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Bill McGurn alerts us to today’s DC school choice rally.

Some hypocrisies are apparently more equal than others. If, for example, you are a politician who preaches “traditional values” and you get caught in a hotel with a woman who is not your wife, the press is going to have a field day with your tartuffery.

If, however, you are a pol who piously tells inner-city families that public schools are the answer — and you do this while safely ensconcing your own kids in some private haven — the press corps mostly winks.

Today at 1 o’clock in Washington, we’ll learn if anything has changed. Two groups — D.C. Children First and D.C. Parents for School Choice — are holding a rally at Freedom Plaza, just across from the offices of the city government. As their flier explains, “D.C. families deserve the same kind of choices that the Mayor, City Council Members, and Federal leaders with children have.”

The precipitate cause of this rally is the Democrats’ passage of an amendment tucked into the omnibus spending bill. Sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), the amendment effectively ended the Opportunity Scholarship Program, a lifeline now used by more than 1,700 schoolchildren to escape one of America’s most miserable public school systems. Rally organizers say that the silence from local leaders was a big reason the Democratic Congress felt free to kill off the program. …

David Harsanyi tells us about Jon Stewart’s history lesson.

It’s fun to be idealistic in a world of moral absolutes. I know, I’m a columnist. But when we start discussing history, things always seem to get complicated.

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show”learned this recently when debating the Foundation for Defense of Democracies president Cliff May about the harsh interrogation techniques administered during the Bush administration.

When May asked Stewart if he also considered Harry Truman a war criminal for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the host said yes. A few days later, however, Stewart apologized for his blasphemy, saying Truman’s decision was, in fact, “complicated.”

Things were indeed complicated. They are always complicated.

That’s the point. …

Thomas Sowell has a second part to his column on the Supreme pick. He writes about Oliver Wendell Holmes who never would qualify according to the empathy doctrine.

After a lunch with Judge Learned Hand, as Holmes was departing in a carriage to return to work, Judge Hand said to him: “Do justice, sir. Do justice.”

Holmes had the carriage stopped. “That is not my job,” he said. “My job is to apply the law.”

Holmes wrote that he did not “think it desirable that the judges should undertake to renovate the law.” If the law needed changing, that was what the democratic process was for. Indeed, that was what the separation of powers in legislative, executive and judicial branches by the Constitution of the United States was for.

“The criterion of constitutionality,” he said, “is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.” That was for other people to decide. For judges, he said: “When we know what the source of the law has said it shall be, our authority is at an end.”

One of Holmes’ judicial opinions ended: “I am not at liberty to consider the justice of the Act.”

Some have tried to depict Justice Holmes as someone who saw no need for morality in the law. On the contrary, he said: “The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.” But a society’s need to put moral content into its laws did not mean that it was the judge’s job to second-guess the moral choices made by others who were authorized to make such choices.

Justice Holmes understood the difference between the rule of law and the rule of lawyers and judges.

And Richard Epstein warns against “empathy.”

… It might be smart politics for Obama to play to his natural constituencies, but intellectually there is, I think, no worse way to go about the selection process. Empathy matters in running business, charities and churches. But judges perform different functions. They interpret laws and resolve disputes. Rather than targeting his favorite groups, Obama should follow the most time-honored image of justice: the blind goddess, Iustitia, carrying the scales of justice.

Iustitia is not blind to the general principles of human nature. Rather her conception of blindness follows Aristotle’s articulation of corrective justice in his Nicomachean ethics. In looking at a dispute between an injurer and an injured party, or between a creditor and debtor, the judge ignores personal features of the litigant that bear no relationship to the merits of the case.

So in a tort action, determining the fault of a driver doesn’t turn on whether he or she is rich or poor, citizen or alien. It’s simply turns on who was in compliance with the rules of the road. And in a collection case the first order of business is whether the debtor has paid his debt, not his or her wealth or citizenship. …

Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald columnist says Joe Biden is just the tip of the stupidity iceberg.

You know what they say about monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare. My question is, if you sat an infinite number of Joe Bidens at an infinite number of microphones, would any of them ever say anything that wasn’t infinitely stupid? From his reminiscences about Franklin Roosevelt’s famous White House television address on the day of the 1929 stock market crash (that is, three years before Roosevelt was president and 20 years before Americans bought TVs) to his campaign-rally exhortation to Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham to ”Stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see ya!” (Graham’s in a wheelchair), Biden’s serial stupidities have become a national mortification.

Listening to Biden’s gaffeprompter running full speed ahead on the subject of swine flu last week — he warned Americans that airplanes, subways and classrooms are microbiologic deathtraps, then promptly took a train to Delaware — my first thought was, who in the world made this guy vice president? My second was, oh, right. And my third was, no wonder people are always calling Barack Obama the smartest guy in the room. At most White House meetings, it’s probably literally — if dishearteningly — true.

Consider Lisa Jackson, Obama’s EPA boss, explaining market economics during an NPR interview. “The president has said, and I couldn’t agree more, that what this country needs is one single national roadmap that tells automakers, who are trying to become solvent again, what kind of car it is that they need to be designing and building for the American people.”

”Is that the role of the government?” asked the reporter. “That doesn’t sound like free enterprise.”

”Well, it is free enterprise, in a way,” declared Jackson. Yes, in the same way that Madonna is a chastity goddess. …

Corner posts on Specter.

Jay Nordlinger says it’s a myth that the GOP has moved to the right.

… I hope you’ll accept that National Review is a pretty good barometer of conservative opinion. A lot of people consider NR the flagship journal of American conservatism. So, as an exercise, consider NR’s positions on George W. Bush and the Republicans. You will see that we steadily criticized them and opposed them—from the right.

Bush and the Republicans spent massively, especially in Bush’s first term. We opposed that, mightily. The president’s most cherished initiative, probably, was the Faith-Based Initiative. We opposed that. Then there was his education policy: No Child Left Behind. We opposed that (mainly on grounds that it wrongly expanded the federal role). He had his new federal entitlement: a prescription-drug benefit. We of course opposed that. He imposed steel tariffs—for a season—which we opposed. He signed the McCain-Feingold law on campaign finance—which we opposed. He established a new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security. We opposed that. He defended race preferences in the University of Michigan Law School case; we were staunchly on the other side. He of course proposed a sweeping new immigration law, which included what amounted to amnesty. We were four-square against that.

I am talking about some things that were very dear to Bush’s heart, and central to his efforts—and self-image, as a leader. NR, the conservative arbiter, opposed those things. The Republican party, by and large, supported them—with one glaring exception: the immigration push.

What on Bush’s domestic agenda did NR support? His tax-cutting, though we had some different ideas about what to do. His Social Security reform, which didn’t get very far. Etc. All thoroughly mainstream conservative stuff. …

Jonah Goldberg agrees. And he gives us the guts of a speech he gave in 2004 laying out the spendthrift ways of G. W. Bush.

A few quick facts. George W. Bush has:

• increased federal spending on education by 60.8 percent;

• increased federal spending on labor by 56 percent;

• increased federal spending on the interior by 23.4 percent;

• increased federal spending on defense by 27.6 percent.

And of course he has:

• created a massive department of homeland security;

• signed a campaign-finance bill he pretty much said he thought was unconstitutional (thereby violating his oath to uphold, protect, and defend the constitution);

• signed the farm bill, which was a non-kosher piñata filled with enough pork to bend space and time;

• pushed through a Medicare plan which starts with a price tag of $400 billion but will — according to every expert who studies the issue — go up a gazillion-bajillion dollars over the next decade;

Walter Williams takes up grade inflation.

… Academic fraud is rife at many of the nation’s most prestigious and costliest universities. At Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A’s. At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. The Boston Globe called Harvard’s grading practices “the laughing stock of the Ivy League.” Eighty percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A’s and B’s. Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean’s list. At Stanford University, where F grades used to be banned, only 6 percent of student grades were as low as a C.

