Ricochet friend and favorite Democrat Mickey Kaus saw this article in Politico, about Obama's recent visit to Detroit, in which he touted the "success" of the auto bailouts. The president told the assembled group that

"If some folks had their way, none of this would be happening,” Obama said, as Chrysler workers booed his reference to Republicans who voted against the bailout. “Just want to point that out. Right? This plant and your jobs might not exist. There were leaders of the ‘just say no’ crowd in Washington. They were saying, 'Oh, standing by the auto industry would guarantee failure.' One of them called it ‘the worst investment you could possibly make.’"

Mickey then Tweeted: Obama's auto bailout celebrations have a "Mission Accomplished" feel, no?
Right again, Mickey.

That's the key line from tonight's episode. It's not the houndstooth dress or the Medicare reference that tells you we're deep into the '60s -- it's the debut of professional psychology in the workplace. At first, the impression created by the test Don wouldn't take looked a lot like what we take for granted in democratic life: everyone's equal and equally different. You take the test that everyone takes and everyone -- or, at least, the test administrator -- knows exactly who you, and only you, are. Snowflakes all, meaning unique snowflakes all. The painful tension between society and the individual? Resolved!

But it's not so easy. Cornered in his office, Don's on the receiving end of a backhanded consolation: you'll be married within a year, yes, because you're that type. And not as, say, the culture of Playboy meant it in the '60s -- where the color of a girl's hair captured, in a way impervious to analysis because it called for no analysis, her personality. Tonight, we saw those superficial types on familiar display: fiery Joan, ice queen Betty, another tempting and dark brunette. But as it penetrated the workplace and the home, psychology told us that every type had a deeper meaning -- and that you couldn't understand the type at all unless you knew it.

From one angle, that's an invitation to some tiresome Freudian question-and-answer. From a better vantage, it's a reminder that we seek refuge in types at our peril. Out here in LA, it really is true that you walk into a casting call and you discover that there are dozens, and by implication hundreds, of people who really are just your type -- same look, same demeanor, same attitude. Your precious individuality? An illusion. Life after Web 2.0 has opened this experience to everybody. Want to find your niche? Start browsing. Want to find a niche? Ditto. We are positively glutted with niches and types. Setting yourself up as a type offers the promise of sanctuary from the exhausting back and forth between being just one of the crowd and being an irreplicable, irreplaceable individual. You pick a part and you stick with it. Where once vocation or location played that foundational, grounding role, now you orient yourself by the identity you role play. Now, everyone wants to know they're a type.

Alas, as tonight's show revealed, no matter how carefully you pick a part or how assiduously you play it, your type -- and, much more importantly, you -- can get picked apart and played. People are starting to ask now whether we have to admit that Don is a creep, and that we'd have admitted this long ago if he weren't so handsome. But this begs the question. Is the real Don starting to destroy his polished, alluring, unflappable type, or are his obligations to his type beginning to destroy him? One way to vault yourself out of this line of questioning has been put front and center tonight -- in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, a not quite psychological kind of therapy that involves a much more radical kind of surrender than surrender to type. But already that seems impossible for Don. His escape, and his survival, has to be of a much different kind. The questions driving the drama, now, are simple. What is it? And can he find it in time?

CNN.com is reporting that Cuba is allowing more private businesses to exist, making it easier for those businesses to hire workers, and attempting to get rid of up to one million redundant state jobs:

The measures "constitute a structural and conceptual change in the interest of preserving and developing our social system to make it sustainable in the future," [Cuban President Raul] Castro said.

The decision was part of a series of measures approved by the Council of Ministers to reduce "the considerably inflated payroll in the state sector," he added.

What's fascinating about the 1 million redundant public jobs is that the entire country only has 5.1 million state jobs.

I never thought I'd say something like this but any chance we could follow Cuba's lead?

Last Friday at a speech at American University, Justice Ginsburg gave a stout defense of the practice of using foreign law to decide constitutional questions. The speech is a frightening window into the Judicial wing of the movement to European-ize the US.

In 2005, the Supreme Court issed a decision (Roper v. Simmons) in which the majority held that the meaning of the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" could (and should) be elucidated on the basis of international law. The Justices relied on a grab-bag of UN conventions (including conventions that had not been ratified by the US) and other foreign law. Justice Antonin Scalia sharply, and correctly, rebuked the majority for engaging in "sophistry."

Ginsburg argues that the Founders themselves would have wanted foreign law to be used to elucidate the Constitution. As proof, she cites evidence that the Founders, and other early jurists, recognized the force of international law (such as treaties) as well as customary international law (such as international mercantile law). Oh, and she also relies heavily on the Declaration of Independence's "decent respect for the opinions of mankind."

This is the best she can do? Of course the Founders recognized the binding force of treaties; the Constitution provides that treaties shall be the law of the land. No conservative - much less Scalia - is arguing that treaties aren't binding. But the liberal wing (supported by Kennedy on this issue) is invoking non-binding contemporary foreign law as evidence of the meaning of constitutional amendments drafted in 1791. And as for the Declaration? Come on! It was a declaration of Independence from the Old World.

