Discovery News

A Wall Street regular of 35 years told me last night that he is "optimistic" about the economy because of the native inventiveness, grit and push of the American businessman--and in spite of the Obama Administration's devaluation of the dollar, expansion of government bureaucracy and regulation and the loming threats to the free market in energy and health care.

Maybe so. But the prospects surely would be a light brighter if a big government hand were not on the tiller of the ship of state.

Here's a less sanguine commentary from Discovery Sr. Fellow John Wohlstetter.

Townhall.com carries a very timely article this morning by Hans Zeiger that reminds political and media elites that "dialogue" requires reciprocity.

Portland's Union Station

Always make time to celebrate your victories; when it comes to mourning, your defeats will make time for themselves.

One victory to celebrate tonight is the announcement that the Canadian government has okayed a "second train" between Portland/Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. We at Discovery Institute (home to the Cascadia Center) have long promoted passenger rail nationally, and especially the re-connection of the U.S. and Canada on the West Coast. The "first train" came between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. came some years ago. Now the second is opening in time for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler/Blackcomb resort.

Passenger rail is not the solution to clogged freeways and the long delays at airports. But it is part of the solution. That is widely recognized in transportation circles, but it is a particularly dicey idea to forward when one is dealing with foreign governments. Amtrak, to its credit, has been positive all the way on the line up to Vancouver. In contrast, the Conservative government in Ottawa was slow to take on the issue--some bureaucrats wanted to charge Amtrak for Customs processing--but it did come around at last. Congratulations to them.

This is one more sign of the renewed cross-border friendship Cascadia Center has promoted tirelessly for nearly 17 years now. It's nice to have The Seattle Times make mention.

Dear President Ahmadinejad:

Have you ever considered the possibility that the Russians might secretly be conspiring with the United States against your government? I know it sounds far-fetched, but, after all, far-fetched is practically your middle name. (As, for example, your denial of the Holocaust. That is about as far-fetched as anyone can get.)

Take it from me, Mahmoud, these days a Russo-American secret entente is just about the only explanation that makes sense when one reviews the strange, strained, nearly strangled relationship between the U.S. and Russia. That relationship is so odd at times that there must be more there than meets the eye. However clichéd, I can't avoid the image of the Matryoshka dolls; you know, the ones with an image of Medvedev on the outside, Putin "nested" underneath, then, underneath them both, Barack Obama. Beneath them all may be the Bibi Netanyahu doll. Have you ever thought of that?

It's possible, I grant you, that the truth is something else. The truth may be that since the Cold War the Americans and Russians have no natural reasons to be adversaries, but they still can't seem to get out of the habit of baiting each other. Fortunately, however, you are likely paranoid and have no truck with the merely apparent truth. Yes, on one level--the level of evident reality--the U.S. and Russia seem to be floundering. But, Mahmoud, that could just be a very clever act.

Barack Obama, having decided recently not to criticize your election and then criticizing it, this past week announced that he was going to Moscow to see President Medevev and was relieved not to have to deal with V. Putin. That would be a bit like Medvedev coming to America and expressing his pleasure at not having to deal with Obama's Congressional leaders, Pelosi and Reid. It had to be a calculated opinion, don't you agree, or else Mr. Obama would have "clarified" it later. The customary kind of Obama clarification would have been, "Actually, after my lengthy official meetings with President Medvedev, I look forward to having tea with Prime Minister Putin, while Michelle hopes to go shopping at the GUM Department Store with Mrs. P."

First ladies Michelle Obama and Svetlana Medvedeva in Moscow

Are serious people (I am imagining you, Mahmoud) to believe such a line as Mr. Obama gave? Yet, did you notice that no one in the Kremlin protested it? Russians and Americans could well be throwing sand in your eyes, Mahmoud.

Ask yourself about the issue of the proposed U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe, Mr. President. Is it possibly just a designed distraction? Supposedly it is to protect Europe from Iran. After all, Poland and the Czech Republic are probably right on top on your military's target list, right? The Russians object...supposedly. But, Mahmoud, you weren't born under a date palm tree, as Omar Khayyam might have put it. Even you can figure out that any missile shield would take years to produce and meantime....well, the fate of your nuclear weapons capability is not exactly "years" away, is it? So what is all the fuss about?

Maybe the Russians are just annoyed because the people that sent them "Bush's legs" (chicken) to dine on when the Wall fell are now building a guard against possible future Russian military expansion into the "Near Abroad." But while the Russians want influence in those former satellites they are horrified at the prospect of having to pay for them, which is what occupiers have to do. So the main problem appears to be one of what is called public relations. The Americans are stepping on the Russians' pride and the Russians are not at all happy about it. At least, that is how it seems.

Meanwhile, we Americans say we badly want the shield, even though I don't recall the Congress ever debating the matter or it's gaining more than passing interest in the media.