Some college administrators will tell us that the higher grades merely reflect higher-quality students. Balderdash! SAT scores have been in decline for four decades and at least a third of entering freshmen must enroll in a remedial course either in math, writing or reading, which indicates academic fraud at the high school level. A recent survey of more than 30,000 first-year students revealed that nearly half spent more hours drinking than study. Another survey found that a third of students expected B’s just for attending class, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the assigned reading. …

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Kevin Hassett comments on the Chrysler deal.

I feel like I have seen this bad gangster movie before.

In the opening scene, a naive investor buys some bonds, explaining to his staff that they are a sound investment secured by hard assets. Even if the company goes under, the investor explains, bond investors stand to get about 80 percent of their money back.

The next day, a government official calls and offers to buy up the bonds at 33 cents on the dollar, while giving controlling interest in the company to the labor unions. The investor refuses. That night, a man shows up at his home.

“We’re not saying anything bad is going to happen to you,” the tough says, “but the big boss is going to be very disappointed in you if you don’t take the deal. By the way, how’s your little girl? Is she still going to school down on Federal Street?” The investor caves.

The evolution of the Chrysler LLC bankruptcy seemed almost as bad. The Obama administration brokered a deal that gave labor unions a 55 percent equity stake in Chrysler, putting their interests ahead of the secured interests of bondholders. …

Thomas Sowell on the Supreme pick.

Justice David Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court presents President Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic or whatever, are missing the point.

That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group “representation” is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.

That President Obama has made “empathy” with certain groups one of his criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee is a dangerous sign of how much further the Supreme Court may be pushed away from the rule of law and toward even more arbitrary judicial edicts to advance the agenda of the left and set it in legal concrete, immune from the democratic process.

Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with “empathy” for groups A, B and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y or Z? Nothing could be further from the rule of law. That would be bad news, even in a traffic court, much less in a court that has the last word on your rights under the Constitution of the United States. …

Stuart Taylor has Supreme thoughts.

… With such a big Democratic majority in the Senate, Obama could get just about anyone confirmed easily. But the Republicans could bleed him some politically if he made an exceptionally controversial pick such as Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge based in New York.

Obama would probably prefer to make a truly outstanding choice, and if possible a consensus choice. He will not see this as some exercise in political gamesmanship. He may also want to break the boring pattern of staffing the Supreme Court with cloistered appellate judges. He said during the campaign that he liked the Earl Warren model — a big-time politician who can lead the court by force of personality and convictions.

Obama has said he wants a Supreme Court justice to have empathy for the powerless; he voted against Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, accusing them of siding with the powerful. Obama is, of course, pro-choice on abortion and pro-civil liberties. But he applauded a conservative Second Amendment decision last June and assailed a liberal decision striking down the death penalty for raping a child. Both stances were widely seen as more politics than principle, but he may want to keep sounding the same political notes on the judicial front.

Presidential war powers seems an especially interesting issue area to watch. Now that he’s president — and taking some of the same positions that George W. Bush took about his power to detain suspected terrorists without criminal charges — Obama might like to reverse the 5-4 majority (which included Souter) that kept ruling against Bush in the Guantanamo cases. …

Robert Samuelson says the administration’s bias against oil and gas is a grave error.

… Contrary to popular wisdom, the United States still has huge oil and natural-gas resources. The outer continental shelf (OCS), including parts that have been off limits to drilling since the early 1980s, may contain much natural gas and 86 billion barrels of oil, about four times today’s “proven” U.S. reserves. The U.S. Geological Survey recently estimated that the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Montana may hold 3.65 billion barrels, about 22 times a 1995 estimate. And then there’s upwards of 2 trillion barrels of oil shale, concentrated in Colorado. If 800 billion barrels were recoverable, that’s triple Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves.

None of these sources, of course, will quickly provide much oil or natural gas. Projects take 5, 10, 15 years. The OCS estimates are just that. The oil and gas must still be located—a costly, chancy and time-consuming process. Extracting oil from shale (in effect, a rock) requires heating the shale and poses major environmental problems. Its economic viability remains uncertain. But added oil from any of these sources could ultimately diminish dependence on imports, now almost 60 percent of U.S. consumption, while the exploration and development process would immediately boost high-wage jobs (geologists, petroleum engineers, roustabouts, steelworkers).

Though straightforward, this logic mostly eludes the Obama administration, which is fixated on “green jobs,” and wind and solar energy. Championing clean fuels has become a political set piece. On Earth Day (April 22), the president visited an Iowa factory that builds towers for wind turbines. “It’s time for us to [begin] a new era of energy exploration in America,” he said. “We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy.”

The president is lauded as a great educator; in this case, he provided much miseducation. He implied that there’s a choice between promoting renewables and relying on oil. Actually, the two are mostly disconnected. …

What do the NBA and the NFL owe to colleges and universities? According to Allen Barra, a lot.

… There are many reasons for the rise of the NFL and NBA over the past half-century, but one of the most important is seldom discussed: They don’t pay for the development of their players. Though MLB does draw some talent from the nation’s top collegiate programs, the major percentage of their players are brought up through an extensive minor-league system.

Who pays for NFL recruits? Many writers who have analyzed the economics of college football believe that between 70% and 75% of athletic departments lose money. Murray Sperber, author of “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education,” believes the number is higher than that. “Almost all athletic departments lose money if they do their books honestly. The NCAA’s latest accounting report, doing the books more honestly than ever before, supports my belief.” This means that much of the bill for maintaining football and basketball programs comes from alumni and even taxpayers. …

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David Harsanyi has interesting points of view.

… Today, a comparable, spontaneous grassroots effort has materialized. This one celebrates free-market principles rather than statism. Not surprisingly, there is also a sudden shift in perception. The once-glorified citizen activist is now nothing more than a radical, slack- jawed, proletariat yokel. …

… Specter, rather than admit that the only way he can win an election is as a Democrat, has perpetuated the following mythical narrative:

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent,” the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat explained, “the Republican Party has moved far to the right.” (All of a sudden Ronald Reagan provided a big tent? Who knew?) …

… There was no greater friend to expansion of government than President George W. Bush. I know this because anytime I mention the massive debt and regulation that Obama has already saddled us with, a helpful Democrat will appropriately point out that Bush started it. Which, apparently, makes it all tolerable. …

Howard Kurtz, who hosts CNN’s Reliable Sources, which is the best of the Sunday morning offerings, writes a great column; part on the different media reactions to GOP or Dem defections, and part stream of consciousness musings on the cable news cycles.

I was surfing the cable news channels, where the swine flu outbreak was being treated as possibly the next bubonic plague, displacing the news of President Obama’s 99th day in office, when word broke that Arlen Specter was switching parties.

The political bombshell reverberated across the screen for hours, until the networks ditched the Pennsylvania senator for a low-speed police chase of a stolen rig with a man clinging to the back. I was waiting in front of a camera at that moment to talk about the feverish flu coverage on Headline News, and never did make it on the air.

News seems more ephemeral than ever in this age of TiVo and tossed-off tweets. But it’s worth hitting the pause button to examine how media organizations chronicled the Specter saga.

The political elements, naturally, were front and center — Specter’s fear of losing a GOP primary next year, and his moving the Democrats within one Al Franken victory dance of a filibuster-proof majority. But in the straight-news reports, little attention was devoted to this question: Was this a betrayal of the voters who elected Specter? …

Last week the kid president was frustrated with some creditors who refused to go along with the haircut touted by the car czar. At the same time he offers 20% of the company to Fiat for nothing. Fiat not investing one lira. The country was presented with a Fiat accompli. We start with a number of Corner posts.

… Obama’s Auto Task Force has already used the run-up to Chapter 11 as an occasion to demonize Chrysler’s creditors. In what amounts to a pre-packaged bankruptcy, the task force and Chrysler in the last week buttoned-up an alliance with Fiat as well as concessions from the UAW. Union leaders trumpeted the “sacrifice” of a freeze in pay for its hourly workers (salaried workers have been under a freeze for years) as well as giving up such health-care benefits as Viagra. With those deals in hand, the president then turned both barrels on Chrysler’s creditors at his news conference, calling them “speculators” who sought to imperil Chrysler’s future for their own benefit. “I do not stand with them,” Obama thundered. …

… Yesterday, Obama said, “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities,” and not “those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.” Does that mean he doesn’t stand with the thousands of Americans who have retirement plans with Oppenheimer Funds?

