A top aide to Iran’s all-powerful leader has accused the country’s main opposition leader of being an American agent who should be tried for treason…There was no immediate reaction from Mir Hossein Mousavi to the accusation in an editorial Saturday in the conservative daily newspaper Khayan. Mousavi, who claims he was fraudulently deprived of victory in the June 12 election that gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term, has not been seen in public in recent days.

The editorial, by Hossein Shariatmadari, a top aide to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, raised the possibility that Mousavi could be arrested and charged like many other pro-reform figures…Shariatmadari wrote, “It has to be asked whether the actions of (Mousavi and his supporters) are in response to instructions of American authorities.”

There have been no street protests since Sunday, but Mousavi has maintained his opposition to the results, issuing a defiant statement against the government Wednesday, saying “A majority of the people — including me — do not accept its political legitimacy.” Iran’s ruling clerics have called the elections “pure” and “healthy” following the supreme leader’s declaration that the results would stand.

So much for that business that the “supreme leader understands the concerns of Iranians about the election.”

Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness.

Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan - if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all - has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama. Only the Republicans are barely any better.

The Democrats and the Republicans are both awful, and the people don’t seem to be too much better at the moment.

The monetary base (coins, currency and bank reserves) has doubled over the past year. It is increasing at a rate 12 times the average since 1981. M1 (the monetary base plus checking deposits) increased last year by roughly 16 percent, a near record and three times faster than average since 1981. M2 (M1 plus most savings deposits and money market funds) increased 9 percent in the past 12 months (a rate more than 50 percent higher than the average since 1981)…

fiscal 2009 federal outlays were $3,938 billion compared to $2,983 billion in fiscal 2008 — a 34 percent increase in one year. Federal spending has grown from 21 percent to 28.1 percent of gross domestic product in only one year. Only during the last three years of World War II has federal spending been a larger share of the economy.

These figures understate the degree to which federal spending and credit creation have increased because various federal entities have guaranteed something on the order of $10 trillion to $12 trillion in private debt…An economic train wreck is coming.

Jonah Goldberg weighs in on the stimulus that does not stimulate:

we’re now stuck with some of the most absurdly counterproductive legislation imaginable. The national debt is growing faster than the GDP. According to the Congressional Budget Office, within 10 years Uncle Sam’s publicly held debt will double to 82 percent of GDP. The CBO predicts that by 2038, our debt will be 200 percent of GDP. Debt siphons off growth for the simple reason that dollars go to paying it off rather than investing in something productive.

Meanwhile, thanks to ongoing trade deficits and relentless borrowing, America’s financial status is deteriorating rapidly. The Commerce Department reported last week that the value of foreign assets owned by Americans is $19.89 trillion, while the value of American assets owned by foreigners is $23.36 trillion. In other words, we are a “net debtor” to the tune of $3.47 trillion. That represents a 62 percent increase over 2007. Foreigners, most significantly China, own nearly 50 percent of our government’s public debt.

Don’t worry. Be happy. As we said a while ago, Obama has inaugurated Dependence Day.

It appears that the political class is too corrupt or too irresponsible to govern. Worse, it appears that a majority of the citizens of the US are either too fat and lazy or too uneducated and ignorant of basic bookkeeping to prevent the fiscal disaster that looms just over the horizon.

“The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision…I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office…With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”…

the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both “the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded.” In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin’s study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.

Perhaps we should just take the advice of Paul Krugman and stop being “deniers” and “traitors” — or perhaps implement this from Tom Friedman: “A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic…It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.” What impels these men to such righteous fervor, and to such apparent hysteria at dissent?

The White House press corps objected to a staged town hall where the questions put to Obama, as well as the questioners, were pre-screened and vetted in advance. Helen Thomas seemed really peeved that Obama manipulates the press so brazenly and thinks nothing of having Potemkin Village events like the so-called town meeting. The performance of Obama’s press secretary was smarmy. Frankly, this fellow makes our skin crawl.

And, in another matter, while we’re talking about elements of the carefully crafted but artificial public persona of the President, Jack Cashill is back on the case of whether Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama’s first book, which we’ve previously discussed:

Within days of my going public last September with the speculation that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not alone in that intuition. Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries…

the first email I received from Mr. West had in the message box “759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers’ works.”…I was able to open them and was promptly blown away. Mr. West’s analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. All were C-level or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity…

both authors evoke images of a “boy” riding on the backs of a “water buffalo” and prodding the beast not just with sticks, but with “bamboo sticks.” Ayers places his boy in Vietnam. Obama puts his in Indonesia…Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library…Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others. In fact, each misspells “Frantz” as “Franz.”

The water buffalo stories and the parallel libraries and author misspellings are highly suggestive. We’d normally consider it nutty to think that Ayers wrote Obama’s book. However so much of the public Obama seems staged and phony — except his desire to centralize power in himself and his disturbing identification with the world’s nasty authoritarian rulers — that we now wouldn’t be surprised if the allegations are true. Things could become interesting again in America if the press decided to regularly stand up on their hind legs as Chip Reid and Helen Thomas did with Gibbs.

Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:

“The history of women’s abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. … The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man’s right thumb. The law became commonly know as ‘The Rule of Thumb.’ These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.”

Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.

The sixties has metastasized. Ugh. (BTW, some Iranian scholarship is comparable to the work of these fine ladies.)

Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the WSJ comments on the arrest of the Honduran President at the order of that country’s Supreme Court, an event called a “coup” by many in the media and politics, including Barack Obama and the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba:

Hugo Chávez’s coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation’s constitution. It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

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

It should be noted that President Obama, who had little to say in the early days of Iran’s turmoils (and much of that was inappropriate), found his voice immediately in this case.

Reuters: “Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a ‘terrible precedent’ of transition by military force unless it was reversed. ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,’ Obama told reporters.”

Obama’s initial gut reactions to the authoritarians and democrats of the world have become as predictible as they are disturbing.

Mr. Zelaya, 56, a rancher who often appears in cowboy boots and a western hat, has the support of labor unions and the poor. But he is a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and the middle class and the wealthy business community fear he wants to introduce Mr. Chávez’s brand of socialist populism into the country, one of Latin America’s poorest. His term was to end in January.

The Honduran military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the country’s Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”

Mr. Zelaya’s ouster capped a showdown with other branches of government over his efforts to lift presidential term limits in a referendum that was to have taken place Sunday. Critics said the vote was part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the Constitution’s limit of a single four-year term for the president.

Early this month, the Supreme Court declared the referendum unconstitutional, and Congress followed suit last week. In the last few weeks, supporters and opponents of the president have held competing demonstrations. The prosecutor’s office and the electoral tribunal issued orders for the referendum ballots to be confiscated, but on Thursday, Mr. Zelaya led a group of protesters to an air force base and seized the ballots.

When the army refused to help organize the vote, he fired the armed forces commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez. The Supreme Court ruled the firing illegal and reinstated General Vásquez.

Even the NYT kind of makes it clear which side the US should be on.

During his campaign, President Obama made a big deal of criticizing leaders who are elected democratically but don’t govern democratically. He’s had a chance to show that it mattered in Honduras. He didn’t…

That’s the sorry story as Honduras’ now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a “survey” to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It’s the same blueprint for a rigged political system that’s made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries.

Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.

As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”

President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.

There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).

Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.

