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Mark Steyn doesn’t believe the literary agent who claimed Obama was born in Kenya.

… When it comes to conspiracies, I’m an Occam’s Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he’s spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.

After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title “Journeys In Black And White,” being born in Hawaii doesn’t really help. It’s entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else.

Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.

And where’s the harm in it? Everybody does it – at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was “the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review,” there’s no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, “Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats’ Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She’s the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she “self-identified” as Cherokee, so that makes her a “woman of color.” Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families.”

The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain.” But then the white man came, and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.

A delegation of college students visited the White House last week, and Vice President Biden told them: “You’re an incredible generation. And that’s not hyperbole, either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced.”

Ever ever ever ever! Even in a world where everyone’s incredible, some things ought to be truly incredible. Yet Harvard Law School touted Elizabeth “Dances with Crabs” Warren as their “first woman of color” – and nobody laughed. Because, if you laugh, chances are you’ll be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six weeks. Because in an ever-more incredible America being an all-white “woman of color” is entirely credible. …

National Review piece on how Oprah cratered her career.

She didn’t see it coming. One day, Oprah Winfrey turned around, and her nationally syndicated show was sliding in the ratings, and her audience was fleeing en masse. And it happened soon after a day she thought was one of the best in her life.

Isn’t that how all the giants fall? When they least expect it?

It was the day Oprah announced she was backing the African-American candidate, then-senator Barack Obama, over the highly qualified and experienced woman candidate, then-senator Hillary Clinton.

It was the first time that Oprah put her brand on a political candidate. And her audience was expecting a very different choice.

Oprah appeared on Larry King Live in May 2007, flush with pride, and was asked the questions lots of women in her audience had on their minds.

“Is there a side of you, the woman side, that would lead toward a Hillary?” King inquired.

“Well, I have great respect for Hillary Clinton,” Oprah said. I think I’ve said this before, and it’s true: Because I am for Barack does not mean I am against Hillary or anybody else.”

So much for the sisterhood!

And so much for that Oprah honesty that her mostly female — and mostly white — audience had come to expect all of those years.

Oprah had chosen the less-qualified, less-experienced black man over the more-qualified, more-experienced white woman. It didn’t take long for Oprah to feel the backlash.

Hell hath no fury like millions of women scorned. …

Pickerhead wonders where this David Brooks was for the last four years.

… In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can’t afford to fulfill. At the same time, the decision-making machinery is breaking down. American and European capitals still have the structures inherited from the past, but without the self-restraining ethos that made them function.

The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint.

The Obama campaign issues its famous “Julia” ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle. The Citizens United case gives well-financed interests tremendous power to preserve or acquire tax breaks and regulatory deals. American senior citizens receive health benefits that cost many times more than the contributions they put into the system.

In Europe, workers across the Continent want great lifestyles without long work hours. They want dynamic capitalism but also personal security. European welfare states go broke trying to deliver these impossibilities.

The European ruling classes once had their power checked through daily contact with the tumble of national politics. But now those ruling classes have built a technocratic apparatus, the European Union, operating far above popular scrutiny. Decisions that reshape the destinies of families and nations are being made at some mysterious, transnational level. Few Europeans can tell who is making decisions or who is to blame if they go wrong, so, of course, they feel powerless and distrustful.

Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.

This is one of the reasons why Europe and the United States are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time. People used to believe that human depravity was self-evident and democratic self-government was fragile. Now they think depravity is nonexistent and they take self-government for granted.

Neither the United States nor the European model will work again until we rediscover and acknowledge our own natural weaknesses and learn to police rather than lionize our impulses.

John Podhoretz says cool it on the Jeremiah Wright stuff. Just have everyone look at Obama’s record.

Yesterday’s breathless campaign hysteria arose out of a not-really-much-of-a-scoop from the broadsheet across town: A rich guy in Omaha wants to spend a lot of money defeating Barack Obama.

Stop the presses. Eek.

Said rich guy sought the advice of a controversial consultant (who’d very much benefit from getting the rich guy’s commission) on a strategy. The consultant proposed reviving the 2008 controversy over Obama’s relationship with his egregious pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

You’d have thought, from the mainstream-media tweets yesterday morning, that the mere act of mentioning Obama and Wright in the same breath was nothing less than a hate crime in itself. How dare anyone mention the president in the same breath as the anti-American demagogue who officiated at his wedding, baptized his children and gave him the title of his second book.

For those of us who enjoy seeing such folk sputter and squirm, the idea of a Wright attack against Obama instantly seemed rather piquant. But it only took a moment’s reflection to see how senseless and even stupid such an approach would be.

First, the sheer quantity of facts and figures and issues from Obama’s actual presidency that can be used to argue against a second term are far more devastating. …

Alan Dershowitz says it’s time to drop the murder charges against Zimmerman.

A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman — if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.

There is, of course, no assurance that the special prosecutor handling the case, State Attorney Angela Corey, will do the right thing. Because until now, her actions have been anything but ethical, lawful and professional.

She was aware when she submitted an affidavit that it did not contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She deliberately withheld evidence that supported Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. The New York Times has reported that the police had “a full face picture” of Zimmerman, before paramedics treated him, that showed “a bloodied nose.” The prosecutor also had photographic evidence of bruises to the back of his head.

But none of this was included in any affidavit.

Now there is much more extensive medical evidence that would tend to support Zimmerman’s version of events. This version, if true, would establish self-defense even if Zimmerman had improperly followed, harassed and provoked Martin. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the Mormon obsession.

The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor has a piece on Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. It is largely sympathetic and reveals, despite Kantor’s thesis that everything you need to know about Romney boils down to Mormonism (hmm, funny how the New York Times ignored and deplored similar inquiries about candidate Barack Obama in 2008, but what do you expect from the liberals’ paper of record?), that his religiosity is identical to those of other faithful people. (“He prays for divine guidance on business decisions and political races .?.?.” or “‘He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land.’”). Perhaps if the liberal media did not treat religious people like Margaret Mead approached natives it would seem less strange.

The piece is a troubling, and in many cases a bizarre, attempt to picture Romney as “The Mormon candidate,” a standard that would repel most Americans if applied to another faith. Take for example this sentence: “He may have many reasons for abhorring debt, wanting to limit federal power, promoting self-reliance and stressing the unique destiny of the United States, but those are all traditionally Mormon traits as well.” Now substitute a different religion: “He may have many reasons for abhorring debt, wanting to limit federal power, promoting self-reliance and stressing the unique destiny of the United States, but those are all traditionally Jewish traits as well.” You see, it comes across as rank bigotry when we talk about other religions.

And since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is also a Mormon, how would one explain that he is unbothered by big government and not all that interested in curtailing the debt? …

Randy Barnett, who led the court charge against the health care act, has a good post in Volokh on our foolish drug war.

There are so many reasons why drug prohibition is objectionable, it is hard to enumerate them all.  In my Utah Law Review article, The Harmful Side Effects of Drug Prohibition, I try to systematically survey just the “consequentialist” arguments against this socially-destructive social policy.    If I were to revise this article today, I suppose I would emphasize even more than I did how destructive the “War on Drugs” has been to the black community, perhaps especially because of the incarceration of thousands of black men, depriving their children of fathers, but also because of how the black market profits from the illicit drug trade supports the gang structure that preys upon the community and sucks up its kids.  Then there is the differential enforcement of drug laws in minority communities.  And I would emphasize how the abnormal profits to be made from black market drugs is systematically destroying the entire political culture of Mexico.  All this to stop some people from getting high.

But, as I said, the problem with assessing the War on Drugs is that there are so many harmful “side effects” of drug prohibition that it is difficult even to know where to begin.  This article is my effort to be as comprehensive about these effects, yet still be accessible.  Here is the abstract: …

Here’s Penn Jillette with his reasoning for ending the drug war. The language here is a little rough, but he was exercised about the juxtaposition of the people in jail with the nonchalant attitude of the president.

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It’s graduation time. Bret Stephens has a mock address.

Dear Class of 2012:

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let’s be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you’re entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They’re the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.

No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West Point. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she’s in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

If you’re like that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for yourself. Just remember she doesn’t.

Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are you’re nothing like her. And since you’re no longer children, at least officially, it’s time someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts. …

Seems like a good time to reprint Steve Jobs famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford.

… My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. …

Larry Bell, Houston prof and Forbes contributor, writes on the administration’s refusal to allow Virginia to control its destiny and drill off the coast.

It seems the Commonwealth of Virginia won’t be receiving “all of the above” energy opportunities they requested from Obama’s permitting elves any time soon. Instead, they will just have to settle for more windy promises.