Now, our new American president, the one who planned to demolish the foreign policy of his predecessor and instead mostly has cast it in bronze, is hinting on hard dealing with the Russians about the shield. Obama does not want to give up the shield for which he previously had no use, any more than he now wants Congress to have access to Presidential internal memos of the kind he used to demand that George W. Bush release. (Sorry for the domestic detour here, Mahmoud.)

Anyhow, if someone is gullible enough to believe that Barack Obama and his imperial retinue flew several plane loads of aides and press to Moscow to talk about prospective nuclear missile reductions, and to disagree again about the shield, as the accounts of the Medvedev-Obama talks indicate; well, those persons probably also could be persuaded that you just won a fair re-election in an unprecedented landslide. (By the way, in his days in Iraq, Saddam didn't settle for two-thirds of the vote; he counted 99.9 percent. Congratulations on your much more becoming modesty.)

To conclude, therefore, maybe it only seems that the relationship between the United States and Russia is a fairyland play of mist and mystery, where leading actors walk about in confusion, mistaking others' identities and purposes, making speeches to no one in particular. Maybe they only appear to be stuck in a midsummer's night's dream.

Naw, don't believe it, Mahmoud. The Americans don't have three worthwhile spies in your fair republic, while the Russians are all over the place "helping" you build your nuclear plants. How eager do you think the Ruskies really are to see your demented theocracy get The Bomb? No, Mahmoud, the clever way to see the combined fumbles of the old rival great powers is that deep down, they are combined in a conspiracy. Against you.

You believe a lot of other things. You might as well believe that.

Bruce Chapman, president of Discovery Institute, is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Organizations in Vienna.

The best blog on bioethics (I am modest to report) is by our Discovery Institute colleague, Wesley J. Smith. Many of his posts tell of the cruel raids the Modern Vikings are making on civilization in such areas as embryonic stem cell research or (Yoiks!) the manufacture of artificial sperm. But occasionally, the forces of ordered morality gather together on the coasts and headlands and take a stand. How encouraging, therefore (note the July 7 post), to see the British House of Lords arise in its ermine robes to repel the barbarians on the issue of assisted suicide.

What George W. Bush named "The Axis of Evil" included Iraq, North Korea and Iran. Iraq is relatively, if perhaps deceptively, quiet, but Iran is "hot" and North Korea seems bent on getting into our faces whether we want to see them there or not. This AP story by Lolita Baldor should push the federal government--as well as the private sector--to greater defensive action. Computer security is national security, and in that light it is worth noting that cyber attacks have increased almost three fold in three years.

This is the kind of story that, in retrospect, may be seen as a lot more significant than what is daily emphasized in most of our hedonistic, anesthetized media.

Both hardware and software defenses are being evaluated and, in some cases, mounted by the feds, as well as by OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and the private companies that purchase their products. But the general public is still in the dark about all this. There doesn't seem any over-riding interest in computer security options yet. But that may be about to change.

(UPDATE JULY 8: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/newspid=20601087&sid=aVEB6XhdZTFA)

Dr. Collins at the signing of President Obama's Executive Order on stem cells. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

The President's nomination of former Human Genome Project head Francis Collins to lead the National Institutes of Health must have seemed like a felicitous decision at the White House. Collins lately has been a popular speaker on science and religion around the country, assuring Christians that there is no problems linking faith in God and faith in Darwinian evolution.

But when the confirmation hearings take place I would not be surprised to hear some sharp questions about Dr. Collins' less known views on subjects that have not come out on his pulpit tours. He is, for example, a strong supporter of President Obama's program on embryonic stem cell research. The head of NIH doesn't have a lot to say about evolution, but he does have a lot to say about research matters in science on key social issues. Stem cells is only one of them.

Conservatives also may want to know Dr. Collins' views on the President's decision to let the Council on Bioethics lapse.

At the same time, Collins is anything but popular on the Darwinian left because, while he affirms Darwin's theory completely, he also works God into the picture, and that especially bothers scientists and pundits in New Atheist circles. It was also known to irritate staff at NIH when he was last there. So you are going to hear some interesting grumbles.

The media template has crises erupt, fasten our attention for, maybe, a week, then surrender to some new sensation--say, the death of Michael Jackson. But revolutions like the slow boiling one that appears to be going on in Iran don't yield to the media's requirements any more than they do to the squeamishness of Western leaders. They will persist after the cameras and reporters have left.

Michael Ledeen is always a stern, but reliable source on developments in Iran and should be getting more attention. His dedication is inspiring.

Had you heard before the account of the fly that buzzed Ahmadinejad during a live broadcast and obviously threw him off? The Twitter joke that Ledeen reports receiving--that the fly was about to be arrested and would soon appear on state television issuing a confession--expresses the spirit of the place and panache of the brave, mostly young, people who are on the rooftops chanting and silently conducting a strike on the streets.