Once again it seems clear enough which side the US should be taking.

foreign observers are condemning the ouster of Honduran President Mel Zelaya, a supporter of Hugo Chavez, as a “military coup.” But can it be a coup when the Honduran military acted on the orders of the nation’s Supreme Court, the step was backed by the nation’s attorney general, and the man replacing Mr. Zelaya and elected in emergency session by that nation’s Congress is a member of the former president’s own political party?

Mr. Zelaya had sacked General Romeo Vasquez, head of the country’s armed forces, after he refused to use his troops to provide logistical support for a referendum designed to let Mr. Zelaya escape the country’s one-term limit on presidents. Both the referendum and the firing of the military chief have been declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Mr. Zelaya intended yesterday to use ballots printed in Venezuela to conduct the vote anyway.

All this will be familiar to members of Honduras’ legislature, who vividly recall how Mr. Chavez in Venezuela adopted similar means to hijack his country’s democracy and economy.

Seems clear enough to us which side the US should be on.

the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course…

researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today…

Gosh! Other government reports, suppressed by the government, draw very different conclusions. And it certainly seems that global cooling has been going on for some time, likely as a result of solar activity. For the record, we’re skeptical of AGM because an increase of 100ppm in CO2 causing such catastrophic problems just doesn’t pass the test of common sense, in our opinion. Indeed, it has been argued that increases in CO2 are an effect of rising temperatures, not the cause. We could be wrong of course, but Krugman’s rather hysterical tone doesn’t help the hypothesis he’s trying to sell.

Cap and trade: a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist?

The ICE’s Dollar Index fell below 80 on the call from China for an alternative to the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency. The gauge tracking the greenback versus the currencies of six leading trading partners decreased 0.5 percent to 79.90.

“To prevent the deficiencies in the main reserve currency, there’s a need to create a new currency that’s delinked from the economies of the issuers,” the People’s Bank of China, or PBOC, said. China is the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $763.5 billion in April.

China sees clearly what is happening in America. Pity that there is apparently no national mood for adult supervision in the US government at the moment.

The EPA’s management’s response to the report:

Environmentalism is a religion of sorts, and an unreformed religion at that. (Those sorts of believers are capable of endless trouble, as we all know.) Chief among its sins is man-made global warming — allegedly caused by CO2’s teeny-tiny increase — for which America must be punished. No matter that China and India are the major contributors to increases at this point. In the Obama administration, Gaia must be served and dissent is clearly not welcome. HT: Powerline

We understand that all administrations want to speak with a coherent voice, and controlling the bureaucracies is one element of that, but any bill that is (a) a “huge tax” according to Warren Buffett; (b) paradoxically also a “jobs bill” according to Obama; and (c) something that is needed to “save our planet” in Obama’s words deserves full and open debate — not evidence of the crass suppression of opposing views.

You can’t look at the chart above without thinking that America has lost its mind. The intergenerational theft from our children and grandchildren is evidence of insanity or idiocy. James Lewis in The American Thinker makes some points that have appeared here as well:

As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean?…

The Federal EPA is about to officially declare carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. That’s not just false and unscientific; it’s not just an excuse for taxing everything in sight, including breathing. It’s not merely wrong. It’s idiotic. It marks a low point in our national conversation. Scientists or engineers with a grain of sense shouldn’t be taking the EPA seriously for a second. Forget the “climate experts,” with their grossly inadequate computer models…

Or look at Obama’s unbelievable spending spree. No sane and sensible taxpayer could possibly believe that spending trillions and trillions of dollars on blue-sky fantasies makes any sense at all; the only reason Americans aren’t in open rebellion yet is that half of them can’t believe it’s happening, and the other half are idiots. We haven’t seen the effect (yet) on our pocketbooks…

Or look at the global warming farce, still hotly pursued by the political classes in Europe and this country, although the Australians seem to be coming to their senses. China now has more millionaires than the UK, because they use all their resources, like coal, to fire their industrial plants. They will never sacrifice a single luxury car to the cap and trade fraud. Neither will India. China and India have been under the thumb of egomaniacal socialists (in the case of India) and communists (in the case of China). They’ve been there, done that, seen the suffering…

No wonder those Chinese college students fell all over themselves with laughter when Timothy Geithner assured them that Obama would never spend the United States into debt. What an idiot! They laughed because Geithner’s stupidity or mendacity was too obvious for words…

Obama’s power-grab over the medical sector of the economy? It’s profoundly stupid…Even if we already have two national lemons in our garage, Medicare and Medicaid, which nobody likes. Now Obee is trying to sell us on a really, really expensive dream mobile that will fix our problems forever, plus it’ll be cheaper than what we have now!

On the last point, health care, it is very hard to believe that Americans are that stupid or gullible. There are fewer than 800,000 doctors in the US. The Obama plan intends to provide insurance to 47 million additional people. So there is a 15% increase in potential demand from physicians, and a 0% increase in supply. Whether you support Obama or not, increasing demand while supply remains constant raises prices, the opposite of what Obama claims. It’s just not possible to do what he says he wants — price control regimes always result in rationing, lower quality, and black markets — but no one seems to care (at least so far).

Here’s the thing, perhaps: The young are disconnected from the past, and live in a world of digital utopian images. They don’t remember a hard past. So they are in the process of creating a hard future. This seems to us one of the greatest avoidable tragedies in history. Sigh.

China once again called for a new reserve currency other than the dollar, as it did first in March. China won’t pay the bill for America’s current idiocy or insanity. Who is going to pay for Obama’s party? The rich can’t. What will it take to end this madness?

America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, which ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance.

“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest U.S. refining capacity.

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported…One in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020 as the cost of carbon allowances erases profits, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group known as API. Carbon permits would add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline

So what? Who cares anymore in the ridiculous TV show that is called America? Who cares if cap and trade won’t even address any real problems, and creates incentives that are precisely the opposite of its stated goals? Don’t bother us. We’re America and we’re sleeping.

Iraq is planning to increase oil production substantially, just as Saudi Arabia has been doing. WSJ:

Iraq…intends to auction off oil contracts to foreign companies for the first time since Iraq nationalized its oil industry more than three decades ago…Some 120 companies expressed interest in bidding for the contracts at the June 29 and 30 auction, according to the oil ministry. Thirty-five companies qualified to bid, including Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Italy’s Eni SpA, Russia’s Lukoil and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec. The six oil fields at stake are believed to hold reserves of more than 43 billion barrels…

Just over 20 of Iraq’s roughly 80 known oil fields have been fully or partially developed, and most of its production comes from just three giants, North and South Rumaila and Kirkuk. Because lots of the black gold is considered relatively easy to extract, oil experts estimate that exploration and development in Iraq costs $1.50 to $2.25 a barrel, compared with about $5 in Malaysia or $20 in Canada…

Iraq is thought to have one of the world’s largest supplies of crude oil, with 115 billion barrels in proven reserves. But foreign know-how is key to its plans to boost oil output to 4 million barrels a day within four to five years, from 2.4 million barrels currently.

It is gross negligence on the part of the American political establishment for the country to be up to 70% dependent on imports of this strategic material. And the tiny SPR is but a drop in the bucket. But no matter. The US is in fantasyland for the moment. One day that will end, and in all likelhood it will not end well.

The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.

I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place…

The Iranian people can speak for themselves. That’s precisely what’s happened in the last few days. In 2009, no iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice. Despite the Iranian government’s efforts to expel journalists and isolate itself, powerful images and poignant words have made their way to us through cell phones and computers. And so we’ve watched what the Iranian people are doing.

