• Watch out, al-Qaeda: The Obama administration might send the Civil Rights Division after you.

• There is increasing talk that Democrats in Congress will attempt to pass what remains of their ambitious agenda in a lame-duck session between the midterm elections and the seating of a new Congress in January. The hope, among liberals, is that after November the Democrats will feel free to vote for unpopular initiatives — cap-and-trade, amnesty, etc. — that they would not feel comfortable endorsing before the election. In this case, the audacity of hope will collide messily with the politics of self-preservation. Are we to believe that those Democrats who don’t lose their seats will be prepared to pursue the same agenda that just chewed up and spat out so many of their colleagues? Things will be even trickier in the Senate, where a united minority can put the kibosh on lame-duck mischief. Sorry, Democrats: Your policies are likely to be just as unpopular after November as they were before.

• Republican senators wanted to ask a few questions of Donald Berwick, Obama’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Who were the contributors to his foundation? What does his fondness for Britain’s system of socialized medicine — and, explicitly, for its attendant rationing — portend for the future of Obamacare? The Democrats never scheduled hearings on the nomination, and then Obama bypassed the Senate by giving Berwick a recess appointment. The White House claimed it acted to avoid Republican stalling. As justifiably angry as Republicans are, they should note the Democrats’ fear of a debate about health care — and give them one at every opportunity.

• Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, came out against the war in Afghanistan, for one night anyway. Amateur cameramen at a Connecticut funder caught him describing it as “a war of Obama’s choosing,” and adding that “everyone” who has fought land wars in Afghanistan “over a thousand years of history has failed.” Steele got hammered, most notably by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who asked him to resign. Ann Coulter rushed to the scene with a load of fireworks, dismissing Afghanistan as “a nation of rocks and brigands,” and wondering if the GOP is now “for all wars.” Steele walked his comments back, expressing support for the war and for General Petraeus. A kerfuffle, or a little cloud like a man’s hand? The war in Afghanistan began after 9/11, but it now belongs to Obama, who has built it up, throwing more troops into it, and hesitated, setting a deadline for withdrawal. Republicans should support him when he is right and instruct him when he is wrong — and not use this, of all things, to score partisan points.

• A Portland, Ore., masseuse filed a complaint against Al Gore, and the resulting police report is quite long: 73 pages. It is also chock-full of details. One is this: The masseuse told friends about her encounter with Gore (or so she says). All were on the political left, like the masseuse herself, and one urged her “to just suck it up; otherwise, the world’s going to be destroyed from global warming.” This falls under the category “Taking One for the Team.”

• There are two things you will not learn about the Democrat running for governor in Nevada from the “Meet the Candidate” section of his website: The first is his last name, the second is that he received it from the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. Rory Reid, spawn of Harry, has opted for a Cher/Sting/Hillary-circa-2000 mononomial approach to campaigning, with the slogan: Rory 2010 — Nevada First. It’s unfair to punish the son for the sins of the father, but it would be entirely legitimate (essential, in fact) to press Reid fils on the sorry record of Washington, D.C. — even if his father were not one of the three Democrats running the U.S. government. The younger Mr. Reid shares a party and a platform with his father, and that, not the 50 percent of his DNA inherited from the Senate boss, is why he should be asked to answer for Democratic misgovernment in Washington — before he replicates it in Carson City.

• Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the liberal blog Daily Kos, has run into a problem. Moulitsas is the author of the forthcoming American Taliban, the latest in a long tradition of comparing American conservatives to hard-line terrorist groups. These comparisons are usually notable for their lack of any evidence, but Moulitsas claimed to have broken from the tradition on this point: He said he had polling evidence demonstrating that American conservatives hold a variety of views that comport with those of the Taliban. This claim was always specious, but now it has taken another blow. Some statistical anomalies having been brought to his attention, Moulitsas now suspects the outfit commissioned to take the polls, Research 2000, of fabricating “some or all of the data” it used, and is suing it for fraud. You’ll note that one reason Moulitsas has the luxury of doing so is that he has not been beheaded by his critics on the American right.

