House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right last week when she called her latest health-care-reform proposal a “his toric moment”: After decades of life-saving and cost-cutting scientific innovations from drug and medical-device companies, the government is about to step in and stifle the R&D that is our best hope for improving health outcomes.

Pelosi’s bill may cost pharmaceutical companies $150 billion over a decade — nearly double the amount they conceded when they cut a White House-approved deal with Sen. Max Baucus this summer.

The Pelosi bill is a prescription for fewer new life-saving drugs. By stifling innovation, it would hurt not only industry, but also all of us who’d benefit from new-drug development.

Read the whole thing. Somehow, we are supposed to believe that less access to life-saving drugs is supposed to be a good thing.

Which is precisely what the press release from Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee says.

Benen tries to disguise and paper over the problems associated with this approach by telling us that an individual mandate “is not exactly scandalous” by likening the individual mandate to taxes. Here’s the difference: Everyone understands that the federal government needs to collect revenue, and that as a consequence, taxes will be imposed. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are cheating the federal government of revenue. Naturally, there ought to be penalties associated with that kind of behavior.

At the end of the day, however, if you decide not to purchase health insurance, you are putting yourself at risk. Yes, if an uninsured individual is treated in an emergency room, society pays somewhat, but society doesn’t pay nearly as much as does that individual when he/she gets a bill for tens–or even hundreds–of thousands of dollars as a cost of health care, and has to max out credit cards/sell the house/go into bankruptcy as a consequence.

Obviously, because of the risks associated with not having health insurance, I think that it is dumb for anyone who can get it to refuse to do so. But part and parcel of living in a free society is having the freedom to be stupid. Democrats want to criminalize a policy choice on the part of Americans by forcing them to pay a fine, and/or go to prison if they don’t purchase health insurance. But it is silly to criminalize a personal choice that puts no one at risk nearly as much as does the individual person making the choice.

Put another way, it’s a strange world Steve Benen endorses: Fail to buy health insurance, go to jail and pay a fine. Fail to pay taxes, get a job in the Obama Administration.

Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found.

California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas – and in 44 other states.

In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.

That total represents more than half of CSU’s statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.

“This is not really a real number of people,” CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. “It’s like a budget number.”

That certainly was not the way Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger described it at a news event with Vice President Joe Biden late last week, where he focused on people, not budgets.

“Anyone that criticizes the stimulus money should talk to those 100,000 people that have retained their jobs or gotten jobs because of the stimulus money, especially the 62,000 teachers that have kept their jobs or gotten jobs,” Schwarzenegger said.

Schwarzenegger was, of course, clearly wrong to have made the comments he made. But it cannot be stressed enough that those comments were entirely in line with the White House’s own message concerning the stimulus’s impact on jobs.

It is clear that the “created or saved” metric is wrong, misleading, and utterly dishonest. It ought to be ditched ASAP by the Obama Administration and by the mainstream media. Whoever propagates the “created or saved” meme ought to be called out for either ignorance or mendacity.

I am on the flight to finally put me back in California, I am reading the web and I come across this:

The Guardian reports today that the International Atomic Energy Agency has asked Iran to explain evidence that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, but Tehran continues to stonewall requests for relevant information and drag its feet at the sputtering talks over its illicit nuclear weapons program. According to a dossier prepared by the IAEA, Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of a “two-point implosion” device that could enable Iran to eventually install small nuclear warheads on its ballistic missiles. One European official said that “It is breathtaking that Iran could be working on this sort of material.” The article reported on speculation that the Pakistani nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan or a Russian weapons expert may have helped the Iranians to master the synchronized high explosive detonations necessary to build the warhead.

And before you ask, I really could not comment publicly on this subject, but let me say this much - find someone who can talk to you about this and ask them. If this is the case, it is clear evidence that Khan gave them the design for a physics package - one that is proven to work. If they can get the neutron source and the initiators, they pretty much not only have a bomb, but a weaponized one at that.

Weaponized as in it’s small enough you can put it on a missile and get it somewhere - which is not possibly with any of the cartoon designs the Norks have been playing with.

This design is markedly different than the multi-point “fat man” type device that the big 5 all started with, and is closer to the kinds of modern warheads that are in use in the US and UK arsenal. The origin of this design was theft from Los Alamos by China, then parts of it was sold through 3rd parties to reach Pakistan. Khan has been rumored to been selling it to other states an non-state entities.

