Being president is about making decisions — it’s why we call it the “Executive” branch of government. You know, all during the Bush presidency the political left promoted the argument that one of the primary faults of conservatives, particularly the “Neo-cons,” is that they only saw things in black and white. This argument is, of course, a steaming pile of excrement. It’s not that conservatives only see black and white, they see the shades of gray and understand complexities just fine. They just don’t use the “shades of gray” as an excuse for inaction and ineptitude. Sometimes you just gotta make a damn decision. And this is especially true if one is the American president.

Browsing the internet coverage of the protests in Iran (indeed, the very descriptor “protest” has since become an understatement to say the least) it seems that the grays are disappearing and the white and black of the conflict is becoming readily clear. No, Iranian opposition leader Hossein Mousavi isn’t Sam Adams. He probably isn’t even a Mikhail Gorbachev. And perhaps he’s just as much the anti-Semitic racist and holocaust denier that Iranian “president” Ahmadinejad is. But so what? The United States, under better leadership from our president, could better support the people of Iran without giving legitimacy to the Iranian theocracy, whether under Mousavi or not. As Charles Krauthammer explains below, this could be — should be — a grand opportunity to create real change in Iran. Or is change for he, but not for thee?

Obama’s nuance is now to a fault. It’s a sick statement that the outrage from leaders in France and Germany, for instance, have been far stronger than Obama. No conservative is saying send in the troops. But the bland message from Obama becomes at some point complicity and quiet support of the Iranian regime. Perhaps that’s not fair but it’s going to become truth if Obama isn’t careful. The fact is the Ayatollah is going to blame Obama, the West, the “Zionist media,” the CIA, Capitalism, and every other bogey man under the sun no matter if Obama takes a stand or not.

Here’s Krauthammer:

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

This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What’s at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime — and the future of the entire Middle East.

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 — the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt — was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.

Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception — Iraq and Lebanon — becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.

All hangs in the balance. The Khamenei regime is deciding whether to do a Tiananmen. And what side is the Obama administration taking? None. Except for the desire that this “vigorous debate” (press secretary Robert Gibbs’s disgraceful euphemism) over election “irregularities” not stand in the way of U.S.-Iranian engagement on nuclear weapons.

The President yesterday denounced the “extent of the fraud” and the “shocking” and “brutal” response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

“These elections are an atrocity,” he said. “If [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?” The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

The President who spoke those words was France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era of Obama.

– Wall Street Journal.

Good questions and points by Bill Kristol:

“Smart power” is a modification of “soft power,” which the Obama-ites are also huge fans of. Well, isn’t this the time to try some soft power?

For example: Statements of support for fair elections and peaceful protest; personal outreach to endangered opposition leaders (if not by us, then by Europeans–though how dramatic would it be if Sec. Clinton placed a phone call to Mousavi to make sure he’s not under arrest and is free to talk?); an immediate infusion of funds to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Radio Farda service, which provides invaluable information from and within Iran; technical assistance against the regime’s attempts to block websites, shut down cell phone networks, etc.; suspension (by the Europeans) of various cultural and commercial contacts; pressure through international organizations on behalf of the Iranian peopleIf the administration remains passive (or even if it doesn’t), there’s certainly a case for a congressional resolution ASAP supporting the people of Iran in their struggle for democracy, calling on the Iranian regime to allow international monitors to review the election results, calling on the Iranian government to allow peaceful demonstrations, to stop jamming radios and blocking the internet, etc.; and for congressional action (an amendment to the next bill to be brought up in the Senate) and/or hearings on increased funding for Radio Farda and the like.

Soft power ain’t hard power, but it can make a difference. Shouldn’t the Obama administration at least try to exercise some? Or don’t they believe in soft power? Are they just soft?

“The four candidates whose names made it on the presidential ballot this year were pre-screened by an unelected Guardian Council composed mostly of Islamic clerics, which also disqualified more than 400 others,” reminds the Wall Street Journal. So, yeah, the Iranian “election” was a predetermined sham long before the final votes were (or rather were not) tallied. That same Guardian Council, headed by the Ayatollah, determines every aspect of society, from its religious and social laws, to its lack of freedoms and liberty, to its economy and terrorism activities.

Even so, the West looks especially weak. It’s not just the reaction — again or lack thereof — by the Obama camp, but the entire Western world’s lack of condemnation of Iran’s brazen tyranny, that risks alienating and subverting all those Iranian citizens begging for support. There are literally hundreds of diplomatic postures that the West, and especially the United States, could take to vocally condemn Iran’s fraud and stomping of liberty. So far, silence, or at best, bland statements “of concern.”

Having shown such courage, the demonstrators deserve Western support, not least from the media that have recently trumpeted the Mousavi candidacy as evidence of Iran’s openness and potential for reform, conciliation and so on. Whatever happens in the days ahead, the world has now seen the tyranny raw. The least we owe the protestors is not to look away.