This is what we’ve witnessed. We’ve seen the timeless dignity of tens of thousands of Iranians marching in silence. We’ve seen people of all ages risk everything to insist that their votes are counted and that their voices are heard.

Above all, we’ve seen courageous women stand up to the brutality and threats, and we’ve experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets. While this loss is raw and extraordinarily painful, we also know this: those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people. It must govern through consent and not coercion.

President Obama’s comments on the atrocities of the Iranian regime seem quite a bit stronger than some critics, like Andrew McCarthy, anticipated (though he still doesn’t use the word “freedom” often). That’s a positive development. And good riddance to the “deeper wisdom” of Obama’s previous reticence on the outrages perpetrated by Khamenei on the Iranian people. Let’s see if these words are meaningful, or just an empty attempt at feel-good-ism; time will tell. (Here’s a candidate for test #1.)

Although 70 percent of insured Americans rate their health care arrangements good or excellent, radical reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is, however, a “snapshot” of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year. Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the people in the photos would be different.

Almost 39 percent of the uninsured are in five states — Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, all of which are entry points for immigrants. About 21 percent — 9.7 million — of the uninsured are not citizens. Up to 14 million are eligible for existing government programs — Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, veterans’ benefits, etc. — but have not enrolled. And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000 and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million.

Insuring the perhaps 20 million persons who are protractedly uninsured because they cannot afford insurance is conceptually simple: Give them money — (refundable) tax credits or debit cards (which have replaced food stamps) loaded with a particular value. This would produce people who are more empowered than dependent. Unfortunately, advocates of a government option consider that a defect.

The fact that the New York Times felt it necessary to cook the books in its recent poll about health care suggests that the fervor on this issue is synthetic.

as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).

Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of “social justice,” and their economic programs. (On this, as in so many other things, Anthony Daniels should be required reading — see his incisive New English Review essay, “There Is No God but Politics“, comparing Marx and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — “equal rights” and “social justice” are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies.

The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left: He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment over what he chooses to see in America’s history, but a “pragmatist” in the sense that where ideology and power collide (as they are apt to do when your ideology becomes less popular the more people understand it), Obama will always give ground on ideology (as little as circumstances allow) in order to maintain his grip on power.

It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama’s instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters. As this position became increasingly untenable politically, and as Democrats became nervous that his silence would become a winning political round for Republicans, he was moved grudgingly to burble a mild censure of the mullah’s “unjust” repression — on the order of describing a maiming as a regrettable “assault,” though enough for the Obamedia to give him cover. But expect him to remain restrained…

That will change only if, unexpectedly, it appears that the freedom-fighters may win, at which point he’ll scoot over to the right side of history and take all conceivable credit.

McCarthy seems unduly harsh to us, even though we have been quite critical of the President’s to-date reticence on Iran. We’ll just have to see if that last bit about the President’s taking credit comes to pass. HT: Ace

Andrew Sullivan, who has done a very good job of linking the various internet postings in the Iranian civil strife, said this amusing and absurd video was “why Obama was watching his words” on Iran. If that is valid, and this crude anti-American propaganda is effective, then it hardly matters what an American government says, the people are so paranoid and gullible. (There is evidence to support this contention.)

We see the government video quite differently. The video shows that the Iranian government is very concerned about “secret messages” coming in over satellite TV, and about the use of the internet for subversive purposes. The video makes the point that if you plot against the government you will get caught because the government has spies everywhere.

The creepiest element is that the bad guy (pro-American) in the film gets caught because his sister rats him out by calling 113, the national hotline to the secret police. Question: if a government is that paranoid and its security apparatus is deployed against the people in such a gross and obvious way, why should we be concerned that pointing out the truth offends them?

Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding “secret energy meetings” with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s “clean coal” policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged “presidential communications.”

The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig’s office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a “new era” of openness, “nothing has changed,” says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. “For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies.”

The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama’s much-publicized Jan. 21 “transparency” memo, administration lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, instructed federal agencies to adopt a “presumption” of disclosure for FOIA requests. This reversal of Bush policy was intended to restore a standard set by President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno.

But in a little-noticed passage, the Holder memo also said the new standard applies “if practicable” for cases involving “pending litigation.” Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, says the passage and other “lawyerly hedges” means the Holder memo is now “astonishingly weaker” than the Reno policy. (The visitor-log request falls in this category because of a pending Bush-era lawsuit for such records.)

It would be a good thing to get rid of the inappropriate haigiography that these media fellows have been writing. Cracks appear here and there on matters both foreign and domestic. A disillusioned media seems unlikely, but possible, if Obama keeps mangling the big issues like the economy and Iran the way he has.

77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care…72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65…the survey results depict a nation desperate for change

77% of those polled are pretty satisfied with the quality of their own care. Why is that an indicator of “a nation desperate for change”? But that’s not the real problem with this poll of 895 adults. Here’s the problem, as it often is in NYT polls: the sample is skewed left:

What do you make of a poll of people who voted Obama 2 to 1 over McCain? The New York Times continues to embarrass itself daily, and shows no respect whatsoever to its readers when it prints rubbish like this.

For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early nineties, the attitude of much of the west to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight…

great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims…You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.

For the Obama administration, this presents a particular challenge — because the president’s preferred rhetorical tic is to stake out the two sides and present himself as a dispassionate, disinterested soul of moderation: “There are those who would argue…” on the one hand, whereas “there are those who insist…” on the other, whereas he is beyond such petty dogmatic positions…

in his recent speech in Cairo he applied the same technique. Among his many unique qualities, the 44th president is the first to give the impression that the job is beneath him — that he is too big and too gifted to be confined to the humdrum interests of one nation state. As my former National Review colleague David Frum put it, the Obama address offered “the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies.”…

What would you make of that “equidistance” if you were back in the palace watching it on CNN International?…they would have concluded that the meta-message of his “equidistance” was a prostration before “stability” — an acceptance of the region’s worst pathologies as a permanent feature of life.

The mullahs stole this election on a grander scale than ever before primarily for reasons of internal security and regional strategy. But Obama’s speech told them that, in the “post-American world,” they could do so with impunity.

Steyn observes that Obama’s use of opposing straw men is a rhetorical feint: “That was pretty much his shtick on abortion at Notre Dame…such studied moderation is usually a crock: Obama is an abortion absolutist, supporting partial-birth infanticide, and even laws that prevent any baby so inconsiderate as to survive the abortion from receiving medical treatment.” The appearance of being above it all conceals a rather clear agenda that can only be seen clearly in the actions or the inactions of Obama.

It seems apparent to us that, based on the administration’s inaction and feeble responses to the unbelievable events in Iran, it is reasonable to conclude that the administration is more or less siding with the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad faction. Certainly that is the conclusion that the Mousavi camp appears to have drawn.

…………………………………………….THE WHITE HOUSE………………………………………….

………………………………………..Office of the Press Secretary……………………………………
________________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release…………………………………………………………………….June 20, 2009

…………………………………..Statement from the President on Iran………………………………..

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

The President underscored the outrage expressed in the statement by going out for ice cream. You be the judge of the seriousness of the message that President Obama means to convey to the Supreme Leader.

