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The Supreme Court hears an important argument today. The Thernstroms, Abby and Steve, give us the background.

The Supreme Court is almost the only place in American society where the “frank” debates on issues of race that Attorney General Eric Holder recently called for actually take place. Justices with lifetime tenure feel free to explore — camouflaged as legal argument — the conflicting moral visions that still prevent resolution of America’s most important, complex and divisive domestic issue.

That debate is likely to be very much in evidence today when the Court hears argument in Ricci v. DeStefano. The issue in Ricci was simply stated by Judge José Cabranes, dissenting from a cursory, unenlightening opinion by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. “At its core,” he wrote, “this case presents a straight-forward question: May a municipal employer disregard the results of a qualifying examination, which was carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality, on the ground that the results of that examination yielded too many qualified applicants of one race and not enough of another?” …

If you’re a hammer, all problems look like nails. That said, Richard Epstein’s National Review essay on the legal causes of the financial crisis is an interesting and important part of the picture. It is typically Epstein, in that he makes the complicated quite clear.

The current financial meltdown has exposed the myth that our nation’s sophisticated, multilayered scheme of government regulation immunizes us from systemic failure. We are realizing that shocks, from both home and abroad, will exact their toll. What is less commonly appreciated is that the very political institutions on which we depend count as a structural cause of much of our current distress. In many cases, the root of our problems lies in the legal restrictions that block the movement of prices and wages in financial markets. It is just this sort of folly that has embroiled the Obama administration in testy disputes with bankers who are desperate to return their TARP money. These banks cannot afford to bleed talent to foreign and start-up companies that operate (for the moment at least) free of Obama’s egalitarian compensation-control shackles.

That said, at least some portion of the current malaise comes from a more prosaic source: We don’t honor the straightforward moral imperative that promises must be kept. Our modern crisis has been brewing since the Supreme Court started inexorably casting aside protection for property and contract in an effort to cope with economic tumults from Roosevelt’s 1930s through Reagan’s 1980s. On this score, our flawed constitutional framework suffers from two related mistakes, both of which are endorsed by acclamation today. The first is the notion that the government may be permitted to disrupt financial transactions between private parties in ways that frustrate the unambiguous expectations of the parties. The second is the idea that the government need not honor its own promises in dealing with private individuals.

These two propositions are stated at a level of abstraction that is likely to draw yawns of indifference from anxious policy wonks who fixate on the latest twists in the fortunes of AIG or Citibank. But these dramatic financial struggles play out against a background of weak contract and property rights — a system that drives political operatives into high gear in times of economic stress.

The legal stability of private agreements offers one powerful bulwark against these mischievous government activities. Once people know that courts will enforce their agreements as made, they have no incentive to beg for government favors to improve their contractual positions. One avenue of political intrigue is closed down. …

Writing for Pajamas Media, Jennifer Rubin says the kid is so Jimmy Carter.

Get out the bell bottoms and the lava lamps. We are going back to the 1970s.  This is not a new fashion craze. It is the new economic and international reality. The good news for Republicans: after the 1970s came Ronald Reagan.

On the domestic front we have at least temporarily given up emphasis on free markets and economic expansion. Instead, we are back to expanding government and running up a frightful tab. The debt is piling up, the Fed has the printing press going and the Chinese rightfully concerned we will inflate away our obligations.

On energy, regulatory schemes to increase energy prices and thereby decrease energy usage are now in fashion. We aren’t yet rationing gas by the last digit of car license plates, but cap-and-trade legislation and the pronouncement that carbon dioxide is a threat to the planet have a common goal: restrict carbon output and industrial activity.

Meanwhile, unemployment is edging higher and higher. Forty-six states have seen joblessness increase, the national rate is 8.5%, and more states will be joining those with double digit unemployment in the months ahead. …

John Tierney has advice for people who want to save the earth; “Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet.”

When the first Earth Day took place in 1970, American environmentalists had good reason to feel guilty. The nation’s affluence and advanced technology seemed so obviously bad for the planet that they were featured in a famous equation developed by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the physicist John P. Holdren, who is now President Obama’s science adviser.

Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology. Protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology — the same sort of social transformation and energy revolution that will be advocated at many Earth Day rallies on Wednesday.

But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because…

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run. …

Lewis Black has some words for the Earth Day pimps. “Kids Know a Bucket of Sh*t When They See One.”

NY Times financials worsen. Yahoo News has the story. We say, “Yahoo!”

The New York Times Co. fell into a deeper financial hole during the first quarter as the newspaper publisher’s advertising revenue plunged 27 percent in an industrywide slump that is reshaping the print media. Its shares dived after the results were released Tuesday.

The owner of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers lost $74.5 million, or 52 cents per share, in the opening three months of the year. That compared with a loss of $335,000 at the same time last year, which was break-even on a per-share basis.

The results in the most recent quarter included charges totaling 18 cents per share to cover the costs of jettisoning employees and other one-time accounting measures.

Even with those charges stripped out, the loss was much worse than analysts expected. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had predicted the New York-based company would lose 4 cents per share.

Revenue for the period dropped 19 percent to $609 million — about $22 million below the average analyst estimate. …

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Peter Wehner figures out the Obama Doctrine.

Jay Nordlinger, Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer react to BO’s narcissism. Krauthammer;

… The most telling moment, however, was when Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, delivered a 53-minute excoriating attack on the United States. And Obama’s response was “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for the things that occurred when I was three months old.”

Does the narcissism of this man know no bounds? This is not about him. It is about his country. This is something that occurred under John Kennedy — the Bay of Pigs is what he is referring to. And what he is saying is that it’s OK that he attacked John Kennedy, as long as it wasn’t me. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the first cabinet meeting.

… This is noteworthy not only because it took nearly a hundred days to convene the cabinet but because it suggests the “What tea parties?” feigned ignorance by the Obama spin-machine is flimsy camouflage for growing concerns that the unwashed rabble may be on to something. Really, why now, out of the blue, find some tiny cost cutting measures? The president could, after all, have made the stimulus plan $100M less expensive or the $3.6 trillion budget a smidgen less irresponsible. …

Heritage Foundation graph shows how puny $100 million looks against the budget.

The Teleprompter posts on the trip to the CIA

Daily Beast on BO’s coming environmental disaster.

Okay, I get it. Carbon dioxide is bad. It’s a pollutant. Thus, based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed finding on greenhouse gases, everyone is now a polluter.

This includes me. I’ve been polluting since July 19, 1960, and damn it, I’m going to keep polluting until they pull the nostrils from my cold dead body. And don’t even think about trying to cut the pollutants emitted by our family’s hyperactive bird dog, Biscuit. She’s a big time exhaler, particularly when the weather gets hot.

Pardon my sarcasm, but the EPA’s plan to equate carbon dioxide, the substance that we emit every minute of every day of our lives, with pollution—a term I equate with noxious substances like benzene, dioxin, and PCBs—seems like something out of a bad science fiction novel. …

Kimberley Strassel with another government created unintended consequence.

This is the tale of how a supposedly innocuous federal subsidy to encourage “alternative energy” has, in a few short years, ballooned into a huge taxpayer liability and a potential trade dispute, even as it has distorted markets and led to greater fossil-fuel use. Think of it as a harbinger of the unintended consequences that will accompany the Obama energy revolution.