Summer still has a long time to go in Iran. The people there are not giving up. Let's not give up on them.

Authoritarian regimes from China to Iran have made it their business to try to control what their peoples can see or do on the internet. It is usually about politics. Now Turkey joins the pack, even while its leader quips about how easy it is to thwart the government's censorship efforts.

Claire Berlinski

In this useful article from Radio Free Europe, Claire Berlinski wonders how Turkey thinks it is going to get into the European Union when it employs such behavior.

How America moves its people and goods in an efficient, effective, and in a secure and environmentally friendly way, will have at least as great of an effect as any other major policy decisions that the current Administration and Congress make. But, woefully, transportation isn’t really the stuff of eye-catching headlines and cocktail party chatter. That might be why, except among a small group of policy wonks, one of the most comprehensive calls for a new way of doing transportation business went largely unnoticed when it was released one month ago in Washington, D.C.

On June 9, the Washington, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center released, “Performance Driven: A New Vision for U.S. Transportation Policy,” which calls for dramatic shifts in the formulation of federal transportation policy, including, for the first time, linking funding to performance. (Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center will co-host an event in Seattle in August with the Bipartisan Policy Center, INRIX and local governments to unveil the report here in the Northwest.)

The Bipartisan Policy Center was founded in 2007 by a group of former U.S. Senate Majority Leaders – Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell. Former U.S. Senator and Discovery Institute board member, Slade Gorton, sits on the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Transportation Policy Project and helped draft the report, which begins:

National transportation policy has lost direction and a clear sense of purpose, threatening substantial costs to our collective prosperity, security, environment, and quality of life. We are recommending bold and comprehensive reform founded on a relatively simple proposition: U.S. transportation policy needs to be more performance-driven, more directly linked to a set of clearly articulated goals, and more accountable for results.

The report turns conventional transportation planning on its head through its recommendation of matching goals to measurements (or metrics), the lack of which, according to the report, has been a system with “an emphasis on revenue sharing and process, rather than results.” The report’s authors, which outline five goals for federal transportation planners (economic growth; national connectivity; metropolitan accessibility; energy security and environmental protection; and, safety) say “a performance-driven approach and introducing accountability will challenge entrenched interests and require government institutions at all levels to change longstanding practices and ways of doing business.”

As with most federal behemoths, transportation programs at the federal level have, to put it kindly, grown unwieldy since the last major overhaul of the system 50 years ago. The Bipartisan Policy Center’s report recommends streamlining the divergent roles through an ambitious reorganization, “from approximately 108 programs to six.”

Although funding for the current highway bill is set to expire at the end of this fiscal year (September 30), with health care, climate change and other issues on the national docket, the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., is that there won’t be a major overhaul of transportation this year. As of right now, Congress will likely pass an 18-month extension of the current transportation programs.

Congress’ stacked agenda might be bad news for those who want to see immediate reforms, but it might be good news for the eventual implementation of many of the ideas presented in the report,“Performance Driven: A New Vision for U.S. Transportation Policy.”

By their own admission, the authors themselves say they don’t “underestimate the difficulty of implementing this agenda” or the challenges the country faces. “We are equally convinced,” they write in the executive summary of the report, “that the effort to bring about fundamental changes in U.S. transportation policy…is in fact necessary….” For anyone concerned about traveling from point A to point B (and that includes all of us in most of our personal and professional interchanges), lets hope that the Administration and Congress finds the time to review and implement at least some of the report’s forward-looking recommendations—sooner rather than later.

Source: The Wall Street Journal Vendors in Accra, Ghana, hawk memorabilia Friday in anticipation of President Obama's visit, his first to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office. News International/ZUMA Press

When it’s all over, on his first presidential trip to sub-Saharan Africa, President Barack Obama, the first black U.S. president, will have spent only one day in Ghana on a visit that began today following the G-8 summit in Italy. But what this trip lacks in duration is more than made up for by what it symbolizes.

The only sub-Saharan stop on the president’s visit, most analysis indicates that Ghana is being singled out for good behavior in a region where rule of law is the most endangered of concepts. While not perfect, unlike many sub-Saharan African nations, (including Nigeria, that despite its oil-fueled potential for great wealth and power, continues to be the picture of instability) Ghana has instituted market and political reforms that have grown the economy and resulted in smooth transitions of power in the most recent presidential cycles.

As Reuters has reported, “Obama's Ghana visit has triggered a bout of angst in Kenya, his ancestral homeland, and Nigeria….Nigeria has an appalling record of organizing transparent polls and ethnic violence after a disputed election in Kenya in 2007 killed at least 1,300 people and shattered its image as the region's stable economic powerhouse.”

Despite all of Ghana's progress, observers and Ghanaians alike say the country needs to guard against “democratic setbacks,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Transparency is still weak, checks and balances ineffective, news media independence isn't well established and power is too centralized....

