banking creditors buy into this deal? Because they accepted federal bailout
money. The Golden Rule prevails — that is, “Them with the gold makes the rules.” Chrysler took federal
funds, so it has to sell itself to whomever the government says. And the banks took federal funds, so they
have to write off whatever debts the government says.


Pollster Kellyanne Conway comments on BO's numbers.
“His numbers are still high.” “People like him.” “The President has the strong support of a majority of
Americans.” These observations are common throughout the blogosphere and within the punditocracy to
describe the current standing of President Obama. Trouble is, they rely upon a very thin and limited
measurement: presidential approval ratings.

Most polls currently have President Obama’s “approval ratings” around 60%. That is not surprising, and
likely will remain there or increase in the coming weeks. He’s likeable. Much of his campaign was built on his
personal appeal. Plenty of the nearly 70 million people who voted for him are not about to second-guess
their own judgment just five months later. Most Americans want the president -- whoever he is -- to do well,
since they view (rightly or wrongly) a nexus between his success or failure and that of the nation.

But adulation abroad and a perception of charm and charisma at home is not a mandate for the type of
sweeping transformations to the domestic economy and foreign policy currently on the table. After all,
Candidate Obama ran on “change we can believe in,” not “revolution you must pay for.” ...

George Will writes on the policy of treating Russia like it's a real country.
... Putin -- ignore the human Potemkin village (Dmitry Medvedev) who currently occupies the presidential
office -- must be amazed and amused that America's president wants to treat Russia as a great power.
Obama should instead study pertinent demographic trends.

Nicholas Eberstadt's essay "Drunken Nation" in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is
experiencing "a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation." Previous episodes of
depopulation -- 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 -- were the results of civil war, Stalin's war on the "kulaks" and
collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today's depopulation is occurring in normal
-- for Russia -- social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate,
sharply declining enrollment rates for primary school pupils, perhaps more than 7 percent of children
abandoned by their parents to orphanages or government care or life as "street children." Furthermore,
"mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits" -- including poisonously impure home brews -- "is
an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents,
violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on." Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a
half-century ago under Khrushchev. ...



Debra Saunders thinks the left coast is out to lunch on offshore drilling.
Last Wednesday, conservatives held coast-to-coast "TEA parties" designed to send the message to
Washington and state governments that the partiers feel "taxed enough already." The exercise struck me as
more than a little out of touch with the political realities of President Obama's America. The next day, Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar held a public hearing in San Francisco on a Bush administration proposal to sell
federal leases to drill for oil and gas off the California coast. The hearing became the Left Coast equivalent
of the right-wing TEA party.

The only difference is that the overwhelmingly anti-drilling crowd was in la-la land on the realities of oil
instead of taxes. Every one of the elected officials who spoke were anti-drilling Democrats. Every one
seemed out of touch with the realities of the need to increase domestic oil production.

America's in a tough recession: It's in no position to turn down good-paying jobs and tax revenue, not to
mention a way to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. Here's a sobering statistic: U.S. imported oil
use grew from 24 percent in 1970 to 70 percent last year. ...


Julie Gunrock in NRO writes about left coast veggie snobs.
In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and
least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most
important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not
known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”
Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the
millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one
cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the
Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester,
Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as
ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who
— in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground,
and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know
that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food. ...

Christopher Buckley says enough with the torture sanctimony.
... It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how
awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure
god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they
had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU?
Hel-lo?)

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that
could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not. ...




John Fund
What Won't Obama Do for a Photo-Op?
During the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Hillary Clinton sharply criticized Barack Obama's pledge to
meet with leaders of rogue nations such as North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela without preconditions.
She warned that allowing the prestige of the U.S. presidency to be "used for propaganda purposes" by such
leaders could easily produce results that "make matters worse" for U.S. interests. She urged that the U.S.
"test the waters" first with meetings with lower-level officials in which the sincerity and opportunity for
genuine progress with such nations could be judged.

Perhaps it's because her warnings were so clear that Secretary of State Clinton has offered no public
comment on the decision of her boss, President Obama, to cross a room and shake the hand of Venezuelan
strongman Hugo Chavez. The resulting photos and video of Mr. Obama's grip-and-grin meeting with Mr.
Chavez were quickly distributed around the world. Many Latin leftists interpreted the gesture as a sign of
weakness by an American president because he got nothing in exchange for it other than a statement from
Mr. Chavez that he would consider sending his recalled ambassador back to Washington.

Mr. Obama defended the meeting by saying that Venezuela has a tiny military budget and so poses no
strategic threat to the U.S. Whoa. Has he forgotten the computer files seized from FARC terrorists by
Colombian forces last year and confirmed by Interpol? They showed that Mr. Chavez has openly supported,
funded and harbored FARC in its effort to destabilize his neighbor Colombia, a key U.S. ally in the war on
illegal drugs. You'd think before Mr. Obama showered a photo-op on a character like Mr. Chavez, he would
have extracted some security concessions from him through lower-level meetings.