… At all times in the negotiations, OppenheimerFunds sought fair treatment for the shareholders of our funds and we were willing to make very significant sacrifices to reach an agreement. Along with more than 20 other secured creditors, OppenheimerFunds rejected the Government’s offers because they unfairly asked our fund shareholders to make financial sacrifices greater than those being made by unsecured creditors [a.k.a. the UAW — SS]. Our holdings in secured Chrysler debt are entitled to priority in long-established US bankruptcy law and we are obligated to our fund shareholders to support agreements that respect these laws. …

Not everyone showed this kind of backbone. I don’t know about you, but knowing that Oppenheimer’s managers were willing to stand up to immense political pressure on behalf of their investors kind of makes me want to open an account there. …

ABC News’ Jake Tapper reports on BO’s threats against bondholders.

A leading bankruptcy attorney representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration’s Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms, an investment bank, that if it continued to oppose the administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan, the White House would use the White House press corps to destroy its reputation.

The White House said the story was false.

“The charge is completely untrue,” said White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, “and there’s obviously no evidence to suggest that this happened in any way.”

Thomas Lauria, Global Practice Head of the Financial Restructuring and Insolvency Group at White & Case, told ABC News that Rattner suggested to an official of the boutique investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners that officials of the Obama White House would embarrass the firm for opposing the Obama administration plan, which President Obama announced Thursday, and which requires creditors to accept roughly 29 cents on the dollar for an estimated $6.8 billion owed by Chrysler. …

Conor Clarke in Atlantic Monthly’s Business Blog follows on this story. Even the Atlantic sees the problems when BO becomes a thug.

… And to the substance: It isn’t that hard to see how getting tough on hedge funds could go wrong. A day before the administration released some details of the Chrysler plan, it released an update on applications to its public-private investor program to repurchase toxic assets. This program, whether you like it or not, relies crucially on the partipation and confidence of private investors. The administration extended the application deadline, and it reportedly had some trouble rustling up qualified applicants. (On just about every conference call with potential investors, a couple will express wariness about partnering with the government.) Even in purely horserace terms, it’s not obvious going after the holdout creditors is a good idea. ..

Reuters has the story too.

Power Line closes out the section.

The Chrysler reorganization is shaping up as another milestone in the decline of the rule of law under Barack Obama. We’ve said for quite a while that bankruptcy is the only viable option for Chrysler and General Motors, not–as Obama claims–because they don’t know how to make the right kinds of vehicles, but because their unsustainable union contracts make it impossible for them to be profitable. That reality has now been turned on its head, as the administration has tried to bully Chrysler’s secured creditors into going away, while the United Auto Workers Union, solely on the basis of political clout, would be paid at an implied rate of 50 percent and would emerge owning 55 percent of the company, with the government also holding a stake.

This is banana republic capitalism at its worst. Political influence, rather than the law, dictates the rights of the parties. When some of the secured creditors refused to be intimidated, Obama libeled them in the press, saying, outrageously, “I don’t stand with those who held out when everyone else is making sacrifices.” Actually, under Obama’s plan the politically favored parties, principally the UAW, will benefit–will steal money, to put it crudely–from the parties who held out. Those parties call themselves the “non-TARP lenders.” …

Richard Epstein calls for faster release of drugs to cancer patients.

Roger Simon on the comic relief that is Joe Biden.

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Andrew McCarthy’s letter to the Attorney General declining an invitation has been around the internet and heavily discussed by Rush Limbaugh.

This letter is respectfully submitted to inform you that I must decline the invitation to participate in the May 4 roundtable meeting the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy is convening with current and former prosecutors involved in international terrorism cases.  An invitation was extended to me by trial lawyers from the Counterterrorism Section, who are members of the Task Force, which you are leading.

The invitation email (of April 14) indicates that the meeting is part of an ongoing effort to identify lawful policies on the detention and disposition of alien enemy combatants—or what the Department now calls “individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.”  I admire the lawyers of the Counterterrorism Division, and I do not question their good faith.  Nevertheless, it is quite clear—most recently, from your provocative remarks on Wednesday in Germany—that the Obama administration has already settled on a policy of releasing trained jihadists (including releasing some of them into the United States).  Whatever the good intentions of the organizers, the meeting will obviously be used by the administration to claim that its policy was arrived at in consultation with current and former government officials experienced in terrorism cases and national security issues.  I deeply disagree with this policy, which I believe is a violation of federal law and a betrayal of the president’s first obligation to protect the American people.  Under the circumstances, I think the better course is to register my dissent, rather than be used as a prop. …

For an illustration of the foolishness of BO’s terrorism policies read about the possible revival of the military tribunals. Ed Morrissey has the story.

Barack Obama promised to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and end the military tribunal process that he opposed as a Senator for its detainees if elected President.  After taking the oath of office, Obama fulfilled that promise by ordering the shutdown of Gitmo and halting the tribunals.  Now, three months later, the Obama administration can’t find nations willing to accept murderous, lunatic terrorists as guests, and suddenly those military tribunals look pretty good: …

Mark Steyn on BO.

… He has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical, which is a lethal skill. The thoughtful look suckered many of my more impressionable conservative comrades last fall, when David Brooks and Christopher Buckley were cranking out gushing paeans to Obama’s “first-class temperament” – temperament being to the Obamacons what Nick Jonas’ hair is to a Tiger Beat reporter. But the drab reality is that the man they hail – Brooks & Buckley, I mean; not the Tiger Beat crowd – is a fantasy projection. There is no Obama The Sober Centrist, …

… underneath the thoughtful look is a transformative domestic agenda that represents a huge annexation of American life by an ever more intrusive federal government. One cannot but admire the singleminded ruthlessness with which Obama is getting on with it, even as he hones his contemplative unhurried moderate routine on prime time news conferences. On foreign affairs, the shtick is less effective, but mainly because he’s not so engaged by the issues: He’s got big plans for health care, and federalized education, and an eco-friendly government-run automobile industry – and Iran’s nuclear program just gets in the way. He’d rather not think about it, and his multicontinental apology tours are his way of kicking the can down the road until that blessed day when America is just another sclerotic Euro-style social democracy …

Corner post by Jay Nordlinger introduces us to Krauthammer’s torture column.

Back in the early 1990s, I said this about Charles Krauthammer as columnist: “The thing is, you can hold up a Krauthammer column and say, ‘Here it is. This is it. This is what I believe, in a nutshell. This is the case I would make, had I the ability.’” A Krauthammer column gave you something to wave. A document to nail to a door, so to speak. A friend or acquaintance would say to you, “What do you believe about this issue, and why?” And you could hand him a Krauthammer column, saying, “Here.”

In fact, that is the highest value of any columnist, don’t you think? He crystallizes your own thought. (Then again, he could make you reexamine.)

All of this came to mind when I read Krauthammer’s column published today, on torture: …

Here’s the Krauthammer column.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, “You do what you have to do.” And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don’t entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen. …

Krauthammer’s take on Fox.

… And in the case of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the guy who they knew was the mastermind behind 9/11, the man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife, he was asked politely about the plans that he knew about, and his answer was “Soon you will know,” meaning you will be looking in the morgues, counting the American dead, looking in hospitals at those who were destroyed, bodies destroyed in a future attack of which he will tell you nothing right now.

That’s why they used enhanced interrogation, which worked. …

As the president pushes the country to spend like there is no tomorrow, California shows the disaster waiting for us. George Will has the story.

… Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating to those states. For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California’s business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state’s. In the past decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million. California is exporting talent while importing Mexico’s poverty. The latter is not California’s fault; the former is.

If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger’s less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent. …

Michael Fumento in Forbes says we can cool it with the flu.

There’s panic in the streets over a flu outbreak. “Projections are that this virus will kill 1 million Americans,” the nation’s top health official has warned.