Iranian officials arrested a Japanese reporter and two Canadian reporters during anti-government protests this week and charged them with “unauthorized reporting,” the semiofficial Fars news agency reported Friday. It did not identify the reporters or their news organizations. The three reporters join two others whose agencies said they were also arrested during Wednesday’s protests marking the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy here. Agence France Presse said its local reporter Farhad Pouladi was detained and the International Federation of Journalists said a Danish journalist, Niels Krogsgaard, was arrested in connection with the demonstration.

“The claim about the arrest of the AFP journalist is under investigation,” the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency cited Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi as saying Friday. Iranian media gave no further details on the other arrested foreigners. All are still believed to be in custody.

On Wednesday authorities temporarily blocked all access to e-mail programs such as Gmail and Yahoo during the demonstrations to prevent people from sending images to foreign media organizations. Still, many managed to upload cellphone clips to video sites, which were widely broadcast by foreign-based Farsi language satellite channels.

At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration.

Political consultants are a staple of cable television talk shows, analyzing current events based on their own experiences working on campaigns or in government.

One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.

The message was, “We better not see you on again,” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that “clients might stop using you if you continue.”

I don’t know what is more absurd, the Administration’s fanaticism and monomania concerning this matter, or the fact that its behavior is so self-defeating. One of my main gripes concerning Republicans and conservatives is that for all of their complaints concerning National Public Radio and its bias, they refuse to go on NPR as much as they could in order to combat that bias, and advance a center-right viewpoint. It seems that the Democrats are making the same mistake concerning Fox. Amazingly enough, they are not giving the network–which isn’t going anywhere, after all–a chance to offer more Democratic viewpoints by encouraging more Democrats to go on Fox. If this isn’t cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, I don’t know what is.

If the Administration and the Democratic party were smart, it would try to flood Fox’s zone with Democrats to advance the Administration’s point of view. This would seem to be the best way to combat any bias. But apparently, the Administration thinks that it is better to destroy Fox than it is to turn it.

As such, of course, it will neither destroy, nor turn it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the speaker will not allow the final language of the health care to be posted online for 72 hours before bringing the bill to a vote on the House floor, despite her September 24 statement that she was “absolutely” committed to doing so.

A competent, functioning press corps would be raising a big stink concerning this issue.

The unemployment rate has hit double digits for the first time since 1983 — and is likely to go higher. The 10.2 percent jobless rate for October shows how weak the economy remains even though it is growing. The rising jobless rate could threaten the recovery if it saps consumers’ confidence and makes them more cautious about spending as the holiday season approaches.

The October unemployment rate — reflecting nearly 16 million jobless people — jumped from 9.8 percent in September, the Labor Department said Friday. The job losses occurred across most industries, from manufacturing and construction to retail and financial.

Economists say the unemployment rate could surpass 10.5 percent next year because employers are reluctant to hire.

I don’t believe in phenomena like “jobless recoveries”; eventually, all recoveries bring about an increase in jobs. Of course, the problem is that unemployment is traditionally a lagging indicator, which means that we have a long way to go before things get better.

There is a lot that we need to learn about this incident. But if the story emerges that this was an act impelled by the perversion of Islam, then there will be an inclination on the part of some to say that Muslims ought to be suspect as a general rule. This observation is not only false, it is ruinous as well. There is no reasonable argument to be made that Muslims as a rule ought to be considered suspect; the percentage of Muslims who pervert their faith with acts of terrorism and violence is exceedingly low. If Muslims as a rule are considered suspect, then we will be in a position where we see enemies everywhere, but find them nowhere, since we will not actually be paying attention to the individuals we ought to suspect. Rather, we will be wasting our time keeping tabs on a gigantic group, the overwhelming majority of which are peaceful, loyal, and outraged by the way in which their faith is twisted for violent ends.

We can either see Islam itself as one giant monolithic force determined to do us evil until individual Muslims prove that they are not (how they are to prove this is anyone’s guess), or we can take the intelligent position that the Nadal Malik Hasans of the world are in a distinct minority, and that we can and should try to make common cause with the vast majority of Muslims who stand in opposition to his acts. I know which policy I am rooting for.