In 2007, the Federal Government had designated certain offshore areas as available for oil and gas leases, raising prospects for creating a boom in new state and local business revenues and jobs. By 2010, Virginia was poised to become the first East Coast state to receive permits which would enable these welcome developments.  Unfortunately, that was then… and this is now.

Last November, despite strong state bi-partisan and public support, the Obama administration unexpectedly dropped Virginia from the government’s most recent leasing plan altogether, declaring a seven-year delay with little explanation. Then, only three months later, the president announced federal approval of leasing plans for a wind farm off the Virginia coast. He apparently didn’t need to offer much reason for that. …

WaPo with a story on the health benefits of coffee drinking.

One of life’s simple pleasures just got a little sweeter. After years of waffling research on coffee and health, even some fear that java might raise the risk of heart disease, a big study finds the opposite: Coffee drinkers are a little more likely to live longer. Regular or decaf doesn’t matter.

The study of 400,000 people is the largest ever done on the issue, and the results should reassure any coffee lovers who think it’s a guilty pleasure that may do harm.

“Our study suggests that’s really not the case,” said lead researcher Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute. “There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking.”

No one knows why. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer. The most widely studied ingredient — caffeine — didn’t play a role in the new study’s results.

It’s not that earlier studies were wrong. There is evidence that coffee can raise LDL, or bad cholesterol, and blood pressure at least short-term, and those in turn can raise the risk of heart disease.

Even in the new study, it first seemed that coffee drinkers were more likely to die at any given time. But they also tended to smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers. Once researchers took those things into account, a clear pattern emerged: Each cup of coffee per day nudged up the chances of living longer.

The study was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. The results are published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. ..

Ed Morrissey makes a serious point about Harvard’s Cherokee.

… The system exists to undo disadvantage — so what purpose is there for Warren to enter into in it at all?  But while we’re criticizing Warren, let’s not leave out Harvard and all of the other public and private organizations that attempt to benefit from the same disunity.  Harvard had no hesitation to promote its “woman of color” despite her color being roughly peaches-and-cream.

The system itself is corrupt, but worse, it’s utterly corrupting.  That’s the true moral of this story, and we shouldn’t let Warren’s rather large tree blind us to the proverbial forest in this issue.  If we want to address systemic disadvantage, to the extent it still exists, we should be reforming the reservation system and inner-city schools to give those who still are truly disadvantaged a chance to overcome those obstacles, and end the system that incentivizes everyone else to exploit those systems at the expense of the actually disadvantaged.

Don’t miss the cool giraffe pic below.

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April 14th Pickings had a review of Escape from Camp 14 – a view into North Korea’s GULAG. Now Jeff Jacoby has more.

… Harden’s book is gripping, and enlightening. Yet not even the most gifted writer can fully convey what it means to grow up in a Camp 14 — a realm in which “love and mercy and family were words without meaning,” in which betrayal was routine and compassion unknown. How does a human being overcome such damage? Grisly physical scars mark Shin’s body, Harden writes, but there are severe psychological scars too. He struggles to show affection and to trust other people; to be capable of sympathy and sadness.

How could it be otherwise? After a lifetime of dehumanization and institutionalized cruelty, Shin can hardly be blamed if he wrestles with emotional paralysis.

But what excuse do we have? We who know what freedom and civilization mean, who live with law and justice and decency, who intone “never again” to accounts of genocide and holocaust — how do we justify our emotional paralysis?

There is no cruelty so depraved that people cannot be induced to do it, or to look the other way while it is being done. “Escape from Camp 14″ reconfirms what we have known for years: North Korea’s rulers brutalize their people with unparalleled and bloody barbarity. Why do we find it so easy to look the other way?

Kimberley Strassel gives the real story behind the company featured in the Obama attack on Bain Capital.  

This week the Obama campaign debuted its attack on Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Mitt Romney founded. Its two-minute ad purports to tell the story of GS Technologies, a Kansas City-based Bain investment that went bankrupt in 2001.

To hear the Obama campaign, this is a tale of greed: GST was a healthy, happy, quality steelmaker until Bain plundered its worth and stripped its 750 workers of their due. “It was like a vampire,” laments one former employee in the ad. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.”

GST is a tragic tale, though in a different way. The real story of GST is that of a private-equity firm trying to spark some life into a uncompetitive, over-unionized industry. Bain’s crime here—if that’s what you call it—was giving a dying steel plant an unexpected eight-year lease on life.  …

More understanding of the value of private equity firms can be gleaned from Guy Sorman, in City Journal.

The 2012 presidential race will be, in part, a showdown between two different models of economic growth. President Barack Obama and his Democratic administration will defend the once-discredited and now-resurgent theory that government must act as the economy’s “tutor” and use public funds to stimulate it. The Republican nominee, presumably Mitt Romney, will advance the free-market argument that the main source of new growth is the innovative energy of American entrepreneurs and that government needs to get out of the way.

An essential part of the free-market argument is “creative destruction,” a theory proposed by the great Austrian economist and Harvard University professor Joseph Schumpeter. If you don’t understand Schumpeter’s insight—expressed most powerfully in his classic 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy—you’ll have a hard time understanding why free markets work so well to generate prosperity. Yet creative destruction is a complicated concept, poorly understood by the general public and not always easy to defend. As November nears, the Republican nominee will have to figure out a way to show voters how essential it is to American prosperity.

Schumpeter believed that progress in a capitalist economy requires that the old give way constantly to the new: production technologies in a free economy improve constantly, and new products and services are always on offer. But this creative transformation also has a destructive side, since it makes earlier products and services—and the workers who provided them—obsolete. Today’s consumers have little reason to buy an oil lamp instead of a lightbulb, or a Sony Walkman instead of an iPod—which can be bad news for the people who manufacture the oil lamp and the Walkman.

Looking back at the history of Western capitalism, we can see how the discovery of new energy sources, new communications systems, and new financial instruments regularly demolished old ways of doing things. …

Abby Thernstrom, one of Pickings favorites, was the WSJ interviewee this weekend.

… She notes that suburban America has been dramatically altered by the changes in immigration law in 1965. “You’ve got Asians. You’ve got Hispanics. And none of them are residentially clustered enough so that you can draw neat little lines around them and create reserved seats for members of minority groups. Residential integration is not in the interest of voting rights advocates.”

Besides, she says, racially tailored districts leave ambitious black politicians (and political discourse generally) worse off, insofar as they eliminate the need to build multiracial coalitions capable of winning broad support. It’s not unusual for the entire Congressional Black Caucus in a given year to sport a more liberal voting record than the average white Democrat, which can limit the appeal of a black candidate to white voters. Republicans have tended to play along with racial gerrymandering because concentrating minority voters in a few districts can result in other districts with large concentrations of nonminorities, where GOP candidates believe they have a better chance of winning.

“So you end up with these black districts in which only blacks run for office,” says Ms. Thernstrom. “The turnout is fairly low, and those who tend to win are the most strident, the most left, the most race-conscious. They’re those who play the race card best. Is it true in every one of these districts? No. There are some exceptions. But there aren’t enough exceptions.”

What suppresses minority turnout, she says, is not voter-ID laws but racial gerrymandering. “Turnout is very low in these safe black and Hispanic districts. And why shouldn’t it be? There’s no real competition.”

Ms. Thernstrom says that the evolution of the Voting Rights Act fits a familiar pattern. “This is the usual civil rights legislation story. It starts out being about opportunity and ends up being about results. We see that in any corner of the civil rights picture that you want to zero in on.”…

“America in Black and White,” the masterful 1997 tome that Ms. Thernstrom co-wrote with her husband, is by and large a good-news story of racial progress in America. It bothers her deeply that so many black leaders have a vested interest in playing down the socioeconomic advancement that has occurred among blacks over the past half-century.  

“They have a whole list of ways in which America hasn’t changed” for blacks, she says. “For their policies to make any sense, they have to pretend that progress isn’t being made or that it’s too little progress to matter.”

Most of the Voting Rights Act is permanent, which means that, notwithstanding Mr. Holder’s scaremongering, elimination of outdated provisions like Section 5 will not threaten the black franchise or leave the U.S. on the cusp of a return to Jim Crow. Asked why the administration of the first black president is so keen on keeping racial issues on the front burner, Ms. Thernstrom replies that “they obviously think it’s good politics. If they looked at the data, though, they would see that it’s ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’ The picture is so heartening, even in the South. In fact, the South is in some ways the vanguard.”