The virus is swine flu. But the date is 1976. And the projection, it turns out, is off by 999,999 deaths. Direct ones, that is. The hastily developed vaccine killed or crippled hundreds. Sadly, the current hysteria outbreak threatens devastation on a worldwide scale.

A calm perspective of the current outbreak of the virus now known as influenza A (H1N1) would compare it to seasonal flu. According to the CDC, the seasonal flu infects between 15 to 60 million Americans each year (5% to 20%), hospitalizes about 200,000 and kills about 36,000. That comes out to over 800 hospitalizations and over 250 deaths each day during flu season. …

Pete Seeger turns 90. Corner post by Andrew Stuttaford.

… As just one example of the some of the more questionable ”choices” that this “teacher to the nation” has made over the years, here’s Reason’s Nick Gillespie with Seeger’s reaction to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the 1939 treaty that divided up much of Eastern Europe between the Third Reich and the USSR and, in effect, gave Hitler the green light to start World War II:

As part of the Stalinist singing group, the Almanac Singers, Seeger recorded an album lobbying against U.S. involvement in the war while the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had a peace treaty. Once Hitler invaded Russia, the band pulled their album from the market and issued a pro-war one.

So that was okay then.

Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

There’s more than a hint of self-confidence in an ostentatiously lifeless title like “Parks and Recreation,” the name of NBC’s new comedy series (Thursdays, 8:30-9 p.m. EDT). There was in fact reason for optimism about this enterprise built around “Saturday Night Live” star Amy Poehler. It was modeled on “The Office,” created by its executive producers and given the lead-in time slot to that adored series. Four weeks into its run — the show had its premiere April 9 — this comedy about Leslie Knope (Ms. Poehler), a minor official of the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Ind., looks as though it may justify that confidence.

Ms. Poehler’s Leslie, oozing with deluded ambitions, is a version of Michael Scott, paper king of Dunder Mifflin and a creature of enchanting depths. Not that there’s much of a resemblance between these two. Leslie, the Parks and Recreation employee with dreams of bettering society and, along the way, winning a place for herself in government — possibly the nation’s highest office, who knows? — is, essentially, a one-note flake. …

Borowitz reports BO has ordered quarantine of Joe Biden.

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Walter Williams writes a great essay about what it means for a culture to be civilized.

During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia’s Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn’t lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the ’60s and ’70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and ’50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today’s pathology on poverty and discrimination.

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

So what kind of people are the Palestinians? One of their courts just sentenced a citizen to death for the crime of selling land to a Jew. Jonathan Tobin has the story in Contentions.

… All of this ought to highlight a key truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict: though Israel is routinely depicted as a “racist” or “apartheid” state, it is actually the Palestinian nationalist movement that is predicated on hatred and exclusion — not Israel, which protects the political and property rights of its Arab minority.

It will be interesting to see whether the State Department or the White House, both eager to portray the P.A. as a worthy peace-partner and deserving of statehood, will call upon Abbas to pardon or commute the sentence of Brigith. We’ll also be waiting to see whether this outrage is taken up by the United Nations and its various agencies that are usually busy condemning Israel for having the temerity to defend its citizens against terrorism.

Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb posts on the 100 days of BO.

… One thing that is certain: Obama’s answers weren’t nearly as weak as the questions that prompted them. Jeff Zeleny embarrassed himself and his paper when he asked Obama what was the most “enchanted” moment of his first 100 days. I was unable to see whether the question was read out of a My Little Unicorn notepad. Readers of the New York Times may wonder why the Obama administration approved a dramatic reenactment of the 9/11 attacks using real fighter planes and a lifesize 747. They won’t find the answer in tomorrow’s paper, though they’ll be delighted to learn that “the ship of state is an ocean liner; it’s not a speed boat.”

In other words, Obama wants credit for closing Gitmo even though there’s only one less prisoner there than when he was inaugurated and his administration has no good answer for what to do with the rest. Obama wants credit for his handling of the economy even though the economy contracted at a worse than expected 6.1% in the first quarter of this year. Obama wants credit for rejecting the false choice between our security and our ideals even though you only get credit for that if your policies keep the American people safe.

Karl Rove comments on 100 days of outsourcing the presidency.

… What happens in a president’s first 100 days rarely characterizes the arc of the 1,361 that follow. Jimmy Carter had a very good first 100 days. Bill Clinton did not.

Still, a president would rather start well than poorly — and Mr. Obama has a job approval of 63%. That leaves him tied with Mr. Carter, one point ahead of George W. Bush, and behind only Ronald Reagan’s 67%. Four of the past six presidents had approval ratings that ranged between 62% and 67%, a statistically insignificant spread.

Mr. Obama is popular because he is a historic figure, has an attractive personality, has passed key legislation, and receives adoring press coverage.

However, there are cautionary signs. …

… Mr. Obama is a great face for the Democratic Party. He is its best salesman and most persuasive advocate. But he is beginning to leave the impression that he is more concerned with the aesthetics of policy rather than its contents. In the long run, substance and consequences define a presidency more than signing ceremonies and photo-ops. In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.

David Goldman, the writer we have known as Spengler, writes for First Things on our evolving society and how its changes might alter the way we approach economics.

Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early 1930s.

In other words, the government tried to do everything right, but everything continues to go wrong. We labored hard and traveled long to avoid a new depression, but one seems to have found us, nonetheless.

So is this something outside the lesson book of the Great Depression? Most officials and economists argue that, until home prices stabilize, necrosis will continue to spread through the assets of the financial system, and consumers will continue to restrict spending. The sources of the present crisis reach into the capillary system of the economy: the most basic decisions and requirements of American households. All the apparatus of financial engineering is helpless beside the simple issue of household decisions about shelter. We are in the most democratic of economic crises, and it stems directly from the character of our people.

Part of the problem in seeing this may be that we are transfixed by the dense technicalities of credit flow, the new varieties of toxic assets, and the endless ­iterations of financial restructuring. Sometimes it helps to look at the world with a kind of simplicity. Think of it this way: Credit markets derive from the cycle of human life. Young people need to borrow capital to start families and businesses; old people need to earn income on the capital they have saved. We invest our retirement savings in the formation of new households. All the armamentarium of modern capital markets boils down to investing in a new generation so that they will provide for us when we are old.

To understand the bleeding in the housing market, then, we need to examine the population of prospective homebuyers whose millions of individual decisions determine whether the economy will recover. Families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. Because single-parent families tend to be poor, the buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children.

Now, consider this fact: America’s population has risen from 200 million to 300 million since 1970, while the total number of two-parent families with children is the same today as it was when Richard Nixon took office, at 25 million. In 1973, the United States had 36 million housing units with three or more bedrooms, not many more than the number of two-parent families with children—which means that the supply of family homes was roughly in line with the number of families. By 2005, the number of housing units with three or more bedrooms had doubled to 72 million, though America had the same number of two-parent families with children. …

… Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects. The capital markets have reduced the value of homeowners’ equity by $8 trillion and of stocks by $7 trillion. Households with a provider aged 45 to 54 have lost half their net worth between 2004 and 2009, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of ­America and now are missed.  …

… The graying of the industrial world creates an inexhaustible supply of savings and demand for assets in which to invest them—which is to say, for young people able to borrow and pay loans with interest. The tragedy is that most of the world’s young people live in countries without capital markets, enforcement of property rights, or reliable governments. Japanese investors will not buy mortgages from Africa or Latin America, or even China. A rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese unless, of course, the poor Chinese first moves to the United States. …

… The rest of the world lent the United States vast sums, rising to almost $1 trillion in 2007. As the rest of the world thrust its savings on the United States, interest rates fell and home prices rose. To feed the inexhaustible demand for American assets, Wall Street connived with the ratings agencies to turn the sow’s ear of subprime mortgages into silk purses, in the form of supposedly default-proof securities with high credit ratings. Americans thought themselves charmed and came to expect indefinitely continuing rates of 10 percent annual appreciation of home prices (and correspondingly higher returns to homeowners with a great deal of leverage).