And what about his treatment of his own people? Mr. Chavez has been locking up most of the leaders of
whatever political opposition he still faces, including the mayor of Caracas, Venezuela's capital. Save for a
brief reference that political prisoners would be included on any list of topics brought up in future diplomatic
talks with the Chavez regime, Mr. Obama was silent on the issue of human rights in both Venezuela and
Cuba. It almost makes one yearn for the days of Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter also practiced a policy of naiveté
in foreign affairs, but at least he never forgot that human rights had to be kept front and center in dealings
with overseas adversaries.


The Corner
Sweet 17 [Jay Nordlinger]
In Impromptus today, I link to the amazing site Serenity Thru Haiku: Surviving the Obama Years. And I give
a sample of the site’s offerings — a haiku concerning health care. May I give another sample? I like it a lot.
This haiku is called “Hypocrite,” and it goes

DC vouchers, gone!
Public schools are good enough
But not for his kids.

And ask not whose kids we’re talking about . . .

Beautiful.



The Corner
Regulatory despotism [Mark Steyn]
Pierre Lemieux is a libertarian Quebecer, which makes him a member of what may be North America's least
electorally significant minority. He's a gun owner, and a couple of years back he was obliged to fill in the
relevant government paperwork:

Before renewing his gun permit in 2007, the authorities decided to inquire into Lemieux's bedroom history.
Did he divorce anyone in the last two years? Did he break up with a girlfriend? If yes, use a separate sheet
to explain.

Pardon me? Explain?

Well, it was nothing personal . Apparently, Canada's government feels it ought to know the romantic status
of all firearm owners.

The Government of Canada has modified the old Mae West line: If you want a pistol in your pocket, you'd
better be pleased to see her. Like any self-respecting citizen (if you'll forgive the expression), M Lemieux told
the government to take a hike, and for good measure explained his reasons to the Prime Minister:

"You will note that, as a proud descendant of the disobedient French Canadian coureurs de bois," he wrote,
"I have not answered one of the [permit renewal] form's indiscreet and obscene questions. I answered that
my love affairs are none of your business."

Needless to say, the government declined to issue his permit, and he's now taking them to court for the next
five-to-ten years.

No elected politicians passed a law in any legislature mandating that would-be gun-owners explain why they
bust up with their sweethearts. But some no-name official somewhere in the permanent bureaucracy did,
and that's that. Two centuries ago, Tocqueville wrote:

There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a
power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.
True. The king was an absolute tyrant - in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles
away, and for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. As Tocqueville wrote:

Although the entire government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and
although he remained, in time of need, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual
existence ordinarily escaped his control.

But what would happen, he wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible "to
subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations"? That moment has now arrived in
much of the western world, including America.

The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as Pierre
Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster - and the machinery of bureaucracy
barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the
merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of "individual
existence" by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we
have the will to resist it?



Times, UK
Beware green jobs, the new sub-prime
by Dominic Lawson

When everybody seems to have the same big idea, you just know it can only mean trouble. Remember sub-
prime mortgages? Now universally excoriated as the spawn of the devil, the proximate cause of the credit
crunch and all that followed, a few years back “sub-prime” was everyone’s darling. Financiers loved it
because it generated sumptuously high-yielding debt instruments; governments, because it promised to
make even the poor into proud property owners.

Now business lobbyists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have got a new big idea. They call it
“green jobs”. Leading the pack is, as you might expect, Barack Obama. The president recently defended a
vast package of subsidies for renewable energy on the grounds that it would “create millions of additional
jobs and entire new industries”.

In Britain, the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, promises billions in state aid for the same purpose. To
add verisimilitude, last week he gave a royal wave from the inside of a prototype electric Mini. Mandelson’s
chauffeur was a representative of the lower house: the transport secretary, Geoff Hoon.

The occasion for this photo opportunity was the government’s proposal to offer a £5,000 subsidy to anyone
buying an electric car of a type not yet available: exact details to be given in Alistair Darling’s forthcoming
budget. The idea is to create a “world-beating” British-based electric-car-manufacturing industry, while also
attempting to meet Gordon Brown’s promise to have the nation converted to electric or hybrid cars by 2020.

That remarkable prime ministerial pledge predated the recession; its motive was to demonstrate that Britain
was “leading the world in the battle against climate change”. We aren’t, as a matter of fact; but under new
Labour we have certainly led the world at claiming to do so. Mandelson expressed this almost satirically last
week when he declared that “Britain has taken a world lead in setting ambitious targets for carbon
reduction”.

