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David Harsanyi thinks we’re overdoing the obeisance to democracy.

… Don’t get me wrong, democracy is clearly a vast improvement over an autocracy. (Though, now that you bring it up, how many of you would choose to reside in one of those despotic Persian Gulf states with stipends, film festivals and casinos rather than a democratic Haiti?)

But democracy without a moral foundation, economic freedom, and a respect for individual and human rights has the potential not to be any kind of freedom at all. It takes more than democracy to be free.

We wish the Muslim world the best in shedding its dictatorships and theocracies and finding true liberty. But let’s not confuse two distinct ideas.

At the very least, not on television, a place where Americans can typically rely on pinpoint accuracy and untainted reporting. Not there.

David Warren notes the power and weakness of the net.

… We have read much about those twittering “social media,” which the younger generation of Islamists have mastered, along with everyone else. The demonstrations were certainly organized through them. They became possible because social media gave people the sense of strength in numbers — well before they actually had the numbers on the street. And al Jazeera leaped in quickly to spread the word and excitement from there. The Internet, in combination with partisan and sensationalized mass media, have rewritten many of the rules.

The mob is now electronically summoned and enhanced, but, to return to where I started, this does not make it any easier to argue with, nor contribute to the possibilities for mature and intelligent deliberation over the path ahead. It instead creates a new and much broader field for anarchy. From anarchy to totalitarianism is one Persian step. …

The next “David” up today is Goldman (AKA – Spengler). He continues the internet thought and proposes a solution too.

Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends.

Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms “Facebook“, “Egypt” and “revolution”. The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed.

As a reality check: the search terms “Egypt”, “revolution” and “genital mutilation” turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation, while fewer than 10% of Egyptians use Facebook. Before long we will see whether the “tech-savvy” revolutionaries (172 stories with the qualifier on Google news) are just benzine bubbles floating atop the viscous Nile mud.

Egypt churns out 700,000 university graduates a year qualified to stamp each other’s papers and not much else, and employs perhaps 200,000 of them, mostly in government bureaucracy.

As Egypt’s new Finance Minister Samir Radwan said of the young people who put him in power (to the Financial Times on February 13), “I’m generalizing, but a large number of the Egyptian labor force is unemployable. The products of the education system are unemployable.”  …

… The Facebook friends of Tahrir Square will do nothing more than furrow the mud of Egypt’s traditional society. But they must be good for something. Here’s one idea: have the army draft them all, and send them to the villages to reach reading. The late Shah of Iran created a “Literacy Corps” that allowed any draftee with a high school diploma to perform military service in rural villages as teachers. In one generation, Iran raised its literacy rate to nearly 90%. If the university graduates are unemployable, at least they can do the same. That would really make a difference.

Today’s Pickings started out to be a reasonable length. But, the unions, and then our foolish president kept raising the stakes in Wisconsin. So we have a section devoted to events there. John Fund kicks it off in the WSJ. 

This week President Obama was roundly criticized, even by many of his allies, for submitting a federal budget that actually increases our already crushing deficit. But that didn’t stop him Thursday from jumping into Wisconsin’s titanic budget battle. He accused the new Republican governor, Scott Walker, of launching an “assault” on unions with his emergency legislation aimed at cutting the state budget.

The real assault this week was led by Organizing for America, the successor to President’s Obama’s 2008 campaign organization. It helped fill buses of protesters who flooded the state capital of Madison and ran 15 phone banks urging people to call state legislators.

Mr. Walker’s proposals are hardly revolutionary. Facing a $137 million budget deficit, he has decided to try to avoid laying off 5,500 state workers by proposing that they contribute 5.8% of their income towards their pensions and 12.6% towards health insurance. That’s roughly the national average for public pension payments, and it is less than half the national average of what government workers contribute to health care. Mr. Walker also wants to limit the power of public-employee unions to negotiate contracts and work rules—something that 24 states already limit or ban. …

Peter Wehner is the first of three from Contentions.

Here are a couple of predictions related to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s relatively modest requests of government unions (asking many of the state’s public employees to start contributing to their own pension and health-care benefits and limiting their collective bargaining rights to negotiations over pay rather than benefits) and the massive, angry protests they have elicited.

First, Governor Walker — if he holds shape and doesn’t back down (and I rather doubt he will back down) — will eventually benefit from this collision. Government unions, on the other hand, will suffer badly. The hysterical reaction to Walker’s reforms — comparing the governor of Wisconsin to (take your pick) Mubarak, Mussolini, or Hitler — is going to go down very poorly with the citizens of Wisconsin. Many of the public-employee protesters come across as pampered, childish, selfish, and overwrought. …

Alana Goodman and Jonathan Tobin note the lack of “civility” coming from the left.

As Alana has noted, one of the interesting sidelights of the confrontation in Wisconsin is the way that, once again, liberal hypocrisy on hate speech has been exposed. The dispute between Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislative majority intent on passing legislation that would limit collective bargaining by state-employee unions and force their members to pay for some of their health-care and pension costs and the Democrats and unions who oppose these measures illustrates the double standard by which our chattering classes view politics in this country.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, during the heated debate about President Obama’s health-care legislation, Americans were repeatedly told by the leaders of the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and even supposedly nonpartisan groups like the Anti-Defamation League that there was something profoundly and uniquely troubling about the angry language and behavior of those who opposed ObamaCare and the stimulus spending bill. Conservative Tea Party activists were continuously slammed as a threat to democracy because of the way they spoke about Obama or characterized the Democratic majority in Congress. The fact that the political left had spent the previous eight years demonizing President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the Republicans was ignored. The hue and cry over the need for more civility in politics was treated as an indication that there was something peculiarly unwholesome or even racist in the revulsion felt by a great many Americans toward the president’s policies. In November 2010, the idea that such sentiments were the preserve of a crackpot minority was exposed as a myth when the voters handed Obama a record midterm election defeat and sent scores of Tea Partiers to Washington. …

Jennifer Rubin closes this section.

E.J. Dionne decries Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s “overreach,” declaring the governor is “drumming up a crisis to change the very nature of the relationship between public workers and the government.”

Let’s talk about overreach. Here’s how the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s editorial board put it:

“Democrats in the state Senate threw a temper tantrum Thursday – essentially they took their ball and went home.

Actually, they didn’t go home. They apparently went to Illinois, just out of reach of their obligations.

By boycotting an expected vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, they were able to prevent action on the measure. Twenty senators are required for a quorum; the Republicans have only 19. . . .

One leading Democrat – Obama was his name, as we recall – put it well after winning the White House in 2008: “Elections have consequences,” he told Republicans at the time. Indeed they do. The Democrats’ childish prank mocks the democratic process.”

Overreach would be choosing extra-legislative means (flight) to prevent the voters’ elected representatives from working their will. Overreach would be threatening Republican officials in their homes. Overreach would be a flurry of Hitlerian imagery (good for the National Jewish Democratic Council in denouncing the widespread signage, but where is the George Soros-backed Jewish Funds for Justice and the anti-Glenn Beck crowd when you need them?) Overreach would be a massive sick-out, in essence a dishonest strike. …

Before we get to the budget, W. W. in the Democracy in America Blog has a neat post demonstrating the dull formulaic groupthink of the American liberal.

… Mr Herbert wanted to say that American democracy is broken because it’s been hijacked by the rich. This is one of approximately five columns liberal pundits phone in when they are uninspired or feeling lazy. …

Turning to the budget, Tony Blankley says rather than saying “draconian cuts” how about saying “draconian deficits.”

… The thing to be condemned should be draconian deficits, not draconian deficit cuts.

From the early reports of the White House‘s proposed 2012 budget, they will be more subject to the former than the latter charge.

According to The Washington Post, quoting the administration (don’t take my word for it): “The White House proposal, outlined Friday by a senior administration official, would barely put a dent in deficits that congressional budget analysts say could approach $12 trillion through 2021. But the policies would stabilize borrowing, the administration official said, while reversing the trend of ramping up spending.”

When a ship is sinking, one might consider actually pumping out more water than is rushing in. But the White House is content to “stabilize” these draconian deficits it contributed to during the past two years. How nice the alliterative phrase “draconian deficits” sounds. …

Debra Saunders knows one place to start cutting. 

The liberal group Moveon.org has been sending out e-mails to warn that Republicans are back in control of the House and to ask recipients to sign a petition that states, “Congress must protect NPR and PBS and guarantee them permanent funding, free from political meddling.”

Of course, the best way to guarantee no political meddling would be to eliminate some $500 million in federal funds allocated annually to these media’s parent organization, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Also of course, the fact that Moveon.org wants to keep federal tax dollars pouring into the public broadcasting bucket should end any question as to whether NPR and PBS news programs lean left. They do.

Yet for all his deficit-reduction talk in the face of America’s $14 trillion federal debt, President Obama wants to increase CPB’s funding by $6 million in 2014. …

WSJ reprints a City Journal article on the return of whooping cough in California where thoughtless people will surf most any silly trend.

Vaccines, which save millions of lives every year, are one of the most successful public-health interventions in the history of modern medicine. Among the diseases that they prevent is the whooping cough. Why, then, is that sickness making a scary comeback in California, which is currently weathering its largest whooping-cough epidemic since 1947, with over 7,800 cases and 10 deaths in 2010? Mainly because more and more parents, worried about the vaccine’s supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children—or not to do it at all. This public-health calamity, moreover, comes at a time when the Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit against whooping-cough vaccine manufacturer Wyeth; if successful, the suit would make epidemics much more likely and undermine public confidence in vaccines even further. …

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Mark Steyn has a short on Egypt.

… Amidst all this flowering of democracy, you’ll notice that it’s only the pro-American dictatorships on the ropes: In Libya and Syria, Gaddafy and Assad sleep soundly in their beds. On the other hand, if you were either of the two King Abdullahs, in Jordan or Saudi Arabia, and you looked at the Obama Administration’s very public abandonment of their Cairo strongman, what would you conclude about the value of being an American ally? For the last three weeks, the superpower has sent the consistent message to the world that (as Bernard Lewis feared some years ago) America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.

Mark Thiessen, in WaPo, writes on how the Egyptian people were lost to us.

The extraordinary scenes in Cairo this past weekend brought back memories of similar scenes on the streets of Warsaw, Prague and Berlin two decades ago. Yet there is one crucial difference between then and now. Unlike the crowds that brought down Marxist regimes in Central Europe, the crowds that brought down the Mubarak regime in Egypt do not believe America stood with them in their struggle for freedom – and many believe we stood against them.