The baby boomers evidently concluded that one day they all would sell their houses to each other at exorbitant prices and retire on the proceeds. The national household savings rate fell to zero by 2007, as Americans came to believe that capital gains on residential real estate would substitute for savings.

After a $15 trillion reduction in asset values, Americans are now saving as much as they can. Of course, if everyone saves and no one spends, the economy shuts down, which is precisely what is happening. The trouble is not that aging baby boomers need to save. The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth. …

Debra Saunders wants to know what Pelosi knew and when did she know it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a “truth commission” to investigate the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques like waterboarding – until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.

Spokesman Brendan Daly told me that Pelosi wants a truth commission, “but she still realizes the political reality” – as in the opposition of President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The rest of the reality may well be this: Pelosi knew that White House lawyers had sanctioned waterboarding in 2002 – and did not protest. …

Anyone who’ll write a book titled Free Range Kids deserves a lot of space in Pickings. First a Contentions post on the author, Lenore Skenazy.

I’d like to nominate Lenore Skenazy as “Heroine of the Day” for her sane approach to child rearing. She is the so-called “worst Mom in America” who agreed to let her 9-year-old son get home on public transportation alone. He successfully rode the subway solo, she wrote a column about it, tons of angry mail and lots of media attention followed and poof a movement was born: Raising kids to be safe but without all the worry. Her book, Free-Range Kids is out today and she’s been hitting the airwaves, including a great interview with Brian Lehrer. One thing she said that is especially significant: “We’ve forgotten how competent our kids are.” …

Then a book WSJ review of her book and one other – both on raising children.

… One effect of parents’ over-involvement in their children’s’ lives has been the demise of those arenas of childhood that were once inviolably the province of children themselves: unsupervised play, neighborhood baseball games and other settings where children first exercised their moral imaginations and were forced to cope independently with their own shortcomings. Parents who lament this turn of events may welcome Lenore Skenazy’s “Free-Range Kids,” which, like Mr. Weissbourd’s book, argues that adults should not always try to protect children from failure.

Ms. Skenazy, a humor columnist, believes we should give “our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry.” She lampoons safety-obsessed parents who see a threat-filled world, from metal baseball bats and raw cookie dough to Halloween-candy poisoners and kidnappers. She advises turning off the news, avoiding experts and boycotting baby knee pads “and the rest of the kiddie safety-industrial complex.” …

News Biscuit reports Somali pirates are going to wear more traditional clothing.

… International shipping insurers have welcomed the shift to more traditional pirate methods. The response came after Lloyds of London announced it had paid the latest ten million dollar ransom demand for the release of a U.S. registered oil tanker; ‘But the treasure be buried on a desert island in the Spanish Main; ten paces north from dead man’s tree. Yo ho ho!’

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Roger Simon figures out Specter

James Kirchick, New Republic editor, is also tired of BO running down his country. Nov. 5th Pickings expressed the hope electing a black as president would get some of the media and the left to agree the U. S. isn’t such a bad place after all. Instead, the new president has taken over the job of trashing our country.

… When not establishing false premises about the previous administration (the easier to glorify his own) or apologizing for his country, Obama has shown unusual deference to autocrats. At the Summit of the Americas, he calmly sat through a 50-minute anti-American tirade by the communist leader of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and was disturbingly ebullient in glad-handing Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez. There’s nothing wrong with the president participating in a multilateral summit where criticism, even egregiously unfair criticism, of the U.S. is expressed. But if he can sit and take verbal abuse from Latin American demagogues, then surely speaking a little truth in response to their lies is appropriate.

It was plenty controversial when, years into his ex-presidency, Jimmy Carter publicized his critique of U.S. policy by meeting with hostile governments to conduct freelance diplomacy. In 1994, Carter traveled to North Korea, called its then-dictator, Kim Il Sung, a “vigorous and intelligent” man, and took the Clinton administration by surprise, negotiating a deal empowering Kim to continue his nascent nuclear program. But Carter at least waited until he left the White House before denigrating his country.

The ill effects of Obama’s obsequious behavior will not be immediate. His friendly handshake with Chavez will not suddenly lead to the closing of more opposition radio stations in Venezuela, nor will his bemoaning American arrogance in Europe lead to more Russian aggression tomorrow.

But Obama’s fecklessness emboldens our adversaries and discourages advocates of liberty around the world. …

Thomas Sowell has similar thoughts.

… In his visit to CIA headquarters, President Obama pledged his support to the people working there and said that there would be no prosecutions of CIA agents for prior actions. Then he welshed on that in a matter of hours by leaving the door open for such prosecutions, which the left has been clamoring for, both inside and outside of Congress.

Repercussions extend far beyond issues of the day. It is bad enough that we have a glib and sophomoric narcissist in the White House. What is worse is that whole nations that rely on the United States for their security see how easily our president welshes on his commitments. So do other nations, including those with murderous intentions toward us, our children and grandchildren.

Jennifer Rubin posts on inadvertent admissions in a Tom Friedman column today.

… So to recap: the Bush team kept us safe from an implacable foe by using interrogation methods which the American public approved of and by fighting (often against the admonitions of Friedman and his colleagues) and largely prevailing in Iraq. The latter effort may deal a death blow to Al Qaeda which one supposes made it a very worthwhile endeavor. Well, yes, Friedman awards Obama the prize for “doing [his] best” in a war largely waged by his reviled predecessor – who is rarely praised for doing his best, but we get the point.

It must be some other George W. Bush who was the worst foreign policy president in history – because the 43rd president, by Friedman’s accounting, got some very big things right, despite ferocious odds. (One of President Bush’s librarians might want to clip this one out for the “Bush Legacy Inadvertently Revived By Obama” file.)

Stratfor on the pandemic possibility.

… We are not trying to be alarmist. As stated, we do not really know what these swine flu infections and deaths mean, and as with many other scares, this situation might dissipate in a matter of days. There have been plenty of scares about avian strains of the flu virus breaking through the human-to-human transmission barrier, and so far they have been unfounded. Even the widely hyped outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which spread rapidly from China to a number of other countries in 2002 and 2003, ultimately was contained. Fewer than 800 fatalities from SARS occurred worldwide, with only eight confirmed cases (and zero deaths) in the United States, despite widespread concern that the disease could severely impact the American populace. …

Debra Saunders won’t drink the torture Kool-Aid.

The mantra from the left during the Bush years went something like this: The world is not black and white. Sophisticated minds should seek out different, nuanced opinions.

Now that Barack Obama is president, you can say a farewell to nuance.

The left chants, “torture doesn’t work” – defining waterboarding and sleep deprivation as torture. Obama has a longhand version of that mantra in his rejection of the “false choice between our security and our ideals.”

In Obamaland, somehow there never are difficult choices.

From the presidency that was supposed to promote intellectualism comes the argument that waterboarding is immoral – which is a fair argument to make, until its adds: and it doesn’t work.

But common sense tells you that techniques like sleep deprivation, waterboarding and a forced bland diet work, at least some times. …

Ross Douthat’s inaugural column at NY Times is here. Ross has taken over the position of in-house conservative last occupied by Bill Kristol. Douthat kind of wastes this one arguing Dick Cheney might have been a better candidate for the GOP last fall.

WSJ reports on the combination of beer giants InBev and Anheuser-Busch.

ST. LOUIS — Construction crews arrived at One Busch Place a few months ago and demolished the ornate executive suites at Anheuser-Busch Cos. In their place the workers built a sea of desks, where executives and others now work a few feet apart.

It is just one piece of a sweeping makeover of the iconic American brewer by InBev, the Belgian company that bought Anheuser-Busch last fall. In about six months, InBev has turned a family-led company that spared little expense into one that is focused intently on cost-cutting and profit margins, while rethinking the way it sells beer.

The new owner has cut jobs, revamped the compensation system and dropped perks that had made Anheuser-Busch workers the envy of others in St. Louis. Managers accustomed to flying first class or on company planes now fly coach. Freebies like tickets to St. Louis Cardinals games are suddenly scarce.