As ever, new Labour confuses announcements and newspaper headlines with real action. Whenever it
becomes obvious even to ministers that Britain will not meet its current carbon reduction target, they replace
it with a yet tougher target, only with an extended deadline.
It does not yet seem to have occurred to new Labour that this is making it look ridiculous, especially to the
environmentalists whose support it is presumably trying to solicit. Or perhaps it has, but it would rather that
than lose our “world leadership” in target-setting.

There is something almost comical in the government’s belief that the electric car, dependent as it is on the
national grid, is a sort of magic recipe for reducing carbon emissions. Some months ago President Sarkozy
of France had an identical idea and commissioned a report on the prospects for turning Renault and Citroën
into producers of mass-market electric vehicles. The report concluded that “the traditional combustion
engine still offers the most realistic prospect of developing cleaner vehicles simply by improving the
performance and efficiency of traditional engines and limiting the top speed to 105mph. The overall cost of
an electric car remains unfeasible at about double that of a conventional vehicle. Battery technology is still
unsatisfactory, severely limiting performance”.

Note that this crushing verdict came in a country where electricity is for the most part generated by nuclear
power, which produces . In this country, more than three-quarters of the grid’s power comes from theno CO2
fossil fuels of gas and coal.

Presumably it is the latter that accounts for the fact that when the London borough of Camden
commissioned a study to see whether it should introduce electric vehicles for some of its services, it found
that “EVs relying on the average UK mix of energy to charge them were responsible for significantly more
particles of soot that lodge deeply in the lungs . . . than the average petrol-powered car”.

If all our electricity were to be generated by wind power, without any fossil-fuel back-up, this criticism would
not apply. Then the cars could take days, rather than hours, to recharge (depending on the weather) and
would be so expensive to run that driving would become the exclusive preserve of the rich.

A further absurdity is that electric cars are suitable only for short rides within urban areas – precisely where
we are being encouraged to abandon cars and use public transport. Ken Livingstone exempted electric cars
from his congestion charge as if, in addition to their suppositious environmental benefits, they also had the
magical property of being incapable of contributing to congestion. As the Ecologist magazine has reported:
“The focus on electric vehicles and the political love they get is totally misguided . . . to have that as the
spearhead of government transport carbon-reduction policy is insane.”

The magazine is controlled by Zac Goldsmith, the prospective Conservative candidate for Richmond Park
and team Cameron’s environmental guru. Last week his colleague George Osborne took a different tack,
observing that the absence of plans for a national network of charging points meant that “the Labour plan is
like giving people a grant to buy an internal combustion engine, without bothering to set up any petrol
stations”. Osborne had his own suggested grant to create “green jobs”: “We will give every household a new
entitlement to £6,500 of energy-saving technologies.”

I’m not sure how the Tories came up with the figure of £6,500. It is pointedly bigger than Labour’s proposed
£5,000 electric car subsidy; but all these figures are preposterous. If you multiply £6,500 by the number of
households in the land, you get to £160 billion, bigger on its own than the national debt that Osborne has
repeatedly told us is unaffordable.

Electoral bribes apart, there is a more serious misconception behind the idea that ploughing subsidies into
the “green economy” is a sure-fire way of boosting domestic employment. At best it will move people from
one economic activity to another. Labour’s plans would subsidise car production workers to move from
making conventional models to electric vehicles, which hardly anyone wants to buy. Osborne’s proposals
would subsidise the double-glazing and home insulation industry and suck in many workers gainfully
employed (without subsidy) elsewhere.

The key to a successful, wealth-generating economy is productivity. Saving energy is what businesses have
done already, because it lowers their production costs. The problem with any form of subsidy is that it makes
the consumer (through hidden taxes) pay to keep inherently uneconomic businesses “profitable”.
Meanwhile, diversified energy companies such as Shell, with plenty of speculatively acquired wind-farm
acreage, are salivating at the plans by Obama to introduce cap-and-trade carbon emissions targets for
American industry.

Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, had some soothing words for US manufacturing companies that
complained that the new policy will make them even less competitive with Chinese exporters, since the
people’s republic has indicated that it has no intention of inflicting a similar increase in energy costs on its
own producers. He suggested that America might have to introduce some sort of “car-bon-intensive” tariff on
Chinese goods. One of China’s envoys, Li Gao, immediately retorted that such a carbon tariff would be a
“disaster”, since it could lead to global trade war.

Actually, Mr Li is right: and this is how an achingly fashionable and well-intentioned plan to create “millions of
new green jobs” could instead end up making the global economy even sicker than it is already.



Contentions
Save a Job, Kill Some Bills
Jennifer Rubin

The Obama administration seems blissfully unaware of its policies’ impact on the economy — or perhaps
doesn’t care so long as its liberal wish list is fulfilled. A prime example is the EPA finding finding that carbon
dioxide threatens the planet. What does this mean?