Cautious appraisals of the current situation should be understood against the backdrop of the past, which for Ghana was quite different than the present.

In the early days of post-Colonialism, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ghana was the very picture of far-left authoritarianism. The cultish nationalist leader was Kwame Nkrumah, who was treated as a demi-god. Even school children were encouraged to sing, “Kwame Nkrumah, he will never die!." Nkrumah did die, of course, and many of the Africans who went for higher education to Moscow--where Nkrumah was celebrated--came back, ironically, with a distaste for communism. Meanwhile, a failing economy and corruption—and a bit of CIA help—precipitated a coup in 1966 and Nkrumah, who was more popular in the rest of Africa than at home, wound up in exile, ultimately dying in communist Romania. Now Ghana even has a free market think tank, the Imani Center in Accra. But the past is never too far away: Accra also boasts a major monument to Kwame Nkrumah.

Ghana has made tremendous, positive strides and President Obama’s visit underscores that. For a country independent only since 1957, and with transparent multi-party elections for less than two decades, it has done much more than most of its neighbors to create democratic and market stability. For those reasons alone, it’s nice to see good governance, market and other reforms rewarded.

Maybe an investigation by the Justice Department and the Congress of reputed illegal anti-terrorist activities of the Bush/Cheney Administration will lead to revelations of abuse of civil liberties and failures to report adequately to the appropriate members of Congress. Maybe not.

But what it certainly will do is persuade anyone who is not already part of the frothing Left that the Democrats care more about a punctilious regard to the rights of terrorists than they do for protecting the American people from terrorists. It is hard to see the advantage in that, except to try to reignite the anti-Bush indignation of last year and earlier among a rather small segment of the electorate; that is, the segment that will vote or take other action based on such concerns. Meanwhile, however, it opens the Administration and its Congressional allies to the charge that they are so worried about the rights of possible terrorists that they are leaving the country vulnerable to attack. That would seem to be a risky image to put out there. The danger of attack on our shores has not passed, has it?

Debra Saunders ably explains what the G-8 failed to deliver to the U.S. partisans of cap and trade legislation.

If President Obama wants to get legislation through Congress on "climate change" (the disorder formerly known as "global warming"), he could start by asking the Republicans what they would agree to. He could make common cause right now with Sen. McCain, for example, and get an exchange of tax cuts in income and other areas for an energy tax. But it appears that "cap and trade" is not going anywhere anytime soon.

The Internet provides occasional news that doesn't seem to make it into the print media, as in this interesting assessment (though biased, to be sure) of the situation in Honduras. Now that I think about it, Chavez does appear to have let up about Honduras, and so has the Obama Administration. This is another situation that actually is under-reported. The key developments seem to be occurring without much external notice.

The Ahmadinejad regime in Iran has been wounded internally, thanks to the brave advocates of freedom who took to the streets, but it probably will try to stabilize its position by foreign policy truculence and a "breakthrough" on nuclear weapons.

It is in this incendiary environment that George Gilder's incredibly timely book, The Israel Test, is coming out (pub date, July 23). It already is getting noticed.

Here is a tiny excerpt--and an admonition at the end!

"The central issue in international politics, dividing the world into two
fractious armies, is the tiny state of Israel.

"The prime issue is not a global war of civilizations between the West and
Islam or a split between Arabs and Jews. These conflicts are real and
salient, but they obscure the deeper moral and ideological war. The real
issue is between the rule of law and the rule of leveler egalitarianism,
between creative excellence and covetous "fairness," between admiration of
achievement versus envy and resentment of it.

"Israel defines a line of demarcation. On one side, marshaled at the United
Nations and in universities around the globe, are those who see capitalism
as a zero-sum game in which success comes at the expense of the poor and
the environment: every gain for one party comes at the cost of another. On
the other side are those who see the genius and the good fortune of some
as a source of wealth and opportunity for all.

"The Israel test can be summarized by a few questions: What is your
attitude toward people who excel you in the creation of wealth or in other
accomplishment? Do you aspire to their excellence, or do you seethe at it?
Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it
and seek to tear it down? Caroline Glick, the dauntless deputy managing
editor of the Jerusalem Post, sums it up: "Some people admire success;
some people envy it. The enviers hate Israel."

". . . . Today in the Middle East, Israeli wealth looms palpably and
portentously over the mosques and middens of Palestinian poverty. But
dwarfing Israel's own wealth is Israel's contribution to the world
economy, stemming from Israeli creativity and entrepreneurial innovation.
Israel's technical and scientific gifts to global progress loom with
similar majesty over all others' contributions outside the United States.

