Members of the U.S. House of Representatives have never before been asked to pass legislation by "deeming" it approved under a House rule instead of following the process required by the U.S. Constitution in which they actually vote on the proposal itself, according to a senior aide to House Republicans.

The procedure - dubbed by critics as the "Slaughter Solution" - is the brain-child of House Rules Committee Chairman Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-NY, who, at the request of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, is trying to fashion a rule that would allow the House to move toward passage of a health care reform bill without a recorded vote on the Senate version.

Like the Senate, which adopted its health care reform measure on Christmas Eve, the House passed its version last year. But there are major differences between the two measures, especially concerning federal funding of abortions. The Senate version includes billions of dollars to fund new health care clinics that would offer abortion services. The House bill was passed only after Rep. Bart Stupak's amendment barring federal funding for the procedure was included.

Slaughter's approach would bring to the House floor a reconcilliation bill to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of health care reform with the rule deeming the House to have approved the Senate version. The GOP aide, who requested anonymity, said a search of the House archives failed to reveal any previous use of the Slaughter Solution.

Earlier today, Slaughter told The Examiner's Susan Ferrichio that a ruling from the Senate Parlimentarian would have no bearing on what the House does. The Parliamentarian said the Senate could not consider the reconcilliation bill until the Senate health care reform bill was signed into law by President Obama.

"We knew that. That's not news to me. We always believed we had to have a signed bill before we reconcile." Slaughter told Ferrichio. Slaughter wouldn't say definitively if House leaders would employ her rule, and she said the Senate Parliamentarian  "cannot rule on what we have to do over here."

Late this afternoon, the GOP aide said "you can report it as fact, they are moving down that road."

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., tells National Review's Robert Costa that the House Democratic leadership is "ignoring" him. The good news: Stupak affirms he won't cave in and is a "definite 'no' vote" because Democratic leaders have made it clear the abortion language won't be fixed.

The bad news: "At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve," says Stupak. "The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions."

If Obamacare passes, Stupak says, it could signal the end of any meaningful role for pro-life Democrats within their own party. “It would be very, very hard for someone who is a right-to-life Democrat to run for office,” he says. “I won’t leave the party. I’m more comfortable here and still believe in a role within it for the right-to-life cause, but this bill will make being a pro-life Democrat much more difficult. They don’t even want to debate this issue. We’ll probably have to wait until the Republicans take back the majority to fix this.”

Stupak told a radio show earlier today that Henry Waxman said during negotiations: "we want to pay for abortions."

From Rachel Maddow's show last night, here's a jaw-dropper from the woman who brought you, "We have to pass the bill, so you can find out what's in it." As I keep saying, the Democratic message mavens are working overtime, apparently to woo the all-important swing vote in Williamsburg to health care:

"Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."

If Pelosi wants us to imagine it, let's do it with a few caveats, shall we? If liberal Boomers such as Nancy Pelosi insist on creating government incentives for a generation of people to be unemployed artists who nonetheless have their health care paid for by productive members of society, there will be fewer productive members of society.

If they insist on creating a generation unable to care for itself up to and past the ripe old age of 26 by incentivizing "children"—and I use to term loosely— to stay on parent's health insurance policies until they're turning the corner from Clearasil to Botox, there will be fewer educated, able-bodied people who ever learn to take care of themselves.

If they insist on creating a generation incentivized to "move out of the money-making industry" entirely and "into the helping industry," as Michelle Obama put it, with student loans forgiven by government if and only if students stay away from icky, profit-making industries, there will be fewer people making a profit.

These are the workers—and I may soon be using that term loosely— upon whom liberal Boomer Pelosi must rely to pay her Social Security through their working years. The ratio of workers to retirees has already shrunk from 41:1 in 1942 to 3.3:1 in the mid-2000s, and is expected to dip into to 2:1 in the next decades. Does Pelosi really want one or more of those young people supporting each worker to be a really keen charcoal sketch artist whose earning potential went as thoroughly unrecognized as his genius?

When imagining Pelosi's economy, liberal Boomers should also imagine what comes with it. The mediocre melodies of their street-bard children will be cold comfort indeed when they're warming their hands over hobo fires in Haight-Ashbury.

"Sorry, Pops! No more money! I'm a barrista-cum-unemployed-sculptor-with-benefits!"