When the protests first erupted, ordinary Egyptians appeared to hope – almost to expect – that once they rose up to demand their freedom, America could not help but stand with them. Instead, they heard President Obama’s handpicked envoy, Frank Wisner, declare that Hosni Mubarak “must stay in office” to oversee the changes he had ordered. They heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare the United States backed “the transition process announced by the Egyptian government” (which then consisted of Mubarak staying in power until September). And they waited in vain for Obama himself to speak out clearly and align America with the democratic revolution they had set in motion. Soon their hopes gave way to disappointment and eventually anger. Demonstrators began carrying signs that declared “Shame on you Obama!” and showed Mubarak depicted as Obama in his iconic “hope” image – with a caption that read “No You Can’t.” …

IBD editors have no illusions about Egypt.

Romantics in Western media expect “democracy” to flower from the anti-Mubarak rioting in Cairo. But polling shows Egyptians actually seek strict Islamic rule.

According to a major survey conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, adults in Egypt don’t crave Western-style democracy, as pundits have blithely trumpeted throughout coverage of the unrest.

Far from it, the vast majority of them want a larger role for Islam in government. This includes making barbaric punishments, such as stoning adulterers and executing apostates, the law of their country. With the ouster of their secular, pro-American leader, they may get their wish. …

Many are the comments on the new budget. Andrew Sullivan is falling out of love.

… In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road. …

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor has budget thoughts.

… This is not a remotely serious proposal.   I don’t know what color the sky is on the planet where this was formulated, but it ain’t the same as what I see out my window.  There is no recognition whatsoever of the existential fiscal situation the country now faces.  ”What, me worry?” doesn’t even come close to describing this.  No spending restraint whatsoever.  Projections of large tax increases and large revenue increases that will never–never–be realized.

The budget is chock-full of silliness, like a vast increase in funding for the Department of Education.  (Motto: “There’s No Problem We Can’t Make Worse With More Money!”)  Or especially the high speed rail boondoggle.  ”High” is right. The only thing that is missing in the administration salesmanship of this turkey is Robert Preston returning from the dead to perform a reprise of his role as the Music Man.  This is a con of the first order.

Apparently, the administration is attempting to reincarnate the budget showdown of 1995, in which Clinton regained his political balance by forcing a budget battle with the Gingrich-led Republicans. …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions;

Barack Obama, the post-everything visionary who vowed to deliver us from a suffocating political past, is in fact a dinosaur. The fossilized evidence has revealed itself over the past two years. So deep in the layers of political history is the 44th president lodged that even Palestinian leaders have moved on from the grievances he cites. So overtaken by the times is he that European heads of state dismiss his economics as yesterday’s errors. Indeed, Obama is so plainly out of step with the challenges of today that he has bowed out of the present altogether and redirected our attention to an impossible and therapeutic “future.”

We have exited politics and entered prophecy. The president’s budget reflects this. It is a spending plan for an alternate universe. …

Jennifer Rubin is next.

… It (The budget) also reveals, as many of us suspected, that Obama’s posturing during the lame duck session and the hiring of some new staff in the White House did not represent a fundamental shift in the White House’s agenda or philosophy. The Obama team is composed of people who think government spending creates prosperity, who have no fear that tax hikes will choke off economic growth, and who believe the electorate won’t notice or care that Obama has rejected the 2010 midterm message.

Obama in presenting his budget and revealing the philosophy to which he stubbornly clings has conceded the huge middle of the political spectrum to the Republicans. The Republicans now have the opportunity to cement their gains with independent voters and to rekindle the same excitement in the base that helped the party take 63 seats in the House and 6 Senate seats. If the Republicans play this smartly — a big if — they have the chance to lead and to make substantial gains in 2012.

Jennifer also comments on Tuesday’s presser.

… His most egregious departure from reality came not on the budget, but on Egypt. He proclaimed: “History will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt that we were on the right side of history.” This is preposterous to anyone but the most determined Obama sycophant. He did virtually nothing to push Hosni Mubarak toward reform for two years, and once the protests began the White House became a muddle of multiple voices, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggesting at points that Mubarak wasn’t and shouldn’t go anywhere. The administration never publicly called for Mubarak’s departure. In short, the Obama team followed and did not lead; its support for regime change was in doubt throughout the process. Unfortunately, Obama wasn’t asked if he had been on the right side of history in June 2009 when he largely ignored the Green Movement’s uprising.

Obama and his advisers seem to have convinced themselves that most problems are a matter of “messaging” or “communication.” But when Obama communicates a flawed message or misrepresents facts, he compounds his own difficulties, making it that much more difficult for his allies to defend him and all the more easy for opponents to demonstrate that he’s not leading on the crucial issues of the day.

Robert Samuelson can not believe anybody could seriously advocate for high speed rail.

Vice President Biden, an avowed friend of good government, is giving it a bad name. With great fanfare, he went to Philadelphia last week to announce that the Obama administration proposes spending $53 billion over six years to construct a “national high-speed rail system.” Translation: The administration would pay states $53 billion to build rail networks that would then lose money – lots – thereby aggravating the budget squeezes of the states or federal government, depending on which covered the deficits.

There’s something wildly irresponsible about the national government undermining states’ already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs. Worse, the rail proposal casts doubt on the administration’s commitment to reducing huge budget deficits. The president’s 2012 budget is due Monday. How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big spending programs?

High-speed rail would definitely be big. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has estimated the administration’s ultimate goal – bringing high-speed rail to 80 percent of the population – could cost $500 billion over 25 years. For this stupendous sum, there would be scant public benefits. Precisely the opposite. Rail subsidies would threaten funding for more pressing public needs: schools, police, defense. …

Thomas Sowell thinks the GOP can learn a lot from Rocky Marciano.

Rocky Marciano was the only heavyweight champion who never lost a single fight in his whole career– and, at the time, he seemed the least likely fighter to do that. In many a boxing match, he was battered, bruised and bleeding.

One of the reasons Marciano took so much punishment in the ring was that he had shorter arms than most other heavyweights. It was easier for others to hit him than for him to hit them.

In a sense, Republicans today are in a similar position in the political arena. With most of the media heavily tilted toward the Democrats, Republicans are going to get hit far more often than they are going to get in their own punches.

The difference is that Rocky Marciano understood from the beginning that he was going to get hit more often, and prepared himself for that kind of fight. His strategy was to concentrate on developing punches powerful enough to nullify his opponents’ greater number of punches.

Republicans take the opposite approach from that of Rocky Marciano– and often with opposite results. That may be why they managed to lose both houses of Congress and the White House in recent years, in a country where there are millions more people who call themselves conservatives than there are who call themselves liberals. …

Toby Harnden looks at the large GOP field for 2012 and likes the chaos.

… The Grand Old Party has a tradition of selecting the next guy in line, the runner up from the previous contest. That hasn’t exactly worked out well in recent years. President George Bush Snr was a one-term president who raised taxes. Bob Dole was trounced by Bill Clinton in 1996 and John McCain, another flawed candidate, was overwhelmed by Obama in 2008.

The open contest this time, and the relatively level playing field – no anointed sons or incumbent vice-presidents – will ensure that the 2012 Republican choice will be more meritocratic than usual.

Amongst conservatives, there is a palpable sense that America is facing a fiscal crisis and that Obama must be stopped at all costs if the US is not to succumb to European-style big government.

That may be an exaggerated fear but few would disagree that there will be a lot at stake in 2012. At the moment, Obama looks strong but he is eminently beatable because of high unemployment and the fact that most of the country opposes his policies, if not him.

In these circumstances, a long, deliberative process to select Obama’s challenger can only benefit Republicans and the country. Competition is good in baseball and business – and politics too.

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Today’s Pickings turns to another review of Bloodlands the story of the lands where Hitler and Stalin clashed. Before that we have some lighter fare. First is David Warren’s look at Vladimir Nabokov and his scientific pursuits. Yup, the author of Lolita was an accomplished naturalist who studied butterflies and in the process expounded theories that have just been proven with DNA testing.

… You make money however you can, and Nabokov also obtained a research fellowship at Harvard, proving so proficient that he was ultimately left in charge of the university’s butterfly collections. There he found the materials to speculate on the evolutionary descent of the whole range of New World “blues,” and to concoct the “imaginative” hypothesis that they were derived from Eurasian species, which had been “able to see Alaska from Russia,” and began crossing the Bering Strait during a warm spell in the Earth’s climate history, 11 million years ago.

In five major waves, corresponding to falling temperatures, successive butterflies crossed, then spread, finally advancing all the way to Chile. The proof that speciations within South America had not been the result (as previously assumed) of the separation of groups by the rise of the Andes, was a demonstration that butterflies on either side of that young mountain chain were more closely related to proposed ancestors in Southeast Asia, than to each other.

Enter the Harvard biology professor, Naomi Pierce, who has had the honour of telling the world this last fortnight, that Nabokov’s fanciful hypothesis is true, down to the most provocative assertions. Using the most advanced current molecular technology, she has tracked the whole history through DNA, confirming Nabokov dead right through fine details on five out of five. …

Pickerhead visited a blog named TreeHugger and learned of 500 year old “living” bridges in India.

Some of the smartest, most sustainable engineering feats were discovered hundreds of years ago, and many have gone unacknowledged. For evidence, take the bridge growers of northeastern India. Planning 10-15 years in advance, they build what may be the most sustainable foot bridges in the world — by literally growing them out of living tree roots. These bridges are extremely sturdy, reach up to 100 feet long, and many are at least 500 years old. …

… In order to make a rubber tree’s roots grow in the right direction–say, over a river–the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems. The thin, tender roots of the rubber tree, prevented from fanning out by the betel nut trunks, grow straight out. When they reach the other side of the river, they’re allowed to take root in the soil. Given enough time, a sturdy, living bridge is produced.

Sure, “enough time” isn’t exactly expedient by today’s standards — each root bridge takes between 10-15 years to grow strong enough to be put into use. But strong they are — evidently up to 50 people can cross the heftier bridges at once, and many bridges are over 100 feet long. And they only become stronger with time, as the roots continue to grow. …

The NY Times has an interesting shipwreck story.

In the annals of the sea, there were few sailors whose luck was worse than George Pollard Jr.’s.