Suppliers haven’t been spared the knife. The combined company, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, has told barley merchants, ad agencies and other vendors that it wants to take up to 120 days to pay bills. The brewer of Budweiser, a company with a rich history of memorable ads, has tossed out some sports deals that were central to marketing at the old Anheuser-Busch.

The changes have been tough for workers to swallow. …

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The Corner

RE: Arlen Specter   [Mark Hemingway]

I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he’s still a Democrat.

Mark Steyn poses an important question; who regulates the regulators?

… This isn’t an abstract philosophical point, but a very practical one. Fans of big government take it for granted that Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Barney Frank, and a couple of other guys can “run” the financial sector better than 8,000 U.S. banks all jostling for elbow room like bacteria in a petri dish. Same with the auto industry, and the insurance industry, and the property market, and health care, and “the global environment.” The skill-set required to run a billion-dollar company is the province of very few individuals. The skill-set required to run a multi-trillion-dollar government is unknown to human history.

John Fund comments on the dem health care strategy.

House and Senate negotiators agreed on a five-year budget plan last night that gives Democrats authority to push through a controversial transformation of the nation’s health care system on a simple majority vote in both houses after a total of only 35 hours of debate. Normally, Senate rules require 60 votes and potentially unlimited debate to push ahead on controversial issues.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota said he personally opposed the move, but insisted Democrats need an “insurance policy” to cut off debate and ensure passage of their health care plan. Republican Paul Ryan, a House member from Wisconsin, accused Democrats of conducting “negotiations with a gun in one hand” as they rammed through the rule. …

Charles Krauthammer has figured out the kid’s agenda.

… Obama’s own budget projections show staggering budget deficits going out to 2019. If he knows his social agenda is going to drown us in debt, what’s he up to?

He has an idea. But he dare not speak of it yet. He has only hinted. When asked in his March 24 news conference about the huge debt he’s incurring, Obama spoke vaguely of “additional adjustments” that will be unfolding in future budgets.

Rarely have two more anodyne words carried such import. “Additional adjustments” equals major cuts in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Social Security is relatively easy. A bipartisan commission (like the 1983 Alan Greenspan commission) recommends some combination of means testing for richer people, increasing the retirement age and a technical change in the inflation measure (indexing benefits to prices instead of wages). The proposal is brought to Congress for a no-amendment up-or-down vote. Done.

The hard part is Medicare and Medicaid. In an aging population, how do you keep them from blowing up the budget? There is only one answer: rationing.

Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical “comparative effectiveness research”? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is “best practice” for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you’ve laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

It is estimated that a third to a half of one’s lifetime health costs are consumed in the last six months of life. Accordingly, Britain’s National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective — and if you’re old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating you plummets. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements. …

Jennifer Rubin pivots off another in a long line of adoring Obama columns from EJ Dionne.

In his column today, E. J. Dionne pens a fawning love letter to the president — praising every aspect of his being. It is however light on evidence to support his amorous assessment. And indeed it is a guide in some respect to the fallacies which hobble the president’s outlook for success.

Dionne contends that the president “loves to engage conservatives.” But he has not done so in any meaningful way. None of their ideas for the stimulus plan were embraced; the president is bent on ramming  home healthcare through the reconciliation process; and he regularly slams conservative policy ideas, no matter how innovative, as “stale” or non-existent. It is an odd form of engagement that governs strictly on party lines. …

Robert Samuelson has complaints about the selling of green policies.

… The selling of the green economy involves much economic make-believe. Environmentalists not only maximize the dangers of global warming — from rising sea levels to advancing tropical diseases — they also minimize the costs of dealing with it. Actually, no one involved in this debate really knows what the consequences or costs might be. All are inferred from models of uncertain reliability. Great schemes of economic and social engineering are proposed on shaky foundations of knowledge. Candor and common sense are in scarce supply.

Even a lib like Albert Hunt thinks BO’s plans will fail because of foolish spending.

George Will adopts a longer perspective to examine the 100 days.

A 19th-century historian called the Middle Ages “a thousand years without a bath.” That oversimplified somewhat, but was interestingly suggestive. So is the summation of Obama’s opening sprint as 100 days without silence.

Ordinary politicians cannot comprehend that it is possible for the public to see and hear too much of them. In this sense, Obama is very ordinary. A few leaders of democracies have understood the importance of being economical with their demands for the public’s attention. Charles de Gaulle believed that remoteness nurtures a mystique that is an essential ingredient of leadership. Ronald Reagan, an actor, knew that the theatrical dimension of politics requires periodic absences of the star from center stage. He spent almost an eighth—a year—of his presidency at his ranch. But when he spoke, people listened. If Obama, constantly flitting here and there, continues to bombard the nation with his presence, he will learn how skillfully Americans wield the basic tool of modern happiness, the TV remote control with its mute button.

Calvin Coolidge, the last president with a proper sense of his office’s constitutional proportions, was known, not coincidentally, as Silent Cal. His reticence expressed an institutional modesty: “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.” …

The president is a sophist according to the Real Clear Politics Blog.

… I have heard “there are those who say…” from this President quite a bit in the last three months. I think it’s time he start naming names. Who are these people who hold such backward-looking, unacceptable positions? If they are elected members of the government, shouldn’t the President tell us who they are so we can vote them out? If they are unelected, how is it they have such power?

Or maybe there are no such people, at least not of such relevance they deserve specific mention by the President. Maybe this is just a rhetorical trick designed to make Mr. Obama’s position seem like the only one allowed by common sense. …

Ryan Sager wonders what it takes to fire a teacher.

WHAT does it take to lose your job as a public- school teacher in America?

That’s a question worth asking as state education leaders bat around the idea of appointing a commission to study how school systems award tenure to New York teachers.

One way is to threaten to blow up your school, as a teacher in the Bronx did Friday, reportedly because he was upset about having been disciplined by his principal for assaulting a student.

Another is to be nominated for your state’s Teacher of the Year award — but have less seniority than some other teacher.

Yes, that’s what happened in Hampton, NH, earlier this month. …

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Melanie Phillips highlights a Bret Stephens question.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens asks a very simple and very obvious question. Observing the fact that while some 6000 Palestinians (many if not most of them terrorists) have been killed by Israeli fire since the beginning of their Second Intifada against Israel compared with between 25,000 and 200,000 Chechen civilians (in a population about one third or one quarter the size of the Palestinians) who have been killed by the Russians during that period, he wonders why the world merely shrugs in indifference at the brutalities in Chechnya while dwelling incessantly and obsessively upon Israel. …

Bill Kristol says we’re throwing to the wolves those who guard us.

“We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Obama said when he ordered the release of the Justice Department interrogation memos. Actually, no. Not at all. We were attacked on 9/11. We responded to that attack with remarkable restraint in the use of force, respect for civil liberties, and even solicitude for those who might inadvertently be offended, let alone harmed, by our policies. We’ve fought a war on jihadist terror in a civilized, even legalized, way. Those who have been on the front and rear lines of that war–in the military and the intelligence agencies, at the Justice Department and, yes, in the White House–have much to be proud of. The rest of us, who’ve been asked to do little, should be grateful.

The dark and painful chapter we have to fear is rather the one President Obama may be ushering in. This would be a chapter in which politicians preen moralistically as they throw patriotic officials, who helped keep this country safe, to the wolves, and in which national leaders posture politically while endangering the nation’s security. …

Stuart Taylor takes up the subject.

“A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals,” President Obama said on April 16, “and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.”

But is it really a false choice? It’s certainly tempting to think so. The fashionable assumption that coercive interrogation (up to and including torture) never saved a single life makes it easy to resolve what otherwise would be an agonizing moral quandary.

The same assumption makes it even easier for congressional Democrats, human-rights activists, and George W. Bush-hating avengers to call for prosecuting and imprisoning the former president and his entire national security team, including their lawyers. The charge: approving brutal methods — seen by many as illegal torture — that were also blessed, at least implicitly, by Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker, and other Intelligence Committee members in and after 2002.

But there is a body of evidence suggesting that brutal interrogation methods may indeed have saved lives, perhaps a great many lives — and that renouncing those methods may someday end up costing many, many more. …

Noemie Emery says let’s have a truth commission.