I have a new distraction as I jog in my hilly NorCal neighborhood: Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge, now available as an audio-only file for download at iTunes.

If you’re hooked on seeing Peter and friends each week, don’t worry. The Hoover Institution is a pro-choice place – in the consumer sense at least – so the video version remains available. In my case, I simply don’t have enough free screen time to view each week’s installment at NRO, and my iPod’s memory is more flatworm than dolphin. So while there’s no room in machine or schedule for video, audio podcasts are a different matter.

Podcasts are the sand poured around the walnuts clogging my day. I listen while driving, gardening, and of course running. Today, I effortlessly consumed four separate UncKnow shows (Hill, Junger, Boskin & Lazear, Steyn and Long) while working on the car, then running in the woods behind my house. It sure beats listening to more Lady Gaga. And my legs didn’t hurt a bit . . . until I got home.

Attention Ricochet Podcast fans: Courtesy of PJTV, we're coming at you in color and in video. Bill Whittle hosts Peter Robinson, Rob Long, and James Lileks in a roundtable for the ages, complete with cameo appearances from Crusoe the Poodle and Tony the Tiger. Watch the show here and here -- and let us know what you think.

Big trouble ahead for the Democrats. Blaming Bush for everything is now unpopular. Even with part of the Democratic base. From the Washington Times:

The summer of the discontented voter steams onward and, unfortunately for President Obama, polls show voters are no longer blaming the bad times on the George W. Bush administration.

Add Hispanics to the growing list of Obama supporters disgruntled by aspects of the presidents performance, in what has become for theWhite House and Democrats a seemingly daily beat of gloomy polls.

Mr. Obama gets only lukewarm ratings on issues important to Hispanics in a Univision/AP poll released Tuesday, and, according to a separate Reuters-Ipsos survey, Americans overwhelmingly believe the president has failed to focus enough on job creation.

"A lot of these folks wouldn't like him no matter what, but I think the country has pretty much the same problems it did before Obama took office — at least that's how voters feel — and more and more that's becoming Obama's fault rather than Bush's fault," said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling.

It's way, way, way too early to be pinning medals on each other. It's August 1st, and November is a political lifetime away. But it's amazing to see just how quickly a president can squander a 53% victory, universal press approval, and a huge amount of good will. Remind me again why he's supposed to be so smart?

[Why leave it to the talking heads? From now on, Ricochet members, you're part of the Sunday roundtable discussions. Emily Esfahani-Smith tees you up with the rundown -- you take the conversation where it should've gone and where it needs to go. Enjoy! -- The Editors]

The three news items on the major Sunday news shows—Fox News Sunday, Meet the Press, and This Week—were the economy, Afghanistan, and the “Rangel conundrum,” as Christiane Amanpour, the new host of This Week, put it. The Arizona immigration bill got a shout too.

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace hosted Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Then panelists Bill Kristol, Juan Williams, Ceci Connolly, and Liz Cheney weighed in on the issues.

Christiane Amanpour debuted as the host of This Week, appearing sometimes softspoken as she interviewed Nancy Pelosi, Robert Gates, and her panel of commentators (Paul Krugman, George Will, and Donna Brazile).

On Meet the Press, David Gregory spoke to Adm. Mike Mullen about Afghanistan. Then, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Alan Greenspan, and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell talked economics.

The rundown's below the fold!

Arizona: Obama Has No Cojones

On FNS, Palin didn’t swerve too far from GOP talking points on the show—“We have a jobless recovery and that’s no recovery in the minds of most Americans”—but she did use some colorful language when discussing the Arizona immigration law.

Palin is of course a proponent of the Arizona law. She told Chris Wallace, “Jan Brewer has the cajones that our president does not have to look out for all Americans in this desire of ours to secure our borders and allow legal immigration as was the intent of our country.” She understandably didn’t dive into a legal defense of her argument—that the law does not promote racial profiling nor does it infringe upon federal duties, contra the Arizona judge’s argument—but Palin did seem satisfied, perhaps naively so, that the injunction ordered by the Arizona judge on key parts of the law was temporary.

Jobs and the Economy: Austerity Proponents “have to have a way to make people suffer more”—Paul Krugman

Should the Bush tax cuts stay or go? Pelosi held her ground about expiring the Bush tax cuts, saying the tax cuts don’t increase jobs.

Alan Greenspan, speaking today on Meet the Press, also opposed these particular tax cuts, saying, “I’m very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money.” Greenspan held, contra Sarah Palin’s argument today on FNS, that tax cuts do not pay for themselves.

Pelosi also told Amanpour that the stimulus bill was a job creator that helped cut the unemployment rate from what it otherwise would have been. Speaking on Meet the Press, Mayor Michael Bloomberg questioned that belief, saying “this stimulus bill started with rebate check … that went to flat screen TVs made in China.” He also said that the money given to government in the bill was “used for operating [expenses], not investing.”

The bottom line, Bloomberg seemed to argue, is that the stimulus was most certainly not a job creator.