"Though Jews in Palestine had been the most powerful force for prosperity
in the region since long before the founding of Israel in 1948, more
remarkable still is the explosion of innovation attained through the
unleashing of Israeli capitalism and technology over the last two decades.
During the 1990s and early 2000s Israel sloughed off its manacles of
confiscatory taxes, oppressive regulations, government ownership, and
Socialist nostalgia and established itself in the global economy first as
a major independent player and then as a technological leader.

"Contemplating this Israeli breakthrough, the minds of parochial intellects
around the globe, from Jerusalem to Los Angeles, are clouded with envy and
suspicion. Everywhere, from the smarmy diplomats of the United Nations to
the cerebral leftists at the Harvard Faculty Club, critics of Israel
assert that Israelis are responsible for Palestinian Arab poverty. . . .
Denying to Israel the moral fruits and affirmations that Jews have so
richly earned by their paramount contributions to our civilization, the
critics of Israel lash out at the foundations of civilization itself--at
the golden rule of capitalism, that the good fortune of others is also
one's own.

"In simplest terms, amid the festering indigence of Palestine, the state of
Israel presents a test. Efflorescent in the desert, militarily powerful,
industrially preeminent, culturally cornucopian, technologically
paramount, it lately has become a spearhead of the global economy and
vanguard of human achievement. Believing that this position was somehow
captured, rather than created, many in the West still manifest a primitive
zero-sum vision of economics and life. . . ."

Get an advance copy now! This is classic Gilder and on a "new" subject. I had the pleasure of editing it in two stages. This is going to be a winner.

I don't know The Caspian Weekly, but two writers there, Nir Boms and Shayan Arya, are making a good case that the West should impose economic sanctions against the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran. The reason is that the Iranian government seems determined to defy the international community and its own agreements regarding nuclear weapons development. Even the U.N. seems clear on this.

The question is, would sanctions hurt or help the cause of peace? Very likely help, in my opinion. President Reagan certainly confronted the Soviets on many subjects in many ways, but he also was willing--and did--negotiate with them. In the case of Iran, we could negotiate after imposing sanctions, at least in theory.

But the truth is that it doesn't matter much whether we want to negotiate: the theocrats in Iran have made it clear they are not going to indulge that fantasy. Therefore, all the "realists" recommending caution actually are recommending inaction. One way or another, as the authors say, the Iranian regime must be pushed--hard. Maybe they will respond to real pressure. Maybe the people will find a successful way to rebel. Regardless, there is not much time left. The present drift is not a strategy.

Alan Mulally of Ford hopes to revive the Taurus, the once-popular sedan whose franchise the company abused and ran into the ground some years back. But there is no sign that Mr. Mulally, or anyone else making vehicles for the middle class, is interested in bringing back the bumper. One might as well expect the return of running boards.

That is a shame, because the assumption that buyers want style and performance to the exclusion of all else may be an error. After all, American automakers for years downplayed the importance, of gas mileage. "Small cars, small profits," was the Detroit chant, as The Big Three slid from grace. Then reality sideswiped them, and--in the case of GM this year--ran over the taxpayers, too.

Similarly, Detroit and most foreign auto-makers --and even the producers of supposedly new "green" hybrids--also seem indifferent to such practical owner costs as detailing for dents and dings that the modern parking garage and reckless drivers (including the owners themselves) inflict on automobiles. Blemishes and gouges at some point demand automotive cosmetic surgery, and sometimes it seems you could get your face lifted for less than a full auto detailing. That is why serious bumpers are so helpful on cars. Same for side-strips.

A friend's old Volvo--driven by his son-in-law--was rear ended by another car recently. The offending vehicle, with its supposedly flexible plastic buffer, suffered what must have amounted to a couple of thousand dollars of damage, while the rubber-bumpered Volvo, my friend exclaimed, just bounced. You couldn't see any damage at all.

I myself drive an old Camry and it is overdue for another appointment with the detailer's art. Part of the problem is mine, I confess, and part is that of persons unknown who opened their car doors against mine too roughly or used the lurch-and-touch system of parallel parking. So, because of that problem, as well as a desire for still better gas mileage, I decided that maybe I am due for a new car at last. Just for fun, I rode in a friend's new Ford Fusion hybrid recently. It was a delight. Hooray for Detroit. I'm interested.

But I am annoyed, too. The people at Ford (and elsewhere, of course) still must believe their marketing reports showing that buyers don't much care about protection against scratches and fender benders. The Fusion still does not do much to protect against such indignities.

Surely sophisticated marketers must realize that you have to dig deep sometimes to uncover people's real sentiments. Not every priority opens up to the marketing questionnaire--as truly intuitive politicians, by the way, know in their sales field.

For years, for example, we were told that all people cared about in airplane travel was ticket price. Surveys proved it. So seats squeezed tighter and tighter, didn't they? Legroom decreased. Meal service deteriorated and then disappeared. But making passengers increasingly miserable on their cheap ticket flights somehow didn't conduce to making them want to fly more. Some did fly more often (grandmothers on pleasure trips to see the kids), but others were turned off and now make a point of flying less (e.g., business people with discretion over their schedules).