Pollard, you see, was the captain of the Essex, the doomed Nantucket whaler whose demise, in 1820, came in a most unbelievable fashion: it was attacked and sunk by an angry sperm whale, an event that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.”

Unlike the tale of Ahab and Ishmael, however, Pollard’s story didn’t end there: After the Essex sank, Pollard and his crew floated through the Pacific for three months, a journey punctuated by death, starvation, madness and, in the end, cannibalism. (Pollard, alas, ate his cousin.)

Despite all that, Pollard survived and was given another ship to steer: the Two Brothers, the very boat that had brought the poor captain back to Nantucket.

And then, that ship sank, too.

On Friday, in a discovery that might bring a measure of peace to Captain Pollard, who survived his second wreck (though his career did not), researchers announced that they have found the remains of the Two Brothers. The whaler went down exactly 188 years ago after hitting a reef at the French Frigate Shoals, a treacherous atoll about 600 miles northwest of here. The trove includes dozens of artifacts: harpoon tips, whaling lances and three intact anchors. …

The Economist tells us how electrical transmission lines can be less ugly.

… The pylons in question have been designed by engineers at TenneT, the firm that runs the Netherlands’ national electricity grid, in collaboration with KEMA, a Dutch research company. Instead of a single lattice tower, the cables are supported by two elegant steel poles up to 65 metres high. There are no arms. The six cables that pass from one pylon to another are each borne by two insulators attached to the poles. The resulting arrangement, though hardly invisible, is reasonably elegant. As much to the point, though, it has technological advantages. Though no harm has been proven from them, conventional pylon cables, which transmit a three-phase alternating current, generate a strong electric field and a continuous buzz of low-frequency radio waves which some people who live near them fear might be detrimental to their health.

TenneT’s pylons should help allay that fear. Carrying all the cables in a “stack” between the poles, rather than hanging them separately on outward-facing arms, allows them to be arranged in a way that causes the individual fields generated by each cable to cancel each other, weakening the overall field around the pylons. The result is far less low-frequency radiation. The combination of being less of an eyesore and producing less electrical smog should, TenneT hopes, soften objections to the construction of new overhead power lines. …

Slate’s review of Bloodlands provides this;

… There is no algorithm for evil, but the case of Stalin’s has for a long time weighed more heavily the ideological murders and gulag deaths that began in 1937 and played down the millions who—Snyder argues—were just as deliberately, cold-bloodedly murdered by enforced famine in 1932 and 1933.

Here is where the shock of Snyder’s relatively few pages on cannibalism brought the question of degrees of evil alive once again to me. According to Snyder’s carefully documented account, it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in Soviet Ukraine for parents to cook and eat their children.

The bare statement alone is horrifying even to write.

The back story: While Lenin was content, for a time anyway, to allow the new Soviet Union to develop a “mixed economy” with state-run industry and peasant-owned private farms, Stalin decided to “collectivize” the grain-producing breadbasket that was the Ukraine. His agents seized all land from the peasants, expelling landowners and placing loyal ideologues with little agricultural experience in charge of the newly collectivized farms, which began to fail miserably. And to fulfill Five-Year Plan goals, he seized all the grain and food that was grown in 1932 and 1933 to feed the rest of Russia and raise foreign capital, and in doing so left the entire Ukrainian people with nothing to eat—except, sometimes, themselves.

I’ve read things as horrifying, but never more horrifying than the four pages in Snyder’s book devoted to cannibalism. In a way I’d like to warn you not to read it; it is, unfortunately, unforgettable. On the other hand, not to read it is a refusal to be fully aware of what kind of world we live in, what human nature is capable of. The Holocaust taught us much on these questions, but alas, there is more to learn. Maybe it’s better to live in denial. Better to think of human history Pollyanna-like, as an evolution upward, although sometimes I feel Darwin spoke more truly than he knew when he titled his book The Descent of Man. Certainly one’s understanding of both Stalinism and human nature will be woefully incomplete until one does read Snyder’s pages.

Here is an excerpt: …

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Rick Richman looks at our foreign policy.

The Bastille has fallen in Egypt, but it will be more difficult to create a constitutional democracy than it was in France in 1789 — and France did not do such a great job itself, as I recall. I knew Louis XVI; Louis XVI was a friend of mine; and Hosni Mubarak was no Louis XVI — he was a U.S. ally, welcomed at the White House a few months ago, praised by President Obama at that time as one of our “key partners.” A few months later, he was on par with Saddam Hussein.

With mass demonstrations against a tyrannical Iranian regime that stole a presidential election, Obama kept silent. When the military removed the president in Honduras pursuant to a judicial order and legislative ratification, Obama called it a coup. When the military removed the Egyptian president months before a scheduled election in which the president had pledged not to run again, Obama supported the removal as essential for freedom. There must be a coherent foreign policy in there somewhere. …

Here’s a brilliant point from Philip Hamburger, in National Review. Hamburger discusses how it is unconstitutional for HHS to grant waivers to some favored organizations, and force the rest of us to follow new healthcare regulations. We look forward to its litigation.

…The Department of Health and Human Services has granted 733 waivers from one of the statute’s key requirements. The recipients of the waivers include insurers such as Oxford Health Insurance, labor organizations such as the Service Employees International Union, and employers such as PepsiCo. This is disturbing for many reasons. At the very least, it suggests the impracticability of the health-care law; HHS gave the waivers because it fears the law will cost many Americans their jobs and insurance.

More seriously, it raises questions about whether we live under a government of laws. Congress can pass statutes that apply to some businesses and not others, but once a law has passed — and therefore is binding — how can the executive branch relieve some Americans of their obligation to obey it?

…Waivers are mostly, if not entirely, for politically significant businesses and unions that get the special attention of HHS or the White House. The rest of us must obey the laws.

As it happens, waivers have a history. In the Middle Ages, the pope granted waivers, known as dispensations, and English kings soon followed suit. …

…The underlying justification was that the king had absolute power — a power above the law …

…Waivers can be used for good purposes. But since the time of Matthew Paris, they have been recognized as a power above the law — a power used by government to co-opt powerful constituencies by freeing them from the law. Like old English kings, the current administration is claiming such a power to decide that some people do not have to follow the law. This is dangerous, above the law, and unauthorized by the Constitution.

Mitch Daniels made a good speech at CPAC. Des Moines Register reviews.  

Washington, D.C. — Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels Friday summoned frustrated Americans to join together in a broad coalition to set the nation on a healthier fiscal and economic course.

But Daniels, a Republican quietly weighing a presidential candidacy, did so in a cerebral call-to-arms by also asking a select audience of conservatives to welcome non-ideologues into the tent.

“We must be the vanguard of recovery, but we cannot do it alone,” Daniels told about 500 attending a banquet at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

“We have learned in Indiana, big change requires big majorities,” the second-term governor and former Bush administration budget director said. “We will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean. Who surf past C-SPAN to get to SportsCenter. Who, if they’d ever heard of CPAC, would assume it was a cruise ship accessory.” …

John Fund compliments Daniels’ speech.

… the wonky former budget director for George W. Bush surprised many by delivering what some said was the most intellectually substantive and eloquent speech of the conference. He won cheers when he compared the federal government to a “morbidly obese patient” that will need “bariatric surgery.” But he also won respectful silence and some applause — remarkable for a highly ideological audience — when he argued the possible merits of political compromise. …

Rich Lowry liked the speech too. 

Mitch Daniels gave an extraordinary speech at CPAC last night. As anyone who has ever done any public speaking at all knows, the hardest thing to do is to tell people things they don’t necessarily want to hear. For Daniels not to strike one pandering note, and even to challenge the audience at times, speaks to just how grounded he is. He even put in a good word for the occasional necessary compromise. Few potential presidential candidates would dare say such a thing in a CPAC speech. …

So, here’s a transcript of Mitch Daniels’ speech and a link to a video courtesy of The Corner.

… I bring greetings from a place called Indiana.  The coastal types present may think of it as a “flyover” state, or one of those “I” states.  Perhaps a quick anthropological summary would help.

We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions.  Some might say we “cling” to them, though not out of fear or ignorance.  We believe in paying our bills.  We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we take in.

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.  When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all. 

Before our General Assembly now is my proposal for an automatic refund of tax dollars beyond a specified level of state reserves.  We say that anytime budgets are balanced and an ample savings account has been set aside, government should just stop collecting taxes.  Better to leave that money in the pockets of those who earned it, than to let it burn a hole, as it always does, in the pockets of government.

We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.  We see government’s mission as fostering and enabling the important realms – our businesses, service clubs, Little Leagues, churches – to flourish. Our first thought is always for those on life’s first rung, and how we might increase their chances of climbing.  

Every day, we work to lower the costs and barriers to free men and women creating wealth for each other.  We build roads, and bridges, and new sources of homegrown energy at record rates, in order to have the strongest possible backbone to which people of enterprise can attach their investments and build their dreams.  When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply:  “Make money. Go make money. That’s the first act of ‘corporate citizenship.’ If you do that, you’ll have to hire someone else, and you’ll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we’re so proud of.”

We place our trust in average people.  We are confident in their ability to decide wisely for themselves, on the important matters of their lives.  So when we cut property taxes, to the lowest level in America, we left flexibility for localities to raise them, but only by securing the permission of their taxpayers, voting in referendum.  We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.  

We have broadened the right of parents to select the best place for their children’s education …

… The national elections of 2010 carried an instruction.  In our nation, in our time, the friends of freedom have an assignment, as great as those of the 1860s, or the 1940s, or the long twilight of the Cold War.   As in those days, the American project is menaced by a survival-level threat.  We face an enemy, lethal to liberty, and even more implacable than those America has defeated before.  We cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose.  We cannot negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a Great White. 

I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence.  It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.  No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be. …

… The regulatory rainforest through which our enterprises must hack their way is blighting the future of millions of Americans.  Today’s EPA should be renamed the “Employment Prevention Agency.”  After a two-year orgy of new regulation, President Obama’s recent executive order was a wonderment, as though the number one producer of rap music had suddenly expressed alarm about obscenity. …

… I’ve always loved John Adams’ diary entry, written en route to Philadelphia, there to put his life, liberty, and sacred honor all at risk. He wrote that it was all well worth it because, he said, “Great things are wanted to be done.”