Yes, I exaggerate (probably!), but the extent to which liberals actively discourage the very productivity that is the life's blood of their beloved entitlements, is astounding.

House Democratic leaders say they are prepared to take up the Senate health care bill, even though it appears it cannot be passed simultaneously with a second bill that would make corrections to it.

I talked to Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Rules Committee, the panel that will be responsible for formatting the way the House debates and votes on health care reform. Congress Daily reported last week the Slaughter was considering a rule that would deem the Senate bill passed only after the House approved the second bill that makes corrections to it. The Senate parliamentarian, however, ruled on Thursday that the Senate can only take up a reconciliation bill if the original Senate bill is first signed into law.

"We knew that," Slaughter told The Examiner. "That's not news to me. We always believed we had to have a signed bill before we reconcile." Slaughter would not say what strategy the House would employ to pass the bill. "We're looking at a lot of things," she said, adding that the Senate parliamentarian, "cannot rule on what we have to do over here."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also acknowledged Friday that the House would have to pass the Senate's $1 trillion health care bill first before either chamber can take up the second bill, which would remove the Senate legislation's tax on expensive insurance policies and some special deals cut for certain senators.

Pelosi left up in the air whether the bill would have to be signed into law, though she acknowledged a ruling by the Senate parliamentarian Thursday that it would.

"We'll pass the Senate bill, once we pass it the president signs it, or doesn't," Pelosi said. "People would rather he wait until the Senate act..."

Pelosi said the ruling by the parliamentarian, provided at the request of Senate GOP leaders, "isn't going to make any difference except maybe the mood that people are in. The fact is, once that it is passed in the House it is going to be the law of the land."

House Democrats have been staunchly opposed to passing the Senate bill first because they worry the corrections bill will never pass in that chamber.

When asked about that opposition by a reporter at her news conference Friday, Pelosi said, "That's another thing," but she suggested her rank-and-file would ultimately vote for the bill because it would expand health care coverage to 31 million people.

In Joel Kotkin’s New Geography blog Richard Cristiano asks whether deconstruction is the fate of urban America. Case in point: Detroit, where Mayor Dave Bing’s Community Development Futures Task Force has presented its Neighborhood Revitalization Strategic Framework. As Cristiano writes:

Twelve years ago, British urban historian Sir Peter Hall wrote in “Cities in Civilization” that Detroit “has become an astonishing case of industrial dereliction; perhaps, before long, the first major industrial city in history to revert to farmland.” Hall may have been prescient. This week, Mayor David Bing released the “Neighborhood Revitalization Strategic Framework," a landmark document that suggests that vast sections of Detroit be razed and returned to farmland, open space and nature. The report suggests the first organized and orderly deconstruction of a major American city.

The report envisons replacing entire neighborhoods with “Naturescapes” (meadows), “Green Thoroughfares” and “Village Hubs” that require fewer city services. But, it will require hundreds of millions of federal aid to finance such a major transformation, money the federal government no longer has to give. . . .

In five years, will Detroit remain a cratered landscape of vacant buildings, broken promises, and smashed dreams? Or will a smaller, safer, more efficient city evolve out of its ruins? If deconstruction is successful in Detroit, it could serve as a model for many other governments as well, from City Hall to state capitols and all the way to the most bloated disaster of all, Washington, DC.

When my parents bought a house in northwest Detroit for $11,500 in 1948, there was a nearby farm which stretched from Pembroke (7 ½ Mile) to the northern city limit at 8 Mile. Now houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $13,000, and Detroit is moving back to farmland. When people ask me why I switched from liberalism to conservatism, my one-word answer is “Detroit.”

Thousands of traditional journalists who lost their jobs in recent years have begun reappearing with online news operations, many of which also use citizen journalists. The two sometimes mix about as well as oil and water.

But it shouldn't be that way and doesn't have to be, according to Jason Stverak, who heads the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Franklin is a non-profit that is building an impressive nationwide network of investigative reporters drawn from both traditional and citizen journalism sources.

Their primary focus is on state and local government investigative reporting, an area which has suffered greatly in recent years as newspapers have reduced their reporting staffs, often beginning with the investigative reporters.

Stverak has an interesting oped in the latest edition of the Online Journalism Review in which he makes the case for the importance of citizen journalism and its compatibility with traditional journalism. He contends that wire news services - think AP - face an especially interesting challenge:

"As more non-profit journalism organizations develop, and more online journalists emerge in cities around the nation, the traditional wire services will have stiff competition unless they deal with reality and start picking up the best work these journalists produce.