VDH sums up the rather narcissistic and strange journey that President Obama has put America on for the past six months:

in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe. He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature. By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country…

almost all Obama’s historical references were wrong or distorted: Berlin airlift, death camps, Inquisition, Muslim contribution to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, Muslim discoveries of breakthroughs in science, math, printing, etc., suggesting that as a postmodernist he (and/or his speechwriters) does not really believe in absolute truth, but rather relative competing narratives predicated on race/class/gender. And the means of magnifying the accomplishments of those “without power” justifies the ends of diminishing those “with power.” The list of other inaccuracies in his Cairo speech could be expanded from the contemporary Middle East to his references to John Adams and Islam…

Here at home — We know the boilerplate: The President outlines the problem, punctuated with those awful “them” and “they” and “some” and “others” who as extremists stand in the way of all good things and present “false choices”, but remain unnamed. (Sort of like the tropes in 1984)…These are the prefaces to his reluctance to … (fill in the blanks: run the private sector, spend massive amounts of money, take over health care, raise taxes, etc.).

Then he pauses, takes a deep breath, and in fact outlines ways to take over GM, regulate compensation, run up massive deficits, nationalize health care, and plan record tax hikes…he finishes with variations on the old campaign formula “this is the moment”, “hope and change”, “yes, we can”, “we will not be deterred.” No one can quite believe that one has just heard Obama deny that he’s going to do exactly what he then outlines he is going to do.

Obama himself gave us ample warning of his reckless grandiosity during the 2008 campaign. So we can’t say we weren’t warned. The situation has only gotten worse in the months since his inauguration. And there’s 3.5 years to go. Help!

this crisis may have started on Wall Street. But its impacts have been felt by ordinary Americans who rely on credit cards, home loans and other financial instruments…Those ridiculous contracts — pages of fine print that no one can figure out — will be a thing of the past. You’ll be able to compare products, with descriptions in plain language, to see what is best for you…

I welcome a debate about how we can make sure our regulations work for businesses and consumers…what I will not accept — what I will vigorously oppose — are those who do not argue in good faith…While I’m not spoiling for a fight, I’m ready for one

Obama can talk tough when he wants to. Pity he hasn’t anything much to say about democracy or human rights in the signal case of Iran, or elsewhere, for that matter, over the last six months.

The most interesting aspect of Obama’s muted response to Iran is that it is a truly revelatory moment. After all, as Roger Simon notes, Iran is an issue that, at the moment at least, “clearly unites the left and right emotionally.” The easiest choice for a politician would be to go with popular opinion; but Obama does not. Therefore, there is either deep strategy at work, or some deeply held belief. We would hope for strategy, but that’s not what we think is really going on.

A bomb blast near the mausoleum of Islamic Republic of Iran founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, located in southern Tehran, has left one person dead and at least two others wounded June 20. It is not clear who was behind the blast but the authorities will use this incident to engage in a wider crackdown…

the blast comes a day after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a rare Friday prayer sermon, in which he said, “Street demonstrations are a target for terrorist plots. Who would be responsible if something happened?” This statement and the fact that the original reports of the blast came from state media make the explosion a suspicious development which may have been engineered by the security establishment

Meanwhile, only 3000 people gathered to get clobbered or killed by the police and Basij at a demonstration. Police beat people trying to get to the protest. Kristallnacht seems more disciplined than this: “”From Iran: I am home since 10 minute and Basij forces and police were killing young people like animals”…

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a rare but critical Friday sermon prayer June 19 in which he addressed the continuing public unrest in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in the June 12 presidential election, as well as the schism among the country’s political leadership. As expected, he took a clear position in favor of the president, rejecting accusations of electoral fraud…

Khamenei has clearly opted for the forcible suppression of the uprising…the country’s elite ideological military force, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has taken command of domestic law enforcement in Tehran. Consequently, from today forward, we can expect to see security forces crush protests…

Khamenei…said, “Differences of opinion do exist between officials which is natural. But it does not mean there is a rift in the system. Ever since the last presidential election there existed differences of opinion between Ahmadinejad and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (the second most powerful cleric in the state). Of course my outlook is closer to that of Ahmadinejad in domestic and foreign policy.”…

The stage is now set for a major confrontation, but it is unclear who will emerge victorious. Regardless of which political faction wins, Khamenei has decided that it is worth the risk to bring in the IRGC. Though the Iranian state security apparatus is adept at extinguishing protests, it is still a risky gamble that will further fuel the fire of discontent.

Here’s some reaction to Khamenei’s speech. Who knows where things go from here?

It appears to us to be more than strategy and tactics that President Obama shows disrespect to, or bullies, America’s traditional allies, while appearing inappropriately obsequent to certain countries, including outright enemies.

You may think that President Obama’s vision is correct, and that the “re-branding” of America is a good thing, or you may think that the President’s policies are foolish, even dangerous. For us, Obama’s reticence at the atrocities in Iran have finally made it very clear whom his gut reactions favor and disfavor, and we find that the conclusions we have drawn are pretty disturbing.

As they note over at Powerline, you don’t have to be much of an American to side with besieged democracy protesters over authoritarian anti-American dictators who are comfortable in their thuggish ways. And then there’s Obama…..

“The fact that the board doesn’t like what I was doing in order to perform my duties as an IG is not a reason for removing me,” Walpin said. “In fact, the more diligent an IG is in reporting criticisms of the board and the running of the corporation, the more the board doesn’t want the IG there. But that’s exactly why the IG position was created.”

In this case, the board and top management were unhappy with Walpin’s aggressive investigation of the misuse of federal AmeriCorps funds by Sacramento, California mayor — and prominent Obama supporter — Kevin Johnson. The board was also unhappy with Walpin’s probe into the waste of AmeriCorps money at the City University of New York.

Those two investigations were on the agenda of the May 20 meeting. Walpin believed the board and management were not supporting his findings about the Sacramento and CUNY matters, and he let them know it. “There was no confusion in my opening remarks at the meeting, in which I chastised the board for what appeared to be the board’s refusal to perform its duty, independent of management, in overseeing what management was doing, particularly as it regards determining the merits of the two reports I had issued,” Walpin says.

“I started out by chastising the board and telling them their duty was not just to accept what management says, but to make their independent analysis of those reports,” Walpin continues. He says board members were “clearly angry at my temerity in telling them they should not be acting in the manner of many for-profit boards, which have been recently criticized.” Walpin says there was “no confusion whatsoever about our two reports, and our clear findings, which were a major part of the meeting.”

There are now assertions that the Obama administration is clamming up and possibly changing its story on Walpin. We’ll have to wait for further developments. In an interesting footnote to the story, Dan Riehl says there are other IG’s who are being fired or let go for doing their jobs.

The President yesterday denounced the “extent of the fraud” and the “shocking” and “brutal” response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days. “These elections are an atrocity,” he said. “If Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?” The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

Great stuff! Taranto adds: “Speaking very broadly, there are two possible outcomes in Iran now. The regime may succeed in crushing the opposition, enhancing its own power at the expense of whatever pretense of legitimacy it might have had a week ago. Or it may fail to do so and be weakened or overthrown. The free world has every interest in encouraging the latter outcome.” Indeed it does.

For an opposing viewpoint, read this.

A decision by China to reduce its US Treasury holdings suggests concern about the US attitude towards its economic woes, Chinese economists were quoted as saying in state media Wednesday…”China is implying to the US, more or less, that it should adopt a more pragmatic and responsible attitude to maintain the stability of the dollar,” He Maochun, a political scientist at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times…Beijing owned 763.5 billion dollars in US securities in April, down from 767.9 billion dollars in March.