Back in 2005, Congress passed a highway bill. In its wisdom, it created a subsidy that gave some entities a 50-cents-a-gallon tax credit for blending “alternative” fuels with traditional fossil fuels. The law restricted which businesses could apply and limited the credit to use of fuel in motor vehicles.

Not long after, some members of Congress got to wondering if they couldn’t tweak this credit in a way that would benefit specific home-state industries. In 2007, Congress expanded the types of alternative fuels that counted for the credit, while also allowing “non-mobile” entities to apply. This meant that Alaskan fish-processing facilities, for instance, which run their boilers off fish oil, might now also claim the credit.

What Congress apparently didn’t consider was every other industry that might qualify. Turns out the paper industry has long used something called the “kraft” process to make paper. One byproduct is a sludge called “black liquor,” which the industry has used for decades to fuel its plants. Black liquor is cost-effective, makes plants nearly self-sufficient, and, most importantly (at least for this story), definitely falls under Congress’s definition of an “alternative fuel.” …

And a WSJ Op-Ed reports on ethanol flops in Iowa.

In September, ethanol giant VeraSun Energy opened a refinery on the outskirts of this eastern Iowa (Dyersville) community. Among the largest biofuels facilities in the country, the Dyersville plant could process 39 million bushels of corn and produce 110 million gallons of ethanol annually. VeraSun boasted the plant could run 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the demand for home-grown energy.

But the only thing happening 24-7 at the Dyersville plant these days is nothing at all. Its doors are shut and corn deliveries are turned away. Touring the facility recently, I saw dozens of rail cars sitting idle. They’ve been there through the long, bleak winter. Two months after Dyersville opened, VeraSun filed for bankruptcy, closing many of its 14 plants and laying off hundreds of employees. VeraSun lost $476 million in the third quarter last year.

A town of 4,000, Dyersville is best known as the location of the 1989 film “Field of Dreams.” In the film, a voice urges Kevin Costner to create a baseball diamond in a cornfield and the ghosts of baseball past emerge from the ether to play ball. Audiences suspended disbelief as they were charmed by a story that blurred the lines between fantasy and reality.

That’s pretty much the story of ethanol. …

The Australian reports Antarctic ice is expanding. And the sea level rising scare? Never mind.

… East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said. …

Shorts from National Review.

… Last year, Obama indicated a willingness to approach school choice with an open mind: “Let’s see if the experiment works,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. On April 3, Obama’s Department of Education released new findings on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which grants vouchers to about 1,700 low-income students in Washington. The reading scores of participants improved compared with those of their peers. Moreover, parents reported a high degree of satisfaction with their children’s schools. This evidence suggests strongly that school choice works — or at least that the D.C. experiment did, and ought to continue. Yet congressional Democrats have voted to eliminate funding for the program following the 2009–10 academic year, and Obama went along with them when he signed the omnibus budget bill. In a just world, none of these characters would be able to speak in public about the nation’s poor and vulnerable again. …

Borowitz reports on Susan Boyle.

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John Fund on the kid’s photo-op  with Hugo.

… And what about his treatment of his own people? Mr. Chavez has been locking up most of the leaders of whatever political opposition he still faces, including the mayor of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. Save for a brief reference that political prisoners would be included on any list of topics brought up in future diplomatic talks with the Chavez regime, Mr. Obama was silent on the issue of human rights in both Venezuela and Cuba. It almost makes one yearn for the days of Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter also practiced a policy of naiveté in foreign affairs, but at least he never forgot that human rights had to be kept front and center in dealings with overseas adversaries.

Mark Steyn Corner post on regulatory despotism.

… The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as Pierre Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster – and the machinery of bureaucracy barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of “individual existence” by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation  is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we have the will to resist it?

London Times Op-Ed claims “green jobs” will become the next “sub-prime.”

When everybody seems to have the same big idea, you just know it can only mean trouble. Remember sub-prime mortgages? Now universally excoriated as the spawn of the devil, the proximate cause of the credit crunch and all that followed, a few years back “sub-prime” was everyone’s darling. Financiers loved it because it generated sumptuously high-yielding debt instruments; governments, because it promised to make even the poor into proud property owners.

Now business lobbyists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have got a new big idea. They call it “green jobs”. Leading the pack is, as you might expect, Barack Obama. The president recently defended a vast package of subsidies for renewable energy on the grounds that it would “create millions of additional jobs and entire new industries”. …

Jennifer Rubin wonders why the kid’s administration has declared war on job creators.

… One wonders where the administration and Congress think jobs come from and what burdens can be placed on employers already struggling. They seem to operate in a fantasyworld in which burden after burden can be loaded onto the backs of businesses, no international competition exists, and no loss of U.S. jobs results. If the Obama team would really like to “save” some jobs they’d call for a time out in the rush to enact job-killing legislation.

And J. G. Thayer says the feds have become a bunch of thugs.

… President Obama’s  hand-picked Car Czar, Steven Rattner has chosen the plan to “save” Chrysler. Chrysler will be sold off, and Ratner has narrowed down the list of buyers to precisely one: Fiat. And to help entice Fiat to make the deal, some of Chrysler’s biggest creditors will write off billions of debt.

Why would Chrysler and its banking creditors buy into this deal? Because they accepted federal bailout money. The Golden Rule prevails — that is, “Them with the gold makes the rules.” Chrysler took federal funds, so it has to sell itself to whomever the government says. And the banks took federal funds, so they have to write off whatever debts the government says.

Pollster Kellyanne Conway comments on BO’s numbers.

“His numbers are still high.” “People like him.” “The President has the strong support of a majority of Americans.” These observations are common throughout the blogosphere and within the punditocracy to describe the current standing of President Obama. Trouble is, they rely upon a very thin and limited measurement: presidential approval ratings.

Most polls currently have President Obama’s “approval ratings” around 60%. That is not surprising, and likely will remain there or increase in the coming weeks. He’s likeable. Much of his campaign was built on his personal appeal. Plenty of the nearly 70 million people who voted for him are not about to second-guess their own judgment just five months later. Most Americans want the president — whoever he is — to do well, since they view (rightly or wrongly) a nexus between his success or failure and that of the nation.

But adulation abroad and a perception of charm and charisma at home is not a mandate for the type of sweeping transformations to the domestic economy and foreign policy currently on the table. After all, Candidate Obama ran on “change we can believe in,” not “revolution you must pay for.” …

George Will writes on the policy of treating Russia like it’s a real country.

… Putin — ignore the human Potemkin village (Dmitry Medvedev) who currently occupies the presidential office — must be amazed and amused that America’s president wants to treat Russia as a great power. Obama should instead study pertinent demographic trends.

Nicholas Eberstadt’s essay “Drunken Nation” in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is experiencing “a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation.” Previous episodes of depopulation — 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 — were the results of civil war, Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” and collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today’s depopulation is occurring in normal — for Russia — social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate, sharply declining enrollment rates for primary school pupils, perhaps more than 7 percent of children abandoned by their parents to orphanages or government care or life as “street children.” Furthermore, “mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits” — including poisonously impure home brews — “is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on.” Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a half-century ago under Khrushchev. …

Debra Saunders thinks the left coast is out to lunch on offshore drilling.