Some Democrats, from the White House on down, are pushing the idea of a “truth commission,” à la South Africa, to deal with the “harsh measures” used by the Bush administration in interrogating al Qaeda detainees. Good. Let’s have lots of truthtelling. Please bring it on.

Let’s tell the truth about Bush’s conduct of the war on terror, which is that it’s been a success. His ultimate legacy hasn’t been written–Iraq is improved, but not out of danger–but the one thing that can be said without reservation is that the country was kept safe. He delivered on the main charge of his office in time of emergency, in a crisis without guidelines or precedent. Attacks took place in Spain, and in London, in Indonesia and India, but not on American soil, which was the obvious target of choice. Bush couldn’t say this before he left office, for obvious reasons, and after he left, attention switched to the new president. This little fact dropped down the memory hole, but with all this discussion, it will rise to the surface. Let the hearings begin! …

More on the apology tour from Karl Rove.

… Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the U.S. had “used a nuclear weapon.” In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not “pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors” because we “failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”

By confessing our nation’s sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has “changed the image of America around the world” and made the U.S. “safer and stronger.” As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.

That’s now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president’s wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War. …

WaPo article laughs at the expense cuts.

These tough times call for sacrifice. So the Obama administration has embarked on a belt-tightening plan that sounds, to some veteran federal budget watchers, like fodder for a Jay Leno monologue.

The Education Department will eliminate a Bush-era “education policy attaché” based in Paris — the one in France — whose annual salary, housing allowance and business expenses exceed $630,000. Employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs will forgo their training junkets to hot spots such as Nashville and satisfy themselves with videoconferencing.

The Department of Homeland Security has started buying its supplies in bulk and — to the surprise and delight of bureaucrats — discovered it’s much cheaper that way.

This is not exactly the revolution in government efficiency that President Obama has promised. Nonetheless, he and the agencies trumpeted the changes, staples of any money-conscious organization, this week as examples of how they intend to cut $100 million over the next 90 days to try to trim a budget deficit projected to reach $1.4 trillion next year.

Experts said the cost-cutting measures will do little to restore fiscal responsibility and are at best a symbolic early move. At worst, they said, the savings, which amount to a fraction of 1 percent of Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget, are so obvious and picayune that by making them a major focus of his first Cabinet meeting, the president may have given the impression that he is not serious about controlling spending. …

Jennifer Rubin agrees.

… this is what the Obama team is forced to resort to — silly symbolic efforts because of the trap they find themselves in, or rather, have put themselves in. They have created a massively irresponsible budget that will, over time, eat up more and more of the GDP and strain our ability to finance our debt. And the public, independent voters especially, are very nervous about it. Figuring that the public isn’t paying much attention to the number of zeroes, Obama throws out a number that used to sound like a lot of money — $100M. But the public is perhaps smarter than Obama reckons, and the administration’s critics aren’t playing along with the charade.

The result: everyone got a reminder of just how irresponsible the Obama fiscal policy is. Good thing for whomever thought this up that the news was swamped by the interrogation memo fiasco. Otherwise someone might be in trouble.

Mark Steyn posts on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s anti-tax screed.

To mark his first 100 days the kid scheduled another prime time presser. Linda Chavez thinks maybe the Obamas should have a reality show.

Teleprompter is back.

News Biscuit writes about a dog that took a year off traveling to “find himself.”

… The early signs were that Shandy was making concessions to his principled approach to his gap year. Despite promising to find employment on his travels and immerse himself in new cultures, by late afternoon on the first day he had already made two reverse-charge calls to the Lucases asking for money, and Mr Lucas’s credit card company had reported a suspicious transaction at a tattoo parlour and a hefty bill for room service and ‘extras’ at a mixed 5-star kennels just outside Sidcup.

However, Shandy did finally make it to Asia, and was last reported to be delighted to have found a restaurant in South Korea that had a picture of a dog on the outside. He said he was just going in to ‘check out the scene’.

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Mark Steyn on the post-American America.

According to an Earth Day survey, one-third of schoolchildren between the ages of 6 and 11 think the Earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the Earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club and the eco-propagandists of the public education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.

Call me crazy, but I’ll bet that in 15-20 years the planet will still be here, along with most of the “environment” – your flora and fauna, your polar bears and three-toed tree sloths and whatnot. But geopolitically we’re in for a hell of a ride, and the world we end up with is unlikely to be as congenial as most Americans have gotten used to. …

Mark Steyn Corner posts on confused HomeSec and senile McCain.

Andrew McCarthy writes on BO’s interrogation mess.

… At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Amie Parnes are reporting that Pres. Barack Obama is now backing away from the idea of an inquiry into the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation tactics — at least insofar as such a probe might be conducted by a 9/11 Commission–style panel or Pat Leahy’s proposed “truth commission.” (The Politico reports are here and here; Jen Rubin, who is closely monitoring developments at Contentions, has observations here.) The president, having started a fire by recklessly releasing memos describing interrogation tactics, and then having poured gasoline on the flames by reversing himself on the banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals, cannot douse the resulting inferno simply by saying, Oh, never mind.

The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.” This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry.

But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the same subject.

… There are two explanations for what happened. One is that the president, without teleprompter and script, messed up — big time — when he blathered on at the press conference with the King of Jordan about the potential for show trials. He was trying to sound sophisticated or thoughtful and instead unleashed the furies. It was a blunder of rather startling proportions.

The other theory is that he changed his mind twice. After shutting the door on Monday he shifted after his CIA visit, trying to mollify the netroot base. He sounded quite sympathetic to the idea of investigations and prosecutions. But when it began to spin out of control he reversed course again and said we’ve had enough. He, in this scenario, is frightfully indecisive and guided by purely political considerations.

We are unlikely to know which it is, but neither paints an impressive picture of our president. …

Krauthammer’s take on the “truth commission.”

Before you can decide whether to have a prosecutor or a commission, you have to know who the players are. The Democrats want to make this a war on the Bush administration.

But there is one inconvenient fact, and it’s stated by none other than Dennis Blair, who’s the Director of National Intelligence under Obama, not under Bush. And he said in writing that the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities to the executive and to members of congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.

Now, he’s a man who’s completely disinterested in this. He does not have a stake in the fight, and that’s what he says. …

Perhaps the kid president can learn how stupid he is by reading Daniel Henninger.

… Hugo Chávez is a tin-pot dictator who has debauched Venezuela’s democracy. Normally in such circumstances, an American president would show reserve. The weirdly ebullient Mr. Obama did not, and that image was the photo seen ’round the world.

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?”

He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”

The hopeful way to view the Obama administration’s openings to Chávez, the Castros, Iran and the others would be: This had better work. Because if it doesn’t, a lot of people who’ve spent years working in opposition to these regimes — in hiding or in prison in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, Burma, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan — are going to get hammered. …

David Harsanyi comments on the “tortuous debate.”

… If your contention is that the outcome of torture is immaterial — whether it’s one life saved or a thousand lives — you’ve taken a principled stand. I’ve yet to hear a policymaker who opposes “torture” be honest and take accountability for the potential consequences of abandoning harsh interrogation techniques.

I put the word torture in quotation marks only to acknowledge that I — and many of you, I’m sure — do not know exactly how to define it. Most laws offer a thoroughly ambiguous definition, which can cover nearly any unpleasant interrogation.

Any parent can tell you that sleep deprivation is mental torture. Does it rise to the level of a crime? Waterboarding? OK, how about pushing someone against a wall? Scaring a grizzled terrorist with a caterpillar? Such techniques inflict “stress and duress,” for sure, but do they “shock the conscience” (one definition offered for torture)?

When President Obama decided to release the “torture memos,” the door was open for a mere debate. When he opened the door for prosecution of lawyers who opined on what constitutes torture — despite encouraging everyone not to spend “time and energy laying blame for the past” — we face something far more important. …

Marty Peretz locates Edward Jay Epstein’s rundown of Steve Rattner’s problems.