China — you know, the country where they laugh out loud at our Secretary of the Treasury’s assurances that their investments are safe.

“I do believe that something has happened in Iran where there is a questioning of the kinds of antagonistic postures towards the international community that have taken place in the past…When I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me, and it’s of concern to the American people…That is not how governments should interact with their people.”

What’s the deal with this? Why is the first sentence so contorted and unclear? Why is it so false — the Iranian people are demanding some freedom, not “questioning Iran’s antagonistic postures towards the international community”? Why are the next sentences so at pains not to single out Iran and its government? Why is the murdering of protesters reduced to the banality of “that is not how governments should interact with their people”? This is bizarre. Taking a “wait-and-see” approach to Iran might seem practical, but exactly what sort of enduring, enforceable agreements are possible with governments that do not hesitate to kill large numbers of their own people when they decide it is in their interests to do so?

By contrast, this reaction by a President to a somewhat similar situation seems a lot clearer: “I want emphatically to state tonight that if the outrages in Poland do not cease, we cannot and will not conduct ‘business as usual’ with the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them. Make no mistake, their crime will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere. I do not make this statement lightly or without serious reflection.”

Maybe it’s just us, but we get the feeling from the way that Obama talks that he is desperate to do a deal, some kind of deal, any deal at all, with Khamenei — the man he calls even now “supreme leader“. Obama so appears to want not to offend him, or to say a clear, good word about some real “community organizers“. Perhaps it goes too far to say that Obama seems to identify with the authoritarians around the world, but the question is not unreasonable, given his taking over vast parts of American industry.

Given how far things have gone in Iran, it is a total cop-out to say “the easiest way for reactionary forces inside Iran to crush reformers is to say it’s the US that is encouraging those reformers.” (Even the man once the designated successor to Ayatollah Khomeini has a good word for the protesters.) Furthermore, even if the US is not causing any provocation, the Iranian regime still declares that we are behind the protests, so what’s the point?

It’s a sad day in America when we shouldn’t express our fundamental beliefs about freedom and liberty because some dictator somewhere might try to use them against his own people. If Obama believes the statement he made above, he has poor judgment. If he doesn’t believe it, but is using it as an excuse, the explanations are not pretty to contemplate.

Final thought: Roger Simon’s reflections on this matter seem pretty similar to ours, and even David Ignatius thinks Obama should be speaking out clearly and in favor of the protesters.

Though the company insists its products are safe and do not cause anosmia, that is not true. Though Zicam works great on colds, it also kills the sense of smell. We have recovered a little from this terrible side-effect of Zicam, and now can report, nearly some two years after losing our sense of smell, that one food has recovered its original taste: barbeque. One unfortunate aspect of losing one’s sense of smell and taste is that it is impossible to recall in any meaningful way just what different foods tasted like. Caveat emptor.

UPDATE — Charles Krauthammer has had some similar thoughts on this matter of the “supreme leader” and his concerns:

after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”

Where to begin? “Supreme Leader”? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts — a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

Krauthammer says: “Obama totally misses the point.” No, that’s not it. Some see a “deeper wisdom” in Obama’s reticence, and we wish that were true, but this is a serious enough situation that you ought to be on one side or the other. Obama’s relative silence chooses sides for him.

The new restrictions on foreign media require journalists to obtain explicit permission before leaving the office to cover any story. Journalists have also been banned from attending or reporting on any “unauthorised” demonstration — and it is unclear which if any of the protests are formally authorised.

Press cards have been declared invalid. Our correspondent says they are the most sweeping restrictions he has ever encountered reporting anywhere. He says the clampdown comes amid surprise and fear among authorities at the show of defiance by opposition supporters who attended Monday’s huge illegal rally, insisting the vote was rigged.

The Guardian Council — Iran’s top legislative body — said votes would be recounted in areas contested by the losing candidates.

Should be a swell recount, since the regime has already announced that the results won’t change. (Reuters adds: “Reuters coverage is now subject to an Iranian ban on foreign media leaving the office to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.”) It remains to be seen what, if any, impact the micro-P-to-P media will have in coming days.

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House. The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

This can’t be the same ABC that allegedly blocked the potentially very profitable sale of the Path to 9-11 DVD because it was politically inconvenient, can it?

The final election result — 85% voter turnout and Ahmadinejad victory with 62.63% of the total vote and a modest 33.75% of the vote to the closest contender Mir-Hossein Mousavi not to mention ridiculously low number of votes of Rezai and Karrubi — shows that the Iranian leadership not even bothered to produce elegant fraud.

Unlike earlier elections there is still no detailed data on breakup of the vote in the provinces, but allegations of lack of voting forms in constituencies supporting Ahmadinejad’s rivals, prohibitions against presence of representatives of the rivals at many voting stations, and election results from native villages and towns of Mousavi, Karrubi and Rezai most surprisingly showing more than 90% vote for Ahmadinejad, demonstrate rather clumsy rigging tactics.

The question is why all the clumsiness? Ahmadinejad could have easily advanced to the second round of election against Mousavi at which point the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij with some manipulation of the vote could have secured him a second-term victory without the easily detectable fraud.

Fair enough. But we think that the most plausible explanation for the clumsy fraud and the over-the-top endorsements by Khamenei is that Ahmadinejad was losing the election very badly — and the last thing the regime wanted to see in the run-up to the run-off was vast areas of the country painted green.

Imagine just how dangerous to the regime this sort of visible and pubic protest (in a very politically correct color in Iran) would have been if two thirds of the population started wearing green scarves or driving green cars as the election campaigns stretched into a second round. The regime’s decision to cook the books in the first round of the election — and brutally suppress whatever protest erupted — was a gamble. No one knows how it will turn out at this point for the oppressed people of Iran, but it certainly has opened the eyes of nearly everyone as to the true nature of this mad dictatorship.

Final thought: for a different take on events, see Rafsanjani’s Gambit Backfires in the Asia times.

Barack Obama found it “exciting” and Hillary Clinton saw it as “a positive sign”. Others, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser, went further and praised it as a “vibrant democracy”. A variety of useful idiots at home and abroad expressed similar illusions about the Iranian presidential election on Friday.

Many had hoped the exercise would dislodge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the maverick who has vowed to chase the United States out of the Middle East, wipe Israel off the map and prepare the ground for the hidden imam, Shi’ite Islam’s “end of times” figure of retribution. In the event, the election turned out to be a choreographed affair designed to reinforce Ahmadinejad’s position as the leader of “resurgent Islam”.