Ms. Thernstrom believes that the administration’s identity politics may be a miscalculation if Mr. Obama’s race is no longer foremost on voters’ minds. “My sense is that when Americans look at the president today, they look at a man who has not exactly solved our economic problems, who has gotten us deeply in debt, and who used up a tremendous amount of time and political capital on legislation—ObamaCare—that Americans don’t want,” she says. “But I don’t think they look at him as a black man who has done these things.”

Marc Thiessen says the creepy Obama minions who have inserted The One into biographies of former presidents have missed the boat.

President Obama is being criticized for inserting himself into the official biographies of his predecessors on the White House website. The RNC and the conservative blogosphere have had a field day with this, pointing to it as yet further evidence of Obama’s enormous ego. I disagree. If anything, Obama was being too modest—leaving out some of his administration’s truly historic accomplishments.

Here are a few suggestions for additions to presidential bios that Obama might want to consider:

In the bio on President Bush, he could say:

•    Under President Bush, the national debt increased by $4 trillion over eight years. President Obama succeeded in increasing the national debt by the same amount in just three years—and in his first term racked up almost as much debt as all previous American presidents combined. …

Howie Carr says it’s time for Elizabeth Warren to tell the truth.

The Globe has finally come clean. The cover-up has crumbled. The New England Historic Genealogical Society threw in the towel a few hours later.

Now it’s Granny Warren’s turn. She needs to cop a plea to being a fake Indian, because it’s way beyond a reasonable doubt.

Unless, of course, she wants to stick with her very believable story about her pappaw having “high cheekbones — like all the Indians do.”

Karma time. One of the many ways Chris Matthews made light of Sarah Palin was to suggest she would be an awful Jeopardy contestant. Last week Matthews was on the show during its visit to DC. It is hard to overstate how poorly he did. NewsBusters has the story.

… Quite comically, the MSNBC anchor’s first gaffe came when he couldn’t even correctly request an answer to a question.

“Let’s go back to, what is ‘Crossword Clues E?’ I mean, I’m sorry, let’s go $200 for the category ‘Crossword Clues E.’”

Matthews appeared to have his Joe Biden thinking cap on.

Host Alex Trebek finally read the answer, “At ____, soldier! Four letters.”

“At ease, soldier,” Matthews responded. “What is ‘At ease, soldier?’”

Although the correct response was “Ease,” host Trebek graciously accepted Matthews’ offering.

A bit later, the answer to another question was, “Full name of the U2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.”

Matthews responded, “Who is Gary Powers?”

Trebek prompted, “We need the full name.”

Again channeling Biden, Matthews actually just repeated the same thing saying, “Who is Gary Powers?”

Trebek said, “No,” and the audience burst out laughing. The full name of course was Francis Gary Powers.

And that’s when things really got ugly for the arrogant Matthews. …

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The same brilliant people who turned home ownership into a crushing burden for millions of Americans have now managed to do the same with a college degree. They’re just trying to help people. But, they are from the government, so when they try to help they do just the opposite and make the problem worse. Because the government always f__ks up (Pickerhead’s Iron Rule of Government). Last Sunday’s NY Times featured an article on student debt that was located above the fold, front page, front section. 

Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.

About two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients borrow money to attend college, either from the government or private lenders, according to a Department of Education survey of 2007-8 graduates; the total number of borrowers is most likely higher since the survey does not track borrowing from family members. 

By contrast, 45 percent of 1992-93 graduates borrowed money; that survey included family borrowing as well as government and private loans. …

… “If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.

Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government. …

… Much like the mortgage brokers who promised pain-free borrowing to homeowners just a few years back, many colleges don’t offer warnings about student debt in the glossy brochures and pitch letters mailed to prospective students. Instead, reading from the same handbook as for-profit colleges, they urge students not to worry about the costs. That’s because most students don’t pay full price.

Even discounted, the price is beyond the means of many. Yet too often, students and their parents listen without question.

“I readily admit it,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, who has also served as president of Vanderbilt and Brown, among others. “I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.”  …

… At Ohio State, “college can be a reality for everyone, no matter your income or background,” its Web site says, while at Ohio Northern, future students are urged to get over the “sticker shock,” and focus instead on “return on investment.”

Oberlin College’s Web site tells prospective students that its financial aid policy is simple: “We meet the full demonstrated financial need of every admitted student.” The University of Dayton declares itself “one of the most affordable private Catholic schools in the country” and a “lifetime investment, appreciating over the course of time.”

The costs for these colleges? At Ohio State, about $25,000 a year for tuition and fees, room and board and living expenses; at Ohio Northern, about $48,000; at Oberlin $60,000; and at Dayton $48,000.

Colleges are aggressively recruiting students, regardless of their financial circumstances. In admissions offices across the country, professional marketing companies and talented alumni are being enlisted to devise catchy slogans, build enticing Web sites — and essentially outpitch the competition.

Affordability, or at least promising that the finances will work out, is increasingly a piece of the pitch. …

… “The overall message was, ‘It’s doable and normal to go into that much debt,’ ” said Jillian Potter, 23, who grew up in Ohio and attended Anderson University, a nonprofit private Christian school in neighboring Indiana.

Ms. Potter figured she would have to borrow about $10,000 a year. But the tuition increased every year, and because she didn’t declare a major until her junior year, she needed five years to graduate.

A social worker, she now owes $80,000. “I try not to think about it because it’s really depressing,” she said. … 

… Wanda McGill has stopped opening her student loan bills.

She isn’t sure how much debt she has accumulated, though she thinks it’s about $100,000. But Ms. McGill, a 38-year-old single mother, knows for sure she cannot pay it.

Ms. McGill said she dropped out of DeVry University, a for-profit college with a branch in Columbus, two years ago after she ran out of money — even with the loans. She now makes $8.50 an hour working for an employment training center in Florida.

“I was promised the world and was given a garbage dump to clean up,” she wrote in an online complaint at consumeraffairs.com. “Like my life was not already screwed up with welfare and all.”

The student loan crisis has spread from for-profit colleges to more traditional institutions, but the for-profit colleges continue to represent the worst of the problem. Students complain that they were misled about the costs of education and that their job prospects were exaggerated. Government reports and lawsuits have accused some for-profit colleges of outright fraud, including doctoring attendance records or peddling near-worthless degrees. …

So how’s things with law graduates? Paul Campos, law prof at Colorado posts in Salon.

Last summer a young lawyer wrote to me about her struggles to find employment. Her story was all too familiar: After graduating with honors from a middling law school, she was unable to find a real legal job, and was reduced to taking a series of temporary, low-paying positions that did not allow her to even begin to pay off educational debts that, three years after graduation, had ballooned to nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

Rather than merely lamenting her situation, however, she explained to me she was more fortunate than many of her fellow recent graduates: “I know that I am better off than a lot of these younger lawyers. I get job interviews. I can afford the apartment I share with my friend. I have a great resume. I am an excellent researcher and writer. I rarely go to bed hungry anymore.”

That last sentence stayed with me. I have been researching what’s been happening to recent law school graduates, and it’s no exaggeration to describe the situation as a growing catastrophe. The statistics are shocking:

Approximately half of the 45,000 people who will graduate this year from ABA-accredited law schools will never find jobs as lawyers. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the next decade 21,000 new jobs for lawyers will become available each year, via growth and outflow from the profession.)

Most of those who do find jobs will be making between $30,000 and $60,000 per year.

People currently in law school are going to graduate with an average of $150,000 of educational debt. …

For a change of pace, The Economist has an obit for a poker player.

IF YOU found yourself sitting at the poker table opposite Amarillo Slim, you were wisest not to say one word. He might try to get you talking, of course. How are you and how’ve you been, any sort of yakking. Best to keep quiet. He could get a tell from you just by watching the sweat on your upper lip. In fact he could know your whole hand by looking at the pulse in your cheek. If you tried to read him back, you’d find those cool hard eyes hidden in the shadow of his big old Stetson hat. He had a rattlesnake head on the band of it—killed by himself, so he said—and he might tell you that as a token of affection he’d put a rattler in your pocket and ask you for a match.

He looked like a Texas cowboy, and that was what he was, with a big spread of acres and many head of registered longhorn cattle. He could rope and drag Arabian stallions faster than they could run, and talk feedlots and milking schedules with the best. But then you noticed that this sonnagun had custom-made ostrich boots with spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds on them, and gold one-dollar-pieces sewn over the buttons on his shirts (or, for best, the uncut emeralds sent to him by Pablo Escobar to apologise for abducting him in Colombia by mistake). Mighty fancy gear, and company, for a cowboy.