When he and his colleagues arrived, and over the years ahead, they practiced the art of the possible.  They made compacts and concessions and, yes, compromises.  They made deep sectional and other differences secondary in pursuit of the grand prize of freedom. They each argued passionately for the best answers as they saw them, but they never permitted the perfect to be the enemy of the historic good they did for us, and all mankind.  They gave us a Republic, citizen Franklin said, if we can keep it.

Keeping the Republic is the great thing that is wanted to be done, now, in our time, by us.  In this room are convened freedom’s best friends but, to keep our Republic, freedom needs every friend it can get.  Let’s go find them, and befriend them, and welcome them to the great thing that is wanted to be done in our day. 

God bless this meeting and the liberty which makes it possible.

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Looking at events in Egypt, Spengler sees little reason for optimism.

… If Obama succeeds in forcing the Muslim Brotherhood into a new Egyptian regime, Mubarak’s cronies really would be better off in London exile. That implies a tsunami of capital flight and the disappearance of Egypt’s managerial class who, feckless as they might be, nonetheless keep the economy working day by day. As I noted last week, Egypt’s $12 billion a year in tourist revenue has gone to zero and would take years to restore under the best of circumstances.

At this point, Egyptians will begin to starve. The government’s immediate response is to spend more. Egypt’s new Finance Minister Samir Radwan promised on February 5 that government subsidies would offset the rise in the world market price of food. The government budget would help to “achieve social justice”, Radwan told reporters.

The trouble, as the rating agency Standard and Poor’s explained, is that the government deficit will climb into the teens, from the 8.1% deficit registered last year.

How long Egypt can finance its external deficit, or its internal deficit, without recourse to the printing press, depends less on internal events than on the weather in China.

The Times’ Friedman writes rapturously that Egyptians “want to shape their own destiny”. Unless Egyptian intelligence has secretly mastered weather modification, Egyptians have very little say about their own destiny.

The New York Times on February 8 quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, the figurehead opposition leader, complaining that the Arab world is “a collection of failed states who add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education. That will change with democracy.”

It’s too late. A country that still practices female genital mutilation cannot undertake a grand leap into modernity (by way of comparison, China began to abolish foot-binding in 1911 and eradicated it entirely shortly after 1949).

In this case, Oswald Spengler’s motto applies: Optimism is cowardice. Memo to the temporary residents of Tahrir Square: pray for rain in China.

Ed Morrissey traces some of the recent missteps in Egypt.

In my latest column for The Week, I ask if Barack Obama truly knows what he wants as an outcome from the Egyptian crisis.  After getting off to a good start in a near-impossible situation for the US, Obama then jumped the gun by demanding a “transition” from the Mubarak regime, which Robert Gibbs emphasized the next day by saying “now means yesterday.”  At the same time, Obama sent a personal envoy to Hosni Mubarak, and the choice of envoy turned out to be a predictable disaster.  Within a few days, the US was in retreat from its earlier demands:

“In the middle of this vacillation, Obama chose former Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner to go to Cairo and handle Mubarak personally. Wisner, who has served as ambassador to five countries in twenty years, went to review the crisis and speak directly with Mubarak on Obama’s behalf. Within days, Wisner publicly insisted that Mubarak needed to stay in office, saying that “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical.” The Obama administration had to distance itself from its own special envoy, who got promptly recalled and this week returned to his day job.”

We will leave it to Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post to illuminate the many errors of this administration in Egypt – not the least of which was the childish effort to be the unBush. 

During her first visit to Egypt as secretary of state, in March 2009, Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked whether human rights violations by the Egyptian government that had been documented by the State Department would interfere with a visit to the White House by President Hosni Mubarak. It was a good question: Mubarak had not been to Washington in five years, thanks to his clashes with the Bush administration over his political repression.

“It is not in any way connected,” Clinton replied. “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”

Thus began what may be remembered as one of the most shortsighted and wrongheaded policies the United States has ever pursued in the Middle East. Admittedly, the bar is high. But the Obama administration’s embrace of Mubarak, even as the octogenarian strongman refused to allow the emergence of a moderate, middle-class-based, pro-democracy opposition, has helped bring the United States’ most important Arab ally to the brink of revolution. Mass popular demonstrations have rocked the country since Tuesday; Friday, when millions of Egyptians will assemble in mosques, could be fateful.

The administration’s miscalculation about Mubarak was threefold. First, it assumed that the damage done to relations by George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” was a mistake that needed to be repaired. In fact, Bush’s pushing for political liberalization was widely viewed, in Egypt and in the region, as the saving grace of an otherwise bad administration.

Second, the Obama administration’s Middle East experts concluded that there was no chance of serious reform – much less revolution – under Mubarak. So they plotted at playing a “long game” of slowly nurturing grass-roots movements and promoting civil society, in preparation for the day when Egypt might be ready for real reform. In this they badly underestimated the secular opposition that was rapidly growing in the blogosphere and that months ago began rallying behind former U.N. nuclear director Mohamed ElBaradei.

Third, as an emboldened Mubarak stepped up repression, staged a blatantly rigged parliamentary election in November and began laying the groundwork to present himself for “reelection” this year, the administration chose to mute its criticism. Bland, carefully balanced statements were issued by second- and third-level spokesmen, while Clinton and Obama – who regularly ripped Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – remained silent.

The balance of today’s Pickings covers the prospects for the election in 2012. Roger Simon kicks it off by watching Ariana Huffington.

… Arianna has read the tea leaves. Progressivism, which was riding the crest of popularity on the election of Obama, is over. It is no longer good for business. And just as the stock market is said to be a leading indicator on business cycles, I submit Arianna’s track record has shown her to be a leading indicator on the zeitgeist. She knows when to get out. Obama, and by extension progressivism, is fini. It is best left to fringey looneys like Code Pink. Put simply: progressivism is no longer good business. …

Charlie Cook, in the National Journal, has a more normal approach.

… It is highly unlikely that unemployment will drop to 7.2 percent by November 2012. A decline to around 8 percent would likely bode well for Obama’s reelection chances. If it remains around 9 percent, one can argue that most any major Republican nominee has a good chance of winning. Under this argument, the tipping point is between 8 and 9 percent.

Among 49 top economists surveyed this month by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, the consensus gross domestic product forecast was 3.2 percent for this year and 3.3 percent for next year, nowhere near the levels of growth that worked to benefit Reagan—4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984.  

The 10 most optimistic forecasts among the 49 projected an average GDP growth rate of 3.9 percent for 2012, while the pessimists were at 3.2 percent.  

For unemployment, the consensus forecast was 9.3 percent for 2011 and 8.6 percent for 2012. The 10 most pessimistic averaged 9 percent, and the 10 most upbeat averaged 8.2 percent.

Obviously, there are economic indicators beyond GDP growth and unemployment that are important. Economists watch inflation carefully, particularly with energy, food, and other commodity costs. They also eye real disposable income, which will be goosed by the temporary cut in payroll taxes enacted during the recent lame duck session of Congress.

None of this is to suggest millions of Americans rush to their computers at 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of every month to find out the latest unemployment rate, and allow that to solely drive their assessment of the president.

But a strong economy and improving jobs picture does tend to validate a president’s economic stewardship, while a weak economy and poor job growth tends to repudiate it, fairly or not. …

And so does Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics.

Coverage of the 2012 elections has recently gone into overdrive, with attention focused largely on two issues: President Obama’s standing in the polls and the Electoral College. The two are obviously interrelated. Though it’s a bit early to be discussing all of this (there’s almost no correlation between a president’s standing in the polls at this point and where he ends up in November two years later) it is always useful to examine where things stand today – with the understanding that things may change for the better or for the worse for either party over the next 18 months.

One thing the polling data have confirmed over the last two years is this: President Obama is more popular than his policies. Going back to the earliest days of his presidency, Obama’s overall job approval rating has typically been higher than the ratings he’s received from voters on most individual issues – particularly on top domestic concerns like the economy, spending, the deficit and health care.

It isn’t hard to see why this is so. The president continues to be viewed in the public’s eye as a likeable person, a faithful husband and a good father. African American voters and liberal voters continue to adore the president. The historic nature of his presidency drew independent voters to him in 2008, and while they have abandoned him and his party in droves over the last two years over policy issues, they continue to have a certain level of affection for him personally.

Because the president generates so much personal goodwill, then, it isn’t clear that his approval rating has the same political effects that other presidents’ approval ratings do. Consider the following chart, which plots the percentage of the House caucus lost by the president’s party in post-World War II midterm elections against the president’s approval rating in the Gallup poll:

Peter Wehner is here too.

A few weeks ago, Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota announced he will not seek re-election in 2012. A few days ago, Representative Jane Harman of California announced she will resign immediately. And last week Senator James Webb of Virginia announced he will not seek re-election in 2012, “confirm[ing] the news Democrats have been dreading for weeks,” according to Politico. Taken together, the resignations of these Democratic lawmakers are signs of a damaged party, one that is getting weaker rather than stronger.

The Obama Undertow is alive and well. …

Nile Gardiner thinks the president should we worried about 2012.

… It is of course far too early to be making concrete predictions for the outcome of the 2012 presidential race, and a great deal depends on the fortunes of the US economy as well as who the Republicans pick as their candidate. But with good reason, President Obama and his supporters should be nervous about their prospects 21 months from now. The November mid-terms were not a flash in the pan but part of a broader political change in the United States away from liberalism towards conservatism, as well as an emphatic rejection of the Big Government policies that continue to be promoted by the Obama presidency in the face of intense public opposition. President Obama may be experiencing a temporary bounce with his own personal ratings, but much of his agenda remain hugely unpopular.

A blogger at Weekly Standard says the same thing.

A CNN poll released this week asked Americans whether they plan to vote for or against President Obama in 2012. The options were “probably vote for,” “probably not vote for,” “definitely vote for,” and “definitely not vote for.” The most popular answer was “definitely not vote for” – chosen by 35 percent of respondents. Only 25 percent say they’ll “definitely vote for” the president. 51 percent predict he will lose. …

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Der Spiegel remembers who, in the West, promoted democratization in the Muslim world.

…The free world has fewer friends outside Europe than it would care to admit. It would obviously be desirable to work exclusively with governments who share our democratic beliefs. That would only leave Israel in the region that we are currently watching with such fascination, as only Israel guarantees full, Western human rights to its citizens, including women, homosexuals and dissidents. But somehow that would also not be right.

The sympathies of many honorable, left-thinking people do not currently lie with the Israelis, who grant the Arab inhabitants in their midst much more freedom than all the neighboring states combined. Astoundingly, their sympathies lie with the Muslim Brotherhood in the surrounding countries, a movement that hates homosexuals, keeps women covered and despises minorities. This is puzzling.