Some, like Bloomberg, say the stimulus did not work, others, as George Will argued this morning, think that we need to enter a period of fiscal austerity. And still others, like the rambling Krugman, who was sitting next to Will on This Week, think we need more stimulus, and more government spending. He said “people have got this austerity notion in their mind …. And it appeals to people because they have to have a way to make people suffer more.”

McConnell weighed in on FNS: “Let me tell you how not to stimulate the economy…their [Democrats’] signature job effort was to extend unemployment.”

Republican Strategy: Focus on Policy, Not Rangel

Boehner and McConnell spoke mostly about the economy, though when the issue of Charlie Rangel’s ethics charges came up, Boehner took a defined stance against Rangel while McConnell kept a cool distance from the issue, saying Democrats’ biggest issue is they’re “spending too much, taxing too much” and promoting job killing policies. This echoed Bill Kristol’s remarks on the show later, during the panel, when he said that the Republicans would be stupid to “harp on this” and should “focus on policy” instead in the lead-up to November.

Juan Williams, speaking on the FNS panel, spun the Rangel issue in terms of race: “It becomes highly racial … Rangel is black, Waters is black … the Congressional Black Caucus says ethics people go after black people.” Someone should alert the black caucus that very white Sen. John Ensign is in talks with the Senate ethics committee—and a grand jury—for a sex and lobbying scandal, a story covered by The Hill, TPM, and other outlets. Yet Krugman, speaking today on This Week, strangely bemoaned the fact that Ensign’s scandal was getting no press. He also called the charges being leveled against Rangel “petty.”

Looking forward to November, Chris Wallace pointed out to McConnell that the Democrats might try to paint the Republicans as obstructionists—they voted against extending unemployment, against financial regulatory reform, and against extending lending to small businesses, a bill that McConnell called “another TARP.”

Nancy Pelosi, speaking on This Week, echoed Wallace’s point, saying that Republicans have spent the last 18 months campaigning while Democrats have spent that time legislating.

Afghanistan/WikiLeaks: Did Julian Assange aid and abet al Qaeda?

Afghanistan was another hot news item this morning.

Amanpour, speaking to Robert Gates, asked him about the timetable to withdraw US troops in 18 months time. She noted that the Taliban is running out the clock. It is telling Afghans that the Americans are leaving in 18 months, so who will the Afghans turn to come month 19? Gates soberly said, “We will be there in 19 months and we will be there with a lot of troops.”

Pelosi, for her part, provided a realpolitik rebuttal to Amanpour’s concerns about the fate of the Afghan people. Amanpour asked her if the United States was going to abandon Afghanistan, especially the oppressed women of that country, such as the woman pictured on this week’s Time cover. Pelosi said, “we’re in Afghanistan because it is in our own national interest to be there ....our own national security.”

On FNS, the most interesting remark about Afghanistan came from Liz Cheney, who thinks that Obama should move aggressively to shut down WikiLeaks, the site that leaked thousands of documents about the war. She added that Julian Assange, the site’s founder, should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting al Qaeda.

I’m not sure if the entire site should be shut down—there’s a place for whistleblowers in a democracy, and WikiLeaks reports on issues other than national security—but perhaps Assange should pull the war documents from the site. On the other hand, the damage has already been done.

George Will, speaking on This Week, said the leak was “lethal without being helpful.”

I read your attack on politics as war with great interest, Conor -- for I too am dissatisfied with our tendency, since the Great Society '60s, to approach every policy, and any political contest, through the metaphor of war. Not only does it make things that aren't war more warlike, it confuses us about what war really is. But politics, which does involve actually competing for power, is considerably more like war than many other things -- at least sometimes. You yourself acknowledge that the warlike approach to politics "usually doesn't make any sense." I'm very interested in understanding the exceptions.

It helps to look at two different visions of war. In the first, war is a state of exception -- a situation in which many rules change, some rules are suspended, and a few new rules kick into effect. War begins when someone creates that situation, or when soon-to-be combatants mutually acknowledge that such a situation exists. The war has a beginning, a middle, and and end, the point at which hostilities are suspended or completed. Maybe one side wins a total or a partial victory. Maybe the loser surrenders conditionally or unconditionally. Maybe one side gains some territory, resources, prestige, or all three.

In the second vision of war, the state of exception is more severe than the one I just identified. Aside from the most basic rules of war, like kill or be killed, there really aren't rules, just strategies. Most important, there's no real narrative or story giving the war a beginning, middle, and end. There's just a mythological notion that now is a time of crisis so profound that we must stop at nothing to win.

It seems pretty commonsensical to recognize that oftentimes politics does resemble the first kind of war. And I think your real concern is that we're developing a particularly ignorant and troublesome habit of analogizing politics to war in the second sense. It's true that there are vested interests in making that kind of view a popular one. But there's a difficulty, which is that the two visions of war I identified actually sit on a continuum, blurring into one another. This isn't some especially heinous feature of 'modernity' or any other bugaboo -- it's on full display in Thucydides. And one of the purposes of politics is to sort out what kind of wars we face, and how we want to wage the ones we're in. In fact, it's hard to think about how we could practice politics in that way without persuading people of the case we're making about war and crisis. You think that the politics of persuasion can lead us out of the distorting view of war as permanent crisis and politics as that kind of war. But isn't that distorting view itself a consequence of the politics of persuasion?