He was so tall and scrawny that he said he feared the bathtub as a boy, in case he vanished down the drain. You’d think you could easily bust his skinny country ass. But when he moved in he was tight and fierce, aggressive as a grizzly bear. So though he sounded like a bumpkin it was all part of the bluff, for you didn’t win four World Series of Poker without a master’s skill in mind-reading and arithmetic, and nerves of steel to match. …

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Bill McGurn contrasts Jerry Brown and Chris Christie. 

In his January 2011 inaugural address, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared it a “time to honestly assess our financial condition and make the tough choices.” Plainly the choices weren’t tough enough: Mr. Brown has just announced that he faces a state budget deficit of $16 billion—nearly twice the $9.2 billion he predicted in January. In Sacramento Monday, he coupled a new round of spending cuts with a call for some hefty new tax hikes.

In his own inaugural address back in January 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also spoke of making tough choices for the people of his state. For his first full budget, Mr. Christie faced a deficit of $10.7 billion—one-third of projected revenues. Not only did Mr. Christie close that deficit without raising taxes, he is now plumping for a 10% across-the-board tax cut.

It’s not just looks that make Mr. Brown Laurel to Mr. Christie’s Hardy. It’s also their political choices.

When the Obama administration’s Transportation Department called on California to cough up billions for a high-speed bullet train or lose federal dollars, Mr. Brown went along. In sharp contrast, when the feds delivered a similar ultimatum to Mr. Christie over a proposed commuter rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, he nixed the project, saying his state just couldn’t afford it. …

… Our states today are conducting a profound and contentious rethink about the right level of taxes, spending and government. Most obvious is the battle for Wisconsin. There Republican Gov. Scott Walker finds himself pitted against public-sector unions that successfully forced a recall election for June 5 after the legislature adopted the governor’s package of labor reforms last spring.

Amid the turmoil—Democratic legislators fled the state to prevent a vote, while union-backed protesters occupied the Capitol—Mr. Walker looked weakened. Now he has taken the lead in polls. More than that, voters have taken the lesson: A recent Marquette University Law School poll showed only 12% of Wisconsin voters listing “restoring collective bargaining rights for public employees” as their priority. …

Since McGurn brought up Wisconsin, let’s have an extended look at the campaign that will culminate on June 5th. Ed Morrissey reports on recent polls.

Now that Democrats have ended their divisive recall primary in Wisconsin, one would expect the polling to show their nominee to be gaining some traction against sitting Governor Scott Walker.  Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was considered the stronger of the Democrats challenging Walker in the unusual recall election, and polls just after the recall showed him nearly within the margin of error of the incumbent.  This week, however, a new poll from We Ask America of over 1200 likely voters puts Walker on top by nine, 52/43: …

Jonathan Tobin.

The labor movement and its left-wing allies in the Democratic Party thought they were doing something extremely clever when they reacted to their defeats at the hands of Scott Walker in the Wisconsin legislature by starting a recall campaign. The recall enabled the losers of the 2010 election where Walker and the GOP swept to power in the state to, in effect, get a do-over in which they could act as if the previous result didn’t really count. But as the latest polls from Wisconsin show, they are on the eve of a catastrophic loss that will not only leave Walker in power and stronger than ever but also deal the Democrats a crucial loss that may be a harbinger of more setbacks in the fall. …

Walter Russell Mead.

David Weigel has a great piece on the Walker phenomenon over at Slate. As Weigel points out, Walker has built an extraordinary political following in the state, pulling together all the disparate elements in today’s Republican universe from tea party activists to megadonors. The result is a formidable political force that dominates the airwaves and inspires the grassroots.

It’s not clear who will win in June; as Weigel notes, Walker currently leads in the polls, but the race is still unpredictable. However, those who rely on the New York Times for their Wisconsin news won’t have any idea about some of the factors shaping this race; Weigel’s piece provides a healthy reality check for them. …

Here’s Weigel’s piece from Slate which gives a good feel for local attitudes.

If you get bored in Wisconsin, play a game. Drive a few miles through any neighborhood. Count the signs that read “We Stand With Scott Walker,” or “I Stand With Scott Walker,” or “Scott Walker: Believe in Wisconsin.” Try and figure out what the houses have in common.

You won’t. There are pieces of Walkerian flair outside of barns on Highway 41, near working-class ranch homes in Appleton, and in the tony part of Oshkosh that Sen. Ron Johnson calls home. On one stretch of Highway 26, somebody’s propped up an unused toilet with a sign reading, “Deposit recall petitions here.” Next to that, a Walker sign that crosses out half of the phrase “for governor” and adds “president.”

The public displays of affection for Walker can put you in mind of October 2008, when placing a HOPE poster or Shepard Fairey print in your window told neighbors about your politics and taste. The Walker gear is easily attained at one of the 20 “victory centers” promoted by the campaign. I stopped by half a dozen of them—local Republican offices temporarily converted to the cause. In the front of the Winnebago County office, a digital sign counted down the days to the June 5 recall. A cardboard Walker stand-up faced visitors from behind a podium. …

… Walker’s supporters agree with a vehemence you rarely find in state elections. On Tuesday, as Walker—surprisingly—got nearly as many votes as the Democrats running against him, I visited a few polling places and met the people toting the free signs. Scott Perzentka, who runs a pier-building business, voted for Walker in Oshkosh, then headed back to his truck with Walker and biker’s-rights signs. Perzentka survived a horrific motorcycle crash in 2003. The experience made him a kind of activist. As he rebuilt his life, it also reinforced his belief that people had to earn what they had, and that unions existed to puff up the salaries of people who didn’t work.

“Seventy-five years ago they were out for the little guy,” he said, “and now they’re out for themselves.

Shikha Dalmia from Reason.

… what exactly has Walker done to deserve a backlash that, if successful, will make him only the third governor in the history of the nation ever to be recalled?

He confronted a $3.6 billion biennial deficit when he assumed office last year. Raising taxes was not an option: Wisconsin already has the 45th-worst overall business tax climate in the country, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

So Walker did what a responsible bookkeeper would do: tackle the biggest driver of the fiscal crisis, public employee costs. …

Time for humor. Walter Jacobson blogs on the Boston Globe finally getting the story straight on Liz Warren’s lily white ancestors. She’s a red allright, just not an Indian.

… As you know, that Boston Globe story created a legend which lives on in the media despite having been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked at every level, and one from which even NEHGS has walked away.

The Globe finally gets around to correcting the story, but buries it in the “For the Record” correction section today:

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in the May 1 Metro section and the accompanying headline incorrectly described the 1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee. The document, alluded to in a family newsletter found by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, was an application for a marriage license,  not the license itself. Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven.

(Note:  The correction references an article on May 1 which repeated the story; the correction now is appended at the end of the original online version.)

That’s it?  After all the trouble The Globe caused, necessitating countless hours by lowly bloggers to correct the falsehood. …

More fun as Politico finds a piece from Fordham University that describes Warren as a “woman of color.”

Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” …

Andrew Malcolm has a “Narcississm Alert.”

It was probably to be expected from a monstrous political ego that considers himself among the top two presidents of the 21st century.

But faced with the apparently frightening possibility of losing his reelection bid, Barack Obama has inserted himself into the online White House bios of almost every president in the last nine decades. To somehow share and compare their achievements. At one point Obama even draws his wife into the biographical additions.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so hilarious. Remember the grandiose but short-lived little party hats that Richard Nixon designed for his special presidential guard unit?

Imagine the emotional insecurities of a grown man who would have henchman find and gratuitously insert even the faintest link between this 44th president and almost every president back to Calvin Coolidge –”On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people…..President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt — “On August 14, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Today the Obama Administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.” …

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Charles Krauthammer thinks a united Israel is more likely to attack Iran.

In May 1967, in brazen violation of previous truce agreements, Egypt ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai, marched 120,000 troops to the Israeli border, blockaded the Straits of Tiran (Israel’s southern outlet to the world’s oceans), abruptly signed a military pact with Jordan and, together with Syria, pledged war for the final destruction of Israel.

May ’67 was Israel’s most fearful, desperate month. The country was surrounded and alone. Previous great-power guarantees proved worthless. A plan to test the blockade with a Western flotilla failed for lack of participants. Time was running out. Forced into mass mobilization in order to protect against invasion — and with a military consisting overwhelmingly of civilian reservists — life ground to a halt. The country was dying.

On June 5, Israel launched a preemptive strike on the Egyptian air force, then proceeded to lightning victories on three fronts. The Six-Day War is legend, but less remembered is that, four days earlier, the nationalist opposition (Mena­chem Begin’s Likud precursor) was for the first time ever brought into the government, creating an emergency national-unity coalition.

Everyone understood why. You do not undertake a supremely risky preemptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus.