"Non-profit journalism organizations as well as citizen journalists are producing news that too often is overlooked by traditional media. Not all those who write online stories are journalists - yet - but the ones who are should get the same access and treatment as those few still employed by newspapers, television and radio.

"At the end of the day, a partnership between newspapers and citizen journalism organizations will be beneficial not only for both, but also for Americans who will be better informed. That's the point. It also is the mission."

You can the rest of Stverak's oped here. This is the first of what will be a monthly column from Jason in OJR on these and other issues related to citizen journalism. 

President Obama has been spending his week doing 'campaign-style' events to promote his version of health care reform. But how can he continue to blast "Washington" for wasting money when he is the one occupying the White House, and his party controls Congress?

From a transcript of his speech in Missouri:

As we were driving in, I was saying, boy, it's just good to be back in the Midwest, this is about as close as I've been to home in a while. And part of the reason it's just good to be back is because Washington is a place where tax dollars are often treated like Monopoly money -- they're bartered and traded, and they're divvied up among lobbyists and special interests, and where waste -- even billions of dollars of waste -- is accepted as the price of doing business. When we proposed, by the way, those $20 billion in cuts last year, we were ridiculed by the press, said, "Ah, that's just a spit in the bucket." Now, I don't know about here in St. Charles, $20 billion, that's real money, isn't it?

Just who does he think is wasting the money, anyway?

As a subtle rejoinder to those whining about health care and the filibuster as if it somehow overturns what we learned in civics class, Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., sends a short e-mail on the so-called "Slaughter Solution," by which House Democrats avoid a vote on health care and simply "deem" it passed in a House rule:

We’re pretty sure there’s no verse about “deeming” in Schoolhouse Rock. It begs the question: why vote on anything at all? Instead of going to the polls next November, Americans can just deem who will represent them in Congress.

UPDATE: The American Prospect's Tapped blog offers up Democratic Party talking points defending this parliamentary trick.

From the PlumLine:

“Congressman [Ben] Chandler’s position on the bill remains the same,” Chandler spokesperson Jennifer Krimm tells our reporter Ryan Derousseau. “He expects to vote against the legislation.”

Last night, John Stewart highlighted the diplomatic 'slap in the face' by Israelis to Vice-President Joe Biden during his trip to Israel and Biden's response. Watch below:

Howell Raines, the former New York Times editor who left the paper under a cloud after following the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, has an op-ed in the Washington Post taking his fellow journalists to task for not assailing Fox News:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Well, this is just beyond words. Say what you want about Fox, but no one from the New York Times is really in a position to complain about the lack of journalistic standards. Especially Howell Raines, who while editing the Times ran 40+ articles from July to November of 2002 on the Augusta National golf club's refusal to admit female members. Talk about a propaganda campaign!

And then there's the matter of asserting a 13 year-old cable network "overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II." Really? Isn't that giving Fox a bit much credit? And I notice that Raines says "standards ... since World War II," perhaps because the decade prior to World War II the Times' star correspondent was busy winning Pulitzer prizes for covering up attrocities committed Joeseph Stalin. The "paper of record" has done a fine job undermining journalistic standards long before Rupert Murdoch was in short pants.

Quit your bellyaching, Raines.

From a USA Today editorial: "The fact is that many of those whom Liz Cheney is quick to brand as terrorists have been released from Guantanamo — including about 530 by the Bush administration, which admitted many posed no long-term threat."

The Bush administration never admitted that "many posed no long-term threat." Almost all of their transfers and releases of detainees contained some risk; the same is true of the Obama administration's transfers and releases. Obama's head of the Gitmo detainee task force has admitted as much on the record in an interview with BBC News.

Remember: the climbing recidivism rate is currently at 20%, with 3 or 4 new recidivists discovered every month. The Obama administration is now even more aware than the previous administration was of the threat posed by releasing or transfering detainees.

So USA Today got it wrong, but thankfully it also had the decency to give Andy McCarthy a chance to share the opposing view: read the whole thing.

Whether or not he is serious and will hold firm to his position, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has thrown the health care ball back up into the air. Gutierrez said yesterday on MSNBC that his concerns over immigration provisions "are enough to say I can't support this bill." Gutierrez voted "yes" in November when the House considered its now-defunct version of the health care bill.