Jarrett Bell has compiled a spectacularly researched article for USA Today about the pitfalls of early fame and fortune in the NFL.

As you might expect, the vast majority of players are ill-prepared for life after football. According to a Sports Illustrated report cited by Bell, 78 percent of NFL players will become bankrupt, divorced, or unemployed within two years of retirement. Talk about a late hit.

The average NFL career is less than four years, Bell points out.

After reading this article – twice – I’d like some help sorting out the villains and the victims. Owners? Uneducated, risk-taking athletes? Greedy, seedy hangers-on? Agents? Money managers? Baby mommas?

Maybe these guys don’t deserve our sympathy. Maybe the NFL simply reflects what a dynamic capitalist system is supposed to look like. Talent is rewarded, of course, but so is risk. Physical injury is always a tackle away, but the greater risk is the sacrifice required to make it. Inevitably, these are not well-rounded guys. They are fully invested in one thing – football success. If it goes bad, well, that’s what you get. After all: No risk, no reward. Whatever. It’s equal parts fascinating and depressing.

Consider the “money” quotes:

“… a pro football player’s earning power is backward, compared to the average American.” Former NFL standout Ken Reuttgers.

"After Uncle Sam comes first, your agent is going to get his cut," says [former NY Jet Keyshawn] Johnson. "Then there's your wife, girlfriend or baby's mama. You're going to hook up your family and homeboys, and get yourself some nice things, like jewelry or some sweet tire rims. By the time you've done all of that, you'd be lucky to have $320,000 left."

Ohhh, what I could do with $320,000. But I digress …

"There's no quicker way to siphon wealth than to pay child-support at $5,000 a month for three or four kids. That's almost $250,000 a year. I've seen it." - Bryan Cave attorney Roy Hadley, on the impact of lifestyle choices.

Deion Sanders, the former all-pro cornerback, offers this advice in the article: "Find someone to mentor you who doesn't have their hands in your pocket."

Hmm. And who’s that going to be? A volunteer from the church? Now that I think about it, I’d actually be willing to do it. But how am I gonna get in touch with these young draftees? E-mail? Do you think it will work?

Dear ______,

My name is Ursula. I’m a stay-at-home mom in Connecticut. I used to be a sportswriter. Would you like my free, no-strings-attached assistance in the financial planning of your gazillion-dollar contract? I want to help you out of the goodness of my heart. I hope you believe me.

Good luck,

Ursula Hennessey

P.S. If for some reason things don’t work out, I am also a former teacher/tutor. I could help you gain admission back into college and then we can do the coursework together! Fun, right? Okay, bye.

Photo of LaDainian Tomlinson by SD Dirk

This week's Ricochet podcast also got me thinking -- what a good idea the 1994 Contract with America Congress had with repeal day. On that day, Congress would repeal, not pass laws. I always thought it should be a week, not a day. Unfortunately, not much came of it -- once there, the new majority became less interested in shrinking government.

But suppose the next Congress, pushed on by the Tea Party, took the idea of shrinking government seriously. What would be the worst laws on the books to repeal? Which laws have the worst cost-benefit ratio? Can the Ricochet network of decentralized but collective wisdom come up with a list? Here are some of the candidates culled from other posts:

1. Obamacare

2. Stimuli

3. TARP

4. ADA?

5. Ethanol subsidy?

6. Mortgage deduction?

7. ????

8. ????

9. ????

10. ????

Can Ricochet members fill out the Top 10?

While listening to this week's Ricochet podcast at the gym, I was struck by how Rob, Peter, James and Pat Sajak were stumped by the question of whether a big government program had ever been repealed. Rob took this to press his theory that the Democrats have succeeded by creating Obamacare, which will hook the American people on yet another permanent entitlement.

Should conservatives despair -- I think at least one example exists. The one that popped in my head right during the podcast: Prohibition. It was perhaps the largest federal intervention in daily life ever, telling Americans not to pursue their favorite pastime. It took a constitutional amendment (the 18th) to establish in 1920, and a big bureaucracy to enforce. But it was repealed by 1933 -- it had led to widespread disobedience to the law and the rise of organized crime. An example of the progressives' use of the federal government to enforce morality on the nation -- and the nation couldn't stand it.

Ricochet: are there other examples?

Peter suggested the 1996 welfare reform -- that indeed was a sweeping reform, but not wholesale root and branch removal.

Ricochet member Duane Oyen posted this astonishing item on Facebook. (Sooner or later we're going to add a few features to the Ricochet software, making it possible for members to originate conversations, not just join them. But for now--and trusting that Duane won't mind--I'm simply dropping his item right here.)