Intemperate Conclusions I’ve been hearing a lot about this new book, Losing Our Cool, by Stan Cox (actual ownership of the book still eludes me). Cox argues that everybody would be better off if we had never invented air conditioning.

Being a sci-fi and comic-book aficionado (Spanish for “nerd”) as well as a history buff, I’m a big fan of the contrafactual, a fertile technique for Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and others. Such questions fascinate: What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated? What if an alien hadn’t taken the form of Colonel Sanders? Marvel Comics used to have a whole series called “What If . . .” in which characters took the road not taken, as it were.

My only problem with this plot device is that it usually yields to the arrogant thesis that we currently live in the best of all possible worlds; our shoulda-coulda-wouldas about the past are misguided because we made the right calls every time, so of course we are capable of doing anything we want now. This is irreconcilable with conservatism and wisdom (but I repeat myself). Conservatism rests on a metaphysics that acknowledges the centrality of error, sin, and caprice in human affairs. It may be true that it’s not worth agonizing over What Might Have Been, but it is equally true that the road to What Might Have Been might have been the better one.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the world would not be better-off if Lenin had never made it to Finland Station, or if the trampy Maria Anna Schicklgruber had stayed unwed, making it quite implausible that her grandson Adolf would rise to power against a chorus of Heil Schicklgruber’s. Heck, if World War I hadn’t been handled so badly, many of us might never have been born, but can one really argue that the world wouldn’t be better off today?

Too often, contrafactuals are refracted through the Great Men of History prism. Humanity drives along the road of progress using many gears, and the decisions of leaders amount to just one of them. What usually pushes progress into overdrive is technology. The printing press outranks any king in historical consequence (which is not to deny that different political conditions might have stopped a Gutenberg from applying his genius). Feminism has its victories and its failures, but the birth-control pill changed society more than anything Gloria Steinem ever said or did. Vast swaths of feminism are naught but a footnote to the internal-combustion engine.

These days, this insight is best appreciated not by the ranks of conservatives who’ve largely made peace with the creative destruction of market innovation, but by the reactionary Left. Many greens bemoan not merely the Enlightenment, but the invention of the automobile, the splitting of the atom, even the creation of microwavable stuffed-crust pizza. We’ve come a long way from the Marxist dream of turning the locomotive into a mechanical messiah.

Losing Our Cool, I gather from articles and interviews, is all about how air conditioning is largely a blight, fueling the advance of civilization into the desert, atomizing inner-city communities, and even aiding the rise of big government. Cox is right on all of these points. Certainly the swampishness of the nation’s capital all but guaranteed that meddling politicians and bureaucrats would take summers off — until the late 1920s (“coincidentally” around the time of the 1929 market crash!). And how many would live in AZ without AC?

Of course, we should not go to the opposite extreme and lament everything ever done. There are plenty of reasons to be happy that Phoenix exists, and thank goodness sweet, sweet refrigerated air isn’t going anywhere. But it’s wise to remember that every right turn is also a little wrong, and every wrong turn can lead to something right. Even from the vantage of our air-conditioned homes, life is a mixed bag.

— JONAH GOLDBERG

• Alvin Greene, as all the world now knows, is the sad-sack vet with a felony obscenity charge hanging over him who won a primary to challenge Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) this November. Democrats accused GOP tricksters of putting Greene up to it, and paying his $10,440 filing fee — which seems not to be the case. Here’s another question: Why is it the case that someone has to pay ten grand to run for Senate in South Carolina? Some states charge no filing fees, some charge small ones. South Carolina and Florida, at $10,440, charge most. That is grotesque. Many of the Founders were comfortable with property qualifications for voting. We no longer are. There should not be property qualifications for office-seekers either. Congratulations to Mr. Greene for saving his money and putting it where his mouth is. May the next poor, unconnected office-seeker be worthy — and unencumbered by such a burden.