Forty-five years later, in the middle of the night of May 7-8, 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by bringing the main opposition party, Kadima, into a national unity government. Shocking because just hours earlier, the Knesset was expediting a bill to call early elections in September.

Why did the high-flying Netanyahu call off elections he was sure to win? …

More on Netanyahu’s moves from Lazar Berman at American.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu continues to confound opponents, surprise experts, and consolidate political power. Through a series of unconventional moves since 2009, Bibi has gone from struggling to form a supposedly weak coalition  to heading one of the largest parliamentary majorities  in Israel’s history. His bold move this week, canceling early elections in favor of a unity deal with opposition leader Shaul Mofaz, is only the latest in a series of maneuvers that attest to his political acumen: …

… This move has implications for America, too. Obama, clearly no Bibi fan, will have to deal with a strengthened PM, and will find it even more difficult to intimidate him. Netanyahu has more political backing for his Iran policy, but Mofaz has been more moderate rhetorically than Netanyahu or Barak. And if the Palestinians are really interested in making progress on peace negotiations, this is exactly the kind of broad coalition, armed with stability and national security credibility, that can hammer out a game changing deal with the Palestinians.

Jeffrey Goldberg, once one of Obama’s fans in the media, jeers at his Syria policy.

… But a crisis is fast approaching: America’s stockpile of vivid adjectives is being depleted rapidly. Some linguists of the realist camp are now arguing for restraint in the use of condemnatory word combinations. They note that the administration, in its effort to shock and awe the Assad regime with the power of its official statements and the stridency of its State Department briefings, has prematurely stripped bare its thesaurus, leaving the U.S. powerless to come to the symbolic aid of the Syrian people.

When the uprising began last year, the Obama administration clearly hoped that softer language would persuade Assad to cease murdering Syrians. It relied on traditional formulations of diplomatic distaste, calling on Syria to “exercise restraint” and “respect the rights of its citizens.”

When it became clear that mild criticism wouldn’t stay Assad’s hand, the administration began carpet-bombing Damascus with powerful sentences and, at times, whole paragraphs.

In April 2011, shortly after Syrian security forces killed more than 80 unarmed demonstrators, President Barack Obama said, “This outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now.” He accused the Syrian government of using “brutal” tactics against civilians.

Somehow, such combative words still didn’t persuade Assad to change course. Soon, the president’s press secretary, Jay Carney, was forced to remind Assad, and the world, of the president’s rhetorical militancy.

“I’m sure you did see the president’s very strong statement of Friday where he condemned in the strongest possible terms the use of force by the Syrian government against demonstrators, referred to an outrageous use of violence to quell protests,” Carney said. He also mentioned that the White House didn’t merely “oppose” the Syrian government’s treatment of its citizens, but “strongly” opposed it.

Assad insolently ignored Carney’s amplification of the president’s muscular language.

A few months later, shortly after the Syrian government killed more than 30 people in the city of Latakia, Obama reached into the arsenal again and said the people of Syria had “braved ferocious brutality at the hands of their government.” This onslaught, Obama said, was “disgraceful.”

The White House appeared surprised when Assad nevertheless chose not to flee Damascus.

So the administration upped the ante. In the months that followed, Carney said the war waged on the Syrian people was both “heinous” and “unforgivable.” … 

Kimberley Strassel shows how the minions work Obama’s enemies list. 

Here’s what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.

Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.

Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, “Keeping GOP Honest,” took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled “Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney’s donors,” the post accused the eight of being “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.” Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being “litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee. …

John Fund on the censorship of Naomi Riley.

Oslo Freedom Forum is an annual event sponsored by the New York–based Human Rights Foundation, which brings together dissidents and journalists from all over the world to show that people of good will can promote basic freedoms without an overlay of ideology.

Censorship, both official and self-imposed, is an important theme here. We have heard stories from brave journalists such as Ecuador’s Nicolas Perez and Kosovo’s Jeta Xharra of efforts to silence them for expressing views unpopular with officials or special interests. So it was strange to be here and read that one of my friends and former journalistic colleagues back home in the U.S. has been fired merely for speaking her mind.

Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for faculty members and administrators in universities, fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid blogger for its website. Her crime? She had the courage to respond to a Chronicle story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” which stated that “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The article used five Ph.D. candidates as examples of those “rewriting the history of race.” Riley looked at the subject areas of the five proposed dissertations and concluded that they were “obscure at best . . . a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap at worst.” One dissertation dealt with the failure of the natural-childbirth literature to include the experiences of non-white women, another blamed the housing crisis on institutional racism, and still another attacked Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas for leading an “assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.” …

Neal Boortz catches the media telling the truth.

… Time magazine’s Mark Halperin appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe yesterday to discuss Obama’s “evolution” on gay marriage. Halperin blatantly states the following about the media coverage of this issue.

“[T]he media is as divided on this issue as the Obama family. Which is to say not at all. And so he’s never going to get negative coverage for this,” Halperin argued. Sure, “The Republicans will say this is a flip-flop and it’s wrong public policy. But when you have almost the entire media establishment on your side on an issue in a presidential campaign, it’s very hard to lose politically.”

Wow. 

Ed Morrissey posts on Obama’s Car Czar defending Romney from Obama attacks.

Well, what else is former auto industry czar Steve Rattner supposed to say?  After all, he quarterbacked the layoffs of tens of thousands of auto-dealer employees in the Obama administration-imposed dealership closures. Moreover, he did so for the exact same reasons Bain had in operating their private-equity turnaround business, which is to make companies and industry stronger through greater efficiency.  However, on Morning Joe today, Rattner went a little further, praising Bain’s integrity and  reputation:

“I think the ad is unfair. Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs. Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for his investors, most of whom were pension funds, endowments and foundations. It did it superbly, acting within the rules and acting very responsibly and was a leading firm,” Rattner said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.

“So I do think to pick out an example of somebody who lost their job unfortunately, this is part of capitalism, this is part of life. And I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about,” he said.

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: After just one term French President Nicolas Sarkozy lost his reelection bid because he was unable to fix his nation’s economy. Or as Obama put it, “Wuh oh!”

Letterman: So President Obama has announced his support of gay marriage. He also announced a new Cabinet position, Decorator of the Interior.

Leno: President Obama was in town for more fundraising. He wanted lots and lots of celebrities. So his choice was pretty much George Clooney’s house or that Malibu rehab center.

Letterman: So President Obama favors gay marriage. My question with same-sex couples is: Who drives? Who nags? Who says, ‘Let’s have dessert.’ And who says, ‘I’ll just taste yours?’

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James Pethokoukis posts on an austerity program that worked.

Now, we all all know “austerity” from deep spending cuts (not the tax hikes, of course) is killing Europe’s economy and would do the same here in America, right?

Well, here’s a story about austerity that critics such as President Obama, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein never seem to mention: From 1944 to 1948, Uncle Sam cut spending by a whopping 75% as World War II came to end. Spending as a share of GDP plunged to 9% in 1948 from 44% in 1944.

Superstar economist and devout Keynesian Paul Samuelson—later to become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics—predicted such shock austerity would cause “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” That dire, disastrous prediction was widely held by his fellow Keynesians, with one even predicting an “epidemic of violence.”

Except the doomsayers were wrong, even though Washington obviously ignored Samuelson’s call for gradual spending reductions. Despite cuts which dwarfed those seen in the EU today—not to mention those Republicans are calling for here at home—the U.S. economy thrived. There was no mass unemployment despite rapid demobilization of the armed forces. As George Mason University economist David Henderson explains is his 2010 paper, “The U.S. Postwar Miracle” (which this entire post draws upon): …

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Veronique de Rugy says successful austerity programs come primarily from spending cuts.

… In a 2009 paper, Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at 107 attempts to reduce the ratio of debt to gross domestic product over 30 years in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They found fiscal adjustments consisting of both tax increases and spending cuts generally failed to stabilize the debt and were also more likely to cause economic contractions. On the other hand, successful austerity packages resulted from making spending cuts without tax increases. They also found this form of austerity is more likely associated with economic expansion rather than with recession.

The Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia provide good examples of successful fiscal adjustments. In the last few years, and contrary to the rest of Europe, the Baltic countries have focused on significantly cutting government spending without equivalent increases in taxes. As a result, the Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell reports, between 2008 and 2011, Estonia and Lithuania reduced nominal spending by 5 percent, and Latvia by 11 percent. France and the United Kingdom increased spending more than 8 percent over the same period, and Spain and Italy increased spending by 3 percent. In contrast to these others, the Baltic states have experienced some of the largest economic gains in the world: Between 2009 and 2010, Estonia’s economy rose from an annual GDP growth of minus-13 percent to 3.1 percent.

