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Spengler notes the foolishness of an address to the “Muslim world.”

… To speak to the “Muslim world”, is to speak not to a fact, but rather to an aspiration, and that is the aspiration that Islam shall be a global state religion as its founders intended. To address this aspiration is to breathe life into it. For an American president to validate such an aspiration is madness. America is not at war with Islam, unless, that is, Islam were to take a political form that threatens America’s global interests. These interests include friendly relationships with nation-states that have a Muslim majority, such as Egypt, Turkey and Jordan. To address “the Muslim world” is to conjure up a prospective enemy, for global political Islam only can exist as the enemy of the nation-states with which America has allied.

Obama, the White House press office told reporters last week, will address among other issues the Arab-Israeli issue. What does it imply to raise this issue in a speech to the “Muslim world”? Nearly 700 million of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims live in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, countries which share no linguistic or cultural affinities with the Arabs, and have only religion in common.

They have no strategic interest whatever in the outcome of war or peace in the Levant. Their only possible interest is religious. Does the United States really believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is religious in origin? …

… Thus far, Obama’s efforts to propitiate the “Muslim world” have made the administration’s future work all the harder. Iran is convinced that the administration needs it to help out in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has all the less incentive to abandon its central goal of developing nuclear weapons. Pakistan is in the midst of a bloody civil war forced upon it by the United States. After Obama leaned on the Israelis to halt settlement construction, the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas left Washington convinced that Obama will force out the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the next two years.

For his trouble, Obama will get more bloodshed in Pakistan, more megalomania from Iran, more triumphalism from the Palestinians, and less control over Iraq and Afghanistan. Of all the available bad choices, Obama has taken the worst. It is hard to imagine any consequence except a steep diminution of American influence.

Corner posts on the visit to Egypt.

“One of the largest Muslim countries.” Jeesh.

More on the large Muslim country.

Richard Epstein has more on Sotomayor.

Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for a Supreme Court seat has put both her defenders and attackers into high gear. In my previous Forbes column, I indicated some of my deep reservations about the Sotomayor candidacy based on her perfunctory performance in Didden v. Town of Port Chester, where the panel brushed aside the “public use” language in the constitution’s takings clause.

Likewise, the cryptic panel decision of her panel in the New Haven firefighters’ case, Ricci v. DeStefano, also evidenced a tin ear to the explosive statutory and constitutional issues that arose when New Haven chose to disregard its own promotion test on the sole ground that it identified few (indeed, no) African-American candidates as eligible for promotion to captain and lieutenant.

On this occasion, I won’t ask why Judge Sotomayor took an intellectual pass on a hard case, which is now before the Supreme Court. Instead I will examine the other side of the coin, which is the serious intellectual weakness in the conservative case against her confirmation. Note that I consciously use the term “conservative” in opposition to the decidedly different “libertarian” orientation. …

Mark Steyn Corner post on empathy on the Court.

Thomas Sowell on the nomination.

… Laws are made for the benefit of the citizens, not for the self-indulgences of judges. Making excuses for such self-indulgences and calling them “inevitable” is part of the cleverness that has eroded the rule of law and undermined respect for the law.

Something else is said to be “inevitable” by the clever people. That is the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. But it was only a year and a half ago that Hillary Clinton’s winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for president was considered “inevitable.”

The Republicans certainly do not have the votes to stop Judge Sotomayor from being confirmed — if all the Democrats vote for her. But that depends on what the people say. It looked like a done deal a couple of years ago when an amnesty bill for illegal aliens was sailing through the Senate with bipartisan support. But public outrage brought that political steamroller to a screeching halt.

Nothing is inevitable in a democracy unless the public lets the political spinmasters and media talking heads lead them around by the nose. …

Mona Charen says it is cruel to casually call someone racist.

The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has already achieved a boon for our political culture: It has helped leading liberals and Democrats to discover that being tarred as a racist on flimsy grounds is unfair and deeply unpleasant. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, when asked on “Face the Nation” to respond to Rush Limbaugh’s and Newt Gingrich’s comments about Sotomayor, said, “That’s an absolutely terrible thing to throw around. Based on that statement — that one word ‘better than’ (sic) — to call someone a racist is just terrible and I would hope that Republicans would not do this.”

Sen. Feinstein is right as far she went. She avoided one undeniable fact though. If a white male nominee had been discovered to have said something similar — that he was better situated to judge due to his background and life experiences than a Latina woman — he would be cashiered so fast as to induce whiplash. Those are the unwritten rules that Limbaugh and Gingrich are attempting, one suspects, to expose for their one-sidedness. Nevertheless, the instant labeling of the woman, based on one unwise remark, is hardly fair. If Democrats are learning this now, that’s excellent news. One hopes they will remember this discovery when the wheel turns and a Republican nominee is before the Senate. Certainly they didn’t seem to get it as recently as 2002, when President Bush nominated Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. …

Treasury Sec. Geithner was laughed at in China.

… Mr Geithner told politicians and academics in Beijing that he still supports a strong US dollar, and insisted that the trillions of dollars of Chinese investments would not be unduly damaged by the economic crisis. Speaking at Peking University, Mr Geithner said: “Chinese assets are very safe.”

The comment provoked loud laughter from the audience of students. There are growing fears over the size and sustainability of the US budget deficit, which is set to rise to almost 13pc of GDP this year as the world’s biggest economy fights off recession. …

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Just as the Dems stood in the school house door fighting
integration, they now stand in the way of education reform. Here’s the story of
one South Carolina Democrat who is fighting for
school choice.

Getting arrested doesn’t normally bolster a politician’s
credibility. But when South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford told me recently
that he saw the inside of a jail cell 73 times, he did so to make a point. As a
youth, Mr. Ford cut his political teeth in tumultuous 1960s civil-rights
protests. 

Today this black Democrat says the new civil-rights struggle
is about the quality of instruction in public schools, and that to receive a
decent education African-Americans need school choice. He wants the president’s
help. “We need choice like Obama has. He can send his kids to any school
he wants.”

Mr. Ford was once like many Democrats on education — a
reliable vote against reforms that would upend the system. But over the past
three and a half years he’s studied how school choice works and he’s now
advocating tax credits and scholarships that parents can spend on public or
private schools.

He’s not alone. …

When he was president of Washington College,
Robert E. Lee admonished the staff for planting neat rows of trees on the
grounds saying nature did not organize planting that way.  David
Warren votes for chaos too.  

Call me an anarchist, but I don’t like books to be all the
same size. They aren’t, of course, but there are people who would like them to
be. I don’t want them to be all the same colour, or smell. I can handle a
fairly long set, here or there, but not the prospect of interminable rows. I am
inflamed by the sight of matching spines on the shelves in the offices of
lawyers.

I don’t like envelopes to be in standard sizes, or
notepaper, either; or magazines. …

… And as readers who have followed me over the years may
recall, I do not like the metric system, which, among its other notorious
evils, is the mother and father of innumerable standardization schemes. It is a
quirkless system, and must therefore be condemned.

All these things are a source of irritation, though I must
boast that Nature is on my side, and that she may be relied upon to put an end
to all projects of regimentation, in due course; and in the meantime, to be a
constant source of sabotage. …

Mark
Steyn Corner post on Britain in the ’70′s.

Bill
Kristol says the Sotomayor confirmation process will get very interesting
when the Court rules on the New Haven firefighters’ case.