• Federal judge Martin Feldman made the right call when he blocked the Obama administration from imposing a sweeping moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. Feldman’s ruling was unequivocal: The administration’s moratorium was “arbitrary and capricious” — exceeding anything the executive branch was authorized by statute to enact. And costly — an estimated 150,000 jobs are directly related to offshore drilling in the Gulf. The administration has issued a new moratorium, supposedly designed to address Judge Feldman’s concerns. But the new moratorium does not appear to differ from the old one in any meaningful way; it merely changes the way “deep-water drilling” is defined. At least one operator has had enough of the uncertainty and decided to relocate two of its rigs from the Gulf, one to Egypt and the other to the Republic of the Congo. This underscores an important point: Offshore drilling will happen whether the Obama administration likes it or not. If it is banned in the Gulf, production will move to places where they care a lot less about the environment.

• Another federal judge, Joseph Tauro, ruled that laws to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman are the products of irrational bigotry and therefore unconstitutional. The specific law in his sights was the Defense of Marriage Act, a bipartisan law signed by President Clinton that defines marriage in the traditional way for the purposes of federal law. Thus when the courts of Massachusetts decided to redefine marriage, federal programs were not obliged to give spousal benefits to same-sex partners. Judge Tauro ruled, incredibly, that the Tenth Amendment blocks the federal government from adopting its own definitions. In effect, then, it gives state judges the power to set federal policy. This concern for state prerogatives is for show: The logic of Tauro’s decision would authorize federal courts to force unwilling states to recognize same-sex marriage. But he is not the only false actor in this drama. Obama’s Justice Department — including the Office of the Solicitor General, run at the time by Elena Kagan — “defended” the Defense of Marriage Act by calling it unjust and attacking its strongest justification. Liberals in different branches of government have worked out a tidy division of labor: The executive branch will pretend to support marriage, and the courts will pretend to apply the law.

• “A lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law”: That was how veteran prosecutor J. Christian Adams described the Obama Justice Department’s motivation for its race-driven decision to drop civil-rights charges against three New Black Panther Party operatives. Adams was writing in the Washington Times to explain his decision to resign after his superiors, who answer directly to Attorney General Eric Holder, ordered him to dismiss the case — which concerned what he describes as “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law” he had ever seen. The Panthers had been caught on tape brandishing a weapon and uttering racially charged epithets to intimidate voters at a Philadelphia polling station. Obama political appointees directed that charges be dropped even though the defendants contemptuously defaulted and the court was poised to enter judgment in favor of the government. Exacerbating what Adams aptly calls “the corrupt nature of the dismissal” was the Holder hierarchy’s order that Adams refuse to comply with lawful subpoenas from the Civil Rights Commission investigating the dismissal. The attorney general famously called the American people “cowards” when it comes to matters of race. He knows whereof he speaks.

• “It would be outrageous and inhumane to take him against his will,” said the lawyer for Aziz Abdul Naji, a jihadist at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. But she wasn’t talking about taking him against his will to Gitmo, where he has been detained for several years. She was talking about taking him back to his country. Naji is one of six Algerians whom the Obama administration is poised to transfer from George W. Bush’s gulag — as a few remaining ineducable leftists still like to call it — to Algeria, the Islamic paradise on the Mediterranean’s south shore. The U.S. has already repatriated ten Algerians, and indications are that none has been persecuted. Yet the six holdouts claim that Gitmo is their only refuge from, yes, torture, and that it would be an unconscionable violation of their human rights to remove them from the naval base Obama is desperate to close because it purportedly stands as a symbol of human-rights abuses. We guess times change.