Sweden is another good example. …

The above two items lead to a piece from Browser on the reasons for studying economic history. This takes the form of an interview with Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist.

In choosing these books, you mentioned you were interested in whether economic history, or books about it, can influence policy and help convince people about the future. Can it?

The problem for economics is that to a lot people it’s kind of boring. Particularly if you write about analytical economics, there’s no narrative that draws you in like a novel or even other social science books can. If you’re talking about big macro themes, it’s hard to write an anecdotal history in a compelling way. I’ve chosen books that are intended to add those dimensions, to talk about historical experiences in such a way that you can say, “Oh yes, I get that, I understand the story.” Then you can think about how to apply that story to the modern predicament and what policy could be in the future. …

Let’s talk about this more as we go through the books. Your first choice is A History of Interest Rates, in which Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla look at interest rate trends and lending practices over four millennia. Tell me why you chose it and what the lessons are for our time.

This is one of my favourite type of books, which are just about data. You can argue all kinds of things about the past, but then you have to go back and look at the actual numbers. The interesting thing about interest rates is that you have these decade-long swings. It’s important to try to situate today in that historical context. We are in the fourth decade of a very long bull market in bonds – meaning rates have gone down and bond prices have gone up – and at some point that will switch. We need to be aware of that. It’s a very simple observation. I don’t know when rates are going to turn against us, but Homer and Sylla’s history shows us that interest rates can go down – and they can go down for a very long time – and then they go the other way, they go up. This means that you can’t build your public finances on the view that, “Oh yes, today’s rates are going to be the rates in two decades.” You can’t bet on the US being able to borrow indefinitely, an infinite amount, at 2% interest. …

Tell me about Why Nations Fail, which looks both at countries around the globe, and at examples from history, to figure out what political and economic institutions make for economic success.

Why Nations Fail is by two of my favourite economists, two very close friends and co-authors of mine, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. They’re tackling a subject that I’ve worked on with them, and they do a great job of bringing it to life and making it vivid. Why Nations Fail is like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel – which I didn’t mention because it’s such an obviously famous book – one of those books that stretches your mind and gives you all these examples and connections between them, so that you come away from it saying, “Wow. I didn’t know that.” It’s really, really interesting.

By the way, it turns out their blog is even better than the book, and they’re even better on Twitter than they are on their blog. So there’s no limits to the genres these guys can master.

So one of the questions they’re asking in the book is whether, politically, America has moved from “a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandise power are resisted” to “a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority”.

Yes, I have not exactly a beef, but a constructive dialogue going, particularly with Daron, about whether or not the US is already in a period of having, in their language, more “extractive” institutions and less inclusive ones. I recognise there is a big gap between the US and, say, Sierra Leone or Haiti, or whichever troubled country you want to pick from the book. But – and this is going back to Teddy Roosevelt – I fear that we have let the concentration of economic, financial and political power go too far. This is really bad for democracy and for the opportunities of most people in this country, and it’s exactly the kind of thing they mean by extractive institutions.

I don’t know if you saw it, but Matthew Yglesias gave a wonderful and hilarious review of Why Nations Fail, in which he compared it to The Hunger Games. His point is that the dystopian view of the world, which is rather chillingly and vividly portrayed in The Hunger Games, is not that far from things we’ve seen in history and things we see around the world today. It’s actually a very extreme form of extractive institutions in which a few people live very well and most people live in squalor. You could say, been there, done that – not for the US, but for many countries. So could the US go down that path? Is our democracy forever? Are our institutions so strong that we have republic-long immunity from those problems? I don’t think so. Ben Franklin was accosted by a stranger upon leaving the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. She asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?” And Franklin said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

So you’re more of a pessimist than the authors?

I would say I’m more of a realist, but yes, they would say I’m more pessimistic. …

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Josh Kraushaar, National Journal, says the going is getting rough for the president.

This presidential election is coming down to two immutable facts that have become increasingly clear as November draws closer: President Obama will be running for a second term under a stagnant economy, and his two most significant legislative accomplishments—health care reform and a job-goosing stimulus—remain deeply unpopular. It doesn’t take a professional pundit to recognize that’s a very tough ticket for reelection.

But there is a glaring disconnect between the conventional wisdom, which still maintains that Obama has a slight edge in the electoral-map math, and the fundamentals pointing to the possibility of a decisive defeat for the president.

The three most recent national polls—Democracy Corps (D), Gallup/USA Today, and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll—underscore how tough a reelection campaign Obama faces and why it’s fair to call him an underdog at this point. He’s stuck at 47 percent against Mitt Romney in all three surveys, with the small slice of undecided voters tilting against the president. His job approval ranges from 45 percent (Democracy Corps) to 48 percent (Battleground). Those numbers are hardly devastating, but given today’s polarized electorate, they’re not encouraging either.

Obama’s scores on the economy are worsening, even as voters still have mixed feelings on who’s to blame. In the Battleground survey, nearly as many voters now blame Obama for the state of the economy (39 percent) as those who don’t think it’s his fault (40 percent). In both the Battleground and Democracy Corps polls, 33 percent said the country is on the right track, with 59 percent saying it’s on the wrong track—numbers awfully similar to the state of play right before the 2010 Republican landslide. These are several leading indicators that suggest the trajectory could well get worse for the president as the election nears. …

According to Victor Davis Hanson, one of the reasons might be the constant reminders of his malignant narcissism.

Former President Bill Clinton just appeared in a reelection television commercial for President Barack Obama. At one point, Clinton weighs in on the potential consequences of Obama’s decision to go ahead with the planned assassination of Osama bin Laden. He smiles and then pontificates, “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there . . . suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him [Obama].”

There is a lot that is disturbing about Clinton’s commentary — and about the fact that such an embarrassment was not deleted by the Obama campaign. Clinton offers unintended self-incrimination as to why in the 1990s he did not order the capture of bin Laden when it might well have been in his power to do so — was it fear of something “horrible” that might have happened to his fortunes rather than to our troops? And, of course, such crass politicization of national security and the war on terror is exactly what Barack Obama accused the two Clintons of in the 2008 Democratic primaries. We also remember that Obama on several occasions chastised George W. Bush for supposedly making reference to the war on terror for political advantage, though he never did so in as creepy a fashion as Clinton. And aside from the fact that Barack Obama promised never to “spike the football” by using the SEAL mission to score campaign points, only a narcissistic Bill Clinton could have envisioned the death or capture of Navy SEALs not in terms of those men’s own horrible fates, but only as political “downside” for an equally narcissistic Barack Obama.

In Clinton’s defense, he spoke not just from his own selfish instinct to see presidential survival as more important than the fates of those who actually took the physical risk. Rather, a year ago Obama himself had already hijacked the mission with a flurry of self-referential pronouns: “Tonight, I can report . . . And so, shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken . . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as commander-in-chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed . . .” …

Michael Barone has the most recent example of president narcissist.

Barack Obama certainly made news today with his announcement that he has changed his position and now favors same-sex marriage. But one part of his statement has evidently aroused a firestorm in the conservative blogosphere. “When I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors,” he said, “who are out there fighting on my behalf . . . .” “My behalf”? They are fighting on behalf of the United States of America of which Obama is, like all his predecessors have been and all his successors will be, temporarily president and commander-in-chief. Obama could have accurately said “at my command,” since that is literally true. But that would conflict with his campaign message that he ends wars rather than wages them. And if he were a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth II he could, I suppose, say “on my behalf.” But we’re not a monarchy and he’s not royal.

Others have noted that in his spike-the-ball statements on the dispatch of Osama bin Laden, Obama has used first person pronouns in a way that presidents like George W. Bush, Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt were careful to avoid. With Obama, it’s always all about him.

One of the things you can enjoy about this campaign is Romney’s references to Jimmy Carter. Politico has the story.

For President Barack Obama, Mitt Romney is an obvious throwback to another era — a stiff Father Knows Best-type who straps the dog to the station wagon and marries his high-school sweetheart.

But Romney is pursuing his own strategy to puncture Obama’s next-generation cool and paint the president as a retread, comparing him to Jimmy Carter and his fuzzy-headed liberal thinking. To the presumptive GOP presidential candidate, Carter is not just a former president, he’s a potent metaphor and political weapon.

“When you mention Jimmy Carter, that lightens up certain regions of the mind and brings to mind ineptness and incompetence,” said Peter Wehner, who worked in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. “That’s going to be one of the things that Romney is going to try and tie to Obama.”