"It appears," Duane wrote, "that the majority of the BP oil leak may well have been the fault of Uncle Sam." From the website of the Center for Public Integrity:

 The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Astonishing.

Or maybe, come to think of it, not.

Our member Duane Oyen left an interesting comment on an earlier thread:

I confess that I hadn't explored Robert Zubrin's ideas, but now I have. Zubrin wants Congress to require that all new cars be flex-fuel--that is, capable of running on ethanol as well as gas. He claims this would cost only another $100 per vehicle. (Is that true? Seems implausible to me--wouldn't you have to completely redesign a lot of cars, retool plants, etc?)

Zubrin writes:

Filling stations don't want to dedicate space to a fuel mix used by only three percent of all cars and consumers are not interested in buying vehicles for which the preferred fuel mix is extremely difficult to find.

He thinks this is one of those problems the government should solve by passing a law. If you build the cars, he believes, the free market will take care of the rest.

I wonder. Is there some other reason consumers don't want cars that run on ethanol? What's the down side to his suggestion?

There's an article in Foreign Policy this week about the real lessons of Afghanistan's history. Contrary to received wisdom, argues Christian Caryl, Afghanistan has not generally been the graveyard of empires; the idea that great and arrogant powers are doomed inherently to wreck themselves on Afghan soil is based upon a series of myths:

One of those myths, for example, is that Afghanistan is inherently unconquerable thanks to the fierceness of its inhabitants and the formidable nature of its terrain. But this isn't at all borne out by the history. "Until 1840 Afghanistan was better known as a 'highway of conquest' rather than the 'graveyard of empires,'" Barfield points out. "For 2,500 years it was always part of somebody's empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C."

After the Persians it was Alexander the Great's turn. Some contend that Alexander met his match in the Afghans, since it was an Afghan archer who wounded him in the heel, ushering in a series of misfortunes that would end with the great conqueror's death. Ask anyone who believes this is why Greek coins keep cropping up in Afghan soil today -- in fact, Alexander's successors managed to keep the place under their control for another 200 years. Not too shabby, really. And there were plenty of empires that came after, thanks to Afghanistan's centrality to world trade in the era before European ocean fleets put an end to the Silk Road's transportation monopoly.

What about the popular accounts that insist, awe-struck, that even Genghis Khan was humbled by the Afghans? Poppycock, says Barfield. Genghis had "no trouble at all overrunning the place," and his descendants would build wide-ranging kingdoms using Afghanistan as a base. Timur (know to most of us as Tamerlane) ultimately shifted the capital of his empire from provincial Samarkand to cosmopolitan Herat, evidence of the role command over Afghanistan played in his calculations. Babur, who is buried in Kabul, used Afghanistan to launch his conquest of a sizable chunk of India and establish centuries of Muslim rule. Afghans seemed pretty happy to go along.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with Afghan history easily to be able to evaluate this argument. Are any of you? Does it sound right?

Time has a horrifying story out about a rash of infanticide that has cropped up in France as a result of something that psychiatrists are calling "pregnancy denial." In the latest case, six tiny bodies were unearthed by authorities in the garden of Dominique Cottrez, and two other bodies were found in the garden of Ms. Cottrez's parents.

Experts explained [this case] as resulting from pregnancy denial, an often misunderstood and minimized condition. According to Michel Delcroix, a former gynecologist...pregnancy denial is a quasi-schizophrenic condition in which women either don't realize or cannot accept that they are with child — not even enough to have an abortion. Whether these women are afflicted with the condition before they deliver or as they're suddenly giving birth, Delcroix explains, the psychological denial is so strong that they refuse to believe they're pregnant even when the reality confronts them.

Some experts in the medical community argue that women who kill their babies as a result of pregnancy denial should not be subject to the criminal justice system, but should instead be treated for a mental condition. Yet, in order to treat pregnancy denial, doctors must understand its cause.

[I]n some cases, it can...be a matter of women simply failing to see themselves as mothers. "Some women never manage to update their self-identity during pregnancy, [while others] want to become pregnant without wanting to procreate," psychiatrist Pierre Lamothe told Le Parisien on Thursday. "When the child arrives, it doesn't really exist for them. They don't give it life, in psychological terms. If they saw it as a [real] baby, they wouldn't kill it."

This rationale, the "they don't see it as a human being, or else they wouldn't kill it" argument, seems an awful lot like what we hear from "pro-choice" advocates. The fetus is not viewed as a human, but rather as a mass of tissue, and its inhumanness somehow makes doing away with it morally acceptable to some. Yet, for many of us who describe ourselves as pro-life, we have a hard time seeing a moral distinction between aborting a life at three months post-conception and nine months post-conception. On the one hand, why should one woman have to face a criminal sentence or even medical treatment simply for aborting her child six months later than another who did so with the full protection of the law? On the other hand, why shouldn't these women who commit infanticide be hit by the full force of the law? After all, denying the personhood of another individual, has been the essence of murder since the beginning of time.