• The story of the Russian spies — ten agents in place, uncovered by the FBI and swapped for four Russians accused of spying for us and Britain — has been played mainly for laughs. Anna Chapman, née Kushchenko, the real-estate-dealing sexpot, set the tone, as saucy pictures of her tumbled out. Hold the mirth. The Russians, like the Soviets before them, well understand the value of agents in place. One of the spies, Vicky Peláez, was a journalist. Who knows whose press secretary she might have become one day? As for Chapman, women who sleep around get around. Think of all the recent American pols who would not have been immune. With the collapse of Soviet Communism, Russia has lost the allure of superpower and (to some minds) idealism. But it is still in the game.

• Hawaii’s governor, Republican Linda Lingle, has vetoed a bill that was advertised as a civil-unions law but was, in substance, a gay-marriage law. Governor Lingle rightly objected to the way the bill had been brought out of the legislature, via a suspension of normal parliamentary rules, and wants a referendum on the bill instead. Same-sex marriage has had a complicated history in Hawaii: First, state courts imposed it, and then a constitutional amendment was enacted explicitly giving the legislature the power to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples. The legislature instead produced the opposite sort of bill, and the governor has vetoed it — democracy, in a word. It is a reasonable thing for states to take steps to enable gay people (and other kinds of people) to arrange their household affairs as they see fit, and laws enabling the management of personal finances, insurance, mortgages, inheritance, and the like are, for the most part, inoffensive. But marriage is not the property of the state: It is older than the state, and it is outside the state, and it is not the state’s to define and redefine as politics demands. Lingle was right to check the legislature in this matter, just as legislators were right to check the overreaching courts with a constitutional amendment: That’s why we have checks and balances.

• You may remember Phil Jones, the scientist at the heart of the Climategate scandal. After being removed from his position as director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia when the scandal broke, he has now been appointed director of research, following a series of reports that exonerated him of scientific wrongdoing. Some of the reports criticized a culture of secrecy and unhelpfulness at the CRU, but they all said that its researchers did nothing scientifically dishonest. How did the reports reach this conclusion? Simple: They asked Jones and his colleagues. Not one of the investigations even bothered to interview the prime critics — and victims — of Jones’s scientific methods. If the courts adopted this procedure, it would cut down on costs.

• Foreign-service veteran Francis J. Ricciardone Jr. is Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Turkey. It is an odd choice. In his stint in the admittedly challenging post of American ambassador to Egypt, Ricciardone seemed to work against the Bush administration’s freedom agenda, citing the Patriot Act as an excuse for the Mubarak dictatorship’s continuing crackdown and shamefully praising Mubarak’s abuse-ridden reelection. With the Erdogan government pulling Turkey toward the Islamist column — and Turkey’s new ambassador to the U.S. recommending the inclusion of Hamas in what he pregnantly calls the “final solution” to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict — now is not a good time for an American emissary with a reputation for cozying up to repressive regimes. At least we can be sure that he will not undermine this president’s policies.

• The Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth found a weird thing when flipping through the financial-regulation bill that’s now before Congress: Section 342. Though this section has gone unnoticed, it would set up at least 20 “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” in government agencies including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Treasury, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. These offices would guarantee, “to the maximum extent possible[,] the fair inclusion” of minorities and women in private financial businesses that work with the government. This means, according to the bill, that these offices will be policing various “financial institutions, investment banking firms, mortgage banking firms, asset management firms, brokers, dealers, financial services entities, underwriters, accountants, investment consultants and providers of legal services.” And remember, the federal government has an illogical tendency to conflate “fair” with “proportional.” Whenever any group is “underrepresented,” the government simply assumes that discrimination, rather than personal choices and differences in ability (whatever their causes; there are both racial and gender gaps on the math SAT, for instance, and employees of these financial agencies need to work with numbers) is to blame. We didn’t need another reason to oppose the bill, but the Democrats have given us one, albeit surreptitiously.