I know how it is, because I answered an airline customer survey a few years ago in which I, too, marked ticket price as my highest priority. That was because I thought that if I didn't the airline company commissioning the survey would use the results to raise fares. Foolish me (and foolish others like me)! The company did keep the nominal fare costs low, but then started jamming me and others into intolerably close quarters and more often canceling flights on transparently flimsy grounds ("flight crew availability") when "low passenger load" was the real trouble.

Might not something similar be going on in auto marketing? Just because the public doesn't answer questionnaires in a way that puts a premium on controlling cost of maintenance of the vehicle's appearance doesn't mean the public is indifferent to the issue and is completely seduced by a car's shapely--but vulnerable--body. Maybe one time, maybe twice, but not forever. Not when money becomes scarce.

Like dating, looks do matter, but eventually wise people want more!

We are in a deep recession, carmakers. Value matters. If you won't make sensible cars that sensible people can afford to operate without constant maintenance and repairs, I'll just keep avoiding making a new commitment. And I don't think I'm unique.

But, by the way, you can make strong, bouncy bumpers that also are attractive. BMW does on some models. How about making the effort?

by John R. Miller

President Obama and Secretary Clinton have both now visited Russia in an effort to “reset” relations. The latest such effort was followed by the kidnapping and murder last week of Natalya Estemirova, a human rights activist in the Chechnya region of Russia. Her organization, Memorial, condemned Premier Putin’s appointee, Chechnya President Kadyrov. This killing followed a string of political murders of Putin critics, Soviet style, ranging from Chechnya, Moscow, and St. Petersburg to Strasbourg and London.

There was the brutal beating of Russian penal system critic Lev Ponomorov last April in Moscow. The murder of the President of the Russian rule of Law Institute Stanislov Markelov in January. The shooting near her home in St. Petersburg several years ago of Parliament member and human rights activist Galina Starovoytova and the assaults several years ago on a former state Duma member, Yulie Rybakova, a long time critic of both the Soviet and Putin regimes. The assassination of leading human rights journalist Anna Politskovskaya in Moscow last year. The poisoning of her friend Karinna Moskalenko, lawyer for Putin opponents Kasparov and Khodorkovsky, in Strasbourg, France. The poisoning of Russian secret service critic Alexander Litvinenko several years ago in London.

And these are just the most prominent cases. It is hard to put a number on the reporters, editors, lawyers and human rights activists that have paid dearly for their criticism of the regime.

Not since the days of Pinochet’s Chile, another developed country that we sought to maintain good relations with, has there been such a string of political disappearances, murders, and beatings.

The Russian government and its apologists in the West have claimed that the victims have been associated with Chechyan terrorism—never mind that most of the killings were far from Chechnya. Or that the victims were just the victims of random hooliganism—never mind that none of the “hooligans” have been brought to justice. Or that it was just a plot by Putin’s enemies at home and abroad to embarrass him—this last excuse brings to mind the explanations used by the former Soviet government when mysterious deaths occurred abroad. Sometimes we are told by Putin’s defenders in Britain and the U.S. that at least under Putin, Russia does not have a totalitarian state as in Soviet days. True enough, but this defense only shows how far the hopes of democracy and the rule of law in Russia have receded.

One hopeful sign was that the recent killing, while greeted with silence by Putin and Russian law enforcement, was criticized by the new Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, albeit while defending the Chechen President. Whether the new Russian President may initiate reforms or whether Putin and his appointees remain in control, the question of what to do faces the West. Generally, this has meant an inquiry or, as in the case of the London killing of Litvinenko, calling in diplomats for consultations, but then matters have been dropped. So eager has been the West to avoid confrontation with Russia that under President Bush—who has been criticized for being too harsh with Russia—human rights reports were shaded so as to avoid giving offense to the Putin regime. Under the Obama administration, all signs are that such a policy will continue. There is no evidence that even one of these human rights cases was raised in Moscow by either President Obama or Secretary Clinton.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, we need to negotiate with the Russians on nuclear weapons and missile defense. But this was also the case in the 80’s when the U.S. negotiated with Putin’s Soviet predecessors. But then Secretary of State Shultz still managed to press the Soviets privately and publicly on human rights issues, winning release of dissidents, encouraging movement toward respect for human rights and at the same time still negotiating broad nuclear agreements. What Secretary Shultz and President Reagan realized and what their successors have been reluctant to realize, is that nations make agreements based on self interest, not on whether the U.S. submerges its human rights ideals in diplosqueak. Speaking out for the rule of law in Russia will not only help past and future victims, it will encourage a more democratic and peaceful Russia which will be even more likely to enter into and keep meaningful international agreements.

