REFORMING MEDICARE THE RIGHT WAY. Hmm. The first idea I favor; that's what I want for my Medicare -- catastrophic insurance. The rest I'll cover on my own. The second two I agree with in principle, but they are subsumed by a more fundamental principle: get the government out of health care regulation entirely and let the market work.

ISS LAMP illuminates when the International Space Station is overhead.

IN A POST OSTENSIBLY ON REP. WEINER, columnist Michael Goodwin made this damning observation on Democrats generally: "But [they] left the hard work to others."

MICHAEL BARONE: The End of a Surprisingly Good Political Career.

RINO GO HOME: In addition to making sure that Obama is a one-term President, it's time for the Tea Party to take on the RINO stalwarts in the Republican establishment.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

I don’t know why the Left is so frightened of Palin. I really can’t figure it out. If she’s as dumb as they pretend she is, shouldn’t they just be ignoring her?

The best I can figure is that Sarah represents the rest of us. As she said a long time ago, she’s just a hockey mom, someone you’d see in carpool line. And the Liberal Elites hold the rest of us in such contempt that they can’t even believe that they have to account to someone like Palin and by extension the rest of us.

From here.

KIDS WIN: Colorado School Board Sets Students and Families Free with Voucher Program.

We all realize that we’ve made two big mistakes in public education. There’s no choice – or limited choice – there’s not enough competition, and we’ve ceded so much of our children’s education to special interest groups. And that needs to end.

Putting parents in charge of their childrens' education. What a novel idea.

I WOULD'VE LIKED to see the employer exemption for health care gotten rid of, but not this way: Employers Drop Insurance Over ObamaCare.

PRESIDENT OBAMA "campaigned this week for 'new and innovative approaches' to America's economic crisis. So naturally, the futurist-in-chief filched his fresh, bold ideas straight from ... the 1930s. The grand new solution to the jobs deficit ... is more FDR-style federal job-training spending."

Guilds - and unions, and 'professional licensing' laws - have all used 'job training' as excuses for their existence. How have they worked out?

JEFF JACOBY on the government feeding trough: "Wherever there is a trough, there you will find pigs."

WILL THE NEXT SPACE STATION be a Budget Suites extended stay hotel?

MAYBE MORE STIMULUS isn't the answer.

[T]he great post-World War II economic boom was ushered in by the swift rollback of what had been the largest economic "stimulus" in US history....

"Government canceled war contracts, and its spending fell from $84 billion in 1945 to under $30 billion in 1946. By 1947, the government was ... running a budget surplus of close to 6 percent of GDP. The military released around 10 million Americans back into civilian life. Most economic controls were lifted, and all were gone less than a year after V-J Day. In short, the economy underwent ... the 'shock of de-stimulus.'"

Fearful predictions of massive unemployment - 14 percent, Business Week said - never materialized. Far from collapsing, "labor markets adjusted quickly and efficiently once they were finally unfettered." Even with millions of demobilized soldiers re-entering the workforce, "unemployment rates ... remained under 4.5 percent in the first three postwar years." Workers who lost government-funded jobs quickly replaced them in the surging private sector. "In fact," Taylor and Vedder add, "civilian employment grew, on net, by over 4 million between 1945 and 1947 when so many pundits were predicting economic Armageddon. Household consumption, business investment, and net exports all boomed as government spending receded."

America's postwar experience indicates that vibrant growth is generated not by massive government interference in the economy, but by the reverse. The way to revive a gasping private sector is for government to get out of its way, not to choke it with trillions of dollars in new spending.

You think?

THE FIRST TWO production F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (JSF) will begin flying the initial training syllabus this month at the U.S. Air Force’s test center at Eglin AFB. Training operational pilots is expected to begin by November.

BEYOND HERE THERE BE MONSTERS:

Economic growth is an enemy of all central planners for the simple reason that growth jumps the guardrails of The Plan; it changes the aesthetically appealing flatline of the steady state and makes it jagged. Growth creates new products, destroys old ones and allows people to behave in ways that render PowerPoint projections dismayingly obsolete. Worse, it takes power from the planners.

In order to herd people back onto the official path, planners must tell them that what exists outside the guardrails is too terrifying to contemplate. "Beyond here there be monsters" is the posted sign at every guardrail.

The dirty little secret is that it's the monsters who created The Plan.