That moral obligation goes especially for the Obama Administration. President Obama came to office promising the world’s dictators an open hand in exchange for an unclenched fist. But as with Kim Jong Il’s nuclear advances and the sham trial of two Americans in North Korea, Mr. Khamenei has repudiated the President’s diplomacy of friendly overture. It turns out that the “axis of evil” really is evil — and not, as liberal sages would have it, merely misunderstood.

The vote should prompt Mr. Obama to rethink his pursuit of a grand nuclear bargain with Iran, though early indications suggest he plans to try anyway. On Saturday, the New York Times quoted one unnamed senior Administration official to the effect that the election uproar would cause Mr. Ahmadinejad to be more receptive to Mr. Obama’s overtures as a sop to disgruntled public opinion. If the Administration really believes this, then Mr. Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter and the mullahs will play him for time to get their bomb.

However, Mr. Obama has also stressed the importance of democracy, rule of law and transparency, most recently in the June 4 Cairo speech in which he addressed himself directly to the world’s Muslims, Iranian-Muslims included. Now the stand-off in Tehran will test — more quickly than Mr. Obama probably imagined — whether he was serious when he said “we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments — provided they govern with respect for all their people.”

Mark Stein comments on the lack of cost-benefits to European single-payer healthcare:

According to the U.N. figures, life expectancy in the United States is 78 years; in the United Kingdom, it’s 79 – yay, go socialized health care! On the other hand, in Albania, where the entire population chain-smokes, and the health care system involves swimming to Italy, life expectancy is still 71 years – or about where America was a generation or so back. Once you get childhood mortality under control and observe basic hygiene and lifestyle precautions, the health “system” is relatively marginal. One notes that, even in Somalia, which still has high childhood mortality, not to mention a state of permanent civil war, functioning government has entirely collapsed and yet life expectancy has increased from 49 to 55. Maybe if government were to collapse entirely in Washington, our life expectancy would show equally remarkable gains. Just thinking outside the box here.

When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making 12 trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.

You really should read this entire commentary by Charles Krauthammer reprimanding Barack Obama for a display of moral equivilance that is truly infantile. That’s not hyperbole either. For an American president to got to the heart of the Islamic world and say these things not only is silly but actually undermines the persecuted pro-democracy minority.

Here’s Krauthammer’s best example:

Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women’s rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country — balanced, of course, with this: “Issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam.” Example? “The struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.”

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women’s softbal team has received insufficient Title IX funds — while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well — but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who’s to judge?

That’s the problem with Obama’s transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professoria sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in al human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn’t mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.

Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.

That’s quite the 180-degree flip-flop from our president in the same paragraph. In one breath Barack Obama makes an apology for the invasion of Iraq (war of choice) and in the next he says Iraqis are better off.

It sounds like he’s apologizing for Iraqis being better off.

There was a great commentary recently by Jim Manzi of the Manhattan Institute regarding the cost-ineffectiveness of the proposed cap and trade bill written by Reps. Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, both Democrats from Taxachusetts. Great because Manzi gets back to basic strategy — conservatives need to concentrate their energy on one basic theme, because it is what most American citizens will best process: “What do we pay, and what do we get?”

So, sure, conservatives can make the arguments that the science behind climate change is unsound (indeed, the reason advocates now call it “climate change” rather than “global warming” is because the records now dispute the warming); and they can make the philosophical arguments — that it’s religion disguised in environmental garb (“save the planet”), that it’s socialism (redistribution of wealth), but the argument that will best stick in the minds of everyday America is one of insurance.

The advocates of climate change argue the precautionary principle: that even if the science is not proven, why not avoid the worst-case scenario and buy the insurance? Here’s why: offer a man insurance for a dollar a day and he’ll likely take it; offer it to him for $1000 a day and he’ll take his chances.

The mechanism for mitigation proposed in the Waxman-Markey bill is a “cap and trade” plan. The idea is quite simple: The government sets a fixed annual limit to total carbon-dioxide emissions and distributes ration cards for the right to emit a portion of this amount (that’s the “cap”); it also allows those who receive ration cards to sell them (that’s the “trade”). Now, “distributes” is an artfully chosen word: How would the government decide who gets the ration cards? One method is to sell them; another is to give them away, theoretically based on some objective criterion such as historical emissions, but in practice more likely based on campaign contributions. Waxman-Markey doesn’t specify how the distributing is to be accomplished. The Obama administration expects to sell ration cards, bringing the government $80 billion a year in revenue over the next decade. This revenue represents a cost increase for more or less any company that uses lots of fossil-fuel energy in one way or another (i.e., most of the economy). Like all raw-material cost increases, these will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. So in reality this is a backdoor tax on energy that conscripts private companies into being collection agents.

… Now consider the potential benefits, of which neither the EPA nor the bill’s sponsors have produced an estimate. Climatologist Chip Knappenberger has applied standard climate models to project that, under the scenario for global economic and population growth referenced above, Waxman-Markey’s emissions reductions would have the net effect of lowering global temperatures by about 0.1°C by 2100. Remember that the estimated cost of a 4°C increase in temperature (40 times this amount) is about 3 percent of global economic output. Assume for the moment that global warming has the same impact on the U.S. as a percentage of GDP as it does on the world as a whole (an assumption that exaggerates the impact on the U.S.). A crude estimate of the U.S. economic costs that Waxman-Markey would avoid sometime later than 2100 would then be about one-fortieth of 3 percent, or about 0.08 percent of economic output. This number is one-tenth of 0.8 percent, the EPA’s estimate of consumption loss from Waxman-Markey by 2050. To repeat: The costs would be more than ten times the benefits, even under extremely unrealistic assumptions of low costs and high benefits. More realistic assumptions would make for a comparison far less favorable to the bill.