Last Wednesday, conservatives held coast-to-coast “TEA parties” designed to send the message to Washington and state governments that the partiers feel “taxed enough already.” The exercise struck me as more than a little out of touch with the political realities of President Obama’s America. The next day, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar held a public hearing in San Francisco on a Bush administration proposal to sell federal leases to drill for oil and gas off the California coast. The hearing became the Left Coast equivalent of the right-wing TEA party.

The only difference is that the overwhelmingly anti-drilling crowd was in la-la land on the realities of oil instead of taxes. Every one of the elected officials who spoke were anti-drilling Democrats. Every one seemed out of touch with the realities of the need to increase domestic oil production.

America’s in a tough recession: It’s in no position to turn down good-paying jobs and tax revenue, not to mention a way to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Here’s a sobering statistic: U.S. imported oil use grew from 24 percent in 1970 to 70 percent last year. …

Julie Gunrock in NRO writes about left coast veggie snobs.

In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”

Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester, Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who — in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground, and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food. …

Christopher Buckley says enough with the torture sanctimony.

… It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-lo?)

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not. …

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Interesting shorts from John Fund. One on Irish documentary film-makers taking on the global warming folks. Another on the tea party preparations.

… The film reminds us that environmentalists have been wrong in the past, as when they convinced the world to ban the pesticide DDT, costing the lives of countless malaria victims. The ban was finally reversed by the World Health Organization only after decades of debate. The two Irish filmmakers argue that if Al Gore’s advice to radically reduce carbon emissions is followed, it would condemn to poverty two billion people in the world who have yet to turn on their first light switch. …

… The protestors at tea parties so far are just getting used to the modern tactics of media-savvy demonstrations. Jenny Beth Martin, a conservative activist organizing the Atlanta rally, admits that “conservatives aren’t known for their protest abilities” and that the first event she attended featured many people “in business suits and umbrellas.”

But organizers and participants have since become more imaginative. At one recent rally a protestor sported an armband that read “POOP — Prisoners of Obama’s Policies.” Another held a sign that read “Let Them Eat Pork!”

Looking at video of several of the recent protests, I’m reminded how similar they were to the protests that fueled Proposition 13 in California and Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts some 30 years ago. Those demonstrations led to real, earthshaking political consequences. Some guy named Ronald Reagan said they ignited a “prairie-fire of protest” that created a backlash against the big-government policies of Jimmy Carter and helped the Gipper himself become president in 1980.

The pseudonymous Spengler is outed …  by  Spengler.

… The 300 or so essays that I have published in this space since 1999 all proceeded from the theme formulated by Rosenzweig: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie, and unadaptable Islam.

Why raise these issues under a pseudonym? There is a simple answer, and a less simple one. To inform a culture that it is going to die does not necessarily win friends, and what I needed to say would be hurtful to many readers. I needed to tell the Europeans that their post-national, secular dystopia was a death-trap whence no-one would get out alive.

I needed to tell the Muslims that nothing would alleviate the unbearable sense of humiliation and loss that globalization inflicted on a civilization that once had pretensions to world dominance. I needed to tell Asians that materialism leads only to despair. And I needed to tell the Americans that their smugness would be their undoing.

In this world of accelerated mortality, in which the prospect of national extinction hung visibly over most of the peoples of the world, Jew-hatred was stripped of its mask, and revealed as the jealousy of the merely undead toward living Israel. And it was not hard to show that the remnants of the tribal world lurking under the cover of Islam were not living, but only undead, incapable of withstanding the onslaught of modernity, throwing a tantrum against their inevitable end.

I have been an equal-opportunity offender, with no natural constituency. My academic training, strewn over two doctoral programs, was in music theory and German, as well as economics. I have published a number of peer-reviewed papers on philosophy, music and mathematics in the Renaissance. But I came to believe that there are things even more important than the high art of the West and its most characteristic endeavor, classical music, the passion and consolation of my youth. Western classical music expresses goal-oriented motion, a teleology, as it were – but where did humankind learn of teleology? I no longer quite belonged with my friends and colleagues, the artists.

G K Chesterton said that if you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe in anything, and I was living proof of that as a young man, wandering in the fever-swamps of left-wing politics. I found my way thanks to the first Ronald Reagan administration. The righting of America after it nearly capsized during the dark years of Jimmy Carter was a defining experience for me. I owe much to several mentors, starting with Dr Norman A. Bailey, special assistant to President Reagan and director of plans at the National Security Council from 1981-1984. My political education began in his lair at the old Executive Office Building in 1981, when he explained to me that the US would destroy the Soviet Empire by the end of the 1980s. I thought him a dangerous lunatic, and immediately signed on. …

Mark Steyn takes a look at the tea parties and the media reaction.

… The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else’s into the same abyss. Which is why they’ve decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans’ wealth and their children’s future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it’s AstroTurf – fake grass-roots, not the real thing.

Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here:

“Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right …”

But Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as these Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from “A Man For All Seasons”: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for a $400 tax credit?” …

… Doing the job the Boston Globe won’t do, Glenn Reynolds, the Internet’s Instapundit, has been posting many photographs of tea parties. For a movement of mean, angry old white men, there seem to be a lot of hot-looking young chicks among them. Perhaps they’re just kinky gerontophiliacs. Or perhaps they understand that their generation will be the principal victim of this grotesque government profligacy. Like the original tea party, it is, in the end, about freedom. Live Tea or die!

Charles Krauthammer takes on BO’s “New Foundation.”

… Obama could not explain how — when the near-term stimulative spending is over and his ambitious domestic priorities kick in, promising sustained prosperity and deficit reduction — the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling. The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.

This is the sand on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.

For some strange reason George Will writes a column dissing denim. Ed Morrissey has fun with it.

… Did I miss a memo?  Have we solved all of the world’s problems?  This doesn’t even make for an interesting blog post, let alone a nationally-syndicated column from an erudite political commentator.  This is a Seinfeldian “What’s up with all the denim?” piece of elitist fluff.

I’d say Will needs to get out of the DC cocktail circuit more and meet the people whose motives he pretends to comprehend.  This isn’t a proletarian pose.  People don’t wear denim as an affectation to seem indifferent to sartorial splendor.  They wear jeans because they’re (a) mostly inexpensive in comparison to other sportswear choices, (b) remarkably durable, and (c) resistant to the whims of fashion.  They match almost every kind of shirt or blouse, and they work in almost every kind of weather. …

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Thomas Sowell writes on politics’ magic words.

… It is too bad that Lincoln is not still around today. He might emancipate us all from our enslavement to words.

When you call something a “stimulus” package, that does not mean that it actually stimulates. The way individuals, banks and businesses in general are hanging onto their money suggests that “sedative” package might be more accurate.

This is not a new phenomenon, peculiar to this administration. President Bush’s “stimulus” package did not stimulate either. The same was true back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “pump-priming” by spending government money to get private money flowing.

The circulation of money slowed down back then the way it has slowed down today.

Some of our biggest political fallacies come from accepting words as evidence of realities. “Rent control” laws do not control rent and “gun control” laws do not control guns.

The big cities with the tightest rent control laws in the nation are New York and San Francisco. The nation’s highest rents are in New York and the second-highest are in San Francisco. …

Michael Barone says when it comes to health care and climate, beware of geeks bearing formulas.

Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That’s the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The “quants” who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.

Turns out they got a few things wrong. Their formulas were based on only a few years of actual data. Or they failed to take into account the possibility that housing prices would fall. Or that the market for mortgage-backed securities might suddenly stop functioning.

The lesson seems clear. Don’t allow a whole system to become hostage to the workings of some geek’s formula. Keep in mind the possibility that the real world might not behave as the formula indicates.

But, astonishingly, our society seems about to forget that lesson, just as it should have been learned. Congress is poised, at least if the Obama administration gets its way, to pass major new laws on carbon emissions and on health care whose success depends on geeks bearing formulas. …

Ron Brownstein took exception to the items about the kid president’s divisiveness. Peter Wehner answers him in Contentions.

… Several of the points Brownstein makes are legitimate. For example, Obama still maintains significant support among independents — though according to Gallup, Bush’s support among independents was by the end of April 2001 slightly higher than Obama’s is right now.

Still, in several respects, Brownstein’s analysis is either incomplete or simply wrong. For example, what Brownstein doesn’t say, but what is highly relevant, is that according to the Gallup Poll, Obama has lost 16 points of support among Republicans since his Inauguration. President Bush actually gained 5 points in approval among Democrats (from 32 percent to 37 percent) between his Inauguration and early April. In fact, it wasn’t until Gallup’s September 19-21, 2003 poll — more than two-and-a-half years after he took office — that Bush’s support among Democrats fell the equivalent of a 16-point drop in support from his Inauguration.

The truth is that Obama started his presidency with fairly strong support among Republicans (above 40 percent according to Gallup). This complicates Brownstein’s claim that the GOP has “contracted” in a way that made support for Obama extremely unlikely because it is a party “dominated by conservatives.” In fact, a dozen weeks ago, in a party “dominated by conservatives,” Obama had substantial support from Republicans. That has been squandered. …

Jennifer Rubin says McCain was right when he said BO would raise taxes.

Although not for lack of trying, John McCain was never able to convince voters of — or get the media to focus on — the fallacy of then-candidate Barack Obama’s claim that he would provide a tax break for 95% of voters. Well, with the enormous spending increases it is becoming clearer that a whopping tax increase is in store for many voters. The Hill reports: …

Karl Rove wonders if the GOP can take advantage of the tea parties.

Yesterday was Tax Day, and it was marked by large numbers of Americans turning out for an estimated 2,000 tea parties across the country. This movement is significant.

In 1978, California voters enacted Prop. 13 in reaction to steep property taxes. That marked the start of a tax-cutting movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan slashing high national income taxes in the 1980s. Now Americans are reacting to runaway government spending that they were not told about before last year’s election, and which Americans are growing to resent.

Derided by elitists as phony, the tea-party movement is spontaneous, decentralized, frequently amateurish and sometimes shrill. If it has a father it is CNBC’s Rick Santelli, who called for holding a tea party in Chicago on July 4. Yesterday’s gatherings were made up of people who may never meet again (there’s no central collection point for email addresses). But the concerns driving people to tea parties are real, growing and powerful. Politicians ignore them at their peril. …

The second half of the Vanity Fair Pinch Sulzberger profile is here.

… Arthur is still often referred to as “Young Arthur,” even though he is old enough to be a grandfather, or by the despised nickname that puns on his father’s, “Pinch.” Even as his locks gray and he nears almost two decades as publisher, he remains the prince-in-waiting who once haunted the newsroom in his socks, his trousers held up by colorful suspenders, peering in a harmless but nevertheless insufferably proprietary way over the shoulders of hard-boiled reporters on deadline. “I have heard him many times refer back to ‘when I was a reporter,’” says one former Times executive, theatrically cringing. “He’ll just do it as a throwaway—‘When I was a reporter.’ I will say this to him one day: Don’t say that. You know what? You don’t have to say that. Do you think it’s giving you more credibility with journalists? It actually gives you less.” On the business side, according to one former associate, he was viewed with contempt. “They saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists.”

But Arthur has one big thing going for him, particularly with the reporters and editors who are the real stars in the Times building. Arthur is motivated, as he himself says, not by wealth but by value. He believes, to be sure, that wealth follows from value, but you can see, even as he says it, that the wealth part is not what drives him. Journalism drives him. The Times’s reputation and influence drive him. He is not just a newspaper publisher and a chairman of the board. He is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and the pride he feels in that name doesn’t have anything to do with how much is in his bank account. No matter what moves he makes, no matter what errors he commits, Arthur will remain every journalist’s dream publisher. He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars. The same people who roll their eyes when they hear him wax nostalgic about his years in the newsroom pray for him daily, because, like them, he completely buys the myth: Journalism sells.

“This is ridiculous,” says a former business-side executive at the Times. “It flies in the face of logic and reason, this belief that if your news product is so good and so comprehensive the normal rules of business are suspended. Think about it. Think about the inanity of saying that you survived by putting in more news and cutting ads.”

Arthur repeated this belief proudly in his interview with Rose, describing how Adolph Ochs responded to the lean years after he purchased the paper by expanding its news hole—“We’re going to give our readers more! That’s gutsy!”—and how his grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger did something similar during World War II, when newsprint was being rationed: “Major decision, major gutsy decision from him there. Perhaps the critical decision of his time … whether to continue to print ads—revenue, money, profit—or to say, No, we’re going to add more news. He went to news, the Herald Tribune went to ads, and the rest was just a matter of time. By the time the war ended the Times had taken such a huge leadership that it was just a matter of time before the Herald Tribune was to fold.”

This story is false. It is dismissed even in The Trust, a mostly glowing account of the newspaper and the family written with the full cooperation of the Sulzbergers, including Arthur, and published more than a year before he spoke those words to Rose. The authors, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, thoroughly debunked the legend.

“One of the enduring myths about The New York Times is that it nobly sacrificed profits from revenue-generating ads during World War II in order to print more news,” wrote Tifft and Jones. “But the truth is somewhat more complicated.” It seems that the Times actually slashed its news hole in this period “far more severely than it cut the space devoted to ads.” With newsprint rationed, and with more ads and news than he could fit, Sulzberger increased space for ads and decreased space for news. In fact, he devoted the majority of the newspaper’s space to ads, and earned more revenue than he had since 1931. Ad revenue “had actually increased during the period, from $13 million to $15 million, while the amount of money spent on news had slumped slightly from $3.9 million to $3.7 million,” Tifft and Jones wrote. …

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Glenn Reynolds, who we know as Instapundit, writes for the WSJ on today’s tea parties.

Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies — dubbed “tea parties” — to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.

So who’s behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing “flash crowds” — groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month. This is part of a general phenomenon dubbed “Smart Mobs” by Howard Rheingold, author of a book by the same title, in which modern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don’t know each other.

In the old days, organizing large groups of people required, well, an organization: a political party, a labor union, a church or some other sort of structure. Now people can coordinate themselves. …

Good time to bring back the awesome graph from Instapundit displaying the out of control federal government.

Robert Samuelson writes in WaPo on the misplaced priorities of this administration.