…Painful as it may be to admit, it was the despised former US President George W. Bush who believed in the democratization of the Muslim world and incurred the scorn and mockery of the Left for his conviction. …

In Frum Forum, David Frum makes a good point about how the administration should handle the despicable activists who are going after Bush. It would be worth Congress investigating whether the UN or any countries receiving foreign aid are funding these activists. Budget cuts are needed, and we could reduce the number of organizations that think our leaders should be targets.

CNN International is reporting that George Bush canceled a trip to Switzerland after – and possibly because – a so-called human rights group filed with a Swiss court a request for the ex-president’s arrest.

…It’s hard to know how much of this story is true, and how much is fundraising bluster. But if even a small portion of the news is true, President Obama has a duty to speak up and to warn foreign governments that further indulgence of this kind of nonsense by their court systems will be viewed as an unfriendly act by the United States. It is one more reminder of why the concept of an International Criminal Court is such an invitation to mischief.

And for those inclined to enjoy the mischief: Just wait until somebody serves an arrest warrant in Luxembourg on ex-President Obama for ordering all those drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

You won’t believe what Thomas Sowell writes about. With friends like this president…

While everyone’s attention seems to be focused on the crisis in Egypt, a bombshell revelation about the administration’s foreign policy in Europe has largely gone unnoticed.

The British newspaper The Telegraph has reported that part of the price which President Obama paid to get Russia to sign the START treaty, limiting nuclear arms, was revealing to the Russians the hitherto secret size of the British nuclear arsenal. This information came from the latest WikiLeaks documents.

To betray vital military secrets of this country’s oldest, most steadfast and most powerful ally, behind the back of the British government, is something that should set off alarm bells. Following in the wake of earlier betrayals of prior American commitments to put a nuclear shield in Eastern Europe, and the undermining of Israel and calculated insults to its prime minister, this pattern raises serious, and perhaps almost unthinkable, questions about the Obama administration’s foreign policy. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the administration giving UK nuclear information to Russia. Perhaps the UK should put out a warrant for Obama’s arrest for espionage (in the style of the obnoxious Swiss activists).

…In December I wrote extensively on the White House’s relentless drive to sign the New START Treaty with Moscow as part of its controversial “reset” policy, despite the fact that it represented a staggeringly bad deal for the United States, and a remarkably good one for the Russians. The Telegraph report confirms the extraordinary lengths to which Washington stooped to meet Russian demands, which stunningly included passing on British nuclear secrets to a major strategic adversary.

As the Prime Minister and senior British ministers head to Germany this weekend to take part in the Munich Security Conference, key questions must be asked of their US counterparts, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as to the exact nature of the deal struck with Russia, and what more has been compromised in relation to British national security.

The matter is serious enough to merit Congressional hearings in Washington as well as parliamentary hearings in London. It is easy to see why the Obama team refused to allow the US Senate access to the negotiating documents for New START, as they would have sparked outrage on both sides of the Atlantic that would almost certainly have killed the Treaty. The Telegraph report clearly contradicts repeated claims by the Obama negotiating team that no side deals were struck with their Russian counterparts. Not for the first time, the current US administration has been eager to appease America’s enemies while shamelessly undercutting her allies.

In the Daily Beast, Andrew Roberts gives us more details on the State Department’s espionage and betrayal of the UK.

…Here’s what happened: According to WikiLeaks, a series of classified cables were sent from the U.S. negotiators to the State Department explaining that the Russians wanted to know the full extent of Great Britain’s nuclear capability. This was hardly surprising, as throughout the Cold War they had been trying to get this information. Now they were insisting on it as a price for Russian support for the New START deal. They could gauge this information from examining the “unique identifier” serial numbers on the Trident missiles that the U.S. has sold the UK over the years. The State Department has called these reports “bunk”.

Instead of telling Moscow that Britain was an independent power not party to the treaty, and therefore information about her nuclear deterrent was non-negotiable, the leaked cables show that the Obama administration lobbied the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defense in 2009 for permission to simply tell Moscow this data about the number, age, and performance capabilities of Trident.

Needless to say, the U.K refused, because not letting the Russians know the full extent of its deterrent has long been key to its success. Yet astonishingly—and in my view despicably—the Obama administration seems to have simply rode roughshod over British objections and—according both to WikiLeaks and the Daily Telegraph of London—“The U.S. agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.”

If it turns out that it is WikiLeaks and not the State Department that is right, this represents a clear violation of the agreement made between Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park in June 1942 over Anglo-American nuclear cooperation. The idea that any American president would browbeat or simply ignore a British government and give U.K.  nuclear secrets to the Russians in order to secure a treaty with Moscow would be unconscionable to Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, probably Carter, certainly Reagan, both Bushes and probably Clinton too. Yet Obama, who has treated Britain with a thinly veiled sneer throughout his presidency, has not only countenanced but actually done it. …

David Harsanyi comments on corporate welfare big government is doling out.

…”Right now, businesses across this country are proving that America can compete,” Obama explained, listing a number of businesses that get it like Caterpillar, Whirlpool, Dow and a company named Geomagic.

All of these phenomenal success stories (thanks to Ira Stoll at The Future of Capitalism blog for pointing this out) also share, in one way or another, the privilege of feeding at gumit’s welfare trough. Oh yes, these exemplars of good corporate citizenry prove they can compete in a marketplace with taxpayer funds. Which will no doubt make them more compliant with the administration’s wishes.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who Obama recently appointed to lead his new panel on “job creation,” understands this new reality. One of the nation’s most effective cronies, Immelt’s company has benefited from government bailouts, waivers and lines of credit. …

The Streetwise Professor explains the slippery slope of corporate social responsibility.

…imposing some sort of vague duty on corporate officers to “do good” is subject to no such checks.  Some may try to do good, but may do ill instead because they lack the incentive or information to do real good.  Others may use “social responsibility” to indulge their own preferences while imposing great costs on others whose resources they utilize in the cause.

But more ominously, creating a presumption that corporations have some broader social responsibility subjects them to political pressure… It effectively subordinates corporations…to politicians who arrogate to themselves the role of speaking in the public–”social”–interest.  This is exactly why the idea is catnip to progressives like Obama.  They don’t like government power constrained by Constitutional and procedural checks and limits.  They don’t like limits on their discretion.  Passing laws or imposing regulations that are subject to legal challenge are a lot harder than executing a shakedown.  Once corporate executives concede that their responsibility is not limited to maximizing shareholder value, they become political puppets always vulnerable to such shakedowns.  There are always competing claims on corporate resources, and political entrepreneurs more than willing to exert those claims.

If you want to see extreme examples of how this works, look at Chavez in Venezuela, or Putin, both of whom browbeat corporations and investors to direct resources to their pet causes in the name of “social” objectives.  And no, I’m not saying Obama=Chavez.  I’m only saying that looking at something in its most purified or extreme forms is often the best way of identifying the essential principle.

The corporate responsibility movement is just another flavor of corporatism.  A conscription of private resources to achieve political (and usually redistributive) objectives, but without the procedural hurdles that constrain such conscription via legislation, regulation, or adjudication.  Which is exactly why progressives like Obama find it so attractive.

The Economist reports on new military technology: antennas made from seawater.

…To make a seawater antenna, the current probe (an electrical coil roughly the size and shape of a large doughnut) is attached to a radio’s antenna jack. When salt water is squirted through the hole in the middle of the probe, signals are transferred to the water stream by electromagnetic induction. The aerial can be adjusted to the frequency of those signals by lengthening or shortening the spout. To fashion antennae for short-wave radio, for example, spouts between 18 and 24 metres high are about right. To increase bandwidth, and thus transmit more data, such as a video, all you need do is thicken the spout. And the system is economical. The probe consumes less electricity than three incandescent desk lamps.

A warship’s metal antennae, which often weigh more than 3½ tonnes apiece, can be damaged in storms or combat. Seawater antennae, whose components weigh next to nothing and are easily stowable, could provide handy backups—and, eventually, more than backups. Not all of a ship’s antennae are used at once, so the spouts could be adjusted continuously to obtain the types needed at a given moment. According to SPAWAR, ten such antennae could replace 80 copper ones.

Fewer antennae mean fewer things for enemy radar to reflect from. Seawater is in any case less reflective of radar waves than metal. And if a ship needed to be particularly stealthy (which would mean keeping its transmissions to a minimum), her captain could simply switch the water spouts off altogether. …

If you are a “Jeopardy” fan, Monday thru Wednesday will be when IBM’s “Watson” challenges the shows two major champions. WSJ has the story.

Watson paused. The closest thing it had to a face, a glowing orb on a flat-panel screen, turned from forest green to a dark shade of blue. Filaments of yellow and red streamed steadily across it, like the paths of jets circumnavigating the globe. This pattern represented a state of quiet anticipation as the supercomputer awaited the next clue.

It was a September morning in 2010 at IBM Research, in the hills north of New York City, and the computer, known as Watson, was annihilating two humans, both champion-caliber players, in practice rounds of the knowledge game of “Jeopardy.” Within months, it would be playing the game on national TV in a million-dollar man vs. machine match-up against two of the show’s all-time greats.

As Todd Crain, an actor and the host of these test games, started to read the next clue, the filaments on Watson’s display began to jag and tremble. Watson was thinking—or coming as close to it as a computer could. The $1,600 clue, in a category called “The eyes have it,” read: “This facial wear made Israel’s Moshe Dayan instantly recognizable world-wide.”

The three players—two human and one electronic—could read the words as soon as they appeared on the big “Jeopardy” board. But they had to wait for Mr. Crain to read the entire clue before buzzing. That was the rule. At the moment the host pronounced the last word, a light would signal that contestants could buzz. The first to hit the button could win $1,600 with the right answer—or lose the same amount with a wrong one. (In these test matches, they were playing with funny money.)

This pause for reading gave Watson three or four seconds to hunt down the answer. …

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John Fund writes that many who are celebrating Reagan’s life aren’t Americans.

…Some of the celebrations won’t be held in America but rather in Eastern European countries where many people credit Reagan with playing a key role in their liberation from communism. “A good number of people we’re dealing with were in prison or threatened during Reagan’s presidency,” says John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Presidential Foundation. “They’re very emotional about this.”