… we will have an unusual moment in the Sotomayor
confirmation process–one that will stand out from the customary small-bore
senatorial back-and-forth during judicial confirmations. We’ll have a
high-profile Supreme Court ruling highlighting a very questionable judicial
decision by the president’s nominee. Most Court observers expect the judgment
in which Sotomayor joined to be reversed. But even if it isn’t, there will be a
closely observed decision by a probably closely divided Supreme Court that will
bring home the importance of the Sotomayor nomination for jurisprudence in this
area. The public will have occasion to see how a nominee, herself picked for
identity-politics reasons, was unempathetic, one might say, and unjust to the
victims of identity politics, the firefighters of New Haven who were denied
promotions.

Sotomayor will probably be confirmed. But nothing is
certain. And a Ricci-focused debate over her confirmation will serve to remind
Americans of the unseemliness and injustice of the Constitution-corrupting,
identity-politics-driven agenda so dear to the hearts of the modern Democratic
party, the Obama administration, and Sonia Sotomayor.

Jennifer
Rubin has thoughts on the subject.

… That is what this will boil down to: does Sotomayor (and
by implication, the president) believe in trying to get it right, trying to set
an impartial standard of justice for all Americans? Conservatives suspect by
word and deed (her perfunctory dismissal of Ricci (New Haven), for
example) on the bench she does not. Whether she does or not, she’ll need
to convince the Senate that she does — or face a very rocky road to
confirmation. Average Americans, unlike law professors and liberal pundits,
like to think “equal justice under the law”  means something and judges
aren’t merely surrogates for special interest groups.

Michael
Barone thinks the GOP should run against the center.

… So I think Republicans today should be less interested
in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center.
Here I mean a different “center” — not a midpoint on an opinion
spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and
strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions
fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.

This center includes the Treasury, with its $700 billion of
TARP funds voted last fall to purchase toxic assets from financial institutions
and used instead to quasi-nationalize banks and preserve union benefits for
employees and retirees of bankrupt auto companies. It includes the Federal
Reserve, which has been vastly increasing the money supply. It includes a
federal government whose $787 billion economic stimulus has so far failed to
lower the unemployment rate from where the government projected it would be
without the stimulus package. …

Bill McGurn
tells us how Hillsdale College beats Harvard.

David
Brooks looks at GM and sees six reasons for the quagmire ahead.

… First, the Obama plan will reduce the influence of
commercial outsiders. The best place for fresh thinking could come from outside
private investors. But the Obama plan rides roughshod over the current private
investors and so discourages future investors. G.M. is now a pariah on Wall
Street. Say farewell to a potentially powerful source of external commercial
pressure.

Second, the Obama plan entrenches the ancien régime. The old
C.E.O. is gone, but he’s been replaced by a veteran insider and similar
executive coterie. Meanwhile, the U.A.W. has been given a bigger leadership
role. This is the union that fought for job banks, where employees get paid for
doing nothing. This is the organization that championed retirement with full
benefits at around age 50. This is not an organization that represents
fundamental cultural change. …

Interesting piece of food
Americana from the Economist. Seems a depression era WPA project on
American food was never published until now.

… The attack on Pearl Harbour, and America’s subsequent
entry into the second world war, meant that “America Eats” was never completed.
Now, however, Mr Kurlansky has dusted off the files from the FWP archive and
chosen the best morsels from a huge amount of raw material. They range from an
essay on maple-syrup production in Vermont to squirrel recipes from Arkansas, a
poem about Nebraskans’ enthusiasm for frankfurter sausages and a description of
how Sioux Indians prepared buffalo meat. As well as providing an introduction,
Mr Kurlansky adds his own commentary and sprinkles in the occasional modern
reference point: alongside the 1940 Christmas dinner menu from the Brown Hotel
in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, the 2007 menu from the same hotel is
provided for comparison. (The modern menu includes antipasti and sushi; the
1940 menu mentions neither.) …

Brown University has become a caricature of the politically
correct. The type of place ABC’s new Show The Goode Family makes fun of on
Wednesday night at 9:00. National
Review Corner posts have more.

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David Warren trashes Canada’s version of the auto bailout.

… Very few Canadians make as much as GM and Chrysler workers, or have pension plans as generous. Many of us don’t have pension plans at all, beyond the chump change offered by our Nanny State. The autoworkers’ plan is around $2 billion in the hole. It goes without saying that at least $2 billion of the bailout will go, directly or indirectly, to rescuing it.

That the government must deny this use of our money also goes without saying. But the plan will be rescued; and the person who thinks it will happen by a spontaneous miracle is naïve.

One of the proofs that Canadians are indeed rather stupid, is that we will stand for this sort of thing: that people who themselves face penury in old age, will agree to have their pockets picked to cover $70-an-hour auto-workers. And then actually vote at the next election for the politicians who robbed them. (For not all Canadians are basically conservative.)

Alas, until some conservatives take over the Conservative party, Canadians will be in no position to prove me wrong.

Stephen Moore laments the missing man – Milton Friedman.

… The myth that the stock-market collapse was due to a failure of Friedman’s principles could hardly be more easily refuted. No one was more critical of the Bush spending and debt binge than Friedman. The massive run up in money and easy credit that facilitated the housing and credit bubbles was precisely the foolishness that Friedman spent a lifetime warning against.

A few scholars are now properly celebrating the Friedman legacy. Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economics professor, has just published a tribute to Friedman in the Journal of Economic Literature. He describes the period 1980-2005 as “The Age of Milton Friedman,” an era that “witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. As the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined.”

So the Bernie Sanders crowd has things exactly backward: Milton’s ideas on capitalism and freedom did more to liberate humankind from poverty than the New Deal, Great Society and Obama economic stimulus plans stacked on top of each other.

At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

But in the energy industry today we are trading in shovels for spoons. The Obama administration wants to power our society by spending three or four times more money to generate electricity using solar and wind power than it would cost to use coal or natural gas. The president says that this initiative will create “green jobs.” …

George Will writes on “shock and awe statism.”

… State governments, too, are expected to accept Washington’s whims, but plucky Indiana is being obdurate. Gov. Mitch Daniels, alarmed by what he calls the Obama administration’s “shock-and-awe statism,” is supporting state Treasurer Richard Mourdock’s objection to the administration’s treatment of Chrysler’s creditors, which include the pension funds for Indiana’s retired teachers and state police officers and a state construction fund. Together they own $42.5 million of Chrysler’s $6.9 billion (supposedly) secured debt.

Compliant, because dependent, banks bowed to the administration’s demand that they accept less than settled bankruptcy law would have given them as secured creditors. Next, the president denounced as “speculators” remaining secured creditors, who then folded and accepted less on the dollar than an unsecured creditor — the United Auto Workers union — is getting. This raw taking of property from secured investors penalized those “speculators” — retired Indiana teachers and state police officers who, Mourdock says, are being “ripped off by the federal government.”

He is asking a court to declare that the Obama administration’s actions have violated “more than 100 years of established law by redefining ‘secured creditors’ to mean something less” and that the actions violate the Fifth Amendment protection against the seizure of private property. Furthermore, he says, the government is guilty of “misuse” of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which gives the Treasury authority only to aid financial institutions, not industrial companies. …

Robert Samuelson normally writes on economics, but today this subject is the media’s Obama infatuation.

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America.

Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power. But the main checks on Obama are modest. They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means. The leaderless and confused Republicans don’t provide effective opposition. And the press — on domestic, if not foreign, policy — has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”  …

How long will we allow ourselves to be governed by children? NY Times has the story.

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended. …

With just another routine lie, the kid president tried to pass off the auto bailout as something the Bush folks dreamed up. Sweetness and Light has the story.

Spend $100,000,000 to save $1,000,000 a year? Cafe Hayek posts on how our government touts failure.

The Economist reports it really was pigs that started that flu.