President Obama has made no secret of his vision for America’s 21st-century economy. We will lead the world in “green” technologies to stop global warming. Advancing medical breakthroughs will improve our well-being, control health spending and enable us to expand insurance coverage. These investments in energy and health care, as well as education, will revive the economy and create millions of well-paying new jobs for middle-class Americans.

It’s a dazzling rhetorical vista that excites the young and fits the country’s mood, which blames “capitalist greed” for the economic crisis. Obama promises communal goals and a more widely shared prosperity. The trouble is that it may not work as well in practice as it does in Obama’s speeches. Still, congressional Democrats press ahead to curb global warming and achieve near-universal health insurance. We should not be stampeded into far-reaching changes that have little to do with today’s crisis.

What Obama proposes is a “post-material economy.” He would de-emphasize the production of ever-more private goods and services, harnessing the economy to achieve broad social goals. In the process, he sets aside the standard logic of economic progress. …

Pickerhead has made no secret of his disdain for the NY Times and its far left agenda. Pinch Sulzberger, the man who is leading the Times down the road to oblivion was treated to a lengthy profile in Vanity Fair. We have it in two parts concluding tomorrow. Can you spell schadenfreude?

I was in a taxi on a wet winter day in Manhattan three years ago when my phone rang, displaying “111-111-1111,” the peculiar signature of an incoming call from The New York Times.

“Mark? It’s Arthur Sulzberger.”

For weeks I had been trying to talk with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of the New York Times Company. We had met once before, on friendly terms, and sometime after that I had informed him that I was hoping to write a story about him. I figured he was calling now to set something up. Instead he asked, “Have you seen the New Yorker piece?”

The article in question, just published, was bruising. It had surely been painful for him to read. Among other indignities, it featured a remark by the celebrated former Times man Gay Talese, the author of one of the most popular histories of the newspaper, The Kingdom and the Power. Speaking of Arthur, the fifth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty to preside over the paper, Talese had said, “You get a bad king every once in a while.”

I told Arthur that I had not yet fully read the story. “Well, I’m getting out of the business,” he said. Startled, I gazed through the window at the cars and people shouldering through the cold rain, the headline already forming in my mind: publishing scion resigns! “Wait, Arthur,” I said. “Is this a major scoop? Or are you just saying that you aren’t talking to writers anymore?” He laughed his high-pitched, zany laugh. “The latter,” he said.

Now, I respect people who avoid the spotlight, and a reluctance to be publicly vivisected is a sure sign of intelligence. But ducking interviews is an awkward policy for the leader of the world’s most celebrated newspaper, one that sends a small army of reporters—approximately 400 of them—into the field every day asking questions. Still, I could understand Arthur’s decision. After presiding or helping to preside over a decade of unprecedented prosperity, the publisher and chairman of the Times had recently begun to appear overmatched. Two of his star staffers were discovered to have violated basic rules of reporting practice; he had been bullied by the newsroom into firing his handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines; and he had spent much of the previous year in a confusing knot of difficulty surrounding one of his reporters and longtime friends, Judith Miller. For an earnest and well-meaning man, the hereditary publisher had begun to look dismayingly small.

He has been shrinking ever since. In 2001, The New York Times celebrated its 150th anniversary. In the years that have followed, Arthur Sulzberger has steered his inheritance into a ditch. As of this writing, Times Company stock is officially classified as junk. Arthur made a catastrophic decision in the 1990s to start aggressively buying back shares ($1.8 billion worth from 2000 to 2004 alone). This was considered a good investment at the time, and had the effect of increasing the stock’s value. Shares were going for more than $50. Now they are slipping below $4—less than the price of the Sunday Times. …

This is an appropriate time for a Power Line post on the Times’ worst columnist.

It’s a tough competition, of course, but it’s hard to imagine that any columnist in America could be more inept than Paul Krugman. I used to enjoy beating up on Krugman, but haven’t read him for a long time–life is short. But today I happened to notice this column, which attacks the Republican Party and the tea party movement.

I’d rebut Krugman’s arguments, only he doesn’t make any. Does he ever? Krugman doesn’t argue, he just vents. This is what we used to call “mailing it in.” If Krugman spent more than 20 minutes writing this column, I’d be shocked.  …

American.com treats us to the latest government idea for curtailing our freedoms. California is thinking of limiting the size of televisions. All for the environment of course.

… The most recent example comes from (where else?) California, which is considering a proposal to ban big-screen TVs. The unelected bureaucrats who comprise the state’s energy commission are working up new efficiency regulations aimed at big-screen televisions, which are condemned as energy hogs.

Big-screen televisions require more energy than smaller ones, and really big plasma TVs can suck more power than your refrigerator. That’s hardly surprising, but it upsets regulators all the same. The California proposal—which could be adopted this summer—would forbid retailers from selling TVs that require what state officials think is too much power. Proponents claim they are mandating energy efficiency, and who could object to that? The practical effect, however, would be to remove TVs with screens 40 inches or bigger from the market.

Regulators cite global warming and note that big-screen TVs are extremely popular among Californians. Soaring sales mean a greater demand for electricity, and more electricity use means increased greenhouse gas emissions. In a state devoted to fighting global warming (though one that has outlawed construction of new nuclear power plants that emit no greenhouse gases), that is unacceptable.

Another problem is that California is notoriously averse to adding electricity capacity, which explains the rolling blackouts earlier this decade. Forecasts of increased energy demand put state officials on the spot. Rather than take steps to build more power plants to meet consumers’ needs, California regulators would force residents to settle for products they do not want.

Last year, the California Energy Commission floated a proposal giving it authority to remotely regulate or even shut down homes’ thermostats via radio-controlled devices at the government’s discretion. It did not get far, but did reveal a bureaucratic desire to dictate appropriate levels of consumption rather than leave consumers to decide what they want and will pay for. The move to ban big-screen TVs is just another version of this bureaucratic power grab to control how other people power their lives. …

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Freedom Works.org has the top ten reasons to scrap the tax code. Here’s number nine.

9. The Code Drives Political Donations

The Congressman on the House Ways and Means Committee Received  </$55,157,458  in the 2008 Election Cycle.

The Ways and Means Committee deals with taxes.  It’s responsible for “raising the revenue required to finance the Federal Government. This includes individual and corporate income taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, gift taxes, and other miscellaneous taxes.”  It’s the busiest committee and it’s membership during the 2008 election cycle received $55,157,458 in campaign contributions.

If we scrapped the code, the committee members would lose their power to manipulate the code in order to pay off their campaign contributors.  Our tax system leads to corruption and corporate capture of legislation .

Couple of good Corner posts on the pirates.

Last week, for the first time in two hundred years, pirates attempted to capture a vessel sailing under the flag of the United States of America, the Alabama. As we all know, their attempt was foiled.

Amazingly, the U.S. destroyer dispatched to the area to confront the pirates bears the name of Commodore Bainbridge, who was instrumental in shaping U.S. policy towards pirates in the late 1700s and early 1800s. At the time, North African pirates were waging war on commerce in the Mediterranean Sea. By declaring independence, the United States had just lost the protection of the British Empire, and with it the world’s most powerful navy. U.S. merchant ships, therefore, increasingly became victims of piracy in what was then a waterway of high importance.

