An editorial / By Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service

The Iron Curtain from the Baltic to the Adriatic that kept the hapless populations of communist Eastern Europe walled off by barbed wire and shoot-to-kill border guards seemed an immutable fact of modern history.

It is doubtful that anyone in authority would say so publicly, but the U.S. probably would not be heartbroken if Hamid Karzai, our man in Kabul, lost his bid for reelection as president of Afghanistan.

The Obama administration is sending mixed signals on its commitment to publicly funded, government-run health insurance as a supposedly indispensable component of health-care reform.

These figures really are remarkable: GM says its Chevy Volt, which the company will bring to market late next year, will get the equivalent of 230 miles per gallon in city driving, and Nissan says its Leaf, also due out late next year, will get the equivalent of 367 mpg.

By comparison, the most fuel-efficient car now on the road, the Toyota Prius hybrid, gets 51 mpg.

Let's hope the drafters of health-care reform have the political courage to stand up to the "death panel" crowd.

As part of his determination to march Venezuela backward, Hugo Chavez has an opportunistic new target: Golf.

He says, using leftist terminology long out of fashion, that golf is a "bourgeois sport," even a "petit-bourgeois" sport. That's roughly middle class and lower middle class, suggesting Chavez has no idea what those terms really mean.

Continental Express Flight 2816 left Houston at 9:23 p.m. on a Friday, en route to Minneapolis. So far, so good.

Because of bad weather, it was diverted to Rochester, Minn. It happens. No sense taking unnecessary risks.

Then Continental dithered. Should they wait out the weather? Should they charter a bus to take the 47 passengers the remaining 85 miles to Minneapolis?

A Scripps Howard News Service study of 4.9 million cause-of-death records for the years 2005 and 2006 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed a disturbing conclusion: medical experts think about 30 percent of the death diagnoses were either incorrect, fraudulent or just somebody's wild guess.

A safe way for a top-level American official to disappear from the public spotlight, without actually appearing to hide out, was to arrange a fact-finding trip to Africa. The media would ignore the trip and the absence while the official could bulk up his resume with high-minded thoughts about the Third World.

But Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have broken that mold.

After the "birthers," now come the "deathers."

Just as there were those who believed, in the face of all evidence, that President Obama's birth certificate was a fake and that he was not really native born, there are those who believe, again against all evidence to the contrary, that Obama's health-care reform has a provision that encourages, even requires, euthanasia.