… This new study does not answer the big questions of how, exactly, the virus crossed over to humans and why it kills some people and not others—in particular, why it hits the young (and thus, presumably, healthy) harder than the elderly. A different study by the CDC has found that nearly two-thirds of swine-flu infections in America have been in people aged between five and 24, whereas only 1% of cases affected those over 65. This is the reverse of the pattern seen in seasonal flu, which kills thousands of old people every winter. One possible explanation, according to Anne Schuchat of the CDC, is that “older adults might have been in contact a long time ago with a virus similar to the one we see now.” That, she surmises, might give them an immunity to this new menace that young people lack.

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Mark Steyn thinks our reaction to North Korea’s test was underdone.

… If you’re American, it’s natural to assume that the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq war is about Iraq. But they’re not. If you’re starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility. The rest of the world doesn’t observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang’s actions were “a matter of …” Drumroll, please! “…grave concern,” declared the president. Furthermore, if North Korea carries on like this, it will – wait for it – “not find international acceptance.” As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, “President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’ Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test ‘supercilious and jejune.’”

The president’s general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don’t need this in my life right now. He’s a domestic transformationalist, working overtime – via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc. – to advance statism’s death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn’t want anyone nuking America before he’s finished turning it into a socialist basket case. This isn’t simply a matter of priorities. A United States government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can’t be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they’re beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to “provoke” America but is demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves and knock-off Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart. …

David Harsanyi says don’t give Sotomayor a free ride.

You know what would be a nice change of pace? A nominee for public office whose compelling life story didn’t remind me of my pitiably self-indulgent life.

Fortunately, while overachievers can induce some self-loathing, when it comes to public service, spectacular life stories are irrelevant.

Adversity does not grant anyone superhuman intellect or a Solomon-like temperament. And gripping tales of perseverance should not make one impenetrable to criticism.

Much has been made of political repercussions for Republicans if they dare target Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina who grew up in a deprived neighborhood in the South Bronx. New York’s hyper-yammering senator, Chuck Schumer, claims that the Republican Party would do so at its “own peril” — in part alluding, no doubt, to blowback from the Hispanic community.

If Republicans take this kind of bigoted advice, they will have done the country a great disservice. …

Jay Nordlinger with interesting background on the Soto story by reminding us of the Dems filibustering of Miguel Estrada.

In recent days, we’ve been hearing a lot about a “wonderful American story” — Sonia Sotomayor’s. Can’t oppose that, can you — that wonderful American story? Oh yes you can, if you’re the Democratic party. They certainly did it in the case of Miguel Estrada.

He came from Honduras, and was no Spanish aristocrat, to put it mildly. Arrived in America at 17 speaking barely any English. Graduated with honors from Columbia and Harvard: Law Review, Supreme Court clerkship, blah, blah, blah. Distinguished record in government service — an American success story, a Movie of the Week, a slam dunk. …

Also from the Corner, Andrew McCarthy tells us how it was Soto was appointed by Bush 41. No, it was not another stupid Souterlike move.

It’s at the top of the Left’s talking-points that Judge Sotomayor was first put on the bench by a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, in 1991. That’s pretty funny when you think about it — the Bush seal of approval is not usually thought an imprimatur by the Left, and it wouldn’t likely be much comfort to conservatives given that Sotomayor’s district court nomination came around the same time GHWB put Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. But there is even less to it than meets the eye. …

Perhaps Sotamayor’s biggest weakness is her record on the second amendment right to bear arms. David Kopel explains in Volokh.

… the Sotomayor per curiam opinion treats any Second Amendment claim as not involving “a fundamental right.”

The Maloney opinion is, on this issue, entirely consistent with Judge Sotomayor’s opinion in a 2004 case: “the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.” United States v. Sanchez-Villar, 99 Fed.Appx. 256, 2004 WL 962938 (2d. Cir. 2004)(Summary Order of Judges Sack, Sotomayor & Kaplan), judgement vacated, Sanchez-Villar v. United States, 544 U.S. 1029 (2005)(for further consideration in light of the 2005 Booker decision on sentencing).

Judge Sotomayor’s record suggests hostility, rather than empathy, for the tens of millions of Americans who exercise their right to keep and bear arms.

Charles Krauthammer comments.

… So it’s extremely odd that she would reach all the way back to 1886 and say that a gun case is excluded because it is under state jurisdiction. It would imply to me that she was reaching as a way to undermine gun rights. And it would also imply that she might be inclined to overturn Heller or restrict it in the future.

Corner post on the fiscal problems in England and here.

Last week, Standard and Poor’s warned the British government that it could lose its triple-A rating for sovereign debt if large budget deficits persist in coming years, as currently projected. S&P noted that the U.K. net government debt burden is expected to reach 100 percent of the country’s annual economic output soon — and stay there indefinitely.

Yesterday, John Taylor of Stanford and the Hoover Institution noted in a piece in the Financial Times that there’s every reason to expect the U.S. will soon find itself in the same boat as the British. …

In response, Larry Kudlow says the VAT is out of the bag.

Everyone should closely read today’s Washington Post story on the value-added tax, or VAT. The cat is now out of the bag. For months I have argued that Team Obama and the Democratic Congress were going to be forced to consider a VAT in order to pay for their extravagant spending. Now borrowing almost 50 cents on every new dollar spent, the Democrats will at some point begin to deal with the politics of deficit reduction as a way of countering Republican criticisms about deficit expansion. …

There has been web noise that the administration is targeting GOP car dealers. Jonah Goldberg dismisses the idea.

… Of the 789 Chrysler dealers who were notified that their contracts will not be renewed, 38 are minority owned…

At the end of April, there were 154 minority dealers in Chrysler’s 3,181 total U.S. dealer body network….

You’ll see that 4.8% of the auto dealerships closed were minority owned.

Total percentage of all Chrysler dealerships that are minority owned? 4.8%

Speaking of autos, P.J. O’Rourke mourns the loss ……

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War. Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass. …

Claudia Rosett has a good take on the Cheerios flap.

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David Warren says it’s nice the Dems are in power, they have to act like grownups.

One of the advantages of having Barack Obama as president of the hyperpower, is that it puts his great mass of fans, in America and abroad, in the position of having to think about real problems. It turns out the solution to each of them was more complicated than “get rid of Bush.” The world does not spontaneously change when the president changes.

North Korea, Iran, and a seriously unstable Pakistan continue to present plausible and pressing nuclear threats. Islamist terrorists continue to seek soft targets right around the world; and the fanatic Islamist ideology continues to win adherents, even in New York prison cells. For that matter, problems of disease, poverty, petty tyranny and oppression, with or without war, continue to afflict our species, regardless of who comes and goes from an office in Washington. America’s allies become no more likely to pull their weight, and no less apt to strike self-serving rhetorical postures.

The banking problems, the environmental and other notional issues, must be seen in a new light. It is no use just inventing bogeymen, and accusing them of imaginary crimes. Suddenly the facts matter, and the advantages of pretending disappear. …

A WSJ editorial that could have been in the revenue shortfall section from two days ago.

… Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000 …

Michael Barone grew up in Detroit so his comments on the auto bailouts can have special poignancy.

… “The volumes need to be big for Chrysler to survive,” [market analyst Tracy Handler] said. “Will they be? I have doubts about that.”

See also this BBC article (“it’s madness”). Pathetically, Chrysler hopes that even if they don’t save the company the new small cars will “[b]urnish the environmental image of Chrysler brands,” says Automotive News.

My question: How many cars does burnishing a firm’s environmental image actually sell?

Barone noted our “gangster government” favoring unions will make it hard for unionized companies to sell bonds. David Indiviglio of The Atlantic has come to the same conclusion saying investors “can’t afford to lend to unionized companies.” Actually, they will, but the rates will be higher.