Thomas Jefferson, then an American diplomat, reached out to France, Spain, and several other countries in an attempt to form a coalition of navies that would patrol the area, but the Europeans preferred paying ransom to the pirates rather than confronting them militarily. So the United States, too, resorted to bribery. The pirates’ demands, however, grew ever larger, and acts of piracy increased, as piracy became more lucrative. By 1786, the pirates had become so bold, and their respect for U.S. power had so diminished, that the leader of one pirateering nation told Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that the United States had to pay him $1 million per year if it wanted the pirates to stop attacking U.S. vessels. Bainbridge found these degradations appalling and advocated a more muscular approach. …

It is ironic that Hernando de Soto is lecturing us about doing the economic paperwork.

… With information about derivatives not standardized and thousands of idiosyncratic bonds sold, resold and scattered helter-skelter all over the market, it will be difficult for any individual vulture to calculate their worth until someone locates and categorizes them. In fact, some derivative paper is so sloppily structured that banks have been unable to figure out the contents of their own portfolios, and U.S. courts continue to reject many foreclosures that are based on this kind of paper. So before we could really hand over the solution to the vultures, someone still would have to do the math.

And even while the vultures are, minimally, at work, the contamination will continue as this huge shadow economy of derivative paper infects everything it touches. Consider that a mere 7% default on subprime paper — equivalent to maybe $1 trillion or $2 trillion — quickly contaminated other paper, creating a $50-trillion hole in the U.S. economy from losses in stocks, home values and revenues in less than one year. By not counting and identifying derivatives one by one and drawing a legal boundary around each by means of the rules of property law (things such as registration, traceability and standardized identification), we are unable to protect every asset and every particular interest on that asset from contamination. The longer we wait to do the math, the worse it will get. And the more likely the anarchy of this shadow economy will spread.

In the world where I come from, it is the typical state of affairs. In fact, apart from the elite Westernized minority, most people’s assets are covered by paper that is endemically toxic: not recorded, not standardized, difficult to identify, hard to locate, its real value so opaque that ordinary people cannot build trust in each other or be trusted in global markets. In short, for shadow economies outside the U.S. and Europe, “credit crunch” and “meltdown” are chronic conditions. …

Karl Rove and Michael Gerson write on BO’s extremism. Rove;

The Pew Research Center reported last week that President Barack Obama “has the most polarized early job approval of any president” since surveys began tracking this 40 years ago. The gap between Mr. Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points. This “approval gap” is 10 points bigger than George W. Bush’s at this point in his presidency, despite Mr. Bush winning a bitterly contested election.

Part of Mr. Obama’s polarized standing can be attributed to a long-term trend. University of Missouri political scientist John Petrocik points out that since 1980, each successive first term president has had more polarized support than his predecessor with the exception of 1989, when George H.W. Bush enjoyed a modest improvement over Ronald Reagan’s 1981 standing.

But rather than end or ameliorate that trend, Mr. Obama’s actions and rhetoric have accelerated it. His campaign promised post-partisanship, but since taking office Mr. Obama has frozen Republicans out of the deliberative process, and his response to their suggestions has been a brusque dismissal that “I won.”

Compare this with Mr. Bush’s actions in the aftermath of his election. Among his first appointments were Democratic judicial nominees who had been blocked by Republicans under President Bill Clinton. The Bush White House joined with Democratic and Republican leaders to draft education reform legislation. And Mr. Bush worked with Republican Chuck Grassley to cut a deal with Democrat Max Baucus to win bipartisan passage of a big tax cut in a Senate split 50-50 after the 2000 election. …

Peter Robinson is in Forbes with a contrarian’s view of the housing crisis.

Jennifer Rubin has more on ethanol in One of the Worst Ideas Ever.

Global warming history lesson from Pajamas Media.

Ah, spring, when the earth slowly wakes from its winter slumber, a warming welcomed by nearly every living thing.

Hard to believe some silly people are deathly afraid of warming weather — worried sick because the earth has warmed a degree or two over the last 150 years.

Make no mistake — the earth has warmed.  Unfortunately for the climate-change catastrophists, warming periods have occurred throughout recorded history, long before the Industrial Revolution and SUVs began spitting man-made carbon into the atmosphere. And as might be expected, these warm periods have invariably proven a blessing for humanity.  Consider:

Around the 3rd century B.C., the planet emerged from a long cold spell. The warm period which followed lasted about 700 years, and since it coincided with the rise of Pax Romana, it is known as the Roman Warming.

In the 5th century A.D., the earth’s climate became cooler.  Cold and drought pushed the tribes of northern Europe south against the Roman frontier. Rome was sacked, and the Dark Ages commenced.  And it was a dark age, both metaphorically and literally — the sun’s light dimmed and gave little warmth; harvest seasons grew shorter and yielded less. Life expectancy and literacy plummeted. The plague appeared and decimated whole populations. …

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Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post on surviving in a post-American world.

Like it or not, the United States of America is no longer the world’s policeman. This was the message of Barack Obama’s presidential journey to Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iraq this past week.

Somewhere between apologizing for American history – both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US’s nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America’s missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, “Don’t worry, be happy,” as he leaves them to Moscow’s tender mercies; humiliating Iraq’s leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world’s aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington.

This news is music to the ears of the American Left and their friends in Europe. Obama’s supporters like billionaire George Soros couldn’t be more excited at the self-induced demise of the American superpower. CNN’s former (anti-)Israel bureau chief Walter Rodgers wrote ecstatically in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, “America’s… superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy.”  …

GWU law prof Jonathan Turley writes on the diminishment of free speech.

For years, the Western world has listened aghast to stories out of Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations of citizens being imprisoned or executed for questioning or offending Islam. Even the most seemingly minor infractions elicit draconian punishments. Late last year, two Afghan journalists were sentenced to prison for blasphemy because they translated the Koran into a Farsi dialect that Afghans can read. In Jordan, a poet was arrested for incorporating Koranic verses into his work. And last week, an Egyptian court banned a magazine for running a similar poem.

But now an equally troubling trend is developing in the West. Ever since 2006, when Muslims worldwide rioted over newspaper cartoons picturing the prophet Muhammad, Western countries, too, have been prosecuting more individuals for criticizing religion. The “Free World,” it appears, may be losing faith in free speech.

Among the new blasphemers is legendary French actress Brigitte Bardot, who was convicted last June of “inciting religious hatred” for a letter she wrote in 2006 to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that Muslims were ruining France. It was her fourth criminal citation for expressing intolerant views of Muslims and homosexuals. Other Western countries, including Canada and Britain, are also cracking down on religious critics. …

And an Easter message from David Warren.

It is Easter. The custom among Christians has ever been to observe this as the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord. Not quite all Christians: for I know several strict Calvinists of the Westminster Confession, who reject both Christmas and Easter as pagan celebrations. God bless them, they are fine people, and my brethren, even if separated from me by more schisms than I can count.

For that matter, as my ancient Roman Church teaches, all men are my brothers, and that includes all women and children, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, animists, atheists, etc. Even Richard Dawkins.

We must (as my Pope also mentions from time to time) categorically respect every sincere and peaceable manifestation of religious belief, no matter how seriously we may believe it is in error.