The finding could touch every corner of Americans’ lives, from the types of cars they drive to the homes they
build. Along with carbon dioxide, the EPA named methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons,
perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride as deleterious to the environment. Even if the agency doesn’t use
its powers under the Clean Air Act to curb greenhouse gases, Friday’s action improves the chances that
Congress will move to create a more flexible mechanism to do so.

Good thing we’re not in a horrid recession with rising unemployment, or this could really be a problem for
American employers. Oh, wait.

Let’s recall we have 8.5% unemployment and double-digit unemployment in a number of states. So we are
now, either by regulation or legislation, going to be embarking on a regulatory scheme that is going to touch
every industry. Add to that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for many small businesses and healthcare
“reform,” which will likely involve some sort of employer mandate, and you have the makings of a stunningly
hostile employment environment — in the midst of a recession.

One wonders where the administration and Congress think jobs come from and what burdens can be placed
on employers already struggling. They seem to operate in a fantasyworld in which burden after burden can
be loaded onto the backs of businesses, no international competition exists, and no loss of U.S. jobs results.
If the Obama team would really like to “save” some jobs they’d call for a time out in the rush to enact job-
killing legislation.



Contentions
“I Am Altering The Deal. Pray I Don’t Alter It Any Further.”
by J.G. Thayer

The Obama administration continues to use the clout it has bought with the taxpayers’ money to impose its
own vision on American industry.
Many banks were pressured into taking TARP bailout money knowing full well there would be strings
attached. But I doubt they had any inkling of just how those strings would be pulled. Likewise, when GM and
Chrysler asked for and accepted federal loan guarantees, they probably expected there would be more
restrictions than when Chrysler did it in the 1970’s. But I doubt they foresaw what would happen.

The Obama administration has adopted an ownership mentality towards the institutions they granted money
and guarantees, and intends to show the world that it can run these businesses better than the people
who’ve spent their entire careers in the fields of finance and auto-making. (To be fair, those worthies haven’t
exactly done a bang-up job, either, or they wouldn’t have gone hat in hand to Washington.)

Well, President Obama’s hand-picked Car Czar, Steven Rattner has chosen the plan to “save” Chrysler.
Chrysler will be sold off, and Ratner has narrowed down the list of buyers to precisely one: Fiat. And to help
entice Fiat to make the deal, some of Chrysler’s biggest creditors will write off billions of debt.

Why would Chrysler and its banking creditors buy into this deal? Because they accepted federal bailout
money. The Golden Rule prevails — that is, “Them with the gold makes the rules.” Chrysler took federal
funds, so it has to sell itself to whomever the government says. And the banks took federal funds, so they
have to write off whatever debts the government says.

That was Rattner’s initial plan, anyway. The banks — once they pulled their collective jaws off the floor —
said they’d come up with a counter-proposal. One that will presumably give the banks some kind of incentive
or reward for helping Chrysler.

Right now the “incentive” for all the players is brute force. They have been told, in no uncertain terms, that
they should not fear the government; rather they should fear the American people. Indeed, President Obama
told a meeting of banking executives recently that “my administration is the only thing between you and the
pitchforks” — a statement eerily reminiscent of mobster thugs running a protection racket.

This is the message of the Obama administration: if you play ball with us, understand that we instantly
become the boss. We set the rules. We call the tune to which you will dance. And we will change that tune
whenever it suits us.

And if you don’t, then may the fates be merciful. Because we won’t.



Human Events
Obama's Soft Polls
by Kellyanne Conway
“His numbers are still high.” “People like him.” “The President has the strong support of a majority of
Americans.” These observations are common throughout the blogosphere and within the punditocracy to
describe the current standing of President Obama. Trouble is, they rely upon a very thin and limited
measurement: presidential approval ratings.

Most polls currently have President Obama’s “approval ratings” around 60%. That is not surprising, and
likely will remain there or increase in the coming weeks. He’s likeable. Much of his campaign was built on his
personal appeal. Plenty of the nearly 70 million people who voted for him are not about to second-guess
their own judgment just five months later. Most Americans want the president -- whoever he is -- to do well,
since they view (rightly or wrongly) a nexus between his success or failure and that of the nation.

But adulation abroad and a perception of charm and charisma at home is not a mandate for the type of
sweeping transformations to the domestic economy and foreign policy currently on the table. After all,
Candidate Obama ran on “change we can believe in,” not “revolution you must pay for.”
If past is prologue, President Obama, like his presidential predecessors, will face approval rating ebbs and
flows and an occasional reminder that likeability and leadership are not the same. President George Herbert
Walker Bush enjoyed a stratospheric 92% approval rating following Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and got
less than half of that -- 37% -- in his re-election loss less than two years later. His son, the 43rd President,
enjoyed the approval of at least 50% of the country for more than three years after 9-11, but left office at
33%. President Clinton’s approval ratings seemed to spike up with each new salacious detail of his
extracurricular details. Go figure.