Ursula's post about summer reading for teens got me thinking about this, and now that several of us--notably, of course, Rupert Murdoch--have mentioned our own summer reading, I thought I'd mention it: There are still some books--quite a lot of them, actually--that I'd rather read have between covers than on the Kindle or iPad. Not that I disdain ebooks. I bought a Kindle about a year ago, and I went through a dozen ebooks before thinking twice about it. Then I downloaded the ebook version of Dostoyevsky's great novel on atheism and revolution, The Devils.

After I got a few pages into the novel, though, I began realizing that having each page simply evaporate the moment I turned to the next made me feel...cheated. I wanted something to show for the effort. If I was going to read 700 pages, at the end I wanted a prize. I wanted a book I could put on my shelf and keep there--an object that would say, if only to me, 'Whatever ills and disappointments befall you, dear Reader, remember this: You are a man of determination and accomplishment, for you once read this entire fat book." I bought the Penguin edition, read the whole novel, and then put The Devils on my bookshelf, between The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace.

But that, I figured, was just me.

Then I read David Brooks's column earlier this month on the importance of summer reading for children. One passage stopped me:

[T]here was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The change in the way kids see themselves as they build a home library. Gosh, I thought, maybe it wasn't just me. Maybe there's something really basic going on here. Maybe people really need the sense of accomplishment that a bookshelf--a bookshelf containing physical objects in three dimensions; actual books--conveys. There and then, I made a resolution. No ebooks for my kids. No library books either. I'm buying the books my kids are reading this summer, then commanding them to clear their bookshelves of baseballs and mitts and all the sorry accumulated detritus of teenaged existence to fill them, instead, with the books they've read. (I'm not rich, but my kids are hardly going to get through enough books to pose any challenge to the family finances, believe me.) At the end of the summer, they'll have something to show for their reading.

Somebody, tell me this isn't just dad going off on another one of his self-improvement jags. Tell me, if you would, that this makes sense.

Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway:

[...] tucked into the health care reform law is a change to the tax laws that will vastly increase tax reporting requirements for businesses nationwide. Despite several complaints from small business that this will require unreasonable administrative costs to be incurred by small businesses, Congress has failed in an effort to repeal the new law.

I've been reading Charles Flood's 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History. It is almost surreal to be reminded of how -- in the midst of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the ongoing slaughter in Virginia (the Army of the Potomac took 60,000 casualties in three months) -- the real Lincoln haters, from Fremont on the left to Greeley on the right, schemed to do him in, only to see all of these setbacks dissipate in early September as Sherman took Atlanta and Sheridan pushed his scorched-earth raids into Virginia. It is a depressing reminder of how fickle the public is, and how eager it is to identify with a winning cause. In reaction to all this, Lincoln himself was not above firing and hiring entirely on political considerations and doing the sort of horse trading that puts modern Congressmen in the pokey.

Although a classicist, I had never read Procopius's The Wars before, either in English or Greek--a much better work than the more popular Secret History. What Belisarius achieved in North Africa in a few weeks--destroying the Vandal Empire in toto--seems almost to read as if fiction, especially how he conquered Carthage with small, often unreliable forces, far from home, and with a jealous emperor in Justinian. Procopius writes (ca. AD 540-550s) in a very clear Greek that deliberately emulates classical authors like Xenophon, nearly a millennium earlier--reminding us how long-lived Hellenism really was (and Constantinople would last nearly another 1,000 years after Belisarius, its authors still emulating 5th-century BC Attic prose.)

Michael Barone has been writing a series of insightful articles -- here's his latest -- about how Obamism is increasingly at odds with the majority of voters and his own favorability is waning and no longer can carry through an unpopular agenda. We know this by a variety of different barometers. November 2010 will be a reckoning that we have not quite seen in our recent past. I think Barone is right, especially since the tendency of more conservative voters in off-year elections is not fully reflected in the polls.

I read carefully Angelo Codevilla's American Spectator essay on the nation's elite. He makes a good argument that the Ivy League liberal technocracy (and its counterparts in the West) is not merely hypocritical, but corrupt as well. They differ from creators of capital and those who build things, largely in that they are interpreters and modifiers but hardly creators of real things. Here I note how John Edward's "two nations" ends up in a 4,000 sq ft. "John's room" within an even larger mansion--all the fruits of ambulance chasing; John Kerry's egalitarian sermons on taxation devolve into cheating on the sales taxes due on his $7 million plaything yacht, itself purchased with someone else's money; Al Gore, of recent "digital brownshirts" fame, who parlayed green alarmism into a near billion dollar fortune, seems an unapologetic mansion-collector and energy hog; Timothy Geithner lectures on the need for higher taxes after ducking out on his FICA obligations and using rather tawdry and unlawful write-offs. We go from Duke Cunningham and the "culture of corruption" to Rangel and Dodd in a blink of an eye.They all remind us of the money schemers among the hierarchy of the Medieval Church. What Codevilla's targets have in common are three general traits: Ivy League or elite school certification (I say certification rather than education because it is mostly a question of a diploma rather than any quantifiable acquisition of knowledge or inductive reasoning); a tendency to lecture the entrepreneurial classes on their greed; and an insatiable appetite for those delights and goods that they scorn in others. I note much of the elite NY-DC media shares this profile. It is all quite unsustainable, as we are seeing in the strange implosion of Barack Obama, who once both lapped up Jeremiah Wright's pop class and race hatred, and yet was intrigued with the nice things that a Tony Rezko might bring to the table—all under a proper Harvard veneer.