As he said at the University of Regensburg in 2006, in a lecture that was maliciously misconstrued, we must further insist that our differences be discussed without violence and intimidation, and by the light of a reason that should be accepted as the common property of all mankind. In the conditions of the modern world, there is no alternative that does not lead to cataclysm. …

WaPo editors rough up Arne Duncan SecEd for the demise of DC vouchers. Jennifer Rubin says, “Wait a minute, Duncan has a boss.”

… So if one re-reads the op-ed with  “the president” in lieu of “Arne Duncan” one gets a better picture of what is going on here. The president has betrayed the kids in his hometown for the sake of mollifying the teachers’ union. It is about as far from “hope” and “change” as one can get. And it is, along with his egregious fiscal irresponsibility, perhaps the greatest disappointment of his new presidency — at least for those who were hoping he’d be a new kind of Democrat. Perhaps it is time for his hometown paper to focus on whom is ultimately and entirely responsible for this abomination.

Here’s that WaPo editorial.

Deroy Murdock writes on DC vouchers for Real Clear Politics.

Despite being “a skeptic of vouchers,” candidate Barack Obama promised this would not prevent him from “making sure that our kids can learn.” As he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “You do what works for the kids.”

Last January 21, his first full day in office, President Obama declared, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

Just 10 weeks later, Obama has broken both these promises. And poor-but-promising minority kids suffer the consequences.

These 1,714 children — 90 percent black and 9 percent Hispanic — enjoy the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. They each receive up to $7,500 for private or parochial schools outside Washington, D.C.’s dismal government-education system. Since its 2004 launch, 7,852 students have applied for these grants, or more than four children per voucher.

This program’s popularity notwithstanding, Obama stayed silent as Congress scheduled this initiative’s demise after the 2009 — 2010 academic year. Both a Democratic Congress and DC authorities must reauthorize the program — not likely. …

London Times reports on new blood test for cancer. Buried in the story is indication of cancer fighting capabilities of statins, the new miracle drug.

A drop of blood or speck of tissue no bigger than a full stop could soon be all that is required to diagnose cancers and assess their response to treatment, research suggests.

New technology that allows cancer proteins to be analysed in tiny samples could spell the end of surgical biopsies, which involve removing lumps of tissue, often under general anaesthetic.

Researchers at Stanford University, California, have developed a machine that separates cancer-associated proteins by means of their electric charge, which varies according to modifications on the protein’s surface. …

Borowitz reports salary caps are driving away Wall Street’s jerks.

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Understanding economics requires the ability to see an action’s unintended consequences. WSJ Editors write on one consequence that ignorant and corrupt dems should have anticipated.

… A tariff imposed to please a powerful domestic constituency leads to retaliation that whacks innocent bystanders who lack the ear of the White House or Speaker of the House. In this case, a payoff to the Teamsters stuffed in a spending bill has now become a hardship for the farm growers and workers of Oregon. We elect Presidents to stop this kind of economic damage, not to promote it.

Instapundit has a graphic illustration of just how bad Obama’s budgets are. Bush was awful. The kid is off the charts.

Peter Wehner posts on BO’s willingness to trash our country.

At convenient points on his overseas trip President Obama purposefully disfigured reality in a way that reflected poorly on America. That is to say, an American president played up cartoon images of the United States in order to get foreign audiences to applaud him. It is rare for the leader of a nation to revise history in order to make his nation look worse. But for Obama, the upside — making himself look good — is an easy trade-off. One senses that when it comes to Obama, it is all, and always, about him.

In thinking about Obama’s trip, I was reminded of the words of another Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who said this:

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

It is almost inconceivable to think of former Democrat, Ronald Reagan, going overseas and criticizing America in the manner Obama did, especially for baseless reasons. …

Jennifer Rubin on the subject.

… You (Peter) raise the possibility that there is a certain potent egotism at work here — the desire to be adored by not just the American public but by a world audience, which of course doesn’t always think very highly of America. But that should be no problem for Obama who finds his country’s behavior to be arrogant and self-centered and insufficiently concerned with others. How nice that he can bond with international audiences in their mutual disdain for America’s behavior. …

Charles Krauthammer picks up the theme in “Your County Too, Mr. President.”

… With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he’ll have to leave his bridge partner behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they’re not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?

When Austria is mocking you, you’re having a bad week. …

… It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country’s decline. A few more such overseas tours, and Obama will have a lot more decline to celebrate.

Mark Steyn writes on all the distractions coming at the kid president. Perhaps we should be thankful for them. Otherwise he could do real damage.

The Reuters headline put it this way: “Pirates Pose Annoying Distraction For Obama.”

So many distractions, aren’t there? Only a week ago, the North Korean missile test was an “annoying distraction” from Barack Obama’s call for a world without nuclear weapons and his pledge that America would lead the way in disarming. And only a couple of days earlier the president insisted Iraq was a “distraction” – from what, I forget: The cooing press coverage of Michelle’s wardrobe? No doubt when the Iranians nuke Israel, that, too, will be an unwelcome distraction from the administration’s plans for federally subsidized day care, just as Pearl Harbor was an annoying distraction from the New Deal, and the First World War was an annoying distraction from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s dinner plans

If the incompetent management driving The New York Times from junk status to oblivion wished to decelerate their terminal decline, they might usefully amend their motto to “All The News That’s Fit To Distract.” Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the past 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and “distractions,” as opposed to about 800 “distractions” for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: “First North Korea, Iran – now Somali pirates.” …

… When all the world’s a “distraction,” maybe you’re not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will. Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity. Don’t be surprised if “the civilized world” shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a “distraction” but a portent of the future.

David Warren continues his columns on the the kid’s excellent adventures with “Innocents Abroad.”

… Barack Obama, is back in Washington after an apology tour to Europe, Turkey, and Iraq. He received no European commitments whatever for his proposed surge-like strategy in Afghanistan. (The word “surge” is now banned in White House parlance, along with the phrase “war on terror” and several related terms. With the help of supinely obliging media, the very ability to describe a conflict may soon be, as it were, “withdrawn.”)

So far as I am able to discover, President Obama’s most significant accomplishment abroad was getting President Sarkozy of France to accept exactly one of the 245 Guantanamo inmates currently on offer to anyone who wants them.

The strategy behind the new Obama foreign policy, so far as any can be discerned, is to disavow everything the Bush administration did in eight years, and then harvest the resulting good will. And while the product of this strategy is zero, it has been charitably observed that his term in office has hardly begun.

Just so we can remember all the foolish things George W. Bush did as president, we are now learning biofuels (ethanol) might be a hazard. The Economist has the story.

… just as governments have committed themselves to the greater use of biofuels (see table), questions are being raised about how green this form of energy really is. The latest come from a report produced by a team of scientists working on behalf of the International Council for Science (ICSU), a Paris-based federation of scientific associations from around the world.

The ICSU report concludes that, so far, the production of biofuels has aggravated rather than ameliorated global warming. In particular, it supports some controversial findings published in 2007 by Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Dr Crutzen concluded that most analyses had underestimated the importance to global warming of a gas called nitrous oxide (N2O) by a factor of between three and five. The amount of this gas released by farming biofuel crops such as maize and rape probably negates by itself any advantage offered by reduced emissions of CO2.

Although N2O is not common in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it hangs around longer. The upshot is that, over the course of a century, its ability to warm the planet is almost 300 times that of an equivalent mass of CO2. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who was involved in writing the ICSU report, said that although the methods used by Dr Crutzen could be criticised, his fundamental conclusions were correct. …

WSJ has the story of how Ronald Reagan rescued a director from Hollywood’s blacklist.