If approval ratings are to be the standard-bearer, then Congress might as well not bother showing up for
work. Their approval is around 34% and since the Dems have taken control, has hovered below 40%.
During the second term (2008) of the Pelosi-Reid-led 110th Congress, their approval stayed below 30%.

Approval ratings for the person should not be confused with approval ratings for the person’s policies.
President Obama’s approval ratings tend to be about 15-20 points higher than popular support for some of
his policies. For example, the latest Newsweek figures give the new POTUS a 61% approval rating, but in
the same poll, less than one-half of Americans offer their support to the way he is handling the economy
(48%), taxes (48%), and the federal budget deficit (42%).

Mr. Obama seems to cash in his popularity to forge agenda items that are not tops on the “wish list” of the
people he serves. Strong majorities of Americans say his main priority should be the economy and jobs,
while less than 5% want him to focus instead on abortion policy (most of whom are pro-life incidentally).
Why, then, has he made or proposed three major changes to abortion-related policy in the first 100 days?
He reversed the Mexico City policy, which means U.S. taxpayers, including those who morally object, will
now pay for abortions performed in other countries and for the destruction of embryos for research
purposes. And doctors, pharmacists and nurses face losing their “right to choose” to not perform a
procedure that offends their consciences.

Another challenge for Mr. Obama is that a majority of the nation tells pollsters that they subscribe to an
ideology different from his. In our most recent nationwide polling figures, Democrats enjoyed a six-point
advantage over Republicans (39% vs. 33%) in political party identification, but the number of people who
describe themselves as “conservative” outnumbers liberals by more than 2-to-1. This is why liberals now
call themselves progressives and why the mainstream media cast everything as between Democrats and
Republicans rather than conservatives and liberals (unless they choose the preceding adjective, like “right-
wing,” or “Christian crazy” or the newest, “Tea Party Nut Jobs.”)

And three months into Mr. Obama’s presidency, twice the number of people thinks the country is headed on
the wrong track rather than in the right direction. Though the spin-doctors will revert to script and blame
President Bush for this, the fact is that millions of Americans are nervous, angry, and impatient with what
they see as a lack of results and the wrong priorities in what is now the Obama economy.

Consider that according to the Pew Research Center, 48% of Americans prefer a “smaller government [with]
fewer services,” up from 42% prior to the November election. In contrast, 40% favor a “bigger government
[with] more services.” Since taking office, President Obama has successfully lobbied for a nearly $800
trillion stimulus package and a $3.6 trillion budget that includes “gimmes” for corporations who have failed to
police greed and incompetence and can’t cut it in the free market.

In a September 2008 survey we conducted with a Democratic firm on behalf of American Solutions for
Winning the Future, we found that “when a company faces a potential failure due to poor internal
mismanagement” 68% of likely voters would prefer “bankruptcy for the company, even if it means investors
lose money and there is harm to the stock market.” In contrast, just 19% believed that in such a situation
that “government should step in and support the companies with taxpayer dollars to avoid bankruptcy and
protect the money of investors.”

And in a Fox News survey, 55% of registered voters -- including 37% of Democrats -- thought the
government should not “increase taxes on the wealthiest individuals so that nobody gets to be too rich.”
President Obama (and unimaginative governors like New York’s David Paterson or Delaware’s Jack
Markell) are suffocating small businesses and discouraging aspiring entrepreneurs whose annual revenues
often fall into clever Democratic definition of “wealth.”

Approval means something, but it should not be confused with respect, agreement, confidence, blind faith or
a blank check. It is not a commitment; for many, it is a polite nod of the head or shrug of the shoulder.
Would you marry the one person with whom you are deeply in love or the 10 of whom you approve?

Mrs. Conway is President of the polling company, inc./WomanTrend, a public opinion firm in Washington,
DC.



Washington Post
Potemkin Country
by George F. Will

America's "progressive" president has some peculiarly retro policies. Domestically, his reactionary liberalism
is exemplified by his policy of No Auto Company Left Behind, with its intimated hope that depopulated
Detroit, where cattle could graze, can somehow return to something like the 1950s. Abroad, he seems to
yearn for the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was rampant and coping with it supposedly depended on arms
control.

Actually, what was needed was not the chimera of arms control but Ronald Reagan's renewal of the arms
race that helped break the Soviet regime. The stately minuet of arms negotiations helped sustain U.S. public
support for the parallel weapons spending.