… On March 29th 2009, Steven Rattner, President Obama’s new car czar, met with Rick Wagoner, the chairman of General Motors, in Rattner’s new office in the Treasury Department, and in one of the most dramatic confrontations of the Obama administration in its first 100 days told him he would have to resign because he had lost the confidence of the Obama Administration. Wagoner, a 30-year veteran of GM,  fell on his sword. Now, less than a month after disposing of Wagoner, Rattner may confront a similar decision about his own tenure. …

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It is hard to look at this new administration with anything approaching equanimity. WSJ Editors write on the flip flop on proceeding against Bush officials in the interrogation debate.

Jan. 4th Pickings started with this;

… Seems like we will have chaos instead, since our new president is a rather unformed immature 46 years old. Is there any guiding thought or idea that lies behind his quest, other than narcissism and change? We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him. …

Peter Wehner Corner post covers the kid’s course reversal.

Spengler looks at the Susan Boyle phenomenon and sees a metaphor for the West.

… Boyle’s stardom might prompt a closer look at the little Scottish town of Blackburn in West Lothian whence she hails, and, more generally, the state of the formerly industrial towns of Britain’s north. There is life after economic death, but it is not pleasant. Few places in the West are more disheartening. Young people have nothing to look forward to but a weekly Walpurgisnacht.

The local newspapers print thick advertising supplements about clubbing, which seems to be the mainstay of the local economy. On Friday or Saturday night, besotted boys and girls in extreme states of dishabille riot through whole quarters of ruined industrial towns. A good deal of Britain’s working class is unemployable at any price, too lazy to move to London to take the jobs waiting tables or driving buses that bring Spaniards or Frenchmen to the British capital.

A generation of Americans learned the wrong jobs: selling real estate, processing mortgages, and selling cheap imports from China at shopping malls. The cleverest among them got business degrees and learned to trade derivatives. Their services will no longer be required. On paper, it is obvious what America needs to do. Its economy went into free fall because everyone cut back spending at the same time in response to the crash of asset prices. The aging Baby Boomers need to save for their retirement, or retire later, now that their home equity has vanished along with the contents of their 401(k) plans. The only way for everyone to save at the same time without crashing the economy is to export, just as China does.

That works well enough on paper: but what are Americans to export? Not electric cars, it would appear. Warren Buffett isn’t buying General Motors these days, but he did put down over $200 million for a tenth of BYD, China’s contender in the electric-car sweepstakes. China requires nuclear power plants – it will install three a year for the next quarter-century – but America shut down its nuclear industry some time ago. There’s always Caterpillar, but the field of heavy earth-moving and construction equipment now is dominated by Japanese and German engineering, as a quick tour of the diggings for New York’s Second Avenue Subway make clear. America can’t even provide the capital equipment for its own infrastructure projects, let alone for China’s.

That Wall Street frat boys are in trouble is not a controversial statement. Top-of-the-market bubble behavior no longer is encouraged. Not long from now, they will be lucky to find employment getting coffee for a Chinese (or Indian) boss. The bubble accounted for so much of America’s employment down the food chain, though, that many millions of American jobs may vanish. This is particularly painful for prospective pensioners who find themselves in need of employment, for just the sort of jobs that suit older people – part-time retail work, for example, or real estate – are the first to disappear. America might find itself with millions of indigent elderly.

If BYD’s electric car takes the jackpot rather than General Motor’s much-heralded “Volt”, Detroit may never come back, and the American automobile industry may shrink to a skeletal remnant of itself, like Britain’s. A number of American rustbelt cities, including Detroit and Cleveland, have shrunk to less than half of their peak population, but the same might be true for the suburban sprawl of parts of the Sunbelt. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz comments on the apology tour.

The president of the United States has completed another outing abroad in his now standard form: as the un-Bush. At one stop after another — the latest in Latin America, where Hugo Chávez expressed wishes to be his friend — Barack Obama fulfilled his campaign vows to show the nations of the world that a new American leadership stood ready to atone for the transgressions of the old.

All went as expected in these travels, not counting certain unforeseen results of that triumphal European tour. The images of that trip, in which Mr. Obama dazzled ecstatic Europeans with citations of the offenses against international goodwill and humanity committed by the nation he leads, are now firmly imprinted on the minds of Americans. That this is so, and that it is not good news for him, is truth of a kind not quite fathomable to this president and his men. …

Nat Hentoff knows what the congressional black caucus missed during their Cuban vacation.

During their April visit to Cuba, members of the Congressional Black Caucus laid flowers at a Havana memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. Said Fidel Castro (CNN, April 8): “I value the gesture of this legislative group. The aura of Martin Luther King is accompanying them.” After meeting Castro, Congressman Bobby Rush, D-Ill., exclaimed: “This is the dawning of a new day! In my household, he (Castro) is known as the ultimate survivor.”

To others of us who honor King, there is a barely surviving black Cuban disciple of King (and Gandhi) whom the Caucus visitors did not meet because he has been in a Castro brothers’ cage for many years, and was off limits to them. He is Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, and he is among those designated by Amnesty International as “prisoners of conscience” in Cuban gulags.

Another visiting Caucus member, Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, said (New York Post, April 11): “We’ve been led to believe that the Cuban people are not free, and they are repressed by a vicious dictator, and I saw nothing to match what we’ve been told.” A government tour can lead you to believe anything.

Cleaver also said of Raul Castro: “He’s one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met.” (New York Post, April 11). The international human rights organizations — which have repeatedly pleaded with the Castros to release the blind physician — also find Biscet amazing in a vitally different sense.

Before he was arrested during Fidel’s 2003 mass crackdown of dissenters (an event infamously known as “Black Spring”) and sentenced to 25 years in prison, Biscet had been put away on occasion for planning to organize small groups in private homes to work nonviolently for democratic rights. …

Jackson Diehl in WaPo surveys the administration’s problems abroad.

New American presidents typically begin by behaving as if most of the world’s problems are the fault of their predecessors — and Barack Obama has been no exception. In his first three months he has quickly taken steps to correct the errors in George W. Bush’s foreign policy, as seen by Democrats. He has collected easy dividends from his base, U.S. allies in Europe and a global following for not being “unilateralist” or war-mongering or scornful of dialogue with enemies.

Now comes the interesting part: when it starts to become evident that Bush did not create rogue states, terrorist movements, Middle Eastern blood feuds or Russian belligerence — and that shake-ups in U.S. diplomacy, however enlightened, might not have much impact on them.

The first wake-up call has come from North Korea …

On Earth Day David Harsanyi says don’t forget to save the humans.

… What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.

This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?

When people are on a crusade, I guess, logic rarely plays a part. …

John Stossel says it is drug prohibition that creates drug violence.

Visiting Mexico last week, President Obama said he will fight drug violence: “I will not pretend that this is Mexico’s responsibility alone. The demand for these drugs inside the United States is keeping these cartels in business”.

I don’t expect politicians to be sticklers for logic, but this is ridiculous. Americans also have a hefty demand for Mexican beer, but there are no “Mexican beer cartels.” When Obama visits France, he doesn’t consult with politicians about “wine violence.” What’s happening on the Mexican border is prohibition-caused violence.

A legal product is produced and traded openly, and is therefore subject to competition and civilizing custom. If two beer distributors have a disagreement or if a liquor retailer fails to pay his wholesaler, the wronged parties can go to court. There’s no need to take matters violently into their own hands. As a result, in legal industries the ability to commit mayhem is not a valued skill.

On the other hand, dealers in a prohibited product operate in the black market. Upstanding businesspeople stay away, relinquishing the trade to those without moral scruples. Black-market operators can’t resolve disputes in court, so being good at using force provides a competitive advantage.

Politicians gave us prohibition and created the conditions in which violence pays. …

HuffPo reports on bonuses for NY Times execs.

… On Tuesday, the Times disclosed a $74 million first quarter loss, 221 times larger than the $335,000 loss in the first quarter of 2008.

According to the New York Times proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, corporate president and CEO Janet L. Robinson received a total compensation package valued at $5.58 million in 2008, up well over a million from the $4.14 million she received in 2007, and the $4.4 million she received in 2006. …

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