In Kirk Douglas’s new one-man stage play, “Before I Forget,” he entertains audiences with the story of how he “broke” the blacklist. In 1960, he used his influence as the executive producer and star of the movie “Spartacus” to give known communist writer Dalton Trumbo on-screen credit for the script. It is regarded as a watershed moment in the movie business — the first time that an artist who was blacklisted by Hollywood for his communist associations was rescued from the shadows.

But as noteworthy as Mr. Douglas’s action was, the first time a blacklistee was openly brought back into the Hollywood fold actually came almost a decade earlier with the rehabilitation of 42-year-old director and former communist Edward Dmytryk. A young Ronald Reagan, of all people, was substantially responsible. …

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David Warren picks up on a column by Thomas Sowell.

One of my living heroes, the American journalist and economist Thomas Sowell, wrote a column a couple of days ago consisting of “random thoughts” — aphoristic remarks about things as they now are. His points ran from the generality of:

“Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences.”

To the specificity of:

“Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy, and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent.”

Sowell is superb when apothegmatic. The value in such assertions as these — made free of the encumbering apparatus of careful qualification on which he usually depends — is that they light a dark landscape with lightning. They are the pure electric charge of insight.

I love Sowell, because he can “do” desolation without wandering into despair. Reciprocally, he can do hope — the real thing, not the rhetorical posture. A black man, from a fatherless home, raised by an aunt whom he thought was his mother, in rural then urban conditions that would excuse any man for failure, he saw through his circumstances. He dragged himself up, through a machine shop, through the Marines, eventually to great eminence in the academic world, at a time before he could trade on his race. And he continued rising, with the help of honest friends, and by ignoring vilifications. …

Camille Paglia has her column that answers letters.

… At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable administrative crux. Arriving at the White House, he understandably stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with him — a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling colossi, into yesterday’s news. But these comrades may not have the practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.

Obama’s staffing problems are blatant — from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another — from the president’s tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady’s over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama’s sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol. …

Mark Steyn wishes to be a demographic bore.

As National Review’s in-house demography bore — oh, hang on, the self-deprecating “demography bore” shtick is getting even more boring than just boring on about demography . . . Well, okay, usually I bore on about it, as my detractors have it, in the head-for-the-hills-the-Muzzies-are-coming sense. So, just for a change, here’s the Subprime Bailout Variations of my same old demographic song.

Take a “toxic asset.” What would improve its current pitiful value? That’s easy: More demand. Less supply. An asset is only an asset as long as there’s a buyer willing to buy it. If you’ve got 50 houses and 100 would-be homeowners, that’s good for property prices. If you’ve got 100 houses and 50 would-be homeowners, that’s not so good.

Which is the situation much of the developed world is facing. A bank is a kind of demographic shorthand, by which old people with capital lend to young people with ambition and ideas. Unfortunately, the Western world is running out of young people. Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. …

BO’s education secretary, Arne Duncan is caught by David Harsanyi lying about the DC voucher program killed by the dems.

… But the most “fundamentally dishonest” aspect of the affair was Duncan’s feeble argument against the program. First, he strongly intimated that since only 1 percent of children were able to “escape” (and, boy, that’s some admission) from D.C. public schools through this program, it was not worth saving.

So, you may ask, why not allow the 1 percent to turn into 2 percent or 10 percent, instead of scrapping the program? After all, only moments earlier, Duncan claimed that there was no magic reform bullet and it would take a multitude of innovations to fix education.

Then, Duncan, after thrashing the scholarship program and study, emphasized that he was opposed to “pulling kids out of a program” in which they were “learning.” Geez. If they’re learning in this program, why kill it? And if the program was insignificant, as Duncan claimed, why keep these kids in it? Are these students worse off? Or are they just inconveniencing the rich kids?

Duncan can’t be honest, of course. Not when it’s about politics and paybacks to unions who are about as interested in reforming education as teenagers are in calculus. …

Speaking of education, John Stossel examines the universal pre-K scam.

Did you go to preschool? When I was growing up, few kids did. But now there is a new movement that says every child in America should have a chance to start school before kindergarten — at taxpayer expense.

It’s part of President Obama’s massive spending plans. His “stimulus” bill includes an Early Learning Challenge Grant to encourage states to “Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs”. It’s a popular idea. Sixty-seven percent of Americans favor universal pre-K funded by the government. But I doubt that most Americans have thought it through.

Mia Levi has. She told me, “This whole thing is a scam.”

Levi runs six preschools. I thought she’d favor the program, since she’d collect easy money from the government.

“I don’t want to have to answer to the government,” she said. “Our programs are so far superior.” …

Jennifer Rubin on the ‘Bama Bow.

Abe Greenwald on the failures of the BO tour.

And now Barack Obama’s aid plan for Pakistan falls flat:

U.S. envoys met with Pakistani leaders on Tuesday to ensure that the $7.5 billion that President Obama plans to send their way over the next five years will be used to achieve common goals in the fight against extremism.

But according to a Pakistani newspaper, regional envoy Richard Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen came up empty-handed and received a “rude shock” when a proposal for joint operations against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the volatile tribal regions was rejected.

It’s a clean sweep. Obama’s proposals have been turned down by every foreign government and international body he’s approached — from Pyongyang to Brussels, and assorted points in between. …

As you’re watching the Masters, The WSJ says try to remember how golf helps you remember.

Millions of golf enthusiasts who will watch the Masters Tournament this weekend have waxed endlessly about the game’s mystical power and its hold on the human mind. A handful of people with Alzheimer’s disease, no longer able to dress or nourish themselves without assistance, are proving them right.

A little after 9 a.m. last week, Wardell Johnston declared he wanted to be left alone. Confused and annoyed by the activities and tasks confronting him, the 87-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer shut his door at the Silverado Senior Living home in Belmont, Calif.

Just hours later, Mr. Johnston was measuring the uphill, right-to-left break on a 12-foot putt and knocking his ball into the hole. Then the former civil engineer, who played the game regularly as a younger man, ambled over to the driving range. He grabbed a six iron and practiced chipping with the sort of easy, stress-free swing duffers half his age could learn something from.

“I quit,” he said with a cocky grin after each successful shot. Then he deftly cradled another ball with his club, moving it into position for the next stroke. “I haven’t played a lot lately,” he added. “I should, though. I’ve still got all the strokes.”

Anyone who has dealt with people suffering from mid- to late-stage Alzheimer’s knows how difficult it can be to transport someone from fear and confusion to contentment and lucidity. But at Silverado, caregivers have stumbled onto a technique that works nearly every time — a golf outing. …

Scrappleface says people are copying Obama’s bow to King Abdullah.

News Biscuit reports on Isle of Wight man who dies trying to answer his daily 3,000 pieces of spam.

… Police investigating the incident found that the last 438 messages in Mr Spriggs’s sent folder read: ‘Dear Sir, I refer to your esteemed correspondence of the 18th inst. I beg to inform you that the length and girth of my penis is adequate for the requirements of my dear wife. I therefore must regretfully decline your kind invitation. I remain, sir, your humble servant, Arthur Spriggs.’

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