But this summer has also seen a lot of bad journalism. Perhaps the most pathetic has been the sudden outrage over criticism of Obama, allegations of racism, and the lamentation over partisanship--this after the left wrote novels, made movies, and did stand-up comedy about killing George Bush. We are in unreal times: suddenly Bush's frivolous aristocratic golfing has become a much needed breather for an overworked President; natural disasters like Katrina are as much referenda on the President as unnatural one's like the BP mess are not; filibusters once good, now bad; recess appointments once bad, now good. All the old commandments on the barn wall have been crossed out and rewritten. There is almost no self-awareness on the part of the Obamians that the past tearing down of the president in ways that transcended good taste and decorum have established protocols that they now resent most deeply--almost as if to say "God, I pray they don't dare do to Obama what we routinely did to Bush". A bunch that gave us sordid lies about the Palin pregnancy, Checkpoint, 'the war is lost' and Guantanamo as a Gulag suddenly seem shocked that any might remember any of that in this new age of 'can't we just get along?'.

As noted here on Ricochet the other day, the very name of the proposed mosque at ground zero, "Cordoba House," represents a provocation.

Question: In its story on the mosque this morning, "Debate Heating Up on Plans For Mosque Near Ground Zero"--a story that appears on the front page, above the fold, in the space reserved for the most important news--how many times does the New York Times mention that name?

Answer: Not once.

At Overlawyered, Walter Olson flags Duane Oyen's "story of ADA’s arguably perverse effects on a shuttle bus service in Minneapolis-St. Paul."

Andrew Sullivan likes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's take on the way low culture leads you to high culture on the internet.

There's been much discussion here of late about happiness and the disconnect between contentment and imminent doom, the latter with particular reference to Claire's and my neighborhood. Well, it turns out that either things really are swell in Israel or we are truly masters of denial. Gallup conducted a study of the happiness levels of 155 countries that surveyed thousands of respondents over four years. The results are in: Israel tied Canada, Switzerland and Australia as the eighth happiest country on earth.

Mt. Airy, NC: The name of this place is Brintles Truck Stop. One of the few mom and pop truck stops that isn't completely dilapidated, the staff is thoroughly friendly. Then again, what else could one expect in Andy Griffith's home town? Mt. Airy was the inspiration for Andy's town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith show. Floyd's Barber Shop really does exist here. In fact, a portion of the truck stop is reserved for Mayberry paraphernalia. Everything from Mayberry coffee cups, Aunt Bea's Cookbook, Mayberry bibs, back scratchers, travel mugs, sheriff badges, thimbles, water bottles, dvds, and more can be found here. The restaurant has been remodeled, the rodents evicted, and flat screen televisions set to Fox News Channel adorn the walls. Supper last night was great. They don't serve dinner here, only supper, and that suits us just fine.

Reluctantly, I have to leave this quaint little place in a few minutes. The good thing about being a long haul trucker is that I get to spend some time in wonderful towns like this. The bad thing is, I invariably have to move on. But its been that way most of my life, from being a minister's kid and moving from church to church, to transferring from one base to another in the military, so that the nomadic existence of a trucker fits like a glove.

But I wonder, as these quintessential American small towns fade in my rig's rear view mirror, are we losing these wonderful little places, or might we be wittnessing a revival of small town ethos in America? Something to think on, as the highway hums beneath 18 wheels, on my way to Maryland today.

So I'm thinking into the future here about Ricochet's answer to the National Review cruise. Why, you ask? Isn't that a little premature? Well, yes, but I've got another deadline, which always inspires me to apply my mind to any problem but the one I'm supposed to be solving.

My train of thought went like this. I found this great link to the best magazine articles ever written, and if you've got a deadline, too, I suggest you not click on it, because there goes your weekend. So instead of working on what I'm supposed to be doing this morning, I ended up re-reading, among other things, David Foster Wallace's essay Shipping Out, which is about his one-week trip on the cruise ship M.V. Zenith. It was later published as A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. That was the first piece I ever read by David Foster Wallace, and I remember reading it and feeling thrilled to see proof that America could, indeed, still produce that kind of incandescent talent, because for a time I wasn't sure. Now, of course, it's impossible to read his work without sadness.

But that's not my point. My point is that after reading that, I just lost all my enthusiasm for cruising, not that I ever had much of it in the first place. Anyway, cruises are National Review's market niche, and while I love National Review as much as any red-blooded American woman, all the more so since they publish me, I just don't see a cruise as a Ricochet kind of thing. For one thing, I don't think our exuberance could be contained to a seafaring vessel, particularly since I imagine one is not allowed to bring firearms on board. For another, a lot of us are pretty broke. So I figure we need to put our minds to the problem of creating a more appropriate Ricochet signature event, or at least I need to, right now, because the alternative is doing gainful work. So here's what I've come up with so far:

Ricochet Goes to Burning Man! I've always wanted to go to that. Don't you think we could build a great Ricochet "Art of the Free Market" theme camp? I get the sense that a lot of people there don't realize it yet, but they're actually on our side. They just need a gentle, inspiring nudge.