Officially put at 85%, voter turnout was the highest in Iran’s history. Ahmadinejad won with 63%…Whoever wrote the script also made sure that his three rivals, all veterans of the Khomeinist revolution, were roundly defeated even in their respective home towns…

the Khomeinist regime remains deeply unpopular, especially among young Iranians, who account for two-thirds of the population. Yesterday Tehran and other cities witnessed antiregime demonstrations, mostly young people shouting, “Shame on you Ahmadinejad! Quit the government!”…

Iran is also heading for economic meltdown, with a daily loss of 1,000 jobs and inflation of more than 20%. Ahmadinejad’s election slogan is “Ma mitavanim” (We can), like Obama’s “Yes we can”. Iran’s leader has been true to his slogan by showing he can fix the election results to the last detail. But can he cope with a restive population…

Iran is an unashamed police state, and was in the last “election” too. (Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hailed the current phony election as a “divine assessment” and a “glittering event“.) In our view, a US President should be on the side of the young people who want freedom instead of the old guys who have the guns and instruments of repression. It’s too bad that Obama is apparently on the wrong side of this issue, at least so far.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has won a crushing victory in Iran’s landmark presidential election, according to the country’s authorities, but his moderate challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi has warned of “tyranny” and protested that the result was rigged after a record turnout of 84%. As the official results were announced, baton-wielding riot police clashed with angry Mousavi supporters in some of the most serious unrest Tehran has seen in years…

Mousavi said this morning: “I personally strongly protest the many obvious violations and I’m warning I will not surrender to this dangerous charade. The result of such performance by some officials will jeopardise the pillars of the Islamic Republic and will establish tyranny.”

But Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, called the result a “divine assessment” and called on all Iranians to support Ahmadinejad. Speaking on state television this afternoon, he said: “I assume that enemies intend to eliminate the sweetness of the election with their hostile provocation.”

We’ve seen this show before. Ahmadinejad and Khamenei enacted the same electoral charade four years ago, though with lower voter turnout. It appears that there is tremendous anger in Iran about the obviously stolen election, not that the Ayatollah cares.

How do President Obama’s words of yesterday look now? (“We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran and obviously, after the speech that I made in Cairo, we tried to send a clear message that we think there’s a possibility of change and, ultimately, the election is for the Iranians to decide but just as what has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well, is that you’re seeing people looking at new possiblities, and whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact that there’s been a robust debate hopefully will help advance our ability to engage them in new ways.”)

Some things in politics you can’t make up, such as President Obama’s re-re-endorsement Tuesday of “pay-as-you-go” budgeting. Coming after $787 billion in nonstimulating stimulus, a $410 billion omnibus to wrap up fiscal 2009, a $3.5 trillion 2010 budget proposal, sundry bailouts and a 13-figure health-care spending expansion still to come, this latest vow of fiscal chastity is like Donald Trump denouncing self-promotion. Check that. Even The Donald would find this one too much to sell.

But Mr. Obama must think the press and public are dumb enough to buy it, because there he was Tuesday re-selling the same “paygo” promises that Democrats roll out every election. Paygo is “very simple,” the President claimed. “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.”

That’s what Democrats also promised in 2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that “the first thing” House Democrats would do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that “Republicans had let lapse.” By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12 times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP, spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.

Pay as you go? There’s been no payment so far for this tragedy. But the bill will very likely be coming due shortly, and perhaps we’ll discover that even many Democrats object to having their pockets picked by the dissembling elites in Washington.

them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office….He’s gotta do what politicians do…Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza…Ethnic cleansing the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel…the Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him, that would not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is.

We don’t know about you, but we think it shows excellent judgement on the part of the President to spend as many as 1000 Sundays associating with this fine fellow Wright, a man who never vacillates and always speaks his mind. We live in an absurd time, not that the media would ever let Americans notice, as they engage in a special kind of worship of the own in this matter.

Obama’s speeches are often strikingly self referential. Clearly, Obama sees unique background and his life experiences as an asset and a rhetorical tool, which helps explain why his recent speech in Cairo was peppered with 68 first person references (I, me, my, or mine). But the habit carries over to other speeches as well, leaving the impression that Obama is often interested in talking about Obama.

In his speech honoring the 65th Anniversary of D-Day, for example, Obama made 10 first person references. While not a huge number in itself, it was eight more than Gordon Brown made and nine more than Stephen Harper made in their respective speeches that day. In his aforementioned national security speech on May 21, President Obama made an astounding 147 first person references.

Most importantly of all, however, Obama’s high profile speechmaking on a range of big issues from restructuring GM to solving Middle East peace has dramatically increased the pressure on him to deliver results.

There is no doubt that Obama has bitten off far more than he can chew, and has doubled down by personalizing so many initiatives. The Cairo speech was noteworthy not only because Obama appeared in it 68 times, but also because at 30 points in the speech, he told other people and nations what they “must” do.

Obama’s line in the Cairo speech that no single nation should decide who should have nuclear weapons was widely taken as a rebuke to American power. However, there is another reading of this which is consistent with Obama’s constant first-person references and his personal ability to tell his listeners what they “must” and must not do. America shouldn’t tell other nations what they must do, but Mr. Obama thinks it is just fine for him to personally do so. Newsweek may have gotten it about right.

You will recall President Obama’s speech as ASU, where he derided traditional American aspirations of getting ahead in life, even as he ticked off, one by one, his own achievement of each of those goals. Hmmm. Let’s see. Aloof, charismatic, obsessed with power, “absolutely certain” that he has a special personal destiny. This can’t end well. No, this can’t end well at all.

the segment of the electorate that did most to produce the Obama victory and give the Democrats large majorities in Congress is the least concerned and least informed about health care. That segment is the 18 percent of voters under 30. Young voters preferred Obama to John McCain by a 66 percent to 32 percent margin, according to the exit poll.

Voters 30 and over preferred Obama by only a 50 percent to 49 percent margin. Some 63 percent of the young voted Democratic for the House of Representatives. Only 51 percent of the rest of Americans did so. Without the young, the votes would clearly not be there for what the Democrats are trying to force through.

But what do the young know or care about health insurance? They have the fewest medical problems of the whole population. Their image of health care, at least until they become pregnant and have babies, is university health services. You come in if you feel like it, someone else pays, you get some pills or some counseling, or whatever.

As for the downside of government insurance, pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that the young favor capitalism over socialism by only a 37 percent to 33 percent margin. The rest of us prefer capitalism by a 57 percent to 17 percent margin.

Last July we said: “Imagine being governed by the media and the kids. They’ll take the car, spend all our money, and post the video of their party on YouTube.” And now it has happened. Good grief! (HT: Mickey Kaus)

Israelis didn’t like the picture above. We didn’t either, and that was before we knew the context. A report from CBS says:

Israeli TV newscasters Tuesday night interpreted a photo taken Monday in the Oval Office of President Obama talking on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “insult” to Israel…It is considered an insult in the Arab world to show the sole of your shoe to someone…Was there a subliminal message intended from the White House to Netanyahu in Jerusalem, who is publicly resisting attempts by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to force Israel to stop any kind of settlement activity in occupied territories once and forever?…

Netanyahu met with George Mitchell today for four hours in Jerusalem…Channel One TV reported that Netanyahu was told Tuesday by an “American official” in Jerusalem that, “We are going to change the world. Please, don’t interfere.” The report said Netanyahu’s aides interpreted this as a “threat.”

Given Obama’s track record of flipping off Hillary Clinton, as the LA Times reported, and his other indirect and deniable insults, it is perfectly plausible that President Obama was insulting Netanyahu with the photo. Powerline has more.

But there are two insults in the photo. Obama didn’t just insult Netanyahu; he insulted his fellow citizens as well. Obama knows perfectly well how to have a decent picture taken in the Oval Office. And whether you’re a fan of silly movies, or are of a certain age and can remember JFK, you know that you shouldn’t be photographed putting your feet up on the Resolute Desk.

Obama lives in a house that is not his; he is a temporary resident in a house that is owned by all of us. Our first thought on seeing the photo was: who does this guy think he is, putting his feet up on furniture he doesn’t own? Get a hassock and get your feet off our desk.