Romney has mentioned Carter periodically on the campaign trail: Twice this month, he has made unflattering references to the 39th president. When asked on the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden whether he would have green-lighted the mission, Romney told reporters on a New Hampshire rope line that “even Jimmy Carter would have given that order” to kill bin Laden.

Two days later at a rally in northern Virginia, he explicitly referred to the Carter era as better for businesspeople than the Obama years have been.

“What the president has done, and I think unknowingly, never having spent any time in the private sector himself … was one item after another make it harder and harder for small business to thrive and to grow and to start up,” Romney said.

“It was the most anti-small business administration I’ve seen probably since Carter. Who would’ve guessed we’d look back at the Carter years as the good ol’ days, you know? And you just go through the president’s agenda over … the last several years and ask yourself, did this help small business or did it hurt small business?” …

You knew Ann Coulter would have a good column on Elizabeth Warren.

… The universities that employed Warren rushed to claim that her fake Indian ancestry had nothing to do with it. They speak with forked tongue, causing heap-um laughter. (Harvard was so desperate for diversity, it made a half-black dilettante president of the Harvard Law Review!)

To grasp what a sin against political correctness this is, consider the Jesuitical debates about blackness regularly engaged in at our universities. About the time Lies on Race Box was getting a job with Harvard as a fake Indian — valued for her fake hunting and tracking skills — a debate broke out at Northwestern University law school about whether a potential faculty hire was black enough.

One professor wrote a heated three-page letter to the hiring committee complaining that the recruit “should not be considered a black candidate,” explaining, “(n)ot all with dark skins are black,” nor should they be considered “black in the U.S. context.” (Flash to: My exact position on Obama.)

Warren has defended herself, claiming she did it only so she would be invited to powwows, or what the great white father calls “meetings,” saying she hoped “I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am.”

What on earth does “people who are like I am” mean? Let’s invite Elizabeth because she’s 1/32nd Cherokee. We really need the 1/32nd Cherokee perspective around here. Maybe she has some old recipes that are 1/32nd Cherokee!

Then, the Warren campaign claimed it was sexist to question Warren about her bald-faced lie: “Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown … It’s outrageous.”

First, Scott Brown has barely mentioned Warren’s stinking lie. …

Weekly Standard piece about government by crucifixion.

Government, and the party of government, have been through something of a rough patch lately. First, there was the GSA’s Las Vegas blowout. Then, the Secret Service debaucheries. And, two weeks ago, the video of an Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat preening about his enforcement strategy of “crucifying” five random oil drillers pour encourager les autres.

Then, to provide theme for the pudding, there was a Pew survey revealing that “just one in three [Americans] has a favorable view of the federal government—the lowest level in 15 years.”

Proving, perhaps, that 33 percent of Americans have not flown commercial for some time. …

… For more and more people, their direct experience with government would incline them to believe that the examples of profligacy and arrogance we’ve seen lately are more rule than exception. One day, perhaps, a president will be elected who remembers being crucified by some bureaucrat who wanted to make an example of him. Then he can appoint a cabinet of people who will go out into the bowels of Leviathan and randomly fire five people in their respective agencies just to get the attention of the other bureaucrats who have become accustomed to a life of routine arrogance and perpetual immunity. …

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Michael Barone says the Warren story highlights the corrupt system of affirmative action.

… The important thing is the Warren story illustrates the rottenness of our system of racial quotas and preferences. Although the people in charge of administering them deny this, just about everyone with eyes to see knows that you’re more likely to be hired and promoted if you have checked one of the non-Asian minority boxes: black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander.

You don’t hear Republicans criticizing this system, and it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who introduced it in the federal government in 1970. It quickly spread to academia and corporate America.

People who classify themselves as approved minorities get into schools and get jobs that they wouldn’t if they classified themselves as white. Not surprisingly, some people, perhaps including Warren, game this system.

The original justification was that this would overcome the disadvantages that American blacks endured during decades of slavery and segregation. That made sense to many people at the time. Those disadvantages were real, and most Americans wanted to be fair.

But the extension of minority status to other groups and the perpetuation of racial preferences for nearly half a century since the abolition of legal segregation means that there is increasingly little correlation between membership in the favored categories and genuine disadvantage. …

You think the Warren story could not get better? Turns out the great great great grandmother who might have been a Cherokee, was married to a man who helped round up the Cherokees for their displacement from the Southeast to Oklahoma (Trail of Tears). Hot Air has the story.

… But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren’s great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

This new information about Ms. Warren’s true heritage came as a direct result of a lead provided to me by William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection, who in turn had received the information from one of his readers. Jacobson, who has questioned Warren’s explanation for her law faculty listing, calls this discovery “the ultimate and cruelest irony” of the Warren Cherokee saga. …

Fred Barnes on the president’s full time job – campaigning

President Obama is breaking new ground in his campaign for reelection. He is going where incumbent presidents have never gone before. He is doing things for which President George W. Bush would have been pilloried. And Obama is doing all this in plain view.

Yet the media have rarely found the new ploys and gambits of Obama’s campaign worth mentioning, much less spotlighting. For instance, in his address at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Obama treated his agenda and Jesus Christ’s as one and the same. Since the media didn’t raise any flags, one might have concluded a comment such as Obama’s was normal for that event. It wasn’t.

Obama offered his own version of the WWJD question—what would Jesus do?—on the issue of raising taxes on the rich. Obama wants to, arguing that seniors, young people, and the middle class shouldn’t be forced to “shoulder the burden alone.” 

Instead, “I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense,” he said. “But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’?”

Linking his tax plan to Jesus was anything but routine. Presidents have been speaking to the prayer breakfast, a Christian-sponsored event, since the 1950s. Their talks have tended to be mildly Christian, not at all political, and never exploited as a vehicle to claim Christ’s endorsement of their policies.

Obama, however, got off without so much as a slap on the wrist from the press. …

David Hansanyi says we can do without the “to do list.”

… But according to White House press secretary Jay Carney, the function of the to-do list is that it ensures that come election time, Republicans will have to explain to their constituents “what they did while they were in Washington these last two years. Did they just say no?”

Correct answer: I didn’t say “no” enough.

The problem is that so-called fiscal conservatives say “yes” too often to populist notions masquerading as policy. With the state of the economy, what’s scarier, that the administration would pretend that these are serious proposals or that the president might actually believe they are?

Jennifer Rubin posts on more stupidity from Joe Biden.

One theory is that Karl Rove has kidnapped the real vice president and is now going around sowing discord and spreading gaffes as fast as the press can record them. That would be the most charitable explanation for why, just a couple days after making a mess on gay marriage, Vice President Biden chose in a speech to the Rabbinical Assembly’s annual conference to deliver Mitt Romney more ammunition.

He declared: “When we took office, let me remind, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem. We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe.”

The Romney camp pounced, releasing a statement from policy director Lanhee Chen that read: …

Daniel Henninger can’t understand why anyone under 25 would vote for this president. 

Why would anyone under the age of 25 vote for Barack Obama in November?

Mr. Obama resumed his College Tour 2012 last week, visiting campuses in Iowa, North Carolina and Colorado for the purpose of replicating his 66% youth-vote total from 2008.

In 2008, he reeled them in with promises of hope and change. In 2012 he’s offering cash, promising to protect 3.4% interest on their college loans. We’re about to find out if it’s true that when you’re young, hope springs eternal.

Put differently, the past three years have been a Peter Pan presidency for Peter Pan voters. If you’re going to college, it’s good to vote for Barack Obama again, so long as you’ll never have to turn 23. But for many young Americans, there will be no Tinker Bell showing them how to land a job with lovely thoughts.

The youth unemployment rate for Americans has hovered around 16%. Anecdotal stories abound of college graduates living in the bedroom they grew up in, jobless. But hey, the president they voted for as freshmen is promising 3.4% interest on the average $25,000 or so of college debt they owe four years later. …

Jeff Jacoby says “income inequality” is not a defining issue of our time. You’ll never guess who says it is.

… But what Americans honor is equality in the eyes of the law, political equality — not equality of income or material circumstances. The two kinds of equality are inherently in conflict, as every effort to impose egalitarianism eventually proves. “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal,” wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1948. The fact that some people make much more money than others has never convinced the American people that a fundamental overhaul of society is necessary or even desirable. For all the extravagant claims made last year about Occupy Wall Street’s significance, is anyone surprised that the movement has fizzled?

For months President Obama has been calling income inequality “the defining issue of our time,” but relatively few Americans agree. In a recent Gallup poll, only 2 percent of respondents identified the gap between rich and poor as their top economic concern. Even among the Democrats in Gallup’s survey, inequality didn’t show up as a major worry. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: So President Obama had an imaginary girlfriend. Big deal! He also had an imaginary economic plan.