I met several of those people at Sunday’s birthday gathering at the Reagan Library. Balazs Bokor, Hungary’s consul general in Los Angeles, regaled me with tales of his country’s plans. They include a major international conference on Reagan’s role in world affairs, the unveiling of a statue and a proclamation in his honor. Prague also plans to build a statue, while Krakow is preparing a special Catholic mass to honor both Reagan and Pope John Paul, his partner in anti-communism. In addition, Grosvenor Square, the current site of the U.S. Embassy in London, will see a statue raised in Reagan’s honor.

“Ronald Reagan was a figure who inspired many in Eastern Europe to hope they would someday be free,” says Horst Schakat, a former political prisoner in East Germany who now lives in California. “When he said the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire,’ that resonated with so many average people in Eastern Europe while at the same time unnerving their illegitimate leaders.”

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, gives a Brit’s view of Reagan.

It is heartening to know that a statue of Ronald Reagan will be unveiled in London’s Grosvenor Square on July 4th this year to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is hard to think of a president who loved Britain more than President Reagan, a great leader who embodied the spirit of the Anglo-American Special Relationship. And it was his alliance with Margaret Thatcher that ultimately brought down the seemingly invincible might of the Soviet Empire, and defeated an evil, totalitarian ideology in the shape of Communism that had placed its boot firmly on the throats of hundreds of millions of people across Eastern and Central Europe for nearly half a century.

As Lady Thatcher noted in her tribute to President Reagan, at his memorial service in Washington National Cathedral in June 2004:

When his allies came under Soviet or domestic pressure, they could look confidently to Washington for firm leadership, and when his enemies tested American resolve, they soon discovered that his resolve was firm and unyielding. … With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today, the world – in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw and Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev, and in Moscow itself, the world mourns the passing of the great liberator and echoes his prayer: God bless America.

“The Gipper” will always be remembered as one of the greatest presidents in American history, and in my view the greatest of the 20th Century…

John Fund has an interesting article about a book that had a tremendous impact on Reagan.

…When Reagan was 11, his mother gave him an inspirational novel called “That Printer of Udell’s,” the story of a young man who combines a belief in “practical Christianity” with Horatio Alger-like grit. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris noted in a 1999 interview in the American Enterprise magazine that the novel’s central character, Dick Falkner, is “a tall, good-looking, genial young man who wears brown suits and has the gift of platform speaking and comes to a Midwestern town just like Dixon, Illinois, and figures out a workfare program to solve the city’s social problems. He marries this girl who looks at him adoringly with big wide eyes through all his speeches, and eventually he goes off with her to represent that shining city in Washington, D.C.”

Years later, Reagan was uncharacteristically revealing about himself in a 1984 letter to the daughter-in-law of Harold Bell Wright, the author of “That Printer of Udell’s.” He noted that all of his boyhood reading “left an abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil,” but he singled out Wright’s work for having “an impact I shall always remember. After reading it and thinking about it for a few days, I went to my mother and told her I wanted to declare my faith and be baptized. . . . I found a role model in that traveling printer whom Harold Bell Wright had brought to life. He set me on a course I’ve tried to follow even unto this day. I shall always be grateful.”

…For Ronald Reagan, the heroes he admired and the hero he aspired to become demonstrated what individuals in a free society like America were capable of achieving. The essence of Ronald Reagan’s personal American Dream was that the next generation should always strive to be better than the previous one. There’s no mystery about that part of Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Charles Krauthammer discusses the possible outcomes in Egypt. He ends with a hopeful scenario.

…The Egyptian military, on the other hand, is the most stable and important institution in the country. It is Western-oriented and rightly suspicious of the Brotherhood. And it is widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 Free Officers Movement that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai.

The military is the best vehicle for guiding the country to free elections over the coming months. Whether it does so with Mubarak at the top, or with Vice President Omar Suleiman or perhaps with some technocrat who arouses no ire among the demonstrators, matters not to us. If the army calculates that sacrificing Mubarak (through exile) will satisfy the opposition and end the unrest, so be it.

The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail. ElBaradei is a menace. Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The United States should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife – and then guarantee – what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Toby Harnden discusses the differences between Reagan and some of the Dems and Republicans who are currently lauding him.

…There is little doubt that Reagan would have been dryly derisive of Obama’s policies and presidency. “Government is like a baby,” Reagan once quipped. “An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Obama, by contrast, views government as a kindly nurse and the people as the baby. According to his mindset, the people should submit to those in government who know better and whose role is to make decisions and control the purse strings.

…Although Obama has been paying lip service to American greatness in recent months, he made it clear in his first two years in office that he saw the United States as a flawed nation with much to apologise for and dismissed the notion of American exceptionalism as mere patriotism. …

John Stossel has an excellent article that helps us to understand the magnitude of the problem that politicians have created by overspending. And even more importantly, Stossel offers an interesting solution of budget cuts that leads to a budget surplus this year. He gives some final options that highlight just how irresponsibly the politicians have been behaving.

…As the bureaucrats complain about proposals to make tiny cuts, it’s good to remember that disciplined government could make cuts that get us to a surplus in one year. But even a timid Congress could make swift progress if it wanted to. If it just froze spending at today’s levels, it would almost balance the budget by 2017. If spending were limited to 1 percent growth each year, the budget would balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington would limit spending growth to about 2 percent a year, the red ink would almost disappear in 10 years.

As you see, the budget can be cut. Only politics stand in the way.

Kimberley Strassel reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, and Rumsfeld’s perspective on some issues.

…History, meet Mr. Rumsfeld’s view. With today’s release of “Known and Unknown”—the 78-year-old’s memoir of his tenure as defense secretary under George W. Bush and Gerald Ford, his years in the Nixon administration and his three terms as an Illinois congressman—”Rummy” is offering his slice of history. As befits a man who has spent decades provoking Washington debate, his chronicle is direct and likely to inspire some shouting.

The usual Rumsfeld critics (including some in the Bush family circle) are rushing to categorize it as a “score-settling” account, but that’s a predictable (and tedious) judgment. At the heart of Mr. Rumsfeld’s book is an important critique of the Bush administration that has been largely missing from the debate over Iraq. The dominant narrative to date has been that a cowboy president and his posse of neocons went to war without adequate preparation and ran roughshod over doubts by more sober bureaucratic and strategic minds.

…Mr. Rumsfeld tells me that he sees his 815-page volume as a “contribution to the historic record”—not some breezy Washington tell-all. In his more than 40 years of public service, he kept extensive records of his votes, his meetings with presidents, and the more than 20,000 memos (known as “snowflakes”) he flurried on the Pentagon during his second run as defense secretary. Mr. Rumsfeld uses them as primary sources, which accounts for the book’s more than 1,300 end notes. He’s also digitized them so readers and historians can consult the evidence first-hand at www.rumsfeld.com. …

We have enjoyed John Tierney’s myth-busting stories about garbage and resource scarcity. In his latest, Tierney looks at discrimination against conservatives in the social sciences.

…Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.” …

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In celebrating Reagan’s 100th, we are including a favorite piece that Mark Steyn wrote about Reagan in 2004.

…the elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be. … 

…I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”, with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those Seventies détente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America”, only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment:  

Tear down this wall!

- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody – which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.

…“The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around,” he said in his inaugural address. And at the end of a grim, grey decade – Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages – Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. Thanks to his clarity, around the world governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of NATO, with free markets and freely elected parliaments. …

The Telegraph, UK, editors add their comments on Reagan.

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old yesterday, and for many of us who remember him there is a twinge of sadness that he is not around to witness America’s celebrations of his centenary. … 

During his two terms in office, President Reagan was subjected to relentless, mean-spirited mockery from the Left. These days, however, the verdict of history is pretty clear, and even liberal US politicians are attempting to appropriate his legacy. …no one was better than Reagan at delivering a self-deprecating wisecrack. In 1981, as he was being lifted on to the operating table after being shot, the 70-year-old president looked around at his surgeons and said: “I hope you’re all Republicans.” One-liners don’t come more spontaneous than that. No wonder we remember Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator.

President Obama is not the only politician to try to hijack the brand, however. Populist Republicans are at it, too (as are self-styled mainstream conservatives here). They flatter themselves. It is not just Reagan’s sense of humour they lack: it is his spirit of tolerance and the calm purpose that lay behind the jokes. President Reagan was not just a communicator – he won the Cold War. It’s hard, not to say impossible, to imagine either Barack Obama or Sarah Palin pulling off such a feat. Let them salute him by all means, but they should jump off the bandwagon.

David Warren hopes the outcome of the current Egyptian revolution is better than the last.

There are two, and only two, credible sources of power in Egypt, at the national level. One is the army, and the other is the Muslim Brotherhood. The former seized power in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, overthrowing the royal dynasty of that extraordinary Albanian, Muhammad Ali, which had ruled Egypt and Sudan (with unwanted British help) since 1805.

…The western powers very slowly grasped that they had contrived to replace a narcissistic fool with a socialist madman. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, almost whimsically; in the course of provoking another disastrous war with Israel in 1956; then another in 1967; while enmiring his country in dysfunctional authoritarian bureaucracy. As the West declined to support him any further, he manoeuvred into the Soviet orbit. But such was his charisma, and the resonance of Israel as his rhetorical bete noire, that he was able to embody pan-Arab nationalist aspirations, so well that we remember that defunct ideology as “Nasserism.”

Nasser was no “Islamist,” and for broader reasons the Egyptian army has long been consciously identified with secular rule. It has remained the only effective bulwark against the expanding influence and demands of the Muslim Brotherhood.

…Mubarak’s greatest difficulty has been securing reforms which have included the gradual replacement of incompetent (and usually army-managed) state enterprises with free markets, and the “normalization” of relations with Israel, from behind a rhetorical cover. His very survival in office has been an extraordinary accomplishment, to which Egypt owes what peace and prosperity it has had. …

In the Corner, Andrew Stiles has CBO numbers on the unbelievable and unconscionable increases in government spending under the Obama administration.

The ink was barely dry on House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to set an appropriations ceiling for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 — a move that would save $74 billion compared with the amount initially requested last year by President Obama — before top-ranking Democrats began trashing it.

…From Ryan’s perspective, however, the cuts are only the beginning. “This is just a down-payment by Republicans to get spending under control,” he said in a statement. “House Republicans will continue to tackle the country’s fiscal problems by advancing spending cuts and spending reforms, and by charting a new course with a new budget for the upcoming fiscal year.”