• On June 29, New Jersey governor Chris Christie sat down at a beige folding table in the bay of a firehouse in South River, a middle-class suburb in traditionally Democratic Middlesex County. He was there, before a small crowd of supporters and a handful of protesters, to sign the state’s $29.4 billion budget. It is a budget passed despite the threats and declamation of the bureaucratic class and the unions; a budget that closed a nearly $11 billion deficit by slashing state spending while avoiding significant tax increases; a budget that, in Christie’s words, took Trenton by the ankles and shook out its pockets. That the Democrat-controlled legislature capitulated on nearly all of the governor’s priorities is perhaps the result of a cold calculation. Christie has staked the balance of his political capital on evangelizing for fiscal sanity, and the Democrats are in a position to either share credit or deflect blame, depending on how things play out. But after decades of taxing and borrowing and bureaucratic bloat, might it also be that, deep down in places they don’t talk about at cocktail parties, the Democrats are beginning to see that Christie’s path is right — and righteous? We can dream.

• What is a NASA administrator’s job? Charles Bolden, the incumbent, informed Al Jazeera in a recent interview that President Obama had told him “perhaps [his] foremost” task was to “engage” with “Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” This was greeted with cackles and snorts. What contribution, since the Middle Ages? And why is it NASA’s business to sing lullabies to anyone? Then Robert Gibbs uttered a curt denial: “That was not his task, and that’s not the task of NASA.” So whom do you believe? Suck-ups like Bolden try to know the mind of those up to whom they suck. For this administration, Muslims are the new Negroes, occupying the space that black people once held for liberals: totems of deprivation, and touchstones of one’s own broad-mindedness. Meanwhile, the place of math and science in the Muslim world is peculiar. Islam has made no advances in the centuries that it has been frozen in dogma and decadence. On the other hand, young Muslim men are steered to technical subjects like engineering, without moral or political substance, so they can be turned into trained cretins (they also become fodder for jihadi maniacs). A serious problem, but one outside the domain of NASA.

• The terrorist bomb that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 killed 270 people, 189 of them Americans. The only person ever convicted in the atrocity was Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland in 2001. Al-Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds last August when a British cancer specialist offered the opinion (paid for by the Libyan government) that al-Megrahi’s prostate cancer left him only three months to live. A year later he seems to be thriving; and while he has been doing the celebrity circuit over in Libya and partying with Colonel Qaddafi’s family, it has emerged that prior to his release his name was prominent in British-Libyan negotiations over oil contracts and major Libyan financial investments. Now, there is a case to be made that coaxing Colonel Qaddafi into the circle of civilized nations is worth an al-Megrahi or two, and that worse deals have been cut in the interests of grand diplomacy. Possibly so: But all our sympathies remain with those still grieving for the 270 dead of Lockerbie while BP begins drilling operations off the Libyan coast (careful with that well-head, guys) and al-Megrahi works on his golf swing.

• What a difference being underwater in the polls makes. In March, when he still floated, Barack Obama treated Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with studied contempt: barring cameras from their White House meeting, leaving him in the Roosevelt Room while he dined with his family. Now, when he is soaking wet, Obama gives Netanyahu cameras galore and warm words. Of course Obama dislikes Israel; he is the most left-wing president ever, and the Left is the modern locus of Israel-hatred. But with Democrats fearing a shellacking in November, Obama feels he must make nice. Insincere rapprochements raise their own issues: The body language of the two men’s handshake showed abiding detestation; will American Jews, some of the stubbornest voters ever, leap to return to their Democratic roots? Thank God, even so, for small favors — and that sometimes domestic politics spreads beyond the three-mile limit.