… Bond investors literally can’t afford to lend to unionized companies because it’s clear that current power in Washington will take the unions’ side, despite past bankruptcy law precedents that favor senior creditors. That means Washington’s actions in pushing for these bankruptcy verdicts to come out in favor of the unions will probably hurt unionized companies in the long run. As a result, it might be wise for Washington to reconsider the precedents it’s setting for unionized companies undergoing bankruptcy.

Mark Steyn on Britain’s expense scandal.

… For their constituents, the scandal is a rare glimpse of a central truth about politics in an advanced Western democracy: A lifetime in “public service” is a lifetime of getting serviced at public expense. The salaries are small but the perks are unlimited. A few weeks back, while the home secretary was away, her poor husband whiled away an evening by purchasing two pay-per-view pornographic movies — By Special Request and Raw Meat 3 — which, upon her return, his missus promptly billed to the government. Most of us, whether we land a job at the local feed store, the dental practice, or National Review, expect to have to pay for our own moats, toilet seats, chocolate Santas, and screenings of Raw Meat 3. But being in “public service” means never having to say, “Hey, this one’s on me.”

There are local variations, of course. In the U.S., I don’t believe you can claim for repairs to the toilet seat at your second home, but then again your second home might have come your way, like Chris Dodd’s Irish “cottage,” at an exceptionally favorable price. A senator gets between $2.3 million and $3.7 million for the costs of running his office. Tom Daschle’s plea in mitigation for his tax irregularities can stand for an entire political culture: It never occurred to him, suddenly returned to private life and working his Rolodex for a little light consulting and speechifying, that things like chauffeurs and limousines were taxable benefits members of the non-legislating class are supposed to declare to the Treasury. After all, in Congress, that stuff is just the way it is: Declaring your driver would be as silly as declaring the air or the grass.

Do you remember the anthrax scare just after 9/11? I remember how shocked I was when I heard on the radio that 34 of Senator Daschle’s staffers had come down with anthrax poisoning. Not shocked that they’d been poisoned, but shocked that Senator Daschle had 34 staffers. Why? …

Tony Blankley goes back to Frederic Bastiat to show the folly of “five million green jobs.”

In 1845, the French economist Frederic Bastiat published a satirical petition from the “Manufacturers of Candles” to the French Chamber of Deputies that ridiculed the arguments made on behalf of inefficient industries to protect them from more efficient producers.

“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us….

“We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds – in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country. . . .”

This famous put-down highlights the problem of claiming that protecting inefficient producers creates good jobs. Obviously, the money the French would waste on unneeded candles could be spent on needed products and services – to the increased prosperity of the French economy. …

Not to mention Bush’s folly ethanol. A piece from American.com. It gets a little technical here, but it’s worth wading through.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently released its analysis of the renewable fuel standard enacted by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The standard requires 11.1 billion gallons of renewable fuel to displace petroleum fuel in 2009, ratcheting up each year until reaching 36.0 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. There are separate volume requirements for advanced biofuels, cellulosic, and biodiesel.

Forcing the market to produce large amounts of renewable fuel will harm consumers in two ways: it will increase prices at the pump, because biofuels are more costly than gasoline, and it will drive up the price of food, because it diverts crops into fuel. The impact of food price inflation will weigh most heavily in developing countries where food purchases comprise larger shares of consumption. Food expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of household consumption among lower income groups in the developing world.

What can justify a policy that deliberately increases the price of food and fuel? Calling passage of the bill the “shot heard ‘round the world,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it would improve the “health of our children.” But this is questionable at best. While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis suggests that the switch toward renewables will decrease ammonia, carbon monoxide, and benzene, it also predicts “significant increases in ethanol and acetaldehyde emissions” and “more modest increases in nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, particulate matter, hydrocarbons, acrolein, and sulfur dioxide.” Citing time constraints, the EPA did not do a full analysis of the net health effects of these emission profiles, but a reasonable assumption is that the detrimental health impacts from increased particulate matter will at least offset the health improvements from the predicted reductions in the other pollutants. …

Karl Rove thinks the GOP should go ahead and oppose Sotomayor on principle.

… The Sotomayor nomination also provides Republicans with some advantages. They can stress their support for judges who strictly interpret the Constitution and apply the law as written. A majority of the public is with the GOP on opposing liberal activist judges. There is something in our political DNA that wants impartial umpires who apply the rules, regardless of who thereby wins or loses.

Mr. Obama understands the danger of heralding Judge Sotomayor as the liberal activist she is, so his spinners are intent on selling her as a moderate. The problem is that she described herself as liberal before becoming a judge, and fair-minded observers find her on the left of the federal bench.

Republicans also get a nominee who likes showing off and whose YouTube moments and Google insights cause people to wince. There are likely to be more revelations like Stuart Taylor’s find last Saturday of this Sotomayor gem in a speech at Berkeley: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Invert the placement of “Latina woman” and “white male” and have a conservative say it: A career would be finished. …

A securities law blog, Lots Stocks and Gavel posts on another foolish Sotomayor decision.

… When the case came to her, Judge Sotomayor took the opinion that the law did not bar standing for all lawsuits in connection with the sale or purchase of securities, even though the act specifically said it did bar standing.  Citing a 30 year-old case, written long before the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards act,  she opined that the law still allowed for class action law suits to be filled by those who suffered direct loss due to the purchase or sale of securities.  Blue Chip Stamps v Manor Drug Stores, 421 US 723 (1975).

In other words, she took an activist position in favor of an interpretation that would have allowed the suit to go forward, in spite of specific language in the law that would have barred it.

Her ruling was overturned unanimously with the Supreme Courts opinion being authored by one of the most liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens.

WaPo’s Dana Milbank is back on the Sotomayor case.

In her years on the bench, Sonia Sotomayor has produced millions of words. Opponents of her Supreme Court nomination are particularly interested in 32 of them:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in a 2001 speech. …

David Harsanyi ponders our changing abortion attitudes.

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Richard Epstein cites an eminent domain case more egregious than Kelo that found Sotomayor in agreement.

… Here is one straw in the wind that does not bode well for a Sotomayor appointment. Justice Stevens of the current court came in for a fair share of criticism (all justified in my view) for his expansive reading in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) of the “public use language.” Of course, the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment is as complex as it is short: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” But he was surely done one better in the Summary Order in Didden v. Village of Port Chester issued by the Second Circuit in 2006. Judge Sotomayor was on the panel that issued the unsigned opinion–one that makes Justice Stevens look like a paradigmatic defender of strong property rights.

I have written about Didden in Forbes. The case involved about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined. Bart Didden came up with an idea to build a pharmacy on land he owned in a redevelopment district in Port Chester over which the town of Port Chester had given Greg Wasser control. Wasser told Didden that he would approve the project only if Didden paid him $800,000 or gave him a partnership interest. The “or else” was that the land would be promptly condemned by the village, and Wasser would put up a pharmacy himself. Just that came to pass. But the Second Circuit panel on which Sotomayor sat did not raise an eyebrow. Its entire analysis reads as follows: “We agree with the district court that [Wasser's] voluntary attempt to resolve appellants’ demands was neither an unconstitutional exaction in the form of extortion nor an equal protection violation.”

Maybe I am missing something, but American business should shudder in its boots if Judge Sotomayor takes this attitude to the Supreme Court. Justice Stevens wrote that the public deliberations over a comprehensive land use plan is what saved the condemnation of Ms. Kelo’s home from constitutional attack. Just that element was missing in the Village of Port Chester fiasco. Indeed, the threats that Wasser made look all too much like the “or else” diplomacy of the Obama administration in business matters. …

Mark Steyn has Sotomayorian experience.