Here we stand more than a year into a grave economic crisis with a projected budget deficit of 13% of GDP. That’s more than twice the size of the next largest deficit since World War II. And this projected deficit is the culmination of a year when the federal government, at taxpayers’ expense, acquired enormous stakes in the banking, auto, mortgage, health-care and insurance industries.

With the crisis, the ill-conceived government reactions, and the ensuing economic downturn, the unfunded liabilities of federal programs — such as Social Security, civil-service and military pensions, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, Medicare and Medicaid — are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. GDP and federal tax receipts at about $14 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively, such a debt all but guarantees higher interest rates, massive tax increases, and partial default on government promises…as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences…

starting in early September 2008, the Bernanke Fed…radically increased the monetary base — which is comprised of currency in circulation, member bank reserves held at the Fed, and vault cash — by a little less than $1 trillion. The Fed controls the monetary base 100% and does so by purchasing and selling assets in the open market. By such a radical move, the Fed signaled a 180-degree shift in its focus from an anti-inflation position to an anti-deflation position. The percentage increase in the monetary base is the largest increase in the past 50 years by a factor of 10…

It’s difficult to estimate the magnitude of the inflationary and interest-rate consequences of the Fed’s actions because, frankly, we haven’t ever seen anything like this in the U.S. To date what’s happened is potentially far more inflationary than were the monetary policies of the 1970s, when the prime interest rate peaked at 21.5% and inflation peaked in the low double digits. Gold prices went from $35 per ounce to $850 per ounce, and the dollar collapsed on the foreign exchanges…

the Fed…should contract the monetary base back to where it otherwise would have been, plus a slight increase geared toward economic expansion…I doubt very much that the Fed will do what is necessary to guard against future inflation and higher interest rates. If the Fed were to reduce the monetary base by $1 trillion, it would need to sell a net $1 trillion in bonds. This would put the Fed in direct competition with Treasury’s planned issuance of about $2 trillion worth of bonds over the coming 12 months. Failed auctions would become the norm and bond prices would tumble, reflecting a massive oversupply of government bonds.

When we asked the other day who was going to buy the net new $10 trillion in Treasury securities to fund the Obama deficits, we didn’t realize that the matter was even more serious than we suggested, given the Fed’s need to issue $1 trillion in new debt itself. The strangest aspect of this situation is that our out-of-control Congress and President may ultimately be reined in by, of all things, the refusal of communist China to buy US debt.

Humorous footnotes on the Obama economic policies: (a) Guess how the NYT apportions blame for the future deficits — you got it, blame George Bush: “Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies”; and (b) the NYT’s claim in the same piece that cap and trade “doesn’t cost the government any money” is a howler — the English press seem to understand these things better than their American counterparts: “a vast and unfathomably complex new system, which fosters corruption, raises little revenue and tries to suppress the incentives that are its entire purpose.”

It is a very sad day in America when the Europeans and the Chinese can see clearly what is going on in this nation, but the American press is blinkered because of its increasingly strange worship of a President seemingly untethered from the realities of everyday life.

‘We heard across the board — in private — substantial, continuing and rising concern,’ Representative Mark Kirk said after a trip to China that included talks with senior officials and central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan. ‘It’s clear that China would like to diversify from its dollar investments,’ the Republican lawmaker said…

Representative Rick Larsen, a member of President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party…agreed that Chinese leaders were looking for a signal from the United States on its deficit in what he said was a ‘wake-up call’ for Congress to tame borrowing…

Mr Kirk said that Chinese leaders were sharply critical in private of the US Federal Reserve’s policy of ‘quantitative easing‘ — a form of flooding the financial system with cash, which critics deride as printing imaginary money.

Cances are that pretty soon China is going to have to dispense with private meetings and indirect suggestions in order to convince the Congress and the administration that it is serious. (HT Polipundit)

The head of China’s second-largest bank has said the United States government should start issuing bonds in yuan, rather than dollars…Guo Shuqing, the chairman of state-controlled China Construction Bank (CCB), also said…”I think the US government and the World Bank can consider the issuing of renminbi bonds,” he said, asking for a “mutual cooperation” between the US and China…

Two months ago, before the G20 meeting in London, Zhou Xiaochuan, the head of the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, published a personal paper proposing to replace the dollar as the international reserve currency. His call came after Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, asked the US to guarantee the safety of China’s huge pile of US debt.

You have to admire the subtlety of China’s approach. In one case a banker wrote a “personal paper” about getting the world to dump the dollar as the leading reserve currency. In another it was the “second-largest bank” that proposed the renminbi bonds. On the other hand, the Chinese are not always so subtle — like when they mocked and laughed at Tim Geithner’s empty assurances about how safe it was to invest in US government securities.

It’s no picnic being a businessman in 2009, let alone an entrepreneur. Here are some thoughts on the subject from Steve Jobs, whose life has had a number of unusual twists and turns. While we’re on the subject of entrepreneurs with improbable lives, we have just read on Kindle Roger Simon’s gratifying and unexpected book, Blacklisting Myself.

We had lunch with Roger a few years ago, and had no idea of the adventures of this remarkable man. We’ve read Ron Radosh, and have gone to some of David Horowitz’s events, but the journeys of those who started out on the far left and now have become something completely different continue to inspire. Fitzgerald couldn’t have been more wrong about this country. (HT: Jean Bellman)

Most of you readers — in business, law, the professions — don’t continually praise your friends, competitors, and enemies (e.g., “Glad you got that job, Home Depot — we at Lowes didn’t really need it; what a wonderful bid you submitted, Hilton, much better than ours here at the Four Seasons; it was my fault here at Goldman Sachs that I didn’t match your better offer at Credit Suisse; I grew up working for the Royals, and can empathize why you Yankees don’t like us; it’s time we at Citibank apologized to Chase for our past cutthroat competition; we are just too arrogant over here at Delta and wanted to let you guys at United know that.”)

The world sadly does not work that way. If one were to do that, we know the outcome: a group of rival execs would say “Hmmm, time to steal market share from Citibank, or Hilton isn’t really up to the arena anymore, let’s move in on its Western region, etc.” Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things. In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself -– at 26…

Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

In our view, it is not yet clear that Hanson’s last paragraph will happen before it is too late to matter. Yet another scary thing is that we now have an America wherein much of Congress and it seems all of the media think having a college professor president is a grand idea.

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing.

Frank Tipler begs to differ. Can’t say we’re surprised at Tipler’s conclusions.

in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above –- above the world, he’s sort of God…the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world…Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial…He’s going to bring all different sides together…Obama is trying to sort of tamper everything down. He doesn’t even use the word terror. He uses extremism. He’s all about let us reason together…He’s the teacher. He is going to say, ‘now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he…can do that.

Evan Thomas once said that media coverage was worth “maybe 15 points” to the Democratic candidate in an election. Is that still true when the media elite sound sillier than teenage girls?

For a different take on the One’s speech in Cairo, we recommend this piece by Scott Johnson.