Significant arms agreements are generally impossible until they are unimportant. Significant agreements are
those that substantially alter an adversarial dynamic between rival powers. But arms agreements never do.
During the Cold War, for example, arms negotiations were another arena of great-power competition rather
than an amelioration of that competition.

The Soviet Union was a Third World nation with First World missiles. It had, as Russia still has, an
essentially hunter-gatherer economy, based on extraction industries -- oil, gas, minerals, furs. Other than
vodka, for what manufactured good would you look to Russia? Caviar? It is extracted from the fish that
manufacture it.

Today, in a world bristling with new threats, the president suggests addressing an old one -- Russia's
nuclear arsenal. It remains potentially dangerous, particularly if a portion of it falls into nonstate hands. But
what is the future of the backward and backsliding kleptocratic thugocracy that is Vladimir Putin's Russia?

Putin -- ignore the human Potemkin village (Dmitry Medvedev) who currently occupies the presidential office
-- must be amazed and amused that America's president wants to treat Russia as a great power. Obama
should instead study pertinent demographic trends.

Nicholas Eberstadt's essay "Drunken Nation" in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is
experiencing "a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation." Previous episodes of
depopulation -- 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 -- were the results of civil war, Stalin's war on the "kulaks" and
collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today's depopulation is occurring in normal
-- for Russia -- social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate,
sharply declining enrollment rates for primary school pupils, perhaps more than 7 percent of children
abandoned by their parents to orphanages or government care or life as "street children." Furthermore,
"mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits" -- including poisonously impure home brews -- "is
an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents,
violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on." Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a
half-century ago under Khrushchev.

Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, writing in the Wilson Quarterly ("The World's
New Numbers"), notes that Russia's declining fertility is magnified by "a phenomenon so extreme that it has
given rise to an ominous new term -- hypermortality." Because of rampant HIV/AIDS, extreme drug-resistant
tuberculosis, alcoholism and the deteriorating health-care system, a U.N. report says "mortality in Russia is
three to five times higher for men and twice as high for women" as in other countries at a comparable stage
of development. The report, Walker says, "predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age
population will be shrinking by up to 1 million people annually." Be that as it may, "Russia is suffering a
demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war."

According to projections by the United Nations Population Division, Russia's population, which was around
143 million four years ago, might be as high as 136 million or as low as 121 million in 2025, and as low as
115 million in 2030.

Marx envisioned the "withering away" of the state under mature communism. Instead, Eberstadt writes, the
world may be witnessing the withering away of Russia, where Marxism was supposed to be the future that
works. Russia, he writes, "has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life
previously unknown in all of human history."

"History," he concludes, "offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance
in the face of long-term population decline." Demography is not by itself destiny, but it is more real than an
arms control "process" that merely expresses the liberal hope of taming the world by wrapping it snugly in
parchment.



San Francisco Chronicle
Left Coast holds tea party over oil
by Debra J. Saunders

Last Wednesday, conservatives held coast-to-coast "TEA parties" designed to send the message to
Washington and state governments that the partiers feel "taxed enough already." The exercise struck me as
more than a little out of touch with the political realities of President Obama's America. The next day, Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar held a public hearing in San Francisco on a Bush administration proposal to sell
federal leases to drill for oil and gas off the California coast. The hearing became the Left Coast equivalent
of the right-wing TEA party.

The only difference is that the overwhelmingly anti-drilling crowd was in la-la land on the realities of oil
instead of taxes. Every one of the elected officials who spoke were anti-drilling Democrats. Every one
seemed out of touch with the realities of the need to increase domestic oil production.

America's in a tough recession: It's in no position to turn down good-paying jobs and tax revenue, not to
mention a way to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. Here's a sobering statistic: U.S. imported oil
use grew from 24 percent in 1970 to 70 percent last year.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, I believe, spoke for the other anti-drilling Democrats - there were no
Republicans or pro-oil politicians - when he said that supporting more oil and gas drilling "sends the wrong
message."

Message? Americans use more oil than we produce. Doesn't that send the most powerful message of all?
And then there's the message sent last September when the Democratic Congress allowed a moratorium on
new offshore drilling to lapse because of high gasoline prices. In July, a Public Policy Institute of California
poll found that 51 percent of Californians supported new drilling off the California coast. Less than a year
later, California politicians are banking that voters have short memories, as they argued that more drilling in
the Outer Continental Shelf would be bad for California's economy.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, criticized President George W. Bush for policies that made America
"hostage" to foreign oil, unperturbed by the fact that California gets 45 percent of its oil from foreign
countries, including Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Of course the Dems talked up wind, solar and wave power as the proper alternative to more oil. But when
Salazar asked if they would support wind power, Kulongoski admitted Oregonians have an "aesthetic issue"
with wind. His people like wave power, which the Department of Interior sees as nascent. That is, his people
like the kind of renewable offshore energy that does not exist here.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, answered she could accept wind power "if it's not harmful to the
environment" and visually acceptable. Remember the circus that followed plans to build a wind farm in
Nantucket Sound, with the otherwise-environmentally sensitive Kennedy family in opposition? The
arguments drilling critics have used - as in, drilling is bad for tourism - may well be used against wind
turbines.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Greenbrae, complained that oil companies
aren't drilling in all the areas already leased. I don't get it: Big Oil pays for the leases. So if they don't drill - I
assume for economic reasons - do No-O ilers complain?