Krauthammer’s Sotomayor take.

Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic wrote a series on possible nominees. Here’s his on Sotomayor. Rather than grounded in fact, a lot of this looks to be unattributed courthouse gossip.

… The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.” (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, “Will you please stop talking and let them talk?”) Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: “She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media.”

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues. …

More on the Cheney debate from a few sources. William McGurn is first.

… Ironically, it was left to Chris Matthews — one of the vice president’s most unrelenting critics — to offer the best take on last week’s dueling speeches. On his Sunday show, he put it this way: “I saw something from Barack Obama I never even saw in the campaign, a sense he was listening for footsteps, that he could hear Cheney coming at him and he was defensive.”

Think about that. Back in those heady days after the 2008 election, anyone who suggested that Mr. Obama might find himself playing defense to Dick Cheney on Guantanamo would have been hauled off as barking mad. Yet that’s exactly what Mr. Cheney has pulled off, leaving a desperate White House to try to drown him out by adding an Obama speech the same day Mr. Cheney was slated to address the American Enterprise Institute.

Of course, the effect was just the opposite. The White House reaction ended up elevating Mr. Cheney to Mr. Obama’s level, and ensuring that his words would be measured directly against the president’s. Like him or loathe him, Mr. Cheney forced the president to engage him.

For much of the Beltway, the Cheney surge is baffling. After all, when Mr. Cheney left office, his reputation seemed divided between those who thought him a punch line on late-night TV and those who thought him a war criminal. As so often happens, however, the conventional wisdom seems to have blinded Mr. Cheney’s ideological opponents to the many advantages he brings to the table. …

Toby Harnden in his Daily Telegraph blog.

The spectacle of two dueling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary. I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama’s address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely two minutes after his adversary had finished.

So who won the fight? (it’s hard to use anything other than a martial or pugilistic metaphor). Well, most people are on either one side or the other of this issue and I doubt today will have prompted many to switch sides.

But the very fact that Obama chose to schedule his speech (Cheney’s was announced first) at exactly the same time as the former veep was a sign of some weakness.

Dana Milbank in his WaPo column.

… The president seemed slightly off his game. He introduced Defense Secretary Robert Gates as “William Gates,” confusing his Cabinet member with the Microsoft founder. And he was thrown off by an apparent teleprompter malfunction at the end of his speech. Mostly, though, Obama struck a defensive tone. “The problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility,” he reminded his audience many times. Without naming Cheney, he objected to his critics’ trying “to scare people rather than educate them.”

At just that moment, some of those very words were being distributed to the audience at AEI: an advance text, still warm from the printer, of Cheney’s rebuttal. The crowd at the conservative think tank offered no applause during or after the Obama speech but gave a warm ovation when Cheney entered the room and flashed a crooked grin. His remarks went quickly to Ground Zero and “the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape being burned alive.”

In an echo of the with-us-or-against-us theme, Cheney told Obama: “In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground.”

Cheney, battling respiratory congestion, listed the many things that have made him dyspeptic. The “so-called truth commission.” The “feigned outrage based on a false narrative” of the opposition. The administration soliciting “applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo.” The “euphemisms” he thinks Democrats are using to sanitize terrorism.

“Tired of calling it a war? Use any term you prefer,” he growled. “Just remember: It is a serious step to begin unraveling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11.”

A swift uppercut to Obama’s chin! Nine more 9/11 jabs and Cheney was ready for his rubdown.

Shorts from National Review.

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Stuart Taylor, law correspondent extraordinaire for the National Journal, is not pleased with the supreme pick. It is passing strange to pick a judge whose latest controversial opinion is about to  be reversed by the Supreme Court.

… I have been hoping that despite our deep divisions, President Obama would coax his party, and the country, to think of Americans more as united by allegiance to democratic ideals and the rule of law and less as competing ethnic and racial groups driven by grievances that are rooted more in our troubled history than in today’s reality.

I also hope that Obama will use this Supreme Court appointment to re-enforce the message of his 2004 Democratic convention speech: “There’s not a black America, and white America, and Latino America, and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

But in this regard, the president’s emphasis on selective “empathy” for preferred racial and other groups as “the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges” is not encouraging, as I explained in a May 15 post on National Journal’s The Ninth Justice blog.

As for Sotomayor’s speech, fragmentary quotations admittedly cannot capture every qualification and nuance. She also stressed that although “men lawyers… need to work on” their “attitudes,” many have already reached “great moments of enlightenment.” She noted that she tries to be impartial. And she did not overtly suggest that judges should play identity politics.

I place the earlier quotations in more-detailed context here so that readers can assess Sotomayor’s meaning for themselves. …

… In one of her few explosive cases, Sotomayor voted (without writing an opinion) to join two colleagues in upholding what I see as raw racial discrimination by New Haven, Conn. The city denied promotions to the firefighters who did best on a test of job-related skills because none was black. (See my column, “New Haven’s Injustice Shouldn’t Disappear.”) …

Jennifer Rubin notes the NY Times distress about the fall of the dollar. “What did you expect?” She says.

… It is no mystery how this happened. As the Times notes, the Fed “is printing money from thin air, and the government is issuing trillions of dollars in new debt as it tries to spend its way out of the recession with a huge stimulus package, new lending programs, health care overhauls and automotive rescues.” The immediate impact is already seen in higher oil and other commodity prices and higher interest rates. In the longer term economists now worry about the loss of the U.S. AAA bond rating. All this is occurring as unemployment is climbing into double digits. …

In a normal day, like most business folk, Pickerhead will ask the CFO, “What were collections today?” The same question has been asked about the federal government. A blog post from Safe Haven.com has the distressing answers.

… In 2007 and 2008, government tax revenues averaged about $633.15 billion per quarter. For the first quarter of 2009, however, the numbers just in tell us that tax receipts totaled only about $442.39 billion — a decline of 30%.Looking to confirm the trend, we compared the data for April – the big kahuna of tax collection months – to the 2007-2008 average, and found that individual income taxes this year were down more than 40%.

The situation is even worse for corporate income taxes, which were down a stunning 67%

When you add in all revenue from all sources (including Social Security revenue, government fees, etc.), the fiscal year-to-date – October through April – revenue shortfall comes to 19%, vs. the 14.6% projected in Obama’s budget. If, however, the accelerating shortfall apparent year-to-date, and in April in particular, continues, the spread between projected and actual tax receipts will widen considerably.

Tellingly, for the first time since 1983, the U.S. government posted a deficit in April. That’s a big swing in the wrong direction, as the bump in personal tax collections in April historically results in a big surplus — on average about $68 billion. …

Jennifer Rubin reports even BO has noticed the revenue shortage. Guess who he’s blaming?

… That darn Bush left a mess on national security. And what’s a guy to do with such a deficit left on his doorstep? But the facts tell a different story, as this chart illustrates. To a greater degree than any predecessor, Obama has run up the deficit — with little to show for it.

Blaming the previous administration is a time-honored political trick. But voters tend to hold the party in power responsible for the state of the country’s finances. That’s how the Republicans lost the White House and I suspect the public will be no less forgiving in 2010 or 2012 if things don’t turn around. …

National Review notes Japan’s opposition party is turning the screws on their government for its purchase of dollar denominated assets.

And Sebastian Mallaby explains China’s dollar dilemma.

… China has accumulated at least $1.5 trillion in dollar assets, according to my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Brad Setser, so a (highly plausible) 30 percent move in the yuan-dollar rate would cost the country around $450 billion — about a tenth of its economy. And, to make the dilemma even more painful, China’s determination to control the appreciation of its currency forces it to buy billions more in dollar assets every month. Like an addict at a slot machine, China is adding to its hopeless bet, ensuring that its eventual losses will be even heavier.