…Now that House Republicans are seeking a return to pre-stimulus levels — and targeting many of these same propped-up federal agencies in the process — Harry Reid thinks its too extreme for his liking. But compared to the spending increases that took place over the past two years, Ryan’s cuts are strikingly modest — and yet only the beginning of what’s required. A closer look at just how much, and how rapidly, some of these federal agencies’ discretionary budgets have ballooned under the Obama administration reveals that well, yes, deep cuts will be necessary if lawmakers are even remotely serious about restoring fiscal sanity to the budget process. …

Michael Barone notes how out-of-touch Obama is with America. Barone points out how oddly antiquated and two-dimensional is Obama’s vision for the country. And the One-Trick President thinks he is going to make the future happen by spending more of your money.

Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. But Sputnik and America’s supposedly less advanced rocket programs of 1957 were government projects, at a time when government defense spending, like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, drove technology.

…And then there is transportation. “Within 25 years,” Obama said, “our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you,” he said breathlessly, “to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying.”

…If you put together Obama’s resistance to just about any serious changes in entitlement spending with his antique vision of technological progress, what you see is an America where the public sector permanently consumes a larger part of the economy than in the past and squanders the proceeds on white elephants like faux high-speed rail lines and political payoffs to the teacher and other public-sector unions. Private-sector innovation gets squeezed out by regulations like the Obama FCC’s net neutrality rules. It’s a plan for a static rather than dynamic economy. …

We have Debra Saunders, in the San Francisco Chronicle, with an excellent article on how money is being wasted on green subsidies.

After receiving at least $43 million in aid from the state of Massachusetts, Evergreen Solar announced last month that it would be closing its manufacturing plant in Devens, Mass., laying off its 800 workers and moving its manufacturing operations to China.

Warning: These are the “green jobs” that President Obama has touted as part of his “winning the future” agenda.

The problem isn’t that Obama wants to direct federal dollars toward research for alternative energy. It is in the national interest to have affordable options when oil sources are depleted.

The problem is that Obama thinks green jobs are the answer to the anemic economy recovery. And he clings to that belief in the face of contrary evidence.

…With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent, Washington should be looking to create jobs that aren’t going to run to China. Or, as Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the New York Times, “If the president really were serious about job creation, he would be working with us to develop American oil and gas by American workers for American consumers.”

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Steven F. Hayward likes to ask people which state has the lowest unemployment rate. The answer is North Dakota, with an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent. “The reason is they’ve had a huge oil and gas boom,” Hayward explained. …

The Investor’s Business Daily editors report on a federal judge finding the Interior Department in contempt. The Interior Department has refused to comply with the federal court’s injunction on the drilling moratorium: the government bureaucrats are running a de facto moratorium by dramatically decreasing the number of oil permits issued.

Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad.

The Obama administration’s trouble with the courts has continued with a judge’s ruling last week that the Interior Department’s reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt.

…In June, Martin Feldman of the Eastern District Court of Louisiana struck down Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s original moratorium, saying it was overkill based on flawed reasoning. …

…So the administration went back, rearranged a few words and a few deck chairs, and reissued its moratorium. That one was officially lifted in October, although the permitting process…has had the effect of continuing the moratorium.

Feldman was not amused. “Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” the judge said in his ruling. “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the reimposition of a second moratorium . .. provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt.”…

Kimberley Strassel details how the first piece of Obamacare was repealed.

Mark this date: On Feb. 2, 2011, a Democratic Senate killed the first piece of the health-care law it passed less than a year ago. Bowing (finally) to reality, 34 Democrats rushed to be among the 81 senators who axed the bill’s odious 1099 tax reporting requirement.

Let the ObamaCare dismantling begin.

…The 1099 provision was a new requirement that businesses report to the IRS annual purchases from any contractor above $600. The provision targeted 40 million businesses and other organizations, crushing them under a costly bookkeeping mandate. But hey, desperate Democrats needed funds to pay for their $1 trillion healthathon. By closing this “loophole,” they claimed, the IRS could commandeer a whole $17 billion in previously uncollected taxes.

…If the GOP is to dismember ObamaCare, it must pressure Democrats into helping. That’s what Republicans did this week. Next up for debate will be other odious elements: the individual mandate, taxes on kids’ braces, restrictions on health savings accounts, cuts to Medicare. The GOP will highlight each one and then ask 2012 Democrats what they are willing to defend. …

In Contentions, Alana Goodman has another example of how perverse and cancerous the liberal elite has become.

President Bush was forced to cancel a visit to Switzerland, where he was slated to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish Zionist charity gala next week, because he risked getting arrested for torture, Reuters is reporting:

Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned. …

And it isn’t just foreign NGOs involved in this. Human Rights Watch reportedly helped draft the criminal complaint, which claims that Bush is guilty of war crimes because he admitted to ordering the waterboarding of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Yes, this is the kind of nonsense human-rights groups are wasting their time on. President Bush can’t attend a Swiss charity event, but Hamas leaders can fly to Switzerland for meetings with government officials without fear.

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In Contentions, Jason Maoz discusses Ronald Reagan’s pro-Israel and pro-Judaism convictions.

Ronald Reagan, who would have been 100 this Sunday, had an instinctive affinity for Jews and Israel. As an actor who spent decades in the heavily Jewish environment of Hollywood and who counted scores of Jews among his friends and colleagues, he moved easily in pro-Israel circles. Both as a private citizen and as governor of California, he was a familiar sight and a favored speaker at various functions for Israel.

“I’ve believed many things in my life,” Reagan states in his memoirs, “but no conviction I’ve ever had has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel.”

…Beyond the Middle East, the plight of Soviet Jews was bound to strike a sympathetic chord with someone as unbendingly anti-Communist as Reagan.

…The Reagan administration was instrumental in gaining the release in 1986 of prominent Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, imprisoned for nine years on trumped-up treason charges. Sharansky has written of his reaction when, in 1983, confined to a tiny cell in a prison near the Siberian border, he saw on the front page of Pravda that Reagan — much to the ridicule and outrage of American and European liberals — had labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

As Sharansky describes it:

“Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth — a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us. I never imagined that three years later I would be in the White House telling this story to the president. … Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.”

Rich Richman adds a footnote to the story of Reagan And Sharansky.

… What few people knew, because Reagan had intentionally kept it secret, was that his first effort to free Sharansky had been undertaken back in 1981, when he wrote a handwritten letter to Brezhnev. He attached the script of the letter to his diary, and it was published in The Reagan Diaries after his death. …

Steven Hayward notes the irony of GE’s current sales campaign.

General Electric is right to celebrate their connection with Ronald Reagan, as they are doing with a splashy ad campaign. It was during Reagan’s years traveling the nation for GE in the 1950s that he developed his political views, and much of his rhetorical skill, as is recounted well in Thomas Evans’s book, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism. …

…According to Federal Election Commission records, in 1980 GE’s political action committee gave $2,000 to the Reagan campaign, but gave Carter’s campaign . . . $3,000.

…Above all one wishes that GE today were less of a rent-seeking company jumping on the “green energy” bandwagon for government mandates that help them sell otherwise uncompetitive products such as windmills. Reagan wouldn’t have thought that was bringing good things to life.

Richard Epstein explains qualities that made Ronald Reagan great.

…Leadership cannot thrive on nuance or uncertainty. It depends on unshakable commitments to sound principles.

That is where Ronald Reagan excelled as a president. On the domestic front, Reagan insisted that the essence of a free society rested on these key building blocks: individual freedom, personal security, limited government and states’ rights. …

…The values articulated will in the end become presumptions that should yield in time to prudent exceptions. But the key insight is that free society has to start with the right presumptions. It must reject the absolute power of the state to impose whatever laws it conjures up in the name of community and the common good. …

…Forthright pronouncements also defined Reagan’s triumphs in foreign affairs. He knew in his bones that the want of inner conviction disarms any president engaged in international diplomacy. Moral relativism in international affairs is not a sign of intellectual discernment. It is a sign of moral weakness. Lots of hard political issues come in all shades of gray. But by the same token, the words for which Ronald Reagan is most remembered drew sharp contrasts. In March 1983, he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in June 1987, Reagan stated his major premise: “We believe that freedom and security go together.” This was followed by his direct challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, his Russian counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Which Gorbachev did by November 1989.

These simple declarative sentences define the man and his massive achievements. They are what all Americans should remember about Ronald Reagan on Sunday’s centennial of his birth. He knew that in politics, as in life, Dooley Wilson had it right. The fundamental things do apply. Ronald Reagan was a great president because he stood for what is great and enduring in the human condition.

The administration still thinks the Sputnik rhetoric is inspiring, Jonah Goldberg has this reply. We highlight Goldberg’s discussion of the laughable energy efficiency of China.

…Apparently, our Sputnik moment requires that we launch an updated arms race with China, but instead of bombs and tanks, we must build windmills and brew the government moonshine we call ethanol.

No metaphor can withstand too much scrutiny. But Obama’s effort to recast America’s plight as a replay of the last Sputnik moment fails in every intended regard.

…For starters, America is vastly more energy efficient than China and has been getting better at it for years. Since the oil shock of 1973, America’s economy has nearly tripled and the population has more than doubled but we only use about 20 percent more oil than we did then. Meanwhile, China — thanks largely to its insatiable appetite for coal — is far less green. In 2006, according to the Heritage Foundation, China and America had generally the same greenhouse emissions, by 2009 China’s were 50 percent greater.

Ironically, China achieves abysmal numbers like these precisely because it pursues the sorts of policies Obama says we need more of: bureaucratic micromanagement, costly subsidies, arbitrary timetables, political goals that are unrelated to the market and unhinged from the science. China is hardly the leader in technical, scientific, intellectual or artistic innovation. That’s where we’re still No. 1 and that’s why authoritarian China is trying to copy our economic model as best it can without adopting our political system. …

Noemie Emery writes that Obama is missing his opportunity to be a great president.

…It turns out Obama does have a big job, just not the one he signed on for. Presidents become great when they fit the times and the mood of the moment, which is Obama’s great problem.

He can give up his dream of expanding the government, and become great by addressing the problem and saving the safety net by making it viable. Or he can cling to his mission, and fail.

…With… the tsunami of debt rolling toward the country — he is pretending it doesn’t exist. In his State of the Union, he proposed still more spending, all on nonessentials.