Statements like this, from such liberals as Reps. Mike Capuano, D-Mass., Mike Arcuri, D-N.Y., and Gutierrez may just be bluffs, and should not be taken as definitive. They may still roll under pressure. But given that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., probably has to convince a dozen or so "no" votes to switch to "yes," it isn't helpful to have a handful of "yes" votes turning "no."

House Democrats are spending a lot of time behind closed doors as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and other Democratic leaders seek that magic number of 216 votes in favor of putting a federal bureaucrat between you and your doctor.

But regardless whether they get to 216, there are a couple of other numbers that really get to the basic fraud underlying Obamacare. This exchange between Fox News' Bill Heller and Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-RN, lays it out:

Heller: If we're going to provide insurance for 30 million additional Americans, where we getting the money to pay for that?

Bachmann: Well, what will happen is we will have reduced care, and that will lead directly to rationing of care. If you are pulling $500 billion out of the system, and putting in 30 million more people, but no more doctors or health care professionals, then there is only one thing that can give and that's the number of appointments, the number of procedures, and the quality of care.

It's a bit lengthy, but the interview covers the Massa ethics probe, the Slaughter Solution, and Republican demands that all health care negotiations be done out in the public instead of behind the closed doors that keep everybody else out.

Well, Democrats may be lacking votes but they're certainly not lacking in chutzpah:

Democratic Congressional leaders struck a tentative agreement on Thursday that breathes new life into President Obama’s proposed overhaul of federal student loan programs.

The deal would bundle the bill into an expedited budget package along with the Democratic health care legislation, which would allow for both measures to be passed by the Senate on a simple majority vote. Without the deal, the student loan bill would have been unlikely to pass because it lacked the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

I can't imagine that this will be viewed as anything other than an arrogant move, and one that would diminish the chances of health care reform being passed even more.

New York Times -- Democrats Struggle to Finish Health Bill

There are lots of problems with getting Obamacare through Congress. Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio outlines two big ones today: the defeat of a convoluted procedural plan and the declaration of an impasse on subsidizing elective abortions.

But big issue is that there is no bill to pass yet.

Part of the reason that the White House had to abandon its March 18 deadline so quickly is that even having embraced the procedural end-around of budget reconciliation to prevent a Republican filibuster, Democrats can’t agree on what will be in the plan. Nancy Pelosi says the House will soon pass the Senate bill and then both Houses will pass curative legislation. But the contents of that 100-page remedial bill are still undecided as work continues behind closed doors today.

After a late-night meeting of the House Democratic caucus, members left knowing no more about the plan than they had before and feeling grumpier than they had before.

The good news for President Obama is that as long as there is no bill, he can keep cajoling “maybes” in the House. The bad news: with no bill there is no CBO score and no answers to the questions that keep “maybes” from being “yeas.”

Despite all the Democratic bravado of late, it’s proving hard for them to cut the switch Republicans will use to whip them.

Writer Robert Pear looks at the harsh reality of timing as the cruelest month approaches.

“House Democrats said Ms. Pelosi had assured them they would have at least one week to examine the text of the budget bill before voting on it.

Democratic aides said House leaders wanted the vote to occur before a two-week spring break scheduled to start on March 26. Otherwise, they said, wavering lawmakers might buckle to pressure from critics of the bill, who plan to step up their campaign against it during the recess.

President Obama plans to leave Thursday on a trip to Indonesia and Australia. With his health care bill hanging in the balance, he faces intensifying questions about whether he should put off the trip, which was timed to coincide with his daughters’ spring break.”

Washington Post -- Democrats move toward grouping health reform with student-aid bill

With health care mired in procedural complexities, Democrats are rushing to add another degree of difficulty by attaching the president’s stalled proposal to take over student lending to the package.

The argument goes that Democrats should get the maximal benefit out of breaking the rules. If you’re going to go nuclear, why not maximize the megatons?

Plus, a bill that ends a sweetheart deal for student lenders and gives away more money for college is likely to be more popular than the politically catastrophic health bill.

Obama can’t pass the plan because Democrats from states that are home to the student lending business won’t sign off, so he wants to reconcile his troubles away.

But with his presidency hanging in the balance, it hardly seems like the time to get greedy or complicate things further.