It is easy to appreciate China’s sudden appetite for bold new ideas about international finance. But Beijing’s leaders look less like the architects of a new Bretton Woods than like aspiring Houdinis.

Bret Stephens notes the disconnect between deciding something is a worthy goal and actually figuring out how to get there.

… The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!

Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.

Now take the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Phase One: Talk to Iran, Syria, whoever. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Peace!

In this case, the administration seems to think that diplomacy, like aspirin, is something you take two of in the morning to take away the pain. But as Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla notes in his book, “Advice to War Presidents,” diplomacy “can neither create nor change basic intentions, interests, or convictions. . . . To say, ‘We’ve got a problem. Let’s try diplomacy, let’s sit down and talk’ abstracts from the important questions: What will you say? And why should anything you say lead anyone to accommodate you?”

Ditto for Mr. Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons. In a speech last month in Prague, right after North Korea had illegally tested a ballistic missile, Mr. Obama promised a new nonproliferation regime, along with “a structure in place that ensures when any nation [breaks the rules], they will face consequences.” Whereupon the U.N. Security Council promptly failed to muster the votes for a resolution condemning Pyongyang’s launch.

Now Kim Jong Il has tested another nuke, and we’re back at the familiar three-step. Phase One: Propose a “structure.” . . . …

Simon Heffer of London’s Daily Telegraph thinks sometime Obama will have to take a stand.

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up.

… In other words, rather than explaining the bleak choices before us and explaining why his preferences have the best chance of succeeding, Obama has so far reduced his presidency to two themes: “Bush did it” and “I’m not your normal white male President.” If he keeps this monotony up, at some point even the comedians are going to notice the predictability.

Borowitz reports U.S. prepared to respond to North Korea with “strongest possible adjectives.”

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The new president pays tribute to George W. Bush; according to Charles Krauthammer anyway.

… If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.

The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they’re back.

Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

Cosmetic changes such as Obama’s declaration that “we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel.” Laughable. High-toned liberal law firms are climbing over each other for the frisson of representing these miscreants in court. …

In his second effort upon return, David Warren writes about his fears for the new administration.

… I think Barack Obama came quite well out of his first 100 days. The personal qualities that got him elected do transfer to elected office, in his case. He is eloquent and unflappable; he is unreadable yet outwardly consistently charming; he looks close up when at a distance, and at a distance when close up; he is smooth and ruthless in the pursuit of his political goals. He has, as we already knew, the gift of charisma with crowds, the seemingly magical ability to embody sweet reason even when making statements entirely hollow of substance. There is something very presidential in that.

I was especially impressed with the way he remained “above the fray” when one cabinet appointment after another proved to be a dog. Somehow it wasn’t Obama’s mistake; somehow it became the fault of the person he had appointed. The new president had the gift of making himself invisible at will; though it should be said that he depends on supine mass media to accomplish this trick. …

Noemie Emery reminds us of the bleak GOP year of 1977 and how Reagan built the opposition to Jimmy Carter, the first incarnation of Obama.

In 1977, as in 2009, the future seemed dark for the country’s conservatives, shut out of all of the conduits to power, with nary a bright spot in sight. “The result of the 1976 election was Democrats in power as far as the eye could see,” wrote Michael Barone in Our Country (1992). “It was almost universally expected that the Democrats would hold on to the executive branch for eight years; it was considered unthinkable that they could lose either house of Congress.” “Once again, the death knell of the Republican Party was being sounded,” added Steven F. Hayward, in his two volume study of Reagan. Notes historian John J. Pitney Jr., “The hot bet of the moment was not whether the Republican Party could reshape politics, but whether it could survive at all.”

At the time, the New York Times said the party was “closer to extinction than ever before in its 122 year history.” House minority leader John Rhodes thought it could go the way of the Whigs and vanish completely. Robert Novak said the election showed the “long descent of the Republican Party into irrelevance, defeat, and perhaps eventual disappearance.”

Gerald Ford had just lost to Jimmy Carter. Republicans held 38 seats in the Senate, and just 143 seats in the House. According to a Gallup poll, more than twice as many Americans identified with the Democrats as with the Republicans. In Fortune magazine, election scholar Everett Carll Ladd pronounced that the GOP was “in a weaker position than any major party of the United States since the Civil War.” Jimmy Carter, the incoming president, was widely regarded as the cure-all for what ailed the Democrats, a social conservative who had been a career Navy officer before coming home to take over the family business (a peanut farm in Plains, Georgia), and who planned to restore simple and homespun American virtue to a scandal-wracked land.

If the GOP seemed washed up, so did Ronald Reagan, who had led a conservative revolt inside the party and then lost to Gerald Ford, who would lose in November. ..

Mark Steyn Corner posts on Government Motors.

… Under traditional bankruptcy restructuring, the various GM/Chrysler brands — Chevy, Dodge, etc — would have wound up in the hands of new owners, domestic and foreign, willing to make a go of them. Instead, Obama and his car czars have delivered these marques into the formal control of the unions (the ones who got the companies into this mess) and of the government — which cannot run a car company. Why? Because it will make decisions for political rather than business reasons. And unions will make decisions for the “workforce” rather than the market. At the moment the GM/Chrysler unions cannot make a car at a price anyone is willing to pay for it. Why give them the companies?

Those of us who’ve lived with government car companies know how this story ends: see Iain Murray’s column today — and, for a precis of life under a union/government alliance, ask Iain to explain the British expression “Beer and sandwiches at Number Ten.”

I love American cars. I have a Chevy truck, Chevy SUV, the whole Steyn fleet. But I will never buy another Chevy until it is restored to private ownership. When GM sneezes, America catches a cold. When GM is put on government life-support, it’s America — and the American idea — that’s dying.

Ross Mackenzie of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has interesting health care proposal.

Our fabulous president said the other day, “I will not rest until the dream of health-care reform is achieved in the United States of America.” What do you think about that?

As we all know, he’s a dreamer, and on this one he’s dreaming big time – or smoking something. His is a protracted exercise in wishful thinking.

You don’t believe in reform? You don’t believe our health-care system needs reforming?

Reform means change, presumably for the better. But not all change is prudent or good. Going to hell is a form of change too, yet hell is not somewhere many want to be.

Does the quality of care the nation’s health system provides need improving?

Not much. Americans receive the highest quality health care in the world – bar none. What does need major improving is the nearly dysfunctional system that finances this outstanding care. …

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It is the day before we honor our war dead, citizens who died in wars that were the failures of our politicians. Today much of our content is comments on the remarkable dueling Cheney/Obama speeches at the end of last week. First though let’s have Mark Steyn’s weekly Orange County Register column which is a peek into the language of govspeech.

I was in Vermont the other day and made the mistake of picking up the local paper. Impressively, it contained a quarter-page ad, a rare sight these days. The rest of the page was made up by in-house promotions for the advertising department’s special offer on yard-sale announcements, etc. But the one real advertisement was from something called SEVCA. SEVCA is a “nonprofit agency,” just like The New York Times, General Motors and the state of California. And it stands for “South-Eastern Vermont Community Action.”

Why, they’re “community organizers,” just like the president! The designated “anti-poverty agency” is taking out quarter-page ads in every local paper because they’re “seeking applicants for several positions funded in full or part by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA)” – that’s the “stimulus” to you and me. Isn’t it great to see those bazillions of stimulus dollars already out there stimulating the economy? Creating lots of new jobs at SEVCA, in order to fulfill the president’s promise to “create or keep” 2.5 million jobs. At SEVCA, he’s not just keeping all the existing ones, but creating new ones, too. Of the eight new positions advertised, the first is:

“ARRA Projects Coordinator.”