Right-wing Yoga Retreat! Wouldn't it be terrific to go on one of those great-looking yoga retreats you always see advertised in the yoga journals--the ones in some subtropical paradise in Costa Rica, with all those pretty birds and flowers--in the full knowledge that no one's going to give you that look when you finish your savasana and tell your favorite Ronald Reagan Cold War joke?

Ricochet Self-Defense Seminar! Honestly, the way I'm envisioning this is we all go out to the desert and shoot things and blow stuff up.

Ricochet Shakespeare Camp! I want Ursula to lead this--I loved her description of coaching her students through their performance of Romeo and Juliet. For a bonus, we could reenact the Peloponnesian War with Victor Davis Hanson, in period costume. Family-friendly!

Ricochet Safari! We may have to wait until we take back the government and the economy improves for this, but I'm seeing us stalking the lions on the grassy plains of the Okavango Delta, the elephants watering themselves in the lagoon, the huge blood-red sun, big as half the sky, setting over a grove of mangosteen trees, a flock of swirling kingfishers darkening the horizon, the impala, the zebra, the giraffes, the lechwe, the tsessebe--although I'm a little worried that none of us will be paying attention because we're all looking anxiously at our Blackberries and fretting over the lack of high-speed Internet access.

Ricochet Bumper Cars! Just a simple outing to the adventure park. Low budget. Lots of you have kids, right?

Classical Liberal Square Dance! Whatever happened to square-dancing, anyway?

The Ricochet "See it While it's Still There" Tour! Come visit Judith and me in Israel and Turkey! You never know how long these countries will still be here! I'll personally show you the elusive moderate Moslem, and then we can all hang out and shoot the breeze in Judith's bomb shelter.

Anyway, those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. They all sound a lot more fun than a cruise to me. Not that there's anything wrong with cruising, if that's what floats your boat, but I just don't think it's Ricochet.

Drudge is excitedly linking to this strange piece on Investors.com that asks rhetorically--but with more than a hint of enthusiasm--whether Americans might not be ready to overthrow their government by force. At least, that's how it reads to me.

The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?"

I don't disagree with many of the authors' observations about the failings of the Obama presidency. But they appear to be suggesting that if the upcoming elections don't succeed in getting rid of him, the emergency is such that other--unspecified--means of unseating the government might be considered. They ascribe this thought to unnamed "people," but you know, I rather doubt there are all that many Americans, named or unnamed, who are seriously discussing the virtues of a coup. (And yes, that's what they must mean: What else could topple an elected American government?)

If this is indeed what they're suggesting, even obliquely, they should wash their mouths with soap. We are a democracy. We do not do coups. I can't believe I even need to say this about the United States, but apparently I do.

This? In the New York Times? Yes, I know. I'm behind the cycle here--I'm only just now getting to the morning newspapers. But jeepers. A column that subjects to the most withering ridicule the Obama administration, environmentalism, the stimulus package, and the overhyped Chevy Volt--all in the pages of the grey lady. Get a load of this:

...G.M.’s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks ... but after billions of dollars of government loans and grants for the Volt’s development and production. And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius. It also requires premium gasoline, seats only four people (the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench) and has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze, which is more or less the non-electric version of the Volt.

I doubt the author intended it this way, but he's not merely providing automotive commentary. He's illustrating an ontological truth. Common sense is impossible to suppress. It pops up in the oddest places.

In an extremely rare move, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has announced she'll go to trial rather than accept the ethics charges against her from a House ethics subcommittee. From The Hill:

Waters is accused of helping facilitate $12 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds for OneUnited Bank, of which her husband was a director and stockholder. OneUnited Bank executives had also contributed to Waters' campaigns.

More details in Politico, which broke the story. This Wall Street Journal story shows a role Barney Frank had in the scandal as well. This is probably the last thing Democrats want or need facing a tough 2010 election. Will President Obama ask Waters to resign like he none-too-subtly suggested to Rep. Charlie Rangel today?

On the Katie Couric show today, President Obama made his first public statement about the ethically-challenged Charlie Rangel, calling the more than dozens of ethics charges levied against him "very troubling."

Here's Obama:

He's somebody who's at the end of his career...I'm sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.

Meanwhile, House dems--perhaps worried about what toll the Rangel effect will take on them in November--are calling on the him to resign:

Calls for Rep. Charlie Rangel's resignation rained down on Capitol Hill late Friday from House Democrats who said more than a dozen ethics charges against the 20-term lawmaker showed a disregard for the rules and undermined the public's confidence in Congress.

What should Rangel do?

But when they have to state their preference to other human beings, it seems they get paranoid.