John R. Miller is a former Member of Congress who served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, a former U.S. Ambassador at Large on Modern Slavery, and currently a Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley and a Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute (Human Rights and Bioethics Center).

Diane Medved is a mother and clinical psychologist who has written sagely about the way the material we witness in the media cannot help but affect us, even if indirectly. Pornography, for example, may not arouse; it may, instead, depress. Either way, a message of bleakness behind the "action" seeps into the mind, like advertising, whether you want it or not. After all, corporations pay lots of money to get their impressions into your head, trusting that it will pay off. What makes you think other messages don't also sink in?

The issue at hand is Bruno. Diane Medved, whose husband, Michael, is a movie critic and has to go see films like Bruno, declined to attend a screening of this picture. She explained this on her blog (July 8). I was going to comment on the film about that same time, but figured that my comments would be dismissed by many readers if I didn't bother to see the film. So I saw it. By and large, Diane was right.

Let it be said that Sasha Baron Cohen is a master comic with a particular gift for reality-tv, Candid Camera style embarrassment. Some of his inventive scenes are inescapably hilarious; others are merely cringe inducing. Regardless, unlike the great comics of yore, such as Charlie Chaplin, deep down Cohen seems to be a misanthrope, a nihilist. He doesn't even really like his own characters. His "Bruno", the gay Austrian fashionista, is a hollow man. There is no way to care about him or anyone else in the film.

In the Victorian Era public art was famously prudish, and the eventual reaction against it was based largely on the proposition that the Victorian moralists were, among other things, hypocrites. In private, they supposedly indulged in the very kinds of vices they deplored in public. Today, we have a new dominant morality, in which the effective highest good is "tolerance" and "diversity". But this morality is hypocritical in its own way, allowing people to defend a behavior (and congratulate themselves in doing so) even while privately scorning that behavior. That is part of Sasha Baron Cohen's insight; he exploits a moral duplicity within his own audience, even while lampooning it. The audience is laughing, but the audience is also the target.

The film presents itself as a satire on celebrity culture. Bruno lets stars like Paula Abdul and Elton John make themselves look foolish, knowing that such people don't really care ultimately if they are exposed as kooks as long as the public continues to notice them. A great many people in this civilization really do care about fame and money to the exclusion of reputation. (Whatever their faults, the Victorians were not so shallow.)

If that was all there was to it, the film would be a small masterpiece. But a satire of celebrity is only the outer layer of the movie. Deeper down, the film is a meditation about itself, and its self not only seems to loathe its subjects, its characters and you, the audience, but also life.

Richard Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, reminds us about Walter Wriston's "law" on the correlation between the way a society treats talent and merit and the way that society's economy performs. People who grow to believe that they simply are entitled to leadership in business or any other field--like traditional welfare recipients at the other end of the spectrum who come to think that they entitled to benefits without working--are a huge drag on progress for the many. They drag down people of ability and that hurts us all.

George Gilder's new book, The Israel Test, was released yesterday and likewise describes a variation on Wriston's Law as it applies to the way Jews are treated in society, analogizing that question to the international treatment of Israel. (You can order The Israel Test at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other outlets as of now.)

The Obama idea ran something like this: People know there are problems with health care, they want the uninsured covered and they want relief from what they may regard as an unfair bureaucracy at many insurance companies. Therefore, the scheme went, this is the time to introduce the vehicle of "reform" that will be sold as limited, but end up in a couple of elections with nationalized (socialized) health care in the supposedly great European tradition.

With President Obama riding a wave of popularity and with media that literally would eat out of his hand if they could get that close, the Administration bet that a big push should be made this year. The Recession didn't bother them; they tried to turn it to their advantage, asserting that somehow increased spending on government medical care would save money for the economy.

What has happened politically is very different from what the Obama Administration hoped. Instead of the President's popularity carrying the medical care proposals to victory, the increasing public unease over a costly new entitlement has cut into Obama's job approval rates.

Meanwhile, the reporting of the major media finally is beginning to take cognizance of the problems with the assorted Democratic bills in Congress. Until the public's opposition started to firm up, Establishment organs were describing each development in language that the White House might have crafted itself. The failure of the public to see the proposed changes as mere "reforms", however, as Democratic leaders and the media have presented them, is testimony to the discernment of public opinion once a subject finally gets enough attention that people can see behind the headlines and the spin.

Hats off to The Wall Street Journal editorial pages on this one. The Journal's Peggy Noonan's insightful weekend piece quickly became the "most emailed" of the paper's work. But outstanding digging went on by other columnists, including John Fund and Kimberley Strassel.

The Journal's editorial writers on Friday ("A Better Health Reform") called, wisely, for Obama to respond to the current de facto reversal of momentum on the Administration-favored Congressional health care bills to develop a program that would have bi-partisan support. He could start by taking a fresh look at what Sen. McCain proposed last fall.