Gotcha. So the first new job created by the stimulus is a job “coordinating” other programs funded by the stimulus. What’s next?

“Grantwriter.”

That’s how they spell it. Like in “Star Wars” – Luke Grantwriter waving his hope saber as instructed by his mentor Obi-Bam Baracki (“May the Funds be with you!”). The Grantwriter will be responsible for writing grant applications “to augment ARRA funds.” So the second new job created by stimulus funding funds someone to petition for additional funding for projects funded by the stimulus. …

David Harsanyi is the first to comment on the speeches. He columns on Obama’s assertion that Bush policies were rooted in “fear.”

… Obama, after all, has been as masterful as anyone in using dread to ram through ideology-driven legislation and silencing political opposition.

During the “debate” over the government’s “stimulus” plan, the president claimed that the consequences of not passing his plan would mean the “recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

To contend that a country that survived the Great Depression, world wars, a Civil War and the social upheavals of the past century could not reverse a recession without an immense government bailout is farcical. (Moreover, almost nothing the president’s economists predicted has come to fruition; the opposite has. We are still approaching double-digit unemployment and sinking deeper into crisis, despite the passage of the “stimulus” plan.)

How many times did proponents of the “recovery” package or other recent spending plans dispatch the bromide “something needs to be done,” or claim that choosing “inaction” was tantamount to national suicide? Those aren’t exactly arguments drenched in reason. Panic, maybe.

But the most common brand of public policy that relies on scary talk is environmental. We need not catalog the endless end-of-days scenarios that environmentalists have been laying on us for more than three decades to understand how intrinsically they rely on fear. …

Now some of our Corner favorites. Ramesh Ponnuru.

… President Obama and former Vice President Cheney weren’t so much a study in contrast today as a portrait of harmony. Both men agree that the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist policies were largely correct. Cheney signaled his acceptance of this view by vigorously defending those policies. Obama signaled it by largely adopting those same policies and emitting a fog of words to cover up the fact. …

Andrew McCarthy.

… President Obama’s speech is the September 10th mindset trying to come to grips with September 11th reality. It is excruciating to watch as the brute facts of life under a jihadist threat, which the president is now accountable for confronting, compel him forever to climb out of holes dug by his high-minded campaign rhetoric — the reversals on military detention, commission trials, prisoner-abuse photos, and the like.

The need to castigate his predecessor, even as he substantially adopts the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy, is especially unbecoming in a president who purports to transcend our ideological divisions. …

Pete Hegseth.

… The president’s juggling-act stands in stark contrast to former Vice President Cheney’s grown-up speech at AEI. After hearing President Obama literally call the Bush approach “a misguided experiment” and “a mess,” Cheney calmly dispelled the caricature of the big bad Bush administration.

His defense of doing what it takes — within the law and under the Constitution — struck me as the kind of gutsy, straightforward, and yet sophisticated approach our country needs from the White House. Cheney underscored the continued threat we face, and the need to support our war-fighters — and intelligence operatives — as they do the dirty work of defending the Constitution. He also emphasized that a) they must have all the tools they need (within the law); b) we can’t afford to start releasing terrorists, thereby putting our troops in more danger; and c) who cares what Europe thinks, American security is at stake here. …

Jay Nordlinger.

There are, of course, 10,000 things to say about President Obama’s national-security speech today, and I said just a few below. Once you start, it’s kind of hard to stop — sort of like eating potato chips. But let me offer just one more point — a somewhat offbeat one.

Obama said, “The Supreme Court that invalidated the system of prosecution at Guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by Republican presidents.”

I don’t remember a president’s talking this way: about the party affiliations of presidents who appointed Supreme Court justices. I don’t recall a president’s describing a Court that way. Been following politics for a while. And I’ve never heard an important presidential national-security speech that sounded so much like a campaign speech — even in the midst of an actual campaign. …

McCarthy again.

… When businesses fail, we have a framework, an institution, and a set of values that are triggered:  The framework is called bankruptcy, the institution is the United States Bankruptcy Court, and the applicable values are found in the corpus known as federal bankruptcy law, which prescribe bedrock principles like: secured creditors take priority over unsecured creditors.  Rather than trusting in those things and using settled law as a compass, Obama has adopted an ad hoc approach which has proved grossly ineffective and — given the moral hazard it infuses in the entire financial system — unsustainable.

Why isn’t the GM debacle a violation of the “rule of law” that Pres. Obama and Attorney General Holder are so fond of lecturing us about?

Now, to favorites from Contentions. John Podhoretz.

There is much to say about President Obama’s speech today, but one thing especially jumped out at me—his accusation that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 response was the result of an excess of fear: “Our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” he said.

Speaking dismissively of “fear,” conceiving of it as a bad thing, is an old trope, dating back to FDR’s notion that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It has within it, this idea, the adult’s condescending and loving laugh when a child is afraid of the vacuum cleaner or of an ant. Fear, from this perspective, is unreasoning and based on ignorance, a misunderstanding of what is and what is not a true threat.

But fear was an entirely responsible response to September 11. …

Jennifer Rubin.

… One final thought: Obama has placed his presidency in the hands of America’s enemies. Should they succeed in any significant operation, his words disparaging his predecessors’ efforts will come crashing down on him and his party. In politics, as in life, you never want to give over control of your destiny to others. But in a shocking way the President of the United States did just that today.

Jonathan Tobin.

One is hard pressed to think of a more unlikely and more lopsided competition for public approval than a debate between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney. The president’s charisma and virtues as a public speaker are no secret. And whether it is entirely deserved or not, Cheney’s reputation as Washington’s prince of darkness is established in the public imagination of the republic. Obama’s easy popularity is matched only by Cheney’s lack of appeal.

And yet if the speeches the two gave this morning on national security and the record of the Bush administration are heard or read alongside each-other, there is no escaping the conclusion that the former vice president got the better of the current resident of the White House. Cheney’s speech was straightforward. He addressed the accusations that have been leveled at the record of the government he served and he calmly and methodically debunked them. …

… Obama’s address was full of good sound bytes. But in terms of substance, it was nothing but moral preening, condescension and self-congratulation. …

Closing the section is an impressive Peter Wehner blog post that puts all of this in historical perspective.

… if Mr. Obama wants to tear into past presidents for violations of the Constitution and basic human rights during war time, perhaps he should start with those whom he must surely consider the worst violators of our Constitution and our values: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

Harvard Professor Jack Goldsmith — who worked in the Bush Justice Department and who opposed waterboarding — has written that

in response to the secession crisis that began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln raised armies and borrowed money on the credit of the United States, both powers that the Constitution gave to Congress; he suspended the writ of habeas corpus in many places even though most constitutional scholars, then and now, believed that only Congress could do this; he imposed a blockade on the South without specific congressional approval; he imprisoned thousands of southern sympathizers and war agitators without any charge or due process; and he ignored a judicial order from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to release a prisoner detained illegally.

“No president before or since Lincoln,” Goldsmith has written, “has acted in such disregard of constitutional traditions.” Perhaps President Obama can therefore devote an entire speech to what he must consider to be the awful and unforgivable assault on the Constitution by Lincoln, his purported hero.

After that, President Obama might want to devote an entire speech — or perhaps several speeches — to FDR. After all, President Roosevelt gave order for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans and people of Japanese descent during World War II, a violation of rights President Bush has never approached. All told, around 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals were forcibly relocated and interned in “War Relocation Camps.” …

For the next few decades, there will be many who say our present economic unpleasantness was caused by capitalism. Steve Malanga puts the lie to some of that in an essay about lying as antithetical to the function of markets.