So the Environmental Protection Agency and other climate change advocates might argue worst-case scenario for inaction, but they curiously cite best-case economics in their models. Yet even the EPA’s analysis admits that the Waxman-Markey model’s cost is ten times that of its benefit!

For that cost we could instead cure a great number of other, more tangible, more immediately deadly ills: “A regional nuclear war in central Asia, a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of the HIV virus, and a rogue state weaponizing genetic-engineering technology all come immediately to mind. Any of these could kill hundreds of millions of people. Scare stories are meant to be frightening, but we shouldn’t become paralyzed by them.”

In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts, the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options, and a much more sensible strategy to deal with climate risk would emphasize technology rather than taxes. The role for the U.S. federal government is to fund prediction, mitigation, and adaptation strategies.

The danger here, of course, is that we may end up back in the failed game of industrial policy. The federal government, after all, was the key sponsor of, for example, the shale-oil and large-scale-wind-turbine debacles in response to the energy crisis 30 years ago. Setting the right scope for such a program and managing the funding process carefully would be essential, to prevent it from becoming corporate welfare.

… The British entrepreneur Richard Branson has offered a $25 million prize to anyone who demonstrates a device that removes significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. What if the U.S. government upped the ante to $1 billion and pledged to make any resulting technology freely available to the world? That would solve any global-warming problem that might develop, at a one-time cost of less than 0.01 percent of U.S. GDP. Of course, this agency would still be a government program, and therefore rife with inefficiencies. But consider that its costs would be on the order of 1/100th of the costs of imposing a large U.S. carbon tax.

What do we pay, what do we get? To date, with every proposed carbon cap and trade model, we get a backdoor tax, a massive drain on our economy and incomes, and no measurable benefit. Once pressed the advocates resort to a feel-good defense. In short, environmentalism curbs their guilt. But the Catholic church tried this hundreds of years ago. They called it the paid indulgence.

Michael Tanner, the author of Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It, cites some facts about the Massachusetts single-payer healthcare system which show that it’s not the model to follow:

Health-care costs continue to rise much faster in Massachusetts than in the nation as a whole. Proponents of the reform promised that it would reduce costs. Gov. Mitt Romney said “the cost of health care would be reduced” and the plan would make health insurance “affordable” for every Massachusetts citizen. Supporters went so far as to suggest that the reforms would reduce the price of individual insurance policies by 25 to 40 percent. In reality, since the program became law, insurance premiums have been increasing by 10 to 12 percent per year, nearly double the national average. On average, health insurance costs $16,897 a year for a family of four in Massachusetts, compared to $12,700 nationally. Meanwhile, total health-care spending in the state has increased by 28 percent.

… Although much of the burden falls on individual policy-holders, the costs to the taxpayers have also skyrocketed. Despite one tax increase already, the program faces huge deficits in the future. As a result, the state is considering caps on insurance premiums, cuts in reimbursements to providers, and even the possibility of a “global budget” on health-care spending — with its attendant rationing.

The reforms have added a new burden on companies, especially smaller ones, wanting to do business in the state. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council cites the Massachusetts health-care regulations and the mandate on companies as its reasons for ranking Massachusetts dead last among the 50 states for business-friendly health-care policies.

A shortage of providers, combined with higher demand, is increasing waiting times to see a physician, especially primary-care providers. The wait for seeing an internist, for example, has nearly doubled since the reforms were implemented.

Here’s Anne Applebaum. In short, the American capilalist leadership is lacking:

In France, Germany, Italy, and Poland—four of Europe’s six largest countries— center-righ governments got unexpectedly enthusiastic endorsements. In the two other large countries Britain and Spain, left-wing ruling parties got hammered, as did socialists in Hungary Austria, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. In some places the results were stark indeed: In London this weekend, I could hardly walk down the street without being assaulted by angry screaming newspaper headlines, all declaring the Labor government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown weak, corrupt, tired, arrogant, and, yes, very unpopular. In some constituencies, European candidates of the ruling Labor Party finished behind fringe parties that normally don’t get noticed at all. So rapidly are British ministers resigning from the Cabinet that it’s hard to keep track of them (four in the last week—I think).

But how is it possible that the European right is doing so well—and so much better than their U.S. counterparts—during what is widely described as a crisis of global capitalism? At least in part, the Europeans are winning because their leaders have the courage of their economic convictions. While it is true that the continenta European welfare states have kicked into high gear over the last six months, there are few equivalents of either George W. Bush’s budget deficits or Barack Obama’s spending binge. And where there have been—in Britain, for example—the high spending has hardly bought popularity.