• Son Jong Nam was a good, loyal North Korean: For ten years, he served in the “presidential security service.” But then something happened: His wife was accused of remarking on the famine that had spread throughout the land. Eight months pregnant, she was seized by the police. They kicked her in the stomach until the baby died. Son fled with his family to China. His wife died. He found Christianity, and began to evangelize among his fellow North Korean defectors. The Chinese caught him doing this and sent him back to North Korea: where he was tortured almost to death. Released, he sneaked back across the Chinese border, to see his daughter, who had been left in the care of a missionary. He decided to return to North Korea, seeing it as his duty to spread the Word there. He was caught with Bibles: and charged with spying for the United States and South Korea. He was sentenced to public execution by firing squad. But his brother, in South Korea, launched an international campaign to save him. According to a news report, the campaign apparently led the North Koreans “to switch to a less public method: torture.” The brother observed, “There are many ways to kill people in North Korea.” Son Jong Nam was at last tortured to death, age 50. A great man. An evil regime.

• Following negotiations with the Catholic Church and the Spanish government, Cuba agreed to release 52 prisoners of conscience. While the unshackling of peaceful democracy advocates gives heart to freedom-lovers everywhere, this release was a PR stunt designed to shield Havana from growing international criticism of its ghastly human-rights record. It was motivated at least partly by the near-death of hunger-striker Guillermo Fariñas, whose protest fast began after the self-starvation of another jailed dissident, Orlando Zapata. Moreover, the 52 prisoners are not truly being liberated: The price for escaping Castro’s gulag is exile abroad. According to bloggers and activists on the island, several of them are refusing to leave Cuba. This group reportedly includes Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, the Cuban Mandela, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. We should also note that the Communist regime continues to hold an American citizen, USAID subcontractor Alan Gross, on bogus spying charges. Cuba has not really changed, and no one should be duped into thinking otherwise.

• In Iran, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an impoverished widow, the mother of two, 43 years old, was sentenced to death after an accusation of adultery. She had already been given 99 lashes. She made a confession under “duress,” which is to say torture, that she later retracted. The decreed method of execution was fairly specific: She was to be buried up to her neck and pelted with small rocks — not big ones, small ones — until she died. Bowing to an outcry, Iran has called off the execution “for the moment”; not every Iranian woman is so lucky. Earlier this year, the Iranian state was elected to the women’s-rights commission at the United Nations. The U.S. government uttered not a word in objection.

• Casting for the Harry Potter films is impeccably diverse, with all races and faiths present in tolerant amity among Harry’s classmates at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The world of actual human beings is somewhat less harmonious. Actress Afshan Azad, who has played the part of classmate Padma Patil in four of the Potter movies, found this out when her father and brother physically assaulted her and threatened her with death for dating a Hindu man. The Azads are British Muslims. After a court appearance in their hometown of Manchester, the two men were released on bail under a curfew order. Miss Azad, who is 22 years old, has fled to an undisclosed location — a good-enough approximation to a cloak of invisibility. Alas, there is no magic potion to still the atavistic passions of an intolerant faith.

• Roman Polanski is a free man. The 76-year-old director has been wanted in the United States since 1978, when he skipped town to beat a rap for unlawful sexual intercourse. French citizenship protected him from extradition so long as he stayed there, but when he ventured to Switzerland to accept an award, we tried to nab him. The Swiss decided, on technicalities, not to extradite him. The law is a collage of technicalities; perhaps the decision was correct. The revival of the case served, however, to recall what Polanski had done: drug and rape a 13-year-old girl during a modeling shoot (he made a deal with the prosecutor to plead guilty only to the single count). This back-lights the artistes (Woody Allen) and art-hounds (French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand) who wanted Polanski freed because they like Chinatown. Who doesn’t? But great scoundrels can be great artists (and bad artists, and followers of any other line of work). Great artists should not get a free pass.

• In yet further evidence that the cellphone is a very mixed blessing, a 54-year-old German man has been arrested for having one of Hitler’s speeches as his ring tone. The speech promised “the destruction of world Jewry” if Germany was again “dragged” into war. The offending gadget rang several times as its owner was riding a train to Hamburg. Outraged fellow passengers got on their own cellphones, and police were waiting at the next station stop. (The German constitution prohibits public displays of sympathy for Nazism.) Many of us would be happy to see all train-riding cellphone users thus treated, but perhaps the commuters of Lower Saxony should look on the bright side. At least it wasn’t one of Fidel Castro’s speeches. Imagine a six-hour ring tone!

