When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the moniker that D.C’s word doctors chose for the health care reform bill) was debated in Congress, many of its proponents described the main components of the bill — an individual insurance mandate, guaranteed issue provisions that prevent exclusion based on pre-existing conditions, and subsidies for poorer citizens — as a three-legged stool. Remove just one of the legs, they explained to colleagues looking to reduce the scope of reform, and the whole thing would fall down.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year (better luck next time with that mortgage), this should come as no surprise: The recovery is not going well. The stimulus bill, passed at the start of 2009, failed to bring the economic growth and employment predicted by its architects. Unemployment is higher than the White House projected it would be <i>without</i> the stimulus, suggesting, in the ultimate of political embarrassments, that the administration’s own numbers prove their policies have been counter-productive.

The past twelve months have not been good for Iran. Domestically, the country still roils from the electoral chicanery of the previous August. Internationally, the United Nations has placed fresh sanctions on the regime for failing to comply with its resolutions. Economically, it seems recession has hit the nation, though it is hard to be certain — the government has ceased releasing numbers entirely.

Suppose the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stood up one day and declared, under a law written 76 years ago, it has the authority to regulate the delivery of newspapers. Shortly after making this proclamation, the FCC chairman announces he has decided how newspaper delivery will be regulated — rather than letting the use of our finite news transportation supply be prioritized by competitive, free market bidding, he will instead institute a one-size-fits-all rule: Delivery companies must deliver the news in the order it is received and charge all customers an equal price. The chairman calls his model “Newspaper Boy Neutrality.”

In the game of geopolitics, Pakistan was dealt a terrible hand. It began its existence situated next to an aggressive and mortal enemy who, both in population as well as gross domestic product, outnumbered it by more than three to one.

<i>“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works... Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”</i>

On August 3, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Society voted unanimously not to extend landmark status to 45–47 Park Place, formerly a Burlington Coat Factory, now a partially-damaged warehouse. As far as municipal law goes, the decision was as mundane and routine as handing out a parking ticket or issuing a liquor license — the warehouse, with its commonplace architectural style, simply did not offer a compelling justification for landmark status. And yet to hear many conservatives talk about the matter, it seems as if the Landmarks Preservation Society has dealt a death blow to the American way of life. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claims that it will “encourage [radical Islamists] in their challenge to our civilization,” and Arizona Senator Jon Kyl writes that it will “risk giving militant Islamists a victory to exploit.”

On November 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film director, author, and father, was shot and killed by Mohammed Bouyeri as van Gogh rode his bicycle to work. In the open air of the streets of Amsterdam, Bouyeri shot van Gogh eight times, attempted to decapitate him, and then finished by stabbing two knives into his chest, pinning there a 5-page manifesto threatening the lives of others, including a prominent Dutch politician.

In 1970, an American agronomist named Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize. His research on improving crop yields, a central component to what is commonly called the “Green Revolution,” has been credited with saving as many as a billion lives. If this estimate is an exaggeration, it is not a large one ­— at the time of Borlaug’s effort, the conventional wisdom of pundits, epitomized by Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” was that without significant population control, mankind was on its way to mass starvation. Though he achieved little fame or monetary reward, Borlaug may be the greatest humanitarian of all time.

Though byzantine on paper, at its heart, the Senate financial reform bill of Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) is sweet and simple. We will expand the resolution authority of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation so that it will be able to do more than simply place small-to-mid-sized banks in federal receivership.