Tell us, writers Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery, who is behind this too-cute plan?

“White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who supports pairing the measures, said Thursday night that lawmakers had made ‘a lot of decisions’ but were still addressing several concerns related to the education bill. ‘We're getting close,’ Emanuel said after meeting at the Capitol with Democratic leaders.”

The Atlantic -- Eric Massa's Navy Files

Good grief, Eric Massa!

Writer Joshua Green looks back at a creepy history of allegations against the former congressman from Western New York from his days as a candidate and his time in the Navy.

The theme is the harassment of junior officers and subordinates. They tell tales of waking up to find Massa attempting to “snorkel” them and of the anxiety of junior officers at having to serve under the ambitious, mercurial officer who had hitched his wagon to Gen. Wesley Clark’s still-rising star.

Green tells us that members of the House Ethics Committee already knew this when the moved Tuesday to drop they investigation into Massa’s alleged harassment of his male staffers. Massa may have been beyond their jurisdiction but weren’t they curious how someone with such a wild record and a quick succession of complaints in Congress escaped the notice of leaders?

On Thursday, House Republicans forced a vote on demanding ethics re-open the Massa probe to see what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, but Democrats defeated the measure. They did, however, go along with suggesting, politely, that the ethics committee take another look.

This could mean headaches for Pelosi, whose staff was said to have been tipped off five months ago.

Green tells us of some of the over-the-top antics ethics committee members had heard about:

“According to Peter Clarke, a Navy shipmate, Massa was notorious for making unwanted advances toward subordinates. He tells the story of his friend Stuart Borsch, with whom Massa shared a hotel room while on leave during the first Gulf War. ‘Stuart's at the edge of the bed,’ Clarke says Borsch told him at the time, ‘and [Massa] starts massaging him. Massa said, 'You'll have to get one of my special massages.' He called them 'Massa Massages.' Ron Moss, a Navy shipmate and Borsch's roommate, confirmed that Borsch told him this story at the time.”

New York Times -- Holder Did Not Disclose Briefs on ‘Enemy Combatant’

Fans of Eric Holder had scored a string of victories in pushing back against criticism of the attorney general’s hiring of seven lawyers for senior posts who had done extensive work representing Guantanamo Bay terrorists.

But Holder has suffered some collateral damage in the fight.

In answering Holder’s defenders in a National Review piece two Bush lawyers revealed that as a private lawyer, Holder had petitioned the Supreme Court on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen accused of a dirty bomb plot and convicted of aiding terrorist groups abroad. Holder argued against charging Padilla in a military court as the Bush administration initially did. The Bush team eventually relented and sought civilian charges when the dirty-bomb plot evidence thinned.

The problem for Holder is that he did not disclose his participation in the Padilla case during his confirmation process document dump.

Writers Charlie Savage and Bernie Becker explain that Holder’s less-than-candid response may give Republicans a chance to dig deeper on the ties between his team and the effort to defend Gitmo terrorists.

“Republicans signaled that they were likely to attack Mr. Holder over his joining the briefs — and his failure to list them, along with other public documents, on a routine confirmation questionnaire — when he testifies before them later this month.

‘Are we expected to believe that then-nominee Holder, with only a handful of Supreme Court briefs to his name, forgot about his role in one of this country’s most publicized terrorism cases?’ asked Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona.”

Caddell and Schoen -- If Democrats ignore health-care polls, midterms will be costly

One of the problems with President Obama and his team believing they are transformative vanguards of a new American politics is that they won’t listen to anybody with experience.

Pat Caddell was a pollster and strategist for Jimmy Carter. He knows a thing or two about a political morass. Doug Schoen was a pollster and strategist for Bill Clinton. He knows a thing or two about making a political comeback.

But Democrats of the Obama breed discount their counsel because they are of the old Democratic guard they disdain.

But perhaps a warning as dire as the one Caddell and Schoen offer will be enough to get a few to take another look.

“For Democrats to begin turning around their political fortunes there has to be a frank acknowledgement that the comprehensive health-care initiative is a failure, regardless of whether it passes. There are enough Republican and Democratic proposals -- such as purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage, initiatives to hold down costs, covering preexisting conditions and ensuring portability -- that can win bipartisan support. It is not a question of starting over but of taking the best of both parties and presenting that as representative of what we need to do to achieve meaningful reform. Such a proposal could even become a template for the central agenda items for the American people: jobs and economic development.