Is that so? D-Day was a risky enterprise to be sure, with the imponderables of weather, German intelligence, logistical screw-ups, and other matters. But it was an intricately planned assault that featured total air superiority by the Allies, among other strategic and tactical advantages. The Allies had learned the lessons of Dieppe. We’ll quote a bit from volumes 5 and 6 of Winston Churchill’s The Second World War:

The concentration of the assaulting forces — 176,000 men, 20,000 vehicles, and many thousand tons of stores, all to be shipped in the next two days — was in itself an enormous task. (v.5, p.596)

great armadas of convoys and their escorts sailed, unknown to the enemy…to the Normandy coast….the Royal Air Force attacked enemy coast defence guns in their concrete emplacements, dropping 5200 tons of bombs…In the 24 hours of June 6 the Allies flew over 14,600 sorties. So great was our superiority in the air that all the enemy could put up during daylight over the invasion beaches was a mere hundred sorties. (v.6, p.3)

I am well satisfied with the situation up to noon today, 7th. Only at one American beach has there been any serious difficulty, and that has now been cleared up. Twenty thousand airborne troops are safely landed behind the flanks of the enemy’s lines…We got across with small losses. We had expected to lose about 10,000 men. By tonight we hope to have the best part of a quarter of a million men ashore. (v.6, p.7)

The planning for Overlord dates back to at least the Casablanca conference of January 1943 (v.5, pp.70-71). “Sheer improbability of this victory”? — that’s quite a statement about an as long planned and well executed invasion as D-Day. As for the bravery of the Americans of D-Day, we’ll let Ronald Reagan and S.L.A. Marshall tell those stories.

Final thoughts: (a) if the media had been like this in 1944, maybe Obama would have been correct; (b) Gordon Brown’s mistaking Obama Beach for Omaha Beach inspires the thought that perhaps the President was thinking of himself when referring to the “sheer improbability of this victory.”

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is pushing for a shake-up of Citigroup Inc.’s top management, imperiling Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, people familiar with the matter said. The FDIC, under Chairman Sheila Bair, also recently pressed a fellow regulator to lower the government’s confidential ranking of Citi’s health…

The FDIC’s willingness to take an increasingly tough position toward one of the nation’s largest and most troubled financial institutions is setting up a bitter clash between regulators — some of whom disagree with the FDIC’s position — and between the FDIC and Citigroup, whose officials have argued that Ms. Bair is overstepping her authority…

The FDIC’s aggressive stance comes just ahead of the Obama administration’s big revamp of financial oversight, which is expected in mid-June. Several regulators, including the FDIC, are hoping to win additional powers, and some may end up losing authority…

Citigroup officials believe that the FDIC will push them onto the “problem” list if they don’t remove Mr. Pandit and his team. They fear being on the list could limit Citigroup’s access to federal programs and prompt trading partners and clients to yank business.

Citigroup is one thing; US monetary policy from an independent central bank quite another. Larry Kudlow: “when you talk to traders and economists, the whisper story is that Bernanke and the Fed are no longer truly independent of the Obama White House and Treasury. As a result, Bernanke will not be able to slow down the printing presses and gradually lift the near-zero target rate in a timely and effective manner. Already the Fed has created more than $1 trillion in new cash, and the M2 money supply is growing at its fastest pace in 25 years.”

Ben Bernanke’s term expires in January. Given all we’ve seen thus far from this administration, we expect Obama to attempt to curtail the critically important independence of the Fed if it interferes (which an independent Fed would have to) with the administration’s policy objectives.

we are not prepared to forgo what all this soon-to-be-unavailable deficit spending can buy us (health care, bank bailouts, defense spending, food stamps, etc.). Nor can our governments (and the publics who elect them) stop the spending.

In Rome, eventually a contradiction arose between Romans’ concern for the tasks that needed to be performed and their concern for their form of government. The contradiction was resolved and the problems solved at the price of their republic: Came Gaius Julius Caesar.

Surely (presumably?), for the next decade, the United States will bungle onward with both our form of government and our deficit spending. But sometime soon after 2017, when Medicare’s trust fund will begin to be depleted (or earlier, if the world stops buying our bonds), the shocking reality of being forced to do without borrowing will shape — and probably misshape — both our way of life and our form of governance.

Right now America is in the midst of a fairy tale that we call “the Obama administration.” Over the course of the next several years, that fairy tale will have an ending, and in all likelihood it will not be a good ending.

The numbers are absolutely clear: the Obama administration’s spending and borrowing plans are ludicrous and unsustainable. Why large portions of the American electorate seem to buy into Obama’s economic fairy tale is a mystery to us.

“one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” Mr. Obama said.

Everyone in the world knows this is nonsense, that the US’s tiny Muslim population would make it rank among the very smallest of Muslim countries (40 out of 48). So why does this man say such obviously false things, and why does no one seem to care? (Even if you accept Obama’s strangely high estimate of the number of Muslim Americans, America would be 27th on the list.)

“Dear Timmy, we are happy to be able to pay back the $25 billion you lent us,” Dimon read yesterday from a mock letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at the 31st Annual NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference. “We hope you enjoyed the experience as much as we did.”

Of course the joke is really on Dimon and others who thought they could get out of the clutches of the government. Bloomberg: “officials surprised bankers in the past week by demanding they raise specific amounts of new capital before repaying taxpayer funds, applying a more stringent assessment than the stress tests in May. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and American Express Co. were told they need to boost common equity, less than four weeks after being informed they had enough to withstand a deeper economic slump.” It’s a laugh a minute in the Obama administration — until the bill eventually arrives, of course.

“Chinese assets are very safe,” Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s. His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience

China apparently teaches its students to do arithmetic and accounting, while US schools apparently do not. The proof is that Obama’s numbers don’t add up, yet no one in the American media or political establishment appears to have noticed — otherwise they’d be laughing like the Chinese students at the risible assertions of Tim Geithner.

It appears that the $10 trillion bill cannot be paid in a conventional way; something’s got to give. Either spending must be curtailed or the Fed has to monetize the debt by printing money, generating Carter-era malaise (high interest rates, high inflation, tanking dollar), because Obama’s numbers just don’t add up. It’s that simple.

Again: an additional $10 trillion in deficits are projected in the plans of President Obama. In the entire history of the US, $6 trillion in deficits have been incurred, and now an additional $10 trillion are planned in the next few years by Obama, which will almost triple debt outstanding.

This $16 trillion in debt is well over the total $14 trillion GDP of the USA, and adds substantially to the $550,000 debt per person in government debt that currently exists. The press won’t ask hard questions, but someone ought to be questioning — before it is too late — who will buy the debt necessary to fund the ambitions of the Obama administration.

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

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

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

Investor concern about a record American budget deficit helped send yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note to 3.74 percent on May 27, the highest level since mid-November…China held about $768 billion of Treasuries as of March, according to U.S. government data. Treasuries have lost 5.1 percent so far this year including reinvested interest, according to Merrill Lynch & Co. index data. The dollar has also slumped…

Seventeen of 23 Chinese economists polled in connection with Geithner’s visit said holdings of Treasuries are a “great risk” for the nation’s economy…Geithner, 47, needs to show how the U.S. can prevent the value of China’s investment from being eroded…“It will be helpful if Geithner can show us some arithmetic,” he said.

We did the arithmetic and we agree with China’s concerns about the spendthrift and irresponsible Obama administration. What a comedian Geithner is, telling his tall tales. Of course the joke is not only on the Chinese and the American middle class, but on future generations. What will they say about the Americans of this time?

Final point: if the former Prime Minister of Australia’s version of events is true, the Chinese authorities already think that Geithner is a clown, so his reputation for humor precedes him.