In truth, the President should step back and realize that his big scheme is not going to make it, even with much of the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies and apparently the bulk of the American Medical Association having thrown in with him in hopes of being spared government revenge. If, instead, he made a more limited proposal that ordinary people in both parties could understand and applaud, the political reality is that it is he who would be given credit in the end. He could just adopt John McCain's proposals and the public would still call it Obama Care. That would be bad for Republicans politically, but it would be good for the country and the economy.

Instead the President seems intent on pushing ahead. As a result, his public approval ratings are falling fast and, with them, his whole domestic program. Critics say that the Rassmussen Poll is often skewed toward Republicans, but there is no ignoring what it says about the trend.

A new Kremlin plan to teach students religion or secular ethics is meant to combat the aimlessness of youth.

Perhaps it will--to some extent.

The approach is probably unique--teach what is again the dominant state religion (Russian Orthodoxy) as the one acceptable Christian faith, and also teach--according to student desires--Islam (the religion of a sizable minority, particularly in the South), Buddhism or Judaism, and give the students the alternative of a coarse in secular ethics. It will seem fair to many, maybe most, Russians. It is quite different, obviously, from the "scientific atheism" of Soviet days.

The program will get a lot of criticism, however. First, the most eager evangelists in Russia today are probably the various kinds of Christian pentecostals, and there is a sizable Roman Catholic population in certain ethnic centers. So the government apparently is starting a new struggle with these groups in schools, of all places.

Then arises the question of how smart it is to have Islam taught in state schools. Who is going to teach it? What is going to be taught? Might the government find itself trying to deal with hostile Friday mosque sermons because of the kind of Islam it promulgates in the schools? Where does that lead? How will populations in areas where Islam is a majority faith react to state school classes that offer instruction as well in other faiths?

Regardless, the new Russian model is so jarringly different from what is on offer in the United States that it may be worth careful monitoring by Americans. We no longer provide much at all in schools of the old, slightly Protestant civic religion of yore. The struggle in the U.S. is over whether to allow any expressions of faith in schools, whether in Commencement speeches by students or in after-school religious clubs.

Overall, America has benefited by a general separation of religious instruction and public education, as in other fields. A state religion gets lazy. It becomes synonymous in students' minds with state politics, which cannot be good.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for students learning more about the religious heritage of their country. If the Russians are erring on one side of that objective, Americans may be erring on the other. If nothing else, comparisons of results should be interesting.

One place where the outcomes may be studied closely is....China.

Sam Harris has a piece in The New York Times suggesting that Francis Collins' Christian views render him unsuited to serve as head of the National Institutes of Health. That is so, says Harris, even though Collins is a devoted Darwinist. Clearly Harris would like a sign that says "Only Atheists Need Apply" to hang over the NIH.

Only a couple of days ago Nicholas Wade wrote a blog for the The Times about Thomas Bouchard, Minnesota psychologist, who contends that science is damaged by conformism, just as economics and other fields are:

Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers

By Nicholas Wade

What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics. “We still have whole domains we can’t talk about,” Dr. Bouchard said, referring to the psychology of differences between races and sexes.

You haven't seen much at all about the elections just held in the Kurdish region of Iraq, perhaps because they were relatively uneventful. But that should be big news. Not only were the elections apparently fair and free of violence, but all sides seem to agree that a new third party, "Change", captured the second highest number of seats. As usual, the distinguished Iraq the Model blog has the report (two, in fact). http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

Contrasts should be drawn with the continuing disgrace in Iran.

Our Sr. Fellow Wesley J. Smith of the Discovery Institute Center for Human Rights and Bioethics is asking the question that Bill Donahue of the Catholic League and others also are raising: Is there language under consideration that could lead to "end of life care" that includes intentional termination of life? Outrageous? Well, then, the Obamacare bill should be clarified to make sure the meaning is not obscure or doubtful.

If there is no domestic constituency that is offended, a gaffe is not treated as a gaffe. But Vice President Joe Biden's snarky remarks about Russia fall into the gaffe category anyhow. What is the point?

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, killed in 2006 in what appeared to be a contract murder.

Political killings have declined in recent years in Russia, but still tend to blot Russia's image in the filed of human rights. Several recent contract murders have been tied to Chechnyan politics, where complex rivalries have been taken to Moscow in a violent manner.

Now comes the story of an apparent murder attempt that was foiled by police. A plausible suspect seems to be in hand. If so, this gives the Russian government a chance to show its determination to strike back at terror-tactics, regardless of their source.

I am skeptical of assertions that the Kremlin itself has backed such political terror tactics. But now--with a live suspect in police hands--is the time and the chance for the national government as well as the police to demonstrate their true resolve. It also is time for the international community to pay more attention to these matters.