Unless the Democrats fundamentally change their approach, they will produce not just a march of folly but also run the risk of unmitigated disaster in November.”

--To get Morning Must Reads in your inbox every weekday click here.

Phil Klein of The American Spectator spoke to Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., yesterday, who says Democrats will pass a "shell" bill out of the Budget Committee on Monday, which they will alter later.

Ryan also emphasized that reconciliation isn't the real ballgame here:

He also warned against focusing too much on the reconciliation process in the Senate. "Reconciliation is a distraction," he said. "Once the House passes the Senate bill we have the massive new entitlement."

In effect, the House vote is all that matters.

Colorado Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter decided not to seek a second term despite the fact he was elected in the midst of a massive resurgence by his party that also saw it take over the legislature in the Rocky Mountain state. Should be a good time to get another term, right?

Well, not if you and your buddies in the legislature have been raising taxes, killing jobs, and doing the bidding of your state's liberal and labor activists.

One of Ritter's measures was the "Amazon tax," a levy imposed on Internet retailers located within a particular state. When Colorado legislators approved the proposal, it promptly produced results described in today's edition of Human Events by journalist Valerie Richardson:

"In February, Colorado became the fourth state to approve the tax, which requires Internet retailers with in-state "affiliates" -- individuals operating websites with links to cyber-companies like Amazon.com -- to collect the state sales tax. New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island have already passed their own Amazon taxes.

"Colorado Democrats predicted that revoking what they described as the Internet sales-tax exemption would bring an additional $5 million to the state's depleted coffers. Instead, it appears the Democrat-controlled legislature has killed an entire industry at the cost of as many as 10,000 jobs."

Career politicians never learn - If you want less of something, tax it more. If you want more of something, tax it less. Richardson has the rest of the story here.

From Reuters:

Homicides in Venezuela have quadrupled during President Hugo Chavez's 11 years in power, with two people murdered every hour, according to new figures from a non-governmental organization. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), whose data is widely followed in the absence of official statistics, said the South American nation has one of the highest crime rates on the continent, with 54 homicides per 100,000 citizens in 2009...

When Chavez came to power in 1999 there were 4,550 homicides whereas in 2009 there were 16,047, the OVV said.

Chavez blames income inequities created by past governments. Obviously, that's why murders have gotten so much worse under his rule.

Worse than Venezuela's deterioration, perhaps, is the fact that it isn't entirely out of line with our historical murder rate Washington, D.C. In 1991, the homicide rate here was above 80 per 100,000. In 2002, my first full year living here, it was 46 per 100,000. It has clearly improved in the last few years: it fell below 32 per 100,000 in 2008.

Fortune contributor and Time International editor Michael Elliott has a thoughtful piece today that looks at the other side of China's economic explosion and notes that most of the phenomenal growth is the result of government flooding the market with money and directing it to favored firms.

That approach can get growth in an economy in which there is a virtually unlimited supply of potential customers and the need to build virtually from scratch both an industrial base and key infrastructures in areas like communication and transportation. But Elliott points out that it remains to be seen whether China's economy can be innovative in the same way as a dynamic mostly free market like that found in the U.S.

Here's Elliott on looking beyond the surface of the Chinese economic miracle:

"At first sight, it seems a ridiculous question. China's universities are turning out hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers; its computing wizards are legendary, and not just because they appear to be among the world's best hackers and copiers of others' intellectual property.

"Venture capitalists talk about the sheer thrill of watching Chinese startups, saying it reminds them of Silicon Valley in its garage-lab days. Yet it's worth remembering that China's recent supercharged economic growth has not been led by innovative private companies. It's mainly the consequence of a government-directed boom in bank lending, much of it to favored state-owned enterprises.

"If you ask management consultants to list the Chinese companies best known and admired in the outside world, many of them would be in basic industry and infrastructure -- the oil giants CNOOC and Sinopec, for example.

"Don't get me wrong; many of these businesses are world-class. I routinely get better mobile reception in rural China than I do in New York's Westchester County and this from a company, China Mobile, that regularly adds 4 million customers to its roster each month. But at least part of the companies' successes depend on privileged access to capital and their close relationships with China's power structure."

Definitely worth a full read, which you can do here.

HT: Politico's Tim Alberta