Leno: Obama’s new campaign slogan: “Forward.” Good one. It tells voters, ‘Don’t look back at all those promises I made but didn’t keep. Just look Forward.’

Fallon: Joe Biden and New York Mayor Bloomberg play golf together. Biden shot an 89 while Bloomberg shot the guy who arranged a round of golf with Joe Biden.

Leno: President Obama getting around these days. He was in Afghanistan last week as part of his ‘Did I Mention I Killed Osama bin Laden Tour?

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Looking at yesterday’s elections, Polipundit says someone had a very bad day.

It’s hard to see how yesterday’s elections could have possibly gone better for conservatives:

North Carolina added marriage protection to its constitution by a margin of 61-39!

Richard Mourdock defeated Obama’s favorite senator – the longest-serving Republican senator – by 61-39!

Scott Walker got more votes than his two Democrat opponents combined, even though he was “running” unopposed in the Republican primary!

There is no hope for Democrats in these results. None. Not even the smallest glimpse of a silver lining.

For Democrats, these results are worse than 2010. They show a continuation of that year’s tidal wave, with conservatives fired up and ready to punish Democrats and liberal causes.

If conservative passion can hold for another six months, Republicans can be expected to significantly outperform their poll numbers in November.

That should send a chill down the spine of all those Democrats who are merely tied with their Republican opponents right now. Being tied in the polls is no longer good enough. Democrats need a 5-10 point lead now to survive November.

And guess which Democrat presidential candidate is currently tied in the polls with his Republican challenger…

Bill Kristol says let Romney be Romney.

No whining. No nagging. No teeth-gnashing. These are our springtime resolutions here at The Weekly Standard, at the beginning of the six-month general election campaign to select the next president of the United States.

Let’s stipulate once and for all that Mitt Romney isn’t a perfect candidate, that he’ll have trouble connecting with some voters, and that he’ll at times fall short of compellingly articulating a reformist conservative agenda for the 21st century. We’ll further stipulate? once and for all that the Romney campaign will be at times annoyingly ham-handed, at other times exasperatingly short-sighted, and will prove in general only imperfectly capable of presenting Romney to the American people as the right man for the job. And we’ll additionally stipulate that some Romney supporters will say silly things, that some Romney surrogates will make unconvincing arguments, that various elements of the Republican party will sometimes behave stupidly, and that even some conservatives will say embarrassing things as well.

It will all be water off our duck-like back here at The Weekly Standard. We won’t worry about it, and we’ll try not even to notice it, since there’s not much we can do about it. And the good news is that, at the end of the day, it will probably all be water off the voters’ backs too. Mitt Romney will be the kind of candidate he is, he’ll run the kind of campaign he runs—and he’ll probably defeat President Obama.

Indeed, he probably has a better chance to win if he relaxes and runs as .??.??. himself. …

Matthew Continetti is annoyed with Generalissimo Obama.

One of President Obama’s most annoying habits is his tendency to mistake the 300 million people of the United States for soldiers in an army charged with national reconstruction. He, of course, is the general.

The tic is often barely perceptible, revealed subtly in those moments when Obama decries partisan politics for interfering with his plans; when he speaks of coming together for the common purpose of redistributing private income to—sorry, “investing” taxpayer dollars in—Democratic client groups; and during the rare occasions when he feels it necessary to address the nation on matters of national security and war.

Here is the president in August 2010, announcing the end of combat operations in Iraq: “And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad.”

The way to “honor” American heroes who serve overseas, Obama said, is “by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for—the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.”

What does “coming together” mean? Why, silly, it means passing Obama’s domestic agenda: …

Finally the media is vetting the president. IBD editors have the story about the lies in his autobiography.

Our president, it seems, is quite the fabulist. A new book reveals he fabricated yet another story in his 1995 memoir, this one about a white girlfriend complaining about black anger.

In his supposedly nonfiction memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama claims he and the girlfriend got into a “big fight” after seeing a New York play by a black writer. He became annoyed when she allegedly asked “why black people were so angry all the time.”

Obama biographer David Maraniss contacted the former girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, who insists the scene never took place. She says they never even saw a show by a black playwright.

Maraniss, who works for the Washington Post, snagged an interview with the president and asked him about the discrepancy. Obama agreed with Cook’s account.

So why did he make up the anecdote? He told Maraniss it was a “useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends.”

How convenient — especially when the overall theme of his bitter memoir is white racism.

Obama told another whopper in his autobiography. He wrote that while thumbing through a copy of Life magazine, he came across a story about a black man who underwent chemical treatments to lighten his skin. He claims he recoiled in horror at the photo of the bleached man, who looked like “an albino.”

Then he says he got so angry that “I felt my face and neck get hot.” He was upset that blackness was so condemned in America that a black man would resort to making himself white.

Only, that story wasn’t true, either. Life never published such an article.

Obama also grossly exaggerates his own battles with racism while attending a mostly white prep school in Honolulu. …

And the Washington Post writes on the shrinking labor force.

If the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. If the percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate would be 13.1 percent. 

That helps explain a seeming contradiction in the unemployment numbers — the rate keeps dropping even though job creation has been soft.

In April, the U.S. economy added a mere 115,000 jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday. In a normal month, that would not even be enough to keep up with new entrants into the labor market. But in this economy, it was enough to drive unemployment from 8.2 percent down to 8.1 percent, the lowest point since January 2009.

The explanation is a little-watched measure known as the “labor force participation rate.” That tracks the number of working-age Americans who are holding a job or looking for one. Between March and April, it dropped by 342,000. But because the official unemployment rate counts only those workers who are actively seeking work, that actually made the unemployment rate go down.

Critics of the Obama administration have been quick to seize on this as the real reason for the falling unemployment rate. In February, the Republican National Committee released a research note on “The Missing Worker,” arguing that “over 3 million unemployed workers have called it quits due to Obamanomics.”

Economists say the story is considerably more complicated. For one thing, the trend predates President Obama. And while part of the story is clearly that the labor force is shrinking because the bad economy is driving workers out, another significant factor is that baby boomers are beginning to retire early — a trend that has worrying implications for future growth. …

Same numbers with a hard right spin from Ricochet.

… The Labor Force Participation Rate shows what percentage of people are working, looking for a job and not looking for a job.  It is a better yardstick to measure the workforce in America than is the usually cited “unemployment rate” which doesn’t count people  who are so frustrated they stopped looking for a job.

The graph shows a huge upswing in labor participation through the Reagan years.  George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush kept the numbers up in Reagan territory.   Since Obama has taken over, he has wiped out the entirety of the Reagan gains. …

Walter Russell Mead says there is a war against the young.

An analysis of recent jobs figures at Investor.com reveals a disturbing development: the biggest beneficiaries from the economic recovery are Boomers, while everyone else is getting the shaft.

Since the Obama administration took office, there has been an epochal shift. Young workers have continued to lose jobs and incomes, while older workers have actually gained ground.

In fact, the Obama administration has seen a boom in the prospects of the 55+ crowd; their (I should say ‘our’) employment stands at a 42 year high. Net, there are 3.9 million new jobs for people over 55 since the recession began in December 2007, but there are 8.1 million fewer jobs for the young folks since that time.

Neither group may feel particularly grateful. Many of the older people working are people who decided to defer retirement, perhaps after their portfolios or pensions took a hit. The gains in employment are even higher among the 60+ set than among the 55-and-overs.

Still, it’s ironic to say the least that a president swept into power on a tsunami of young voter support has presided over a boom for the grannies and a bust for the kids. Logically, President Obama should expect to do somewhat better among senior citizens and worse among young people than in his first campaign — but logic often goes one way and politics another.

We shall see.

Another day, another column on government foolishness from Thomas Sowell.

Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government’s time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government’s preconceptions.

Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness — whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations — shows a “problem” that has to be “corrected.”

No speck of evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence, of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population — in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history.

Nothing is more common than for people to sort themselves out when it comes to residential housing, whether by class, race or other factors.

When there was a large Jewish population living on New York’s lower east side, a century ago, Jews did not live at random among themselves. Polish Jews had their neighborhoods, Rumanian Jews theirs, and so on. Meanwhile German Jews lived uptown. In Chicago, when Eastern European Jews began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods, German Jews began moving out.

It was much the same story in Harlem or in other urban ghettoes, where blacks did not live at random among themselves. Landmark scholarly studies by E. Franklin Frazier in the 1930s showed in detail how different neighborhoods within the ghettoes had people of different educational and income levels, with different malefemale ratios and different ways of life living in different places.