Friday evening roundup

Compare and contrast: The National Review Online editorial that gives a big thumbs-down to the Senate version of a new health-care bill. and Avik Roy's enthusiastic take at Forbes.

For LITD's money, after all the wonkery has been duly digested, the essential difference in the takes comes down to this:

NRO's summary:

he Senate Republican health-care bill would not repeal and replace Obamacare. The federal government would remain the chief regulator of health insurance. No state would be allowed to experiment with different models for protecting people with pre-existing conditions. Federal policy would continue to push people away from inexpensive catastrophic coverage. 

Roy's rationale for getting behind the Senate bill:

Full repeal was never going to be possible in a Senate where Republicans did not control 60 votes. And furthermore, we have learned that moderate Republicans in both the House and the Senate have no appetite to fully deregulate Obamacare at the federal level.

Are you surprised to learn that LITD finds Roy's position lame? Damn it, that's exactly why you forthrightly and cogently make the case for real repeal and for a free market approach, as Sen. Paul has done.  If a big brain like Roy would contribute his voice to the simple, pro-freedom approach, it would be a real boon to the cause. I guess he's swallowed just a little too much Beltway Kool-Aid.

Why we still call wind and solar play-like energy forms: The world still gets 85 percent of its energy from oil, gas and coal, and 2 percent from the play-like forms.

Excellent essay at Big Questions Online entitled "Can We Live Without Enchantment?" by historians Wilfred McClay and Donald Yerxa. In the course of exploring the connection between humankind's sense of wonder and its drive to know, they look at the contributions to that question made by folks ranging from Aristotle to Frederic Jackson Turner.

Those wacky fetal-American-exterminators: Planned Parenthood says that the victory by a woman in Georgia's 6th-district race was a blow in the "fight for women."

Mona Charen at Townhall says that post-America has developed a glaring cultural blind spot: revulsion at  the Muslim practice of female genital mutilation, even as it lets little kids start taking puberty-supression drugs if they start showing signs of resenting the equipment - including DNA - they were born with.