• The Boy Scouts of America is celebrating its centenary. We celebrate with it. In these hundred years, scouting has brought healthy and harmless fun to untold millions of American boys, while imparting solid practical and moral instruction. From the lofty heights of early-21st-century enlightenment, some of that moral instruction looks uncharitable. The more dogmatic of our moralists have even declared the BSA a hate group on account of its refusal to countenance openly homosexual scoutmasters. Robert Baden-Powell, who founded scouting (in Britain, a couple of years before W. D. Boyce brought it to the U.S.), has himself been much mocked for his snobbery and imperialism, his political naïveté, his enthusiasm for pastimes like pig-sticking and skirt-dancing, and his distressingly un-modern attitudes to sexuality. Well, let the mockers mock. Scouting has accomplished wonders in the most difficult of all social endeavors: the civilizing of young males. Baden-Powell was several times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The last nomination, in 1939, lapsed because of WWII. (Baden-Powell died in 1941.) It’s a pity it can’t be revived. Looking through the list of subsequent recipients of that award, we see precious few who did as much good in the world as Robert Baden-Powell.

• Following in the footsteps of such mighty predecessors as the National Abortion Rights Action League and Kentucky Fried Chicken, National Public Radio has changed its name to its initials: NPR. NARAL changed its name because it would rather talk about “choice” than about abortion, while the Colonel wants to downplay the amount of grease in his secret recipe. NPR wants to show that it has moved beyond radio, sort of like BP (formerly British Petroleum) has moved “Beyond Petroleum.” Here’s an idea: Now that the “public” has been removed from NPR’s name, how about we remove the public from its finances?

• Diageo, like a lot of businesses these days, was having trouble finding the money to meet its pension obligations. Luckily, the company — which owns such brands as Johnnie Walker, Bushmills, and Lagavulin — found a creative solution: Instead of cash, fill the pension fund with whiskey. (Don’t laugh; a barrel of maturing Scotch is an appreciating asset.) Could state governments facing their own pension time bombs take a page from Diageo’s playbook? Alas, unlike fine Scottish distilleries, bloated bureaucracies do not produce enough of lasting value to pull off such a scheme.

• When it comes to “great guyness,” Thomas L. Rhodes — Dusty — has pretty much retired the cup. For many years, he has been the genial spirit of the conservative movement: and the entrepreneurial spirit and an all-around invaluable spirit. A Wall Street whiz, he rose to be a partner of Goldman Sachs. In due course, he wanted to do other things. Like what? Well, as he told WFB, “I want to fight socialism.” And fight it he did. He helped lead the Club for Growth, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Bradley Foundation. He was Ward Connerly’s partner at the American Civil Rights Coalition. He was everywhere, in the service of high principle. Most important to us, he has been chairman and CEO of National Review. Now he is retiring, and he is at the moment with his glorious wife Gleaves at their home in Nantucket. Once, before reciting a limerick of his own composition (clean), he referred to himself slyly as “the man from Nantucket.” We are hugely grateful for his service.

• Christopher Hitchens, scold, scourge, and one-man band, has cut short the book tour for Hitch-22, his memoir in medias res, to take chemotherapy for cancer of the esophagus. On many subjects (God, Trotsky) Hitchens is barking mad, but on others (the war against Islamist terrorism) he has been doing, he should pardon the expression, the Lord’s work. If spit and vinegar count for anything, then Hitchens should come through. We wish him well.

