Minimal free time today forces me to truncate my posting. Here are a couple of links for your perusal.
Maxed Out Mama adds some (mathematical) muscle to the skeleton of criticisms of Obamacare. We really, really can't afford everything we want and the plans being bandied about explicitly refuse to use the markets to do things that could lower costs for all. And, by the way, Arnold Kling makes a pretty good case that Obama's healthcare speech was itself The Biggest Lie on Health Reform.
When does holding Israel to impossible standards cross over into anti-Semitism? Richard Landes does not directly address this question, but his fisking of Richard Goldstone's op-ed in the Times today is must reading. Delegitimizing Israel is a sport engaged in by overt anti-Semites as well as by those who impose impossible restraints and impossible expectations on the state of Israel either out of guilt or idealism which hides and rationalizes their destructive behavior: Fisking Goldstone: What’s happened to this man?
Vanderleun can ruin your day as thoughts of the recent terrorism raids leads him to speculate on how easily New York City could be shut down: Killing New York: What It Would Take, A Simple Scenario. I can think of other, even more frightening scenarios and, in fact wonder why some easily committed atrocities have not occurred; maybe there aren't that many people living in America who hate us enough to die killing Americans?
A blog that is new to me called Your Lying Eyes makes an interesting point; maybe It's All About Race after all. [HT: Steve Sailer]
Finally, I thought I was getting a handle on President Obama's foreign policy. "No enemies on the left" sounded reasonable and fit some of the data. However, more recently, it appears more to me that his foreign policy is the foreign policy of a certain type of grade schooler who is being bullied. He appeases the bullies, even when he is bigger than they are and could take them down, and turns around and bullies the little kids who can't fight back. Why else would he show such deference to all the thugs in the world, from the Castro twins to Putin to Ahmadinejad to Chavez, et al while putting the screws to the Israelis, Hondurans, Colombians, Poles, and many of our other friends who look to us to have their back. Maybe there is a grand Tom Barnettian strategy to the whole thing but it is hard to discern. (Besides, Tom Barnett would never support protectionism; starting a trade war with China, among others, to pay off his union supporters will undermine any grand strategy Obama might have.)
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