…It was as if FDR gave a speech in 1940 on foreign affairs, and ignored Nazi Germany while he touted our friendly relations with Canada. This is not the way men of destiny act. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Janet Daley says what many conservatives are thinking.

The editors of ConservativeHome USA have taken a deep breath and uttered the unsayable: the only real media star on the Republican stage is not a serious contender for the presidency. Publishing a compendium of comments from highly regarded commentators and Republican party figures, it makes a case for facing the truth that Sarah Palin cannot be regarded as presidential material, particularly at a time of such economic peril and global instability.

What it does not say (but does imply) is that the party would do real damage to its own reputation by nominating her. It would appear both desperate and unserious – a deadly electoral combination. I had a good deal of time for the Palin phenomenon when she was John McCain’s surprise choice of running mate: she seemed to represent the voice of an America which was too often treated with contempt by the political class and, after all, this was the vice-presidency we were talking about. The virulent attacks on her from the liberal establishment reminded me uncannily of that mix of misogyny and snobbery which had been thrown at Margaret Thatcher, and if only for that reason, I was inclined to defend her.

But enough is enough. She is not another Thatcher – nor is she another Reagan. …Given her star quality and wide support, she could be a plausible king-maker and power broker for some more credible candidate. Some of my senior Republican friends are disappointed that Governor Chris Christie has decided not to run this time around, and fear that the party may not be able to find a big enough figure in time. But developing the profile of a relative unknown would be better than going with a super star who would burn out spectacularly under fire.

In the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown.

…In Known and Unknown, which was purchased by a reporter at a Washington bookstore in advance of its official release, Rumsfeld offers a muscular, uncompromising defense of his tenure, the military operations he helped direct in Afghanistan and Iraq and the president he served. He settles his share of scores, most notably with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Dick Armitage and the media. While he acknowledges some missteps along the way, Rumsfeld also chastises high-ranking Democrats and insists—as does George W. Bush—that even if he had known in 2003 that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the former defense secretary would still have favored going to war. …

…The book retraces familiar ground—the U.S. intelligence estimates in 2002 that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons—with Rumsfeld arguing that “recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.” This, of course, was the mother of all intelligence failures…

…Rumsfeld takes direct aim at Colin Powell in recounting the former general’s famous U.N. speech in February 2003, laying out the administration’s case that Saddam indeed possessed a stockpile of banned weapons. “Over time a narrative developed that Powell was somehow innocently misled into making a false declaration to the Security Council and the world,” Rumsfeld writes. He seems particularly offended that Powell has said that some in the intelligence community knew “that some of these sources were not good,” “didn’t speak up,” and “that devastated me.”

Rumsfeld fires back that the secretary of State had once been “the most senior military officer in our country” and no one else in the administration had “even a fraction of his experience” on intelligence matters. “Powell was not duped or misled by anybody, nor did he lie about Saddam’s suspected WMD stockpiles. The president did not lie. The vice president did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.” …

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Ed Feulner reminds us of the true Reagan legacy.

… so many politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, seek to portray themselves as a latter-day Reagan. To decide whether they deserve this mantle, however, consider this quote from his farewell address:

“‘We the people’ tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the people’ are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.”

Only a politician who agrees with this — and governs accordingly — can be considered Reagan’s true heir.

In Fortune, Keith McCullough says the Fed’s monetary policy is causing global inflation and fueling the unrest we are seeing.

…Captains of Keynesian economics don’t use the word ‘stagflation’ very much for a reason. The last time these bubble-makers plugged the world with stagflation was in the mid-to-late 1970s. That’s when US Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns was attempting to monetize America’s debt as President Jimmy Carter bet that it would not create any globally interconnected risk. Sound familiar?

We call it stagflation when real-world inflation readings are growing faster than economic growth. …

…It’s time to recognize what America’s debauchery of the US Dollar is doing to global inflation. If US monetary policy makers are still in the camp of the willfully blind and want to believe there’s no real-world inflation out there because Ben Bernanke’s conflicted and compromised calculation of CPI says so, Godspeed having the world agree with them on that. …

In the Washington Examiner, Lynn Mitchell tells us about the healthcare repeal vote of the Virginia senators who were Obama stooges last year.  

Many in Virginia are questioning the votes Wednesday (or lack thereof) of their Democratic Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner when the U.S. Senate took a vote on whether to repeal the health care law known as ObamaCare. It was defeated, falling along party lines and ending up 51-47 against repeal.

…Jim Riley at Virginia Virtucon blog noted Warner was a no-show even though he was in Washington that day to address the centrist think tank Center for American Progress. So the question begs to be asked … where was he for the Senate vote? Could he have skipped it, as some have suggested, to avoid a record of voting against the people of Virginia — again — or to avoid showing his lemming status voting lockstep with the Democrats?

 Meanwhile, Webb lined up against repeal despite the outcry from Virginians who were for it, despite two election cycles that saw the Commonwealth’s citizens vote overwhelmingly for Republicans while throwing out Democrats, and despite two federal judge rulings declaring ObamaCare as unconstitutional.

…With this latest round, Webb and Warner continue to show that adhering to party lines is more important than listening to all the citizens they represent.

In the American Spectator, Ross Kaminsky comments on the defeat of the Senate repeal of Obamacare.

…Despite the rhetoric of the left, the vote was far more than symbolic as it forced some key vulnerable Democrats, including Claire McCaskill (MO) and Ben Nelson (NE), to show whether they stood with the citizens of their states or with the arm-twisting of Harry Reid and Barack Obama. In a vote in August, 71% of those Missourians who cast ballots voted to prohibit the government from requiring that a person purchase health insurance, the lynchpin of Obamacare’s takeover of the American health insurance system. McCaskill gave those 71% of voters the finger and, I predict, sealed her fate in the 2012 elections, as did Ben Nelson whose state is 2-to-1 against Obamacare.

“Conservative” Democrat Joe Manchin (WV) also voted with the Democrats to preserve Obamacare, proving right his Republican challenger in the 2010 Senate race who said that Manchin’s late-in-the-race conversion to being against Obamacare was a lie and that his earlier support of Obamacare represented who Manchin really is. A Rasmussen Reports poll of West Virginia likely voters in August, 2010 showed 69% of the state opposed to Obamacare, with 80% of those “strongly opposed” and almost twice as many supporting the state suing to block the law’s health insurance mandate as opposing such a lawsuit. &%^$! the people, says Manchin!

…If you want to understand the implication of the Republican assault on Obamacare (and of the Democrats’ defense of it), don’t bother with the lamestream media. Instead, look at betting on 2012 Senate control. It’s trading around 70% for the Republicans to win back control, the all-time high for that bet and up 15% from the November elections.

In the WaPo, Charles Lane explains that Congress cannot lie to the American people in order to enact a law. Lane is the Post’s Supreme Court reporter, so him leaving the dark side is an indication the legal challenge to healthcare is gaining momentum.

…Ezra says this is all about “semantics.” Congress has the power to levy taxes; and the “penalty” attached the mandate really is a tax, but Congress couldn’t use the word “tax,” because it’s politically “toxic.” “I don’t believe our forefathers risked their lives to make sure the word ‘penalty’ was eschewed in favor of the word ‘tax,’” he writes. Wrong again: Actually, one purpose of the Constitution is to prevent government from engaging in politically expedient deception. …

This passage from New York v. United States, from which Judge Vinson also aptly quoted, puts it rather well:

Some truths are so basic that, like the air around us, they are easily overlooked. Much of the Constitution is concerned with setting forth the form of our government, and the courts have traditionally invalidated measures deviating from that form. The result may appear “formalistic” in a given case to partisans of the measure at issue, because such measures are typically the product of the era’s perceived necessity. But the Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — not exactly a right-wing nut — wrote those words, in 1992. What she was basically saying is that, under our Constitution, the ends do not justify the means.

In the Agenda from National Review, Avik Roy puts together an excellent review of the verdict in Florida v HHS. Roy highlights Judge Vinson’s compelling rejection of the Necessary and Proper Clause.

Florida v. Health and Human Services, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could go down as an important landmark in the history of American liberty. But that’s a big “if.”

Most people expected Judge C. Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida to rule that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, based on his questions and comments during hearings on the case. Less expected was his decision to overturn the 2010 health care law in its entirety.

…Indeed, Judge Vinson has penned a persuasive, well-researched, and tightly-reasoned opinion, one that will surely have some impact on what the Supreme Court eventually ends up doing. Judge Vinson marshals statements from both sides to show that PPACA indeed represents an unprecedented expansion of federal power, one that, if upheld, makes it difficult to argue that the Constitution restrains Congress in any way. Equally importantly, he points out that even the White House believes that the PPACA’s other provisions will destabilize the health insurance market without an individual mandate, thereby making it difficult to uphold the rest of PPACA in the mandate’s absence.

There are four key components to Judge Vinson’s opinion: (1) a ruling that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s dramatic expansion of Medicaid is not coercive to the states; (2) that the individual mandate exceeds Congressional powers to regulate interstate commerce; (3) that the individual mandate exceeds Congressional prerogatives to enact laws that are “necessary and proper” for executing its delegated powers; (4) that the individual mandate was essential to the functioning of other critical components of PPACA, and therefore the entire law must be overturned. …

…3. The Necessary and Proper clause does not allow Congress to impose an individual mandate

…Judge Vinson spends more intellectual energy in this area, pointing out that the Constitution only allows Congress to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers” that were explicitly laid out in the Constitution (p. 58).

Vinson points out that advocates of the law assert that the mandate is essential because without it, the law’s requirement that insurers take all comers, without regard to preexisting conditions, would “[bankrupt] the health insurance industry.” But that doesn’t rise to the level of Constitutional justification (p. 60):

Thus, rather than being used to implement or facilitate enforcement of the Act’s insurance industry reforms, the individual mandate is actually being used as the means to avoid the adverse consequences of the Act itself. Such an application of the Necessary and Proper Clause would have the perverse effect of enabling Congress to pass ill conceived, or economically disruptive statutes, secure in the knowledge that the more dysfunctional the results of the statute are, the more essential or “necessary” the statutory fix would be. Under such a rationale, the more harm the statute does, the more power Congress could assume for itself under the Necessary and Proper Clause. This result would, of course, expand the Necessary and Proper Clause far beyond its original meaning, and allow Congress to exceed the powers specifically enumerated in Article I. Surely this is not what the Founders anticipated, nor how that Clause should operate. …