Accidents? Boxer brought up the 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, and another Santa Barbara spill in 2008.
Salazar's Interior Department, however, has issued a report that noted the industry's record "shows good
results in preventing and minimizing spills." It also cited a 2003 National Research Council report that found
"offshore oil and gas development was responsible for only 2 percent of the petroleum found in the marine
environment for North America." That's right, folks, Mother Nature also puts oil in the ocean.

My guess is that Salazar will approve new leases for the Gulf Coast, where people value oil jobs more than
B&Bs. But as for California, how can President Obama refuse the wishes of Democrats in a state that
demands cheap gas to fuel its car culture, then says no to more oil drilling at the voting booth?

Salazar noted in a press conference Thursday that oil, natural gas and coal are going to be part of America's
energy mix for years to come. He's right, so the issue is: Where will America get its oil?

When it was Western States Petroleum Association President Joe Sparano's turn to talk, Salazar saluted
him for appearing before the hostile crowd, then exhorted the room to give Sparano "a round of applause."
The sound that followed was not clapping. Some people held up dollar bills. Sparano had crashed their
party.

Sparano noted that California produces about 800,000 barrels of oil a day, but consumes almost twice that
amount. The Department of Interior estimates that there are some 10 billion barrels of "technically
recoverable" oil off the West Coast. That's enough, Sparano argued, to replace California's foreign oil use
for 35 years. If he's half right, then think of the gains for California and the losses for OPEC.

The only other morning speaker who supported California oil drilling was Van Bivans, who runs a Super 8
Motel in Goleta (Santa Barbara County). He remembered what $4 gas did to area businesses last year. He
worries that if the same thing occurs, then "many businesses could go under." Some in the room hissed.
National Review
Alice in Wonderland
The gushing of Waters is all wet.
By Julie Gunlock

In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and
least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most
important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not
known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”

Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the
millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one
cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the
Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester,
Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as
ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who
— in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground,
and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know
that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food.

Her condescension is typical of a food culture that is increasingly withdrawn from mainstream America — a
food culture that increasingly preaches to the average American consumer that eating non-organic food is
bad for you. The truth is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the
resources. Those who can afford it and want it should have it, but organic food is not a panacea for the
world’s ills.

It may be easier for Ms. Waters and her cadre to simply label Americans stupid and ill-informed than to
tackle the real reason people are not eating more organic and locally grown food — i.e., most Americans
simply are not able to afford it. Even 60 Minutes — known for asking tough questions and making
interviewees sweat — basically punted on this issue. Highlighted on the program earlier this year, Waters
introduced Lesley Stahl to a man that grows organic grapes and sells them for a staggering $4 a pound (to
give non-shoppers some perspective on this price, grocery-store grapes usually cost under $2 a pound, and
even most meat comes in under $4 a pound).

While Stahl did seem surprised at the high price, Waters never directly addressed the cost issue; instead,
she made an offhand remark that people would simply have to make the choice between expensive grapes
and Nike tennis shoes. What she fails to appreciate is that some people can’t buy those tennis shoes either.
It is not about making choices between two expensive items, it is about something much more fundamental.
Particularly in this economic downturn, when about one in eight adults is currently out of a job and looking
for work, many families are not just cutting back on luxuries, but are reassessing their food budgets and
trying to save every penny they can. If Waters had been a little more frank, and simply affirmed that $4 a
pound for grapes is a steep price that most people can’t afford, fair enough; instead, viewers were treated to
a lecture on how we simply need to make better choices.

There are others, in her view, who are making better choices — namely, the Europeans. Waters gushes
over the European slow-food movement even as she dismisses American food sensibilities. In one
interview, she hastily summed up American food history: “Americans don’t have deep gastronomic roots.
They wanted to get away from the cultures of Europe or wherever they came from. We stirred up that
melting pot pretty quickly. Then fast food came in and took over.”