The further we get from the housing bubble that helped to prompt our current financial meltdown, the less we seem bothered by the decline in trustworthiness and the rise in cheating that fueled the irrational exuberance of the home mortgage market. And then along comes New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews to remind us of that era via his own personal story of attempted mortgage deception and borrowing irresponsibility. If you want to understand how individual wrongs by seemingly upstanding members of society piled up and helped fuel our national ruin, read Andrews’ piece, My Personal Credit Crisis, in last Sunday’s Times.

As an economics reporter for the Times, Andrews analyzed and described the frothy housing market before he made his own unwise plunge. In a story he published in June of 2004 he explained the growing risk that home borrowers were taking on, including those who used “innovations” in the market, like no-documentation mortgages that were nicknamed “liar’s loans,” which didn’t require income verification. In the story, Andrews noted that their growing use alarmed housing experts. …

… Is there a larger consequence to such shifts in attitudes? Adam Smith would certainly have thought so. A moral philosopher, Smith laid the groundwork for his ideas on trade and commerce in his first book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he traced the evolution of mankind’s ethics from our nature as social beings who feel bad if we do something that we believe an imagined impartial observe would consider improper. Out of this basic mechanism for making judgments, what Smith called sympathy and modern psychology calls empathy, we create civilizing institutions, like courts of law, to help us govern our economy as it becomes more complex. Over time a society relies on these institutions to reinforce our individual values. …

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Michael Barone takes up India policy.

Last November 131, million Americans voted, and the whole world took notice. Over the last month, about 700 million Indians voted, and most Americans, like most of the world, didn’t much notice. To be sure, American elections are more important to people all over the world than those in any other country. But the election in India is more important to Americans than most of us realize. Including, perhaps, our president. …

… Obama has continued military operations in Iraq and stepped them up in Afghanistan, but otherwise he is banking heavily on the proposition that he can convince those who have been our sworn enemies that they should be our friends. Maybe that will work. But in the meantime, it would not hurt to show some solicitude for our friends in India, with whom we share strategic interests and moral principles. The 700 million voters of India have chosen to be our ally. We should take them up on it.

Karl Rove does a victory lap over Obama flip-flops on national security policies. Domestically though, we are watching Bush on steroids.

In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called “the projection of appealing images.” All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image “becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself.” Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out.

Mr. Obama’s appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America’s security interests.

Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

Jennifer Rubin comments on the Gitmo two step.

Let’s see if we can figure this out. Before he knew much of anything about Guantanamo or had a plan for how to treat the detainees, Obama announced Guantanamo’s closing, hoping to impress his friends on the Left and overseas. But it’s hugely unpopular — so unpopular you have 90 senators (more than you usually get for tributes to National Girl Scout Day and the like) scrambling to get out of the way of the voters who would descend on their offices en masse if this ever resulted in terrorists coming to the U.S. The administration wants to strong-arm and pressure lawmakers into staying on board and, left to their own devices, liberal lawmakers would happily oblige. But they can’t — because, after all, the majority of voters in this country think this is nuts. But they still haven’t a clue what to do with these people. So you have a meandering, equivocating performance today as Democrats try to balance their loyalty to the president and their sense of self-preservation. In that fight, it’s easy to predict the winner.

David Warren returns from a holiday with a paean to the printed word.

The last five weeks I’ve been on holiday, getting as far away from it all as I could, mentally when not corporally. The reader may guess I am a news junkie; it would be a safe guess for anyone who works in newspapers. Being removed from the necessity of consulting the daily news does not cure one of the habit, however. And since a holiday isn’t Lent, I wasn’t planning to starve my curiosity about current events. But my wrists told me I needed a holiday from my laptop, and my eyes added that they were sick of being glared by backlit screens.

I, anyway, don’t watch television; succumbing to temptation not even on those rare occasions when I am myself being interviewed. For some reason I have never liked television — actually, “reasons” in the plural, and I could list them in a book. But the dislike extends to the irrational, and were I dictator of the universe the first three things I’d disinvent would be cars, and TV. (I know, that’s only two things, but as we learned from fairy tales, it is wise to reserve one’s third wish.)

Therefore I resolved to read only such news as I could find in print. …

David Harsanyi expects the U. S. will be invaded by Le Car imitations.

Finally, Americans can start moving forward — albeit in small, unsafe, state-mandated, subsidized pieces of junk.

We all remember a time when we drove around in nearly any variety of car or truck desired. Well, thank goodness we’re getting past that kind of anarchy.

Rejoice, my fellow citizens, in the forthcoming automobile emission and efficiency standards, even if they happen to add more than $1,000 to the cost of an average car.

Just consider it charity, or an “investment.” Because, needless to say, you might as well pony up the dough since your tax dollars already are keeping the auto industry afloat.

Then again, despite my profound appreciation for all the decency being showered upon me, it is difficult not to marvel at the demagoguery and corruption that’s employed to get it done.

Take the supposed coming together of California, the United Auto Workers, Washington and the auto industry, in support of stringent new standards that would cut an entire 0.05 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. …

John Stossel thinks old folks are becoming “greedy geezers.”

Isn’t it high time America did less for the elderly? A politically incorrect question for sure. But Medicare has an astounding $34-trillion unfunded liability. And because of rising unemployment, its hospital-stay program will go broke two years earlier than previously predicted.

I spoke with residents of La Posada, a development in Florida that made Forbes’s list of top 10 “ritzy” retirement communities. These folks are well off. And they get a bonus: You pay for most of their health care under Medicare.

The retirees love it. Everyone likes getting free stuff. And Medicare often makes going to the doctor just about free.

Why is this a good thing?

“What about those young people [who pick up the tab]? What kind of legacy are we leaving for them?” asks Harvard Business School Professor Regina Herzlinger. “We’re really stealing from them.”

NY Times Art Review introduces us to the Storm King Wavefield in the Hudson River Valley. Perhaps because of spending so much time on the water, Pickerhead loves this work by Maya Lin, the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC.

MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y. — When the painter Winslow Homer left New York City for this Hudson Valley hamlet in the summer of 1878, he was reported to be “a little under the weather.” He was probably suffering a nervous breakdown. Whether the cause was a failed romance or despair at seeing the Gilded Age shatter around him, we don’t know. But he felt unmoored and clung to the natural world. The dozens of watercolors he did that summer were landscape-filled, with sloping pastures and wall-like mountains dwarfing human figures, idylls so perfect that they look unreal.

The New York State Thruway buzzes through that landscape now. Most of the pastures are gone, but the mountains are still here: Schunnemunk, behind a series of ridges; Storm King, running high and long before dropping into the Hudson. And recently, some new additions, baby mountains, have appeared: seven undulating, grass-covered ranges of them.

These mini-Catskills were conceived and built — molded is really the word — by the artist Maya Lin as a permanent installation at the Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre sculpture park that for almost half a century has been devoted to the display of outdoor works either designed for the location or too large or strange to fit comfortably elsewhere. …

Adam Smith gives us a picture of Zimbabwe’s One Hundred Trillion Dollar note.

In this case money tells us a little about Robert Mugabe and a lot about centrally planned economies. The hundred trillion dollar note is literally not worth the paper it’s printed on, and the city authorities in Harare had to put up notices in the loos forbidding people to use banknotes in the toilets.

Bjørn Lomborg warns about the climate-industrial complex.

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the “military-industrial complex,” cautioning that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He worried that “there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a “climate-industrial complex” is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain. …

Scrappleface reports Pelosi first learned of 9/11 in late 2003.

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