• Abu Daoud raised Palestinian terror to some sort of international peak when he organized the murder of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. He had a team of eight members of Black September, one of the several bodies that did Yasser Arafat’s dirty work. Storming into the Olympic Village, they shot dead two Israelis who resisted and held the others hostage. A firefight mistimed by the German police left all the Israelis and five Palestinians dead. Mossad agents eventually accounted for two of the three who got away. Daoud himself survived an assassination attempt in Warsaw, going on to live comfortably in Damascus under his proper name of Muhammad Oudeh. Travelling once to Paris, he was detained briefly, but the French government chose not to bring him to justice. “I regret nothing,” he told German television, although his Munich exploit did much to turn public opinion against Palestinians. Hearing of Abu Daoud’s death, Mahmoud Abbas, the present Palestinian leader, sent the family a letter of warm condolence. R.I.P.

• Turning to our back page, you will notice the absence of Mark Steyn’s “Happy Warrior” column. Mark is on leave for the summer. We will be publishing a variety of guest authors in his usual space, beginning, in this issue, with Rob Long.

Backward and Upward At a campaign stop for Harry Reid, President Obama said that the job losses of the last few years “were all the consequence of a decade of misguided economic policies.” At another campaign stop, he said that in the November elections voters must choose between “the policies that led us into this mess and the policies that are leading us out of this mess.” The president, widely reputed for his thoughtfulness and ability to present complex opposing arguments fairly, added, “It’s a choice between falling backwards or moving forward.”

The president is right about those misguided policies, but they are not the ones he has in mind. President Bush’s tax cuts were not responsible for the financial crisis — lucky for us, since Obama claims to want to keep many of them. Several federal policies during the Bush years led us to our reckoning. The Fed was too loose. The government promoted homeownership too recklessly. Its subsidies encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to gain a dangerous dominance in mortgage markets. These policies have two things in common: Democrats supported them at the time, and they have done nothing to alter them since. In the case of Fannie and Freddie, the Democrats, very much including one Senator Obama, resisted Bush’s attempts at reform.

We have not emerged from a “decade of spiraling deficits.” Deficits were declining until the recession and financial crisis hit, and they would begin declining again were recovery to take hold and Washington to enact long-term spending restraint. The president’s policies imperil both conditions. He has made entitlement reform more difficult by enacting a bogus version of it in his health-care legislation, and he seems likely to allow taxes on investment to rise dramatically. Obama has retained the worst policies of the Bush years and added bad ones of his own.

When you’re already moving backward, the only way to go forward is to turn around.

The Battle of Arizona After the fusillade of abuse that accompanied the passage of its new immigration-enforcement law, Arizona might wonder: Is this it? The state was accused of incipient Nazism, but the Obama administration does not even mention potential civil-rights violations in its suit against Arizona. Instead, it challenges the law on the far more technical grounds that federal law “preempts” the state statute.

Even this far less incendiary claim is dubious. The drafters of the Arizona law carefully stayed within the bounds of the federal code and of case law. It’s well established that states may enforce federal immigration law. This is why the Obama administration must argue that the very fact of state-level enforcement interferes with the “balance” of priorities set by the executive branch — i.e., its determination to ignore federal law in crucial respects.

Embedded in this argument is the contention that it’s not federal law as written by Congress that reigns supreme, but how executive agencies in their discretion decide to interpret it. At the very least, this is a novel claim. Why the urgency in making it?

As a practical matter, it’s hard to see how Arizona’s alerting of the federal government to the presence of illegal aliens found within the state — the heart of its law — would undo federal priorities. The feds can still decide how to handle those cases. Bizarrely, the federal government is saying it doesn’t even want — nay, considers unconstitutional — assistance in enforcing its own laws.

The impetus for the suit is clearly political. The Obama administration is ideologically opposed to enforcement and is desperate to boost its declining numbers among Latinos — and distract them from the president’s failure to deliver on his promise to get “comprehensive” immigration reform in his first year in office. Right before the Arizona suit, Obama gave a speech plugging for “comprehensive” immigration reform and warning against a “patchwork” of different approaches to immigration across the country. Shortly thereafter, the Justice Department made the administration’s preference clear — uniform defiance of the law.