It is a stunningly simplistic assessment of American food culture, making it sound as if the Pilgrims landed at
Plymouth Rock and were greeted with a combo meal from Wendy’s (supersized, of course). In fact, America
has an amazing and varied food culture — whole books, documentaries, and movies have centered on it.
Has Waters visited New York, Little Havana in Miami, or border towns in Texas? And what about the millions
of chef-owned restaurants serving up those treasured American comfort dishes that can make even the
most elite food critic smile? Food traditions in this country have endured. My own family came to the United
States from French Canada over 150 years ago, yet my mother continues to have tourtière (pork pie) and
croton (pork spread — sort of a poor man’s pâté) every Christmas Eve. Waters, who has lived in Berkeley,
Calif., most of her adult life cooking things just dug out of California’s rich, sun-drenched earth, is clearly out
of touch with the broader American reality.

Consider, also, her campaign for a White House vegetable garden. Waters has been badgering U.S.
presidents about this vegetable garden for years. In 2000, she wrote a letter to Pres. Bill Clinton about the
importance of a White House garden, saying: “I can think of no more powerful way to ground your legacy
than to leave behind you a kitchen garden and the compost pile to nourish it.” Really? A garden and a
compost pile? Grounding President Clinton’s legacy in compost? Did she think about how this sounds,
alongside Clinton’s other goals, such as Middle East peace, a secure and nuclear-free Korean peninsula,
health-care reform, and Russia’s peaceful transition to democracy?

In Alice Waters’s wonderland, all is made better with the growing of vegetables. But regular Americans know
better. Many enjoy buying organic, visiting their local markets, and gardening, but they also know that the
purpose of food is nourishment. America’s robust agricultural sector has made food cheaper and more
plentiful not just for our nation’s citizens, but for the entire world. Environmentalists may dismiss big,
industrial farms, but it is these largely American innovations that are helping feed the world, and keeping
costs down for coupon clippers like me.



Daily Beast
Enough With the Torture Sanctimony
It is, yes, good that we're not torturing anymore, but let's not get sanctimonious about how awful it
was that we indulged in these techniques after watching 3,000 Americans die at the hands of
fanatics who would happily detonate a nuclear bomb.
by Christopher Buckley




I’m glad that President Obama is not going to prosecute the CIA interrogators for torture. As national
intelligence director Dennis Blair wisely commented in a written statement, “Those methods, read on a
bright, sunny, safe day in Aril 2009, appear graphic and disturbing. But we will absolutely defend those who
relied on these memos.” The memos, that is, issued by the Justice Department in the days following 9/11,
authorizing harsh interrogation techniques.

These techniques, we learn, included “Sleep deprivation,” “Nudity,” “Dietary Manipulation,” “Abdominal
Slap,” “Attention Grasp,” “Waterboarding,” “Water Dousing,” “Confinement With Insects,” and “Walling.” This
last one is when the interrogator “quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall…The head and neck
are supported with a rolled hood or towel … to help prevent whiplash.”

I think I remember that one, from boarding school—only the senior boys left out the rolled hoods and towels.
It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful
it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-
awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had
gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-
lo?)

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that
could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not.

Remember the Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” skit, where the lads torture the sweet old lady with such
cruel techniques as “The Comfy Chair!” and “The Extra Pillow!”? Or the Spanish Inquisition musical number
in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World”?

Auto-da-fé? What’s an auto-da-fé?

It’s what ya oughtn’t to do, but ya do any-way!

As the CIA sets about the revising its Interrogation Manual—that will be a fun project—here are some
suggestions for up-to-date techniques that will have the dastards crying “Uncle!” in no time.

Traffic Jamming Subjects are placed in cars and made to endure daily commutes of up to four hours, five
days a week. Technique may be enhanced by alternating the interior temperature by means of A/C and
heat; also by having radio set to Rush Limbaugh radio show or Christian Broadcasting stations at high
volume.

Telephoning Subjects are given rotary dial telephones and told that they will be released if they call a
certain number and follow the prompts, which will instruct them to “press” various numbers. As subjects dial
the numbers, the prompts will respond that their did not understand and repeat their instruction.

Televisioning Subjects are ushered into comfortable TV rooms with state-of-the-art TVs with cable, DVD,
video game players, etc. TV will display cable guide with hundreds of channels, all themed to delight
murderous religious fanatics, e.g.: TALIBAN TODAY, DRIVING ISRAEL INTO THE SEA, THE IED
CHANNEL, WHO WANTS TO BE A MARTYR? No matter which button or combination of buttons are
pressed on the nine remote controls, nothing happens. After several hours, screen will spontaneously
display the 1960 movie Exodus, which will remain on no matter which button is pressed or even if electrical
cord is yanked out of wall socket. (Note: the International Court of Justice at the Hague has ruled that being
forced to watch Exodus constitutes “torture.”)

Confinement With Cheney In this “extreme” technique, the subject is placed in a confined area with former
Vice President Dick Cheney. In past experiments, most subjects have broken “within minutes.”

Christopher Buckley’s books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking,
Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush,
and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine.